During my life time, one of the main, long running disputes in theology and Biblical studies has been around the Doctrine of Justification and what St Paul really taught. It began with the work of EP Sanders on Second Temple, Palestinian Judaism where he argued that the Jews of Jesus and Paul’s day were not the legalists of Reformation legend. Rather, they held to something that became defined as Covenant Nomism. This term means that Jews were officially in the Covenant through God’s grace in predestining Abraham and his offspring. However, the expectation was that once included, you stayed in by keeping the Law.
Others, including some significant Evangelical scholars, most notably James Dunn and NT Wright followed Sanders and this led to a redefining of the doctrine of justification. If the problem wasn’t about law v grace, then the point of justification couldn’t have been that you needed to be justified through faith to belong to God’s people. The focus turned to what marked you out and identified you as belonging to/being in the covenant and so justification by faith was no longer a salvation issue to them.
Alongside this, people were reading Paul’s letters, particularly Galatians but see alsot he later parts of Romans and picking up on the issue of table fellowship and who was included or waan’t included. Paul seemed to have a big concern for resolving conflicts within churches between Jewish believers and Gentile believers.
So, it has become increasingly common for people to focus on the ethnic question and to suggest that if there was a problem with ethnic pride, then Paul’s primary concern was to encourage the church to be outward looking. The big point of the Gospel wasn’t that grace was now available but that what had been restricted to one people group was now for all people.
Such a message is appealing and potentially helpful in a world where we have a significant challenge with racism and a kind of Christianised Nationalism in some quarters. It would seem to help us think about multi-ethnic church. Now to be clear, I believe that both of these concerns, the need to counter ethnic superiority and to grow healthy multi-cultural churches are important. I also believe that Paul’s teaching in his letters isn’t primarily about that. I think that the ethnic focus is a bit of a red herring.[1]
Why do I say this? Well, first of all, throughout the history of God’s people in Scripture and even in Paul’s day the issue of ethnic superiority in terms of Jews as a genetic race doesn’t seem to have been the big ticket issue people seem to be assuming. Right back from the Exodus, it was a mixed crowd who were reported as leaving Egypt, Moses marries outside of ethnic Israel, various people including Rahab and Ruth are incorporated into God’s people and the ancestral line of David.
By Jesus and Paul’s day, people were seeking to follow YHWH as God fearers and some receive a mention in the New Testament. However, it was also possible to fully convert with circumcision and also a form of baptism rite, a washing and a repeating of the Red Sea/Jordan crossings. So, when Paul in Romans 11 talks about Gentiles being grafted into God’s people, he wasn’t in reality introducing a new concept. It was already understood that you could be ingrafted into the people of Israel.
The difference was this. What did it mean to be God’s people and therefore how did you get grafted in. For Paul’s interlocuters, the baseline/trunk of the tree/vine was the ethnic people of Israel, therefore that is what the Gentile branches were grafted into (so ethnicity is not entirely absent). For Paul, God’s people were always those of the promise and so it was never about ethnic descent, nor about circumcision. Indeed, we might go a step further and suggest that the vine, the true and better people of God is Christ himself. So, then you are grafted in as a branch, not by being circumcised or going through any rite of passage. You are grafted in by faith. That’s why justification matters because it is what everyone needs, Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised. It means that it is only through the death and resurrection of Jesus that anyone can be right with God. It’s not that some people were right with God but for others to be made right with God, then they need Jesus. There are not two ways to be saved.
Why does this matter? Well, first of all, if you will permit me, there is a particular contemporary concern. It has become popular in certain quarters to blame the ongoing trouble in the Middle East on Jewish ethnic pride and exceptionalism. At it’s worst this strays into some of the most horrific antisemitism. Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t Jews who struggle with ethnic pride and a tendency to nationalism, just as you will find in any nation or people group. What we shouldn’t do, is assume that this is something hardwired into Jewishness or Judaism. In fact, we should be wary of any approach which assumes that a particular problem is hardwired into one ethnic group or other and not a danger for all of us.
Secondly, in terms of the New Perspective debate, I think the recognition that the issue was to do with circumcision and not genetic ethnicity does push us back, more towards an old perspective understanding, that the issue was to do with how you are included in God’s people and so justification by faith rather than works is a crucial salvation issue.
[1] Incidentally, I don’t think that the original founding fathers of the New Perspective would have intended the focus to be on ethnicity itself, though they saw ethnic pride as a factor. Rather, their concern was with circumcision as a covenant/cultural marker.
Faithroots 