Is justification by faith the centre of Paul's Gospel?

One of the best books on Paul that I've come across recently was D A Campbell's The Quest For Paul's Gospel, which came out late last year. It is an ambitious book that aims to try and determine the centre of Paul's theology so as to better understand the overall coherence of his theology. The book is not another vociferous defence of the New Perspective, but neither is it a reaffirmation of the traditional Protestant view of Pauline theology. Campbell argues (with a considerable degree of success in my view) that if we see Paul's chief theological concern as being justification by faith, then many other parts of his theology are a non-sequitur and appear to be out of place, or even contradictory. That is not to say that Paul is disinterested in justification by faith - clearly he is - but that for him the core of the Gospel consists of something else altogether.

Campbell considers four models that may be used to understand Paul's theological thinking. The first is the anti-theological model (AT), which suggests that Paul is too inconsistent and irrational in his thinking and so a reconstruction of his theology is not possible. Campbell spends only a little time critiquing this idea before considering the other three main models that claim to most clearly explain Paul's theology.

The first model is the Salvation-Historical (SH) approach to Paul's theology, which understands Paul as now seeing the Church as the fulfillment of Israel's history (he places N T Wright in this camp) but ultimately Campbell detects too many problems with this model for it to be considered a coherent theological strategy for explaining the conclusions that Paul comes to. Personally I thought Campbell was a little too keen to dismiss this model without really interacting with it as much as he could have done.

Campbell's own suggested model is what he calls Pneumatological Participatory Martyrological Eschatology (hereafter PPME, for obvious reasons!), which he sees as superior to approaches that place either SH or Justification by Faith (JF) at the heart of Paul's Gospel. Without going into too much detail, Campbell believes that the role of the Spirit in creating and constituting a eschatological people who share "in Christ" is Paul's overriding theological concern and the heart of his theology. My intention for now is not to focus on Campbell's solution so much as on his criticism of some aspects of the traditional Protestant reading of Paul which places justification by faith at the centre of the Pauline Gospel.

Debates over what St. Paul really said about justification by faith are rife on the internet and frequently far too shrill and defensive for my liking and I don't really want to get stuck into one as they tend to be somewhat tiresome. I should be clear that Campbell does not deny justification by faith, but rather he argues that if JF is the centre of Paul's Gospel, then too many other parts of it do not make sense. Rather than being the core doctrine from which all else radiates, justification by faith is really a peripheral doctrine in Paul's overall evangelical scheme. Rather than seeing the Gospel in what is perhaps a more traditional evangelical manner, Campbell summarises Paul's Gospel thus:

"...the important thing for Paul is the new set of relationships created in Christ, as well as the new relational capacity human beings have "in" him Through Christians' relationships with the Spirit, they now relate, in Christ, to the Father. In short, Christ makes Christians into fully relation beings, that is, into real full persons."In Him" they can relate to God as they ought to. Outside of him, humanity is enslaved to hostile and evil forces that curve people in on themselves, away from God and from others, corrupting and distorting all their relationships." (p41)

So far, so interesting, but what I really want to focus on in this mini-series is Campbell's critique of the JF model. Many of his criticisms of the "Lutheran view" are not original, but they are still valid, and at least raise some interesting questions about how we might better put together the pieces of the Pauline puzzle.The next few posts in this series will outline some of Campbell's criticism in a little more depth.

(This post was shorter than I intended it to be, but I'm working an awful lot of hours at the moment so it's better to write several short posts rather than one long one!)