Anglican, evangelical, well-respected, prolific writer, ... but nothing recent... died 2011
Many of his commentaries are in the top ten at BestCommentaries
I've had a copy of his
Basic Christianity on my to-be-read shelf for quite a while - other books keep crowding it out.
BST authors (like all other commentators) are committed to a serious study of the text in its own integrity. Although a pre-suppositionless approach is impossible (and all the commentators tend to be recognizably Lutheran or Reformed, Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative), yet I have known that my first responsibility has been to seek a fresh encounter with the authentic Paul. Karl Barth, in his preface to the first edition of his famous Römerbrief (1918), called this an ‘utter loyalty’ to Paul, which would allow the apostle to say what he does say and would not force him to say what we might want him to say.
This principle has made it necessary for me to listen respectfully to those scholars who are offering us a ‘new perspective on Paul’, especially Professors Krister Stendahl, E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn. Their claims that both Paul and Palestinian Judaism have been gravely misunderstood have to be taken seriously, although I note that the most recent commentator, the American Jesuit scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, whose work appeared in 1993 and was hailed by the reviewers as ‘monumental’ and ‘magisterial’, almost entirely ignores this debate. All I have felt able to do is to sketch a brief explanation and evaluation of it in my Preliminary Essay.
But expositors should not be antiquarians, living only in the remote past. Reverting to Barth, it was his conviction that Paul, although ‘a child of his age’, who addressed his contemporaries, also ‘speaks to all men of every age’. So he celebrated the ‘creative energy’ with which Luther and Calvin had wrestled with Paul’s message ‘till the walls which separated the sixteenth century from the first became transparent’. And the same dialectical process between ancient text and modern context must continue today, even though many commentators confine themselves to exegesis without application.
I confess that, ever since I became a Christian fifty-six years ago, I have enjoyed what could be termed a ‘love-hate’ relationship with Romans, because of its joyful-painful personal challenges. It began soon after my conversion, with chapter 6 and my longing to experience that ‘death to sin’ which it seemed to promise. I toyed for many years with the fantasy that Christians are supposed to be as insensitive to sin as a corpse is to external stimuli. My final deliverance from this chimera was sealed when I was invited to give the Keswick Convention ‘Bible Readings’ on Romans 5–8 in 1965, which were subsequently published under the title Men Made New.
John Stott, The Message of Romans, p 8
Rob
