{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03315455875182838, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009263773768893223, 'mean_word_length': 4.796610169491525, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Reading 1 Corinthians in the Twenty-First Century

Gospel’ (p. 44). He selects ‘peace’ – with God and on earth – as one such aspect, so 13.1–7 is interpreted as a ‘strategy of conformity’, seeking to reduce conflict. A section on ‘Righteousness Redefined: a Metamorphosis of Ethics’ (pp. 53–69) is stimulating, but not ideal for a student’s first encounter with the text. Some will question the formulation ‘Ethics discarded as the basis of salvation and replaced by grace and faith’, but this touches on a problem with any textbook on Romans: there are so many competing ways to read it that one has to carve out a furrow; but others will disagree and beginners are illequipped to evaluate it. This problem becomes more acute when the commentator is trying (as here) to write New Testament theology: ‘our interpretation of Romans must bridge a gap between modern modes of thinking and the mind of Paul and his contemporaries’ (p. 70). Haacker insists that ‘in exegesis we have to explore the sense which the text yields before we integrate it into our overall theological convictions or constructions’ (p. 87), but he looks for meanings which address his own concerns. The remaining five chapters discuss sources (Scripture, early Jewish and Christian traditions, borrowings from secular culture), provide an idiosyncratic account of the rhetoric of Romans as a model for preaching the gospel in Rome, and consider Romans in its canonical context, its impact and its relevance. These contain many good things, including a pointer in the direction of Philip Esler’s most interesting work on Conflict and Identity in Romans (2003). Romans has many lessons for today even apart from its traditional interpretations in Protestantism, but the author’s theory about how far Paul was prepared to go in order to relate to the intellectual climate in Rome as evidenced in Latin writers is far-fetched. This is nevertheless a book worth pondering by anyone who is aware of being less familiar with Romans than Luther said all Christians should be.