The "New" Perspective (Or My Perspective, At Least) on St. Paul

[Just so no-one thinks I've completely ripped-off +Tom Wright when his most recent magnum opus arrives in a couple months.]

Wrapped up my triennial lectionary sojourn in Galatians this week. This year I've had the benefit of supplementing my work in the text with prep work for our Wednesday class in 1 Maccabees. After teaching the life and epistles of Paul to upper-level undergrads at Saint Louis University and trudging through the exegesis again this last month (with two additional commentaries on the shelf by Martinus De Boer and FB friend/colleague, ScotMcKnight), I'm more convinced than ever of the soundness the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul. Treating Paul as a polemicist against a proto-Pelagian merit theology (as though the Jews were trying to earn salvation/God's favor by “good works,” etc.) is to miss the point and the power of his gambit entirely.

My basic summary of the New Perspective would go something like this: 

The basic question is not is not "How do I get a gracious God?" or "How are my sins forgiven so that I can go to heaven?" The question for St. Paul was "How does one recognize the "people of God"? Or as he Paul himself puts it in Galatians six, “Whence do we find the 'Israel of God'?"

Beginning in Genesis with the common human ancestry in Adam and the purpose of Israel (children of Abraham) to visit all the families of the earth with his blessing, God has always been about the reconciliation of the whole human family. The purpose of Torah was to preserve Israel inviolate (uncorrupted by Gentile idolatry) until the coming of the true Son of Abraham and perfectly faithful Israelite, Jesus the Messiah.

In his death and especially in his resurrection, Torah had fulfilled its purpose (i.e. the Pauline analogy of the paidagogos, shepherding the people of God to maturity). As no less a figure than Jacob Neusner has observed, Judaism recognizes the people of God by the light of Torah at it's center. Hence, the Judaizers (Christianized Jews) were seeking to maintain the works of Torah (circumcision, Sabbath, kosher laws, etc.) as a continuing center. This is where Antiochus' attempts to forcibly alienate the Jews fro Torah and heroic Judaism's fidelity to the death is instructive. For Paul, however, this was to miss the point of the cross and resurrection entirely. 

As Jesus consistently demonstrated throughout his public ministry with stuff like his “You have heard it said, but I say...” instruction, he had come to fulfill and thus supplant Torah as the luminate center of the people of God. The glory of the resurrected Jesus was Zion restored and his outpoured Spirit was the shekinah (the glory of the divine presence) returned to a living temple (the embodied church). Thus, as Paul both taught and exemplified by his mission to the Gentiles , the time had now finally come to gather the nations and fulfill the Abrahamic promise. Christianity would not be the Maccabaeus redivivus, but something new entirely. Now the nations would be reclaimed and blessed, not simply repelled. 

Critical here, however, was that the Gentiles were to be included AS GENTILES, in all their alien integrity, rather than as bar/bat mitzvahed Jews. To require Judaizing as a basis for inclusion would have been for Paul tantamount to denying the resurrection and would represent a retreat from the in-breaking consummation of redemptive history. We recognize the people of God, therefore, not by the boundary makers prescribed by Torah, but by a living faith that embraces the lordship of Jesus (hence Paul's anti-imperial polemic: kurios iesous) and manifests the fruit of the Spirit—against which (especially when manifest among formerly pagan, idolatrous and reprobate Gentiles) no one could utter condemnation (Cf. Rom. 8.1ff.) or establish a Torah (Cf. Gal. 5.23). 

The “getting in” vs. “staying in” slogans in current use are over-simple in my opinion. I think Paul was defending over-all the notion that we recognize the people of God by their faithful embrace of the Lordship of Jesus and their manifestation of the Spirit's fruitful power. This is a matter of faithfully embracing the manifold reality of the rule of Christ NOW amid this present, contested kingdom, so we are speaking of faith immediately embodied in works of righteousness.

That's the necessary point to come to BEFORE we start thoughtfully applying things to our contemporary world, but whatever results will be a community that bears witness to the in-breaking rule and reign of Jesus. It will also be a reconciling community—reconciling people to God and to one another as the fulfillment of what Torah always pointed to as its own fulfillment. See the “summary of the law” at the beginning of the Anglican Eucharist as a basic summons for the Church to more perfectly realize what it is:

Hear what our Lord Jesus saith: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."   Matthew 22:37-40