What does Paul mean when he says that “death is swallowed up in victory”? When will this happen? And has he made fair use of the Old Testament texts that he cites in support of his claim?

Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15:50-57 that flesh and blood will not inherit the rule with Jesus at the right hand of God over the nations. So when this new order is inaugurated, those who have died in Christ will be raised, perishable bodies will put on imperishability, mortal bodies will put on immortality. Thus will come to pass the saying that is written…

The question of the meaning of Habakkuk’s “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4) came up in a comment on a recent post about Romans. My argument is that when Paul quotes this line in Romans 1:17, he is using it more or less in the same way that Habakkuk intended it, as identifying a pragmatic stance to be taken in the midst of historical upheaval and change. His argument is very different to the Reformed appropriation of the maxim in the service of a doctrine of justification by faith.

There is a group of Gentiles in Paul’s eschatological narrative who do not have the Law of Moses, who nevertheless do the work of the Law, and who “will be justified” on a day of judgment and earn “glory and honour and peace” (Rom. 2:12-16). The question of the religious or rhetorical status of these Gentiles came up for discussion at last week’s research conference at the London School of Theology.

Critical scholars mostly think that these are unbelieving Gentiles, which is the view that I took in The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom. The preference of more conservative scholars would be to suppose either that Paul is speaking only of a hypothetical pagan righteousness for rhetorical purposes, or that these are Christian Gentiles who have been regenerated by the Spirit. I’ve thought through my position again in light of the discussion and I’ve come to the same conclusion, with one or two novelties picked up along the way. This is a fairly sketchy presentation of my reasons, beginning with a translation that attempts to show the syntactic structure of the passage….

Very reluctantly, I am going to take issue with Peter Enns here. In a recent “Bible for Normal People” podcast he advocates what is basically a New Perspective reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

It’s not about individuals but it’s about a collective. If I can put that a little bit differently, the book of Romans, to use theological language, the book of Romans is not about soteriology—how you get saved. It’s about ecclesiology. Ecclesiology means the church and the study of the church. In other words, who makes up the people of God?

This is fine as far as it goes, and maybe we shouldn’t expect “normal people” to go much further at the moment. But I think a more drastic overhaul of the standard Protestant understanding of Romans is called for.

By way of an addendum to the previous piece on Jesus’ subversion of the Jewish Gehenna, I want to look briefly at James 3:5b-6, which is the only place in the New Testament outside the Synoptic Gospels where the word geenna occurs. The verse reads (my translation):

A major part of my argument against the traditional doctrine of “hell” is that in Jesus’ teaching “Gehenna” is not a place of unending conscious torment after death but a symbol for the devastation and loss of life that Israel would suffer as a consequence of the war against Rome. I think that Jesus has basically reworked Jeremiah’s prediction that Jews who died during the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians would be thrown into the Valley of the Son of Hinnom because there would be no place left to bury the dead in the city (Jer. 7:32; 19:6-7).

Steve Jacob found my post on annihilationism very interesting and wants to know whether I think “Tim Keller is on the mark in his recent article on hell”. The short answer is no. A longer answer follows. Readers might also be interested in my post “Tim Keller gets a lot right but gets hell badly wrong”.

Actually, Keller’s “The Importance of Hell” is not a recent article; it was first published in 2009 on the Redeemer website. In it he puts forward four reasons why the church needs to preach hell. All make some appeal to scripture, but only the first amounts to anything like a biblical justification of the doctrine. The other three arguments are attempts to mount a defence of hell on ethical and theological grounds.