A Theology of Paul and His Letters

The Gift of the New Realm in Christ

Douglas J. Moo, Andreas J. Kostenberger

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310128502
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

A landmark study of the apostle's writings by one of the world's leading Pauline scholars

Winner of the 2022 ECPA Christian Book Award for Bible Reference Works

This highly anticipated volume gives pastors, scholars, and all serious students of the New Testament exactly what they need for in-depth study and engagement with one of Christian history's most formative thinkers and writers. A Theology of Paul and His Letters is a landmark study of the apostle's writings by one of the world's leading Pauline scholars Douglas J. Moo. Fifteen years in the making, this groundbreaking work is organized into three major sections:

• Part 1 provides an overview of the issues involved in doing biblical theology in general and a Pauline theology in particular. Here Moo also sets out the methodological issues, formative influences, and conceptual categories of Paul's thought.
• Part 2 moves on to Paul's New Testament writings, where Moo describes each Pauline letter with particular relevance to its theology.
• Part 3 offers a masterful synthesis of Paul's theology under the overarching theme of the gift of the new realm in Christ.

Engaging, insightful, and wise, this substantive, evangelical treatment of Paul's theology offers extensive engagement with the latest Pauline scholarship without sacrificing its readability. This volume brings insights from over thirty years of experience studying, teaching, and writing about Paul into one comprehensive guide that will serve readers as a go-to resource for decades to come.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Biblical Theology of the New Testament (BTNT) series provides upper college and seminary-level textbooks for students of New Testament theology, interpretation, and exegesis. Pastors and discerning theology readers alike will also benefit from this series. Written at the highest level of academic excellence by recognized experts in the field, the BTNT series not only offers a comprehensive exploration of the theology of every book of the New Testament, including introductory issues and major themes, but also shows how each book relates to the broad picture of New Testament Theology.

Part 1
INTRODUCTORY ISSUES

Chapter 1

APPROACHING PAUL’S THEOLOGY

THE APOSTLE PAUL has arguably had a greater impact on Christianity than any figure other than Jesus Christ himself. His words and the ideas those words point to are woven into the fabric of our faith, our hymns, and our sermons. His influence has varied over time, and some parts of the church are more influenced by his teaching than others. And, of course, an overreliance on Paul’s writings to the detriment of the rest of the canon can create an imbalance in our understanding of the faith. Yet with all appropriate caveats introduced, we still need to treasure the rich deposit of teaching Paul has left for us. I know I do. I have had the inestimable privilege of spending at least thirty years in intense study of Paul. I cannot even estimate the number of articles and books about Paul I have read over these years. (Please: could someone call a moratorium on books on Paul?) However, without in any way minimizing all that I have learned from this extensive reading, the heart of my study has been reading, and rereading, and rereading, the letters of Paul. I pray that what I have written in these pages reflects what is found in those letters.

Nevertheless, writing a book on Paul’s theology is a daunting task. Over the last fifteen years, I have more than once regretted that I ever agreed to something so foolish. But I persevered, despite my doubts (which have not gone away). Readers will have to decide how justified those doubts might be.

“Doing” Paul’s theology is hard for several reasons. In this opening chapter, I want to deal briefly with some of these challenges and to explain my own approach in this book.

1 BIBLICAL THEOLOGY¹

This volume appears in a series entitled “Biblical Theology of the New Testament,” so I begin with this big issue: What do we mean by “biblical theology”? While taking quite diverse forms, theology for most of church history was not consciously divided into different types or styles. However, it is important, in contrast to some construals of the history, to emphasize that Christian theologians had been doing some form of what we might call “biblical” theology for a long time—if we define it as a close reading of Scripture focused on drawing out the theological meaning of the text. This enterprise, generally viewed simply as “theology,” took on a new aspect in the late 1700s under the impact of Enlightenment-influenced academic study of the Bible. As academic study of the biblical text became increasingly separated from the church, it was felt necessary to isolate this kind of theology from “doctrinal” or “systematic” theology. I have neither the space nor the ability to pursue the history of this new discipline of “biblical theology.”² To fastforward to the present, we now find ourselves in a time when “biblical theology” has lost any agreed-upon meaning. As Klink and Lockett comment, “Biblical theology has become a catchphrase, a wax nose that can mean anything from the historical-critical method applied to the Bible to a theological interpretation of Scripture that in practice appears to leave history out of the equation altogether.”³ As this quotation suggests, one key tension in current discussions of biblical theology is the one between historical reconstructions of early Christianity, on the one hand, and the final, canonical shape of Scripture on the other. This tension is closely tied to a second issue: How should we “locate” biblical theology with respect to exegesis, on the one hand, and systematic theology on the other?⁴

Addressing this latter question (and implicitly, perhaps the former one also), Charles Scobie, in his breathtakingly ambitious whole-Bible theology, advocates an “intermediate” biblical theology. Representing what is probably the dominant view among contemporary scholars, he compares biblical theology to a bridge, with one pier sunk in a close reading of the text and the other in systematic theology and, by implication, the ministry of applying the text. The bridge metaphor, while it has drawbacks (see below), is a good starting point to use in pinning down biblical theology.

A biblical-theological bridge capable of carrying traffic from text to application will need to be built of four materials in particular. These materials are, in fact, inherent in the words “biblical” and “theological.”

First, to be truly biblical, our biblical theology must be descriptive. This element of biblical theology is widely recognized and relatively uncontroversial. As a second-level activity, one step removed from the text, biblical theology seeks to summarize and synthesize the teaching of the Bible using the Bible’s own categories and with attention to its redemptive-historical movement.⁵

Second, to be truly theological, our biblical theology should also be prescriptive. Biblical theologians have not always recognized this aspect in their work. Indeed, it has often been actively resisted. This resistance has its basis in an appropriate concern to root theology in history and exegesis, requiring, it is thought, a strict separation between “what the text meant” in distinction to “what the text means”—to use the familiar terminology from Krister Stendahl’s programmatic dictionary article.⁶ While sometimes rejected today in the name of postmodernism, the concern to distinguish these and to ground “what it means” firmly in “what it meant” is a valid one, necessary if our theology is to have any authority.⁷ However, without in any way neglecting the absolutely indispensable descriptive exegetical task, a prescriptive aspect in our biblical theology seems to me to be implied in the word “theology”—at least as I understand it.⁸ No “theology,” whatever adjective we put in front of it, can fully avoid the task of addressing the people of God today. The very nature of the Word of God discourages us from confining our study, whatever we call it, to description only. The biblical theologian rightly focuses on the horizon of the text, while the systematic theologian gives more attention to the horizon of our own world. But focus should not become tunnel vision. The dividing line between the one task and the other will not be a neat one. We biblical theologians must build our bridge far enough toward the land of systematic theology and application, so that our colleagues in theology will have the necessary biblical-construction materials to build their structures, and pastors will be given the kind of biblical material they need to address their congregations.

Third, to turn back again to the word “biblical”: our biblical theology must be inclusive. Discussions of biblical theology often focus on whether “biblical” here means that we study the theology found in the Bible or that we develop a theology that does justice to the Bible. But the adjective implies something more fundamental: It suggests that the theologian operates as a Christian who assumes that the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament canon form a distinctive set of books that are worthy of study and synthesis. The evangelical biblical theologian fleshes out this assumption by taking a further vital step: he or she assumes that these thirty-nine, or twenty-seven, or sixty-six, books ultimately speak with a single voice. I often remind my students that we evangelicals face a special challenge in our biblical theology: to develop a theology that does full justice to all the data of Scripture. We don’t have the luxury of throwing out inconvenient bits of text or of forcing interpretations on them in the interest of harmonization. Of course, our concern in this volume is with the thirteen letters of Paul we find in the New Testament. As I will briefly argue elsewhere, I consider all thirteen of these letters to be authentically Pauline. The voice of each letter must be heard in its appropriate volume and tone as we construct a theology of Paul.

Fourth, our biblical theology must be canonical. The word “theology” reminds us that we engage in our task as “people of the book”—the whole book. Paul’s teaching must ultimately be seen in relationship to the other books of the canon. The relationship of his teaching to the Old Testament will therefore be a constant concern in this book. And, while we will have less opportunity to do so, his theology must ultimately be compared and integrated with the teaching of the rest of the New Testament.

Our biblical theology must, then, be descriptive, prescriptive, inclusive, and canonical. These are what we might call the essential characteristics of the interpretive bridge that we are building. But there are some other interpretive matters that need to be added before we are finished, matters that have to do not so much with the basic structure as the way we navigate it. To describe these additional matters, I need to change our ruling metaphor. After comparing biblical theology to a bridge between the text and systematic theology, Scobie goes on to argue that this bridge must be able to “carry traffic in both directions.”⁹ The basic image is widespread in this context, and those who use it are not pressing the analogy beyond the simple point of mutual interaction and enrichment. Still, if we take a closer look at the two-way traffic analogy, its limitations become clear. We picture either two lanes of traffic passing each other with little or no contact; or, more disturbingly, a head-on accident. Perhaps a better image, then, at least for my purposes, is the roundabout that one finds along some highways, especially in the United Kingdom. The road from exegesis to systematics and application is not an uninterrupted super highway. Feeding into our biblical theology are several roads, which we may compare to the traffic from secondary roads that merge into the main through road at a roundabout. My point here, then, is that we perhaps have to abandon, or at least modify, the notion that our biblical work proceeds in a linear fashion from exegesis to biblical theology to systematic theology. These disciplines are inevitably mixed up with each other. The diverse movement labeled “theological interpretation of Scripture” has drawn attention to these matters. I do not view this movement as clearly espousing a specific methodology; I view it rather as insisting on certain values that should characterize our methodology: the importance of bringing the resources of historical and systematic theology to bear on our exegesis and biblical theology, the importance that we “do” theology for the sake of the church, and the importance of humility in light of our location in time, place, and theological tradition.

So my study of Paul’s theology will unashamedly draw on the resources of systematic theology and historical theology. Of course, I recognize that I thereby open myself to the charge that I am simply reading my own theological preferences into the text. The response, however, is not to try to escape the roundabout; it should be, rather, to make sure that the road emerging from the text is always given its appropriate priority. In sum, then, I would characterize my own method as an exegetically based biblical theology informed by some of th...