Douglas Campbell’s invention of “the Teacher” as Paul’s interlocutor in his Roman epistle is radically misconceived.

Douglas A. Campbell* argues for a Pauline gospel that makes God’s love, grace, and beneficence primary and basic to His  being.  I have little objection to such an emphasis except that his route thereto wrongly muffles God’s wrath/ anger/ indignation toward sin and its evil fruits.  Consequently, along the way, Campbell discounts the raw force of many a Scripture that exhibits His unvarnished ire.  Had he perceived “the righteousness of God” as always  resurrectionary in relation to His Son, and had he therefore been able to incorporate key passages such as Romans 3:25-26 into Paul’s authentic gospel rather than conceding them to “the Teacher” he alleges Paul to be contending with, he might have perceived how to retain the basic thrust of God’s love and benevolence without jettisoning His veritable indignation against subbornness and hardheartedness.  As it stands, Campbell’s obliviousness to the meaning of sacrificial blood as “resurrection from the dead” by the power of the Holy Spirit has sabotaged the main strength of his theological advance toward full recovery of the Pauline teaching about justification and atonement.

Moreover, had he seen this, Campbell could have distinguished more carefully between the “Christ event(s)” of crucifixion and resurrection as regards which of those in particular actually “reveals,” “manifests,” and “displays” the righteousness of God proper.  Yet, against his own best interests, and contrarty to the integral coherence of the Gospel, he left the door open for some sort of “righteousness of God” attaching to the crucifixion (and not even simply to Christ’s personal faithfulness and obedience in submitting to the gross indignity of that paramount exhibit of human sinfulness, which, though plausible and inoffensive on its surface, still happens to be askew from Paul’s consistent, driving intention in all his discourse regarding God’s own justice relative to human justification).  By a process of elimination, such an attachment necessarily reduces down to a penal “righteousness,” and accordingly marches Campbell right back into the jaws of the conundrum that compels him to spin out a theory of “the Teacher,” along with his fateful “baby-plus-bathwater-throw-away program” when confronted with certain challenging scriptures.  [5/13/10; 5/14/21; 5/17/21]

*Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2009).

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #7)

 7.     What is “the righteousness of God”, and how was it manifested at the Cross?

God’s righteousness is His just disposition that both penalizes the wrong and rewards the right.  In Paul’s letters, the expression almost exclusively refers to the latter, in particular, God’s rewarding Jesus by raising him from the dead and exalting him to His throne of glory.  The just award given to Christ by this upright judicial decision of God, the power of resurrection life, is in turn graciously bestowed as a free gift, via the Holy Spirit, on all who have faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord.  This is the justice that we enjoy by faith, not through human works of the Law of Moses.  Exclusively through the faithfulness of Jesus in perfectly fulfilling the Old Covenant by his faultless obedience to God’s desire, at great personal cost, he won the award that has the power to set us free from death, Satan, sin, and the Law of the Old Covenant.  God’s righteousness was in no sense manifested at the Cross, which is, by stark contrast, a standing tribute to the bitterly vicious envy, hatred, and fury of the Adversary and his reign of darkness in diabolical opposition to God, both Father and Son and all they stand for.  God’s integral justice in return for this savage event—both immediate reward and delayed retribution—was yet to make its advent in either aspect at that pregnant moment.