"Approaches to Paul"

I thought I would go through a book this week and in to next week.  Over the Christmas break, I had dinner with a friend, who works in a church but not heavily into Biblical studies.  Over dinner, he asked me to explain the New Perspective on Paul.  He had heard about it at church and in the Christian media.  So, along that line I thought I would go through Magnus Zetterholm’s “Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship.”

Zetterholm does an exceptional job of over viewing the history and current trends in the study of Paul by analyzing the major works that have contributed to Pauline scholarship.  He broadly lays out three main groupings, the standard view, new perspective, and beyond the new perspective.  These form the main portion of his work with some introductory and concluding chapters.

I wanted to skip the first chapter, which is a history of Paul and his missions, and jump into what has lead to the necessity for a new perspective on Paul.  Zetterholm begins with the Tubingen School and the influence of Hegel.  Hegel’s philosophy, in many ways, and was understood as open theology back up in light of the Enlightenment.  Hegel’s understanding of reality functioned in a process.  Each generation gives rise to a higher ordered understanding, followed by another even higher understanding.  This view sees the past as “a lower evolutionary form than the present, and the future always holds something better in store.  The reason for this s that the dialectical process is not governed by chance…The history of the world is thus a process run by reason, which in reality is the true lord of the world” (34).

This influenced the way Biblical scholars viewed Judaism, mostly in theological terms.  Zetterholm notes the work of F.C. Baur who was influenced by Hegel and the Tubingen School.  In Baur’s writing of history, Paul argues against Judaism.  Paul represents a later, higher understanding than earlier Judaism.  With Hegel’s ideas in mind, it is easy to see how this can lead to anti-Semitic notions of Judaism.  Zetterholm draws on the historical nature of anti-Semitism in Christian communities, noting that distinctions where made between Jews and Christians from an early point in Christian history.

It is with this background that Zetterholm discusses the nature of Luther’s writings, as well as Augustine.  Which we will turn to next time.