The New Perspective on Paul (part 3)

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the apostle Paul in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.

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I’m going to direct your attention to Romans 3:21 and following, as it is one of the most important passages on the atonement in the New Testament, but before we come to this passage, it is important to remind ourselves what precedes it. Paul’s argument, apart from introductory comments in the beginning of Romans 1, really begins with 1:18–20.

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

This reminds us not only of human guilt but of the fact that the Bible storyline is more comprehensive than merely the move from exile to end of exile. You see, it is not that the Bible has no Old to New Testament connection along the line of exile to end of exile; just about everybody recognizes that there is something of that there. When I wrote my Matthew commentary back in 1980 or ‘81.… That lovely little quotation in Matthew 2 about Rachel weeping for her children …

I’m convinced myself that is bound up with this “end of the exile” theme. That theme is found in the New Testament all right, but there are a lot of other themes in the New Testament. The danger with some ideological approach is sometimes you find the theme that’s there that has maybe been overlooked a bit or deemphasized a bit, then once you’ve found it, you make it the centerpoint of all of your theology, and then you run galloping through the New Testament showing that it controls absolutely everything.

There is a new book that has just been published in Scotland by Tom Holland called Contours of Pauline Theology. Well, he’s managed to get another gallop through the New Testament approach. This time it’s Exodus and Passover; now that controls absolutely everything, and nobody else has got it right before he managed to put it all together. I want to say, “Avoid reductionism; avoid oversimplification.”

The way you check to see if this is true is check the contexts of the proof checks that are adduced, again and again and again. Do careful exegesis on those texts. I’m persuaded, with all due respect to my dear friend Tom (and he is a good fellow in so many ways), that he is much more of a systematician than he is an exegete. He has actually found some things that are truly there about the exile, and then they’ve been controlling for him.

What you have to do is check the text that he cites to adduce them and not simply scan them quickly in any which translation, but do your exegesis carefully. Work through the texts. Then when you work through the text, you discover, “No, no, that’s not quite right; it’s not quite what the text is saying.”

The layers that connect the Old Testament and the New are many. They are multiform; they are complex. So in addition to exile to end of exile, you have exodus through to new exodus. Then you have promise to Abraham through to “in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” Then you have creation and fall all the way through the new creation. Each one is imbedded in the next one, and they can interweave in a variety of ways.

For example, a number of years ago, Mark scholars were debating whether or not Mark really carries a lot of new exodus themes. One group said, “Yes, yes, yes. They’re all over the place. Thematically they’re here; thematically they’re there.” And the other group said, “You can talk about the new exodus themes until the cows come home, but let’s be quite frank. The linguistic connections with the book of Exodus simply aren’t there, whether with the Hebrew or with the Greek.” So the debate went on: the big conceptual people versus the little picky linguistic people.

It was another friend, Rikki Watts, who, in my view, nailed this one. What he points out is that the exodus theme is there, but the linguistic connections are through the exodus theme as treated by Isaiah. In other words, the canonical connections move from exodus through to promises of a new exodus, and the exodus theme as picked up by Mark is linguistically connected with Isaiah’s promise of the new exodus. But that new exodus theme in Isaiah overlaps and is interlaced with the end of the exile theme in Isaiah.

So when you’re dealing with end of the exile theme, is it really end of the exile theme or is it new exodus theme, which itself is tied to a temple theme that goes all the way back to creation? There are layers of these interweavings on which you must build your biblical theology, and if you ignore those layers, you start thinning out your theology and introducing wobbles that are really not quite kosher, to coin a phrase.

Now in this particular instance, the wrath of God that is displayed, which generates this entire discussion, is not the wrath of God on the Jewish covenantal people because of their idolatry leading to the exodus. It’s the wrath of God on the entire human race stemming from the fall at creation. That’s what you must see. Having begun with that point, then the apostle spends a lot of time demonstrating that both Jews and Gentiles are guilty, and that is the lead-up to the cross.

So that by the time you get to the cross, the cross is not simply the reversal of the exile: that he takes on himself the curse that should have come on the Jews corporately, and thus reverses the exile. No, no, no, he’s dealing with humankind’s fallenness, with what comes out of Genesis 3, not simply with what comes out of 587 BC. The categories are much, much, much bigger! To try to understand Romans 3 in any restraining configuration that loses sight of this big sin issue is a huge mistake, it seems to me.

Moreover, as difficult as Romans 2 is, and it is difficult by any standard, it seems to me there is one part of the argument that should be seen as fairly straightforward. Take a look at 2:12–16, “All who sin apart from the law [that is, the law of covenant] will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but those who obey the law who will be declared righteous indeed.

When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their conscience is also bearing witness and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.”

Now then, some have taken this to prove that human beings who do not stand under the law of covenant, because they are made imago Dei, in the image of God, because of the conscience that God has given us, nevertheless they can actually live acceptably before God and do the things that the law requires. Isn’t that what the text says?

“Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law.” So they can do it. “Even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their conscience is also bearing witness and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.” So this is taken to be proof positive that God does not demand perfection; he demands some sort of conformity to God’s general revelation, if you stand outside of the law of covenant.

My judgment is that is a major misinterpretation of this passage. This passage is not trying to say that some Gentiles are saved apart from the law of covenant or saved apart from Christ. It’s simply not what’s being addressed. What is being addressed in the context of the whole chapter is how Jews and Gentiles are alike condemned.

The argument is the fact that Gentiles have a conscience, which lines up with some stipulations in the law of covenant, which shows that they have adequate revelation to do what’s right or not do what’s right as the case pertains. Sometimes they do what’s right and sometimes they do not do what’s right and thus they are without excuse. They may not be judged by the standards of being under the law of covenant, but they are judged by the standards of whatever law has already been stamped on them as imago Dei.

The argument here is not that some approve these things to an acceptable level such that they are saved; rather the evidence is that because they can approve these things or disapprove them and have a clear conscience or have a guilty conscience, therefore they really do have some knowledge of what God’s demands are. That’s why they stand condemned. The whole argument is to prove universal guilt, not to mean that some people are saved by being good enough. It is a major misunderstanding not to see that, it seems to me.

Very good on this paragraph, if you want to look it up in a commentary, is Doug Moo. In fact, the best English language commentary on the epistle of the Romans nowadays is, in my judgment, Moo’s. Do you know how he got his name? Am I allowed to introduce something? This has nothing to do with anything, but he used to teach on our faculty for a long time. Now he’s at Wheaton, of course.

Many of you have been inflicted with Carson, Moo, and Morris. Morris is now past it, so a new edition is coming out this summer, and it’s just Carson and Moo. A new chapter is added, and everything is lengthened and increased and.… What can I say? But have you ever imagined in your head what Moo looks like, what race that represents? Have you? Do you ever think such perverse thoughts?

His great-great-grandfather was a Norwegian with a name like Johansson or Pedersen or one of those, so transparently Norwegian. He himself is a six-foot-seven Norwegian. What can I say? But when his great-great-grandfather came into the country with another mate from Norway, they landed at Ellis Island. The rules of the time were you could either keep your family name or change it to something else.

So the clerk sitting at the desk says, “Name?” He said, “Johansson,” or whatever it was. “Do you want to keep the same name or do you want to change it to something else?” Well, this was so fast, he didn’t have a clue what was being said. The guy behind him with him did understand and explained it to him later when he got over laughing, but he decided he wasn’t going to help him to see what would happen.

So the guy simply shrugged his shoulders. “Well, do you want to keep your name or not?” It was too fast; he shrugged his shoulders again. The clerk said, “Well, some people chose the name of their village.” He shrugged his shoulders again; he didn’t catch that either. “What village did you come from?” He said, “MoÎ,” so the man put down Moo, and that’s how he got his name.

That had nothing whatsoever to do with this, except that the name Moo is an honorable name in these debates. Moo is one of the few who, in writing on Romans, understands the new perspective and sees what’s good in it, so he’s not just reacting negatively but is penetrating and wise in his criticisms as well. So you see, there was some small justification for me to tell you that story.

It is finally important to see, I think, that Paul, in establishing universal guilt, does not begin with the law. He begins with the fall this side of creation. He begins with what we might call, generically, idolatry: the de-Godding of God. I think that that is extraordinarily important as we try to get across the notion of human guilt in a generation that is increasingly postmodern in its epistemology.

People understand the breakdown of relationship, which is part of what idolatry is. Moreover, in the Old Testament, the thing that is repeatedly said to make God angry is, in fact, idolatry. Oh, sometimes social injustice is in parts of Isaiah and Amos, but far more commonly it is idolatry: the de-Godding of God, the relativizing of God. That’s the way Paul begins. He sets the stage in the most sweeping terms.

I cannot resist reading a few lines from J. Budziszewski in his essay “Escape from Nihilism.” He’s talking about how he was converted. “I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God,” he writes. “This is true even of the good things he has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong.

When some people flee from God, they rob and kill. When others flee from God, they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God, I didn’t do any of those things. My way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all.

That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil, and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students. Now that’s sin. It was also agony. You can’t imagine what a person has to do to himself—well, if you’re like I was, maybe you can—to go on believing such nonsense.

St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ ” This is the passage that I just read. “The way natural law thinkers put this …” He’s in a Catholic tradition; I would put it slightly a different way, but it makes the same point. “The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them.

Well, I was unusually determined not to know them; therefore, I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value.

Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person. How can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good and thus denies the reality of persons and denies that his commitments are in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop no matter how many he pulls out. There are still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about.

But because there was less and less I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. But I was the fool.” Then he starts talking about how he came to Christ.

Now I’ve taken the time to read that because I want you to see how enormously complex, variegated, and diverse is the biblical description of sin. It simply cannot be reduced to some guilt connected with the exile. It is a massive reductionism. It stems from the garden and shows itself in all of the idolatries, all of the genocide, all of the hates, all of the bitternesses, all of the social injustices, all of the rapes, all of the wars, all of the disgusting malevolence, all of the maleficence, and above all, in the sheer de-Godding of God, in sheer idolatry: I will be god.

Unless you have that comprehensive vision, then you cannot see that what the problem is, is that God is against us. Our problem is God, and our only hope is God. Unless you see that, you are not prepared to come to grips with the gospel. Now then, that’s Paul’s point all the way through to the end of 3:20.

Try reading 3:9–20 on any university campus today and they’ll think you’re from another planet. In fact, I dare to suggest that there are some people here, though you affirm quietly that the Bible is the Word of God, yet when you read through this catena of biblical quotations, it makes you squirm.

“There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are an open grave; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips; their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” And so on and so on.

Unless you empathize deeply with the sheer accuracy of this description, you’re not really well prepared for the next verses. That’s how far our culture has been alienated from thinking biblically about these things. You can’t really appreciate the good news until you see how bad the bad news is.

Now verses 21–26: What Paul does in these verses is establish four things. They are very tight, but I’ll try to go through the logic coherently. If you read these six verses, you quickly discover that the expression dikaiosynē theos shows up four times in verses 21–26: the righteousness of God or the justification of God. Dikaioō, the verb to justify, shows up twice. The adjective justice or righteous, shows up once, as well (dikaios).

In other words, this passage is massively about, in some sense, the righteousness and the justice of God in the light of all the sin that has been described in the previous verses. Paul establishes four points …

1. The revelation of God’s righteousness in its relationship to the Old Testament

Romans 3:21. “But now a righteousness from God apart from law has been made known to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” Now in the first instance, you must decide what “but now” means. Is that purely logical? Occasionally in Paul, the expression is that nyni de, but here almost certainly (and more commonly in Paul) it is temporal, almost eschatological: something has been in the past but now something else is.

What then is the nature of the change? What is the nature of the change he’s envisaging? Some have argued that in the past, God showed himself in wrath, but now he shows himself as the God who justifies sinners: sort of a gentler, kinder, new covenant God. That really won’t work. It won’t work because it doesn’t fit the passage very well, and it doesn’t work very well in the New Testament, though I understand where it comes from.

Haven’t you met people in pastoral responsibility who say, “You know, the God of the Old Testament, all that mayhem and genocide and famine and all that.… You know, Jesus says turn the other cheek. Doesn’t it seem as if Jesus is sort of a wee bit softer, maybe?” How do you respond to that?

I would be prepared to argue that it is more accurate to say that just as the description of God’s love is ratcheted up as you move from the old covenant to the new, so the description of God’s wrath is ratcheted up as you move from the old covenant to the new.

The trouble is that in the ratcheting up of God’s wrath, such that you move to all of Jesus’ depictions of hell (it is Jesus actually who speaks more of hell than any other person in the New Testament) and such that you come to the kinds of descriptions of torment that you find at the end of Revelation 14 (with human beings thrown into the great winepress of God’s wrath, trampled underfoot until their blood flows out to the height of a horse’s bridle for a distance of 300 kilometers), now you are going to tell me that the God of the New Testament is a softer God?

No, no, no, no. The reason why people think that when you move from the old covenant to the new covenant the depiction of wrath is downplayed is because people don’t believe in hell. We’re far more afraid of famine, sword, and pestilence than we are of hell. But if you take the biblical description of things at face value, then it seems to me you have to say that just as the depiction of God’s love is ratcheted up as you move to the new covenant, so the depiction of God’s wrath is ratcheted up as you move to the New Testament.

There is a sense in which God’s great disclosures of saving love in the Old Testament, all this checed, all of this is in anticipation of the great covenantal mercy that is shown us in Christ Jesus under the terms of the new covenant. All the wrath that’s depicted in the old covenant, in terms of war and pestilence and plague and the like, is only a foretaste of the judgment that finally descends in hell itself under the final state.

Oh no, this “but now” is not introducing a change in God. No, what is at issue is this: “… a righteousness from God has been made known apart from law …” Now this little expression, “apart from law,” could be understood to modify righteousness, reading “A righteousness from God apart from law has been made known.” Or it could be taken to modify “has been made known,” reading, “A righteousness from God apart from law has been made known.” Or to put it in English word order, “A righteousness from God has been made known apart from law.”

Now for reasons I won’t go into, I take the second, very strongly so. That is to say, this is not a righteousness apart from law; that’s not the point. But a righteousness from God, now, has been disclosed apart from the law of covenant. This righteousness from God has been disclosed under the terms of the new covenant; it is not under the terms of the old covenant.

But that does not mean that it is entirely divorced from the old covenant, for the last line of the verse says, “… to which the Law and Prophets testify.” That is, this righteousness from God is not under the law of covenant, but on the other hand, the law of covenant testifies to it. It bears witness to it and anticipates it. One of the functions of the Law and the Prophets is to predict the new covenant with this dikaiosynē theos that is coming under the terms of the new covenant.

Thus, for example, the old covenant has a sacrificial system and a priest and a temple and rights of propitiation, and so on, which look forward to the righteousness of God that comes under the New Testament. It’s prophetic; it’s anticipatory. Through the categories of typology, no doubt, but nevertheless this new covenant is not cut off entirely from the old covenant; it is that to which the Law and the Prophets bear witness.

But it is not itself under the old covenant. This righteousness from God now has been made known apart from the old covenant. After all, “The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’ ” So in the first place, then, Paul sets forth the revelation of God’s righteousness in its relationship to the Old Testament.

2. The availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings, without racial distinction, but on condition of faith

Romans 3:22–23. For those who are strongly in the Reformed tradition, which I’m sure means most of us, this is not in any sense a threat to historic Calvinist thought. It is a threat to hyper-Calvinist thought, but the Reformed tradition at its best has always insisted on the sufficiency of the gospel for all human beings.

Paul’s point here is not to settle that particular issue, in any case, but to show it’s universality across the Jew-Gentile divide. Listen to what the text says about this righteousness that I’ve just been talking about, this righteousness which has been manifested apart from the law of covenant, his righteousness to which the Law and the Prophets testify: “This righteousness comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Now then, before we understand this text closely, we need to reflect on this little expression, in the NIV, “… through faith in Jesus Christ …” (in the nominative, “through pistis Iēsous Christos”). Many want this to be rendered: “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.” What shall we make of this? You can begin to make a good case for that rendering, and you need to see that there is nothing intrinsically heretical about that rendering.

After all, other parts of the New Testament do speak of the faithfulness of Christ in very decisive ways: John’s gospel (in John 5) and especially the epistle of the Hebrews, where the faithfulness of Christ is a very important theme. So you can make perfect theological sense of this by saying, “This righteousness from God comes through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Yes, you can; you can make good sense of that.

Moreover, you can make a certain kind of superficial case for it simply by reading the Greek text as opposed to the English. You see, in English, our noun faith sounds different from our verb to believe. But in Greek it’s the same root, it’s the pist- word group, whether pistis or pistuo. So granted, if that’s the case then, if you have the same words being used here with the traditional interpretation, this is the way it sounds: “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.”

Doesn’t that sound a bit redundant? “It comes in trust through Jesus Christ to all who trust.” That’s what the Greek says, under the traditional interpretation. Doesn’t that sound a bit redundant? So they say that since Paul wouldn’t write such redundant stuff, the first instance of trust must really be taken in its other legitimate meaning: not trust or faith, but faithfulness.

Then you no longer have the redundancy: “This righteousness from God comes through the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ to all who trust.” You’ve removed the redundancy. Isn’t getting rid of redundancy a good thing? So you’re beginning to make a good case for it. (And there are seven texts in the New Testament with this sort of problem.)

But when Tom Wright gets hold of it, he not only wants to go that route, but he says one of the reasons for going that route is that Paul is establishing here the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ in terms of the abolition of the exile. That is to say, the people of God were not themselves faithful; that’s why they remained in exile.

But Christ comes along and is the perfectly obedient Son; he’s perfectly trustworthy, and that is why he can cancel the exile. He’s the trustworthy Son. So through the trustworthy Son, then, who cancels the exile, we have trust in Jesus Christ. Neat, isn’t it? Then to add to this, there is an entire book by Richard Hays which tries to argue very strongly that, for linguistic reasons and for considerations on the way the expression is used in the patristics and elsewhere, this really has to be seen as the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ, the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

But with all due respect, the best treatment of this now (there are quite a lot of people who have tried to refute it over the years), in my judgment, is the essay by MoisÈs Silva in Volume 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism. Again, its treatment of the thing linguistically is superb. Silva knows his linguistics.

What he has done, also, is to work through every single possible occurrence in the patristics, down to the fourth century and shows that where you can make an unambiguous distinction, this phrase means faith in Jesus Christ, not the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ. In other words, he refutes Hays line by line, line by line, on that sort of claim.

In any case, with all due respect to Tom, there is not a hint of the mention of the exile here. You have to read it in. Where is the exile? You’re dealing with creation. You’re dealing with the fall. You’re dealing with idolatry. You’re dealing with universal sin, Jew and Gentile alike. Where does the exile suddenly get brought in here? His attempts to bring it in just prove not very conclusive, exegetically.

More important yet, I think there is a transparent reason why Paul is redundant. In other words, Paul is not redundant because he’s writing slightly sloppy Greek; he’s redundant for an important stylistic reason. He is making a point. Now let me read it again, still using trust so we’ve got the same words: “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust. For there is no difference: all have sinned.”

That’s the point. The point is the “all.” It comes through trust in Jesus Christ, indeed all who trust in Jesus Christ, because all have sinned. That’s what ties this paragraph to the previous two and a half chapters. His whole argument from 1:18 to 3:20 is that all have sinned; all are under the curse, Jew and Gentile alike; all are fallen; all are rebels; all are condemned; all are sinners.

“Now,” he says, “there is a righteousness from God that has been disclosed.” It has been disclosed apart from the old covenant, because under the terms of the old covenant, that righteousness from God was primarily directed toward Jews, after all. Those were the terms of the covenant. But now there is this righteousness from God, to which the old Law and the Prophets bear witness. It has now been disclosed apart from that law of covenant.

This righteousness from God, we are told, comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have such faith in Jesus Christ, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Thus the paragraph becomes an integral part of the development of his thoughts from 1:18 all the way through; he prepares the way for the fuller exposition of the gospel in subsequent chapters.

In other words, Paul sets forth in this second point (in verses 22 and 23) that the revelation, the availability of God’s righteousness is to all human beings, without racial distinction.… Jew and Gentile, it doesn’t matter … but on condition of faith.

3. The source of God’s righteousness is in the gracious provision of Christ Jesus as the propitiation for our sins.

Romans 3:24–25a. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” we’re told in verse 23, “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood.”

Now there are half a dozen expressions there that cry to be unpacked. Today, in modern American English, we do not use redemption-redeem language on the streets. I’m old enough to remember when we still did. You redeemed your mortgage. Or if you went to a pawn shop and handed in your watch for some ready cash, then you would go and redeem your watch. People don’t use that language even anymore; that’s pretty well gone. There might be some older conservative corners in the country, but not many of them.

For us today, redeem and redemption are “God words.” They’re not “language of the street” words, by and large. But in the first century, they were language of the street words. They could be used in the economic sense, more or less redeeming mortgages and redeeming things in a pawn shop. They could be used also in the slave markets.

People became slaves in the ancient world for different reasons: sometimes they became slaves because of a bloody military coup and then taking over a new populace, but sometimes because there was no Chapter 11 or Chapter 13; there was no bankruptcy law. So if you borrowed money and then you couldn’t pay, you went belly-up, you sold yourself (and perhaps your family) as a slave to the creditor. Now supposing your cousin hears about that 20 kilometers away and wants to buy you back. There was provision for that.

It was a sort of a mythical deal, but what happened was you paid for the price of the slave, plus a small percentage, to the local pagan temple. Then the pagan temple kept the percentage and gave the price of the slave to the owner of the slave. That transferred the slavery, as it were, to the god of the temple. So now in theory, you were still a slave, but at least you were a slave of the temple and not of some human being. As a result, you were free to do jolly well what you wanted, because the gods didn’t care that much.

This became sort of a legal fiction to have people being redeemed from slavery. Of course, there is a somewhat analogous system under Old Testament law by which slaves could be redeemed, and, in theory, with the Year of Jubilee, then slaves are supposed to be set free at any case. So there are redemption procedures in the Old Testament, in the legal market, the slave market, and so on.

That’s one of the reasons why elsewhere Paul can speak of us being redeemed from our sin, where sin is seen as the power that makes us slaves to sin. We’re freed from it, bought out, so that we’re free from the enslaving capacity of sin itself. So that’s the way Paul uses the language here: “We’re justified freely by his grace, declared just before God now …” How? “… through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ, through being bought out by Jesus Christ and set free from our slavery.

But that still doesn’t explain any of the mechanism of it. “God presented him as a …” The NIV has “sacrifice of atonement.” It’s a fudge. It’s a hard word to translate all right; its hilastērion, as you well know. Hilastērion is used, if memory serves, 21 times in the LXX, and 14 of them find the noun referring to the top of the ark of the covenant, on which the blood of atonement was spilled: a bull and goat on Yom Kippur.

As has often been shown, it is regularly found in a context in which God’s wrath needs to be set aside, but propitiation has seen its share of debates over the years. Propitiation is simply the act by which God becomes propitious. That is, favorable. Propitiation is that act in by which God becomes propitious. So in propitiation, the sacrifice is directed to the god, in the pagan world, or to God himself, in the biblical world. It is that act by which God becomes favorable or propitious.

In the pagan world, I am the subject and the god is the object. To make the god favorable, I offer a propitiating sacrifice, a propitiation, to make the god propitious. In this way, I get a fat baby, or a cow with lots of milk, or whatever it is I’m looking for, a safe voyage (if I’m offering something up to Poseidon or Neptune or one of the gods of the sea, because I want a safe voyage). So I offer to the gods, the god becomes propitious, and I get what I want. I am the sacrificer, the god is the object, and the god is made propitious.

But C.H. Dodd argued, back in the 1930s, that can’t be what it means here. “In the first place,” he says, “God is the One that sets forth his Son. If God is already so propitious toward us that he sends his Son, how can the son be making God propitious?” “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.” God is already so propitious toward us that he gives his Son, so how can the son himself make God propitious? “It doesn’t make sense,” he says.

“Therefore,” he said, “you must think of this rather as expiation.” Now expiation has at its object not God, but sin. Expiation is the canceling of something. If you expiate sin, you cancel sin. In propitiation, you make God propitious, but if sin is expiated, then sin is canceled. “So God, already propitious, so loves the world he gives his Son, he placards his Son, as the expiation for our sin,” he says. “No place for propitiation; we’re not pagans here.”

Well, that generated all kinds of discussion, and there was an article in the Westminster Theological Journal, way back in 1955, responding to this. Perhaps the most important book on the subject still, though it came out in 1965, is by Leon Morris (yes, the same Morris of Carson, Moo, and Morris; forgive him, will you?). It’s called The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, and if you don’t have it yet, buy it. Sell your shirt and buy it. Read it.

That’s must reading for anybody who loves the gospel, to understand what the various redemption terms are and how they work and so on. It’s dated now in some ways, but it’s still well worth reading to this day. One of the things that he points out is that this word group in the Old Testament is pretty strongly tied to setting aside God’s wrath. That’s what Yom Kippur was supposed to do. God was standing in wrath and judgment against the people, and what are you going to do with this wrath?

Well, from the point of view of Dodd, the wrath was not personal, it was simply a way that the Bible has of talking about “Bad things happen to bad people.” You do naughty stuff and naughty stuff happens to you; it’s the way the universe runs. There is nothing personal about it. You don’t have to make God propitious. God’s already so loving he sends his own Son. You don’t have to turn aside the wrath; wrath is just a metaphor.

So the debate went on and on, and above all, it was argued: how can God, who is so propitious toward us that he gives us his Son, be said to propitiate God? Morris’s answer was, “Don’t you understand? That is the gospel.” Because the same God who stands over against us in wrath, as a function of his holiness when holiness confronts sin, is still the God who stands over against us in loving redemption because he is that kind of God.

But the fact that he stands over against us in loving redemption does not mean that he does not stand over against us in wrath because we are sinners. What sets aside God’s wrath? In fact, C.H. Dodd has a reputation for so much loathing any notion of substitutionary penal atonement that when he was working on the New English Bible (he was the editor of the final senior committee for the New English Bible), he got to this passage and was heard to mutter under his breath, “What rubbish,” whereupon an English cleric wrote a limerick:

There was a professor called Dodd

Whose name was exceedingly odd;

He spelt, if you please,

His name with three “D’s,”

While one is sufficient for God.

Now this is a quintessentially English form of theological argument. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the argument, but it sure slaps the poor chap down!

It helps, I think, to see what is going on here, if we make another distinction. Have you ever used this sort of illustration in your evangelistic efforts? You know, you’re speaking to an evangelistic group of young people or something, and you try to explain what substitution looks like. You say that the judge is on the bench, and he pronounces sentence upon the criminal: a $20,000 fine or five years in jail.

Then having pronounced sentence, he gets off the bench, takes off his robes, and he writes the check for $20,000 or goes off to jail himself. That’s what substitution is about; that’s what God does for us in the person of his Son. Have you ever used an illustration like that? Have you, to get it across? Yes? No? Don’t you use illustrations?

I used to use that one before I repented. It gets across the notion of substitution all right; in that sense, it’s pretty good. But in one sense, it’s deceptive in any Western culture, because in any Western culture, the judge, by definition, is not the wounded party. If it’s the judge who has been mugged, the judge cannot stand in judgment of the mugger. He must recuse himself.

We always speak of the mugger as having sinned against the state or against the law or against the government or (if you live in the British Commonwealth) against the crown, but never against the judge. The judge is merely the administrator of the system, and he’s supposed to be an independent arbitrator as it were, to make sure that the system is dispensed fairly. He is not himself ever to be the offended party.

But in the case of God, God is not the independent arbitrator of a system that is bigger than he is. He is always the most offended party. Always. In any sin and every sin we commit, he is always the most offended party. Every time we commit any sin, we always break the first commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” It’s the only sin we always commit whenever we commit any other sin. He is always the most offended party, and he is our judge.

You see, in our system, if the judge were to step down and pay the penalty himself, it would be a miscarriage of justice. It might be generous, but it’s still not just. But God is the most offended party. The law is not independent of him; it is what he makes it to be. He absorbs it in himself in the person of his Son in his own body on the tree. God was in Christ.

So within that framework, then, you see how God becomes both the One, who because of his very character, loves even such sinful people as we (“crying out, ‘Turn, turn, why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked’ ”) and the One whose wrath must be satisfied. That brings us to the last point. Paul establishes …

4. The demonstration of the righteousness of God through the cross of Jesus Christ

Romans 3:25b–26. “God did this …” That is, providing this propitiation. “… though faith in his blood …” That is, through faith in Christ’s death, that’s what is meant. “He did this to demonstrate his justice [his righteousness, his dikaiosynē] …”

Here is one of the most important elements of justification in all of the Bible: God himself is vindicated. In all of his contestings with rebellious human beings, God is the One who is vindicated. God is the One who is justified. God is the One who is always in the right. Always. But he placards his Son as the propitiation for our sins so as to demonstrate his justice, not his love (that’s true, but that’s not the point here), but to demonstrate his justice.

“Because in his forbearance, he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” Now there is a tricky bit here: “In his forbearance, he left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” Do you read the Old Testament as if God left the sins unpunished? But that’s exactly what the text says: he left them unpunished.

That is to say, they did receive relative punishments of one sort or another, but the ultimate punishment for Abraham’s sin, for David’s sin, or whatever … as we and they together are gathered into Abraham’s bosom or into the new heaven and the new earth, or into resurrection bodies on the last day … the final payment of that punishment was not secured by dear old David. In one sense, he left those sins unpunished.

I think you catch this in quite a number of passages when you start thinking them though; it’s just that we don’t think in these categories very often. In Revelation 14, for example, when hell is described and the final punishment is described, it’s pictured as the wine of God’s wrath poured out full strength. Now when you make wine, how strong it is depends on the soil, the grapes, the temperature, things like that, but because there’s not a distilling process it comes out (give or take a percentage or two) at 14 to 15 percent, about 30 proof.

But in the ancient Jewish world, they tended not to drink it at full strength the way we drink it today. They cut it with water, somewhere between three parts to one and ten parts to one. So three parts to one brings it down to about five percent, sort of strong Canadian beer, or ten parts to one down to about a percent and a half, the weakest of the American beers. Don’t you worry how I know this stuff?

Now the point of Revelation 14 is that God’s wrath is seen as dilute in the Old Testament, but now the full fury of God’s wrath is poured out undiluted. That’s the image. The wine of God’s wrath is poured out full strength. If you think God’s wrath, his punishments have been severe in the Old Testament, you must understand that they were not. They were dilute; they weren’t full strength. God was leaving the sins unpunished.

The full punishment comes in hell itself or it comes on the cross. That’s the point. God establishes his justice, because he had left those sins unpunished. How is he going to forgive them? Until now, in the fullness of time, God placards his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Both so that God may be just and the One who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Now once again, this last verse and a half have been translated in a very different way by Tom Wright and others. My time is collapsing and I won’t go through the distinctions in the Greek text, but in my view, once again, they’re not very convincing. They depend on already buying into an exile theme that is not really there. It seems to me that this is what the passage means, and once again, if I may dare say so, Moo’s commentary on this passage is terrific.

Finally then, verses 27 to the end of the passage establish the glories of faith. Faith is mentioned again and again. As far as I can see, the argument of 27–31 anticipates the argument exactly, right through chapter 4. I will simply give you the outline, and then you can meditate on it at your leisure, and you will see for yourself how this thing hangs together.

Just as justice and justification control the thought in verses 21–26, faith controls the thought here. Verse 27 says, “On what? By observing law? No, but of that of faith.” Verse 28 continues, “We maintain that a man is justified by faith.” And then, verses 30 and 31: “Justify the circumcised by faith, the uncircumcised by the same faith. Do we then nullify the law by this faith?” This controls the whole thought here. Paul establishes four points. I’ll just list them to you, and then show you the parallel in chapter 4.

1. Faith excludes boasting.

Romans 3:27. “Where then is boasting? It is excluded on what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith.” You see, you do get a contrast between a faith principle and an observing the law principle. To try to smuggle in some sort of observing the law by the back door at a final justification of the last day seems terribly precarious in the light of such argument as this.

The parallel in chapter 4 is verses 1 and 2: “What about Abraham? What did he discover? Well, if he was justified by works, he had something to boast about, but not before God.” Faith before God excludes boasting.

2. Faith is necessary to preserve grace.

Romans 3:28. “We maintain that a man is justified by faith, apart from observing the law.” And now again in chapter 4, verses 3–8: “What does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now when a man works, he wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However to the man who does not work, but trusts God who justifies the wicked …”

Notice that: “justifies the wicked.” Not those who are good enough, so that that can be added somehow to what Christ has done. That presupposes that Abraham is seen as wicked. “To him his faith is credited as righteousness.” In other words, faith is necessary to preserve grace.

3. Faith is necessary if Jews and Gentiles alike are to be saved.

Romans 3:29–30. “Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too. There is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith, and the uncircumcised by that same faith.” And now you see again, this is tied back to the whole argument of chapters 1, 2, and 3: Jew and Gentile alike are under the curse, which brings you back to creation, not to the exile! To creation, and all of the guilt that comes from that …

And in chapter 4, likewise that argument runs all the way from verses 9–17: first of all, evidence of this point from Abraham’s own experience (verses 9–12), then evidence of this point from redemptive history (verses 13–17).

4. Christian faith, far from overturning the Old Testament, upholds the Old Testament anticipation.

Romans 3:31. “Do we then nullify the law by this faith? No, not at all. We’re upholding the law …” That is, this is the direction in which the law of covenant points. That’s what he said way back in chapter 3, verse 21: “The Law and the Prophets testify to it.” That same point then is worked out in chapter 4, verses 18–25.

Now this is only one passage; it is only one superficial exposition of something that could be unpacked at great length. I don’t encourage you to duck working through these issues. The only thing I do strongly urge you to undertake when you think about this or any other dispute in the church, is not only to read the arguments of the proponents of a particular view but to read them with your Bibles open, your commentaries open and not just glancing at a quick proof text, but working through the passage, text by text, text by text, to see whether these things are so. And thus, you too become part of a noble Berean heritage.

Now we are to finish in 10 minutes. That means we have 10 minutes for questions and comments and then I will close in prayer. Questions, comments?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: That exposition is not necessary for my interpretation of the block as a whole. In other words, I could have taken a more traditional rendering of that phrase and not changed the thrust of my whole argument. I just think that my argument makes it a little bit more consistent. In other words, I don’t think that the passage seems to be talking about spirit living in me in some sort of metaphorically spatial sense and thus animating me.

That’s found in the Bible, as in the Paraclete passages, but I don’t think that it makes much sense here, where the whole tone and thrust is forensic. So just as when the text says, “I have been crucified with Christ,” it doesn’t mean that I physically have somehow got up there on the cross and been nailed there too.

It doesn’t even mean that there is some ontological part of me that has died with Christ. It seems to me that that’s an error in Watchman Nee’s sort of theology: there is a chunk (a definable chunk, the sole chunk perhaps, the spirit chunk or whatever) that dies ontologically somehow in Christ. That’s not the point at all.

The point is that because Christ dies in my place, then before God, when he dies, I die. I am dead. Christ has died for me. The whole context of the argument is forensic justification. But in exactly the same way, the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in Christ (because I am still alive, of course) who loved me and gave his life for me. I trust him, and indeed not only is his death mine, but his life is mine.

If Christ views me as dead, but I’m still in some sense alive, how does he view my life? But Christ lives with reference to me. So the same way that God views me as dead in Christ, he views me as alive in Christ. It’s Christ who is my death and Christ who is my life. In other words, I think this is part of the same world of discourse as the union with Christ language that is so common in Paul. I think this union with Christ language actually undergirds a lot of the justification language.

Now that’s another whole thing that I haven’t even begun to get into here, but that is discussed as well in the second volume of this pair. When I finish the commentary that I’m working on, Galatians is next, so eventually I have to defend this in print instead of waffling about it in meetings.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Great question. The question is, “What do you make of the fact that Paul circumcises Timothy when he makes such a big deal about not circumcising Titus in Galatians 2?” Great question.

That’s part of the reason why, of course, he can be called a man-pleaser, to use the language of Galatians 1:10. To an outside observer who does not understand what Paul is doing, he can seem pretty two-faced: he does one; he doesn’t do the other. It depends on the circumstances. You can’t trust these people who have no backbone and no principle, can you?

But look at it from Paul’s point of view. According to Galatians 2, there were some in Jerusalem who insisted that Titus must be circumcised. In other words, what they were insisting upon is that for him to accept the Jewish Messiah he had to become a Jew to accept the Jewish Messiah. He had to become circumcised, which then commits him to obeying the law of Moses.

Thus you have to become a Jew to become a Christian. That means that Gentiles must become Jews first; Christ’s death is not sufficient in and of itself. No, no, no, no. It is only sufficient in conjunction with the fulfillment of being a Jew. Paul understands what that does is jeopardize the exclusive sufficiency of Christ, for Jew and Gentile alike.

But where nobody is saying, “You must be circumcised to be a Christian,” where it’s a question of merely taking away possible offense and of getting into a situation where you can bear witness, then Paul is astonishingly flexible. So in 1 Corinthians 9, he says, “To the Jew, I became a Jew, though I am not myself under the law, but I became as one under the law so that I might save those who are under the law. And to the Gentiles, I became as lawless, though I am not myself free from the law of God, but ennomos Christos, under the law in Christ.”

And thus you see, he is maximally flexible so as not to cause umbrage. Let me take an example from some parts of American culture. I’m not sure about Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina, but in some places in American culture, there are some components that would say, “Absolutely if you’re a Christian, you cannot drink.” Alcohol, that is. “If you’re a Christian, you cannot drink.”

Now if somebody is simply saying, “Oh, it’s going to upset a lot of sensibilities, and to be able to preach in that context, I should adopt that stance …” Ok, I won’t drink. No big deal. To the drinkless, I became as drinkless, in order that I might win the drinkless. But if somebody tells me, “Don, you cannot be a Christian and drink,” I will say, “Pass the port,” because I will not jeopardize the exclusive sufficiency of Christ. So you see, I think that Paul is deeply principled. Besides, when I go to France.… Well, that’s another subject!

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: The question is, “Does Wright interpret the Adam and Eve from the garden as an exodus?” He has not dealt with that at great length. He’s made some elusive comments about that. In fact, once about three or four years ago or whatever it was, we had a breakfast together at SPL (where we sometimes bump into each other), and I said to him some of what I’m saying now.

I said, “You know, whatever insight you have on the exile thing, and you do have some, it seems to me that you made it stand for the whole. Why don’t you expand the story back to Abraham, back to the patriarchs, back to the fall, and back …” And he says, “Oh, I’ll do that eventually.” I said, “Well, you’d better hurry up because, meanwhile, you’re reducing the story.”

So in all fairness, he hasn’t really dealt with that at great length. But in any case, if you try to deal with that in terms of the exodus, are you putting the cart before the horse? You have to still deal with what Paul is actually doing in Romans 1, 2, and 3. That’s a big story.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: The question is, “Do I review the reduction as something sinful or an oversight?” Well, that’s for the Lord to sort out. I’m not trying to judge the motives in the whole thing. I’m merely trying to judge, as best as I can, what is the fairest exposition of what God’s Word says. Insofar as it twists or distorts God’s Word in some ways and then ultimately changes the question of what justification is, then even if it’s well motivated, it’s ending in results that are deleterious to the church.

I don’t find myself in a place where I have to stand in judgment of them morally; one way or another, to our own master we stand or fall. On the other hand, I will make a strong case for whether or not this is exegesis that is serious enough that it could have long-term negative repercussions for the articulation and defense of the gospel. That, I will insist, it does have.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: The question is, “In the work on the emergent church, do I discover any connection between the new perspective and the emerging church movement?” As far as I can see, there is no organic connection, that is, there is no essential organic integrated thought connection. There just isn’t. But there are some who just love leftish things, if I may use that.… You know, whatever is sort of new and cutesy they gravitate toward, it seems like, on the front end.

Do you remember the old Scottish preacher who said, “You say I am not with it. My friend, I do not doubt it. But when I see what I’m not with, I’d rather be without it”? But there are some who go.… You know, every new thing that comes along, they sort of glom onto it, so there are some who are glomming onto two or three new things all at once, so you do find some alignments like that. But the ideology that drives the emergent church is a certain reading what post-modernism is. This is another domain of intellectual debate, it seems to me, rather than this one. Tom hasn’t written on epistemology.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Well, there is some truth to that, but for different reasons. In other words, the way Catholics get there is a bit different from the way Tom Wright gets there. But they both get, in some ways, to the same place, because works have been smuggled in through the back door somehow. Tom himself, in his vast ecumenical visions that he sometimes casts in public debates, can sound remarkably like that. That’s why I said earlier that the way he casts justification, he has elevated ecclesiology above soteriology.

Now Catholic theology does that, but for different reasons. It doesn’t do it for the same reason, but the point is the crucial thing is to belong in the true church; if you’re in the true church, you do get saved. Whereas, it seems to me in biblical theology, you must confront God, you must be saved and if so, then you are thus inducted into the church. Now there are wrinkles on that in Presbyterian thought, of course, but we won’t go into that now.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Well, I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, so I’m really reluctant to say how things are going to come out. I work for a non-profit organization too, as Walt Kaiser likes to say. I’ve mentioned Scott Hafemann, dear Scott. And he is a friend; he’s a very talented and gifted friend. As many things as I’ve been helped by him, I haven’t talked behind his back on this one.

We spent four or five hours on the phone a summer and a half ago, going through some of the passages line by line, line by line, to see if we could come to agreement on this, and we haven’t. This past year, before he left Wheaton, there was a debate between him and another person on his side and, on the other side, Doug Moo and Henri Blocher. I don’t know if you know Henri Blocher, but he wrote the closing chapter in this Justification and Variegated Nomism book. It’s brilliant.

If you want to see systematic theology at its best, read Henri Blocher on this topic. Blocher’s closing line in the debate with Hafemann, down at Wheaton this past year, was something like, “Monsieur Hafemann, before I abandoned the theology of Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Heidelberg and Dordt and Spurgeon …” And he listed.… He went on, and on, and on, and on. “… I would be very reluctant.” Sort of nicely put, you know?

So these things have been debated in those circles. Scott’s open and frank about these things, so I’m not talking behind his back at all. With one or two who are clearly sympathetic to that line of thought at Westminster, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time talking with them. So some of what I’m hearing is hearsay as well, so I’m pretty reluctant to start naming names unless they’ve put a whole lot of stuff out in print or I’ve talked with them face-to-face.

I try to be pretty careful about that, so that when I do talk about them, it’s not from mere hearsay. It’s what I’ve seen in print or personal talking face-to-face. That there are one or two at Westminster who apparently take this sort of line is common scuttlebutt, but I haven’t talked with them face-to-face on it; what can I say? I think our time is gone, and I don’t want to abuse your generosity and kindness.

Merciful God, we freely confess that none of us understands as we ought to understand, and we obey even less. Have mercy on us. We have received such matchless grace from your hand. Our sins have been forgiven. Already we have received the Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance. We have received the promises that make us eagerly look forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

And all of this because, though you might well have written us all off and condemned us to the judgment that we deserve, you are the God of mercy, of compassion, before eternity in your own mind, placarding your Son on the cross, crucified from before the foundation of the world. We thank you that even now, you call out for yourself men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, and you do so in such a way that you justify them while being just: yourself just and the One who justifies the ungodly. What grace is this?

Merciful God, in all of our attempts to understand your most Holy Word, help us not to treat these theological truths as other, as distant, as separate from us, mere things to think about, but the very fabric of our being, the heart of all we believe and are. Give us a passion not only to know the truth but to do it.

Help us to learn from one another, to guard ourselves and our hearts and our minds, as we too may easily go astray, to listen to the voices of Christians across the centuries, and yet still not to buy into any of them as if they were God, but to come back to your most Holy Word and study and think and meditate on your truth again and again, and beseech you for the grace to understand what we read.

We remember than on the night he was betrayed, the Master himself prayed, “Sanctify them through your truth.” Your Word is truth. So sanctify us, we beseech you, Heavenly Father. For Jesus’ sake, amen.