Justification by faith

Sven has been doing a series of reviews of a book, D A Campbell’s The Quest For Paul’s Gospel (here, here and here, with more to come). It’s interesting reading because of the way Campbell takes on justification by faith as the single central idea of Paul’s teaching. Campbell believes that reading Paul only through this lens will be misleading. (Note, though, that “justification by faith” here something more specific than one might assume. Particularly, it doesn’t mean that we are justified by faith alone – it means that everything Paul writes should be read as though this is the idea he’s dealing with.)

In the third part, Sven quotes some of what Campbell writes about a common view of God, as primarily concerned with retributive justice (punishing sin), and models for how God acts to save us that result from this view.

“By orienting the model’s first phase to God’s retributive justice, the model in fact commits the entire theological programme to this basal understanding of the divine nature; if all else fails or does not unfold, God will still, at bottom, be retributively just. It follows from this that any different attributes – for example, mercy – must in effect be super-added to God’s existing nature. They are accidental or occasional qualities, while the divine justice lies beneath them permanently. Indeed, they can only be exercised when the divine justice has been satisfied…
It is hard to see, then, how a God constrained by a fundamentally retributive attitude could act in a consistently and fundamentally gracious and loving fashion. These are, at bottom, different Gods…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this also calls many aspects of the [justification-by-faith] model of atonement into question, since what we see at Calvary is an accomodation of the divine love to the divine justice. Grace and love are made to fit within the retributive parameters that the [justification-by-faith] model is already committed to, and not vice-versa. Apart from an appropriation of the benefits of the cross by believers, other humans will encounter only God’s justice, will his love and mercy remain elusive…
Finally, the final justice of God on judgment day also becomes somewhat clouded when interpreted and developed through the theological precommitments of a [justification-by-faith]-centric soteriology:

“This fundamentally just God holds everyone accountable on the Last Day for any failure to perform good deeds. If this was to be a just scenario, however, then human beings would have to be capable of performing good deeds (as well as avoiding bad ones)...but the [justification-by-faith] model also holds that people are actually incapable of doing good deeds indefinitely, and of avoiding the bad. People are fundamentally fallen and corrupt by nature…And this raises an awkward question. It does not seem fundamentally just in retributive terms to hold people accountable for something that they could not avoid instrinsically.”

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:19am on 15 September 2006
Category: Books, Faith, Links

I’m having trouble pinning Campbell down in Sven’s series. Would you say he holds to the “New Perspective” on Paul? I read a book outlining its propositions, and he doesn’t seem far from it, at least in the language he is using to argue against justification by faith as a central tenet of Pauline theology.

Hammertime () (URL)
6:32pm on 22 September 2006

I couldn’t say personally, although Sven does (IIRC) say that Campbell isn’t actually an NPP type. He disagrees with JF as the central theme of Paul in much the same way as the NPP does, but I don’t think he agrees with them either! In any case, it’s been an interesting series.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
6:51pm on 22 September 2006