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I'm continuing my way through Stephen Westerholm's Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics.
An issue that has interested me is how scholars view Paul's stance on the law: Did they believe that Paul viewed the law as universal, or that he felt that God gave the law to Israel alone? It was frustrating to read Westerholm's summary of scholars in an attempt to find an answer to this question, for it appeared to me that scholars talked on both sides of their mouths. On the one hand, they talked as if Paul saw the law as something that convicts all of humanity of sin. On the other hand, they held that Paul thought that the law was given only to Israel, and so they vacillated between maintaining that Paul is speaking of the plight of humanity under the law, and saying that he's referring to the plight of Jews under it.
I appreciated Westerholm's summary of Heikki Raisanen, for Raisanen seems to have acknowledged the tension within Paul. Paul said that the Jews were under the law whereas the Gentiles were without it (Romans 2:1; I Corinthians 9:20-21; cf. Galatians 2:15), and yet Paul also says that churches that include Gentiles have been redeemed from the curse of the law, as if they were previously under the law's condemnation, and thus the law's authority.
As I read Westerholm's summary of various scholarly perspectives on Paul, I wondered if Paul was telling Gentiles not to enter God's people through circumcision and observance of the law, for the law was a dead end for Israel, which was weakened by sin. Moreover, could Gentiles have been under the law in the sense that they were under the authority of their own consciences, which overlapped with the law (Romans 2)? In any case, many scholars agree that, for Paul, Christians (Jews and Gentiles) obeyed the law by loving other people, apart from Mosaic rituals.
The issue of Paul and the law is something that I will continually revisit on this blog.
