Review of John Barclay’s “Paul & the Gift”

As many of you Paulinistas are aware, John Barclay’s long awaited volume Paul & the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015) is now out. This is thought to be a landmark volume in the whole question of Jewish and Pauline soteriologies.

A review has been posted at TGC-Australia’s website by Peter Orr, which you can read here.

Orr writes:

For Paul, writes Barclay, God’s activity in Christ is the ultimate gift which overturns and reconfigures allconcepts of worth: all conditioning of God’s gift in Christ is ruled out – whether human works to earn salvation, or ethnicity, or gender, or social standing (Galatians 3:28). The grace of God in Christ is shockinglyincongruous because it is an incredibly significant gift (the death of God’s son) given to people who are morally unworthy (Romans 4:5). Here Barclay manages to encapsulate both New Perspective insights and classical Augustinian-Lutheranism. The New Perspective concern over Jewish exclusivism is legitimate, but so is Reformed interest in the moral plight of the individual. The apostle wants to defend the incongruity of God’s grace from all qualification: ethnic and moral; corporate and individual. In making this case, Barclay demonstrates that the New Perspective on Paul is overly narrow and reductionistic. That does not mean that the academy will return to a classical Reformed/Lutheran reading of Paul. But Barclay’s focus on worth, I think, actually shows a closer affinity with this earlier reading. It reinstates the issue of individual salvation to the heart of Paul’s concerns.

The only thing I want to read more than this book is the responses to it by folks like: N.T. Wright, Michael Gorman, Douglas Campbell, Beverly Gaventa, Mark Nanos, and Pamela Eisenbaum.