Confidence in Flesh

Philippians 3:1-11 has been seen as a key anti-NPP text, emphasizing as it does the contrast between Paul’s zeal and his righteousness by law (v. 6) with the righteousness not of his own not derived from the law but a righteousness from God on the basis of faith (v. 9).

Watson suggests that the passage proves the opposite. Paul does not contrast his own striving with the obedience of Christ imputed to him. He contrasts everything he had as a Jew with everything he has in Christ, a contrast that is not equivalent to a contrast of faith and works. What Paul renounces, after all, is not just “striving for righteousness” by his own works. He renounces also the inheritance he has wholly apart from his own works – “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (v. 5). One might say he renounces Jewish grace as well as Jewish works.

What he is actually renouncing, as Watson says, is his “covenant-status as a Jew, which includes reliance on the divine gifts bestowed on Israel as well as the confirmation of those gifts by his own obedience.”