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).

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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)

In Douglas J. Moo’s concise article on Romans in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, he highlights “six aspects of justification in Romans”:

1. “God justifies people through faith and not through ‘works of the law,’” which “refer to obedience to the OT law, the Torah” and “exclude all works.”
2. “Justification is available for all human beings, Jew and Gentile, on the same basis of faith.”
3. “God justifies people by a completely free act of his will: in a word, by ‘grace.’”
4. “Justification by faith is rooted in the OT.”
5. “Justification is the product, or extension, of ‘the righteousness of God,’” which “refers to an activity of God: his acting to put people in right relationship to himself.”
6. “Justification by faith is based in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. . . . In a bold metaphor, Paul claims, in effect, that Christ is now the final, eschatological ‘mercy seat,’ the place where God draws near to human beings for their redemption.”

Moo concludes,

While not the centre of Romans, justification by faith is nevertheless a critical component of Paul’s presentation of the gospel in Romans. The doctrine expresses, in the sphere of anthropology, a crucial element in Paul’s understanding of God’s work in Christ: its entirely gracious character. Not only, then, does justification by faith guard against the Jewish attempt to make works of the law basic for salvation in Paul’s day; it expresses the resolute resistance of Paul, and the NT authors, to the constant human tendency to make what people do decisive for salvation.

I can’t wait to sing about this tomorrow morning with my church!

Douglas J. Moo concisely summarizes the meaning of Romans 10:6–8 in the NLT Study Bible:

10:6-8 Here Paul quotes three phrases from Deut 30:12–14 dealing with the law, and he applies them to the Good News about Christ. We do not need to go up to heaven to find Christ (and thus to be made right with God), because God has already brought him down to earth as a man. Nor do we need to go down to the place of the dead to find Christ, because God has already raised him from the dead. To find Christ, we must simply believe in the message that is close at hand.

Doug Moo’s The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon is hot off the press, and I enjoyed spending some time surveying it this morning. It’s another outstanding addition to the Pillar NT Commentary series. (See my review of the PNTC series, which also notes the authors slated for the forthcoming volumes.)

From D. A. Carson’s “Editor’s Preface”

For many years Doug Moo and I served on the same faculty. His move from Trinity to Wheaton, however much a gain for the latter, was a personal loss. Mercifully, we have continued to collaborate on various projects, and he is surely among the two or three scholars with whom I am most happy to work in close association. Readers of this series will already be familiar with his Pillar commentary on James—and that after writing, for another series, what is still the best English-language commentary on Romans.

Continue Reading »

The fall 2007 Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (vol. 11, no. 3) is devoted to the epistle to the Romans. It includes eight articles, two of which are available as PDFs (linked below).

1. Editorial: Stephen J. Wellum: “Learning from the Epistle to the Romans“
2. John Polhill, “The Setting of Romans in the Ministry of Paul”
3. Benjamin L. Merkle, “Is Romans Really the Greatest Letter Ever Written?“
4. A. B. Caneday, “‘They Exchanged the Glory of God for the Likeness of an Image’: Idolatrous Adam and Israel as Representatives in Paul’s Letter to the Romans”
5. Robert W. Yarbrough, “The Theology of Romans in Future Tense”
6. Douglas Moo, “Paul’s Universalizing Hermeneutic in Romans”
7. Mark A. Seifrid, “The Gospel as the Revelation of Mystery: The Witness of the Scriptures to Christ in Romans”
8. Thomas R. Schreiner, “Sermon: Loving One Another Fulfills the Law: Romans 13:8-10″

Update: See “Fall SBJT studies significance of Paul’s epistle to the Romans,” published by Towers Online, SBTS’s news service.

D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 721–22 (bold emphasis added):

If, as we have argued, Revelation focuses on the end of history, then it is in the area of eschatology that it makes its most important contribution. Nowhere are we given a more detailed description of the events of the end; and while many interpreters have been guilty of finding far more specifics in John’s visions than his symbolism allows and of unwisely insisting that only their own circumstances fit those specifics, we should not go to the other extreme and ignore those details that John does make relatively clear.

But it is shortsighted to think of eschatology simply in the sense of what will happen in the end times. For the End, in biblical thought, shapes and informs the past and the present. Knowing how history ends helps us understand how we are to fit into it now. Particularly  is this so because the New Testament makes it clear that even now we are in “the last days.” Thus, Revelation reminds us of the reality and severity of evil, and of the demonic forces that are active in history. . . . At the same time, the degree to which Revelation exhorts believers should not be neglected. . . .

John’s visions also place in clear relief the reality of God’s judgment. A day will come when his wrath will be poured out, when sins will have to be accounted for, when the fate of every individual will depend on whether or not his or her name is “written in the Lamb’s book of life.” Equally clear, of course, is the reward that God has in store for those who “keep the word of endurance” and resolutely stand against the devil and his earthly minions, even at the cost of life itself. John’s visions are a source of comfort for suffering and persecuted believers in all ages.