CONTOURS OF PAULINE THEOLOGY
By Tom Holland
Mentor/Christian Focus. 291 pages + 90 pages appendices, bibliography and indexes
ISBN 1 85792 469 X
My verdict on this book? I really cannot improve on that of Dr. Peter Head, who, on the front cover, describes it as, ‘Challenging, unsettling and infuriating’.
Dr. Tom Holland teaches New Testament and Hermeneutics at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales. He writes to demonstrate that Paul ‘never left the religion of the Old Testament’ and ‘never departed from the teaching of Jesus’. In this he follows in the footsteps of Tom Wright in What St. Paul Really Said and David Wenham in Paul and Jesus. But Dr. Holland believes that he has uniquely discerned the key to Paul’s thinking: he argues that no other scholar has paid sufficient attention to the way in which Paul’s understanding of salvation is modelled on the New Exodus promise of the Old Testament. In particular, Dr. Holland argues that the Passover is key to understanding Paul’s doctrine of redemption and provides the background to his use of the term ‘firstborn’ as a title for Christ.
