The Upper Register Blog

James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright agree that “the righteousness of God” in Paul’s usage really means “the covenant faithfulness of God.” But there is a perfectly good word for “faithfulness” in Greek (πιστότης) that Paul could have used. Paul does not use this exact word, but he comes close. He speaks of “the faithfulness of God” (ἡ πίστις τοῦ θεοῦ) (Rom 3:3). Three times he says that “God is faithful” (πιστὸς ὁ θεός) (1 Cor 1:9; 10:13; 2 Cor 1:18), and on other occasions he uses the adjective πιστός in reference to God or Christ (1 Thess 5:24; 2 Thess 3:3; 2 Tim 2:13).

In addition, Paul uses a variety phrases and idioms to affirm that God keeps his promises, but none of them involves the use of “righteousness” terminology: “… so that the promise (ἡ ἐπαγγελία) will be guaranteed (βέβαιος) to all the seed” (Rom 4:16); “With respect to the promise (ἡ ἐπαγγελία) of God he did not waver in unbelief … being fully assured that what God had promised (ἐπήγγελται), he was able also to perform” (Rom 4:20-21); “It is not as though the word of God has failed” (Rom 9:6); “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29); “For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God (ἀλήθεια θεοῦ) to confirm (εἰς τὸ βεβαιῶσαι = ‘in order to fulfill’ [BDAG]) the promises (αἱ ἐπαγγελίαι) given to the fathers” (Rom 15:8); “For as many as are the promises (ἐπαγγελίαι) of God, in him they are yes … Now he who establishes (ὁ βεβαιῶν) us with you in Christ and has anointed us is God” (2 Cor 1:20-21); “the Law, which came 430 years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise (ἡ ἐπαγγελία)” (Gal 3:17).

Paul frequently uses the noun or verb for “promise” in the contexts where he wants to affirm the faithfulness of God. Yet the words for “promise” are strikingly absent from the contexts where Paul speaks of “the righteousness of God.” This suggests that the translation “the covenant faithfulness of God” is incorrect.

Denny Burk (formerly assistant professor of NT at Criswell College, but recently named as Dean of Boyce College) has published an article titled, “Is Paul’s Gospel Counterimperial? Evaluating the Prospects of the ‘Fresh Perspective’ for Evangelical Theology” (JETS 51 [June 2008]: 309-37). It’s a helpful article for several reasons: (a) Burk surveys the major players and books in this movement to read Paul as engaging in a “counter-imperial” polemic; (b) he shows that this movement is motivated by a critique of an alleged “American imperialism” and is therefore popular with the denizens of the evangelical left; and (c) he urges seven points of caution about the “Paul and Empire” movement for those committed to an evangelical view of Scripture:

1. Caution about the use of parallels. Certainly, verbal parallels can be found between Paul’s vocabulary and that of Roman imperial propaganda (e.g., kyrios, soteria, euaggelion, etc.). But Burk warns against “parallelomania” (Samuel Sandmel) and suggests that “we cannot rule out the possibility that some parallels are due to the fact that different movements are grabbing theopolitical language from the same linguistic bag” (p. 317). In addition, it is easily domonstrable that Paul’s use of some of these terms (e.g., kyrios) is driven more by his appropriation of the language of the LXX than by an alleged attempt to subvert the lofty claims of the Roman emperors. “Paul’s explicit and implicit allusions to the Septuagint stand as prima facie evidence that Paul’s theological lexicon was shaped primarily by Judaism” (p. 319).

2. Caution about the distinction between meaning and application (E. D. Hirsch’s distinction). Paul does not explicitly formulate his gospel as a critique of the Roman empire, but he does explicitly state that his gospel is the fulfillment of the OT scriptures. Thus, being “counter-imperial” is not part of Paul’s intended meaning, even if it could perhaps be a legitimate application.

3. Caution about the hermeneutics of the “Paul and Empire” movement. Burk points out that some of the more extreme practitioners like Richard Horsley self-consciously employ a postcolonial, reader-response hermeneutic that diminishes the role of authorial intent. The result is that this approach inevitably leads to distortion of Paul’s message, since the agendas and biases of the interpreter are given a controlling influence over the interpretive process. Burk quotes N. T. Wright (one of the more responsible members of this movement) as saying: “There is a danger — and I think Horsley and his colleagues have not always avoided it — of ignoring the major theological themes in Paul and simply plundering parts of his writings to find help in addressing the political concerns of the contemporary western world” (p. 325).

4. Caution about a narrow application to the Roman Empire. Paul opposed all false gods and pretended powers with the Lordship of Christ, not just the Roman emperors who claimed to be divine.

5. Caution about the “Paul and Empire” movement’s view of Scripture. Many of the members of this movement regard the disputed Pauline letters as pseudepigraphical. This is also related to the fact that they regard the genuine Paul as egalitarian, so obviously the passages in Eph and 1 Tim that teach the subordination of women could not have been written by Paul. Burk has an interesting comment about N. T. Wright in this section. Due to his higher regard for the OT-Jewish background of Paul’s thought and due to his less critical stance toward the disputed Paulines (at least Ephesians and Colossians), Burk thinks Wright’s “participation in this conversation is a needed counter-balance to some of the more radical, critical assumptions made by” others in the movement (p. 328).

6. Caution about the analogy between America and Rome. Here Burk makes an excellent point:  even acknowledging America’s huge economic, military, and cultural influence in the world, America cannot be simply equated with Rome. I loved this line: “Lining the Appian Way with crucified slaves is hardly the moral equivalent of lining the streets of foreign countries with outposts of American capitalism (like McDonald’s, Coca Cola, etc.)” (p. 329).

7. Caution about the interpretation of Romans 13:1-7. Paul’s positive statements about Rome in this passage seem to sit uncomfortably with the theory that Paul was engaged in “counter-imperial” polemic. So Burk looks at two scholars (Robert Jewett and N. T. Wright) who have written commentaries on Romans to see how they struggle to fit Rom 13 into their paradigm. Burk shows that their attempts to interpret this passage as a “subversive” or “implicit” critique of Rome are not convincing.

In conclusion, Burk argues that in spite of its popularity, this approach “does not offer a way forward for evangelical interpreters” (p. 337). I would have to agree.

I have little to say by way of criticism. I would only like to add an eighth item of caution to Burk’s list:  evangelicals should be concerned about this movement because it has the effect of shifting the focus of Paul’s gospel away from the existential issues of personal sin and guilt before a holy God, to structural issues in society as a whole. Sin is not that I have transgressed God’s will but that American foreign policy or global capitalism are oppressive forces causing suffering and pain. Instead of personal guilt, the focus is on systemic structural evil. Thus, Paul’s gospel is not (on this view) fundamentally a message about how Christ delivers us from the wrath to come through his atoning death and resurrection, but a message that God is on the side of the politically oppressed and the environment. And instead of calling fundamentally for a response of repentance toward God and faith/trust in Jesus Christ, this “gospel” (if one can call it that) calls for a new moralism with a political agenda. The “Paul and Empire” movement transforms Paul’s proclamation of Christ into a social gospel that in the final analysis could do without Christ. I do not think N. T. Wright is as guilty on this score as Horsley and others, but I fear that Wright is at least complicit in encouraging a social gospel interpretation of Paul’s gospel (witness his influence on Brian McLaren).

Check out this great post by Paul Helm showing the structural similarities between Richard Baxter and N. T. Wright on justification.

HT: Between Two Worlds

As I’ve mentioned before, I passed my comps last August and now I’m entering the dissertation phase of my Ph.D. work at Fuller. When I last blogged about this, I said that I wanted to do something in the whole area of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), but that I needed time to do more reading and narrow down my topic to one particular aspect of the NPP. I think I’ve finally zeroed in on my topic, and I will explain what it is in a minute. But first, let me say that I’m convinced that the NPP is fundamentally a distortion of Paul’s gospel. Although the Reformation tradition certainly is not perfect and has areas that need sharpening and refinement in light of modern biblical scholarship, I am in agreement with Stephen Westerholm when he famously said that any NT scholar who thinks they have nothing to learn from Martin Luther should consider a career in metallurgy. The Old Perspective on Paul is not without its imperfections and blind spots at certain points, but it is far closer to the truth than the New Perspective.

What is needed is a rehabilitation (and, where necessary, refinement) of the Old Perspective on Paul on a solid foundation of painstaking, objective exegetical labor informed by deep knowledge of Paul’s first century Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. As I have been immersing myself in the literature of the NPP, I have come to think that there are two main issues that need to be addressed if we are to accomplish this goal. First, we must answer E. P. Sanders’s claim that the Judaism of Paul’s context was not a legalistic religion that taught salvation by works of merit. Second, we must investigate the notion, defended by James Dunn and N. T. Wright, that Paul’s “righteousness” language (verb, noun, and adjective) is informed primarily by a relational or covenantal significance due to its origin within an OT/Jewish matrix.  

Some very good work has already been done in response to Sanders and critiquing his notion that the Judaism of Paul’s day was “covenantal nomism” (e.g., Elliott, Das, Gathercole, and many others), but to my knowledge little has been done on the second issue which has more to do with lexical semantics. Therefore, I have chosen to tackle the second problem by writing a dissertation that will subject the Hebraic/relational interpretation of Paul’s “righteousness” terminology to critical examination.

The Hebraic/relational view goes back to a seminal treatise by Hermann Cremer published in 1899 (second edition, 1900) titled Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhange ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. I translate this as The Pauline Doctrine of Justification in the Context of its Historical Presuppositions. By “historical presuppositions,” Cremer means primarily the usage of “righteousness” in the Old Testament and in post-biblical Jewish literature. Cremer was one of the first to argue that Paul’s usage of “righteousness” is not governed by standard Greek usage but by its usage in the OT, where it has a relational or covenantal meaning as opposed to the alleged abstract, ethical meaning in secular Greek. The idea is that “righteousness” does not signify conformity to an abstract norm but the fulfilling of one’s obligations as defined within a particular relationship. When applied to “the righteousness of God,” God’s righteousness is his faithfulness to the covenant. In German theology, scholars tend to speak of God’s Gemeinschaftstreue (faithfulness to the community, i.e., Israel) or his Bundestreue (covenant faithfulness). 

Cremer further argued that not only does God’s righteousness refer to God’s covenant faithfulness, but that in many instances, particularly in the Psalms and Deutero-Isaiah, it refers specifically to God’s saving activity (Heilshandeln) by which he intervenes in history to redeem his people, thus fulfilling his obligations to the covenant. Taking this concept and applying it to Paul, Cremer argued that in the key Pauline texts that speak of “the righteousness of God” (Rom 1:17; 3:5, 21ff; 10:3; 2 Cor 5:21) the “of God” is a subjective genitive and that the whole phrase refers to God’s covenant faithfulness as manifested in his saving or justifying activity in Christ.

Cremer’s revolutionary argument has had a deep and lasting impact on theological and biblical studies throughout the 20th century. His ideas were well received by OT scholars, in particular Gerhard von Rad and Walther Eichrodt, both of whom devote sections in their OT theologies to the Cremer theory. On the NT side, Adolf Schlatter wrote a commentary on Romans titled The Righteousness of God (1935) which relied on Cremer’s interpretation. The next major appropriation of Cremer’s theory by a major NT scholar was the brilliant contribution of Ernst Käsemann in his famous 1961 essay, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul.” Käsemann argued that the righteousness of God must not be reduced to the gift-aspect, which is the dominant theme in Luther’s interpretation, i.e., the gift of imputed righteousness given to the believer. Rather, Käsemann spoke of “the power-character of the gift” (der Machtcharakter der Gabe) and argued that the righteousness of God is his covenant faithfulness, not merely to Israel but to the entire creation, by which he engages in his saving activity to reclaim the world for himself and to bring it under his lordship. Salvation is not merely a reception of a divine gift but a change of lordship (Herrschaftswechsel) by which we are transferred out of the lordship of sin under the reign of the first Adam into the lordship-realm of Christ the second Adam. Justification and sanctification are therefore indistinguishable, merely two sides of the same coin.

All of this flows from his fundamental presupposition that the phrase “the righteousness of God” was a technical term or fixed formula in apocalyptic Judaism that Paul radicalized and universalized in light of the Christ event. Käsemann himself did not spend a whole lot of energy trying to prove this point, but his student, Peter Stuhlmacher, filled in the lacuna by writing his dissertation on the subject in 1965 (second edition, 1966), although Stuhlmacher would later admit that he had overstated his claim that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ was a fixed formula. 

There are many other lesser scholars to be noted along the way, but I think you get the picture. There is a more-or-less direct line from Cremer to Käsemann to the NPP as articulated by Dunn and Wright. There are, of course, some important differences where the NPP takes the Cremer theory in new directions. For example, Dunn and Wright not only argue that “the righteousness of God” is his covenant faithfulness, but they interpret the verb “to justify” to mean “to declare someone to be a member of the covenant.” This is a new application or extension of the Cremer theory but it is perfectly consistent with it. Furthermore, both Dunn and Wright have added the new twist that “the works of the law” refers to Jewish boundary markers. In so doing, they interpret Paul’s slogan that “one is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Christ” to mean that one is not reckoned as a member of the covenant people by the badge of Jewish practices. This is what leads the NPP to reinterpret Paul’s Rechtfertigungslehre as a fundamentally social doctrine calling the church to be radically inclusive.

(In my view this is dangerous because it denies or at least downplays the soteriological and eschatological significance of justification as God’s act - on the basis of Christ’s atoning obedience unto death - of reckoning individual sinners as righteous in God’s sight and thus worthy of attaining eternal life in the age to come. In the NPP, and despite recent attempts to have their cake and eat it too, sociology and ecclesiology have trumped soteriology and eschatology. The fundamental human problem has switched from guilt before a holy God to the problems of racism, social exclusion, and ecumenical relations. This plays right into the hands of the renewed social gospel that we are now seeing in the emergent community.)

My dissertation, then, will be a critique of the Hebraic/relational interpretation of Paul’s righteousness terminology from Cremer to the NPP, with a special focus on the underlying lexical semantics of the question. Can the word “righteousness” mean “covenant faithfulness”? Can the word “to justify” mean “to reckon someone as a member of the covenant”? I don’t think they can bear these meanings, and that, in fact, the traditional understanding does a much better job of explaining all of the data, including the usage of these terms in Paul’s OT and Jewish context.

I was in Dr. Seyoon Kim’s office the other day and he showed me the finished manuscript of his latest book, Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke. It is scheduled to be released by Eerdmans this September. This monograph will be a helpful critique of N. T. Wright and the “Paul and Empire” coalition.

Matt Morgan has a good post exploring N. T. Wright’s murky position on the atonement. On the one hand, NTW has made statements that sound like penal substitutionary atonement. On the other hand, he defends Steven Chalke’s ”cosmic child abuse” comment, and is critical of Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution. In his “The Cross and the Caricatures”, published this past Easter, NTW wrote that there are many models of penal substitution:

On the cross, as an expression of God’s love, Jesus took into and upon himself the full force of all the evil around him, in the knowledge that if he bore it we would not have to; but this, which amounts to a form of penal substitution, is quite different from other forms of penal substitution, such as the mediaeval model of a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son. In other words, there are many models of penal substitution, and the vengeful-father-and-innocent-son story is at best a caricature of the true one.

Notice that for NTW, Jesus took upon himself the full force of “the evil around him.” But this is a very different thing than bearing the full force of the righteous judgment of God that we deserved for our sins. By focusing on abstract evil floating “around him” rather than the execution of divine punishment, NTW empties the word ”penal” of all significance. And, like Steven Chalke, NTW can’t help but engage in caricature, in an essay devoted to attacking caricatures. He says of the traditional ”model” of penal substitution that it pictures ”a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son.” 

It really does make you wonder what NTW means when he claims to believe in penal substitution. I think a case can be made that NTW’s “model” of penal substitution is actually closer to the atonement theory of René Girard, which is the current theory du jour espoused by those who object to the penal model on the ground that it endorses violence.

NTW sounds to me like a Mormon claiming that he’s a Christian since, after all, he really does believe that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humankind (with hidden asterisks next to the terms “son,” “God,” and “savior” all redefined in terms of Mormon theology).

Matt concludes:

When you put it all together, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that N.T. Wright understands penal substitution correctly, for the simple reason that all these loose ends in Wright-speak simply do not cohere. I’m inclined to think the Oakhill men (Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sach) are surely right to identify their disagreement with Wright as a “methodological one” at its core. In other words, this cannot be written off simply as a matter of emphasizing one thing more than the other; Wright seems to be tolerating a fundamentally different way we should think about the atonement.

John M. G. Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul” (conclusion) 

Imagine that we meet Paul into the street and he invites us into the house of a believer which we find to be arranged like a theater. He invites us to watch a play called “The Drama of History.” The main characters listed in the dramatis personae are not the Emperor or the Roman Empire but oddly named powers such as “Flesh” and “Spirit,” “Death” and “Life.” The play depicts a comprehensive account of reality, including the political and the historical dimensions. The play is about a conflict, not between the Roman Empire and its barbarian foes or between the church and the Roman Empire. None of the characters on the stage are distinguishably Roman. The children of God are engaged in a continual conflict. At one moment, we see Satan looking a bit like a Roman governor preventing the movements of an evangelist, but in another he is an angel of light or an apostle in the church who needs to be unmasked.

There are stage hands, some called exousiai [”governing authorities,” Rom 13:1], wearing the clothes of various nations, including Greeks and Romans. They are there to sustain the conditions under which the drama can unfold, thus supporting “the good” [Rom 13:4]. But since their ethnicity is not germane, they are listed in the program in small print as diakonoi theou [”servants of God,” Rom 13:4] not as Roman officials or Roman emperors.

The drama concerns the story of the gospel as it advances over the contested terrain of the world. The chief characters are Christ the Son of God and the archic entities we described above mysteriously working not only behind but within in every individual life, every human institution, and every superhuman power. The advance of the gospel is everywhere in danger and frequently frustrated, but we know that the life it imparts is as indestructible as the risen Christ, and that even the most terrible enemy on the stage, Death, is doomed itself doomed to die. Indeed we get a strong sense that the forces of darkness, though presently dominant, are in decline, that the night sky that looms over the stage may be lightening a little in the east. And we cannot help noticing that the children of light keep celebrating the victory of their King by faith, even before it is fully visible and fully enacted. [Minute 36-37]

After the play is over, we emerge into the bright light of the street and see a 10-foot high statue of Augustus.  Surely this must have been represented in Paul’s drama. We find Paul himself. “Brother Paul, surely you were not so naïve or pietistic to ignore this huge reality. What did I miss? Where was the central character, Caesar?” Paul asks us whether we stayed awake! We’ve clearly not seen reality as Paul’s play describes it. We know nobody kata sarka [”according to the flesh,” 2 Cor 5:16], i.e., in normal, “this age” terms. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. The play has invited us to a new epistemology.

Paul is not blind. Of course he sees the huge statue of Caesar, but he sees through it and behind it. When you see the world aright, you realize that Rome never was nor will be a significant actor in the drama of history. It is not itself an archic force, only sometimes co-opted by them. Rome does not rule the world, or write the script of its history, or offer anything new, or constitute anything unique. Its grand place has been most effectively subverted by Paul, not by direct challenge, but by subsuming Rome into the undifferentiated crowd of “the rest” (hoi loipoi) [1 Thess 4:13] and by placing her, even in her supporting role for the conditions of life, under the anonymous title diakonoi theou [Rom 13:4]. As we walk past the plinth of the deified Augustus, we realize that Paul’s cross-formed epistemology may be true. It may be the deepest insult that Augustus and his successors ever received.

I consider, then, that Tom’s reading of Paul and that of the “Paul and Empire” coalition is fundamentally misshapen. Tom has taken his expectations of Paul from the street and its Imperial dominated scenery and imposed upon Paul’s drama a rubric and a structure quite alien to it. Ironically, the framework of Tom’s reading of first century reality is much closer to that of Rome than to that of Paul. Like Rome, Tom insists on attributing to the Rome Empire a central role in history. He insists on the importance of the Emperor and that his agency was so powerful that it needed to be parodied or upstaged by Christ. In so doing, I submit, by Pauline standards, Tom is massively promoting the Emperor and massively demoting Christ. It’s hard for me to say this to my Bishop [laughter], but I believe he is reading reality kata sarka and not kata Christon. [Minute 43-44]

After a few more concluding words, thus ended Barclay’s brilliant critique of N. T. Wright and the “Paul and Empire” coalition. Next, I’ll blog N. T. Wright’s response.

John M. G. Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul” (continued)

I continue my notes of John Barclay’s lecture critiquing N. T. Wright and the “Paul and Empire” coalition. Again, these are very close but not exact quotes, except as indicated by the use of block-quotes. The previous post was Barclay’s negative statement in which he showed Paul’s lack of interest in the Roman Empire. Now he turns to a positive statement of the drama of history according to Paul and the place of the Roman Empire within that drama.

Positively: The drama of history according to Paul

The main players in this drama are the Spirit and grace, on the one hand, and sin, flesh, and death, or what Paul calls “the powers,” on the other. The Roman Empire is not itself one of these powers, because they operate across all levels simultaneously – individual, social, political, cosmic. Like any empire, the Roman Empire may be co-opted in whole or in part into the ranks of the sons of darkness, but only as an undifferentiated mass whose identity is determined by its allegiance to the powers. Paul’s most subversive act vis-à-vis the Roman Empire was not to oppose it but to relegate it to the ranks of a dependent and derivative entity and to deny it any significance.

We are at a loss at how to categorize the powers such as sin, flesh, and death:

If we call them “cosmic,” it sounds like they are otherworldly, whereas they operate very much in human lives on the earthly stage. If we call them “anthropological,” we lose the sense that they cover the whole gamut of existence – from the sin of lust, to social disintegration, to the corruption and decay that infests the whole cosmos … We have to reckon with comprehensive features of reality covering all levels and dimensions of existence … Following the Greek term archai [”powers”] I shall label this mode of world-description “archic.” These entities are both the principles behind and the powers over every sphere of life. In this sense, there is nothing in this world that is not archic, lining up on one side of the battle or the other. [Minute 24]

Romans 5:12-21. The reign of grace versus the reign of death. The power that has reconfigured the world in Christ sweeps away old divisions, crosses ethnic, social, and political boundaries and creates new boundaries. Formerly, Paul divided the world between Jews and Gentiles. Now he divides the world between those who are being saved and those who are on the way to destruction. Paul saw no interesting or archic differences between Romans and Greeks, only between this present cosmos and the new creation. The crucifixion is what creates this new distinction. The cross divides the world anew.

Paul’s Christ-shaped communities have a radically new understanding of power – not force but service of the other. They are controlled by the love of Christ. These communities do not return evil for evil. They welcome one another as Christ has welcomed them. They strive for peace not warfare. They provide a socio-political alternative, a sign against and a bridgehead into the realm of sin and death.

Undoubtedly Paul saw many fleshly and sinful aspects of the Roman Empire, indeed of all nations and even of the church itself. The battle-line between flesh and Spirit does not pass neatly between the Roman Empire and the rest, because the archic division is pervasive and affects the whole of humanity.

Paul never names any of the idols, not because he’s never heard of Artemis, Dionysus, Serapis, Jupiter, Caesar, or the deified emperors, but because they all reflect the same thing, deflection of worship from the Creator. The emperors and their cult are simply further items in a general category of “many lords and many gods” [1 Cor 8:5], no more significant than any other. There was no need to single any one out. They are all eidololatria [“idolatry”].

Although the present contest is certainly intense, fought out at every level from inner temptation to social conflict to cosmic warfare, Paul knows that the victory won in the cross and resurrection has sealed the fate of the opponents of Christ. With a striking use of the present tense, he declares that “the form of this world is passing away” (paragei) [1 Cor 7:31], and can assure believers that “the night is far gone, the day is at hand” [Rom 13:12]. The stoicheia tou kosmou [”the elemental forces of the world,” Gal 4:3; Col 2:8, 20], powerful and wealthy as they might seem, are shown to be weak and abjectly impoverished (asthene kai ptocha) [Gal 4:9] in the light of the power of the cross and the resurrection and in comparison to the charis [”grace”] of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the wake of the cross of Christ, the rulers of this age are being nullified or de-activated (katargoumenon) [1 Cor 2:6], as is the whole structure of the present state of affairs.

These rulers, we note, are nameless and undifferentiated, because what matters about them is not whether it was this king or that governor who crucified the Lord of glory, but that they belong to this age whose obsolescence and inadequacy is defined by the work of God in Christ. Their defining characteristic is not that they are Roman or Hellenistic or Jewish or whatever. When we hear that they are rulers of this age, that’s all we need to know, because we then know that and how they are on the wrong side, and that and how they are being de-activated by Christ.

In the midst of this crumbling present age, believers can live to their Lord in every sphere of life, since he is the Lord of the cosmos in every dimension, the only Lord who will last. With the hos me [“as if not”] policy of involved detachment [”those who are married should live as if they were not,” etc., 1 Cor 7:29-31], they know that only the work of the Spirit will survive the collapse of the present evil age.  What is of the flesh even in their own lives will be burned up, but they will sow to the Spirit in every dimension of their existence – personal, social, and political – as the imminent harvest will be rich. In their worship they anticipate their eschaton, celebrating the grace that has already begun to reconquer and reconstitute the world. [Minutes 30-32]

Stay tuned for the last installment of Barclay’s lecture.

I was present but my memory was fading, so I began listening to the MP3 of the debate between John M. G. Barclay and N. T. Wright on “Paul and Empire” held at SBL in San Diego on Monday afternoon, November 19, 2007. Here are my notes, at times verbatim, from the first 20 minutes of Barclay’s lecture. When I do quote verbatim, I use the block-quote format.

John M. G. Barclay:  “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul”

This is the second round of a fight that started in March earlier this year. Tom and I are old friends. We go back some 28 years. I regard Tom’s work as the most balanced, measured, comprehensive, and theologically developed in the “Paul and Empire” coalition. Yet I regard his thesis as fundamentally wrong.

Areas of agreement with N. T. Wright:

Shared deep suspicion of imperial power, whether Roman, British, or American. Paul does not recognize the boundary between religion and politics. Agreement that we should not consider Paul an apolitical figure with a privatized piety. Paul is very interested in power, but does not line up on either right or left of political spectrum. Agreement that Paul’s gospel is deeply confrontational, the reign of Christ versus his enemies. The cross creates a distinction between this age and the new creation. Endorse Tom’s attempt to integrate Paul’s political thought with the rest of his theology. Agreement that we should learn from Classical scholars that the imperial cult was extremely important for most of Paul’s contemporaries in the form of festivals, games, statues, coins, temples, etc. Even agree that some of Paul’s language (euangelion, soter, kyrios, parousia, ereine, etc.) could have been heard as analogous to the language used in Imperial propaganda. But the question is not how it could have been heard, but how Paul meant it, how he framed and focused it.

Tom reads Paul’s theology as intended to counter the propaganda claims of the Roman Empire, to parody and upstage Caesar, and to undermine the Imperial cult … Tom finds this assault on Rome sometimes explicit, often implicit in Paul’s language and narrative, and occasionally – as in Philippians 3 — in code. I think, to the contrary, that Tom is simply hallucinating [laughter], that there is no evidence that Paul had the Roman Empire or the Imperial cult particularly in view, and that better understood, Paul’s theology is deeply political, but in a way that makes Rome, not a central player in the history of the world, but a bit-part, a member of a largely undifferentiated crowd in a drama governed by much greater and much more pervasive powers. [Minutes 6-7]

Negatively:

There is no evidence that Paul accords special role to Roman emperor. He never refers to any Roman governors or emperors by name, although he does mention King Aratus, thus showing he’s not averse to naming rulers. Paul never refers to Roman deities. He never refers to his Roman citizenship positively or negatively. He never identifies the cross as a Roman punishment. It is the Jews (1 Thess 2:14) or the nameless ”rulers of this age” (1 Cor 2:6-8) who killed Christ. The offence of the cross is drawn out in relation to the Jews and the Greeks, never in relation to the Romans in particular. Paul attributes his punishments and persecutions to the Jews, never to the Roman authorities. When he does refer to civil rulers, they are always anonymous and never specifically identified with Rome.

Tom and others in the ”Paul and Empire” coalition argue that Paul uses “code” or “hidden transcripts.” This whole scenario strikes me as absurd. There is not a single hint in Paul’s writings of a second meaning. Why on earth would Paul need to write in code? Paul’s letters are private communications carried by trusted friends. There were no secret police in Paul’s day opening the early Christians’ mail to look for signs of political insubordination.

What would Paul be saying that needed to be coded? That Caesar is not God or son of God? Philo said so openly and more or less directly to the emperor’s face. That Roman governors were responsible for terrible miscarriages of justice? Josephus says that time and again in public writings that were even presented to emperors. That the empire brings as much war as peace, injustice as justice? Even Tacitus, from the heart of the establishment, can see that and say that in his famed history of Rome. That one should not take part in the Imperial cult? Paul said that in 1 Corinthians with regard to eidolothuta.  Josephus said the cult was useful neither to God nor human beings. The image of Paul as too afraid to say what he thinks strikes me as bizarre. Paul expected persecution. He would hardly have tried to avoid it by speaking in code.

We should learn from the history of exegesis:  the Valentinians teach us that once you start looking for code in Paul, you can end up just about anywhere you want.

At base, Tom’s argument works by inference:  the Roman Empire was so important, Paul must have said something specifically about it. Rome and Caesar must be somewhere in Paul’s letters. We just have to adjust our spectacles. But if we are determined to find it, we will.

You know the story of the little boy in the crowd watching as the emperor paraded down the street in his supposedly new clothes and was bold enough to say, “But the emperor is naked!” I feel like that little boy, only in this case, when I am bidden to watch the emperor walking around Paul’s letters, I rudely blurt out, “But I see no emperor!” [Laughter] Sorry to be so impolite, but I try to tell the truth. 28 years ago you taught me, Tom, in reading the New Testament to pay very close attention to what is actually there and not to read any theologies or history-of-religions backgrounds that have to be imported into the text. I learned well from you during those two enthralling years of Cambridge supervision and I have come back to remind you of your lesson. [Laughter]

But what if Paul has his own peculiar perception of the world? What if the event that dominates history for Paul is not the Roman Empire but the cross and resurrection of Jesus and the new creation that these events inaugurated? What if that event changes Paul’s understanding of history? We have to read Paul’s letters according to his vision of reality, not according to that of his contemporaries.

Today I listened to one of the MP3’s that I linked to in my previous post, N. T. Wright’s lecture titled “God in Public: The Bible and Politics in Tomorrow’s World.” It was an invited lecture delivered on Sunday afternoon, November 18, 2007, at SBL in San Diego. I think this lecture helps to explain some crucial things about Wright’s theology. One thing that struck me was the similarities between Wright and Brian McLaren. This shouldn’t be surprising since McLaren is heavily dependent on Wright’s books, particularly Jesus and the Victory of God.

First, Wright states that his theological writings about Jesus and Paul have inherently political implications. Wright’s theology and Wright’s politics are a package deal. If you like his theology, but you aren’t too keen on his anti-American politics, then you might want to go back and rethink the theology. 

I’ve gotten used by now to getting plaintive emails from people saying things like, ‘We like what you write about Jesus and the resurrection. We are fascinated by what you say on Paul. But why are you so critical of our president?’ [Laughter] But my answer normally has to take the form, ‘If you actually read what I say about Jesus […?…] understand what Paul was on about, you have to take the questions of God in public seriously in a whole new way.’ … Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all in their various ways about ‘God in public,’ about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven through the public career and death and resurrection of Jesus. [Minute 12]

Second, he defines the kingdom of God so that the accent falls on saving the world, the creation, while the salvation of “individual souls” gets subordinated: 

Yes, Jesus did indeed launch God’s saving sovereignty on earth as in heaven, but this couldn’t be accomplished without his death and resurrection. In other words, the problem for which God’s kingdom project was and is the answer was deeper than could be addressed by a social program alone. Equally too, yes, Jesus did die for our sins, but his whole agenda of dealing with sin and its effects and consequences was never about rescuing individual souls from the world but about saving humans so that they could become part of his project of saving the world. [Minute 22] 

Third, Wright argues that the death, resurrection, and lordship of Christ inaugurated the eschaton, thereby entrusting to earthly rulers the duty of anticipating the new creation here and now, what he calls “restorative justice.” His proof text in support of this theory is Psalm 2, the same passage appealed to by Reformed theocrats of various stripes. He then says: 

Jesus was hailed as already Lord of heaven and earth, and in particular as the one through whom the Creator God will restore and unite all things. And this gives a sharp focus to the present task of earthly rulers … Now, since Jesus’ death and resurrection … they are to look forward … to the ultimate eschaton. One day God will right all wrongs through Jesus, and earthly rulers – whether or not they acknowledge this Jesus and his coming kingdom – in fact are entrusted with the task of anticipating in a measure that final judgment and final mercy … They are to enact in a measure, in advance, the time when God will make all things new and will once again declare that it’s very good. [Minutes 37-38]

Fourth, the church’s role is to remind the earthly rulers of their obligation to enact Jesus’ victory here and now and to call the earthly rulers to account when they fall short:

Along with this vision of God working through earthly rulers there goes a vocation to the church to be the people through whom the rulers are to be reminded of their task and called to account … Part of the way in which the church will do this is by getting on with and setting forward those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, which the rulers know in their bones ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about … Thus, the church in its biblical commitment to doing ‘God in public’ is called to learn how to collaborate without compromise (hence the importance of the common good theory) and to critique without dualism … The aim of this lecture, then, is to encourage readings of the Bible which by highlighting the public-ness of God and the gospel set forward such reforms as will enable the church to play its part in holding the powers to account and thus advancing God’s restorative justice. [Minutes 38, 40, 45]

My main objection to this view of politics is that it conflates the city of God with the city of man to the detriment of clarity with regard to both. Wright views the kingdom of God as not really being about the salvation of the elect on the basis of the atoning death of Christ applied to sinners through effectual calling in the context of the preaching of the gospel. Though personal salvation is included, it is only a means to the end of helping God finish his project of restoring creation. Wright is correct to interpret the kingdom of God in a creational context, but he is wrong in his over-realized eschatology which assumes that the new creation is advancing quite publicly even prior to the eschaton in the physical creation, in society, and in the political realm. This is exactly the opposite of Jesus’ teaching concerning the hidden nature of the kingdom in its present pre-eschatological phase. In so doing, he denigrates the spiritual, largely non-public, hidden-from-view activities of God’s Spirit in effectually calling the elect, justifying them by imputing the satisfaction and righteousness of Christ to them, and progressively sanctifying them in Christ-like character and personal obedience. The redemption of larger societal structures is more interesting to Wright.

By the same token, Wright sacralizes the city of man so that it loses its character as part of God’s common-grace, non-holy order for the provision of a temporary field upon which the operations of soteric grace may be played out via the gospel mission of the church. Common grace is the key here! Kline has taught us that God established a common grace order that began after the fall and which will be terminated at the second coming. Civil rulers belong to this common grace order. They are neither sacred nor sinful, although individual rulers can usurp god-like prerogatives and become sinful, even Satanic in their opposition to the kingdom of God. But as ordained by God civil rulers are merely given to promote temporal justice, to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. They are not agents of the eschatological kingdom. They are not means of bringing in the eschaton.

Finally, Wright never shows that the New Testament anywhere “entrusts” to earthly political rulers this supposed duty of anticipating the eschatological new creation by means of restorative justice. He appeals to Psalm 2, but no New Testament texts, to support his view that Christ uses civil rulers to bring in his kingdom here on earth, visibly, and in the concrete structures of society outside the visible church. (BTW, Psalm 2 must be interpreted eschatologically, in accordance with the apostolic hermeneutic attested in Acts 4:24-30 and elsewhere.)  

I still plan to post on the Wright vs. Barclay debate on “Paul and Empire,” which will shed further light on Wright’s view of the relation of God and politics.