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D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds. Justification and Variegated Nomism: Vol. 2: The Paradoxes of Paul. WUNT 2.181. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. xiii + 545 pp. $55.00.
This is the successor to Vol. 1, The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism (WUNT 2.140; 2001) by the same editors. Both volumes were stimulated by the work of E. P. Sanders and "the new perspective on Paul" which took off from Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Volume 1 focused particularly on the formula "covenantal nomism" which Sanders had put forward as the most succinct summary of Second Temple Judaism's pattern of religion and soteriology. Volume 2 turns principally to the NT and the "new perspective" proper as it focuses particularly on Paul.
Stephen Westerholm begins the volume with a very fair review of the "new perspective" (covering 33 contributions) which neatly complements his Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) published the same year (2004). He notes, for example, that Sanders has established the fundamental role played by divine grace in Jewish "soteriology," that Luther was "prone to see his own circumstances reflected in biblical texts," and that for both Paul and Luther faith in God "is a living, busy, active, mighty thing" (pp. 37-38).
Mark Seifrid's "Paul's Use of Righteousness Language Against its Hellenistic Background" is complementary to his vol. 1 essay on "Righteousness Language in the Hebrew Scriptures." His warning against reducing the Hebrew concept of "righteousness" to "covenant faithfulness" or "salvation" is fair (pp. 51-52), a warning presumably directed at Tom Wright. That God's "righteousness" towards the peoples he has created includes wrath and judgment as well as faithfulness and salvation is clearly implicit in the sequences Rom 1:16-18 and 3:3-6 (pp. 58-59). But apart from that, I do not regard the "covenantal nomism" thesis to be much disturbed by Seifrid's material.
Here should be mentioned also Seifrid's second article, "Unrighteous by Faith: Apostolic Proclamation in Romans 1:18-3:20" (pp. 106-45). It criticizes the new perspective in its focusing the problem addressed by Paul in Jewish "ethnocentrism" (pp. 130-32, 135), but acknowledges that the problem in view is "the false assumption that they (the Jews) possessed a special knowledge of the divine...