The theological topic that Sam has asked me to speak about
tonight is something called the New Perspective on Paul. Paul, in case you
weren’t sure, was a younger contemporary of Jesus. After Jesus died and a group
of his followers began going around saying that they had seen him alive again,
Paul was initially part of a religious movement that was adamantly opposed to
this new movement of Jesus-followers. He even goes on record saying that he
hunted down and killed people who made this claim about Jesus, … until one day,
he had an experience that was powerful enough to convince him that these people
he was hunting were right about Jesus. So Paul left behind a career as a
religious leader and teacher to travel throughout the known world telling
people about Jesus. And the reason that Paul plays such an important role in
the formation of what is now called Christianity is that when he went from town
to town, he started churches. And when he left one town to go start another
church, he would often remain in contact with the churches in the last town
through letters. Some of Paul’s letters have been preserved and kept, and now
make up a big section of our Bibles. So to this day, everyone in the world who
identifies as a Christian uses words, phrases, ideas, and images for
understanding our faith that were first written down by Paul.
So as you can imagine, this is a man whose writing have been
analyzed and dissected and argued over perhaps more than any other single
writer in history. As a result, it sounds kind of silly to speak of a “New
Perspective on Paul” when people all around the world probably have different
opinions on what his writings mean. And in fact, one of the scholars who is
frequently associated with the title “New Perspective on Paul”, N.T. Wright,
said that “there are probably almost as many ‘new perspective’ positions as
there are writers espousing it - and I disagree with most of them.” If nothing
else, what unites this “new perspective” is the belief that there is an “old
perspective” on Paul - a perspective that has become so common, especially in
Protestant churches in the last few centuries, that many Christians in the
United States and Europe have come to see it as “the one meaning of the
Christian faith”. “New Perspective” scholars are not saying that the “old
perspective” is wrong - for the most part, they are saying that the old
perspective is only part of the story.
There are a handful of reasons that I might veer a bit off
the main topic tonight. First, although I’ve studied the New Perspective as a
student at Fuller Seminary - where most of the New Testament professors under
whom I’ve studied are either proponents of the New Perspective or at least hold
it in high regard - I don’t really consider myself all that knowledgeable in
it. I realized as I was preparing this
talk that I could come in and give a “book report version” on the New
Perspective - with the main figures, and their beliefs, and so on - but I don’t
know how helpful that would be for you. Instead, what I’m hoping to do tonight
is to talk through some real-world scenarios that have caused people like the
New Perspective crowd to ask, “How is the death and the resurrection of Jesus
meaningful for people in our world today?”
How many people here have a friend, a roommate, a family
member, or someone else fairly close to you who does not consider himself or
herself a Christian? Now, how many of us feel some sort of inclination that it
would be a good thing for those people to come to know Jesus? I don’t think
it’s too much of a stretch to say that most of us would say, “Yes, absolutely.”
But…. why? Why is a man who died in the Middle East two thousand years ago
significant for me? Or for my neighbors? Or the entire world?
I’m assuming that as soon as I ask that question, several of
us will have memorized answers, perhaps dating as far back as your youth group
or Sunday School, that immediately come to mind. Tonight, I’m going to push
back on those answers, because I think it will give you a flavor of what the
New Perspective conversation is all about.
If I may, I’d like to make a generalization about the human
condition: people know that something is wrong. For all the ways that life on
earth as human beings can be a wonderful, joy-filled experience, it can also be
full of pain, sorrow, and tragedy.
The way Christians have typically responded to this sense
that “something is wrong” is to try to convince people that the thing that is
wrong is all of our legal status before God. This argument essentially follows
three propositions:
A) I, and
you, and everyone on earth, have broken the rules set forth by God. This makes me
a sinner.
B) The
punishment for sinners is death.
C) The
solution for this problem is to accept Jesus, who died as a substitute for the death I deserve.
Is this understanding of why someone would want to become a
Christian familiar to anyone here? I would imagine so. I would also imagine
that you are aware that a number of people who hear this explanation of the
human problem have said, “That may work for you, but this idea that all of us
have broken a set of laws and that we need to be punished doesn't really
connect with me.”
As an illustration, there were two friends at a bible college
in Bethlehem. One was from America and the other from Palestine. They were
taking a test one day and the American saw the Palestinian helping his friend
out, what seemed like blatant cheating to the American. The next day, the
Palestinian saw the American with his girlfriend, and they were holding hands in public! Neither one
could see how the other could be a true Christian and behave like that.
When we never interact with people outside of our own
culture, who don’t speak our language, who don’t wear the same kinds of
clothing that we do… it can become dangerously easy to assume that the way the
I think is the way that all people everywhere think.
How many people came to school here from a place that was different
than Southern California? What were some of the differences?
Examples:
- Walking
and stoplights
- Chinese
New Year
- New
Year’s in Asia vs. the West
Even thinking back before you came to California, you were
still probably aware on some level that not everyone in the world is exactly
like you. How?
- Media:
the Internet, television, film, music
- The
ability to travel
Back to the story from Bethlehem Bible College for a moment.
For the Palestinian Christian, his sense of what it means to be a good friend was
more important than following the rules. Relationships are more important than
rules. For the American Christian, following the rules is considered a higher
priority than honoring a relational commitment. Both were pretty well convinced
that they were doing what would please God the most, and that the other was
doing something sinful. But do you think that if those two guys with their very
different cultural backgrounds became good friends, that a lot of the
assumptions they held about the world - and how to live as followers of Jesus
in that world - would begin to shift? Likewise, does your experience as a
person living in the 21st Century, next to one of the world’s
leading cities for creating and transmitting culture to the rest of the planet,
literally living next to people - to use the biblical phrase - from every
tribe, tongue, and nation, and with technology at your fingertips that allows
you to access more information than people in previous eras ever dreamed of -
does this realization cause you to ask questions about what we have always
assumed to be true that might be unique to us?
In 1963, a Norwegian theologian named Krister Stendahl wrote an article called, “The apostle Paul and the introspective conscience of the west”. In it, he argued that people living in the parts of the world shaped by European culture have a unique habit of seeing ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the world in terms of guilt, and this profoundly impacts the way we read the Bible, particularly certain passages of Paul. We’ll return to this in a moment.
In 1963, a Norwegian theologian named Krister Stendahl wrote an article called, “The apostle Paul and the introspective conscience of the west”. In it, he argued that people living in the parts of the world shaped by European culture have a unique habit of seeing ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the world in terms of guilt, and this profoundly impacts the way we read the Bible, particularly certain passages of Paul. We’ll return to this in a moment.
So with this debate in mind, let’s go back to the discussion
earlier about how some people have connected really well with the idea that
Jesus’ death served as a substitute for the penalty that I ought to pay. This
theory of what Jesus’ death means is known as “penal substitutionary
atonement”. There is a clearly laid-out set of rules that God wanted his people
to follow. None of us have followed it. As a result, God sent his Son to die so
that anyone who believes in him doesn’t have to. But as we’ve already said, there
are an increasing number of people who have heard the “penal substitution”
explanation of what Jesus does for us, and have said, “No thanks. That doesn’t
make sense to me.”
I would propose to you that we now live in a time and place
in which it is increasingly more normal to have been formed by experiences like
the interaction between the Palestinian Christian and the American Christian.
Many Western Christians have responded to this “postmodern
turn” by insisting that in order to convey the gospel message faithfully, we
need to convince people to adopt the legal understanding of God that has its roots
in an earlier time when people were basically in agreement about what the rules
of life were and how to avoid guilt by obeying the rules.
On the other hand, some other Christians have said,
“Actually, our postmodern condition is maybe a lot closer to the multicultural
world of the Roman Empire. So maybe, if our Bible was written by and to
Christians who lived in a multicultural world, then there may be ways that they
understood Jesus to be important that would also be beneficial for today’s
world.”
Enter: Paul! Paul was primarily a pastor, and a good one,
who doesn’t preach all the time about doctrine… a good pastor thinks through
what keeps people awake at night and teaches them how to see God in the midst
of that.
For instance, Paul talked to two very different sets of
people, Jews and Gentiles. When Paul speaks of "works of the Law", he
does not mean human efforts to please God and earn our salvation (though NPP
constituents would certainly agree). Rather, he is referring to the well-known
badges of Jewish covenant membership (observance of Torah, circumcision, food
laws, feasts) and arguing that Gentiles do not need to observe them to follow
Jesus.
Now, most of the scholars who have promoted this New
Perspective on Paul would say, “Yes. You can read Paul’s writings, and the rest
of the New Testament - the rest of the Bible - and find strong support for a
penal substitutionary view of the death of Jesus. That is a legitimate reading
of some of the things that Paul wrote in Romans and his other letters. But it’s
not necessarily the only thing that Paul was saying to those early Christians.
In fact, it might not have even been the main thing that Paul was saying to
those early Christians.” And yet Paul could hardly stop talking about the
cross, and relating it to his own life and to the life of those whom he was
teaching. It almost seems as if Paul tailored his representation of Jesus’
death to the needs of his audience in particular circumstances.
The significance of Jesus' death is represented through at least
five constellations of images in the New Testament:
1) The court of law (justification)
Paul: Galatians
3:11-14
2) The economic sphere (redemption)
I Cor. 7:23 - “You
were bought with a price.”
3) Relationships (reconciliation)
II Cor. 5:16-21
4) Worship (sacrifice)
5) The battlefield (victory over evil)
Now, you may know someone - or you may be someone - who lies
awake at night terrified that God is angry at you and wants to punish you. If
that is the case, then for you, a metaphor for Jesus’ atonement that might
click for you might be one in which God the judge decides to find you
completely innocent because Jesus gladly took your penalty for you. And if that
metaphor works for you, then you can find biblical support in the letters of
Paul. However, if we are to be people who announce the good news of Jesus to
the entire world, then we should not stop asking the question, “What are the
things that keep people awake at night?” And then, “How does the death of Jesus
offer those people comfort, encouragement, correction, guidance, friendship,
freedom, hope, healing, forgiveness, salvation?”
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