Ep 287: Reading the Apostle Paul | Four Schools of Interpretation

Preorder my new book Politics, Economics and New Testament Interpretation here: https://libertarianchristians.com/store/politics-economics-and-new-testament-interpretation/ 

In this Theology Thursday episode, I explore the four main “schools” of Pauline interpretation, including the Traditional (or Reformational) Perspective, the New Perspective, the Apocalyptic Paul, and Paul Within Judaism. I talk about the strengths of each perspective and how they all contribute something of significance to readers of Paul. The Traditional Perspective rightly observes that grace is entirely unmerited and that believers cannot earn salvation, the New Perspective highlights that the relationship between Jews and Gentiles is central to Paul’s though, the Apocalyptic school contends that there is a radical eschatological intrusion with the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and the Paul Within Judaism school rightly recognizes that Paul wasn’t rejecting or abandoning Judaism and must be understood within the framework of Second Temple Judaism. 

Media Referenced:

John Collins Episode: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-272-the-apocalyptic-worldview-of-ancient-judaism-and-christianity-with-john-j-collins/

Jason Staples Episode: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-278-paul-and-the-resurrection-of-israel-with-jason-staples/

Mark Nanos Episode: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-219-judeophobia-and-philippians-3-with-mark-nanos/ 

Frank Thielman Episode: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-202-paul-apostle-of-grace-with-frank-thielman/ 

Paul Duff Episode: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-276-paul-and-the-corinthians-with-paul-duff/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

All right, everybody. I want to take a quick break from the show to let you all know that my brand new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, where I argue definitively that the New Testament does not endorse modern authoritarian socialism, is now available for pre-order. The release date is going to be Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. And you can go to libertarianchristians.com, click on the book tab at the top of the page, and then select my book. You can pre-order the physical copy through LibertarianChristians.com and you can go to Amazon and pre-order the ebook version, the Kindle version of that book over there. And of course, on September 15th, you'll be able to find the physical copy on Amazon and in many other places where books are sold. I'm extremely excited about this book. This is a culmination of my life's work. I know that many of you guys have asked me about it over the last several months, and I am so ready to get into your hands. Let's go ahead and make this a big hit, get these ideas out there. Again, go and pre-order the book at libertarianchristians.com or at Amazon.com. You can search my name or the title of the book. Thank you guys very much. This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. I am very excited to have you guys back for another Theology Thursday episode. A couple of things before we start the show. My book is going to be coming out in just a few days. So go over to libertarianchristians.com and pick yourself up a copy of my book, Politics, Economics, New Testament Interpretation. It'll be available uh everywhere in hard copy on September 15th. And you can buy it the e-version of it on Amazon right now. Pre-order the e-version of it on Amazon right now. So please go over and do that. I'm very excited to get this book out with you. Also, while you're over there, you can buy yourself some nice merch, like this Protestant Libertarian podcast, Highball Glass, that I'm drinking out of right now. And also I want to remind you guys about the Christians for Liberty conference that's going to be happening in Cincinnati, Ohio on Saturday, October 17th. This is not just across the river from where I live, close to Cody's home, Cody Cook's home. So please go to our website and register for that. It's going to be an awesome event. A lot of great speakers from the Libertarian Christian Institute, including yours truly. So I'm very excited about that. Okay, uh, for those of you guys who've been following the show over the last couple of months, you will realize that I've been on a little bit of a paw kick lately. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that in 2024 and 2025, I spent a lot of time working on Gospels type material. And a lot of the interviews I did and the episodes that I had back then were on issues that were related to the interpretation of the gospels and the political and economic themes in the gospel. And then I spent most of 2025 writing this book that's coming out in a couple of weeks. And so as I wrapped up the writing of that book back in January, I realized that I wanted to get back into reading and studying Paul. And I read a couple of really good books that had been on my list, but I hadn't been able to get to because of the research I was doing for the book. And so, really, for the last five or six months, I've been studying Paul. And we are right now going through Paul's letter to Rome with our small group. And so this is the first time in my life I've ever taught through the entire letter of the Romans. So I figured, you know, I really needed to sharpen up my tools and get on my A game here. So you've seen a lot more episodes on the Apostle Paul lately, and that has a lot to do with my reading interest and just kind of the direction of where I'm going theologically right now. And in fact, uh, I'm recording this before the interview. But if all goes according to plan, Nick Quint was on my show this past Tuesday talking about the apocalyptic Paul. So I want you to go back and listen to that. I'm gonna try to remember to get back in here and put the uh put the links in the show notes and everything for that, but it'll be the episode that was just released before this one. So I think that's gonna be episode 286 for those of you that are counting. And we're gonna talk about some of these issues, I think, in that interview. But I really wanted today on this Theology Thursday episode to talk about a couple of issues in Pauline interpretation that I've been reflecting on over the last several months. Now, for those of you that remember, way back in, I think, January of this year, I interviewed Cody Cook on a new book that he had called Delivered from the Evil Age of the Present, and it which is a really great book. And the flagship article is based on an interpretation of Galatians one through seven. And at the end of the episode, we talked about some of our differences in Pauline interpretation. Cody and I agree on a whole lot, uh, but there are areas of disagreement, and we disagree on some, not all, but some emphases in Pauline interpretation, and which is all great. You know, I totally respect Cody and love him and really enjoy having these uh these conversations and these debates with him. But they got me thinking about the different ways that scholars tend to interpret the Apostle Paul and what those various methods of interpretation contribute to our overall understanding of the apostle. So I want to talk about that on the show today. And if you look at Pauline scholarship as a whole, there are in the modern era, the or the contemporary conversation, the conversation that we're having in 2026 and that we've been having for the last 20 or so years on the Apostle Paul, really four different kinds of schools of Pauline interpretation. Now, I have to give a caveat before we break down these schools that there are scholars that are associated with each of these schools that don't exactly fit the criteria, right? These schools are not something that exists objectively, but ways of talking about how scholars approach Paul. And there's a lot of diversity, um, even among scholars who are oftentimes located within one of these four schools. So I don't want to say that just because a scholar happens to be associated with one school of thought, that means they agree with everything else that all of the other scholars in that school of thought think. And of course, with all of these academic constructs, there's a lot of liminal area uh, you know, around the margins between these various schools of thought and scholars that just don't quite fit into one or the other. But uh, be that as it may, there are definitely different approaches to interpreting Paul. And in the scholarly literature, we'll hear these different approaches talked about generally as different schools. And so today I want to talk about these four schools, and I want to talk about what I think each of these schools gets right and how each of these schools can contribute to our overall understanding of Paul and his letters. Not to say that there aren't major disagreements. I do happen, and as I'll talk about at the end of the show, I do happen to align more closely with a couple of these schools than with other ones. But I think that there are plenty of times in debate and discourse where people want to play these schools off of each other as if they are in direct antithesis to each other. You know, if you if you subscribe to one of these schools, you can't subscribe to some of the insights of the others. And what I want to say is that the idea that these schools are mutually exclusive and self-contained is, I think, an overblown generalization that's not actually true in fact. There's a lot of overlap between these schools. And I think that if you really want to understand the Apostle Paul and where the academic discussion about the Apostle Paul is headed, you have to understand these four schools. So I've been saying four schools a lot. What are these four schools? So the four different ways that people have generally tended to approach the Apostle Paul have been labeled various schools. And so the four main categories or schools for thinking about Pauline interpretation are this. You have the traditional or the reformed or reformational perspective on Paul. This is sometimes called the old perspective on Paul. I don't really like that term, old perspective, for reasons I'll talk about in a minute. But this is the stream of interpretation or thinking about Paul that goes back to the Protestant Reformation. So this is a way of looking at Paul in concert with the main ideas and beliefs of the Reformation. And this is called the traditional or reformational school on Paul, sometimes called the old perspective. Then you have the new perspective on Paul, which was pioneered starting in the 1970s, uh, and it's most closely and famously associated with the scholars E. P. Sanders, James Dunn, Tom Wright, and I would say Michael Byrd, and maybe Scott McKnight would fit into that camp too. Although some of Scott McKnight's recent works maybe uh push him beyond that perspective. But these are these are the scholars that are associated with the new perspective on Paul. And the new perspective offers a correction of their traditional reformational perspective. And a lot of that has to do with a reassessment of Judaism and the role that the law and works play in Jewish theology. Then you have the apocalyptic Paul, the father of that is Ernst Kasimon, but you have other major figures like J. Lewis Martin, uh, J. Christian Becker, and Beverly Roberts Gavinta that are associated with the apocalyptic Paul school. And that school of thought really emphasizes the fact that there is a radical historical discontinuity that emerges with the arrival of Jesus in Paul's thought. So, in other words, Paul is thinking to a certain degree in terms of this split between the time before Jesus and the time after, and then also emphasizes a lot of the themes of Jewish apocalyptic thought that we discussed when we had John Joseph Collins on the show a few weeks ago and reading Paul through that lens. So that's the apocalyptic school. And then the final one is the Paul within Judaism School. And this one is very diverse because you have figures like Lloyd Gatston, uh, going all the way back to a long time uh from that. Amy Jill Levine, I think, would consider herself to be a part of this Paul within Judaism school, uh, Matthew Novenson, um, Matthew Tyson. These are all scholars that are associated with that. And essentially the Paul within Judaism school seeks to interpret Paul as a figure within Judaism. So Paul is not in any way opposed to or antagonistic towards Judaism. He is someone who can be located within the framework of first century Judaism and needs to be interpreted as such. And so that's essentially what's going on with those four schools. So you have the traditional perspective, you have the new perspective, you have the apocalyptic Paul, and then you have the Paul within Judaism. And these are the four schools, the four general schools of Paul line interpretation. I'm going to talk about what I like regarding each of these and maybe some of the things I don't like about each of these in turn. And Theology Thursday is supposed to be a little bit shorter. I could go and do a full episode, like a full 60-minute long, 65-minute long episode covering these four schools, or really what I would like to do in the future is give an episode, like a full-length episode to each of these four schools on their own. So this is going to be a very brief overview today. And again, going back to that, what I've been thinking over the last couple of months about how these schools might actually have more in common, or at least they all give us something of value when reading and interpreting Paul. So let's start with the traditional or the reformational perspective on Paul. And I'll explain why I don't like the label old perspective when we get to the new perspective. All right. But the traditional perspective on Paul goes back to the Reformation. And essentially, it is the idea that what's at the core of the traditional idea, uh, the traditional reading, the traditional school of Paul, is that human beings cannot earn salvation and we don't deserve God's grace, right? This is one of the fundamental insights of the Protestant Reformation, is that there is nothing that we can do that will ever earn the love or the grace or the mercy of God. God's grace is exclusively a gift to us apart from our works. There's nothing we can do to do that. And our salvation is dependent entirely upon the grace and righteousness of God. Now, that is the primary insight of the traditional or reformational perspective. And I think that that is an absolutely essential way of reading Paul. Now, there are some problems, I think, with the reformational understanding of Paul, and that is that they essentially assumed, and this can be traced back to Martin Luther, uh, that Martin Luther and other reformers essentially assumed that when Paul was talking about works of the law, that he was talking about what somebody needed to do in order to be saved. It was about earning your place before God, earning the love or the favor of God. And of course, they mapped this on to the theology of the Catholic Church in the um in the 16th century, uh, the 15th and 16th century, which essentially said you had to contribute to your salvation, that there were works that you needed to complete in order to earn your favor with God. And so Martin Luther, very, uh, very much stricken, afflicted, if you will, with a conscience that was extremely robust and negative, uh, always wondering about how he could possibly earn salvation. He had his big reformational insight when he read Romans 1, 16 through 17 and came to the conclusion that we could not earn God's love or merit or salvation. Now, he would talk about the righteousness of God in imputed terms. So he would say that the righteousness of God is something that God gives to us and that we don't deserve that. And there might, you know, I would want to nuance that in several ways. But if we step back and look at the big picture, I do think that the traditional perspective on Paul doesn't quite understand the Jewish context of Paul, which makes sense. It was developed in the 16th century. We've learned a lot more about Second Temple Judaism and the various worldviews of the peoples that were living at that time, which should nuance our reading of Paul, of course. But the fundamental insight of the traditional perspective is that we cannot earn God's grace. We cannot earn God's favor, and we cannot work for our salvation. This is all a gracious gift of God and something that absent God's initiation, we would not be able to, we would never be able to achieve, right? And so I want to retain that as a model for analyzing Paul. Now, I think that Paul is a little bit more nuanced and complicated with that, but we do have to fundamentally understand that when we are reading Paul, Paul does not believe that human beings are in and of themselves capable of earning the love of God. God has to act first. And this is why all throughout the letter of Rome, or all throughout Paul's letter to the Romans, he talks about the gracious gift of God. Everything that God does for us is a gift. He takes the initiative, he provides us with the ability to perform. And traditional perspective gets that right. Now, the new perspective comes along in the 1970s after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a long hundreds year or so reappraisal of Judaism in the first century. And this really begins with a work that was written by a scholar named E.P. Sanders called Paul and Palestinian Judaism, which if you're watching on YouTube, you can see it right here at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, right? That one that I'm putting that kind of tambook that I'm pointing at on the screen there, that is Paul and Palestinian Judaism. And in reality, the new perspective on Paul doesn't begin with a reappraisal of Paul himself. It begins with a reappraisal of Judaism. So E.P. Sanders, after looking at all of the data from the first century and analyzing all of these Jewish texts, came to the realization that Jews were not trying to earn their favor before God. So again, going back to the Reformation, there was this, you know, this trend in the Catholic Church to make this theology of trying to earn your salvation. And that was by Martin Luther and other reformers imposed back upon Paul. But what E.P. Sanders recognizes is that Jews at this time don't really think that. Jews at this time believe in what he calls covenantal gnomism, which is where Jews are already brought into the covenant. They're already members of the covenant community, the family of Abraham before God by God's grace. And their works, their following of the law, which is what the term gnomism means, is an expression of gratitude for the fact that they are already considered to be a part of God's covenant family. So, in other words, for Jews, following the law wasn't an attempt to earn salvation. Following the law was a response to the salvation that God had already granted them. So obviously, that requires a huge revision of the way that we think about Paul because, though, then going back to the idea, well, what does Paul mean about works of the law? Is does that mean, uh, do works of the law mean that we're trying to earn salvation before God, or does it have to do with identity and inclusion into the covenant community? And one of the emphases of the new perspective, and you can see this in the writings of Christopher Stendel already in the 1960s, who kind of anticipated a lot of the main tenets of the new perspective, there's this emphasis on trying to understand Paul's letters, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, as examples of this tension between Jews and Gentiles. So the question isn't how do individual sinners get right with God? How do we earn our salvation? The question is how can lawless Gentiles become a part of the family of Abraham without themselves having to follow the law and become Jewish? And this is a major component of the work of James Dunn and more importantly, N. T. Wright. He and Dunn would both argue that the Jew-Gentile conflict is intrinsic to New Testament theology, and that a lot of Paul's language about the works of the law and justification and salvation have to do with the incorporation of Gentiles or non-Jews into the family of Abraham. So there's this racial component that Paul is trying to overcome. And Paul is not saying that Judaism is bad and that Judaism is a religion of works righteousness. Instead, what Paul is saying is that Gentiles do not Gentiles do not have to enter into the family of Abraham by following the Jewish law. Gentiles can remain Gentiles if they put their faith in Christ and be a part of this family. And this is the real strength of the new perspective, is that the new perspective brings out the relationship between Jews and Gentiles as an essential component of Pauline thought, that this is an issue that Paul really cared about and that Paul dives into deeply in his letters, and that we have to try to read Romans and Galatians and some of Paul's other letters through the lens of the incorporation of Gentiles into the family of Abraham without the Jewish law. Now, I don't agree with all of the conclusions of the new perspective. And in some ways, I think that they still retain some of those old reformational antitheses between Paul and Judaism. Paul is somehow responding to a Judaism that's lost its way. And T. Wright, in some of his earlier works, makes these sweeping claims about the nationalistic aspiration of Jews, which is not true for all Jewish people in the first century. But again, the core insight of the new perspective on Paul, that uh race doesn't really matter. What matters is you're standing before God, and that's why the Jew-Gentile issue is so pertinent for Paul is extremely relevant. And I think that that's incredibly an incredibly important insight. So the traditional perspective offers us the very true and correct reading of Paul, that we can't earn our salvation and that God's love and grace is always unmerited, where the new perspective refines our understanding of Judaism and places the Jew-Gentile issue at the center of Pauline thought. Both of those are valuable and true insights that do not conflict with one another at all. So then we get to the apocalyptic school of Paul. And there's a lot going on in the apocalyptic school that I really appreciate. The apocalyptic school begins really with the works of Ernst Kasimon, and I've been reading a lot of Kaezimon, the summary's very brilliant New Testament scholar from the middle part of the 20th century. And I've learned a lot from his works. In many ways, he anticipated a lot of the conclusions of modern scholarship. In some ways, he was very much limited by the scholarly conversations of his time, but in other ways he was a very forward-thinking figure. And he's the one who is going to contend that apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology. And so what he means by that is the apocalyptic worldview, which includes this duality between the previous age and the age to come, characterizes early Christian thought, particularly with respect to Paul. And that when Paul reflects on what happens with Jesus, there is a radical discontinuity between the previous age or the evil age of the present, as Paul says in Galatians, and the Messianic age that is inaugurated with the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. And so what the apocalyptic school does at its best is try to understand Paul within the framework of Jewish apocalyptic thought, and then also emphasize that there is a radical historical disjunction which takes place in Paul's mind through the Jesus event, right? Through the Christ event, that the world was a quantitatively and qualitatively different place before the arrival of Israel's Messiah. And so in order to properly read Paul, we have to realize that for Paul, at least with respect to history, there was this radical discontinuity between what came before and what has come after. And so I think that there's a lot going on with the apocalyptic school. Now, I've read a lot of the members of the apocalyptic school in this summer, so this is all kind of fresh in my mind. And they have different ways of nuancing this and parsing this out. But I do think we want to make sure that when we are thinking about the apocalyptic school and its contribution to our interpretation or readings of the Apocalypse of the Apostle Paul, that we do understand that for Paul, uh, this kind of apocalyptic in-breaking is significant. And really, this idea goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Uh, and you can see this in Casimon and Gavinta and some of the other ones. Eschatology, Paul's thinking about where we are in history and about how God is going to wrap all of this up, is at the forefront of Paul's thought. Eschatology is a major, if not the major, issue in Pauline theology. He really does think about the Christ event and the church and salvation and all of these other related issues in terms of an apocalyptic eschatology, the idea that the end is already in some sense begun in the present. And that is something that contributes positively to our understanding of Paul, having this kind of eschatological reading of him. I think that that is really, really important, that there is a disjunction. Now, one of the one of the criticisms that I would have with the apocalyptic Paul school, at least in some expressions of the apocalyptic Paul, is that it in many ways takes the display. Disjunction between Christianity and Judaism, this kind of radical split between the two from the traditional perspective on Paul and maps it on to apocalyptic Judaism. So there's kind of this idea, and you can see this in Khazimon. And again, he's working with, he's working in a pre-Sanders world, right? He's working in a world before Paul and Palestinian Judaism, where there was an assumption that Judaism and Christianity were two separate religions from the beginning and that Paul was siding with Christianity as opposed to Judaism. And so there's this assumption sometimes that Paul leaves Judaism the old way of thinking about things for Christianity, the new one. Now, Beverly Roberts Gaminta and newer apocalyptic school thinkers would challenge that. But the apocalyptic school can lend itself to that way of thinking about Judaism and Christianity in very dualistic terms, which I don't think is historically accurate. But nevertheless, the idea that apocalyptic eschatology dominates Pauline thought is another worthwhile contribution to our readings of Paul. And that leads us to the Paul within Judaism school, which may be perhaps the most diverse and the most controversial of all of these schools. Now, the uh the the uh the the um I'm sorry, the Paul within Judaism school, there it is, the Paul within Judaism school was sometimes called the radical new perspective. So the new perspective happens in the 1970s, and the traditional or reformational perspective is dubbed the old perspective, but we can't really call it the old perspective because there are plenty of people that still hold to the traditional or reformational reading of Paul. I've had uh a couple of them on my show in the last year or so, right? So I know that there are some people that still hold to that view. So it's not really an old view, it's just a view that goes back to the Reformation. And then there are people that would call the Paul within Judaism School the radical new perspective on Paul, which I don't really like that either, because I think that that would identify those two movements in a way that is closer than they ought to be placed next to each other. Um, and maybe that's more of an aesthetic uh or kind of linguistic complaint more than anything else. But the Paul within Judaism School is sometimes called the radical new perspective. But essentially what the Paul within Judaism school does at its best is argues that Paul is not in any way opposed to Judaism. And in fact, Paul never abandons his Jewish identity. We can see that in passage after passage in Paul's writings, whether we're taking a look at Romans 9 or any of those related passages where Paul talks about his heritage or Galatians 2.15, we are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles, talking about himself and Peter. We know that Paul does not abandon his Jewish identity. He remains a Jew who believes that the Jewish Messiah has come, and that conditions all of his thought. And this is where I think the Paul within Judaism school is correctly offers a new, a more nuanced perspective that the other three don't have, in that within the traditional view, the apocalyptic view, and the new perspective view or schools of Pauline interpretation, it's kind of easy, and you can see this in some of their writings, to think that Paul has a problem with some aspect of Judaism that is solved with Christ. And what the radical New Perspective or the Paul within Judaism School asserts is that Judaism itself is extremely diverse in the first century. Therefore, Paul doesn't have to abandon any aspect of his Jewish identity in order to affirm that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. So with the Paul within Judaism school, instead of reading Paul as if he's opposed to some aspect of Judaism, they read him as one figure, one thinker within the framework of Judaism. And again, uh before the time you can see this in the Gospels too, with the the Pharisees and the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They're both Jewish, but they debate with one another about how to best interpret the Jewish law. And Paul would just be another Jew in that spectrum of diverse Judaism, variegated gnomism is what some of these scholars call it. There are different ways of thinking about following the Jewish law, and Paul has one way of doing that. And that I think is the most prominent insight of the Paul within Judaism school. Now it is true that some of the early proponents of the Paul within Judaism school, like Lloyd Gaston and some of the others, and I think Mark Nanos, who I've had on the show before, would be a Paul within Judaism scholar who I think kind of suggests this in some of his writings. They would say that there are essentially two paths to salvation, one for Jews, one for Gentiles. And so Jews can continue to follow the law and go on just as they did before, and Gentiles can follow the Jewish Messiah, and they're both saved by those two passes, sometimes called the Sonderwag approach. There are two different paths, uh, two differing paths for salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike. Now, I think that that perspective isn't quite right. I think that Paul believes that there's only one way to salvation, and that is through the Jewish Messiah, Jesus. But saying that isn't a repudiation or a rejection of Judaism. In fact, it is an affirmation that the hopes of Judaism have been fulfilled through Israel's Messiah. And this is where Romans 11 is so important, where Paul talks about the grafting in of the Gentiles. And as he says throughout his epistle to Rome, the gospel is for the Jews first and also for the Greeks. So that even within, and this is where the Paul within Judaism school kind of rightly emphasizes Paul's Jewish identity. Paul does think that the gospel is for the Jews and that the Jews kind of have priority in the framework of salvation. But in order for Jews to appropriately express their Jewish identity, they need to believe in their own Messiah. But we and so there aren't two different paths. There's only one, and that path runs through Jesus. But Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, and it's not Jews that have to abandon their Jewish identity to become Gentile Christians. It's Gentiles who have to be conformed to the image of God's Jewish son, Jesus, and then therefore incorporated into the family of Abraham. That's how these ideas really work out. And so what I want to say about the Paul within Judaism school is I think that that can be at its best. And I look at the work of Matthew, again, I'm gonna hold up uh Matthew Novenson and uh Matthew Tyson as two modern examples of this phenomenon who I think really get much of this stuff right. I think Paul within Judaism should be the framework through which we view the other three schools. That the idea that you cannot earn God's salvation, the idea that's contributed by the traditional school, that God's love is something that is unmerited. It's a gracious gift from God all the time, and we we cannot earn that on our own, that works within a Jewish framework, right? And so that traditional insight, uh, that traditional school insight works within a Jewish framework and should be retained as such. The new perspective idea that Paul is dealing with the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, and that is a really important component of Paul's thought, also makes sense within the Paul within Judaism school. The apocalyptic Paul, with Jewish apocalypticism, the apocalyptic worldview, is an inherent component of Judaism in the time of Paul. So any apocalyptic reading of Paul necessarily requires a Paul who is operating within Judaism. And the disjunction is historical between the old age and the new age, not religious, in the sense that Paul is not abandoning the old Judaism for the new Christianity. He's remaining within his Jewish identity. That Jewish identity has just reached its apocalyptic denuma in Christ. And so we can see that within the framework of each of these four schools, they all have something very positive to contribute to our reading of Paul. And they all have areas where, at least in my opinion, we can offer some legitimate critique and pushback. So I want to offer this to you today just as uh just as a way of thinking about Paul and what his writings represent and how we can appropriate his writings in the world today. So the next time you sit down to read Paul, maybe think about these four different schools of Pauline interpretation. And when you're going through, let's say that you pick up a chapter in Paul's letter to Rome, and I've I've done this before, I think this is very helpful. Maybe read that chapter once through within the framework of the traditional perspective. Okay, how is this showing that we can't earn God's love or favor for us? Then maybe read through that section with the insights of the new perspective. How does this contribute to the relationship between Jews and Gentiles? Then maybe read through it again with the apocalyptic perspective. How does this help us understand the radical disjunction that takes place with the Christ event? And then read it through one more time with the Paul from the Paul within Judaism perspective, where you look at this, okay, so this is an expression of Paul's Jewish identity. How does that shape the way we read the text? And I think that if we can incorporate all four of those very good and helpful insights into Pauline interpretation, that we'll actually do a much better job of reading Paul. So that is my goal for this week. Well, I really hope that you guys enjoyed today's episode and that you got a lot out of this. Again, always open for questions and comments. I want to come back to this in the future and do more work on this. So this is me kind of putting down a marker, like my Theology of Thursday sanctification uh episode and saying we will return to these themes later on. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the apocalyptic school and hopefully we get into some of the other schools of interpretation too. Catch my episode from Tuesday with Nick Quint, where we talk about the apocalyptic Paul. All right, again, one more time, go to libertarianchristians.com. You can pick up a copy or I pre-order a copy of my brand new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation. You can get yourself a Protestant Libertarian podcast highball glass for whiskey in the afternoon and evening. Very good. Or a Protestant Libertarian mug for your coffee in the morning. Very nice mug. They come in black and white, good colors. Uh, and then you can get a coaster, and then we're hoping to get other merch very soon. And again, sign up for the conference. If you're in the Cincinnati area or you can fly and drive there, we would love to see you. It's going to be an awesome day. We're really excited about that. Thank you guys for everything you do, and we will see you next week. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. 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