The Relation between Justification and Identity as Key to Evaluate the Radical New Perspective on Paul

Abstract

According to prevalent approaches to the Pauline corpus, the concepts of justification and salvation are often interpreted as constituting a believer's legal and salvific status before God in distinction from such a person's ethnic identity. In the so-called Radical New Perspective on Paul, Judaean believers in Christ are envisioned to keep their nomistic identity in distinction from gentile believers, which is then differentiated from their legal and salvific status before God. In this contribution, the relation between justification and identity is defined more closely in order to evaluate the tendency to distinguish between justification/salvation and identity. This is done especially by analysing texts in the Pauline corpus in which the concepts of justification, salvation and identity overlap.