Let me begin by observing that many Pauline interpreters share with me a fundamentally participatory view of Paul's gospel, understanding salvation as a pneumatological incorporation into Christ's death and resurrection. This is arguably an irreducibly proto-trinitarian account as well, so recently Michael Gorman has rightly emphasised theosis within its description. This view holds further that the only effective ethic for a sinful humanity is generated by divine action, essentially in terms of inaugurated eschatology; humanity must be transformed in Christ in order to act well. Hence Douglas Moo clearly shares this articulation. Indeed, I do not know of an Evangelical who does not affirm everything that has just been said; but it tends to be arranged under the rubric of ‘sanctification’, and hence treated in second position in any account of Paul's gospel. And this brings us to the nub of the problem, and to the solution, that I articulate in my book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.

A colleague commented that it is difficult to give a clear brief summary of Eccentric Existence because it has so many moving parts. That's fair, and for that reason Tom Greggs offers not a précis but, as he says, a ‘tour’ of EE. I am grateful to him for this perceptive, perspicuous and generous tour of the book's premises and conclusions. I want to address as best I can here Greggs's several ‘unsystematic probes’. The probes seem to me to fall into two broad groups, one raising formal or methodological concerns and the other substantive concerns. I shall begin with the first group, taking them up in more or less the order in which they were made.

One of Alasdair MacIntyre's colleagues at Notre Dame once told me that of all the passages in all his books, there is one of which MacIntyre is most proud. It is found, of course, in After Virtue:

I am grateful to John Perry for his deft and illuminating review, which nudges in productive ways at the unity and shape of the story I have told in Putting on Virtue. In brief, Perry reads my book as a defence of Christian eudaimonism against charges of hypocrisy. He judges the defence to be a success, but suggests that I am conflating two distinct issues, only one of which is helpfully construed as hypocrisy. As a result of this conflation, I end up including topics and thinkers which don't properly belong under the same umbrella, and failing to do justice to those that do. I overlook the significance of the journey metaphor for Augustine's construal of pagan virtue, and so miss some of his most valuable resources for coming to terms with the character of all virtue in via. Furthermore, while Luther might appear to be the villain of my narrative, Perry argues that in fact he hardly deserves a place in it. Luther's rejection of eudaimonism is so complete that he doesn't really contribute at all to an ongoing conversation about it; his real concern is justification, with an unfortunate spillover into the foreign territory of ethics. It is Hume, Perry proposes, who is the proper villain, undermining the eudaemonist tradition by unashamedly setting aside the task of differentiating objective goods from subjective goods.