Corpus-Paul

["John Brand" <jbrand AT gvsd.mb.ca>]

From:                   "Tim Gallant" <tim AT rabbisaul.com>
To:                     "Corpus-Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject:                Re: [Corpus-Paul] Did Paul break the Law?

John Brand wrote:
> > My understanding of your 'Paul and Torah' essay is that the Torah as
> > scripture is still relevant and authoritative but as 'covenant' it
> > has been abrogated for the Christian. More particularly you say:
> >
> > "Correlative to the understanding of nomos as the Torah-covenant, we
> > must recognize that a fundamental dictum in Paul's theology of the
> > law is that Christians are not under the Torah-covenant (see e.g.
> > Rom 6.14)." (Paul and Torah: An Introductory Overview)

Tim Gallant comments: 
> (Note by Tim: Lest one take this out of context, I elsewhere try to
> make clear that the new covenant is not just some de novo
> administration, but a glorification and "eschatologicization" of the
> Mosaic. Thus one is not to take the "abrogated" side of things on its
> own.)

John asks:
What I am about to explain is garbled and, therefore, difficult to 
penetrate but it is a sincere attempt to recover what Paul is 
actually saying in his epistles.

If we are to face the confessional interpretation of Paul squarely, 
the understanding of the 'new covenant' is that this covenant is 
written on the heart by those who are 'in Christ.' All others, 
therefore, are outside of the covenant. Thus, in saying it is 
'eschatologized' the confessions are saying that all other covenants 
(the Noahide, Mosaic, Davidic, etc.) are 'abrogated' (abolished, done 
away with). What this means in very practical terms is that neither 
the Jew nor the Gentile outside of Christ can expect to participate 
in the summing up of all things in Christ. My understanding of this 
is that it eventually comes to mean that no one goes to heaven except 
those who are 'in Christ.' This, then, means that the Jewish religion 
is not a legitimate religion in terms of the eschatology of the 
confessions. Am I confused on this, Tim?

When one reads a passage such as Romans 2 where both the Jew and the 
Gentile are judged apart from halakah (circumcision or 
uncircumcision), the idea is that a man is justified by what the Jew 
would call kavanah or 'intentionality' (faith working through love). 
The implications of an interpretation which moves in the direction of 
legitimating the Jewish faith would also imply that the Noahide 
covenant legitimates all religions so long as they fulfill the 
injunction 'faith working through love.' Conversely, if we want to 
say that the Noahide covenant is abrogated, we have to say that the 
Mosaic covenant is abrogated.

John wrote:
> 
> > What I understand from the work of the scholars who contributed to
> > "The Galatians Debate" (ed. Mark D. Nanos) is that an understanding
> > such as yours where 'Christians are not under the Torah-covenant' is
> > a misunderstanding of Paul's thought. Rather, we have a Torah
> > observant mission to the Gentiles which necessitates a new look at
> > the Jewish halakah (from Hebre hlk 'to walk') i.e. if the Gentile is
> > accepted as a Gentile without reference to Jewish halakah because he
> > has received the same spirit as the Jew, what are the halakhic
> > implications for the Jew/Gentile 'in Christ.' The implications have
> > mainly to do with the Gentile and the attitude of the Jew or his
> > reception of the Gentile as a 'co-heir.'

Tim responds:
> In many respects, I do think that the "eschatologicization" of the law
> focuses upon Jew/Gentile issues, but not completely. However, it will
> not do to say that with reference to the Jew, the main issue is
> "attitude."  For one thing, as Davies has shown, Paul in numerous
> places sets Christ up as a personal Torah (which is the implication,
> not least, in Rom 10.5ff, where Paul applies Deut 30 to Christ). For
> another, Galatians 3-4 does not say merely that "you" Gentiles were
> lost or imprisoned during the period of Torah, but that "we" Jews were
> under a paidagogos, and in Christ we have been moved from minority to
> mature sonship. Consequently, the notion that Jewish Christians are de
> jure under the Mosaic covenant is not possible.

John continues:
I am not familiar with Davies but thank-you for the summary. You are 
perhaps missing the assumption that I am seeing in Nanos et al vis a 
vis the Jewish faith was at the writing of the NT considered a 
legitimate vehicle to justification outside of Christ. When the 
confessions talk about Christ as a personal torah, do they not mean 
to focus on Christ's atonement rather than his example? In other 
words, while the Jew would interpret Isaiah 53 as a picture of his 
own suffering epitomized in the Messiah (which the NT sees to be 
Jesus) whom he is to follow. The confessions interpret Isaiah 53 as 
the Messiah's propitiatory sacrifice on behalf of the church. This 
appears to be a major difference between Nanos et al and the 
confessionals. Also, the NPP would move in the same direction where 
Isaiah 53 is the epitome of what God calls us to rather than the 
propitiation. Am I missing something here?

John wrote:
> > IMO the fundamental implication is that it is difficult to separate
> > Torah as covenant and Torah as revelation/guide. This was as
> > difficult for the NT situation as it is in our own day. Also, it is
> > misguided to think of the Jew as having 'stumbled' so as to be
> > outside of a relevant covenant.

Tim responds:
> That statement is not clear to me. In my view, everywhere in Romans
> Israel's stumbling is over Christ. But I'm not clear on what you are
> attempting to say here.

John:
I am trying to reflect back to you the confessional interpretation of 
the 'fall' of Israel (Romans 11:11 'they did not stumble so as to 
fall'). In the deuteronomic system a Jew is justified so long as he 
is allowing torah to be his guide. Thus, if Christ replaces the 
Torah, it would follow that those who follow Christ (i.e. are 
disciples) are justified rather than those who have entered into a 
covenant with Christ. In this view, if the Jew  continues to follow 
Torah as guide while he is in Christ, the confessionals would say 
that he is 'in bondage' to Torah. Nanos et al would contend that this 
is a misinterpretation of what Paul is saying.

John wrote:
> I think that this lies at the heart
> > of the difference between yourself and Mark rather than his coming
> > from a 'post-modern' perspective while you come from a confessional
> > perspective. However, I may be wrong in this observation and I
> > welcome clarification from yourself and Mark.

Tim responds:
> By suggesting postmodernism (or something parallel), I was pointing to
> Mark's supposition, not that Jews and Gentiles could live differently
> (i.e. in Paul's view), but that there are two ways of salvation. I
> don't find that a believable reading in the first century Jewish
> context in general, much less in the light of Paul's own statements.
> 
> Let me clarify a term I used above. I believe that for Paul, Jewish
> Christians are no longer *de jure* under the Mosaic covenant. But
> parallel with that, I don't believe either that he encourages Jewish
> Christians to violate the Mosaic law either. Precisely because it has
> been relativized along with the rest of "this age," Jews are free and
> even encouraged to remain in the place where they were called (cf 1
> Cor 7). 

John responds:
Mark Nanos treats 1 Corinthians 7 as a key passage to support the 
view that the Jewish way of life was not changed by their coming into 
Christ. (see his "Paul and Judaism" on his website)

Tim continues:
And I think Acts is right on the money when it portrays Paul's
> response to James's report (James tells Paul that people are saying he
> is telling Jews not to observe the law; Paul's response indicates that
> he is saying no such thing). The only place where Paul would tell Jews
> not to observe the law would be regarding possible issues where
> fellowship with Gentiles on an equal footing would be impossible, and
> those issues are relatively few, in my reading of the law. Thus the
> fact that Jews observe Torah and Gentiles do not is not a matter of
> "unfairness" (as someone suggested earlier). Far from it; unfairness
> would be requiring Jews to live like Gentiles. Living like Jews is
> what they always have done, and following the law's prescriptions as
> "lifestyle" is presumably not onerous. (As a friend of mine says:
> perhaps for the first generation, avoiding pork was difficult, but in
> a culture that hasn't eaten pork for generations, it simply isn't a
> temptation, just as for most of us, eating some strange meat is not
> all that appealing. Changes in habit are always more difficult than
> retention.)

John responds:
I think I understand where you are going here; again where there is a 
conflict is in the legitimacy of the Jewish religion as it is outside 
of Christ. This appears to be the crux of the issue that Mark is 
raising (i.e. the deleterious affects of the confessions).

Tim continues:
> 
> Does this mean ambiguity and difficulty? Absolutely, as witness
> passages such as Romans 14! It seems to me that it is precisely the
> view above the leads to the writing of the passages that we do have.

John responds:
I'll have to review an essay by Robert J. Karris in "The Romans 
Debate" ("Romans 14:1-15:3 and the Occasion of Romans") and Mark 
Nanos "The Mystery of Romans" to help me clarify his position. My 
understanding is that Romans 14 is not to be taken as speaking of the 
'weak Jew' and the 'strong Gentile.'  I'll get back to you on this.

Thanks, Tim. Please excuse some of the garbled or emerging theology. 
I am trying to recover what the text is saying; I realize that my 
interpretation is at odds with the confessions.

Regards,

John Brand

B.A. (Providence College, 1980)
M.Min. (Providence Seminary, 1990)