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This is Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig today. The Doctrine of Salvation, Part 15 for more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org
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welcome to Defenders. I'm glad that you could join us for this important lesson on the doctrine of salvation and in particular the doctrine of church justification, which lies at the very heart of the Christian faith Today. We want to continue our discussion of the so called new perspective on Paul. The new perspective offers a view of justification which is radically different than traditional Catholic and Protestant perspectives. This time the dispute concerns the meaning of Paul's phrase the righteousness of God, or in the Greek, dikaiosune theu. Some proponents of the new perspective construe God's righteousness to be his faithfulness to the covenant. Proponents of the new perspective think of God's righteousness as as a relational, not a normative, concept, and identify it with God's being faithful to his covenant people. Now this claim seems to be implausible on the face of it, for it amounts to nothing less than the claim that English translators, not to mention non English translators, have for generations actually mistranslated dikaiosune theu, since the English word righteousness just does not mean faithfulness. The Hebrew word tzedek, also in effect mistranslated by righteousness, is also said not to express a normative concept like goodness, but rather a relational concept like faithful to. If one reduces God's righteousness to his covenant faithfulness, this will radically impact one's understanding of Paul's doctrine of justification. For then justification is not about God's reckoning us to be guiltless by the standard of divine justice, but rather reckoning to us covenant faithfulness. The problem with this is that faithfulness to the covenant would not suffice for salvation. When Paul declares in Philippians 3, 6, 9 his desire for a righteousness that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. He is not longing for faithfulness to the covenant, for he says that he was already blameless in that respect, and it availed him nothing. The Implausibility of the New Perspectives Reductionism with respect to righteousness is perhaps best seen by asking what the opposite of righteousness that is unrighteousness, is said by Paul to be. It is not unfaithfulness, but rather wickedness and ungodliness or lawlessness. Faithlessness is but one of the many sins listed by Paul in Romans 1:29,31 which result in God's just condemnation. Righteousness is a broad moral property which entails faithfulness, since to break one's word is wrong but is not reducible.
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Faithfulness as Mark Seifried puts it, all covenant keeping is righteous behavior, but not all righteous behavior is covenant keeping. It is misleading, therefore, to speak of God's righteousness as his covenant faithfulness. Seichelied points out that righteousness language in the Old Testament has primarily to do with God's role as judge and ruler of creation. As such, it is a normative concept having to do with God's establishing right moral order in the world. It takes on a positive or salvific sense because the biblical writers expect God to intervene to reinstate right order when it is usurped by evil in the world. It takes on a negative or punitive sense because the biblical writers expect a reinstatement of right order by God to involve the punishment of the wicked. As Seyfried so aptly puts it, retribution remains on the backside of divine acts of righteousness. So While there are 64 instances of God's saving righteousness in the Old Testament, Seifed counts as well 15 cases in which God's righteousness is conceived in retributive or or punitive terms. God's righteousness comprises both aspects. Moreover, although the intention of the proponents of the new perspective is to explain God's justification of the Gentiles as His declaring them to be righteous, that is faithful to the covenant, in fact, the new perspective, by reducing God's righteousness to his covenant faithfulness, does not make sense of God's relation to Gentiles since they stand outside the covenant made with Israel. If unrighteousness is unfaithfulness to the covenant, then Gentiles cannot be said to be unrighteous, which is expressly said by Paul in Romans 1:18 Nor could a Gentile like Job be said to be righteous, as the Lord himself affirms, since he was not faithful to the covenant. In point of fact, no connection between justification and covenant faithfulness seems to exist. Seyfried observes that of the 283 occurrences of the word Covenant and the over 500 occurrences of the word righteousness in the Old Testament, in only seven instances are the two words used together. In general, one does not act righteously or unrighteously with respect to a covenant rather, one keeps or remembers or establishes a covenant or conversely, one breaks or transgresses or despises the covenant. In speaking of righteousness as covenant faithfulness, proponents of the new perspective seemed to be guilty of a category mistake, mixing apples and oranges, as it were. In any case, the reductionistic interpretation of dikaiosunatheu as covenant faithfulness has now been shown to be linguistically untenable. Charles Aaron's The Righteousness of God, published in 2015 and is the definitive work on this expression and a convincing refutation of the reductionistic interpretation of the new perspective. Irons conducts a thorough investigation of righteousness language in the Hebrew Old Testament, in the Greek Septuagint, and in extra biblical Jewish writings. With respect to the use of tzedek in the Old Testament, Irons finds that the word does not have a relational meaning like faithfulness, he says, in the Old Testament, righteousness is a normative concept and the norm is God's own moral law, which is grounded in his unchanging nature and as a God of perfect holiness, justice, and truth. With respect to the Septuagint and extra biblical Greek, no essential differences emerge from Old Testament usage. In the New Testament, Irons finds that the verb justified Dikaio means either or 1 to vindicate someone or 2 to declare someone to be righteous and to treat them as righteous. For Paul, he says, it is a soteriological term that denotes God's act of forgiving sins and accounting sinners as righteous in his his sight. Thus the translation of the phrase dikaiosune theu as the faithfulness of God is simply incorrect. Fortunately, proponents of the new perspective have backed away from the simplistic reductionistic conception of God's righteousness. For example, the late James D.G. dunn, in response to his critics, acknowledges that the Hebrew concept of righteousness cannot be reduced to covenant faithfulness or salvation. Righteousness language in the Hebrew scriptures, he recognizes, also involves punitive divine justice, according to which righteousness is understood and I quote unquote as measured by a norm, right order, or that which is morally right, with the qualification that the norm is not seen as some abstract ideal but rather as a norm concretized in relation between God and creatures. So when we come to Romans, Donne says that God's righteousness towards the peoples he has created includes wrath and judgment as well as faithfulness and salvation is clearly implicit in the sequences Romans 1, 16, 18. Those who deny that dikaiosune is a forensic term, Donne says, pay insufficient attention to Romans 4, verses 4 to 5, where the forensic background is clear in the allusion to the legal impropriety of a judge justifying the ungodly, and where again, the thought is entirely of attributing a righteous status of to one who is unrighteous. Donne's point is that Paul's referring to God as him who justifies the ungodly recalls the Old Testament description of the unjust judge who justifies the wicked Proverbs 17:15, which is an abomination in in the Lord's sight, French theologian Henri Blocher remarks on the staggering audacity of Paul's combination of words. God who justifies the ungodly? He asks, have New perspective and other scholars measured the shocking magnitude of this paradox? Evidently not. Therefore, the new perspective on Paul has run its useful course and should now be abandoned. The evidence shows clearly that the Protestant reformers were on target in their doctrine of justification as God's declaration of a new legal status for believers in involving a normative right standing before the holy God. Next time we'll look at what Paul means when he says that believers in Christ are justified by faith. Until then, may God go with you.