Does the New Perspective on Paul offer us anything positive at all? Should we throw out the NPP and its proponents completely?
This week, I am making the case that writers such as N.T. Wright have much to offer evangelicalism. Several areas of the New Perspective (and Wright’s work in particular) serve as correctives for evangelicalism today. These areas can be incorporated into a conservative Reformed framework without doing harm to the substance of Reformed theology. There are three areas where I believe the New Perspective might help us have a more biblically-based Reformed theology. The first area is a simple reminder.
1. We need to stop seeing first-century Judaism as sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism.
Are there some parallels between the two? Certainly. But we are not doing justice to the biblical text if we read the debates of the 16th century into the first century as if there is little to no difference. We are bound to misread the Bible if we treat the New Testament as a treatise written directly for any time other than its own.
As much as we can appreciate Martin Luther’s insights into New Testament exegesis, he often wrongly read “justification by faith alone” into everything, including the Gospels. One only has to think of his woeful treatment of the Sermon on the Mount – in which everything is in black and white categories of Law and Gospel. Luther states, without much support and against Augustine, that “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” cannot in any way mean our mercy merits mercy.
Calvin and the other Reformers do a better job with the Gospels than Luther. But ironically, it seems that many who claim to be Reformed (at least at the popular level) resemble Luther more than Calvin here.
As much as we appreciate the heritage and witness of Luther and the other Reformers, we must not assume their teachings are the end-all, final word on matters of Christian doctrine. We tend to idolize the Reformers as if they were apostles to the 16th-century Catholicism much like the disciples were apostles to 1st century Judaism. The Reformers, for all their goodness, got some things wrong. If anything, the New Perspective is like a gadfly, irritating us and prodding us to better exegesis and less reliance on Reformation heroes. I believe this is a good thing.
It goes without saying that the Bible has application for every generation. But it is an interpretive fallacy to read our own debates (or medieval debates) back into the biblical era.
The New Perspective is helpful in reminding us of the historical situation of the first century. While we might not agree completely with the NPP reconstruction of Judaism (I concur with John Piper that we cannot clearly separate ethnocentrism and legalism), we can be thankful for the healthy reminder that we need to read Scripture in its historical context, not merely in its history of interpretation. Both readings may be helpful at some level, but we run into danger when we read back the history of interpretation (Luther against the Catholics, for example) into the original historical context (second-temple Judaism).
Is Wright guilty of eisegesis (reading his own views into the text)? Yes. He does it often. And so do many of his Reformed critics. So do you. So do I. It’s unavoidable at some level, as best we might try to be objective.
So let’s get back to the task at hand – exegeting the text in its first-century context and doing our best to avoid the inevitable traces of eisegesis. Wright’s goal is noble, even if his output is often incorrect.
The New Perspective gives us a healthy reminder that Judaism and Catholicism were not and are not identical.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at another area where the NPP makes a positive contribution.
