Pauline Theology
Tom Holland, lecturer at the Evangelical
Theological College of Wales, has produced a welcome and important contribution
to the controversial area of Pauline theology: Contours of Pauline Theology;
A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings
(Mentor/Christian Focus, 2004 hc, 382pp).
The author’s thesis is simply that the roots of
Paul’s theology are to be found in the Old Testament, and particularly in the
prophecy of Isaiah. He rejects earlier
scholarship which places too much emphasis on a Hellenistic cultural setting,
and the reliance of recent scholarship on the Pseudepigrapha as the background
to Paul’s thought. Rather he sees
Paul’s theology as an exposition of the Old Testament prophetic hope of a New
Exodus, now fulfilled in the coming of Christ.
Paul quotes in particular from the prophecy of Isaiah, and Holland
suggests that it is this prophecy that actually provides the skeleton of his
teaching. He points out that ‘...if the
letter to the Romans was laid out as a continuous papyrus, and the citations
from Isaiah were raised out of the text and suspended at their point of use,
those texts, in that order, would summarise salvation history. Such a pattern could not be anything but
intentional.’ (p.31).
This thesis is then applied to key areas of
Paul’s thought. It is suggested that we
should not understand Paul’s use of the word doulos (slave) against the
background of slaves in Graeco-Roman society, but rather with reference to the
Old Testament idea of ebed (slave/servant). Holland maintains that an Old Testament background gives a much
more corporate emphasis to Paul’s teaching of salvation, and he understands the
term “body of sin” as being corporate rather than personal. He also interprets baptism in Romans 6 as
corporate – thus following on directly from the corporate emphasis of Romans
5. So baptism here is not a reference
to personal Christian experience, but the incorporation of the church into
Christ in the same way as Israel was baptised into Moses in the Exodus. The Exodus background is also central to
Paul’s teaching on the Cross, where the Passover is the key idea. And the Passover is even seen as central in
Paul’s Christology – providing the background for the ‘firstborn.’
It is Holland’s ideas of justification which
are of greatest interest, as this is a matter of such controversy in recent
scholarship. There are very brief
critiques of the works of Dunn and N T Wright.
He concludes that it is right to understand justification in a
‘forensic’ sense, and that Romans 5 teaches the imputation of both Adam’s guilt
and Christ’s righteousness. However,
Holland maintains that justification is more than a declaration of innocence in
the face of the law’s demands; it is acceptance into covenant relationship with
God. He insists that we must keep in
view this broader context, that passages such as Genesis 15 and Romans 4 are
essentially about the creation of covenant relationship. There is an emphasis on the Cross as
Christ’s representative death on our behalf, hence ending our old covenantal
‘marriage’ relationship with Satan (sealed by our guilt), and establishing a
new ‘marriage’ relationship between God and the church.
This is a stimulating contribution to the
current debate.