Four Views on the Apostle by Paul Thomas R. Schreiner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Douglas A. Campbell, and Mark D. Nanos
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Four Views on the Apostle Paul
Thomas R. Schreiner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Douglas A. Campbell, and Mark D. Nanos
Bibliographic Information
Contributors: Schreiner, Thomas R.; Johnson, Luke Timothy; Campbell, Douglas A.; Nanos, Mark D. Full Title: Four Views on the Apostle Paul General Editor: Bird, Michael F. Series Editor: Gundry, Stanley N. Publisher: Zondervan Academic Year of Publication: 2012 Pages: 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-310-32695-3 Series: Counterpoints: Bible and Theology
Author Background
Thomas R. Schreiner (Ph.D., Fuller Theological Seminary) is James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament and Associate Dean at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His institutional home — Southern Seminary under the leadership of Albert Mohler — is one of the most confessionally explicit Reformed Baptist institutions in North America, and Schreiner is one of its most prolific and respected New Testament scholars. His major publications include commentaries on Romans (Baker Exegetical Commentary, 1998), Galatians (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary, 2010), and the systematic work Paul, Apostle of God's Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology (Baker, 2001). He writes squarely within the Reformed/Calvinist tradition: his treatment of Paul is shaped by penal substitutionary atonement, forensic justification by imputed righteousness, unconditional election, and the primacy of Romans and Galatians as the center of the Pauline corpus. Readers should be aware that Schreiner's essay represents a specific confessional reading of Paul that has been contested not only by the other three contributors but also by many within the broader evangelical tradition.
Luke Timothy Johnson (Ph.D., Yale University) is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a former Benedictine monk and priest. He represents the Roman Catholic tradition — and specifically, as he notes, the broader and older Catholic tradition defined by creed, Scripture, patristic interpretation, and liturgical practice rather than by Counter-Reformation polemics. A prolific author, his major contributions relevant to this volume include The Writings of the New Testament (Fortress, 3rd ed. 2010), The First and Second Letters to Timothy (Anchor Bible, 2001), and Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity (Yale, 2009). Johnson's most distinctive methodological commitment in this volume is his insistence on using all thirteen canonical letters attributed to Paul as his evidence base — a position at odds with the majority of critical scholars, who regard Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastorals as deutero-Pauline at best — and his corresponding emphasis on the communal, experiential, and Greco-Roman dimensions of Paul's thought.
Douglas A. Campbell (Ph.D., University of Toronto, under Richard Longenecker) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. He is the volume's most technically demanding contributor — the author of the 1,218-page The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009), one of the most ambitious and most contested monographs in recent Pauline studies. Campbell's position is deliberately ecumenical in its sources: he draws from Barth's Trinitarian theology, the Torrances' rejection of federal theology, J. Louis Martyn and Ernst Käsemann's apocalyptic Paul, Richard Hays's narrative Christology, and the Patristic tradition reaching from Irenaeus through the Cappadocian Fathers. Bird places him under the Ecumenical/Broadly Christian category, though Campbell himself insists his reading represents nothing new — merely a recovery of the catholic reading of Paul that predates Lutheran and Reformed reductions of his gospel to forensic justification. His chapter constitutes the most theological and least narrowly exegetical contribution in the volume.
Mark D. Nanos (Ph.D., Saint Paul School of Theology) serves as Soebbing Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. He is the volume's only non-Christian contributor, a practicing Jew who has devoted his scholarly career to demonstrating that Paul can be read more responsibly within his native first-century Jewish context — and that such a reading serves both historical integrity and contemporary Christian-Jewish relations. His major monographs include The Mystery of Romans (Fortress, 1996) and The Irony of Galatians (Fortress, 2002). Nanos's presence in the volume is its most distinctive editorial choice and one of its greatest contributions: no other Counterpoints volume in the series includes a Jewish scholar as a principal contributor, and the questions Nanos raises about the assumptions embedded in Christian Pauline interpretation are not available from any of the other three contributors regardless of their tradition.
Michael F. Bird (Ph.D., University of Queensland), who serves as general editor and supplies both introduction and conclusion, was at the time of publication a lecturer at Crossway College in Brisbane; he is now Deputy Principal at Ridley College, Melbourne, placing him within the Anglican tradition with broadly evangelical convictions. Bird is himself a recognized Pauline scholar — his The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective (Wipf & Stock, 2007) and Introducing Paul (IVP, 2009) map his own broadly evangelical-ecumenical position — and his editorial framing is notably more self-restrained than the Counterpoints norm. He explicitly declines to present a fifth view of his own.
Thesis and Central Argument
Four Views on the Apostle Paul does not advance a single thesis but stages a multidirectional scholarly debate on the most contested questions in contemporary Pauline studies: What is the best overarching framework for understanding Paul's theology? What is the significance of Jesus Christ in Paul's thought? What does Paul mean by salvation? And what was Paul's vision for the communities he founded? These four organizing questions — provided to each contributor as common coordinates — were designed to ensure a measure of structural comparability across four radically different approaches to Paul. The underlying question the volume surfaces, though never fully names, is whether Paul's letters can be read from outside the Christian tradition (as Nanos proposes), and whether the majority of Christian readings of Paul — Reformed, Catholic, and ecumenical alike — have been distorted by interpretive frameworks imported into the text rather than derived from it. The volume is unusual in the Counterpoints series for the radicalism of its diversity: these four interlocutors genuinely represent incompatible readings of the apostle, not merely intramural evangelical disagreements about secondary matters.
Chapter-by-Chapter Overview
Introduction — Michael F. Bird
Bird's nine-page introduction is the most useful editorial framing in the Counterpoints series to date. Rather than merely summarizing each contributor's credentials, it identifies the specific live debates animating contemporary Pauline scholarship — the "New Perspective on Paul" launched by E. P. Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) and developed by J. D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright, the apocalyptic reading associated with Martyn and Käsemann, the question of the Pauline corpus, the pistis Christou debate, and the problem of Paul and Judaism after the Holocaust — and explains how each contributor's position relates to these conversations. Bird's matrix of the four positions across the volume's four questions is an especially useful pedagogical device, giving readers a comparative framework before the positions are elaborated in the essays themselves.
Chapter One — "Paul: A Reformed Reading" (Thomas R. Schreiner)
Schreiner's essay is the volume's most conventionally structured and, for readers shaped by evangelical Protestant tradition, its most immediately accessible. His argument proceeds across the four mandated topics. For the Pauline framework, he identifies inaugurated eschatology — the "already/not yet" tension in which the new exodus, new covenant, and new creation have been inaugurated in Christ but await consummation at the Parousia — as the organizing grid. The treatment of Christ's centrality is the essay's most devotionally rich section, cataloguing the Pauline texts that ascribe to Jesus the divine name (kyrios), the authority attributed to Yahweh in the Old Testament (particularly the application of Isaiah 45:23 to Jesus in Philippians 2:9–11), and the pervasive claim that everything is to be done "in Christ" and "in his name." Schreiner's treatment of salvation is the essay's theological core: he defends a forensic reading of justification as the declaration of righteousness over sinners on the basis of Christ's penal substitution, drawing on the law-court background of dikaioō, the Day of Atonement imagery in Romans 3:25–26, and the "great exchange" of 2 Corinthians 5:21. The church section reads the Pauline ekklēsia as the "true Israel" — those who, Jew and Gentile alike, are united to Christ by faith and thus inherit the promises to Abraham.
The essay is notable for what it consciously brackets: the New Perspective debates about works of law and ethnic boundary markers receive only brief engagement, and Campbell's apocalyptic participatory reading is mentioned but not substantially addressed. Schreiner's rationale is explicitly inductive — he is setting out what he finds in Paul before engaging alternatives — but this means the chapter reads less as a contribution to the volume's debate and more as a compressed summary of his larger Pauline theology. The pistis Christou debate (whether "faith of/in Jesus Christ" in Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 is an objective or subjective genitive) receives careful attention, with Schreiner defending the objective reading (faith in Christ rather than Christ's own faithfulness) against Campbell's subjective interpretation — one of the volume's most precise points of direct disagreement.
Chapter Two — "The Paul of the Letters: A Catholic Perspective" (Luke Timothy Johnson)
Johnson's chapter is the volume's broadest in scope and, in certain respects, the most methodologically self-conscious. Its most important opening move is his defense of using all thirteen canonical Pauline letters as primary evidence — including the Pastorals — on the grounds that the stylistic and thematic differences between the disputed and undisputed letters are differences of degree rather than kind, and that a "school" of Pauline coworkers shaped the correspondence during Paul's lifetime. This decision has significant consequences for Johnson's portrait of Paul: the "true Israel" ecclesiology Schreiner finds in Galatians and Romans must coexist with the household order of Ephesians and the institutional concerns of the Pastorals; the charismatic pneumatology of 1 Corinthians must be held alongside the sober ethical instruction of 1 Timothy.
Johnson's argument about the Pauline framework resists any single organizing principle, proposing instead a matrix of three intersecting realities that shape all thirteen letters: Paul's personal religious experience (the Damascus encounter, his mystical prayer life, his continuing sense of empowerment by the risen Christ), the shared religious experience of his communities (the gift of the Spirit as factual reality, not ideal aspiration), and the complex of traditions and practices already in place when Paul became a church founder (baptism, the Lord's Supper, confession, the traditions about Jesus). This experiential and phenomenological account of Paul's organizing center differs from all three other contributors: it is not eschatological in Schreiner's sense, not formally Trinitarian in Campbell's sense, and not centered on Israel's Shema in Nanos's sense.
Johnson's treatment of salvation emphasizes liberation and transformation over forensic declaration — salvation as liberation from cosmic and social hostile powers, as transformation into the image of Christ by the Spirit, and as participation in God's new creation through the experience of the risen Lord. His reading of Paul's Christology stresses the resurrection and exaltation above the cross as the primary locus of Paul's theological reflection: it is the risen and exalted Christ as kyrios who mediates God's new creation to believers and through whom the Spirit works. Johnson's Catholic tradition emerges most visibly in his attention to the community dimensions of Pauline ecclesiology and in his critique of both Schreiner's individualized soteriology (sin as individual guilt requiring forensic acquittal) and what he regards as the inappropriately narrow selection of "great letters" that has dominated Protestant Pauline scholarship since Bultmann and Käsemann.
Chapter Three — "Christ and the Church in Paul: A 'Post-New Perspective' Account" (Douglas A. Campbell)
Campbell's chapter is simultaneously the most intellectually ambitious and the most potentially frustrating in the volume. His argument proceeds in three stages: a diagnosis of the problem within Pauline interpretation, a proposal for its resolution, and an exposition of his alternative reading focused on Romans 5–8.
The diagnosis engages the New Perspective's legacy directly. Campbell agrees with Sanders that the Reformation reading of Paul as attacking Jewish "works-righteousness" is a caricature of Judaism that has had catastrophic consequences — asking, in Irving Greenberg's phrase, whether such readings "can be uttered in the presence of the burning children." But he argues that the New Perspective's proposed solution — relocating Paul's attack from Jewish legalism to Jewish ethnocentrism and exclusivism — does not actually solve the problem and introduces new distortions of its own. Campbell's counter-proposal is what he labels a "post-new perspective" reading: returning to a fully Trinitarian, revelatory account of Paul's gospel in which God's prior loving initiative in Christ is absolutely primary, the problematic "contractual" reading of Paul's soteriology (humans must first recognize their guilt and need before receiving grace) is dismantled, and the participatory framework of Romans 5–8 — union with Christ's death and resurrection through the Spirit — replaces the prospective forensic justification framework as the center of Paul's thought.
His exposition of Romans 5–8 as the "test case" for his reading is the chapter's most concrete section and its most contested editorial choice: several reviewers and respondents (particularly Johnson) press the question of whether Romans 5–8 can bear the weight Campbell assigns it as the key to Paul's theology when vast sections of the Pauline corpus — the Corinthian correspondence, Galatians, Philippians, the Thessalonian letters — are barely engaged. Campbell's terminology ("pneumatologically participatory martyrological eschatology") is his own acknowledged self-parody, gesturing at the complexity of a position that draws simultaneously from apocalyptic eschatology, narrative Christology, and participatory soteriology without reducing to any of them. Schreiner's response — that Campbell's portrait may be "hyper-Calvinist" or even implicitly universalist in its stress on the all-inclusive scope of Christ's participation — is the sharpest intra-Christian exchange in the volume.
Chapter Four — "A Jewish View" (Mark D. Nanos)
Nanos's contribution is the volume's most genuinely estranging for Christian readers and, precisely for that reason, the most valuable. His central argument is that Paul is best understood as a Torah-observant Jew who never left Judaism, who established communities that functioned as subgroups within Jewish synagogues rather than as a new religion, and whose instructions to non-Jews to refrain from proselyte conversion (circumcision) represent not an abandonment of Torah but a theologically principled application of the Shema's claim that God is the God of all nations — a claim whose fulfillment requires that Gentiles remain Gentiles rather than becoming Israelites.
The hermeneutical key to Nanos's reading is his insistence that virtually every Pauline statement about Torah, circumcision, and works should be read with the implied qualification: "for non-Jews who are Christ-followers." Statements that have traditionally been read as Paul critiquing Judaism as such — "not under the law," "works of law," "freedom from the curse of the law" — apply specifically to Gentiles who were never under Mosaic Torah in the first place and who must not become Jews through proselyte conversion because to do so would be to undermine the eschatological declaration that the God of Israel is now, through the Messiah's resurrection, also God of all nations. Jewish Christ-followers, including Paul himself, remain Torah-observant. The "new perspective" on Paul, in Nanos's reading, has only partially solved the problem it identified: it has rightly rejected the caricature of Jewish "works-righteousness" but has merely shifted the charge against Judaism from legalism to ethnocentrism, still requiring that Paul find something wrong with Judaism as such.
The chapter's most productive contribution is its account of the Shema as the theological foundation of Paul's resistance to Gentile circumcision — an argument with implications for how Paul's anti-circumcision passages in Galatians, Romans, and Philippians are read that no other contributor in the volume adequately engages. Its most significant limitation — frankly acknowledged by Johnson's response — is a tendency toward binary constructions (Jew/non-Jew, Israel/nations) that Nanos himself critiques in others, and a resistance to the Hellenistic dimensions of Paul's Jewish world that may underestimate how porous the boundaries between Palestinian and diaspora Judaism already were in Paul's day.
Conclusion — Michael F. Bird
Bird's six-page conclusion performs the valuable function of resisting the Counterpoints format's recurring temptation toward superficial resolution. He explicitly notes that in this volume, unlike many others in the series, "the sharp corners of the debaters" were not blunted by the exchanges — the differences remain stark. His summary of the main fault lines is lucid: the four contributors disagree about whether salvation is primarily about the rectification of guilty individuals (Schreiner), liberation and renewal through Christ's risen life (Johnson), participation in the Trinitarian story of Christ (Campbell), or the incorporation of Gentiles into Israel's ongoing covenant story (Nanos). They agree that Jesus is close to the center of Paul's mission and message but diverge on whether that centrality is best expressed through divine lordship (Schreiner), resurrection and new creation (Johnson), the self-disclosure of the triune God (Campbell), or the arrival of the Messianic age for both Israel and nations (Nanos).
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
The volume's most fundamental methodological divergences concern three questions: Which letters constitute the Pauline corpus? Which letters are most representative of Paul's theology? And how should Paul's relationship to Second Temple Judaism be conceptualized?
Johnson's insistence on all thirteen canonical letters as evidence, while a minority position in critical scholarship, rests on a principled argument about the diversity within both the accepted and disputed letters that deserves more direct engagement from the other contributors than it receives. Schreiner accepts the canon without extensive argument; Campbell builds his case almost entirely on Romans 5–8 without addressing the methodological stakes of that selection; Nanos engages primarily the undisputed letters. The question of which Paul — the Paul of the seven "great letters" or the Paul of all thirteen — one is reading significantly shapes each contributor's portrait, and the volume would have been strengthened by a more direct exchange on this hermeneutical prior.
On the pistis Christou debate, the volume stages one of its most technically focused exchanges. Schreiner defends the objective genitive (faith in Christ) with seven arguments from grammar and context; Campbell defends the subjective genitive (Christ's own faithfulness) as the better account of the participatory logic he finds in Paul's soteriology. Johnson and Nanos both engage this question from their respective vantage points. The exchange models responsible exegetical debate and is one of the volume's most useful contributions for readers navigating the secondary literature on this question.
The most significant hermeneutical issue the volume raises but does not fully address is whether the four contributors are, in effect, reading four different Pauls — and if so, whether there is a principled way to adjudicate between their constructions or whether they represent irreducibly different communities of reading for whom Paul functions as a different kind of authority. Johnson's observation that Paul's letters were "occasional" rather than systematic — that he "probably discovered what he thought in the process of composition" — suggests that looking for a unified Pauline theology may itself be a methodologically problematic enterprise. This challenge is never directly taken up by Schreiner (who proceeds as though Paul's thought is a coherent system with eschatology as its center) or by Campbell (who treats Romans 5–8 as the key to a unified Pauline gospel).
Doctrinal Analysis
From a Reformed perspective, the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter XI, "Of Justification") provides the most direct confessional benchmark: "Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone." Schreiner's essay is the most direct defense of this position available in the Counterpoints format, and his arguments for forensic justification against transformative or participatory alternatives constitute one of the Reformed tradition's clearest contemporary expositions of the doctrine. The Canons of Dort's account of irresistible grace and unconditional election undergirds his treatment of salvation throughout, though not named explicitly. Campbell's response — that Schreiner's forensic reading involves a "Melanchthonian" distortion of Paul that effectively makes human recognition of guilt the precondition for divine grace — is the most pointed critique of the Reformed reading in recent popular-level Pauline scholarship, and Schreiner's response ("hyper-Calvinist or even Arian?") is the volume's sharpest intramural exchange.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, several dimensions of this debate bear directly on the tradition's theological commitments. First, the question of whether Pauline salvation is primarily forensic (Schreiner) or transformative/participatory (Johnson, Campbell) is directly relevant to the Wesleyan tradition's insistence on imparted as well as imputed righteousness, and on sanctification as a genuine work of the Spirit rather than merely a consequence of forensic declaration. Johnson's emphasis on liberation from "hostile powers, cosmic and social" and transformation through the Spirit's ongoing work in believers resonates with Wesleyan soteriology more naturally than Schreiner's strictly forensic account. Campbell's participatory framework — salvation as God's gift of himself in communal union with Christ through the Spirit — likewise aligns with Wesleyan pneumatology and the tradition's concern for real moral transformation. Second, the universal scope of the atonement question — implicit in Campbell's discussion of whether Paul's "in Adam/in Christ" typology in Romans 5 implies universal participation in Christ's benefits — touches Wesleyan concerns about prevenient grace and the universal salvific intent of God. Third, Nanos's insistence that Paul's instructions about Torah are specifically directed at non-Jews, not as a universal principle, raises questions about how Wesleyan readings of Paul's law-grace antithesis have treated texts whose primary referent may be ethnic-covenantal rather than soteriological-moral. Thomas Oden's John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity (Zondervan, 1994), which synthesizes Wesley's engagement with Paul along broadly Arminian lines, represents the tradition's most systematic relevant resource and is not engaged by any contributor.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, Johnson's essay is the most directly relevant, and his insistence on the authentic Pauline authorship of all thirteen canonical letters aligns with the tradition's canonical reception of the corpus as a whole. The Council of Trent's Decree on Justification (1547) affirmed that justification involves not merely the forgiveness of sins but also "the sanctification and renewal of the interior man through the voluntary reception of grace and of gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just" — a transformative account that resonates with Johnson's emphasis on salvation as liberation and transformation and sits in tension with Schreiner's strictly forensic reading. Johnson's resurrection-centered Christology and his emphasis on the Spirit as the living medium of Christ's ongoing presence in the community reflect post-Vatican II Catholic pneumatology. Campbell's recovery of the Patristic tradition — particularly Irenaeus — as the best reading of Paul will be welcomed by Catholic readers for whom the ante-Nicene tradition is itself a normative witness.
From a Lutheran perspective, the most directly relevant benchmark is the Augsburg Confession's Article IV on Justification and Luther's distinction between Law and Gospel as the two primary modes of divine address. Schreiner's forensic reading has more structural affinity with Lutheran confessionalism than his Baptist institutional location might suggest, though his Calvinist soteriology (with its unconditional election) diverges from Lutheran accounts of grace at the level of application. The most pointed Lutheran concern in the volume arises from Campbell's accusation that both Schreiner and the New Perspective writers represent "Melanchthonian" deformations of Paul's gospel — a critique that applies as much to Lutheran as to Calvinist confessionalism, and that Lutheran readers will find both provocative and worth direct engagement.
From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, Campbell's essay is the closest to the tradition's instincts — his Irenaeun reading of Paul as a theologian of participation in the Trinitarian life, his emphasis on the Spirit as the medium of the divine self-communication, and his resistance to Western juridical frameworks for understanding salvation all resonate with the Orthodox tradition's characterization of salvation as theosis. Orthodox readers will also find Johnson's resurrection-centered Christology and his attention to the experiential and liturgical dimensions of Pauline community life congenial. Nanos's insistence that Paul remains within Second Temple Judaism raises questions about the Orthodox tradition's typological reading of Israel's Scriptures that the volume does not explore.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The volume's secondary literature engagement reflects its 2012 publication date and the state of the field at that moment. The New Perspective literature — Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress, 1977), Dunn's The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Eerdmans, 1998), and Wright's The Climax of the Covenant (Fortress, 1992) — forms the backdrop against which all four contributors position themselves, though no contributor explicitly represents the New Perspective. This absence — noted by multiple reviewers — is the volume's most significant editorial gap: the decision to include a "post-new perspective" (Campbell) without including a representative New Perspective view leaves readers without direct representation of the interpretive framework against which both Campbell and Nanos most directly define their own positions. Wright in particular — whose Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013) appeared the year after this volume and would have constituted a natural fifth view — is engaged primarily through Schreiner's critique of New Perspective accounts of "works of law" and Campbell's sympathetic but critical engagement with its post-Holocaust motivations.
The most important secondary conversation is the apocalyptic Paul tradition. Campbell's engagement with Käsemann, J. C. Beker (Paul the Apostle, Fortress, 1980), and J. Louis Martyn (Galatians, Anchor Bible, 1997) is substantive; Schreiner and Johnson both engage aspects of this tradition but do not develop it with the depth it has since received. Beverly Gaventa's Our Mother Saint Paul (Westminster John Knox, 2007) and Martinus de Boer's work on the Galatian crisis represent the most important developments in this conversation that the volume's contributors engage unevenly.
Nanos's engagement with the "third quest" for the historical Jesus and Paul — particularly the work of Lloyd Gaston, John Gager, and Pamela Eisenbaum — is the most specialized secondary conversation in the volume and the least accessible to non-specialist readers. His own monographs (The Mystery of Romans and The Irony of Galatians) are the primary resources for developing his approach beyond the chapter's compressed form. The secondary literature on the specific passages Nanos emphasizes (Romans 3:29–31, Galatians 3, the seven letters as addressing primarily Gentile Christ-followers) is represented in his footnotes but would benefit from more explicit engagement with the strongest objections from Christian interpreters — particularly Simon Gathercole's Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul's Response in Romans 1–5 (Eerdmans, 2002), which presses the question of whether Judaism's covenantal categories are as grace-based as Nanos's apologetic portrait implies.
Strengths
The genuine diversity of contributors. The most singular strength of this volume is that its four contributors represent genuinely incompatible readings of Paul, not merely different emphases within a shared evangelical framework. The inclusion of a Catholic scholar who uses all thirteen letters, a post-Barthian Protestant whose argument is primarily theological rather than historically exegetical, and a Jewish scholar who reads Paul as still within Torah-observant Judaism creates a range of perspectives that no other Counterpoints volume on a Pauline topic has achieved. The exchanges that result are accordingly sharper, more revealing, and more instructive than those in volumes where the participants share more foundational assumptions. Readers who engage all four essays will come away understanding not merely what each contributor argues but what is fundamentally at stake in the interpretive choices that produce such divergent portrayals of a single apostle.
Campbell's introduction to his own position. Given the inaccessibility of Campbell's 1,218-page The Deliverance of God to most readers outside specialist academic circles, his thirty-page contribution to this volume is the best available short introduction to his argument for a large and important readership. His account of why the New Perspective's positive response to Sanders's work was insufficient — that it relocated rather than resolved the anti-Jewish dimensions of the received reading of Paul — and his proposal that Romans 5–8's participatory framework represents the center of Paul's gospel are here presented with more clarity and accessibility than in the monograph. Readers who engage seriously with Campbell's chapter will be equipped to navigate the larger work and to assess the objections leveled against it by Schreiner, Johnson, and Nanos.
Nanos's contribution to Christian-Jewish dialogue. Nanos's essay models the kind of historical and theological engagement across religious traditions that is both rare in this format and urgently needed. His insistence that Paul's most polemical passages about Torah, circumcision, and works have been read through a Christian framework that distorts both their historical meaning and their implications for Judaism is not a merely academic observation: it bears directly on whether Christians who draw on Paul's letters are perpetuating an account of Judaism that contributed, historically, to Christian anti-Judaism and its atrocities. Even readers who do not adopt Nanos's conclusions will benefit from his demonstration that the conventions of Christian Pauline scholarship embed assumptions about Jewish "failure" or "inadequacy" that are neither historically warranted nor theologically necessary for Christian faith in Christ. His exposition of the Shema as the theological foundation of Paul's Gentile mission is one of the volume's most constructive exegetical proposals.
Johnson's case for the thirteen-letter corpus. Johnson's defense of Pauline authorship across all thirteen canonical letters is not merely a confessional preference; it is a principled methodological argument that the differences between "undisputed" and "disputed" letters are a matter of degree rather than kind, and that any authentic Pauline portrait drawn from seven letters alone is likely to suppress the complexity present in the full canonical collection. For pastors and teachers who work with the full New Testament canon and who must account for Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals as Pauline, Johnson's argument provides a scholarly basis for treating them alongside Galatians and Romans rather than relegating them to a "deutero-Pauline school" of uncertain authority. His specific argument from the clustering of letters — the Thessalonian, Corinthian, Galatian/Roman, prison, and pastoral clusters all show as much internal divergence as the disputed letters show from the undisputed — deserves more direct response from the other contributors than it receives.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The absence of a New Perspective representative. The volume's most consequential editorial lacuna is the absence of a contributor presenting the New Perspective on Paul in its strongest academic form. Campbell is explicitly "post-new perspective," meaning he presupposes and moves beyond it. Schreiner critiques it. Nanos argues it did not go far enough. Johnson largely bypasses it. But the New Perspective — associated with Sanders, Dunn, and above all N. T. Wright — has been the most influential development in Pauline scholarship of the past four decades and represents the scholarly framework that has most significantly disrupted evangelical and confessional Protestant readings of Paul. Wright's covenantal-narrative reading of Paul, in particular, constitutes a fifth genuinely distinct position that would have enriched the exchange considerably; his Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013) appeared the following year, but his earlier work was fully developed by 2012. The decision to frame Campbell's position as "post-new perspective" rather than to include a New Perspective contributor leaves readers without a direct confrontation between the Reformed reading (Schreiner) and its most formidable academic challenge (Wright-style New Perspective).
Nanos's response to Schreiner. While Nanos's contribution is one of the volume's greatest strengths in its main chapter, his response to Schreiner is one of the volume's most problematic exchanges. Rather than engaging Schreiner's essay directly, Nanos devotes more than half of his response to attacking comments Schreiner made in his 2010 Galatians commentary about Nanos's own prior work — a move that most reviewers have rightly identified as an attempt to settle a score from the secondary literature rather than to serve readers of the present volume. Readers unfamiliar with the controversy between the two scholars on Galatians will be genuinely confused about what Nanos is arguing. The polemical tone of the response also undercuts the irenic spirit Nanos articulates in his main chapter and somewhat damages the broader project of Christian-Jewish dialogue that his participation in this volume represents. The exchange illustrates the format's limitation when contributors treat each other's responses as opportunities to relitigate prior academic disputes.
Campbell's narrow exegetical base. Campbell's decision to anchor his argument in Romans 5–8 exclusively, treating these four chapters as the hermeneutical key to Paul's entire gospel, creates a significant vulnerability that both Schreiner and Johnson press with legitimate force. Why Romans 5–8 rather than Galatians, where the direct confrontation with Jewish-Christian opponents of Paul's Gentile mission makes the soteriological stakes clearest? Why not 1 Corinthians, with its sustained treatment of resurrection, community ethics, and spiritual gifts? Why not Philippians, where the pistis Christou phrase appears in a context that is indisputably personal and participatory? Campbell's essay reads, in places, as a theological argument using Paul's letters as supporting evidence rather than as an exegesis of the letters that derives its framework from the texts. For readers accustomed to the Reformed and Catholic approaches — where the argument proceeds text by text, with the theological framework emerging inductively — Campbell's methodology can feel more like dogmatic theology than New Testament studies.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
Four Views on the Apostle Paul enters a scholarly conversation of extraordinary depth and breadth. Its immediate intellectual context is the multi-decade debate between "Lutheran Paul" readings (associated with Bultmann, Käsemann, and, among evangelicals, Schreiner) and New Perspective readings (Sanders, Dunn, Wright), with Campbell's apocalyptic-participatory approach representing a third trajectory that draws from both while refusing alignment with either. The most important complementary volume is Westerholm's Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics (Eerdmans, 2004), which remains the most balanced scholarly account of the debate; Wright's two-volume Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013) is the most exhaustive scholarly treatment from the New Perspective tradition. For the Jewish dimension of the debate, Pamela Eisenbaum's Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (HarperOne, 2009) develops a position similar to Nanos's with greater accessibility. For Campbell's argument in full, The Deliverance of God (Eerdmans, 2009) is indispensable, though daunting; Bird and Sprinkle's edited volume The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies (Hendrickson, 2009) provides the best short-form survey of the pistis Christou debate that runs through multiple chapters. For readers in the Wesleyan tradition seeking to situate these debates in relation to their own theological commitments, Thomas Oden's John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity (Zondervan, 1994) and N. T. Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision (IVP, 2009) together provide the most useful complement.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Four Views on the Apostle Paul is the most intellectually ambitious and academically demanding volume in the Counterpoints series, and it deserves recognition as such. Its greatest contribution is the radical diversity of its four principal contributors: a Reformed Baptist defending forensic justification, a Roman Catholic reading all thirteen canonical letters through the lens of communal religious experience, a post-Barthian Protestant dismantling the received juridical framework in favor of Trinitarian participation, and a Jewish scholar arguing that Paul never left Torah-observant Judaism. These are not merely variations on a Protestant evangelical theme; they represent genuinely incompatible portraits of the apostle, and the exchanges between them illuminate the stakes of interpretive choices that most readers never see made explicit. The volume is limited by the absence of a direct New Perspective representative, by the polemical quality of Nanos's response to Schreiner, and by Campbell's narrow exegetical base — but none of these limitations diminishes the significance of the conversation the volume stages. It will be most useful for readers willing to hold the uncertainty that genuine engagement with all four views requires, and least useful for those seeking confirmation of a position already held.
Recommended for: Graduate students in New Testament, systematic theology, and Jewish-Christian relations; pastors and educated laypersons who have encountered the New Perspective debates and want a scholarly map of the broader territory; anyone interested in the relationship between confessional identity and biblical interpretation; readers in the Wesleyan tradition seeking to understand where the transformative and participatory dimensions of their soteriology stand in relation to contemporary Pauline scholarship; Jewish readers interested in how a practicing Jewish scholar reads the apostle who became the theological founder of a tradition that separated from Judaism.
Not recommended for: Introductory-level students without background in Pauline studies and the New Perspective debates — for these readers, Bird's own Introducing Paul (IVP, 2009) or Yinger's The New Perspective on Paul: An Introduction (Cascade, 2011) provide better starting points; those seeking a sustained exegetical commentary on any individual Pauline letter; anyone requiring Campbell's full argument rather than a compressed summary — for these readers, The Deliverance of God itself remains necessary.
Overall Assessment: ☐ Highly Recommended | ☑ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
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