InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
Paul’s New Perspective: Charting a Soteriological Journey, Garwood P. Anderson. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016
Summary: Argues that both the traditional Protestant perspective and the New Perspective on Paul are each partly right, based on the idea that Paul’s ideas on salvation developed as he wrote over a period of time and addressed different circumstances.
What am I, a nice campus minister, doing on a blog like this? I am neither a scholar nor the son of a scholar. I occupy no endowed chairs. I will be presented with no festschriften upon my retirement.
Why, then, have I been asked to be a regular contributor here on the Emerging Scholars Network Blog? The short answer is that I am doing what I can to help Christian scholars to integrate their faith with their scholarship. I am an InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries staff person serving the students and faculty of New York University. So while I may not be a scholar per se, I am a pastor for scholars — for graduate students, faculty, and others engaged in post-graduate education. My calling is to help scholars and aspiring scholars to live out their callings by inviting and encouraging them to allow their faith to enrich their scholarship and to allow their scholarship to inform their faith.
The full story of how I got into the Christian scholarship business is a long one, stretching back through my graduate schooling at Duke and Westminster, my time as a philosophy major at a secular state college, and into my years as a bookish Christian teenager. But in many ways, my sojourn in Christian learning really began when I went to Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. I had long had aspirations of becoming a Christian scholar and I even had some fairly fleshed-out ideas about what that was supposed to mean — ideas largely influenced by George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988). However, I really had not even begun to understand the challenges involved in actually doing Christian scholarship — actually giving oneself to the serious study of a particular field, following the evidence wherever it leads, and thinking things through from a self-consciously Christian vantage — until I was put through the wringer in seminary. [Read more…] about Why You Must Be Dying to be a Christian Scholar: David Williams Intro (1/2)