A Pilgrim's Search

Introduction

Paul’s sometimes cryptic style conceals a gospel radically different from the modern “grace through faith” motif—one far more astonishing and transformative.  Because it has been ignored, even suppressed over the centuries, it needs to be decoded and heard. 😉

Stirb und werde – “die and become” – has long been recognized as the core of Paul’s gospel.  Dr. Jason Staples[0] explores this theme in his forthcoming article The Death of Death, from which several unattributed quotations here are drawn. This idea also played a pivotal role in C. S. Lewis’s conversion, shaped by thinkers such as Matthew Arnold and George MacDonald.

The foundation of Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians is found in the imagery of Christian believers “dying” to their old life and remade into Christlikeness by God’s indwelling Spirit – the very fulfillment of God’s New Covenant promise of new hearts, hearts of flesh on which is written God’s law, through which “all will know me”, and Spirit-empowered obedience.

Christ makes this transformation possible, and Paul extends its reach to Gentiles—including descendants of the lost House of Israel—and to his fellow Jews. Christ’s death and resurrection serve as metaphors for the believer’s death to self and Spirit‑empowered transformation. Paul calls this transformative death “justification.”

What is Justification, and How Is it Attained?

The Jewish Understanding and Practice

Jews generally do not agonize over justification. As God’s chosen people, they maintain covenant identity through festivals, Sabbath observance, synagogue participation, Torah readings, scheduled prayer, and kosher practice.

Justification?  A Jew assumes he is in good standing with his God through covenant membership and faithful observance — anciently including sacrificial practices. Repentance, prayer, and sacrifice restored one to a “justified” state.

Education in the faith’s precepts and disciplined practice of them both require effort, the practice of which reinforces the assumption of acceptable standing before God.

This is not at all how Paul saw the matter, as we will see.  His message to his brethren Jews was consistent: performing ‘works of the law’ maintained one’s standing in the covenant people – one’s license to stay “in the camp”.  But it did not justify.

The Traditional Christian Understanding

Traditionally, Christians think of justification as being summarized in Ga 2:16

¹⁶yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ…

What they’ve been told justification is not, under any circumstances, is the result of “works of the law”.  But what is it?

This traditional view was born out of a courtroom metaphor first developed by Anselm in the Middle Ages, which was later interpreted by Luther, the Reformation, and his Reformed church. In this metaphor, God is the judge, you are the defendant standing on the charge of “unrighteousness,” of which you are clearly “guilty” in as much as you have not lived up to God’s standard of righteousness declared in his Torah, and Christ is the surrogate bearer of your punishment.  Crucially, Christ, framed as the suffering intermediary, was seen as removing the defendant’s sin to himself, and in this way enabling God to act on his mercy (toward the guilty) and according to his justice.

However, what this model ignores is that in proposing Christ as the surrogate to take for himself the defendant’s judgement of guilt, this transaction is still unjust, perhaps even more so.  Staples writes:

…the usual criminal/legal formulation of this framework violates perhaps the most fundamental principle of justice: the foundation that each person gets what that person deserves.20 An innocent person being punished for the crime of another who then goes free does not preserve justice but rather adds to the injustice, even if the innocent person volunteered as substitute.

Despite this problem, this interpretation became the Protestant standard.  Most Christians see it as meaning identical with “salvation” – the gift of eternal life when they die through their faith in Jesus (where, for most, “faith” = simply their agreement that he was the Son of God who was crucified and was resurrected.)  Nonetheless, it is the essence of modern Christian faith.

Paul could not have recognized this as his gospel or its faith (as we shall see).  Because it isn’t.

Paul’s Justification – Transformative Death and New Covenant Renewal

The New Covenant is the covenant that God promised to fulfill with “the House of Israel” and “the House of Judah” in many passages from the prophets (Dt 30:6, Jer 24:7, Jer 31:33-34, Jer 32:39–40, Eze 11:19–20, Eze 36:26–27, Eze 37:1-22,  Isa 44:3–5,  Isa 57:15,  Isa 59:21, Hos 2:23, Joel 2:28–29).

This covenant promises to give Judah and Israel new hearts, the knowledge of God and his Torah written on their hearts, and God’s Spirit living within them.  It is the inheritance of those turning their lives over to God/Christ (including those who were “not my people”).  It is Paul’s “justification”.   Says Staples:

“Justification first and foremost refers to moral transformation—the fulfillment of the change of heart promised in the Torah and Prophets by receiving the spirit of Christ (Rom 2:14–16, 26–29; 8:2–4, 9–17; 2 Cor 3:4–6), which leads the previously sinful person to behave in a Christlike manner (Phil 2:12–13; Rom 5:3–5; 6:1–22; 2 Cor 3:4–6).”

This transformation is triggered when one rejects his old life and instead commits his life to God/Christ.  This abandonment metaphorically represents the repentant’s death to self.

Death

In his 1870 book “St. Paul and Protestantism”, Matthew Arnold developed the view that the idea of death was central to Paul’s theology.  He calls it the “doctrine of necrosis” and comments that the three main pillars of Paul’s soteriology were: dying with Christ, resurrection from the (spiritually) dead, growing into Christ.”  This view served as a stark counterpoint to the prevailing view (then and now) of God’s saving work as calling, justification, sanctification. The “dying” Arnold says Paul has in mind is the dying to “obedience to blind selfish impulse”, which only then can be followed by one’s resurrection to “obedience to the eternal moral order” as a member of Christ.

One might object that such “dying” seems extreme.  After all, aren’t we just trying to think and behave “better” – be “better” people?  Destroying oneself as the treatment for one’s unrighteousness seems severe, particularly when we contrast it with the ancient Jewish formula for handling periodic episodes of unrighteousness: prayer of contrition, or offering of a sacrifice, or both.  Not self-destruction.  Yet Paul saw it as essential for ratifying one’s participation in God’s New Covenant.

Of the Jewish redemptive scheme Staples writes:

“…the Torah contains provisions for forgiveness and atonement. But those provisions do not cover more systemic covenantal violations; for these more serious violations, the only means of atonement is the death of the violator(s).³¹ The cultic practices that function to atone and grant access to forgiveness within a functioning covenantal relationship cannot renew an entirely broken covenant.” (Emphasis mine.)

This is why death was not seen as extreme for Paul.  For him, the Torah prescribed the only possible remedy for covenant-breaking offenses (e.g., adultery, murder) that would preserve the life and purity of the community.  Therefore, he interprets death in these cases as essential and the only remedy to allow life with God.  As Staples puts it,

“The problem is akin to trying to make a corpse into an excellent dancer. Moral effort alone cannot bring life.  In the end, no matter how superior one’s dance instructors, choreography, costuming, and marionette technology may be, it remains a corpse. The problem of death overshadows every other aspect of the problem, and no external behavioral technology can achieve the goal unless and until someone can breathe life into the dead body. As Paul says, “If a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed have been from law” (Gal 3:21).”

and,

“For Paul, humans are not merely weak or misguided and in need of forgiveness but fully under the power and dominion of sin and death. The solution therefore requires something significantly more radical than forgiveness or moral instruction: the weapon God uses against sin and death is the cross. Only by passing through death is death defeated — death is both the enemy and the weapon by which that enemy is defeated, and the crucifixion and resurrection therefore effectively mark the death of death.” (Emphasis mine.)

Of course, Staples’s (and Paul’s) metaphor addresses two different kinds of death: one’s transformative death from what he was to what he becomes under the influence of God’s Spirit, and mortal death — ultimate destruction – ceasing to be.  The first type is the adversary, antidote, and destroyer of the second.

It is this second form of death that God defeated through Jesus’s resurrection.  Despite much of Christianity’s mythologizing and veneration of “the Cross” as the symbol of Christ’s death, death is not the goal of Jesus’s crucifixion on the cross.  His resurrection to eternal life with his father is, and its public destruction of death itself.

A Practicum

Once a person decides he no longer wants the life he has been living and instead wants to live the life God wants for him (and that Jesus died and was resurrected to enable), he abandons his old self and life pattern, and places himself at God’s disposal. This is our repentance and Paul’s “death to sin” (Ro 6:2); the old “man” dies (Ro 6:6-7) (although not easily or quietly).

1. He is then (metaphorically) resurrected to Christlikeness and a new life of well-doing and service to God, allowing him to be judged righteous on the last day.
   • Ro 6:4: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
2. The Transformed Christ-follower lives in accordance with the Torah (Ro 8:4) by following the leading of God’s Spirit within him.  Which is the desire of his heart.

This is not the reformed nightmare of “works righteousness”.  It is not a righteousness because of some moral discipline or technology we master, but rather what God, through Christ, has given us in his grace and mercy.  This righteousness can’t be secured by moral “diet and exercise”, which is the Jews’ presumption — “works of the law” – that Paul is pointing out in Ro 3:20.  The solution to that problem he reports in Ro 8:10-14 as being “through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

Torah, the Law

Paul characterizes the Torah in Ro 8:2-5 (as elsewhere) as the diagnostic tool that, when held up to one’s life, reveals unrighteousness.  And, he’s saying that the diagnostic test always yields the result of “unrighteous”.  Why? 

Sin.  Which is a kind of parasitic inhabitant of the natural, untransformed man. It is sustained within its “host” by the host’s natural human proclivities (or “weaknesses”) which Paul attributes to our humanity – our “flesh” (Ro 7). He understands that we are unable to consistently obey God’s moral and ethical laws, which leads (as in Ro 7:9-11) to a judgment, in response to the Law’s diagnosis, of “death”. 

God’s objective for this transformative death, then, is to provide the ability for us to live in accordance with the law’s righteous requirements (not abandon it, as Paul’s critics charge).  This gift is the result of what is traditionally identified as God’s “grace” (5485. χάρις cháris Eph 2:8).  And his offer of this transformative death and resurrection to new life in Christ is for all who sincerely want it (and God) – “to the Jew first and also the Greek”.  This is Paul’s “my gospel” (Ro 2:16).

God’s Justice vs Mercy, and the Role of Christ

Commentators note a tension in God’s character: justice demands that God punish sin/unrighteousness; God’s mercy desires to forgive and restore. This tension produced the courtroom metaphor.

The courtroom metaphor imagines God declaring sinners “not guilty” only after their sins are removed by Christ’s sacrificial death.  In other words, Christ’s righteousness took the place of the defendant’s unrighteousness – and was “imputed” to him.  In this way, Christ “satisfied” (a term from Christianity’s feudal period) not only the righteousness requirement of the defendant but, to some, the object of God’s wrath against the defendant’s sin, by acting as his substitute.

Ironically, Paul himself authored the vast majority of modern Christianity’s metaphoric idioms about Christ’s death and resurrection, most of which have been used as support, if not the origin of, the ideas of substitutionary, sacrificial atonement.

I suspect, however, that we don’t really understand the meaning of his words that are then translated into our modern English salvation doctrines. We won’t turn this into a study of Greek translation, when the overarching messages are so clear and profound.

However, if you’d like to take a look to look at just one example, Romans 3:25, where we traditionally misunderstand Paul’s meaning by inferring Jesus was God’s required sacrifice rather than Jesus’s own, just click this text to pop it open, or simply read on.

Breaking Down Propitiation in Romans 3:25

²⁵whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

This ESV translation inserts the verb phrase “to be received by”, which is missing from Paul’s Greek.  A better translation reads:

“whom God publicly set forth as propitiation through the faithfulness which is in his blood . . . .”

What is God doing in setting Jesus forth as “propitiation”?  There are several possible meanings. But first, we have to understand what propitiation (ἱλαστήριος hilastḗrios) is to Paul.  The word carries the meaning of “place of sacrifice”, “Mercy Seat”, the place where the High Priest sprinkled blood annually on Yom Kippur as part of the ritual cleansing of the temple (and its most holy object where YHVH was thought at one time to sit/rest) and the people.

• The image is understood to be God’s throne on earth.  It’s the place where he talked to Moses, the place from which God interacts with Israel. (Num 7:89)
  • Jesus has become God’s designated spokesman (Lk 9:35).
• It’s the object in the Holy of Holies that, once a year, was purified by the sprinkling of sacrificial blood by the High Priest as a part of the remission of the sins of Israel (Lev 16:14-15)
  • Jesus’s blood purifying God’s home on earth (the place of atonement), which is about to be “both Jew and Greek” following the pouring out of his Spirit at Pentecost. (Acts 2:1-4, 1 Cor 6:19-20)
• This lid of the Ark of the Covenant enclosed the tablets of God’s covenant with Israel (Dt 10:5).  Above that covenant we have God’s throne, sealing in his covenant, and representing the heavenly place from which he judged Israel’s fidelity to that covenant law, and could elect to delay judgment in deference to his mercy (Ps 9:7–8).
  • Jesus can be seen as the focal point for evaluating Israel’s fidelity to God, and preserving God’s covenant will (through the creation of righteous children obedient to that will). (Is 11:3-4, Mt 7:21)
• It locates God’s holiness on earth (Ex 26:33).
  • Heb 7:26, Lk 1:35

So, God sets forth (maybe “establishes”?) Jesus as the place of sacrifice.  Whichever of the above meanings Paul intended, notice that Jesus is not set forth as a sacrifice, nor does it read that he is set forth as removing sin but rather purifying from it. 

The other key corruption of meaning in this verse is the (common) mistranslation of the term rendered “faith” (πίστις pístis; gen. písteōs).  Comparing the two translations above, you see that the ESV translates the word as meaning our faith (in Jesus), while the more accurate translation reveals that it is the subject’s (Jesus’s) faithfulness (subjective genitive) that is represented in (the giving of) his blood.  (He uses the identical grammatical structure immediately prior in verse 22.)

Most know the verse that says that Jesus “became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:8, cf. Rom 5:19).  It’s presenting the same image as our subject verse, Ro 3:25.

In other words, the more accurate interpretation is that God established Jesus because of his faithfulness, as proven by his willingness to give his blood, as the one (or “place”, the holiest of objects) “on” (or “by” or “through”) whom one’s offerings to God should be expressed.  And in the New Covenant sense, our offerings to God are ourselves. 

This preceding interpretation bears no relationship to modern interpretations of this verse, and that’s a problem.  I’m not saying that all of Paul’s substitutional, sacrificial atonement language somehow morphs, upon closer inspection, into a representation of the New Covenant view.  After all, it would seem that after spending 40 years or so in the heart of the Temple sacrificial system, its images would be fresh in his mind to employ in describing the Lord’s death. But there are likely many more just like this one to be found, repaired, and re-understood.

Justification as Transformation

Paul frequently described this transformation using sacrificial metaphors: “cancelling debt” (Col 1:4), “condemned sin in the flesh” (Ro 8:3), “reconciled to God by the death of his son” (Ro 5:10), and “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13).  To see how each of these results of Jesus’s death map to the New Covenant gospel, click on this text.

• Cancelling debt – Indebtedness is a persistent theme of sacrificial atonement.  The one seeking atonement has accumulated a debt to God in his righteousness account.  He, himself, has no way to pay it, so he needs a redeemer, who is Christ.  We can easily see Christ’s death and resurrection that empower our death and resurrection to life in Christ as our redemption from Paul’s “law of sin and death”.  After our transformation, we are no longer indebted in righteousness.
• “Condemned sin in the flesh” – This is a tough one.  Here’s the verse:

“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

It’s hard to know what the phrase “and for sin” meant for Paul.  One inference is that Jesus, perhaps as Christ, was to take some action against sin (i.e., “for sin”). Some commentators think it points to sacrificial atonement.  But the sense of “for” could be “because of”.  That meaning would open the interpretation up to the entire scope of the salvation-by-transformation New Covenant.  But the balance of the passage seems clear enough. God… sent his Son…and by so doing condemned sin in the flesh… in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

Whatever the symbolism and reality of “condemned sin in the flesh”, the result is clear.  And it is Paul’s New Covenant transformation.  It says he condemned sin in the flesh by sending his Son.  If the sense of “condemn” is to declare sin bad, Jesus’s entire ministry was one of condemning sin either explicitly (e.g., Mk 7:20-23) or implicitly by teaching God-honoring behaviors (e.g., Mt 5:39).

If the sense of “condemn” is not only to declare it bad, but to execute a judgment on it, say to destroy it or to confine or limit it in some way, then it is not at all clear what was done to sin, the moral state of man, at Jesus’s death, or his resurrection.  One could make the case that providing humanity’s way out of the sentence of perpetual moral failure and into life with God through his indwelt Spirit is as close to a death sentence for sin as we’re going to see in this world.

There seems to be no escaping the image painted here of God condemning sin through (or as a result of) Jesus, who is of and represents “the flesh”.  There is substitution imagery here.  The sin is that of “those under the law”, the Jews.  That is what God has “condemned”.  Something Jesus did (i.e., through his death and resurrection) accomplished either the death of sin, the death of sin’s agency with us (i.e., the traditional “our sins are forgiven”), or the death of our enslavement to sin (i.e., “set free” from Paul’s law of sin and death).

• “Reconciled (us) to God” – In the Bible, reconciliation is somewhat inverted from how we usually think of the word.  In the Bible, the one requiring reconciliation is the one who has broken a healthy relationship.  The typical example is a faithless husband who breaks the marriage covenant relationship.  To be reconciled back to his wife, the one who broke the relationship has to reform himself – to change such that he will no longer violate that covenant.  In Ro 8:3 we see the substitutional theme at play, as the sinner’s relationship with his God is reconciled “by the death of his son”, not by us who have violated that relationship/covenant.

And maybe it’s Jesus’s death that unilaterally achieves that reconciliation.  Or maybe “death of his son” is just Paul’s shorthand for the first step of the entire transformation of the sinner that results in his relationship with God not only reconciled but restored to the Gen 1 relationship of man to God.

• “Redeemed us…by becoming a curse for us.”  Again, we have some substitution language.  The usual OT reference is to Dt 21:23: “a hanged man is cursed by God”.  Redemption is the paying off of one’s indebtedness of righteousness to God.  We’ve had a deficit of righteousness. So, Paul’s saying that, again associated with just Christ’s death, that it is payment cancelling that debt.  Once again, especially given the fact that he has the complete New Covenant transformation solution in his mind, it is quite likely that this is simply Paul’s shorthand for referring to that overall solution.

For Paul, justification was moral transformation, not a courtroom pronouncement involving whatever substitutionary atonement sleight-of-hand.  Why this view?

Because by simply declaring the sinner sinless (as a courtroom verdict), he nevertheless remains a sinner — a sin “doer”, and therefore still unfit to live in communion with YHVH.  He is ontologically non-Torah compliant.  Just as the Torah was not effective to make one righteous (Ro 8:3), a declaration of sinlessness doesn’t end sinning[i].

God’s family members must be righteous, not be dressed up to appear righteous.  Producing righteous children to live in God’s family is not a matter of looking at them “as if” they were Christ.  They’re not, in their untransformed condition, defeating God’s goal for his righteous children: to be glorified through their lives (Is 43:7) here as his representations (Gen 1:26).

No.  To Paul, those seeking adoption as God’s children had to pass through death to self and be resurrected into Christ and his likeness that would grow in them over time.  And the only way to accomplish Christlikeness in those children was to transform their hearts and indwell them with his Spirit, yielding knowledge of him and his law.  This formula is what God declared in his New Covenant, what Jesus taught Nicodemus (Jn 3:3), and what Paul is trying to teach us (his soteriology) in his epistles.

Christ’s Key Role

Paul consistently qualifies promises of new life with phrases like “through Christ” (2 Cor 3), or “in Christ” (Ro 3:24, Ro 8:1), or “who belong to Christ” (Gal 5:24, 1 Cor 15:23), or synonyms for this condition like “those who love God” (Ro 8:28).  The conclusion is clear: transformation is possible only through union with Christ.  How?  What did Paul see that because of our smudged, dirty, cracked glass that we’re looking through, we don’t see as he does?

Christ Fulfilled the Law and the Prophets

Jesus’s pedigree as Christ rests in part on his perfect faithfulness and obedience to “my father”, God.  We see that message from Jesus and throughout Paul: Mt. 5:17, Rom 8:3-4, Ro 10:4, Phil 2:8.  This is crucially important because we learn in Lev 18:5

⁵ You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by[ii] them: I am the LORD.

Paul asserts that Jesus, having lived in perfect obedience to YHVH, was to be granted life (and so was resurrected to life promised in Lev 18:5).  He says: Ro 10:5

⁵For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

 And Ga 3:10-12

¹⁰For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” ¹¹Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” ¹²But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.”

The point he’s making is that obedience[iii] to the law is God’s requirement for life.  If one is disobedient, he will not partake of life. 

Fulfillment of the Law

Elsewhere Paul (Ro 5:19[iv], Phil 2:8, Ro 10:4), as other NT authors (Heb 4:15, 7:26, 1 Pet 2:22, 1 Jn 3:5, Mt 3:15, Mt 5:17, 1 Jn 2:1, Jn 8:29, 15:10), makes the case that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law in that he lived it in sinless perfection. Therefore, Paul reasons, as the only man to have ever lived perfectly within God’s will to that point in time, he is the only man to have inherited the “life” promised in Lev 18:5, which he sees as God raising Jesus to himself.  God has effectively designed “a contract that promises life to ‘the man who does these’”.

He explains, however, that God’s plan through Christ is to predestine all of those who turn to Christ, and thus are transformed through his Spirit, to be “conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” (Ro 8:29)

So, Jesus was the first of many.  All those who experience transformative death will be, like him, resurrected to the righteous life God intends for them through the power of his Spirit.

Substitution?

Through Christ’s resurrection, God has publicly declared his defeat of death.

However, most of Christianity sees Christ’s death as a substitution for the death they now will not experience.  But Paul understood that wasn’t its purpose. Staples:

“…Paul argues that Christ died so that, by joining him in his death, we may join him in his resurrection: Now if we have died with Christ, we trust that we will also live with him (Ro 6:8; cf. 8:13; 1 Cor 15:31; Col 2:20, 3:3; 2 Tim 2:11).”

The substitution Christ had in mind, however, is that through transformative death and spiritual resurrection wrapped in the Spirit of God, we have been equipped to live the life Christ would live if he were us.[v] He has substituted his life for ours, not his death for ours.

Reconciling the Two Views

How, then, can this New Covenant view of the effects of Christ’s death and resurrection be reconciled with the traditional views of the church such as Christ “suffered for you”, “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” for our sins, being “…put forward as (a) propitiation”, saving us “from the wrath of God”, and God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Go to Heaven?

The contrast is crystal clear.  In the traditional view, believers are freed from sin (and so given their ticket to heaven when they die), through the punishment of Jesus who assumed our sins/debt/unrighteousness and death in our place.  In the New Covenant/Transformation view, Jesus’s death and resurrection enable those who choose to follow him to, similarly, die to themselves and be resurrected into his life here, and eternally with God.

Pentecost?

Jesus’s death and resurrection “enabled” our death and new life (i.e., “But if I go…”) by sending God’s Spirit into his followers (“when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you”). And fifty days later, his promise was manifested.  That was Pentecost.

Producing the Righteous

If we survey the epistles, we find the pattern of salvation that was embedded in Paul’s mind.

1. The penitent rejects his current life ruled by the “law of sin and death” (Ro 8:2) and chooses instead to accept God’s gracious offer of a new life (Ro 12:1, Mt 13:44-46) as one who lives obediently to God’s will through his moral transformation.
2. God fulfills the change of heart promise of his New Covenant by supplying the Spirit of God (Rom 2:14–16, 26–29; 8:2–4, 9–17; 2 Cor 3:4–6), transforming him into a new person, and one who can live righteously.

This last step creates one who not only seeks (wants) to live righteously, but who is defended from sin that would otherwise take advantage of the weakness of his nature, and who is led by that Spirit into the life that God wills for him (Phil 2:13).  The collection of these folks comprises God’s family, which Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

The key characteristic of the transformed life is this: Living a righteous life is the credential that will be examined in God’s judgment on the Last Day. 2Co 5:10 (cf Ac 17:30-31)

¹⁰For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

This verse is as applicable to Christ-followers as it is to everyone else.  Paul here is writing to Christians.

Contrasting Salvations

Having laid out the core ideas of Paul’s salvation doctrine in his “New Covenant Gospel” featuring justification through transformative death into new life, and having reviewed the traditional doctrine’s key precepts, we can summarize some of their key differences.

Click on this text to review a tabular summary of some of the key differences.

Belief	Traditional Foregiveness	New Covenant Transformation
Nature of men	Sinful but not beyond God’s grace	Sinful but not beyond God’s gracoius offer of new life
Requirement for being saved	Praying a prayer of contrition. No “effort” or “work” necessary (or allowed) as God’s grace is all sufficient.	Contrition accompanied by a commitment to fidelity to God for one’s life that replaces the priority of himself.
Goal of those seeking salvation	Predominantly, to be granted amnesty from God’s final judgment (I,e, go to heaven when you die.)	Be able to live the life God wants for him so that he is judged righteous on the last day.
Torah	Not part of its doctrine	The representation of the moral and ethical standards of God we are enabled to live out.
Role of Death in Salvation	Not part of its doctrine other than symbolically in water baptism as a memorial/metaphor of Chirst’s death and resurrection.	One’s necessary state in order to be resurrected to life.
Man’s state following salvation	Sin free. Granted eternal sinlessness and life with God.	Empowered by the Holy Spirit to live righteously.
Justification	Forgiven and essentially declared saved.	God’s gift of tranformation by his grace (Rom 3:28).
Eternal Security	Most, not all, believe and emphasize this idea. (“Once saved, always saved.”)	Not formally a part of the doctrine. Discounted by the Last Day Judgement.
	Christ’s Roles:
Fulfill the “law and the prophets”	Not part of its doctrine.	Key to demonstrating the pattern of the obedient, righteous life that leads to eternal life with God.
Christ as God’s required sacrifice (whether to appease God, or vent his wrath, or bring us to purity).	The most common understanding: “substitutionary sacrifice “	Unnecessary, though not precluded.
Satisfy God’s wrath against humanity’s sin.	Central.	Not part of its doctrine. (Understood to be the medieval theology of Anselm.)
Substitutionary atoning for man’s sins through his death.	Essential. Central. “Paid for all sin”.	Christ’s death does not replace the death of sinners so much as it allows sinners to die with him.
Provide “redemption and forgiveness for all who believe”	Redemption is seen as not going to hell when you die. Forgiveness is often mistakenly seen as all encompassing.	Redemption is the gift of new life through the Spirit in God/Christ. Forgiveness (“to cause to stand away”) is the casting off of the old life and its sin, and the working of the Spirit in defeating new sin.
Resurrected	Central.	Central.
	Other
Role of God’s Spirit	Not emphasized, as a practical matter. A member of the Trinity.	Essential. Central. (Phil 2:13)
Relationship to God’s promise to Abram’s	Not part of its doctrine	Transformation is the fulfillment of Abram’s promise of blessing to all the nations and families of the earth.
Relationship to God’s New Covenant	None	Its purpose and implementation.
Relationship to God’s promised regathering of Israel and Judah to himself.	None	A byproduct. See “What Paul Meant by All Israel“
Relationship to the fulfillment of God’s promise of blessing to Abram	None	Yet another byproduct of God’s New Covenant plan.

Because of the nature of this transformation, Paul’s salvation is from sin itself, not just the penalty of sin offered by the traditional “forgiveness of sins”; it is “transformation rather than mere forgiveness”.

Jesus wasn’t resurrected because he was crucified.  He was resurrected because he had fulfilled the “righteous requirements of the law” (Lev 18:5) and thus was “the end of the law for righteousness”.  His followers don’t inherit that righteousness: they reproduce it in their own lives.

What is so revolutionary about this salvation (that other NT authors seemingly didn’t completely grasp) is that it produces “new” people who are obedient to God’s eternal moral order.  The salvation doctrines of others can make no such claim. 

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[0] Staples, Jason A, In his contribution entitled “The Death of Death” to an unnamed, forthcoming book. (Hereinafter, “Staples”) This essay is also the source of otherwise unattributed quotes throughout this piece.

[i] A statement like this is quite heretical, especially to those in traditional churches represented by this webpage example.  They say:

Jesus Christ, through His death on the cross, paid for all sin, completely satisfied the righteous wrath of God against sin, and provided redemption and forgiveness for all who believe.

There is absolutely no acknowledgement, nor apparently concern, of the judgement on the Last Day.

[ii] There are various versions of the Leviticus statement in different Bibles, including the Septuagint, of the preposition in front of “them” (i.e. the laws) as “by”, “in” or “through”.  It seems Paul has in mind the idea that “live by them” has the instrumental sense: that obedience to God’s law results in life.  (The predicate of the statement is “a person does them”.  The consequent of the statement “he shall live by them” then assumes they’re already being obeyed.  So, living “by them” can’t mean living “as a result of” them.  It can (and likely does) mean living – having life – as a consequence of the predicate condition – “a person does them”.

[iii] There is a question as to the what meaning of the preposition בָּהֶם (by, in, through, in) did Paul have in mind in penning his citations?  Many scholars see the “Instrumental” sense of the word, giving the phrase the meaning of “live by means of” or “live through obedience to” the laws, where obedience is assumed (i.e. the purpose of the law is to elicit obedient behavior to it).

[iv] Notice the future tense in this verse: “will be made righteous”. Christ was crucified perhaps 30 years prior to writing this line.  So, when did Paul have in mind that this would happen?  Whenever one turned from themselves and to Christ and experienced transformative death and resurrection to/in him.

[v] Willard, Dallas, “Renovation of the Heart”, NavPress, 2021