Latest CBR

In the latest issue of Currents in Biblical Research 11.3 (2013) including the following:

Jason Hood and Matthew Y. Emerson
“Summaries of Israel’s Story: Reviewing a Compositional Category”

Coleman A. Baker
“Peter and Paul in Acts and the Construction of Early Christian Identity: A Review of Historical and Literary Approaches”

Bruce Worthington
“Alternative Perspectives beyond the Perspectives: A Summary of Pauline Studies that has Nothing to Do with Piper or Wright”

Worthington looks at recent philosophical, post-colonial, ecological, feminist, and social-scientific readings of Paul and concludes:

As a result of this interpretive exercise, one looming hesitation remains. While I certainly appreciate the post-colonial, feminist and ecological re-reading against the grain, I am afraid that such readings rely too heavily on a false ‘original purity’ of primitive Christian origins. The logic of reconstruction implies a certain docetism, namely that human organization strategies are always a corrupting one, and that underneath the appearance of institutional domination and hegemony lies a pure Christian ethic of blissful togetherness. Reconstructions that function on the notion of original primitive purity are virginal narratives – relying on an origin ‘in abstraction’ from the frail contingencies of human interactions and complex power struggles. A less idealistic reading strategy might reject this as fantasy, and develop reading strategies that take seriously the human complexities of power ‘in the beginning.’

Perhaps a tad too general, but he is definitely onto something.