Sunday, November 15, 2020

Tom Holland on the Covenantal Law, not Criminal Law, Background to the Judicial Language used of Justification in Paul

  

If Paul’s understanding of justification and righteousness comes from the Law and the Prophets and not from the criminal law court, then it must affect how we understand Romans 4:3. The law and the Prophets provide a distinctly conventual framework for Paul’s argument. What Paul is saying is that Abraham believed  that God would make his son his heir and that he would become the first of millions of offspring. He was effectively believing that God would be faithful to the promise  he had made, and God responded by crediting to him righteousness, i.e., accrediting to him the status of what he was to become, the head of a redeemed covenant community. If this understanding is correct, then both Genesis and Paul see that the primary issue with which Genesis 15:6 is dealing is Yahweh’s acceptance of Abraham, God committed himself to Abraham in covenant, saying that he would act righteously toward Abraham, always keeping faith with his promise. Abraham’s faith was his response to the promise that Yahweh had given him; it was his ‘Amen, I want to be part of your covenant’. The matter of Abraham’s sin and its forgiveness is secondary, even though still very important. No covenant with Yahweh could be established without a proper dealing with sin. For the covenant to be established and ratified it is implied that the sin of Abraham has been dealt with. But again, to make that the primary issue of the passage is to miss the clear covenantal significance of what is happening.

 

The emphasis on the criminal legal setting that has dominated the traditional understanding of ‘counted righteousness’ has left its own problems. Terms like sacrifice, redemption, inheritance, Spirit etc. have no part in such a model. The growing appreciation that Paul stayed within the framework of Old Testament covenantal theology, developing it in the light of the Christ event that had brought to completion the covenant promises, suggests that this is the correct paradigm for understanding Paul’s thinking. Within the covenant framework, of course, was the law, which made demands that had to be satisfied. When the terms of the covenant were broken, there was only one way back into fellowship with God, and that was on the basis of the law’s demands being satisfied. Thus the law is covenant law. Justification is not modelled on criminal law, but covenantal law. (Tom Holland, Contours of Pauline Theology: A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings [Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2010], 214-15)