From a Baptist News story

— Traditional Protestant theology wrongly caricatures first century Judaism as a religion of works or legalism, whereby Jews believed they had to earn their salvation by keeping the law. Instead, NP theology claims that Judaism was a religion of grace. This is the foundational tenet to the New Perspective and “if it goes, everything else goes with it,” Waldron said.

Yet neither the Westminster Confession, Catechisms, nor the 1689 London Baptist Confession saw fit to articulate this essential belief to “everything” in the Gospel.

Waldron’s claim about a domino effect from a change of opinion about the religion of first-century Judaism(s) is doubtful (and, since unargued, unworthy of acceptance). In Romans 4 we read,

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about; but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his wage is not reckoned as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness… (vv. 3-5).

Clearly, Paul is arguing against boasting in “the works of the law” by virtually equating such boasting with earning favor from God. Clearly, also, Paul’s argument presupposes that his opponents would recoil from such an idea. Paul’s critique will work only if Paul’s opponents think that it is wrong to claim to be earning God’s favor–otherwise Paul would need to include an actual argument to the effect that it is wrong to boast in one’s good deeds. But there is no such argument. Rather, equating the works of the Law with boasting requires no further argumentation. This is evidence of the NPP thesis that Waldron finds so dangerous, but it also shows that the positive content of justification by faith alone can be presented without needing such an historical foil.

Whether or not all find the above interpretation convincing, there is plenty of reason why Paul would teach the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone in the context of arguing against nationalistic-covenant pride. For example:

Hear, O Israel! You are crossing over the Jordan today to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, great cities fortified to heaven, a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim, whom you know and of whom you have heard it said, “Who can stand before the sons of Anak?” Know therefore today that it is the LORD your God who is crossing over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and He will subdue them before you, so that you may drive them out and destroy them quickly, just as the LORD has spoken to you. Do not say in your heart when the LORD your God has driven them out before you, “Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,” but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is dispossessing them before you. It is not for your righteousness or for the uprightness of your heart that you are going to possess their land, but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God is driving them out before you, in order to confirm the oath which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Know, then, it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stubborn people (Deuteronomy 9.1-6).

Here we have a statement that condemns self-righteous nationalistic pride and applies (and has been applied by Reformed preachers for centuries) to all forms of self-righteousness. Thus (1) the Bible does condemn merit theology in this passage and many others whether or not it was a widespread phenomenon that Paul had to deal with; and (2) Paul might well have found reason to mention the theology of grace found in passages like Deuteronomy 9.1-6 even if there were no merit legalists to refute (I have never heard of any Biblical scholar that the above passage only makes sense if there were widespread merit theologians throughout the ancient NearEast at the time Moses spoke).

Or to look at this another way, there are lots of passages that support the theology of grace of the Reformation in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. For example:

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1.26-31)

Now these things, brethren, I have figuratively applied to myself and Apollos for your sakes, that in us you might learn not to exceed what is written, in order that no one of you might become arrogant in behalf of one against the other. For who regards you as superior? And what do you have that you did not receive? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? (4.6-7)

You know that when you were Gentiles, you were led astray to the dumb idols, however you were led. Therefore I make known to you, that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is accursed”; and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit (12.2-3).

Now, one can simply read through this letter to see that some in the Corinthian Church believed they were especially spiritual and above the “weak” around them. Paul rebukes their boasting and emphasizes Christ crucified, just as he does in Galatians (c.f. First Corinthians 1.17, 23; 2.2; Galatians 2.20; 3.1; 5.24; 6.14). Furthermore, in both cases he appeals to their baptismal identity to deny the divisions they are maintaining (c.f. First Corinthians 12.12-13; Galatians 3.26-29). Yet, despite these striking similarities, no one has ever found it necessary to actually hypothesize a form of merit legalism behind the boasting of the Corinthian elite–even though Paul’s critique can be, and often is, used as a refutation of merit legalism.

So in the case of First Corinthians, Reformed pastors don’t seem to need merit legalists to exist as Paul’s opponents in order to derive and defend the doctrines of grace against more recent merit theologies. Why could not the same hold, in principle, for Galatians or Romans?

— Paul’s doctrine of justification was not about his opposition to the concept of “salvation through works” but about “Jewish exclusivism” that used the works of the law to socially exclude Gentiles from numbering among God’s people.

Well “about” can be more or less specific. Both Dunn and Wright have insisted that Paul’s polemnic against Jewish exclusivism was properly used by Luther against Roman Catholic merit theology. Since Dunn is widely known as the less orthodox and the non-Evangelical of the two, I’ll produce one highly representative statement from him. This is from his Theology of Paul’s Letters to the Galatians (Cambridge University Press; 1993):

These extracts are enough to show that Luther had fairly grasped Paul’s principal thrust on the sufficiency of faith. His own experience had taught him thoroughly that any attempt to add conditions to the acceptability of human beings before God is a breach and distortion of the essential truth of the gospel. And his restatement of this insight, not least in his lectures on Galatians, lit a torch which has continued to illuminate western Christianity ever since….

The corollary of Luther’s restatement, however, was less fortunate. For in understanding “works of the law” as good works done to achieve righteousness his thinking was beginning to run at tangent to Paul’s…. he lost sight of the whole corporate dimension of Paul’s doctrine… The gain which Luther’s emphasis brought to theology is in no doubt and has often been explored. But an interpretation of the theology of Galatians more closely related to the historical situation of the letter itself will want to bring out other aspects too.

It is important to appreciate that both emphases are rooted in a fundamental assertion of the sufficiency of faith; both protest against any attempt to add or require something more than faith on the human side when computing what makes a person acceptable to God. The difference which became apparent in earlier chapters is that the added factor against which Paul himself was protesting was not individual human effort, but the assumption that ethnic origin and identity is a factor in determining the grace of God and its expression. Ethnic origin and identity is a different way of assessing human worth, but one more fundamental than the question of ability to perform good works. What Paul protested against was even more insidious — the assumption that the way people are constituted by birth rules them in or rules them out from receiving God’s grace. Paul’s protest was not against a high regard for righteousness, against dedicated devotion to God’s law. It was rather against the corollary to such devotion: that failure to share in that devotion meant exclusion from the life of the world to come, and that the majority of peoples in the world were in principle so excluded.

One sees here that Dunn does think that Luther misunderstood some aspects of Paul’s message, but he doesn’t at all disagree with Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. On the contrary Luther has “illuminated Western Christianity” and his discovery is to be considered a “gain” that hinges on the “sufficiency of faith” as “what makes a person acceptable to God.”

— “Works of the law” in Paul’s epistles refer not to works of righteousness or acts to earn salvation, but primarily refer to “Jewish boundary markers” that established who could and could not claim to be God’s chosen people.

Well, so what? What if Galatians and Romans were referring to such a thing? As I pointed out, Romans 4 still says what it says. Furthermore, what about other letters? Paul writes:

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2.8-10).

Sadly, many in New Testament scholarship don’t believe that Paul wrote Ephesians. That is too bad for them. But I note that we Evangelicals have here Paul’s statement about salvation by grace through faith apart from works and the context demands that these works are not “boundary markers” like circumcision, dietary code, or cultic calendar, but rather generic good deeds.

Paul also writes:

For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3.3-7).

Granted, Paul doesn’t mention faith explicitly, but do we not find here an affirmation of salvation by grace and mercy rather than anything we have done? Again the problem is the higher critical consensus that Titus is not a genuinely Pauline Epistle. But that is not a problem for Evangelicals.

My point is that reinterpreting Galatians and Romans could not, even at its worst, threaten justification by grace through faith apart from any and all good deeds. The only thing at stake is the possibility that mortal men whom we respect such as John Calvin and Martin Luther might have made some exegetical mistakes.

— “The righteousness of God” or the idea of a sinner being “made righteous” does not refer to a new doctrine of non-works-oriented justification as claimed by traditional Protestantism, but refers to law-keeping and good works as a sign of being among the covenant people.

It is not the case that “the New Perspetive” makes such claims about “the righteousness of God.” You can read any number of severe criticisms of Wright to confirm this fact. Wright claims that “the righteousness of God” [dikaiosune theou] is God’s own character which compels his to be faithful to his gracious promises to bring salvation to the world. Here is a series of blogs (like most blog series, still unfinished) I wrote on the subject:

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

It has nothing to do with the idea of good works being a sign that one is a member of God’s people.

By the way, what if NPP did define the righteousness of God in this way? Is Waldron claiming it is wrong to regard “good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith”? Surely not. Is he claiming that the New Perspective has no place for an alien rightousness from God in Christ. If so, he is simply mistaken. If one wants to read about a righteousness from God, one needs to turn to the place where Paul actually talks about a “righteousness from God” (ek theou): Philipppians 3.9.

If one wants a forensic justification based on an alien righteousnees, here is N. T. Wright

…the key point is that, within the technical language of the law court, “righteous” means, for these two persons, the status they have when the court finds in their favor, Nothing more, nothing less (What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul the Real Founder of Christianity [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1997], 98).

God vindicates in the present, in advance of the last day, all those who believe in Jesus as Messiah and Lord (Rom. 3.21-31; 4.13-25; 10.9-13). The law court language indicates what is meant. “Justification” itself is not God’s act of changing the heart or character of the person; that is what Paul means by the “call”, which comes through the word and the Spirit. “Justification” has a specific, and narrower, reference: it is God’s declaration that the person is now in the right, which confers on them the status “righteous”. (We may note that, since “righteous” here, within the law court metaphor, refers to “status”, not “character”, we correctly say that God’s declaration makes the person “righteous”, i.e. in good standing.)…

The “faith” in question is faith in “the God who raised Jesus from the dead.” It comes about through the announcement of God’s word, the gospel, which works powerfully in the hearts of hearers, “calling” them to believe, or indeed (as Paul often puts it) to “obey’ the gospel” (Rom. 1.16f.; 1 Thess. 1.3f., 2.13; 2 Thess. 1.8). This faith looks backwards to what God has done in Christ, by means of his own obedient faithfulness to God’s purpose (Rom. 5.19; Phil. 2.6), relying on that rather than on anything that is true of oneself [emphasis added].

A forensic verdict that we receive in relying on Christ’s faithfulness rather than anything true in ourselves–how can anyone complain?

— Faith is the true fulfilling of the law by a sinner and is the badge of covenant membership on the basis of which one is declared to be a covenant member — or a Christian. Historic Christianity holds that the sinner is made righteous by trusting in Christ who perfectly obeyed — or fulfilled — the law. Thus, salvation comes by grace.

It is hard to know what Waldron was trying to say. If he is saying that NP believes one’s faith is so good in God’s eyes that he rewards it with salvation, then he is wrong. See Wright’s definition of faith above. Is Waldron denying that a profession of faith is a badge that one is a Christian? It is hard to see how this could be. If he’s trying to deal with the details of Wright’s views he needs to stay away from those who publish soundbites.

— Contrary to traditional Christian thought, justification has nothing to do with the righteousness of Christ being “imputed” — or given by God — to sinners who trust in Christ.

False. Here: “‘Justification’ is thus the declaration of God, the just judge, that someone is (a) in the right, that their sins are forgiven, and (b) a true member of the covenant family, the people belonging to Abraham.” And another example I discuss here: Wright argues that for Paul (and, no doubt, for Wright as well), the title, Christ, bears an “incorporative” meaning: “Paul regularly uses the word to connote, and sometimes even denote, the whole people of whom the Messiah is the representative” (boldface added).

But why should “Messiah” bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is enemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.

Thus, since one is incorporated into Christ by faith alone, by faith one receives all that Christ has done. One is forgiven and regarded as righteous. “Because Jesus is the Messiah, he sums up his people in himself, os that what is true of him is true of them.