In the comments in the previous post, there were a couple of requests for me to amplify just a tad. So here goes.
The NPP wants to say that Second Temple Judaism was fundamentally a religion of grace, contra those folks who tend to see it as a first century version of the monkish merit-mongering that drove Luther to his first clear understanding of free justification. Therefore, the NPP argues, the model of Luther’s “conversion” must not be taken as a model for all time, and we should not see the pre-Damascus road Saul as being tormented in conscience the way Luther was, and so on.
Now of course, there is plenty of evidence that first century Judaism was a religion of grace — if you look at the Torah, and the writings of various rabbis who praised the graciousness of what God had done for Israel, and so on. Of course it was. But if you look at the hypocrisy of those scoundrels who twisted this religion of grace into something according to their own image, the story was quite different.
Those who lived in accordance with grace were Jews like Zecharias and Elizabeth, and those who hated the gracious heart of God were men like Saul of Tarsus. God thought that Zecharias and Elizabeth were blameless according to the law, and inspired Luke to say so. This does not mean that they were sinlessly perfect, but rather that they were faithful covenant members who by faith availed themselves of the means of forgiveness built into the covenant. Everything the NPP would say about them would be true.
Saul, on the other hand, was an insolent, blaspheming man. He hated the grace of God as it was evidenced in the seed of the woman — the people he thought his duty to savage in his persecution of the church. He was a snake, a viper. And of course, he was a snake fully convinced in his own mind that he was not a snake. Given his own screwed up premises, he was blameless according to the law. But at the heart level, he needed to be converted. Put another way, in the simplest “bottom line” kind of way, if Zecharias and Saul had both had a heart attack in 25 A.D., Zecharias would have been saved and Saul lost. That fundamental divide between unregenerate and regenerate is one where Saul was on the wrong side of the line, and by the grace of God in the visitation of Christ on the Damascus road, was wonderfully converted to the right side. Just like Augustine, Luther, and John Newton. To put it in evangelical parlance, he was born again.
So this means, in its turn — if the NPP drops the entirely unhelpful idea that there was no fundamental covenantal difference between Zecharias and Saul — that the Old Perspective on Paul is fully consistent with the (remaining) valuable observations offering by the NPP. But until that move is made, the NPP, for all the clarity it brings to many texts and issues, on this crucial issue, is badly smudging things.