Teaching by Alex Leung

Great class today everybody…very heavy-loaded topic we touched upon, but I hope we were able to gain some deeper understanding of God in the process.

Check out this very very interesting article, posted by the President of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Dr. Ligon Duncan:

One of the hottest theological debates in the evangelical and Reformed community today relates, surprisingly, to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. A number of contemporary theologians, including some with evangelical credentials, are suggesting that we need to revisit, correct and move beyond the formulations of the great sixteenth century Protestant Reformers and confessions (and their conservative heirs) on the nature and meaning of justification. The school of thought that is promoting this particular reassessment has been called the New Perspective (or Perspectives) on Paul. What is an evangelical pastor, elder or congregant to make of this? What are the proponents of the New Perspective(s) saying? How should we respond? What’s all the fuss about? What are the pastoral consequences of the various positions? We’ll tackle and try to sort some of these things out in this multi-part article.

The New Perspective(s) on Paul (NPP) represents a paradigm shift in the scholarly study of Pauline theology (with ramifications for New Testament Theology as a whole). It calls into question the Protestant Reformation’s reading of and conclusions regarding Paul’s doctrine of redemption and its application to the believer. In other words, it suggests that the Protestant Reformers’ exegesis of Paul on justification and their theological formulations of what Paul taught about our being justified by grace through faith alone, and not by works, based on the work of Christ alone, imputed to us were mistaken. The NPP even questions whether Paul was primarily concerned with the question “how can I be saved?” For instance, N.T. Wright says flatly “that ‘the gospel’ is not, for Paul, a message about ‘how one gets saved’, in an individual and ahistorical sense” in What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 60, see also 113-117.

The NPP has its origins in the academic historical-critical tradition, quadrants unfriendly to evangelical approaches to New Testament Theology. Though precursors can be found, for instance in the 1960s in the work of Krister Stendahl, the NPP was really launched through the work of E.P. Sanders, especially his celebrated Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress), published in 1977. If you want a quick taste of the NPP from the original proponents in their own words, see E.P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” originally printed in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65 (1983): 95-122; and reprinted in The Romans Debate, ed. Karl P. Donfried (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991), 299-308.

Read the whole article here.

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