Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

112 Dimensions of Baptism

former Jewish perspective, and it is this that forms the substance of his

exhortation to Christian communities.

'Covenantal nomism' is the term that is employed to describe the com-

mon pattern of Jewish religion during the centuries immediately before

and after the times of Jesus and Paul. 'Covenant' is a given, though it

appears little as a formal term. Obedience to the law maintains a person's

dwelling within the covenant, but does not achieve status within it. The

twin themes of mercy and retribution are not contradictory, but have dif-

ferent functions. Election and salvation are gifts of God's mercy, but God

is just and what his people do matters. However, ultimately even the

righteous rely on God's mercy:

The frequent Christian charge against Judaism, it must be recalled, is not

that some individual Jews misunderstood, misapplied and abused their

religion, but that Judaism necessarily tends towards petty legalism, self-

serving and self-deceiving casuistry, and a mixture of arrogance and lack of

confidence in God. But the surviving Jewish literature is as free of these

characteristics as any I have ever read. By consistently maintaining the

basic framework of covenantal nomism, the gift and demand of God were

kept in a healthy relationship with each other, the minutiae of the law were

observed on the basis of the large principles of religion and because of

commitment to God, and humility before the God who chose and would

ultimately redeem Israel was encouraged.^4

Paul's view of participation in Christ as a complete and continuing

transformation is named by Sanders as participationist eschatology. Cru-

cially, this is characterized by the 'transfer from one lordship to another'

and the real union of believer and Lord through the Spirit. 'But if we have

died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him' (Rom. 6.8);

'I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ

who lives in me' (Gal. 3.20); 'But whatsoever gain I had, I counted as loss

for the sake of Christ' (Phil. 3.7).

It was not dissatisfaction with Judaism which radically shifted Paul's

theology: by his own account he was a good Jew (Gal. 3.5; Rom. 11), but

the experience of salvation in Christ alerted him to a problem he perhaps

never knew he had. Thus Paul's experience was to identify his plight in

the light of its solution rather than (as Bultmann preached) to work from

humankind's existential need to the salvation wrought in Christ.

Paul's activity, consequent to his conversion, is determined by the

threefold belief that (a) Jesus is Lord, (b) in him God has provided for the

4. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p. 427.