British New Testament Society

All his life Martin Luther experienced what he calls his Anfechtungen, his struggles with spiritual despair and guilt. As is well known, these struggles yielded his 'Reformation Discovery' that the righteousness of God in Rom. 1:17 is not the punitive righteousness by which a wrathful God punishes sinners, but the gift of his own righteousness through faith in Christ to all who believe. In recent decades, following the influential lead given by the work of Krister Stendahl, Pauline scholars have often assumed that Luther is guilty of simple anachronism, projecting back onto Paul his own guilty conscience. This paper subjects that assumption to careful scrutiny, tracing Luther's reading of Phil. 3 across various texts. Although Luther does not discuss Paul's conscience as an issue in its own right, he in fact repeatedly assumes that Paul's conscience was robust. The paper moves on to consider how this finding fits into Luther's overall reading of Paul, the manner in which he thinks he thinks about Paul's post-conversion Christian conscience, and the parallels that Luther does draw between his own biography and that of Paul. These parallels are significant and extensive, but do not include a guilty conscience. Luther does not project his own guilty conscience back onto Paul. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these findings for current 'new perspective' debates.

In this short paper, I take a brief look at this passage, and especially at its last verse, verse 15, because it seems to me to be one of the canonical texts that have been disproportionately used in discussions of Women and Authority in the Bible. It also seems odd to me that, out of all the available material in the generally 'Pauline' tradition this small section has offered a range of interpretive communities, as Stanley Fish would have it, sanction to argue for the on-going oppression of women within their ecclesial structures.

I look at three aspects - clearly, a full exegesis is beyond the scope of this paper, so I merely review three general questions: What did the text mean? What has it meant? What might it mean? And I focus on the specifically hermeneutical question of how this text has been used to justify oppression of women in a number of different ways. Finally, I reconsider, very briefly, the concept of salvation in Paul and decide whether this passage can be reconciled with the theology of the 'genuine' Pauline letters.

No abstract available

Joint Session with the NT: Use and Influence Seminar

Panelists: Richard Burridge, Helenann Francis, Mark Goodacre