The Sufficiency of Scripture in Doing Christian Theology by the Book

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Listen to the reading of this longform essay here. Listen as David Schrock and Stephen Wellum discuss the essay here.

Introduction

Most Christians have heard pastors, Bible teachers, or friends return from Israel raving about how their recent tour of the Holy Land “unlocks the Bible” for them. With wonder, they recount how standing on Mount Carmel brings to life the prophet Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). They tell of how traversing the streets of Galilee, where Jesus walked, opens up the four Gospels as never before. They effusively recount walking in the footsteps of Jesus along the Via Dolorosa and entering the empty tomb. This naive posture tends to render Christians susceptible to the notion that some crucial aspects of understanding the Bible reside outside the biblical text.

Even Bible teachers fall prey to this notion. During my first tour of Israel, our group had the privilege of hearing a presentation by a renowned biblical scholar who frequently lectured throughout the Middle Eastern countries. Reputed to be a foremost interpreter of the Jewish culture during the life of Jesus, he presented a lecture on John 4, the account concerning Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Many in the classroom sat spellbound as he expounded the account by drawing from his numerous observations of Middle Eastern culture as a resident.

This lecturer observed that the well would not have had a bucket tied to a rope for drawing water. He claimed that travelers would have carried a foldable leather bucket to collect water, but evidently, Jesus’s disciples had the bucket with them when they departed and went into town. Likewise, drawing on his cultural observations, this biblical scholar explained that the Samaritan woman’s journey to the well alone during the midday heat hints that she was an outcast among her fellow Samaritans. While Jesus approached the well, cultural mores called for him not to engage the woman in conversation, but to retreat several feet from her to show it was safe and appropriate for her to come closer. Jesus, however, did not withdraw from her but instead held his ground, and worse, he broke the social taboo by speaking to her.

While listening to the lecture, I was struck by two observations. First, I noticed how others sat spellbound as if hearing the account from John 4 for the first time. Second, I marveled that the lecturer enraptured his hearers with details that are almost all present within the biblical text itself, but he, perhaps without realizing it, framed those aspects as if he discovered them in resources outside the text of John’s Gospel.

Following the lecture, through conversations with others who heard the presentation, I realized that many naively came to think that (a) the apostle John’s account was insufficient by itself, and (b) background knowledge derived from other resources was essential for grasping the truths being conveyed. I realized that I was witnessing an exercise, doubtless intended for good by the lecturer, that nonetheless was misleading many to suppose that the Fourth Gospel’s account of Jesus and the woman at the well was not sufficient, calling for the acquisition of social-cultural knowledge outside the Bible to grasp the account’s significance.

The truth is that anyone who reads the account concerning Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman can readily discern from the text of John’s Gospel, either explicitly or implicitly, that the woman was on society’s fringe. Jesus characterizes this woman as one who has had multiple husbands and was in an illicit relationship with a man who was not her husband (John 4:16–18). One can readily infer from the text that this is why the woman came to the well by herself during the middle of the day (“about the sixth hour”)—when other women would not be present because of the heat (John 4:6).[1] Also, the text expressly states, by way of the woman’s attentiveness, that Jesus had no means by which he could draw water from the deep well (John 4:11). Likewise, John the Evangelist plainly informs the reader that when Jesus’s disciples returned to him, “they marveled that he was talking with a woman” (John 4:27).

1. Biblical quotations in this article are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible unless otherwise noted.

Because John’s Gospel sufficiently informs readers concerning each of these cultural aspects integral to the account, special knowledge of the culture derived from outside the biblical text is both extraneous and superfluous. Thus, whenever we read the Scriptures, especially narrative portions such as in the four Gospels, we should expect that the immediate textual setting sufficiently provides what is necessary for correctly understanding the passage.

The occasion portrayed above may seem innocent and harmless because the interpretive details derived from outside the biblical account are truly present in the biblical text. Yet a question is fitting: Do such incidents become the seductive gateway to a sinister subjection of Scripture to external authorities? The demeanor of both the Holy Land lecturer and his listeners exhibited an inclination to look to resources outside the Bible to authorize the correct interpretation of the biblical text.

Does this posture pose a challenge to Scripture’s authority? If so, does it threaten the proper grounding of our Christian faith? Hence, we must consider whether appeals to resources outside the Holy Scriptures subvert our longstanding Protestant doctrine called “The Sufficiency of Scripture.”

Scripture’s Sufficiency

What do we mean when we speak of Scripture’s sufficiency? Question and answer 3 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism succinctly expresses the range of Scripture’s sufficiency:

Q. What do the Scriptures principally teach?
A. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.[2]

2. See also question and answer 6 of the Baptist Catechism. Westminster Confession of Faith: Together with the Larger Catechism and the Shorter Catechism with the Scripture Proofs, 3rd ed. (1647; repr., Atlanta: PCA Committee for Christian Education & Publications, 1990), question and answer 3; The Baptist Catechism: With Proof Texts (1695; repr., Knightstown, IN: Particular Baptist Heritage Books, 2021), question and answer 6.

This means that the Scriptures are sufficient for the specific task for which God gave them. The Scriptures reveal who God is, who humans are in relation to God, and how we should portray this relationship in worship of our Creator. The Scriptures are sufficient to ground our trust in God and to know what God requires of us. However, when we say that Scripture is sufficient, we do not mean that Scripture alone is necessary for our growth in the gospel. Scripture tells us that God calls the church to gather together to worship him (Heb. 10:25), and he has provided teachers and preachers to expound the Scriptures for our edification and spiritual growth as Christians (Eph. 4:11–12). Likewise, the Lord gives elders and deacons to govern the church wisely and to guard the doctrinal affirmations of the Christian faith (1 Tim. 3:1–13).

Likewise, we must not subject God or his Scriptures to mockery as if the Bible answers every question we could ever pose. It does not. Most of our daily routines—cooking meals, our vocational callings, home ownership and maintenance, car repair, problems with our computers, etc.—call for authoritative information outside the Bible. Nevertheless, we Protestant Christians believe that Scripture suffices as the ground of our knowing God and ourselves in relation to our Creator.

Thus, all our affirmations must be consistent with Scripture’s teachings. So, Scripture suffices as our governing guide for Christian faith and behavior. While Scripture does not specifically state how we Christians are to position ourselves in relation to our culture or to cast our voting ballots in any election, local or national, the Bible contains sufficient authoritative guidance concerning what our view of the world should be in whatever culture we find ourselves.

Scripture’s Sufficiency and Resources Outside the Bible

The Scriptures came to us by the direct agency of God’s Spirit working harmoniously with the divinely appointed human writers so that the result of this concursive process is that the human authors’ activities of thinking and writing were not coerced. Their activities were free and spontaneous, yet at the same time, divinely prompted and governed. Thus, Scripture, written for our good, is not merely a human production but God’s own authoritative word concerning the redemption of his created order. The Bible has human authors and one overarching divine Author.

God’s written word authorizes ministers of the gospel to train Christians concerning the good news that is in Jesus. It authorizes Christian parents to do the same for their children. When we affirm the sufficiency of Scripture, we do not put resources that supplement the Bible out of bounds for ministers and parents. Scripture’s sufficiency does not prohibit our use of a rich and vast library of resources to assist our study of God’s word.

Thus, Abraham Kuyper’s biblical reasoning is praiseworthy when, during his inaugural address at the dedication of The Free University of Amsterdam (1880), he asserted:

Man in his antithesis as fallen sinner or self-developing natural creature returns again as “the subject that thinks” or “the object that prompts thought” in every department, in every discipline, and with every investigator. Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”[3]

3. James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488. Emphasis in the original.

Kuyper offered this appraisal to counter anyone who might allow for Christian theology to have its own department in a university but who would dismiss the notion that theology is a constituent aspect of every academic discipline, whether the sciences, medicine, law, economics, history, psychology, or linguistics. He correctly envisioned the Christian university wherein all learners acknowledge that theology is the core discipline of learning and the one that permeates the entire curriculum so that every academic discipline submits to Christ’s Lordship as revealed in Scripture. Oh, how far short of this ideal our Christian institutions of learning fall!

As Protestants, we correctly affirm sola Scriptura because Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and conduct, the final authority by which we are to judge (a) the Bible itself and (b) the Christian doctrine and practice that the Bible teaches. Yet, we must be wary lest we fall into either of the two ditches that line our pathway.

The first temptation, to shut ourselves up to Scripture alone as our only resource of learning for human life, is to find ourselves in the ditch of obscurantism, restricting knowledge concerning God’s world to what is revealed in the Bible. The Bible is not an encyclopedic life guide. In fact, Scripture itself teaches us that God reveals himself in his created order (Rom. 1:18–21).

The second temptation, a much more seductive ditch, elicits greater enticements. This is the allurement about which Kuyper implicitly warned and into which many scholars in Christian universities have stumbled. The error is that we must somehow integrate or synthesize learning derived from the created universe with Christian faith revealed in God’s Scriptures.[4] Academicians who embrace this deceptive premise as true regularly constrain the Scriptures to accommodate their interpretation concerning the “evidence” their research uncovers in support of theories that contradict the plain sense of Scripture.[5]

4. Ardel Caneday, “Integration of Faith and Thought Is Not the Scholar’s Work but the Creator’s Work Already Accomplished,” keynote address for the Twin Cities Undergraduate Theology Conference, University of Northwestern—St. Paul, St. Paul, MN, April 7, 2022.

5. See, for example, Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 25–44.

The false premise induces Old Testament scholars and even apologists to abandon the plain sense of Genesis 1–11 in favor of explaining the biblical text as “mytho-history” akin to what they deem to be parallel accounts in ancient Near Eastern records. Though they deny doing so, they subvert Scripture’s authority by appealing to an external authority.[6] Archaeological discoveries often provide evidence that confirms the truthfulness of the Bible’s claims. However, when biblical scholars and apologists exploit ancient pagan accounts and records to interpret (or reinterpret) the Holy Scriptures, as when they expound Genesis 1–11, they undermine the sufficiency of Scripture’s testimony concerning what we are obligated to believe as did Jesus, his apostles and their associates who wrote the New Testament.

6. See Ardel B. Caneday, “A Misguided Quest for the Historical Adam: Implications for our View of Scripture,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 26, no. 2 (2022): 48–68.

To fall into this latter ditch invariably induces scholars to flirt with another transgression of Christian doctrine, the notion that Scripture’s inerrancy is “limited” to matters that pertain explicitly to the Christian faith.[7] This error, not at all rare in Old Testament studies, is more subtle among scholars whose work focuses on the New Testament and, therefore, not as readily discernible. So, we now turn to discern the principal way in which New Testament scholars tend to subvert Scripture’s sufficiency concerning a crucial Christian teaching.

7. Denis Lamoureux explicitly promotes “limited inerrancy,” calling it the “message-incident principle.” By this phrase, he means that God accommodated errant ancient science as the incidental vehicle to convey his inerrant message. Lamoureux illustrates his point: “The ancient science in Scripture is essential for transporting spiritual truths. It acts like a cup that holds water. Whether a cup is made of glass, plastic, or metal is incidental. What matters is that a vessel is needed to bring water to a thirsty person.” Denis Lamoureux, Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 90.

Second Temple Literature as the Resource for Interpreting Jesus and Paul?

At erudite meetings, beginning a generation ago with the rise of postmodernism, biblical scholars frequently discussed and lectured on where the meaning of a literary text resides. Should we look for meaning in what the author intended? Should we focus on the reader’s experience of the text? Or is it a combination of factors that yields a text’s meaning? At that time, “reader-response theory” (placing meaning in the reader’s subjective experience of the text) was a concept that rivaled inquiry into the author’s intended meaning. The effects of those discussions are with us to this day.

Unsurprisingly, some biblical scholars began to employ a version of the reader-response theory that significantly influenced their interpretation of Scripture. Of course, anyone who employs this theory for interpreting a text must consider who the author’s initial hearers or readers were. Since the Bible’s texts are ancient, biblical scholars who accept some version of the “reader-response theory” to expound the Scriptures find it necessary to become conversant not only with the cultural aspects of ancient Israelites but also their beliefs. Scholars do this by mining the prolific deposits of Jewish literature following the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple (c. 516 BC), around the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, and during the time of the Temple’s destruction by Roman armies during the Jewish revolt in AD 70.[8]

8. Some of the more well-known pieces of literature from the Second Temple period include what is known as the Apocrypha (e.g., Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Bel and the Dragon), the Pseudepigrapha (e.g., 1 Enoch, Jubilees), the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., Qumran Sectarian Writings, Septuagint, Damascus Document, portions of every Old Testament book except Esther), Talmudic and Rabbinic literature, Philo, and Josephus.

Among the scholars who held significant roles in the discussion a generation ago, one stands out. N. T. Wright, a prominent scholar whose impact on New Testament studies is incalculable, led the way for other academicians (and laymen) to alter their interpretation of the teachings of Jesus and the apostle Paul. As an undergraduate student at Oxford University, Wright was the president of the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU). He confidently affirmed theological beliefs he was pleased to describe as “Calvinistic, Augustinian or Reformed, since any system of divinity stands or falls according as it is, or is not, thoroughly Scripture-based, and in harmony with the entire content of God’s Holy Word.”[9] In his student days, Wright endorsed the following affirmation as a contributing author of a book entitled The Grace of God in the Gospel:

9. John Cheeseman, Philip Gardner, Michael Sadgrove, and Tom Wright, The Grace of God in the Gospel (1972; repr., Edinburgh, UK; Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1976), 17.

Justification by faith is the heart of the Gospel. This is what is contained in the promise, “Whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” If we fail to grasp the fact that the righteousness which justifies us is imputed and not infused or inherent, we shall find that, in substance, what we preach is a gospel of works, not a Gospel of grace.[10]

10. Cheeseman, Gardner, Sadgrove, and Wright, Grace of God in the Gospel, 48.

However, Wright underwent a significant transformation from those initial beliefs. Observe how Wright’s former beliefs concerning justification contrast with his later (current) beliefs. Now he reasons:

If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. . . . To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge’s righteousness is simply a category mistake. That is not how language works.[11]

11. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 98.

In addition to this distorted parody of the traditional Protestant expression of God’s justifying verdict pronounced to the believing sinner, it is crucial to observe Wright’s caricature of everyone who maintains that justification entails imputed righteousness. According to him, most Protestants are oblivious to the fact that both Jesus and Paul were keenly aware of being participants in the unfolding drama of God’s dominion over his created order so that the gospel has political ramifications for first-century Jews and Gentiles within the Roman Empire. Wright elaborates:

If we are to locate both Jesus and Paul within the world of first-century Judaism, within the turbulent theological and political movements and expectations of the time (and if we are not then we should admit that we know very little about either of them) then we must face the fact that neither of them was teaching a timeless system of religion or ethics, or even a timeless message about how human beings are saved. Both of them believed themselves to be actors within the drama staged by Israel’s God in fulfillment of his long purposes. Both, in other words, breathed the air of Jewish eschatology.[12]

12. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 178–79.

Despite attempts to camouflage it, all our doing of theology is, to some extent, unavoidably autobiographical. Our theological speech discloses the simplicity or maturity of our beliefs. Thus, when Wright characterizes his former beliefs concerning justification in God’s courtroom, he reveals how simplistic his former beliefs were in that they: (1) failed to acknowledge the progress of redemptive history, (2) viewed Jesus and Paul as teachers of a “timeless system of religion” without reference to a God-given covenant, (3) assumed that the Pharisees and Judaizers were devoted to a system of works-righteousness, and (4) supposed that the gospel message is strictly individualistic without eschatological ramifications of Christ’s lordship over the entirety of God’s created order. Wright now presumptuously assigns these immature beliefs, formerly his own, to anyone who still believes, as he once did, that God acquits believers by imputing to them all that belongs to Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:31–39).

When we respond to Wright’s caricature of Protestant biblical scholars, we are obligated not to reciprocate in kind and not to mischaracterize his views. Many respondents to Wright’s pale imitation of the Reformed understanding are inclined to adopt a defensive posture, uncritically passing over some crucial foundational questions. Why did Wright undertake such a significant adjustment to his understanding of the apostle Paul’s doctrine of justification before God? What now grounds his interpretation of Jesus and Paul? What authorizes his theological formulations?

Wright explains:

Saul, I used to believe, was a proto-Pelagian, who thought he could pull himself up by his moral bootstraps. What mattered for him was understanding, believing, and operating a system of salvation that could be described as “moralism” or “legalism”: a timeless system into which one plugged oneself in order to receive the promised benefits, especially “salvation” and “eternal life,” understood as the post-mortem bliss of heaven. I now believe that this is both radically anachronistic (this view was not invented in Saul’s day) and culturally out of line (it is not the Jewish way of thinking). . . .

But Saul of Tarsus was not interested in a timeless system of salvation, whether of works-righteousness or anything else. Nor was he interested simply in understanding and operating a system of religion, a system of “getting in” and/or “staying in” . . . He wanted God to redeem Israel.[13]

13. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 32.

What authorizes Wright’s new perspective on Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels and on the apostle Paul’s teaching in his letters? On what basis does he stake his claim? To what does he attribute his major revision concerning how he characterizes the apostle Paul’s beliefs prior to and after his conversion when Christ Jesus confronted him on his way to Damascus to arrest Jews who believed in the resurrected Messiah?

Extra-Biblical Historical Backgrounds

Wright attributes his shift to the influence of the publication of Paul and Palestinian Judaism by E. P. Sanders in 1977.[14] Sanders reassessed the diverse range of religious beliefs within Judaism prior to and contemporaneous with the time of Jesus and Paul. From his analysis of Second Temple Jewish literature, Sanders contends that Protestant Christians since the Reformation have significantly misjudged Judaism, especially the beliefs of the Pharisees. So, Wright grounds his “new perspective on Paul” (and on Jesus) outside the biblical text: in his and Sanders’s reading of diverse forms of Judaism through non-canonical intertestamental Jewish literature. Wright explains:

14. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 18–19. Despite Wright’s general agreement with Sanders, he faults him for assessing ancient Judaism’s religion without accounting for the “political dimension.”

Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a religion of legalistic works-righteousness. If we imagine that it was, and that Paul was attacking it as if it was, we will do great violence to it and to him. Most Protestant exegetes had read Paul and Judaism as if Judaism was a form of the old heresy Pelagianism, according to which humans must pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps and thereby earn justification, righteousness, and salvation. No, said Sanders. Keeping the law within Judaism always functioned within a covenantal scheme. God took the initiative, when he made a covenant with Judaism; God’s grace thus precedes everything that people (specifically, Jews) do in response. The Jew keeps the law out of gratitude, as the proper response to grace—not, in other words, in order to get into the covenant people, but to stay in. Being “in” in the first place was God’s gift.[15]

15. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 18–19. Emphasis in the original.

Whether Sanders and Wright correctly assess the varieties of Second Temple Judaism as neither holding nor promoting a religion of works-righteousness is a fair question that has occupied most respondents. That, however, is not the focus of this article. Rather, our chief concern is that Wright, following Sanders, grounds his interpretation of Jesus’s engagement with the Pharisees and Paul’s opposition to the Judaizers not within but outside the biblical text.

It is noteworthy that Wright argues that Protestants continue to ground their understanding of the Pharisees and the Judaizers in the sixteenth-century Pelagian system of works-righteousness that Protestant Reformers, like Martin Luther and John Calvin, opposed. Wright argues that the Reformers wrongly retrofitted sixteenth-century Roman Catholic dogma and practice onto first-century Judaism, particularly in reference to the Pharisees and Judaizers. Essentially, Wright objects that Luther identified himself with Jesus and Paul while associating Roman Catholics and Papists with the Pharisees and Judaizers, thus treating the latter as if they were full-blown works-righteousness proponents. Wright’s criticism correctly requires each of us to carefully assess the warrant for how we read and teach the Scriptures. We must ask ourselves: What grounds our characterization of the Pharisees and Judaizers? Does Scripture itself warrant such a depiction of these two groups?

Nevertheless, it is highly ironic that Wright fails to acknowledge that he, as a scholar, does the same sort of “reading in” that he accuses Luther, Calvin, and their theological heirs of practicing. While Wright faults Luther for superimposing his medieval battle with Roman Catholicism onto Jesus’s and Paul’s conflicts with the Pharisees and Judaizers, respectively, Wright superimposes his interpretation of Second Temple Judaism onto the Pharisees and Judaizers with whom Jesus and Paul had to contend. If Luther and his theological descendants unwittingly and wrongly reshape the Pharisees and Judaizers to medieval Romanist teaching and practice, does not Wright wrongly do the same, only taking his cues from a different source, that of Jewish Second Temple literature?[16]

16. In fairness, it is right to point out that Wright’s sources for interpretation come from a time period that is much closer to that of Jesus and Paul, even overlapping them.

If Wright is convinced that Luther and the Protestant tradition mischaracterize the Jews, the Pharisees, and the Judaizers whom we encounter within the pages of the Bible, why is the biblical text not sufficient to demonstrate the truthfulness of his objection? Why does Wright, like those he faults, go outside the biblical record to authorize his character sketches of the Jewish opponents of Jesus and Paul and their corrective teachings? Why, for Wright, does not the biblical text suffice? Why does Wright not demonstrate from the biblical character sketches within Scripture that the Reformers and their theological progeny mischaracterize the Jewish opponents of the gospel that Jesus and Paul preached?

Conclusion

If Wright is correct that the Jews who opposed Jesus and Paul did not hold to a system of works-righteousness, why does he not demonstrate this point from Scripture? Why does he find the authority for his claims in literature outside the Bible? If the Protestant tradition has wrongly retrojected sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism onto the biblical characterizations of Pharisees and Judaizers, one needs to demonstrate from the biblical text itself Protestantism’s mischaracterization.[17] Appealing to literature outside the Bible to correct this alleged error is to commit the very same mistake.

17. Certainly, Wright appeals to the New Testament to argue his case concerning justification, both against the Protestant doctrine and for his modification. However, without realizing it, his uses of the New Testament to argue his case against the Reformed doctrine of justification and imputation are heavily refracted through the prism of his reading of Second Temple Judaism which is not monolithic but diverse.

The reality is that Scripture itself is sufficient in its depiction of both the Pharisees and Judaizers. The apostle Paul testifies that he was a Pharisee, “advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). Thus, should not Paul’s own characterization of the doctrinal opponents he faces suffice as authoritative? If not, why not? Paul notes, “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:9). When Paul, a Jew and former Pharisee, conclusively and emphatically announces this curse upon his Judaizing opponents in Galatia who proclaim a “different gospel,” we are obliged to account for his characterization of their teaching and practice within his letter to the Galatians, whatever it is. And if the “different gospel” they preach is not a system of works-righteousness, then we are obligated to demonstrate this from the apostle’s portrayal of them, and not by looking in extrabiblical literature.

The Gospels, the Book of Acts, and Paul’s letters unequivocally characterize the Jews as rejecting Jesus of Nazareth, their long-awaited promised Messiah. The Pharisees and chief priests regarded Jesus as a threat and disrupter to their dominance over Jewish religious life (John 11:48). Their religious zeal to maintain the purity of the law of Moses, the Temple, and synagogues from Jesus’s teaching about God’s kingdom consumed them to conspire against him and put him to death.

Some Jews, who professedly acknowledged Jesus as the promised Messiah, zealously insisted upon the permanence of the Mosaic law with its requirement of circumcision and observance of food laws and holy days, thus regarding the Messiah as subject to the law covenant rather than fulfilling it. They preached that Gentiles must receive circumcision, whereby they would then become Abraham’s seed (Acts 15:1; Gal. 5:2). Such Judaizers inverted the gospel promise, namely, that Gentiles and Jews, together, become Abraham’s seed by belonging to Jesus Christ, who is the True Seed of Abraham (Gal 3:16, 29). The Judaizers’ prioritizing of Abraham over his Seed, the Messiah (Gal. 3:16), and of Mosaic law over the one who entirely fulfilled the law (Gal. 4:4), is the fundamental error Paul counters in his letter to the Galatians.

Whether Paul’s opponents taught a system of works-righteousness must be demonstrated or invalidated on the authority of the biblical text, not from outside of it. The invalidity or validity of Luther’s lens of medieval Roman Catholicism or Wright’s lens of Second Temple Judaism must be assessed by the ultimate standard of biblical truth. Scripture’s portrayal of the theological errors of both the Pharisees and Judaizers is utterly sufficient. Otherwise, Scripture no longer stands as the norming norm.

***

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted and abridged with permission from an article by the same title published in Pro Pastor, 2.2 (Fall 2023), 2–10. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author

  • Ardel Caneday

    Ardel Caneday continues as an adjunct faculty member at University of Northwestern after recently retiring from his role as Professor of New Testament & Greek. Ardel completed the MDiv and ThM at Grace Theological Seminary and the PhD in New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a founding teaching elder of Christ Bible Church (Roseville, MN). He co-edited with Matthew Barrett Four Views on the Historical Adam, co-authored with Thomas R. Schreiner The Race Set Before Us, and has published many articles in Christian magazines, journals, books, and online.

Picture of Ardel Caneday

Ardel Caneday

Ardel Caneday continues as an adjunct faculty member at University of Northwestern after recently retiring from his role as Professor of New Testament & Greek. Ardel completed the MDiv and ThM at Grace Theological Seminary and the PhD in New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a founding teaching elder of Christ Bible Church (Roseville, MN). He co-edited with Matthew Barrett Four Views on the Historical Adam, co-authored with Thomas R. Schreiner The Race Set Before Us, and has published many articles in Christian magazines, journals, books, and online.