[69]
Redemption from the New
Perspective?
Originally published in Redemption,
ed. S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, G. O’Collins (
Original pagination is retained in bold
italicized numbers.
Reproduced by permission of the author.
N. T. WRIGHT
I INTRODUCTION
Calling something ‘new’
is always risky, and the ‘new perspective’ on Paul, now a quarter of a century
old since it was introduced by Ed Sanders in 1977, is starting to look rather
frayed around the edges. Others have written its history; some are now trying
to write its epitaph.[1] I come neither to bury Sanders nor to
praise him, but to do two things simultaneously: to look at Paul’s doctrine of
‘redemption’ from (one version of) the perspective Sanders proposed, and in so
doing to see what if anything can be redeemed from his proposal. I am conscious
that the current wave of gravediggers are making room for more than one coffin,
and that some of them at least want to bury N. T. W. along with E. P. S. (and
indeed J. D. G. D.). But I am inclined to believe that the rumours of my
theological demise have been exaggerated, and that the modified and developed
version of the [70] ‘new perspective’ (hereafter NP) which I
adopt possesses not only life but considerable explanatory and exegetical power.
A few brief introductory
notes on the various topics thus introduced. First, as to the NP. Sanders’s
proposed reading of Paul had at its heart a massively argued proposal about
first-century Judaism, in which Sanders substantially followed the protest of
H.-J. Schoeps a generation before and G. F. Moore a generation before that.
Judaism was not, basically, a religion of self-help moralism, a kind of early
Semitic Pelagianism, but was a religion in which the keeping of the law
mattered not because people were trying to earn their member-ship in God’s
people but because they were eager to demonstrate it. Law-keeping was not part
of ‘getting in’ but of ‘staying in’—two categories which become thematic for
Sanders. Keeping the law within the ‘staying in’ mode is what he calls
‘covenantal nomism’, another thematic technical term.
This proposal cuts most
deeply against the Lutheran readings of Paul which have been common coin in New
Testament scholarship for a long time, and also in many non-Lutheran parts of
the church which have assumed that its account of Judaism (enshrined in such
monumental works as Strack-Billerbeck and the Kittel Wörterbuch) was
historically accurate. Sanders is clearly motivated by the desire to do justice
to first-century Judaism rather than caricature it in the interest of Christian
apologetic. Painting the ‘background’ dark in order to make the jewel of the
gospel shine more brightly—the very word ‘background’ has become taboo,
carrying as it does the implication that one might be studying Judaism not for
itself but in order to contrast it with Christianity to the advantage of the
latter—must be abjured in the interests of objective study of the different
‘patterns of religion’. As in all his work, Sanders belongs within the post-Holocaust
movement of scholarship, trying to get away from a polarization between Judaism
and Christianity and to show their many convergences. Indeed, though Sanders
does acknowledge that Paul held a critique of Judaism (in this he does better
than his teacher, W. D. Davies, who in other respects paved the way for him),
this critique is minimal and simply a reflex of Paul’s new experience: Paul has
found salvation in Christ, and so deduces that there must have been a problem
with Judaism. He begins with the solution and then postulates a plight, rather
than the old theory in which Paul began with a problem (variously described) to
which he found the answer in Christ. The implicit conclusion from a good deal
of [71] Sanders’s work, as in many other contemporary writers, is
that these two religions at least are more or less equally valid paths to
salvation. Sanders is clear that Paul does not say that himself, but he
constantly hints that it will not take a large step beyond Paul for us to do
so.
As the subtitle of his
book indicates, Sanders’s proposal is about religion, not theology. Indeed,
when it comes to theology both his initial book and his subsequent ones are
unsystematic, and do not address in any sustained way the major topics of
Pauline theology (christology, justification, the cross, etc.). If anything,
Sanders simply assumes that the big words like justification, atonement,
salvation, redemption and so on all converge in meaning. His major proposal
about interpreting Paul himself does not need to explore that territory too
far, because the emphasis lies elsewhere: he divides Paul’s thought, in a
traditional fashion, between ‘juristic’ categories and ‘participationist’
categories, and, following Schweitzer and Davies, declares that the latter are
primary and central, and that the former are ancillary and more situational or
polemical. Thus he regards ‘being in Christ’ as central, and ‘justification’ as
more peripheral. This has obvious exegetical spin-offs (e.g. reading
Second, the relation of
my own reading of Paul to the NP. Perhaps the most important point is this: had
the dominant view of Paul prior to Sanders been Reformed rather than Lutheran,
the NP might never have been necessary. I began my graduate work on Paul with
just such a Reformed standpoint, and in many respects found Sanders an ally
rather than an adversary. Since this will be counter-intuitive to some, an
explanation is needed.
From (at least) Calvin
onwards, reaching something of a climax in the Romans commentary of Charles
Cranfield, exegetes in the Reformed tradition found in Paul a view of the
Jewish law which was far more positive than Lutheran exegesis had assumed. I am
not sure that this tradition ever did full justice to second
I arrived at my own
understanding after some years of struggling to make Cranfield’s reading of
Romans fit with what Paul actually says in Galatians—something Cranfield, I
think, never achieved. I was not satisfied with the shallow developmental
analyses offered by various scholars, according to which Paul was opposed to
the law in Galatians and in favour of it in Romans, and so on.[2]
I found the clue in Romans 10: 3: Paul’s fellow Jews, he says. ‘were ignorant
of God’s righteousness, and were seeking to establish their own, and so did not
submit to God’s righteousness’. Their own: not a ‘righteousness’, a
status of membership in God’s people, which might be obtained by assiduous and
moralistic self-help Torah-keeping, but a covenant status which would be for
Jews and Jews only. It would be what I called a ‘national righteousness’.
Dunn followed this with his proposal, which I fully endorse, that the ‘works of
the Law’, against which Paul warned in both Galatians and Romans, were not any
and every legal ‘work’ done out of a desire to earn good marks in some heavenly
ledger account, but were the ‘works of Torah’ which marked out Jews over against
their pagan neighbours: sabbath, circumcision, and food laws. I have shown in
considerable detail that this proposal works exegetically, verse by verse and
line by line, through Romans, and I have sketched out the way it works in
Galatians.
[73] In particular, it makes
sense of first-century Judaism. A recent attempt to prove that there was a
‘variegated nomism’ in the second Temple period has indeed succeeded in
bringing out various nuances which go beyond what Sanders had said.[3]
But, despite the attempt in the book’s final summary to suggest otherwise,[4]
it has not basically undercut the overall emphasis of his work or mine. Nobody
has succeeded in proving that Judaism was after all the kind of
proto-Pelagianism which it would need to have been for the normal Lutheran
(and, in some circles, ‘evangelical’) understanding to be correct. In
particular, remarkably, nobody in the entire project noticed that the one
second Temple passage in which ‘works of Torah’ were thematic (4QMMT section C)
referred not to ‘works of the law’ as something to be done in order to earn
membership in the community, or salvation, or justification, but as things to
be done in order to mark out in the present the community that would be
vindicated in the future. The question being addressed is not: ‘How do you become
a true Jew?’, but ‘How are you marked out in the present as a true Jew?’
The parameters of the discussion are eschatological, looking ahead to the last
day: the assumption is that at the last day some Jews but not all will be
vindicated by God; the question is, how can you tell here and now who it is
that will be vindicated in the future. This has exactly the same shape
and form as Paul’s doctrine of justification, but, as we shall see,
different content, appropriate for his Jesus-shaped construal of both
problem and solution.
But this is to run ahead
of myself. Two more remarks, one on a major weakness of Sanders’s proposal, and
one on a strength.
First, the weakness.
Sanders declares that prior to his conversion Paul had no problem—no unquiet
conscience, no difficulty keeping the law, no existential angst of the kind
normally imagined within the ruling paradigm. Here Sanders, like Stendahl
before him, rightly emphasized Philippians 3: 2-6.[5]
As a result, he says, Paul moved not ‘from plight to solution’, first being
aware of a problem and then finding Christ as the answer to it, but ‘from
solution to plight’, first finding ‘salvation’ in Christ (what this word would
mean if there was no sense of plight is not clear) and then deducing that there
must [74] have been some kind of ‘plight’ to which this
‘salvation’ was the answer. This explains, according to Sanders, the seemingly
muddled nature of Paul’s critique of
But this ignores the
enormous problem, like the elephant in the living room, of which every
first-century Jew—and particularly a Pharisee—would be aware.
This enables us to
locate Sanders’s proposal about Paul moving from solution to plight as the
second half of a two-stage movement of thought. I agree that Paul offers an
analysis of ‘the problem’ (
Second, the strength of
Sanders’s proposal. The NP enables us, at a stroke, to make sense of one area
which has long been controverted in Paul. Why does Paul insist, in I
Corinthians 8-10 and Romans 14, that one must not divide the community over
issues of what you eat and which holy days you keep, while also insisting, in
several places, including I Corinthians 5 and 6, that there are certain types
of behaviour for which there must be zero tolerance? This has been a problem
for those who think that the key issue in his theology is ‘keeping rules’ over
against ‘trusting God’. But when we line up the matter in a post-NP way, the
answer is: because food and holy days are things which threaten to divide the
community along ethnic lines, whereas sexual ethics (or their non-observance)
would divide the community in terms of what it means to be a renewed-in-Christ
human being. Personal holiness matters even more for the Christian than it did
for the Jew, because in Christ we have died to sin and come alive into God’s
new world; but personal holiness has nothing to do with the ‘works of the law’
by which ethnic Israel was demarcated. I thus agree with several aspects of
Sanders’s proposal while differing from it in some ways and going beyond it in
others. I am [76] not surprised that some conservative Christians
have found Sanders’s proposal not to their taste. It contains a strong streak
of relativism, and that was bound to be unwelcome. He shows little appreciation
of Paul’s view of either God, Jesus, or the Spirit. But I am saddened that many
have imagined they have nothing to learn from Sanders’s massive scholarship and
have run howling back into the arms of Luther. In some cases—these are, I
think, the saddest of all—they have been reduced to appealing over the head of
the New Testament to the tradition of the sixteenth century, which is all the
more ironic when we reflect that Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest
would certainly have advised us to read the New Testament even better than they
did, not to set up their own work as a new authoritative tradition, a fixed
lens through which the Bible would have to be viewed for ever afterwards. And
what has been on offer in post-Sanders scholarship, including my own, has not
been a slavish following of Sanders, but an insistence on rereading Paul with
our eyes and ears open to the many-sided nature of second Temple Judaism, and a
recognition that none of our traditions may yet have learnt all that the
apostle has to teach us.
Our present summit need
not concern itself, I guess, with the detail of these debates. But it has been
important to sketch them out, because the theme of redemption is clearly
central to some of them at least. I hope it will be clear that a (not
uncritical) post-Sanders reading will enable us to take huge strides forward in
our understanding of redemption, which has itself of course been contentious in
various areas, not least ecumenical discussion. (I think of the perennial
squabbles about justification, and also of the echoes of the Jansenist
controversy in some Roman rejection of anything approaching penal
substitution.) Sanders did not himself attempt to locate and explicate Paul’s
theology of redemption within his overall argument. Can we do so, and what will
happen to the NP if we do?
Before I move to
positive statements, though, a word about two other movements which I regard as
vital for a proper, historically and theologically sensitive, reading of Paul.
First, there is the narrative reading of Paul which, pioneered by
Richard Hays twenty years ago, has been found increasingly fruitful, and goes
with Hays’s equally important stress on Paul’s fresh reading of scripture.
Basically, Paul grounds his theology again and again not in isolated prooftexts
(one of Sanders’s many weaknesses was to suggest this) but in a reading of
scripture which, like many second Temple Jewish [77] readings,
picked up its fundamental quality as the story of the creator and covenant God
with the world and with Israel. It is central to Paul’s world-view that this
long story has now come to its climax in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah (another
failing of Sanders is that he does not explore the significance of Christos
in Paul), and that the church, not least his own apostolic ministry, is called
to implement that achievement in a continuation of the same story in a new
mode. This, I suspect, is one of the main things that recent anti-NP writers
have objected to, which is the more ironic in that it was not part of Sanders’s
platform: that when Paul is talking of salvation, he, like his Jewish
contemporaries, was thinking in terms of the eschatological scheme in which
‘the present evil age’ would give way to ‘the age to come’, seen as a dramatic
turn-around within a continuing history, rather than a snatching of God’s
people out of the space-time world altogether. (Notice how, within the
traditional paradigm, Rom. 8: 18-28, which is structurally one of Paul’s most
emphatic passages, becomes marginalized in favour of a supposed message of
individual salvation away from the world.) When Paul draws on scripture,
whether it be Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, or Habakkuk, he is more often than
not aware of, and intending to resonate with, the place of the scripture in
question within a longer narrative. This is where the motif of ‘return from
exile’ is so important, though still so controverted. The best example is the
use of Deuteronomy 30 in Romans 10: 5-8, exactly parallel to the use of the
same passage in 4QMMT. Paul believes himself to be living in a story, the real
story of the real world, which stretches back to creation, and comes forward,
through Abraham, the exodus, the monarchy, the prophets, to the exile, which in
the political and theological sense has continued to his own day. He believes
that the real return from exile, which is also the new ‘exodus’, has taken
place in Jesus the Messiah, and that this has brought to birth the ‘new age’,
the ‘age to come’, by freeing God’s people from ‘the present evil age’.
Within this new age,
there are new tasks, of which Paul’s Gentile mission, in all its many facets of
evangelism, church planting, and maintaining, is a central one. The story will
continue until God is finally ‘all in all’, when the cosmos itself has been set
free from its bondage to decay and God’s people are finally given the new,
resurrection bodies that correspond to that of Jesus himself. As I said, the
real objection to the NP within certain conservative circles seems actually to
be an objection to this reading of Paul as the theologian of [78]
a salvation which is not away from the world but for the world.
Narrative readings of Paul are thus not simply a new fad, a postmodern trick
played on an ancient text, an attempt to award Paul an honorary Doctor of
Letters from Yale. They reflect, at a very deep level, the fact that he is as
much a theologian of creation as of redemption, and of alerting us to the fact
that his theology of redemption is precisely a theology of renewed, redeemed
creation. They reflect, also at a deep level, the fact that (though he seldom
mentions the word) he is a theologian of covenant, expounding Genesis 15
and wrestling with the apparent tension between the foundational covenant
promises to Abraham and the subsequent covenant with Moses (Rom. 4; Gal. 3).
The two are intimately related: God’s covenant promises to Abraham always were
the road towards the redemption of humankind and creation as a whole (e.g. new
covenant in 2 Cor. 3 leading to new creation in chapter 5; and the argument
from Abraham back to Adam in Rom. 4-5). I use ‘covenant’ in this sense as a
shorthand way of drawing attention to the fact that, though of course Paul
believes that God’s purpose has been achieved through the dramatic, apocalyptic
event of the cross, cutting across all human pride and immanent process, this
is nevertheless the fulfilment precisely of that larger, longer purpose. What
God did in the cross and resurrection of the Messiah, and the gift of the
Spirit, was what he had promised Abraham he would do: that is what I meant by
referring to those events as ‘the climax of the covenant’. Paul does not think
in detached aphorisms or theological slogans, but in large stories, including
the story within which he believes himself to be playing a vital role. That is
the framework for the various narratives that we find embedded, and
fruit-bearing, within his letters.
The second movement
which must be factored in to any fully fledged reading of Paul is the new
awareness of the political dimension of all his thought.[6]
Though there are many flaws in the work of Richard Horsley on this subject, he
has pioneered the way for us to see what I have called ‘the fresh perspective
on Paul’, according to which the gospel of Jesus the Messiah impinges directly
on the other ‘gospel’ which was making great inroads into the same world
namely, that of Caesar. As I have argued elsewhere, for Paul it was central
that if Jesus was ‘Lord’ then Caesar was not. This, too, has an [79]
inescapable narrative dimension, and indeed a recognition of the narrative and
historical nature of Paul’s thought, as above, precipitates us into the
political arena: the story of Rome, with its vivid eschatology of empire (a
thousand years of preparation, and now—Caesar!), was to be subverted by the
story of Israel, climaxing in Jesus. Paul fell heir to the long tradition of
Jewish critique of pagan empire, stretching back to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Daniel. This was never a dualist rejection of every aspect of empire (think of
Cyrus, of Jeremiah telling the exiles to settle down in
In particular, if we are
to have any historical sensitivity to the meaning of the cross in Paul’s
thinking, we must place at the very centre the awareness of the cross that
every first-century person, Jew and pagan alike, would share. This is where the
political meaning of Paul’s gospel bites most deeply, where the ‘fresh
perspective’ in its turn offers insights on a Pauline view of redemption.
Granted that crucifixion was widespread as a punishment for all sorts of
people, particularly at the lowest end of the social scale, it was particularly
used—and had been used in Palestine in Jesus’ lifetime—as a way both of
punishing revolutionaries and of warning those who might imitate them. The
cross already said, with all its violent symbolic power, that Caesar ruled the
world, and that those who stood in his way would be both shamed and
obliterated. To get at this today we might draw on a variety of images: the
world-famous photo of a small, naked Vietnamese girl, terrified and tearful;
the demolition of a Palestinian home; the burning of a synagogue in 1930s
Berlin, or of a church in today’s Sudan; imperial tanks sweeping into a
resistant city (Russian ones, in Prague; Chinese, in Tiananmen Square?). Brute
force, dehumanizing humiliation, shameful death: that was the symbolic message
of the cross, and that was the symbol that came, from Paul onwards, to speak of
the love of the true God, the love which had somehow conquered the
principalities and powers.
I propose, then, that
the true insights of the NP should be blended with a narratival and political
reading of Paul, and that when we do [80] this we find the
possibility of a multi-faceted theology of redemption emerging from his
writings. There are several ways of approaching this topic: for present
purposes I shall do so by considering the place of the cross within seven
implicit narratives in Paul’s writings.
II REDEMPTION IN PAUL
(i) Overview
What do we mean by
‘redemption’? I take it that for the purposes of the Redemption Summit we are using
the word in a broad sense, to denote the action(s) whereby God rescues human
beings, and (if we are being biblical) the whole cosmos, from the state of sin,
decay, and death to which they have become subject. This broad sense includes,
but goes beyond, the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion on the one hand and the
‘application’ of redemption (‘call’, faith, justification, glorification, to
use some of Paul’s terms) on the other. It is thus very nearly coextensive with
‘salvation’, seen also in a broad sense.
These big, somewhat
floppy terms can get in the way, not least because Paul uses them in a much
more precise sense, so that most of them fit together snugly in his mind like
adjacent, but not identical, pieces of a jigsaw. Thus, with regard to ‘redemption’,
Paul seems clearly to have in mind not just the often-noted slave-market
metaphor in which someone buys the slave his or her freedom but the more
specifically Jewish meaning in which God rescues Israel from the historical
slave-market of Egypt. As I have argued elsewhere (that phrase applies to most
of what will now follow), the context of Romans 3: 24 and 8: 23, two of Paul’s
key uses of apolytrosis, strongly suggests an Exodus-interpretation:
human beings in the present, and the whole creation in the future, are rescued
from slavery to sin and death as Israel was rescued from slavery in Egypt. Paul
uses the word again in I Corinthians 1: 30, in a string alongside sophia,
dikaiosyne, and hagiasmos, which tells us little about the
precise meaning he attaches to the word, though later in the letter he does
speak of ‘Christ our Passover’ being sacrificed for us (5: 7). Two of the uses
in Ephesians (1: 7 and 4: 30) reflect the same present/future balance as the
two in Romans; the third (1: 14) seems to be a more restricted metaphor, part
of the picture of a ‘down-payment’ guaranteeing ‘full possession’. The one
remaining Pauline [81] use of the word, Colossians 1: 14, belongs
with Romans 3: 24 and Ephesians 1:7.
But of course our topic
is wider than simply the occurrences of the word normally translated
‘redemption’. Part of the difficulty now emerges: God’s action to rescue humans
and the world is such a constant topic in Paul’s letters, and he says so many
different things about it in so many different contexts, that without launching
into a full exegesis of most of the letters I cannot really do justice to the
multi-faceted nature of his thought. Nevertheless, I may attempt a proposal, at
least for the sake of discussion. My proposal is that Paul’s thought about
Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, the one in whom God’s promises to Israel and,
through Israel, to the world are fulfilled, functions as the vital turning
point in no fewer than seven interlocking narratives which form the backbone of
all his thought. Understanding how the cross in particular functions in each of
these will take us close to a presentation of the heart of his theology.
(ii) Biblical Narratives in the
Background
Standing over all the
stories that make up the narrative substructure of Paul’s thought, we find
frequent reference to the Exodus. Romans 8 uses Exodus-language of the whole
creation, and of the people of God travelling through the wilderness towards
their ‘inheritance’. Similarly, Galatians 4: 1-n speaks of God’s people as
being enslaved, and then, at the right time (the time for the Abrahamic
promises to be fulfilled, as in Genesis 15 which Paul has been expounding in
the previous chapter), God sending forth his Son and his Spirit to rescue those
who are ‘under the law’. This is of course heavily ironic in that, in the
original Exodus-story, the law is God’s good gift to the newly redeemed people,
whereas here it is a force or power from whose enslavement people need to be
freed. Perhaps the most obvious point (at least, thus it seems to me) is Romans
6, where those in Christ come through the waters of baptism, symbolizing the
dying and rising of and with Christ, and so pass from the slavery of sin to the
new life of sanctification.
The story of the Exodus
is re-used in various ways both in the OT and NT, and in the latter, as in some
other second Temple contexts, it gives shape in particular to stories and
prophecies about the ‘return from exile’. As indicated above. I use this as a
shorthand way of referring to the widespread second Temple belief (as in Daniel
9) that [82] the true ‘exile’ continued long after the
geographical return, leading to speculation about when the real ‘redemption’,
in other words, the New Exodus, would take place.
If exile is the problem,
the servant is the answer—at least according to Isaiah 40-55. Though this
remains controversial, I now regard it as a fixed point that Paul made
extensive though subtle use of the servant songs at several places in his
writings, and, we may infer from his almost casual references, at considerably
more places in the thinking that lay behind the writings we have. An obvious
example is Romans 4:24-5, where the entire train of thought of 3: 21 - 4: 25,
is summed up in a formulaic sentence which clearly evokes Isaiah 53 and to
which Paul refers in his statements about the ‘obedience of the one man’ in
5:12-21. Not that Paul has removed the servant from his wider Isaian context:
chapters 40-55 are all about the righteousness of God through which the powers
of the world are defeated and God’s people in consequence rescued—the New
Exodus, in other words. And, within the servant story itself, but obviously
going much wider in Jewish thought as a whole, we cannot ignore Paul’s regular
use of sacrificial terminology. Our difficulty here is not so much in
recognizing that Paul sees Jesus’ death as a sacrifice as in working out what
he might [83] have meant by this, since our knowledge of how
second Temple Jews understood the theology of sacrifice is remarkably thin.[8]
This is bound to remain a question mark within this chapter as a whole: how
precisely did Paul understand Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, and how does this
integrate with all the other things he says? If we could answer this more
satisfactorily we would take another large step, I think, to integrating
several other aspects of his thought. These are the narratives—the exodus, the
return from exile, the offering of sacrifices—which help to frame and shape the
seven key stories which Paul is telling, in each of which the redeeming death
of Jesus the Messiah is the central point. I must now set them out one by one
before attempting integration.
(iii) The Seven Key Stories, and the
Cross within Them
The first story
Paul tells, by implication throughout, is that of creation and new creation.
A consistently Jewish thinker, Paul never imagines that creation is evil; it is
the good creation of the good God, and to be enjoyed as such. But, in line with
much apocalyptic thought, Paul believes that God is planning to renew creation,
to bring it out of its present state of decay and death and into the new world
where it would find its true fulfilment. The classic passage for this is of
course Rom. 8: 18-27, which as we saw offers one of the rare occurrences of the
word ‘redemption’ itself. Paul does not mention the cross in that passage
itself, but the sufferings of Christians, which are, for him, the sharing of
Christ’s sufferings, hold the key to the current state of affairs through which
the world must pass to attain its final deliverance from decay.
This explains why, at
the end of Galatians (6: 14-15), Paul can suddenly broaden the horizon of what
has been up till then a sharply focused discussion. I suspect that many at the
Redemption Summit sang a few days earlier Isaac Watts' version of
redemption:
Forbid it, Lord, that I
should boast,
Save in the cross of
Christ my God;
All the vain things that
charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his
blood.
[84]
Were the whole realm of
nature mine
That were an offering
far too small;
Love so amazing, so
divine.
Demands my soul, my
life, my all.
A wonderful statement of
Christian devotion; yet, as with other hymns from the same period, we may
question whether it does full justice to the scope of what Paul actually says:
‘through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world; for
neither circumcision is anything, nor uncircumcision, but new creation’. The
‘to me’ is clearly important, and the ‘new creation’ is focused on the new
creation that consists in the Spirit-called people defined by faith as opposed
to membership in ethnic Israel; but what Paul is saying about himself, and
about all God’s people in Christ, is not just that they have changed,
but that they live in a landscape which has decisively changed. The world as a
whole has been crucified in the crucifixion of the Messiah, and a new world has
been brought to birth. This is presumably why he can say in Colossians 1: 23
that the gospel has already been proclaimed to every creature under heaven:
when Jesus died and rose again, the cosmos as a whole became a different place.
This is also closely linked to the famous 2 Corinthians 5: 17: ‘anyone in
Christ is new creation—the old things have gone, and look, new things have come
into being’. That passage, too, belongs closely with a massive statement both
of the cross of Jesus and of the way the cross has worked its way through
Paul’s apostolic ministry, as we shall see later. What seems to be happening is
that Paul understands the death of Jesus, and the continuing resonances of that
death in the suffering of the church, as the hinge upon which the door of world
history turns. From that moment, the forces of decay and death have suffered
their major defeat, and from now on new creation is under way, with its first
signs being the new life of those who believe the gospel. ‘New creation’ thus
refers to the actual people concerned, not over against the rest of the world
but as the sign of the new life that will one day flood the entire creation.
The second great narrative
which Paul has in mind throughout his writing is the story of
This is exactly the way
Paul sets up the problem in two classic passages, Romans 2: 17-3: 9 and
Galatians 3: 6-12. The answer, in both cases, is the death of Jesus, bursting
through the blockage in the historical fulfilment of the divine purposes. In
Romans, Jesus appears as the Messiah, the faithful Israelite, whose redeeming
death (3: 24- 6) is the means of God’s now declaring that all who share this
faith are ‘righteous’, that is, members of the sin-forgiven family (3: 27-31),
and that this is how God has fulfilled the Abrahamic promises (4: 1-25). In
Galatians, more specifically, the curse of exile which had bottled up the
promises and prevented them getting through to the Gentiles, leaving Israel
itself under condemnation, is dealt with by the death of Jesus: he takes
Israel’s curse on himself (and thus, at one remove, the world’s curse, though
this is not what is in view in this passage, despite efforts to employ it as a
generalized statement of ‘atonement theology’), making it possible at last for
‘the blessing of Abraham to come on the Gentiles’ and also that ‘we’ (in other
words, Jews who had been under the very specific ‘curse’ of Deuteronomy) might
receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. In other words, the covenant
has been renewed at last—through the death of Jesus as
In other words, I do not
think that Paul’s train of thought ran, as so many have suggested: (a) Jesus
was crucified, therefore he was under God’s curse, therefore he cannot have
been the Messiah; and then (b) God raised him from the dead, therefore he
cannot have been cursed, therefore his death must have been redemptive. Paul is
quite clear that Jesus did bear the curse, not that he didn’t.
This explains, among
many other things, why Paul says at the start of Galatians (the point in the
letter when we might expect a thematic statement) that ‘our Lord Jesus the
Messiah gave himself for our sins, to deliver us from the present evil age
according to the will of God our Father’ (1: 3-4). And this in turn brings into
view the central statement of the common early creed quoted by Paul in I
Corinthians 15: 3: the Messiah ‘died for our sins according to the scriptures’.
Galatians 1:4 shows very clearly what this means, [86] offering
once more a historical understanding rather than a dehistoricized
atonement-theory. For a second Temple Jew, soaked in passages like Daniel 9,
the present parlous state of Israel, which (following Daniel and many other
writers) I have characterized as ‘continuing exile’, was the result of Israel’s
sins. The ancient Israelites had sinned, and had gone into exile; now their
successors, even those living back in the land, had continued to sin, and as a
result the final redemption, the real ‘return from exile’, was delayed. (Think,
for instance, of Malachi.) The problem of sin is thus not simply that it
separates the individual from God in his or her existential spirituality (true
though that is as well). The problem is that
The story of the crucified Messiah is thus at the heart
of Paul’s way of telling the story of how
I through the Torah died
to Torah, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah;
however, I am alive, yet it is not me, but the Messiah lives in me. And the
life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me. I do not nullify God’s [87] grace; for
if covenant membership came by Torah, then the Messiah died for no reason.
(Gal. 2:19-21)
This spills over into
the next story (and all these stories are in any case interlocked); yet I
cannot resist putting it here. The point of all that Paul is saying, to Peter
at Antioch and, through the telling of that incident, to the Galatians as they
‘overhear’ the Paul/Peter debate, or at least Paul’s side of it, is not that
he, Paul, has had a particular spiritual experience or that he now enjoys a
particular kind of spiritual life. The point of it all is that Paul is here
standing, as in one or two other places, as the typical Israelite. He has
stated the general principle in Galatians 2:15-16: though we are by birth Jews,
not ‘Gentile sinners’, we know that God declares ‘righteous’ not those who rely
on ‘works of Torah’, but those whose status depends on the faithfulness of the Messiah. Paul’s point, in other
words, is that through the faithful death of the Messiah God has acted to transform
the category of ‘the righteous’, so that it now denotes not those who are
defined by Torah but those who are defined by the Messiah. And ‘those who are
defined by the Messiah’ means those who have died and come to life in and with
him; those, in other words, who have been co-crucified with him (v. 19). Here
the cross determines the death of the old identity: the Messiah,
The third great narrative
which Paul offers is embedded within the second, as the second is in the first:
it is the story of Torah. Torah is almost personified in some Pauline passages,
and its multiple ambiguities have precipitated a huge secondary literature. The
crucial passages are again in Galatians and Romans. In Galatians 4: 1-7, [88]
Paul tells the story of
We should do so not least in the light of the parallel in Romans 7:1-8: 11. Once again I refer to my commentary for fuller treatment. The main point to be drawn out here is found in two seminal statements, Romans 7: 4 and 8: 3-4.
Paul’s advance summary
in 7: 4 is very close to Galatians 2: l6-21: ‘You died to the law through the
body of the Messiah, so that you could belong to another, to the one who was
raised from the dead, so that you could bear fruit for God’. Briefly, the point
is this: Torah had bound
Torah, however, has
throughout this process had an important and God-given negative purpose: to
draw sin onto one place, luring it forwards to concentrate all its efforts at
one spot. That is the meaning of the otherwise puzzling 5: 20. And when this
has been done, then the trap can be sprung: sin, the real culprit (does Paul in
personifying ‘sin’, take a step towards identifying it with the serpent in the
garden, and hence with ‘the satan’?), must be condemned. This is the closest
Paul comes to saying in so many words what so many of his interpreters have attributed
to him: that the death of Jesus was the ultimate moment of judicial
condemnation, of God’s punishment; ‘God, sending his own son in the likeness of
sinful flesh and as a sin-offering, condemned sin in the flesh.’ This is
strongly penal language. However, Paul does not say either that God punished
Jesus or that God punished Jesus for ‘my sins’; much of the previous chapter
has been devoted to demonstrating that. For the pious Jew under Torah. ‘it is
not I that do it, but sin dwelling in me’. What Paul says is that God punished sin
in the flesh, that is the flesh of Jesus. Of course, this amounts to the same
thing in practice; Jesus’ crucifixion was not one whit less horrible, shameful
disgusting, and agonizing for the fact that God was punishing sin rather than
punishing Jesus, since of course the point was that he had come ‘in the
likeness of sinful flesh’. But this theological analysis of the event indicates
well enough, I think, how close the traditional penal theories of the atonement
come to his meaning while yet not allowing for its subtlety. The point within
this third story is that Torah, God’s agent in the necessarily negative period
between Moses and Jesus, was used to draw sin onto one place-Israel, and thence
to Israel’s representative, the Messiah-so that in his crucifixion, it could be
punished at last as it deserved. And in that punishment-here the penal
substitutionary theory makes its perfectly valid point-’there is now no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (8: 1). No condemnation for
Christ’s people because God has condemned sin in the flesh of Christ: that is
the perfectly Pauline point underneath the substitutionary language that has
proved so powerful for some and so problematic for others.
[90] This leads us to the fourth
story, which is that of the human race. This is central to the whole
presentation and, though this treatment is still very brief, it will be
somewhat longer than that of the other stories. ‘All sinned, and came short of
the glory of God; and they are justified by his grace as a gift through the
redemption which is in Messiah Jesus’ (Rom. 3: 23-4). Redemption is the means
of justification. How can we understand this? ‘Justification’ has, since
Augustine at least, often been understood as more or less coterminous with
‘conversion’. Traditional Reformed theology has spelt things out in more detail
in terms of an ‘ordo salutis’ which comes close, in my view, to the substance
of what Paul is saying without always reflecting his use of key terms. My
contention here—and this explains the anger directed against my view in some
circles—is that Paul does not use the verb like this. This is where I not only
agree with Sanders in seeing that Paul is talking about the coming together of
Jew and Gentile in Christ, but go beyond him into a far more precise definition
of ‘justification’.
When Paul speaks of the
initial hearing-the-gospel-and-coming-to-faith he speaks of the ‘call’ of God
(see I Cor. 1: 26; Gal. 1: 15; spelt out in I Thess. 1: 4; 2:13). In the
decisive, crystal-clear summary at the end of Romans 8 he distinguishes ‘call’
from ‘justify’ within the sequence of God’s actions. Thus, despite generations
who have read it this way, I conclude that Romans 3: 21-6 does not describe
how someone becomes a Christian, but describes rather the grounds on which
God declares that certain persons, despite their all alike being sinful, are
declared to be members of his covenant family. This declaration is not what
brings people into the family; it is what certifies— against the expectation of
those who might still assume that the Jew/Gentile distinction operates in
perpetuity—that all who are ‘of the faith of Jesus’ are full members,
circumcised and uncircumcised alike. That this is Paul’s meaning ought to have
been clear long ago from verses 29 and 30, which explain the nature of the
‘boasting’ in 3: 27-8; but the Lutheran reading of the passage, according to
which ‘boasting’ meant ‘self-righteous legalism, trying to earn God’s favour’,
has been so strong that even good exegetes have been content to see verse 29 as
a transition to a different theme. God ‘justifies’ all alike on the basis of
faith; that is, exactly as in Galatians 2:15-21, God regards all the faithful
alike as fully members of the same single family, and as belonging side by side
at the same table.
[91] Thus, despite
generations of zealous evangelistic use of Romans 3:21-6 as describing and
facilitating ‘conversion’, I do not think this is what the passage is basically
about. ‘Justification’ is not about ‘entry’, about ‘getting in’; this is where
Sanders, I think, failed to draw the appropriate conclusion from his own
thesis. Nor is it exactly about ‘staying in’. It is about God declaring that
someone is in. It defines the community.
In the light of this, what can we say about the cross in verses 24-6? How does Paul explain more precisely the meaning of ‘the redemption which is in Messiah Jesus’?
The main thing to say is
that it is cultic. God ‘put him forth’—the word is used in the LXX of
the shewbread—as a hilasterion, through his faithfulness (i.e. his
obedience-to-death, as in 5:12-21), by means of his blood. Much debate has
poured forth on the precise meaning of hilasterion, and much has been
invested in making this the vital turning point in atonement theology. By
itself the word probably cannot bear that weight. Strong indications point to a
propitiatory significance, but this is not enough to force the whole passage
into the normal straitjacket of ‘we sinned; God punished Jesus instead; we go
free’. The main point is that, as with the sacrifices of the OT, the death of
Jesus is the means whereby the God of infinite justice can nevertheless declare
that certain people truly are his people, are dikaioi: that is, they are
covenant members, and their sins are forgiven. That was what the covenant was
always designed to do, and in Jesus the Messiah the object has been attained. I
have argued in my commentary that Paul is here drawing on ideas connected to
the sacrificial death of the martyrs, which in turn point back to second Temple
readings of Isaiah 53; and the fact that Paul refers to that passage when
summing up the place of Jesus’ death in the argument of this section (4: 24-5)
gives this strong support. The servant dies ‘for our trespasses/iniquities’, in
order to put into effect God’s righteousness and salvation.
There can be no question
but that Isaiah 53 has in mind some kind of substitution: the servant is
innocent, yet bears the fate of the guilty. (See too Rom. 8. 3, discussed
briefly above.) Paul has made it very clear in his initial statement of human
guilt that the characteristic human position is to know God’s decree that
certain types of behaviour deserve death, and yet to practise and approve them.
Now he describes the Messiah dying ‘on behalf of’ the weak, the sinful, as the
outworking of God’s love (Rom. 5: 8), resulting in people being [92]
‘justified’, that is, declared to be in the right, in the present, and being
assured of final salvation (Rom. 5: 9). (Paul here draws on the same seam of
thought as we saw in Gal. 1: 3-4 and I Cor. 15: 3.) And, as the paragraph
reaches its climax in Romans 5: 10, Paul speaks of enemies being reconciled,
and of those now reconciled then being saved the more easily. The fact that he
has just spoken of God’s wrath (Rom. 5: 9) ought to warn us against too readily
assuming that ‘enemies’ describes only the subjective state of rebellious human
beings; the mystery is that God simultaneously was turned against the human
race in wrath (Rom. i: 18) and turned towards it in love (Rom. 5: 8). The day
we fathom that mystery will be the day we understand Paul’s atonement theology.
Where has this taken us in following the fourth story? The whole human race, sinful and unable to defend itself (Rom. 3:19-20), finds itself addressed by a love which declares that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, has died for it and risen again. When this message is preached, and the Spirit works powerfully through this gospel, this constitutes the ‘call’ (Rom. 1: 16-17; I Cor. 12: 3; Gal.1: 15; I Thess. 2: 13), resulting in the faith that Jesus is indeed Lord and that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 4: 24-5; lo: 9). This ‘call’ is itself possible because of what Jesus has already done, because of the new world that has come into being through his dying and rising (see story 1 above); but as it is applied, through the word and the Spirit, to the individual heart it invites the surprised, newly believing person to reflect on the status he or she now has. This is the status of ‘righteous’, and it is grounded in what has been achieved on the cross. By only a small expansion of Romans 5: 6-10 we can see the point. Those who were weak are now strong; those who were unaware of God’s love are now grasped by it; those who were sinners are now accounted such no longer; those who were unrighteous are now righteous; those facing wrath are now rescued from it; those who were enemies are now reconciled and, once more, rescued. All this has taken place because of the death of Jesus, and the new life which flows from it. All of this constitutes ‘the redemption which is in Messiah Jesus’. And all of this points on, in the argument of Romans 5-8 and the theology of Paul as a whole, to the climax in Romans 8: those who share Christ’s sufferings will share his glory, his dominion over the redeemed cosmos.
At the heart of this we
find the strange combination of two apparently opposite ideas: the Messiah
dies, therefore his people die [93] with him; the Messiah dies,
therefore his people do not die. Though these are often played off against one
another (‘representation’ versus ‘substitution’), I have already said enough to
show that they belong closely with one another. Substitution (he dies, we do
not) makes sense within the context of representation (the Member of Parliament
represents the constituents, and therefore is qualified to act,
particularly to speak and vote, in their place). Representation is
important not least because it creates the context for substitution. Within the
story of the human race as a whole we find the Pauline story of the individual
human being, summarized in Romans 8: 2.9-30. When someone becomes a Christian,
this is rooted in God’s inscrutable will, not in their own initiative; Paul has
little to say about this, but (here and in e.g. I Thess.1i: 4-5) it is clear
that when the gospel works powerfully to change hearts and lives, Paul traces
this not to the worthiness of the hearer but to the grace of God (he may well,
of course, have in mind passages like Deut. 7: 6-8). For our purposes the key
events are the three final ones in Romans 8: 29-30: those God called, he also
justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
This should make it clear that when Paul wants to refer to the initial event of someone’s becoming a Christian he does not use the term ‘justify’ and its cognates. He uses ‘call’, and he glosses this, as we saw, with a theology of the preaching of the gospel, the ‘word’, in the power of the Spirit. ‘Call’ denotes the event that people often refer to as ‘conversion’, though of course whereas ‘conversion’ draws attention to the change of heart and mind in the person concerned, the word ‘call’ draws attention to God’s action and hence places that change of heart and mind already in the category of ‘obedience’ as well as ‘faith’ (see e.g. Rom. 1: 5). The ‘call’ thus does indeed evoke faith, faith that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.
The verb ‘justify’ does
not, then, denote the initial moment of coming-to-faith, but (when used in the
present—see below) the declaration which God makes on the basis of that faith.
Justification in the present is God’s declaration, based on that faith alone
rather than anything in the ethnic, gendered, moral, or social background of
the person concerned, that this person is indeed a member of the covenant
family, one whose sins are forgiven and for whom there is ‘no condemnation’.
Justification thus points forwards to ‘glorification’, Paul’s larger term for
the eventual goal. I note that this is a larger category than ‘sanctification’,
though it includes it en route (not least by means of baptism; there is,
unfortunately, no space for [94] Romans 6 in this chapter). I
also note that the concrete referent is the final resurrection (Rom. 8: n), not
simply a post-mortem life of bliss in ‘heaven’ or wherever, something about
which Paul has almost nothing to say.
What then does Paul mean
by ‘justification’? Once we clear our minds of the referent the word has had in
much of the last 1600 years, and listen carefully to what he says, we discover
three things. When we listen to its OT echoes, the word is covenantal:
it refers to the declaration that these people are members of God’s true
people. But because this declaration is always made in the face of the
accusation of sin, and in the light of God’s determination to put the world to
rights precisely through the Abrahamic covenant, the word is also forensic:
the ‘law-court’ categories are not simply snatched from a different and perhaps
conflicting metaphorical home base, but rather explain how it is that the covenantal
purpose is worked out. And the word is also, especially, eschatological.
It can be used in both past and future as well as present, and indeed the past
justification and the future justification determine the meaning of the
present. This will become clear if we lay these senses out.
In Romans 2: 1-16 Paul speaks of ‘justification’ in the future: those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honour, and immortality will be given the life of the age to come, and this is to be seen as ‘justification’, that is, God’s final declaration that they are his people. This future ‘declaration’ will consist in God’s raising these people from the dead; this same event can thus properly be described, also, as ‘salvation’, since it will be the means of rescuing people from the state of death; and, as we saw, as ‘glorification’, stressing the new role for God’s redeemed humanity within God’s new world.
In Romans 4: 25 Paul declares that Jesus was ‘put to death for our trespasses, and raised for our justification’. The connection implied by ‘for’ in this double statement is highly contested, but for present purposes the point is that Paul is looking back to a past event which somehow grounds the justification that we enjoy in the present. It is the event which he can sum up as the ‘act of obedience’ of Jesus Christ, or as his ‘faithfulness’.
Thus Romans 3: 21-31,
and indeed Romans 4 which roots it in God’s covenant promises, speaks of a present
justification which is based on the action of the faithful Messiah in the past
and which anticipates the verdict of the future. When someone believes
the [95] gospel—when, in other words, the ‘call’ takes place, as
above—then the verdict of the future is brought forward into the present. As in
4QMMT, this is how that which will be revealed on the last day—namely, who
God’s true people really are—is known in advance. But whereas in 4QMMT the
evidence was to be the performance of certain specified ‘works of Torah’,
namely the regulations which marked out the Essenes from other Jews, and
whereas for the Pharisees (or their Christian analogues whom we can assume to
have been Paul’s partners in controversy) the evidence was to be the
performance of the ‘works of Torah’ which marked out Jews from their pagan
neighbours, that is, sabbath, food-laws, and circumcision, for Paul the
evidence is simply Christ-faith: belief that Jesus is Lord and that God raised
him from the dead. This faith, the obedient response to God’s call, is the
appropriate evidence for this declaration, both because it is the sign of the
Christ-life (note how the faith of the believer mirrors the faithfulness of
Jesus the Messiah in Rom. 3: 22) and because, since it is the work of the
Spirit through the gospel, it is the sign of that upon which final assurance is
based. ‘The one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the
day of the Messiah’ (Phil. 1. 6). This is where Paul’s whole theme of the
Spirit as arrabon, ‘down-payment’, makes its contribution to a fully
blown theology of justification.
I thus note that, despite the loose language (and theology) we often find in this area, Paul does not speak of ‘salvation by faith’ (except for Eph. 2: 8, which raises other questions). Once we free ‘justification’ from meaning ‘conversion’ or anything like it, we cut loose from the sterile and often tortuous debates about ‘faith and works’ that have taken place in an environment many miles removed from second Temple Judaism, namely the European controversies of the sixteenth and some subsequent centuries. Paul would, of course, have scoffed at Pelagian-style self-help moralism, but this is not what Romans and Galatians are about. He believed, like most Jews of his day, in a final judgement which would be ‘according to works’, and did not in any way see that as compromising his position on justification, God’s declaration in the present that all believers belong to his true people. ‘Justification’ is a technically precise way of saying something Paul was eager to say and many of his readers have completely missed: that all those who believe in Jesus as the risen Lord belong in the same family, no matter what their social or moral status or background.
[96] So much for the fourth
story Paul is telling. I turn fifthly, much more briefly, to a very
specific outworking of the same narrative, namely the story of Paul’s apostolic
vocation. Two passages are particularly significant: Philippians 3: 4-n and 2
Corinthians as a whole. In Philippians Paul applies the pattern he has set out
in 2:6-n to his own life. Whatever gain he had, he counted as loss because of
the Messiah. His goal is ‘to know him and the power of his resurrection and the
fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death, if somehow I may
attain to the resurrection from the dead’. I have argued elsewhere that this is
not said for the sake of autobiography, but in order to highlight the pattern
of Jesus’ dying and rising as being etched into Paul’s apostolic work so that
it may serve as a pattern. He wants the Philippians to imitate him; they cannot
do this directly, since none of them had been zealous Pharisaic Jews as he
describes himself to have been. The solution is found at the end of the
chapter, where Paul’s description of Jesus seems deliberately to echo Roman
imperial rhetoric about Caesar. Paul is hinting, I suggest, that the
Philippians, some of whom at least will have been Roman citizens, and all of
whom may have found benefit in the city’s status as a Roman colony, must sit as
loose to their privileges as he has to his.[9]
Paul’s second letter to
Again, I have argued
elsewhere for a different interpretation to the normal one.[10]
Start from two fixed points. First, it is highly probable [97]
that when Paul writes dikaiosyne theou, as here and in several passages
in Romans, he is not referring to the status which he and all Christians have,
the status of ‘righteous’ which is God’s gift. That he describes as the
righteous status which comes from God (he ek theou dikaiosune,
Phil. 3: 9). Rather, he refers to God’s own covenant faithfulness. (This is
strengthened further by the oddity of saying ‘become’, had he meant that this
righteous status was ‘reckoned’ to them, as in Rom. 4 or Gal. 3.) Second,
reading the verse the normal way, as a statement of abstract atonement theology
in which our sins are credited to Jesus and his righteousness is credited to us
(something Paul says nowhere else), destroys the force of the passage, in which
Paul is building up to a crescendo not about soteriology but about the inner
logic of his apostolic ministry. In fact, the normal reading of the passage
often results in v. 21 falling off the end of the discussion; or, sometimes, in
the treating of v. 20 as if it were a direct appeal to the Corinthians
themselves (by the unwarranted addition of ‘you’), rather than a broad
statement of Paul’s apostolic activity. These two fixed points suggest the
following reading: that the cross of Jesus the Messiah is (among many other
things) the means by which the failings and limitations of the apostle and his
work, and particularly his personal sins, are dealt with, setting him free to become,
to embody, to encapsulate, and show forth in his own work, that covenant
faithfulness of God whose initial unveiling in the faithful death of Jesus
(Rom. 3: 21-6) stands behind everything Paul believes, writes, and attempts. I
therefore read v. 21 not as a statement of God’s righteousness, still less Christ’s
righteousness, being imputed, imparted or otherwise transferred to the
believer, but as a statement of God’s own covenant faithfulness being embodied
in the apostolic work which is causing Paul so much grief throughout the
letter.
This still leaves,
however, the first half of the verse: ‘For our sake [God] made [the Messiah],
who knew no sin, to be sin for us.’ Though Paul does not mention the death of
Jesus specifically, the wider context has been full of it (especially e.g. 4:
7-15), and the mention of God’s reconciling work in the Messiah (5: 18-19) fits
closely with his cross-shaped reconciliation theology in Romans 5: 9-10 and
Colossians 1: 20. 22. Once again there may be cultic overtones: to make
something to be ‘sin’ could be a way of referring to the sin-offering. But this
should not take away from the central statement: God’s making the sinless one
to be sin on our behalf. Once again the [98] closest OT passage
seems to be Isaiah 53, where the innocent one is wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities. It may be, though, that Paul is not simply
explaining that in his death Jesus has borne ‘our’ sin, that is, including that
of the apostles themselves, in order that they might be fit embodiments of
God’s covenant faithfulness. He may also, or even primarily, be referring to
Jesus’ sin-bearing death as the model for, and the locus of, the suffering
which the apostle must now undergo as he brings the message of reconciliation.
It is ‘in him’, after all, that the apostles ‘become’ God’s covenant
faithfulness. Once again the parallel with Colossians 1 suggests itself: Paul
fills up in his own flesh what was lacking in the Messiah’s afflictions for the
sake of his body, the church (1: 24).
Colossians 1 points us
to the sixth story which Paul is aware of telling throughout his work:
that of the powers of the world. Briefly, and confusingly, the powers—every
single one of them, in heaven and earth—are created in, through, and for the
Messiah, God’s beloved son (1: 16), and then are reconciled through him (1:
20). The reader of Paul’s great poem is puzzled: why, if they were created by
him, did they need to be reconciled? The poem clearly presupposes some sort of
‘fall’, or rebellion of the powers. This is confirmed in Colossians 2: 15. The
cross of Jesus, instead of being as one might suppose the place where the
powers celebrated a triumph over him, stripping him naked and holding him up to
public contempt, is to be seen as the place where Jesus celebrated his
triumph over them.
This victory over the
powers, and their consequent reconciliation, sets the stage for Paul’s
reworking of the ancient Jewish theme of the one sovereign God and the powers
of the world, spiritual and political (a modem distinction to which,
notoriously, neither Jewish nor Pauline thought corresponds). Alongside
Colossians 1 we must place I Corinthians 2: 8: ‘None of the rulers of this age
knew [the hidden wisdom of God]; if they had, they wouldn’t have crucified the
Lord of Glory.’ Three things are going on here, points at which Paul is picking
up Jewish political theology where the Wisdom of Solomon left off and taking it
forward. First, he implies that the wisdom of
This is where, I suggest, Paul’s theology of the cross
confronts, in principle, the power of
The seventh and last
story we note is that of God himself. It may seem a step too far towards
process theology to imagine God himself having a ‘story’; yet when Paul tells
the story of Israel this is really the obverse of the other story looming up
behind, the story of the creator and covenant God. This is, surely, what Romans
9-11 is all about; were there more space, I would try to demonstrate that that
entire section of the book is radically shaped around the cross of
In fact, the passage
traditionally quoted in favour of a ‘kenotic’ christology makes this point very
well. Philippians 2: 6-n turns on the little word dio at the start of
v.9: therefore God has given him the name above every name, that every
tongue should confess that Jesus, Messiah, is kyrios. The LXX
references, especially to Isaiah 45: 23, indicate what is in mind: the One God,
who will not share his glory with another, has shared it with Jesus—precisely
because he has been ‘obedient to death, yes, the death of the cross’. For Paul
in Philippians, the crucifixion of Jesus is not something which [100]
happened despite the fact that he was God incarnate, but because of it. He has
done what only God can do.
(iv) Conclusion: The Cross within
Paul’s Storied World
I have tried to show, in
all too incomplete a fashion, the role that the cross played in seven of the
key interlocking stories which contribute to the rich texture of Paul’s
theological and practical writing. Ideally, I should now work through the
material from one or two more angles, establishing some cross-sectioned
references and so homing in the more accurately on the way Paul’s mind and
arguments worked. But I have said enough to show, I think, both that the New
Perspective, by highlighting key aspects of second Temple Judaism and by
loosening the grip of a wooden Lutheran-style analysis, has opened up all kinds
of new possibilities, even though within the NP itself these were not followed
up in the way I have now done. I have also tried to indicate how the fresh perspective
plays out, though there again there is much more to be said. Certainly Paul
believed that through his costly apostolic work (story 5) and through the
creation, by the gospel, of a renewed non-ethno-specific human family (story
4), Caesar’s grandiose claim to bring justice, freedom, and peace to the world
(story 6) was being challenged by God’s counter-claim, which, like Caesar’s,
hinged decisively on the cross. This coming together of soteriology and
‘political theology’ may indeed be the most important proposal of this chapter.
But I have tried to
show, in particular, how narrative readings of Paul can shed fresh light on
well-known and contentious areas. I do not think I have made these areas less
contentious, but I hope I have conveyed something of the excitement and drama
that they had for Paul himself and can, I believe, still have today.
‘Redemption’ is one of those heavy, stodgy words that sit amongst Christian
vocabulary the way suet puddings sit amongst the other food on the plate. I
hope I have indicated that for Paul this was a word which spoke of promise
fulfilled, of freedom attained, of the faithful love of God and the journey
home to the ‘inheritance’—in other words, of exodus. In a world ringing once
more with the familiar imperial rhetoric of freedom, it is good to be reminded
that there is another way of telling the story.
[1] Representative works of the New
Perspective include: E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A
Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977); James D.
G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul. and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]