Paul's theology in Romans

" Above all, what is noteworthy about Paul's theology in Romans is the way the pivotal significance of Jesus' death and resurrection emphasizes the character of God. The theology of Romans is theocentric because it is christomorphic. That is, the understanding of God, which Paul inherited from the Pharisaic Judaism he had once advocated assiduously (Gal 1:14), was reshaped in light of his conviction that God had resurrected the crucified Jesus. For the theology of Romans (as for Paul's theology as a whole), what matters is not what Jesus of Nazareth had done and said in his Galilean ministry, but what God had done in resurrecting him, and thus far only him. If God has done that, then what does that disclose about God that was not known before, and how is this new disclosure related to what is known through scripture, which emphasizes God's commitment to Israel? Such are the questions that propel Paul's theological thinking in this letter. "

Leander Keck, Romans (Abingdon, 2005) p. 37

Paul assumes the worldview of the Psalms

We may well find curious the way the psalmists can abstract, out of all the ambiguities of lived experience, this unambiguous portrayal of the glories of the created order. The psalmists knew famine, disease, violence, and death. And yet, in some of the psalms at least, no trace of evil of any kind is part of the picture. ... To dismiss such texts as naive would only show our own naiveté. Rather, they are an affirmation that ultimately, fundamentally, creation is good, and the Creator deserving of universal praise; that the reality of evil is not ultimate, but secondary and parasitic, a disorder brought about by inappropriate responses to the goodness of the fundamental order.

Stephen Westerholm, A Preface to the Study of Paul (Eerdmans, 1997), p. 15

On the assumptions of form criticism

"Our own conviction is that if scholars are genuinely open to the possibility that the Gospel portrait of Jesus is possible, an assessment of all available evidence in this light will lead them to the conclusion that the historical veracity of this portrait is not only possible but most plausible. To state it differently, we believe that once the “plausibility” criterion is no longer used as an a priori naturalistic filter imposed upon the data, and once we allow the techniques and standards of historical reporting/precision of the orally oriented ancient world to guide our reflection, the evidence itself offers good reasons to conclude that the a posteriori burden of proof is justly shifted to those who wish to argue that the Synoptic portrait(s) of Jesus is not substantially reliable."

Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A Boyd, Jesus Legend, The: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker Academic, 2007), p. 440

Reevaluating Jesus' Ethical Teaching

"As the biographical genre of the gospels means that we should take Jesus' deeds and example into account as much as his words, so the epistolary genre of Paul's letters directs us to set his ethical teaching within the contingent context of his early Christian communities. As Jesus' pastoral acceptance of 'sinners' means that his extremely demanding teaching cannot be applied in an exclusive manner, so too Paul's ethical teaching must always be balanced by his appeal to the imitation of Christ -- and this entails accepting others as we have been accepted."

Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Eerdmans, 2007), p. 154.

Is Christianity True? Democracy and Tradition

The following lines from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy do a fine job of exposing the inadequacy of one of the still very common objections to Christianity, namely, that it is old.

"In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -- the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

"But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. ...

"If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea."

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908) ch 4