As you may gather from my blog, I have an eclectic cloud of influences in my thought and writing.

In this fifth and final post of the series, I’ll lay out my own views about the so-called New Perspective on Paul (NPP). I’ve insinuated throughout that I’m not an advocate of the NPP, and yet I’ve tried to accurately and fairly represent it in the previous posts.

We wrapped up the previous post with a question: “What role do works play in our future justification?” We’ll get to that question below, but first, let’s throw the whole Piper/Wright debate on the table.

The last two posts have summed up some key New Testament passages that are foundational for the New Perspective on Paul (Rom 3:28-30; 4:12-14; Gal 2:11-16). James Dunn and others have argued from these passages that since first century Judaism was not legalistic (as shown by Sanders),

One of the best pieces of intellectual advice I received (from a student, actually) was that “we should seek to understand before we critique.”

John Piper and N. T. Wright have been two of the most influential voices in my life, and I love the confused reaction I get when I tell people this.