This essay discusses the texts that, through their commonalities and differences, illustrate various ways in which early forms of Jesus-devotion were relating to their contexts within the Roman world and how Paul addressed particular issues that arose within those communities

International law was a subject of interest for philosophers from the early modern period to the Enlightenment – from the Spanish Scholastics and Grotius to Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant. With a few exceptions (most notably Jeremy Bentham and Hans Kelsen), however, it has not been a principal object of philosophical inquiry for much of the last two centuries. Why?

Through the coming, death, and resurrection/exaltation of the Messiah Jesus, God has graciously determined to rescue humanity from the powers of Sin and Death, thereby creating a forgiven, liberated, and reconciled people: the community of the new creation and new covenant. By faith and baptism, and through the work of God’s empowering, indwelling Spirit, people may participate in this saving, transformative event and thus live “in Christ,” experiencing the fullness of life with God and others for which they were created, in anticipation of the restoration of the entire creation.

Is property in some way basic to our moral lives? Many have thought so. For Aristotle, moral virtues, like liberality, presuppose some idea of property, for one can display liberality only with respect to what is one’s own. For Kant, property is a requirement of freedom in the external world. For Locke, property, allocated according to principles of labour and desert, is basic to the very idea of justice that our political institutions are meant to secure. Others have denied that property is foundational in this way, suggesting rather that property is one strategy available to us in meeting the demands of our general theories of justice but is not itself morally basic.1

For Paul, the social ethos of Christian communities grows directly out of Christ’s movement into the sphere of sin and death, there to rescue derelict humanity through the radical solidarity of the cross and the power of the resurrection. This movement reverses hierarchies and destabilizes social norms, in visible, counterintuitive ways: the inclusion of socially incompatible members, the redistribution of resources, solidarity with all humanity in its most desperate cry for liberation, and the creation of a fellowship in which diverse people with divergent backgrounds and different gifts grow together into moral agents shaped by Christ’s self-giving love.

Ever since the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971, Anglo-American philosophers have discussed the nature of equality and its place in a theory of distributive justice.1 They have asked whether it is equality per se that is valuable, or priority for those who are worst off, or perhaps sufficiency – that is, ensuring that each person has enough.2 They have also asked about the ‘currency’ of egalitarian justice: what is it that should be distributed equally? Is it welfare, resources, opportunities, or perhaps what Amartya Sen called ‘capabilities’?3 In response, philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson, Samuel Scheffler and Joshua Cohen have argued that it is a mistake to think of the value of equality solely in distributive terms.4 Rather, within a democratic society, we need to aim at relational equality – that is, relationships of equal status, in which no one is unfairly subordinated to others. Relational equality requires the redistribution of certain goods; so it is not unrelated to distributive equality. But from the standpoint of relational equality, particular distributive goals matter only insofar as they help us achieve a society in which no one is relegated to the status of a second-class citizen. And to achieve such a society, we need to pay particular attention not just to how various goods are distributed, but also to inappropriate expressions of deference toward certain groups and censure of others, and to policies and structures that inadvertently leave certain groups unable to see themselves as full and equal participants in society.

In his robust and polarizing style, Paul makes claims that have provoked readers in numerous ways, at times spurring admirers to follow daring paths with radical implications for theology, but sometimes irritating his critics, who have raised numerous objections on theological, philosophical, and moral grounds. Paul divides opinion as much today as he did in his own lifetime. This essay discusses five topics where Paul proves to be challenging. In each case, we will trace how Paul subverts some aspects of an ancient value-system, not by a straightforward inversion of values but by his reconfiguration of what is good and necessary around the event of Christ crucified and risen. In many cases we will find that there is a partial match between Paul’s Christological configuration of values and the liberal values espoused by the majority of intellectuals in the modern West, with respect to justice, equality, freedom, and human rights. If Paul is to remain in any sense a constructive challenge, we will need to deploy a creative theological hermeneutic, which attempts to recontextualize Paul’s core insights in our own very different historical, intellectual, and social setting.

Punishment is a burden that some agent with relevant powers deliberately imposes on someone else as a purportedly justified response to conduct that she, the punishing agent, views as wrong.1 The agent might view the conduct as wrong in itself or as wrong simply because it breaches an authoritative rule. But the burden imposed on the supposed wrongdoer is normally intended to communicate the punisher’s justified condemnation of the wrong in question. The punishing agent not only has the power to inflict hard treatment in response to the conduct, but also, usually, claims to have the authority – the right – to do so. The punishee is allegedly responsible for the (putative) wrong, in the sense of meeting the conditions that would make it fair or fitting or otherwise appropriate to impose the punishment – though of course he in fact might not be responsible for it. These features – that punishment is justified, that the punishing agent has the relevant authority, and that those punished are responsible – are the sources of most of the philosophical issues that arise in regard to punishment, and we examine them in more detail in this chapter.

When Paul gave consideration to the issue of what was wrong within God’s good creation, he saw a consistently repeating pattern all around him. No matter where he looked, Paul observed relationships distorted by the on-going and ever-present quest for self-preservation, together with the consequent abuse of power that all too often characterizes that quest. Paul saw this same pattern of distorted relationality repeated in every area of life. This essay teases out the character of the relational distortion that Paul found lying at the heart of the problem that required God’s salvific intervention. Profitable advances into understanding Paul’s view of “the problem” can be achieved if we place our focus on a single motif: power. But that motif includes within itself at least two separate but interrelated phenomena that, for Paul, lie at the heart of all that had gone wrong within God’s good creation. Those two phenomena are: (1) the abusive application of power within patterns of dysfunctional relationship, and (2) human inability (or the lack of power) to offset those abusive applications of power.

Inquiry into the nature of law as a form of social ordering, including the values it ought to serve, threads a long and complex path through the great classics of Western philosophy. Plato’s Republic and Laws, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, Cicero’s De Officiis, St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Immanuel Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals, and G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right, all engage with questions that form part of such an inquiry. But even though many of the chapters in this volume display an acute sensitivity to this history, with some authors explicitly situating themselves in a specific tradition of philosophical thought, they all share a determinedly contemporary focus. The contributors to this volume were not invited to provide overviews of the history of ideas, but rather to identify what they judge to be the key questions for us today, and the most compelling lines of approach to those questions, in relation to topics such as the aims and limits of law; what makes for sound legal adjudication; the scope of justice and the place of human rights; the concepts, institutional structures, and values that unify individual departments of law such as crime, contract, and tort; and the prospects for transnational legal order. This contemporary focus is neither a mere accident nor an instance of sheer parochialism.

The Pastoral Epistles, read individually or together, give us glimpses into the way the church was developing institutionally and the way the Christian message was to be understood and handled in the period beyond Paul’s death. They represent a particular way of thinking about the church and exercising leadership in a church that was moving from a charismatic movement to an institutional reality prepared for life in the Greco-Roman imperial world. In short, the Pastoral letters represent an important hinge point in the development of early Christianity and, as such, they are fascinating both historically and theologically and deserve attention in their own right.