Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love and James W. Thompson, Apostle of Persuasion: Theology and Rhetoric in the Pauline Letters

Abstract

predictions that focus the reader’s attention on the death of Jesus. As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, he teaches the disciples, implicitly informing the lives of the communities to which the Gospel was directed. The second half of the volume is dedicated to various theological topics and issues that arise out of the Gospel, broken out into two sections: “Thinking Theologically” and “Constructive Theological Engagement.” In the first, the topics discussed include the kingdom, Christology, Holy Spirit, discipleship, and Jesus’s deeds in Matthew. Here I especially appreciated the chapter on Jesus’s deeds, in which the authors emphasized the significance of the human Jesus living out the values and ethos of God’s kingdom. In the second section, Roberts and Brown present chapters on Matthew’s particular contribution to the theology of the NT, feminist and global/liberation theological understandings of Matthew, and finally reading Matthew pastorally, politically, and in a post-Holocaust context. In this section the highlight is the chapter discussing feminist and majority world readings of Matthew. This volume is a solid addition to the Two Horizons series. The commentary, however, would benefit from a slightly less rigorous narrative critical reading and also explore redaction-critical understandings of the text. Further, within the commentary (and theological discussions) there is a strong emphasis on reading the “least of these” in Matt 25:31–46 as a general term for those on the margins, thus arguing that ministry to the oppressed is a major theme in Matthew. The parable, however, may be describing how non-believers (“the nations”; 25:32) have treated “the least,” who are emissaries of Jesus (cf. 10:42). Finally, the intent of this commentary and the series in which it has been published is to pair theological exegesis of the text with theological reflection on the text. This particular volume is weighted more toward the latter. The commentary on the text is not expressly theological; to its credit, it is a thoroughly narrative critical reading of Matthew that takes into account the first-century context within which it was written and first heard. As presented, however, the book as a whole somewhat ironically reinforces the division of biblical studies from theology. These minor critiques notwithstanding, I can recommend this resource to pastors and scholars of Matthew’s Gospel.