Pauline Perspectives

Essays On Paul 1978-2013

NT Wright, Tom Wright, N.T. Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281063666
• eBook ISBN: 9780281070329
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The book begins with N. T. Wright's auspicious essay of 1978, when as a young, aspiring scholar he gave the annual Tyndale lecture in Cambridge, and proposed, for the first time, 'a new perspective' on Pauline theology. The book ends with an expanded version of a paper he gave in Leuven in 2012, when as a seasoned scholar at the height of his powers, he explored the foundational role of Abraham in Romans and Galatians. In all, the thirty-three articles published here provide a rich feast for all students of Paul, both seasoned and aspiring. Each one will amply reward those looking for detailed, incisive and exquisitely nuanced exegesis, resulting in a clearer, deeper and more informed appreciation of Paul's great theological achievement.

Part I

Oxford and Cambridge

Chapter One

The Paul of History and The Apostle of Faith (1978)

The Tyndale New Testament Lecture, delivered at Tyndale House, Cambridge, on 4 July 1978. Originally published in Tyndale Bulletin 29 (1978): 61–88. Reprinted with permission.

This was not the first piece I published on Paul. That dubious distinction belongs to the short article on peri hamartias in Romans 8.3 which I gave at the Oxford Congress on Biblical Studies in the spring of 1978 and which, after its initial publication in the volume of conference papers, found its way into The Climax of the Covenant. But the present article was the first time I tried out on an audience the larger thesis about Paul which had been coming clear in my mind over the previous two or three years, and to which the 1977 publication of Ed Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism had given a considerable boost. I remain very grateful to the Tyndale Fellowship for inviting a young, untried scholar to give the annual New Testament lecture, and to the lively audience who listened to it, and to its proposal for a ‘new perspective’ on Paul (p. 64 in the original). That was the summer my family and I moved to Cambridge, and the meeting at Tyndale House gave me an appetite for working in that collegial atmosphere for which Oxford had provided no parallel. Owing to the arrangements for billeting conference participants, I wrote the final version of this lecture in the room I had been assigned in Newnham College, just down the road from Tyndale House. My grandfather used to boast of having been at Somerville College, Oxford, explaining after puzzled glances that the female-only college had been transformed, during the First World War, into a military hospital, where he recovered from wounds received at the Front. I am happy to pay a similar, though less painful, tribute to Newnham for its hospitality.

* * *

[61] ‘Controversy’ writes Ernst Käsemann ‘is the breath of life to a German theologian’¹ – and he should know. What he imagines the rest of us breathe he does not say: but since the essay which begins with these words engages in debate with Krister Stendahl, a Swede now living in America, I see no reason why a mere Englishman may not join in as well. I want in this lecture to contribute to the debate in question, and then to exploit the ambiguities of my title and discuss the distinction which needs to be made today between the real Paul and the Apostle of the church’s imagination. The debate between Stendahl and Käsemann concerns the relation, in Paul’s thought, between justification and salvation history – between the Apostle who preached the Lutheran Gospel of justification by faith and the Paul who was called, in God’s historical purposes, to be the Apostle to the gentiles. It would not be an overstatement to say that all the major issues in Pauline interpretation are contained (at least by implication) in this debate, and in one lecture there are therefore bound to be oversimplifications and downright lacunae. I want to try nevertheless to present what I take to be a new view of Paul, in the hope of at least stimulating fresh thought, and also to prepare the way for further, and fuller, exegetical studies. If I seem at times to be deliberately controversial, I hope you will take that as a sign that I am trying to impart the breath of life to the subject.

[62] Justification and Salvation History: Stendahl and Käsemann

I begin, then, with the debate between Stendahl and Käsemann. Nearly 20 years ago Krister Stendahl wrote the now famous article ‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West’.² In it he pleaded that we should let the text which Paul actually wrote function as a critique of inherited presuppositions in interpretation, and warned of the danger of ‘modernizing’ Paul. Specifically, he claimed that the picture of Paul inherited from Augustine and Luther was misleading in several important respects. Paul, he said, had never suffered from a bad conscience: the soul-searchings and agonies of Luther were not to be read back into Romans or Galatians. Instead of the question ‘how can I find a gracious God?’, Paul had asked the question: granted that the gospel is for the gentiles, what is now the place of the Jews, and of the Torah? Romans 9—11 is, he claimed, the real centre of the epistle: salvation history is the basic content of Paul’s theology, and justification by faith is part of Paul’s apologetic for the gentile mission and the place of gentiles in the church.

Not surprisingly, this drew a sharp intake of the breath of life from Ernst Käsemann.³ Salvation history, he affirmed, was opposed to the true Protestant doctrine of justification and its basis, the theologia crucis. The gospel of the cross shatters comfortable assumptions, and declares, particularly to those who rest on their historical background and continuity with the past, that God is the God who justifies the ungodly. Though Käsemann, like Stendahl, insists that the Bible must be allowed to be over the church, he does not tackle the detailed exegetical points on which Stendahl had based [63] much of his case, but leans heavily on a theological interpretation of twentieth-century politics and philosophy, warning that salvation history had been used to back up Nazism, and aligning it with ‘an immanent evolutionary process whose meaning can be grasped on earth, or which we can control or calculate’.⁴ While agreeing that there is a sense in which, for Paul, Christianity is in continuity with Judaism, Käsemann emphasizes the discontinuity. Though justification and salvation history belong together, justification is prior in every sense. Otherwise, says Käsemann, we cease to be true Protestants.

Stendahl has now replied to Käsemann, in the book which reprints his original essay.⁵ He claims, justifiably, that Käsemann has misrepresented him at various points, and questions whether ‘the justification of the ungodly’, being mentioned so rarely by Paul, can properly be regarded as the centre of his thought. Käsemann, he says, has begged the question by beginning from the traditional Protestant doctrine of justification which it was his (Stendahl’s) purpose to challenge. Whereas Käsemann claims that justification is ‘the centre the beginning and the end of salvation history’,⁶ Stendahl reasserts that ‘the very argument about justification by faith functions within [Paul’s] reflection on God’s plan for the world’, and he points out tartly that, if theologies of history have been responsible for political evils in Germany, so has a theology which has seen ‘the Jew’ as the symbol of all that is false and dangerous in religion.

The last point is one of the most important that the debate has raised. I will shortly question very seriously whether the traditional understanding of Judaism and of Paul’s attack on it is not fundamentally mistaken. And Stendahl is absolutely right to draw attention to Paul’s robust conscience, and to the fact that justification and salvation history have a habit of keeping close company in Paul (Romans 1—4; 9—11; Galatians 2—4; Philippians 3). It does appear that [64] Käsemann has not allowed for the force of these arguments, themselves (we should note) essentially historically critical ones, essentially a critique of presuppositions on the basis of the text, and has on the contrary lapsed into a dogmatic polemic which does little credit to his professed desire to let the church stand under the word. Nevertheless, many of his criticisms strike home at Stendahl: the scheme the Swede has proposed has little or no place for the theology of the cross, for the discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism witnessed to by Paul’s strong polemic in Romans, Galatians and Philippians, for the contrast between Adam and Christ, or for the fact that it is salvation, salvation from sin and ungodliness, that Paul is talking about. Käsemann, in fact, is not alone in leaning heavily on twentieth-century dogmatic presuppositions, though he does so more openly. Stendahl’s belief that Jews have their own way of salvation apart from Christ and the church⁷ has clearly in turn influenced his reading of the text. It is curious how, though both men have reacted sharply against Nazism and anti-Semitism, they have arrived at opposite conclusions.

This debate has all the makings of a classic, with the agenda including wide-ranging issues in Pauline theology, detailed exegesis of several passages, and challenges to traditional dogmatic frameworks, all with inescapable twentieth-century overtones. I want now to contribute to it by offering a new way of looking at Paul which provides, I believe, not only an advance in the debate between Stendahl and Käsemann, but also a new perspective on other related Pauline problems. I shall first sketch out this new view and argue briefly for its central thrust, and then show how it offers new light on the debate. That will be the first half of the lecture, and will provide the groundwork for the (shorter) second half, in which I will try to distinguish the Paul of history from the Apostle of traditional imagination.

[65] One of the central points in the view I propose is that Paul regarded the historical people of Abraham as God’s answer to the problem of the sin of Adam. He would have agreed in principle with the Rabbi who put into God’s mouth the words ‘I will make Adam first: if he goes wrong Abraham will come to restore everything again’.⁸ Romans 4 and Galatians 3 are best explained not as arbitrary proofs of justification by faith, but as an exposition of the true nature of Abraham’s faith and his family. Paul, in other words, read Genesis 12ff. as the sequel to Genesis 1—11. Where Paul differs from Jewish understanding, however, is in the next step of the argument: Abraham’s people, intended as a light to the world, provided only darkness. Israel, as Psalm 8 implies,⁹ were meant to be God’s new humanity, taking Adam’s place under God in obedience and over the world in authority, but Israel failed in this task. Their failure – whose nature I shall come to in a moment – meant both that the task had to be undertaken by their representative, alone, and also that they would themselves need saving. By acting out on a grand scale the sin of Adam,¹⁰ Israel not only could not redeem the world, but also needed redeeming herself.

If we ask how it is that Israel has missed her vocation, Paul’s answer is that she is guilty not of ‘legalism’ or ‘works-righteousness’ but of what I call ‘national righteousness’, the belief that fleshly Jewish descent guarantees membership of God’s true covenant people. This charge is worked out in Romans 2.17–29, 9.30—10.13, Galatians, and Philippians 3, to which we will return later. Within this ‘national righteousness’, the law functions not as a legalist’s ladder but as a charter of national privilege, so that, for the Jew, possession of the law is three parts of salvation: and circumcision functions not as a ritualist’s outward show but as a badge of national privilege. Over against this abuse of Israel’s undoubted privileged status, Paul establishes, in his theology and in his missionary work, the true children of Abraham, the world-wide community of faith. Faith, unlike the Torah, is available to all.

[66] At the centre of this scheme of thought stands Christology, since the task of Israel has now been handed on by default to Israel’s anointed representative, the Messiah. Two aspects of Christology in particular stand out here. First, the Messiah sums up his people in himself, so that what is true of him is true of them. Second, the Messiah has died and been raised. From these two sources flow salvation history and justification by faith, not as two parallel streams, nor even as two currents in the same stream, but as one stream. If the Messiah has died and been raised, so has Israel: and her death and resurrection consist precisely in this, that God’s purpose of saving Jews and gentiles alike is achieved through justification, in Christ, by faith. And behind the Christology and the soteriology stands the theology: there is one way of justification for all men (Romans 3.27ff.) since God is one. In a brilliant and daring move, Paul takes the Shema itself, the heart of Jewish life and worship, and uses it as the heart of justification and salvation history, which are as inseparable in Romans 3 as anywhere else.¹¹ The one God has purposed and promised that he will create one worldwide family for Abraham, a family in whom the sin of Adam is reversed: and this he has achieved in the Messiah, Jesus.

The fundamental assumption behind this view, that the Messiah sums up his people in himself, is not (of course) new,¹² but is so often ignored or overlooked that it is worth rehearsing in brief some of the arguments for it. In his picture of Jesus Christ Paul uses several themes – Son of David, Son of God, the Spirit, the resurr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I Oxford and Cambridge
• Part II Lichfield and Westminster
• Part III Durham
• Part IV St Andrews
• Bibliography
• Search Items for Ancient Sources
• Search Items for Modern Authors
• Search Items for Selected Topics