“For God has bound all over to disobedience
so that He may have mercy on all.”
Romans 11:32
To Honor the Legacy of A.B. Simpson
“I would rather play with forked lightning or take in my hands living wires with their fiery current than speak a reckless word against any servant of Christ or idly repeat the slanderous darts which thousands of Christians are hurling on others.” — A. B. Simpson, Danger Signals, 1890
Abstract
This study re-examines Paul’s theology of justification by faith within its first-century legal and political matrix, drawing insight from Acts and from Paul’s letters. It argues that “works of the law” were not moralistic attempts to earn salvation but boundary rites—circumcision, food laws, and calendrical observance—that defined participation in Judaism, a religio licita under Roman rule. Paul’s insistence on faith apart from these rites therefore challenged not only Jewish exclusivism but also the imperial logic of legitimacy itself. By appealing to Caesar, he exposed the gospel’s claim to universal citizenship before God—a message continuous with the Abrahamic covenant yet radically disruptive to Rome’s hierarchical order.
Integrating insights from the New Perspective on Paul and the renewed historical study of Jesus, this essay honors the Reformation’s proclamation of sola gratia and sola fide—grace alone and faith alone—while situating that confession within Paul’s lived world of Torah and empire. It further introduces a Torat Edom framework that names the covenantal mystery Paul alludes to in Ephesians and commissions in 2 Corinthians 5: the reconciliation of grace and judgment, Jacob and Edom, Israel and the nations, within God’s restorative justice. In dialogue with A. B. Simpson’s Fourfold vision of Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King—and with Meister Eckhart’s homo iustus insight into the Spirit’s work of likeness—it shows that justification and sanctification flow from the same source: the indwelling life of the Messiah-Spirit (Gen 1:2). Thus the grace that frees the conscience also empowers the mission, revealing faith as both divine gift and incarnational calling.
⸻
1 Introduction
The post-Reformation recovery of the individual’s justification by faith restored the freedom of conscience, yet it often obscured Paul’s historical surroundings. In the Roman world, religion was a civic institution: ancestral cults were tolerated as religiones licitae, sanctioned pillars of public order. Judaism, as an ancient tradition, enjoyed that legal protection. Its customs—circumcision, Sabbath rest, dietary separation—functioned not only as covenantal signs but also as civic identifiers of a recognized nation.
Against this background, Paul’s proclamation of faith apart from “works of the law” was revolutionary. It invited Gentiles into Israel’s covenant without demanding the legal badges that secured Roman recognition. The gospel thus appeared both within and beyond Judaism—neither neatly licit nor straightforwardly illicit by imperial categories. To see Paul clearly is to place him once more between Torah and Caesar—between the promise to Abraham and the empire’s registry of approved faiths.
Already in Acts 15, James frames Gentile inclusion by citing Amos 9:11–12. In the Septuagint—the form quoted in Acts—God restores “the tent of David” so “that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord…even all the Gentiles who are called by my name.” In the Masoretic Text, the same verse reads “the remnant of Edom (שְׁאֵרִית אֱדוֹם),” sharpening the Jacob–Esau horizon of reconciliation. On either reading, the nations are gathered under David’s restored reign; on the Edom reading, the very brother once estranged is brought near.
Here the Torat Edom narrative emerges: grace does not annul divine order but heals its distortions, joining Israel’s covenantal life to the nations through mercy rather than coercion (cf. Rom 9–11). In this light, justification by faith (Rom 3–5) is the Abrahamic blessing extended outward—“in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed”—the reconciliation of brothers through the mercy of God, the wound of election becoming the wellspring of redemption.
⸻
⸻
2 Religio Licita and Jewish Identity under Rome
Roman governors regarded religion as a civic and legal matter. A cult was legitimate (licita) if it was ancient, local, and politically stabilizing. Because Jewish customs were ancestral, emperors from Julius Caesar onward reaffirmed Judea and Samaria’s right to maintain their law. Yet it is crucial to distinguish Judaism as a religion from the territorial administration of Judea and Samaria. The former—matured through the Maccabean revival and Second-Temple reforms—had become a portable religious system centered on Scripture, synagogue, and halakhah. The latter was a political province under Roman oversight. In Roman eyes, Ioudaismos was both a national cult and a civil code; but by the first century the religious Judaism of the diaspora had already outgrown its geographical cradle.
Josephus preserves Caesar’s decree confirming Jewish legal autonomy: “It is my pleasure that the Jews shall be allowed to observe their own customs in accordance with their law and that they be not hindered in sending their contributions to Jerusalem.” Philo echoes this in Legatio ad Gaium 155–158. Such edicts enabled Jews to refuse the imperial cult without penalty; Judaism thus stood as a religio licita—a legally protected ethnos.
Josephus preserves Caesar’s decree confirming Jewish legal autonomy: “It is my pleasure that the Jews shall be allowed to observe their own customs in accordance with their law and that they be not hindered in sending their contributions to Jerusalem.” Philo echoes this in Legatio ad Gaium 155–158. Such edicts enabled Jews to refuse the imperial cult without penalty; Judaism thus stood as a religio licita—a legally protected ethnos.
For Gentile “God-fearers,” circumcision conferred not only religious belonging but also civic cover. Faithfulness to Israel’s God could therefore blur into pursuit of legal status under Rome’s tolerance system. Identity became as much a juridical as a theological question—an early prefigurement of what later centuries would call “church and state.”
Paul’s assemblies unsettled this equilibrium. By proclaiming inclusion without circumcision, he dissolved the protective membrane of licitness. The gospel’s universality was not a new charter within the empire but the revelation of divine righteousness transcending every human registry of legitimacy. In this sense, Paul did not create a new sect; he unveiled a reality that no empire could license—the righteousness of God revealed apart from law, yet witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.
This claim echoes across history. By locating divine legitimacy outside imperial sanction, Paul’s gospel undermined the foundational logic of religio licita. Centuries later, when Constantine fused Christianity with Roman order, the Church again confronted the tension between grace and legality, spirit and statecraft. Augustine’s City of God sought to parse them; yet Paul’s original vision—of a faith unlicensed, transcending every civic registry—remains a prophetic critique of any empire that claims to administer salvation.
Paul’s defiance of the religio licita system was not revolt against Torah but restoration of its hospitality. By reopening the covenant to the nations without demanding juridical conversion, he re-anchored faith in mercy rather than status. This turn leads directly into the halakhic world of the gēr toshav—the righteous sojourner who lives under Israel’s God while remaining among the nations—a category through which the universal scope of Torat Edom begins to unfold.
At the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15), this logic appears in scriptural form: James cites Amos 9:11–12 (MT “Edom”; LXX “mankind/Gentiles”), signaling that the inclusion of the nations is restoration, not innovation—the rebuilding of David’s fallen tent so that even Edom, long estranged, might be reconciled. Paul’s mission to Gentiles is the living enactment of that prophecy—the widening of Israel’s mercy to embrace her ancient brother.
⸻
3 Paul’s Appeal to Caesar: Law, Citizenship, and Legitimacy
The closing chapters of Acts (24–28) dramatize the clash between divine and imperial notions of legitimacy. Under Felix, Festus, and Agrippa II, Paul’s hearings exposed Rome’s uncertainty: was the Jesus-movement a branch of Judaism—therefore licita—or a novel superstition threatening civic order? Festus concedes, “Their dispute concerns questions of their own religion and of a certain Jesus who was dead, whom Paul asserts to be alive” (Acts 25:19).
Lacking any civic charge, the governor nevertheless bows to pressure from Jerusalem’s elite until Paul invokes his rights as a Roman citizen: “I appeal to Caesar” (25:11). That declaration transfers the arena from the provincial court to the empire’s throne and forces a new legal question: can faith in the risen Jesus be contained within Judaism’s charter, or does it constitute a trans-ethnic claim beyond the empire’s power to regulate?
Agrippa’s verdict—“This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar ” (26:32)—captures the ambiguity: Paul remains recognizably Jewish yet already beyond the boundaries of religio licita. In Rome itself, Jewish leaders confess, “This sect is spoken against everywhere” (28:22). The gospel stands suspended between protection and persecution—sheltered for a moment by the law, yet destined to transcend it.
By appealing to Caesar, Paul exposes the paradox of grace: divine legitimacy voluntarily subjecting itself to imperial trial. His citizenship functions not as privilege but as witness, a living parable of the Torat Edom tension between law and mercy, justice and inclusion. The courtroom thus becomes the first arena where Rome must hear—however dimly—that a higher justice has entered its legal space. Paul not only secures his path to Rome; he symbolically sets the empire itself before the cross—where divine mercy pronounces its verdict over every human court.
⸻
4 “Works of the Law” as Boundary and Badge
Reformation theology often read “works of the law” as moral striving; the New Perspective posited their historical meaning as covenantal markers. Judaism, E. P. Sanders showed, was a religion of grace in which Torah sustained covenant membership rather than achieved it. James D. G. Dunn refined the point by identifying circumcision, dietary rules, and holy days as boundary symbols preserving Israel’s identity. When Paul declares that justification is “apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28), he contests the misuse of these signs as admission credentials.
Abraham’s faith in Genesis 15:6 becomes his paradigm: righteousness precedes ritual; inclusion precedes ethnicity. The covenant expands without erasing Israel’s story.
Paul therefore does not abolish Torah’s foundation but redirects its force outward. His gospel reframes belonging not as ethnic transfer but as covenantal grafting—a movement from proselyte conversion to gēr toshav participation. In Jewish halakhah, the gēr toshav (“resident sojourner”) is a Gentile who renounces idolatry, observes the Noahide laws, and lives among Israel under divine protection. Such a person shares moral accountability before God and a portion of covenantal blessing while retaining Gentile identity. Paul’s invitation to the nations functions precisely at this level: to live by faith in the God of Israel through the Messiah of Israel without demanding juridical conversion.
By this move Paul simultaneously upholds Torah’s hospitality and dismantles ethnic exclusivism. “Works of the law” no longer serve as civic credentials within Rome’s tolerance system but as signs transfigured by faith. In Torat Edom terms, this is the reconciliation of covenant and creation: the gēr toshav embodies grace dwelling in justice—an outsider welcomed without erasure of difference. Faith restores the moral architecture of law by re-centering it in mercy; boundary becomes bridge, and covenantal holiness becomes hospitality.
By this move Paul simultaneously upholds Torah’s hospitality and dismantles ethnic exclusivism. “Works of the law” no longer serve as civic credentials within Rome’s tolerance system but as signs transfigured by faith. In Torat Edom terms, this is the reconciliation of covenant and creation: the gēr toshav embodies grace dwelling in justice—an outsider welcomed without erasure of difference. Faith restores the moral architecture of law by re-centering it in mercy; boundary becomes bridge, and covenantal holiness becomes hospitality.
The Passion gathers these threads into one act. In His crucifixion, the perfect Israelite submits to both Torah’s curse and Rome’s verdict, bearing the sentence of each and transforming both into instruments of mercy. The cross becomes the true courtroom of Torat Edom: divine justice fulfilled not through domination but through self-giving love. In Christ the covenant’s boundary is transfigured into invitation; law and grace meet, Israel and the nations reconcile, and the wound of election becomes the world’s healing.
⸻
5 Faith and Religio Licita: Paul’s Gospel of Grace under the Roman Empire
5.1 Beyond Protestant Legalism
The Reformers rightly proclaimed salvation by grace through faith, yet later Protestantism often universalized “law” into a moral abstraction, severed from its Jewish and imperial setting. The New Perspective restored Paul to his Jewish horizon, and Mark D. Nanos pressed the insight further: “works of the law,” he argued, were rites of proselyte conversion conferring legal identity within Judaism’s religio licita framework. In The Irony of Galatians and The Mystery of Romans, Nanos shows that circumcision and purity laws were civic credentials before Rome, not merely theological emblems.
Paul’s radical act was to open covenantal fellowship to Gentiles as gērim toshavim—resident sojourners—who could worship Israel’s God without assuming juridical conversion. This halakhic category affirmed moral accountability to the Creator and participation in covenantal blessing while preserving Gentile identity. Grace does not abolish law; it restores the law’s intent—hospitality without hierarchy. In Torat Edom terms, the wound between Jew and Gentile begins to close: divine justice becomes the dwelling place of mercy.
5.2 Conversion and Status
Under imperial policy, Judaism’s ancestral customs secured exemption from emperor worship and civic sacrifice. Josephus and Philo record decrees granting Jews freedom to keep their law. Circumcision thus functioned as civil registration within the religio licita: a mark placing one safely inside Rome’s map of tolerable faiths. Gentile converts could obtain protection otherwise denied.
Paul’s refusal to compel circumcision was both theological and political—a rejection of salvation by status. “Faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) dethrones civic legitimacy as the ground of divine favor. The righteousness of God is not distributed by imperial tolerance but revealed in the crucified and risen Lord. What Rome certified from above, God grants from below; what law enclosed, mercy opens.
5.3 Faith as Counter-Imperial Citizenship
By appealing to Caesar, Paul forced the empire to confront a question it had never imagined: could a faith confessing a crucified Jew as Kyrios remain within Judaism’s charter, or did it constitute an unlawful superstition? Nero’s later persecutions answered by exclusion. The confession Iēsous Kyrios (“Jesus is Lord”) mirrored imperial titulature even as it subverted it.
As N. T. Wright notes, Paul’s euangelion reclaims the empire’s vocabulary for the reign of God. Yet Paul was no anarchist. Romans 13 honors civil order even as Romans 9–12 unveil the collective logic of Torat Edom and Romans 3–8 the personal. Justification thus becomes a politics of resurrection—trans-ethnic citizenship sustained not by Caesar’s decree but by the Spirit’s indwelling life.
5.4 Integrating Reformation and New Perspective
5.4 Integrating Reformation and New Perspective
The perceived rivalry dissolves within Paul’s covenantal horizon. The Reformers preserved the inward freedom of grace; the New Perspective recovered the historical body of that freedom. Together they reveal justification as both personal liberation and communal reconciliation. Nanos adds the missing juridical realism: “works of the law” were not moral strivings but legal badges. Paul’s gospel overturns every system—religious or imperial—that mediates belonging through credentials of power. The Reformers fought the bondage of merit; Paul fought the bondage of legitimacy. Grace triumphed in both.
5.4.1 — Beyond Entrenchment
Some heirs of the Reformation remain cautious. Thomas R. Schreiner, Mark A. Seifrid, and James M. Hamilton Jr. retain exclusively forensic readings of justification, wary that the New Perspective erodes sola fide. For them, Paul’s polemic safeguards the imputed righteousness of Christ rather than covenantal inclusion. D. A. Carson similarly warns that sociological readings risk diluting Paul’s doctrine of sin and grace.
Some heirs of the Reformation remain cautious. Thomas R. Schreiner, Mark A. Seifrid, and James M. Hamilton Jr. retain exclusively forensic readings of justification, wary that the New Perspective erodes sola fide. For them, Paul’s polemic safeguards the imputed righteousness of Christ rather than covenantal inclusion. D. A. Carson similarly warns that sociological readings risk diluting Paul’s doctrine of sin and grace.
Their concern is not misplaced, yet their posture reveals a deeper anxiety: that grace, once released from its courtroom, might lose its authority. But this fear betrays the very freedom grace secures. The gospel’s verdict was never meant to freeze faith into a legal category; it was meant to send it forth as a living covenant. When justification remains only imputed and never enacted, grace becomes guarded rather than generative—preserved in doctrine but absent in mission.
Read within the Abrahamic promise, justification regains its original tension: law clarified, mercy embodied, faith made fruitful. Paul’s righteousness is neither a forensic abstraction nor a sociological adjustment but the life of the faithful Messiah reproduced in His people. Imputation and participation are not opposites but dimensions of one mystery—God’s righteousness both declared for us and displayed through us.
The tragedy is that each camp holds a fragment of the same jewel. The Reformed rightly preserve the purity of divine initiative; the New Perspective rightly restores the covenantal horizon of inclusion. Yet both, standing guard at their own gates, forget that the city has no walls. Until grace is seen not as a doctrine to defend but as a Person to embody, justification will remain defined by its borders instead of its power to reconcile.
Their concern is essential, for it safeguards the truth that righteousness is not earned but received. Yet Paul’s gospel pushes further. The way forward is neither capitulation to sociological reduction nor retreat into sterile polemic, but cruciform participation. Paul does not choose between verdict and vocation—he weds them. The justified become the offering (Rom 12:1). The courtroom gives way to the altar. Grace, no longer defended, becomes enacted; faith, no longer argued, becomes poured out.
Here the Reformation’s “free conscience” meets the New Perspective’s “renewed community.” What both sought separately, Paul holds together in the mysterion of the Cross: the declaration that becomes transformation, the imputation that becomes incarnation.
5.5 Allegiance and the Scandal of the Cross
Matthew W. Bates has proposed that pistis be translated “allegiance” to Jesus the King. His emphasis corrects the modern reduction of faith to inner assent, reminding us that first-century belief implied embodied loyalty. Yet when read against Roman and Jewish legal backdrops, allegiance cannot be equated with imperial loyalty or civic obedience. The object of Christian faith is the crucified Lord—by every earthly measure a man under curse and disgrace.
Matthew W. Bates has proposed that pistis be translated “allegiance” to Jesus the King. His emphasis corrects the modern reduction of faith to inner assent, reminding us that first-century belief implied embodied loyalty. Yet when read against Roman and Jewish legal backdrops, allegiance cannot be equated with imperial loyalty or civic obedience. The object of Christian faith is the crucified Lord—by every earthly measure a man under curse and disgrace.
Bates’s recent writings, however, reveal a troubling drift. In seeking to move beyond Protestant fragmentation, he often gestures admiringly toward Rome’s theological coherence and its institutional continuity, even suggesting that the way forward lies in rapprochement with the very system Paul’s gospel unsettled. His call for “ecclesial allegiance” and his endorsement of a unified Catholic–Protestant vision of faith risk mistaking administrative unity for the unity of the Spirit. The empire’s ecumenical instinct—periodically reborn in later Christendom—has always sought to domesticate grace by systematizing it. Rome’s genius was not only in conquest but in sacral order; its modern heirs repeat the gesture whenever ecclesial allegiance replaces identifucation in the faithfulness of the Crucified.
Paul’s pistis Christou stands in radical opposition to such re-Romanization. His faith is fidelity to the rejected and risen Messiah, not submission to renovated forms of imperial hierarchy. To proclaim “Jesus is Lord” is not to enthrone a better emperor but to announce the end of every empire—including religious ones.
The true Church is not curator of revelation but its living witness, sustained not by institutional alignment but by the indwelling Spirit who unites the body through shared suffering and love.
In the end, allegiance without the cross reverts to civility; it becomes polite religion under imperial management. Paul’s allegiance is cruciform, not conciliatory. It is the loyalty of the condemned to the Condemned-One, the fellowship of those who bear in their bodies the marks of Jesus (Gal 6:17). To reclaim pistis Christou is therefore to renounce every nostalgia for Rome—ancient or modern—and to live instead as citizens of the kingdom whose charter is mercy, not mandate.
5.6 Faith as Our Sacrifice and Substitution, Not Civic Fealty
Deuteronomy 21:22–23 declares, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” For Israel, hanging meant exclusion from covenant; for Rome, crucifixion meant degradation from society. To preach a crucified Messiah therefore offended both worlds. Martin Hengel calls crucifixion “a political and social deterrent in the extreme.” Paul transforms that double stigma into revelation: “Messiah became a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). The cross—history’s tribunal of shame—becomes heaven’s courtroom of mercy.
Yet the atonement Paul proclaims is not a detached theory but a lived substitution. “I am already being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith” (Phil 2:17). His life becomes liturgy; his ministry, the ongoing mediation of the Crucified. Paul does not merely preach substitution—he performs it. He stands where Christ stood, between God and empire, as a living intercessor whose chains are his credentials.
Romans 12:1 gathers this theology into a single imperative: “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—this is your spiritual worship.” Here justification flowers into vocation; imputation becomes embodiment. To believe is to ascend the altar.
Under Rome, allegiance meant oaths, censuses, and sacrifices affirming Caesar’s lordship. Under the gospel, pistis is trust in the condemned yet risen One—a renunciation of every system that trades legitimacy for power. To confess Iēsous Kyrios is to pledge oneself to the Crucified against the world’s empires. As Richard B. Hays and J. Louis Martyn show, pistis Christou denotes believers’ participation in Messiah’s own faithfulness unto death.
Allegiance, then, is not civic loyalty but covenantal substitution—the sharing of His obedience through our own poured-out lives. J. Gresham Machen’s final telegram captured the essence: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” Hope rests not on our allegiance but on His fidelity—embodied, by grace, in His people. What the Reformed call imputation becomes participation; what Bates calls allegiance becomes self-offering. The cross we preach must become the cross we bear.
5.7 The Cross as the End of Religio Licita
In this light, the cross marks the collapse of religio licita. Empire, Temple, and Law converge to condemn the Righteous One—and that condemnation becomes the world’s justification. “God chose what is weak to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).
Paul’s gospel shatters every category of legitimacy. The crucified Lord is declared illicit by Rome, accursed by Torah, and foolish by Greece—yet only He is vindicated by God. Faith therefore is not allegiance within the system but allegiance that dies to the system. To follow Christ is to accept exile from every charter of approval and to discover, in that exile, the freedom of sonship.
Paul’s own sufferings seal the claim: “I bear in my body the marks of Jesus” (Gal 6:17). His wounds are not anomalies but apostolic credentials. “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,” he writes, “and in my flesh I fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24). Far from diminishing Christ’s sufficiency, Paul’s suffering manifests its extension—the atonement moving through history in embodied intercession. The Church thus becomes the living priesthood through which Christ continues to reconcile the world.
The scandal of the cross is that the site of illegality becomes the throne of grace. What was illicita before men becomes grata before God. Rome’s punishments become heaven’s sacraments. The crucified community replaces civic cult with living sacrifice. Faith itself becomes the true liturgy of a kingdom no registry can contain.
5.8 Reframing Bates’s Insight
Matthew Bates is right to recover the language of allegiance; perhaps his error lies in its potential for domestication. True allegiance is not civic fidelity to a triumphant ruler but cruciform fidelity to a condemned King. To say “Jesus is Lord” is to affirm that the Lord was first judged as a criminal—and to take one’s place beside Him.
Paul’s gospel does not exchange grace for allegiance; it reveals that grace isallegiance fulfilled in love. But love, in this kingdom, always takes the shape of the cross. The believer’s loyalty is not the discipline of empire but the self-offering of reconciliation: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20). The Church is not merely the recipient of substitution—it is its continuation. Through her witness, Christ still pleads, “Be reconciled to God.”
Deuteronomy 21:22–23 declares, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” For Israel, hanging meant exclusion from covenant; for Rome, crucifixion meant degradation from society. To preach a crucified Messiah therefore offended both worlds. Martin Hengel calls crucifixion “a political and social deterrent in the extreme.” Paul transforms that double stigma into revelation: “Messiah became a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). The cross—history’s tribunal of shame—becomes heaven’s courtroom of mercy.
Yet the atonement Paul proclaims is not a detached theory but a lived substitution. “I am already being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith” (Phil 2:17). His life becomes liturgy; his ministry, the ongoing mediation of the Crucified. Paul does not merely preach substitution—he performs it. He stands where Christ stood, between God and empire, as a living intercessor whose chains are his credentials.
Romans 12:1 gathers this theology into a single imperative: “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—this is your spiritual worship.” Here justification flowers into vocation; imputation becomes embodiment. To believe is to ascend the altar.
Under Rome, allegiance meant oaths, censuses, and sacrifices affirming Caesar’s lordship. Under the gospel, pistis is trust in the condemned yet risen One—a renunciation of every system that trades legitimacy for power. To confess Iēsous Kyrios is to pledge oneself to the Crucified against the world’s empires. As Richard B. Hays and J. Louis Martyn show, pistis Christou denotes believers’ participation in Messiah’s own faithfulness unto death.
Allegiance, then, is not civic loyalty but covenantal substitution—the sharing of His obedience through our own poured-out lives. J. Gresham Machen’s final telegram captured the essence: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” Hope rests not on our allegiance but on His fidelity—embodied, by grace, in His people. What the Reformed call imputation becomes participation; what Bates calls allegiance becomes self-offering. The cross we preach must become the cross we bear.
5.7 The Cross as the End of Religio Licita
In this light, the cross marks the collapse of religio licita. Empire, Temple, and Law converge to condemn the Righteous One—and that condemnation becomes the world’s justification. “God chose what is weak to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).
Paul’s gospel shatters every category of legitimacy. The crucified Lord is declared illicit by Rome, accursed by Torah, and foolish by Greece—yet only He is vindicated by God. Faith therefore is not allegiance within the system but allegiance that dies to the system. To follow Christ is to accept exile from every charter of approval and to discover, in that exile, the freedom of sonship.
Paul’s own sufferings seal the claim: “I bear in my body the marks of Jesus” (Gal 6:17). His wounds are not anomalies but apostolic credentials. “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,” he writes, “and in my flesh I fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24). Far from diminishing Christ’s sufficiency, Paul’s suffering manifests its extension—the atonement moving through history in embodied intercession. The Church thus becomes the living priesthood through which Christ continues to reconcile the world.
The scandal of the cross is that the site of illegality becomes the throne of grace. What was illicita before men becomes grata before God. Rome’s punishments become heaven’s sacraments. The crucified community replaces civic cult with living sacrifice. Faith itself becomes the true liturgy of a kingdom no registry can contain.
5.8 Reframing Bates’s Insight
Matthew Bates is right to recover the language of allegiance; perhaps his error lies in its potential for domestication. True allegiance is not civic fidelity to a triumphant ruler but cruciform fidelity to a condemned King. To say “Jesus is Lord” is to affirm that the Lord was first judged as a criminal—and to take one’s place beside Him.
Paul’s gospel does not exchange grace for allegiance; it reveals that grace isallegiance fulfilled in love. But love, in this kingdom, always takes the shape of the cross. The believer’s loyalty is not the discipline of empire but the self-offering of reconciliation: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20). The Church is not merely the recipient of substitution—it is its continuation. Through her witness, Christ still pleads, “Be reconciled to God.”
Both theological camps require conversion. The Reformed must see that substitution is not only imputed but enacted; the allegiance theologians must see that participation is not moral performance but vicarious suffering.
The cross is not merely for us—it is through us.
Romans 12 closes the circle: the justified become the offering. The altar is no longer in the Temple but in the Body of Christ. When that Body—unified, sanctified, and poured out—embraces the ministry of reconciliation, the age of empire ends and the reign of mercy begins.
Until the Church rediscovers this sacrificial vocation, the gospel will remain an abstraction. But when she does, she will once again embody the mysterion Paul saw so clearly:
“Death is at work in us, but life in you.” (2 Cor 4:12)
Only then will the world see not a religion of legality but the living sacrifice of love that brings the King back.
⸻
The pistis Christou—the faith of Christ—reaches its full meaning only as pneumatological participation. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11) is the same Spirit who unites believers to Him, creating what may be called monotheistic alignment: “one God, one Lord, one Spirit, one Body” (Eph 4:4–6). Faith, therefore, is no longer mere assent or allegiance; it becomes indwelling correspondence—the human will aligned to the divine not by coercion but by co-inhabitation.
This is the logic latent in Paul’s en Christō (“in Christ”) language. The Spirit does not merely justify; the Spirit joins: “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body” (1 Cor 12:13). Divine unity thus becomes participatory rather than hierarchical. Paul’s monotheism blossoms into Christic monotheism—the Father known through the Son, the Son indwelling by the Spirit, and believers sharing in this triune circulation of life. This is what Torat Edom names the reconciliation of divine justice and human participation—the healing of separation through shared presence.
6.1 Eckhart’s Homo Iustus and the Mysterion of the Spirit
Meister Eckhart stands as an unlikely but profound ally to Paul. In his sermons he describes the human as homo iustus—the “like-righteous” one—whose soul is geformt (conformed) to the eternal Son by the Holy Spirit. For Eckhart, the Spirit is unitas amoris, the oneness of love that makes God and the soul “one without confusion.” This is not pantheistic collapse but pneumatic likeness: the Spirit reproduces in the believer the same righteousness that is in Christ—homo iustus per Spiritum.
Eckhart’s vision expresses what Paul calls the mysterion (Eph 3:3–6; Col 1:26–27)—the hidden reality now revealed as “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Righteousness here is not transferred as legal credit but manifested as relational participation: the Spirit bearing witness within the soul to the Son’s obedience. “The Father brings forth the Son in the soul,” Eckhart writes, “and in that birth the soul is righteous.”
His theology of the mysterion anticipates what Calvin would later formalize as duplex gratia—justification and sanctification as two rays of one indwelling light. The homo iustus is thus the Spirit-formed human: faith as likeness, love as life—anticipating Simpson’s conviction that “Christ in you” is the gospel in miniature.
Before Paul’s theology becomes ecclesiology, it is ontology: faith re-creates the human in the pattern of the Son. To be in Christ is to share the Son’s relation to the Father through the Spirit—the only true monotheism, because it is the only divine-human unity grounded in grace, not essence.
6.2 Union with Christ and the Body of the Mysterion
If Paul’s pistis is participation in the faithfulness of the Crucified, union with Christ is its embodied form. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). Forensic, covenantal, and participatory realities converge: we are declared righteous because we share Messiah’s vindication; we live because we share His life—and because we share His life, we share His work. “God … has reconciled us to Himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18).
6.2.1 The Crisis of Participation: Simpson’s Challenge to Autopilot Sanctification
In one sense, this became a tension in Simpson’s theology. His insistence on a crisis experience of sanctification risked fragmenting Calvin’s single grace into two sequential moments—conversion and consecration. Yet Simpson’s real intention was corrective, not divisive. He was resisting the autopilot sanctification of standard Reformed dogmatics, where moral transformation was affirmed doctrinally but seldom experienced existentially.
Simpson saw that without encounter, grace becomes static; without surrender, union remains theoretical. His “crisis” was therefore not a second blessing in the Wesleyan sense but the personal realization of the mysterion—Christ’s indwelling presence consciously received. “Sanctification is not a condition we attain,” he wrote, “but a Person we receive.” The Spirit’s infilling was not emotional excess or mystical extremity, but the manifestation of participation—the believer’s full consent to the indwelling Christ who both justifies and sanctifies.
Where Calvin emphasized duplex gratia as the structure of union, Simpson insisted it must also be the experience of union. Sanctification, in his vision, was not incremental moral polish but the life of the Vine flowing unimpeded through the branches—a continual crisis of yieldedness. The believer must cross the threshold from belief to embodiment, from positional to relational holiness.
In this way Simpson restored dynamism to Calvin’s participation theology: justification as the gate, sanctification as the ongoing habitation of grace. The double grace becomes a living mysterion—Christ reproducing His obedience through His Body, the Spirit continually reconstituting the Church as the field where grace takes flesh.
6.3 The Theology of the Mysterion Recovered
To affirm the God of Abraham—not Plato nor Aristotle—is to reclaim the biblical mysterion as revelation rather than speculation. From Origen and Augustine through Bernard and Eckhart, the teachers of the mysterion sought language for participation—a term they inherited from Plato but transformed by grace—to describe how the hidden life of God becomes manifest in the believer through the Spirit.
Eckhart’s funkelein (“divine spark”) does not signify private mysticism but revelation itself: the manifestation of the mysterion—“Christ formed within” (Gal 4:19)—the same grace Paul calls “Christ in you, the hope of glory ” (Col 1:27). Participation here is not metaphysical ascent but incarnational union, the self-giving of God in and through the creature.
In that manifestation, the believer becomes a living member of the reconciling body: the Spirit indwelling many as one, the Son reproducing His obedience within the Church. Rico Sneller calls this a corridor of resonance between Eckhart and Paul’s en Christō—a shared ontology of grace where divine initiative and human vocation converge. The result is not absorption into divinity but communion within it—the restoration of relationship, not the loss of distinction.
6.4 Simpson’s Union with Christ and the Ministry of Reconciliation
A. B. Simpson, heir of Reformed revivalism and holiness piety, translated this theology of the mysterion into mission. His Fourfold Gospel—Christ our Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, Coming King—renders union a pattern of vocation. “The same life that saves is the life that serves,” he wrote. For Simpson, indwelling grace is not passive contemplation but active incarnation—Christ living through His people for the reconciliation of the world.
To be filled with the Spirit is to participate in the reconciling purpose of God—the life that healed the breach between Jew and Gentile continuing through His Body.
Justification and mission are therefore inseparable faces of the same mysterion.
6.5 Grace as Presence
6.5 Grace as Presence
Here the forensic, covenantal, and revelational dimensions appear as facets of one diamond:
1. Forensic — Justification declares the believer righteous IN the Righteous One.2. Covenantal — Union grafts Gentiles INTO Israel’s renewed olive tree.3. Revelational — The Spirit communicates the life of the risen Lord, TRANSFORMING obedience into participation.4. Vocational — This union extends Christ’s own ministry of reconciliation THROUGH His Body, the Church.
What Rome once licensed and Torah once bounded, grace now indwells. Religio licita yields to religio vivifica—the living faith of Christ’s reconciling presence.
“Christ in you—the power for service.”
⸻
7. Resurrection, Faith, and the Collective Hope
The faith that survived beneath Rome’s suspicion was not retreat but renewal. For Paul, resurrection is not an appendix to theology—it is its grammar. To believe in the resurrection is to affirm that divine justice has already entered history, overturning every verdict of law and empire.
Before the Sanhedrin Paul cried, “It is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial ” (Acts 23:6). The Pharisees affirmed resurrection as vindication; the Sadducees denied it. Paul aligned not with sectarian optimism but with God’s judgment—mercy triumphant over death. The empty tomb became his courtroom; the risen Lord, his acquittal.
This faith is collective: “He died for all…that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised ” (2 Cor 5:14–15). Each redeemed life becomes a fragment of creation’s coming restoration. Paul radicalizes Pharisaic hope: the resurrection has already begun in Messiah. Grace becomes eschatology in motion; the community lives from the future, bearing the promise of a world made right.
When the empire declared the Church illicita, heaven declared her vindicata.
7. Resurrection, Faith, and the Collective Hope
The faith that survived beneath Rome’s suspicion was not retreat but renewal. For Paul, resurrection is not an appendix to theology—it is its grammar. To believe in the resurrection is to affirm that divine justice has already entered history, overturning every verdict of law and empire.
Before the Sanhedrin Paul cried, “It is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial ” (Acts 23:6). The Pharisees affirmed resurrection as vindication; the Sadducees denied it. Paul aligned not with sectarian optimism but with God’s judgment—mercy triumphant over death. The empty tomb became his courtroom; the risen Lord, his acquittal.
This faith is collective: “He died for all…that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised ” (2 Cor 5:14–15). Each redeemed life becomes a fragment of creation’s coming restoration. Paul radicalizes Pharisaic hope: the resurrection has already begun in Messiah. Grace becomes eschatology in motion; the community lives from the future, bearing the promise of a world made right.
When the empire declared the Church illicita, heaven declared her vindicata.
Persecution became proof of legitimacy before God, for the pattern of Christ repeats in His Body (Phil 3:10–11). Rome ruled through fear of death; Christ rules by conquering it. Empire can silence witnesses but cannot revoke witness. The tomb’s emptiness unseats the empire’s fullness.
Here Torat Edom finds its climax: reconciliation fulfilled in creation’s renewal. Jacob and Edom—Israel and the nations—are raised into one humanity, their enmity transfigured into shared inheritance. In the risen Messiah, law’s demand and grace’s gift meet without remainder; the covenant’s wound becomes the doorway of the world’s healing.
And because we are His Body, we are entrusted with “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18)—the same Spirit that raised Jesus now forming a people through whom the King’s reign advances. Resurrection faith therefore becomes resurrection vocation: to live as the firstfruits of a reconciled creation until the whole world echoes the empty tomb.
⸻
Here Torat Edom finds its climax: reconciliation fulfilled in creation’s renewal. Jacob and Edom—Israel and the nations—are raised into one humanity, their enmity transfigured into shared inheritance. In the risen Messiah, law’s demand and grace’s gift meet without remainder; the covenant’s wound becomes the doorway of the world’s healing.
And because we are His Body, we are entrusted with “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18)—the same Spirit that raised Jesus now forming a people through whom the King’s reign advances. Resurrection faith therefore becomes resurrection vocation: to live as the firstfruits of a reconciled creation until the whole world echoes the empty tomb.
⸻
8. Conclusion — Grace Beyond Law and Empire
Paul’s gospel of grace stands where Abraham’s faith meets Rome’s law and where the Passion redefines them both. Justification by faith is neither the negation of obedience nor the privatization of piety; it unveils a covenantal order that fulfills Torah’s promise while transcending Caesar’s jurisdiction. To proclaim Jew and Gentile righteous together is to announce the end of religio licita as arbiter of divine favor and the dawn of a kingdom whose charter is mercy alone.
The Reformation recovered this truth for the conscience; the New Perspective restored it to history. Torat Edom unites them in a single grammar of reconciliation: grace and justice, Israel and the nations, wound and healing converge in the Son of Abraham, crucified and raised. Election becomes vocation: the Chosen bears the curse for all so that all may share the blessing (Gen 12:3; Gal 3:8–14). The Passion is not merely the climax of suffering; it is the axis of reconciliation. What law demanded, grace accomplished; what empire enforced, love redeemed.
A. B. Simpson’s vision brings this dynamic to its eschatological horizon. The same grace that saves is the life that serves—and in serving, prepares creation for its restoration. To be justified is to participate in the Messiah’s faithfulness; to be sanctified is to embody His mission for the world. Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel—Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, Coming King—is not a sequence but a symphony: one Christ living through His people until the world is reconciled. “Bringing Back the King” is therefore not escapist expectation but covenantal cooperation—the unified Body manifesting the reign of the risen Lord through the Spirit of reconciliation.
Here Torat Edom ceases to be theory and becomes vocation: the Church as the living borderland where Edom and Jacob, Jew and Gentile, law and grace meet beneath the cross and rise in the resurrection life of Christ. When the Body walks in unity, the Head is revealed; when reconciliation becomes visible in the household of faith, the world beholds its destiny.
The Reformation recovered this truth for the conscience; the New Perspective restored it to history. Torat Edom unites them in a single grammar of reconciliation: grace and justice, Israel and the nations, wound and healing converge in the Son of Abraham, crucified and raised. Election becomes vocation: the Chosen bears the curse for all so that all may share the blessing (Gen 12:3; Gal 3:8–14). The Passion is not merely the climax of suffering; it is the axis of reconciliation. What law demanded, grace accomplished; what empire enforced, love redeemed.
A. B. Simpson’s vision brings this dynamic to its eschatological horizon. The same grace that saves is the life that serves—and in serving, prepares creation for its restoration. To be justified is to participate in the Messiah’s faithfulness; to be sanctified is to embody His mission for the world. Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel—Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, Coming King—is not a sequence but a symphony: one Christ living through His people until the world is reconciled. “Bringing Back the King” is therefore not escapist expectation but covenantal cooperation—the unified Body manifesting the reign of the risen Lord through the Spirit of reconciliation.
Here Torat Edom ceases to be theory and becomes vocation: the Church as the living borderland where Edom and Jacob, Jew and Gentile, law and grace meet beneath the cross and rise in the resurrection life of Christ. When the Body walks in unity, the Head is revealed; when reconciliation becomes visible in the household of faith, the world beholds its destiny.
At last the full trajectory of the Abrahamic covenant comes into view: what began in promise finds completion in participation. The Spirit writes the law on hearts; the nations enter the household of faith as gērim toshavim—sojourners grafted into mercy. The Church, no longer licensed by empire or defined by exclusion, becomes the dwelling of divine reconciliation within history. In the Crucified, faith and mercy embrace; justice breathes again; and the nations discover themselves not as rivals to Israel but as participants in her calling.
This is Torat Edom—the covenant’s final harmony, the reconciliation of brothers, the healing of history, and the renewal of creation through the living grace of the Risen Lord.
And when that harmony resounds in a unified Church, the King returns—brought back not by dominion, but by reconciliation fulfilled.
⸻
Appendix 👉 A New Perspectives Primer
Endnotes
1. Amos 9:11–12 in MT and LXX; Acts 15:16–17. The MT reads “the remnant of Edom,” while the LXX reads “the rest of mankind” / “the Gentiles.” The Acts citation follows the LXX. Text-critically, the consonantal similarity of ’dm (Edom/humanity) likely underlies the divergence. Theologically, both readings converge on Gentile inclusion; the MT adds a Jacob–Esau reconciliation motif that suits the paper’s Torat Edom frame. See apparatus in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 299–302.
2. From Ioudaismos to Judaism. In 2 Macc 2:21; 8:1; 14:38, Ioudaismosdenotes fidelity to ancestral law over against Hellēnismos. By the first century, the term marks a portable, trans-local religious identity. See Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 146–51.
3. Caesarean decree in Josephus. Josephus, Antiquities 14.213–16, preserves Julius Caesar’s decree authorizing Jewish customs and remittances to Jerusalem, anchoring a de facto religio licita status in Roman practice.
4. Philo on Jewish privileges. Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 155–58, corroborates imperial recognition of Jewish observances and assemblies—an ideological predicate for later legal toleration.
5. Church and empire. Augustine’s City of God maps competing loves (civitates) rather than competing jurisdictions; more recent discussions of Constantinian synthesis include Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine(Downers Grove: IVP, 2010), 87–119. The present essay treats Paul’s appeal as a theological placing of Rome before grace.
6. The gēr toshav in halakhah. Avodah Zarah 64b and Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim u-Milḥamot 8:10–11, define the gēr toshav as a Gentile who renounces idolatry and accepts the Noahide laws before a Jewish court; he remains a Gentile while dwelling under Israel’s protection. This category illumines Paul’s Gentile inclusion without proselyte conversion.
7. Sanders and Dunn on “works of the law.” E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), famously argues covenantal nomism; James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 110–35, identifies circumcision, food, and calendar as boundary markers.
8. Gentiles as covenantal sojourners. See Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (New York: Seabury, 1983), 174–80, for a robust account of Gentile status vis-à-vis Israel’s covenant; the present essay adapts this logic to Paul’s assemblies.
9. Nanos’s juridical realism. Mark D. Nanos, The Irony of Galatians(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) and The Mystery of Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), argue that erga nomou names rites of proselyte conversion functioning as legal identity within a Roman context. See also Nanos, “Re-framing Paul’s Opposition to Erga Nomou,” in Nanos & Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 95–122.
10. Acts 15 and Rom 2:26–29. These texts distinguish covenantal righteousness from juridical proselyte status. For the line from Abrahamic faith to non-proselyte inclusion, see Nanos, Irony of Galatians, 102–7; Mystery of Romans, 123–35.
11. Imperial exemptions. Philo, Legatio 155–58; Josephus, Antiquities14.213–16; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (New York: Vintage, 2008), 92–104, together outline Roman practice that gave Judaism a privileged, if pragmatic, accommodation.
12. Counter-imperial euangelion. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1283–98; Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), on how imperial language is re-inhabited by Paul’s gospel.
13. Reformed cautions. Thomas R. Schreiner, Faith Alone (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015); James M. Hamilton Jr., God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 456–69; D. A. Carson, The Vindication of Imputation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011). The present essay affirms their soteriological clarity while relocating exegesis within Paul’s Jewish–imperial horizon.
14. Allegiance thesis. Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 92–108. Bates’s Roman trajectory. Matthew W. Bates, The Gospel Precisely: Surprisingly Good News about Jesus Christ the King (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021); Why the Gospel? Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023); and Why the Church? A Theological Primer for the People of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024). While these works seek to heal ecclesial division, their appeal to Catholic synthesis re-centers faith around institutional allegiance rather than the cruciform fidelity of the risen Messiah—a tendency that replays Rome’s ancient conflation of authority and legitimacy. Compare Paul’s counter-imperial pistis Christou paradigm (Gal 2:16; Rom 3:22) with N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1283–90.
15. Crucifixion as deterrent. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 86–90, details crucifixion’s social stigma and political utility, intensifying Paul’s paradox.
16. Faith of/faith in Christ. Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (AB 33A; New York: Doubleday, 2004), 359–68, explore pistis Christou as Christ’s own faithfulness in which believers participate.
17. Machen’s telegram. J. Gresham Machen to John Murray, Jan 1, 1937: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” See John Murray, “Dr. Machen’s Hope and the Active Obedience of Christ,” Westminster Theological Seminary (posted Feb. 22, 2025); and New Horizons (June 2006). The line succinctly grounds hope in Christ’s fidelity, not ours.
18. Calvin on duplex gratia. John Calvin, Institutes 3.1.1–3.2.42; esp. 3.1.1: union with Christ is sine qua non—otherwise the benefits remain “outside us.”
19. Mysticism and participation. Rico Sneller, Perspectives on the Divine Human Relationship (Leiden & Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 145–73, traces a “corridor of resonance” between Eckhart’s metaphysics of union and Pauline participation, without collapsing Creator–creature distinction.
20. Simpson on indwelling life. A. B. Simpson, The Christ Life (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing, 1892), 15–17, emphasizes that the life that saves is the life that serves.
21. “Christ in you—the power for service.” A. B. Simpson, The Gospel of Healing (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing, 1888), 4; the line epitomizes Simpson’s practical mysticism.
22. Neronian crisis. Tacitus, Annals 15.44; cf. Suetonius, Nero 16; Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984). The shift from tolerated ambiguity to targeted suppression frames the essay’s §6.
23. From licit to illicit. Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 25–31, clarifies superstitio illicita and the legal climate that followed.
24. Pharisaic resurrection. Josephus, Antiquities 18.14–15; cf. Acts 23:6–8. Josephus’s testimony corroborates the Pharisaic expectation Paul harnesses in his defense.
25. Resurrection as grammar. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 207–19; Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox, 1997), 268–73; Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (New Haven: Yale, 2006).
26. Fourfold Gospel as vocation. A. B. Simpson, The Fourfold Gospel (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing, 1890), 11–18, frames justification and sanctification as one indwelling life with missionary telos.
27. Reformation accents. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian(1520), and Calvin, Institutes 3.1–3.2, provide classic statements of conscience-freeing grace that integrate with the present essay’s historical framing.
28. Election for the nations. Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity(Paris, 1901; Eng. trans., Paulist, 1995), 89–94, articulates election as vocation—an idea harmonizing with the Torat Edom thesis.
29. Pharisaic continuity. Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee (New York: Paulist, 1985), 101–8, argues Jesus and Paul resonate with Pharisaic currents that anticipated Gentile inclusion without erasing Israel’s calling.
30. Simpson’s charitable ethos. A. B. Simpson, Danger Signals and Other Writings (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing, 1890), 46, for the “forked lightning” epigraph—a fitting ethic for theological disputation.
