Occasionally there’s one that makes you smile the first time you see it (“Forgive your enemies. It messes with their minds.”) But most bring groans.

How about this? Use church signs for the church’s name. Maybe a website. Maybe assembly times. Can the cute quotes.

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Another amazing work on Paul’s writings has come from N. T. Wright. I’d highly recommend that you get ahold of Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision. It is a response to the attacks that have been launched at him by John Piper and others; but beyond that it’s a powerful study of Paul’s theological framework.

“. . . People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”

- N. T. Wright

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“Christians in our culture are greatly tempted to accept the definitions of reality that are given us by the dominant voices of our culture. This, of course, is not to say there are not good values in our culture, even as there were good values in a quite advanced Babylonian culture. The trouble comes, nonetheless, when those cultural modes are so much taken for granted that they are equated with the claims of faith. We may observe how very easily American Christianity comes to identify with Western capitalism, the free market system, and the values that grow from there. Or, more acutely, how easily we are enveloped into consumer militarism, which roughly characterizes the main value tendency of American society. Consumerism is the seduction that getting and having and using is the main mode of humanness. Militarism is an act of public power that defends and legitimates our inordinate privilege in the world. We live in that system long enough, we enjoy its benefits long enough, until we come to think of it as a given. There follows from these values certain hopes and expectations, certain fears and dreads. The whole package tends to be identified with the claims of Christian faith.”

- Walter Brueggemann

Even after four years (since THE WRECK), it’s still hard not to hold my breath.

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From N. T. Wright (on Rom. 8:28-30):

Is Paul after all a determinist, believing in a blind plan that determines everything, so that human freedom, responsibility, obedience, and love itself are after all a sham?

One can easily imagine Paul’s own reaction . . . “Certainly not!” What we have here, rather, is an expression, as in 1:1, of God’s action in setting people apart for a particular purpose, a purpose in which their cooperation, their loving response to love, their obedient response to the personal call, is itself all-important. This is not to deny the mystery of grace, the free initiative of God, and the clear divine sovereignty that is after all the major theme of this entire passage, here brought to a glorious climax. But it is to deny the common misconception, based on a two-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional understanding of how God’s actions and human actions relate to each other, that sees something done by God as something not done by humans, and vice versa.

For those who don’t know, Wright is a leading New Testament scholar. To get a feel for the breadth of his writing, check here.

The book continues his ground-breaking work on Paul, offering fresh insight into the way in which his letters seek to form a people in the Way of the Messiah.

Have you ever come across the phrase “the new perspective on Paul”? Most haven’t, I’m sure. But here’s a bit of a summary.

The “old perspective” on Paul reflected the anxiety of Martin Luther over salvation. This view heavily impacted NT studies for centuries. It says that Paul was writing because of the problem of legalism: people trying to earn salvation by their works. So he writes about “the righteousness from God” that is given “by faith in Jesus.”

The “new perspective” goes a different direction, though–one that I think better reflects Paul’s concern in his letters. This says that those concerns about legalism were Martin Luther’s in the sixteenth century, but not Paul’s in the first century. They involve a stereotype of Jewish religion that just doesn’t fit. Of course every religion has some who seek to earn salvation, but that’s not the view of the Old Testament nor of the best part of the Jewish heritage.

What Paul was primarily dealing with wasn’t legalism but inclusion of the Gentiles into the people of God. His questions (especially in Romans/Galatians) were more like these: Has God been faithful to his promises to Israel? Will Israel’s faithlessness nullify the promises? Can Gentiles be included? If they can, how can Jews and Gentiles be one? If the Jews have rejected the Messiah, is there any hope for them?

Part of the problem comes in translations that reflect the Lutheran perspective (like the old NIV, though there are significant improvements in the Today’s NIV). E.g., rather than translating a Greek phrase as “the righteousness from God” it should likely be “the righteousness of God”–referring not to the way people become Christians but to God’s covenant faithfulness. And rather than translating another Greek phrase as “by faith in Jesus” it probably should be (at least most of the time) “by the faithfulness of Jesus.” (A good place to see the difference this makes is in Romans 3:21-25.) I.e., the Messiah is the faithful one who has made it possible through his life and obedience to death for the promises of God to be kept.

In other words, the central issue isn’t, How does one become a Christian? (Answer: by faith rather than works.) Rather, the central theme is, How has God been faithful to his covenant in bringing together one people in the Messiah?

Sorry, this is shorthand. The book is brilliant. If you haven’t done much work in this area, it will be slow, slow sledding. But there are pay-offs on nearly every page.

By the way the full title is Paul: A Fresh Perspective. I doubt that the subtitle is an accident. In other words, it isn’t the “old perspective,” for sure. But not exactly the “new perspective” (as led by Sanders and Dunn). This is a “fresh perspective” in which he points to the missional impact of what God has done to bring together a people, the restored “Israel,” through the Messiah.

There are great sections on the Spirit, on the place of Israel today and in the future, and on the eschatology of the Left Behind books. I hope to get to those later.

But honestly — isn’t this more than you want to know already? Whatever happened to guacamole recipes and how to teach a kid to throw a curve?