Paul and Reformation

Adherents to some form of the New Perspective on Paul are notorious for saying that the Catholic opponents of the Reformers were significantly different from the Jewish opponents of Paul, and that the issues Paul dealt with were not those of the Protestant Reformation. Reformers, on this view, addressed works righteousness, while Paul dealt with Jew-Gentile issues and the sin of Jewish exclusivism and national pride.

Suppose the NPP is right about Paul’s obsessions. If so, perhaps a “new perspective on the Reformation” will bring Paul and Luther back into amicable communion. A lot of recent social history on the Reformation takes the focus off the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation and examines how the Reformers dealt with the Roman hierarchy, practices of piety, structures and symbols that formed the “symbolic universe” of late medieval Catholicism. The doctrinal disputes are not ignored, but they are put into a setting where the Reformers are seen as challengers to a whole religious-political system, centering on the Mass and the Papacy. The stripping of the idols and all that. Now, if this is the model we use for the Reformation, then the similarities between the “NPP” Paul and Luther are much more apparent. In short, the NPP sees a disjunction between Paul and Luther because they are operating with an “old” perspective on the Reformation.