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October 17, 2008 6:27pm v.8
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 I'm reading Paul: In Fresh Perspective by N.T. Wright. It's a short 170pg book that briefly covers N.T. Wright's conservative (and reasonably orthodox) version of the New Perspective on Paul that is different from the liberal extremes of E.P. Sanders and James Dunn. In "Paul", N.T. Wright discusses the three worldviews of Paul: Second Temple Judaism, the Roman Empire, and his association with Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Each of these world views are analyzed against N.T. Wright's meta-narrative approach to understanding Paul: Creation vs Covenant, Messiah vs Apocalyptic, and Gospel vs the Roman Empire. The worldviews and the meta-narratives fuse together Paul's theology into a Covenantal Nomism where Salvation History soteriology is stressed as building throughout history rather than an a-historical view of salvation. The cross of Christ is still defined as the unexpected event that has always been a part of the plan that causes the election of God's people. The cross extends the holy people and land to all peoples and the entire earth by consider creation and covenant as synonyms in the dikaiosune theou ("righteousness of God").N.T. Wright uses his meta-narrative approach to prove that Colossians and Ephesians and the Pauline portions of Acts are correctly ascribed to Paul. This wins him favor with conservative scholarship (and myself!), but I fear it is at the consequence of clouding our understanding of Paul over all. N.T. Wright's three-fold analysis of Philippi does add clarity by explaining the pros-and-cons of the city's annexation by the Rome Empire, and I found Wright's exegesis of Philippians 2 very good when he used his hermaneutic to exegete the church's charge to "work our their salvation when it is God who actually works." Wright's methodology also demonstrates that the letter to the Galatians was among the first books written in the New Testament. So I find the book valuable two fold, for using the world-view of second-Temple Judaism to read Paul's literature, and second to put down disputes against Paul's authorship. N.T. Wright also considers 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra and a few other Jewish Apocalyptic writings. I believe this would be informative to many Christians who do not know about these letter's existence, but my reading of those letters didn't bring me to the same conclusions that he arrived upon, so I was skeptical rather than intrigued. I am no expect, so maybe I should read those letters again. Lastly, my overall gripe against N.T. Wright is that I would value his literature far more if he didn't put me on the defense all the time. I feel that the New Perspective on Paul has some value but its forced at the loss of a plain reading of Paul's writings. This is also my concern with Karl Barth as well. Reinterpretation is very valuable as long as it doesn't interpret away what is obviously before our face. Overall, I consider N.T. Wright's view orthodox and very good, with only a few hesitations. I recommend this book as an introduction to N.T. Wright.
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