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.)