Peter Stuhlmacher’s Spring 2000 lectures delivered at Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama represent his last word’ on a subject extremely close to his head and heart over decades of NT research. This reviewer was able to be present when Herr Stuhlmacher delivered his lectures and they are now available in IVP’s handy paperback edition.
Stuhlmacher’s three lectures are more a correction to the ‘new perspective on Paul’ than a refutation of it. But they constitute an exegetical alternative to key assumptions that lie beneath it.
Chapter one grounds justification in the final judgement of God as understood in the OT and in the intertestamental literature, especially Qumran. Justification is also creative: ‘God’s righteousness in the Old Testament and early Judaism means, above all, the activity of the one God to create welfare and salvation in the creation, in the history of Israel, and in the situation of the (end-time) judgement’ (19). Stuhlmacher’s interpretation, parallel but not identical to Ernst Käsemann’s, is to link God’s creatio ex nihilo with his creation of righteousness in the cross-enabled effective declaration of justification.
Wilhelm Wrede and Albert Schweitzer’s early-20th century re-interpretation of Paul, by which justification was understood to be a ‘subsidiary crater’ within his thought, is refuted by Stuhlmacher’s argument that ‘justification for the apostle is the quintessential structural law of God’s gracious work in salvation history’ (30).
Chapter two outlines the familiar claims of E.P. Sanders, Krister Stendahl and James Dunn, and to a lesser extent N.T. Wright, that Paul was misinterpreted fundamentally by Martin Luther. They wish to wrest from our eyes the ‘Reformation spectacles’ that made Paul’s struggle to enlarge the ‘boundary markers’ for the Gentile mission into an analogy for the Reformer’s struggle against late medieval Catholicism. Stuhlmacher criticises Sanders’ ‘covenantal nomism’ as being a onesided or overly-concessive depiction of Judaism’s soteriology. He also sees the ‘new perspective’ as evasive on the relation of justification to the final judgement. Stuhlmacher accuses the ‘new perspective’ of truncating Paul (44).
The heart of this book is found between pages 44 and 53, in the section entitled ‘The True Perspective on Paul’. Pauline eschatology affirmed a cosmic justification in the coming establishment of the Zion—βαδιλεια Paul saw himself playing a personal role in the final time-table. ‘Paul thought and taught as a converted Jew whom the exalted Christ had enlisted in the service of worldwide preaching of the gospel of God’s kingdom’ (52).
In chapter three Stuhlmacher discusses justification as a biblical theologian. He holds a high understanding of Christ’s blood-atonement and sees Christ for Paul as a corporate, representative figure. He also sees justification as powerful: we are different because of our justification pronounced and enacted through baptism. Justification is therefore substantially transforming.
Stuhlmacher is not satisfied by the imputation-argument of many traditional Lutherans (and Protestant Anglicans, for that matter). On this point, he wishes to bind together participatory views of Christian existence with forensic or simul peccator et iustus (sic-PZ) views. Stuhlmacher wants to be faithful to Paul’s entire message.
The Pauline doctrine of justification is the doctrine about the implementation of God’s righteousness through Christ for the entire creation (Stuhlmacher’s emphasis) … This doctrine therefore shows in its own way both that and how God will bring the first and second petitions of the Lord’s prayer to their fulfilment (73).
A strong and very useful essay by Donald Hagner constitutes the appendix to these Stuhlmacher’s lectures. Hagner is able, as an American scholar rather than a post-Holocaust German one, to be less velvet-gloved with the ‘new perspective on Paul’. He understands first-century Judaism to have been synergistic (I would say, semi-pelagian), and is therefore more comfortable with the idea that Paul criticised his inherited religion as being more law-oriented than Christianity. Hagner also sees Paul’s assessment of the human condition to be more negative than Judaism’s. This is a crucial point! ‘In short, while Judaism is nomocentric, Paul is christocentric’ (98).
Interpreters who have hoped for a technical knock-out delivered by Peter Stuhlmacher to the ‘new perspective on Paul’ may not be satisfied by this marvellous book. The book is not so much a riposte as it is an alternative system. Stuhlmacher understands the NT, anchored in its most prolific author, to be a thoroughly eschatological view of life and history. Justification becomes the cantus firmus for an integrated field-theory of past, present, and future.
My only question is: How well does the cosmic, creative, and times-spanning version of justification preach? How is it to be ‘packaged’ for the purpose of having a riveting effect in the local fellowship and congregation? I think Herr Stuhlmacher’s book could use a second appendix: the homiletic and present pastoral implications of Paul’s message.
