Final Account

`Final Account, Paul's Letter to the Romans' is a very small book by the very distinguished Krister Stendahl, a Professor Emeritus of Divinity at Harvard, whose liturgical affiliation, as one could easily assume from his Scandinavian name, is Lutheran. In a world filled with big books on Paul in general and on his Epistle to the Romans in particular, this slim volume is a bit of an anomaly. One thing the size tells us is that unlike the tomes by the likes of Ernst Kasemann, Karl Barth, and N. T. Wright, this volume will not be giving us a chapter and verse exegesis of the famous Epistle. The volume is even smaller when you take into consideration the fact that 25 pages, a full third of the volume, are taken up with a reprint of the RSV translation of the letter. One thing that is important to realize is that this is not gratuitous padding, as it is all part of Bishop Stendahl's big idea. I can't help but think of Isaiah Berlin's famous comparison of the hedgehog and the fox in reading this book. One may say that while Kasemann and Wright and James Dunn (in `The Theology of Paul the Apostle') deal with many, many ideas, Stendahl, in this volume, brings us no more than a few `big' ideas. Stendahl's most impressive `big' idea is the notion that one should embark on reading Romans with an open mind, devoid of all preconceptions. Therefore, the good Bishop provides us with his preferred translation for studious reading. Since, as Stendahl points out, Romans has been claimed as the documentary underpinning of every variety of theological point of view from Augustine to the present, it is easy to find oneself with an inadvertent pair of tinted glasses. The Lutheran shade of glasses is, of course, the issue of justification by faith, which every non-Lutheran commentator points out is actually not one of Paul's major themes, as he brings it up only in Romans and Galatians, the Epistles wherein he is arguing against Gentile Christians having to follow Mosaic law. While Stendahl is a self-confessed Lutheran, he is well aware of this slant and side steps it as deftly as many earlier commentators such as William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer. One important original idea is usually enough for me to consider a book valuable, but Stendahl has more. Two of the more novel thoughts are in his first lecture, where he says Paul's primary concerns were with his health and with the fate, following the advent of the Messiah, of Israel. The second seems not too novel until you realize, from Stendahl's perspective, that Paul had a genuine concern for the Jews. The first issue is easy to overlook, and tends to get lost with all the more theological issues abounding in Paul's writings. But Paul's letters are filled with puzzlement over why Paul, chosen by God to be an apostle, should be afflicted by such corporeal weaknesses. While this book offers only some highlights from a very sound source, it's virtue, aside from the value of those insights is the fact that it ca

Stendhal is well-known to New Testament students for his provocative article on 'The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West' (1963) and here at last is his book-length reflection on Paul's letter to the Romans, where he works out that article at greater length and tied to the text.It is succinct (around 80 pages of text) and written with a superb lightness of touch. This is 'the big picture' of Paul at his most excited, guiding the perplexed reader through the tangled maze of the argument with humour and yet a serious concern to grasp the same vision of God which motivated Paul.If there is a complaint, it is perhaps that Stendahl makes such short work of the intricacies of Romans that one wonders if he is perhaps a little more straightforward than Paul himself. Never the less, he nuances well known positions with clarity (notably rejecting simplistic ideas of '2 covenants' sometimes attributed to him) and he reminds us of just why we ever bothered with the New Testament in the first place.Highly recommended.