The Upper Register

ETS Annual Meeting this week

I'll be at the ETS Annual Meeting in Atlanta this week, traveling with my friend, the Rev. Bob Bjerkaas. I'm presenting a paper on Friday afternoon. Here's the abstract:

Δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ: A Cipher for “God’s Covenant Faithfulness”?

Advocates of the New Perspective on Paul appeal to the view that “righteousness” in biblical theology is a Verhältnisbegriff (relational concept). This is the view that “righteousness” does not mean conformity to a norm, nor is it an essentially legal concept; rather, “righteousness” denotes the fulfillment of the demands of a relationship, since the relationship itself is the norm. This relational interpretation of “righteousness” was first put forward by Hermann Cremer in 1899 and exercised a profound influence in biblical scholarship throughout the 20th century. It lies at the root of the New Perspective claim that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in Paul is a cipher for God’s saving faithfulness to his covenant. In this paper, I critically examine Cremer’s chief arguments for the relational interpretation. The paper summarizes the fruits of an exhaustive lexical study of tsedeq and tsedaqah in the Hebrew Bible and their translational equivalents in the Septuagint.

It should be an interesting meeting. It will be helpful to hear N. T. Wright, Frank Thielman, and Tom Schreiner speaking individually and then interacting together as a panel on Friday morning. One's understanding of a scholar's position is deepened by the combination of reading what they have published and then hearing them explain their ideas orally in person. It's even better if you get a chance to ask them questions.

Holy tedium - we can't get away from the words

As I slog through my dissertation, which is basically a word study on "righteousness," I sometimes feel the tedium of word studies. But the following quote cheered me up. 

In his Firth Lectures of 1962, Bishop Stephen Neill, has just been discussing James Barr's influential 1961 book, The Semantics of Biblical Language, a book that has greatly influenced me and my interest in biblical lexicography, and thus directly contributed to my decision to pick "the righteousness of God" as my dissertation topic. "In the year 1961," writes Neill, "a large stone was thrown with great violence into the calm pool of Biblical studies" by the publication of this book. Barr had exposed some of the faulty linguistic assumptions behind one of the pillars of biblical scholarship, Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

After summarizing Barr's critique of Kittel, Neill writes:

"It may seem that this chapter has come down with a sudden bump from the hills to the plains. We were considering the highest flights of New Testament understanding and now we have come back to words -- to the details of linguistic theory, of grammar, and of syntax -- subjects that many readers will feel glad to have left behind in their schooldays. But is that really a come-down? Is it not simply a frank recognition of the nature of the revelation which is there in the Bible? 'We have this treasure in earthen vessels', says St. Paul of his own ministry; by analogy the same phrase can be used of the Scriptures. If revelation comes to us as the Word of God, it can come only through words; every word has its history, it is related to other words, it stands somewhere in a complex linguistic structure. Words, as we said, are not solid objects like marbles; they are flexible, always changing their meanings and their connotations, difficult to seize in their integrity, always a little recalcitrant in the hands of the one who uses them. Try as we will we cannot get away from the words, in themselves, and in those subtle grammatical structures that build up sentences and paragraphs and books. In theology no one renders us more valuable service than the scholar who helps us to understand the words better, who guides us through the subtleties of idiom, who heads us off from the blind alleys of false etymology or false interpretation of usage. For him the work may be tedious -- for those who profit by his labours the results may be illuminating in the extreme."

[Stephen Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861--1961: The Firth Lectures, 1962 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 334-35. Yes, I know there is a Second Edition published in 1988, in which N. T. Wright provided an update of NT scholarship up to 1986. But I prefer the original edition; that way I can enjoy the older Bishop's writing unalloyed by the "newer perspectives" of the younger Bishop.]

Anyway, I enjoyed that quote. There does seem to be a general sense that word studies are just not that important or helpful. It is often said that word studies, philology, and grammatical exegesis can't resolve this or that debate, that we have to engage in broader historical, philosophical, and theological analyses. But I think Neill is right: "Try as we will we cannot get away from the words, in themselves." The work may be tedious, but ultimately there is no other route to grasping the meaning of God's word.

Some additional links on Stephen Neill:

Neill's involvement in the ecumenical movement

A good paper on Neill's life

Romans 2:6-13: Response to Sam Waldron, Pt. 4

I've let my blogging slide for a while as I make a push to finish my dissertation by the end of the year. In the meantime, it has been brought to my attention that Sam Waldron responded to a post in which I quoted Murray as holding to the hypothetical interpretation of Rom 2:13 (but not Rom 2:6-11). It looks like we have both shifted somewhat from our initial attempts to claim Murray unambiguously in support of our divergent views. I started out claiming Murray for the "hypothetical" team; and Waldron started out claiming Murray totally for the "evangelical obedience" team. By means of the give-and-take of blogging, we both have given and retained some ground. I have conceded Murray to Waldron's side regarding Rom 2:6-11 and Waldron has conceded Murray to support my interpretation of Rom 2:13 (just this narrow verse). Because Murray adopted a mediating position, we can both have our Murray and eat it too.

In this same post, Waldron brings up another issue, the question of how Rom 2:25-29 fits into the broader context of Romans 1:18--3:20. Let me back up for a moment. My argument is that Rom 2:13 must be taken hypothetically because it is the interpretation that makes best sense in the context, which is a diatribe with an imaginary Jewish interlocutor who thinks that he will be accepted as righteous at the day of judgment on the basis of his law keeping. As Calvin writes in his commentary, Paul's point in Rom 2:13 is not to assert that post-fall humans can in fact be justified by keeping the law but that "if righteousness be sought from the law, the law must be fulfilled; for the righteousness of the law consists in the perfection of works." The Jews do not keep the law perfectly; therefore, they are condemned rather than justified by the law. This is precisely what Paul says in the preceding verse: "All who have sinned under the law will be judged/condemned by the law" (v 12b, taking krino in the negative sense). And why is it that the law condemns the Jews who think that they will be justified by the law? "For (gar) it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified" (v 13 ESV). As Paul goes on to say in vv 17-24, the Jews boast in the law and yet they break the law. The very thing in which they boast will bring them not justification but condemnation.

Now I have been arguing that it does not fit in the scope of this argument to take v 13 as an affirmation that the evangelical obedience of believers will be the eschatological vindication of the genuineness of their profession of faith. As true and as theologically sound as that may be, it is not germane to the context, namely, Paul's diatribe with the Jewish interlocutor as part of a larger indictment of Gentiles and Jews whose conclusion is stated in Rom 3:9-20. 

Waldron responds by pointing out that later in the same chapter Paul brings up the evangelical obedience of the Christian (vv 25-29). He writes: "By Irons' reasoning we should not find all this stuff about the truly circumcised man who does good works and so proves that he is a true Jew in this context. And yet we do!" I guess his point is that Paul sometimes goes off into irrelevant tangents in the midst of pursuing other arguments.

Really? In my view, Waldron is wrong to interpret the language of "the circumcision of the heart" and the "true Jew" as unambiguous, explicit, and direct references to the evangelical obedience of Christians. These terms surely could be applied to Christians, but I don't think Paul is, at this point in his argument, speaking so directly of the new obedience of Christians. None of the terms used in vv 25-29 is outside the bounds of the Old Testament or Jewish point of view. The notion that a true Jew is not one who is merely outwardly circumcised but one who is also circumcised in heart is taught in Deut 10:16; 30:6; Jer 4:4; 9:25-26; Ezek 44:7, 9. It is further explored in such non-canonical Jewish texts as the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS V,5; 1QpHab XI, 13), Philo (Spec. 1.305; Migr. 92), and Jubilees (1:23). Paul has not gone beyond a Jewish frame of reference in vv 25-29. He is still engaging in a diatribe to indict the Jews who boast in the law of actually being law breakers. This part of the diatribe, the exposure of the hypocrisy of the Jew, also contains a hypothetical reflection on the possibility of one who is not physically circumcised, yet who keeps the law. Would it not be a condemnation of the law "boasting-yet-breaking" Jew if there were such a thing as a law "not-boasting-yet-keeping" Gentile?

Now it is certainly true that in the back of Paul's mind, he knows that regenerate, Christian Gentiles do fit the description in a non-literal, "new covenant" sense, i.e., they fulfill the moral core of the Mosaic law by the Spirit, even though they do not literally keep the Mosaic law in its totality. Indeed, his audience of Roman Christians who were primarily Gentiles, probably overheard the description here as one that ultimately does include them (in a different way than the Jews would recognize). I have no doubt that Paul delights in the irony of his Christian audience overhearing a deeper meaning that the imaginary Jewish interlocutor wouldn't "get." But as Brendan Byrne says, "It is a disservice to Paul’s argument to 'Christianize' it 'too early' and fail to appreciate the way in which it operates as an 'inner-Jewish' indictment couched in biblical terms" (Romans [Sacra Pagina 6; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1996], 104). 

Paul's point in Rom 1:18--3:20 is to reach the conclusion that "by the works of the law no human being will be justified in [God's] sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin" (3:20 ESV). It would singularly distract from that argumentative conclusion, and in fact seem to contradict it, were Paul to be read as affirming that "the doers of the law will be justified" (2:13) in a real sense, a reading that can only be made orthodox by changing the meaning of the key terms "doer," "law" and "justified" in this one verse, and taking them in ways out of accord with the meaning in which they will be used in the conclusion of the argument.