New Perspective on Paul

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Definition

The New Perspective on Paul (NPP) is a movement in New Testament scholarship, beginning with E. P. Sanders’s 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism, that reinterprets first-century Judaism as a religion of grace rather than legalism, a pattern Sanders called “covenantal nomism,” and reinterprets Paul’s phrase “works of the law” as referring to Jewish boundary markers such as circumcision and food laws rather than to a general system of earning salvation by good works.¹ Its most influential popularizer, N. T. Wright, further redefines justification as God’s declaration of covenant membership rather than the reckoning of Christ’s righteousness to the believer.²

Historical Origin

Isolated scholars had questioned the traditional reading of Paul against Judaism since the early twentieth century, but E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) set the terms of the modern debate. Sanders stated his aim as being “to destroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship.”¹ James D. G. Dunn coined the movement’s name in a 1983 Manson Memorial Lecture, “The New Perspective on Paul and the Law,” and N. T. Wright became its most widely read popularizer, applying the reinterpretation directly to the doctrine of justification. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley’s 2010 dissertation “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul,” approved by Thomas R. Schreiner, offers a dedicated book-length Reformed engagement with the movement’s own historical and theological claims.³

Core Tenets

Covenantal nomism

Sanders defines the pattern he finds throughout Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism:

“Briefly put, covenantal nomism is the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.”⁴

On this reading, obedience to the law is how a Jew remains within the covenant God has already established by grace, not how one earns entry into it. Sanders summarizes: “salvation is by grace but judgment is according to works… God saves by grace, but… within the framework established by grace he rewards good deeds and punishes transgression.”⁵ Wright adds that “we have misjudged early Judaism, especially Pharisaism, if we have thought of it as an early version of Pelagianism.”⁶

“Works of the law” as boundary markers

Dunn argues that when Paul opposes justification by “works of the law” (Gal. 2:16), the phrase does not name meritorious observance in general but specifically the “badges” of Jewish identity, chiefly circumcision, food laws, and sabbath-keeping, that marked Jews off from Gentiles. On this reading, Paul’s target is not a Jewish attempt to earn God’s favor but a Jewish insistence that Gentile believers adopt these national boundary markers before they can belong to God’s covenant people.⁷

Justification redefined

Wright argues that “the gospel” and “justification” name two different things: the gospel is the announcement of Jesus’s lordship, and justification is not the means by which someone becomes a Christian but the declaration that someone already is one:

“‘Justification’ is the doctrine which insists that all those who have this faith belong as full members of this family, on this basis and no other.”²

Wright accordingly reinterprets the “righteousness of God” language in Romans as God’s own covenant faithfulness rather than a righteousness that can be reckoned to a believer’s account, and denies that Christ’s own righteousness is imputed to the believer:

“This is not God’s own righteousness, or Christ’s own righteousness, that is reckoned to God’s redeemed people, but rather the fresh status of ‘covenant member’… which is accredited to those who are in Christ.”⁸

Critical Reception

Reformed and confessional Protestant scholarship has raised sustained objections to the NPP’s central claims, particularly its account of Judaism, its reading of “works of the law,” and its redefinition of justification.

Sanders overstates how sharply covenantal nomism differs from what the Reformers actually opposed. Stephen Westerholm answers Sanders directly:

“Sanders has shown that Judaism did not generally believe that salvation was earned from scratch by human deeds of righteousness; the point is well taken, but it by no means differentiates Judaism from the classical opponents of ‘Lutheran’ thought. Each acknowledged human need of divine grace. What the opponents of ‘Lutheranism’ emphatically did not do, however, what they indeed regarded as morally disastrous to do, was to suggest that humans can contribute nothing to their salvation.”⁹

Michael Horton presses the same point more sharply, arguing that NPP scholarship mistook a caricature for the real target of the Reformation:

“Despite Sanders and his diverse students having made the Reformation views part of their thesis (viz., the Reformers missed Paul’s point), not a single representative of the new perspective on Paul demonstrates any scholarly familiarity with primary or secondary sources in the field…. Sanders’ so-called discoveries are hardly new, except to the generations of biblical scholars who have heard distorted versions of Reformation theology only secondhand or thirdhand and assumed a crude view of Judaism as ‘law without grace,’ which the Reformers were too well-informed to have adopted.”¹⁰

Horton goes further, arguing that Sanders’s own description of covenantal nomism resembles a system the Reformation did in fact oppose:

“it is impossible to read Sanders’ description of Second Temple Judaism and Heiko Oberman’s description of late medieval nominalism and not recognize striking similarities. This covenantal nomism is the official position of post-Tridentine Rome.”¹¹

Showing that Judaism was gracious does not show that Paul was wrong about Judaism, because grace was never the real dividing line. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley argues that even granting Sanders’s picture of covenantal nomism, Sanders’s own argument “has no bearing on the categories that defined the concepts of grace, merit, and justification in the Reformation debates,” and so cannot overturn the Reformation’s reading of Paul.³ The real dividing line is not whether a system affirms grace (both Rome and the Reformers did) but where the legal ground of a right verdict before God is located:

“That which truly distinguishes Protestantism from Rome on this question is the doctrine of alien righteousness, or the location of the legal basis of right standing with God outside of, rather than intrinsic to, the believer… Does God render this verdict because he sees that his grace has accomplished an effective, though not yet perfect, transformation of the sinner? Or does God count the believer righteous with regard to an alien righteousness imputed to him or her? This issue is the real dividing line between two major streams of Christendom.”¹²

On this reckoning, showing that first-century Judaism affirmed grace, as covenantal nomism does, settles nothing about whether Paul opposed an intrinsic or an alien righteousness. It is exactly this same question, not the “is Judaism legalistic?” question, that Wright’s own denial of imputation reopens.

“Works of the law” names obedience to the law as a whole, not merely boundary markers. Micah McCormick surveys the case against Dunn’s reading, noting that it “has come under significant criticism by scholars such as Simon Gathercole, Thomas Schreiner, Stephen Westerholm, and Douglas Moo,” who take “works of the law” as referring to what the law commands in its entirety, not a subset of ceremonial identity markers.¹³ McCormick presses the point further from Romans 9:30-10:5, where Paul contrasts “works” as such, not merely boundary-marking works, with God’s grace and calling (Rom. 11:6; 9:12, 16): “Paul’s point is that any human attempt to gain God’s favor by ‘doing’ fails.”¹⁴

Redefining justification as a declaration of covenant membership displaces the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Wright’s own denial that Christ’s righteousness is reckoned to the believer draws the most direct confessional objection (see Comparison with the Reformed Confessions below), since it removes the very transaction the Reformed doctrine of justification depends on.

O’Kelley presses this dividing line against two passages NPP scholars read as targeting Jewish nationalism rather than law-keeping as such.¹⁵

The Community Rule and the Limits of Covenantal Nomism

Sanders drew on the Qumran Community Rule (1QS) repeatedly as one of his primary examples of covenantal nomism.¹⁶ Daniel Timmer’s study of 1QS’s own eschatology and soteriology argues that the document itself does not fit the “getting in” and “staying in” categories Sanders built on it:

“These complexities mean that the New Perspective’s systemic religious categories of ‘getting in’ and ‘staying in’ have the same undesirable effect on 1QS that Procrustes’ bed had on its oversized occupants: what doesn’t fit within them gets lopped off.”¹⁷

Timmer identifies three specific frictions between 1QS’s own text and Sanders’s taxonomy: the links it establishes between obedience and reward “necessitate a ‘merit’ aspect in its soteriology”; its practice of atonement by human agency, the community’s own atoning function, is “potentially antithetical to atonement within the cult,” which 1QS elsewhere treats as God’s unique prerogative; and its requirement that a member join the covenant “of one’s free will” makes “getting in” itself “quite dependent upon human agency,” not on God’s prior choice alone.¹⁷ Citing Simon Gathercole, Timmer adds that reducing 1QS’s soteriology to “getting in” and “staying in” also flattens the document’s own strong emphasis on a final, works-based reckoning.¹⁷

Timmer closes by connecting this directly to New Testament soteriology: despite humanity’s inability to fulfill the law, God has revealed in Jesus Christ the righteousness he requires (Rom. 3:19-20).¹⁷

Galatians 3:10-14

James Dunn reads the curse Paul pronounces on those who “rely on works of the law” (Gal. 3:10) not as a curse for failing to keep the law perfectly, but as an “ecclesiological” curse on Jewish nationalism: Israel misused the law as an exclusionary boundary marker, and Christ bore that curse to open the covenant people to Gentiles.¹⁵ O’Kelley argues this reading “must be deemed implausible for several reasons.”¹⁵ Deuteronomy 27:26, the verse Paul quotes to establish the curse, threatens it for disobedience to the law in general, not for exclusive nationalism specifically. Dunn’s own account also equivocates about who bears the curse and why, at one point locating it on Israel’s nationalism and elsewhere describing Christ’s work as delivering “the heirs of the covenant promise from the ill effects of the too narrow understanding of covenant and law held by most of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries,” a shift Seyoon Kim summarizes: “It is no longer the curse for a wrong understanding of the law, but the curse of a wrong understanding.”¹⁸

Stephen Westerholm presses the ecclesiological reading with a series of questions it cannot answer:

“According to Paul, Jews before Christ lived ‘under sin’ no less than did the Gentiles (Gal. 3:22); they lived in the ‘flesh,’ a flesh for whose typical expressions Paul has a handy list (5:19-21), none of whose items is readily rendered ‘ethnocentrism.’ How is it, then, that their failure to ‘abide by all the things written in the book of the law’ can be limited to the claims of racial privileges? Did the Sinaitic covenant itself provide atonement for all transgression except this one? For that matter, were all Jews guilty of racism, or were the select few who escaped this sin in no need of Christ’s death? Was the death of Christ the only way Jews could be disabused of their misunderstanding? Had it no broader function?”¹⁹

Galatians 2:16, Romans 3:20, and Romans 4:4-8

Andrew Michael Hassler’s 2011 SBTS dissertation, approved by Thomas R. Schreiner, Brian J. Vickers, and Jonathan T. Pennington, turns to Paul’s own citation habits: his allusion to Psalm 143:2 in Galatians 2:16 and Romans 3:20, and his citation of Psalm 32:1-2 in Romans 4:6-8.²⁰

In Galatians 2:16, at the propositio of the letter, and again in Romans 3:20, Paul grounds his argument for faith over works in a psalm where the psalmist confesses that no one living can be justified before God:

“It is virtually certain that Paul at least alludes to Psalm 143:2 in Galatians 2:16…. My contention is that this allusion, both here and in Romans 3:20, is ideally suited to Paul’s argument if a Jewish ethnocentric legalism is what has sparked his polemic. In Psalm 143:2, the psalmist proclaims that no one living is ‘justified’ before God, the implication being that, because of inherent unworthiness, no one can withstand the judgment of God.”²¹

Paul intensifies the allusion in Romans, adding a phrase that ties his wording even more closely to the Greek Old Testament text of the psalm, and pairs it with a clause on what the law does accomplish. Hassler argues this creates two connected problems for a reading that limits Paul’s target to Jewish ethnocentrism:

“Seeking refuge in the law through one’s presumed obedience without a proper understanding of how faith justifies creates two problems. First, it wrongly separates Jews from Gentiles (ethnocentrism), which has its root in the second, more fundamental problem: it obscures the fundamental necessity of grace. This is, in essence, legalism, and it is the reason Paul employs Psalm 143:2 at this point.”²²

Hassler answers Richard Hays’s argument that the allusion trades on the psalm’s wider theme of God’s own covenant faithfulness rather than personal unworthiness before God: Hays, he notes, “works strictly with a ‘non-legalism framework’ that most scholars have accepted since the emergence of the New Perspective on Paul,” so his reading of the psalm’s context presupposes the very point at issue rather than settling it.²³

Hassler presses the same point from Paul’s citation of David in Romans 4:6-8, a text he calls the most difficult in his study for a corporate reading. Unlike Abraham, who predates circumcision, David was a circumcised, law-observant Israelite already inside the covenant when he wrote the psalm Paul quotes:

“While it was necessary to provide a reading of Romans 4:1-5, it is 4:6-8 that are the most problematic for the corporate view of justification. Here Paul shifts from the great forefather of the faith to the greatest king in Israel…. This man has his ‘lawless deeds’ forgiven and his ‘sins’ covered (v. 7)…. The only ‘works’ the ‘blessed’ man has in this instance are ‘lawless deeds’ and acts of sin, not anything that could be considered in line with the will of God.”²⁴

Against James Dunn, who reads David’s “lawless deeds” as code for standing outside the ethnic covenant rather than for moral sin, Hassler answers that David never left the covenant:

“David was still an Israelite. According to the notion of covenantal nomism, it is only outright rejection of the covenant that puts one outside of the covenant, not moral failure, no matter how great…. If Paul was mainly concerned with the social separation created by the law, how is David one of the quintessential figures to whom appeal should be made? One would think Paul would be concerned with the way David’s circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, and food observances kept Gentiles out of the family of God and thus avoid his example altogether. Yet, Paul appeals to his testimony here at a key point in his discussion of justification by faith.”²⁵

Hassler concludes that Paul cites David not only to extend his argument to Gentiles but to remind Jewish readers that they too have always been justified by faith, since human pride obscures the reality of grace regardless of covenant status.²⁶

Wright reads the same chapter’s earlier language of “reward” differently. He argues that Paul’s reference to Abraham’s reward in Romans 4:4 alludes to God’s promise of a family in Genesis 15:1, not to a view of justification that involves earning a righteous status:

“[Paul’s] reference to Abraham’s ‘reward’ (μισθός) in 4.4 is an allusion to Gen. 15.1, where the ‘reward’ is the large family; he is not then, refuting a view of justification which involves ‘earning’ a righteous status.”²⁷

Wright’s argument addresses Abraham’s own reward language specifically; it does not extend to David’s forgiveness in verses 6-8, the harder case Hassler presses from the same chapter.

Romans 9:30-10:13

Paul draws the same contrast three times in this passage: “the righteousness based on faith” against “the law of righteousness” (9:30-31); “the righteousness of God” against “their own righteousness” (10:3); “the righteousness based on the law” against “the righteousness based on faith” (10:5-6).²⁸ Cranfield reads Israel’s failure as a legalistic distortion of the law; Dunn and Wright read it, as with Galatians 3, as a nationalistic one.²⁸ O’Kelley argues the immediate context resists both readings in favor of a straightforward law/gospel contrast:

“Romans 10:5-6 contrasts ‘the righteousness that is based on the law’ with ‘the righteousness based on faith.’ Here ‘law’ and ‘faith’ stand over against one another. Paul again quotes Leviticus 18:5 in Romans 10:5 in order to demonstrate that the principle of ‘doing’ is at work in the law according to the law’s own testimony, as opposed to faith.”²⁹

The same law/gospel contrast recurs in Galatians 3:12 and Philippians 3:9.²⁹ On O’Kelley’s reading, Israel’s actual failure was neither legalism nor nationalism specifically but a refusal to let the law’s own guardian role give way to Christ, whom the law itself pointed toward: “Israel has distorted the law by absolutizing it, when the law itself always looked forward to the day when its guardian role would be brought to [an] end by the advent of faith.”³⁰

Philippians 3:2-11

Paul calls his former, pre-Christian standing under the law “blameless” (Phil. 3:6), a word new perspective scholars have taken as evidence that Paul saw no inherent deficiency in his own law-keeping. Sanders states the point directly: “Paul had no trouble fulfilling the law satisfactorily. It is most important that Paul’s argument concerning the law does not in fact rest on man’s inability to fulfil it.”³¹ O’Kelley responds that Paul’s blamelessness is relative to a Pharisaic community’s own standards of outward observance, the same sense in which the Pastoral Epistles require elders to be “above reproach” (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6), not a claim that he had actually met God’s own standard of perfect obedience.³² Paul’s own language in the same passage tells against Sanders’s reading: he opens by warning against “the dogs,” “the evildoers,” and “those who mutilate the flesh” (v. 2), then lists his own former credentials as one who had belonged to that very group, before counting “all as loss and dung” what he once called blameless (vv. 7-8).³² Stephen Westerholm draws out the point:

“It would be wrong to conclude from what Paul says here that he saw nothing unsatisfactory in the righteousness of the law and only opted for faith in Christ because it somehow seemed even better. Though ‘blameless’ from his former perspective, his persecution of the church (3:6) could only have appeared to him, from the moment he encountered the risen Christ, as a bad thing to have done (cf. 1 Cor. 15:9). And all his merits under the law he characterizes as belonging to the realm of the flesh (Phil. 3:3-4). For Paul that means they could not please God (cf. Gal. 3:3; Rom. 8:7-8).”³³

Paul also contrasts “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” with “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (v. 9). Wright reads Paul’s “own” righteousness not as personal moral achievement but as a claim to Jewish covenant status: “not a moralistic or self-help righteousness, but the status of orthodox Jewish covenant membership.”³⁴ O’Kelley answers that Paul’s own list of credentials in verses 4-6 will not support the distinction Wright draws: four items concern his birth and heritage, and three concern his personal achievement under the law, moving “seamlessly” from one to the other, so that Jewish heritage and personal law-keeping cannot be divided as Wright’s antithesis requires.³⁵

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

Where Wright holds that justification is a declaration of covenant status rather than the reckoning of an alien righteousness, the 2LBCF grounds justification in Christ’s own obedience credited to the believer:

“Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.”³⁶

A. A. Hodge states the same conviction in scholastic terms: “his perfect righteousness, as imputed to us, is the sole and strictly legal ground of our justification.”³⁷ Herman Bavinck distinguishes the ground of justification from its instrument in a way that bears directly on Wright’s covenant-membership reading: faith justifies “not because it itself is righteousness, but by its content, because it is faith in Christ, who is our righteousness.”³⁸ Brian Vickers makes the same point through Abraham’s own justification, the very text Wright reads as covenant membership rather than imputation:

“By faith, Abraham stands before God as one who has fulfilled every standard and condition expected by God. If God declares that Abraham is righteous, it means that God himself views Abraham as a righteous person. The surprising turn in the story is that ‘righteousness,’ typically associated with what one does, is here declared on one who believes.”³⁹

Justification, on this account, is not God recognizing a status the believer already holds, as Wright’s covenant-membership reading has it. It is God crediting the believer with a righteousness that was never theirs to begin with: Christ’s own.

Against Dunn and Wright’s reading of “works of the law” as boundary markers rather than law-keeping as such, Charles Hodge states the common Protestant reading of Paul’s own antithesis: “faith is merely the instrumental cause of justification,” standing opposed to any human doing, not merely to a subset of ceremonial observances.⁴⁰ Edward Leigh makes the same point, insisting faith is reckoned in justification “not considered as a work.”⁴¹

Related Doctrines

• Justification
• Imputation
• Sola Fide
• Covenant Theology
• Federal Vision
• Gospel-Allegiance Model

Further Reading

Primary and sympathetic

• E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Fortress Press, 1977)
• N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Eerdmans, 1997)
• James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Eerdmans, 1998)

Critical

• D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols. (Baker Academic, 2001, 2004)
• Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1-5 (Eerdmans, 2002)
• Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Eerdmans, 2004)
• Guy Prentiss Waters, Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul: A Review and Response (P&R, 2004)
• Cornelis P. Venema, Getting the Gospel Right: Assessing the Reformation and New Perspectives on Paul (Reformed Fellowship, 2006)
• Peter Stuhlmacher and Donald A. Hagner, Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective (InterVarsity, 2001)
• Seyoon Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2002)
• A. Andrew Das, Paul, the Law, and the Covenant (Hendrickson, 2001)
• John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Crossway, 2007)
• Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010)

References

1. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), xii. ↩ ↩²

2. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), quoted in “A Summary of the New Perspective on Paul,” thepaulpage.com. ↩ ↩²

3. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Introduction,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 3. ↩ ↩²

4. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 75. ↩

5. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 543. ↩

6. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 32. ↩

7. Micah John McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 172-173. ↩

8. N. T. Wright, Rutherford House Conference 2003, quoted in “A Summary of the New Perspective on Paul,” thepaulpage.com. ↩

9. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 351, quoted in McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” 153. ↩

10. Michael Horton, “Which Covenant Theology,” in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry, ed. R. Scott Clark (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 199-200, quoted in McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” 153. ↩

11. Horton, “Which Covenant Theology,” 205-206, quoted in McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” 153. ↩

12. O’Kelley, “Three Prominent Reformers on Justification,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul,” 69-70. ↩

13. McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” 173. ↩

14. McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” 174. ↩

15. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul,” 168-171. ↩ ↩² ↩³

16. Daniel C. Timmer, “Variegated Nomism Indeed: Multiphase Eschatology and Soteriology in the Qumranite Community Rule (1QS) and the New Perspective on Paul,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52, no. 2 (June 2009): 341-56, at 341n1. ↩

17. Timmer, “Variegated Nomism Indeed,” 353. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

18. Seyoon Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 133, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 171. ↩

19. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul, 318, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 171. ↩

20. Andrew Michael Hassler, “Introduction,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 3. ↩

21. Hassler, “Psalm 143:2 in Galatians 2 and Romans 3,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul,” 71. ↩

22. Hassler, “Psalm 143:2 in Galatians 2 and Romans 3,” 99. ↩

23. Hassler, “Psalm 143:2 in Galatians 2 and Romans 3,” 100. ↩

24. Hassler, “Romans 4 and Psalm 32:1-2,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul,” 131, 133. ↩

25. Hassler, “Romans 4 and Psalm 32:1-2,” 136-137, responding to James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC, vol. 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988). ↩

26. Hassler, “Romans 4 and Psalm 32:1-2,” 138. ↩

27. N. T. Wright, “Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35, no. 3 (2013): 207, quoted in Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 105n148. ↩

28. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 181-183. ↩ ↩²

29. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 184. ↩ ↩²

30. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 185. ↩

31. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 443, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 193. ↩

32. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 193-195. ↩ ↩²

33. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul, 403, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 195. ↩

34. N. T. Wright, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 195-196. ↩

35. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 196. ↩

36. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩

37. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 33, “Justification.” ↩

38. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

39. Brian J. Vickers, Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 84, quoted in Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” 105n150. ↩

40. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVII. Justification,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 144. ↩

41. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London, 1654), bk. 7. ↩