The Quest for Paul's Gospel: A Suggested Strategy

The Quest for Paul's Gospel is a new book of essays by Douglas Campbell, my Paul teacher from King's (Douglas is now at Duke).  The describes Campbell's own description of Paul's gospel, which is snappily titled PPME (Pneumatologically Participatory Martyrological Eschatology) and the reasons why he rejects the Justification by Faith (JF) model and Salvation Historical (SH) model.  This is an important contribution to Pauline scholarship and the church in general.

The book includes chapters on PPME, the place of Judaism, the problems of the JF model, the meaning of that contested word 'faith', the interpretation of faith in Gal 3 and Campbell's rereading of Rom 1:18-3:20.

Campbell writes 'Paul is a critical theatre of operations for the Christian and the church. He is an area, as the genuine strategists would say, of "vital interest". To lose him is potentially to lose everything' (p.3).  In other words, if we get Paul wrong, we get most of our theology wrong.

I am going to be interested in Tom Wright and Campbell interact. Wright's description of Paul's gospel is not I think ultimately vastly different from Campbell, however, Wright prior commitment to a salvation history model means I think he mis-reads passages like Romans 3-8 as relating to the Exodus. Whereas Campbell argues we must 'resist the SH approach as a fully fledged model of soteriology', he does claim that 'many of the central concerns of the SH model can be assimilated within the PPME model' (p.51).

Comments

[Phife]

I am in the third chapter of this book and thus far I must say that Campbell is convoluted and entirely too brief in his deconstructions of the JF and SH models. Not only that, but the "participatory" part of his PPME model seems to be a rough sketch at best. He says that Paul uses the phrase "in Christ" to describe this...however, Campbell never spends time discussing how one gets "in Christ," that is, how one participates in Christ. Maybe he will address this issue later...but until then, I am unconvinced.

[andy goodliff]

Keep reading for the entire argument. This is a suggested strategy where each chapter deserves a book-length treatment. Douglas' complete deconstruction of the JF model will come in his next book due out in 2007.