LUTHER AFTER THE STENDAHL/ SANDERS REVOLUTION: A RESPONSIVE EVALUATION OF LUTHER'S VIEW OF FIRST-CENTURY JUDAISM IN HIS 1535 COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS

Trinity Journal, Spring 2006 by Artinian, Robert G

As early as Karl Barth and Peter Wiener, modern scholars and theologians have accused Luther's theology of carrying devastating implications and incalculable consequences, of being inherently antiSemitic, and of even leading to the Holocaust.1 Barth himself believed that Luther's theology was one of the key factors that prepared the way for Hitler and his regime.2 While the cause-andeffect link connecting Luther and Hitler has long since been discredited,3 the same allegation continues to be made in modern scholarship. Perhaps more important, charges that Luther's theology mischaracterizes first-century Judaism and is inherently anti-Semitic not only continue, but appear to be at a crescendo.4

The particular area of scholarship in which these accusations have become most pronounced is in the area of Pauline studies, particularly over the course of the past forty years. What began this trend (beyond, of course, the event of the Holocaust itself and German theologians' complicity in it) was a lecture made by the accomplished Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, Krister Stendahl, in 1963 -a lecture subsequently published under the now famous title, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West."5 In that lecture and article, Stendahl blamed Luther for misinterpreting both Paul and Judaism by reading his own psychological struggles with the Law into Paul and his own context of a legalistic sixteenthcentury Roman Catholicism into the Judaism of first-century Palestine.6 In the wake of this massive claim, a whole "new perspective" on Paul-really, a new perspective on first-century Palestinian Judaism which has drastically affected Pauline interpretation-has blossomed, taking its critical impetus (and at least a part of its formative shape) from Stendahl's proposal.7 For Stendahl's thesis about Luther remains to this day a critical touchstone of the New Perspective on Paul.8

All of these charges from Barth to Stendahl to the present are, indeed, serious charges, and have frequently flowed from the pens of serious theologians. And from these charges, as we have said, a whole movement in NT scholarship has arisen in reaction to Luther's reading of Paul and the Law.9 But what is striking about this new view in Pauline studies is the cursory manner in which Luther's views are typically characterized and how casually Luther is minimized as an interpreter of Paul. Stendahl's thesis on Luther was quickly accepted as a sort of "given" (especially in the wake of Sanders) and it is presumed as a theological starting-point that Luther's theology of justification is fundamentally anti-Semitic and sets forth "the Jew" as the chief representative of worksrighteousness, and thus as "the symbol of all that is false and dangerous in religion."10

In the paper to follow, we will survey Luther's treatment of first-century Judaism in his 1535 commentary on Galatians - the piece of writing in which the mature Luther most fully works out and elaborates his theology of justification.11 In this survey, we will limit ourselves to two questions: (1) Did Luther-as Stendahl and those who have followed him assert-construct his view of first-century Judaism by simply reading sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism back into the first-century? (2) Is Luther's theology of justification-as many scholars now assume-inherently anti-Semitic, demonizing "the Jew" as the worst of all religious people? In our investigation, we find that, at least in the case of Luther's 1535 commentary on Galatians, the first charge is not true to Luther's ostensible exegetical methodology, and the second (while complicated by Christianity's inherent theological anti-Judaism) is not fair to Luther's theology of justification as he here presents it. In short, it is shown that modern Pauline studies, at least the New Perspective wing of it, fail sufficiently to appreciate Luther both as an exegete and as a theologian, and thus misconstrue the method by which Luther arrives at his picture of first-century Judaism and unfairly characterize Luther's treatment of "the Jew" as a religious person in his theology of justification.12

I. THE "NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PAUL" AND ITS ANTI-LUTHER POLEMIC

Before turning to Luther's view of first-century Judaism in his 1535 commentary on Galatians, we should first pause to elucidate at least the general shape of the charges in Pauline scholarship as they now stand against the Reformer; that is, we must look a little more deeply into the New Perspective on Paul. It is my belief that a number of other preliminary matters-regarding Luther, his time, and our definitions of "anti-Semitism" (a form of racism, since ethnocentric) versus "anti-Judaism" (not at all a form of racism, since theological)-should be considered before doing this, but I have relegated these discussions to an appendix.

As is often noted in surveys of the New Perspective, the New Perspective on Paul is by no means monolithic; consensus is not a word that really characterizes the movement, with its many participants and its varying proposals.13 There are, however, no less than two points that unite all the major proponents: first, the belief that Luther read himself into Paul, and sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism into first-century Judaism; second, the conviction that first-century Judaism was not a legalistic religion in which human obedience was seen as meriting divine favor, acceptance, or salvation. These two fundamental points were established as cornerstones of the burgeoning movement (as we have already implied) in the controversial works of Krister Stendahl and E. P. Sanders, respectively. To these and to their adherents we now very briefly turn.