Paul Liberated from Misunderstanding (Part 2/2)

Continuing from last week ... BJ = Beyond Justification and CDP = its authors Douglas Campbell and Jon DePue and JT = Justification Theory:

In the end I think I have two big questions about BJ (aside from anything else I raised last week):

1. Is it plausible to read Romans and Galatians as a debate between Paul and one of more Jewish Christians distorting the gospel (rather than a debate between Paul and the Judaism or Judaisms of his day)?

2. Is there a difference between the God of retributive justice (wrongdoing deserves punishment) and the God of love?

1. There is an intriguing possibility that the answer to the first question is "Maybe for Galatians, but not for Romans." CDP answer affirmatively for both, however, and so I confine my remarks here to Romans, not being convinced that they have gotten Romans right, while accepting there is plausibility to their case re Galatians. In particular, Romans conjures up CDP's (as far as I know) novel proposal that when we get to Romans 1:18-32 we do NOT hear Paul speaking but the voice of "The Teacher" (i.e. the Jewish-Christian false teacher) coming through. I am not convinced as I am sure many others are not. There is no specific clue that between v. 17 and v. 18 we have a change of voice, that Paul is switching from what he believes to what another person believes. 

Sure, later in Romans 2 and beyond there are some questions Paul raises and responds to (which could indeed be the questions of an opposing interlocutor so that Romans includes the kind of debate CDP propose is there). But if Romans 1:18-32 is the voice of Paul, do we not have to engage with this God of Paul who is wrathful against wrongdoing and with the impact this makes on his understanding of the gospel? This engagement being especially through Romans 3 and 4, no matter how difficult it is to make sense of it. And, even if we broadly agree with CDP that JT is the not-quite-wholly-plausible theory that flows out of Romans 3 and 4, does this question not remain? It is quite plausible that Paul writing to Christians in Rome, sets out in Romans 1:18-32 what is a fairly unexceptional Jewish critique of the excesses of Rome's licentious culture? (Look to Jude, for example, for another NT example of such unexecptional critique). If the gospel is the power of God to transform the lives of sinners (1:1-17), then it is the power of God to transform all sinners, Jew and Gentile, averagely/morally good citizen of Rome and exceptionally immoral citizens too.

For myself I continue to think, in a pretty much standard Protestantish manner, that Romans 3 and 4 set out an answer to the following question: 

If, within the flow of Israel's theological understanding, from Mosaic law or Torah, through to first and then second Temple worship (the Judaic sacrificial system), we ask the question, relative to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, on what basis are our sins and their consequences before God removed from us and forgiveness and new life proceeds from an engagement with God's own revealed solution to the problem of wrongdoing? Then, according to Paul, writing in Romans 3-4, that basis is that Christ has fulfilled the law of Moses, and on the cross became both the ultimate and lasting sacrifice for our sins and thus also heralded the end of the application of Torah to human life. 

And, consequentially, in response to the obvious supplementary question, how might we gain the benefits of that sacrifice, the answer given (in Romans, Galatians, 1 Peter, Hebrews etc) is that we are asked to put our faith in Jesus Christ: we are not asked to do good works, to make an offering of money or meat or other materials. This is so, whether (again in fairly recent debates) we posit that "good works" (i.e. "works of the Law") means works which establish identity, such as being circumcised, or works which respond to the Law as the covenant between God and ourselves in which our response is marked by strict obedience to all the laws within Torah. 

Further, no matter how many times we translate "faith in Jesus Christ" into "the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ" (noting a modern debate about the meaning of the frequent phrase pistou Christou in Paul's writings), we are left with instances when, clearly, our faith is invited by God as our response to the gospel of new life in Christ (as, in fact, I note CDP inter alia acknowledge also).

So, whether or not Paul has in mind a specific "teacher" - a member of  Jewish Christian group imposing its distortion of the gospel on Christians in Rome as well as in Galatia - he offers us, in all its complexities within the text, with all the tragic risks that it would in centuries to come contribute to a theological/cultural anti-semitic outlook, a theology of salvation which is utterly Christian (i.e. focused on Jesus Christ and what he has done for us through death and resurrection and through release of the Holy Spirit). This soteriology stands its ground distinctively in the face of counter claims based on Judaism or Judaisms of his day, and proposes that in Christ, all who avail themselves of the salvation he offers, are entering into the true fullness of God's plan for the Jews, notably into the true fullness of God's promises to Abraham himself. Put a little differently, Paul in Romans takes on "all Judaism", whether the Judaism of Jews or the Judaism of a particular Christian Jewish teacher, and highlights the fulfilment of promises to Abraham and the goal of laws revealed to Moses being the son of David, Jesus Christ the Son of God.

2. Is there a difference between the God of retributive justice (wrongdoing deserves punishment) and the God of love?

Now this question could have mountains of words written in an attempt to answer it when that attempt is to provide a full and final theological coup de grace of an answer, drawing across the whole of Scripture. This is not that. 

Here I simply observe that the Old Testament is full of God commanding just living with reference to punishment for failure to obey (law), wrathfully speaking against injustice (prophets) and reflections on the collective punishment (exile, destruction of Jerusalem) of Israel/Judah for its disobedience which permeate historical and prophetic books in the OT. 

This is the theological background to Paul's engagement as a Jew (a Pharisee no less) transformed by Christ and now writing to Jewish and Gentile Christians about the gospel and its meaning and application in contexts where arguments between Jews and Christians, and between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians abounded. 

It is quite reasonable to expect that what Paul writes will incorporate the "God of retributive justice" into his new understanding of the "God of love" - of the God who loved us so much that in Christ Jesus God's Son, he became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21), made us alive when we should be dead "through our trespasses" (Ephesians 2:5; cf 2:1-10), and became "a sacrifice of atonement by his blood" (Romans 3:25) saving us "through him from the wrath of God" (Romans 5:9). Thus and so can Paul also boldly declare, concerning the God who is love, "God proves his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8) and that nothing can separate those in Christ from God's love in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:28-39).

In sum, I do not think, within Paul's theological writings, within Romans in particular, a neat cleavage can be made between the God of retributive justice and the God of love.

To conclude: BJ is not the final word of clarification on what Paul writes to Christians then and now about matters of salvation, justification, theology and, thus, also christology. If we have misunderstood Paul (and BJ totally nails the depth of the challenge for anyone past, present or future to make the claim of "finally, we may understand Paul completely"), then Campbell and DePue have not yet liberated Paul from misunderstanding. Their best point, IMHO, is that any "justification theory" (let alone the specific "Justification Theory" they oppose) must embrace the whole of Paul on God's transformative work in Christ - through his death, resurrection and unleashing of the Holy Spirit. And wherever we arrive within that embrace, it must be devoid of antisemitism of any shade, implicit or explicit.

Paul Liberated from Misunderstanding - Do Campbell and DePue Deliver? (Might be Part 1/n)

As usual, if you do not like this post, before you even read it, there are some alternatives :)

1. What to make of Matariki? Archdeacon Lyndon Drake makes a good point here about spirituality in NZ.

2. A correspondent has alerted me to a wonderful video-coffee with ++Rowan Williams and Sr Vassa. This description may, or may not entice you to view/listen: "Sister Vassa is an Orthodox nun and liturgiologist in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). Like Rowan himself, she has been outspoken against Kirill's advocacy of war in Ukraine and strained relations with other Orthodox. Against this background, Rowan defines orthodoxy, reflects on mediating That Topic, comments on an alleged clash of civilizations, and advocates candor within church unity about what is unholy."

Now to this week's "post proper":

Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul's Gospel by Douglas A. Campbell and Jon DePue (Cascade Books, 2024)

This book is a popular version of a long academic-standard book by Doug Campbell (The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, Eerdmans, 2009.) That longer book is well reviewed/discussed (for example here and here) and I acknowledge insights from those reflections, but, generally, my frustration(s) here and in futue posts with the popular version are my own!

Now, generally, when anyone says (something like), "Look here, Christians have misunderstood X for 1900/2000 or so years, but I have discovered what X really means," we should be very suspicious. There is nothing true which is new and nothing new which is true - and all that!

However, there is a case for saying (with the author of 2 Peter 3:15-16) that Paul is difficult to understand in places, and that through the 1900+ years since he wrote, there has been much discussion, most notably in the context of the Reformation and its aftermath as to what Paul's words mean for the contemporary church (in the context of contemporary reflection on relationships between Jews and Christians). 

The Reformation's aftermath remains with us as, for example, in 20th and 21st centuries, we continue to dialogue Anglican-Catholic, Lutheran-Catholic, Reformed-Catholic and so forth, and as we have the New Perspective on Paul and, now, Campbell and DePue, who could be said to propose a New New Perspective on Paul. Or, alternatively, as various scholars propose a new "originalism" about what Paul really meant. 

So, a starting point here is not to dismiss this book (or its larger precursor) on the basis we might dismiss other theological claims which seem to amount to, "I, Peter Carrell now know what no one else before me has known." Rather, let's join the fray and ask, with many well-known and not well-known readers of Paul's epistles, "What did Paul mean when he wrote Romans and Galatians and in the context of those epistles in particular, developed his theology of salvation in which we are justified through the death and resurrection of Christ?"

For ease of writing I am going to abbreviate the (popular) book title to BJ and the authorship to CDP.

CDP advance a complex of theses in BJ. My summary (which is "my" summary of the complex amlagam which is BJ) is this:

1. That Paul's soteriology (or, gospel) is "participatory, resurrectional, and transformational" - God draws us [participatory] into new life in Christ made possible through his death and rising again [resurrectional], in which we are empowered through the Spirit to live a life pleasing to God [transformational]. Concimitantly the God of this gospel is the God of love who has loved us from before the foundation of the world, never stops loving us, and never stops drawing us into the loving life of God. And, 

1A: this gospel is not "the gospel of justification" or "justification theory" [JT] which posits a God of retributional justice who requires our punishment unless it is borne by another, i.e. Christ dying on the cross, and who seeks "faith" from us instead of "works". For this gospel, passages in Romans 1-4 and Galatians 1-4 appear supportive, but it is then hard (so CDP argue) to make sense of the participatory, resurrectional, and transformational passages in Paul's writings, notably in Romans 5-8, and in epistles such as Ephesians. In fact, on CDP's count, only about 10% of Paul's writings support JT and faithful interpretation and application of Paul's writings should work with the other 90% (if not the whole 100%) of his epistles. 

2. That JT (and even recent attempts to revise it through scholars such as E.P. Sanders, J.D.G. Dunn, and N.T. Wright) have either harmed Jews through the Christian era, leading most horribly and tragically to the Holocaust, or, in respect of recent revisions, insufficiently improved the situation for Jews for the present and the future: Jews in one way or another are replaceable by Christians in our various understandings of Pauline soteriology. By contrast, 

2A: BJ leads to an understanding of Pauline theology which avoids diminution, let alone denigration of Jews, or even denial of the right of Jews to exist.

3. That JT rests on a misreading of Romans and Galatians because there has been a failure through centuries and centuries to recognise that Paul is not contrasting his gospel with Jewish soteriology generally (in popular summations: faith v works, grace v law, the cross v temple sacrifice) but with a specific teaching of Jewish Christians who influentially proposed that Christians should abide by the requirements of Mosaic law. 

In other words, Paul doesn't have "Jews" or "Judaism" or "Judaisms of the so called Second Temple period" in his sights, but a very specific opposition to his participatory, resurrectional, and transformational gospel. That is, Paul has an opposition internal to the fledgling Christian movement in his sights, and not Jews who remained external to this movement. 

In support of this thesis, BJ provides an alternative reading of key passages in Romans and Galatians, effectively meaning that, with some adroit imagination (where no other clue than BJ's thesis exists) or some reasonable presumption (e.g. where Paul proposes a question and then answers it, the question could reasonably be the question of an opponent), these passages are Paul's dailogue/debate with a malignant distortion of the gospel, and not with Judaic thought generally.

Now, this might be enough for this week's post save for a few final notes.

A. I am completely with BJ in understanding that Paul's gospel is participatory, resurrectional, and transformational. Not only is this coherent with the "whole" of Paul's writings, it is also coherent with, say, Johannine theology, and with my own preferred understanding of the eucharist in Anglican theology.

B. I think worrying about outcomes for Jews may distort how we read Paul, and this may be the case in BJ. We SHOULD worry about outcomes for Jews for any theological work we do, but we should take care we are not attempting to rescue Paul (or others such as Luther or G.K. Chesterton) from anti-semitic charges we would prefer them not to be condemned for. Let's read Paul and then work out mitigations afterwards to any unsatisfactory readings we arrive at. Or, more simply, I think BJ would be a better reading of Paul if its concerns about BJ's outcomes re Jews were tackled at the end of the book and not at the beginning.

C. (A personal note.) It has been a privilege in my life to have once known Douglas Campbell (when I began theological study with Otago University in 1984, he was a graduate in Dunedin working in my local parish church between the end of Otago's [southern hemisphere] academic year in 1983 and heading to Toronto for postgraduate study in September 1984). I hold him in the highest regard as a person and as the possessor of a luminous mind. 

While I do not know Jon DePue and never met E.P. Sanders, J.D.G. Dunn was my doctoral supervisor and I have had a few face to face engagements with N.T. Wright. I do not believe that if Sanders and Dunn were still alive they would not have a robust response to the critique CDP mount against them ... and I look forward, in hope, to Wright's! (If he has already responded to the earlier book, let me know in a comment here.)