The New Perspective and Sola Fide

A more recent challenge to the Reformation Anglican doctrine of justification by faith alone has come from the movement within New Testament studies known widely as the ‘New Perspective on Paul’. One of the leading advocates for this new reading of Paul on justification is the Anglican scholar and former bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright. The New Perspective argues for a revision of Paul’s thought in the light of the context of 1^st century Judaism. Paul’s polemic in a letter like Galatians is not against a version of medieval Catholicism, but against the ethno-centricism of his fellow Jews. ‘The works of the law’ are not simply moral deeds done to win merit with God, but the specifically Jewish markers of identity: circumcision, the food laws, the temple cult and so on. His question is not ‘how can I find be righteous before God?’ but ‘how can the Gentiles be included in the covenant that God made to establish for himself a people?’

If proven, this insight dramatically shifts the context against which the traditional terms involved in the doctrine of justification have normally been understood. In the first place, it means that Paul in his famous Galatian and Roman epistles was not making claims about universal human nature and its determination to save itself by works (as Luther claimed), but rather about the specific moment in covenantal history that he was addressing in which the Jew-Gentile issue was most pressing.

Secondly, on Wright’s view, justification is not the central doctrine that it has been held to be, and many of the Reformation claims for its significance have been overstated. It is rather:

God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of His people… It wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology, not so much about salvation as about the church.[1]

That means that for Wright and others, justification is about who is a member of the covenant people of God, not an individual’s wrestle to stand before the holy God. Faith, then, is the badge of membership in the covenant of God, since it involves the kind of trust in the promises of God exemplified by Abraham – which was ‘credited to him as righteousness’ (as Paul says in Romans 4). Being ‘justified by faith’ means something like ‘becoming a member of the covenant people of God by trusting in the promises of God’. 

There is not space here for a fully detailed evaluation of the New Perspective on Paul. That can be already found in a number of places.[2] The debates in New Testament studies about the centre of Paul’s thought continue to rage. Nevertheless, it is possible to offer these reflections. First, the New Perspective has insisted that the theological debate be about what the Bible itself actually says, and not about competing confessions. The Bible should be read in its historical context and with the New Testament read in the light of the Old; and one of the striking things about the Scriptural narrative is the particularity of its strange story. It does not deliver universal and timeless truths; quite the opposite. It is a book of particular and time-located texts with specific occasional purposes. This is especially true of Paul’s writings. In particular, the New Perspective provides a corrective to a kind of extreme Lutheran position which pits the Old Testament (‘Law’) against the New Testament (‘Gospel’). 

Second, the New Perspective has provided a riposte to a very individualist Protestantism and has pointed to the close relationship between ecclesiology and soteriology. Becoming a member of the people of God and being justified are in essence the same process. Mind you, Calvin and Luther would not have denied this.

Third, a justification by faith alone read in New Perspective terms points to the problem not simply of moral pride but a racial and ethnic presumptiveness; and is the proclamation of a gospel that transcends ethnic barriers. The Gentiles are admissible as part of the people of God, and not simply by the route of converting first to Judaism. By faith, without any other qualifications or bloodlines, they are allowed to the table of fellowship with God and his people.

Even the New Perspective’s critics admit that these points have led to a helpful recalibration of aspects of the doctrine of justification. Nevertheless, careful scholarship has shown that the Judaism of the first century were far more complex and diverse than the New Perspective advocates have perhaps allowed. Paul could have pointed to forms of Judaism that were similar in their legalism to medieval Catholicism, since such forms did exist.  

It is also the case the Wright’s polemical style tends to exaggerate the differences between the New Perspective and the traditional Protestant reading of Paul. Many of the claims that have been heralded as the ‘New Perspective’ can be received as useful additions to our thinking about Paul’s theology without having to concede that the Reformation position was drastically in error. Wright’s insistence that the Christian gospel is the Lordship of the risen Messiah Jesus is surely not denied by the holders of the traditional view. But also: the strong words that Paul speaks against the ‘mutilators of the flesh’ in the Galatian letter as ‘preaching another gospel’ do not come because they were denying the Lordship of Christ. Likewise, an emphasis on the corporate nature of our salvation need not come at the expense of the right emphasis on the individual’s faith that the Reformation era rediscovered.

But the New Perspective’s understanding of the role of faith remains obscure and controversial even to many trained readers. Is faith a virtue deserving of merit in place of works? Or is it merely the instrument by which God justifies the ungodly by bringing them to himself? What is the significance of the notion of ‘credited’ or ‘reckoned’ in the description of Abraham having his faith ‘credited to him as righteousness’. Wright’s answers are not always clear on this subject. If faith earns merit, then it is hard to see how Wright’s view accords with any but the Catholic view, and is closer to Trent than to Luther. If however, faith is truly sola, then perhaps what he is arguing is less radical and less alarming than it appears. Beyond that, I cannot go!

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[1] What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 116

[2] D. A. Carson, Peter Thomas O'Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols., Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament, (T©*bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).