This is Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, the Doctrine of Salvation, Part 14.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

It's so great to know that people from all around the world are joining us this morning for our Defender's class.

Last time I introduced the so-called new perspective on Paul, and today we want to come to some assessment of the new perspective.

The claim of the adherence of the new perspective, you'll remember, is that the traditional Protestant

reformers have seriously misunderstood Paul, and that when we correctly interpret Paul, we see

that in fact he's not really saying anything at all that is different from what the Judaism

of his day was saying. Namely, you are saved

by grace, but then you stay in the covenant by means of doing good works. A very penetating critique

of the new perspective has been written by the New Testament scholar Robert Gundry.

He writes an essay called The Inferiority of the New Perspective on Paul. In his book,

The Old is Better, published in 2005. Well, now, Gundry doesn't mince words, does he? The inferiority

of the new perspective on Paul. Gundry agrees with E.P. Sanders that the evidence of Palestinian Judaism

shows that Jews had a strong emphasis upon obedience to the law as the way of staying in the

covenant. So Palestinian Judaism was preoccupied with legal matters, how you apply the law to various

situations, what the law really requires of you, extensive

wrangling over the requirements of the law because this is the means by which one

stays in the covenant with God. But Gundry denies that Paul has a similar emphasis, he writes,

though obedience is integral and important to Paul's theology, alongside Palestinian Jewish

absorption in legal questions, his comments on obedience look proportionately

slight. Furthermore, they usually take the form of exhortations, not of legal interpretation,

extension, and application. So what Gundry is saying here is that obedience is important to Paul.

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