Byrne - Paul and the Economy of Salvation: Reading from the Perspective of the Last Judgment

2021 by Brendan Byrne

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2021

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ISBN 978-1-4934-3067-3

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Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam

Contents

Preface

T his work draws together four decades of study, teaching, and research on the writings of Paul the apostle. The question that emerged for me from my first engagement with Paul concerned how he understood the death of Jesus to be salvific for other human beings. What was the connection? In the 1970s I went to Oxford to pursue this issue under the able direction of Morna D. Hooker, later Lady Margarets Professor at the University of Cambridge. What drew me from my antipodean locale were her early writing on the motif of interchange in Christ and Pauls view of Christ as the last Adam. In the event, my doctoral research on Paul went in a different direction. However, the original question has not ceased to accompany my reflection and teaching in the years since. The present work represents an attempt to draw together some conclusions on this matter, while necessarily placing Pauls understanding of Christs death within the wider context of other significant trajectories of his theology.

My academic study of Paul was preceded by an MA at Melbourne University devoted to building and temple imagery in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Later, I spent a semester away from Oxford in the library of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome, immersing myself in the biblical and postbiblical apocalyptic literature of Second Temple Judaism. My study in both these areas led to a firm conviction that apocalyptic Judaism formed the essential background for understanding Paul and the theology to be culled from his letters. Within that wider conviction, I have become further convinced of the role played by the apocalyptic motif of the last judgment in his theology and commitment to the proclamation of the gospel. Topics in Christian theology that have traditionally owed much to Paul, such as justification and redemption, have to be understood, at least as regards their origins, within the pressing horizon of the last judgment.

More particularly, I have continued to find in Paul, especially in the sequence comprising chapters 58 of Romans, a causal connection between the way believers live out the righteous status they have received on the basis of faith and their receiving a positive verdict at the judgment. Traditional Protestant interpretation of Paul has always experienced difficulty in this area. I hope to show, however, that, rightly understood, recognizing that human living in the power of the Spirit really does contribute to the gaining of salvation is not incompatible with preserving the initiative of divine grace.

I write as a Catholic scholar within a Pauline guild that, for obvious reasons, has largely been and continues to be a strongly Protestant preserve. For decades, however, my teaching and research have been as a member of the ecumenical United Faculty of Theology, Parkville, Victoria, within the equally ecumenical Melbourne College of Divinity, now the University of Divinity. My understanding of Paul has, accordingly, developed in a milieu of continual interchange with colleagues and students of all Christian traditions. It is widely acknowledged that ecumenical understanding and collaboration have flourished to a unique degree in Melbourne since the middle of the last century. The Fellowship for Biblical Studies, which meets regularly for fellowship and congenial scholarly exchange, is a notable instance of this, for which I am truly grateful.

In this connection let me mention with gratitude New Testament colleagues now gone to the Lord who greatly contributed to the fostering of that fellowship: Davis McCaughey (later governor of the State of Victoria), Eric Osborn, and Nigel Watson. I am privileged to have as colleagues and friends three members of an outstanding Johannine School that flourishes in Melbourne: Dorothy Lee, Mary Coloe, and Francis Moloney. The last named I have to single out for particular mention in connection with this present work. Frank and I, two Catholic priests of similar age from Melbourne, first met in the office of Morna Hooker, our common supervisor, in Oxford in 1972. Since then, Frank has been an inestimable friend and support, not least in the encouragement to go ahead with this work and in facilitating my approach to Baker Academic as publishers.

In terms of more immediate community, I have to single out my first teacher in Paul, Bill Dalton, SJ, who in the years both before and after the Second Vatican Council breathed a spirit of Pauline freedom into the church in Australia and many places overseas. I owe an incomparable debt to Morna Hooker, who, thankfully, displays the longevity that seems to be a particular feature of British New Testament scholars. I am grateful to the provincials of the Australian Province of the Society of Jesus, who have always encouraged my work and given me the leisure to pursue work of this kind. My colleagues and fellow community members Gerald OCollins, SJ, and Justin Glyn, SJ, have greatly helped with theological guidance, reading the manuscript and providing helpful comments.

Finally, returning to a more academic note, I single out the work of Douglas Moo, whose commentary on Romans from the evangelical tradition has been my constant dialogue partner on Pauls greatest letter over several decades. The commentary is not only a monument of scholarship but also, in every way, a testament to the fair-mindedness and openness of spirit that make scholarly interaction fruitful.

The immediate stimulus for the present work came from participation in a conference, Romans and the Legacy of St Paul, hosted by the Sydney College of Divinity at Macquarie Park, Sydney, Australia, in 2016. My two contributions, The Apocalyptic Motif of the Last Judgment: The Essential Horizon of Pauls Argument in Romans, and Justification and Last Judgement in Romans: The Place of Chapters 58, have now appeared in the publication of the conference papers. I am grateful to Associate Professor Peter G. Bolt and Professor James R. Harrison for permission to use content from these papers in the present work. I am also grateful for agreement from the Liturgical Press to use translations and other content from my commentary on Romans published in the Sacra Pagina series (6) in 1996.