Paul’s Doctrine of Justification by Faith
Perhaps one of the greatest causes for contention between the common evangelical readings of Paul and the New Perspective come at this point. What is the meaning of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith? Perhaps one of the best ways to establish the meaning of Paul’s doctrine of justification is to study the manner in which he uses it. It is this that I now hope to briefly examine.
In Galatians 2:16 Paul gives a concise expression of the doctrine of justification by faith in response to Peter. Although some question whether Paul is directly addressing Peter from verse 15 onwards, it is clear that what he says in these verses follows on from his statements to Peter. If we can establish the question that is being tackled by Paul we will be more equipped to understand the nature of his doctrine of justification.
The Context and Continuity of Paul’s Argument
Paul is seeking to argue that Peter is wrong to withdraw from fellowship with Gentiles. We ought to pay careful attention to the issue that Paul was addressing in Antioch. Peter was not denying that Gentiles were being saved or denying the validity of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. Peter was not arguing that Gentiles needed to submit to the Torah if they were to be right with God. Peter was not trying to earn his own salvation, nor was he encouraging the Gentiles to earn theirs. All that Peter was doing was refraining from eating with Gentiles.
Paul summarized the issue by saying that Peter was ‘compelling’ Gentiles to ‘live as Jews’. Peter was doing this by means of manipulative social pressure, by withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles. The question that was being tackled was whether Gentiles should be pressurized to ‘live as Jews’ or whether Peter had any right to refrain from eating with them. Paul’s argument in this chapter must answer this question.
Most evangelicals presume that to ‘live as a Jew’ is to be a closet Pelagian, seeking to gain merit points with God. Peter, by pressurizing Gentiles to live as Jews, was encouraging them to buy into a system whereby they had to earn their own salvation. Getting the Gentiles to adopt Jewish practices was merely the tip of a Pelagian iceberg. Paul saw that Peter had stumbled at this point and had opened the door to the whole works’-salvation agenda of the Judaizers, who were maintaining that people were saved by faith
and moral effort (‘works’). Whilst Peter himself was probably not guilty of trying to earn his own salvation, he was tempting the Gentiles to earn theirs.
Pressurizing Gentiles to adopt Jewish practices was certainly the tip of an iceberg of error in Paul’s understanding. However, this error is not as simple as believing that one can earn one’s own salvation. The common evangelical reading rapidly departs from the context established by the dispute in Antioch and ends up with Paul debating with Pelagians and semi-Pelagians. The problem with this approach is that the latter part of Paul’s argument in the chapter is very hard to relate to the specific problem at Antioch.
To maintain the continuity of Paul’s argument the common evangelical position has to prove that adopting Jewish practices led to some form of Pelagianism or admit that Pelagianism, even if mentioned in the passage, is totally peripheral to Paul’s argument. The continuity of the argument depends upon the tenuous presumption either that the men from James had the intention of encouraging the Gentiles to earn their salvation or that the law was intrinsically a system of salvation by merit. The first option is clearly not justified — and certainly not necessitated (as I hope I have already demonstrated in earlier posts) — by the text. The second goes right against the OT teaching on the Torah. Unfortunately, some have reread the OT in the light of the Pelagian hypothesis, doing untold damage to the meaning of Scripture.
It must be remembered that the argument is directed firstly against Peter, not against the Judaizers. Whatever we may believe about the Judaizers, it is hard to argue that Peter was presenting the Torah as some system of works’-salvation. Peter was maintaining the distinctions of the Torah in regard to the people that he ate with, to avoid offending the Jews. If he was teaching that Gentiles could only be saved by becoming Jews (although not considering the Torah to be a meritorious system), the common evangelical reading would make slightly more sense (although it would still be demonstrably wrong). However, this would involve Peter radically turning from his previous position, in which he both recognized the validity of the mission to the uncircumcised and recognized that there was no real distinction between Jews and Gentiles (Acts 10:28, 34-35; 11:1-18; Galatians 2:9). The text gives us absolutely no basis for claiming this. Peter was merely practicing old distinctions, he was not theologically arguing for their necessity.
Paul’s argument is directed against the practice of Peter, not against supposed intentions of the Judaizers. The means by which Peter was compelling people to live as Jews was by withdrawing from Gentiles. He was not arguing for the necessity of living under the Torah if an individual was to be saved. What he was doing was establishing the Torah as a barrier within the church.
Justification: Ecclesiology or Soteriology?
A lot of criticism has been levelled at N.T. Wright for his claim that the doctrine of justification is not so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology. Whilst it should be stressed that Wright and others like him are by no means denying that the doctrine of justification is also about soteriology, we ought to take the time to carefully examine their claims.
If Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith was to really be an answer to the situation in Antioch, it must be relevant to the issue of who you eat with. In the context of Galatians 2 justification has to be about ecclesiology. Even if we presume that the Judaizers were teaching salvation by works, given the fact that Paul’s argument is addressing Peter’s practice, any attack upon a Pelagian soteriology is a digression from the point at hand. If Paul’s response to Peter’s withdrawing from eating with Gentiles out of fear of the Jews is: ‘Peter don’t you realize that an individual goes to heaven when he dies by believing in Jesus and not by working really hard to merit God’s favour’, we could be forgiven for being confused. The argument that a man is saved by faith and not by meritorious works sounds decidedly incongruous in the context of the dispute at Antioch. At worst it is misleading and is a misrepresentation of Peter, at best it is irrelevant to the issue in hand.
In another context, Wright has made the helpful analogy between exegesis and riding a bicycle. If you go too slow you will fall off. This danger is always present in books such as Galatians and Romans. Many evangelicals have been weaned on expository sermons that proceed through these books virtually verse by verse. Each verse is gradually treated as a self-standing proposition designed to answer the questions that you have brought to the text, rather than the questions raised by the context. One of the things that has really helped me to understand these books is to repeatedly read them straight through in single sittings. Once this has been done to Galatians, the common evangelical reading is seen to be disjointed and untenable.
In Galatians 2, the doctrine of justification focuses on addressing the issue of our relationship with other Christians, rather than on the issue of how we get into a relationship with God. Before we appropriate Galatians 2:16 as an answer to our disputes we must recognize how it served as an answer to the dispute at Antioch. The question being answered is one of ecclesiology —
is it permissible for Jews to withdraw from fellowship with Gentiles? — not one of soteriology —
how can an individual sinner get right with a holy God? Once this is understood, the burden of proof is placed upon those who would argue that Paul’s doctrine of justification in Galatians 2 is about soteriology.
The Demise of the ‘Pelagian Hypothesis’
The New Perspective is often attacked for allowing the study of Second Temple Judaism to dictate the meaning of the Scriptures to us. I think that this charge is a very weak one. The ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ has held Protestants in its thrall for so long that people fail to realize how hard it is to derive this understanding from a study of the text itself. All the time a perfectly plausible and, indeed, compelling reading of the text can be obtained by approaching the text on its own terms. Having probed the text, I firmly believe that the most satisfying reading by far is that provided to us by Wright, Hays and others from within the New Perspective movements.
The ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ has formed a Procrustean bed of distinctions between law and grace and misunderstandings of the Torah that has hampered evangelical theology for centuries now. If evangelicals could only step back and realize how all-conditioning
their theory about Second Temple Judaism has become they would not be trying to take the mote out of the eye of NPP scholars.
Reading through writers such as Ridderbos, one soon gets the impression that the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ has created a number of problems for their theology. Whilst they accept its general validity, they spend a lot of time seeking to limit its influence. They want to make clear that there is no antithesis between Paul’s teaching on the law and that of the OT. Paul is attacking a misconception of the law and not the original intention of the law. Ridderbos tries to clear Paul from the charge that by operating with the (Pelagian) misconception of the law propounded by ‘Jewish-synagogical nomism’ his whole treatment of the law is rendered suspect (of course, the fact that Paul is dealing with situations
within the church is easily forgotten). Ridderbos maintains that Paul nowhere confuses this misconception of the law with the actual teaching of the OT. Ridderbos writes:—
…for Paul the failure of Israel lay in this: that by failing to appreciate the true nature of God’s election (Rom. 9-11), they have not been able to see the law in the proper light, but have viewed it as a means for setting up their own righteousness (Rom. 10:3).
For Ridderbos, Paul is starting from the position of his opponents and he binds them to their false point of departure.
The theology of Ridderbos is very much redemptive historical. He does not want to set up an antithesis between the OT law and the NT way of salvation. However, he wants to maintain a redemptive historical critique of the law. Consequently, Paul’s battles with ‘Pelagian’ Judaism have a tendency to distract from the main issue, which is to do with
historia salutis and not the
ordo salutis. If the Torah was in no sense a covenant of works and Paul is merely attacking a delusion of Second Temple Judaism, the weight of Paul’s argument shifts decisively to the areas in which he critiques the Torah on a more redemptive historical basis.
Should the exegetical necessity of adopting the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ in approaching the Pauline epistles be undermined, there is no pressing theological reason to prevent followers of Ridderbos from abandoning it. It would have the welcome effect of emphasizing the centrality of the
historia salutis and prevent Paul’s discussions with his Jewish contemporaries from clouding the issue.
Calvinists have long believed the ‘third use’ of the law to be the principal use intended by God and have been more attuned to the redemptive historical role that the law was designed to play. Many have valiantly struggled against the controlling influence of the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ for these reasons. They have been concerned that people distinguish between the original intention of the law and the misuse of the law by the Judaizers. Any reader of Norman Shepherd’s book,
The Call of Grace, will have been struck by his constant wish to prevent the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ distorting these issues.
I contend that as Reformed theology becomes more and more aware that the Torah was not ‘the covenant of works republished’, the appeal of the NPP will grow. This will occur for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’ will be recognized to be an unnecessary appendage to Reformed theology. The exegetical Gordian knot that it has tied us up in can be cut quite simply and the centrality of the redemptive historical issues can be expressed far more clearly. There will be few theological reasons to refrain from denying the ‘Pelagian hypothesis’. If the ‘covenant of works’ view of the law is chimerical and detached from any real basis in the law as God delivered it, Paul could easily articulate his relationship with the Torah without ever engaging with the issues raised by Pelagianism.
Secondly, as people learn to view the Torah apart from the covenant of works they will be able to see grace where formerly they saw merit. They will be able to see that much of the ‘merit theology’ in Second Temple Judaism has been read into the texts. The existence of Pelagian Judaizers will seem increasingly implausible. As the historical work of Sanders and the exegetical work of NPP authors such as Dunn, Wright and Hays provide the opportunity to jettison the ailing hypothesis once and for all, people will jump at the opportunity.
I hope to move on to unpack some of the different elements of justification itself in my next post. Having done this I would like to conclude by proving the practical value of the NPP approach to the doctrine of justification by applying it to a number of problems in the church today.
