As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Read the first article in this series.
Dunn explains that “justification by faith” means trusting in Jesus alone for salvation, and not relying on obsolete Jewish boundary markers as covenant preconditions for God’s acceptance (i.e., “works of the law”). Jesus is enough. According to Dunn, Paul’s target is not grace v. legalism, but grace v. outmoded nationalism.
The “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP) is a re-calibration of the traditional Protestant understanding of “justification.” NPP has now been a force in New Testament and Pauline scholarship for about three generations. This article aims to present a positive statement of NPP. It is a summary, not a critique—so there will be no critical interaction.
First, we briefly sum up the traditional Protestant understanding of “justification.” Next, we survey five aspects of the NPP that differ from the traditional framework.
“Wright refers to the stories in John 20 and Romans 16 as “big stories” that should be used to shed light on less clear or difficult passages such as 1 Timothy 2.” - Church Leaders
N. T. Wright on marriage “When anybody—pressure groups, governments, civilizations—suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying ‘N.S.,’ meaning National Socialist or Nazi.
“I don’t call myself an ‘inerrantist’ (a) because that word means what it means within a modernist rationalism, which I reject and (b) because it seems to me to have failed in delivering a full-blooded reading and living of what the Bible actually says.” RNS
“The church has misread Paul so severely, it seems, that no one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek in graduate school.” Surprised by N.T. Wright
Discussion