Well, here’s a book to look forward to from Eerdmans. This looks like yet another excellent addition to the recent work on the doctrine of justification, Pauline theology, and apocalyptic. Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

This scholarly book breaks a significant impasse in much Pauline interpretation today, pushing beyond both “Lutheran” and “new” perspectives to a new, noncontractual, “apocalyptic” reading of many of the apostle’s most famous and most troublesome texts.

Douglas Campbell holds that the intrusion of an alien, essentially modern, and theologically unhealthy theoretical construct into the interpretation of Paul has disordered the broader interpretation of his thought and created many of the difficulties that scholars now struggle with. It has, in fact, produced an individualistic and contractual construct, which Campbell terms “the Justification discourse” that shares more with modern political traditions than with either orthodox theology or Paul’s first-century world. In order to counteract that influence, Campbell argues that it needs to be isolated and brought to the foreground before the interpretation of Paul’s texts begins. When that is done, new readings free from this intrusive paradigm become possible and surprising new interpretations unfold.

Demonstrating in detail how prior positions in theological and political terms affect exegesis, how commitments to either lead to bad exegetical decisions at key points, shifting the theoretical implications of certain key texts, The Deliverance of God proves itself a unique and very important work for those looking for an accurate reading of Paul’s words.