Paul and the God of the Gift

Abstract

John Barclay’s book Paul and the Gift complicates a simple opposition between categories of “history” and “being” when it comes to sketching a Pauline doctrine of God. On the one hand, Barclay sees Paul’s understanding of the divine identity as basically narratival and “actualist”: God defines his character in and through the Christ-event. But by tracing the Pauline and post-Pauline placement of Jesus in a pre-existent eternity and as the agent of creation, Barclay also shows that the patristic and later theological tradition’s deployment of the language of divine essence has real roots in the Pauline tradition as well.