I Still Don’t Get It

I was reading through Acts last week and came across 15:1 “But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the command of Moses, you cannot be saved.” Everyone who knows anything about the New Perspective(s) on Paul knows that the advocates of NPP argue that the Reformers got Paul wrong in seeing him as a crusader against works righteousness. First century Judaism, they say, was gracious, not legalistic. As Richard Longenecker puts it in his commentary on Galatians, E.P. Sanders has taught us that “the ‘covenantal nomism’ of first-century Judaism understood Torah observance not as merit-amassing, but as a gladsome response to a loving God who had acted on his people’s behalf and who asked that they in turn identify themselves as his people by keeping his ordinances” (86). First century Judaism was not a form of Pelagianism by which people pulled themselves up by their moral bootstraps. “Keeping the Jewish law was the human response to God’s covenantal initiative” (N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 19). Wright makes the same point many times in his new book too. Seeing himself as Calvin’s heir (instead of Luther’s), Wright argues that law-keeping was not a means to procure salvation, but the proper response to God’s gracious deliverance and election.

To which I say, “Amen!” This is how the law was supposed to function in Israel. God didn’t give Moses the Law before he set them free from Egypt. First he saved them, then he told them what to do as their obedient response to this grace. But there’s a reason “supposed” is in italics in the sentence above. Judaism didn’t always function like Judaism was supposed to. Wright probably thinks people like me are still missing his Copernican revolution, but I confess I still don’t get it. It seems obvious to me from the New Testament that some (not all, I’m sure) of the Jews thought they were saved by keeping the law. They boasted in a righteousness “of my own that comes from the law” instead of a righteousness “from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9).

And who frankly cares if they thought they were saved by keeping the big parts of the law or the small parts of the ethnic boundary marker parts? The point is some of the Jews trusted in themselves for their righteousness (Luke 18:9). They thought Jewishness (which in the first century cannot really be distinguished from law keeping) saved, “but” says Peter in response to the men from Judea in Acts 15:1, “we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will” (15:11). Grace, for Peter in this speech, is put opposite the work of circumcision. These men from Judea were not covenantal nomists, trying to express gratitude to God by keeping Torah. They had put the custom of Moses over against the grace of the Lord Jesus. They had misunderstood, not just what marks out the people of God, but how the people, not yet of God, were to be saved.

The New Perspective, then, can help remind us of what the Jews were supposed to believe, but the Old Perspective helps us see first century Judaism as it often was–boastful, morally self-assured, and determined to be good enough for God. Which, not so incidentally, are tendencies in human nature that have a habit of showing up rather frequently. So don’t throw out Luther’s Commentary on Galatians quite yet. You may just find your heart strangely warmed.