Review of God and the Faithfulness of Paul

Over at RBL, Nijay Gupta has a great review of God and the Faithfulness of Paul, a collection of (mostly) European essays interacting with N.T. Wright’s massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

What makes God and the Faithfulness of Paul unique is not only its length but also its contributors. It is well-known (and made explicit in the introduction) that on the subject of Paul’s thought Anglophone and Deutschophone scholarship do not interact often enough (see 5). Several prominent German scholars feature in God and the Faithfulness of Paul, including Oda Wischmeyer, Eve-Marie Becker, Peter Stuhlmacher, and Jörg Frey (all the essays in the work are in English), and perhaps the most insightful essay, penned by Wischmeyer, is entitled “N. T. Wright’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Considered from a German Exegetical Perspective.”

We have only had a chance in this review of God and the Faithfulness of Paul to sample the feast of interaction between several eminent biblical scholars and N. T. Wright on PFG, but what I hope is clear is that this book, God and the Faithfulness of Paul, may be equally important for an understanding of the state of Pauline studies as PFG. The editors and contributors did well to offer here more than just a book-length “review.” Rather, many contributors situated Wright and PFG within a place, time, and academic culture and tested Wright’s ideas and approach carefully to understand better both Paul and his interpretation. I hasten to add that, though I read and reviewed the original Mohr Siebeck volume of God and the Faithfulness of Paul (2016), the book has been reprinted through Fortress Press (2017) and is now much more affordable for individual purchase.