Romans Through History and Culture – serie

Navigating Romans Through Cultures contains eight chapters of critical and contextualized readings of Paul's letter to the Romans by scholars from Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Asia. It provides an interpretive voyage into how the gospel of Paul, as contained in his letter to the Romans, fulfills its original vision of "making known the gospel of Christ in all nations" (Rom 16:26). The challenge of the contributors is to express Paul's gospel in terms of their own cultures. The book is the latest installment in the Romans Through History and Culture series, edited by Daniel Patte and Cristina Grenholm. This journey around the world took no less than four years. Each contributor is familiar with the culture they worked with, since many lived in that culture. Each "travel-log" is not just a report of how we steer the ship (letter to the Romans) through the water of a particular culture (or a sea of cultures for many of us); it is also a life changing critical reflection on our reading and interpretative process.Thus charting a new course involves more than offering new ways of reading Romans; it also involves clarifying the rationales for this new reading, in the light of the contextual, analytical, and hermeneutical frames of Scripture Criticism. In their challenging readings of Romans, the contributors have wrestled with: xan understanding of culture; xthe cultural background and mission of Paul; xcultural and theological conflicts in the letter of Paul to the Romans; xcultural interpretations of Paul; xand navigating equipments in steering Romans through cultures. Contributors include Florin T. Cimpean; Herold O. Weiss; Jonathan A. Draper; Gerald O. West; Mark D. Baker; J. Ross Wagner; James D. G. Dunn; Juan Escarfuller; Elsa Tamez; Monya A. Stubbs; Kathy Ehrensperger; Daniel C. Arichea, Jr; Douglas A. Campbell; Revelation Enriquez Velunt; Troy A. Martin; Brian K. Blount; Charles H. Cosgrove; K.K. Yeo

Reading Romans with Contemporary Philosophers and Theologians explores the recent works by philosophers and theologians who engage Paul's letter to the Romans by scholars in the fields of New Testament studies, theology and philosophy from North America and Europe. The first part of the volume is an engaging discussion of the recently published commentary Romans (Chalice Press, 2005) by co-authors John Cobb and David Lull with Jouette Bassler and David Odell-Scott. The second part of the volume offers engaging articles by Valérie Nicolet Anderson, Alain Gignac, Theodore Jennings and Ola Sigurdson which discuss recent works on Romans by continental philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and Slovoj Zizek, and which explore the influences of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Benjamin, and Derrida on the recent interest in Saint Paul. The final chapter by Kathy Ehrensperger is an exploration of the possibility of a dialogue between Paul of Tarsus and Emmanuel Levinas.

This sixth volume of the Romans through History and Culture series consists of 14 contributions by North-American and European medievalists and Pauline scholars who discuss significant readings of Romans through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the eve of the Reformation. The commentaries of Abelard, William of St. Thierry, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicolas of Lyra, and the wider influence of Romans as reflected in the letters of Heloise and the works of Dante demonstrate the reception of Romans at this period. Starting with an introduction inviting the reader to into the biblical environment of the Middle Ages and suggesting the varied ways in which Paul was understood in both high clerical culture and among the people; it also offers a summary of the work done by each of the authors. This volume attests the dominant role of scripture in communal life and witnesses to the pervasive influence of Paul's letter to the Romans in the flourishing discussions on Scripture and theology.

This volume of essays provides presentations and analyses of several Reformation theologians' interpretations of Romans as a whole or in part, some focusing on one particular interpreter, such as Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Bullinger, and Bucer; others compare and contrast two or more of the major interpreters whether in relation to a particular section of the letter. The commonalities and divergence in the readings are analyzed in relation to and as a reflection of the various social, political and personal circumstances of the Reformers.

From a gender perspective, Romans differs from many biblical texts. It contains few explicit mentions of gender, no household code and it has been understood as promoting universalism. This volume joins several feminist commentators in showing how crucial Romans is for understanding Paul's view of gender. Divided into three parts: mapping traditions in Romans, challenging gendered traditions in Romans, and gender and the authority of Romans, the concluding essays ask: Does scriptural criticism really do justice to feminist concerns? Both avenues and obstacles for feminist scholars interpreting Romans are pointed out.

This volume traces the earliest receptions of "Paul's Letter to the Romans", seeking to elucidate their hermeneutical strategies as they endorse, explain, construct, and rework Romans as a normative authority. These early patristic readings of Romans by Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen, and others are pivotal. Long before Augustine and Luther they set formative interpretive principles upon which is built the imposing yet diverse edifice of subsequent interpretations and uses of Romans. By the end of the second century CE, the letters of Paul had established themselves as authoritative bearers of divine revelation. Yet the task of tracing the earliest receptions of "Paul's Letter to the Romans" is challenging, because the thought world of the early Christians is remote, molten, largely oral, and as such, hard to trace. The essays in this volume rise to the challenge by explicating significant aspects of Paul's reception among early Christian readers. They ask: how did these readers construct Paul's view of pagan and Christian relations? Of the Gentiles? Of Jewish salvation? Of faith? Of resurrection? Of Christian Platonist principles?Contributors to this volume demonstrate specific ways in which Romans was appropriated to define the philosophy of Christian Platonism, a development which has had an enduring impact upon the creation of a Christian paideia.

This volume complements, but does not duplicate, the history of the exegeses of Romans since the 19th century which have been repeatedly presented in the introductions of various commentaries on Romans. This collection of essays explores major interpretations of Romans by the following major figures: the philosopher, Immanuel Kant; the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer, the theologian Karl Barth, the political theologian Erik Peterson, and the biblical scholar Ernst Kasemann; and how they are related to the "new perspective" on Paul, introduced by Krister Stendahl. Rather than tracking changes in exegetical approaches and conclusions (with special attention to analytical choices) among the modern interpretations of Romans, this volume deliberately follows changes in hermeneutical/theological choices. Focusing exclusively in modern exegetical studies of Romans, the distinguished contributors consider interpretations of Romans by philosophers, by theologians, and by biblical scholars.

This collection of essays integrates scholarly and scriptural interpretations, Eastern Orthodox biblical scholarship, together with biblical interpretations throughout church history. Unlike the Western interpretations that read Romans in terms of theological anthropology, the Greek Fathers do not presuppose such a concept and therefore each of the articles in this volume invites Western scholars and students to re-read Paul's letter with new eyes: with a greater sensitivity to the nuances of the Greek text; with an openness to envision what Paul is saying from very different theological and hermeneutical perspectives; and with the awareness that the Greek Fathers addressed particular contextual issues of their time.