Status Updates From Paul: A Biography

Romans chapter 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerful sustained climax, anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.

Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly, and compelling, but it does so, in order to highlight the faithfulness of God, and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes. The Roman Church urgently needed to understand.

Gnosticism, a religion of inner self-discovery, rather than a rescue, of private devotion, rather than public witness.

To retrain the imagination and the natural impulses to resist the murky short-term delight of the pagan world is harder still. Jamaican sustained marriages of genuine mutual submission is perhaps hardest of all. Compromises and a second-best solutions are easy. To go for the full version of discipleship is to sign on for spiritual warfare.