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  • From: Jeff Peterson <peterson AT mail.ics.edu>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: SBL Pauline Theology Group
  • Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 10:11:56 -0700


First I wrote:
>> Your criticism of Dunn's use of Romans seems to me to encapsulate
>> the fundamental insight of the SBL group's project, viz., that responsible
>> theological interpretation of the letters begins with recognition of the
>> occasional character of each letter, rather than with the collection of
>> theologoumena for arrangement under loci, harmonization, synthesis, etc.;
>> and this insight of course calls into question many magisterial accounts
>of
>> Pauline theology.

Then, at 8:42 PM +0000 5/13/99, Michael Thompson wrote:
>I hope I'm misunderstanding you here, Jeff. If Dunn is being criticized for
>irresponsible theological interpretation because he hasn't recognized the
>occasional character of Paul's letters, people haven't been reading his
>commentaries very closely. Yes, the material in his Theology of Paul book is
>arranged under traditional loci, but that is to make Paul's ideas
>accessible, not to minimize their contextual nature nor to imply that other
>approaches to Paul are valuable.

I offered no criticism of Dunn; I cited a criticism expressed in the post
to which I responded as a way of getting to the main concern of the SBL
group's project, which is what I was asking about. While I've used _The
Theology of Paul the Apostle_ for reference, I haven't yet read it in
sufficient depth to reach a judgment on whether it succeeds as a systematic
presentation of Paul's convictions free of such forcing of the exegesis as
one finds in Bultmann, which was the principal "magisterial account of
Pauline theology" I was thinking of when I wrote that phrase.

There can be no question of the value of Prof. Dunn's contributions to
Pauline exegesis and theology; neither, however, should there be any real
exception taken to formulating a principle of method and then asking, "Does
X's work run afoul of this?" That's how we can hope to reach a deeper
understanding of the difficult subject to which Bultmann, Dunn, et al. have
given us an entry, for which we are in their debt.

Jeff


------------------------------------
Jeffrey Peterson
Institute for Christian Studies
Austin, Texas, USA
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