Getting The Bible Right: Saint Paul and His Epistles

Choosing your assumptions before reading St. Paul is like choosing your cologne before a date. Get it wrong, and the rest of the night you're just really, really off.A couple of months ago I went after Scot McKnight's analysis in Christianity Today of the historic Jesus.  This month, Timothy Gombis has written a rather better article on St. Paul that needs to be read dispassionately by evangelical pastors and laity.  He lays out, among other things, the most recent scholarship that changes the Protestant game immeasurably, going right to misconceptions about Paul in the Reformation that was trying to grapple with Roman Catholic excesses and seeing analogies for that struggle in scripture.  Gombis organizes his strip-down of Pauline misconceptions into three brackets: (1) Paul's real relationship to Judaism; (2) Paul's orientation towards "Kingdom" / community rather than private spirituality; and (3) Paul's counter-culturalism.

I'm not sure Gombis acknowledges to my satisfaction the degree to which misconceptions lie at the heart of evangelicalism: if you've ever said, "I'm not religious, I just love Jesus," you need to read Krister Stendahl.  But I think that's good: evangelicalism shouldn't be shelved, it should be converted.  

Anyway, his article is well worth a look for anybody who wants to understand Christianity.

Update on Monday, July 25, 2011 at 9:38AM by Otter

If you glance through the comments on Gombis' article, you'll see why I hold that Evangelical Christianity is a fucking mess.  At least some of the critics there really do understand the degree to which the New Perspectives in Paul threaten Evangelicalism at its root: but the dismissal of any actual scholarship is as depressing as it is laughable.  The only way not to lose your cookies in Evangelicalism is to switch off your brain: if you keep thinking and reading, you'll find yourself pilloried as godless.  You deserve better.