MetaCatholic

Yesterday, I began looking at Piper’s arguments against Tom Wright and the New Perspective (NPP) more generally. Today I move onto a significant introductory comment, which I think says a great deal about why there is such an impasse here. Piper gets into his argument with the idea that “common-sense” tells us that interpreting the New Testament in the light of first-century ideas might be misleading.¹ He suggests three reasons for this rather strange claim.

Firstly, he says the interpreter may misunderstand the first-century idea. That much is common-sense, along with the idea that the interpreter may misunderstand the first-century biblical text. But it is equally common-sense that any interpretation which makes good sense both of the biblical and extra-biblical material is superior to those that make sense of one by ignoring the other. The idea that we can downplay the first-century context because it might be misleading is to set off on an a-historical and irrational path. Piper appeals to the Holy Spirit as illuminating the biblical text, but the Holy Spirit is not a get-out-of-jail free card for those who ignore the evidence.

Piper’s second reason is that the evidence we have is partial. “Sweeping statements about worldviews in first-century Judaism are precarious.”² Partial, yes; non-existent, no. We can’t ignore the evidence we have, just because we would like more. The whole point, of course of Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism,³ on which Wright builds, is that the overwhelming pattern of all the evidence we have is an argument for covenantal nomism. Further examination might have succeeded in demonstrating some exceptions to this (there are still some open questions here) but in this case “partial”, while not exactly untrue, is a somewhat misleading description of the wide-ranging nature of the available material, and the diversity of the witnesses.

Thirdly he argues rightly that any particular NT writer may use an idea in general currency, but use it in a way that is (somewhat?) different because of its new context.⁴ This is, of course, by itself an unexceptional viewpoint, and a commonplace of synchronic linguistics. However, it would seem that the onus to prove a significantly different meaning exegetically must be on those who say the author means something different by the term rather than on those who assume it shares the common usage. Otherwise (and I fear this is likely to be the result) this simply becomes an excuse to import anachronistic and idiosyncratic meanings into the text.

As an aside I note that his illustration of this third point oddly proves a somewhat different if equally unexceptional point, that the meaning of a word is established from its context not from a dictionary. I quite agree. It is therefore strange that in the next chapter he argues:

Will Paul’s use of δικαιόω (I justify) bear the weight of Wright’s meaning? I doubt it for at least two reasons. … One reason is that there are uses of δικαιόω in Paul where the meaning “declaring one as a covenant member” does not work.⁵

Here he does exactly what he says we should not, and assumes that the word must mean exactly the same in every context.

The danger of these three points of Pipers is that, when taken together they seem to offer an argument for effectively side-stepping historically contextual exegesis. But where then does any control for interpretation come in, if not through the tradition, and only through the tradition? It is, without the tradition, a reader-response hermeneutic, and with the tradition an old-fashioned catholic one. A strange way to uphold the Reformed position, indeed!

1. Future of Justification pp 34 ff [↩]
2. p36 [↩]
3. SCM Press 1977 [↩]
4. p36 [↩]
5. p 40 [↩]