Another Perspective on the New Perspective

With all due respect to my Co-Pastor John, I’m not bored with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). In fact, I feel like I’m just beginning to learn something!! Having learned something about N. T. Wright’s NPP, I’m curious about another (less popular) pillar of the NPP, James D. G. Dunn. What is Dunn’s view of the New Perspective on Paul?

James D. G. Dunn is yet another prolific writer on Pauline theology. I confess that I have not read his The Theology of Paul the Apostle or his newly revised The New Perspective on Paul. Perhaps I’ll review these in the future. But for now, let’s begin with Dunn’s two-volume commentary on Romans in the Word Biblical Commentary series.

What is the New Perspective on Paul?

The traditional view: “The point is that Protestant exegesis has for too long allowed a typically Lutheran emphasis on justification by faith to impose a hermeneutical grid on the text of Romans…The antithesis to “justification by faith” - what Paul speaks of as “justification by works” - was understood in terms of a system whereby salvation is earned through the merit of good works” (p. lxv). The hermeneutical mistake was taking Luther’s protest against the pre-Reformation church and applying it to Paul’s protest against first-century Judaism.

The NPP view: “Judaism’s whole religious self-understanding was based on the premise of grace - that God had freely chosen Israel and made his covenant with Israel…This covenant relationship was regulated by the law, not as a way of entering the covenant, or of gaining merit, but as the way of living within the covenant” (p. lxv).

Exegetical Issues

“The exegetical questions exposed here focus very largely on the issue of Paul and the law…Since these references taken together span the complete argument of chaps. 1-11 in all its stages, there can be little doubt that the tension between his gospel and the law and his concern to resolve that tension provide one of Paul’s chief motivations in penning the letter” (p. lxvi). But, “only when we can take for granted what Paul and his readers took for granted with regard to the law and its function will we be able to hear the allusions he was making and understand the argument he was offering” (p. lxvii).

Dunn’s Understanding of Law in Judaism and Paul

1. Law equals Torah. Contrary to some scholarly debate, Dunn believes that, for Paul, “law” does equal “torah.” Therefore, when Paul uses the term “law” in Romans, he is referring to “Israel’s obligations as set out by Moses” (p. lxvii). Furthermore, the Old Testament makes it clear that the law/torah was given in response to salvation, not as a means of earning salvation.
2. The Law as Marker. “The law thus became a basic expression of Israel’s distinctiveness as the people specially chosen by (the one) God to be his people. In sociological terms the law functioned as an “identity marker” and “boundary,” reinforcing Israel’s sense of distinctiveness and distinguishing Israel from the surrounding nations” (p. lxix). Therefore, Israel had a theology of separation (because the Gentiles were without the law)!
3. The Law as Privilege. “A natural and more or less inevitable converse of this sense of distinctiveness was the sense of privilege, precisely in being the nation specially chosen by the one God and favored by gift of covenant and law.” Therefore, Israel developed a “pride in the law as the mark of God’s special favor to Israel” (p. lxx).
4. Emphasis on Specific Laws. “Three of Israel’s laws gained particular prominence as being especially distinctive - circumcision, food laws, and sabbath” (p. lxxi).
5. Paul Protests this Use of the Law. “What Paul was concerned about was the fact that covenant promise and law had become too inextricably identified with ethnic Israel as such, with the Jewish people marked out in their national distinctiveness by the practices of circumcision, food laws, and sabbath in particular. They [Paul's readers] would recognize that what Paul was trying to do was to free both promise and law for a wider range of recipients, freed from the ethnic constraints which he saw to be narrowing the grace of God and diverting the saving purpose of God out of its main channel - Christ” (pp. lxxi-lxxii).

Law and Paul in Romans

The implications of this are far reaching for our understanding of Romans:

1. Romans 2: “a developing critique of…the law as dividing Jew from non-Jew, the haves from the have-nots, those within from those without (2:12-14); the law as a source of ethnic pride for the typical devout Jew (2:17-23); and circumcision as the focal point for this sense of privileged distinctiveness (2:25-29)” (p. lxxii).
2. Romans 3:27-31, 7:14-25, 9:30-10:4: “Paul’s negative thrust against the law is against the law taken over too completely by Israel, the law misunderstood by a misplaced emphasis on boundary-marking ritual, the law become a tool of sin in its too close identification with matters of the flesh, the law sidetracked into a focus for nationalistic zeal” (p. lxxii).
3. Romans 12:1-15:6: “Paul’s attempt to provide a basic guideline for social living, the law redefined for the eschatological people of God in place of the law misunderstood in too distinctively Jewish terms, with the climax understandably focused on a treatment of the two older test-cases, food laws and sabbath” (p. lxxii).

That is enough to get us running. In the near future I’ll probe Dunn’s understanding of righteousness and justification.