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"What is there really in the Pauline interpretation, in the Christian understanding of the Law? Judged from within Judaism, a misunderstanding of immense proportions, for all Christianity, especially the neo-Protestant polemic against the Law, misunderstands the Jewish Law as a means of obtaining justice before God (the so-called Justification by Works). Where Protestant theologians today do their best to speak in Luther's language and to take over his very often simplistic views, they confuse the claims of God's Law-- which should surely in reality be the foundation of the Covenant-- with the Justification by Works of the mediaeval Catholic Church in its decline. And all this because Paul, after his experience at Damascus, could no longer understand... what as a Pharisee he must certainly have known before, that the law of the Torah was not given to make the Jews just and pleasing to their Father in Heaven. The Rabbinic glorifications of the law are to be understood only in the sense of carrying out the divine will, never in any ethic of "merit" of whatever kind. But if Paul says (in Romans 3:20) that "by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified" in God's sight, then it is all very well for this great teacher of 'Midrashim' to inveigh against the error made by some of his contemporary fellow-Pharisees. For Scripture, of course, does not teach 'that' as the "purpose" of the Law, any more than the reason Paul adduces, "for by the law is the knowledge of sin," is its 'purpose'. The Jews of his century knew as well as the Jews of all other centuries have known that man falls into sin because he does not live up to the revealed Law of God; only they have not let the living experience discoverable in daily life be petrified to an 'a priori' statement which resignedly invalidates the Law because it is known from the start to be impossible of fulfilment...
(95:2)
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