MetaCatholic

(Updated 10/08/08 – see below)

Simon Gathercole’s article in Christianity Today on the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) – not as far as I can see yet online – has prompted two blog series so far. One is Scot McKnight’s on the Jesus Creed, which begins with this post. It makes a fairly useful introduction both to the NPP and the issues raised. The other is a summary of the article, so far in five parts, by Matthew Montonini, which begins here. In the absence of the article, both series make useful reading for people trying to get a sense of the NPP.

While both series state that the article is a fair and balanced one, I am, from Montonini’s description rather less sure, so I hope the article will appear online at some point. I just think (as someone who broadly stands more in the NPP strand than not) that if you criticise NPP as getting its understandings of “justification” “righteousness” and “works of the law” wrong, then you probably aren’t wildly keen on it. Gathercole, of course, has written against it based his understanding of the language of “boasting”.

One point in McKnight’s series I did enjoy was the way he drew attention to the double irony of Tom, as an Anglican Bishop, appearing to mount a sola scriptura case against the Reformation understanding, while the evangelical defenders of the of the traditional view were complaining that Tom wasn’t in line with Reformed tradition! I’d spotted the second irony before, but not the first one.

McKnight articulates the common understanding that:

The NPP begins, oddly enough, with a public lecture on 4 November of 1982 by my then-mentor in PhD studies, Jimmy Dunn. I didn’t hear it; but I heard plenty about it. It was published the next year and it changed NT studies by giving a handle to what was going on. But it took awhile for what was going on to take on the name “The New Perspective.”

However, I’d like to draw attention to the following quotation

The central claim against which [Paul's] polemic is aimed:is the boats that coveant membership is for Jews and Jews only, with very few exceptions … “Works of the law” were not, as is usually thought, the attempt to earn salvation de novo: they were the attempt to prove, by obedience to the law given to the Jews, that one was already a ember of Abraham’s family.

and to this footnote on it

Sanders’ thesis is open to various criticisms, but the point here at issue can be well established: the book of Jubilees, the Letter of Aristeas, and most of the other Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament exhibit what we may call ‘national righteousness’, as do the Qumran scrolls. To generalize the discussion of the law, as is almost always done (particularly in the Reformation tradition), and to take it out of the context of Israel in the interests of making the doctrine ‘relevant’, is to demythologize Paul, and to make it impossible to understand whole sections of his thought. Witness the failure of most writers to take Romans 9-11 seriously.

These come form a 1980 popular book setting out understandings and implications of justification for the church’s life, and for individual Christians — The Great Acquittal ed. Gavin Reid (now out of print). The quotations are, respectively, page 18, and note 18 on page 111.

Now Wright’s thought has certainly developed since then, but this is unquestionably the first published expression I know of that actually looks something like an NPP view, two years before Dunn delivered the lecture that is now taken as its start. Indeed, one of the fascinating things about the book is that the other essayists are so obviously talking about a different understanding of justification from Wright’s. At the same time, because Wright simply sets his views out as a piece of biblical exegesis (but with plenty of early hints of his happy pugnacity), and nobody then knows there is such a thing as NPP, the other contributors remain oblivious that these views are heading for a collision among evangelicals in the future, and just treat it as an interesting way of putting things.

But the fact remains on paper. NPP actually predates Dunn’s lecture, and Wright’s work on this is not a third phase beyond Dunn, but one that, at the very least, was being worked out at the same time, if not slightly earlier.

Update

Gathercole’s article is now online. (HT Mark Goodacre) Interestingly, among the attached bibliography, he includes a volume, Justification and Variegated Nomism, to which, if my memory serves, he was a contributor. This volume is most notable for having an editor (Don Carson) who believes that it fundamentally disproves the concept of covenantal nomism, while a number of its contributors actually agree with it as a good description of the texts they write on!.

In his post, Mark Goodacre criticises the article for spending too much time on Wright. This, however, is I think mainly because it is written for a popular evangelical audience, whose main acquaintance with NPP is through Wright, and Wright is certainly the big bogeyman among those Reformed leaders who wish to purge their denomination of NPP.