Abstract
Justification Reconsidered: Rethinking a Pauline Theme
Stephen Westerholm
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. 104 pp. $15.00
Stephen Westerholm has dedicated a significant part of his academic career to interacting with the various “New Perspective” interpretations of the apostle Paul’s doctrine of justification. This short monograph is a summary and a supplement of his 488-page Perspectives Old and New on Paul, published in 2004. Westerholm teaches early Christianity at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
The book’s thesis is easily recognizable in the preface: “In this short work, I engage with scholars who have posed fresh questions, and proposed fresh answers, regarding the familiar texts in which Paul speaks of justification” (vii). Westerholm then discusses various strands of the “New Perspective,” and his reactions are based on a careful study of Paul’s thought, especially justification. He ultimately concludes that the traditional understanding of the apostle’s doctrine of justification is the proper one, while conceding and even appreciating a few of the insights of his revisionist foils.
Justification Reconsidered is divided into seven chapters. In chapter 1, “The Peril of Modernizing Paul,” Westerholm insightfully observes that “Our secularized age has undoubtedly thrust earlier concerns about human relationships with God into the background—if not rendered them completely unintelligible” (4). He begins by interacting with Krister Stendahl’s scholarship. Not surprisingly, the next chapter is devoted to a description and reaction to E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Westerholm concludes that when Sanders essentially banished “the worst caricatures of Judaism” from contemporary New Testament scholarship, “he also convinced many scholars that traditional views of justification are no longer tenable” (24).
Another Paul revisionist is soon up for engagement. Here, Finnish theologian Heikki Räisänen’s Paul and the Law is engaged. Westerholm addresses with remarkable brevity the issue of whether “untransformed” human beings can actually do what is good in a worldly sense, ultimately citing Romans 13 on governing authorities as proof that they can (42). Here it would have been helpful to bring into the discussion the term “civic righteousness.” The author understands the concept, but does not use the actual term.
N.T. Wright’s shadow in New Testament scholarship is a long one, and Westerholm engages Wright in the next chapter, “Justified by Faith,” which in many respects is the spine of Justification Reconsidered. Here he retells how Wright perceives Paul’s understanding of justification as largely in relation to Israel’s covenant history in which the crucified and risen Christ is understood as the representative Israelite (54). In reply, Westerholm provides a word study of righteousness and maintains that “Paul no doubt had his idiosyncrasies, but using ordinary words in a sense peculiarly his own was not among them” (65). He defines the biblical concept of righteousness as “what one ought to do” (65). Not as helpful is one part of Westerholm’s definition of the verb “justify.” One of his definitions is “finding innocent” (66). This reviewer believes it is more correct to define “justify” as “to declare righteous” (66) or “to declare not guilty,” and leave the word “innocent” to where it is in the New Testament, in Matthew 27:4, 21, where Jesus is described as innocent by both Judas and Pontius Pilate.
Westerholm devotes two more chapters to interacting with various New Perspective ideas. Chapter 5 addresses James Dunn’s scholarship and what Dunn believes Paul meant when he wrote about “works of the law,” which Dunn understood more as Jew and Gentile boundary markers (76–77). Westerholm sides more with Luther than with Dunn. In chapter 6, the basic thesis of Douglas Campbell’s 1,200-page monograph The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul is briefly analyzed and refuted, namely Campbell’s assertion that Paul’s metanarrative was not traditional justification theory but “apocalyptic redemption” (90).
Justification Reconsidered concludes with a summary chapter. The author concedes to the revisionists that Paul did first use the language of justification in the context of the Judaizing issue and that justification as Paul taught it did indeed have first-century social implications (98). Yet Westerholm concludes that, when reconsidered, “the doctrine of justification means that God declares sinners righteous, apart from righteous deeds, when they believe in Jesus Christ” (99).
Oldness does not necessarily mean obsolescence. A reading of Justification Reconsidered confirms that and gives the reader a succinct introduction to the issues involved when Pauline revisionists maintain otherwise.
Joel L. Pless
Wisconsin Lutheran College, Milwaukee