Krister Stendahl’s 1963 essay The Apostle Paul and the Instrospective Conscience of the West was a clear foreshadowing to the modern New Perspective on Paul movement. Stendahl’s controversial article is available here. Stendahl concludes:
Thus, the theologian would note that the Pauline original should not be identified with such interpretations. He would try to find ways by which the church – also in the West – could do more justice to other elements of the Pauline original than those catering to the problems raised by introspection. He would be suspicious of a teaching and a preaching which pretended that the only door into the church was that of evermore introspective awareness of sin and guilt. For it appears that the Apostle Paul was a rather good Christian, and yet he seems to have had little such awareness. We note how the biblical original functions as a critique of inherited presuppositions and an incentive to new thought. Few things are more liberating and creative in modern theology than a clear distinction between the “original” and the “translation” in any age, our own included.
My friend Bill DeJong offers a response to Stendahl here.
Marcion argued that the works of believers will not be weighed by God in the final judgement. Origen objects, and argues that faith and good works are ‘two complementary conditions of salvation that must not be separated.’ And what is Thomas Scheck’s conclusion? Scheck concludes that “on the theme of justification, faith, and works, Augustine does not differ substantially from Origen.”