Dwight Pryor on Sinful Nature

BySkip Moen, Ph.D.

nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.  Galatians 2:16 NASB

In – What a difference it makes to change even a single preposition!  Galatians 2:16 uses the Greek genitive case for the nouns Iesousand Christos.  This means the words should be translated “of” not “in.”  It is the faith of Yeshua that produces justification, not our belief in Yeshua.  Catholic scholar Felix Just makes some significant remarks about this mistranslation, noting that ideas like faith, salvation and justification are not states of being but rather relational processes (see http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Paul-Justification.htm, although I disagree with his conclusions about Torah).

In his excellent lecture series on Paul, Dwight Pryor clearly demonstrated that changes like this resulted from the Church adopting a Platonic-Augustinian view of human nature not warranted by the Scriptures.  Here are summary remarks from Pryor’s lectures:

  1. According to Christian doctrine, Adam and Eve were created perfect and their souls were immortal. But the Torah teaches that they were created innocent, not perfect, with the potential for immortality. The separation of body and soul is an imported idea not found in the Genesis text.

 

  1. In the Christian view, God created death as punishment for sin. But if Genesis 3 is descriptive, not prescriptive, then it describes the inevitable consequence of disobedience, namely, mortality.  It is not about God punishing human beings with death but rather about what it means to be separated from the God of life.

 

  1. In his influential work, The City of God, Augustine adopted a Platonic view of Man and defined our true destiny as residents in heaven as immortal souls.  Augustine’s view followed Plato by considering the material (body) essentially corrupt and therefore not capable of immortality.  This created the dualism that still infects Christian thought, a dualism not found in the Hebraic world.

 

  1. By the 4th Century, Christianity organized itself around the Apostle’s Creed and the sacraments. Righteousness became an imputed action – a “legal” fiction – as conceived by Luther.  The focus turned toward the individual, not humanity.  Faith, as a state of being, was now personal and the objective of salvation was to get to heaven.   The Reformers added a penal theory of atonement, not found among the Apostles or the early Church fathers.  The Apostles provided no theory of atonement.  They just used imagery from Jewish thought, such as victory, ransom, reconciliation, sacrifice, suffering, and adoption.  There are many different views in the parables but the Western mind wants theanswer.  Once again we see that Hebraic teaching is directed toward practical and relational actions where Christian theology is directed toward fixed states of being.

 

  1. Categories of Roman law became the central idea of justification but justification is only mentioned two times by Paul. Many other Jewish ideas are more dominant.  Consequently, Christians tend to read the Jewish texts as if it were Roman law, that is, as if they were about punishment and reward, not guidance for a community.  The texts become descriptions of God as the great Policeman in the Sky rather than relational instructions about how to walk in the world for individual and unique communities. Paul’s rabbinic approach is ignored.

 

  1. The Geneva Bible of 1599 completely misunderstood Romans 5:12 (“even so death went over all men in whom all men have sinned”).  This is a mistranslation of the Greek into Latin.  In Latin the phrase is “en quo” – in whom – but in Greek it is “because.”  Luther, Calvin, Piper and Sproul all follow Augustine in this. This mistaken translation fuels the idea that all men were represented in Adam and that all men deserve death due to Adam’s sin.  The doctrine of original sin is generated from this translation. The foundation of original sin is that we inherit guilt from Adam and therefore we die, but the texts suggest that we inherit death, not guilt, because each one of us sins.  The issue for Paul is mortality, not legal status.

 

  1. In Jewish law the idea of original sin is blasphemy against God.  After all, God’s image is in Man.  If Man is essentially sinful, what does that imply about God’s image? According the Jewish thinking, “choice” is the crucial term.  If Augustine is correct, then God is cruel and capricious, consigning men to eternal death as a result of being born.

 

  1. There is an important distinction between propitiation and expiation. Propitiation is  always about the person while expiation is always about the object.  To expiate death is to deflect death so the consequence no longer applies.  It is to be set free to the domain of the Messiah.  Expiation is about the problem of the consequence of sin.

 

I highly recommend these lectures.  They are clear and concise.

Topical Index:  Dwight Pryor, sinful nature, death, atonement, Augustine, Galatians 2:16

First published 20 October 2015