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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Wright, N. T. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a book by N. T. Wright called “The Climax of the Covenant.” The author was unknown to me and the book’s title wasn’t particularly appealing. But because of some of the discussions we were having, he said that this book would help me see where he was coming from. I read the book and was captivated by it. I have to say that quite a bit of the book was way over my head and a lot just seemed like too much information for me to be able to process at the time. But I was able to get the gist of the issues involved and the solutions that Wright was attempting to put forth. This is one of the reasons why I need to read the Climax again because, since then, I have become more familiar with the issues and little more in tune with the process of exegesis. This is why I first started to read N. T. Wright. He was the author who really got me interested in N. T. exegesis and Paul in particular.

After many lectures, articles and books, I finally came around to reading “Paul.” I had read “What Saint Paul Really Said” before and I was glad to know that Wright had written a book that seemed to go beyond it and would become a sort of thumbnail sketch of what is to become his fourth volume in “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” Read more »