The Living Paul: An Introduction to the Apostle's Life and Thought by Anthony C. Thiselton

Author:Anthony C. Thiselton [Thiselton, Anthony C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2011-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Bultmann asserts, following Paul, that as ‘rightwised’ people, Christians ‘have peace with God’ (Rom. 5.1, 5.9).14 This ‘righteousness’, he says, means the abolition of objective enmity or hostility. In faith the believer turns away from himself or herself to God. Nygren also quotes Paul: ‘not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God’ (Phil. 3.9), and declares that ‘righteousness is an objective relationship’.15 It is ‘being right with God’ resulting from his verdict, and living out subsequently being ‘in Christ’. Tom Wright and others see this act of putting things right as an implicate of God’s covenant faithfulness as formerly portrayed in the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel 9, and elsewhere in the Old Testament.16 Strictly speaking, it is also an anticipation in the present of God’s verdict which belongs to the judgement day. It is part of what Barrett calls ‘setting things and persons right’.17 Strictly, judgement and justification belong together at the last day (Rom. 2.12–13; Gal. 5.5). Richardson, too, sees this as a pronouncement of the last judgement, brought forward by faith.18

This brings us to a major question. How prominent in Paul is justification by grace through faith alone? Martin Luther and John Calvin saw it as a central theme. On Gal. 2.16–17 Luther calls justification the rule of Christianity, whereby sin is forgiven, and our sin is ‘laid upon Christ’ (Isa. 53.5).19 Human righteousness, like human wisdom, is ‘torn down’ by Paul’s gospel. The Pietist or ‘Left-Wing’ Reformers begin, like him, with faith alone, but by imposing legalistic codes of holiness on Christians, they unwittingly become ‘teachers of the law’, like some of the Galatians.20 Calvin urged the importance of the theme because ‘unless you understand first of all what your position is before God, and what the judgment which he passes upon you, you have no foundation on which your salvation can be laid’.21

Criticism of Luther’s and Calvin’s view comes most recently from Stendahl and Sanders, but earlier from Weiss and from Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer argued, ‘By taking the doctrine of righteousness by faith as the starting-point the understanding of the Pauline world of thought was made impossible.’22 Justification, he argues, was a mere tributary to Paul’s theology. Ernst Käsemann rightly insists that Stendahl’s criticisms are far from new;23 and F. C. Baur saw Romans 9—11 as the key climax of the epistle.

The burden of Schweitzer’s attack on tradition was first that justification or ‘being counted right with God’ constituted an affair for the individual, whereas Paul addresses a communal problem. Second, he saw no logical connection between justification with the gift of the Holy Spirit and ethics. Further, this theme is largely restricted to addressing Judaizing Christians; and it isolates the atoning death of Christ from dying and being raised with Christ. Wright, however, comments on the approach shared by Wrede and Schweitzer: ‘Wrede, aware of the same phenomena which “the new perspective” [explained below] has highlighted, but without any glimmer of the

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