The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (89 page)

Instead, salvation came through “passive righteousness,” a righteousness provided by God that was imputed to the sinner through faith in Jesus Christ. Luther argued that the law was never intended to be a means of salvation. The role of the law was to terrify the sinner so that he despaired of his own self-righteousness and trusted the atoning death of Jesus Christ alone for salvation. Luther saw the law as having little significance for the believer since whatever remained useful in the law was written on the Christian's heart in fulfillment of the new covenant promise.
⁴²

Luther closely associated the dependence on good works for salvation in medieval Catholicism with an assumed works-righteousness in the Judaism of Paul's day. He read references in Romans and Galatians as if he and Paul contended with opponents who affirmed essentially the same view of the relationship of the law to salvation. The hermeneutic that confused the Catholicism of Luther's day with the Judaism of Paul's day dominated Protestant exegesis of Paul's letters and discussions of Paul's theology for the next 400 years until it was challenged by a number of Jewish and Protestant scholars in the twentieth century.

Few Protestant scholars undertook an extensive study of ancient Judaism in order to determine whether the equation of medieval Catholic theology with Judaism was accurate. F. Weber produced a handbook titled
Jewish Theology on the Basis of the Talmud and Related Writings
, whose German version was published in 1880. Weber asserted that legalism, the study and quest to obey the law, was the essence of Talmudic Judaism.
⁴³
Weber described Jewish theology as depicting God as a great shopkeeper who carefully recorded the good and bad deeds of individuals in an enormous ledger and who punished or rewarded individuals with eternal life or eternal torment based on these deeds. Interpreters of the NT often relied on Weber's handbook as an aid in understanding the Judaism of Paul's time even though the Talmud postdated the Pauline era by several hundred years.

The New Perspective

Weber's description of rabbinic Judaism (and, at least implicitly, Luther's) met with several forceful challenges. In 1900, C. G. Montefiore labeled Weber's work a gross caricature of rabbinic Judaism since the Jews viewed the law as a blessing and a delight rather than an oppressive burden.
⁴⁴
In 1921, G. F. Moore offered a more devastating critique of Weber's portrayal of legalistic Judaism.
⁴⁵
Despite these objections from rabbinic scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, interpreters of Paul continued to portray first-century Judaism as a more ancient version of the legalistic view of salvation by works that Luther encountered in Roman Catholicism.

Luther's portrayal of Judaism reigned until the publication of E. P. Sanders's
Paul and Palestinian Judaism
in 1977. The stated purpose of the book was to destroy the view held and propagated by Weber and others (particularly Bousset and Billerbeck) that first-century Judaism was based upon legalistic works-righteousness. Although Sanders admitted that Weber's view was held by the majority of NT scholars, he argued that the view “is based upon a massive perversion and misunderstanding of the material.”
⁴⁶
Sanders argued that the essence of ancient Judaism was what he termed “covenantal nomism.” He initially defined covenantal nomism in the following manner: “Covenantal nomism is the view that one's place in God's plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.”
⁴⁷
Sanders clearly stated that the required response to the covenant was man's obedience to its commandments. He later clarified that the obedience required by the covenant was merely intended but not actual obedience. Consequently, as long as the Israelite did not renounce God's right to command, he need not fear an eschatological judgment in which God would closely scrutinize his individual deeds. Such a judgment would not occur.
⁴⁸

Sanders admitted that many ancient Jewish texts seem to affirm a view in which salvation is dependent on personal acts of righteousness. However, Sanders insisted that statements seeming to imply that salvation was accomplished by human effort must somehow be reconciled with other statements emphasizing divine grace and mercy.

Sanders appealed to three important pieces of evidence to argue that covenantal nomism was not legalistic but was dominated by an emphasis on divine grace. First, God established his covenant with the Jews due to his own gracious election. Second, God required only the intention to obey his law rather than actual obedience, and Israelites need not fear a strict judgment that would evaluate individual deeds. Third, God provided means of atonement for failure to obey.
⁴⁹

Sanders acknowledged that the Judaism challenged by Paul in his letters seemed different from his covenantal nomism. He suggested that this distinction resulted from the fact that Paul developed his view of the law “from solution to plight” rather than “from plight to solution.” Rather than recognizing a problem within Judaism that Christ answered, Paul first concluded that Christ was the answer and then created a need for Christ by developing a view of the function of the law in salvation that no other first-century Jew shared, that is, a person must fulfill the law perfectly in order to be saved by it.

Sanders's portrayal of ancient Judaism has been so widely accepted by NT scholars that it has virtually become the consensus view. In his 1982 Manson Memorial lecture, J. D. G.
Dunn coined the phrase “New Perspective” to describe the view of Second Temple Judaism espoused by Sanders and his followers.
⁵⁰

Variations of the New Perspective

Sanders's views have been significantly modified even by those who embrace the essentials of his portrait of Judaism. N. T. Wright has often remarked that “there are as many versions of the New Perspective as there are people writing in it.”
⁵¹
Wright and J. D. G. Dunn are two important scholars who have adapted elements of Sanders's position and added their own unique contributions.
⁵²

Dunn accepted Sanders's view that the Lutheran view which assumes first-century Judaism was a religion depending on works-righteousness for salvation is inaccurate. But Dunn disputed Sanders's theory that the view of the law that Paul attacked was his own creation and was shared by no one in ancient Judaism.
⁵³
According to Dunn , Paul's real opponent was not legalism but Jewish exclusivism. The Jews believed that they alone had been chosen by God as his covenant people. They further saw the law as a badge, an identity marker that distinguished them from other people and identified them as recipients of God's grace and special blessing. Although the phrase “works of the law” in texts such as Rom 4:4–5 included obedience to the entirety of the Torah, the phrase more particularly denoted fidelity to those aspects of the law that functioned socially to separate Jews from Gentiles.

These aspects included especially the law of circumcision, the law of the Sabbath, and the laws of clean and unclean.
⁵⁴
Dunn reasoned: “To affirm justification by the works of the law is to affirm that justification is for Jews only, is to require that Gentile believers take on the persona and practices of the Jewish people.”
⁵⁵
Paul distinguished “works of the law” (acts that distinguished Jew from Gentile) from “good works” (acts of righteousness). For this reason, Paul could rail against dependence on works of the law for salvation and still affirm a judgment according to works (Rom 2:6–11). Dunn concluded:

It is difficult to sustain the claim that Paul was polemicizing against “self-achieved righteousness.” Of course the texts just reviewed can be read that way. The only question is whether those who read them that way have shifted the issue from one of Israel's works of the law vis-à-vis Gentile acceptability to the more fundamental one of the terms of human
acceptability by God. That may have happened already in Eph. 2.8–9, where the issue does seem to have moved from one of works of law to one of human effort. But when the texts in the undisputed Pauline letters are read within the context of Paul's mission emerging from its Jewish matrix, the resulting picture is rather different. Within that context we gain a clear picture of Paul fiercely resisting his own earlier pre-Christian assumption that God's righteousness was only for Israel, and only for Gentiles if they became Jews and took on the distinctive obligations of God's covenant with Israel.
⁵⁶

N. T. Wright independently arrived at a view similar to Dunn's . He acknowledged that Paul challenged Jewish exclusivism rather than a self-dependent moralism that sought to please God through good works. Wright made his own unique contribution to the New Perspective by insisting that Protestant scholars have missed the mark by identifying the “righteousness of God” as imputed righteousness. Although “the righteousness from God”
(hē ek theou dikaiosynē)
refers to imputed righteousness, “the righteousness of God” is covenant faithfulness.
⁵⁷
Wright denied that the righteousness imputed to the believer is God's or Christ's own righteousness. The believer is declared righteous by God before his judgment bar, but the NT never speaks of a transfer of God's personal righteousness to the believer.

Moreover, this “justification” is essentially an eschatological declaration that occurs in final judgment and will be based on the evaluation of the totality of one's life, a judgment according to works.
⁵⁸
This in no way implies that an individual earns or achieves salvation by his own moral efforts. Rather, good works are the inevitable expression of the activity of the Spirit in the believer so that one's life demonstrates whether an individual is truly in Christ. Justification is a projection of eschatological justification into the present, an anticipation of God's final verdict.
⁵⁹

A Critique of the New Perspective

Although the majority of scholars today appear to have accepted the major tenets of Sanders's portrait of Judaism, many believe that some of Sanders's claims were imbalanced and that NT scholarship is moving toward a more balanced position. Several have argued that NT scholarship has already moved beyond the New Perspective toward what might
be termed the “post-New Perspective perspective.”
⁶⁰
Although scholars may be grateful for some of the contributions of the New Perspective, several criticisms are in order. Since the New Perspective is not a clearly defined school of thought with established parameters but more of a movement with serious disagreement between even its strongest advocates, these criticisms do not apply to all representatives of the New Perspective. They primarily respond to the groundbreaking research of Sanders in
Paul and Palestinian Judaism
that spawned the movement.

Sanders's attempt to find a single “pattern of religion” in first-century Judaism sometimes led him to downplay the vast differences between various sects and theological perspectives within Judaism.
⁶¹
Although one may affirm that Sanders discovered
a
pattern of religion in Second Temple Judaism, Sanders was incautious to claim that he had discovered
the
pattern. NT scholars are increasingly aware that Second Temple Judaism was not theologically uniform. Precision demands that one speak of Second Temple Judaism
s
(in the plural) rather than assume that all Jews of the period shared a single soteriological system.

Sanders appealed to three important lines of evidence to argue that covenantal nomism was not legalistic but was dominated by an emphasis on divine grace. However, all three of these arguments are problematic. First, Sanders argued that God established his covenant with the Jews due to his own gracious election. God demanded obedience to the covenant not in order to “get in” a covenant relationship with God but only to “stay in” such a covenant relationship.
⁶²
But Sanders's portrayal of the pattern of religion in Second Temple Judaism still makes human effort the determining factor in eschatological judgment and easily degenerates into legalism.

Second, according to Sanders, God required only the intention to obey his law rather than actual obedience, so Israelites need not fear a strict judgment that would evaluate individual deeds. Sanders's dismissal of a requirement of actual obedience in Second Temple Judaism is at odds with
m. Avot
3:16, which is perhaps the most systematic statement of soteriology in the Mishnah.
⁶³
Rabbi Akiba taught that the “world is judged according to righteousness but all is according to the majority of works that be good or evil.” Although Sanders dismissed the text from consideration in his composition of a pattern of religion by claiming that the text is “enigmatic,” a parable that immediately follows the statement
makes its meaning clear. The parable describes God as a great shopkeeper who carefully records moral debits in his ledger. The shopkeeper will eventually send out his collectors to exact payment from the debtors, whether or not they like it, based on the record of their debts. The parable concludes: “the judgment is a judgment of truth and all is ready for the banquet.” The conclusion demonstrates that eschatological judgment is the focus of the parable and confirms that the parable illustrates the judgment according to the majority of works described by Akiba.

Akiba thus taught that one's eternal fate was determined by the preponderance of one's deeds. If an individual did more bad than good, he could expect punishment in the afterlife. If an individual did more good than bad, he could expect a reward. The concept of judging according to the majority of deeds is affirmed in other statements of the Tannaim
⁶⁴
such as
m. Qiddushin
1:10 and
m. Avot
4:22. The interpretations of these mishnaic references in the Tosefta
⁶⁵
and by later Amoraic
⁶⁶
rabbis confirm that Akiba's view was shared by others.
⁶⁷
Through a carefully crafted paradoxical statement, Akiba contrasted this judgment according to the majority of deeds with a judgment according to divine righteousness, implying that he recognized that God's unmitigated holiness demanded total perfection rather than a mere majority of good deeds. This more extreme standard of eschatological judgment was affirmed by Gamaliel II in
b. Sanhedrin
81a. The great rabbi wept as he read Ezek 18:5–9, because he interpreted the text as demanding total and perfect obedience, of which he was incapable.