A New Perspective on Jesus

Summary of the argument

The supposed New Perspective has come up a few times recently here, not least because it has a significant bearing on how people understand New Testament teaching about wrath, judgment, “hell”, and salvation. The impression is that the New Perspective is still largely confined to the academic sphere and that people are only slowly beginning to grasp its revolutionary implications. James Dunn's book “A New Perspective on Jesus is a timely resource for the church as it struggles to rethink its identity and purpose. It is sensitive to the concerns of many outside the world of academics, evangelical pastors in particular, regarding the impact that the New Perspective have on the faith of young, impressionable theology students. There are four questions addressed in the book that are What is it? Where did it come from? What are the potential dangers? What good is it? In some instances, it is a bad thing “since it blocks out a better understanding of Scripture. The book was based on these four questions (Dunn, 122).

Insights from the book

The author started from the origins of the NPP in the work of E.P. Sanders, whose book Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) radically transformed the dominant scholarly understanding of the place of the Law in second temple Judaism. To large extent Reformation theologies, including modern evangelicalism, have grounded their argument about faith, and, salvation in the view that the second temple Judaism was inherently legalistic. Sanders argued that the pattern of Jewish religion that provides the background to the New Testament, better defined as “covenantal nomism”, where “covenantal” precedes “nomism”, the gift of Israel's relationship with God precedes observance of the commandments of God. However, clearly, if a central premise of Reformation theologies has been misconceived, the conclusions reached by Reformation theologies may also have to be re-examined (Lüdemann, 133).

The three central chapters of the book addressed the critical response to the NPP. Was first century Judaism a grace-filled and non-legalistic as, claimed? Paul's argument about “works” and “Law” actually was reduced to the issue of the sociological markers of covenant membership. It was surely in Romans 4:1-5 that people found exactly the “contrast of faith (or gift) versus works which the Reformation highlighted and which Sanders and the NPP called into question”. It is perhaps most seriously of all that referred to NPP amount to an implicit repudiation of ...