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We are privileged to have Dr. McKnight with us today as 2014's Westervelt speaker. Please welcome Dr. McKnight.

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I want to thank Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary for this kind invitation and for the opportunity to be with you. And my lecture will tie into what Dr. Wells said this morning, but the tie-in will come mostly tomorrow. So I'm giving a trailer as well for what's going to happen.

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And it is great to be with you, and it is great to be out of Chicago at the beginning of February. The American church, from the far right, conservative, evangelical, to the far left, liberal, Protestant, or Catholic, needs now more than ever the Apostle Paul's vision of the Christian life. I read that sentence with my eyes down for one reason.

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I didn't want to see the rolling of eyes that seemingly overcomes many faces for anyone who mentions the Apostle Paul. My friend Daniel Kirk captured the trend of our day in the title of his book, Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? He put into words what many think, and I quote from him, Some find Paul lacking in comparison with the master. Others simply find Paul distasteful, offensive, oppressive, exclusive, confusing, arrogant, or just plain wrong.

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Bible readers, of course, fill in the blank for of Jacob and Esau, God says, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. 13 as he quotes from Malachi chapter 1. Esau, in the Jewish tradition, became a trope of one not blessed as he also became a trope for being godless.

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For some, Paul has followed behind Esau in a train of people worth despising, not so much for godlessness, but for hierarchy and authoritarianism, and for his posture in particular toward women. The attempt to rescue Paul from those texts by assigning them to post-Pauline authors, whatever you think of pseudonymity in the New Testament, doesn't, however, delete those statements or books from Sacred Scripture. The fact remains that in most churches, we have a canonical Paul to deal with.

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The oddest thing is that the one who is often most despised today in the canon might be the one we most need. And my aim in this and tomorrow's lectures is to see if I can reclaim the whole canonical Paul for the American church. I believe he offers a vision of the Christian life that radically reframes how we see our lives in this world.

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Whether I convince you or not, I'll give my best attempt. To do this, I want in this first session to set the Apostle Paul in the context of some big trends in Pauline scholarship. And here we will want to consider three movements in scholarship. The old perspective on Paul.

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the new perspective on Paul, and the post-new perspective on Paul. What needs to be drawn out, but which is often ignored in old, new, and post-new approaches, is that each of these perspectives approaches the reading of the Apostle Paul in a framework that also shapes how we understand the Christian life. So I'd like to begin with the old perspective. And when I use the word Reformed, I'm not talking about you, if you know what I mean, and you know what I mean.

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When I'm talking about you, I'll use the word Presbyterian. Reactions today to Paul, the sort that resonate, With Daniel Kirk's title, our reactions mostly to the old perspective on Paul, how to describe this in the old perspective. Paul was converted from Judaism to Christianity.

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In the old perspective, the law was primarily an instrument of accusation, and the New Testament and Jesus' teachings, and especially life in the Holy Spirit was now the way to live properly before God, not by the Torah. In the human problem is sin and the human propensity to establish our own righteousness. In the old perspective, the Old Testament is abrogated or at least superseded by the New Covenant.

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In the old perspective, and here we get to the core of the historiography, Judaism was a religion of works righteousness which Jesus came to free us from and which Paul declared over, all over, in justification by faith, not works. In the old perspective, works of the law, a technical expression in Paul, refers to human attempts to establish ourselves before God on the basis of works and merit building. In the old perspective, grace,

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is much more of a New Testament word and law and works and merit Old Testament words. The old perspective came to us through Paul as interpreted by Augustine in the famous Pelagian controversies. It came to us then through Luther, who in some ways mimicked, some ways, mimicked Paul's theology in his insufferably relentless demonizing of the Roman Catholic Church and its priests and its popes -- and I have softened the language that Luther often uses -- and in his own quest to find relief for a guilty conscience.

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It was then nuanced in important ways by John Calvin in Geneva, where law was given a more varied set of functions. including guiding the Christian life, and where grace was more transformative. But it finally came to rest in the Western churches, including our American churches, through the Puritans, the revivalists of the 19th and 20th century, and then through theologians at Princeton like Charles Hodge. This view was only partially softened

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by American liberal theologians, whether in a social gospel sense, in people like Walter Rauschenbusch, or Reinhold Niebuhr, or Paul Tillich. And then, of course, Karl Barth. How can you go without mentioning Karl Barth? The download for the American church about the old perspectives approach to Paul entail these important elements: Judaism,

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at the time of Jesus and Paul, was a works and legalistic righteousness religion. The God of the New Testament is a God of free grace, and we cannot earn our way with God, since salvation is a gift. All humans are of grace and salvation, and they come to us through Christ's obedient life and sacrificial death.

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The Gospel relieves the existential crisis of guilt for the one who seizes his or her striving and comes to rest in the all-sufficient grace of God. And some old perspectivists see the ultimate and universal triumph of grace but they are still more or less operating out of an old perspective on Judaism and Paul. At this point, I have to speculate a bit because I want to synthesize the old perspective into a theory of the Christian life.

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Because this old perspective completely shapes how one understands the Christian life if one is operating through Pauline grids and all Protestants basically are. The old perspective generated an individualistic understanding of the Christian life. The old perspective focused on personal redemption and thus on happiness now and eternal life with God when we die.

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The old perspective saw the mission of God in getting people saved, even if the word salvation gets expanded into the social sector for some. The old perspective saw the Christian life in terms of living out of grace, not works, and thus not seeking to please God by what we do.

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The old perspective tended at times, not always, to minimize social efforts because personal redemption and eternal life at times became the whole message. The old perspective never had ecclesiology at its center and sometimes diminished the church. The old perspective saw Judaism as the past work of God and the church as the present work of God, so that it is fair to say the old perspective is inherently supersessionistic.

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No one wants to be called supersessionist these days. So if you want to win, call them supersessionist. And the old perspective, and I think this is the critical category, framed the Christian life inside what is often called the ordo salutis, debates about order aside, in which we map the journey of the Christian life to eternal life from regeneration and justification to sanctification and ultimately to final glorification. One can say, then, that the old perspective in most of its forms was an individualistic Augustinian anthropology, a Lutheran or Reformed or American evangelical or Protestant liberal soteriology, and more often than not, a supersessionist hermeneutic.

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Have I used all the words that you're supposed to learn in seminary? It would take a long time to explain all those terms. I can't explain them, and that's why I use the big ones. These three elements, Augustinian anthropology, Protestant soteriology, and a supersessionist hermeneutic, determine how one reads Paul

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and therefore, how to frame the Christian life. I want to interrupt now this more academic focus of the lecture to illustrate the implication of individualistic Augustinian approaches to the Christian life and to American life, one in which the church's role is clearly up for grabs. Churches are shutting down all over the nation because lots of people think following Jesus and church are disconnected.

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How did this happen? America pioneered an idea that has become a Western world assumption and law, the total separation of church and state. Westerners assume freedom of religion and the wall of separation between church and state. No one was more responsible for the robust idea of religious freedom from state interference than the 17th century Rhode Island person named Roger Williams.

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His contribution to America, indeed to the entire Western culture's belief in the separation of church and state, is foundational even if many today have never heard of Roger Williams. In England, the mutually dependent church and state had shifted at times toward the Catholic Church and finally toward a Protestant Anglican church. The Puritans, however, failed in their purging England of all traces of Catholicism, so some left to become America's pilgrims. Edwin Gostad, one of the finest American church historians,

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sums up the Puritan name in these words: Far from England's intruding and persecuting bishops, protected from the nation's nosy and arresting sheriffs, the Puritans, taking only the New Testament as their pattern and guide, could fashion a pure, non-political, uncorrupted, non-compromised church, and I would add, nation. They tried. Soon, Roger Williams landed on America's shores, and he spotted significant failures to form a pure church. So he sought to establish a church based on the New Testament and the New Testament alone.

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Have you ever heard that? The challenge, now well-known to most of us, was beyond achievable, so he left the Boston area Moved into what is now known as Rhode Island, which was then Providence Plantation, and created what we now know as freedom of. religion.

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One of his implications was the virtual creation of a group we today call the Baptists. If I love Williams' contribution to our country, I am less sanguine about the cyclical problem he created: dream, establish the church, find problems, separate, and start the process all over again until you give up. In his puritanical desire to find the perfect church, Roger Williams himself became the problem.

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No church ever got to the image in his vision. Williams formed a church of one, the first American who loved Jesus, but not the church. We are given in America The power of choice and religion has become a smorgasbord.

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Choose your own church. Choose it based on its ability to live up to your preferences. I could go on with observations about the deeper American spirit by calling our attention to Henry David Thoreau. But we have to get back to the old perspective and its propensity toward individualism.

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So I resume with just a brief word before the new perspective. Individualism is one clear dimension of the old perspective, but we are now a little more concerned about one other element, how Judaism was understood and is understood in the old perspective. Let this be said, the old perspective is not the same as conservative evangelicalism or historic Protestantism.

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The old perspective ran the whole Pauline show until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It follows that the Christian life itself was also shaped more often than not by that same old perspective on Judaism and Paul. But that all changed in the second-half of the 20th century. So now the new perspective.

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If it is not clear already, I will make it clear now. The issue in the old versus new versus post-new perspective is how one understands Judaism and therefore how one understands that which gave rise to earliest Christianity. In the old perspective, Judaism was a works-based system of religion. Listen to Sunday school people talk about the Old Testament, and you will almost always hear the old perspective coughed and breathed and triumphed over.

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That changes in the new perspective, and that change shifted everything from our understanding of Paul and what he was opposing to how the Christian life now should be framed. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the late 1940s, made public not long after that, and there's a whole story there. But it took three decades before their impact revolutionized Pauline's studies. It got its decisive treatment in 1977 with Ed Sanders when he wrote a book called Paul and Palestinian Judaism.

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Fifteen years later, he published a book on Judaism, and the movement around Sanders changed how we view Judaism and therefore how we view that to which Paul responded and out of which he emerged. Here's the point. Judaism was no longer seen as a works-based religion, and therefore when Paul fought against works of the law, he was not fighting against works-based righteousness. Now I have to flesh this out a bit, because it matters.

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To begin with, in the new perspective, Judaism is called covenant nomism. Covenant, you know what that means. You're Presbyterians, and maybe even Reformed. Nomism is a Greek word for law, so it is a covenant-based understanding and locating of the law.

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Law follows covenant relationship with God. That is, in the new perspective, one became a Jew, or one found acceptance with God on the basis of God's covenant election of Israel. The central existential anxiety of Judaism at the time of Paul was not about personal salvation, because the matter had already been settled by election Or, to put it more crudely, a knife.

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That's biblical humor for circumcision. Because the Jews were a cut above the rest. You'll be using that in your sermons, I can guarantee you. The central anxiety, if there was one, was about the condition of the people, Israel, in a world dominated by Rome.

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Jews were saved because they were Jews. And on that elective consciousness, we're on about other things, like getting a Messiah. and getting the Romans back to Rome and dwelling in the land in peace and holiness. Look at Benedictus by Zechariah and Luke 1, and you'll see Judaism on full display.

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Nor were Jews at all convinced that they had to be perfect, as the Reformers so often emphasized in their covenant of works in order to be accepted by God. The whole of the Bible speaks against that view, for after all, they had a system of forgiveness established in the temple system. Every year, on Yom Kippur, they confessed their sins and their priests announced absolution.

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Perfection, it was assumed, was impossible. Torah observance, then, was not about getting to heaven or entering the covenant or being good enough to be approved. Rather, the law was God's gracious instruction on how elect people were to live in ha'aretz, in the land.

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For the new perspective, there is now no Judaism other to do battle with. Paul is not fighting Judaism, per se. And he is certainly not fighting a Judaism that did not exist, the works-righteousness Judaism of the Protestant Reformers. What then does Paul mean when he says works of the law, if he doesn't mean works-righteousness?

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I'm glad you asked, because that's where I was going. This is where the New Perspective scholars, especially my doctoral supervisor, Jimmy Dunn, whom you are to call James D.G. Dunn, he paved new ground for a fresh perspective of Judaism in Paul.

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Works of the law refer not to general Torah observance, and neither do they refer to works done to merit favor with God. Instead, as Paul's letters to the Galatians and Romans reveal, the issue is works Jews did that distinguished them from Gentiles. Jimmy Dunn called them boundary markers, and he was drawing on important sociological studies. In short, works of the law refer to circumcision, Sabbath observance, and food laws, like kosher, pork.

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That is, to the laws and practices that Jews did and Gentiles did not do, and that therefore distinguished Jews from Gentiles. Works of the law, then, was shorthand for become a Jew or be a Jew. One is not justified by becoming Jewish, Paul is saying, when he says not by works of the law.

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The old perspective framed Paul as a Christian over against Judaism. The new perspective framed Paul as a Jewish Christian or a Christian Jew over against what he would call resistant forms of Judaism, but still within Judaism. A little-known statement by Paul in the book of Acts, found at Acts 23:6, is telling. Paul, before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, publicly declares

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I am a Pharisee. In the old perspective, he's fibbing, or he's telling his present in light of his past, or he's being clever by half, or rhetorically manipulative. But in the new perspective, he's telling the truth about his past and his present. He is a Christian, all right, but he's a Christian Pharisee.

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a Jew through and through, which is exactly what Paul says in Philippians 3, verses 4 through 6. To circle the wagons yet again, in the old perspective, the problem was individual redemption. In the new perspective, there is a shift toward the people, to Israel and to the church. The old focused on the existential crisis

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and the new on the new ecclesial crisis. The tension between Paul and fellow Jews, then, is not between a Christian and a Jew, but between one vision for Judaism over against other visions for Judaism. In the new perspective, it comes down to this: Paul believed Judaism, by virtue of the death and resurrection of Jesus, was big to expand to include Gentiles in the one people of God, which he called ekklesia.

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And most importantly, he believed God expanded the people of God to include Gentiles, and this is the real tension point, by exempting Gentiles from Torah observance, works of the law, and to be received solely on the basis of faith. Thus, in one stroke of interpretation, justification by faith is not an accusation against Judaism's works righteousness, but an inclusive framework for saving both Jews and Gentiles. If Abraham was saved by faith, Jews are still saved by faith. And if Abraham was saved by faith,

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Anyone with faith, including Gentiles and Green Bay Packer fans, can be included, maybe not, could be included in Abraham's faith. As Daniel Kirk expressed it, Gentiles in Paul's hand have been scripted into the story of Israel. This draws us now to how theology perspective framed the Christian life.

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Here I speak for myself. Though I am a son of Dunn, in that Jimmy Dunn was my doctoral supervisor, we Dunn students often refer to Jimmy, a Scotsman, by the German term Dr. Fatter, because I suspect we were all required to read all the German scholarship. I don't think he cared if we read the French.

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If the old perspective was driven by personal soteriology, the new perspective is driven by an ecclesiology of expansion. There is one work of God, one mission of God. That work is to form a redeemed and liberated people in this world under King Jesus, Messiah and Lord. That mission is not just for Israel,

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But now for Israel expanded, as Paul put it in Romans 11 about the Gentiles being grafted into the tree trunk called Israel. In other words, the Christian life is about learning to live in an inclusive community, a new kind of fellowship of Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, male and female. Barbarians and Scythians. That'd probably get you going.

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It is not that the old perspective has no room for ecclesiology. It just enters the game late. Sometimes, like subs who sit on the bench until the game has been decided. Nor does the new perspective deny personal soteriology,

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though both Jimmy Dunn and Tom Wright have been caustically accused wrongly of such teaching. No, the first foot in the New Perspective dance is that God is doing the same old thing, forming a people, but now God is expanding the people to include those who were formally excluded. Accompanying the dance of the first foot and close behind that foot is the foot of personal soteriology.

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Is there a supersessionism at work in the new perspective? As you may well now know, supersession is the one thing scholars don't want to be accused of. Tom Wright, in his new book, if you can call it a book, it's more like an encyclopedia, Paul, in the faithfulness of God, takes it on directly, this issue of supersessionism.

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Before I state his view, I want to recall a conversation I had with a well-known Jewish scholar who knows the New Testament quite well. I asked him, If I say Jesus is Messiah and one is to believe in Him for redemption, am I being supersessionistic? He said, Of course. All of historic Christianity's beliefs are supersessionism.

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I said, What's the alternative? And he said, Pluralism. Religious pluralism. We are now at a very uncomfortable moment and fork in the road.

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At some level, according to many, any firm conviction that Jesus is the world's Savior including the Savior for Jews, is supersessionism. N.T. Wright admits as much and calls Pauline Christianity a kind of sectarian supersessionism.

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And he said it is fully in line with the sectarian supersessionism of the Qumran scrolls. Supersessionism is the driving force in the third approach to the Apostle Paul, and therefore frames yet another way to live the Christian life. Before I get to how the new perspective frames the Christian life, which I'll do tomorrow, Since it is where I land and since it paves fresh ground in comparison to the old perspective, and I will have to spell it out more perspective, I will sketch first the post-new perspective and then offer reasons why I am a new perspective kind of guy.

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So the post-new perspective. It began in some ways in the 19th century Germany with a scholar, a Jewish scholar named Abraham Geiger. But the recent breakthroughs are not indebted so much to Geiger as they are to scholars like Mark Nanos, a Jewish New Testament scholar, and Marcus Bachmuhl, a Christian New Testament scholar. In the old perspective, Paul was a Christian over against Judaism.

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In the new perspective, Paul is a Jewish Christian, or a Christian Jew, still a Jew, but very much a fulfilled Messianic Jew. In the post-New perspective, Paul is a Jew. Paul's faith is 100% Jewish, and here's the big point. God saves Jews through Abraham's covenant, and He saves Gentiles through the New Covenant.

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They are one family, but there are two family origins, two branches in one family of God. Jewish believers in Jesus follow the Torah. Gentile believers in Jesus are to follow the Torah so far as the Torah is for them. A critical text for the post-New Perspective is found in Acts 15, verses 28 to 29, and it's a text that most people don't spend much time thinking about.

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The probably James-shaped letter concludes with these words: For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what is strangled, and from fornication. Jews thought all Jews, all Gentiles, were fornicators. The way some Texans think about -- I won't go there -- but it's a state farther north.

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If you keep yourselves from these, James says, you will do well. Farewell. Some have taken this to be a rigorous set of standards that were dropped as soon as Paul got involved in the Gentile mission and away from those stuffy Jewish leaders. That is, one sees Paul's real commitment to the Torah in the common chameleon-like reading of 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul says, more or less, he does what it takes to get folks interested in the gospel, living in one place like a Gentile and in another place like a Jew.

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But others, like Richard Baucom, have argued, on the contrary, that the four stipulations of Acts 15 are not the hoped-for morality of Gentile believers, but instead specific laws in the Old Testament, Leviticus, for Gentiles living in Eretz Israel. In other words, instead of modifying or toning down Torah for Gentiles, this set of stipulation affirms Torah for Gentiles, so far as it applies to them. but does so in a way that the Torah is never toned down for Jewish believers in Jesus.

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For the post-new perspective, then, there are in effect either two quite distinct covenants, or perhaps one covenant focused on Jews with modifications of the covenant for Gentiles. What is perhaps most notable for the post-new perspective, and I'm not entirely certain this is the view of all of them, Paul's letters are sent to -- this is really important to him -- Paul's letters are sent to and concern Gentile Christianity and not Jewish Christianity. I was once sitting over lunch with a Messianic Jew who informed me quite clearly that Romans was not for us, but for you.

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I had not heard this, so I asked rather naively, then what in the New Testament is for you? I mean, if you cut out Romans, what's left? To which he said, Mostly Matthew and James, with bits here and there in the other stuff. But we've got the Tanakh, you know, the Old Testament.

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What he said was also a bit of a canonical reprimand as well when he... said, We weren't consulted, you know, when the list of New Testament books were determined. What I see, then, in the post-New Perspective is the end of supersessionism, though one always has to wonder if one has to believe in Jesus to be in the covenant. And if one does not, one cannot escape that term of opproprium.

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For some, one does not have to believe in Jesus, and this crosses the line into pluralism. Abraham for the Jews, Jesus for the Gentiles, Israel for Jews, and the Church for Gentile believers in the God of Abraham and Jesus. In this perspective, it appears that Jews not only had precedence in the people of God, but still have it. What then of the Christian life in the post-new perspective?

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It is not unfair to say that many of us who are concerned with the niceties of early Christian history are not all that concerned with talking about the Christian life. So in some ways here, I can only speak generally. For the post-new perspective, even if rarely discussed except in broad ethical categories like love and justice, the Christian life is first of all determined by who you are, Jew or Gentile.

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If a Jewish believer, then the Christian life is a messianically shaped living out of the Torah. 17-48 will serve as the template, not for removing the Torah, but for fulfilling it. For the Jewish believer, kosher obtains. And for many today, that means full kosher, no different than your typical Hasidic Jew.

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Church fellowship is more often than not seen as synagogue-like fellowship with very Jewish things going on, like reading Torah and Haftorahs, celebrating Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Hanukkah and Purim, circumcising baby boys properly, and learning the Halakah like any ordinary observant Jew. Gentiles are to carry on with their own believing ways, some, of course, opting for things like the Creed. But for some, in the post-new perspective, Gentile churches ought to follow more what is said in Acts 15 and not be so casual with either Torah or the Jewish origins of the Christian faith. But what is perhaps most noticeable for the Christian life here is that there are, in effect, two fellowships.

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Israel and the church are synagogues and churches. The unity of the one people of God is realized in separation, not in integrated fellowship, worship, or discipleship. Yes, at times a more pluralistic framework is set up in which Jews remain fully integrated into Judaism without faith in Jesus as the Messiah, while for Gentiles, belief in Jesus is the way of the church. It doesn't take genius insight to see that the post-new perspective has nearly turned the old perspective inside out and upside down.

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Instead of a law that had to be abrogated, we have a law that has to be followed by Jews and Gentile believers. There is no thought here of a works righteousness, But of a grace-shaped election formed through a covenant God made with Israel, and the whole Christian life is about the Torah and for Gentile believers. Paul's teaching about how Gentiles who are not given the Torah are to live.

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Before I offer a thicker view of the new perspective, A brief encapsulating way of summarizing what we have so far contended, but this time from the angle, the problem of the gospel and what it resolves. In the old perspective, the problem is my standing before God. I am guilty and under God's wrath and self-righteousness and self-righteous and in need of a system of grace.

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and the gospel assaults my self-righteousness and pride while offering consolation if I surrender and trust to God's grace in Christ. In the new perspective, the problem is the kind of ecclesial particularism. that leads to exclusiveness and separation and ethnic privilege. So the gospel comes to reveal the gospel that God has ushered in a new creation for all and loves everyone and justifies everyone in Christ, the church, through faith.

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In the post-new perspective, the problem is the need for the covenant God made with Israel somehow to be offered to Gentiles on their own terms in a way that both preserves the ethnic identity of the Jews and missional privilege, while at the same time expanding the people of God. Now, I'd like to give a brief defense of why I defend the new perspective. In a doctoral seminar, we would go patiently through each of these views and ponder the significant New Testament texts in light of the Old Testament texts giving their proper context in the Jewish world of hermeneutics.

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And we'd work toward resolutions, but wouldn't get there. We don't have time for that, and this is not a doctoral seminar. So I'll tell you what I think and why. I'm new perspective, neither old nor post-new.

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though at times I affirm postures of the post-new and positions in the old. The new perspective is not wholly other, but an attempt to be more historically accurate with what the New Testament teaches in the context of a fresh appreciation of Judaism. Why do I affirm the new perspective? I could be very post-modern with you now, and post-liberal, and say it's because of my location.

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I came of age intellectually with E.P. Sanders. Jimmy Dunn was my supervisor, and Tom Wright is my friend. But I came to this conviction as a non-Paul student of Dunn's when I was teaching the Book of Galatians in the late '80s.

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This letter gets heated about Jewish believers who considered Gentile believers nothing but God-fearers in need of full conversion so they can become proselytes. And that means they had little knives tucked in their tunics for when someone got fully committed. They believe these Gentile believers need to be fully converted, which means undergoing circumcision.

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That is, they believe Gentiles need to become Jews to become genuine members of the people of God here understood to be Israel. The single text in Galatians that led me to the new perspective was Galatians 3:15-29, which I will try to sort out briefly in the time remaining. I'm going to read some of this because I'm not going to assume that you have Galatians 3 put to memory. You may have Romans put to memory, or the Beatitudes, but not Galatians 3.

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Brothers and sisters, Paul says, I give an example from daily life. Once a person's will has been ratified, no one adds to it or annuls it. He obviously doesn't know what it's like to live in Chicago. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.

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It does not say, and to offsprings, as of many, but it says, and to your offspring, that is, listen to this, to one person, that is Christ. My point is this. The law, which came 430 years after the Torah, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, or after the promise, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance comes from the law, it no longer comes from the promise, but God granted it to Abraham through promise.

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Why, then, the law? Paul gives statements here that I think his Judaizing opponents went ballistic. And this is the hermeneutic of Paul. The law was added because of transgressions until the offspring, Christ, would come to whom the promise had been made.

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And furthermore, if you want another argument, The law was ordained through angels by a mediator. Now, a mediator involves more than one party, but God is one. Is the law, then, opposed to the promises of God?

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Never. For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would come through the law. But The Scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

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Now, before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore, the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came. so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.

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As many of you as were baptized into Christ, have clothed yourselves with Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Now, it would take a lot of time to unpack this, so I just want to make five life-changing points. First, Paul thinks he has established the grounds for an inclusive church, a church made-up of Jews and Greeks

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Slay. and free, males and female. We must keep this in mind. He is reading the Old Testament in such a way that it affirms one people of God that includes Jews and Gentiles.

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And this puts the Judaizing opponents in deep waters, because he wants to show that Gentile believers don't have to become Jews to be a part of the Israel of God. Second, the promise to Abraham was given in a playful yet serious look at grammar to the seed, a singular. And this leads Paul to the astounding claim that it was all designed to come to completion in Christ.

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That is, in Paul, there is a pervasive Christocentrism in Paul's reading of the Bible. Anything that diminishes the centrality of Christ, which at times emerges in some forms of the post-new perspective, is out of touch with how Paul thinks. Third, the promise is first and the law is second.

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In fact, the law is given 430 years later. This sets a priority to promise and not the Torah. Paul here lowers in the orders of importance the Torah, a move not made lightly or heard welcomely by Paul's opponents. The covenant's promise establishes identity, not the Torah, or one's measured observance of it.

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Fourth, Paul says the law was only added for a limited reason, with an inferior method and for a limited time. And in this one, Paul is clearly at odds with the post-new perspective. Paul says that the law was added to turn transgressions into capital letter sin.

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That the law was given indirectly through angels, but the promise was given through the unmediated presence of God. Think of smoking pot. not what you're thinking -- of Abraham and the smoking pot. And the law was given only for the time between Moses and Christ.

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The law was given in 3.24, Paul says, until Christ came. Fifth, the aim of the Torah was faith, and with faith came -- that is, when Christ's faith and our faith in Christ -- The Torah had served its purpose. Therefore, the Torah's inevitable division of Jews from Gentiles ended in Christ.

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And now it is time for the family of God to be established on the basis of faith, not on the basis of Israel's elective status in the mission of God in this world. I'll put it this way in closing. The argument here is aimed at establishing a fellowship of difference, T-S, not E-N-C-E. And these difference are Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, and males and females.

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It makes no sense to tell Gentiles that the law has been put aside. It was never for them to begin with. Paul has Jews in mind, which he clearly had in mind in 2.15-21 as well, where he reprimanded Peter. So this argument about Torah is a Jew-directed statement more than a Gentile-directed statement.

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So here's his argument. Christ is the Abrahamic seed. Those in Christ are in Abraham, or those who are in Abraham are in Christ. We are in Christ by faith, not by Torah or ethnicity or gender or economic status.

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Therefore, there is one body in Christ. The ecclesial focus here is the singular focus of the new perspective on Paul. The personal redemption theme of the old perspective is not the central concern of Paul in this passage. And this passage, which forms the heart of Paul's entire theology, has a decidedly ecclesial focus.

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His concern is that the church is a fellowship of difference. In our next lecture, I want to show how pervasive This inclusive reading of the Church or the One Body in Christ theme is in Paul's mission and his understanding of the Christian life. I will argue that the Christian life is about learning to live and embodying a unified body of Christ in this world as a witness to what God does when the Spirit is unleashed.

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Thank you.