N.T. Wright’s Obituary of C.E.B. Cranfield

Tom Wright provides some wonderful reflections in his obituary for Charles Cranfield.

My own personal gratitude to Cranfield dates to one evening in the early 1970s when I had been reading other writers on ‘Paul and the Law’, and had found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the idea, popular at the time, that Paul had seen the Mosaic Law as a bad thing now happily abolished through the gospel. (This went, of course, with the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when moral restraint was being cast off as stuffy and old-fashioned.) Though I do not think Paul’s discussion of the Jewish Law was primarily about moral restraint, this easy-going rejection of the law, and a facile opposition between ‘law’ and ‘gospel’, was the order of the day, and I was having difficulty combatting it. At that point I came across Cranfield’s essay on ‘Paul and the Law’, published earlier, and then subsequently incorporated into the long essay on Pauline theology at the end of the second volume of the Romans commentary. I think that was the first time I ever spontaneously knelt down and thanked God for an academic article. It said what needed to be said at a time when nobody else was saying it.