andygoodliff: Douglas Campbell on Paul, Apocalyptic, Prison, Biography his new book

In February this year, Douglas Campbell published Paul: An Apostle's Journey (Eerdmans). (I review it here.)
He has very kindly agreed to some answers to some questions about his new book and wider field of Pauline studies. Enjoy!
(For those in distance of London, Douglas is speaking at St Mellitus College on Monday 21 May, 6.45pm.)

What led you to spend most of your life reading, researching, and trying to understand the apostle Paul and his letters?

An excellent question! Hopefully it was God or I have made a horrible mistake.

In a little more detail … I was a convert, walking the aisle, quite literally, at the age of twenty. As a student at the time I was drawn naturally to “the book,” which is to say, to the Bible. I read it voraciously, and ended up pursuing graduate studies at the University of Toronto in Religious Studies. Someone told me I needed to study with Richard Longenecker there so I enrolled in his famous class on Romans. It was so popular that they had to move all the tables out of the dining hall and move in chairs every week because it was the only room at Wycliffe College big enough to hold the crowd. When Dick started to teach, I really caught a vision of what a person could accomplish for the gospel when they were immensely learned in scholarly terms, immersed in the biblical text, but also someone of integrity, with deep spiritual roots. It was a powerful thing—a powerful presence. So I committed to the study of Romans from that moment forward in my graduate studies, and to being a teacher of Paul, and I’ve never really escaped!

Fortunately, Paul’s interpretation is so contested that there has been plenty to keep me occupied since. As Dick himself would say (quoting an old academic saw), “to write something you have to love your subject and hate what everyone else is writing about it,” and that has been very much the case for me in relation to Paul. I have always found Paul’s thought deeply inspiring and profound, and been both amazed and outraged by what everyone is saying that he thought! The entire field of Pauline studies needs to change! So that has been my immodest goal now for some time. People need to know – to borrow a phrase – what Paul really said.

What might the future hold for Pauline studies? Where might the lay of the land be in ten years time?

Speaking optimistically, in faith and hope, the future is apocalyptic! (See more on this just below.)

Speaking pessimistically, the lay of the land will still probably be quite embattled and even gridlocked, which is not a good thing, and especially not for the church.

There are important demographic forces at work here. The centre of gravity for Pauline interpretation is still the USA because of the vast numbers of people there who still attend church and really care about the Bible. This results in a lot of money and teaching flowing into academic work. But with the rapid decline of Liberal and mainline churches, the Academy will be increasingly influenced by scholars emerging from conservative backgrounds. (Conservative churches are in decline as well but not as rapidly.) And those scholars have been taught that the Gospel is based on Paul and specifically on what scholars know there as “the Lutheran reading” or “the old perspective.” They have also been taught to defend that version of the gospel tooth and nail. This leads in my view to fairly repetitive dynamics in the scholarly world at conferences like SBL.

There are trenchant restatements of the old perspective. (“Isn’t this just obvious?!”) There are restatements of the problems scholars have detected in that view for about a hundred years. (“Shouldn’t we be more careful about what it says about Jews?” Etc.) There are restatements of the new perspective as the putative solution to the old perspective, followed by statements that the NP doesn’t cohere and that it doesn’t solve the problems in the OP. (“It isn’t really convincing to suggest that Romans 1–3 addresses race rather than legalism because that just isn’t what the text says”; and “how does it help us in any case if Paul is accusing Judaism of racism instead of moralising?”) And these things go round and round. Then there are largely separate conversations about how Paul is basically an ass because he was so insensitive to the oppressions of slavery, of women, and of minoritised populations in terms of gender identity, these concerns arising largely out of the universities and their obsessive preoccupation in the US with identity politics. (I always find these comments particularly strange given that we have only worked these things out since the 1800s, and in some respects, since the 1960s. Academics refer to this pervasive interpretative fallacy as “Presentism.”)

My view is (of course!) that the apocalyptic reading of Paul breaks through the OP-NP impasse, resolving all the problems there and that it addresses the very real difficulties named by identity politics advocates helpfully without collapsing the Gospel into identity politics. So hopefully the future is apocalyptic. You never know. People just might cotton on to this.

What’s your hope for your new book, Paul: An Apostle’s Journey?

I hope it introduces an essentially apocalyptic account of Paul to a much wider audience than struggled through either my Quest for Paul’s Gospel or Deliverance of God. There is a very new view of Paul out there besides the OP and the NP and it’s worth taking seriously.

It also signals what an apocalyptic approach to Paul actually involves, which I haven’t yet written up in detail. Journey intimates that this is rather broader, more complex, and deeper, than it is currently usually described. There is an interweaving of practical sociological and neurological insights (network theory; Affect theory; and so on) with important currents in systematic theology and ethics (Trinitarian thinking; command ethics; virtue ethics). Paul’s life is interwined with his thinking as well. We see that he was a practical theologian and an extremely gifted missionary, and that apocalyptic helps to explain all this.

Journey is also something of an appetiser for my forthcoming Pauline Dogmatics in Outline, which lays out all the intellectual dimensions here in more detail. But Journey also does its own work by showing how Paul’s life and his thinking are inextricably caught up with each other. It tries to break through the thought-act divide that so plagues modern thinking, along with much modern scholarship on Paul, this being something we will talk about a bit more in just a moment.

You are one of a group of scholars who read Paul apocalyptically. What does that mean?

I think it means four things in particular—revelation, eschatology, liberation, and Lou Martyn:

(i) Paul knew the truth about God through revelation, which in Greek is an apokalypsis, rendered in English as “apocalypse.” God revealed or “apocalypsed” to him that God was present with him fully in Jesus (Gal. 1:11-16), although this was also known through the work of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10-16). However, I would add immediately that I believe this too, as does the entire church through its history as attested by its main confessions; in other words, Paul got this right. Christian truth starts with and is focused on Jesus as Lord, and we know this because of the Lord. Jesus is the truth and He is the Lord of the truth (along with the other members of the Trinity of course).

(ii) Paul’s understanding of Jesus is not just limited to His identity, however—that He is God with us. Jesus has an impact on us. He changes us. Moreover, he does so by drawing us into his resurrection. Hence, putting things slightly more technically, we would say that eschatology, which was the Jewish expectation of a great future day when all wrongs would be erased and the heavens and the earth would be transformed, is breaking into the lives of Christians now, by way of Jesus, who has already been resurrected and lifted into the heavens and sits at the right hand of God. These notions about eschatology tend to be found in Jewish literature named, after the book of Revelation, as Apocalypses, so this is another reason for calling this approach “Apocalyptic,” but they are not limited to those texts.

(iii) Corresponding to this dramatic theocentric drama of resurrection, apocalyptic readers of Paul detect a strong liberational dimension within salvation as God working through Christ and the Spirit sets us free from the evil Powers that currently dominate the cosmos where we live right now. And, rather significantly, this can lead to a different understanding of God. Whereas both OP and NP readers of Paul tend to view God as fundamentally characterized by retributive justice, apocalyptic readers view God as fundamentally characterized by love, benevolence, and advocacy.

That is, both the OP and the NP think that Paul sees people as having a fundamental problem with God. They have flouted His justice and must pay the price at some point, basically to Him. Apocalyptic readers think that Paul sees people as having a fundamental problem with Satan, with destructive and oppressive demonic forces and structures, and with their own sinful flesh. They don’t need to be judged then as much as rescued. (Judgment still takes place but it does so later within this fundamentally constructive frame.) It’s a very different perspective—so much so that we cannot really speak of a new perspective as much as of a new paradigm.

(iv) I would add that many of these interpretative emphases have been inherited from some of the great Pauline scholars of the twentieth century so a particular genealogy is usually detectable behind an apocalyptic reader of Paul, most notably, a loyalty to and influence from J. Louis Martyn, who wrote arguably the most powerful commentary on Galatians of all time (Anchor Bible 1997); but also, behind him, an influence from the great German scholar, Ernst Käsemann, who read Paul partly against the influential but highly individualized account of his teacher, Rudolf Bultmann, and who was also shaped profoundly by his experiences in the Confessing Church during WWII. (See Fleming Rutledge's more detailed genealogy here)

What’s your next book going to be about?

My next book is the big one—the whole ball of wax.I have spent many years now trying to think about how all of Paul’s thinking fits together if we set the OP and the NP to one side and read him as a thoroughgoing apocalyptic figure (i.e., as we should). But we also need to read him as a practical thinker and a missionary, living a particular life with all its challenges and struggles. What does Paul’s thinking look like viewed from this place, with this concerns and assumptions in place? It will be very unlike most of the other accounts of his thought that are currently out there! But I ask in addition where might we need to tweak this thought if it is to be useful to the modern church. It is a powerful, dynamic, sophisticated account of the God of Jesus Christ, and will, I believe, lead to powerful, dynamic, sophisticated missions and churches if it is followed. But we can’t just lift everything straight out of Paul’s mind without asking about where he would rephrase and restate things if he was with us here evangelizing today, roughly two thousand years later (and I emphasize the word “thousand” here; it’s a very long time).

I have called this book Pauline Dogmatics in Outline: Revelation to Race. It is complete (finally, gasp), but I am going to polish it off for a few months before releasing it to my publisher, Eerdmans. So expect it out around summer next year.

I have written this book for my students more than for my fellow academics, although I hope that academics will find plenty to engage with. Certainly some of the conceptual moves are new and challenging. I have structured it in twenty-seven manageable chapters each concluding with bulleted summaries, an assembly of the key Pauline texts, and an annotated bibliography of further key readings. My main conversation partners throughout in relation to Paul are Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas, supplemented by contributions from important thinkers like John Zizioulas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jeremy Begbie, the Torrances, Gene Rogers, and Willie Jennings. (In fact, most of the Duke Divinity School faculty, past and present, get involved at some point. They have taught me a lot.) I am very pleased with it, but then hardly anyone else has read it, so perhaps that’s not surprising. Doubtless a dose of cold hard academic reality awaits me.

Your reading of Paul has been shaped by your experiences of prison ministry. How has that helped you read his letters and why is it important?

I would say this experience has helped me as a person and a Christian, and that there have been additional implications for how I read the New Testament.

The friendship between a friend of our son’s, incarcerated since his junior year in High School (2005), and Rachel and I, has been one of the most influential things in our lives. It has been utterly transformational, and in many respects, deeply positive. One would think that the influence would run the other way, but he has blessed us, especially during difficult times. This friendship has led to a lot of visiting of prisons, from which one learns many things, not least about the New Testament.

Where we read the New Testament is important. We forget that we are embodied, and that the location of our bodies affects our readings—strange but true. So there is simply no comparison between reading the Household Codes at home on the couch or from behind a lectern and reading them standing in the small dark rooms of the slave quarters in the largest plantation in North Carolina. The texts read differently. And the same applies to prison literature. We learn new things. In fact, we just feel them. (I learned this from my colleague Chuck Campbell, an expert in homiletics.)

First of all, most of us don’t even notice that (by my reckoning) four of Paul’s ten letters were written from an imprisonment—a full forty percent! How much of our writing comes from a similar place?!, and what does this say about us? Second, there were important practical difficulties that had to be navigated when they were written. Martin Luther King had to smuggle his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail out of the jail written on fragments of newspaper concealed in his visitors’ shoes. How did Paul compose and send his letters from a dank dark room with his feet in fetters? Third, and perhaps most importantly, when Paul’s texts are read in a jail, we start to get in touch with some of the things that really matter—and with various things that matter less than we thought they did, and various other things that actually damage and hurt people. It is a powerful and challenging context that burns our delusions and pretentions away. I strongly recommend trying it. (For a little more of the story and its implications, see my article 'Strange Friendships' here from the Duke Divinity magazine.)

Philip Ziegler’s new book on apocalyptic theology (called Militant Grace) is an example of systematic theologians picking up insights from biblical scholars. Is this a good thing and does it work vice versa?

Absolutely, this is a good thing. And yes, it works nicely in reverse as well.

Paul has critical things to say about theology, ethics, ecclesiology, mission, diversity, and politics. It is vital to draw the Christian leaders in these fields into conversation with his seminal insights, and the fact that they are drawn into these conversations with the apocalyptic reading is a sign that this reading is powerful, dynamic, and profound. (We owe a debt of thanks here to Phil Ziegler, Doug Harink, and Edwin van Driel, by the way, and we should also read their stuff carefully, because it is very good.) That Pauline scholars learn from this conversation goes without saying. I have learned much from theologians and ethicists, but also from sociologists, neuroscientists, and gender theorists. May the conversations continue!

You demonstrate a care not just for Paul’s theology, but also his biography. Why is it important that they are not separated? We tend today to read most theology independent of the scholar’s biography, should we pay more attention?

As I mentioned earlier on, most Pauline scholarship takes place within an overarching division between thoughts and actions (and also between thoughts and emotions). We read books about Paul’s thoughts (The Theology of Paul) and books about Paul’s life (A Life of Paul) and ne’er the twain shall meet. This massive academic bifurcation results from the deep presumption that we can reconstruct someone’s thoughts apart from any consideration of their acts or their emotions—a disaster on multiple fronts!

These divisions are simply incoherent. Thoughts are acts. There is no such thing as a thought that isn’t an act. Moreover, thoughts are fused with emotions. There is no such thing as an emotionless thought. These aspects of the person are all tied together like love and marriage and a horse and carriage. And it follows from this that in order to understand a person’s thoughts about God, which is to say, their theology, we must attend to their whole person. Every act is a theological statement in some sense. People are how they act, and think the way they do because they act (otherwise) as they do. And their emotions are a part of all this as well. So biography and thinking and what we tend to call psychology must be fused together in the analysis of Paul. To attend only to one piece of this complex is to ignore half the data!, and to produce a radically reductionist account of the apostle.

Scholars have known this in theory for some time, but part of the problem here is practical. Pauline biography seems complex and forbidding so scholars haven’t known which biography to follow, and have understandably backed off from using one at all. However, this is no excuse! Our interpretative results for anything in relation to Paul is only ever as good as the biography that they presuppose, and they always presuppose one. Wrong biography equals wrong results. So we simply have to roll up our sleeves and get stuck into the data (and there isn’t that much of it). When we do so we find that it’s actually quite a fun exercise. I thoroughly enjoyed my own attempt to puzzle out the pieces in Pauline biography (see my Framing Paul), although the puzzle isn’t quite complete yet because I still have to finish a complementary book on the Pauline data in Acts. Journey is, moreover, the first overview that really holds this account of his life and his thinking together, showing how they affected one another. It’s strange to think that the story of Paul’s theology turns out—properly understood—to be such a dramatic tale. But it was. I think of it rather like a rock opera (although that dates me a little; it would be more contextual to speak of a rap opera like Hamilton).

You’ve enjoyed some good debates with N. T. Wright in the last few years. What is nub of the difference between your reading of Paul and his? What, do you think, does he get right and what does he get wrong?

Ha. It’s hard to give a short answer to this set of questions!

I think he gets a lot right. Where we agree and overlap—and we actually say very similar things about Paul for a lot of the time—I would say he is right, so there is a lot here to affirm. But this material tends to be muddled together with some problems. I’ll mention just two difficulties here.

Basically, I don’t think the new perspective is a coherent answer to the problems in the old perspective. And when anyone suggests that it is, s/he lets a lot of those problems – and they are serious – rumble on in our readings of Paul. Neither perspective really knows how to handle the Jews constructively, for example, and in a post-Holocaust world we just have to learn how to do this. At bottom, the NP is too similar to the OP; it is the same tune played in a different key. So the problems present in the actual tune have not been resolved. They have just been restated. It’s a cosmetic response, not a deep one. So I don’t think the NP is the way forward. Not at all. (Bear in mind that I don’t think the OP is the way forward either. But I view it as a more coherent reading than the NP.)

Also, in a second, fairly major disagreement, I think Tom is ambivalent about the locus of Christian truth, and this is a point that requires absolute clarity.

I take my stand, as I said earlier, on the revelatory dimension in Paul, which resonates with the revelatory dimension in Christianity—one of the key elements in apocalyptic that we just talked about. We know about God because God has revealed Godself to us through Jesus Christ and the work of the Spirit, as mediated through the confessions of the church. We then are required to think through everything else in the light of this definitive disclosure, which is nothing more than trying to be consistent to the truth that Jesus is Lord! And when we fail to do this we undercut the centrality and primacy of this revelation and of Jesus’s Lordship. So we must learn to think quite explicitly backwards from this event (and person) to the past. In the light of the solution, which is Christ, we understand the problem that precedes, and we also understand the history that precedes, especially the all-important history of Israel. And I think Tom compromises on this issue, slipping at times into thinking forwards, not backwards, which means setting up key truth claims before we get to Christ, and then failing to renegotiate those in the light of Christ. He works with a Plan A—Plan B system for much of the time, starting his books with large sections on what preceded Jesus in Judaism. But this can result in a subordination of the insights found in Christ to a set of prior commitments that he has basically thought up for himself, with impressive learning, no doubt, but still, at those moments, substituting his own wisdom for what God – God – has told us. We must not subordinate the insights found in Christ to a comprehensive historical reconstruction of late Second Temple Judaism. We must let the insights found in Christ tell us (a) what insights from late Second Temple Judaism Paul and other early Christian thinkers used; and (b) what late Second Temple Judaism, deep-down, as Israel, was all about.

I don’t think Tom makes this mistake all the time. But I do think he is not always clear about what he is doing, sometimes working in one direction, sometimes in another, making it very difficult to evaluate clearly when he is doing rigorous Christocentric work. The result is then something of a scholarly instance of the curate’s egg, a metaphor that may not mean much to some of you. But a biblical equivalent would be the parable of the wheat and the tares.

Your career has seen you move between Dunedin, New Zealand, London, England, and Durham, North Carolina, USA. Have you picked up anything of how Paul is read in the churches of these different countries?

These moves have had their difficulties but I have really learned a lot from them. The political implications of how we read Paul are more starkly apparent in the USA than they are anywhere else.

The US is still, broadly speaking, Constantinian, and you have to live in a Constantinian environment to see just how sinister that environment can be for the Gospel. The attraction of political power, and of using that power in a Christian way, and of then accommodating the demands of the Gospel to that use, are so subtle and so corrupting. There are few things more liberating than a genuine Pauline Gospel and few things more oppressive than a Pauline Gospel misread in relation to a God of retribution. There is, in short, a fairly direct connection between a conservative reading of Paul and the crisis of mass incarceration that the USA alone of all the advanced post-Christian states faces, not to mention, with the steadfast support of the vast majority of white Evangelicals here for Trump’s presidency. (Don’t get me started on that!) To stick with the mass incarceration connection for a moment.

Why is it that the most Christian country in the post-industrial West, which comprises 4% of the world’s population, incarcerates 24% of the world’s prisoners?, and executes a larger number of them than anyone else except communist tyrannies and hyper-conservative Islamic states?! (The state of Texas, located firmly in the Bible Belt, actually executes more prisoners than anywhere else in the world.) One key component is the widespread moralising of large sectors of the American population, many of them good churchgoing folk, who believe that the basis of politics is authority, and law-and-order. And the biblical basis for this politics is often Paul, read in a certain way of course, which is why the battle for his interpretation is so important. It literally affects lives.

Having said this, it is more apparent in countries outside the USA like Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and Germany, what challenges an essentially secular society poses to the organised churches. And churches in the US would do well to heed these warnings and to recover a sense of Paul the missionary before it is too late. His thinking, and the rest of his actions, combined together into a highly practical and powerfully effective strategy for planting and nurturing churches, which is something many institutionalised churches have forgotten how to do. So an accurate reading of Paul will, once again, be critical and extremely helpful. Heck, an accurate reading of Paul is critical to just about everything—and that is probably a good note to close on.