Q. I was very pleased to see your exegesis of Rom. 7.7-25, a Christian description of a pre-Christian condition. Luther’s mistaken interpretation of that passage has done a lot of damage to Christians since the Reformation. At one point I was the cantor in a Lutheran church in Ashland Ohio, and I had to lead the saying of the Lutheran creed. For the life of me, I couldn’t say the words in the Lutheran confession, ‘we are still in the... Read more

Q. Let’s talk about Rom. 6 for a minute. It seems clear Paul is talking about water baptism there, which he says is an image of being immersed or plunged into Christ’s death and being buried with Christ. In short it is an image of the death of the old person. After that one rises to newness of life, set free from the bondage to sin. But what was Paul’s actual theology of baptism? I ask this question because I... Read more

Q. Reading through your treatment of Romans I note your point about ‘the righteousness of God’ referring to an attribute of God (p. 191). Exactly right. And certainly one of the points of Romans is that God doesn’t want his people to simply have right-standing with him, he wants them to be actually like him in character. In other words, Romans is not just about justification, it’s also about moral transformation through ‘the obedience of faith’. I think you would... Read more

Q. It is interesting to me that you seem to agree with Wright’s attempt to use the term Israel to refer to the church of Jew and Gentile united in Christ, but disagree with him in regard to pistis Christou. You follow the argument of a German scholar that pistis Christou is both an objective and a subjective genitive all rolled into one. I must confess I disagree with Wright about the use of Israel by Paul, especially in Rom.... Read more

Q. Throughout the book you regularly use the phrase prophetic rhetoric. I have assumed you mean that the content of Paul’s rhetorical expression is Jewish and OT prophetic in character, especially indebted to 2 Isaiah. And this is as opposed to the common content of rhetorical arguments in the Greco-Roman world. Am I tracking with you? And yet it is interesting that Paul is well aware of how to follow the proper form for artificial and inartificial proofs, and when... Read more

Q. In reading through the chapter on 1 Corinthians and the cross, I am reminded of the old scholarly dictum that there are basically two kinds of Pauline letters— problem solving letters and progress-oriented letters with 1 Cor. being an example of the former and Philippians the latter. What occurred to me in reading that chapter is that ‘cross talk’ seems to come up more in a problem-solving letter like 1 Corinthians than in a progress-oriented letter like Philippians. Have... Read more

Q. Let’s talk for a moment about 1 Cor. 11 and the argument there. I don’t think this is really an argument about hierarchy, it is an argument about source, and of course kephale can mean source (as in the head of a river) just as it can mean head. Here Paul plays on the two meanings. Paul is thinking about the fact that Christ is the only begotten of God, so the Father is the source of the Son,... Read more

Q. Thanks for stressing the ethical or moral use of the Christological hymn by Paul in Phil. 2. It is a mystery to me why some scholars (e.g. Ralph Martin’s treatment of this hymn) strive so hard to avoid the conclusion that Paul is using this material for moral formation, as if theology is one thing which has to do with salvation, whereas ethics is just a response to the divine act and fiat but isn’t involved in salvation. I... Read more

Q. The Thessalonians chapter in dealing with the Holy Spirit and sanctification made me wonder if you had read and worked through Gordon Fee’s classic treatment of this in his God’s Empowering Presence when he goes through every reference to the Spirit and also sanctification in Paul. I also wondered if you had been influenced by Furnish’s The Love Command in the NT?   A. I read Fee’s and Furnish’s work many years ago, but I did consult them only... Read more

Q. Your treatment of the exordiums in these various letters is very helpful. It is the place where Paul is establishing rapport with his audience, sometimes with laudatory words that are later followed by a strong critique— for example in 1 Cor. the exordium praises the audience in regard to their many spiritual gifts, but then Paul goes on to strongly rebuke the abusive way they have used the gifts. My students call the exordium ‘the sucking up’ to make... Read more