Think On These Things - May 2007

The New Perspective on Paul

By Dr. Gary E. Gilley, Pastor-teacher, Southern View Chapel

The lovers of God’s truth can be excused if they seem to be a little “under the weather” lately, for everywhere we turn there are attacks on cardinal doctrines of the faith which most of us have considered secure and untouchable for years. Nathan Busenitz says it well,

It seems like just about every major doctrine of historic Christianity is currently under attack. Theology proper faces the Open-Theism debate; bibliology is still reeling from higher criticism; and pneumatology is split over the Charismatic question. For Christology the issue is the lordship of Christ; for anthropology it’s Christian psychology; and for ecclesiology it’s the Church-growth movement.¹

Not even the gospel is safe from attacks by those who claim to be part of the church. As a matter of fact, the foremost battle being waged at this moment is over soteriological issues. Emergent church leaders are in the forefront of this battle as they slice, dice, rearrange, deny and undercut the gospel message as found in Scripture.² Emergent church leaders fight this battle largely on the popular front, but underpinning their views is the theological framework of what has been termed “The New Perspective on Paul” (NPP).

The NPP, like most novel and complicated doctrinal positions, is not monolithic. Views among leading components vary but there are some definite core beliefs that we will explore.

Origins

The backdrop for the NPP appears to be various searches for the “historic Jesus” stemming from Albert Schweitzer in the early twentieth century. Schweitzer was a liberal missionary/theologian who concluded that Jesus had tried but failed in His quest to rescue humanity. He further denied the trustworthiness of the Scriptures. In contrast to the Reformers, Schweitzer believed that the center of Pauline theology was not justification by faith but Christ-mysticism, or what he calls “being in Christ.” One got into Christ through baptism, Schweitzer maintained. He was one of the first to advocate that Paul’s theology was derived from his Jewish roots and not from the Hellenistic culture. Thus, to Schweitzer’s way of thinking, Paul’s theology and the rabbinical teachings of the first century were very much in harmony

Rudolf Bultmann, in the mid-1950s, introduced the second leg in this search, arising from skepticism and leading to such modern challenges as the Jesus Seminar. Still, Bultmann reversed course from Schweitzer on justification (it was central to Pauline theology), Judaism (Judaism was a works-based religion) and influence (Paul was decidedly Hellenistic).

A third round in the search for this historic Jesus centered on attempting to understand the Bible through the studies of Second-Temple Judaism (extrabiblical understanding of Judaism from approximately 200 B.C. to A. D. 200) and the rabbinical writings of that period. Challenging Bultmann were theologians such as William Davis, Ernst Kasemann and Krister Stendahl who saw little disagreement between Paul and Judaism. Their contention was that Western thinking had created these differences and, contrary to Bultmann and the Reformers, the Judaizers of New Testament times taught a grace-based faith much like the Christianity Paul taught. Therefore when Paul came to Christ he experienced not a spiritual conversion but a vocational call. His call was to take the message his Jewish brothers already had to the Gentiles, with the addition of the Lordship of Jesus. Paul was a Jewish rabbi who believed in Jesus as the Messiah. This is the seed-bed of the NPP.

What happened next, with the publication of E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, has been called “the Sanders’ revolution.” N. T. Wright states Sanders’ position as such:

Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a religion of legalistic works-righteousness… [Rather] the Jew keeps the Law out of gratitude, as the proper response to grace – not, in other words, in order to get into the covenant people, but to stay in…. Judaism… was and is a perfectly valid and proper form of religion. Paul’s only critique of Judaism, according to Sanders, was that it was “not Christianity.”³

There are other developers and promoters of the NPP including James Dunn of the University of Durham, but it is important to note that all of the aforementioned scholars would be considered liberal in their theology and understanding of Scripture. Enter now N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and leading New Testament scholar (author of 43 books) who claims to be an evangelical and is accepted by many as such. It is Wright who has become the conduit through which the NPP teachings have entered the evangelical church. For this reason, as we examine the NPP, it is the writings of Wright with which we will interact, principally his book What Saint Paul Really Said.

What is being taught by Wright and his followers? Phil Johnson gives an excellent summary:

In a nutshell, they are suggesting that the apostle Paul has been seriously misunderstood, at least since the time of Augustine and the Pelagian controversy, but even more since the time of Luther and the Protestant Reformation. They claim first-century Judaism has also been misinterpreted and misconstrued by New Testament scholars for hundreds and hundreds of years, and therefore the church’s understanding of what Paul was teaching in Romans and Galatians has been seriously flawed at least since the time of Augustine.

An Overview of Basic Teachings

I will handle the all-important issue of justification and the gospel message in another section. At this point let’s identify some other vital teachings of the NPP.

Covenantal nomism.

Covenantal nomism is a centerpiece in the theology of the NPP. Quoting Sanders, Guy Waters gives this definition:

One enters the covenant by baptism…. Once one enters the covenant, then membership provides salvation. Obedience to (or repentance for a transgression of) a specific set of commandments keeps one in the covenantal relationship, while repeated or heinous transgression removes one from membership.⁴

Under covenantal nomism one is placed in the covenant through the grace of God (although baptism is necessary). One does not earn a place in the covenant through works (except the work of baptism). However to maintain one’s position in the covenant requires obedience to the laws of the covenant. One enters the covenant by faith but stays in by works. Jack Hughes is correct when he notes,

The similarities to Roman Catholic theology are very striking. Roman Catholic theology teaches that infant baptism places one into the “covenant community” and as long as that person continues to observe the sacraments, he will preserve himself and be saved. That is legalism, salvation by works.⁵

Correcting a false grid

The NPP proponents see themselves as the first people since the early Church Fathers who have rightly understood Paul and his message. This is the case, they say, because believers in the past have used the wrong grid with which to filter the words of Paul at least since Augustine and especially since Luther. John Armstrong, once a defender of Reformed theology who has in recent years become an adherent to the NPP, writes,

Luther understood Paul’s description of the Jews, and their relationship to the law, through the grid of his medieval Roman Catholic experience. By this approach Luther saw Judaism as a religion of merit, a religion in which one earns salvation. Coming to rest in the grace of God alone, Luther believed that Paul’s first century experience was essentially like his own sixteenth century one. Justification by grace through faith was really new, or at least the new element of the gospel that had not been clear to Jews of the Second Temple period. In Luther’s view this gospel of grace was the central point of his entire reformation effort. This is why Luther said, “The true Church stands or falls” by this article, sola fide.⁶

In other words, Luther read his own experience into the Pauline epistles. Since the Roman Church of the sixteenth century was legalistic, seeking salvation through merit, so Luther reasoned that Judaism described in Paul’s epistles did the same. But the NPP leadership assures us that such was not the case. We have been misunderstanding Paul all these years. So what was Paul really after?

Racial reconciliation

Wright insists, “Justification in Galatians, is the doctrine which insists that all who share faith in Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their racial differences, as together they wait for the final creation.”⁷

Since legalism was supposedly not on the table for first century Judaism, Paul apparently was not discussing the issue of how one is saved, but rather who belongs at the same table. In other words, how can Jews and Gentiles live together peaceably in the same covenant community? For Gentiles to be accepted in the community it would be necessary for Jewish believers to lay down their laws concerning foods, circumcision and holy days and welcome Gentiles on equal terms. The “badge” (a favorite NPP term) of community membership must be shifted from Kosher laws to baptism, faith and obedience to Christ.

To Paul, justification is more about ecclesiology than soteriology. That is, Paul is not really concerned about the individual’s standing before God. His concern is about the status of Gentiles who are now joining the Jews in the covenant community. Paul is laying down boundary markers for those in the community (the church); badges that tell who is “in,” not requirements for getting “in.” Since those who practiced Judaism were already in the covenant community, so say the NPP scholars, the only issue is how to integrate Gentiles into the already-established community.

Second Temple Judaism

This leads us to a brief discussion about what Judaism of the New Testament times actually believed and taught. Foundational to NPP theology and without which the system collapses, is E. P. Sanders’ thesis that Judaism of Paul’s day (often referred to as Second Temple Judaism or Palestinian Judaism) was not a self-righteous, merit-based religion. Long before the Reformation, Augustine had defended the faith against Pelagianism which taught that salvation was obtained through works. The Reformers, they claim, had read their struggle with Catholicism back into the New Testament texts and assumed the practitioners of Judaism were as Pelagian as medieval Catholicism. The Reformers equated sixteenth century Roman theology with Pelagianism then linked both with Second Temple Judaism.

Thus, in the minds of Luther, Calvin and the other Reformers, Paul was addressing first century Pelagianism found in Judaism much as they were addressing it in Romanism. It is the contention of the NPP leaders that the Reformers misread Paul because of this faulty link between Judaism and Pelagianism. For this reason it is believed that Paul did not so much as even address legalism, for Palestinian Judaism was not a legalistic religion. First century Judaism was a religion of grace and Paul did not have any significant theological disagreements with it.

On what do the NPP scholars base their understanding of Second Temple Judaism? They claim when the primary rabbinical writings are studied they yield a very different understanding of Judaism than that of the Reformers and evangelicals since. What these writings yield is covenantal nomism as described above; that is, a religion in which one enters the covenant by the grace of God but stays in the covenant through obedience.

How do we respond to this claim by the NPP?

• There is much disagreement even by scholars who are reading the same texts. Interpretations of the texts are not easy and vary widely; the state and date of the texts are often uncertain; many rabbinical documents were written in the 3^rd to 5^th century but are being used to illustrate Jewish teaching in the 1^st century.⁸

• The NPP misrepresents what evangelicals teach. No one is saying that either Catholicism or Palestinian Judaism were Pelagian in the sense that they were totally work-based religions. Rather they both were semi-Pelagian, meaning that they both taught that salvation (whatever that might mean to the NPP) is based on the grace of God and accepted by faith plus works. Both Rome and Judaism were semi-Pelagian – God does His part and the rest is up to us (also known as synergism).

• This means that Sanders and the others do not really understand legalism. Even as they claim that Judaism is not legalistic they provide quotes from rabbinical sources showing that it clearly is.⁹ Even the definition of covenantal nomism, as given by Sanders, is a synergetic, and thus legalistic, defining of Judaism.

• The NPP places more confidence in rabbinical sources than they do in the New Testament. The Reformers in the past, as well as modern evangelicals, have drawn their conclusions about Judaism primarily from the inspired text of Scripture. Indeed, it is impossible to go to the New Testament and not conclude that first century Judaism is clearly legalistic. Acts 13:38-39; Luke 18:14; Galatians 2:16; and Romans 3:20 and 9:30-32 would be hard to refute. We would have to wonder what so disturbed Jesus about the Pharisees that He would pronounce them hypocrites who added their traditions to the Word of God if, in fact, they and He were basically on the same page.

William Barrick offers this critique of Judaism as analyzed in the book of Galatians. He writes,

Consider the following characteristics of Paul’s opposition:

• They preach a different gospel (1:6).

• They are “disturbing Paul’s converts and “distorting” his gospel message (1:7).

• They are “false brethren (2:4; 5:1).

• They belonged to the “party of the circumcision” (2:12).

• They compel Gentile Christians to live like Jews (2:14).

• They cause Galatian believers to be spellbound and drawn away from the gospel (3:1).

• The Gentiles must accept their ethic in order to be saved (4:17).

Barrick continues, “Paul’s antagonists were not simply first-century Jews with a grace perspective practicing so-called ‘covenantal nomism’ nor were they ‘right wing’ Jewish Christians. Clearly, they were first-century enemies of the faith and opponents of the gospel in particular.”¹⁰

Phil Johnson summarizes the evangelical position well: “If in fact, we allow the gospel accounts to inform our understanding of the Pharisees’ religion, rather than selling out to the scholarship of E. P. Sanders, we must come to the conclusion that the old perspective of first-century Pharisaism is the correct one”¹¹

The Gospel

Martin Luther said that the church stands or falls on this one doctrine – justification by faith. If that is so, and conservative Christians down through the ages have agreed with Luther, then an examination of the NPP’s gospel message should be very instructive. So what is the gospel according to this school of thought? In “older theology,” N. T. Wright tells us, “‘the gospel’ is supposed to be a description of how people get saved,” or how “Christ takes our sin and we his righteousness” or something along that order.¹² To Wright this is not what Paul meant by the gospel. The gospel instead is “the narrative proclamation of King Jesus;”¹³ [Paul] “is announcing…that Jesus is King, not just of Israel but of the whole world.”¹⁴ Said with greater clarity, “The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord – Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth, of the ozone layer, of whales and waterfalls, of trees and tortoises.”¹⁵ While no thinking Christian would deny the lordship of Christ over all things, nevertheless when the gospel itself becomes the message of lordship rather than the message of redemption and justification, there will necessitate a seismic shift in our understanding of why Jesus came and died and what we are to proclaim as a result. Wright leaves no doubt where he is headed:

As soon as we get this right we destroy at a stroke the disastrous dichotomy that has existed in people’s minds between “preaching the gospel” on the one hand and what used to be called loosely “social action” or “social justice” on the other. Preaching the gospel means announcing Jesus as Lord of the world; and…we cannot make that announcement without seeking to bring that lordship to bear over every aspect of the world… It is bringing the whole world under the lordship of Christ.¹⁶

I see many things wrong with this definition of the gospel; two are outstanding. First, it transfers the focus of God’s people from the proclamation of redemption to social enhancement of the planet. For, as Wright points out, His gospel is not merely the announcement that Jesus is Lord (something true before the cross, by the way) but the rallying point from which the church is to “bring the whole world under the lordship of Christ.” Our mandate under the NPP is not to rescue people “from the domain of darkness, and transfer them to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:13-14). Rather our mandate is to rescue the planet and ultimately to crown Christ as Lord over all earthly systems and structures. God’s people are to set up the kingdom which Christ began. This is a clear “kingdom now” perspective found in postmillennialism. That is, we are in the kingdom now and our job is to advance the kingdom to the point where Christ can declare kingship over the earth and ultimately reign in person. For now this shakes out to be a social agenda.

This becomes even clearer when vital aspects of the true gospel are either minimized or eliminated altogether. Thus, my second concern is even more serious, for in elevating the social agenda the redemption agenda is devalued. Take the all-important doctrine of justification, for example. Conservative Christians have agreed that justification is defined as Christ forgiving and taking away our sin and giving us God’s righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). The NPP rejects this definition replacing it with Christ’s eschatological victory for the nation of Israel. Writ explains,

“Justification” is a law-court term, and in its Jewish context it refers to the greatest lawsuit of all: that which will take place on the great day when the true God judges all the nations, more particularly the nations that have been oppressing Israel. God will, at last, find in favor of his people: he will judge the pagan nations and rescue his true people. “Justification” thus describes the coming great act of redemption and salvation, seen from the point of view of the covenant (Israel is God’s people) on the one hand and the law court on the other (God’s final judgment will be like a great law-court scene, with Israel winning the case).¹⁷

Phil Johnson is correct when he offers the follow summary,

Ultimately, the New Perspective divests the gospel of – or downplays – every significant aspect of soteriology. The means of atonement is left vague in this system; the issues of personal sin and guilt are passed over and brushed aside. The gospel becomes a proclamation of victory, period. In other words, the gospel of the New Perspective is decidedly not a message about how sinners can escape the wrath of God. In fact, this gospel says little or nothing about personal sin and forgiveness, individual redemption, atonement, or any of the other great soteriological doctrines. Soteriology is hardly a concern of the New Perspective – even when they are dealing with the gospel message.¹⁸

It gets even more complicated for, as the NPP leaders seek to foster their new perspectives, it necessitates that they change the meaning of every issue that touches the subject of justification. They start with the covenant, for the big issue with the NPP is being in the covenant. This presents several questions, foremost of which is how does one get into the covenant? Amazingly, considering the covenant’s importance in the system, the NPP proponents do not like to talk about how one gets in. Wright, however, offers a 3-fold process, “They come to believe the message; they join the Christian community through baptism, and they begin to share in its common life and its common way of life. That is how people come into relationship with the living God.”¹⁹ So, people are to believe the message about Jesus, and remember it is not a message of redemption (Christ dying for our sins) but a message of lordship, a belief that Jesus is Lord. This is followed by baptism and joining the church.

Once in the covenant, as we have already seen, one remains in the covenant through obedience. Some, such as Sanders, apparently make this a minimal level of obedience saying that only a “renunciation of God and his covenant can put one out of the covenant.”²⁰

While the NPP gives lip-service to faith it can readily be seen that one enters the covenant by faith plus works (baptism), is sustained in the covenant by involvement in the church, and is maintained in the covenant by obedience. You can understand why many see the NPP as merely a thinly disguised road to Rome. As a matter of fact, under NPP theology, a theology which places no weight in sola fide, all who claim the lordship of Christ, whether Catholic, Protestant or something else, “belong together in the one family.”²¹

In the NPP, justification has nothing to do with salvation and everything to do with the church, or community. Declaring that the evangelical church has misread Galatians from ancient times, Wright assures us that he and his comrades have discovered what Paul really meant,

The problem he addresses is: should his ex-pagan converts be circumcised or not?... It has to do quite obviously with the question of how you define the people of God: are they to be defined by the badges of Jewish race, or in some other way?... Who belongs to Abraham’s family… Justification, in Galatians, is the doctrine which insists that all who share faith in Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their racial differences, as together they wait for the final new creation… Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian.²²

In other words, “it is not so much about ‘getting in’, or indeed about staying in’, as about ‘how you can tell who was in.’ In standard Christian theological language, it wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology, not so much about salvation as about the church.”²³ According to Wright, Paul is not even concerned with the works-salvation issue; he is concerned about racial equality in the community. Jewish Christians were insisting that Gentile believers take on the badges of Judaism in order to join the community; Paul is saying not that Judaism was wrong but that the “badges” have changed. Under the old covenant the badges were circumcision, dietary laws and Sabbath keeping; under the new covenant it is belief in the lordship of the Messiah, baptism and joining the community. All who meet these three criteria belong at the same table.

According to the NPP Paul was not in his epistles concerned with the subject of salvation because that subject was not a major issue. Palestinian Judaism was not a merit-based religion and, therefore, the apostle was not wasting his time correcting their theology. Paul’s concern was the barriers keeping Jewish believers and Gentile believers from participating in a single community. What had to be changed was not the means of salvation but the badges of salvation in order that followers of Christ would know who was in the community. Paul changed the badges from Jewish Torah-keeping, especially circumcism, dietary laws and Sabbath-keeping, to faith, baptism, obedience to the covenant and covenant community involvement. The church would no longer be divided over racial lines but would be united by the new badges.

Thus the NPP devastates sola fide and turns salvation into the very thing it claims it does not do: a semi-Pelagian, faith-plus-human-merit-based religion. This is the identical error the Reformers recognized and battled. Far from getting it wrong, the Reformers were exactly on the mark. They saw in Roman Catholicism the same error they recognized in New Testament Judaism – both being semi-Pelagian.

The NPP system stands or falls on its understanding of Second Temple Judaism. If the Judaism of Paul’s day was acceptable to God, only in need of minor adjustments to accommodate the coming of their Messiah, then we have misunderstood Paul for centuries. But was this the case? Were the followers of Judaism already members of the covenant and only in need of a “badge” upgrade, or were they a people who had become lost in their own muddled theology and human efforts? Going to the rabbinical writings the NPP scholars see first century Judaism as a grace-based, non-legalistic religion while, as we have already seen, other scholars using the same documents disagree. But the final arbitrator should be the New Testament itself. What did Jesus and the writers of the epistles, especially Paul, think about first century Judaism?

Even a quick run through the New Testament reveals a completely different picture of Judaism, especially the leaders within Judaism, than the NPP portrays. John the Baptist called the leaders of Judaism “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7). Jesus described their righteousness as inferior and told his audience, “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). The Gospels record numerous conflicts between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders (E. P. Sanders dismisses the ones found in Mark 2:1-3:6; 7 and Matthew 15 by denying the historical accuracy of the Gospels). In Matthew 23 Jesus pronounces eight woes or judgments on the Pharisees – hardly sounds like all is well in first century Judaism. Our Lord even told the Pharisees that they were of their father the devil (John 8:44).²⁴ As a matter of fact we would be hard-pressed to find even one positive encounter or description of Jewish religious leaders in the Gospels. It was these very religious leaders who led the people in crucifying their own Messiah. In similar fashion, throughout the book of Acts we find the same adherents to Judaism rejecting the gospel and persecuting Christians.

Things do not improve for Judaism in the epistles. So convinced are the NPP theologians that Judaism was acceptable to God they see Paul’s Damascus road experience as a call, not a conversion. Paul did not change religions so much as changed his focus.²⁵ But that is not how Paul saw it. He accused them of being those who had caused the name of God to be blasphemed among the Gentiles (Romans 2:17-24). He said the Jews had failed in their pursuit of righteousness because they did not pursue it by faith (Romans 9:30-32). He accused them of preaching a different gospel and cursed them for it (Galatians 1:6-9). Paul calls them false brethren who had “sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ” (Galatians 2:4). In Philippians 3:2-11 the apostle recounts his efforts while in Judaism as of absolutely no value in gaining the righteousness of God through Christ.

The picture we get in the New Testament of first century Judaism is of a religion which had morphed from the teachings of the Old Testament to become a system of merit-based legalism repudiated by Jesus and Paul. That some of the rabbinical writings demonstrate faith being a component of Judaism does not significantly change the problem. Faith plus works is essentially the same heresy as works alone. Both Jesus and Paul condemned first century Judaism because it did not teach salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Somehow the NPP misses the very obvious fact that “if the Jews in the first century had exhibited the spirituality demanded by the OT, they would not have rejected the Messiah and they would not have been judged by exile and dispersion.”²⁶

Miscellaneous Views and Doctrines

In order to make the NPP “work” it becomes necessary to redefine or deny fundamental doctrines of the faith. For example, Wright gives this definition for “the righteousness of God:” “For the reader of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures, ‘the righteousness of God’ would have one obvious meaning: God’s own faithfulness to his promises, to the covenant…. God’s righteousness is thus cognate with his trustworthiness on the one hand, and Israel’s salvation on the other.”²⁷

This is representative of what Wright does. Actually he believes that the evangelical church has missed the point of Scripture in numerous ways. Not only was Paul not primarily interested in the doctrine of salvation²⁸ but we have misunderstood:

• Judaism.²⁹

• The purpose of the covenant.³⁰

• The definition of justification.³¹

• Eschatology.³²

• The gospel.³³

• Imputation.³⁴

• Justification by faith.³⁵

• Exclusivism.³⁶

Ultimately the NPP is ecumenical in nature. By eliminating and reworking the foundational truths of Scripture the NPP has reduced the requirements to become part of the covenant community to a nebulous belief in Jesus, baptism and obedience. This allows for a set of doctrines, especially that of justification, with “which Catholic and Protestant might just be able to agree on, as a result of hard ecumenical endeavor… And which declares that all who believe in Jesus belong together in the one family.”³⁷ As a matter of fact I have to wonder if Wright in his ecumenism is not flirting with universalism. He writes,

The point is this: the covenant between God and Israel was always designed to be God’s means of saving the whole world. It was never supposed to be the means whereby God would have a private little group of people who would be saved while the rest of the world went to hell (whatever you mean by that). Thus, when God is faithful to the covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the work of the Spirit, it makes nonsense of the Pauline gospel to imagine that the be-all and end-all of this operation is so that God can have another, merely different, private little group of people who are saved while the world is consigned to the cosmic waste-paper basket.³⁸

Summary

Robert Thomas, at the end of his article on the hermeneutics of the NPP offers an excellent summary of the NPP teachings. I will close my paper with a selection of a few of these:

• First-century Judaism was not a salvation-by-works religion.

• Until the death and resurrection of Christ, by virtue of God’s election, any physical descendant of Abraham is a member of the covenant people and thereby justified.

• Those who maintain the covenantal nomism relationship by obedience are the ones who will be saved.

• Paul retained his covenantal nomism after his Damascus road experience.

• From that point on, his mission was to dispense with circumcision, Sabbath observance, and dietary restrictions of the Mosaic law as boundaries that limited who could be a member of the covenant people.

• Guilt was not expressed in Paul’s writings, but was introduced by Augustine and Luther.

• Justification by faith and imputed righteousness was read into Paul by Augustine, Luther, Wesley, and Calvin because of their contemporary situations.

• Faith is not the means of justification or of joining the covenant community; it is rather a badge of covenant membership. One joins the covenant community through water baptism.

• Final justification is based on works of obedience to the Mosaic law so that any justification a person enjoys at present is only preliminary and can be reversed.³⁹
  
  

1 Nathan Busenitz, “What Did Saint Paul Really Say?” https://www.gracechurch.org/sfellowship/default.asp?file://C:\DOCUME~1Gary\LOCALS~1\Temp\VXG148AI.htm.

2 See Gary E. Gilley, “The Emergent Church” Parts 1-3 http://svchapel.org/Resources/articles/read_articles.asp?id=122.

3 N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), p. 19.

4 Guy Prentiss Waters, Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2004), p. 61.

5 Jack Hughes, “A New Perspective’s View of Paul and the Law,” The Master’s Seminary Journal, Vol. 16 #2; p. 272.

6 John H. Armstong, “Do Good People Go to Heaven?” Reformation Revival, the Weekly Messenger/February 10, 2003, p. 1.

7 N. T. Wright, p. 122.

8 F. David Farnell, “The New Perspective on Paul: Its Basic Tenets, History, and Presuppositions, The Master’s Seminary Journal, Vol. 16 #2; p. 220.

9 See Guy Waters, pp. 42-57.

10 William W. Barrick, “The New Perspective and Works of the Law,” The Master’s Seminary Journal, Vol. 16 #2; p. 281.

11 Phil Johnson, “A Defense of the Old Perspective on Paul,” https://www.gracechurch.org/sfellowship/default.asp?file://C:\DOCUME~1Gary\LOCALS~1\Temp\OVLSA294..htm.

12 N. T. Wright, p. 41.

13 Ibid., p. 45.

14 Ibid., p. 53.

15 Ibid., pp. 153-154.

16 Ibid., pp. 154-155.

17 Ibid., p. 33 (emphasis in the original).

18 Phil Johnson, p. 4.

19 N. T. Wright, pp. 116-117.

20 Guy Waters, p. 48.

21 N. T. Wright, p. 158.

22 Ibid., pp. 120, 121, 122, 125 (emphasis in the original).

23 Ibid., p. 119.

24 Robert Thomas “Hermeneutics of the New Perspective on Paul. The Master’s Seminary Journal, Vol. 16#2; pp.299-300, (I have paraphrased Thomas’ excellent section on this subject).

25 Guy Waters, p. 26.

26William Barrick, p. 291.

27 N. T. Wright, p. 96.

28 Ibid., p. 32.

29 Ibid., pp. 32, 35.

30 Ibid., p. 33.

31 Ibid., pp. 33-34.

32 Ibid., p. 34.

33 Ibid., pp. 40-41.

34 Ibid., pp. 98-99.

35 Ibid., pp. 113-114.

36 Ibid., p. 158.

37 Ibid., p. 158.

38 Ibid., p. 163.

39 Robert Thomas, pp. 315-316.