Kirk, J. R. Daniel. Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008.

Unlocking Romans first came to my attention in a post by Foolish Tarheel Daniel Kirk’s New Book: Unlocking Romans. Although I was not planning to read anything on Romans now (since I had spent some time on it last year), I was impressed by FT’s recommendation of Daniel Kirk as a person and his work. FT thinks that Kirk’s exegesis is “careful and sensitive” and whose sensitivity spans from “historical, cultural, communal, and theological issues of the first century to missional, practical, theological, and pastoral concerns for both then and now.” With this recommendation and the fact that Daniel Kirk would probably interact with the New Perspective on Paul, I decided to read the book. I was not disappointed.

Starting with the question of “Who is God?,” Kirk says that “no question is more central to the study of Paul than to determine at the outset which God we expect to find as the topic of his letters” (2). Can God be defined in universal terms without reference to the story of Israel? His answer is no.

If this is true, then we need to start asking questions about how God will fulfill his promises to Israel and be faithful to His covenant. Therefore the following statement gets to the heart of the thesis of the book:

“In Romans, the resurrection of Jesus becomes Paul’s key for demonstrating that the promises contained in the Scriptures have been fulfilled in the Christ event…Because Paul’s God is the God of particulars, the God whose righteousness is tied to a particular story in which God has promised to act in a particular way and to bless a particular people, Paul must show that his gospel message makes sense as the fulfillment of that God’s actions fulfilling precisely those promises and blessing that particular people” (8).

Basically, Jesus’ resurrection is the hermeneutical key for understanding Romans. In a sense, this book is proposing that Paul’s hermeneutics is a hermeneutics of resurrection.
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