I have been invited to assess Douglas Campbell's door-stopper of a tome from a theological perspective. Given that this is a work in Pauline scholarship by a leading New Testament scholar, what is the justification for involving a theologian? Clearly, it is because the argumentation of this book is driven by a theological critique of certain key methodological, epistemological and, indeed, ontological suppositions which have functioned to sustain what Campbell calls ‘justification discourse’ – an approach to Pauline interpretation that Campbell argues is outmoded, confused and ultimately incoherent.

So, very briefly, what are the core concerns of this book? The first is to expose the fallacious reasoning underpinning justification theory as this has characterised Pauline scholarship since the Reformation. Justification theory or discourse, Campbell argues, has provided the Western church with an interpretative framework which has distorted the core of Paul's theology and notably its ethical, anthropological, theological, soteriological and epistemological implications.

The second related aim is to solve the problem of the apparent tension between Romans 1:18–3:20, on the one hand, which underpins justification theory, and Romans 5–8 (anticipated in 3:21–6) which he sees as expounding the glorious, heart of Pauline theology – his profound, apocalyptic and participative vision of the Gospel. What is presented here is nothing less than what Campbell describes as a divine ‘rescue mission’ which liberates and reconstitutes a confused humanity which is otherwise dysfunctional (ethically, epistemically, spiritually and theologically) by giving it to participate en Christo and, thereby, in all-embracing and all-transforming communion with God – a communion that requires to be conceived in irreducibly trinitarian terms with an essentially christological and pneumatological grammar. The associated interpretations of God, the character of the divine will, salvation as also the role of Christ and the Spirit, constitute a profoundly coherent yet also a very different Gospel from that presented in Romans 1–4. Although the tension here was already recognised by Deissmann, Schweitzer, Wrede and others, none of the revisionist scholars who challenged the justification discourse offered a ‘satisfactory explanation of how the two discourses, forensic and mystical, might fit together either in Romans or in Paul's thinking about salvation as a whole’.

Campbell's solution to this tension is to argue that the early chapters of Romans are a kind of rhetorical exposé of a legalistic ‘alternative Gospel’ that is not the Gospel that Paul himself is proclaiming. In short, in opposing this alternative soteriological programme Paul uses various rhetorical devices (here Campbell utilises the work of Stanley Stowers) which, as he explains in chapter 14, would have made it clear to his contemporary audience that Paul was not himself endorsing the programme of Romans 1–4 and certainly not its building blocks as if they provided the route into the affirmations of 5–8. Although the rhetorical cues communicated to the performers are lost, we should not be misled by the naked text as it stands, given that there is much within it that serves to establish this reading.

Campbell goes on to draw parallels between Paul's concerns in Romans and those in Galatians, where he also opposed Teachers who were presenting ‘an alternative soteriological programme’. Just as Galatians is written in a context in which there were two Gospels in play, two Gospels were also in play in Romans occasioned by ‘the spectre of the Teachers’ arrival’ (p. 522).

I am not qualified to assess Campbell's explanation of what is going on here. What I would like to do, however, is to consider Campbell's analysis of the methodological moves and theological suppositions which have supported the justification discourse and its utilisation of Romans 1–4 for its specific ends. What must be clear to all is that justification discourse does not simply emerge in a spontaneous and unmediated way from Pauline texts. It is a theological doctrine, formulated on the basis of a series of theological premises which addresses a particular problematic and is driven by a whole series of apologetic and other concerns. In other words, the genetic confusions here can be traced to doctrinal exposition rather than biblical scholarship per se. Lying behind the relevant theological moves is one of the tragedies of Western thought, namely, the manner in which theological and biblical interpretation has been driven by the mistranslation of Hebrew terms – let me mention three in particular. First, berith, as it is used in the Pentateuch to denote the Lord's relationship to Israel denotes an unconditioned and unconditional covenant commitment to Israel grounded in love and characterised by hesed – God's sustained and unconditional covenant faithfulness. Berith in Hebrew and diatheke in Greek, were translated foedus in Latin giving rise to federal theology. Foedus makes no distinction between covenant and contract and essentially means ‘contract’. Subliminal within the Western tradition, not least the Calvinist tradition, as Campbell so rightly argues, was a contractual model of the relationship between the God and Israel – contract of nature, contract of faith, etc.

The second concept, torah (nomos in Greek), was translated lex in Latin, which was immediately interpreted in the light of categories of Roman or natural law. Whereas torah articulated the unconditional, apodictic obligations which stem from God's covenant commitment to Israel, lex came to be interpreted in terms of a contract of nature – the contractual conditions of the divine acceptance of humanity. These legal conditions were perceived as being met by Jesus’ death on the cross – the necessary condition of God's forgiveness of humanity.

Tsedaqah, dikaiosune in Greek, was interpreted iustitia in Latin. The righteousness which characterised God's covenant faithfulness towards an unfaithful people and which placed them under unconditional obligations to be faithful (literally to image God's righteousness) was reinterpreted by means of a juridical concept of justice – initially distributive and, later, retributive justice worked out in much Western theology in contractual terms.

In short, on the one side of this translation process we have God's purposes conceived as covenant, torah (the obligations to be faithful) and righteousness. On the other side, we have God's essential purposes conceived through the categories of contract (conditional acceptance), lex (Stoic notions of natural law) and iustitia (justice). What takes place is nothing less than a metabasis eis allo genos of the very heart of Judaism. We have, in short a foreign religion emerging – the re-schematisation of a primarily filial relationship towards humanity as a fundamentally legalistic one where divine acceptance is conceived as conditional upon our meeting legal requirements and the satisfaction of the demands of justice conceived in retributive terms. This, of course, led to the emergence of the various forms of the Western ordo salutis, together with juridical constructions of the atonement whereby the Son conditions the Father into having mercy on those who have offended his holy will by breaching the contractual conditions of his legal demands. The Father is conditioned into loving and forgiving sinners through the satisfaction of his wrath by the blood and innocent suffering of his Son.

For Campbell, when Romans 1–4 is taken as underwriting this kind of programme, it is simply not possible to make it consistent with the thrust and implications of chapters 5–8. It is entirely unclear, that is, how the graft can be made to take – and no book I know of exposes this more effectively or more rigorously than this one!

So how precisely does Campbell conceive of the essential shape of the justification model?

First, it interprets human beings in essentially individualistic terms as rational, self-interested beings who possess immanent, epistemic access to God's ethical demands and, thereby, to the essential conditions of God's contractual acceptance of them. This is what Federal Calvinists referred to as the foedus naturae (contract of nature) or the foedus operum (contract of works). Contemplating the cosmos without provides veridical knowledge of God's nature and contemplating the conscience within provides knowledge of God's justice and just requirements. Whereas for Jews, therefore, God's ethical demands are revealed through written legislation, those same demands are revealed to everyone innately. Here we must note that, as Campbell rightly points out, this involves the de-historicisation of the torah, its divorce from its covenantal context and its identification, in effect, with the dictates of natural law –and too often natural law is conceived in ways which bear little resemblance to the obligations of the torah or, indeed, to the law as it is summarised by Jesus! The next step in the argument is the recognition that rewards/punishments are apportioned according to an individual's fulfilment or otherwise of God's ethical demands as these are apparent to our consciences.

This brings us to the next key moves in the reasoning of the justification discourse, namely, what Campbell describes as the introspective twist (p. 28) and the loop of despair (p. 29) – that is, self-perceived ethical incapacity (p. 34), the awareness that we violate God's ethical demands and that a negative divine judgement is unavoidable. On this basis, the gift of grace is then presented – the ‘compensatory mechanism of satisfaction, namely, Christ's atonement’ (p. 34) whereby God redirects that punishment which is our due to Christ (who dies) and his Righteousness to us, who are sinners but who are now viewed as if his righteousness were theirs. It is at precisely this point, however, that we are presented with a second contract, what the Calvinists referred to as the contract of faith (foedus fidei). God stipulates an alternative criterion or condition by which we may appropriate this redirection of divine punishment to Christ, namely, faith. IFF (if and only if) you have faith, you proceed to blessed eternal life because all the criteria or conditions are met by one means or another. Clearly, how the mechanisms by which these contractual conditions are met or conceived depends on whether you are Arminian or Reformed or hyper-Calvinist, but the same essentially contractual structure of the argument remains whichever position you adopt.

So where lie the problems?

First, it operates with an individualistic concept of the person, driven not by love of God but ultimately by self-interest – fear of judgement, not least. Campbell writes, ‘Individuals are not disposed to act ethically because this is right or even because this is how they are constructed but largely because it is in their best interests so to act – an enduring conundrum for this approach to ethics’ (p. 31).

Second, hand in hand with this go highly problematic epistemological assumptions. That is, our primary epistemic access to God is ahistorical – it is universal, innate and a priori with respect to God's self-disclosure in the Old Testament and in Christ. Justification discourse, Campbell argues, assumes a veridical natural theology. It is not irrelevant, therefore, that justification theory could be promulgated by the Lutheran Deutsche Christen, who believed that it is by this same ahistorical, universal knowledge of God's natural purposes that we know that Aryans shouldn't marry Jews, that Aryan culture is ordained by God to be distinctive and should not be polluted by interbreeding. Or that it could be promulgated by Afrikaner Calvinists in one of the most Christian countries in the world, who believed that God's purposes for the state, vis-à-vis race, should be determined in advance of any mediation of God's creative purposes in Christ by appeal to the cultural mandates delivered to natural reason – the theology that underpinned apartheid. Or that God's purposes for women should be interpreted accordingly by men, appealing to natural reason . . . There are many more examples! In short, justification discourse goes hand in hand with the notion of a duplex cognitio – a two-fold knowledge of God from creation by natural reason, that is, an ahistorical, non-christological revelation and then salvific knowledge which is secondary and serves as an add-on for the faithful. In short, Campbell is absolutely right to point to the fact that there are immense socio-political and ethical implications and problems relating to the historical advocacy of this model!

As soon as one repudiates the duplex cognitio, and suggests that true, properly functional, reconciled knowledge of God's purposes for humanity per se are revealed en Christo, this key element in justification theory collapses. What is significant is that, as T. H. L. Parker shows in Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, Calvin was arguably far closer to the mind of Paul – he repudiated any such veridical knowledge of God from creation. For Calvin, we would only have had veridical knowledge of God from creation ‘si integer Adam stetisset’ – if Adam had remained true. Consequently, knowledge of creation is mediated to those who have that mind which was in Christ Jesus, whose apperceptions are reconciled or metamorphosed for the discernment of truth, where God's purposes for creation are interpreted therefore in and through the One for whom and through whom all things were created . . .

Third, there are the assumptions vis-à-vis the doctrine of God. The underlying doctrine of God, Campbell argues, is a ‘strict authoritarian’ God whose primary attribute is his justice – a Father who, in relation to humanity per se, ‘rules, judges, or parents in terms of retributive justice’ – the counterpart to the essentially individual, rational and self-interested subject.

Campbell then devotes an entire chapter to exposing the fundamental problems in the further concepts of revelation, law, theodicy, christology, atonement and faith which attend this confused construct.

Perhaps the most fundamental problem which underpins all the above is methodological. The justification construct echoes all the problems of the nature–grace model namely, that we interpret nature, human nature, justice and God by appeal to unredeemed, natural reason and then seek to interpret the Gospel in that light. In short, we interpret the heart of Paul with recourse to a prior, foundational, world-view (one that is, for Paul, echthros te dianoia – alienated in its capacity to think through to the reality of God). What we see is that the direction of the pressure of interpretation, therefore, runs in precisely the opposite direction to God's self-disclosure in Christ with all that that involves for how we interpret creation, the world, humanity, the nature and character of God and God's purposes for the world. The result is that the Gospel, as Paul would have it, finds itself presented with a Procrustean bed – moulded to fit our prior (unreconciled) affirmations vis-à-vis God, humanity, law, the nature of the knowledge of God, ethics, justice, etc., rather than the other way round.

What Campbell applies in the interpretation of Paul are essentially the principles of theological hermeneutics which Eberhard Jüngel (author of Paulus und Jesus: Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, Mohr Siebeck, 2004) argued for so profoundly in his classic Gottes Sein ist im Werden. In a devastating critique of all approaches which are driven by religious Voraussetzungen, Vorverstaendnisse, etc., he argues ‘das Sein Gottes geht und eben so allem menschlichen Fragen zuvorkommt’Footnote ² (‘the Being of God proceeds, and thus precedes all human questioning’Footnote ³). Applied to the interpretation of Paul, it is our being en Christo which must precede and be presupposed by our questions and not our prior natural self-understandings or quasi-religious propensities. Romans 5–8 and, indeed, so much else in the Pauline corpus suggests that a reverent Pauline hermeneutic constitutes a form of Nachdenken – reflection after the event of God's self-disclosure in Christ and emphatically not an attempt to accommodate or subject the testimony to that self-disclosure within a series of pre-established vestibules which appeal to prior, unreconciled world-views.

In short, the direction of the pressure of interpretation must be from Paul's central affirmations vis-à-vis the nature of God, humanity, law, ethics and the nature of epistemic access as these are given en Christo and not to these notions from conceptions dictated by our prior natural reasoning. This is the underlying concern in Campbell's repudiation of ‘foundationalism’.

So what happens when (as Campbell suggests we should), we allow the solution of Romans 5–8 to determine our approach to the problem, when the hermeneutical direction of thought is reversed – or should I say redeemed? Well, things look very different!

We are obliged to consider our prior epistemic states, affiliations and suppositions from an apocalyptic deliverance in which salvation is proclaimed as having arrived unconditionally, at the behest of the Father, through the Son and bringing a spectrum of blessings, as Campbell puts it – ‘life, peace, glory, dominion, reconciliation, atonement, ethical capacity, and so on’ (p. 72) – all of which require a radical re-evaluation of the human problem in its light. We find an event of atonement symbolised by metaphors signifying the death of the old and our rising with Christ – denoting genuine discontinuity with our prior states and orientation. The new situation, moreover, turns out to be an essentially koinonial, relational and interpersonal form of existence rooted in the divine communion.

In stark contrast, the ‘natural’ individualistic state is seen to be subject to hostile powers, enslaved by sinful passions – an old, unredeemed humanity which cannot comprehend the nature of the problem let alone the solution. Old ways of thinking are hostile and erroneous, condemned to follow a confused trajectory which requires to be ‘metamorphosed’ for the discernment of truth – emphatically not ‘schematised’ with reference to the unredeemed, natural order. (Romans 12:2)

What is recognised from within this reconciled state?

• * that such perceptions are fundamentally discontinuous with our prior suppositions about the way God is, how we are created to be, the character of ethical existence, etc.

• * that those prior suppositions reflect the alienated mind and do not constitute an appropriate vestibule for interpreting atonement, as the justification discourse appears to assume.

The ramifications of this move are immense, not only for epistemology, anthropology, the doctrine of God (God is no longer conceived as essentially the God of retributive justice), but also christology (no longer monopolised by his death to satisfy retributive requirements), soteriology, faith, assurance, sanctification, the sacraments and so on. The danger of the nature–grace model is inevitably that a prior, alienated conception of the self serves as the foundation for Paul's vision of the new humanity, which then comes to be conceived in supererogatory terms and not as defining God's creative purposes for humanity per se! To understand Campbell's argument is to be persuaded that we must be consistent in our interpretation of Paul by conceiving of the pre-Christian state in the light of what it is to be human in truth – and not the other way round. In this respect, not least, this book is a profoundly cogent and refreshing rethink of Pauline interpretation – one which stands to generate a tectonic shift in Pauline scholarship. Viewing things purely theologically, that is, without judging the exegetical case, the Paul who emerges is emphatically more coherent than in the approach he critiques. Meanwhile, any countervailing claim that these issues are unimportant or marginal has to be treated with extreme scepticism.