Shane Williamson’s Reviews > New Interpreter's Bible: Acts - I Corinthians > Status Update

The drama of the eucharistic liturgy is the reenactment of the story of Israel, focused on Jesus and supremely on his death; to break up its lines, to avoid any sense of drama in case it became a new "works-righteousness," can itself be an act of human-centered arrogance, declaring one's independence from the very gospel events themselves. (486)

The Enlightenment swapped the idea that history had turned its critical corner in Palestine in the first century for the belief that the moment had happened instead in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. The tacit assumption of this point of view is the deeper reason why the Pauline claim sounds simply incredible to so many. It offers a rival eschatology to that by which our culture has lived. (477)

"...within the Reformation tradition, which, eager for the universal relevance and the essential pro me (i.e., "for me") of the gospel, and regarding Israel mainly as a classic example of the wrong way of approaching God or "religion," has created a would-be "Pauline" theology in which half of what Paul was most eager to say in Romans has been screened out." (464)

Preachers of the gospel cannot escape the task of being ancient historians. The alternative is shallow anachronism. (462)

"...the very Jewish, very biblically based, revelation of the divine righteousness/justice was necessarily at the same time the revelation of the true lustitia, that which really did accomplish what Caesar's lustitia had claimed to do namely, the putting to rights of the entire creation." (405)

Although recent scholars have emphasized that there is no evidence for the pre-Christian Paul suffering from a bad or troubled conscience in the post Augustinian sense, we must insist that there is every reason to suppose that he agonized over the fate of Israel, longing for YHWH to act decisively in history, but uncomfortably aware that if this were to happen many lews would face condemnation along with Gentiles. 5

God's righteousness, seen in terms of covenant faithfulness and through the image of the lawcourt, was to be the instrument of putting the world to rights of what we might call cosmic restorative justice. (5)

[Reading Wright on Romans]

It is common to list saints and Christian leaders whose lives have been changed by reading this letter; the catalog could be balanced by a similar number who have radically misunderstood it. (395)