Edward Adams, Dorothea H. Bertschmann, Stephen J. Chester, Jonathan A. Linebaugh, and Todd D. Still, eds. The New Perspective on Grace: Paul and the Gospel after Paul and the Gift

This collection of essays, dedicated to John M. G. Barclay on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, represents an attempt at mature reflection by seasoned academics and practitioners on the significance of Barclay’s scholarship, specifically his magnum opus Paul and the Gift. Published in 2015, Paul and the Gift sent shockwaves through the field of New Testament studies by side-stepping old, deadlocked debates between various schools of Pauline theology. His method was deceptively simple: to examine in detail how Paul uses the language of “grace” in his letters (specifically focusing on Romans and Galatians) within the broader discourse of gift-giving in Second Temple Judaism and Greco-Roman literature. In so doing, Barclay observed that previous scholarship has often been hampered by making assumptions about how grace is defined, contending that further nuance is needed. To remedy this deficit, he proposed a taxonomy of six perfections of grace––superabundance, singularity, priority, incongruity, efficacy, and non-circularity. Barclay demonstrated that gifts in the ancient world imposed obligations upon the recipients, undermining the modern notion of the “pure gift.” Thus, while Paul viewed God’s grace in Christ as unconditioned, it was not unconditional.To interact with Barclay’s ideas about grace, this Festschrift contains twenty essays grouped into four sections. The first and largest part (seven chapters) deals with grace as manifested in various elements of Pauline theology. In Part 2, entitled “Contextual and Canonical Conversations,” four essays examine gift-language in other texts in the New Testament canon (Matthew, the Gospel of John, 1 Peter) and in light of ancient aesthetical terminology. Part 3, comprising five essays, focuses on reception history and looks at grace as it has been understood in various writers from Cyril of Alexandria to Karl Barth. Part 4 contains four essays that address some of the pastoral implications of incongruous grace for the contemporary church.Contributions approach Barclay’s work from a variety of perspectives, with some chapters warmly receiving and extending his conclusions. For example, Jonathan Linebaugh’s wide-ranging essay “The Uglier Ditch: First-Century Grace in the Present Tense” contains a beautiful theological reflection on incongruous grace, which alone is worth the price of the volume. In a similar vein, John K. Goodrich moves Barclay’s analysis beyond Romans and Galatians by tracing gift-narratives in Ephesians, showing that the epistle “articulates a drama centering on God’s grace and beneficence” (p. 107). Believers have been delivered from sin, described as both power and pathogen in Eph 2:1–3, and are caught up into the resurrection life of the exalted Christ (3:6) who continues to empower them (3:16, 18, 20) to do good works that God prepared beforehand (2:10). Goodrich suggests that Ephesians expresses several perfections of grace beyond incongruity, focusing on priority, superabundance, and (distinctively) efficacy: “The significant emphasis Paul places on divine agency and empowerment (strength, might, make, create, work, became) therefore suggests that in Ephesians the efficacy of grace is not only central but, in some instances, perfected” (p. 124).Other chapters, however, push back against features of Barclay’s interpretation. Simon Gathercole critiques Barclay for being reticent to read Paul as opposing a theological position in which “justification is the μισθός for Torah-work” (p. 46). Jane Heath moreover suggests Barclay has too quickly dismissed aesthetic elements of the χάρις word-group in the New Testament writings; Christ is not just the gift of God but a beautiful and glorious gift (p. 186).Perhaps most contentiously, Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that though Barclay has rightly characterized the Christ-gift as incongruously given and requiring the response of pistis, Barclay has thoroughly misunderstood the logic of Pauline soteriology. Rather than articulating an ordo salutis that is dependent on grace from start to finish, Engberg-Pedersen asserts that Paul espouses a six-stage soteriological scheme (p. 8), with pneumatically enabled altruistic acts of love belonging outside the “gift-circulation system” (p. 11). Acts of love serve to fulfill the Mosaic law, resulting in just behavior now and final salvation in the future (p. 13). The implication is a kind of Pauline “perfectionism” (p. 20).Although not intended as such, persuasive counterarguments to Engberg-Pedersen’s proposal can be found in several of the following chapters. For example, Todd D. Still briefly surveys grace-language in the Hauptbriefe and demonstrates, among other things, that grace is “an ongoing reality” (p. 27) in which Paul lived, a pervasive and prevailing power sustaining Paul in weakness (cf. 2 Cor 12:9). Similarly, David Briones contends that Paul’s doxology in Rom 11:33–36 reveals a circular relationship of grace and gratitude: “God, as the divine Giver, redeems through the gift of his Son and empowers his new creation by the Spirit to give him glory” (p. 72). Because Christ is God’s gift of grace, Paul’s doctrine of union with Christ implies that the whole Christian life is permeated by grace: “God gives grace, God’s grace works in and through believers, and believers respond by giving glory to God” (p. 72). This is confirmed by Paul’s doxological comment that all things are not only “from him” and “to him” but also “through him” (Rom 11:36), underscoring that all the activities of the Christian life found in the following chapters of Romans are enabled and energized by the “mercies of God” (Rom 12:1).This review has highlighted just a sampling of the essays in this Festschrift. Although not all the chapters are of equal strength or significance, this volume admirably serves its purpose of providing a forum for dialogue and debate. Just like Paul and the Gift, it too deserves to be widely read.