Doug Moo’s A Theology of Paul and his Letters

Last updated on: March 30, 2022 at 1:13 am by Ben Witherington

Doug Moo’s A Theology of Paul and his Letters 2022-01-29T12:29:19-05:00 Ben Witherington

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REVIEW OF DOUG MOO’S, A THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND HIS LETTERS (Zondervan, 2021, 784 pages)

Doug Moo has labored long in the Pauline vineyard, producing a plethora of articles, and commentaries, particularly on Romans and Galatians, and unsurprisingly, basically from a very traditional Reformed perspective on those documents. More on this in a moment. What we have in this particular volume is an exegesis of the whole Pauline corpus (all 13 books, all of which Doug believes can be rightly attributed to Paul) with copious notes, and then in the latter half of the book a synthesis of Pauline thought, taken on topic by topic, again in a quite tradition way. As it happens this book emerged only a little after James Thompson’s Apostle of Persuasion and there could hardly be more of a difference between two volumes of senior scholars who have written a lot on Paul. These two volumes represent their mature reflections, even magnum opuses on this subject. We will not rehearse here the review of Thompson (see the conversation on this blog which began with a review at the end of February and continued through much of this month).

The first thing to be said about Doug’s volume is that it is well-written, thorough, and detailed, with copious notes showing a wide arrange of reading on the subject. And the volume has mercifully few typos or howlers as the British would call them. I would say that at this juncture, there is no finer exposition of Paul from a contemporary yet quite traditional Reformed perspective than this one. And Doug is careful and very fair to views that at the end of the day he rejects. He does not dismiss them with a wave of the hand, or resort to polemics, he interacts and explains his reasons for not agreeing and then moves on. The volume has an excellent bibliography and indexes including works not in English. As such it is a very useful resource for further research. So, you may be asking, what are my issues with this volume?

My first issue is with the approach of this series Biblical Theology of the NT. Doug is not to blame for this orientation. Each of the volumes in this series takes some large portion of the NT and deals with it under the heading of Biblical Theology, this one on the Pauline corpus. One should have asked— What’s Wrong with this Picture? In the first place, Pauline theology is not Biblical theology in any normal sense of the word Biblical. Biblical Theology involves the theology not merely of the entire NT but of the entire Bible— hence the word Biblical (see my Cambridge 2020 volume entitled Biblical Theology. The Convergence of the Canon). I’m pretty sure this whole approach and labeling of this series would give someone like John Goldingay apoplexy.

Why, you ask? Because Pauline theology is not only just a part of the larger theological enterprise of Biblical theology, it is an incomplete part of that enterprise. For example, Paul does not deal at all with the crucial theological discussion of the virginal conception we find in Matthew and Luke. But even more to the point, what we have of Paul, even though it involves 13 letters, is an incomplete representation of his thought! Indeed, the attempt to construct ‘a theology of Paul’ from these ad hoc letters ignores the fact that they are ad hoc letters. They are examples of specific theologizing out of Paul’s narrative thought world and into certain first century contexts. Moo eschews a narratological approach to Pauline theology, and he makes some good points about the limitations of that approach, but there is no debating that Paul’s thought is not like post-Enlightenment thinking which involves putting together of abstract ideas like— justification leads to sanctification which leads to glorification etc. Paul’s whole approach to theology is profoundly more Jewish and also a word on target for specific problems and possibilities.

In short, you can’t do a Biblical Theology just focusing on Paul, unless of course like Marcion you really believe in a canon within the canon, or want to somehow privilege Pauline theology as the norm or apex of all Biblical theologizing, or at least NT theologizing. One example of what I mean will have to serve. Doug uses the concept of the eschatological Realm as a motif particularly for the synthetic part of his project in the second part of this book, which is fine, except that sometimes baseleia means reign rather than realm even in Paul’s seven uses of the phrase kingdom of God.

Doug emphasizes that Paul thinks the eschatological realm really begins with the death and resurrection of Jesus. I doubt this is right. Paul says in Galatians ‘when the time had fully come God sent forth his Son’. Surely the realm broke into human history with the incarnation. And here’s another problem with starting the clock at the death of Jesus. It provides us with an all too convenient way of ignoring the Gospels themselves which suggest that Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom during his earthly ministry, involving his word and deeds on earth. Real Biblical Theology would surely have to wrestle with the relationship of Paul’s thought world and that of Jesus, with Paul’s actions with that of Jesus’, not to mention wrestling with the relationship between Hebrews and the Pauline corpus, or the Johannine corpus and the Pauline corpus, or 1 Peter and the Pauline corpus etc. And of course Paul’s thought in relationship to the OT material he draws on. Moo does helpfully attend to the latter. Moos’ volume is a very good example of a particular reading of Pauline theology in a self-contained sort of way, but Biblical theology in the proper sense of the word, it is not. I suspect that the apostle to the Gentiles himself would be surprised at how many volumes have been devoted to ‘Pauline Theology’ when it should have been clear from Gal. 1-2 that the apostle was concerned (as for instance the beginning of 1 Cor. 15 suggests) with passing on the common faith in Christ of the apostles, though of course with his distinct take on it.

I, of course, have theological complaints about Reformed readings including Moo’s of various Pauline texts, for instance Ephesians 1. Let’s pause for a minute on just two verses— Ephes. 1.4-5: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will”. As Markus Barth pointed out long ago in his magisterial commentary on Ephesians, the key phrases here are ‘in him’ and ‘through Jesus Christ’. If we ask the question— Who existed before the foundations of the world and could be elected and destined in advance to do various things later on earth, the answer is the pre-existent Son of God. NOT US! We didn’t exist back then. We are only elect in Him. He is the Elect One, and he is the one destined in advance to be our savior. We were predestined not merely through Christ’s good work and God’s will, but ‘in Him’. This concept of corporate personality is crucial to understanding the passage. Israelites were elect in Israel, as a group, and BTW this did not guarantee the salvation of particular individual Israelites (see Rom. 9-11). Christians are elect in Christ, and not outside of him, they are chosen in Him, and not elsewhere, and he existed before the foundation the world to be picked by the Father to be the destined one, and the one in whom we could be destined for adoption to sonship.

How then do Christians get ‘into’ the corporate being that is Christ— this same passage tells us— by grace and through faith in Him. And while we are at it— yes faith is a gift from God, but faith has to be exercised by us, hence we have faith in him. Faith is not like a trophy handed to us and then set on the mantle. It is a living thing which involves trust, faithfulness and more. Assurance of salvation comes through that trust in Christ, like Abraham’s trust in God. Enough said on that subject. Not surprisingly Doug and I differ on ‘pistis Christou’ as well. It is not in Rom.3 an objective genitive any more than the preceding reference to ‘the faith of God’ or in the same context ‘the faith of Abraham’ refers to faith in God or faith in Abraham. In both cases it refers to the faithfulness of God, and to the trust or faithfulness of Abraham and also to the faithfulness of Christ, including his obedience unto death on the Cross. But Doug provides a good rationale for taking one particular traditional view.

Last but not least, it is quite amazing to me that a detailed treatment of Paul’s letters, including his theological arguments could manage to not adequately or more fully engage with the burgeoning rhetorical analysis of Paul’s letters and thought both in North America and in Europe, for instance as Thompson so helpfully does. This literature has increased dramatically since the 1990s with many good dissertations, monographs (see Margaret Mitchell’s seminal work on 1 Corinthians), commentaries and articles. Paul is not giving us a post-Reformation ordo salutis even in Romans, a linking together of abstract ideas about soteriology. He is giving us arguments for and about his Gospel of Jesus Christ. He is engaging in an ancient form of persuasion with ad hoc arguments and the occasional syllogism. This must be taken well into account if we are to do justice to what Paul’s thought world is, and what he is trying to accomplish with these articulations out of his narrative thought world.

Nevertheless, I am very thankful that Doug took the many years he did to produce this book. There is a lot of excellent exegesis, and interaction with other scholarly works on Paul, and we will be in his debt for a long time to come for putting this volume together. Well done Doug— hopefully inherit, if not the reward, at least the royalties.

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