Epistle to the Romans

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice in Love. Eerdmans, 2011.

Wolsterstorff teaches philosophy at Yale (his title is “Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology Emeritus”). Before teaching at Yale he taught at Calvin College for about thirty years. For a more personal and autobiographical take on his combining philosophy and faith see his contribution in Philosophers who believe (IVP, 1997).

I have mentioned in another post that Calvin already refers to the discussion of the works of the law in reference to ceremonials. Calvin refers back to Chrystostome, Origen, and Jerome. I had also mentioned Ambrosiaster’s reference to works of the law as sabbaths, circumcision, etc. Here are the references in his Romans commentary where Ambrosiaster brings this up from the English translation in the Ancien Christian Texts Series (Ambrosiaster. Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians. Ancient Christian Texts. Edited by Thomas C. Oden and Gerald L. Bray. Translated by Gerald L. Bray. IVP Academic, 2009.)

Four years after the publication of my dissertation, it has finally been reviewed on the Review of Biblical Literature site. The review is by Paul Sanders of the Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, in Utrecht (Netherlands).

One frustrating thing with a review coming out so long after your publication (most of my revised dissertation was finished in the fall of 2006) is that it drags you back to a bygone stage of your research. Hopefully you have progressed since then.

The big ticket at the ETS 2010 was the sessions by Tom Schreiner, Frank Thielman, and N. T. Wright on the issue of Justification by faith, mostly actually on Wright’s vision of it. Originally, John Piper was to come but cancelled due to a sabbatical. Schreiner accepted to take his place. Since Wright’s Justification book is a response to Piper’s book about Wright position, Piper’s presence would have been interesting. Nevertheless, his absence may have been a good thing since the whole thing might have centered too much on Wright-Piper with Thelma as a outsider/spectator. Plus, it might have become too personal, kind of a Luther-Calvin (the two figures Wright often pits against each other) debate with Zwingli (or Bucer, or whoever Thielman feels comfortable being associated with) counting the points, you just never know.

Many students enrolled in a Ph.D. program hope to have their dissertation published at some point. I have been asked several times how I got mine published by de Gruyter. It was actually much more straightforward than I had imagined. No arm twisting or bribery or any unbecoming behavior. It all started in 2006. Here is how it happened.

Edwin Hamilton Gifford, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, Nabu Press, 2010. (London: John Murray, 1886. Originally in The Speaker's Commentary, 1881).

This very good but hard to find exegetical commentary from the nineteenth century is now available again in an exact reproduction.

Though I have mentioned the inflation of commentaries, and on Romans in particular, I have to mention these two since they are not in English. The first one is not exactly new since the original dates back to the third century. The second if a full length work in three volumes by Romano Penna in Italian.

The use of the Old Testament in Romans has been a fertile ground of investigation for decades, and rightly so since there are about sixty OT “quotations” in Romans. The number varies according to how you define a “quotation” and a few others technical arguments better left out of this post.

Westcott-Hort 1881: Quotation in Rom 2.6 in capitals

The debate is ancient as to whether here and there Paul refers or alludes to some OT passages or not. I have already mentioned the use of Ps 97 in Rom 1.17 as an example.

To the writing of commentaries there is not end.

There are so many commentaries on almost any book of the Bible today that one might as well give up trying to keep up with the field. It gets even worse if you pay more than lip service to working in several languages. For example, not counting commentaries in English, three pretty hefty commentaries came out recently on Luke: Bovon’s last volume of his four volume commentary; Michael Wolter’s volume published by Mohr-Siebeck; Heins Klein’s commentary published by Vandenhoeck, to name only these three.

My present research work is spread mainly over three areas.