Udo Schnelle on Justification by Faith and the New Perspective

  
Frederik Mulder has a nice interview with Udo Schnelle on justification by faith and the New Perspective on Paul here.
   

Meyer on the State of the Post E.P. Sanders Discussion

"Many of those who followed in Sander's wake adopted his understanding of Judaism, but not his view of Paul. In other words, they agreed with Sanders's assessment of Paul's context (i.e., the Judaism to which Paul responded) but not Paul's content (i.e., Paul's response to Judaism). Sanders argued that Paul attacked Jewish legalism, but only because he misunderstood the Judaism of his day. New Perspective adherents assert that Paul understood Second Temple Judaism, and therefore he did not attack Jewish legalism, but Jewish exclusivism.

"Responses to Sanders and the New Perspective have followed four different tracks. First, some scholars responded exegetically by contesting the New Perspective reading of Paul's epistles. Second, scholars have reevaluated the Judaism of Paul's day and begun to question Sanders's one-sided reading of Second Temple Judaism. Some scholars then combined both of these elements in contesting the New Perspective. Fourth, some studies now call the New Perspective's reading of Luther into question."

Jason C. Meyer, The End of the Law: Mosaic Covenant in Pauline Theology, NAC Studies in Bible and Theology (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2009), 6-7.

You can read the introduction from which this portion comes here.

An Appraisal of New Testament Studies

Paul Wolfe, one of my former professors, has written a nice article ("Appraising New Testament Studies," Southwestern Journal of Theology 52 [2009], 74–82) summarizing and evaluating some recent trends in New Testament studies. Wolfe focuses on four areas of New Testament interpretation.

A present preoccupation – Anti-imperial interpretation (e.g., R. Horsley)

A new paradigm for old evidence – the New Perspective on Paul (e.g., E. P. Sanders, J. D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright)

A restatement of old assumptions – a general rather than specific audience for the Gospels (R. Bauckham)

A Rereading of the New Testament – Theological interpretation (e.g., B. Childs, D. Treier, M. Bockmuehl)

Wolfe also offers the following observations concerning the future of these developments.

“It generally takes at least a generation, and often longer, for a new development to get enough traction to affect a broad range of interpreters and then begin showing up in subsequent works. The New Perspective on Paul is already deeply entrenched in one form or another and will likely be a development with significant pedigree. The abandonment of the search for the historical audiences or communities of the Gospels is likely too much to ask of main stream scholarship. Evangelicals and lay readers already approach the Gospels with little concern for such a search, so Bauckham’s thesis is not so much of a development as a sophisticated foundation for an approach already widely in place. Unfortunately it will continue to be ignored by most of main-stream scholarship. It is too early to tell if the current trend of anti-Imperial readings of the NT will have much of a legacy. I doubt so, for such readings are under the spell of the current secular political climate, which the readings themselves may not outlast. Theological reading of the NT is gaining significant traction and looks to be a major development with staying power. It, too, is already widely practiced.”

Beyond the New Perspective

While some are just now getting up to speed on the new perspective on Paul, some scholars have already moved beyond it (Should we call this the newer perspective?). Magnus Zetterholm suggests that those who have moved beyond the new perspective of Sanders-Dunn-Wright are characterized by four shifts of focus. The four are:

1. The traditional idea that Paul addressed the whole of humanity has been heavily challenged. Within the radical new perspective, it is quite clear that Paul addresses non-Jews.
2. The assumption that Paul turned to non-Jews has led scholars to the conclusion that his major theological problem concerned non-Jews, not Jews.
3. While traditional scholarship and the new perspective often have argued that Paul created a new group, free from ethnic boundaries, these scholars maintain that the Jesus movement did not represent for Paul a "third race," but remained within Judaism, with new ideas about the appropriate ways to identify and instruct the non-Jewish members.
4. A common trait among the radical new perspective scholars is the ambition not to let contemporary Christian normative theology influence their interpretations.

Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 161–2.

Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright

The much discussed nineteenth annual Wheaton Theology Conference held on April 16-17, 2010: Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright is now available in audio or video here.

HT: Denny Burk

Boyce College Panel Discussion on Justification and the Debate between John Piper and N. T. Wright

The audio for the recent Boyce College panel discussion on justification and the debate between John Piper and N. T. Wright can be accessed here. Participants in the discussion included Denny Burk, Tom Schreiner, Mark Seifrid, and Brian Vickers.