Tom Wright. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. SPCK, 2009.

N.T. Wright has achieved that stature among theologians that he can whip off a long, wordy direct response to a critique of his thought and have it become a major publishing event–which I think is mostly a good thing. I do find his switching back and forth between “N.T. Wright” and “Tom Wright” as the author of his various books to be irritating. And this book is being rushed out, seemingly in order to utilize the buzz among evangelicals concerning the debate between Wright and the super-Calvinist pastor/theologian John Piper while it lasts. The British edition has come out in paperback and can be purchased on line in the States.  The American edition, to be published by InterVarsity this month will start out in hardback–another indicator of the effort to exploit Wright’s popularity.

Nonetheless, this is an important and helpful book. As with all of Wright’s work, we have an engagingly written, theologically oriented, and exegetically careful treatment of central issues of the interpretation and application of New Testament writings. In this case, Wright focuses on the issue of “justification” in Paul’s writings–especially Galatians and Romans.

For the more general reader who is not particularly interested in the extremist views of someone like John Piper, chunks of Wright’s book will lend themselves to skimming. However, when he focuses on his constructive interpretation of Paul’s thought (which is, happily, for most of the book), Wright gives us a great deal to chew on. Basically, Wright understands “justification” in the context of the salvation narrative of the entire Bible–and makes what seems to me to be a quite persuasive case for this kind of reading. Linking with the argument of his fine recent book, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (to be reviewed on this website soon), Wright interprets Paul as presenting justification as a world-transforming impetus from God in the present world–not as a matter of an individual believer finding one’s way to an otherworldly heaven after death.

He sees Paul articulating a “covenant” theology: “the belief that the creator God called Abraham’s family into covenant with him so that through his family all the world might escape from the curse of sin and death and enjoy the blessing and life of new creation” (page 222).  Well said!

So, all things considered, I highly recommend this book and anticipate the publication of Wright’s promised big, big book on Paul’s theology–which will, no doubt, be published under the name “N.T. Wright.”

Jouette M. Bassler. Navigating Paul: An Introduction to Key Theological Concepts. Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

We have no shortage of short, accessible, clearly-written, and thoughtful books on the theology of Christianity’s most important theologian–Paul the Apostle. However, since Paul’s thought is so fascinating and complex, and because Pauline theology remains so relevant to the life of faith today, and because one’s interpretation of Pauline theology is such an indicator of one’s views of so many other things, we should welcome all attempts to help us with such important material.

So, I feel compelled to welcome this book by Bassler. However, I would rank it well below recent similar books such as those of N.T. Wright (Paul: A Fresh Reading) and Michael Gorman (Reading Paul). She engages contemporary scholarship in an accessible way in a series of short studies on various Pauline themes (e.g., grace, the law, and the “future of Israel”). However, I found very little here that made Paul come alive. Bassler’s book especially pales in relation to Gorman’s Reading Paul–a book that helps us see why Paul remains so relevant for our quest for faithfulness to the way of Jesus today. In Bassler’s telling, Paul seems more like a kind of boring first-century Christian.

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N. T. Wright. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. Fortress Press, 2005.

If this book were written by just about anyone but N.T. Wright, I would praise it to the skies as a clear, accessible, but substantial introduction to the Apostle Paul’s thought. The author puts Paul theology in the context of 21st century discussions about empire and Paul’s Judaism in a way that draws on the insights of these discussions without coming across as faddish. The Christian faith community both in Paul’s context and ours is taken as the locus for deliberations on Paul’s thought–an emphasis much to be welcomed.

Yet, since it is N.T. Wright that wrote this book, one feels a bit disappointed. Wright promised years ago that the next volume in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series would be on Paul’s thought. He ended up devoting his energies to a volume of Jesus’ resurrection instead. How many more of these massive, magisterial tomes does Wright have left in him? 

If Paul: In Fresh Perspective is a volume meant to tide us over for the main course, I am willing to be patient. It’s quite good for what it is, a popular-level (in the sense of being accessible to a general, non-specialist audience of thoughtful Christians) summary of some of the latest thinking about Paul’s thought. And we should appreciate this effort–even as it joins numerous other similar books in the field.

However, Wright is uniquely situated to give us more, something few other contemporary writers (if any) could–an epoch-defining treatment of Christianity’s most important theological writer that takes his historical and theological context into account and is also engaged with present-day concerns.

Wright has gained his current stature because of his unique combination of an engaging writing style, extraordinarily clear thinking, sympathy to theological and social currents in our contemporary world that highlight the need to read the Bible as a resource for present-day discipleship, and an unmatched engagement with just about any scholarly literature that matters.

If one is interested in Paul, this book is as good a place to begin in understanding the Apostle as any basic-level book I know of. And let’s hope the main dish will arrive in due course.

Garry Wills. What Paul Meant. Viking, 2006

Garry Wills is an American treasure–a great historian, especially of American presidents, a political and religious progressive, a powerful critic of many of the failings of hierarchical Catholicism, a perceptive commentator on current events, and a prolific writer of always useful books.  As a kind of sidelight late in life, he has written a series of books on the New Testament–one on Jesus, one on Paul, and one of the gospels.

The second of the series, What Paul Meant, provides a clear, concise, and informative look at the great Apostle. One strength of the book is its accessibility combined with its reliability. Wills is not a New Testament scholar, but he is attentive to some of the best of Pauline scholarship and does a fine job summarizing some of its key insights. Another strength of the book is Wills’ clear and forceful placing of Paul firmly in first century Jewish debates. He rightly, and importantly, asserts that Paul was not a “Christian” because such a thing did not exist until after Paul’s death. Paul was a Jew arguing with other Jews about the best understanding of their tradition–from within that tradition.

Somewhat of a weakness, in my opinion, is that Wills does write as a historian–even if one seeking (successfully) to speak to a general audience.  That is, he is more descriptive than prescriptive, focusing more on what Paul “meant” then, than on what Paul means for us now.  One somewhat distracting element of this historical focus is the energy Wills spends on debunking Luke’s Acts of the Apostles as a useful source of information about the historical Paul. In such a short book (again, its brevity is a strength for Wills’ intentions with this book), it seems too bad that he would focus on this negative tangent. I don’t necessarily disagree with his judgment of Acts as history (though I think he presents the evidence as more clear and certain than it probably is) so much as think that if one wants to focus on Paul’s own writings as the basis for reconstructing the central elements of his life and thought one should simply do so and not spend much time justifying the exclusion of Acts from consideration (it would be different should this book be aimed at a more scholarly audience).

Nonetheless, while I was disappointed that Wills did not reflect more on Paul’s meaning for today (which would have seemed natural for one who pays such perceptive attention to the American political scene), I would recommend this book as a great introduction to the historical Paul.  And, in the end, Wills gets it exactly right, in my opinion, when he links Paul with Jesus, summarizing the message of both: “Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of ‘religion’ and punish those who try to escape them. They were radical egalitarians, though in ways that delved below and soared above conventional politics. They were on the side of the poor, and saw through the rich. They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. Both were liberators, not imprisoners–so they were imprisoned. So they were killed. Paul meant what Jesus meant, that love is the only law” (175).

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