Welcome everyone to my blog.
I hope you will check in here from time to time to hear about what I am up to, whether in the world of Pauline scholarship, where I will be continuing to fight the good fight, or in relation to my wandering journey through life, which takes me down some interesting byways. I am, with my beloved partner Rachel, deeply engaged with prisons and prison-related issues. I am involved supporting her flourishing art career as an oil painter. And, like many academics, I think that I also know important answers to many of our most pressing political and cultural questions, which I will air here from time to time, humbly accepting from your feedback that I clearly have less of a grip on things than I had previously thought. But my main focus will doubtless be, more broadly, the world of New Testament scholarship and its interfaces with other relevant disciplines like theology, politics, and sociology and, more narrowly, the field of Pauline studies. There I will continue to champion my various causes—the importance of the faithfulness of Jesus himself as the means by which we are enabled to have faith; the centrality of revelation, covenant, and eschatology to Paul’s thinking about salvation; the importance of knowing—insofar as we can—exactly where Paul was when he was writing his letters, as well as when, and to whom; and related matters like which letters—if necessary contrary to much scholarly opinion—he actually wrote.
Much of this activity has culminated in my latest book, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love, which is now available from Eerdmans, although its official launch date is January 2020. And this will be available during SBL, which is to say, during the massive conference and general circus that is the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual get together, this year in San Diego. Pauline Dogmatics is also the subject there of a “panel discussion,” as we politely call them. Four very diverse and interesting scholars will have at it for the best part of two hours on Sunday afternoon after lunch—Grant MacCaskill from Aberdeen, Judy Gundry from Yale, Doug Harink from King’s University in the far north (i.e., Canada), and Mark Kinzer, who heads the Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology—after which I will get to respond to their reviews. It is an honor to have such able colleagues reading my work, and I look forward to what I hope will be a constructive discussion about some of the issues that really matter in Pauline studies but that we don’t always get to talk about in gatherings like SBL, where the prevailing ethos is functionally secular. Pauline Dogmatics resists that frame and insists on talking about Jesus as if he really did rise from the dead (et cetera), so it will be very interesting to see how that goes down.
After SBL, Rachel and I head up to Vancouver, where the birth of our first grandchild is imminent. Very exciting! We then fly to our homeland of New Zealand for an extended Christmas holiday with our families.
I hope to post here fairly regularly, but I want to admit up front that I am finding it hard to compose regular blog posts. I am very new to the game, and also feel innately cautious about letting my words out into the public domain so freely. I guess my scholarly education has trained me to be very measured about publication, and I generally work my material over repeatedly before releasing it in any form. So please be patient with me as I find my feet.
This will probably not be a blog about the cutting edge in NT scholarship, partly because I think that that metaphor is fundamentally wrong. The assumption that the latest trends and flurries of excitement denote the correct lines of future research is, I would suggest, horribly wrong. This is a bit like thinking that future research projects in universities should be taking as their point of departure the articles with the most hits on HuffingtonPost. My own approach to scholarship these days is to sit back a bit from the maelstrom and see which proposals “have legs.” High quality work tends to persist, and even begins to gain salience some time after its initial publication. That is the work that interests me. There are massive tectonic plates underlying almost all our discussions and the scholarship that shifts those plates and their interactions is what interests me. That’s what I hope to talk about here from time to time.
And do let me know if you have any other questions and inquiries. I can’t promise to answer all of them, and almost certainly not straightaway. But I am very interested to hear what you have to say. Any questions about Paul, about my scholarly agenda, about my teaching and preaching availability, about the social justice questions I am involved with, and about any related matters, especially interpretative or theological, do interest me and are welcome.