A Decontextualized Paul? A Response to Francis Watson’s Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith

There is much to like about Francis Watson’s new book, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith.1 Watson is clearly a superb reader of texts, and his thinking is always creative even when it fails to command assent. One has to admire a scholar who has both the imagination and the temerity to propose an entirely new approach to the long-standing problem of the origins and meaning of Paul’s central theological concepts. Tohiscredit,Watsondoesnotclaimtooffera comprehensive explanation of Paul’s theology; in fact, he states explicitly that there are important elements of Paul’s thought that cannot be explained by his thesis. But he does think that he can explain the background of Paul’s crucial theological beliefs about faith, righteousness, the law, election, promise and similar topics. As Douglas Campbell has indicated in his review, Watson traces Paul’s thinking on these issues to a contextual reading of the Pentateuch. More specifically, he argues that Paul was seeking to resolve two crucial contradictions that he discovered while reading the narrative chapters of theTorah throughthelensofChristianfaith.The first is the tension between the unconditional election of Abraham’s descendants in Genesis and the inaugurationof a conditional covenant in the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.The second is the conflict between the Torah’s promise to give ‘life’ (i.e. well-being) to those who obey it and the accounts of what actually happened to the generation that received the laws of Torah. Instead of enjoying ‘life’, they were condemned to die in the desert when they