The Deliverance of God

I have the Deliverance of God. A copy of the book that is. Flip it's big! You can see why it took Douglas over fifteen years to write. It is without a doubt the book on Paul to read this year, all 1300 pages. Fantastic front cover, designed, like his previous book, by his wife Rachel. (The front cover says a foreword by N. T. Wright, but this doesn't appear, although he does write some words for the back cover). The only initial and relatively minor annoying feature is the lack of footnotes and instead an end 'notes' section. Douglas' thesis, if you've not read his work (like The Quest for Paul's Gospel, which is like a trailer/preview of Deliverance) before will utterly challenge how you interpret Paul's letters, especially Romans. I was fortunate to have been taught by Douglas for two years during my undergraduate degree (2002-3), which I discovered after reading the preface was still relatively early on in the book's development, and have been convinced of his reading of Paul for a while. It's still great to read it in its final form ... and will now be very interesting to see how its received. There is a special seminar devoted to it at SBL with Michael Gorman, Alan J. Torrance and Douglas Moo offering responses. One other small note for now is that you can find a reference to this page on my blog on p. 1041, footnote 10.

I know Douglas is taking something of a short break now in terms of new projects, although at some point in the future we should a book length treatment on Paul's biography. But for now we will just enjoy the Deliverance of God.

Comments

[blog.jasonstaples.com]

Douglas hasn't actually been on much of a break; he's been working on that bibliography project for a while already, though I wouldn't expect it in the immediate future. The guy is tireless.

[Terry]

Endnotes? Gah! The bane of readers everywhere!

[Sean Winter]

Hi Andy
I agree about endnotes. My hard copy has a cover without the reference to Wright. Perhaps he read the contents and thought twice about adding a foreword.

Oh, and reviews will be with you some time next week.

Sean