Reviews

REVIEWS

Joseph McDonald (Ed.), ExploringMoralInjuryinSacredTexts.StudiesinReligionand Theology. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2017. (214 pp.) [ISBN 9781785927560]

Darren Cronshaw

Moral injury (MI) eventuates from violating moral convictions. Whereas Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is founded on fear, MI is driven by and leads to shame and guilt, and then to self-harming, selfhandicapping, self-medicating behaviours. Recovery from moral injury cannot rely on therapy and medication alone. Community support and practices such as forgiveness and making amends helps foster moral repair. These are traditionally the sphere of faith communities and religious practices and texts. So, what can religions and their Scriptures offer for the journey of moral repair for soldiers and others when morally injured?

Exploring Moral Injury in Sacred Texts offers a model of reading the texts of religious traditions and gleaning insight about the dynamics of moral injury and how religions may point in healing directions. A large part of its value is how it draws on traditions of Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and US civil religion. The contributors never suggest any list of easy steps to shortcut recovery, but they identify and offer thoughtful exegesis of passages that are relevant to those who have suffered moral injury and are on a journey to moral recovery. The texts include narratives of war, murder, rape, slavery, toxic leadership, and betrayal and how these injurious events affect individuals and groups. For example, Professor of Judaic Studies David Blumenthal offers a Jewish view of soul repair and explores King David and his abusive use of power and sex with Bathsheba. He explains his subsequent suicidal ideation but also his repair and rejoining life. Similarly, Old Testament scholars Nancy Bowen and Brad Kelle both offer reflections on the Hebrew Bible. Bowen exegetes Sodom and Lot and how MI can produce dehumanization and further MI. Yet then, good acts of character can foster moral repair as in the story of Ruth. Kelle examines rituals of acquiring and sharing enemy goods after battle—with non-combatants as well as combatants (thus communalizing responsibility warfare) and as temple offerings (thus reframing military action in a broader cosmic narrative). Amir Hussain explores an incident of Muhammad’s life, inspired by Joseph and his brothers, both stories which point beyond violence and vengeance. Hussain faces contemporary rhetoric of Islamophobia, compares Qur’anic references to war and violence with Islam’s sister traditions of Judaism and Christianity, and guides a path from moral injury through forgiveness to peace. Theological ethicist Daniel Maguire explores civil religion and moral wounds particularly in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and its sanctification of warfare and its call for citizens to bring healing. He appeals for greater attention to that call for healing and questions the US soldier’s enlistment oath and its removal of the right to selective conscientious objection.

Peace and Justice Studies scholar Kelly Denton-Borhang integrates a reading of the gospels alongside a critique of civil religion’s clichéd conceptualizing of soldiers’ deaths as analogous to Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. She sensitively but boldly advocates looking at how wartime killing is fed by structural violence (including the economics of the military complex) and deeper cultural violence (including religion and assumptions of cultural supremacy and contesting the idea of moral injury). Michael Yanell, PhD student and veteran US Army Sergeant Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist, reads “the man out of the tombs” who Jesus meets in Mark 5 as a symbol of Palestinian occupation and literally as a Roman military veteran with moral injuries. Unique among the volume’s writers, Yannell draws on his experience of veteran suffering to explain the man’s confused identities, isolation and self-harm. The story illustrates the beginning and trajectory of a path to healing from MI with divine assistance. Considering Peter’s denial and Judas’ betrayal, New Testament scholar Warren Carter suggests Jesus was willing to forgive both of their guilt and shame. Yet he asks why Peter went on to be a key leader in the church, while Judas was withdrawn from his community and hung himself?

John Thompson reflects on Buddhism’s story of Aṅgulimāla, a murderous outlaw who suffered MI

both being betrayed by authority and choosing gruesome violence. Yet after encountering Buddha and doing reparative community work, he transforms into an ascetic monk. A limitation of this list of writers is they are all academics and all work in the United States. Reflective practice from practicing caregivers and more military leaders, and further exegesis from people from other national and cultural contexts, would broaden the engagement and relevance of this kind of study. Rita Brock, previous Director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School and currently Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Programs at Volunteers of America, offers a Foreword that positions the importance of these textual studies in the context of communities that seek to offer moral repair to soldiers and others outside the military. Joseph McDonald, adjunct faculty at Texas Christian University, edited the volume and introduced how textual studies can mutually inform moral injury. Following Shay’s seminal work on moral injury as seen in ancient literature from Achilles in Vietnam (1994) and Odysseus in America (2002), McDonald has invited religious scholars to delve into their texts with the lens of moral injury. Whether the agency of any MI is from a betrayal of “what’s right” by an authority (as Shay defines MI) or from a personal violation of one’s moral code (following Litz and colleagues), the writers of Exploring Moral injury in Sacred Texts maintain that Scriptures and classical texts are allies in healing. For those who are familiar with the texts, they broaden understanding in the context of MI. For those unfamiliar with certain traditions, they illuminate the healing utility of fresh readings of diverse Scriptures. Moreover, contemporary psychological understanding of moral injury can illuminate and offer fresh readings or ancient sacred texts.

Exploring Moral Injury in Sacred Texts is an important resource for chaplains and caregivers, for textual scholars interested in the relevance of their traditions for contemporary moral dilemmas, and for those who have suffered moral injury from across religious traditions. It is an important addition to the growing body of literature on moral injury. It is also an original foundation for what will hopefully be a growing field of

research on the use of sacred texts in moral injury treatment from scholars of religion and pastoral theologians, and reflective practice from caregivers and military personnel themselves.

John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Power of Grace. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020. (xviii + 184) [ISBN 9780802874610]

Jonathan R. Robinson

John Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He is an authority on the SecondTemple Jewish Background of the New Testament and possibly the most widely respected Pauline scholar of the current time after his book, Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans, 2015). That last work is probably the most important book in Pauline studies since E. P Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress, 1977), although time is yet to tell if it will have such an enduring impact. Paul and the Gift is an imposing and detailed tome of nearly 700 pages and designed to engage numerous complex scholarly debates. This more recent work, Paul and the Power of Grace, is a much-condensed and more accessible version of the earlier book, but with additional chapters responding to questions and concerns raised by respondents. It should be said at the outset, that this book is a model of clarity, accessibility, scholarly care, and economy. It absolutely succeeds in its intention and is highly readable. Chapters 1-9 of Paul and the Power of Grace contain a precis of the argument of Paul and the Gift. The first two chapters discuss the anthropology of and possible implications of the idea of gift, a concept found throughout human societies. Barclay clearly explicates six different ways in which gift/grace could be understood to be “perfected.” The concept of gift may reach perfection in some combination of or emphasis on superabundance, singularity, priority, incongruity, efficacy, and non-circularity (pp.13-16). Barclay argues that a failure to clarify these different possible approaches to gift has fueled many theological and exegetical disagreements (p. 17). He rightly observes that non-circularity of gift is the most widespread present-day conception of a perfect gift, that is, one with no response expected or required. However, as he argues in the next chapter, this view of gift is simply not apparent in ancient texts. Therefore, reading Paul as if he has a modern conception of gift may considerably mislead the interpreter. The third chapter discusses four different Second Temple texts, each of which illustrates a different understanding of gift at work in the Jewish environment. The Wisdom of Solomon “expresses an emphatic theology of grace” marked by priority (God gives first) and superabundance (God gives abundantly) but not by incongruity, because God only gives to the worthy (p. 31). Philo of Alexandria “thinks that God’s gifts are singular, abundant, and prior” but not undeserved, or incongruous (p. 32). The Hodayot (hymns) of Qumran give “probably the most negative picture of the human condition in Jewish literature of the time.” God brings the elect into an undeserved righteousness and destiny despite their initial worthlessness, and thus grace is perfected in incongruity (pp. 33-4). His final example is the dialogue from 4 Ezra between Ezra and the angel Uriel. While Ezra pleads for incongruous grace, mercy given to the unrighteous, for Uriel this would “compromise justice” and is “ultimately unsatisfactory as a view of the world” (p. 36).

Barclay thus effectively demonstrates the need for a nuanced approach to Jewish thought about gift and grace. Early Jews were diverse in the way they perfected grace, and so when reading Paul, in context as a Jew, one particular model of grace cannot be assumed. Chapters 4-6 are structured as a commentary on grace in Galatians. Arguing that the letter is a response to the influence of Messianic-Jews on the gentile congregation in Galatia, in particular, their insistence on circumcision both in regard to Mosaic law and to the patriarchal narratives of Abraham, Barclay demonstrates how Paul’s theological response to each aspect of this controversy is set in the language of “gift” (pp.40-41). One of the key exegetical moves Barclay makes is his interpretation of the verb dikaioō, usually translated justify, as not describing a change in condition but, in view of its normal meaning in Greek, as describing a judgement of worth (p.48). Thus, worth does not come through being circumcised but is a result of the gift of Christ, a gift that is effective not because of the worth of the recipient, but because of the incongruous worth of the gift. In light of this gift, all other possible factors of worth, the law of Moses, gender, race, or legal status as slave or free (cf. Gal 3:15) are radically relativized and only have value in as far as they contribute to the purposes of Christ (p50). He concludes that “this unconditioned gift, given in Christ, cannot be mapped onto prior configurations of worth, it subverts old cultural norms, it refounds individual subjectivity, it justifies new patterns of mission, it reconfigures history, it retunes the voice of scripture, and it creates new communities on the landscape of the Roman Empire” (p. 73). In a similar vein, chapters 7-9 provide a commentary on Romans. Barclay traces several ways that Paul’s thought has developed from the letter to the Galatians. Whereas in Galatians God’s gift is given “irrespective of worth,” in Romans Paul articulates that it is given “in the absence of worth” (p. 76). In addition to this amplification of the incongruity of God’s grace, Barclay also highlights other developments, including the “efficacy” and “superabundance” of God’s grace in Romans (p. 76). As a result, “God’s incongruous grace creates congruity” (p. 81). That is, the grace of God, while “unconditioned” (given without regard to worth) is not “unconditional,” it has an expected outcome in the transformation of the receiver (p. 87). Importantly, “What grace conveys is not a thing but a person” (p. 90) this gift generates a new relationship, which generates an obligation to act out the new life given through participation in Christ (p. 93). Importantly, even the ability to live this new life and to trust in Christ is itself part of the gift of Christ. In chapter 9, Barclay examines Romans 9-11 and shows that these difficult chapters are united by a “consistent narrative pattern,” that is, “the incongruity of divine election, the absence of fit between divine mercy and the worth of its recipients” (p112). For those familiar with Paul and the Gift, these chapters will contain little new. However, my short summary here cannot do justice to just how scintillating and nuanced Barclay’s exegesis is, even in

condensed form. He compresses the insights from a much larger work into these chapters, and so these commentaries are exceedingly rich. Whilst cleaving strictly to the theme of grace, Barclay nonetheless touches on many other issues of import with economy and skill. While their purpose is to convey the thesis of the book regarding the central place of the incongruous, unconditioned, but not unconditional grace of

God in Paul’s thought, they could also serve a as useful commentary for preaching or study. Barclay also

displays a talent for pithy and arresting phrases, and where the subject matter reoccurs, he seems to work hard, and successfully so, to couch it in fresh language and to keep the reader’s attention and imagination engaged. The remaining chapters move to more original material, developing the argument beyond the original scope of Paul and the Gift. In chapter 10, Barclay seeks to demonstrate how Paul’s conception of God’s grace functions as “the grammar of his theology” (p. 114) elsewhere in the undisputed Pauline letters. He

argues that, despite the change in terminology, in the Corinthian correspondence and Philippians, the underlying pattern of Paul’s theology is “recognizably the same” as that of Galatians and Romans (p. 119). In the Corinthian correspondence, incongruous grace is reflected in incongruous power in weakness (cf. 1 Cor 1:18-23; 2 Cor 13:4) and “undermines the human capital in which believers take confidence” so that they can only trust in the gift of Christ (p.119). In the letter to the Philippians, “Christ participates in the human condition all the way to death, in order that others may participate in his condition, all the way to eternal life,” and “this reconstituted self is and always will be the product of a gift” (p.123). Chapter 11 expands the discussion by outlining some ethical implications of Paul’s theology of grace within Pauline church communities. These ethical practices are a “return-gift to God” but also a “forward transfer of grace” whereby others benefit from what God has given us (p. 125). This can be seen in Paul’s discussion of the use of individual “gifts” in the body of Christ for the sake of the community (1 Cor 12; Rom 12; cf. Eph 4; p.126) as well as in the honour given to those who conventional society would consider of lesser worth (p. 128). In the “one another” language found in Paul’s letters, Barclay argues we see an ideal of a reciprocal support network operating within Christians communities, which function to both support the community and also to enable the community to give back to God who is the source of that gift-dynamic” (p. 132). And in the collection gift for Jerusalem, a “circle” of grace is exposed as grace comes first from God in Christ, is at work “through and among believers,” and returns to God in thanksgiving (2

Cor 9:12-15; p. 133). Chapter 12 helps situate Barclay’s thesis in regard to other perspectives on Paul: Protestant, Catholic, the New Perspective on Paul, and the Paul within Judaism School. This chapter is particularly helpful for those who are not professional Pauline scholars. His summaries of the other approaches are balanced and sympathetic, rather than agonistic. Barclay, rightly in my view, presents his thesis as a mediating way, with commonalities and constructive critique for all the schools mentioned. Perhaps one other important school of thought missing from the discussion would be the Apocalyptic Paul perspective. This is treated in a footnote that refers the reader to his discussion in Paul and the Gift (fn.5 p. 139). You cannot cover everything in a book this size, but given the influence of J. Louis Martyn and others on the theological reception of Paul (especially among Barthians), this would have been helpful to include. Notwithstanding, this chapter demonstrates why Barclay has become such a significant figure in Pauline studies. In his work, he appears to have listened to and learned from each school of thought and critiques them without disregarding or negating their contribution.

The final chapter reflects on how Paul’s vision of grace, as described by Barclay, might connect with contemporary culture and church. Here Barclay offers three brief sketches of “theological interpretation” that takes inspiration from Paul’s letters “in their historical context” but also utilize “a necessary freedom to rethink his theology for new contexts” (p. 151). He argues that Paul’s theology of grace is “a rich resource for Christians in challenging racism, gender prejudice, and all forms of negative stereotype” (p. 152). He argues that the “indiscriminate grace of God in Christ” is a superior foundation for human rights than the Imago Dei, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the American Declaration of Independence (pp. 153-4). He also suggests Paul’s theology of grace could address the crisis of self-worth, mental health and self-esteem in Western culture (p. 154). It is not just a matter of theoretically locating our self-worth in the unconditioned love of God, but also enacting Paul’s “social vision of community in which each person honors and affirms the other” (p. 155). Finally, he argues that our Western perfection of gift as non-circular has rendered our approach to charity as “patronizing, demeaning and disempowering” (p. 157). Against this he argues Paul’s ethic of “reciprocity and interdependency” (p. 157) has currency both inside and outside of church situations: “everyone has something to give to others, and one should expect to give not to the poor but with them” (p. 158, emphasis original). He concludes that “one of Paul’s greatest contributions to our contemporary world must be his theology of grace” (p. 159). While Pauline scholars will still need to refer to Paul and the Gift for their work, for most others Paul and the Power of Grace is an excellent volume that will be a wonderful resource for undergraduate study, sermon preparation, theological engagement with Paul, and personal interest. It is highly recommended.

Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020. (165 pp.) [ISBN: 9780802878441]

A. D. Clark-Howard

Willie Jennings has begun to solidify his legacy as one of the most significant and important prophetic voices in the theological guild, examining the entanglements of race, colonialism, Christian theology, and its twenty-first-century performances. His latest text, After Whiteness—part treatise, part memoir, part poetry—both recapitulates and condenses some of his previous work on the relationship of the theological academy and the modern racial condition entrenched by centuries of European colonialism, while also, albeit tentatively, offering a more constructive and concrete vision for theological education. Though it is always difficult to make such claims so close to any historical moment, this text, if taken seriously, promises to upend and remake theological education into the future. It demands a wide readership across all spectrums and subdisciplines within the theological academy and by all theological educators. Jennings’ main claim in the text is that “the formation that attends theological education and, more broadly, Western education is troubled—in fact, deeply distorted” (p. 5). Formation lies at the heart of the educational exercise; as Jennings’ neatly surmises: “Education and theological education kill the lie that people don’t change” (p. 5). Yet the change wrought by much theological education in the West is

deformed. In a rather sweeping categorisation in terms of intersectionality, Jennings argues that the formative which “propels the curricular, pedagogical, and formational energies of Western education, and especially theological education” is that of “a white self-sufficient man, his self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery” (p. 6). White, self-sufficient masculinity makes up the method, mode, and end of formation in the theological academy, a colonial telos aimed towards isolation, mastery, and control with deep roots in the history of Western Christianity and European imperialism. Jennings draws an analysis of the formational power of white self-sufficient masculinity in contrast with an image of Jesus amidst the crowds; diverse people brought together to dwell within the body which Christ himself offers. Such a reorientation in theological education is an orientation toward love and belonging, a bold vision of a thick life together characterised by the formation of “erotic souls” drawn into authentic connection with one another. “Theological education must capture its central work—to form us in the art of cultivating belonging” (p. 10). The book is structured in five chapters, a prologue and brief epilogue. The prologue (“Secrets”) introduces the text, provides definitions of critical terms utilised by Jennings, and plunges the reader into the mix of personal storytelling, poetry, and decolonial analysis, which is to follow. Chapter one (“Fragments”) describes the way in which knowledge and skill is detached and rearranged towards the colonial ends of mastery and control in the intellectual instincts of Western theology. Such a model of arranging fragments is a way to detach from and control the other, as Jennings writes, “born of a tragic history of Christians who came not to learn anything from indigenous peoples but only to instruct them, and to exorcize and eradicate anything and everything that seemed strange and therefore anti-Christian” (p. 37). Chapter two (“Designs”) examines the “form of attention cultivated through brutality,” a design of intellectual life that should instead be met through affection and desire (p. 59). Intellectual attention drawn around the cultural aesthetic of whiteness resists the gathering of diverse peoples around Jesus, God enfleshed whose life is given for many. Chapter three (“Buildings”) explores institutionalism and leadership, both, in Jennings’ analysis, descendants of the plantation structure of slave and master. Leadership in the guild and in the church is judged by its cold bravado, an ability to “control the space and master the small worlds” (p. 86). Building, like education, is a gift from God, but entangled with white masculinity, it is a building toward death. Chapter four (“Motions”) is more constructive. Jennings sketches out three areas in which a new image of formation and theological education can be imagined: “an assimilation, an inwardness, and a revolution that help us form an erotic soul,” a theological culture formed towards communion (p. 134). Colonial designs of whiteness, control, and destruction can be replaced by practices of mutual exchange, contemplation, and eschatological renewal. Chapter five (“Eros”) solidifies this new

picture of theological education. Communion is the goal of theological education, a communion thwarted by whiteness. Nonetheless, such an image offers the theological academy an exciting, though uncharted, future.

Jennings’ text is rich with personal insight and keen observation from his own experiences working as dean at Duke Divinity School. As his previous work has suggested, the problems late modernity poses

for theology of intellectual fragmentation and passé exclusivist truth claims are only a (possibly inconsequential) slice of the whole picture. Pressing deeper into the issues of our current cultural moment, especially from the underside of history, reveals a wider, more profound, centuries-long endeavour of conquest and power in the formation of race, whiteness, and coloniality within the ongoing legacies of European empires. Such legacies formulate and shape the way theological education exists today, pressing all peoples into a mould formed at the site of the colonial project and its fusion with Christianity. A “pedagogy of the plantation” functions as the main educational and formational reflex of theological education in the West, modelled off the mastery of the racial paterfamilias of colonial history (p. 82). One’s positionality in reading these histories and their modern manifestations will account for its experience. For readers of colour, many stories recounted by Jennings will no doubt feel familiar and easily identifiable. For myself, however, as a white scholar in theology, it is an indispensable demonstration that while the old hegemonies may sometimes seem fragile, they are nonetheless thoroughly entrenched within our institutional and pedagogical structures. Part of Jennings’ project can also be understood as a reminder to the theological academy of the voices it has left behind in the past. In the prologue, Jennings references a text lost (or, rather, ignored) to history on Christian feminism and theological education as an important inspiration for his own. Produced in the 1980s by the Mud Flower Collective, a group of female and ethnically diverse scholars working in religious and theological education, God’s Fierce Whimsy reflects in their own contexts on many of the poignant issues of race and gender Jennings raises today. (I am grateful to my colleague Jaimee van Gemerden who drew my attention to the Mud Flower Collective, and their influence over After Whiteness, and is seeking to explore their collective methodology for theological education and research today.) Furthermore, the title After Whiteness references Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential After Virtue, indicative of Jennings’ intended scope and critique. The implicit message of After Whiteness might be understood as thus:

current diagnoses of the issues befalling theological education, and theological study more generally, have been looking in the wrong place. The main questions to be asking—questions which attend to the destructive effects of modern colonialism’s impact on Christian intellectual discourse and pedagogy—are obfuscated by the theological guild’s ongoing polemic against late modernity and its various splintering of religion, ontology, and morality, etc. Instead, it is the devastating performative effects of whiteness joined to Christian formation which lies at the heart of many of our deepest problems. The mix of memoir, study, and poetry is both enigmatic and provocative. The book is also short, just over 150 pages in a small book format. Yet, a detailed investigation of the relationship between Christian theology, race, and European colonialism is not Jennings’ purpose in writing here, and indeed one ought to seek out Jennings’ magisterial and lengthier The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race for such a project. However, the rejection of more typical forms of analytical writing and detail here seem to be part of the point. After Whiteness inhabits, in its very form and function, the type of decolonial theological discourse it seeks to explore. It is a plea to those of us who inhabit white, masculine positionalities to move towards the other and enter the destabilising process of encountering, in love, that

which is foreign—a project that, at least in Jennings’ mind, invites an extravagance of language and form in writing. Such a process offers redemption, “to imagine new conversations that open up a shared exploration into the desire for communion that is intended to vivify theological education” (p. 157). Such practice is a “practice aimed at eternity,” one that longs for the beauty and multiplicity of God’s own eschaton (p. 157). Thus, there is something deeply pastoral in the wisdom and experiences Jennings offers as he reflects over his career.

After Whiteness is quite simply a ground-breaking text. While not a radical departure or invention from Jennings’ earlier work, it condenses and applies much of his previous work on theology, race, and colonialism into a short format, accessible, and thoroughly disturbing tour de force. While, as I have already mentioned, it deserves to be read alongside Jennings’ lengthier Christian Imagination, it is also sharper in focus than his previous opus and rid of the last vestiges of any sort of post-racial optimism present within the previous book’s Obama context. There is no-one involved in theological education today—scholars, students, administrators, and so on—who should not read After Whiteness and reflect on its urgent message. Though readable in an afternoon, it invites meditative attention and multiple re-readings. Jennings’ latest book is a profound, haunting examination of theological education as it is and yet theological education as it could be.

Viorel Coman, Dumitru Stăniloae’s Trinitarian Ecclesiology: Orthodoxy and the Filioque. (London: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019. (310 pp.) [ISBN 9781978703780]

Jordan Jones

Viorel Coman’s Dumitru Stăniloae’s Trinitarian Ecclesiology: Orthodoxy and the Filioque consists of six chapters with the goal of demonstrating Stăniloae’s relevance for Trinitarian theology for the debates about the filioque and the broader practical implications for the ecclesiology of Western and Eastern Trinitarian theologies. “The monograph,” Coman reveals, “[gives] priority to Stăniloae’s ecclesiological synthesis between Christology and pneumatology” (p. 263). With the first chapter giving necessary background information to help contextualise the Orthodox Church and Stăniloae, including his influence on and the influence on him of the Neo-patristic movement, Western theology, and Trinitarian theology. Chapter 2 is less bibliographical in its overview of “Stăniloae’s Early Approach (1964-1978) to the Filioque.” In it, Coman profitably appropriates Kallistos Ware’s labels of “hawks” and “doves” to differentiate those scholars who perceived the filioque to have severe repercussions on Western theology, namely in ecclesiology, and those who saw the debate as insignificant and speculative (p. 25). After analysing the hawks and doves of the East and the West, respectively, Coman explores Stăniloae’s engagement with the filioque. After initially indicating that Stăniloae’s scholarship was silent on the topic for over 20 years until 1964, Coman explores how Stăniloae’s subsequent reaction to the filioque was a reflection of his Orthodox influences, primarily Photius, the three Byzantine theologians—Gregory II of Cyprus, Gregory

Palamas, and Joseph Bryennios, and his contemporaries—Vladimir Lossky and Nikos Nissiotis (pp. 34-6). The chapter concludes with the three primary problems that Stăniloae accused the filioque of having on ecclesiology and soteriology. Coman critiques fairly both sides, with him perceptively noting that discourses on the Trinity being a model for the church logically entail Trinitarian doctrine having ecclesiological implications and him irenically challenging the “regrettable caricatures” of Christomonism and pneumatomonism (ibid., p. 51). His conclusion to the chapter helpfully specifies his “spectrum” of hawks and doves within Orthodoxy: Lossky—Stăniloae—Nissiotis—Zizioulas—Ware—Evdokimov—Bulgakov (p. 53). However, Coman claims that Stăniloae was the only hawk whose position on the issue changed over time (p. 54). Chapter 3 concerns “Stăniloae’s Approach to the Filioque in an Ecumenical Context” which explores his “methodology of conversation” for the rest of his career (p. 62). Coman demonstrates that Stăniloae held in tension in his later years “Orthodoxy’s task of departing from the Western scholastic and neoscholastic influences (the goal of the Neo-Patristic synthesis) … with Orthodoxy’s task of letting itself be enriched by the spiritual and theological values of others Christian traditions (the goal of “open sobornicity”)” (p. 62). Coman offers in this chapter unique insight into how open sobornicity is both an idea within Stăniloae’s thought and an implemented methodology within his engagement in “the Trinitarian debates on the filioque and its subsidiary aspects … [as witnessed by]: (i) the very positive evaluation of the role of cataphatic theology for the doctrine of the Trinity; (ii) the incorporation of Augustine’s motif of the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son; and (iii) Stăniloae’s willingness to read back from the economic Trinity into the immanent Trinity”(ps. 65, 76). The final section is devoted to Stăniloae’s approach to the filioque from 1978 to 1993 where dialogue on the filioque at numerous “ecumenical meetings and international theological conferences … in a more cordial context” led to him becoming ecumenical over polemical (p. 76). Thus, Stăniloae’s later posture to Trinitarian dialogue is pithily summarised in Coman’s précis: “No longer a hawk[,] not yet a dove” (p. 87). Chapter 4, “The “Holy Grail” of Twentieth-Century Christian Theology”, explores numerous ecclesiological syntheses between Christology and Pneumatology within the works of selected “influential Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians: [Florovsky, Lossky, and Zizioulas], on the Orthodox side; [Congar and Kasper], on the Roman Catholic side” (p. 96). The selection of these theologians was, Coman notes, “guided by the criterion of ethnic and cultural diversity” although he acknowledges that other significant theologians with their corresponding ecclesiological syntheses “[deserved] attention” too (p. 96). However, he does not specify why Roman Catholic scholars were selected over Protestant ones to represent the Western tradition, despite him mentioning relevant and reputable Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars in the previous chapters. Nonetheless, Coman’s choice of conversation partners is effective in situating Stăniloae in the contexts of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and wider Trinitarian scholarship, including Spirit Christology. He also helpfully offers his parameters for ecclesiological syntheses between Christology and pneumatology, noting that such projects attempt to “harmonize Ignatius of Antioch’s statement, ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia (wherever Christ is, there is the church) with Irenaeus of Lyon’s assertion,

ubi Spiritus Sanctus, ibi ecclesia (wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is the Church,” to the extent that none of the two main pillars of the Church takes precedence over the other” (p. 95). Accordingly, Coman welcomes Congar and Kasper’s Trinitarian insight for ecclesiology that “Christology is conditioned by the Holy Spirit (pneumatological Christology) to the same extent that the Spirit is conditioned by Christ (Christological

pneumatology)” (p. 123).

Chapter 5 covers “Stăniloae’s Early Ecclesiology (1938-1964): A Christological Approach to the Church.” In section one, Stăniloae identifies the Church as the extension of Christ (Christus prolongatus) or the Incarnation continued (incarnatio continua), “the closing act of Christ’s soteriological work,” the Body of Christ or “Mystical Body” and totus Christus in union with and under the authority of Christ, the Head (p. 145). Alongside these Christocentric tropes, Stăniloae also began describing “the Trinity [as] not only a model for the life of the Church but also its source and ultimate aim or climax” (p. 144). In section two, Coman contextualises the church’s sacramentality with commentary on Roman Catholicism before turning to Stăniloae’s sacramental theology of “The Created World: The First Sacrament” (pp. 151-2), “Christ: The New Sacrament” (pp. 152-3), and “The Church of Christ: The Third Sacrament” (pp. 153-6). After exploring the paradox of the Church as “Condition of the Sacraments” or “Result of the Sacraments”, Coman comments that for Stăniloae “the basis of the Church’s existence and its source of life remains Christ, for the Church is not a self-sufficient reality that exists in circularity (Church-sacraments; sacraments-Church); but its existence and vigour ultimately depend upon Christ” (p. 158). Coman concludes the chapter with criticism of the absent synthesis between Christology and pneumatology in Stăniloae’s early ecclesiology when he “drastically criticized Western theology for its forgetfulness of the role of the Holy Spirit while his own doctrine of the Church before 1964 was equally grounded in Christology. References to the Holy Spirit appear only sporadically in his early publications on the doctrine of the Church” (p. 159). Chapter 6, which accounts for a third of the book’s pages, is titled “The Church in Light of the Mystery of the Trinity: Stăniloae’s Late Ecclesiology (1964-1993).” It has four sections. In the first section on the topic of Stăniloae’s mature theology of “The Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love”, Coman identifies Stăniloae’s simultaneous apophatic and cataphatic attitudes, through acknowledging the “The Trinity as a Mystery” yet also constructively incorporating “the paradigm[s] of love and communion into his Trinitarian theology” of God immanently and economically (p. 171). After identifying Stăniloae’s appreciation for the fittingness of a loving God in three persons, Coman examines the “Dynamics of the Trinitarian Loving Communion” moving from Father to Son to Holy Spirit (pp. 173-6) and “The Mystery of Unity in Diversity” within the Trinity through treating the topics of “The Monarchy of the Father,” “The Unity of Essence,” “Perichoresis and Intersubjectivity,” and “Divine Energies” (pp. 176-83). Section 2 concerns “two definitions of the Church [that] could serve as a guide through Stăniloae’s Trinitarian ecclesiology”: the Church as an “icon” of the Trinity and the Church as participant in the katabatic and anabatic movements of the Triune God of love (p. 184). Although Coman acknowledges, and potentially overstates, the point that “both definitions are interrelated, for the Church as an icon of the Trinity implies the idea that it partakes of the Trinitarian communion and vice-versa ” (ibid.).

The third section revolves around “Stăniloae’s concern to anchor the ecclesiological synthesis between Christology and pneumatology in the indissoluble union that eternally exists between the Son and the Holy Spirit” (p. 217). That is, his synthesis was characterised by beliefs in “(i) the irreducibility of the Spirit to the Son and the affirmation of his equal importance with the Logos; and (ii) the inseparability of the Son from the Spirit” economically (p. 197). Notably, Stăniloae’s synthesis relied on “relations of reciprocity” instead of “relations of opposition,” which distanced him from Lossky and Zizioulas and “placed him closer to … Congar” (p. 197) Coman’s primary reservation about Stăniloae’s synthesis is that the indissoluble union marked by reciprocity “[risks] confusing the work of Christ with the work of the Spirit” (p. 197). The final section provides Stăniloae’s evaluation of two noteworthy ecclesiological models from recent Orthodox memory: the ecclesiology of sobornost associated with Khomiakov and Afanasiev’s Eucharistic ecclesiology. Stăniloae responded positively overall to Khomiakov, according to Coman, but was “more critical” of Afanasiev, i.e. critiquing his emphasis on the Eucharist while neglecting the church’s wider activities and

identity as a “sacramental community” (p. 246).

I commend Coman for his thorough analysis of Stăniloae’s corpus and extensive engagement with Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians in order to present systematically the relevance of Stăniloae’s contributions for robust contemporary Trinitarian ecclesiologies. However, I hope to see him develop in the future a “more critical approach to [Stăniloae’s] theology” that builds on his legacy (p. 267).

Michael J. Gorman, Abide and Go: Missional Theosis in the Gospel of John. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. (258 pp.) [ISBN 9781532615450]

Kenneth M. Keyte

In his book Abide and Go, Michael Gorman proposes a theotic-missional reading of John by which the narrative pattern of abide and go is made obvious to the reader. Gorman explains what a theotic-missional reading involves (Ch. 1); identifies the narrative missional pattern of abide and go (Chs. 2-3); exegetes John’s gospel theotically and missionally (Chs. 3-6); then reflects hermeneutically on contemporary missional theosis (Ch. 7). I began reading Abide and Go prior to the Covid pandemic but had to put it aside to concentrate on pastoring a church through these exceptional socially restrictive times. I completed the book after the initial restrictions had eased in New Zealand. Yet despite these restrictions, most churches found ways to continue patterns of abiding together and going into the world through innovative use of online social media. The church’s resilience in overcoming these barriers made clear to me the priority of the theotic-missional pattern of abide and go that Michael Gorman exegetes from John’s gospel. Gorman offers three pairs of general and contextual questions for a missional reading of scripture. (1) What does the text say about the missio Dei? And what does the text say about the missio Dei here and now? (2) What does the text say about the condition of humanity and the world, about the need for God’s saving

mission? And what does the text say about the specific condition and need of humanity and the world here and now, in our context? (3) What does this text say about the nature and mission of God’s people as participants in the missio Dei? And what does the text say to us about the call of God on us to participate in the missio Dei here and now? (p. 6) Gorman offers two further questions for a theotic reading of scripture. (1) Who is the God in whose life and mission we participate, and what is this God like? (2) How do we participate in the life of this God? (p. 21). Gorman explains the title of his book “Abide and go” as the theological paradox of John’s gospel that unites spirituality (“abide”) and mission (“go”). He calls their marriage “missional theosis” (p. 9). In other words, a disciple of Jesus becomes like God by participating in the mission of God. Gorman concludes that the structure, theme and content of the first half of John’s gospel (Chapters 1-12) bears witness to a missional Jesus who has come to bring the love, light, and abundant life of God into the world. A primary aspect of Jesus’ mission in the world is being the agent of spiritual rebirth to create an extended family of God, who are swept up into the life and love of God. The mission is also cruciform, as it participates in the paradoxically life-giving death of Jesus (p. 69). Gorman shifts from overview mode to a tighter theotic-missional reading of the second half of John. Perichoresis—the mutual indwelling within God particularly between Father and Son (in John) but also involving the Spirit—is the theological starting point for human participation in the life of God (p. 72). Gorman notes that in John, perichoresis is at the very core of the Gospel’s good news, that is, Jesus and the community of disciples are the dwelling place of God. Consequently, the ultimate purpose of believers’ participation in God’s own unity and indwelling is to missionally demonstrate God’s love for the world in Jesus. Gorman concludes that, for John, there is no participation in God without mission, and no mission without participation in God: mission and spirituality are inseparable (p.73-74). Gorman’s theotic-missional exegesis of John 15 is the most obvious example of the narrative pattern of abide and go. Gorman calls it the metaphor of a mobile vine since the verbs “do” and “depart” that John uses, have to do with acting and moving. “Although healthy vines and branches naturally grow and bear fruit, they do not naturally move from place to place. The disciples, however, have been appointed to go, to depart (15:16). They constitute, in other words, a mobile vine, a community of centripetally oriented love that shares that love centrifugally as they move out from themselves, all the while abiding in the vine, the very source of their life, love and power to do” (pp. 101-2). In contrast, the theotic-narrative pattern of abide and go is implicit rather than explicit in John’s narratives of enemy-love. Gorman cites examples of the Johanine narrative portraying Jesus as practicing enemy-love and implicitly teaching his disciples to go and do the same. Jesus washing the feet of his enemy (John 13), his rejection of violence toward enemies (John 18:10-11), and his offering of shalom and the Spirit (John 20:21-23), and rehabilitation of Peter (21:15-19), are all examples of an implicit pattern of abide and go. In Gorman’s prior works, he identified narrative patterns of cruciformity in Paul’s letters. In Abide and Go he has used his expert eye for narrative patterns to identify the pattern of abide and go throughout

John’s gospel. His work is particularly helpful for practitioners as it assists them to understand that spiritual practices intended for helping people abide in Christ are inseparable from missional activities for expressing the love of Jesus in the world. Whenever we interconnect spiritual practices with mission endeavours we can expect to become more Christ-like as a result. Whenever we decouple theosis from mission we should not be surprised if little transformation occurs. However, an area of Gorman’s work that I found somewhat underwhelming was his lack of direct application of the missional hermeneutic he introduced at the start. After introducing the method, Gorman finally returns to answer the three general questions from John in overview fashion in his final chapter (p. 182-184). He then steps back into today’s world by citing several contemporary examples of communities practicing patterns of abide and go. As helpful as these are, I wonder how much more might have been gleaned from the chapters of John’s gospel if Gorman had asked and answered his six missional questions all the way through his exegesis of John? Nevertheless, especially in our present contemporary church context where our usual patterns of abide and go have been severely disrupted by social restrictions, Gorman’s work on missional theosis / abide and go, raises the priority of developing practices for abiding and going into our Covid and postCovid world.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. (425 pp.) [ISBN 9781433556333]

Stanley S. Maclean

In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by church historian Carl Trueman we have another diagnosis of the ills of modern (American) society, and one for a Christian readership. For Trueman, the cause of these ills is the common understanding of what it means to be an individual self. Specifically, it is the sexualizing of individual self-identity that is epitomized in the claim heard nowadays: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (p. 19). Trueman wants to know why such a claim is treated with respect and sympathy today when it would have been derided as nonsensical just a few generations ago. Naturally, he looks for an explanation in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But he believes the explanation is to be located centuries earlier, in the “revolution of the self” that began in the 1700s with the thoughts of Jean-Jacque Rousseau especially. Rousseau, he feels, sowed the seeds for the modern “construction of selfhood and human authenticity” (p.

125).

The book is divided into four parts. Part one examines the “Architecture of the Revolution”; part two the “Foundations of the Revolution”; part three the ‘sexualization of the Revolution”; while last part deals with the “Triumphs of the Revolution.” In the first part, Trueman utilizes the conceptual categories of the philosopher Charles Taylor, the ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, and the sociologist Philip Rieff to get a

handle on the “pathologies of this present age” (p. 102). Trueman borrows Taylor’s concept of the ‘social imaginary” as well as his theory of how the notion of the “expressive self” emerged in modern society. He finds MacIntyre’s concept of “emotivism” indispensable for understanding why serious debates today on sexual ethics and sexual identity are impossible. Rieff is the least familiar intellectual of the three, but

Trueman marshals his concepts—“the triumph of the therapeutic”, “psychological man”, “the anticulture” and “deathworks” (p. 26) in his diagnosis of the sickness of contemporary culture in parts two and three. As indicated already, the “foundations” of the revolution of the self, for Trueman, were being put down in the eighteenth century, beginning with Rousseau. In him the “essential dynamics of the modern understanding of the self are… already in place” (p. 129). But Trueman believes that the English Romantic poets of the 1800s— in particular Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake—fortified and propagated this understanding of the self. In particular, their disdain for monogamy and traditional marriage paved the way for the modern politicising of sex and the redefinition of marriage. The foundations of the revolution were completed when Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin convinced many, in their different idioms, that human nature is malleable, that there is no human substance created

in the image of God. “All three … provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity… (166).” The “revolution of self,” after all, rests on the assumption that one can “make and remake personal identity” at will, while transgenderism is just the most radical outgrowth so far of this

assumption. Freud, of course, is the figure who ultimately sexualizes the new understanding of self-identity that was taking place in his day. Indeed, Trueman believes that Freud is the pivotal figure in his sweeping narrative of the triumph of the self. “Freud’s fingerprints are all over the Western culture of the last century, from university lecture halls to art galleries to television commercials” (p. 203). While Rosseau and the Romantics psychologized the self, Freud was instrumental not only in sexualizing the self but also in turning sexuality into an identity. It does not matter that Freud’s psychological theories have been discredited. His lasting legacy is the belief that ‘sex…is the real key to human existence” (p. 204). The revolution of the self was completed when sex was “politicized” by representatives of the New Left, specifically Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, when they married the “political concerns of Marxism with psycho-analytical claims of Freud” (p. 230). After them, the need for liberation from economic oppression expanded into the need for liberation from sexual repression. The mainstreaming in society of the “erotic,” the “therapeutic,” and lately “transgenderism” are proofs, for Trueman, that the revolution of the self that began with Rousseau and the Romantics has finally “triumphed.” Those phenomena are really only symptoms of a pathological “social imaginary” that has captivated all of us. Genealogies of modernity have become fashionable, and this one by Trueman has to be one of the most engaging and accessible; and it is doubtless the only one that devotes so much space to sex—and perhaps too much. Although the narrative tends to fall apart near the end of the book, the author adroitly holds it together. To his credit, Trueman also avoids a polemical tone and resists fanning the flames of the

“culture war.” “The revolution of the self,” he concludes, “is now the revolution of us all” (p. 381). Still, in the “Concluding Unscientific Prologue,” he helpfully suggests ways for people, and the church, to deal with this revolution.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self certainly fills a gap in our knowledge of the modern identity, but its scope is too narrow to give anything close to a complete picture. To get that, one needs to study other works of the same genre, beginning with those that Trueman draws upon, especially Taylors’s Sources of the Self and his Malaise of Modernity.

Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love. Grand Rapids, MI:

Eerdmans, 2020. (xii + 795 pp.) [ISBN 9780802875648]

Jonathan R. Robinson

Douglas Campbell is a prolific and innovative Pauline scholar who achieved some prominence in the field, particularly for his tome The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009). He is also a New Zealander, a graduate and later faculty member of the University of Otago, and now a professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in the USA. Hence, he is well known in the “Pacific” context, although not personally to this reviewer. This new book, while building on his previous work on Paul, is not a Pauline theology (in the vein of James Dunn’s Theology of Paul the Apostle (T&T Clark, 2003)) but is very much an exposition of Campbell’s own theology. Indeed, it is as much in tribute to Karl Barth (hence the “dogmatics” of the title) as it is to Paul, although Campbell’s understanding of Paul is the bedrock of the volume. However, the author’s understanding of Paul is not the only foundation on which Campbell builds his theological edifice, drawing deeply on Barth as well as Stanley Hauerwas and many other theological resources both ancient and modern. Campbell also brings insights from a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, physics, and his own life experience, to inform this constructive work of theology. The wide variety of different disciplines Campbell interacts with are a stimulating feature of this book. There is something a little strange, then, from the start, with a systematic theology which embraces a wide range of theological and influences as well as theories from the natural sciences, but only focuses on one voice in the canonical Biblical witness. This is not something Campbell ever tries to justify, even as there is a very clear sense that he offers this as a Christian theology, without need for further reflection on the Gospels, or the Old Testament, or indeed the remainder of the New Testament. He will very occasionally cite the Gospels or other parts of the Bible, but the exegetical focus never moves away from Paul’s letters (working with a 10-letter corpus. The Pastoral Epistles, he argues, are the product of a faithful Pauline disciple, pp. 5, 720-40). This is especially apparent in his discussion of “covenant” which seems to rely far more on analogy to Campbell’s own experience of parenting than the concept as employed in the Bible or ancient Judaism (pp. 175-77). Other times, his argument would have been considerably

strengthened by non-Pauline biblical texts which state in stronger terms, things which Campbell found implicit in Paul. A particular glaring example of this would be the gospel tradition about Jesus saying there is no marriage at the resurrection (Mark 12:25; Matt 22:30; Luke 20:35) in Campbell’s discussion of marriage as an interim order (p. 607). This book is extremely readable. Campbell manages this in part by not burdening his main text with many references or discussions of other work. The argument of each chapter is followed by a list of main theses from the chapter (essentially bullet points of the chapter content), then short discussion of key scriptural references, key secondary readings, and further reading recommendations before the chapter’s bibliography. This layout probably reflects Campbell’s approach to teaching (anecdotes of conversations or

reactions of students to his teaching pepper the text), and it has to be said it is a very effective way of presenting the work. Not only does it make the main text highly readable, but the these summaries make it easy to quickly review any chapter, and the smaller chapter-specific bibliographies make them significantly more likely to be read. On the other hand, Campbell’s conversational style occasionally indulges (apparent) hyperbole, and unfortunately, this can occasionally confuse the reader as to whether they have encountered an error of overstatement or just a figure of speech. The twenty-nine chapters of the book are arranged in four unequal divisions. The first part, “Resurrection”, moves in eight chapters from the revelation of God in Christ as the starting point of theology to election, the divine plan “that everyone should bear the image of the risen Jesus and should live in communion with him” (p.186). Part two, “Formation”, examines in six chapters how the theology of election to divine communion should manifest itself in the lives of individuals and the Christian community.

Part three, “Mission”, takes four chapters to consider the Pauline way of engaging beyond the church with those culturally different to ourselves. The final part, “Navigation”, spends four chapters laying the groundwork for a general approach to ethical questions before applying this approach to gender and sexuality issues over three chapters and then two on the question of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The ninth chapter of this section briefly discusses the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) as an example of Pauline ethical navigation at work in the generation after Paul. The focus of the latter three sections give some credence to Campbell’s claim that the book is not just a dogmatics but also “a manual of Pauline church planting” (p. 741). Indeed, for this reader Campbell was at his best when most practical, showing great sensitivity and genuine insight into difficult pastoral and missional issues. One great strength of Campbell’s work here is its relevance to the current cultural moment of the Western church as it struggles to engage a rapidly changing society without and the polarizing differences within. Campbell accurately observes that “In any authentic missional situation Christians will probably end up taking heat from both sides [i.e. parent culture of missionaries and culture of converts]” (p. 499). He brings pertinent examples not just from Paul but also from the history of Protestant and Catholic mission. Campbell clearly argues that “a navigation into difference is a fundamental feature of Pauline mission” (p. 506). As the church encounters new cultures, it must adapt and contextualize. Rather than something to be avoided, “we must embrace contextualization, with all its creativity and risks and resulting offensive

diversifications, as fully as we can. This all seems to be part of God’s great plan” (p. 504). For those in engaged in missional theology, this might sound rather obvious, but the location (academic biblical studies), creativity, and rigour of Campbell’s argument on this point will be of interest and worth engaging. The concentration on the Pauline text is variable from chapter to chapter and sometimes hardly discernable. Some chapters seem to be crying out for discussion related to Paul’s writings but simply do not connect. For example, chapter 9 discusses possible approaches to received traditions without connecting with Paul’s own talk of law/Torah. In fact, the discussion about Paul and Torah does eventuate, but not until chapters 27 and 28, near the end of the book. For me, this meant Campbell’s basic account of Pauline theology was frustratingly incomplete, making it hard to evaluate the book as it progressed. Even when Paul’s texts are being discussed in more detail, the exegesis tends to be cursory and relies, to some extent, on Campbell’s earlier works having been digested and found convincing. Rather than a strictly exegetical argument, the book builds a theological argument using selected moments in which Campbell discerns that Paul is correct, against those moments when Paul is deemed less correct, accommodated to his milieu, or altogether wrong. Many before have tried to discover a consistent system behind Paul’s thought, while others have labelled Paul hopelessly inconsistent, Campbell finds that Paul’s theology is inherently unstable and inconsistent as apocalyptic/ infralapsarian aspects of Paul’s thought are sometimes contradicted by foundationalist/ supralapsarian aspects. Thus, Campbell works towards a theology which is more Pauline than Paul himself, producing a theology that Paul would agree with—if he had the advantage of the perspective of a well-read 21st century biblical scholar, like Douglas Campbell. While Campbell’s intention is unusual, not fitting comfortably in either biblical studies nor systematic theology, I do not think this is an invalid or uninteresting exercise. It does, however, further raise the question of the role of scripture in Campbell’s theology. Campbell treats Paul’s writings in an “essentially historical” manner “to reconstruct his thinking in his own context” (p. 627). The revelation on which Pauline Dogmatics is built is the revelation to Paul as Campbell reconstructs it. The status of the scriptural text is only as a witness to Paul’s experience and theology of that revelation. “But,” as Campbell admits, “this is not the way Paul used scripture” (p. 627). Unfortunately, Campbell never clearly articulates a theology of scripture. In a short section on hermeneutics beyond historical readings, Campbell seems only concerned to “convince the many Jews or Christians who think that these texts as Scripture are relevant in some sense” (p.628). It might appear that hermeneutics is simply a practical discipline to generate the desired outcome rather than a sincere attempt to hear something true, challenging, or new from the scripture. Perhaps the best clue to Campbell’s theology of scripture is his methodology of Sachkritik (sense/subject interpretation), demythologization, and amplification (p. 7–8). The scriptures, or at least Paul’s writings, contain insights, but these have to be extracted, adapted and developed. They testify to revelation, but not reliably. The remainder of the review will discuss this methodology and examples of its results in Campbell’s volume.

For Campbell, “Sachkritik will mean pressing Paul’s Trinitarian and Christocentric claims over against any instructions that do not seem to be grounded particularly securely in those realities–places, that is, where Paul must interpret Paul” (p7). The key starting point for this Pauline theology is God’s apocalyptic revelation of God’s self in Jesus Christ (p. 20–22). This is a revelation that stands without any external proof

or warrant, and to desire or claim otherwise is epistemic “idolatry” or “foundationalism” (p. 37). The distinction between revelation and foundationalism does a great deal of theological work in the book. Anything that can be labelled foundationalist, either in Paul or in any other school of thought, is summarily dismissed.

The first major section sets out Campbell’s understanding of this revelation, a Trinitarian God of love who desires to bring all creation into communion, and has overcome the problem of sin and death through the resurrection, and has unconditionally and irrevocably elected everyone to “the ultimate destiny of eternal communion” (p. 175). Through much of this section, Campbell seems to be pointing towards universal salvation, but never quite makes it clear. It is not until chapter 18 that he finally states that Paul is a universalist “implicitly” and that to fail to infer this is to unleash “horrible internal contradictions” (436). His argument, when he finally gets to it, is a strong one: without universal salvation, Christ’s work is inferior to Adam’s, who brought about universal death (1 Cor 15:22; Rom 5:15-17, p. 429-32, 436-37). Here then, is Campbell’s Sachkritik at work, as the universalism he finds to be implicit in Paul’s Christology corrects our reading of Paul’s explicit statements about judgement. They are to be read as describing “evaluative” and not “punitive” judgement (e.g. Rom 14:10-12; 1 Cor 3:13-17; p. 420). For this argument to be fully convincing a more canonical approach would be helpful, again, especially one dealing with Jesus’ overt statements about punishment in the Gospels. Campbell’s demythologization is easier to describe and is perhaps less fundamental to the project. Rather than stripping Paul of “mythological” elements, à la Bultmann, Campbell’s demythologization is the “modern person informed by modern science” needing to “update Paul a little . . . without losing our grasp on those central truths about God” (p. 8). For example, Campbell finds that Paul’s “commitment to an intermediate state [that is, between death and resurrection] necessarily commits him to the concession that

human existence with Jesus is possible without a body.” This potentially allows gnostic readers to override “Paul’s explicit commitments to embodied human existence”, employing a “Sachkritik” of their own (p. 155). To solve this Pauline contradiction Campbell applies Einstein’s theory of relativity, to argue that we are working with a “false conception of time” (p. 156) and that God, being outside of time, does not wait to resurrection our bodies but brings the dead into “another time, in the sense of another dimension” where, “they dwell with their new bodies, which are of course present to them but unrealized for us, because we live in the space time continuum that has ‘not yet’ been transformed as a whole” (p. 159). Thus, the need for an intermediate state is eliminated. The theory of relativity comes in useful for Campbell again, when later discussing how Jesus is somehow present in the history of Israel (1 Cor 10:1-4) and the question of how all Israel will be saved (Rom 11:26, p. 510-11).

Amplification is Campbell’s term for moving “beyond the strict boundaries of [Paul’s] original conceptuality, but . . . in a way that is in direct continuity with it” (p.8). In other words, Campbell seeks to establish the trajectory of Paul’s most important insights, how they have developed in church history and how they might be further developed today. For example, 1 Cor 8:6 where Jesus is incorporated into the Israelite Shema and titled “Lord” forms a trajectory with later Christian creeds affirming the Trinity. Paul did not have “a full-fledged doctrine of the trinity” but the details and implications of such teaching are “all implicit in the claim that Jesus is Lord” (p. 25). Campbell builds further on these insights to establish that the relationality of the Trinity is the goal of existence: “God is a personal God and desires to commune with us as persons” (p. 194). Thus, for Campbell, the creation story and its subsequent fall should not be the beginning of our Christian gospel. This would be to suggest that the revelation of Jesus is the solution to our sin problem, rather than God’s intention all along. Instead, the gospel needs to be told as a retrospective story, beginning with the end, that is, Jesus saving work to bring us into communion with God (p. 82). This narrative move not only allows a retrospective interpretation of creation, Israel, etc., in the light of Christ, but also effectively relativizes anything which does not belong to the core storyline of humanity being brought into Trinitarian communion. Thus, creation itself becomes a “temporary ordering structure”, or even a “temporary, emergency measure” and no part of it is necessary to “God’s original and perfect design” to elect us in Christ (p. 581-82). Likewise, the law of Moses is itself an interim arrangement that is entirely negotiable on cultural grounds (p. 583). Pushing this trajectory, Campbell engages the language of supra- and infralapsarianism. Infralapsarianism (whereby God’s election is a consequence of the Fall) is, for Campbell, a form of

foundationalism whereby the temporary ordering structures of creation are treated as immutable. Conversely, supralapsarianism (whereby God’s election precedes the Fall) affirms that, “Trinitarian communion is God’s plan for us, which was established ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1:4) and is the only form or structure (if these terms are even appropriate) that is nonnegotiable” (p. 603). Campbell then categorizes the patriarchy and heteronormativity found in the creation accounts and Paul’s writings as being temporary, cultural, and therefore potentially negotiable (p. 635-42). Practically, this then enables a relational account of marriage that “has no objections to adults of any sexual orientation or gender construction covenanting with one another in marriage” (p. 641). For many, Campbell’s conclusions will seem radical. It is important to state that my summary in a review like this cannot do justice to Campbell’s extensive, nuanced, and extended argumentation. He maintains an impressive theological consistency throughout, and while one can disagree with his starting points, his internal logic is hard to fault. Not only that, but he effectively demonstrates how theological starting points, when followed consistently, can have radical practical outcomes. Reading Pauline Dogmatics, then, is a useful exercise in biblical-theological method, whether or not you agree with where he starts or ends up. In particular, Campbell’s at times ruthless, parsing of Paul’s theology is a refreshing change from more biblicist approaches that assume a seamless system can be constructed from Paul’s diachronic and ad

hoc letters. Campbell dares to critique Paul with Paul and, by accepting the possibility of inconsistency and instability (something that most of us can relate to personally), nonetheless finds Paul a rich resource for doing theology and encountering and understanding God’s revelation of electing love in Jesus Christ. This is a hard book to sum up. Its length limits those to whom it could be usefully recommended. I think this tome would have been better as several smaller books. For example, one book making an argument for universalism, another outlining a Pauline approach to missional contextualization, another on sexuality, and another on the question of Jewish-Christian relations. Campbell has pertinent insights and compelling arguments to bring in all these areas, but by presenting the whole thing as a single “dogmatics” the whole does not quite equal the sum of its parts. As a dogmatic work, too many basic questions (e.g., a theology of scripture) are not even broached. Likewise, its failure to engage the whole canon of scripture is a significant shortcoming. That said, this is a book I will come back to. Each chapter makes an interesting and frequently novel argument. It is a useful reference work, and there are plenty of thought-provoking insights and possibilities for further research and development. In the end, Campbell’s wit, enthusiasm, originality, and erudition shine through and make this experiment in Pauline theology well worth wrestling with.