One of the most theologically interesting – and interested – debates in recent New Testament scholarship has centred on the ‘apocalyptic’ interpretation of Paul and its critique of salvation-historical accounts of the apostle's thought, particularly those that assert the continuity of the salvation brought about by the person of Jesus with the covenants and the law of Israel. The most celebrated representative of the latter today is almost certainly N. T. Wright, while, on the other side, the apocalyptic school is usually traced through J. Louis Martyn to the work of Ernst Käsemann.Footnote 1 The most vibrant contemporary debates have involved Wright and Douglas A. Campbell, with a distinct set of discussions involving Wright and John Barclay.Footnote 2
The debate is focused on the question of how the relationship between the ‘Christ event’ and those events that preceded it temporally, including particularly the covenant(s) with Israel, is to be conceived. In broad terms, the apocalyptic approach asserts the radical newness of what has been revealed (‘apocalypsed’) in Christ and traces the evidence in Paul's writings that suggests he understood salvation in such terms. Against, this, Wright stresses the continuity of the language used to describe the Christ event with the language used of Israel and the covenants: what is revealed in Christ is precisely the ‘climax of the covenant’. The story of Jesus must, then, be located within a story of salvation, an unfolding drama of sequential acts that correspond to a salvation-history principally structured around covenants, which incorporates the entirety of cosmic history. The presenting issue and focus of the debate, then, has been that of continuity/discontinuity in the apostle's account of salvation and the history of the cosmos.
In truth, however, the debate is about something more basic than the relation of one event to another: it is about the relationship of all of these events in time and history to the agency of God. It has become increasingly obvious that what is considered to be at stake by both parties is a reading of Paul that is theologically responsible, particularly as it represents God, the character of God's relationship with the temporal cosmos throughout its history, and – crucially – how true knowledge of these is reached.Footnote 3 Yet, while there have been numerous exchanges within the debate, there has been little sense of progress or resolution: the positions appear to be irreconcilable.
I would suggest that the lack of progress in the debate is, at least in part, the result of the limited engagement with theological resources that speak to the question of God's relation to the cosmos and its history. For all their theological intentions, the participants in the debate have largely sought to explicate and defend their positions using the limited categories or vocabulary of historical criticism. The suggestion that I will make in this article is that the debate has reached the limits of what can be resolved on such terms, and that if it is to be moved forward constructively it requires to be recast with reference to the doctrine of providence. Providence is the doctrine that articulates God's purposive relationship to temporal creatures and, as such, bears on the question of how this purpose relates to their history. It is, moreover, an important element in some emergent approaches to biblical theology.Footnote 4 If the debate is to demonstrate a real commitment to the theological task, then, it ought to give consideration to the doctrine of providence. This application of the doctrine is an act of theological systematising rather than historical critical retrieval: it follows from the need to set the study of Paul's gospel in an appropriate conceptual framework, rather than simply to recover the apostle's own view of the relationship between God and the temporal cosmos.Footnote 5
The apocalyptic Paul: Outlining the debate
The ‘apocalyptic’ reading of Paul is generally traced, in modern scholarship, back to Ernst Käsemann. His famous statement that ‘Apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology’ articulates the conviction that the category of apocalyptic is pivotal to the understanding of the gospel.Footnote 6 Throughout Käsemann's writings, but most notably in his studies of Paul, the gospel is represented in terms that stress the radical disruption constituted by the Christ event: the gospel involves the invasion of the world of sin and death by the Son, bringing that world to its end and bringing into being a new condition of eschatological blessing.Footnote 7
Käsemann's work was influenced, on one hand, by the legacy of Schweitzer's handling of Pauline eschatology, elements of which he revived, and, on the other, by Barth's resistance to ‘religion’, articulated partly in opposition to the views of Käsemann's teacher, Rudolf Bultmann.Footnote 8 Both of these influences are important to the impact that Käsemann's work has subsequently had. The connections to Barth's thought have made his contribution broadly attractive to those working from Barthian viewpoints, facilitating the level of theological interest that Käsemann's project now enjoys.Footnote 9 The connection with Schweitzer's work, though, has shaped the eschatological dimension to Käsemann's project and its legacy in very specific ways that require to be traced further.
When Käsemann revived Schweitzer's emphasis on eschatology in Paul's thought by factoring it into his own account of the early development of Christian thought, he maintained the basic apocalyptic-eschatological schema of two ages that Schweitzer had inherited from Kabisch.Footnote 10 Within this, time is divided into a present evil age, in which the world is ruled by sin and Satan, and a future age to come, in which God will invade that reality and deliver it from these principalities and powers. The apostle understands the gospel to concern that invasion, as it has occurred in Christ, and sees his own current time as positioned at the juncture of these two periods. The significance of this claim is twofold: it represents salvation as involving participation in a cosmic drama, and it presents that drama as involving a deliverance consequent to divine invasion.
This dramatic account of cosmic ‘invasion’ lies at the heart of Martyn's subsequent development of the apocalyptic reading of Paul.Footnote 11 Like Käsemann, he emphasises the invasive character of the gospel: it is a divine ‘inbreaking’ into the world ruled by sin. The invasion is eschatological, with the present time involving the juncture of the old and the new age; and it is anthropological, in that it centres on human participation not just in the drama of cosmic conflict but in the ‘paradigmatic eschatological anthrôpos’, Jesus Christ.Footnote 12 This participation involves, very specifically, participation in the death of Jesus, which is essentially an ending, a termination of the old order of the cosmos, which includes the ordering role of the law:
In this event, Paul was torn away from the cosmos in which he had lived, and it was torn away from him. For, in dying with Christ on Christ's cross, this zealous Pharisee suffered the loss of the law, surely his earlier guide to the whole of the cosmos.Footnote 13
From the reference here to the law as ‘guide’, we can begin to see also the epistemological dimension that is central to the apocalyptic approach and that is the true significant of its label: what has been revealed in Christ tears the veil off the world and its history, demanding and offering a new evaluation of all that has gone before as world under the reign of sin and death.Footnote 14
Any attempt to render the gospel as the ‘climax’ of the covenant(s) with Israel, then, is considered problematic. This is not to negate ‘covenant’, as such: Martyn offers a careful analysis of the relationship between the covenantal blessing of Abraham and the law, as represented in Galatians 3, in which he affirms the promissory dimension of the Abrahamic covenant.Footnote 15 But no line can be traced from that covenant, through Sinai and the law, to the gospel: the blessing, accomplished by the gospel, is announced to Abraham and then waits in the wings.Footnote 16 The law, meanwhile, belongs to the realm of death. Importantly, this Pauline claim is seen (by mirror reading) to be opposed quite deliberately to the views of Jewish ‘Teachers’, for whom the law and its works are key to salvation. This representation of Pauline engagement with Jewish, or Judaising, teachers is developed still further in Douglas A. Campbell's work on Romans, which argues that much of Romans 1:18–3:20 is prosopopoeia, a rhetorically motivated quoting of Paul's opponent, the Teacher.Footnote 17 Campbell's reading of that section of Romans has won few supporters, even within the apocalyptic approach, but as a particularly strong outworking of Martyn's position, it serves to throw into even sharper relief the lines of the argument.
This apocalyptic reading of Paul is developed in close engagement with the phenomena of the Pauline texts: it is a serious piece of historical-critical analysis that seeks to understand the negativity with which Paul appears to speak of the law, and to do so in light of his eschatological language of old and new, his depiction of the death of Jesus as something in which others participate, and his representation of the gospel as something that originates outside the flow of Israel's history. The advocates of the approach, however, are also sharply sensitive to its theological dimensions. Their reading of Paul asserts the unconditioned priority of divine activity, understanding God to be categorically apart from the cosmos and involving himself with it as an other, this being the element most clearly safeguarded by the language of invasion. A vital corollary of this is that any naturalistic interpretation of the Christ event, in which its significance is comprehended first ‘from below’, or is rendered explicable by recourse to a series of historical events, is ruled out. As something that does not arise from the processes or machinery of world history, the significance of the Christ event can only be comprehended by disclosure ‘from above’, or from outside. Hence, the language of invasion and the language of disclosure are necessarily joined, and the question of how one reaches true knowledge of God and his activity broached: one can attain this only by God's own gracious giving of himself.
N. T. Wright is not the only one to challenge this reading of Paul, but his public engagements with Campbell and de Boer, along with the discussion of Martyn's legacy in his two recent major studies of Paul, have ensured that he is seen as the leading critic of the apocalyptic school.Footnote 18 His position can be traced a long way back through his research and, as such, predates Martyn's seminal work on Galatians;Footnote 19 Käsemann's reading of Romans, however, has always been in view for Wright, and the criticisms of Martyn et al. really grow out of the criticisms of Martyn's teacher.
For Wright, the apocalyptic approach fails to see the narrative connections that link Adam, Israel and Christ and the place that the law occupies within the covenant that joins these elements together in the drama of redemption.Footnote 20 Like Martyn, his representation of the divine work of salvation is essentially dramatic, but where the apocalyptic Paul school sees the temporal framework of the drama as reducible to only two elements – the old and the new – with the evaluation of the old always made retrospectively from within the new,Footnote 21 Wright's drama moves through multiple acts, each leading into the next. It is a salvation-historical approach, but Wright rejects the accusation that it is progressively linear: the movement from one act to the next can be occasioned by human failure and by the divine refusal to allow such failure to prevent the purposes for mankind being realised.Footnote 22 This, in particular, shapes the movement to the Christ act, the pivotal moment for history, in which what was intended in the covenants with Israel is brought to its climax. The drama, then, moves from creation to recreation, via the narrative of Adam's fall, Israel's failure and Christ's fulfilment of the covenant. The elements are consciously represented in the scriptural text with reference to what has gone before: the church's story is told in relation to Christ's; Christ's story is told in relation to Israel's; Israel's story is told in relation to Adam's.
Crucially, God is present and involved in every stage of this unfolding historical story; there is no part of the story from which he is absent. Each ‘subplot’ contributes in some way to the accomplishment of the goal of the governing story, that of God's rule over creation.Footnote 23 This comes to shape Wright's account of knowledge of God in interesting ways: God is known by our ‘critically realist’ knowledge of his historical activity, brokered to us by the accounts of scripture, behind which it lies. For Adams, this is the fundamental problem with Wright's approach, since it identifies right knowledge of God with an objective reading of God's activities in the world, bypassing the need for God to give his own person as the subject of knowledge if true objective knowledge is to be attained: it is methodologically naturalistic, and naively so.Footnote 24 For others, Wright's account is problematic in its lining up of the correspondences seen between narrative elements into a temporally linear (if not constantly progressive) drama of salvation.Footnote 25
What is at stake on both sides is a theologically responsible view of God's relationship to the temporal world. For Wright, the apocalyptic approach is dualistic in its segregation of a space and a time (a history) ruled by sin and death, which God must invade if he is to save; for the apocalyptic Paul school, Wright's account of history, and the knowledge of God's presence and activity within it, is insufficiently attentive to divine transcendence and distorts a true account of God's activity by reading history forward and from within its own confines, rather than backwards, from the vantage point of the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. Despite the repeated assertions and explications of both viewpoints, there is little sense of the debate leading to much modification of either position.
On providence
What then might an account of divine providence bring to this discussion, to allow it to progress beyond its current state? In this second section, I will outline some of the key ways in which a doctrine of providence might reframe some of the issues, allowing a measure of progress within the debate that does not concede the principles maintained on both sides, but that nevertheless requires some critical awareness of the weaknesses in the positions as presently formulated.
Preliminary comments: The definition and distribution of providence
We must, of course, begin with some kind of definition. Providence has been conceived in a number of different ways through the centuries and these conceptions have varied as to how providence is located in relation to other truths or doctrines, particularly creation, or as to how the concept of causality functions within it. Some of those accounts have been notoriously problematic; others have been widely, and probably unfairly, condemned.Footnote 26
It is not necessary at this point in the discussion to develop a fully articulated doctrine of providence of our own. What is necessary, rather, is for us to offer a core statement of what we mean by providence and to do so without naïveté, recognising the attendant risk of distorting the doctrine by mistakenly collapsing it into something else. For this core statement of the doctrine, I employ the one offered recently by John Webster:
The Christian doctrine of providence concerns God's continuing relation to the world that he has created. In his continuing work of providence, God acts upon, with and in each particular creature and created reality as a whole. As God so acts, God preserves created reality and being, maintains its order and directs it to the end that he has established for it. God's providence enacts his enduring love for that which he has made and shows him to be a faithful Creator.Footnote 27
I choose Webster's statement because it is self-consciously shaped by classical accounts of providence, and his development of it is fully conversant with the problems identified in these by modern thought. As such, it provides a useful core definition from which we can work, as well as being embedded in a body of subsequent reflection that can further aid our reflection. Moreover, Webster's definition aligns well with the concept of providence that appears to be operative in some of the more significant recent deployments of the doctrine, such as those of Kathryn Tanner and David Kelsey.Footnote 28
Before we consider how the doctrine of providence might bear on the apocalyptic Paul debate, it is important to note and reflect upon several issues highlighted by Webster, and by others who have sought to defend the importance of the doctrine.
First, providence is a ‘distributed doctrine’: it belongs both to theology proper and to the economy and, as Fergusson notes, classically operates as an aspect of various specific doctrines.Footnote 29 This observation is important if we are to avoid narrowing providence from its proper range of function or isolating it from its necessary contexts.Footnote 30 Some of the most significant problems with the handling of the doctrine have arisen from the neglect of this point. As importantly, the distributed character of providence means that when we invoke it in relation to a specific issue, we are forced to acknowledge the linkages that providence establishes between that issue and others that may have been overlooked in the discussion. This why providence, precisely as a distributed doctrine, has such potential significance for the apocalyptic Paul debate: its distribution enables it to link concepts that have become isolated problematically in that context.
Second, and as a corollary of this, providence is connected to history and to eschatology, but cannot simply be identified with either, precisely because of the distribution of providence between theology and economy. This distribution requires that we are attentive to the ceaseless agency of God, and that we affirm the correspondence of that agency with its operation in creation. While attempts to locate providence entirely within the doctrine of creation have justly been criticised, the failure to link the doctrines is also problematic.
Third, providence has commonly been divided into specific kinds: for example, general providence (by which God cares for all things), special providence (by which he cares for humans) and singular providence (by which God fulfils his purposes for the church).Footnote 31 Such divisions may not always be helpful, but they have a value in highlighting appropriately the architectonics of God's providential activity.Footnote 32 If the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God (Rom 8:19) and if this is the telos of God's working of all things together for good (Rom 8:28), then it is right to affirm that ‘In the Church, the end of creation is being reached; that is why the history of the church is the meaning of the world's history, which is the unification of all things in Christ (Eph. 1.10)’.Footnote 33 But, precisely because this teleological affirmation is embedded in a broader account of providence, it cannot be allowed to eclipse the ceaseless and ubiquitous divine care for creatures.
Providence and the apocalyptic Paul debate
From these general points, I turn now to a set of more specific reflections on how the doctrine of providence bears on the apocalyptic Paul debate.
(i)
Providence allows us to affirm and to speak of the history of the creation in a way that is fundamentally resistant to naturalisation, provided the doctrine of God by which it is informed recognises the categorical distinction between God and creation. In those theologies that do not maintain this distinction, providence offers nothing to change the terms by which we consider historical process.
The doctrine of providence proceeds from and is necessarily subordinate to the doctrine of God; its economic dimensions are derivative of its properly theological ones. This is one of the key reasons that providence no longer occupies the place that it once did in various theological accounts: as the doctrine of God has been subject to various reinterpretations in the modern period and, particularly, as the nature of the relationship between God and creation has been subject to revision, traditional accounts of providence have been considered problematic or inadmissible.
For our purposes here, it is not necessary to respond to such shifts or to provide a defence of this particular account of providence, for the doctrine of God held by all parties in this specific debate is essentially in agreement (in principle, at least). That is to say, over against the direction of travel seen in much modern scholarship towards an account of God that understands him in some sense or another to be subject to the effects of the world – effectively to be a thing among things – the participants in this debate share a commitment to a doctrine of God that is constrained by the classical monotheistic distinction between Creator and creation. In the case of Wright, such a commitment is at the core of his argument, which rests on the affirmation of strict monotheism in the Judaism of the Second Temple Period: monotheism, as he understands it, involves an identification of God as the one who alone rules and upholds all things.Footnote 34 In the case of the apocalyptic Paul school, such a commitment reflects the programmatic resistance to ‘religion’, shaped in some cases with reference to Barth.Footnote 35
If a classical account of the relationship between God and the cosmos is in place, then the deployment of the term ‘providence’ in relation to history removes historical processes from a framework in which they are seen as fully intelligible from below, in which their workings can be completely analysed according to naturalistic criteria. They can be partially analysed according to these, but this should not be taken to represent a full critical description of history. By invoking providence, then, we safeguard a space in which we can freely talk of history and historical process without the risk of unwittingly naturalising them.
(ii)
Precisely because it is derivative of the doctrine of God, as construed above, a responsible account of providence necessarily requires an element of revelation or disclosure by which its patterns can be rendered intelligible, or by which the believer can, by faith, assert the purposeful work of God when such patterns cannot be identified. The workings of providence can never simply be comprehended from below or derived from simple reflection on the progress of events, for God is not reducible to a constituent part of the machinery and the machine itself does not constitute the totality of reality.
Consequently, a doctrine of providence requires a reading of history that is necessarily apocalyptic (in the sense that it requires the self-disclosure of God) and Christocentric. This is a necessary correlate of the priority of God considered Christianly: if the doctrine of God is now necessarily conditioned by christological convictions (that is, by what has been revealed in Christ), as all involved in this debate would surely agree, then christology (rightly developed in relation to the incarnational narrative) must inform the consideration of all divine activity in history, within which particular space must be allocated to his covenantal dealings with Israel.
Consideration of divine activity in history also, however, requires attention to the doctrine of scripture, since this is necessarily part of the discussion of the self-disclosure of God. It is here, I would suggest, that much of the effort in the debate from here on needs to be focused. What has become increasingly explicit in the apocalyptic Paul debate is that it concerns how right knowledge of God is acquired, and how this relates to historical events. The doctrine of scripture has seldom been discussed in its own distinctive relation to the doctrine of God:Footnote 36 rather, the term ‘scripture’ has been deployed in a very underdetermined way, with the principal focus of debate being on historiography and epistemology.Footnote 37 The invocation of providence – which is distributed in such a way that it is both informed by scripture and, in turn, contributes to the account of scriptural formation and canon – requires that the doctrine of scripture be properly addressed. For if providence requires us to recognise the need for revelation, it also requires us to see that the incarnation does not provide this revelation in isolation from scripture. Providentially, our cognitive access to the incarnational reality involves its contextualised rendering by scripture.
The point bears heavily on this discussion. Arguably, the apocalyptic Paul debate has been distorted by the dislocation of incarnation as revelation from its relationship to the canon of scripture, meaning that the former is inadequately illuminated by the latter, or the latter inadequately conditioned by the former. This is understandable when the debate is limited to the historical critical reading of Paul, but it needs to be challenged as the scholars in question move to make truly theological claims. This, of course, takes us to one of the core problems within the debate: the contributors have moved directly from the Pauline text to the theological claim, without seeking to locate Paul's writings within a responsible account of scripture and canon. Paul's eschatological and invasive language (and debates about how these are to be understood), thus come to have a dominant or totalising place in theological talk, rather than a subordinate one.
For the advocates of the apocalyptic reading, the neglect of the concept of scripture has led to an apparent neglect of those parts of the canon that speak of the goodness of creation, or of the law, or of God's blessing of Israel through both. It is hard to imagine the apocalyptic Paul, as described by Martyn, singing Psalms 19 or 119 (‘The heavens proclaim your glory’; ‘Oh, how I love your law’) as Christian worship, hence the accusations of a kind of Marcionism.Footnote 38 It is not just the law, but the Old Testament as a whole that appears to have been ripped from Paul and nailed to the cross. This is perhaps not what the apocalyptic school seeks to argue, but if it is a misreading of their position, it is a very understandable one. As well as the rhetoric concerning ‘old’ and ‘new’ and the negative portrayal of the story of Israel and the law, there is often little done with Old Testament material in the scholarship.Footnote 39 Yet, many of those who share the core theological commitments of the apocalyptic school to an account of the gospel that aligns well with Barth's would deal much more positively and extensively with the Old Testament, essentially demonstrating a commitment to reading Paul canonically. In New Testament scholarship, Richard B. Hays is perhaps the most important example.Footnote 40 The obvious affinity of his work with that of theologically interested Old Testament scholars, such as Walter Moberly or Christopher Seitz, and the lineage that all trace, through Childs and Frei to Barth, is important: it highlights that a theologically apocalyptic reading of Paul can be canonical.Footnote 41
The importance of a doctrine of scripture also has implications also for Wright, however. One of the key criticisms levelled at Wright is that he has collapsed divine self-disclosure into history, identifying that disclosure too simply with the objective consideration of the historical events behind the texts of scripture: scripture records and bears witness to these events, but its own disclosive and communicative character is obscured.Footnote 42 Asserting the place of providence with reference to scripture requires that attention is paid both to the providential activity of God in those historical events, and their rendering in the scripture that has been preserved by providential purpose.
(iii)
Providence sets the consideration of history, even the divine purposes in history, in the immediate context of God's purposes for creatures, considered individually and collectively.Footnote 43 These creatures are temporally and historically identified, so that God's purposes for them are correlated with his ordering of historical realities; but that ordering is seen in terms of a purposive love that is attached to the characters and entities within the story, and should not in the first instance be abstracted to the ordering of that story itself. Neither the teleological nor the eschatological elements of our account of salvation can be isolated or abstracted from the will of God for each and every creature.
This requires that talk of history, now conceived in terms of providence, is appropriately linked through those terms to talk of creation: creaturely things are affirmed as the objects of their Creator's love and that love is affirmed to be ceaselessly active for them.Footnote 44 Affirming this complex of linkages at the beginning of our reflection is necessary if the apocalyptic dimension of Paul's gospel is to be asserted and investigated without doing violence to the doctrine of creation or, indeed, to the identification of God as Creator. As we have noted, the apocalyptic reading of Paul is seen by its advocates to be anti-dualistic; yet to its critics, the prominence of the ‘invasion’ motif suggests precisely the opposite. Affirming providence allows the invasional language in Paul to be affirmed and understood within its proper limits; as such, it allows us to reflect rightly on the oppositional or conflictual dimensions of God's loving relationship to creatures, as he is positioned over and against all that is evil, without losing sight of other dimensions of the relationship.
(iv)
This last point involves a proper recognition of the mediatorial role of Christ, and of the relations between God and all that is not God as always-mediated relations. This recognition is central to recent theological scholarship that shares a commitment to a classical understanding of the relationship between God and the world, but is otherwise outside of the apocalyptic debate. Much of this scholarship has affirmed that providence is inseparable from the concept of the incarnation. Kathryn Tanner's appropriations of Athanasius's On the Incarnation of the Word highlight this point nicely:
While present in the whole creation, [the Word] is at once distinct in being from the universe, and present in all things by his own power – giving order to all things, and over all and in all revealing his own providence, and giving life to each thing and all things, including the whole without being included, but being in his own Father alone wholly and in every respect.Footnote 45
If then the Word of God is in the universe . . . and has united himself with the whole . . . what is there surprising or absurd if we say that he has united himself with man also. For if it were absurd for him to be in a body . . ., it would be absurd for him . . . either . . . to be giving light and movement to all things by his providence.Footnote 46
Such an account demands that the affirmation of incarnation and providence are linked. It also demands that the divine working in history is understood according to the category of ‘gift’, as much as the category of ‘sovereignty’: God's rule is purposed towards his ‘giving’ of himself to that over which he rules. It is crucial that our formulations of this position recognise what is reflected in Colossians 1, namely, that what has now been disclosed in Christ is a reality by which ‘all things’ are maintained in such mediated providence, and that this constant reality is one that can be traced back to the creation itself:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:15–20)
We cannot, then, affirm the incarnation in the way that the apocalyptic Paul school does without also reflecting on its implications for God's providential involvement with the ‘old’.
Conclusions
The contributors to the debate concerning the ‘apocalyptic Paul’ have demonstrated an admirable commitment to conducting their biblical research with theological attentiveness; the energy and ferocity of the debate has reflected this sense of what is at stake. They have, however, sought to move directly from the Pauline text to their theological formulations in ways that bypass relevant theological frameworks and the linkages that these necessarily establish. The result is that particular elements of Paul's specific contribution to the canon become either disproportionate to or dislocated from other relevant elements in scripture. This decontextalisation has a distortive effect on the contributors’ assertions, even if the assertions themselves are correct. The doctrine of providence, precisely as a distributed doctrine, serves to recontextualise the core assertions within a redemptive framework that should be acceptable to all parties, since it rests on a classical identification of God and his relation to created realities that they share. This is not to say that the parties will immediately come to agreement on the reading of Paul, but it does mean that as they move between that reading and their theological claims, in the process of dialogue, their articulations will be nuanced in important ways. This ought to limit the scope for rhetoric on both sides, and it also ought to create space for a more finely grained analysis of the matters truly at stake.
The following points may be stated in conclusion. First, it is vital that our reading of Paul does justice to the disjunctive elements of his thought, that it takes seriously his stress that the old has gone and the new has come. Similarly, it must take seriously his alignment of the present age with evil and his use of invasional language to represent the gospel. But, it must not do so in a way that compromises assertions about God's perfections as Creator. Neither must it do so in a way that neglects his loving involvement with all things at all times. By introducing the concept of providence into our analysis of Paul, we can be free to explore these dramatic military themes with a set of necessary safeguards in place. Second, we must ensure that our discussion of the grand storyline of God's dealings with the creation – our debate over its disjunctions and continuities – does not lose sight of his loving commitments to each individual creature. In the sweeping character of the debate over the apocalyptic Paul, there is a risk that the little things get trampled underfoot. Again, by introducing the concept of providence, as classically articulated, this imbalance is resisted, for providence asserts both the universal and the particular. That assertion, moreover, rests on the incarnation itself as the key to providence: in Christ, all things hold together. Third, as we invoke providence, we necessarily acknowledge that Paul's writings do not shape Christian theology in isolation, but as part of the canon of scripture; our move to the theological claim must always be regulated by that recognition and cannot, therefore, proceed immediately from the exegesis of those writings. If recognised, this point itself would require the debate to be recast in significant ways.
