As in Barclay’s previous monographs, though here to greater extent, he has offered the Pauline community an absolute tour de force. This massive tome attempts, through the sophisticated analytic of distinguishing between the six possible ‘perfections’ when speaking of ‘grace’, to move beyond the debates between the New Perspective (and particularly Sanders’ ‘covenantal nomism’) and traditional Protestant construals of ‘Paul and Second Temple Judaism’.
In the initial sections of the book (pp. 1-50), Barclay argues the following, interrelated case:
(1) the language of ‘gift’ is central in Paul
(2) the language of ‘gift’ has also been a famously contested dimension of Pauline theology, and not least in relation to the New Perspective
(3) attention to socio-anthropological discussions of ‘gift giving’, and particularly to the work written by, and in response to, the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss, significantly illuminates our understanding of the concept of the ‘gift’, both in the ancient as in the modern world
(4) in relation to (3), Paul’s famous language of χάρις (‘grace’), along with its putative Hebrew precedents in Israel’s Scriptures and its Greek and Latin cognates in the LXX, the rest of Paul, and the larger Greco-Roman world, belongs within the larger semantic-conceptual (and sociological) discourse of ‘gift giving’
(5) when seen as a part of this discourse, and when one compares this discourse across Paul and the wider Jewish and Greco-Roman literature of the period, it becomes apparent that this ‘gift’ language, and not least the word χάρις itself, is not univocal: even if the language of ‘grace’ is everywhere in the ancient world, it is not ‘everywhere the same’ (p. 2)
(6) and, most importantly, a proper appreciation of (5) allows for a disaggregation of ‘gift’ language into six possible ‘perfections’ (pp. 66-78).
Gift/Grace might be ‘perfected’—that is, drawn ‘out…to its endpoint or extreme’ (p. 67)—in six possible ways. (1) One might totalize its superabundance; (2) its singularity (God is only and singularly gracious to the exclusion of others attributes); (3) its priority (God is always the initiator); (4) its incongruity (God acts kindly without regard for any positive worth in the recipients); (5) its efficacy (God’s grace, by its agency alone, produces the response which it intends to elicit); (6) and/or its non-circularity (God gives without expectation of a return; sometimes called the ‘pure gift’). Each of these perfections, Barclay contends—though by no means all of them at the same time—are evident in ancient gift discourse, save the non-circular conception (pp. 74-75). This concept of the ‘pure gift’, which neither intends nor expects a response, is a decidedly modern notion (pp. 51-63). On the contrary, in the ancient world,
“Gift” denotes the sphere of voluntary, personal relations, characterized by goodwill in the giving of benefit or favor, and eliciting some form of reciprocal return that is both voluntary and necessary for the continuation of the relationship. (p. 575, italics original)
Furthermore, it is not the case, either in the ancient world or in the reception of Paul, that for one properly to be speaking of ‘grace’ one must perfect all, or even one particular, facet of grace (pp. 75-78). Rather, in the ancient world as in the reception of ‘Paul and Judaism’, we are dealing with a debate over different perfections of grace (pp. 75-78).
When the discussion is framed in this way, with the analytical distinction of ‘grace’ into six possible perfections, it becomes clear that the whole history of the reception of ‘Paul and Judaism on Grace’ consists in a debate over which facets of grace Paul and/or ancient Judaism perfected. With this frame, Barclay provides a penetrating survey of the history of the reception of ‘Paul (and, even if implicitly, Judaism) on Grace’ (pp. 79-188), focusing particularly on the challenge issued by the New Perspective to all prior readings of ‘Paul and Judaism’ (pp. 151-65). While Barclay concedes that Sanders’ argument for a pervasive theology of ‘covenantal nomism’ provided a necessary critique of prior construals of ‘legalistic Judaism’, his specific critique: namely, that Sanders wrongly took the pervasiveness of the perfection of one facet of grace in Jewish sources (priority [in God’s election of Israel]) to indicate that these sources therefore espoused the same theology of grace—in the sense of perfecting the same facets—as one finds in Paul, is an utter triumph of his analytic model (pp. 151-8). On this point, to be sure, Paul can be distinguished from Second Temple Jewish texts, as Second Temple Jewish texts can be distinguished from one another, not because some espouse ‘grace’ and others ‘non-grace’, but because they espouse different perfections of grace: …
‘[they] represent not differing degrees of emphasis on their theme but the development of different facets of this multivalent concept into varying end-of-the-line extremes’ (p. 314, italics original). As Barclay pithily states, ‘grace is everywhere in the theology of Second Temple Judaism, but not everywhere the same’ (p. 565).
Through a close and illuminating reading of ‘gift’ language in five Second Temple Jewish authors (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, Hodayot, L.A.B., and 4 Ezra), as well as in Galatians and Romans, Barclay demonstrates that Paul belongs within an inner-Jewish debate about the perfections of grace (pp. 189-561). Paul, both like and totally unlike the five Jewish authors, characteristically perfects the incongruity of God’s grace, a facet which he both learned from and catalyzed toward his Gentile mission (pp. 331-574 and esp. 566-9). Likewise, Paul can speak of the superabundance of God’s grace as well as its priority, while at times suggesting its efficacy, but he does not perfect its singularity or its non-circularity (pp. 442-6, 556-61, and 565-9). Paul’s God is not singularly gracious; the Christ-gift does expect a return wherein believers will be judged eschatologically according to their works (pp. 461-74); while God’s grace is superabundant, Paul does not systematically work out its priority or efficacy such that it would appropriate to call his soteriology monergistic. In summary,
‘Paul…explores the incongruity of grace, which he relates to the Christ-event as the definitive enactment of God’s love for the unlovely, and to the Gentile mission, where the gifts of God ignore ethnic differentials of worth and Torah-based definitions of value…’ (pp. 565-6, italics original).
What one is left with is a stunning, and utterly compelling, construal of ‘Paul and Judaism on Grace’ and of their contested reception. There remains, however, a particular puzzle about the rhetorical logic of the book as a whole vis à vis the field of Pauline studies. Does Barclay suppose that he is offering solutions to the long-contested problem of ‘Paul and Judaism on Grace’; and/or does he suppose that he is offering a solution as the true center/coherency of Paul’s thought—which is, it seems, a rather different claim (cf. pp. 442-6, and 520-61). To put it another way, it is one thing to demonstrate, quite helpfully, that incongruous grace, and no conception of grace as ‘pure gift’, stands at the heart of Paul’s theology; it is quite another thing, however, to argue that the heart of Paul’s theology is purely incongruous grace.
The Bottom Line: Barclay’s Paul & the Gift is a stunning re-evaluation of ‘gift/grace’ language in Paul vis à vis ancient Judaism, along with a compelling assessment of both in relation to the history of their reception.
Review by Chris Kugler
University of St Andrews
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