382 Theology 119(5)

gospel and the pressures of the secularized society. We need to have greater help in
creating the hermeneutic bridge between them. Nevertheless, it is good to be
reminded that Christian witness and ministry has primarily to be rooted the
resources of the faith and to be enriched and challenged by another tradition.

Paul Ballard
Peterborough

John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015); xvi + 656 pp.:
9780802868893, $70.00 (hbk)
John Barclays long-awaited volume, the product of ten years labour, seems sure
to make its mark as Pauline scholarships most dening book in English since E. P.
Sanderss Paul and Palestinian Judaism almost 40 years ago. It tackles what
remains a puzzlingly underexplored conundrum in Pauls thought: how precisely
does he envisage the workings of divine grace in relation to human responsibility?
To this question Barclay applies a methodological tour de force that injects
welcome nuance and renement into clunkily binary conceptions of grace vs
works, conditional vs unconditional or even (in Sanderss terms) getting in
vs staying in. As Barclay soon demonstrates with wholly convincing clarity, grace
is everywhere in Paul, in Judaism and in the history of interpretation, but not
everywhere the same (p. 191).
Barclay denes Pauls theology of grace through the lens of a cultural anthro-
pology of gift, underwritten by an unlikely ancientmodern alliance of Seneca,
Mauss and Derrida. Over half the book constructs for this analysis a machine (here
called a tool) scanning six disaggregated perfections of grace, resembling inde-
pendent gauges or levers capable of settings from 0 to 100, which are assumed to
determine all conceptions of gift, ancient and modern: superabundance, singular-
ity, priority, incongruity, ecacy, non-circularity. This machine is ne-tuned in
relation to a tellingly eclectic history of Pauline interpretation, and then road-
tested against Second Temple Judaism (reduced to ve texts from roughly the
rst Christian century, only one of them in Hebrew: the Qumran Hodayot). Pauls
emerges as one voice among diversely contested Jewish construals of grace
a point that, despite the narrow text base, is convincingly established vis-a-vis
conventional perspectives both new and old.
Within this context, Barclays Paul radicalizes and perfects the incongruity of
Gods Christ-gift given without regard for the recipients intrinsic worth or sym-
bolic capital. Just two letters serve to establish this: Galatians and (more briey!)
Romans. Yet even in Paul, it turns out, grace is not everywhere the same: in
Galatians, its incongruity means that the gift appears entirely ex nihilo (or perhaps
ex machina). With only the slightest hints at any exception (e.g. 6.16), grace is
radically severed from any story of Gods promise, election or a chosen people
(never mind Scriptures foreseeing the salvation of the Gentiles, 3.8). And no gift
Book reviews 383

or reception of law has any part to play (despite Pauls presumption of gift at 3.21,
Spirit-powered law fullment at 5.1416, etc.), so that even life in the Spirit, if
Torah-shaped, is no Spirit at all, only esh (p. 391).
Romans, by contrast, develops and in part reverses earlier negations about
Israel or about connections between Torah and Spirit-led behaviour. Like
Galatians, Romans perfects the gifts incongruity with human worth but not
its singularity or its non-circularity: here, the eect of unconditioned grace in the
recipients includes their social transformation in community-forming obedience of
faith, thus rendering the incongruous gift eschatologically congruous with the just
judgement of God. And even graces incongruity is in Romans integral to the story
of Abraham and indeed to the story of Israel, which in the Christ event is not
completed so much as discovered and imbued with meaning.
No brief summary could begin to do justice to this milestone of international
Pauline scholarship. The reviewers conned space permits just three questions for
consideration in what will clearly be a discussion for years to come.
First, Barclay analyses Pauls deeply theological account of salvation through an
emphatically anthropological account of gift (a term Paul deploys only occasion-
ally to denote Gods initiative in Christ, sometimes critically e.g. at Gal 2.21).
Leaving aside its textbook vulnerability to Feuerbachs critique of religion, this
move appears to favour an account of grace that is heavily transactional (the
Christ event etc.) rather than primarily and overwhelmingly personal. Is what
God gives really an event or transaction rather than, above all, Gods self for
us his only Son and with him everything, union with him and adoption as
children, his personal Triune presence in grace, love and communion?
Second, this book wears its relentlessly Protestant identity with condence on
its sleeve, despite periodic self-critical awareness of that traditions weaknesses.
After Marcion (en passant), the protagonists of its intellectual world are
Augustine (not always persuasively) and Luther, Kasemann and Martyn, Badiou
and (eventually) Kahl. If the historic shape of Pauline reception matters at all
(as apparently it does), then it seems surprising that Barclay cites no ancient or
medieval Pauline commentators other than Augustine, not even those who (like
Origen, Ambrosiaster, Pelagius, Chrysostom, Aquinas or Lyra) were unquestion-
ably formative for their contemporaries and successors alike (including the
Reformers!), adumbrating a full-bodied account of graces perfections that was
appreciably less reactive and not constricted to just two Hauptbriefe. Without
accounting for the canonical apostles larger footprint and reception, is there not a
danger that the six-levered machine produces at the bottom largely what is inserted
in the top?
Finally, among the consequences of ratcheting up the incongruity lever all the
way to 100 may be the logical diculties of entertaining quite such conicting
Pauline conceptions of grace in two letters of vaguely comparable date and subject
matter. The mature Paul of the year 50 or 55 might conceivably have understood
grace either according to Barclays Galatians or according to Barclays Romans,
but not easily both at once without some mental discomfort. Similarly, if graces
384 Theology 119(5)

incongruity is radically perfected to the extent proposed for Galatians, it becomes

dicult to understand how a gift so entirely unheralded and ex nihilo could ever
require the surprising specicity, both Christ-like and Torah-like (5.14; 6.2), of
moral obligations entailed by graces imperfect non-circularity in this letter let
alone in Romans or 1 Corinthians. Might such abstract incongruity in the end
assume the very mantle of that undisaggregated, pre-Barclayan grace of which
Sanders et al. are here so eectively convicted? Perfect incongruity may be every-
where in Pauls view of grace, but perhaps it is not everywhere the same.

Markus Bockmuehl
University of Oxford

N. T. Wright, The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the

Apostle (London: SPCK, 2016); 110 pp.: 9780281074112, 16.99 (pbk)
This is an unusual kind of book. Its raison detre is to give a synthetic response, in
110 pages, to a number of critical reviews of the authors 1600-page opus Paul and
the Faithfulness of God (SPCK, 2013). The Paul Debate comprises a preface explain-
ing this purpose, ve slim chapters on as many interpretative disputes and a bibli-
ography of the 16 published reviews to which the book is a response: reviews by John
Barclay, Markus Bockmuehl, Martinus de Boer, Alexandra Brown, Douglas
Campbell, James Dunn, Paula Fredriksen, Simon Gathercole, Beverly Gaventa,
Michael Gorman, Sam Hailes, Larry Hurtado, Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner,
David Starling and Chris Tilling. The chapters proceed sans footnotes, each one
clarifying Wrights constructive position on the issue in question without making
specic reference to his critics. (Those, therefore, who want to get the most out of the
book might benet from reading the reviews before reading The Paul Debate.) The
ve issue-specic chapters are as follows: (1) Paul and the messiah: Knowing the
name or having the mind? (2) How to begin with Jesus: What did Paul know, and
how did he come to know it? (3) Apocalyptic: Covenantal narrative or cosmic inva-
sion? (4) The justied people of God: Messianic Israel or saved sinners? and (5)
Theology, mission and method: Pauls and ours.
As the book title and the chapter subtitles indicate, Wright approaches these
topics, with a few exceptions, as point-counterpoint debates: Covenantal narrative
or cosmic invasion? (Wrights answer: covenantal narrative.) Messianic Israel or
saved sinners? (Wrights answer: messianic Israel.) Chapters 2, 3 and 4, especially,
although they do not name names, have in view quite particular critics on quite
particular issues: chapter 2 Fredriksen, Hurtado and others on the high-ness of
Pauls Christology and how he arrived at it; chapter 3 Barclay, de Boer, Gaventa
and others on apocalyptic and supersessionism; chapter 4 Gathercole, Moo,
Schreiner and others on Protestant understandings of justication. Chapters 1
and 5 are rather more general. The former tries to steer a course between theories
of Paul as Jewish thinker simpliciter and Paul as Hellenizer, while the latter defends