This book should be available in about one month (click the image to enlarge the back cover, spine, and front cover):

Introducing the New Testament: A Short Guide to Its History and Message. By D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo. Edited by Andrew David Naselli. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010.

• This 160-page book abridges Carson and Moo’s 781-page An Introduction to the New Testament (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
• You can pre-order it from Amazon and WTS Books.
• WTS Books includes a PDF with some sample pages (including the TOC, preface, introductory chapter, and chapter on Romans).

This 160-page book abridges Carson and Moo’s An Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

Romans is consuming the majority of my time and thoughts these days since I’m writing a dissertation on the use of the OT in Romans 11:34–35. I recently read and s-l-o-w-l-y reread everything that Douglas J. Moo has written on (1) the theme and structure of Romans and (2) Romans 9–11, and I couldn’t give his outstanding work higher praise. His publications are first-class: the content is superb, and the style is clear. I thank God for this man!

Here’s a chronological list of most of Moo’s publications on Romans, which I’ve ranked as introductory, intermediate, and advanced. The most valuable are the NICNT and NIVAC volumes. (more…)

This is convicting. Maintaining the kind of theological humility that Moo describes below is no easy task. It’s like walking on an extremely narrow path with steep drop-offs on both sides.

1. On the one hand, theologians can be pugnacious, arrogantly close-minded, and overly confident about their positions.
2. On the other hand, they can be noncommittal, compromisingly ecumenical, and insufficiently confident about their positions (e.g., epistemological pseudo-humility).

What follows is from the “contemporary significance” section of Douglas J. Moo‘s comments on Romans 11:33–36 in Romans (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 391–92:

Theological humility. To my mortification and my family’s delight, I received in the mail just this week an invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). [Moo was born in 1950.] I have reached a point of life in which I find myself prefacing many things I say with “at my age.” Undoubtedly, as my children insist, some of the sentences that follow reflect hardening of the arteries or irrational fear of anything new. But a few of these statements, I trust, reflect some wisdom that the perspective of age has inculcated. (more…)

Here’s an easy-to-understand illustration from Douglas J. Moo‘s Encountering the Book of Romans: A Theological Survey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002). It’s entitled “The Many Uses of Quotations” (p. 161):

We have encountered several places in Romans where Paul does not seem to apply the Old Testament in quite the way the original Old Testament context would seem to validate. This creates a theological problem. How can a New Testament writer use the Old Testament to claim that something is true when the Old Testament does not even teach what he claims it does? Such a procedure would be like our trying to prove a doctrine from a text that we have misunderstood. Understandably, we would convince few people. Answers to this problem, which theologians have discussed for years, are not simple. In fact, each of the texts has to be taken on its own, because they present different kinds of problems. But one part of the solution is to recognize that New Testament writers sometimes use the Old Testament not to prove a point but to borrow its language and ethos. An illustration will make the point.

When I was young, and my sons were even younger, we often played basketball out on the driveway together. Then I, and they, grew. I became weaker and slower; they became bigger, stronger, and faster. Foolishly, I kept trying to compete. One day, I was playing one-on-one with my third son, Lukas. He had grown to about six feet six inches and 240 pounds, and was a very strong, highly skilled basketball player. I warned him, “Watch out, Luke, I’m going to take the ball to the basket on you!” He shot back, “Go ahead, Dad, make my day.” He was “quoting” the lines of the character Dirty Harry from the movie starring Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, portraying a cop, uses these words to dare a criminal to draw his gun on him. Luke did not have a gun; he was not threatening to shoot me. He did not intend to quote the author’s “original intention,” nor did I think that he was doing so. The language was a striking way of making a point: if I was foolish enough to try to take the ball to the basket on Luke, I could very well suffer the violence that Dirty Harry’s bad guy suffered in the movie. The quotation worked because we both knew the movie; it therefore communicated the point very well. So Paul and other New Testament writers often use Old Testament language. They know that their readers will understand it, and the application of the language often helps them to perceive a situation in a new light. Thus, in Romans 10:18, for instance, Paul quotes Psalm 19:4 not because he thinks that this text speaks directly about the preaching of the gospel to Israel; rather, he quotes it because the words would awaken echoes in his readers’ minds that would lend force to his assertion.

Related: See G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, eds., “Introduction,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), pp. xxiv–xxvi. (Cf. my post on this volume.)

The below list does not reproduce a particular chart from D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo’s Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), but it is based on the text. They roughly date the twenty-seven New Testament books as follows (though the exact order of the twenty-seven books is fuzzy, e.g., re the prison epistles):

1. James: around 46–48 (just before the Jerusalem Council)
2. Galatians: 48 (just prior to the Jerusalem Council)
3. 1 Thessalonians: 50
4. 2 Thessalonians: either in late 50 or early 51
5. 1 Corinthians: probably early in 55
6. 2 Corinthians: 56 (i.e., within the next year or so of 1 Corinthians)
7. Romans: 57
8. Philippians: mid–50s to early 60s if written from Ephesus (61–62 if written from Rome)
9. Mark: sometime in the late 50s or the 60s
10. Philemon: probably Rome in the early 60s
11. Colossians: early 60s, probably 61
12. Ephesians: the early 60s
13. 1 Peter: almost surely in 62–63
14. Titus: probably not later than the mid-60s
15. 1 Timothy: early to mid-60s
16. 2 Timothy: early or mid-60s (about 64 or 65)
17. 2 Peter: likely shortly before 65
18. Acts: mid-60s
19. Jude: middle-to-late 60s
20. Luke: mid or late 60s
21. Hebrews: before 70
22. Matthew: not long before 70
23. John: tentatively 80–85
24. 1 John: early 90s
25. 2 John: early 90s
26. 3 John: early 90s
27. Revelation: 95–96 (at the end of the Emperor Domitian’s reign)