What is your take on James Dunn’s new perspective on Paul?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2002.

I am disturbed by reports of the discouraging and enervating effect that the New Perspective has had on some in the Anglican churches, who have hitherto been accustomed to preaching the gospel faithfully. I am afraid that these theories are not innocent before God. I am not against profound theological study of Scripture: I have tried to be a little bit of an academic myself. But the truth of God is not ultimately a pursuit of knowledge or scholarship.

In my humble opinion, when Romans 3 states that it was the purpose of God's law that every mouth should be stopped and the whole world become guilty before God, it is patently absurd to suggest that the works of the law that Paul was envisaging there were merely the food laws and the ceremonial laws, which were the distinct badges of Israel. Nor does it suffice to say that James Dunn, having promoted this theory, still really believes in justification by faith, and so forth: for one sees the effect of such academic theories on the undermining of the preaching of the gospel.¹

It will be a disaster in countries like Russia and Romania, where young men, not long converted, feel that the way to serve the Lord would be to take a degree course in a university in the West, if their faith in the doctrine of justification by faith, and so forth, were to be undermined. The Orthodox Church itself cares very little for the doctrine of justification by faith. Witness the Penguin book on Orthodoxy by Bishop [Timothy] Kallistos Ware.² Many in the Orthodox Church do not believe in the doctrine of Christ's substitutionary death, anyway. They hold that Christ suffered as an example to us, to show us how we should suffer; and it is by our suffering that we find salvation.

One fears, therefore, for the young men from these Eastern European countries, not long converted. Coming from that kind of background, if, when they come to theological departments in universities of the West, they have to spend long hours mugging up the New Perspective, so having their faith undermined when they do not as yet have the strength and the depth to resist it.

Ever yours in Christ,

¹ Dunn, James D. G, (1990). Jesus, Paul, and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians, Westminster John Knox Press, pp. 1–7.

² Kallistos (1993). The Orthodox Church, 2nd ed., Penguin.