The Deliverance Of God

Being out the academic loop I don’t often get the gossip on the latest and greatest books being released. That’s why I was very interested to read Sean The Baptist’s quick write up on The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul by Douglas Campbell. Sean intends to blog his way through the book, which should make for interesting reading.

I met Douglas when I was at King’s. My original desire was to study New Testament hermeneutics there, but the Theology department was in a period of transition and I found an intellectual home in a different part of the university.

But, it isn’t just a quirk of biography that attracts me to this book. I’ve been on a slow (painfully slow) journey towards re-consideration of Paul that began in the mid 90s when I stumbled across Stanley Stowers’ A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. Romans was, in many ways, the seminal New Testament book in my early days as a Christian and reading it carefully while at theological college marked the beginning of my move away from orthodox evangelicalism.

In recent years I’ve re-invested myself in reading Paul as a way to get a more developed sense of what a Biblical hermeneutics of culture and globalisation might look like. It’s from this position that I look forward to reading Douglas’ new book.