Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe,
Louisiana
Paul in Different Perspectives
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright
Lecture 1: Starting Points and Opening Reflections
3 January 2005
Introduction
Thank you for your warm welcome and generous hospitality. It is an
enormous pleasure for Maggie and myself to be here in Monroe for the first
time. I am particularly grateful to those who have worked very hard to set this
conference up and make it all happen.
I want in this opening session to set some parameters for
our subsequent discussion, and in particular to put some cards firmly and
clearly on the table about my starting points, my fixed points in reading Paul,
and my aims in expounding his theology. I am aware – and it is a matter of some
irony in my mind – that my own views on Paul have been the subject of far more
interest and debate in America, and within churches other than my own, than they
have in England, or within worldwide Anglicanism. I do sometimes catch myself
wondering, ‘Why should I worry if one branch of American Presbyterianism wants
to fight another branch about whether I’m a good thing or a bad thing?’; rather
as though two baseball fans were to argue about the respective merits of a
cricket player. One answer is, I guess, that since I think my own reading of
Paul represents a historically grounded and theologically accurate and sensitive
understanding I naturally hope that other Christians of whatever tradition will
find what I say fruitful, and I grieve that anyone should get into trouble in
their own denomination, whatever that may be, for embracing a viewpoint which
ought at the very least to be within anybody’s limits of orthodoxy. I suppose,
though, that part at least of the reason I am concerned about all this is that
within my own church I have engaged in a lifelong struggle to get Paul back on
to the agenda, and to allow his vision of God in Christ, of the cross and
resurrection, and justification by faith, to become once more part of the
bloodstream of a church that was founded on them but has done its best to forget
the fact. My church grew directly out of the sixteenth-century Reformation, and
even where I have disagreed with some of the Reformers’ particular proposals I
believe I have remained true to their foundational principles. And, indeed, I
want now to begin the first section of this lecture with a quote from the first
and perhaps the greatest of the English reformers, the one from whom I most
securely learnt the formal principle which underlies all my reading not only of
Paul but of the whole of
scripture.
1. No Syllable Altered
That formal principle is, of course, a total commitment to scripture
itself, over against all human traditions, all structures created by human
reason, all abstractions from the actual text. Of course, I read scripture
within various traditions, I use reason in thinking about it, I make my own
abstractions from the text as I go along. I am not a naive positivist, as some
appear to think. But at every point one must come back to the text itself, the
whole text, and in the last analysis nothing but the text. I have in mind in
particular at this point a saying which has accompanied me through my whole
adult life, a line from the early English reformer William Tyndale. The first
research project I undertook as a postgraduate was a edition – the first one
since the 1570s – of the work of Tyndale’s friend and colleague John Frith, a
cheerful young scholar and devout Protestant Christian who was burnt at the
stake two years before Tyndale, in 1533. As Frith lay in prison awaiting his
fate, Tyndale, in exile in Belgium, wrote him two letters. The concern both men
had shared, working at full stretch against all the odds, had been to get the
Bible in English into the common life of the church and people. Many were
suspicious of this attempt, preferring to control what people thought scripture
contained rather than to allow it free rein and full force, an attitude some of
you here know only too well. Tyndale rejects such suspicions. In his first letter
to Frith, dated probably in January 1533, he writes this memorable sentence,
which was etched upon my mind and heart long before I became a Bible translator
myself. ‘I call God to record,’ he writes, ‘against the day we shall appear
before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God’s word against
my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be
honour, pleasure or riches, might be given me.’ I think of that sentence when I
read and preach from scripture. I recalled it as I stood before Tyndale’s
statue on the Thames Embankment before I went into No. 10 Downing Street to
accept a senior appointment in the Church of England. I have recalled it a
thousand times as I have struggled in my own work to express in clear, crisp
contemporary English as close as I can get to the Greek of Paul, Mark, Luke and
the rest. As far as I’m concerned, Tyndale’s principle is exactly right – even
if he did not always, in our judgment today, live up to it himself. It’s not
easy; it is again and again a matter of close judgment. But it is judgment
informed not only by scholarship but also by conscience. Not one syllable must
be changed. That is what it means to speak of ‘sola scriptura’ and to mean it.
It is for that reason that I begin my reflections with a single
syllable at the heart of Romans 3. Indeed, in this case it is a single letter
in Greek, the letter e, eta. In 3.29–30 Paul writes e
Ioudaion ho theos monon? ouchi kai ethnon? nai kai ethnon, eiper
heis ho theos hos dikaiosei peritomen ek pisteos kai akrobustian
dia tes pisteos. That opening single letter, e,
translates into a single syllable in English, this time with two letters: Or
is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not God of Gentiles also? Yes, of
Gentiles also, since God is one, and will justify circumcision on the ground of
faith and uncircumcision through faith. It would be interesting to study the
various translations and commentaries and see what different traditions have
done with that opening e, that connecting ‘or’. Sadly, Tyndale
himself, followed by the King James version, omits it altogether. Several of
the classic commentaries find it very puzzling. Paul has been talking about how
sinners are justified by faith alone, apart from works of the law; why does he
suddenly shift here to an apparently different topic, that of the equality
before God of Jews and Gentiles? Some, indeed, have expounded the passage as
though verses 29–30 did not exist, as though the paragraph stopped with verse
28. But Paul has written e; the Holy Spirit has inspired that
single syllable, that single letter; and are we going to ignore it?
The answer, of course, is that for Paul there is an intimate connection
between God’s free justification of sinners through the death of Jesus and on the
basis of faith, on the one hand, and God’s creation, on the other hand, of a
new family composed of Jews and Gentiles alike. We can well understand that the
Reformers themselves, faced with the urgent challenge of a deeply corrupt Roman
Catholicism, rightly wanted to emphasize the first rather than the second. But
in sharing their formal principle of sola scriptura we are bound to
highlight what is there in the text, syllable by syllable, even if they did
not. And for Paul that little e is a crucial, tell-tale indication
of where his actual argument is going. Its point is simply this: that if God
were to justify people on any other ground than faith, then he would after all
be God of the Jews only, and not of Gentiles also. And unless we are prepared
to think through why that is so, and to grasp the fact that this is where the
whole paragraph is going – in other words, unless we see that Romans 3.21–31 as
it stands, syllable by syllable, in the text of inspired scripture, is
driving towards this point, which is then massively supported by the whole of
chapter 4, and that this point is not a side-issue, an ‘extra implication’ of a
gospel which is about something quite different – then the formal principle of
all reformation-inspired theology has been sacrificed on the altar of our own
traditions.
Let’s take another example. In Galatians 2.16 we have another
single-syllable word, this time of two letters: the little connective de,
normally meaning a gentle ‘but’ or ‘yet’. Listen to what Paul writes, starting
a verse earlier: We are Jews by birth, not Gentile sinners; yet we know
that a person is not justified by works of the Law, but through the faith of
Jesus the Messiah (let’s leave that question open for the moment; whether it
means ‘faith in’ or ‘the faithfulness of’ does not affect my present point).
What is the point of that ‘yet’, that single syllable which as a good heir of
the Reformation I am determined not to alter against my conscience, even though
sadly once again both Tyndale and the King James version omit it? The sentence
itself, never mind the wider context, gives the clear answer: to be ‘justified
by works of the Law’ would mean a status of privilege for Jews over against
Gentiles. The wider context explains that this is indeed what Paul is
talking about: he is not offering a theory of salvation, nor yet an ordo
salutis per se, but rather a bold and frank statement, in relation to the
behaviour of Peter, Barnabas and the others at Antioch, of why it is that
Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, not least uncircumcised Gentile
Christians, belong at the same table. Galatians 2.16 is the first time in
Paul’s writings he mentions justification by faith, and he does so in order to
insist that all those who believe in Jesus the Messiah are equally members of
God’s family. The question which dominates the whole letter from this point on
is: who are the true children of Abraham, the single family whom God promised
to him? And the answer is: all those who believe in Jesus the Messiah, whose
faith is the only badge of membership that counts. All of this flows from
taking seriously that little syllable de in 2.16.
I could go to other examples, but time is short and I merely refer to
them in passing: we could take gar in Romans 10.12, for instance, or –
to go up to two syllables! – dio in Ephesians 2.11. A third example to
make the point, I hope, even clearer. Another single-syllable word, gar,
in Romans 10.12. How does the passage go? Verse 11 declares that one believes
in Jesus’ resurrection with the heart ‘unto righteousness’, and confesses
Jesus’ lordship with the lips ‘unto salvation’ – as opposed, as we know from
earlier in the passage, to keeping the works of the Law. Verse 12 then explains
this (the function of gar always being to explain something that has
just gone before): ou gar estin diastole Ioudaion te kai
Hellenos; ho gar autos kyrios panton. The explanation as to why
righteousness comes through faith in Jesus’ resurrection and salvation through
confession that he is Lord is that there is no distinction between Jew and
Greek, since the same Lord is Lord of all. This is of course exactly the same
point as we saw in Romans 3.29, only now worked out in relation to the
particular argument of chapters 9—11, building on and developing the earlier
themes of the letter. I dare not alter that gar, that explanation of
justification by faith in terms of the coming together of Jew and Gentile into
a single family. It stands in the scripture which God has inspired by his
Spirit, and I am committed to giving it full weight.
Permit me a final example, this time another three-letter word but with
two syllables: dio. It comes in Ephesians 2.11, and indeed Ephesians,
which I take to be by Paul in the teeth of the scholarly fashion of the last hundred
years, provides as a whole an excellent study in how to take seriously not only
the bits of Paul which sustain our particular traditions but the bits which
challenge us to go deeper. In this instance, the word connects together the two
halves of the chapter, 2.1–10 and 2.11–21. The first half provides a classic
statement of the fact that all humankind, Jew as well as Gentile, is enslaved
to sin in body and mind, and of the fact that it is by God’s mercy and love
that we are forgiven our sins and saved from wrath. ‘By grace you have been
saved, through faith; and this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God;
not because of works, lest anyone should boast’. A central statement of a great
Pauline theme to stand beside anything from Romans and Galatians. Paul then
immediately writes dio, ‘therefore’: `Therefore remember that you
Gentiles, having once been separated from the covenant family of God’s people,
have been brought into membership through the sacrificial death, the blood, of
the Messiah.’ I must do justice to that dio if I am to stand before God
as a reader and interpreter of inspired scripture; and as I do so I discover,
reading on to the end of the chapter and the start of chapter 3, that this
coming together of Jew and Gentile is not one incidental spin-off from grace
and justification, not just one interesting result among many, but that it lies
at the very heart of Paul’s gospel, by his own definition: that the Gentiles
are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise through
Messiah Jesus.
I thus discover that my call, my Reformational call, to be a faithful
reader and interpreter of scripture impels me to take seriously the fact, to
which many writers in the last two hundred years have called attention, that
whenever Paul is talking about justification by faith he is also talking about
the coming together of Jews and Gentiles into the single people of God. I did
not make this up; it is there in the God-given texts. I do not draw from this
observation the conclusion that some have done (I think particularly of Wrede
and Schweitzer), namely that justification is itself a mere secondary doctrine,
called upon for particular polemical purposes but not at the very centre of
Paul’s thought. On the contrary: since the creation, through the preaching of
the gospel of Jesus Christ, of this single multi-ethnic family, the family God
promised to Abraham, the family justified, declared to be in the right,
declared to be God’s people, on the basis of faith alone, the family whose sins
have been forgiven through the death of the Messiah in their place and on their
behalf, the family who constitute the first-fruits of the new creation that
began with the bodily resurrection of Jesus – since the creation of this family
was the aim and goal of all Paul’s work, and since this work was by its very
nature polemical, granted the deeply suspicious pagan world on the one hand and
the deeply Law-based Jewish world on the other, it was natural and inevitable
that Paul’s apostolic work would itself involve polemical exposition of the
results of the gospel, and that justification by faith, as itself a key
polemical doctrine, would find itself at the centre when he did so. That which
God has joined, joined not least through the single little syllables which
serve as the tiny rudders for the large ship of his holy word, let us not put
asunder. And since these little words join together whole arguments, let us pay
attention to the actual arguments Paul mounts, not to three or four verses
snatched out of their real-life, God-given contexts. This is my first appeal to
you, an appeal which is for the Reformation principle of sola scriptura to have its way again over against all our human
traditions.
2. No Other Lord
My second section is an appeal that we take seriously, in reading Paul,
his own central emphasis on Jesus as the world’s true Lord. Sola Scriptura
must lead, and in Paul obviously does lead, to Solus Christus. In the
Reformation this slogan functioned not least as a warning against the insertion
into theology or spirituality of other potential mediators between God and
human beings, meaning the saints and in particular Mary. I regard this as a
still important task, and in my own work within the last year or two I have
devoted some time to restating the Reformers’ view of sainthood and defending
it not only in print, not only in a rather sharp commentary on the
Anglican-Roman agreed statement on Mary, but also in vital liturgical debates
in the Church of England’s General Synod. I wave these credentials before you
as a sign that I still regard that particular Reformation battle as urgent and
vital.
But it is not something we find stressed in Paul. He is not worried
that some of his converts may start giving special honour to some dead Christians
over others; nor is he aware of Mary and her supposed ‘mediation’ in the task
of salvation. Jesus was born of a woman, he says in Galatians 4.4; that is his
only mention of her. But his insistence on Jesus as the world’s true and only
Lord is central and vital. Let me spell this out in four subsections, each of
which is very important within any attempt to get to the heart of Paul.
First, when Paul uses the word ‘gospel’, this is the very centre of
what he is referring to: the annoucement that Jesus, the crucified Jew from
Nazareth, has been raised from the dead by the creator God, and has been
exalted as Lord of the world, claiming allegiance from all alike, Jew and
Gentile, great and small, from Caesar on his throne to the poorest child of the
humblest slave in the farthest corners of the world. For Paul, what he means by
‘the gospel’ is not, despite some of our current usage, the description of a
way of salvation; it is not an account of how you can reorder your private
spirituality; it is not an ordo salutis. ‘The gospel’ is not, in
particular, identical with the doctrine of justification. ‘The gospel’ is not
itself the same thing as the revelation of God’s righteousness; that revelation
takes place within the gospel, so that when the gospel is announced God’s
righteousness is indeed unveiled; but ‘the gospel’ itself refers to the
proclamation that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the one, true and
only Lord of the world. Notice how this works out in Romans, and again we must
pay attention to what scripture says rather than to what our traditions would
have preferred it to say. Paul describes his gospel in 1.3–4; then, in 1.16–17,
he explains why he is not ashamed of this gospel, because in it God’s
righteousness is unveiled. Those of us who grew up in the Reformation tradition
were often taught, implicitly if not explicitly, (a) that 1.16–17 is the first
statement of justification by faith, which then becomes the main theme of the
letter, (b) that justification by faith is what Paul means by ‘the
gospel’, and (c) that 1.3–4 is a detached statement of an early credal formula
put in at that point for some reason but not central either to Paul’s thought
or to the message of the letter. I well remember the struggle I had,
intellectually and spiritually, back in the mid 1970s, as I realised that each
of those three points had to be challenged in the name of careful, faithful and
accurate exegesis of what Paul actually wrote. My continuing commitment to
reading 1.3–4 as Paul’s opening statement of the gospel itself, 1.16–17 as a
statement of the unveiling of God’s own righteousness, which in turn
results in justification by faith but is a much bigger thing altogether, and
the consequent difference between ‘the gospel’ and ‘justification by faith’,
without diminution or derogation of the latter – that continuing commitment has
justified itself, if I can put it like that, by so many further exegetical and
theological insights that have flowed directly from it that I could not dream
of going back on it. Solus Christus: the Messiah himself, not any truth
about myself, not even about my salvation, is the centre of Paul’s gospel.
The second thing to say about the universal Lordship of Jesus Christ in
Paul is what we today call the political meaning. In several passages,
when Paul says that Jesus is Lord one of the many meanings of that is that
Caesar is not. I have written about this extensively elsewhere and haven’t got
time to develop it further at the moment, except to point out that for Paul’s
hearers the word ‘gospel’ itself, applied to the message about Jesus, would
have carried this implication, since along with its meaning in Isaiah 40 and
52, which stand in the background of Paul’s own thinking, the word euangelion
was in first-century use as the ‘good news’ of the accession, or the birthday,
of the Emperor. Part of the meaning of Solus Christus for today is that
we recapture Paul’s insistence that Jesus is the world’s Lord; that, as Jesus
himself said, all authority not only in heaven but also on earth has
been given to him. The churches in the western world have hardly begun to
address the question of what this might mean in practice, and when they have
tried they have often got it badly wrong. But unless we make the effort we are
not simply missing out a marginal element in Paul’s preaching. We are being
disloyal to the gospel itself, to the message that the crucified Messiah is the
Lord of the world.
Third, Paul’s gospel of Jesus and his lordship stands over against all
kinds of relativism. Again, there is no time to develop this tonight. Relativism
has been a major creed in the western world since the eighteenth century.
Sometimes it has even been assumed that it is a necessary part of Christian
faith itself. It goes, of course, with the Enlightenment’s favourite virtue,
‘tolerance’. In this respect at least, postmodernity has simply increased the
pressure, as the only virtue allowed in many parts of our world is the virtue
of recognising that we are all different. Now Paul lived in a highly relativistic
world, not least in terms of its various religions. Religious pluralism and
syncretism was the order of the day right across the ancient world, with the
notable exception of Judaism (and even that was contested in various ways). And
it was of the very essence of his work that he established communities of
people who were loyal to Jesus as Messiah and Lord and therefore ceased to take
part in the other local cults, state religions, mystery cults and so on that
their neighbours continued to patronize. The unity of this new community was
therefore central and vital, since division would reflect, again and again,
ethnic and cultural differences within the Body of Christ. This is where the so-called
new perspective on Paul, in one at least of its manifestations, makes a
decisive contribution to our understanding of Paul today. When Paul appeals,
not for ‘tolerance’, but for that love that accepts a fellow Christian across
ethnic and cultural boundaries, he is not, as many have supposed, weakening his
ethical stance by allowing that some people see things this way and
others that. In the same way, when he insists that one is not justified by
works of the law, he is not saying that Christian behaviour doesn’t matter. He
isn’t arguing for a laissez-faire tolerance in matters of ethics. His
expositions of mutual Christian acceptance in 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14 are
the direct outflowing of justification by faith itself, and they have nothing
to do with a relativism or an Enlightenment-style tolerance, but everything to
do with saying precisely that Jesus and he alone is Lord – which is of course
then at the root of his ethic itself, the most bracing and exhilarating ethic
the world has ever known. Thus, whenever I am asked what I think about the
so-called ‘other faiths’, which I often am, including on radio shows and the
like, one of the things I normally say is that Krishna didn’t die for me, that
Buddha didn’t rise again, that Mohammad ruled out as an impossibility what to
me is the very centre of my life, that in Jesus Christ the one true God became
human and lived, died and rose again for the world’s salvation, and for mine.
That is what Solus Christus must say when faced with relativism.
Fourth, Paul’s insistence on Solus Christus comes fully into its
own, of course, in his theology of the accomplishment of Jesus in his death and
resurrection. There is at this point a strange theory doing the rounds,
according to which all of us who have adopted some variety of the so-called new
perspective on Paul are, by definition, weak or vague on Paul’s atonement
theology. The thinking seems to go like this: all new perspective writers are
basically liberals in disguise (not least since they adopt some positions also
adopted by some liberals a hundred years ago); liberals tend to be wooly or
vague on the atonement; some new perspective writers are also wooly or vague on
the atonement; therefore all new perspective writers must be wooly and vague on
the atonement. And therefore, I discover, I am criticized in some quarters in
exactly these terms. Frankly, I don’t know whether to be offended or amused by
this. I am the author of the longest ever exposition and defence, certainly in
modern times, of the view that Jesus himself made Isaiah 53, the greatest
atonement-chapter in the Old Testament, the clearest statement of penal
substitution in the whole of the Bible, central to his own self-understanding
and vocation, and I have spelled out the meaning of that, in the sustained
climax of my second longest book, in great detail. I have done my NT
scholarship in a world where battle-lines were drawn up very clearly on this
topic: those who want to avoid penal substitution at all costs have done their
best to argue that Jesus did not refer to Isaiah 53, and I have refuted that
attempt at great length and, I trust, with proper weight. What is more, I have
expounded the truth of Jesus’ death ‘in our place’ from the very first sermon I
preached, in Passiontide 1972, when I spoke to a small congregation on the
faith of the dying brigand who turned to Jesus on the cross and saw him as the
innocent one dying the death of the guilty. I have several volumes of sermons
in print, and in many of them you will find sermons on the cross expounding
this view of the atonement. If you look at my biblical commentaries, whether
scholarly or popular, you will find the same thing. It is therefore bizarre to
be told, in a recent book criticizing me on this and on several other counts,
that my statements remain ‘vague’, just because I do not subscribe to a
particular Reformed way of talking about imputed righteousness, about which we
shall have more to say later, and just because I, like Paul himself in many
passages, highlight the Christus Victor theme rather than penal
substitution, even though when you ask how the powers of evil were
defeated Paul’s answer is of course that God condemned them. Again, I invoke
the Tyndale principle: I am determined to read exactly what is there in
scripture, not to miss a thing on the one hand but not to insert things either
into texts which do not state them.
That is why, for instance, I have been very careful to say that in
Romans 8.3, where the penal note is struck firmly by Paul himself, the point is
that on the cross God condemned sin in the flesh of his own Son. He does
not say that God condemned the Son, though of course in physical and
historical terms that is what it amounted to. That is why, as well, he declares
in 2 Corinthians 5.21 that God made him to be sin for us, while adding a caveat
that he knew no sin. And that is why, in particular, I insist on paying
attention to the actual argument in Galatians 3.10–14, rather than seizing upon
a few phrases there and making them support a systematic position which is not
what Paul is at that point talking about. I have to point out, in fact, that
there is no single passage in Paul where he says all, or even most, of what he
believes about what happened on the cross. It is of course possible to present
penal substitution in such a way as to remain open, if not even to invite, the
kind of riposte which liberal theology has traditionally made, namely that it
makes God look like a bloodthirsty tyrant who wants to kill someone and doesn’t
much mind who. I have been accused of all kinds of things on this score from the
liberal side, but I stand my ground because Paul stands his, even though some
who agree with me in formulation have strange ways of putting things which make
me embarrassed to be associated with them. But precisely because I believe that
God gave us, through Paul, the letters we have, rather than the books of
systematic theology which we have deduced from them (necessary though that task
of theology obviously is), I have insisted and shall insist on understanding
the full sweep of the letters themselves, giving exact and due weight to the
statements and arguments that are actually being mounted, instead of ransacking
them to fight in-house battles between rival schools of interpretation.
The crucial thing here, I believe, is that the Solus Christus of
the Reformation struck a blow, not always understood by the successors of the
Reformers, for a thoroughly eschatological understanding of the gospel. Solus
Christus is a way of saying that the entire world turned its critical
corner when God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus the Messiah and then when
God began the new creation in his resurrection, the new creation which was at
last possible because the forces of corruption, decay and death had been
defeated on Good Friday. That, incidentally, is a theme not sufficiently
noticed within Reformed theology and exposition of Paul, but it is one of his
greatest subjects, fully integrated of course with everything else. More of
that anon.
For me, therefore, Sola Scriptura leads straight to Solus
Christus, and Solus Christus cashes out in terms of the meaning of
the word ‘gospel’ itself, the political declaration that Jesus is Lord, the
stance over against relativism ancient and modern, and the centrality of the
cross where God condemned sin once and for all. I stress again that I am not
saying anything new here, but only drawing together themes, particularly that of
the cross, which have been front and centre in my praying, my preaching, my
pastoral work and my scholarship throughout my adult life. I regret that the
in-house polemics of some recent writers have suggested otherwise, and hope that
the record may hereby be set straight.
3. The Glory of God
I pass from Sola Scriptura and Solus Christus to Soli
Deo Gloria, saving the other obvious slogan for later. I want to insist
that the great unmentioned subject at the heart of much of Pauline theology is
God himself. I shall have more to say about this in the second lecture, when I
shall be expounding the way in which Paul took the classic Jewish monotheistic
belief about God and rethought it in the light of Christ and the Spirit. But I
note, for our present purposes, that the times when Paul most fully and
elaborately celebrates the glory, the sole glory, of the one true God are the
times when he has presented his gospel, not as a message about how individuals
get saved from sin and death, though that is of course taken for granted, but
as the message about how God has brought Jew and Gentile together into one
body. I refer of course principally to the end of Romans 11, where it is the
strange plan of God, expressing both his kindness and his severity to Jew and
Gentile alike, that calls forth the final paean of praise. But to this we must
at once add Romans 15.1–13, where, at the end of the theological exposition proper
of the entire letter, Paul states this as his great aim: that together you, Jew
and Gentile alike, may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ (15.6). The mutual welcome which is mandatory within the body of
Christ, the coming together of Christians across the boundaries of race, class,
gender and culture, was predicted in the Old Testament, and according to Paul
has now been accomplished as people from all the world place their hope in the
Root of Jesse who rises to rule the nations. Every tongue shall confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, he shouts in exultation in Philippians 2.11, to the
glory of God the Father.
Why does Paul see God being glorified specifically by the joint
salvation of people of different races? For Paul, as a theologian rooted in the
early chapters of Genesis, God is glorified when human beings become truly
themselves through the grace and power of the gospel. God created humans to
bear his image in the world; and, when that image is restored through the Image
himself, Jesus Christ, and through the work of the Spirit, the living God is
glorified as he is reflected into the world. That is why, in a connection we
cannot emphasize too highly, the sin of humans, whereby they lost the glory of
God (Romans 1.18–25; 3.23, which sums up that earlier passage), is reversed
when Abraham believes God, gives him the glory, and trusts that he is
able to do what he has promised (4.18–21). That is part of the larger logic of
Romans 1—4 as a whole, which is why we must read the section in its entirety to
see what Paul is really on about. This is where, as one aspect of the glory of
God, we meet the theme of God’s over-arching plan of salvation, the saving plan
for the whole cosmos, within which the saving plan for human beings is one
part, albeit obviously a vital part, not only because our own salvation is
rightly a cause of concern but because it is through the salvation of
human beings in the present time that the larger plan is taken forward – just
as it is through Israel that God intends to save the rest of the human
race, and now that it is through Jesus the Messiah that this
Israel-purpose has been fulfilled. At the centre of it all, you see, is the
Jewish belief, implicit in a thousand first-century texts, not just in Paul,
that God called Abraham in order that through his family he might undo the
sin of Adam. This is what the covenant is all about, and why as Moses
rightly saw God’s own glory is at stake when the covenant appears to have
failed (as at the Golden Calf incident). ‘If you let us die in the wilderness,
the Egyptians will hear of it; and then what will you do for your great name?’
The covenant which God made with Abraham, the covenant within which all other
subsequent covenants (with Moses, with David) are in their different ways
subsumed, is the vital missing piece of the jigsaw through which the false
antithesis between ‘juridical’ and ‘participationist’ theological schemes are
brought together into a fully Pauline single whole; and that falling-apart of categories,
juridical and participationist, is itself one of the things that has brought
dishonour to God, rather than glory, in the theology and exegesis of the last
few generations. The covenant was there to deal with the evil in the world; in
other words, to advance the glory of God the creator.
That is why God’s covenantal action has a central and
non-negotiable juridical aspect, in two ways. First, it is part of the
covenant, part of God’s plan of salvation, that he should judge and condemn
idolatry, sin and death itself; this is after all vital if God, the creator, is
to be glorified for creation and new creation, rather than being vilified
because creation itself seems to have been a gigantic blunder. This is in fact
part of the Jewish and Pauline doctrine of the tsedaqah elohim, the dikaiosyne
theou, God’s righteousness, God’s being-in-the-right. Second, it is part of
the covenant, God’s glorious plan of salvation for the world, that through the
gospel he should call men, women and children to confess that Jesus is Lord and
to believe that God raised him from the dead, and thereupon to declare,
forensically, that is, as though in a lawcourt, that they are in the right,
that their sins have been forgiven, that they are part of his true, single,
worldwide family, and that this status in all its aspects will be reaffirmed at
the final judgment. Embrace Paul’s
covenantal theology and you get the juridical theme not only thrown in but
highlighted so that we can see it all clearly; and, with it, we can see clearly
that this is indeed the means whereby God, the creator, will bring glory to his
own name.
But, equally, the covenant plan of God has what may loosely be called a
‘participationist’ aspect, and this, too, is part of the glorification of God,
as I have already shown from Romans 15. Abraham’s true family, the single
‘seed’ which God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role
precisely as Messiah is not least to draw together the identity of the
whole of God’s people so that what is true of him is true of them and vice
versa. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that
the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in
him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed tradition
in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of Jesus Christ
having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated a ‘righteous’ status
which can be shared with all his people. As with some other theological
problems, I regard this as saying a substantially right thing in a
substantially wrong way, and the trouble when you do that is that things on
both sides of the equation, and the passages which are invoked to support them,
become distorted. The central passage is in fact Romans 6, and I think it is
because much post-reformation theology has tended to fight shy of taking
seriously Paul’s realistic theology of baptism that it has sought to achieve
what Paul describes in that chapter and elsewhere by another route. The Messiah
died to sin; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have
died to sin. The Messiah rose again and is now ‘alive to God’; we are in the
Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have risen again and are now
‘alive to God’. This is what Paul means in Galatians 3 when he says that as
many as have been baptised in to the Messiah have put on the Messiah, and that
if we thus belong to the Messiah we are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the
promise. There is indeed a status which is reckoned to all God’s
people, all those in Christ; and this status is that of dikaiosune,
‘righteousness’, ‘covenant membership’; and this covenant membership, in order
to be covenant membership, must be a covenant membership in which the
members have died and been raised, because until that has happened they would
still be in their sins. ‘I through the law died to the law, that I might live
to God; I have been crucified with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; and the
life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me
and gave himself for me’. If this is what you are trying to get at by the
phrase ‘imputed righteousness’, then I not only have no quarrel with the
substance of it but rather insist on it as a central and vital part of Paul’s
theology. What I do object to is calling this truth by a name which, within the
world of thought where it is common coin, is bound to be heard to say that
Jesus has himself earned something called ‘righteousness’, and that he then
reckons this to be true of his people (as in the phrase ‘the merits of
Christ’), whereas on my reading of Paul the ‘righteousness’ of Jesus is that
which results from God’s vindication of him as Messiah in the
resurrection; and, particularly, that this is what Paul means when he speaks of
‘God’s righteousness’, as though that phrase denoted the righteous status which
God’s people have in virtue of justification, whereas in fact the phrase,
always and everywhere else from the Psalms and Isaiah onwards, refers to God’s own
righteousness as the creator and covenant God; and, underneath all of this, I
object to the misreading of several key Pauline texts that results, and the
marginalisation in consequence of themes which have major importance for Paul
but which this theology manages to ignore. The mistake, as I see it, arises
from the combination of the Reformers’ proper sense of something being
accomplished in Christ Jesus which is then reckoned to us, allied with their
overemphasis on the category of iustitia as the catch-all, their
consequent underemphasis on Paul’s frequently repeated theology of our participation
in the Messiah’s death and resurrection, and their failure to locate Paul’s
soteriology itself on the larger map of God’s plan for the whole creation. A
proper re-emphasis on ‘God’s righteousness’ as God’s own righteousness
should set all this straight.
This, in fact, is at the heart of Paul’s theology of God’s glory,
though because of the misreading of dikaosune theou from Martin
Luther onwards it has routinely been misunderstood. Paul insists, in Romans
above all, that the creator of the world, who has established his covenant with
Abraham and has now fulfilled that covenant in Christ, is himself in the
right, that he has demonstrated that decisively in Jesus’ death and
resurrection, and that he will demonstrate it finally when he gives
resurrection life to his people and thereby rescues the whole cosmos from its
bondage to decay to share the freedom of their glory. ‘We rejoice in the hope
of the glory of God’, he says in Romans 5.5, and by the end of chapter 8 we
know what he means. Soli Deo Gloria is the cry that arises from a fully
creational and fully covenantal exposition of Paul.
We shall return to this topic, I do not doubt, more than once over the
next couple of days. All I want to suggest at the moment is that Paul’s view of
God’s covenant plan, focussed on Jesus as the Messiah in whom God’s people are
summed up and through whom, in their unity, they give glory and praise to the
creator God who has made the whole human race of one blood – that this view of
the covenant, and of God’s glory revealed through it, holds together juridical
and participationist theology, and that some things which some post-reformation
theology has dealt with through one of those two may better be seen as
belonging with the other.
I conclude this section on God’s sole glory with the other obvious
Pauline passage, 1 Corinthians 15.20–28. There, as in Romans 8, Paul allows the
argument to mount higher and higher, with Jesus already reigning as Messiah and
Lord until he has put all his enemies under his feet, in fulfilment of Psalm 8
and Psalm 110; and then, when the task is complete, and death itself is
destroyed, he hands over the kingdom to the Father, becoming himself subject to
the Father, so that God may be all in all. This is, obviously, very close to
Philippians 2.11, and it shows once more that for Paul the sole glory of God is
intimately bound up with the healing and restoration of the whole of creation,
and within that with the rescue of human beings from sin and death so that they
may be restored as God’s image-bearers.
I recognise that in this section of this lecture I have not gone the
way many reformation theologians have gone with the topic of Soli Deo Gloria. I have not played off God’s glory
against human glory, though that is of course implicit in the way the reformers
meant it. I have tried to see what Paul himself means by the glory of God, and I
have argued that he sees this glory displayed in the gospel events through which
the covenant is fulfilled and creation is redeemed, and that, as one of Paul’s
great patristic expositors insisted, the glory of God is then seen in the life
of a human being who has been put to death and brought with Christ to new life.
But all this propels me, none too soon, into my fourth section.
4. Solo Spiritu
My fourth section is something of a jeu d’esprit, in two senses:
first, that it is an innovation into the Reformation list of ‘only’s, and
second that it is about the Spirit, God’s Holy Spirit. I want to draw
attention, as a way of homing in on questions of ordo salutis which will
no doubt occupy us later, to the fact that Paul is quite clear about how human
faith, faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, comes about: it comes about by the
work of the Holy Spirit through the announcement of the gospel. This is of
course another way of saying the more familiar Sola Gratia, but I want
to run it this way round to make a particular point about what Paul believes
actually happens when people come to faith.
First, as he says in 1 Corinthians 12, no-one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’
except by the Holy Spirit. This is crucial, because ‘Jesus is Lord’ is of
course the baptismal confession, which Paul elsewhere highlights both as the
confession which indicates that the confessor is saved (Romans 10.11) and as
the confession which will one day be made by every creature in heaven, on earth
and under the earth (Philippians 2.11). (Presumably on that day those who have
refused to make the confession during the present life will not need the
Spirit’s assistance on the last day, since at that point it will no longer be a
matter of faith, but of clear sight.) The point for the moment is that Paul
does not believe, as some within some protestant traditions have believed, that
human beings have to come to faith by their own efforts and that only then does
God give them the Spirit.
Second, Paul correlates this with his belief in the power of the word,
a theme which does not often occur but when it does is extremely important. In
1 Thessalonians 1 and 2 he speaks of the word which has been at work, the sign
that God has chosen them, the word which is not mere human words but the
powerful divine word. (Once again Isaiah 40 and 55 are in the background,
significantly passages which are also about ‘gospel’ and those who proclaim
it.) Paul’s view seems to be that when the evangelist announces the ‘word’, God
the Spirit works through that proclamation to bring people to faith. Paul has a
very precise technical term which he uses to denote this moment, and it is not
of course ‘justification’, but ‘call’. ‘Those he called, them he also
justified.’
In particular, then, it is the gospel itself through which the Spirit
is at work; that is, as I said before, the gospel not as the truth of
justification by faith but as the announcement that the crucified and risen
Jesus is Lord – which is why, no doubt, the confession of that Lordship is seen
by Paul as the first sign of the Spirit’s powerful work within the human heart
and life. We should not underestimate what has happened through this work. It
is not as though the gospel is the announcement simply of an odd fact that
people happened not to know before – as, say, the information that the world is
six billion trillion tons in weight, or that space is curved, or that elephants
bury their dead, or any one of a thousand other odd things that not many people
know but about which one might in principle come to be convinced by new
information and/or good argument. The gospel was not like that. It was the
announcement, within the world where Caesar reigned supreme, that a young
Jewish prophet who had been crucified by the Roman authorities had been raised
from the dead, a thing all pagans knew was impossible and absurd and all Jews
knew should only happen at the end, and then to all people not to one in
advance; and that this crucified and risen Jesus was the true Lord of the
world. This makes no sense in terms of ancient or modern worldviews, which is
of course why many then and now have tried to transform it into something more
credible. Those of us who have believed the gospel from our earliest memories
should not forget what an extraordinary privilege that is. And those who preach
the gospel should never forget that for it to have any effect it must be driven
by and accompanied with the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.
But if the Holy Spirit is the one through whom people come to faith by
the preaching of the word of the gospel, it is also clear that the Holy Spirit
is the one through whom they move forward from that initial faith to the point
where, on the day of the Messiah, they will find the work complete. Paul puts
this graphically in Philippians 1 when he says that the one who began a good
work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ. Paul’s exposition
of this in various passages leads directly to the statement of something he
says again and again but which is routinely ignored when the eschatological
framework of his doctrine of justification is forgotten: that on the last day
the final judgment will be made on the evidence of the complete life that
someone has led. Back once more to Sola Scriptura: one cannot avoid this
conclusion unless you are prepared to scratch out not only Romans 2, about
which the reformation tradition has developed several interesting avoidance
techniques, but also Romans 14 and 2 Corinthians 5, not to mention sundry
passages in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. And what about Romans 8 itself?
‘If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit
you put to death the deeds of the body you will live’; and this, at the heart
of his great argument for assurance, that those whom God justified them he also
glorified, the argument which runs from the start of Romans 5 to the end of
Romans 8. We should not be mealy-mouthed at this, or pretend that Paul didn’t
really mean it; if the Spirit has taken up residence in someone’s heart and
life, bringing about faith in the risen Lord, then that person has begun a
journey which will end, on the day of judgment, in the words ‘well done’, because
as Paul himself says (though many of his interpreters have fought shy of it)
those who are in the flesh cannot please God, but those who are in the Spirit,
whose minds have been renewed so that they can discern God’s will, really do
act in ways which please him. The attempt to shore up justification by faith by
saying that the life we now live will be irrelevant at the final judgment is
unPauline, unpastoral and ultimately dishonouring to God himself. It was Paul,
after all, who answered his own question about what would be his hope and joy
and crown of boasting at the appearing of the Lord Jesus with the answer, not
‘the merits and death of Christ’, but the churches he had founded and
maintained. ‘It’s you!’ he cries. ‘You are our glory and our joy!’ (1 Thess.
2.19f.)
What then shall we say about sola fide itself, around which all
these other ‘only’s have been circling?
5. Sola Fide
I have only a short time, and will say this as briefly as I can. What
is ‘justification by faith’ all about?
Paul’s answer is that it is the anticipation, in the present time,
of the verdict which will be issued on the last day. Those who believe the
gospel; those, that is, in whose hearts and lives the Spirit has been at work
by the word to produce the faith that Jesus is Lord and the belief that God
raised him from the dead – these people are assured, as soon as they believe,
that they are dikaioi, in the right. They are declared to be
righteous; the verb dikaioo has that declarative force,
the sense of something being said which creates a new situation, as when a
minister says ‘I pronounce that they are husband and wife’ or when a judge says
‘I declare that the defendant is not guilty’. They are then, because of God’s
declaration, ‘righteous’ in the covenantal sense that they are members
of the single family God promised to Abraham, in the forensic sense that
the divine lawcourt has already announced its verdict in their case, and in the
eschatological sense that this verdict properly anticipates the one
which will be issued, in confirmation, on the last day. ‘There is therefore now
no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus; for the law of the Spirit
of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.’ It
takes all of the rest of Romans 8 to explain that, of course, but we should be
in no doubt that Paul connects in the most intimate way possible the final
verdict ‘not condemned’ with the continuing work of the Spirit, and roots that
work in the death of Jesus through which sin was condemned and the verdict
‘righteous’ which was already issued as soon as the gospel had produced faith.
It is false to the point of slander to say, as some have, that by stressing the
Spirit-led life as that which leads to the final verdict I (or Paul!)
must somehow be insinuating that present justification is after all a
matter of something I do as opposed to something God does. The word of the
gospel, and the work of the Spirit which puts it into effect, is all of grace,
producing in me that first fruit of faith which is itself simply the breathing
in of God’s love poured out in the cross and the breathing out of what results,
the confession that Jesus is Lord and the belief that God raised him from the
dead.
Does this mean, after all, some kind of semi-Pelagianism in which God
first infuses ‘righteousness’ into me and then declares that he likes what he
sees? Have we abandoned the extra nos of the gospel? By no means. That
is simply to take what I have said and filter it back through the old
misunderstandings of the word ‘righteousness’ which I have been careful to rule
out. The whole point of the gospel, and of my initial response to it, is that
the gospel is not about me, but about Jesus, and his unique death and
resurrection. That is the extra nos, which is actually compromised not
by pointing out that the Spirit brings about faith but by making the phrase
‘the gospel’ denote justification itself rather than the proclamation about
Jesus. (We are not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith,
but by believing in Jesus; that being so, when we believe in justification by
faith what we get is not justification itself, but assurance; and it also
follows that those who believe in Jesus but do not believe in justification by
faith are nevertheless justified by faith without knowing it.) It is precisely
this point which a robust Reformed theology ought to celebrate, since it fits
exactly with an ordo salutis in which, unlike some other schemes of
thought, the word ‘justification’ denotes, not the process whereby the gospel
works in someone’s heart (for that, Paul as we have seen reserves the word
‘call’), but the verdict which is issued once the ‘call’ has happened.
‘Those whom he called, them he also justified.’
Justification by faith, the verdict issued in the present time over
gospel faith which anticipates the verdict issued in the future over the entire
life, thus produces the solid assurance of membership, now and in the future,
in the single family promised to Abraham, which as I have already stressed is
the family whose sins have been forgiven, since the purpose of the covenant in
the first place was always to deal with sin. Justification in the present tells
every believer that she or he is a beloved, forgiven child of God, a fact which
must at once be put into practice in terms of full membership in God’s people,
full dining rights at the family table. Justification by faith in the present
is therefore equally about (a) the sigh of relief that I don’t have to earn my status in God’s people, simply to receive
it, and (b) the definition of the Christian community in terms of nothing more
nor less than faith itself. And this brings us back where we began: because,
since the covenant community was promised to Abraham and his family, and since
the Jewish people had been the embattled guardians of that promise for two
millennia, nothing was more natural, but nothing would have been more fatal to
God’s ultimate purposes, than for the bearers of the promise to try to confine
it to Abraham’s family according to the flesh. They had been entrusted with the
promise, but they had proved untrustworthy, and had not brought about the
worldwide glorification of Israel’s God that had been intended. (That is what is
going on in Romans 3.1–8, and it would be good to see the supposed defenders of
reformed orthodoxy offering an exegesis of that passage.) But now the Messiah
has been faithful, as the representative Israelite, so that God’s own covenant
faithfulness would be unveiled in action in his ‘obedience unto death, even the
death of the cross’. And since the covenant purpose, to deal with sin and to
launch new creation, has thus been spectacularly accomplished in his work,
justification in the present must be by faith alone, not by works of the Jewish
Law, partly because all human beings have fallen short of God’s glory, and
partly because if it were by the Law only Jews would qualify. And we know,
because Paul insists on it, with that little single-syllable, single-letter word
we spoke of an hour ago, that God is not the God of Jews only, but of Gentiles
also, since God is one.
Conclusion
I have done two things in this lecture, which many would regard as incompatible. I have been expounding the basic tenets of the protestant reformation: Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Soli Deo Gloria and Sola Fide, with an extra one of my own, Solo Spiritu. I have done so by the formal principle enunciated in the first, taking scripture with absolute seriousness and seeking to test all human schemes in its light. But I have also been expounding my own version of the so-called New Perspective on Paul, in which I have been equally critical, without naming them, of Ed Sanders and many of his followers on the one hand and my critics such as Guy Waters and many of his readers on the other. My hope and prayer for this conference is that we will now be able to carry forward this conversation not simply so that we can hear, understand and appreciate one another better but so that we can send out a signal from this place that there are ways forward, not simply backward, in the study of Paul and more particularly in the living, teaching and above all proclaiming of the gospel by which he defined himself. The reformed faith which I have held since my youth is enhanced, not diminished, by fresh exploration of scripture. My prayer is that we together this week may know the truth, the (dare I say) ecumenical truth, which Paul longed that Jews and Gentiles would come to embody, that we may with one mouth, from across our different traditions, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.