A Brief History of New Perspectives on Paul and Federal Vision
A New Perspective and Federal Vision
(a theological variation of Biblical justification)
This brief history on the New Perspective of Paul and Federal Vision was originally presented as a lesson for an adult class at a church I pastored. The class took place in August of 2005. The purpose was to give some background to the rising interest in the two subjects and address the biblical and Reformed position of justification.
A. The Historical Evangelical and Reformed teaching on the subject of justification by faith
1. The biblical doctrine of justification was clearly articulated by Church reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al, in large measure due to a response to the prevailing Roman Catholic view of salvation during the late Medieval/early modern era in western church history. The Roman Catholic view held to a personal salvation that takes place within the context of the universal church, through belief in Jesus Christ by grace and love-works.
2. The Evangelical and Reformed view about how one is saved can be traced from Paul to Augustine to Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Wesley, and Whitfield to the present day.
3. This particular understanding of justification taught by Paul is often labeled “Luther’s justification” or “Luther’s Paul.” This is because “justification by faith” was the central theme and rallying cry for Church reformers beginning in the late 1400’s.
B. There have always been differing views on the subject of salvation, but the question for purposes of this study is: what does Paul mean when he says that believers are justified?
1. Does he mean it in the way Augustine, Luther, Calvin and other Reformers and Reformed confessions interpret it?
2. Or does Paul mean something else? Since the early 1900’s certain Christian theologians believed Augustine and the Reformers misinterpreted Paul.
C. These more recent views that are having a significant influence in both Evangelical and Reformed churches come from the following men:
1. William Wrede
Wrede is a Biblical scholar who emphasized the historical context of Paul as primary to understanding his theology. Therefore he taught that:
a. Paul was not concerned with an individual, personal salvation with a modern emphasis upon the mind and soul. Instead, he was concerned about how God saves a community that includes Jewish and non-Jewish people. Specifically, how does someone enter into the new community of God? That is the essence of true redemption.
(1) Paul believed, like many Jewish legal scholars of his day, that the Law was given by angels in order to keep humanity subservient to their power. The Law’s three-fold standard is found in morality, Sabbath and diet. Angelic domination was a significant and very real force in the world.
(2) Redemption meant becoming free from these angelic dominion, powers, and authorities, which meant becoming free from the law. That was Paul’s point in Romans and Galatians.
b. Therefore, justification by faith is not central to Paul’s corpus of doctrine.
c. Justification by faith for Paul speaks to two issues:
(1) How does a Gentile become a Christian (follower of Jewish messiah)? It is not by becoming Jewish first.
(2) What is the path to salvation? Was it by keeping the commandments as the Jews believed? No, there was a better way. Wrede believes that Paul was confused and confusing when it came to the Law, often contradicting himself.
2. Albert Schweitzer
The next biblical scholar to address the doctrine of justification and Paul’s teachings was a principal of a theological college who wrote two books on Paul. He was also a missionary doctor, philosopher, musician-organist, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
a. The way to interpret and understand Jesus is to see him and his teachings in the context of eschatology; in other words, how Christ’s kingdom comes and the goal toward which it is moving. He believed that the Gospel itself was very narrow in its appeal because it was tied exclusively to Jewish eschatological hope.
b. The question history imposed upon the fledgling movement of Jesus’ followers was how can Christ’s new religion become universal in scope, reaching beyond Palestinian Judaism and even Hellenism (Greek-influenced Judaism)?
c. Schweitzer said Jesus’ early followers helped to shape a Hellenist model for conversion to Christianity, but others, particularly Paul, took the Gospel of the Kingdom beyond Judaism.
d. Redemption was not only entering into this kingdom of hope but being released from angelic domination and the power of the Law. Schweitzer said that obedience to the Law was not a service to God but to angels. Any people outside of Christ’s kingdom are still slaves to angelic forces and in bondage to the Law.
e. Redemption then,
(1) Comes through the mystical work of the Spirit bringing one into the Kingdom through Christ. One who is in Christ is freed from bondage to angelic forces, the power of the Law, who has left this natural world and begun sharing in the new supernatural realm.
(2) Are believers free from the Law?
Schweitzer claimed Paul taught that whatever natural condition you were in before you came to be in Christ is the condition in which you should still live. For the Jew, it meant remaining Jewish and still obligated to live obediently by the law, even though now a messianic Christian. However, for the Gentile, it meant not to put oneself under the Law or become Jewish, rather live in the same external condition one found himself before coming to believe in Jesus.
(3) Redemption is the way of salvation under which justification is a small aspect. One is righteous through faith, and to be righteous means that one has a right to be pronounced righteous at the great Judgment. Righteousness comes from “being-in-Christ” and therefore set fee from angelic domination.
3. Claude G. Montefiore’s contribution to the subject
a. This scholar wrote The Synoptic Gospels (1909).
b. Based on his study of the history of Judaism and reading extant materials dating back to the 4th-6th centuries BC, he taught that there were two variations of Jewish theology during the first century:
(1) Rabbinic Jews – the law was a gracious gift from a loving God to His special people that was given to make them holy and happy. The Law was given for one’s improvement and to increase in holiness. Obedience to the law brought about life, happiness, and peace. The more the commandments the better because it revealed the great honor God had for His people. Jewish men gave praise to God that they were not like women because “men have more commandments to fulfill than women.”
(a) The two main parts of the law were the Sabbath and dietary or food restrictions
(b) What about transgressing the Law? God was gracious and did not expect anyone to perfectly keep all the commands. God’s mercy and grace outweigh His anger, so therefore God gives the gift of repentance to help a true Jewish person defeat sin and gain forgiveness.
(2) Hellenic Jews – who were heavily influenced by Greek religion, philosophy and thought, supposedly believed that God was pretty much unapproachably transcendent, “more august and majestic, but less gentle and kindly.” The Law was terribly difficult to observe in the midst of a deviant culture. It was negative and therefore focused upon restrictions rather than upon joy and the presence of God.
c. Montefiore said Paul, being a Hellenized Jew, brought into Christianity his negative perspective of the Law.
4. Hans Joachim Schoeps
Schoeps disagreed with Montefiore and contends that Paul, a student under Gamaliel (leader of the Rabbinic school) was not a Hellenist. If anything Paul was not influenced by non-Jewish, Greek culture. Instead, Paul was influenced by his conversion experience, who came to know Christ through a mystical event rather than through a personal, historical relationship. Paul’s theology, then, is radical, teaching a post-Messianic theology (Christ has already come and brought the Kingdom). Paul teaches a new age whereby Gentiles can now come to God with Israel. This new age is fully “un-Jewish.”
As for the Law, Schoep states:
It must ever remain thought-provoking that the Christian church has received a completely distorted view of the Jewish law at the hands of a Diaspora Jew who had become alienated from the faith-ideas of the fathers – a view which ignores that side of it connected with the berith (covenant) as a sanctifying ordinance and that has reduced it to a matter of ethical self-justification and ritual performance. He said, that still more astounding is the fact that church theology throughout Christian history has imputed Paul’s unacceptability to the Jews to as Jewish insensitivity, and has never asked itself whether it might not be due to the fact that Paul could gain no audience with the Jews because from the start he misunderstood Jewish theology” (Perspectives Old and New on Paul; p. 128).
5. E. P. Sanders
a. Sanders wrote Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977)
b. Sanders takes a rather sociological-historical approach and studied how Palestinian Judaism’s “pattern of religion,” (how people enter into a religious group) and compared it with Paul’s pattern. Sanders is one of the first to propose a “new perspective” on Judaism and Paul or New Perspective on Paul (NPP).
c. Sander’s understanding of Judaism in Paul’s day stated:
(1) The bond of Israel was “covenantal nomism” – that Israel’s relationship with God was secured by God’s election. They were God’s special covenant people. What is important for one’s standing with God is whether or not he had entered into the covenant community. You enter in by the gift of God’s elective grace. Their obedience to the Law was a loving response to God’s unconditional love and grace and was necessary to maintain that relationship and “stay in” the covenant. So, salvation is not earned but kept. A truly righteous person was one who accepts the covenant and maintains it; therefore good works are necessary.
Non-Jewish people enter the covenant by baptism, and it is the covenant that provides salvation.
Obedience to (or “repentance for the transgression of”) a “specific set of commandments keeps one in the covenantal relationship, while repeated or heinous transgression removes one from membership (in the covenant). The overarching assumption, then, is excepting the notable specific instances (as above), we are to assume continuity between Paul and Judaism (Guy Prentiss Waters. Justification and the New Perspective on Paul; p. 61).
(2) The law did not motivate Israel to a legalistic works-righteousness that earned salvation. All the extra laws of the rabbis were given to clearly and very carefully delineate Israel’s covenantal responsibilities. This was to help the obedient covenant keeper keep the covenant. An individual believer who actively and deliberately disobeyed the law would fall from covenant blessings and be punished.
(3) But what of sin? For the Rabbinic Jew, there was no original sin. God’s mercy is greater than sin, so forgiveness is the general nature of things for the covenant member. At the core or “What counts is being in the covenant and intending to be obedient to the God who gave the covenant. Rejection of even one commandment, while acceptance of a fundamental commandment, such as the commandment not to commit idolatry, may show one’s intent to be obedient” (ibid; p. 131).
(4) This being the case, Sanders says, Paul’s Christian writings are not in this way significantly different that Rabbinic Judaism.
d. Sander’s understanding of Paul
(1) Paul’s experience was not so much a conversion as it was a call from God.
(2) Paul essentially was not unhappy with Judaism as a whole.
(3) Paul’s biggest disagreement with Judaism was
(a) Not their legalistic works-righteousness
(b) But their “national righteousness” that held a faith in Jewish genealogical descent that ‘guarantees’ entrance into the covenant. This nationalism had no room for Gentiles.
(c) The question Paul was answering in Romans and Galatians was not how a person can be made righteous in God’s sight, rather what was the basis for bringing Gentiles into the covenant? This means of course that the predominant theme in Romans and Galatians is not justification by faith alone in Christ but how Jew and Gentile are made equal in covenant with God?
(4) As for the Law, Paul only criticized Judaism when the Law threatened” the exclusiveness of salvation by faith in Christ” (ibid.; p. 251). Therefore, being made righteous by faith in Christ in Galatians means that Gentiles who have faith in Christ need not become Jewish to earn a right standing with the covenant God.
6. N. T. Wright
a. Along with Sanders, he is a key proponent of this “new perspective. Wright essentially agrees with Sanders on many points.
b. God’s covenant people were called into being in order for God to undo the sin, curse, and the effects of Adam’s sin. These specially elected covenant people served God. But Israel too fell as Adam did. They took the special characteristics of a holy covenant (circumcision, the Sabbath and dietary rules) and made them trophies of their own national pride and honor. Further, to their discredit, Israel failed to fulfill their call, and instead focused upon their nationalism and ethnic purity. This sin prevented God’s special blessing to spread to other nations.
c. God, therefore, cursed Israel by exiling them. The hope for Israel was true repentance and to a special blessing of restoration with the true and living God. Israel continued under the curse during the time of Christ and Paul.
d. Jesus Christ became Israel, paid the price and lifted the curse of the exile at the resurrection. Israel’s covenant was therefore fulfilled. Now all the blessings are made available to Jews and Gentiles alike. “Hence the fulfillment of God’s covenant involves the redefinition of ‘Israel’ as God’s people along the lines determined by grace, no race; by faith, not by the ‘works’ (or boundary markers) of Torah. ‘Israel is transformed from being an ethnic people into a worldwide family.’ Not all Jews, to be sure, a prepared to allow the transformation. Those who cling to the path of ‘national righteousness’ and reject the gospel have both misunderstood God’s intentions and perpetuated the ‘meta sin’ of ethnic Israel. The Israel, that, according to Romans 11:26, is destined for salvation is the single-family drawn from all nations and marked by its faith” (Ibid., p. 182).
e. What about being justified by faith?
(1) Paul’s central theme is that the Creator God is the Covenant God, and the principle by which God’s covenant community is identified is through justification by faith.
(2) Justification was the “decisive vindication of God’s people when God (as in a court of law) pronounced in their favor. (‘Righteous,’ or ‘justified,’ here designates those in whose favor the divine judge has pronounced.)…”justification” – a divine verdict at the end of history, known in anticipation by God’s people in the present – is for those who have faith in the gospel.” (p. 182)
(3) Justification or true righteousness has to do with being in the covenant and not being declared personally righteous. It is covenantal language, not an individualistic sort of term. Paul was not concerned with how a sinner can find favor with a holy God; rather he wrote to demonstrate concern for how Gentiles are made equal as covenant members with Israel. It can be translated as “covenant membership.” Therefore, to be justified by Christ means to be made covenant members by Christ.
7. James D. G. Dunn
a. Dunn is by far the strongest and most aggressive advocate of this new perspective (for example see, The Theology of Paul the Apostle).
b. Dunn adds some unique qualities to this theology.
(1) The Judaism of Christ’s and Paul’s day was very similar to “Protestant” teaching:
(a) the grace of God came first
(b) human works are responsive to God’s grace and the fruit of it.
(2) Through Christ, God was fulfilling his promise to incorporate all nations into the covenant community. The true marker for entrance is faith in Christ, even though for a time in the age with Israel the covenant was seemingly marked by “narrowly nationalistic identity markers of…circumcision, food laws and Sabbath” (p. 186).
(3) The role of the Law was to define sin and transgression against God, to provide for a temporary cover-over of sin through ceremonial sacrifices, and to keep Israel segregated and pure from Gentile contamination. Once Christ came and fulfilled the promise to Abraham, the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile was done away with. All who believed shared in the same covenant and received covenant blessing. The Law that marked Israel from non-Israel, and provided a temporary cover-over was done away with, according to Paul. By extension, any law that “ran counter to the basic principle of the love command, Paul thought that the requirements could and should be dispensed with. The law to be fulfilled is thus the ‘law of Christ’; it is the old law still, but as taught and lived out by Jesus” (pp. 187-188).
(4) Paul’s polemic in Romans and Galatians was to combat the nationalist pride of Israel and Jewish Christians, not to set straight how a person is made right with God.
(5) The doctrine of justification by faith as taught by Paul was intended to address the error of some Jewish Christians who insisted that all people become Jewish and observe the old markers of circumcision, Sabbath, and food (what he means by putting confidence in the flesh). Dunn does not believe that early Judaism held to a works-righteousness or a works-earning salvation.
According to Dunn, justification by faith has nothing to do with how an individual is made right with a holy God and declared just, but is the condition by which Gentiles are admitted into the covenant. Paul was answering the question as to which law-works were necessary, if at all, or if whether they must be observed by all covenant people or just Jewish Christians. Justification by faith and not by works means that the covenant is open to Jew and Gentile, not merely to the Jew who is set apart by law-works.
Paul was also setting the record straight that Israel’s special relationship did not come through Law as supposed by some misguided teachers, but came through faith. Paul further corrected (in Romans) the apparent notion that Israel’s special relationship with God as an elect people would necessarily exempt them from judgment.
What’s more, Paul was revealing what he himself had realized that both entrance AND life in the covenant was by faith and not to any rules or laws. God has always only justified those who relied totally on Him alone. So, anyone who understood covenant righteousness in ethnic and legal terms failed to understand the truth of covenant life is by comes and is sustained by faith alone.
8. Other men who are affiliated with the New Perspectives camp:
C. Beker, Boyarin, Donaldson, Garlington, Hansen, B. Longenecker, Raisanen, M. Seifrid, and K. Stendahl.
9. Robert Gundry (professor at Westmont College)
a. Believes that the Reformed or Protestant doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ is unbiblical and needs to be abandoned.
b. Generally agrees with the NPP, and applies the covenantal paradigm of the NPP to the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ (his active and passive obedience and the consequent imputation to those who believe). He believes that “God’s righteousness is his ‘salvific activity in a covenantal framework’ as opposed to imputation in a ‘bookkeeping framework.’ This salvific activity, called ‘justification,’ included what has traditionally been called ‘sanctification’: Justification ‘has to do with liberation from sin’s mastery’ (Counted Righteous in Christ; p. 48).
D. Federal Vision (FV) or the Auburn Avenue Theology
1. The proponents
James Jordan, Steve Schlissel, Steve. Wilkens, Doug Wilson
2. FV share common emphases with traditional Reformed theology
a. The Louisiana Presbytery of the PCA, in their July 2005 report (http://www.louisianapresbytery.com) wrote that the Federal Vision proponents have “some common doctrinal emphases”:
(1) sacramental efficacy
(2) the centrality of the visible Church
(3) the importance of a lived out faith to Christ, and
(4) ‘real’ covenantal union with Christ.”
b. The report also stated that FV offers the following helpful criticisms:
(1) FV challenges Scholastic tendencies within the Reformed traditions.
(2) FV challenges sectarianism, neglecting in practice the essential doctrine of the unity of the church, which is a great offense to God and of which most Reformed traditions and churches are guilty.
(3) FV challenges Evangelicalism’s focusing exclusively on individualistic soteriology while neglecting the ecclesiological aspects of salvation.
(4) FV challenges a low view of the sacraments, held in much of Evangelicalism.
(5) FV challenges the way the doctrine of the Covenant of Works has been formulated and held in some Reformed camps.
c. Taking its cue from covenantal nomism of the NPP, proponents of the Federal Vision theology generally teach:
(1) The corporate aspect of a covenantal relationship with God is more biblically important than a concern for one’s individual relationship.
(2) Baptism is an effectual sacrament and the means of union with Christ, hence the entrance into the covenant community. Some teach while others imply baptismal regeneration. At a minimum, they believe that we are to presume all who have been baptized, who have not been excommunicated are regenerate.
(3) As with the old covenant, one enters and is saved in the context of the covenant. However, he perseveres or maintains covenant membership through works, which are judged at the final Judgment Day. Therefore, it is possible that those who are considered “elect” (read: members of the covenant community by the gracious election of God) can fall away from grace.
(4) FV sees justification and sanctification as part of the same saving process and downplays the differences between the two.
Recommended resources:
Guy Prentiss Waters. Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing; 2004.
Stephen Westerholm. Perspectives Old and New on Paul. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co; 2004.
Dr. Don