Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
Concluding Observations
This short chapter is less concerned with summarising the material of this part of the book, than with highlighting several important findings which have fallen out of the study so far.
The first is the most obvious. Despite all the diversity which enriches intertestamental Judaism, certain trends are so clear they can scarcely be ignored. With the partial exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls, legalism is on the rise, and with it merit theology. T. F. Torrance makes a percipient remark when, though focusing his attention on a later age, he comments that ‘legalism always [leads] to the growth of Pelagian notions of merit and of fulfilled duty’. Whether this merit theology adopts, for instance, the garb of Jewish apocalyptic or of rabbinic discussion and legal formulation is not too important from the point of view of this study. Much more crucial are the formulated free will, the ‘election’ that is more response than grace (despite retention of the latter word), the emphasis on merit, the subtle fences built around God to protect him from charges of either finitude or of involvement with evil.
Some of the distinctions from corpus to corpus bear more significance for this work. The eschatological structure embraced by apocalyptic insures that God’s present reign is to be sharply distinguished from his coming reign. The DS preserve a curious independence from the main-stream trends surrounding them.
Yet it is extremely important to recognise that none of this literature resolves or evades the question of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Implicitly or explicitly, the tension returns, in one form or another, to haunt us still. Individual writers may succeed in eliminating it from a particular passage or even from a particular theme; but this merely changes its shape. For example, formulated free will, understood to include power to contrary, may now absolve God from any apparent complicity in human evil; but then questions must be raised concerning the source of the human capacity for evil, or the manner in which God sovereignly controls history if he does not in some way control human decisions of a moral nature. Elimination of the tension in the arena of human moral responsibility or in the realm of soteriology does not eliminate the tension per se. But it does radically transform its shape.
It is the failure to recognise this which mars the otherwise excellent work of E. P. Sanders, and entices him into too uniform and monolithic a presentation of the intertestamental literature. Again and again he observes that human decision stands side by side with divine ‘grace’; but he never remarks that ‘grace’ is undergoing a major semantic shift. He draws attention to passages on election, but minimises the evidence which transforms ‘election’ almost into reward. I hasten to add that I agree with the thrust of his work and admire his massive competence in the sources; but in my view his polemical aim prevents him from being sufficiently sensitive to the changing face of the sovereignty-responsibility tension.