Fr. Al Kimel is going to be reading through Paul’s Letter to the Romans…it will be instructive to read along with him. Justification has been an important subject of the Pontificator blog, and here, Fr. Kimel will be looking at one of the primary texts for the doctrine and disputes, in the light of some more recent scholarship:

I should state upfront that I bring to my reading of Paul my recollections of E. P. Sanders’s seminal work Paul and Palestinian Judaism. I read the book shortly after it was published in the late 70s, and he convinced me that the Apostle was not addressing the questions of legalism and works-righteousness that so animated the 16th century Reformers. It will be interesting to see whether my reading of Romans confirms or disconfirms Sanders’s thesis.

Although theological thinking is one of the things I am worst at, this is one of those questions that has dogged me since I read Wright’s Paul: In Fresh Perspective and did a bit of subsequent reading on the New Perspectives on Paul. I’ll be reading along with Fr. Kimel with a great deal of interest.