New Perspective on Paul

Paul shows how a person is put right with God as a gift received by faith, and James shows what that living faith looks like over a lifetime, with Genesis 22 as the fruit of Genesis 15.

More recently, N.T. Wright and others in what's called the New Perspectives on Paul have argued that the main issue in Romans 4 is who belongs to Abraham's family, Jew and Gentile together, and that Reformation readers sometimes missed that dimension.

I think Wright has helped us see the family question clearly.

But I hold to the classic Reformation conviction that Abraham's righteousness was credited to him as a gift, which is precisely why the family can include anyone.

Uh, man, I didn't think I'd ever be using that type of language.

Um, back at the turn of the century, the new perspective on Paul stuff was, was real big.

Sanders and Wright and, um, basically what N.T. Wright was saying is that the Reformation missed it on both sides, that the Reformers were wrong in their emphasis and Roman Catholicism was wrong in its emphasis.

Um, the justification isn't about being right with God, it's about being in community, and that the works were not works of merit, um, sacramental obedience, whatever terminology you might wanna use, but they were outward symbols of, of, uh, community adherence, circumcision, et cetera, et cetera.

And how would you respond to that objection?

Well, yeah.

And that, that I touched on, uh, earlier when I mentioned the new perspective on Paul, because that's fundamentally where Sanders and Wright...

I mean, they obviously have differences with each other, too.

Uh, what, how that would've been understood by those who heard Paul use the term grace, and how he would've intended his first-century Greco-Roman audience to understand it.

And I started in, it was this scholarly, you know, there's this new, this, this academic movement called, um, New Perspective on Paul or something like that.

Outside of the, the faith.

This was, like, high-level academics, and they're starting to realize that we've under- misunderstood Paul-