Archives for “New Perspective on Paul”
Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled by us believing in what we had almost no evidence for. This question came home to me most clearly whenever I heard informal apologetics arguing that the reason God doesn’t just show Himself to us is that if He did, no faith would be necessary, and God really wants us to have faith. Obviously this is quite circular, akin to being asked, “Why do we have to have faith?” and answering, “Because faith is necessary.”
So when I found out in third-year Greek (undergrad) about a related discussion that had been going on in scholarly academic circles, I was intrigued. The main question was about the Pauline expression ek/dia pisteos iesou christou (e.g. Philippians 3.9), customarily, but probably inaccurately, translated as “faith in Jesus Christ”, whereas scholars such as Richard Hayes have argued for the reading “faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ”; I just posted my exploratory paper on this topic yesterday. As I described in another recent post, the Greek word that we translate as “faith” also carried the meaning faithfulness (notice that English uses the root “faith-” in both “faith” and “faithfulness” as well). In fact, there is no other word in NT Greek that translates as “faithfulness” as directly as pistis. So theoretically, whether Paul had meant to describe a concept more on the “faithfulness” side or on the “belief” side of pistis, or some hybrid of both “belief” and “faithfulness, he would have in all likelihood used the word pistis in any case. “Belief” and “faithfulness” are two very different English words and markedly different conceptually in our modern understanding, but the fact that the NT often uses them in their divergent semantics in places where the meaning is ambiguous suggests that pistis meant not either/or but indicated a concept closely related to both of them. After all, belief is in a sense a commitment to an idea, and I recognize this usage for “faith” and “believing” (Gk pist-euo) in the NT as well.
- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
- Defining faith in Hebrews 11.1 I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen....
- Campbell: what did Paul mean by “justified”? Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of...
Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As a segue between my last post and my next, I thought I’d present it here with minimal edits. Please realize that the scholarship within this is a good decade behind, but given the modesty of the claims in this overview, I sincerely doubt that much of what is argued below has been soundly defeated.
The interpretation of Iesou Christou as an objective genitive (faith in Jesus Christ) in Galatians 2.16 and 3.22 (cf. Php 3.9) is the overwhelmingly pervasive reading of that construction. Fairly recently, however, scholarship has had to come to terms with the work of many scholars such as Richard B. Hays, who argues most strenuously that our modern fixation on the freedom of the individual conscience distorts Paul’s concerns. In his article, “Jesus’ Faith and Ours” (Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, 7 No. 1 [S-O 1983], 2-6), Hays argued that nowhere in Galatians 3 does Paul place any emphasis on the salvific efficacy of “believing,” and nor does he speak of Jesus Christ as the object of human faith. Paul insists that we are redeemed/justified by Jesus Christ’s faithfulness (pistis Iesou Christou) on our behalf, not by our believing.
Related posts:- More on what NT faith is about Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled...
- Defining faith in Hebrews 11.1 I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen....
- How do you know you’re in the faith? I think Paul gives us a somewhat unexpected answer in 2 Corinthians. I’ll return to the subject of this post after a (possibly irrelevant) discursus here. This morning in Sunday...
I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (KJV)
Some of the mystery surrounding it resulted from its sounding so much like a riddle: a verse whose first few words signal a definition (“Now faith is…”) ends up leaving you more questions than the one you had about “faith” to begin with. What’s all this stuff about substance and evidence of the unseen? Faith is just “believing”, right?
Well, no. But this is the way many modern translations make it sound. When it’s said that “faith is the ὑπόστᾰσις of things hoped for,” a lot hinges on how one translates the word with funny letters, transliterated as hypostasis.
Related posts:- More on what NT faith is about Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled...
- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
- How do you know you’re in the faith? I think Paul gives us a somewhat unexpected answer in 2 Corinthians. I’ll return to the subject of this post after a (possibly irrelevant) discursus here. This morning in Sunday...
Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of thinking, and at 1218 pages it promises to be an important work on the subject. The book is entitled, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, written by Douglas A. Campbell. The review itself, written by Dr. Richard Beck, is quite readable and easy to follow, although certainly lengthy enough.
Related posts:According to Campbell, Justification Theory was the big mistake. When you read Paul through the lens of Justification Theory you get a wildly distorted Paul. And the debates within Pauline scholarship are created by this distorted Paul. This warped, funhouse mirror image of Paul. And if Justification Theory is wrong and alien to Paul then clarity might be achieved if we could read Paul through the spectacles he was wearing. To see Paul as he saw himself, not as we see him through the prism of Justification Theory. So Campbell’s project is twofold. First, show us the flaws of Justification Theory with a particular focus on how Justification Theory is implicated in the debates within Pauline scholarship. And, second, show us an alternative reading of Paul, one that approximates, as best we can, how Paul understood his own theology.
- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
- Christian responsibility according to St. Paul .!. A funny thing happened on my way through Paul’s epistles. I read through all of Paul’s letters over the last couple days, trying to take note of the commonalities...
- More on what NT faith is about Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled...
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into a topic I’ve been reading into for quite a while now, but it’s so deep and I’m so shallow. The issue is the so-called New Perspective on Paul. The Paul Page has some extraordinary articles describing it (start with Mattison’s summary), and so what I reproduce on this blog should only be seen as appetite-whetting for that excellent website.
For those of you who would like a summary of the summary listed above, read on. What is this “new perspective”?
Well, for starters, it’s not really new; it takes into account what its supporters insist is the actual historical context for Paul’s teaching on justification and removes it from the lens of Luther’s anachronistic understanding of the issue. What’s “new” about it is that it wasn’t until the seventies that Christians first started taking it seriously. The four most important scholars for this view are Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders (with his watershed 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism), James Dunn (who modified Sanders’s view), and N.T. Wright (who has modified Sanders and Dunn). This position has plunged the scholarly community into a flurry of debate for the last forty years, with old school Reformed types standing the hardest against it but other Reformed theologians (such as Wright) showing a willingness to accept criticism of traditional Lutheran understandings on justification.
If you want a short sound-bite summary of this view as I did, you’ll be disappointed; it is, after all, an interpretation of one of the fundamental aspects of Pauline theology, which is remarkably complex for any position. But let me say a couple things that help position us to view Pauline theology in this way.
Related posts:- Campbell: what did Paul mean by “justified”? Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of...
- Election and Adoption Part 3: God’s Purpose in Election As I stated in Part 2, I reject the notion that foreknowledge is prescriptive. I hold to the conviction that there is an interplay between man’s choice and God’s choice....
- Election and Adoption Part 2: Gracious Sovereignty I had to cut the last post short, somewhat abruptly as you might have noticed. But presenting bite-size chunks is better for blogging anyway (not that you would know it...