Colin Hansen is an editor at Christianity Today and recently began his M.Div. at TEDS [1]. He has started some web-only content at CT which is trying to summarize some of the big theological discussions and debates so that non-seminarians can understand and digest them. Wow. That is a huge but necessary task! I only hope that Colin is a good enough student to continue that work and keep up with Greek, Hebrew and the avalanche of reading he faces at TEDS.
His first installment [2] is on the New Perspective on Paul. Seven or so years ago when I first heard of it, it was pretty much stranded in the halls of academia and didn’t look like it was going to make it mainstream yet. Recently N. T. Wright has become a bit of a rock star amongst younger evangelicals. From what I can tell (and I could be wrong) this was in part because of the Emergent Church being fascinated with all things new and traditional. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, fits that bill on both counts. His New Perspective is, well, new and his title as ‘bishop’ and membership in the Anglican communion has that traditional all over it. Some Emergent Church people began reading and loving Wright and I think that is how he got introduced to many American evangelicals. The other thing about Wright is that he is an excellent writer and is orthodox on about 90% of what he says. It is that last 10% that is troubling.
Till recently, the response to the New Perspective has been mostly in academic circles. D. A. Carson edited a massive, two part work addressing the New Perspective entitled Varigated Nomism. It is not for consumption by normal humans as the title indicates. Carson recommends Stephen Westerholm’s book Perspectives Old and New on Paul as an introduction to the subject. If you’re still wondering what the New Perspective is, here’s a quote from Colin:
New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole introduced and critiqued the new perspective in a recent cover story [3] for Christianity Today. He offers this brief definition: “In particular, the new perspective investigates the problem Paul has with ‘works’ or ‘works of the law.'” If by “works” the apostle Paul meant something other than moral behavior, then have Protestants promoted a false dichotomy between faith and works? Could Martin Luther’s critique of the Roman Catholic Church have clouded and confused how Protestants read the New Testament?
See, the problem is that if Paul was not combating legalism, the idea that we’re accepted by God for obeying his laws, then it seems Luther and the other Reformers were reading the Roman Catholicism of their day back in to Paul and fighting a different battle. Wright and others maintain that the Reformers got it wrong as did the Roman Church at the time. We’re saved by faith, the New Perspective says, but we remain saved by obeying the covenant law. That is, we remain saved by works. So much for having Jesus’ righteousness imputed to us. Now he just gets us in the covenant after that it is up to us.
The reason Colin brings all this up is because with Wright, the New Perspective has found its way out of the schools and into the pews. The Presbyterian Church in America recently passed a resolution stating that the New Perspective is out of step with their confession and catechisms. John Piper has written a book that will be published soon that engages Wright on the doctrine of justification. The reason the PCA and Piper have taken up this question is because they’ve had to. Ten years ago no on in the pew had heard of this. Now it is catching on.
I remember about 7 or 8 years ago attending a regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society at Talbot Seminary and listening to someone lecture on the New Perspective. I’d never heard of it before that moment and thought it made some sense. Some time later I learned more about it and became concerned but felt reasonably safe because it was only an academic issue at the time. I could see, though, how the idea could spread into evangelicalism once it found its way out. It is an answer on how faith and works fit together that might make sense to some folks. Thank God we have pastors like Piper and theologians like Carson to address it. And I really hope that Colin can find the time to continue to bridge the space between seminary and the pew.