"What St. Paul Really Said"

My journey through the works of N.T. Wright has hit another milestone: this past week I finished his book “What Saint Paul Really Said.” This is one of the best books of Wright’s I’ve read, up-to-par with both “Surprised by Hope” and “The Challenge of Jesus.” I give this book two thumbs up (three if I were able). He begins the book by looking at the background to St. Paul within the lens of second-temple Palestinian Judaism and the hope for the end of exile and all that entailed, as well as within the lens of Paul’s history as a Pharisee. He then launches into writing about Paul’s conversion, then delves into some of the more bulkier chapters. Throughout the book he writes a lot about the gospel—what it is and what it is not; and he does well to separate the actual gospel from the gospel’s effects on the hearts of its hearers—and his chapter on “the righteousness of God” was spell-binding. I was familiar with the N.P.P. approach through the works of James Dunn and Michael Gorman, and N.T. Wright really set the bar with this one, analyzing various interpretations of “the righteousness of God” and, in classic Wright fashion, showing which one held the most promise (“the righteousness of God” being God’s covenant faithfulness, and the righteousness he gives being membership within his covenant rather than some metaphysical “righteousness” in the moral sense). His chapter on justification was no more than a tease, and I’m excited to read his book called, quite aptly, “Justification.” He writes a lot about Paul’s message to the pagans and contrasts it with his message to the Jews, and he says that the message evangelical Christianity generally proclaims is Paul’s message to the Jews rather than his message to the pagans (his chapter on that was remarkably rewarding). In the second-to-last chapter he takes everything he’s written and brings it together in several threads of thought, the best ones being about justification & the church, and how the gospel proclamation demands that we preach the dethronement of all other gods (he specifically looks at sex, money, and power—Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche). Next up is “Evil & The Justice of God”, and I’m already halfway through it (it’s the shortest of his books that I own).