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A Man More Sinned Against than Sinning? |
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The following response
to Carl Trueman is part of a larger project, currently underway, to respond
to critics of the new perspective on Paul. Having finished his recent work on
Jesus, Dunn is turning his attention again to the new perspective which he
first helped to articulate over twenty years ago. I must confess to
complete astonishment at the tone and content of Carl Trueman's lecture, 'A Man More Sinned
Against than Sinning? The Portrait of Martin Luther in Contemporary New
Testament Scholarship: Some Casual Observations of a Mere Historian'
(Tyndale Fellowship, I freely admit that I am
no expert on Luther and that my direct familiarity with his writings is
limited This is where my
puzzlement at Dr Trueman's attack begins. He accuses me, as a proponent of
'the so-called New Perspective on Paul', of fundamentally repudiating the
Protestant and entire Western tradition on justification, of in effect
calling for 'a fundamental redefinition of what Protestantism is', of
rejecting Lutheran teaching on justification, and of claiming 'that the whole
of Christian tradition is basically wrongheaded over salvation, [and] that
the Reformers were more guilty than most in the perversion of the gospel'. I
simply have to say that I recognize none of this. I am totally astonished by
such statements and wonder whether Dr Trueman has been reading what I wrote.
It is all the more puzzling since I took pains to emphasise at the beginning
of the 'Justice of God' essay1 that the central affirmation of
the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is and remains
absolutely fundamental for Christian faith -- a point reasserted once
again in the conclusion.2 That Dr Trueman could so blithely ignore
these explicit affirmations is a painful example of blinkered reading. As these same sections,
and indeed the whole essay clearly attests, my concern was (and still is)
that the doctrine of justification as rediscovered by Luther and as
traditionally expounded within Protestantism has neglected important aspects
particularly of Paul's original formulation in the context of his mission. It
is true that in this connection I speak of 'a significant misunderstanding of
Paul' in relation to justification by faith (referring to these neglected
aspects). But I immediately repeat that the charge is not directed against
what has always been recognized as 'the Protestant doctrine of justification'
(p. 2). On the contrary, it is directed particularly against the corollary
that Paul affirmed his doctrine against a degenerate Jewish legalism (pp.
5-8). It observes that Paul's teaching on justification is an expression of
his mission to the Gentiles, that it embodies a protest against national or
ethnic presumption and disdain for the (other) nations (pp. 8-12); the gospel
is 'for all who believe, Jew first but also Gentile' (Rom. 1.16). It
argues that an integral aspect of 'works of the law' was the concern to
maintain Israel's distinctiveness and separateness from the (other) nations
(pp. 13-15), and that this aspect has been but should not be ignored in our
attempts to explicate Paul's key formulation, 'a person is justified by faith
apart from works of the law' (Rom. 3.28). Can I say this again in
case anyone is in doubt on the point. I affirm as a central point of
Christian faith that God's acceptance of any and every person is by his grace
alone and through faith alone; I would have hoped that my chapter on
'Justification by Faith' (particularly #14.7) in my Theology of Paul the
Apostle would have made that clear enough. I have no problem in affirming
that the doctrine of justification is articulus stantis et cadentis
ecclesiae; I am astonished by and repudiate entirely the charge that 'the
new perspective on Paul' as formulated by me constitutes an attack on and
denial of that Protestant fundamental. Anyone who reads that from my writing
is reading in what he wants to see, not reading out what is there. The point
I am trying to make is simply that there is/are (an)other dimension(s) of the
biblical doctrine of God's justice and of Paul's teaching on justification
which have been overlooked and neglected, and that it is important to recover
these aspects and to think them through afresh in the changing circumstances
of today's world. In a word, I seek not to diminish let alone repudiate
the doctrine of justification (me genoito), but to bring more fully to
light its still greater riches. As to the charge that I
'turned my guns against the great German Reformers', I have to protest once
again that Dr Trueman's self-styled 'casual observations' have been much too
casual. A more careful reading of my essay would reveal that my critique is
directed chiefly against the way in which Luther's conversion has been interpreted
as shedding light on Paul's. It is that tradition which I comment on, not
Luther's own words on the matter. Dr Trueman criticizes me for attributing to
Luther himself the view that the 'I' passage in Romans 7 refers to Paul's
pre-Christian state. I never say that. And if Dr Trueman had checked my
earlier essay on 'Rom. 7.14-25 in the Theology of Paul', Theologische
Zeitschrift 31 (1975) 257-73, delivered at Tyndale House 26 years before
his own, he would have seen that I am very much aware that I follow in the
footsteps of Luther and Calvin in interpreting Rom. 7.14-25 as a description
of Paul's continuing experience as a believer.3 In the 'Justice of
God' essay I take up the criticism of Werner Kümmel, directed against what
became the standard Protestant interpretation of Romans 7 as a piece of
pre-Christian autobiography, and particularly Krister Stendahl's criticism of
the way he perceived Luther's conversion to have been interpreted within his
own Lutheran tradition. The exegetical criticism which I offer is directed
not at Luther himself, but against those who regarded Luther's conversion as
paradigmatic and as a key to understanding Paul's conversion. To repeat: even
a not very careful reading of my 'Justice of God' essay should have made that
plain. Dr Trueman apparently wants to set me up as a straw man, as one to
whom he can impute the most egregious motivation (Dunn's 'determination to
vitiate the whole Protestant tradition'), and whose position can the more
easily be blown to pieces by Dr Trueman's mortars. The imputation is
offensive to the one attacked and the mode of attack unworthy of the
attacker. Those who live in glass houses should hesitate before they throw
charges of 'eisegetical projectionism' at others. Dr Trueman's second major
criticism is that in my 'Justice of God' essay I charged Luther with
'thinking of justification in distinctly individualistic terms'. Once again
the spectacles of prejudice or prejudgment seem to have clouded the fact that
I clearly refer to the way Luther's conversion was understood -- I do not say
by Luther himself. My main target, in fact, is Bultmann's highly influential
existentialist reading of Paul. Dr Trueman makes much of the lack of
precision in my use of the term 'individualism', and that may be fair
comment. But once again the context in which I use the term should have made
it clear that it is there simply as a contrast to the corporate or national
or ethnic character of a doctrine which was expounded by Paul in order to
insist that the saving righteousness of (Israel's) God was for Gentile as
well as Jew. Here again is a feature of Dr Trueman's lecture which astonishes
me: that he has so completely ignored what was quite clearly one of the major
thrusts of my 'Justice of God' essay, and what has been the main factor to
motivate the new perspective on Paul. I refer again to the disparagement of
Second Temple Judaism as cold and arid legalism which has been such a painful
feature of Christian scholarship up until the latter decades of the 20th
century. In contrast, it is the recognition that there was much more of
divine grace behind and in the Judaism of Paul's time which motivated the new
perspective's call for a fresh assessment of how Paul responded to his fellow
Jewish believers' de facto insistence that works of the law were also
essential for justification. That call to take with
renewed seriousness the full ramifications of Paul's slogan, 'to Jew first
but also Gentile', should never have been heard as antithetical to or as a
repudiation of the classic Christian doctrine of justification. Why it has
been so heard is for Dr Trueman and others who have so charged it to explain,
an explanation which I would welcome. If this invitation is met by a setting
of the spectacles of polemical pre-judgment the more firmly on the nose, that
will only serve the cause of prejudice and untruth. But if it encourages a
truly honest and open exchange, a clearing away of the thickets of
misrepresentation and misunderstanding, and a mutual growing in appreciation
of the riches of the biblical teaching on the theme, then the cause of truth and
of the gospel can only benefit. February 2004 Endnotes 1'The insight into divine human
relationships thus crystallized by Luther's conversion experience is
fundamental and far-reaching: that God's grace is always prior, the only
ground on which we can stand before him; that for any human creatures to
think to make a claim upon God by virtue of what they possess or control is a
presumption of absolute folly; that religion can all too quickly be perverted
into a system which sustains a self-deluding pride in piety.
"Justification by faith" thus understood and propounded has been a
sharp-edged sword cutting through all self-deception and misapplied
principle, a powerful shibboleth to distinguish right-thinking theology and
the spirituality which God acknowledges from every counterfeit' ('Justice of
God' 1-2). 2'... we are now in a position ...
to restate a more rounded and richer and more biblical doctrine of
justification. In doing so there is no call to set aside the often
penetrating insights of Reformation and Protestant restatements of the
doctrine. But we do need to complement them with a firm reassertion of the
corporate and social implications of the full doctrine ... ' (21). 3'Continuing to commend some
support, but very definitely a minority view in modern exegesis, is the
classic interpretation of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, of Luther and Calvin,
that in Rom. 7 Paul describes his continuing experience as a believer. ...
This third, the minority interpretation, commends itself most strongly to
me.' (' |
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