Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love by Douglas A. Campbell (Eerdmans, 2020)
What might the reader want to know about this latest book from Douglas Campbell. Perhaps it will be this first: it's shorter than The Deliverance of God (Eerdmans, 2009), but definitely longer than Paul: An Apostle's Journey (Eerdmans, 2018). This is Campbell's fourth book in ten years (five if you count the Chris Tilling (ed.), New and Old Perspectives on Paul). Thirty years of research and thought is now emerging in an important body of work that gives us a Paul we can love and a gospel that really is good news.
Deliverance was a ground-clearing work. It was long because Campbell argued there was a lot to tear down before there could be a chance to build up. Pauline Dogmatics gives readers of Deliverance Campbell's constructive statement of how to read Paul as we find him in his letters and how to read beyond (but arguably still with) Paul for those tasked with preaching today. For those who both liked but were also frustrated by An Apostle's Journey, Pauline Dogmatics is the main course and dessert compared to Apostle's Journey's appetiser. Pauline Dogmatics was already in draft form when there was request for something shorter. Pauline Dogmatics is now the full treatment, the full argument.
In Pauline Dogmatics Campbell takes us into the classroom and leads us a 29-session course on how to read Paul. It sounds intense but the way the book is put together many of the chapters can be read on their own as well as in sequence.
What do we learn of Paul according to Campbell? Here's an attempt at the briefest of summaries, but as they say about Barth that the best thing to do is read the theologian himself, so I suggest you need to do the same with Pauline Dogmatics.
You got to start with Jesus and no other foundation will do. You got to do theology backwards from Jesus. The God revealed by Jesus is a God of love 'fundamentally and limitlessly.' The cross deals with sin, the resurrection with death. Followers of Jesus already experience in some sense the resurrection and possess the mind of Christ and yet simul iustus et peccator remains true. In this we have experienced God's election, which is covenantal, and this establishes human agency and does not remove it.
God's election is one to fellowship with God, which begins now in the founding and nurturing of relational communities. These communities are shaped by learning and they have leaders who provide a model of Christian living for others to imitate in a relational way, dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit. The tenor of the communities reflects the life of Christ which is a life and a four-fold activity of love (incarnation, cross, resurrection and ascension) that is shaped by giving faithfulness, peacemaking and celebrating.
Churches have an apostolic foundation which for Paul meaning having a divine commission to go cross-culturally to proclaim the Lord Jesus. This mission must have the right view of outsiders, must have the right motivation for engagement, must have right method of engagement and a right manner of engagement. All are in Christ and in Adam, the difference between a Christian and an 'outsider' is the Christian is responding to rehab, there no hard boundary between church and non-Christians. The right motivation for mission is a hopeful, prayerful but agnostic universalism. Paul does not consistently press this view, but his explicit expectations regarding future salvation offer an implicit universalism. Mission is motivated by genuine friendship, these friendships will sometimes be strange, in the sense of unexpected. Mission in this manner will produce diversity as it crosses cultures.
At this point we move into Part Four of Pauline Dogmatics which is headed 'Navigation.' In this section especially Campbell continues to describe Paul, but also to go beyond Paul or seek to interpret Paul with Paul. Paul's church planting in different contexts saw him respond in different ways. Campbell identifies 4: affirmation, admonition, reformation and condemnation. Rarely does Paul simply affirm (which would indicate no change required), he mostly practices admonition (be more loving), reformation (a different way of practising benefaction or reconciliation) and condemnation (most clearly in his no to all idolatry, prostitution and magic). Paul models a way of mission that is flexible, discerning and avoids colonialism. This emerging communities in 'pagan' contexts required teaching, and most importantly this requires translation, and resourcing. Here there be dangers that certain things don't get challenged. So we might suggest Paul imposed a structure of sex and gender that was too Jewish and he failed to reform and condemn slavery. Paul's ethics sometimes betrayed a foundation other than Christ. Paul's ethics are relational because God is relational. Paul's offers a virtue ethic that enables us to here the commands/requests of God which we should obey. A virtue ethic requires a tradition, the key part of which is Scripture. Scripture is something we come to know well and read in different ways to discern God's commands, distinguishing between the Spirit's use of scripture and other uses of scripture, the latter of which can be death-dealing rather than life-giving.
Paul's thought articulates the birth of a new creation. The 'trap' that emerges here is to claim that God had two plans, A and B. When A failed God introduced B. What is called an 'infralapsarian' account. Campbell argues for a 'supralapsarianism' account in which God only has one plan, Plan A, Christ brings Plan A back on track. Death is unnatural. Creation is battlefield between God and forces of evil. This challenges how we read creation correctly. Paul in many places offers this supralapsarian account — e.g. Gal 3.28, 2 Cor 5.17, Rom 8.29, 1 Cor 8.6, Col 1.15-17. And so we come to navigating sex, marriage and gender. There is lots to navigate here. Paul offers mostly an infralapsarian account of sex, marriage and gender that continues to maintain 'a pyramid of vertical binary oppositions', seen in the household codes. To a certain extent Paul 'Christianizes' these relationships and occasionally challenges them But here Campbell particularly wants to go beyond Paul. While he holds to the importance of either marriage or celibacy, he wants to challenge patriarchy and a heterosexual only account of marriage. Here Campbell sees too often foundationalist and infralapasrian accounts of gender. So he argues for same-sex marriage on covenantal, and ascetic grounds (close he says to the position of Eugene Rogers). He recognises he is going beyond Paul's stated position, but argues that this is still in line with Paul's key trinitarian, christology and pneumatological convictions. I'm summarising a much more extended argument that recognises 16 different ways of reading Paul's texts on sex and gender. The chapters ends that in making this argument there will be a need for strange friendships (between affirming and non-affirming), peacemaking and defending the gospel.
Chapters 27 and 28 address the issue of Judaism and supersessionism. How does Paul avoid a negative reading of Judaism, he resists foundationalism and he reads backwards. This requires us to see the justification texts as contingent and dealing with messanic Jews hostile to Paul. Paul advocates a non-colonial gospel. Paul does a provide a salvation-historical account of the gospel but it is retrospective. 'Paul never expected Judaism to be erased.' The final chapter addresses 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. He sees these as second century and show how Paul was being interpreted by the mainstream church then.
This says Campbell is his 'A to Z of Pauline theology' but with a strong practical edge, reflecting the kind of theologian Paul was. This is tremendous achievement which I hope many pastors, ministers, evangelists and missionaries read. Campbell wants us to read Paul differently than we often read him and in so the book while scholarly is also deeply practical. This is what makes it stand out from a lot of Pauline theology. It's the kind of book you might read in one go (with necessary food, toilet and sleep breaks!), but it is also the kind of book to pick up again and again to re-engage with chapter here or there. There is so much to ponder, even where you might disagree, for those of us who are tasked with forming churches, leading in mission and helping the church navigate culture and context.
We can't breathe for the constant stream of books on Paul's theology be published all asking to be read, Pauline Dogmatics should be at the top of the pile.
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