Revisiting Salvation in Paul’s “Judaism” with Preston Sprinkle

Last updated on: September 13, 2015 at 1:41 am by Michael F. Bird

Revisiting Salvation in Paul’s “Judaism” with Preston Sprinkle 2015-09-10T00:46:28-04:00 Michael F. Bird

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I’m refurbishing an old essay on “Salvation in Paul’s Judaism” and Preston Sprinkle is a good dialogue partner to spring ideas off:

Paul teaches that salvation comes from Judaism in a positive sense in terms of its point of origin because Christ himself came from Israel and to Israel (esp. Rom 9:4-5). In Pauline language, Gentiles have been grafted into a Jewish olive tree and they receive the patriarchal promises only because the Messiah served the circumcision (Rom 11:17-24; 15:8-9). Salvation will always be “for”Israel as well since the messianic age gains currency from the efficacy of Israel’s covenant promises. Still, there is no denying the tensions between Paul and his Jewish and Jewish Messiah-believing contemporaries when it comes to the means of salvation. Paul knows of several soteric schemes in Judaism such as ‘ethical monotheism’ (Rom 1:18-32), ‘covenantal nomism’ (Romans 2–3, 9–11), an ‘ethnocentric nomism’ (Galatians), ‘sapiential nomism’ (1 Cor 1:10–3:23), and ‘apocalyptic mysticism’ (Colossians). Against all of these, salvation comes from Judaism in an antithetical sense because: (1) the Torah has served to antagonize rather than solve the adamic condition of humanity in its state of alienation from God and one should not impose a deadly and defunct force upon his Gentile converts, (2) because the majority of Israel including its leaders have vigorously opposed the message of the gospel, and (3) the Torah’s temporal and ethnographic character did not lend itself to being the mechanism by which God achieved his purpose of extending salvation to the nations.

I want to stress that such an antithesis should not be pressed so as to evacuate Judaism, Israel, and the Torah of its genuinely salvific role in Paul’s narrative about the culmination of salvation in Christ. Paul is announcing the good news of salvation by announcing the fulfilment of Israel’s eschatological hopes. Still, Paul’s point of contention was not simply that Judaism needs to let the Gentiles into a Christ-religion while the Jews themselves continue on under the Mosaic religion, nor is it that the eschatological sands had simply shifted and Israel was yet to catch up – it is far more problematic than that – the end had come in Christ and not in Torah, for both Jews and Gentiles. Furthermore, when Torah’s role in salvation-history is viewed retrospectively through the lens of messianic faith it is seen as oppressive, ineffectual, and temporary. “Paul’s soteriology” says Sprinkle “remains within the Jewish spectrum of beliefs” rooted as it is in prophetic restoration eschatology. However, “Paul’s Damascus road encounter would entail a rereading of salvation history – a transposition of the divine and human dynamics in bringing eschatological salvation into the present through the death and resurrection of the Messiah” with the result that “the most unique element in Paul’s soteriology, one which used to offend his Pharisaic sensibilities and no doubt continued to sound outlandish, is the sacrificial death, bodily resurrection, subsequent enthronement, and personal indwelling, intercession and love that the risen Messiah accomplishes in and for wicked people, Jesus’ enemies, whom God stubbornly sought to justify.”[1]

[1] Preston Sprinkle, Paul & Judaism Revisited, 243-47, 249.

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