charlieDEAN’S Blog

I have a couple friends who like to ready heady stuff and get together and discuss, so Sunday evening we got together and discussed N.T. Wright’s book Paul: in fresh perspective.

I think we all had the sense that if we were up-to-date with the latest theological discussions of Paul, we would have felt like we knew more about what he was talking about.  Nevertheless, it was a valuable read.  Here are some of the takeaways for me:

• Great reminder of Paul’s “Jewishness.”  Oftentimes, in our modern exegesis, it’s easy to slip and to start assuming that N.T. writers think like we do about the world.  Wright’s reminder of the three worlds of Paul (Jewish, Hellenistic & Roman) as well as the primary focuses of 2nd Temple Judaic thought (Covenant, Creation & Apocalyptic) was very helpful to me.
• I found the last chapter “Jesus, Paul and the Task of the Church,” to be my favorite as one of Wright’s primary purposes was to consider the relationship between what Jesus taught and what Paul taught.  He mostly talked about their differing mission & audience that leads to different emphases and different ways of saying things.
• I liked Wrights discussion, under the heading “Conclusion: Paul and the Task of the Church,” as he talked about understanding the church to be part of a large play, in which we are the fifth act.  Here’s a quotation:
  • “I believe it is part of the task of the church today to accept the postmodern critique of modernity but to insist that it is not the last word…I believe that part of the task of the church in our own day is to pioneer a way through postmodernity and out the other side, not back to modernity in its various, even in its Christian, guises, but into a new world, a new culture, which nobody else is shaping and which we have a chance to.”

Okay…there was lots of stuff that I could have written about…I’ll just say…if you consider yourself a “closet theologian,” you need to read this book.