Our church are just starting a series on Galatians. Different people will be preaching a chapter each week and we’ll be following up in a bit more detail in our life group studies and with some blog posts here on Faithroots. Galatians is a controversial letter, controversial because Paul himself was writing polemically to respond to agitators but also controversial because there has been some debate about what exactly the controversy of Paul’s day was. So it is pretty much impossible to read about Galatians and to some extent Romans as well without being asked to read lots about something called “The New Perspective on Paul”. I include some discussion about this in my own introduction to Galatians.
What then should we do with something like “The New Perspective” when preparing to preach of teach on a particular book of the Bible? I think there are two extremes that we can find ourselves following. We can either give extensive time to studying and reading up on the controversy and then we can spend a lot of time in our preaching explaining it and advocating for our own preferred position. We might for example, consider “The New Perspective” a good thing and spend a lot of time defending it. Alternatively, we might think that it is a dangerous heresy that needs to be countered and so spend a lot of time showing why the old perspective was right.
At the other end of the spectrum is the tendency to ignore such things. Surely, all we need to do is preach the text. We don’t need to get into such debates. Most of the congregation won’t be interested, it will go over their heads. We may decide that we don’t even need to bother reading up on such things.
In my opinion, we probably want to try and steer a course between the extremes. First of all, I agree that a lot of these controversies are of little interest or help to our congregations and can indeed give the impression that preaching and sermons are an intellectual exercise. We risk getting so caught up in something that seems interesting to us that we fail to preach to the heart. Furthermore, because we want our sermon preparation to focus on preparing to preach to the heart, we probably don’t want to spend too much time reading heavy academic books debating these things.
However, we also want to be cautious about the other extreme too. This is because we can miss things if we are over dismissive. Sticking with The New Perspective as an example, in my opinion, there are things that it may be helpful for us to be alert to, areas where the perspective, properly engaged with may helpfully inform our exposition.
In the case of the New Perspective on Paul, it is my view that Wright, Dunn and Sanders correctly identified some issues with the historical assessment of Second Temple Judaism. If we assume that the issue in Galatia was a straight forward disagreement between legalistic Judaizers who thought they were saved by works and Paul’s emphasise on grace and justification by faith as the way in then we may end up with a surface/shallow interpretation leading equally to a shallow application.
The New Perspective highlights that things were more complex, that Jews did believe in election and in grace, they thought that they were chosen in Abraham, however they also saw their responsibility to keep the Law in order to stay in God’s covenant. However, it falls short because it fails to see that if you are dependent on Law keeping to stay in the covenant then this is just as deadly as assuming that you come in by grace. So, I don’t think that the NPP quite grasps that Paul would be as staunchly opposed to their version of Palestinian Judaism as he is assumed to be of Old Perspective Judaism. The New Perspective therefore only becomes a useful perspective once we take into account the responses to it. Rather than being something that can replace the Old Perspective, it is most helpful as something that helps to modify and correct the Old Perspective.
Once you put all of that together, I think you end up with something that is extremely relevant and practical to the church. This is because of two reasons.
- Legalism isn’t our only danger. We can also fall into other traps. We can treat Christianity as something inherited, even if we expect a conversion experience from our children and grandchildren. We can become complacent about their inclusion in God’s people. This is a particular danger for those who promote paedobaptism but I think even Baptists can be at risk of just assuming that their children will one day express public faith and get baptised as a rite of passage. Sadly too, this assumed Christianity works its way out in more extreme forms in some contexts, especially through the culture wars and the rise of Christian Nationalism in some places.
- Legalism can be more present and more deadly than we realise. We can drift into it by preaching the Gospel to unbelievers but then forgetting that the Gospel is what we need to apply to believers too. We can do it when we combine evangelistic events with moralistic preaching and especially when we allow that kind of moralism to filter into our children’s work.
So, there are some important and practical things that we might miss if we just ignore the controversy. However, this still doesn’t mean that we need to go overboard in spending a lot of time in the study on the New Perspective and definitely not in the pulpit. That’s because we can address those issues from the text. We want to be preaching what Paul said about Jesus and the Gospel, not what EP Sanders and NT Wright said about a particular bunch of rabbis and the Talmud.
So don’t get overwhelmed by debates and discussions, whether it’s the New Perspective or some other fad or controversy. Do be alert to the perspectives that others have to offer. Do keep your focus on preaching the Gospel to your church.
Faithroots 