A Neo-Lutheran Reading Which Is Not Anti-Judaic: Stephen Westerholm

In his Israel's Law and the Church's Faith, Stephen Westerholm is a Pauline scholar who essentially maintains the view of Paul that Luther promulgated, without, however, allowing it to be or become a slander of rabbinic Judaism. He accepts Sanders's principle that we cannot describe Judaism on the basis of our reading of Paul, cannot assume that Judaism is in every way the antithesis of Pauline theology—e.g., cannot conclude that if Paul says that Christ excludes boasting, then Jews boast. Westerholm provides, however, an important counter-corollary, “The basis for Paul's rejection of the law must not be determined solely by asking what his foes were proposing any more than we may see Judaism's own perspective of the law in Paul's rejected version of it” (1988, 150). This is well put and means that the initial reasons for Paul's rejection of the Law and his later reflections and amplifications are both equally important. Westerholm argues that Luther understood Paul well but that Paul was representing not Judaism but Christian theology:

There is more of Paul in Luther than many twentieth-century scholars are inclined to allow. But the insights of the “new perspective” must not be lost to view. Paul's convictions need to be identified; they must also be recognized as Christian theology. When Paul's conclusion that the path of the law is dependent on human works is used to posit a rabbinic doctrine of salvation by works, and when his claim that God's grace in Christ excludes human boasting is used to portray rabbinic Jews as self-righteous boasters, the results (in Johnsonian terms) are “pernicious as well as false.” When, moreover, the doctrine of merit perceived by Luther in the Catholicism of his day is read into the Judaism of the first Christian centuries, the results are worthless for historical study. Students who want to know how a rabbinic Jew perceived humanity's place in God's world will read Paul with caution and Luther not at all. (173)

Westerholm goes on to say, “On the other hand, students who want to understand Paul but feel they have nothing to learn from a Martin Luther should consider a career in metallurgy.” The point is well taken, if exaggerated, and Westerholm has made a strong case for reading Paul as motivated by a sense of the universality of sin and a conviction that only grace can save. The important shift in his work from the neo-Lutheran interpretations of the Bultmann school is that for Westerholm it is not keeping of the Law which is sinful in Paul but failure to keep the Law. There is no doubt in my mind as well that Luther's emphasis on faith is a pivotal Pauline theme, once it is deprived of its anti-Judaic slander as Westerholm has done, but I am convinced that Luther (and Westerholm) have missed a major issue in Paul (perhaps the major issue). The issue of re-creation of Universal Israel was central for him, and justification by grace was a necessary condition for this; for Westerholm, the issue of universal sin and salvation by grace is the central point, and the salvation of the gentiles is almost epiphenomenal. While I am entirely in sympathy with Westerholm's sense that theological issues are central in the interpretation of Paul, I disagree strongly with his suggestion that the issue of unification of Jews and gentiles was a “sociological” and not a theological issue for Paul (122). This was no practical matter of “the promotion of the Gentile mission” but rather the very motivation for the gentile mission! It is this difference between us that ultimately determines, I think, the different emphases of our readings of Paul. Westerholm concludes his book by writing, “What influence Paul's discussions of the Gentile problem had in Galatia or Rome in the first century remains a mystery; their later effects in Hippo, Wittenberg, and Aldersgate are better known.” Indeed, but I trust I will be forgiven the observation that this is a rather selective list of Christian “giants.” Westerholm's interpretation is neither pernicious nor false but, I think, not sufficiently grounded in Paul's particular historical situation and that of first-century Judaism. What would have happened, on Westerholm's account, had the Jews been able to keep the Law? The question is, however, one of interpretative emphasis, not absolute disagreement.