Holiness and Ecclesiology in the New Testament. Edited by KENT E. BROWER and ANDY JOHNSON.

Abstract

Alex R. G. Deasley is honoured here in twenty essays by evangelical scholars, many of them colleagues at the Nazarene Theological seminaries in Kansas City and Manchester, where he taught and preached, and where he published on both New Testament and Qumran. Contributors have appended to their workmanlike exegesis its applications to the contemporary church. The particular aspect of New Testament ecclesiology under investigation here is traced in Qumran (G. Brooke and D. Swanson), and in most of the New Testament. The most notable contributions are from D. Hagner on Matthew, R. Bauckham on John, I. H. Marshall on Acts, M. J. Gorman on ‘Paul's Trinitarian Reconstruction of Holiness’, P. Oakes on Romans, and B. W. Winter on 1 Corinthians, but the other twelve writers have also dutifully followed their brief. Colossians and the Johannine epistles are unfortunately not included. The editors conclude that holiness is derived from relationship to the Holy One, that purity is redefined, and that holiness is communal and public. At a time when much is being written on the subject, this survey of the New Testament material deserves a wide readership, even if it does not reconfigure the field. Whether it ‘represents a new and much better way of doing what is conventionally called “the theology and ethics of the New Testament”,’ as claimed on the cover, may be questioned.