Originally Posted by
greenbaggins 
The New Perspective on Paul is not an offshoot of the Federal Vision, as it has been around far longer. Some say it had its beginnings with Krister Stendahl's article "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1963. There were other forerunners of Sanders as well. One might point to W.D. Davies' book Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, as well as the much older three volume history of Judaism by George Foote Moore. But undoubtedly, the watershed was the publication of Sanders's book Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977.
The basic idea of the New Perspective on Paul is that the Judaism of the first century against which Paul was arguing was not a legalistic religion, but rather an exclusivistic religion. In other words, according to the NPP, Judaism's problem (according to Paul) was not legalism, but rather the fact that they could not tell what time it was (that the promises to Abraham were being fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and thus the promise could now go out to the Gentiles). They have several ways of saying this. One is "Paul's problem with Judaism is that it is not Christianity" (Sanders). Or, one could talk about faith as the now-appropriate badge of the true community of God (Dunn and Wright), that replaces circumcision (as if faith didn't always mark out the true Israel, even in the OT!).
This view of things means that Paul's problem was not a wrestling with his conscience as to whether he had done enough good works, and then coming to the realization that he needed an alien righteousness imputed to him (as Luther thought; NPP advocates claim that Luther was reading into Paul his own agonized conscience), but rather that the primary issue was how the promise made to Abraham about all the nations of the earth would be fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. All NPP advocates reject the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer, even if some say they are not. This is because they do not eliminate all works from justification. Whenever Paul says that one is not justified by the works of the law, NPP advocates say that he is rejecting primarily (not exclusively) the badges of circumcision, dietary laws, things that marked out Jews as Jews. Paul was not rejecting all works from justification, but only some.
Justification itself is also redefined, especially in Wright. In his recent book (I'm about halfway through) on justification, Wright argues that there is a way past the impasse between old and new perspectives on Paul. That is to argue that justification is the solution both to the problem of Genesis 3 and the problem of Genesis 11, and that justification refers to a person being included in the family of Israel as headed up in Christ for the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham. He does not (any longer!) deny that our sin problem is taken care of in justification, but how that happens is different. It is not clear, for instance, whether Wright holds to penal substitutionary atonement in the same way that the Reformed faith has always formulated it. He would definitely say, for instance, that the guilt of our sin is laid on Christ as our substitute. But he does not like the word "imputation." And he certainly does not advocate the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us in any way, shape or form, although he claims that what imputation was designed to say is something you get in his theology, just in another way. I do not agree with his assessment, and I also have trouble believing his descriptions of the old perspective when they are manifestly out in left field. This is something that Doug Wilson has actually showed pretty well in his review of Wright's book, and it comes out even more clearly in Guy Waters's review over on Reformation 21.
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NT Wright's main problem is that he rejects imputed righteousness.
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