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THE NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PAUL: SUMMARY AND REFLECTIONS

Published by Lionel Windsor on February 1, 2006

The weird and wonderful world of biblical scholarship may seem a thousand miles
removed from the day to day life of ordinary Christians. To the outsider,
biblical scholarship looks like a strange little enclave where papers get
written, learned journals get printed, books get published and theories get
advanced and refuted, all with seemingly negligible effect on the day-to-day
preaching of the gospel. However, looks can be deceptive. Biblical scholars tend
to write (and influence) commentaries; commentaries are read by the preachers;
and preachers regularly teach the Bible to their congregations. Of course, the
main lesson to learn from this phenomenon is that preachers should keep reading
the Bible carefully for themselves before turning to the commentaries so as to
gain from the positive and avoid the negative aspects of such scholarship. But
every so often, a movement comes along in biblical scholarship that has so much
momentum, is so influential, and produces so many interesting insights, that it
tends to shape and mould the commentaries, and hence the sermons, and hence the
beliefs of ordinary Christians. Such is the influence of a movement in the world
of New Testament scholarship commonly called, ‘The New Perspective on Paul’.

What is this ‘New Perspective’ all about? Unfortunately, this is a very
difficult question, because the New Perspective is such a diverse movement. It
is a ‘perspective’, not a creed or a religion. Different New Perspective
scholars (e.g. E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright) emphasise
different things, and in different ways. Furthermore, The New Perspective just
won’t sit still. Many of its proponents have modified their earlier views. It
develops, changes and grows with every new article and book published.

However, because it is so influential, ordinary Christians need to get some sort
of handle on the New Perspective. At the very least, we need to be able to
detect when our preachers are using New Perspective ideas so that we can
evaluate what they are saying. How, then, can we approach such a seemingly
impossible task? For those who have the time, there are big books available that
survey the issues.[1] There are also articles focussing more directly on the
doctrinal and pastoral implications of the New Perspective.[2] But in this
article, I’d like to do something a bit more general. I want to present a
‘perspective’ on the New Perspective, to try to convey an overall feel for the
emphases of the ‘New Perspective’, and to make some informed generalisations. I
will concentrate on N. T. Wright, because he is very influential and is often in
dialogue with conservative evangelicals.


WHAT IS THE NEW PERSPECTIVE REACTING AGAINST?

The general aim of the New Perspective is to emphasise certain aspects of the
Apostle Paul’s original teaching (mainly in his ‘early’ letters like Romans, 1 &
2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians and 1 & 2 Thessalonians) that have been
neglected by Protestants because traditional Protestants are (allegedly) too
focussed on the debates of the Reformation. According to a well-known website
called The Paul Page,[3] the New Perspective is a ‘revolutionary breakthrough’
in understanding Paul’s letters. The New Perspective claims to be ‘engaging
first-century Judaism on its own terms, not in the context of the
Protestant-Catholic debates of the sixteenth century’. The core issue is that

> ‘Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about Christian grace versus
> Jewish legalism [because the Jews were not legalists]. His argument was rather
> about the status of Gentiles in the church. Paul’s doctrine of justification,
> therefore, had far more to do with Jewish-Gentile issues than with questions
> of the individual’s status before God.’

So the ‘New Perspective’ aims to present ‘new’ ways of looking at old
material—so that we can better understand Paul’s letters on their own terms. The
New Perspective tends to redefine traditional Protestant words and concepts,
sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly. Often it’s a matter of changing emphasis
rather than outright denial of anything in particular. N. T. Wright, for
example, is able to affirm most of the evangelical creeds, slogans, articles,
etc., sometimes because he agrees wholeheartedly (e.g. on the principle of
‘Scripture Alone’), at other times because he has redefined the words so that
they mean something different to their traditional interpretation (e.g.
‘justification by faith’).

Because the New Perspective tends to see itself as correcting the errors of the
(Protestant) past, a good starting point is to look at some of the ‘errors’ that
the New Perspective is trying to rectify.


INDIVIDUALISM

The proponents of the New Perspective believe that they are correcting an
unhealthy emphasis on individual salvation that Martin Luther began and later
Protestants have perpetuated. In an influential article originally published in
a psychological journal, Krister Stendahl claimed that Martin Luther’s
‘testimony of conversion’ involved a long introverted struggle with his
individual conscience until finally the light dawned and he was ‘justified by
faith’. According to Stendahl, Protestant theology has been unknowingly and
illegitimately influenced by Luther’s individual psychological issues.[4]
According to Mark Mattison, ‘One of the primary features of the traditional
Protestant doctrine of justification is an emphasis on the plight of the
individual before God, an individual quest for piety apart from concrete social
structures.’[5] As I was listening to a sermon by N. T. Wright on Romans, he was
outlining God’s grand plan for salvation from creation to new creation centring
on Christ. He is an engaging speaker, and was beginning to get very excited and
stirred up by this topic (understandably!) Finally it appeared he could contain
himself no longer and he burst exclaimed: ‘Isn’t this so much grander than the
little question of “how I can be saved”?’[6]

It must be said that this alleged ‘traditional Protestant doctrine of
justification’ is not the ‘justification by faith’ that the sixteenth century
Reformers believed and taught. Take Luther’s balanced summary statement in his
early work about justification by faith, Concerning Christian Liberty: ‘A
Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man
is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.’[7] This work, all
about ‘justification by faith’ addresses the effects of justification on all
sorts of concrete social structures such as governments, neighbourhoods and
churches. It concludes, ‘We conclude therefore that a Christian man does not
live in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour, or else is no Christian: in
Christ by faith; in his neighbour by love.’ Hearing this, it is pretty hard to
accuse Martin Luther of introspective individualism!

However, there are other movements that have done their bit to contribute to
individualism in modern Protestantism. German pietism, consumerism, secular
individualism, existentialism (via Bultmann), and Sigmund Freud, among others,
can all share some of the blame. The New Perspective is reacting against a real
contemporary problem, even if it misdiagnoses the cause.


ANTI-SEMITISM

We might recall here the comic antics of Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese),
in the memorable episode of Fawlty Towers, ‘The Germans’. In this episode, the
very English Fawlty goes to ridiculous extremes to avoid upsetting his German
guests by mentioning World War II (and fails spectacularly). He constantly
reminds himself and his staff: ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the war!’.

The comedy works, of course, partly because it taps into a very serious and
deep-seated sentiment in the modern Western psyche. Following the horrors of the
Holocaust in Nazi Europe, ‘The West’ has an introspective corporate conscience,
smitten to its core. This is, of course, understandable. Sin of this magnitude
should smite our conscience!

However, some have traced the Nazi anti-Semitism back to Luther (with some
cause, since Luther used harsh words for harsh times) and have thereby
implicated the whole of Lutheran theology (with much less cause). The argument
proceeds along the following lines. Lutheran theology was about individual
faith-righteousness versus legalistic individualistic works-righteousness.
Lutheran theology needed a foil, a bogeyman, an arch-nemesis which embodied
legalism. Judaism became that foil, because this is Paul’s main
sparring-partner. But then, enter E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism
(1977) whose attempt to ‘cleanse’ the West’s corporate introspective conscience
has been the most successful:

> ‘Sanders has coined a now well-known phrase to describe the character of
> first-century Palestinian Judaism: “covenantal nomism.” The meaning of
> “covenantal nomism” is that human obedience is not construed as the means of
> entering into God’s covenant. That cannot be earned; inclusion within the
> covenant body is by the grace of God. Rather, obedience is the means of
> maintaining one’s status within the covenant. And with its emphasis on divine
> grace and forgiveness, Judaism was never a religion of legalism.’[8]


ANTI-HISTORICISM

Traditional biblical scholarship tended to treat Paul’s letters (especially
Romans) as a ‘compendium of timeless theology’, and sometimes lost sight of the
historical situation that Paul was actually writing from / to / about. The New
Perspective proponents aim to restore the significance of the historical
particularity of Paul’s letters (especially the Jew / Gentile issue).


THE LOSS OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

One of the problems in modern biblical scholarship (and much contemporary
preaching) is that the ‘big picture’ of what the Bible is all about has been all
but lost. People are so busy focussing on the particular text of Romans or
Galatians that they have forgotten the fact that these books were written in the
context of the whole Bible, and need to be understood in light of the big
biblical story. N. T. Wright attempts to provide a coherent, reasonable picture
of the whole biblical story from creation to new creation using the overarching
theme of ‘covenant’.

> ‘What I miss entirely in the Old Perspective, but find so powerfully in some
> modern Pauline scholarship, is Paul’s sense of an underlying narrative, the
> story of God and Israel, God and Abraham, God and the covenant people, and the
> way in which that story came to its climax, as he says, “when the time had
> fully come” with the coming of Jesus the Messiah.’[9]

According to Wright, the theme of ‘covenant’ can account for all of God’s
dealings with humanity, Jew and Gentile. It is also the overarching theme behind
the strong ‘community’ focus of the Bible, the death and resurrection of Jesus,
the place of justification by faith and the historical specificity of biblical
revelation.


A PRELIMINARY RESPONSE

Unfortunately, the New Perspective tends to adopt an ‘either/or’ approach when
it reacts against these perceived problems. For example, proponents of the New
Perspective have perceived ‘individualism’ to be a real problem in contemporary
Christianity. But their solution is often to emphasise the ‘community’ as more
important than the individual, instead of trying to integrate individual and
community issues together on an equal footing. This creates a tendency to lose
sight of the very real individual issues that abound when it comes to salvation.

Furthermore, in reacting against anti-Semitism, the New Perspective has lost
sight of the pan-human tendency for legalism and works-righteousness that was
present among Judaism as it was also amongst medieval Catholicism; and as it is
in our own day!

Finally, in using ‘covenant’ as the key to biblical theology, N. T. Wright has
not considered other strong and coherent ways of understanding biblical theology
that don’t use ‘covenant’ as their integrating theme. For example, Graham
Goldsworthy’s very helpful biblical theology is based on the ‘Kingdom of God’,
not on ‘covenant’.[10]


N. T. WRIGHT AND ‘THE COVENANT’

N. T. Wright claims that he is adopting ‘a covenantal reading of Paul’.[11] For
Wright, ‘covenant’ is the key to understanding all of Paul’s letters.
Righteousness is ‘covenant membership’, justification is ‘the declaration of
covenant membership’, faith is ‘the badge of covenant membership’, etc. Although
Wright never really defines ‘covenant’, here (in broad brushstrokes) is what I
think he means by the concept.

Basically, ‘covenant’ is the way that God relates to humanity. ‘Covenant’
defines a closely-related or even synonymous entity called the ‘people of God’
(or ‘God’s worldwide family’, or ‘The Church’). This ‘people’ has distinct
‘boundaries’ which define who is ‘in’ or ‘out’. Diagrammatically, I think this
is a fair representation of Wright’s schema of the relationship between God and
his people:

Wright’s view of the covenant:



This ‘people of God’ idea is very important for Wright, because it means that
there are two distinct places where God works. Firstly (and most importantly),
God works at the level of the ‘covenant’ between God and his ‘people’. The
‘covenant’ is where things such as righteousness, election, salvation, atonement
and even (possibly) wrath belong. Secondly (dependent on the first, and quite
distinct from it), there are individuals moving (or being moved) inside and
outside the boundaries of God’s people.

So if you asked the question, ‘Did Jesus die to turn away God’s wrath from the
sins of God’s people?’, Wright would answer, ‘Yes, absolutely!’. Because
according to Wright, Jesus’ death happens at the level of God’s covenant. But if
you asked the question, ‘Did Jesus die to turn away God’s wrath from me, a
sinner?’, the answer tends to something along the lines of, ‘Wrong question!
That’s your introspective conscience talking. That’s not what Jesus’ death was
about. Just join the covenant, and everything else will be taken care of.’

What was the problem with Judaism, according to Wright? Judaism had no problem
with their understanding of how God relates to the covenant. But they had too
narrow a view of the extent of the people of God!

Wright’s New Perspective on Judaism:



When Christ came, he fulfilled God’s covenant by his death and resurrection.
Hence the only valid ‘boundary marker’ for who is in or out of the covenant is
faith in Christ, not Torah.

Wright’s New Perspective on Paul:




HOW ‘COVENANT’ REDEFINES OTHER CONCEPTS

Here is a summary of some of Wright’s statements in his commentary on Romans
that help us to see how he redefines certain traditional Protestant words in the
light of his ‘covenantal’ reading.[12] According to Wright:

 * the gospel is not a message first and foremost about how humans get saved but
   an announcement about Jesus, the Messiah, i.e. the covenant head of the
   people of God.
 * the law is not a principle or a moral regulation but it is the Torah, which
   includes ceremonies that can estrange Jew and Gentile but whose ultimate
   ground is faith.
 * sin is not individual transgression of the rules of the law but The fall of
   Adam, in which all humans are incorporated. Its main effect is estrangement
   between people, particularly Jew and Gentile.
 * God’s righteousness is not God’s justice in rewarding the godly and punishing
   the ungodly but God’s faithfulness to his covenant, which may even involve
   forgiving sinners in order to remain faithful to the covenant.
 * our righteousness is not an undeserved, imputed state of non-condemnation
   from God but membership of the covenant people of God.
 * justification is not a description of how somebody becomes a Christian but
   the verdict of righteousness at the last day based on covenant membership,
   now able to be pronounced on all who have the badge of covenant membership
   (faith).
 * grace is the work of Christ in bringing us into the covenant plus the work of
   the Spirit in making us act in line with the covenant.
 * sacrifice / propitiation is the mysterious and complex removal of God’s wrath
   at sin from his covenant people (not so much from the individual) by the
   death of the Messiah.
 * faith is not a spiritual act which gains merit for the sinner in place of
   works [N.B. this is Wright’s understanding of the Protestant view, but not
   the Reformer’s view] but the badge of membership in the people of God, given
   by God’s sheer grace, which includes Christlike trust and active Christlike
   loyalty to God.
 * works are not the keeping of moral regulations to earn God’s favour but
   ceremonies which distinguish Israel from the nations

So the most serious consequence of Wright’s ‘covenantal reading of Paul’ is that
he has drastically reconfigured the idea of ‘justification by faith’ in Paul’s
letters. According to Wright, justification is simply one aspect of the covenant
between God and his people.[13] ‘[J]ustification is the covenant declaration,
which will be issued on the last day, in which the true people of God will be
vindicated [. . .] the verdict, can be issued already in the present, in
anticipation.’[14] This means that for Wright, the covenantal ‘people of God’
becomes a sort of mediator between the individual believer and Christ’s cross.
Once you join the ‘people’, your vindication is guaranteed. The individual is
not so much justified by faith (according to the traditional Protestant
understanding) as declared a member of the covenant people by virtue of wearing
the ‘covenant badge’ of faith. Wright claims that when Paul says that we are now
‘justified by faith’ what he means is that we are members of the people of
God—and since we will therefore be vindicated on the last day, we can even now
be declared ‘vindicated’ on the basis of our covenant membership.[15] Paul was
not primarily interested in the justification of the individual sinner. He was
much more interested in whether an individual was a member of the people of God.


PROBLEMS WITH ‘THE COVENANT’

‘THE PEOPLE OF GOD’?

I hope that the above discussion has already shown the absurdity of drawing a
distinction between the ‘people’ of God and the individual persons who make up
that people. Let me take a familiar example (at least to me!). I love my family.
When I say this, I am saying absolutely synonymously that I love my wife, I love
my daughter and I love my son. My ‘family’ consists in the individuals who make
it up. It does not exist, in either practice or in theory, apart from these
individuals. It would be absurd to say, ‘I love my family. What is my family? My
family is defined by certain covenantal boundary markers – we live together, we
eat together, you trust me, etc. If you are part of my family, then I will love
you as an individual, too.’ This is a crazy distinction. But it appears this is
the way ‘people of God’ is, in practice, used by Wright.

I think the following diagram presents a better understanding of the ‘people of
God’.



COVENANT: WHAT SAINT PAUL RARELY SAID?

There is also an important question that Wright does not appear to have properly
addressed in his writings: Is ‘covenant’ really the primary category of
relationship in the Bible? Does ‘covenant’ really hold the testaments together?
Jesus’ first words in his public ministry were ‘The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’ (Mark 1:15), not
‘The covenant has reached a climax’![16] Paul uses terms like ‘faith’ and
‘righteousness’ far more often than he uses the term ‘covenant’ (only nine times
in all his letters). When Paul does use the term ‘covenant’, he usually speaks
of covenants (plural), or of a ‘new covenant’ (Gal 3:15, 3:17, 4:24; 1 Cor
11:25; 2 Cor 3:6, 14; Rom 9:4; Eph 2:12). Wright is too quick to assume that
‘covenant’, rather than (for example) ‘gospel’ and ‘kingdom’, is the main link
that ties Paul to his Old Testament background.

I argue in my essay The Fulfilment of the Covenants: an Acovenantal Perspective
on Paul that the way that N. T. Wright and others in the New Perspective use the
term ‘covenant’ is unbiblical. The New Perspective’s use of the term ‘covenant’
is more akin to the sociological notions of the ancient Qumran sectarians than
it is to the Old or New testaments. Rather, Paul’s view of the relationship
between God and Christians is ‘acovenantal’. ‘Covenant’ is an inappropriate
category for describing the fundamental character of a Christian’s relationship
with God. Rather, the covenants were instruments that God used historically to
bring about such a relationship. The ‘new covenant’ is not a ‘new relationship
with God’, but Christ’s atoning death and the apostolic preaching of the gospel.
The covenants inform our relationship with God, but the relationship itself is
not a covenant. The relationship is best expressed as spiritual union with
Christ by faith.


LEARNING FROM THE NEW PERSPECTIVE

While the New Perspective has some pretty serious flaws, it also has a number of
helpful things to say. Before moving on to the dangers in the New Perspective,
it’s worth pointing out some of the things we can learn from it.

The proponents of the New Perspective are good at pointing out things in Paul’s
letters that a lot of contemporary evangelicalism tends to neglect. Although the
New Perspective tends to overreact (e.g. by neglecting the importance of
individual justification by faith), we can still learn it by asking ourselves if
the critiques do actually apply to us. For example, are we too individualistic
in our daily life and worship, spurning community and society? Are we too
human-centred in our Christianity, forgetting that the gospel is actually about
God’s work through Jesus, and not ‘all about us’? Are we insensitive to the
historical character of Paul’s letters, treating them as direct solutions to our
own problems before we understand what issues Paul was faced with in his own
day?

The New Perspective is especially good at picking up ‘representative’,
‘participatory’ elements of Paul’s teaching. How often do we hear about the
importance of corporately dying and rising with Christ as a basis for Paul’s
ethical commands (e.g. Romans 6:3-6)? Too often, we talk about obedience to God
as if it’s just a matter of being ‘grateful’ for our salvation, instead of an
intrinsic aspect of who we are in Christ.


DANGERS IN THE NEW PERSPECTIVE

However, there are many grave dangers in the New Perspective on Paul which can’t
be ignored.


SIDELINING JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

According to Wright, ‘The gospel’ of ‘Jesus is Lord’ is primarily for the world,
not the individual.[17] It is a royal pronouncement comparable with the
pronouncement of an ancient emperor.[18] The individual’s response and
experience is acknowledged by Wright, but sidelined in the interests of
community.[19] But when the question, ‘How can I be saved?’ is sidelined as
secondary, it doesn’t disappear. The individual believer will keep asking the
question, and the answers he or she receives will be inadequate because Christ’s
work has not been used to properly define his person. Jesus is Lord because of
his atoning death which justifies individual sinners through faith; the two
cannot be separated (e.g. Rom 4:23-5:2, 1 Cor 6:11).

Asking the question, ‘Is the gospel about Christ’s lordship or justification by
faith?’ is a bit like asking the question, ‘Which leg do you want me to chop
off?’ Why ask it in the first place? Are you planning to get rid of one or the
other? Even though Wright protests the importance of justification by faith, by
redefining it he has really made it a ‘subsidiary’ issue that is relegated to
second place in the overall scheme of things.

We need to realise that there are other motivations driving these dichotomies.
If justification by faith can become secondary, then there have a basis for
fellowship with Catholics, Orthodox, etc.[20] Fellowship is not bad, of course!
But we need to be aware of this ecumenical agenda.


IMPOSING A THEOLOGY OF INCLUSION / EXCLUSION ON THE WHOLE BIBLE

I was recently listening to a sermon on Romans 8, directed at gospel ministers.
Romans 8:1 says ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in
Christ Jesus.’ The preacher asked us: ‘How could you be (wrongly) exercising a
ministry of condemnation?’ This is a great question to ask gospel ministers!
Since ‘condemnation’ is all about pronouncing guilt, announcing God’s wrath,
etc, then I would have expected the preacher to go on and warn us about the
danger of imposing guilt upon Christians, making them think that they are worthy
of God’s anger for their sin despite Jesus’ sacrifice for them, excessively
questioning them about their private lives, etc.

However, what the preacher meant by the ‘ministry of condemnation’ was a
ministry that subtly ‘excluded’ certain people from the ‘evangelical camp’
because of unsavoury beliefs and not being like minded. So the ‘ministry of
condemnation’ at this point means ‘exclusion’ from the theological ‘camp’.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this application. It is, in fact,
sorely needed. Sometimes theology is treated as a club to bludgeon the ‘other
side’ in a kind of tribal warfare. But this application should come from
elsewhere (e.g. Ephesians 2:11-21, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and
aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household
of God,’). This application doesn’t really seem to follow from the context of
Romans 8:1. If we mute the aspects of personal sin, wrath, condemnation,
salvation, etc in those passages which most clearly speak about it (e.g. Romans
8:1), then a theology of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ may effectively end up
dominating over these other very fundamental aspects of the gospel.

(Note: at first, I had thought that the preacher was operating within a
framework in which ‘condemnation’ was always equivalent to ‘exclusion’, but
after interaction with the preacher himself I’ve changed my mind and I have
removed statements from this section of my article that implied this).


MUTING THE GOSPEL

I also find intriguing a recent newspaper article by a non-Christian journalist
describing her experience of having friends in a Christian group. The journalist
describes how she was both attracted to and repelled by the group. The
attraction, to her, was the sense of ‘community’ that gave the group cohesion
and caused her to envy them. But she was also overwhelmingly repelled by their
use of the word of God which, in her mind, placed ‘boundaries’ on who was ‘in’
and who was ‘out’. She had seemingly not heard about the death and resurrection
of Christ (which is what she should have been attracted and repelled by!). That
is, she had not actually heard the gospel. However, she had surmised from the
speech and behaviour of this group that Christianity was all about whether you
were included or excluded from the community. This may be just her
misunderstanding, and certainly she does not have the full picture. However, it
is worrying, because, at least in this case, the idea of ‘community’ had
replaced the work of Christ as the central tenet of Christian witness to an
unbeliever. The New Perspective may well have been at work in this group.


BEING FOUND OUTSIDE OF CHRIST

The greatest danger I can see is that the ‘people of God’ (in Wright especially)
has been drastically redefined. It has morphed away from being the community of
individuals whom God loves, and has become a separate entity which one must
join. This new so-called ‘people of God’, if it isn’t held in check, may well
turn into a beast that claims to be a mediator between the individual and God.
In seeking to be justified by joining this alien entity, we may find ourselves
outside of Christ and his benefits (cf. 1 Tim 2:5). This is a very grave danger
indeed!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© Lionel Windsor.
For more articles, see the website Lionel’s Bible Resources

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


FOOTNOTES

 * [1] E.g. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The ‘Lutheran’
   Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); D. A. Carson, Peter T.
   O’Brien and Mark A. Seifrid (eds), Justification and Variegated Nomism (2
   vols.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001 & 2004), 1-38.
 * [2] E.g. Robert S. Smith. Justification and Eschatology: A Dialogue with ‘The
   New Perspective on Paul’. (Reformed Theological Review Supplement 1;
   Doncaster: RTR, 2001).
 * [3] Mark Mattison, The Paul Page. This is is a great compendium of New
   Perspective scholarship and critiques.
 * [4] Stendahl, ‘The Apostle Paul and Introspective Conscience of the West’,
   HTR 56 (1963), 199-213.
 * [5] Mattison, The Paul Page.
 * [6] I’m not sure if I’ve quoted him verbatim, but this was certainly the
   point that he was making!
 * [7] Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian
 * [8] Mattison, The Paul Page.
 * [9] N. T. Wright, New Perspectives on Paul (2003 Rutherford Lecture)
 * [10] Graham Goldsworthy, According to Plan: the Unfolding Revelation of God
   in the Bible (Leicester: IVP, 1991).
 * [11] N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real
   Founder of Christianity? (Oxford: Lion, 1997), 132.
 * [12] N. T. Wright, ‘The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and
   Reflections’, in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary In Twelve Volumes,
   Vol. 10 (ed. Leander E. Keck; Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), 393-770, esp.
   464-93.
 * [13] Wright, Saint Paul, 117-18, 160.
 * [14] Wright, Saint Paul, 131.
 * [15] Wright, Saint Paul, 131.
 * [16] cf. N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant (London: T & T Clark,
   1991).
 * [17] Wright, Saint Paul, 153-57.
 * [18] Wright, Saint Paul, 157.
 * [19] Wright, Saint Paul, 157-58.
 * [20] Wright, Saint Paul, 158-59.


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