Scot McKnight Briefly Summarizes the New Perspective on Paul

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/04/the-new-perspective-and-resurr.html


...Now the New Perspective in three lines, though mine are not as funny or clever:

1. Judaism was not a works-earns-salvation religion.
2. Paul was therefore not opposing a works-earns-salvation religion.
3. Therefore, the Reformation's way of framing the entire message of the New Testament as humans seeking to earn their own redemption rests on shaky historical grounds.

What do you know about the New Perspective? How do you summarize it? Do you think my three lines gets to the heart of it? What light has the NPP shed for you? What do you think are its major weaknesses?

Another way of summing up the NPP is this: the Augustinian anthropology that undergirds much of Reformed theology (humans as depraved and totally dead and in need of grace and humans, in true Pelagian fashion, want to prove themselves before God) may well be true but it is not what Paul was talking about.