The arrival of a big book on a favourite subject is always a pick me up event. By which I mean not just a large book, but an enlarging book, one that is the distilled concentrate of long and deep reflection.
For a long time now Luke Timothy Johnson has been one of my go to scholars in my study of the New Testament. His commentaries on Luke, Acts, I&II Timothy, Hebrews, and James, and from its first edition, The Writings of the New Testament, have been well used reliable guides, marked by independent thought and serious engagement by a first rate scholar in the service of the Church. Add to that a range of monographs intended to earth such scholarship in Christian experience and the ecclesial life of the people of God, and you can see why I found in Johnson a trusted and enriching guide.
Last year during lock down I read through Constructing Paul, the first of two volumes on the canonical Paul, by which is meant Paul as revealed and interpreted through study of all the letters attributed to him. Johnson has little patience for the assured and unquestioned claims of the scholarly guild that almost half of Paul's letters are not by Paul (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, I&II Timothy, Titus). That first volume was refreshing, provocative, and for myself, largely persuasive. It sits now with several other large and valuable studies of Paul produced in the past 20 years, most of them reluctant to attribute the disputed letters to Paul – which significantly shapes, Johnson would say distorts or at best unnecessarily diminishes, their portrayal of Paul's life and thought.
What I wrote about Johnson's first volume you can find here: https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/04/constructing-paul-a-brief-review.html
Well, Volume 2 has arrived. It's made up of 23 chapters, 13 of them previously published essays and 10 of them written especially for this volume. They are not intended to be an integrated whole providing 'a theology of Paul', a term Johnson finds deeply problematic. They are essays on Pauline texts and themes as they arise from the selected texts. So far I've only read the Introduction and the first essay.
In that essay "Romans 3.21-26 and the Faith of Christ", published in 1982 in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Johnson jumps straight into the deep end of current Pauline studies by facing head on the ongoing controversy over the meaning of the phrase faith of / in Christ, the celebrated subjective vs objective debate. I realise the essay is now 40 years old – but interestingly Moo and Longenecker in their Romans commentaries continue to count it as 'the most thorough defence' of the subjective genitive position.
So, does the phrase mean faith in Christ, or the faithfulness of Christ? Johnson concludes it is the subjective faith of Christ, and his way of getting there is typical of Johnson's independence of mind. By paying attention to this particular text text he seeks to disqualify unacknowledged prior theological commitments; additionally, he has no hesitation in ignoring the critical consensus which disqualifies the disputed letters. Instead he analyses Romans 3.21-26, as the key text in the debate, comparing it with other related Pauline texts, and argues his way towards establishing Paul's intended meaning as the faith of Christ, that faith best expressed as 'the obedience of faith, a phrase which Johnson believes acts as an inclusio to the whole letter - see1.5 and 16.6.
This essay is typical of Johnson's well researched material and independent conclusions. He is quite explicit in what he believes is at stake if interpreters push the objective genitive to the exclusion of the subjective. Doing so with a theological bias, produces both skewed exegesis and flawed theological interpretation. Throughout this article, on the basis of the text itself, Johnson insists upon 'the soteriological significance of the faith of Jesus'. To avoid this conclusion on the basis of prior theological rather than exegetical grounds risks significant misunderstanding of Paul.
"The importance of recognising the proper place of Jesus's faith within the heart of the Pauline gospel may ultimately be that we do not allow a (properly) kenotic theology to become an (improperly) docetic one." (Page 26).
It's such comments that make Johnson such an interesting exegete belonging to neither extreme in the ongoing exegetical debate and theological argument. However this is a classic 40 year old essay, and it has not been updated by engaging with developments in the debate since. Much of that debate is explored in The Faith of Jesus Christ, (ed. Michael Bird, 2009) a collection of essays from the varying perspectives on Paul's intended meaning(s), from old and new, objective and subjective, to justification and participation. Surprisingly there is no interaction with Michael Gorman's work spanning 20 years, of Paul's cruciform – resurrectional – participationary theology of Christian experience and existence.
Increased interest in 'union with Christ' is a major research seam opened up again in the last two decades by scholars such as Michael Gorman, Frank Matera, Grant McCaskill, Douglas Campbell and Richard Hays, and much of their work bears significantly on the objective / subjective genitive debate. Likewise recent works such as Nijay Gupta's monograph Paul and the Language of Faith, on the polyvalent meanings of faith in the Pauline letters, caution against the binary tendencies of those arguing either side. At the same time the continuing debates since Johnson's essay was published in 1982 between key platers such as J D G Dunn, N T Wright, Francis Watson, Michael Gorman, John Barclay, Douglas Campbell and Richard Hays have enriched and developed this debate with important new research to the point where Johnson's essay is now only the 'most thorough' starting point in making the subjective case. The current state of play is much richer, more nuanced and more variously contested, so that the absence of familiar contemporary voices creates in the reader a strange temporal dislocation. The wisdom of starting a crowning publication with an unrevised classic essay remains to be seen, and only when the whole book is read. So, more on this book later.
In the photo used for the book cover, Luke Timothy Johnson looks like he enjoys what he does! And I enjoy reading what he writes 🙂
Leave a Reply