269 - The Pauline Letters & Preaching Paul

The Pauline Letters
By Leander E. Keck and Victor Paul Furnish
Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1984. 156 pp. $8.95.

Preaching Paul
By Daniel Patte
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 95 pp. $4.95.

These two books, like the odd couple, are mismatched. One is selfconsciously historical, the other avoids historical questions. One aimed to be a book from the beginning; the other was a set of lectures to preachers that became a book as an afterthought. Thus one comes with a clarity and economy of style without the speaker's presence; the other is distractingly colloquial and labored.

After a sketchy but suggestive treatment of our inherited images of Paul (public, scholarly, and ecclesiastical), Keck and Furnish discuss the modes of historical criticism: explanation (viewing the text in context), understanding (imaginatively cntering the world of the text), and interpretation (bringing the text's world into our own).

The heart of the book, chapter 4, treats key Pauline texts dealing with the resurrection (I Cor. 15:3-7), redemption (Rom. 3:21-26), Christ and the law (Gal. 4:4-6), and ethical instruction (Phil. 2). Chapter 5 does the same for the deutero-Pauline epistles. These brief treatments offer a tantalizing taste of a rich fare, and for those still hungry, a bibliography offers a full meal. This fresh, readable treatment made me uncomfortable only with its brief discussion of the law in Gal. 4:4-6, an enormously complex topic that required attention; and yet any treatment as brief as this is guaranteed to provoke uneasiness in the guild.

In his book for preachers and lay people, Daniel Patte weaves his notes around fifteen theses supplemented by a short conclusion. The theses proceed in geometric progression from the necessity of preaching to the importance of the believers' mission to and through the church. Though devoted to a practical task, the work is highly theoretical, being thoroughly informed by Patte's earlier work on structuralism. The bipolar nature of the church (and indeed of the world) is assumed, and effective preaching or witness is supposed to reconcile these opposites. For example, believers are always freed from their idolatry by discovering the work of God in the one perceived as "sinner" (p. 44). Drug dealing, child molesting, wife battering, nuclear proliferation, world hunger and so on are recognized, but Patte's response borders on the glib: "You cannot correct these evils, the Lord alone can. Proclaim the gospel and have faith" (p. 62). Where the church is faithful to its gospel, Patte argues, the power of God is juxtaposed against these idolatrous expressions of evil. Who would deny the limitation

270 - The Pauline Letters & Preaching Paul

and distortion of the "social gospel," but Patte's response is simplistic in the extreme.

The shorthand character of the notes, though ideal for lectures to ministers, falls short when the reader cannot raise a hand. The view that the Jews were under a curse because they made the law into an idol cries out for development and explanation. When he belatedly gets down to cases, Patte's approach is insightful, and his efforts to upgrade preaching are laudable. But for those conditioned to view texts in context, this book will frustrate. In that case, Keck and Furnish might be more useful.

Calvin J. Roetzel
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minn.