God and the Faithfulness of Paul

A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright

Christoph Heilig, J. Thomas Hewitt, Christoph Heilig, J. Thomas Hewitt, Michael F. Bird, Christoph Heilig, J. Thomas Hewitt, Michael F. Bird

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506421674
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506421681
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

N. T. Wright's magnum opus Paul and the Faithfulness of God is a landmark study on the history and thought of the apostle Paul. This volume brings together a stellar group of international scholars to critically assess an array of issues in Wright's work.

Essays in Part I set Wright in the context of other Pauline theologies. Part II addresses methodological issues in Wright's approach, including critical realism, historiography, intertextuality, and narrative. In Part III, on context, scholars measure Wright's representation of early Judaism, Greek philosophy, paganism, and the Roman Empire. Part IV turns to Wright's exegetical decisions regarding law, covenant, and election, the "New Perspective," justification and redemption, Christology, Spirit, eschatology, and ethics. Part V at last speaks to the implications of Wright's work for the church's theology, sacraments, and mission, and for global responsibility in a "postmodern" age. The volume includes a critical response from Wright himself.

IV

Exegetical Issues

Law and Covenant in Paul and the Faithfulness of God

Gregory Tatum

N. T. Wright in Paul and the Faithfulness of God deploys his entire rhetorical armory in responding to E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion.^[1] Wright is convinced by Sanders’s central argument, that is, that the portrayal of Second-Temple Judaism standard in New Testament studies was an odious and erroneous caricature of the historical reality. Sanders further proposed the shorthand expression “participationist eschatology” to characterize Paul’s “pattern of religion.” By “pattern of religion” Sanders does not mean a theological system but rather a conceptual framework for describing how a religion functions. By “participationist eschatology” Sanders means that for Paul, the end-times have begun with the death and resurrection of Jesus so that God is saving his end-time people through being-in-Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.^[2] Wright’s acceptance of the former move (demolishing the caricature of Second Temple Judaism) and his rejection of the latter move (describing the functioning of Paul’s religion as participationist eschatology) give rise to PFG.^[3] Since the conventional notion of forensic justification lost its foundation (the false caricature of Judaism), Wright attempts to lay a new foundation by constructing a grand covenantal narrative based on Paul’s rhetorical use of select Abraham texts in Galatians and Romans.^[4] Wright’s treatment of Law and Covenant is thus the very heart of PFG. The first part of this essay examines God’s promises to Abraham versus the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants. The second part explores Torah and the unity of the people of God. The third part discusses the elephant in the room: forensic justification and “doing the Torah.” This essay does not examine Wright’s grand covenantal narrative in se, but rather examines its lack of foundation in Paul’s letters.

1. God’s Promises to Abraham versus the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants

The main, but not only, discussion of covenant and Torah in PFG comes in ch. 10, “The People of God Freshly Reworked,” which deals with covenant membership (soteriology) in light of the Messiah and the Spirit. Wright correctly understands that salvation for Paul entails at very least membership in an objectively identifiable social group, what Sanders calls “Getting In” and “Staying In.”^[5] Wright’s invocation of the Abrahamic Covenant as a “controlling theme in Paul’s soteriology” privileges “key passages in Galatians and Romans.”

The point of invoking ‘covenant’ as a controlling theme in Pauline soteriology is to highlight the way in which, in key passages in Galatians and Romans in particular, Paul stresses that what has happened in the gospel events has happened in fulfilment of the promises to Abraham, and has resulted in the formation (or the re-formation) of a people who are bound in a common life as a kind of extension or radical development of the covenantal life of Israel. (PFG 781–82)

The choice of the word “controlling” reveals an unexpressed assumption at work. Considering the thematic wealth of Pauline salvation-discourse addressing a wide array of issues in differing contexts, why should the theme of the Abrahamic inheritance addressing circumcision in two rhetorical contexts be privileged above all other themes? Yet, even if the promises/heir schema of Gal 3 and Rom 4 were “key,” it cannot perform the theological task that Wright demands of it. According to Wright, Jesus’s fulfilment of the Abrahamic promises

has resulted in the formation (or the re-formation) of a people who are bound in a common life as a kind of extension or radical development of the covenantal life of Israel. (PFG 782)

In Gal 3 and Rom 4, Paul uses the promises/heir schema to bypass salvationhistory, not to reinterpret it. The “covenantal life of Israel” cannot be separated from circumcision and Torah; the promises/heir schema does precisely that.

Wright picks and chooses the passages he considers to be evidence; he sidelines Paul’s actual use of covenant language. How does Paul himself speak of covenant? Gal 4:21–31 explicitly identifies God’s promises to Abraham fulfilled in Jesus as a covenant. Paul allegorizes and subverts the Abraham story by speaking of Abraham’s children as two opposing covenants. The children of the slave girl, Hagar, are the members of the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision, whereas the children of the free wife, Sarah, are those Gentile believers who reject entry into the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision. Paul transforms Jacob into Ishmael, the enslaved offspring of the Abrahamic carnal covenant of circumcision; Paul transforms Ishmael into Israel, the free offspring of the spiritual heavenly covenant of the divine promises to Abraham. By dividing the promises from circumcision, Paul builds a detour around the history of the Jewish people. The two covenants are rivals (at least here). The “covenantal life of Israel” is grounded (and continues to be grounded) on the covenant of circumcision. Although Wright correctly notes that the Sarah and Hagar allegory opposes the Abrahamic promises/heir schema to the Mosaic covenant of Torah (i.e., the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision) (PFG 1139), he does not seem to realize that the two covenant allegory undermines him reading a single grand covenantal narrative into Paul’s arguments. In Galatians, the only references to a διαθήκη are 1) a merely human analogy of the Abrahamic promises/heir schema to a last will and testament (Gal 3:15–18)^[6] and 2) a clear dissociation of the promises/heir schema from the covenantal history of Israel in the Sarah/Hagar allegory (Gal 4:21–31). Paul’s references to Abraham are ad hoc, rather than foundational.^[7]

Paul relates a tradition (1 Cor 11:23–26) he received from the Lord concerning the Lord’s Supper (which Wright does not even mention in “Part III: Paul’s Theology”). “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11:25). This cup makes present the New Covenant sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The cup of blessing is also “a κοινωνία of the blood of Christ” (1 Cor 10:16). The cup of the Lord’s Supper thus evokes rich layers of sacrificial language, imagery, themes, and narratives in the Scriptures of Israel for believers to encounter the inauguration of the New Covenant and the κοινωνία of Christ in the covenant-sacrifice of the Cross. Further, the cup of the Lord’s Supper is prefigured in the desert by the water flowing from the rock. It is “spiritual drink” communicating the κοινωνία of the Spirit flowing from Christ (1 Cor 10:1–11).^[8] The sacrifice of the New Covenant effects real more-than-notional communion with Jesus and the Spirit (i.e. participationist eschatology).^[9]

2 Corinthians 3 contrasts two covenants: old and new. Paul opposes the ministries of letter and Spirit and the covenants of death and life, of condemnation and righteousness, of passing glory vs. permanent glory. When the Old Covenant/Moses is read by non-Christian Jews, a veil distorts their letterbound reading. When the holy ones read the same text, with unveiled faces, their reading is Spirit-endowed, transformative, liberating, and glorious. Notice that reading the Scriptures of Israel pneumatologically transforms and christologically transfigures the believer. The holy ones do not read in a carnal, merely human way. Since God has equipped Paul for the ministry of the spiritual New Covenant, the ministry of the New Covenant communicates the divine Spirit (2 Cor 3:4–6); the ministry of the Old Covenant could not. For Paul, New Covenant reading of Israel’s Scriptures according to the divine Spirit differs ontologically from Old Covenant reading of them according to the dead letter.

Wright’s covenantal reading of Gal 3 and Rom 4 collapses the New Covenant into the Old. Paul’s actual use of covenant language excludes this move definitively; the New Covenant of “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” is a quantum leap beyond the Old Covenant according to the flesh. This point cannot be overemphasized. Participationist eschatology does not spring Athena- like out of covenantal nomism; the former is a fully Jewish development of the latter. Nevertheless, the difference in the descriptors indicates the radicality of the development. In other words, participationist eschatology describes the newness of the New Covenant. The actual covenant texts reveal a re-location of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants before, within, over against, and alongside the New Covenant.

Wright holds that faith replaces circumcision as the badge of the Abrahamic covenant in its new and improved Messianic version.

− Gentiles on account of the covenant badge of πίστις receive the legal status of membership in Abraham’s “family” for the first time (PFG 847–48, 864).

− Members of Abraham’s actual family with the covenant badge of circumcision need to have their legal status as Abraham’s family “freshly ratified” or “renewed” on the basis of the covenant badge of πίστις (PFG 848, 864).

− Those members of Abraham’s actual family with the covenant badge of circumcision who do not have the covenant badge of πίστις lose their legal status as members of Abraham’s family (PFG 1195–1257)!

Something is seriously wrong with this reading of Gal 3 and Rom 4. How can the legal status as members of Abraham’s family possibly do the theological work that the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit does in Paul’s letters?

Although he rightly emphasizes the subjective genitive πίστις Χριστοῦ, Wright misreads the righteousness at issue.^[10] He reduces divine righteousness to covenant membership and covenant membership to a legal status, rather than recognizing that righteousness here is divine and that covenant membership entails the real reception of the Spirit and embodied being-in-Christ. Not only is Wright wrong on the basis of Paul’s actual use of covenant language, but also because nothing in the select Abrahamic texts cited in Gal 3 and Rom 4 suggests such an interpretation. According to Wright’s line of thought, Christ died and was raised from the dead so Gentiles could become legally adopted children of Abraham without circumcision (PFG 862)! Manifestly, Christ’s death and resurrection provide something unavailable in the Old Covenant. Forgiveness of sins (by repentance and sacrifice), Abrahamic sonship (by circumcision), and even holiness (by descent, sacrifice, and the occasional activity of the Spirit of God) do not qualify as such. Participation in divine life through, with, and in Jesus Christ through the lavish eschatological out-pouring of the Spirit (i.e. participationist eschatology) does qualify.

In Gal 3 and Rom 4, Paul implicitly contrasts the New Covenant with the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision. At the beginning of the chapter, Gal 3:1–5, the Spirit (of the New Covenant) is con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Prologue
• Methodological Issues
• Contextual Issues
• Exegetical Issues
• Implications
• Epilogue
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects