This chapter works through Romans 10 and Galatians 3:10–14 in conversation with other early Jewish evidence, arguing that Paul is participating in a long-standing Jewish debate about the relationship between repentance and Israel’s redemption. Specifically, will Israel’s repentance initiate the restoration or will God’s redemptive intervention produce Israel’s repentance? Paul comes down squarely on the latter side, arguing for a divinely-initiated redemption through the obedient fidelity of Jesus, whose status and authority as “the just one”—the figure divinely appointed to bring about redemption—was validated by the resurrection. In the process, this chapter provides an elegant solution for the longstanding problem of how to understand Paul’s citations of Lev 18:5 and Deut 30:12–14 in these passages.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

This chapter examines the Laudian account of the relation between faith, hope and charity, and thus of that between faith and works. The Laudian answer to the question of how far, in this life, fallen humanity could fulfil the law of God is addressed.

This chapter contrasts a traditional Protestant understanding of justifying faith as responding to God’s act of reconciliation with an argument for understanding Pauline faith as eschatological trust. The argument focuses on an exegesis of Romans 4. This latter interpretation opens up new vistas on the Pauline implicit narrative substructure as it tells the story of the work of Christ, the community of faith, and the course of history.

This chapter illustrates the theological potency of the freshly explored Pauline gospel narrative. The chapter focuses on three contemporary theological conversations: on justification and theological anthropology, on race and social imagination, and on mission and neighborhoods. Engaging a representative voice from within each of these conversations (Eberhard Jüngel, Willie Jennings, and Scott Hagley respectively), the chapter explores how the work of the exegetes discussed in this book could come alongside and enrich these theological debates. The focus is particularly on how the proposed Pauline narrative substructure identified in the previous chapter might deepen and enhance the theological proposals that are being made. The conclusion is that in each instance the proposed narrative has the potential to enhance our theological imagination and offer new avenues for exploration.