Where Everybody's Crazy

So for Romans yesterday I had to present on the topic of justification. I looked at "how to think about justification": What is the problem, what is the solution and how do we get from A to B. (The Quest For Paul's Gospel, which I leant on heavily for the presentation, says that you can describe any theory of justification with two boxes and an arrow. Then we looked at some of the models.

We started with the classical Justification by Faith model; (JF) since theologians don't get much of a chance to rebel against things, it's become fashionable for them to rebel against this standard interpretation of justification. I think what I wanted more than anything else to demonstrate was that there are multiple perspectives on this subject, and therefore when we see "justified by faith" in Romans we are not to assume Paul is referring to Luther's particular soteriology with all the trimmings. So I asked the now-common questions about this doctrine:

• Why is the first mention of justification in Romans (2:13) justification by works, not faith?
• Similarly, how does being justified by faith alone, not works, square with the ethical injunctions of both Jesus and Paul?
• Why do we equate salvation and justification, failing to take note of the wider sense in which salvation is used in the Bible?
• Why would God give his chosen, beloved people a Law that only condemns them to death?
• If righteousness is imputed (ie. counted, considered) to us, is justification by faith anything more than a legal fiction where God pretends we're righteous even when He knows full well that we are not? If not, and righteousness is imparted to us, is righteousness a kind of physical thing that it makes sense to pass around?
• A loving God wants to punish us. Say what?
• What happened to God's free will? By constraining God to His justice we deny Him the opportunity to forgo justice and be merciful and freely forgive.
• Indeed, aren't His justice and His forgiveness and mercy directly antithetical? Forgiveness is, after all, the foregoing of justice.
• Why did Jesus bother teaching? If Jesus came to save us and that salvation is reduced to the cross as substitution, what was the purpose of His teaching and commandments?
• Do the Jewish people see the legalistic requirements of the Law as the problem that needs to be solved? Would Paul, as a Jewish person, see it that way?
• Speaking of Paul, Stendahl's famous article "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" shows that seeing Paul's conversion as a struggle against legalism is psychologically anachronistic. How does JF, with its emphasis on choosing to believe, deal with the fact that Paul had no choice about his conversion at all?
• Isn't "you just need to have faith" something else that you need to do in order to enter the Kingdom - ie, another kind of work?

So I concluded that JF is hardly the neatest doctrine around. Many of its problems stem from its defective use of the lawcourt analogy. The lawcourt motif is used over and over in the Hebrew Bible and is picked up in Romans to describe justification. But we understand "lawcourt" as a criminal investigation where the judge hears the evidence and applies the penalty prescribed by law for the defendant. The judgement is therefore a bad thing (for us) that we want to get away from.

All good stuff, but nothing to do with the lawcourt motif in the Hebrew Bible, where God is the judge in a civil suit between two parties (typically Israel and the Gentile oppressors), and exercises his judgement rather than applying an external legal code. (Don't get confused with the covenant motif which does prescribe penalties for defaulting on a mutual agreement; we're talking about the rib, the lawcourt, which turns up typically in the Prophets.) In this situation, judgement is the sort of thing you want: Ps 5:24 says "Judge me". The NIV might translate it as "vindicate", but the Hebrew is shafatni.

The next model to look at was Salvation History, which fits neatly into what the New Perspective folks have come up with as part of their understanding of justification. Here we have a totally different problem: people living under the Old Covenant have the promises of God, but they haven't seen them fulfilled yet. The solution is the New Covenant, with the fulfillment. How do we get from A to B? By the coming of the Messiah.

This is a bit better; it recognises that the Jewish Law was a Good Thing - as Sanders puts it, the only thing wrong with Judaism for Paul was that it wasn't Christianity. It's also less individualistic, in that it puts the emphasis back on what God has done, not what we do. It has a big problem, though, because Paul does use a lot of words that start with "dika-" and which undeniably talk about righteousness, not covenant. Oops.

Then my prefered model, Participatory Pneumatological Martyrological Eschatological justification. The only thing wrong with it is the name. For PPME, the problem is that the world is going to end and us with it. The solution is the eternal Kingdom of God. (That's the Eschatological bit.) How we get from A to B is a bit complex, but: God the Father sends Christ to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, He dies (that's the martyrological) and then is raised to the newness of life. We, by the Spirit (pneumatological) participate in the new life in the Eternal kingdom and escape the closing of the age. You see this a lot in Romans 6, where we died with Christ and will live with Him, and so on.

The major, major advantage of this is that it releases the tension between Christ's talk of the "Kingdom of God" and Paul's emphasis on the "gospel of salvation". In the JF model, Paul and Jesus seem to be talking about entirely different things. In PPME, the gospel of salvation is the good news of the Kingdom of God. It also makes a lot of sense of Paul's talk of mystical union with Christ. And, as an added bonus, it's trinitarian, so it must be good.

Finally, I looked forward to the coming debates in justification theology. First, Protestant-Catholic rapprochment. In the sixties, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth and the Catholic Hans Kung had a very public and very unexpected complete agreement, that the two churches had been talking past each other for the past few hundred years and that really if you put it in simple terms, they actually were in basic agreement. Then there's imputation versus impartation which we've touched on above. This is a very tedious debate that happens if you go down the JF route.

The last one caused a bit of a stir, as I expected. We are saved, Romans says, through the pistis Christou. (Or sometimes pistis Iesou or equivalent) Now we translate this "faith in Christ" because that works very well with the JF model. It's a bit of a funny translation, though, because unqualified genitives are more often possessive, and "pistis" may also mean "faithfulness". So a more usual translation would be that we are saved by Christ's faithfulness - by the fact that He lived a perfect life in obedience to His father. The hair-splitting continues.

No stones were thrown at me in the course of the presentation.