Contours
of Pauline theology
CONTOURS OF PAULINE
THEOLOGY
By Tom Holland
Mentor/Christian Focus. 291 pages + 90 pages appendices, bibliography and
indexes
ISBN 1 85792 469 X
My verdict on this book? I really
cannot improve on that of Dr. Peter Head, who, on the front cover, describes it
as, ‘Challenging, unsettling and infuriating’.
Dr. Tom Holland teaches New
Testament and Hermeneutics at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales. He
writes to demonstrate that Paul ‘never left the religion of the Old Testament’
and ‘never departed from the teaching of Jesus’. In this he follows in the
footsteps of Tom Wright in What St. Paul Really Said and David Wenham in Paul
and Jesus. But Dr. Holland believes that he has uniquely discerned the key to
Paul’s thinking: he argues that no other scholar has paid sufficient attention
to the way in which Paul’s understanding of salvation is modelled on the New
Exodus promise of the Old Testament. In particular, Dr. Holland argues that the
Passover is key to understanding Paul’s doctrine of redemption and provides the
background to his use of the term ‘firstborn’ as a title for Christ.
There is much to be
applauded in this book, such as the insistence that Paul’s thinking, including
the shape of his argument in Romans 6 and 7 and his use of the term
‘justification’, is corporate rather than individualistic. Dr. Holland writes
that Paul’s letters ‘are not about what God has done or is doing for a
Christian. They are about what God has done or is doing for his covenant
people, the church’. In another particularly helpful section, Dr. Holland
argues that Paul, in his mission, so identifies with Christ that he sees
himself as a suffering servant of the New Covenant. However, in trying to
demonstrate that Exodus and Passover are central to Paul’s thinking, it seems
to me that Dr. Holland has at times forced the evidence to fit the conclusion,
such as in his suggestion that the absence of any explicit mention in Luke of
Mary and Joseph’s ‘redemption’ of their firstborn means that he, unlike all
other firstborn males at that time, was not redeemed. Other themes, equally
important to Paul, such as ‘new creation’, are underplayed in this study.
I found it a frustrating
book, scholarly and even pedantic in style, and yet, failing to do justice to
the contribution of many other scholars in this field. Frustrating also
because, alongside fine treatment of many passages of Scripture, Old Testament
as well as New, there was a failure to recognise the multifaceted nature of
biblical imagery — a tendency to want to tie everything down to a single
definitive reference or meaning. But even here I am thankful to Dr. Holland for
he has renewed my desire to study Paul’s writings and to understand afresh the
glorious gospel that animated the life and ministry of this apostle.
The book also suffers from
an unattractive layout with narrow margins.
Peter Misselbrook,
member of Pendennis Evangelical Church, Bristol