Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Re-imagining the Symbols of the Jewish Worldview (Torah)

We are considering N. T. Wright’s newly released Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God) — a massive and masterful consideration of Paul’s theology.

We been considering Wright’s review of the various symbols at the heart of the worldview of the Jews of Paul’s day: Temple, Torah, Prayer, Land, Family, Battle, and Scripture.  We pick up with Torah.

The Torah, or Law of Moses, is of course the first five books of the Bible. To the Jew, the Torah is the core of the scriptures. And in the First Century, much of the Torah had become impossible to keep for many Jews. The vast majority of Jews were part of the Diaspora, that is, the Jews dispersed across the Roman Empire by conquest, flight, exile, and business.

A Jew living in Spain might, at best, make a single pilgrimage to Jerusalem and so celebrate many of the feasts of the Jews once in his lifetime. Travel was both very expensive and very dangerous. He might attempt some sort of duplicate honoring of the feast day at home, but he could not climb into and out of a mikveh to walk the Temple grounds a cleansed child of God ready to offer a lamb as a sacrifice. He could not worship.

As a result, the Jews came to focus on the parts of the Torah they could honor: circumcision, the kosher rules regarding food, and the Sabbath especially. And in Paul’s day, it was well understood that obedience to these commands served to mark the Jews as separate from the Gentiles.

It wasn’t just that the Jews obeyed the Law and the Gentiles did not. The Jews kept these particular laws very intentionally because they marked themselves as Jews. After all, most of the Empire did not take off every seventh day. Closing your shop and refusing to work your fields on the seventh day was a conspicuous decision. Refusing to eat pork and countless other foods enjoyed by the Gentiles further separated the Jews at the marketplace and the dinner table.

In fact, although not commanded by the Law, the practice had evolved that Jews would not eat with Gentiles at all — in part to help keep kosher and in part to avoid the uncleanness necessarily associated with those who do not keep the Law. Of course, this refusal of hospitality had the effect of very effectively dividing Jew from Gentile, so much so that many cities had separate Jewish quarters so that the Jews and Gentiles could be as separate as possible.

Paul, of course, radically re-interpreted the Torah — and these boundary markers — in light of the work of Jesus to fulfill God’s covenant with Abraham, as we learn in Gal 3 and Rom 4. In particular, the resurrection of Jesus demonstrated that it was time for God to invite the nations into the Kingdom.

The question therefore arose as to whether the Gentiles must become proselytes — or at least honor the boundary markers of Judaism — to be part of the Kingdom. And Paul concluded that the need to mark Jew as separate from Gentile was over. All are invited! Therefore, the real boundary marker is no longer circumcision but faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord.

In short, because the boundary of the Kingdom is faith in/faithfulness to Jesus, nothing else can be.  However, Wright wryly notes that declaring what is and isn’t indifferent is not a matter of indifference! When Paul declared such cherished elements of Judaism as circumcision and the Sabbath as indifferent, he infuriated a great many Jews — Jews who were glad to see Gentiles enter the Kingdom if only they’d also become Jewish.

Paul’s reaction is not to buy time, be patient hoping they’d come around, or any such thing. Rather, in Galatians 5, he quite plainly declares them damned.

(Gal 5:1-6 ESV) For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.  2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you.  3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law.  4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.  5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.  6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

Why are his opponents lost in their sins? Not merely because they are wrong, but because they are setting up as a boundary to the Kingdom something other than “faith working through love.” It is faith by which we “eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.” It not that circumcision is part of the Law but that it’s not faith in Jesus. They are standing in the way of the salvation of the nations. And they are dividing the church, by separating Jews from Gentiles — wrongly treating many brothers and sisters in Christ as damned.

And that should be the direst, most fearsome warning to those in the Churches of Christ (and many other denominations) who insist that salvation is bounded by denominational markers, rather than faith in Jesus. In chapter 1, Paul declares such thinking another gospel — a damning lie.

No eldership, no teacher, and no blogger should ever hide the truth of Paul’s teaching. Plainly, if we insist on setting up as “salvation issues” such items as instrumental music and the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, we’ve set up something other than faith/faithfulness in Jesus as a Kingdom boundary — and Paul could not be more severe in his his condemnation.

Why? Why does missing this turn mean so much? Well, first, because God gets to make his own rules, and he’s decided to draw the line at faith in/faithfulness to Jesus. (Wright uses this combination because it’s true to the Greek word, pistis, often translated “faith” but also “faithfulness.” I do the same because I want to avoid the lie that faith in Jesus somehow doesn’t include obedience to him as Lord. Of course, it does — but “obedience” does not mean perfect obedience. Rather, faithfulness is about the state of the heart — very akin to how we often use “repentance.”)

Second, had God made other things the standard, he would have made it more difficult to invite the nations into the Kingdom, while his goal is to save as many as possible (John 3:16 is pretty clear). When we make instrumental music and such like barriers to salvation, we stand in the way of the very purposes of God in sending Jesus to be crucified.

Finally, look at what the relationships between Jews and Gentiles had been like because of these boundary markers. Jews refused to eat with Gentiles. Jews lived in segregated quarters to avoid the taint of the Gentiles.

Such a separation of Christian from non-Christian would, of course, destroy evangelism. Paul is quite plain —

(1Co 5:9-13 ESV)  9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people — 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.  11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler — not even to eat with such a one.  12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?  13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

In the Kingdom, we are free to associate with the lost. They are in need of a Savior. Of course, we should associate with them!

But willful sinners within the Kingdom, they should be expelled. We are to judge those inside the church, but not those outside the church!

Of course, the modern church often gets this exactly backwards, refusing to play softball with the damned while looking the other way at sin within the church. I mean, we do have this tendency to try to separate ourselves from the world we’re supposed to be saving.

And so, if the Judaizing teachers had gotten their way, not only would Christians have to keep kosher and be circumcised, we’d have to disassociate ourselves from those we consider lost and mark ourselves as separate (hanging fish symbols on our cars?), even segregating ourselves into separate subdivisions when we have the political power to do so. We might even attempt to have our own political party and run out of the church those who vote wrong.

No, the church is bounded by faith in/faithfulness to Jesus. To do otherwise is to invite the ghetto-ization of Christianity, segregating ourselves from the lost and thereby destroying our influence over them.

This analysis gives far greater poignancy to the words of Peter at the Jerusalem council —

(Act 15:8-11 ESV)  8 “And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to [the Gentile converts], by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us,  9 and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.  10 Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?  11 But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”