The New Perspective on Paul’s Fatal Blow

By inwoolee, May 31, 2018

Theologians have said that the Gospel is not a gun fight. They’re right, it is not. It’s a sword fight. 

1. James is not Paul, yet the book of James provides an interesting contrast. What James states a formulation in chapter 2 that returns to Paul.
2. Whomever James is writing against, the position that he holds is that he is writing against those who are saying that justification by faith leads to antinomianism.
3. What is clear is that some in the middle part of the 1st century have understood Paul to be antinomian, and James is writing–not against Apostle Paul–but to correct  those who have understood Paul in an antinomian way.
4. Notice that James does not have in mind Gentile inclusion into the community or the exclusion of the Jews, the works as just circumcision, but such moral good deeds as clothing the naked.

-Joel Kim, taken from part of his lecture for Pauline Epistles

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