From Solution to Plight: E.P. Sanders’ PAUL

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:52 pm by Ben Witherington

From Solution to Plight: E.P. Sanders’ PAUL 2015-03-13T22:52:13-04:00 Ben Witherington

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It is difficult, some would say nigh impossible to do justice to Paul and his thought and ministry in a short book. While that is true, there are some short books on Paul that do him some justice, and are well worth the read. One such book is the revised edition of E.P. Sander’s Paul: A Brief Insight*. The book was originally published in 1991 by Oxford and then again in 2001, and then it was picked up for an illustrated and hardback edition by Sterling Publishing, and reissued with additional comments, updated bibliography and lovely pictures in 2009. This is a testimony to the durability of the book over a span of almost twenty years. One of the reason for this is that Sander’s book is very very readable for lay person, clergy, and scholar alike. The focus in the book is mainly on Paul’s writings rather than his mission and ministry, but it is none the worse for that. After so many lives of Paul in recent years that hardly deal with his thought world in any depth, this book is refreshing.*

Sanders is of course known for his game-changing book Paul and Palestinian Judaism which tried to further situate Paul in his early Jewish context, developing further some of the things W.D. Davies and others had suggested before Sanders. In this little book it becomes obvious that Sanders is rather indebted to Heikki Raisanen who has argued that Paul is no systematic theologian and that in fact there are places where Paul contradicts himself.

Sanders does not over-emphasis this idea like Raisanen, but it does lead to some unsatisfactory analysis at points in any case in this book. One really can’t have it both ways— You can’t praise Paul to the moon as a deep and creative and even logical thinker and then at the same time suggest he made blunders of inconsistency or failures in thinking things through that would characterize a young school boy. Which is it? Leaving that aside, it is clear enough that Sanders himself, like Paul, is an independent thinker about Paul and brings numerous good insights to the discussion. I will focus on just a few. Let’s start with what Sanders says about Paul’s views on ‘imputed righteousness’ and related matters.

On p. 108 Sanders says bluntly: “In the discussion of Romans 3-4 the verb ‘reckon’ (logizomai) derived from Genesis 15.6, comes into prominence (3.28, and eleven times in Chapter 4). This does not mean, however that Paul thinks of righteousness as being fictitiously imputed to those who have faith, while they remain sinners in fact. In sharing Christ’s death Christians have died to the old order. They no longer live in sin (6.2) but are ‘slaves’ of righteousness, who have become obedient to God (6.15-18). Paul picked up ‘reckon’ from Genesis, and then he repeated it, with no thought of a fictional ‘merely imputed’ righteousness.” This is in judgment absolutely correct. I would add that we must note that it is Abraham’s faith that is credited as Abraham’s righteousness, not Christ’s righteousness credited as the believer’s righteousness in Romans 4. Further more the language here is not judicial or forensic, it is from the business world of credits and debits. Sanders goes on to rightly stress that Luther also had it wrong. Paul believed that believers were truly transformed by grace through faith. They were no longer in the bondage to sin, like non-believers. As Sander’s adds, like a good early Jew emphasizing praxis and behavior Paul insists “Christians should lead morally blameless lives. The idea of fictional ,imputed righteousness, had not occurred to him, but had it done so, he would have raged against it. Since faith in Christ was the sole pre-requisite for being a member of Christ’s people, it followed that accepting the Jewish law or practicing was not necessary. As Sander’s says “This is the meaning of ‘righteoused by faith in Christ, not by works of the Law'”. (p. 110). “Paul thought that God did something other than keep track of people and alter his opinion about them. God ‘righteoused’ the person of faith as well as reckoned the person to be righteous. The active verb, with God as subject, occurs in Romans 3.26,30;4.5;8.30,33 and Galatians 3.8. The usual formulation is the passive verb, a person is ‘righteoused’. This passive however implies God as the understood subject…This means that the person’s name was not just moved from one side of God’s ledger to another, as reckon might imply, but that the person was transferred to another sphere, called variously ‘the body of Christ’, the Spirit, and the like. In this transfer a real change was effected, the first step towards the glorified body which would be attained at the return of the Lord. As a result of this change the new person found that good deeds flowed out naturally and that everything which the law had required was ‘fulfilled’ in his or her life (Rom. 8.4).” (p. 118). There is much more along these lines, and it should be said that Sanders agrees that Paul sometimes does use forensic language in discussing this matter (i.e. talking of acquittal for example), but he seldom talks about guilt and legal absolution. I’ll let you read Sanders on this and see what you think.

Less satisfactory is Sander’s analysis of Paul and the Law, though he makes some good points along the way (for example that only the sin of covetousness fits the discussion in Romans 7 of how there was sin which enticed and bedeviled all humans, because it could not be said that all were enticed to murder simply because the Law prohibited murder, or that all were enticed to commit actual adultery because the Law prohibited it (see the discussion on pp. 145-47).

Sander’s little book on Paul is an excellent conversation starter, and while his analysis does not always hold up, there are plenty of good insights in the book which tease the mind into active thought about Paul and his thought world, which was the purpose of such a book anyway. For my part, I think Sander’s under-estimates Paul as a coherent and consistent thinker. The Paul I encounter when I pick up the NT is rather like what John Donne says ‘wheresoever I open the letters of Paul, I hear thunder, a thunder which rolls throughout the earth’.

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