Sanders comments that “Stendahl argued that . . . the usual (Lutheran) interpretation of Paul’s view of righteousness by faith is historically erroneous since it understands the doctrine as freeing one from the guilt of an ‘introspective conscience’, while Paul had not suffered such a dilemma.”28
Stendahl maintains that Luther’s reading of what Paul said “has been reversed into saying the opposite to his original intention.”29 The Reformers misunderstood the Jewish problem, believing that they were attempting to achieve peace with God by their own works, essentially, justification by works, whereas Stendahl believes that Paul was concerned with something very different:
The Problem we are trying to isolate could be expressed in hermeneutical terms somewhat like this: The Reformers’ interpretation of Paul rests on an analogism when Pauline statements about Faith and Works, Law and Gospel, Jews and Gentiles are read in the framework of late medieval piety. The Law, the Torah, with its specific requirements of circumcision and food restrictions becomes a general principle of “legalism in religious matters.” Where Paul was concerned about the possibility of Gentiles to be included in the messianic community, his statements are now read as answers to the quest for assurance about man’s salvation out of a common human predicament.30
He sees little or no evidence in Scripture for the old perspective’s interpretation of the law as something that makes men aware of their wretchedness. He states that “God’s mighty hammer bringing complacent sinners to despair has little support in Paul. The roots of the notion are rather problems peculiar to the modern West.”31
Stendahl rejects the more orthodox understanding of Paul’s Damascene experience that insists it concerned his conversion or rebirth and associates it more with the apostle’s call to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, “There is not- as we usually think-first a conversion, then a call to apostleship; there is only the call to work among the gentiles.”32 While Paul’s great concern was the inclusion of the Gentiles, “his statements are now read as answers to the question for assurance about man’s salvation out of a common human predicament.”33 When Paul spoke about justification his chief concern was the church’s identity and to show that the law should not be imposed upon the Gentiles. He was most certainly not thinking about how the individual might be saved and inherit eternal life.
E. P. Sanders
Stendahl’s work, “like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, gave promise of the coming storm. The storm broke with the publication in 1977 of Paul and Palestinian Judaism.”34 This effectively provided the impetus for the development of the NPP.
Sanders maintains that in order to understand the New Testament’s relationship to Judaism one must first understand the Judaism of the time. To this end, Sanders researched Second Temple Judaism, a period from BC 200 to AD 200. He saw the old perspective as being wrong, principally because it has been based on a Judaism from a later age. Regarding justification, he is of the opinion that “Many Christians, both in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation traditions, have done themselves and the church a great disservice by treating the doctrine of ‘justification’ as central to their debates, and by supposing that it described the system by which people attained salvation.” 35 When, therefore, the old perspective interprets Paul in regard to doctrines like justification by faith, it is, so he would have us believe, guilty of anachronism. In other words, the old perspective is charged with interpreting Paul’s letters in the context of a Judaism that did not exist in the first century. Not only this, but Sanders maintains that our understanding of the New Testament owes much to Medieval Roman Catholicism.
The Reformers, men like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli saw Roman Catholicism as a legalist religion, one based on good works. He tells us that “Luther’s problems were not Paul’s, and we misunderstand him if we see him through Luther’s eyes.”36
They then took this understanding and applied it to the Judaism of Paul’s day. Their view of first-century Judaism was then, in the words of Sanders, the result of “the retrojection of the Protestant-Catholic debate into ancient history, with Judaism taking the role of Catholicism and Christianity the role of Lutheranism.”37
From his research into Palestinian Judaism Sanders saw a very different Judaism from the Reformers legalist portrayal. He saw Paul arriving at a solution, namely, salvation in Christ before he became aware of man’s plight. He essentially reversed the traditional understanding, so instead of believing that Paul became aware of sin and condemnation before he turned to Christ, he was, rather, reconciled with Christ before he turned his attention to the law. In the words of Venema, “Paul’s understanding of the human plight was a kind of by-product of his view of salvation.”38 So the apostle’s view of sin was shaped by his understanding of the salvation he recognized in Christ, where “Paul, in effect, starts from the basic conviction that Christ is the only Saviour of Jews and Gentiles and on this basis develops a doctrine of law and human sinfulness corresponding to it.”39
He is of the opinion that Paul criticised the law because salvation is only found in Christ, however, having said this, he embraced a very different understanding of the Jewish relationship to the law from that of the old perspective. Paul does not criticise the Judaism of his day for believing in the possibility of keeping the law. By this, he did not mean a perfect obedience to God’s moral law, but an acknowledgment that whilst the Israelites did break the law, they were, by correctly administering the sacrificial system, granted the forgiveness for their transgressions. So the keeping of the law relates not to perfect obedience, as the Reformers believe, but to the proper administration of the Mosaic administration.
Sanders saw in Judaism a religion of grace and coined the term “covenantal nomism”. He identifies essentially eight characteristics of first century Judaism.
The ‘pattern’ or ‘structure’ of covenantal nomism is this: (1) God has chosen Israel and (2) given the law. The law implies both (3) God’s promise to maintain the election and (4) the requirement to obey. (5) God rewards obedience and punishes transgression. (6) The law provides the means of atonement, and atonement results in (7) the maintenance or re-establishment of the covenantal relationship. (8) All those who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement and God’s mercy belong to the group which will be saved. An important interpretation of the first and last points is that election and ultimately salvation are considered to be by God’s mercy rather than human achievement.40
Although Israel entered the covenant solely on account of God’s grace, staying in the covenant was dependent on obedience to God’s law, “Salvation is by grace but judgment is according to works; works are the condition of remaining ‘in’ but they do not earn salvation.”41 According to Wright, Sanders thus, “at a stroke, cut the ground from under the majority reading of Paul, especially mainline Protestantism.”42 Sanders summarizes covenant nomism as “one’s place in God’s plan . . . established on the basis of covenant and that covenant requires as the proper response
