Christianity or Marxianity?

An Exploratory Biblical Critique of the New Pauline Perspective

De: Marc Grenier

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’, herein called the New Pauline Perspective (NPP), has been significantly impacting and re-shaping Christian doctrine in earnest in varied ways for nearly fifty years, yet for a much longer period of time when the historical development of its central precepts, tenets, and philosophical assumptions and presuppositions is brought into consideration. It began its particularly modern rendition with the audacious claim that Western churches, especially Protestants since the Reformation, have gotten Paul all wrong for the past 2,000 years mainly because they ignored Paul’s own Jewish heritage and the Rabbinic traditions that allegedly molded his ideas. So, then, all believers need to literally scrap the now obsolete ‘Old Perspective on Paul’ (OPP) which proclaims that Paul was primarily concerned about sin, souls, salvation, justification, faith, and God’s laws. From the OPP point of view, Paul’s focus is on how individual sinners are saved from the consequences of Adam’s disobedience and how they can be justified in the eyes of a sacred and just God the Father who created them through a ‘not guilty’ verdict imputed to them by the righteousness of Christ’s obedience on the cross. Not so, say the proponents of the NPP although in several different ways. Paul was not concerned with saving individual sinners from the consequences of Adam’s disobedience and not concerned about how to justify them before the eyes of a Creator God. Justification has nothing to do with individual salvation or the legal standing of individual sinners before the eyes of God. It’s not about a vertical relationship between God and individual sinners for the sake of salvation but, rather, a horizontal relationship between individuals themselves for the sake of covenantal membership. It’s not about the salvation of souls from eternal ravages of sin through Christ’s substitutionary atonement but, rather, who is in the covenantal family. The analyses and assessments contained in the present exploratory biblical critique of the NPP and its sympathizers suggest that heresies come in many different shades and colors, mostly mixed with bits of biblical truth here and there to deceive the unsuspecting and that the NPP is essentially a body of heretical ideas concocted by largely Liberal scholars and theologians. It represents a masterful and powerful attempt to transform Christianity into its mirror image, Marxianity, through the grain-by-grain importation of socialist doctrines in the quest to build a socialist society on Earth. In effect, it is Marxianity masquerading as Christianity. Apparently, the words spoken by Christ in John 18: 33-37, “My kingdom is not of this world”, are not to be taken very seriously by leaders and proponents of the NPP.