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Editorial

New Directions in Pauline Theology

Pauline Theology is the attempt to interpret Pauls texts on the assumptionthat they are organized around a set of convictions about God, Christ, andSpirit, and that they seek to reshape their addresseessocialworld in light ofthose convictions.Other approaches toPauls texts are possible and indeednecessary. Much of the most substantial scholarly work on Paul occurswithin the genre of the commentary, focused on the individual text inits line-by-line unfolding. A more historically-oriented approach mightinvestigate the place of the distinctive Pauline strandwithin earliest Chris-tianity as awhole, or seek to reconstruct the circumstances presupposed ineach of Pauls letters. There may also be a concern with the wider cultural,social and political environment, where Pauls community-founding gos-pel is just one element in a confusion of theologies, philosophies or ideol-ogies, whether Jewish,Hellenistic, orRoman (or some combination there-of). These varied approaches to Pauls texts are notmutually exclusive, norare they in competitionwith one another.On the contrary, they are in con-stant dialogue. A significant new insight in one area will have immediateconsequences in others.

Pauline Theology allows but does not require the interpreters existen-tial involvement in articulating the subject-matter of Pauls texts. Pauls in-terpreters may or may not integrate their account of his theology into ex-plicit theological constructions of their own. Albert SchweitzersDieMys-tik des Apostels Paulus is virtually unrelated to its authors wider philo-sophical and theological concerns; but that does not make it any less sig-nificant a contribution to Pauline Theology. Amore direct interaction be-tween Pauls theology and his interpreters is evident in Part II of RudolfBultmanns Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Yet Bultmanns account ofhumanity prior to the revelation of faith and under faith remains aclose reading of Paul, rather than an exercise in free theological construc-tion. If it is a one-sided reading of Paul, so too is Schweitzers; and the one-sidedness of both readings is their strength as well as their limitation. Inevaluating this field of research, it is a mistake to ascribe too central a role

Early Christianity 1 (2010), 11 14 ISSN 1868-7032 2010 Mohr Siebeck

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to the issue of existential involvement or confessional bias. Heated de-bate about the possibility or otherwise of an objective, purely historicalapproach to Paulwill no doubt continue; but obsessive focus on the role ofthe interpreter is unlikely to issue in significant new directions.

Far more promising is a comparative or perspectival approach, repre-sented by this first issue of the new journal. Such an approachwould aban-don the assumption that Pauline Theology must be seen as a singular,self-contained object with a centre and a structure which it is the inter-preters task to identify, describe, and analyse. Pauline Theology need notbe derived from Pauls undisputed texts alone. Other texts may be setalongside them, defamiliarizing them by assigning them to new contextsand viewing them from different perspectives. These co-texts include thework of Pauls first interpreters, who composed letters in his name or whoappealed to him to legitimate their own theological constructions. Theyinclude the scriptural texts to which Paul himself appeals, together withthe alternative readings of scripture proposed by other Jewish interpretersof the Second Temple period. They include contemporary philosophicaltexts, and the range of texts and text-like artefacts that attest the politicalideologies of the time. This comparative, perspectival approachwould alsobe pluralistic. It would not insist that Paul will inevitably be misunder-stood (yet again), if his texts are not read in the context ofRoman imperialideology. Nor would it privilege a Jewish/scriptural context over a Greek/philosophical one, or judge Pauls first interpreters by their faithfulness orotherwise to what the apostle really meant.What Paul really meant can-not be so easily detached from what he meant or would have meant fromthe perspectives of his contemporaries and successors.

MichaelWolter employs the distinction between a Bekehrungsreligionand a Traditionsreligion to rethink the relationship between the Paulineand deutero-Pauline letters. A Bekehrungsreligion is a religion underconstruction, in which everyone has experienced the transfer from theold life to the new and in which basic decisions about ethos and ideologyare still being made. A Traditionsreligion is characterized by temporalcontinuitywith anorigin that now lies in thepast, rather thanby theoriginalrupture between old and new. The transition from the first pattern of reli-gion to the second isnot tobe seenasa decline fromthecreative insightsofthe formative period. Rather, it is simply a consequence of the passing oftime. On Wolters account, the deutero-Pauline texts articulate a develop-ment that is not only legitimate but also necessary and inevitable if PaulineChristianity is to survive at all. Pauls own texts are no longer free-standingbut require their later supplementation.

12 New Directions in Pauline Theology

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Does Marcion represent an early attempt to recover the original Pau-line impetus from an overlay of tradition, as Harnack and others have ar-gued? According to Judith Lieu, both the form and the content of Mar-cions engagement with Paul is less clear than is often thought. WhenTer-tullianworks throughMarcions edition of Paul and argues for the onenessof the God differently revealed in the Law and the Gospel, he may be en-gagingnotwith interpretative texts byMarcionhimself butwith laterMar-cionite tradition or with a rhetorical Marcion fabricated by himself. Mar-cion serves as a foil for Tertullians own systematic interpretation of Paul,which seeks to integrate him into an emergent canon in which old andnew are harmoniously co-ordinated. For Tertullian, the apocalypticreading of Paul he attributes to Marcion must be superseded by a salva-tion-historical one. Pauline interpretation is not an end in itself, however.Rather, it is subsumed into an account of God in which the Marcioniteantithesis of justice and grace now represents a dialectic within the singu-lar divine nature.

A comparative approach to Pauline theology is, of course, not theonly approach desirable or necessary. Starting from more conventionalexegetical issues,Matthias Konradt shows how these may still lead to pro-foundly significant conclusions about the nature and scope of Paulinetheology. The initial question is whether the freedom that is announcedin Galatians 5:1 is limited by the love that is the fulfilling of the law(5:14), or whether freedom and love are actually identical. In otherwords, the question is whether Paul construes freedom purely negatively,as a freedom from external constraints, or whether it has a positive con-tent. If Christ has set us free for a freedom that is also love, then loveand ethics more generally are integral to Pauls account of salvation.They should not be seen merely as a grateful response, a secondary im-perative that supplements the primary and all-important indicative. Thattraditional view serves only to undermine the coherence of Pauls accountof the relationship of divine to human agency, in which certain humanpractices are enclosed, intended, and enabled within the divine act of sal-vation.

John Barclay notes Pauls interest in the Golden Calf incident and itssequels, as narrated in Exodus 3234, and sets Pauls reading of this ma-terial alongside that of the author of the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum(Pseudo-Philo). A first point to note is that Paul and Pseudo-Philoread this potentially damaging material at all unlike Josephus, Philo,and the author of theWisdom of Solomon, who pass over it in almost com-plete silence. A second point is that they both focus on the theme ofmercy.

New Directions in Pauline Theology 13

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Pseudo-Philo views the divine mercy as a restorative agency that ensuresthe continuation of the covenantal narrative in spite of repeated episodesof sin and rebellion. This author can read the narrative of Exodus 3234 asboth brutally honest and supremely hopeful. In Romans 911, on theother hand, Paul traces divine agency even behind sin and rebellion, elim-inates the concept of moral worth, and develops from Exodus an accountof divine mercy as creative rather than merely restorative.

Somewhat similar from a methodological point of view is JonathanLinebaughs imaginative rereading of material from Romans 3 from thestandpoint of the author of theEpistle of Enoch.This author is preoccupiedwith the deuteronomic links between obedience and the divine blessingand between disobedience and the divine curse, by their failure to materi-alize on the historical plane, and by their final eschatological realization.Like Paul, he traces his account of the workings of divine righteousnessback to revelation; but there the resemblances end. As the Enochic authorreads Romans, it comes to light that his problem the apparent vindi-cation of sinners in the present world looks remarkably like Pauls so-lution. Rereading Paul from the standpoint of another text brings the rad-icalism of his claims into sharp focus. In passing, it also highlights the lim-itations of the post-Sanders new perspective on Paul and shows howrelatively traditional exegetical conclusions can be presented in freshways.

Finally, Iwoulddrawattention to otherPaul-relatedmaterial in the sec-tions of this issue devoted to discoveries and reviews. In particular,Peter Arzt-Grabners article may be taken as a reminder of the primarymaterial basis for all concern with Pauline Theology that is, the oldestextant manuscripts.

Durham, UK Francis Watson

14 New Directions in Pauline Theology