New Perspective Corporatism

Doug Moo:

My quarrel with new perspective advocates is often not so much over what they say but about what they do not say--or, perhaps better, the overall balance that they give to certain issues. Romans, for instance, is without doubt deeply concerned with the 'people' or 'national' question: how God's grace in Christ embraces both Israel and the Gentiles - as Paul announces the theme in 1:16, 'first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.' But this national breakdown follows and explicates the immediate recipient of the salvation which Paul's gospel both proclaims and effects: 'everyone who believes.' Individual human beings here and, I would assert, in Romans generally are the immediate concern of Paul. . . . New perspective advocates, I think, exchange background and foreground in their overall reading of Romans.

--Douglas J. Moo, 'Israel and the Law in Romans 5-11: Interaction with the New Perspective,' in Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2:188