Abstract
This book comprises the proceedings of a conference on chapters 5-8 of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans held at Princeton Theological Seminary in May 2012, coinciding with the bicentennial of that institution. Most of the contributors are exegetes, while several are theologians. They do not represent a single school of thought, but they are all committed to, in the editor’s apt description, ‘the effort to understand the relationship between divine activity and its human reception in a cosmos that remains contested territory’ (p. vii). The contents of the book unfold as follows: Martinus C. de Boer, ‘Paul’s Mythologizing Program in Romans 5-8,’ argues that Paul, so far from distilling the primitive kerygma to its existentialist core (as per Bultmann), actually adds a layer of cosmological myth to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition that he inherited. Stephen Westerholm, ‘Righteousness, Cosmic and Microcosmic,’ gives an account of dikaiosune, ‘righteousness’, in Paul, and explains how it pertains both to the whole order of things and to particular persons and their deeds. Benjamin Myers, ‘A Tale of Two Gardens: Augustine’s Narrative Interpretation of Romans 5’, defends Augustine from Krister Stendahl’s charge that he corrupts the Pauline gospel, arguing that Augustine rightly understands Rom. 5:12-21 as the story of humanity’s, and each human’s, transfer from life in Adam to life in Christ. John M. G. Barclay, ‘Under Grace: The Christ-Gift and the Construction of a Christian Habitus’, explicates the key term charis, ‘grace’, or, better, ‘gift’, in Rom. 6, arguing that for Paul the Christ gift is incongruous and unconditioned but not therefore unconditional. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ‘The Shape of the ‘I’: The Psalter, the Gospel, and the Speaker in Romans 7’, argues that the notoriously difficult first-person discourse in Rom. 7 is literarily shaped by the first-person discourse of the Psalter, especially the psalms of lament. Susan Eastman, ‘Double Participation and the Responsible Self in Romans 5-8’, argues, in conversation with Bultmann and Käsemann, that Rom. 5-8 envisions the human both as an individual self and part of a world, and that both under sin and under grace. Philip G. Ziegler, ‘The Love of God Is a Sovereign Thing: The Witness of Romans 8:31-39 and the Royal Office of Jesus Christ’, gives a dogmatic account of the munus regnum Christi in dialogue with Luther, Calvin, Barth, and Otto Weber, suggesting that Rom. 8 provides resources for overcoming recent objections to the doctrine. Neil Elliott, ‘Creation, Cosmos, and Conflict in Romans 8-9’, interprets the restoration of creation in Rom. 8 and the lament for Israel in Rom. 9 as a polemical foil to the Roman myth of creation and conquest represented on the Ara Pacis Augustae. Finally, J. Louis Martyn supplies an afterword, titled ‘The Human Moral Dilemma’, in which he assesses the contributions and predicts the ascendancy of their approach in Pauline studies in the years to come. I suspect that there are Paulinists in, say, New Haven, Copenhagen, or Jerusalem who might dispute this prediction, but the book certainly represents the best of its particular approach to Paul. It is characterized by a more markedly theological, even pious tone than many comparable volumes, but it is none the worse for that. The volume is a fitting tribute to the long, distinguished history of Pauline interpretation at Princeton Theological Seminary. Finally, it should be noted and appreciated that Baylor University Press have produced a handsome volume, generally free of typos, thoroughly indexed, and reasonably priced.