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I have two slightly-overlapping items for my write-up today on Stephen Westerholm's Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics:
An evangelical view on the Gospel that I have repeatedly encountered says that a pure and holy God will only be satisfied by moral perfection (obedience to the Sinaitic law, for Jews, and to the moral demands of the conscience that overlap with the law in significant areas, for Gentiles), and, because we all fall short of that, we can only be saved by trusting Jesus Christ's sacrifice for our sins on the cross. Westerholm discusses two issues that stood out to me in my reading today. First of all, did Paul really believe this---that the law can only save if a person obeys it perfectly? Second, considering that Paul did view the law as a dead end that led to condemnation and death rather than life and righteousness, how did Paul address the fact that the Torah and Judaism had provisions for atonement? Don't they prevent the law from leading inexorably to condemnation and death? Was Paul unaware of that?
For the first issue, whether Paul believed that God only would accept perfect obedience to the law were one to try to obey the law to become righteous in God's sight, Westerholm on page 375 refers to scholars who interpret Galatians 3:10 (which mentions a curse on those who do not do all things in the law) to mean that "100 percent fulfillment is needed if one is to be found righteous..." But Westerholm thinks that, even if the "passing grade of righteousness" were set lower, it's a moot point, for Paul believes that people fall short even of that. Paul says that humanity, after all, is under a curse.
Was Paul assuming a position within Judaism, a position that maintained that Jews needed to observe the law perfectly in order to be saved, thereby making the law a burden? Claude Montefiore says that, if Paul was responding to a Judaism of his day, it certainly wasn't rabbinic Judaism, for that had provisions for repentance and forgiveness. E.P. Sanders argues that the intent to keep the Torah was key in Palestinian Judaism, not the success at actually carrying it out. But Hans Hubner affirms that the Pharisaic House of Shammai held that transgression of one commandment was like disregarding the entire Torah, and he may believe that this led Paul to the conclusion that there was no hope to be found in the Torah, which was why Jesus Christ was necessary for righteousness and life. I wonder if Hubner addresses the view attributed to the House of Shammai in Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hoshanah 16b-17a, however, which states that the intermediate Jews (who are neither fully righteous nor fully wicked) will enter Paradise after spending some time in Gehinnom. This implies that a Jew does not have to keep the law perfectly in this lifetime to enter Paradise, for, even if he's intermediate, he can go there after a period of cleansing in Gehinnom.
Second, how does Westerholm address the issue of whether or not Paul was aware that there were provisions for atonement in the Torah and Judaism? From pages 381-383, my impression is that Westerholm's answer is that Paul had a much more pessimistic picture of Israel than did Second Temple Judaism and the Jewish Christians with whom Paul contended. According to Westerholm, Second Temple Jews, by-and-large, held that they did live up to the covenant and were righteous, and that there were sacrifices that took care of their inevitable sins. Westerholm speculates that Paul's Judaizing opponents, too, thought that the law could be kept, but they maintained that Jesus' sacrifice took care of the inevitable sins of people who were righteous, in an overall sense. Paul, by contrast, did not believe that Jews were living up to the covenant, and he did not think that the law would be a path to righteousness and life to Gentiles joining the people of God. Rather, Paul felt that the world was sinful and that an "apocalyptic transformation" needed to occur for people to become righteous. Westerholm's point may be that, for Paul, Yom Kippur, sin offerings, and guilt offerings were not sufficient to cleanse people from sin, for people needed to be transformed by God's Holy Spirit if they were to live righteous lives. For Westerholm, Paul viewed the sin problem as deeper than did Second Temple Judaism and Paul's Jewish Christian opponents.
