Overcoming Angst
I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; Romans 7:9 NASB
I died – In 1977, Krister Stendahl changed everything about the way Christianity understood Paul.[1] You probably didn’t know that; in fact, you probably never heard his name. What he started is now called the “New Perspective.” It is basically an attempt to understand Paul as a Jew in the Jewish Diaspora. But I’m guessing you never heard any preacher speak about this seminal work (or any of the men and women who continued the effort). I’m guessing that the Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist view of Paul is what you were taught, what you know, and what you believe. Eliska Havelkova summarizes it very well:
My perspective on Paul has been the whole life through the lens of the protestant tradition. I have been raised believing to have better understanding of Paul than those of the catholic provenience, thanks to the freedom brought by the reformation tradition. Paul, for me, was the man rediscovered by Luther, who finally found his answer to the question, “Wie bekomme ich einen gn.digen Gott?” Paul was the man who had spoken about the law, the law that threatened my personal salvation in case of my insufficiency. Paul was the man, whose theology was explained to me by the reformation tradition in the three uses of the law. Law is good, it shows how people should behave to each other, but in the face of God, its purpose has always been to put me on my knees, in order to receive mercy, and it is also supposed to teach me how to live my Christian life in thankfulness. Paul, explained by Bultmann, as a man who frees me from the existential Angst. This is the Paul I have been taught my whole life.[2]
Paul, the first Christian theologian, the apostle of freedom, the convert to grace, the man who overcame the oppressive guilt of the Law and showed us how to live victorious lives through Christ—that’s what we were taught. Stendahl, the Lutheran bishop of Sweden, overturned it all.
Stendahl says that “We should venture to suggest that the West for centuries has wrongly surmised that the biblical writers were grappling with problems which no doubt are ours, but which never entered their consciousness.” In his own exegesis of Rom 7, Stendahl shows, that Paul’s main struggle was to unite Gentile and Jewish Christians, not to help his troubled consciousness, which, in turn, was quite robust. Paul was not troubled because of his insufficiency in face of stern requirements of law. Law is holy and good, yet it is not a ticket to salvation or anything that a man should boast about, and in Romans 7 Paul is “involved in an argument about the law; he is not primarily concerned about man’s or his own cloven ego or predicament.”[3]
1977 was 43 years ago—an entire generation! Yet the Christian Paul continues to hold dominance in virtually all denominations. Why? If Paul was thoroughly Jewish and his message to ex-pagan Gentile followers of the Jewish Messiah was perfectly understandable within the Jewish context, why has Christianity continued to hold on to an anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish “convert” named Paul? The answer is appalling. A Jewish Paul undermines the entire edifice of Christianity. As Lloyd Gaston said, “A Christian Church with an antisemitic New Testament is abominable, but a Christian Church without a New Testament is inconceivable.” If Paul is Jewish, so is Messianic faith—and Christianity goes away. The Empire cannot allow such a conclusion—ever! So Stendahl is buried in the halls of academia, never to be heard by the sheep in the pews. We might ask who really died in that famous chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. I suspect it wasn’t Paul or the ex-pagan Messianic believers. Maybe it was all of us who thought Paul was a Christian.
Topical Index: Stendahl, New Perspective, Gaston, Romans 7:9
[1] Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays. Augsburg Fortress, 1977.
[2] Eliska Havelkova, “Un-Lutherizing Paul: The Far-Reaching Individualization in Protestant Readings of Rom 4,14-16,” Presented in Amsterdam June 2014, Comenius Conference
[3] Ibid.
