I started explaining that Paul has different ways that he conceptualizes the act of salvation – how the death and resurrection of Christ restores a person to a right relationship with God. The judicial model that I laid out can be found in several of Paul’s letters, especially Romans and Galatians. But he has other ways of understanding how salvation works, other models involving Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other BIG one can be called the Participationist model. Here is what I say about it in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** The Participationist Model. Most of us today have no trouble understanding how a judicial process can be seen as analogous to the act of salvation. The participationist model, however, is much harder to get our minds around. This is partly because it involves a way of thinking that is no longer prevalent in our culture. Under this second model the human problem is still called "sin," "sin" is still thought to lead to "death," and Christ's death and resurrection still work to [...]

I am currently in the middle of a thread discussing the significance of Paul to the history of early Christianity.  So far I have been trying to argue that Paul is of utmost importance to the New Testament itself, but that it is very difficult to know how much of what we think of as Pauline theology (the doctrine of the atonement, for example) was *distinctive* of Paul (I doubt if he came up with the idea himself) and that there are some prominent features of Paul’s thought – e.g., the importance of Jesus’ resurrection – that he must have inherited from Christians before him. One of my ultimate points is going to be that whatever one thinks about Paul’s originality, it is clear that the gospel that he proclaimed looked very different from what Jesus himself taught.  To get to that point, I have to deal a bit more with what it is that Paul proclaimed. Nowhere does Paul lay out his gospel message more clearly than in the book of Romans.  The reason [...]

I was recently recording the monthly Q&A that I do with Gold members of the blog (if you're not a Gold member, this is one of the perks of moving to that level: every month Gold members ask me questions -- in writing -- and I record a 50-55 minute audio Q&A answering them; since the Gold members get audio versions of the posts, as well as written, this is an add-on they get every month.  Think about joining!).  In this Q&A I received a lot of really interesting questions, but one was very important for understanding the life and ministry of Paul.  And now I see that it was closely related to a question I received on the blog years ago, which is exactly what I was going to post on today anyway!  Here's the original blog question and response.   QUESTION What do you make of Paul’s statement that he didn’t get the good news (= the resurrection and thus the triumph over death) from other humans but from the ‘risen Christ’ himself? [...]