The New Perspective on Paul

Christadelphian approaches to the Letter to the Romans have largely followed the tradition which prevailed in Protestant circles for something like four centuries after the Reformation. That tradition was based upon a two fundamental assumptions:

• The Letter to the Romans is essentially a treatise rather than a letter, presenting a systematic statement of the gospel rather than an engagement with any specific questions or problems or with any particular circumstances among its recipients in Rome.

Brother John Carter formulated this view clearly on the first page of his work on Romans, published in 1931:

…it [the letter] does not appear to have been written to meet difficulties in the church to which it was addressed … Romans is a statement of Paul’s teachings concerning the principles of God’s dealings with men … As it is a statement of principles, comparable to a treatise as much as to a letter, it can be studied independently of a knowledge of local conditions and the need for it being written.[1]

• The principal concern of the Letter is the theme of justification by faith, which was thought to be the decisive issue in the thinking of the apostle.

This view found clear expression in William Tyndale’s preface, much influenced by Martin Luther, to his translation of Romans:

The sum and whole cause of the writings of this epistle, is, to prove that a man is justified by faith only: which proposition whoso denieth, to him is not only this epistle and all that Paul writeth, but also the whole scripture, so locked up that he shall never understand it to his soul’s health. And to bring a man to the understanding and feeling that faith only justifieth, Paul proveth that the whole nature of man is so poisoned and so corrupt, yea and so dead concerning godly living or godly thinking, that it is impossible for her to keep the law in the sight of God.[2]

It was consequently held that the essential argument of Romans is found in chapters 1-8, while chapters 9-11 were regarded as, and sometimes openly stated to be, a ‘digression’.

This second conviction about Romans was buttressed by two widely accepted ideas about Paul himself and about the views that he was thought to be challenging in the letter:

• The focus on justification by faith was a consequence of Paul’s own experience of a desperate and unavailing struggle to keep the Mosaic Law, of which chapter 7 was held to provide a graphic picture. Paradoxically, however, the same chapter was (and still is) often also read as a picture of the Christian believer’s struggle against sin, i.e. of Paul’s experience after his ‘conversion’. The prevalence of this reading derived, in part at least, from Luther’s sense of unworthiness and of struggling unavailingly against sin before his ‘discovery’ of the ‘justification by faith’ through his reading of Romans 1: 17-18. That experience strongly coloured his own view of the Letter and came to be ascribed to Paul also.
• The notion of ‘justification by works’, which Paul challenges in Romans, was identified with ‘Judaism’, the essence of which was assumed to be that Jews considered themselves able to achieve ‘righteousness’ unaided, by means of their observance of the Mosaic Law, and therefore not dependent on divine grace.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century all these assumptions, both about Romans and about Paul and Judaism, have been called into question. The process of questioning, as far as Romans was concerned, can be dated back to an influential essay by the German theologian F. C. Baur in 1836, entitled ‘Zweck und Veranlassung des Römerbriefs und die damit zusammenhängenden Verhältnisse der römischen Gemeinde’ (‘Purpose and occasion of the Letter to the Romans and the related conditions in the Roman church’),[3] which challenged what Douglas Moo calls ‘the prevalent tendency to consider Romans as a timeless theological manifesto’, suggesting instead that it must, like the rest of Paul’s letters, be ‘directed to specific issues in the church addressed’. [4] One of the first of those to take up and develop Baur’s initiative was Paul S. Minear, who on the first page of his short book on Romans wrote:

It is customary to view the epistle as a treatise in systematic or dogmatic theology, moving from one doctrinal theme to another. I think it reflects a primary concern with pastoral problems and therefore presents a continuous argument designed to meet specific situations in Rome. Many readers suppose that the message is quite independent of the occasion; in principle the letter might have been sent anywhere without altering the ideas. I think Paul would have found such an attitude inconceivable. Again, it is customary to suppose that the most significant passages are to be found in the early chapters… I am convinced that ‘the peculiar feature of this letter is that its main message comes at the end [quoting Willi Marxsen].’ [5]

Over the past thirty years or so, detailed study of ‘Second-Temple Judaism’, particularly the work of E. P. Sanders,[6] has provided a better grasp of the conception of righteousness which prevailed among his Jewish compatriots. This in turn has led to a major reappraisal of Paul’s writings, leading to a revised view on the part of many scholars which has come to be known as ‘the new perspective on Paul’ or simply ‘the new Paul’.[7] One aspect of this reappraisal has been a questioning of the traditional view of Paul’s own spiritual development, especially with regard to his supposed agonising sense of guilt and unavailing quest for righteousness prior to his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus.

It seems to me that the ‘new perspective’ has a good deal to teach us about Paul and his writings. One reason for attempting to expound Romans, as I shall be doing here, is to provide for Christadelphian readers an introduction to this alternative way of viewing the great apostle. In the first section of what follows I shall focus on the question of why Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans, examining not only what he himself says in the letter but also its contemporary context, including both Paul’s own circumstances and conditions among the Christians in Rome, as far as we are able to gauge them from the letter itself and other evidence. These factors must, I believe, be taken into account in reading Romans and can help us better to grasp Paul’s argument. Romans needs, I suggest, to be read as a letter, addressed to real readers and concerned with both their practice and their attitudes.  In other words, Romans is less a treatise than a work of persuasion – and the style, as we shall see, reflects this.

As far as the letter’s central theme is concerned, I will argue in chapter 1 that both the contextual factors and the evidence of the letter itself support the view that it is not justification by faith which is for Paul the central issue but rather the co-existence of Jews and Gentiles within the young Christian community, as it also was in the other letter where ‘justification’ plays an important part, Galatians. Paul’s task is to help Gentile and Jewish Christians alike to see their place within the overarching saving purpose of God and, as he says in the very significant final exhortative passage in chapter 15, to ‘live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’, and to ‘welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God’ (15: 5-7).

This is not to say that justification by faith is not a central theme but rather that it is deployed and expounded in the service of a more pressing and practical purpose, that of uniting a church in danger of collapsing into parallel but separate Jewish and Gentile sections. It is significant that the two letters, Romans and Galatians, which expound justification by faith at any length are precisely the ones which deal extensively with the Jew-Gentile issue.

The ‘new perspective’ has, I think, helped us to grasp better what the real issues were between Paul and his critics. In the Galatian situation the problems emerged in their most acute form, with Gentiles being urged to submit to circumcision. The following passages from a commentary on Galatians published in 1994 illustrate the influence that the work of Sanders et al and the ‘New Perspective’ has had upon the understanding of that letter:

In Galatians Paul develops his argument for justification for faith in order to correct a social problem: Gentile believers have been excluded from fellowship with Jewish believers because they did not observe the law … Jewish Christians did not have a legalistic view of their own relationship to God; they knew that they had right standing with God not because of their observance of the law but because of their faith in Christ. Their problem was not legalism; it was ethnocentrism. They were convinced that the blessing of God was given to the people of God, and that only the Jewish people were the people of God. So they were insisting that all Gentile Christians had to become part of the Jewish nation before they could enjoy the full blessing of God.[8]

Though the specific form that the problem took in Romans was somewhat different, as we shall see, this account of the central issue is valid in relation to that letter too.

Having sketched in a context and suggested the reason (or reasons) for the writing of Romans and its central theme, it is obviously necessary to demonstrate that the Letter does indeed support that approach, and I shall be attempting to do this in chapters 3-7. Before doing so, however, I will also try to clarify in chapter 2 what Paul means by ‘justification by works’ in the light of contemporary Jewish attitudes. The question of Paul’s own spiritual development is an important element in that discussion, and I shall be suggesting that the popular view of Romans 7 as a picture of Paul’s own pre-conversion experience is contrary to Paul’s intentions.

Romans 7, along with its counterpart, chapter 8, will also figure prominently later on in my analysis of the letter itself. The picture of a despairing, unavailing struggle against sin that we find there is surely not intended to be read as a picture of life in Christ – we find that rather in chapter 8. It seems to me that we have been less than faithful to Paul in discussing these chapters because we have been reluctant to take seriously the centrality of the Spirit in the life of faith.

Overall, I hope to show that looking at the letter contextually enables us to make better sense of it than did the older view – and by ‘better’ I mean one which explains more satisfactorily not only why Paul says what he does but also how the letter as a whole hangs together. It is not the intention to provide an exhaustive, ‘verse-by-verse’ commentary but rather to show how Paul’s argument reflects the context that has been outlined.

Two other conclusions will also emerge from my analysis of Paul’s argument. First, I hope to have demonstrated in chapter 6 that Romans 9-11, often found puzzling and ‘difficult’, does genuinely constitute the climax of Paul’s expository argument, for it is here that he attempts to set the very different experiences of Jews and Gentiles within the overarching purpose of God. This historical interpretation complements the more ‘theoretical’ theological argument of the earlier chapters. Secondly, my chapter 7 shows that Romans 12-15 provides not simply general and somewhat random exhortations, but rather a compelling and practical response to the specific situation in which his readers in Rome found themselves, however valuable it might also be for other, later readers – and one which arises out of the argument developed in chapters 1-11. This means that, rather as Minear suggests, the climax of the letter as a whole, as distinct from its expository section, is indeed at the end, in chapters 14-15, confirming the view that, like all Paul’s other letters, it is ultimately a pastoral letter, concerned with practical problems facing its readers.

A reading of Romans which emphasises its bearing on issues then current may be thought disappointing by those who are accustomed to taking this letter as a succinct summary of the gospel – in spite of its obvious shortcomings for that purpose. And ‘salvation by works or by faith’, as traditionally understood, is in any case hardly a burning issue today. By contrast, reading Romans in the context of the church then can help us, however odd that might sound, to better grasp what its significance might be for the church now, and I have attempted in chapter 8 to indicate what that significance might be. When we grasp what the real problems among the Romans were, we find, I think, very significant parallels with our own day. Moreover, the manner in which Paul deals with those problems – for it is truly a pastoral letter – provides a model for how we should deal with ours.

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