Paul and the Law

Rating:
Summary: Raisanen and the Lutheran Paul
Review: Raisanen's study, Paul and the Law, is an extraordinarily insightful
analysis of the coherence of Paul's rhetoric as it relates to the Torah. One outcome of Raisanen's careful work is that Paul's formal statements tend to contradict one another; perhaps, therefore, Paul had other, functional reasons motivating his statements concerning the Jewish law. The reader should consider that Raisanen works basically with the Lutheran paradigm in his understanding of Paul's letters; as a result, his work may well show that it is the Lutheran position itself that undermines Paul's coherence. However, Paul's rhetoric, grasped in its first century environment, probably hung together considerably better than the paradoxes that Protestant tradition has found in him.