Some good press for Paul

When Susan Grove Eastman told a fellow conference attendee that she was working on a book on Paul’s letters, the response was perhaps unsurprising: “All I know about Paul is his bad press.”

Indeed, in recent years Paul has gotten a great deal of bad press, particularly as mainline churches and clergy have highlighted Jesus as a teacher and moral example at the expense of Christ as Lord. It seems almost a badge of honor among recent seminary graduates to diss Paul. I suspect a lot of this resistance comes from people who have never really read Paul or studied the work of his more sympathetic interpreters.

Eastman is not just a sympathetic interpreter of Paul; she is a person whose life has been changed by a deep reading of Paul’s letters. “They have,” she writes, “taken me captive, captured my attention, enthralled me, engrossed me, and laid claim to me, with an urgency that exceeds mere ‘academic’ curiosity.” As one who, like Eastman, has experienced the power of Paul’s words—words that captivate me, quicken my pulse, and take my breath away—I am grateful for her resistance to contemporary and conventional wisdom’s dismissals of the apostle.