Paul and the faithfulness of God

Abstract

This book, the latest in Wright's series on 'Christian Origins and the Question of God', is a daunting phenomenon: over 1500 pages, packaged in two volumes, containing (I reckon) more than 800,000 words.Building on his earlier publications, and referring across to companion volumesnot even this gigantic text is selfsufficient -Wright here advances in full the synthetic vision of Paul's theology that he has developed and promoted over more than thirty years.The scale reflects his ambition: to integrate all the motifs in Pauline theology within a single large-scale schema; to elucidate its Jewish roots and its points of interaction with Graeco-Roman philosophy, religion and politics; to engage in most of the recent debates on Pauline theology; and to defend and advance his own distinctive theories on justification, covenant, and the Messiahship of Jesus, against critics who have lined up against him on several sides. 1 The structure and size of the project create considerable repetition.Many topics are opened, postponed for several hundred pages, then discussed and then later reprised, while the reader is liable to be wearied by a prose style that often seems excessively baggy.Wright strives to keep our attention with arresting metaphors, engaging illustrations, and a knock-about lecture-hall style, but the latter is often tetchy in its criticism of others, and descends too often to caricature.Indeed, the standard of intellectual engagement with contrary opinions is often disappointing, and hardly improved by grand generalisations about 'Enlightenment frameworks' and 'postmodern moralism'. 2It is only rarely that this large work engages in detailed 1 The dialogue is largely Anglophone: less than 60 of the 1300 items in the bibliography are in German. 2 The dismissal of those who argue for the non-Pauline authorship of Colossians and Ephesians is a case in point (56-61); the detailed historical, literary, stylistic and content-focused arguments current in scholarship deserve much better than this.Wright may come to regret some of his rhetoric: post-Holocaust sensibilities are noted sympathetically at times, but then apparently ridiculed as 'the tearful misted-up spectacles of post-holocaust western thinkers' (1413).He promises fuller engagement with others in his forthcoming Paul and his Recent Interpreters; but the inadequate comprehension of (e.g.)

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Choice Reviews Online, 2014 · DOI ↗