Search results for ""Author Seyoon Kim""

Critical studies of the two 'test cases' for James D.G. Dunn's 'New Perspective on Paul,' Paul's Damascus experience and Gal 3:10-14, reaffirm the Reformation interpretation of Paul's doctrine of justification and confirm that Paul obtained that doctrine from his Damascus experience. The discovery that Isaiah 42 influenced Paul's interpretation of his apostolic call helps explain how Paul developed his antithesis between the Spirit and the flesh/law and why he insists on the impossibility of justification by works of the law. Contrary to the assumption of the 'New Perspective School', Seyoon Kim's studies issue a call to take Paul seriously as an important witness to his contemporary Judaism. The distinctive Pauline doctrine of Christ as the Image of God and as the Last Adam is revisited in the light of the growing interest in the apocalyptic-mystical background of Paul. The author also explicates how Paul uses the Jesus tradition in the light of the Damascus experience to develop his christology and soteriology. So, while reaffirming the significance of the Damascus event, Seyoon Kim now appreciates the Jesus tradition as equally important for the origin of Paul's gospel. Thus, the overall thesis of the book is that Paul's gospel is a child born of two parents, the Damascus revelation and the Jesus tradition.

Read more less

In this collection of essays, Seyoon Kim analyses the structure and function of 1 Thess 1-3, which leads to a new reading of 1 Thessalonians. He devotes several essays to a comprehensive exposition of Paul's gospel for the Thessalonians by fully unfolding several summaries of the gospel in the epistle, by detecting and analysing various Son of Man sayings of Jesus that are alluded to or echoed in it, and by a thorough discussion of the unity and continuity of Paul's gospel between this early epistle and his later epistles. This exposition is augmented by a new observation of Paul's doctrine of justification in 2 Thess 1-2 and a new explanation of τὸ κατέχον and ὁ κατέχων (2 Thess 2:3-8).

Read more less

The traditional understanding of Paul's doctrine of justification has an inherent problem of relating to his ethics. Following its anthropocentric approach to the doctrine, even "the New Perspective" makes little contribution toward resolving it. Hence, appreciating the facts that Paul places the doctrine in Romans within the inclusio of the Davidic Messiah Jesus' rule over all the nations as God's Son in Rom 1:3-5 and 15:12 and that his thesis about the doctrine in Rom 1:16-17 is but a soteriological statement about the effect of the Christologically formulated gospel of Rom 1:3-4, Seyoon Kim approaches the doctrine from both the Christological and anthropological perspectives. Thus he interprets justification as Herrschaftswechsel (cf. Käsemann), a transfer from the Satanic kingdom into the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus the Lord. This understanding makes him stress the present phase of justification as the process of rendering "the obedience of faith" to the Lord Jesus, and explain afresh the relationship between justification sola gratia/fide and judgment according to works. So he sets forth the thesis that Paul's gospel of justification is a post-Easter soteriological form of Jesus' gospel of God's kingdom.

Read more less