Universal law

In the introduction to his book, Watson summarizes the thesis of his unpublished doctoral thesis, on which the published book is based. His initiating observation is that “in virtually every passage where the Reformation tradition has found an attack on ‘earning salvation,’ there is a reference to the exclusiveness of the Jewish theology of the covenant as contrasted with the universality of Paul’s proclamation.” Paul’s attack does not, as Sanders claimed, arise from Christology per se, but from a “universalizing view of the law itself, peculiar to Paul and derived from his gospel.”

For the Jews, the law has a positive role, marking the Jews out as a special people, “exempt . . . from that solidarity in guilt before God.” Paul argued, on the contrary, that the law has universal, not particular application, and that this universal application is fundamentally negative: It “reveals to be the true position of all men, Jews and Gentiles alike.” Promise too is not particular, as the Jews would have it, but universal. This led Watson to conclude that “justification has a clear social dimension, in that it is directed against a construal of the law that serves only to exclude .”

Watson, interestingly, lists a large number of scholars who noted this social dimension prior to Sanders and Dunn: Bauer, Markus Barth, Dahl, W. D. Davies, George Howard, Ulrich Mauer, Paul Minear, Halvor Moxnes, as well as Krister Stendahl and NT Wright. He notes that the diversity of this group makes “their common emphasis on the universality/exclusiveness polarity all the more striking.”