Theopedia

Stephen Westerholm

Overview

Stephen Westerholm (b. 1949) is a Canadian New Testament scholar long associated with McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, known chiefly for his sustained defense of the Reformation’s traditional reading of Paul’s doctrine of justification against the New Perspective on Paul.1 His 2004 monograph Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics is engaged directly by Reformed scholarship assessing the New Perspective’s claims about justification and the Mosaic law.23

Life and Ministry

Westerholm earned a BA and MA from the University of Toronto and a ThD from the University of Lund, Sweden, before a multi-decade teaching career in New Testament and early Christianity at McMaster University.1 His work centers on Pauline studies, particularly the letter to the Romans and the history of its interpretation from the Reformation to the present.1

Theological Contribution

The “Lutheran” Paul: restating the Reformation reading

In Perspectives Old and New on Paul, Westerholm sets out to state, carefully and on its own terms, the “Lutheran” reading of Paul inherited from the Reformation before assessing the New Perspective’s case against it. He deliberately puts “Lutheran” in quotation marks throughout, since the label names a type of reading shared across the Reformation traditions rather than only Martin Luther’s own views.2 He states the reading as a series of theses, four of which a Reformed dissertation assessing the New Perspective singles out as directly relevant to Paul’s doctrine of justification:

Thesis 1: Human nature, created good, has been so corrupted by sin that human beings are incapable of God-pleasing action. They are rightly subject to God’s condemnation.

Thesis 2: Human beings must be justified by divine grace, responded to in faith, and not by any works of their own.

Thesis 3: Justification by grace through faith leaves human beings with nothing of which they may boast in God’s presence. The (false) notion that human beings can contribute to their justification opens the door to a presumption that ill suits creatures in the presence of their Creator.

Thesis 5: The Mosaic law was given, in part, to awaken in human beings an awareness of their need of divine grace. Believers are delivered from its condemnation and need not observe its ceremonial prescriptions. The gift of God’s Spirit enables them (in some measure) to fulfill its moral demands.2

Westerholm also argues that a Paul who excludes human works from salvation generally, not merely Jewish boundary-marking practices from the terms of Gentile admission, cannot be dismissed as a post-Reformation “misreading” projected back onto the text: “no study that took Ephesians and the Pastorals into account could conclude … that the Pelagian crisis or sixteenth-century controversies are the source of the ‘misreading’ of Paul that sees him excluding human works from salvation rather than particular works from the terms for Gentile admission to the people of God.”4

Answering the New Perspective’s reading of “works of the law”

Westerholm presses a set of exegetical objections against James Dunn’s proposal that Paul’s phrase “works of the law” refers specifically to Jewish “boundary markers” such as circumcision and food laws, rather than to law-keeping in general:

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?3

A Reformed dissertation on the active obedience of Christ likewise draws on Westerholm’s account of justification as a forensic, legal term (one’s standing declared before God), against readings that recast it in primarily social or participationist terms.5

Sin, not ethnocentrism, as Paul’s target

Westerholm concedes a genuine point to the New Perspective: Paul did not first formulate the doctrine of justification in the context of “a debate whether one is saved by human effort or divine grace,” but in the context of the dispute over Gentile inclusion in the church.6 He nevertheless argues this was

in effect Paul’s “gospel” all along: a gospel of salvation for sinners facing God’s wrath, but graciously offered through Jesus Christ to all who believed in him.7

On this reading, the works Paul excludes from justification were not only Jewish boundary markers such as circumcision, but more broadly “the righteous works on the basis of which people were (ordinarily) thought to be righteous.”7 Paul’s fundamental disagreement with first-century Judaism, on Westerholm’s account, was therefore not ethnocentrism but sin: “The message of ‘justification by faith’ pertains in the first place not to how Gentiles may be included in the Jewish covenant but to how sinners—Jews and Gentiles alike—who are threatened by God’s wrath may enjoy God’s approval.”8

Historical Significance

Both a Reformed dissertation surveying the Reformation’s own doctrine of justification against the New Perspective’s central historical claim and one on the individual’s place in Pauline justification cite Perspectives Old and New on Paul repeatedly as their starting statement of the traditional position before engaging the New Perspective on its own terms.23

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Stephen Westerholm faculty biography, McMaster University, http://www.mcmaster.ca/mjtm/bio3-3.htm; McMaster University Department of Religious Studies, “Celebrating 33 Years of Service: Dr. Stephen Westerholm Retires,” https://religiousstudies.mcmaster.ca/news/dr-stephen-westerholms-retirement. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Andrew Michael Hassler, “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 3-4, quoting Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul, 318, quoted in Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 159-207 n. 8. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New, 406, quoted in Hassler, “Justification and the Individual,” 28-29 n. 105. ↩

  5. Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New, 441, quoted in Hassler, “Justification and the Individual,” 28 n. 103. ↩

  6. Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New, 442, quoted in Hassler, “Justification and the Individual,” 28-29 nn. 104, 106. ↩ ↩2

  7. Stephen Westerholm, “The Righteousness of the Law and the Righteousness of Faith in Romans,” Interpretation 58 (2004): 264, quoted in Hassler, “Justification and the Individual,” 29 n. 108. ↩