In Marlowe’s renowned play, Doctor Faustus, the doctor wagers his soul to the task of achieving a unified understanding of all things. The chief obstacle to this ambition—laying aside his moral shortcomings and his seduction by Lucifer—is the ambiguity of the world he encounters at every turn. “Resolve me of all ambiguities,”1 Faustus exclaims, but due to the fragmentary nature of human thought and knowledge, neither books nor academic disciplines nor even magic make such resolution possible.

Without suggesting any comparisons in character between Faustus and Thomas McGlothlin, in his brilliant monograph, Resurrection as Salvation, McGlothlin masterfully engages with a “familiar” topic in early Christianity which is latent with ambiguity: resurrection. By setting out his Pauline resurrection schema, McGlothlin comes as close as anyone to achieving a unified understanding of resurrection in early Christian writings.

From the start, McGlothlin is clear that the question driving his research is not about the nature of resurrection (What is the resurrection body like?) but the purpose of resurrection (Why does resurrection happen, what does it accomplish, and for whom?). As becomes clear through each chapter, agreement about what constitutes resurrection does not ensure agreement about why it happens (18). McGlothlin grounds his argument in Scripture and Second Temple Jewish literature and sets out two primary purposes for resurrection in the ancient world: as a prerequisite for judgment and as an outworking of salvation (265). So, McGlothlin finds resurrection for judgment of both the righteous and the wicked in Daniel 12, 4 Ezra 7, and 2 Baruch 50–51, as well as John 5, Acts 24, and Revelation 20. He locates resurrection only of the righteous for salvation in Josephus’s description of the Pharisees, 2 Maccabees, John 6, and Paul’s writings (namely Romans 6, Philippians 3, Ephesians 2, and Colossians 2). McGlothlin offers words of caution that (1) believing all will face judgment is not the same as belief in the resurrection of all people (33), and (2) that these divisions rely on “an ostensibly suspicious silence” since a number of texts don’t associate resurrection with anyone but the righteous, thus not addressing questions of a more universal resurrection (24).

McGlothlin’s primary argument is that the tension between the two purposes for resurrection shapes early Christian understandings of resurrection and informs differences in how resurrection is understood and defended in early Christian writings. Early Christians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, for example, are often lumped together as holding similar views of resurrection. However, McGlothlin concludes that while both writers agree on the fleshly nature of resurrection, they different rather significantly on resurrection’s purpose. Other surprises include agreements between those seemingly opposed to one another, such as Irenaeus and the Valentinians, as well as Origen and Methodius.

Nevertheless, the focus of the study is not only on the tensions between the two purposes of resurrection, but how Paul’s writings are used to resolve these tensions and defend a particular understanding of “resurrection.” McGlothlin begins with what he calls the Pauline resurrection schema (PRS) and traces this schema through five sets of early Christian writings: Irenaeus, Tertullian, two Valentinian works, Origen, and Methodius. As McGlothlin argues, how they engage—or don’t—with the PRS determines how they define resurrection and their understanding of resurrection’s purpose.

The first chapter offers a survey of the two understandings of resurrection in Second Temple and NT texts and sets out the PRS in detail. Essentially, the PRS develops the second view of resurrection—resurrection as an aspect of salvation. Noticing the connections in Paul’s writings between resurrection, righteousness, salvation, the Spirit, and Christ, McGlothlin draws these motifs together into one “constellation.” This resurrection schema links moral transformation to resurrection through conformity to the resurrected Christ driven by the Holy Spirit and describes both the present and future condition of the Christian, depending on the Pauline letter. The view of resurrection of all for judgment is juxtaposed with the PRS: those who link resurrection with judgment cannot grasp the integration of resurrection and salvation found in the PRS; but those who uphold the PRS have difficulty explaining how all people are resurrected (43).

McGlothlin’s description of resurrection in early Christian and Jewish writings and Paul’s development of a resurrection schema is clear and masterful. Within this setup he offers a few important nuances (1) the NT offers no explanation for how to hold together the two understandings of resurrection within it; (2) early Christians writers don’t have two competing views before them, consciously deciding on one over the other; and (3) Paul’s understanding of resurrection and how moral transformation, salvation, Christ, and the Spirit work together can be unpacked in many ways. In other words, even with two understandings and one resurrection schema, ambiguity remains.

These points of clarity begin to address the lingering question of whether early Christian writings are asking the same questions as McGlothlin. Were they more focused on nature than purpose when discussing resurrection, which explains why 1 Corinthians 15:50 is one of the most utilized texts in early Christian writings, but Romans 6 is not? Were the tensions surrounding the purpose of resurrection in early Christian writings simply mirroring the tensions in the NT on which they depended? Such questions are not meant to undermine McGlothlin’s argument but to support it. That both understandings of resurrection exist within the NT—even within Paul’s words if Acts 24 is included—suggests that early Christian understandings of resurrection are more complicated than often suggested. As McGlothlin concludes, adding Paul’s resurrection schema into the mix ensures that early Christian reflection on resurrection is necessarily complex (267) and begins to unpick the source of this complexity. Conflicts over resurrection—whether interpreting 1 Corinthians or Romans—were “conflicts within Paulinism” (268) as McGlothlin draws out in the chapters that follow.

Within chapter 2, McGlothlin shows how Irenaeus, defending creation’s integrity, adopts elements of the PRS and links together moral transformation, baptism, the Spirit, and bodily resurrection. For Irenaeus, resurrection is reserved for the righteous and part of a longer process of maturation and moral transformation, a “stepping-stone” toward immortality and perfection in Christ with the Spirit’s help (73). But, as McGlothlin notes, Irenaeus develops this understanding of resurrection alongside a “bare, undeveloped affirmation that all will be raised to face judgment” (50) and “appears not to have noticed the tension” (95). While Irenaeus takes seriously the PRS in his anthropology, theology, and account of resurrection, he does not ultimately offer “one coherent understanding of resurrection” (86).

McGlothlin then turns to Tertullian (chapter 3). Despite Tertullian’s defence of Paul as “my apostle,” McGlothlin concludes that in contrast with Irenaeus, Tertullian’s understanding of resurrection does not cohere with the PRS. He writes, “Where Irenaeus had used the work of the Holy Spirit to link moral transformation and resurrection within the broader process of human maturation, failing along the way to explain how all would be raised for judgment, Tertullian began with the purpose of resurrection as a prerequisite for judgment and severed the connections in the [PRS] that did not fit with this view” (96). While Tertullian upholds a link between moral transformation and resurrection, “the whole point of resurrection, its tota causa, is judgment” because only through resurrection can “the whole morally responsible being . . . receive God’s judgment” (122). Resurrection is connected with moral transformation, but only because resurrection and judgment for moral actions are synonymous for Tertullian. This, McGlothlin argues, subverts the connections between these motifs in the PRS. In Tertullian’s model, moral transformation, the work of the Spirit, and even Christ’s own resurrection (132–33) have no impact on a person’s resurrection, only on what happens afterward.

In chapter 4, McGlothlin engages with two Valentinian texts: Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip. He suggests that these texts, which lack discussion of a general resurrection, reflect a use of “resurrection” that is more faithful to the PRS than Irenaeus or Tertullian. Both of these texts, relying on Colossians and Ephesians, speak of resurrection both as that which happens after physical death and as something received now. Physical death is not a prerequisite for resurrection but rather in the Treatise, resurrection is the morally transformed Christian life now (147) and for the Gospel, transformation is resurrection, intimately connected with the sacraments (157). McGlothlin observes that these texts synthesize Pauline thought, holding together two senses of resurrection—in this life and after death—even though Paul himself never describes these two senses in the same letter.

McGlothlin then moves to Origen (chapter 5) arguing that Origen unites the tensions in previous chapters though his description of the resurrection of all people alongside an understanding of moral transformation as resurrection both in this life and as an eschatological reality. For McGlothlin, with his unique anthropology (i.e., material continuity of the body is not necessary after death), Origen is the first to bring together the PRS and a general eschatological resurrection. For Origen, bodies reflect the moral state of the soul so that after death, the inhabited body (either more glorious or more gross) corresponds to the moral state of the person in life. As such, the “actual event of resurrection . . . is shaped by moral transformation in this life” (176). Moral transformation is not synonymous with resurrection, but the resurrected body corresponds to moral transformation. For Origen, resurrection is possible in this life, is directly connected with salvation, and is what all will experience after physical death as their bodies are transformed either for glory or for shame (204).

McGlothlin’s final chapter (chapter 6) examines the writings of Methodius with a focus not only on how Methodius reacts against Origen but also on Methodius’s “own theological voice” (213). Like Origen, Methodius embraces a connection between moral transformation and resurrection as found in the PRS alongside a belief in the resurrection of all. However, for Methodius, death and resurrection happen so that all—good and evil—may be morally transformed to perfection, thereby cutting the connection between moral transformation in this life and in the resurrection, and instead linking moral effort in this life and what happens after resurrection. For Methodius, the causal direction is reversed so that death and resurrection produce moral transformation and perfection. Whether these morally transformed humans will spend eternity in glory or shame, however, depends on their moral efforts in life. As with Tertullian, a liability in limiting resurrection only to that which happens after physical death means that Christ’s death and resurrection has limited space in Methodius’s scheme. Christ’s resurrection and that of all people is not one Methodius addresses directly (253). Even as Methodius embraces the two kinds of resurrection found in Scripture, they remain separate in his thinking and thus, at the end of this chapter, it is clear that no early Christian successfully resolves the tension between these dual understandings.

Despite the remaining ambiguities and unresolved tensions, McGlothlin offers challenging and clear conclusions alongside common themes that emerge from the interaction of early Christian writers with his PRS. One significant result is the significance of this study for Pauline reception since McGlothlin concludes that Paul is “the clear force to be reckoned with on the theme of resurrection” (8) even as his own ambiguities influence those of early Christians.

Two threads drawn out in each chapter but not featured in the conclusion are the definitional differences between early Christian writers and the importance of progress in their understandings of resurrection. In terms of definitions, depending on the chapter, the argument revolves around differing definitions of “spiritual” (Irenaeus), “resurrection” (Tertullian, Origen), “death” (Gospel of Philip, Origen), and “flesh” (all of the above). McGlothlin points out where definitions of key words are at stake, but doesn’t explore how such differences impact the way the motifs of the PRS are linked together (or not!).

In terms of progress, this theme occurs in almost every chapter. McGlothlin describes Irenaeus’s understanding of humanity as working “through a series of pedagogical stages” to make possible the gift of bodily resurrection, which is in itself “merely a stepping-stone to further progress” (70, 73). For McGlothlin, Tertullian understands newness of life to be “a gradual process of progress in faith” (109) and, similar to Irenaeus, he leaves room for those who enter God’s kingdom after resurrection “to continue pursuing knowledge of God after this world has passed away” (119). Even the Gospel of Philip’s resurrection is described as a “complex process that is ongoing even now, conforming the baptized to Christ” (157). Origen’s soteriology is also portrayed as a process leading to “increasing conformity to God” (185). As a teacher himself, Origen draws the motifs of the PRS together to offer “a rich account of the way in which moral progress is a long, sometimes slow process of progressive education by the Spirit” (197). What place, therefore, does progress have in an understanding of how the PRS is incorporated into early Christian resurrection schemata?

Overall, McGlothlin’s lucid writing engages with the intricacies of each writer’s theological and philosophical concerns in a way that readers can easily follow with key points repeated so as not to be missed. And yet, despite all of his work to resolve the tensions in early Christian use of Paul to understand the purpose of “resurrection,” McGlothlin ends not with a unified understanding of all things but with a set of new questions. Unlike Faustus, McGlothlin doesn’t need to have all the answers. For him, the questions are enough as they open up new avenues for understanding Paul, Paul’s use in early Christian writings, and even “resurrection” in a way that contributes to contemporary systematic theology. This book is a significant study not only for questions about resurrection in early Christianity, but also for the use of Paul by early Christians. It is also an excellent example of how one holds together the study of Scripture, the history of interpretation of a text, and the theological questions and concerns that emerge from such study and interpretation. McGlothlin might not offer in the end a unified theory of resurrection, but he does accomplish a goal shared with Origen as he helps the reader to “perceive as open and clear the things that earlier seemed less easy to understand” (Comm. Rom. 5.8.13; 187).2

In Resurrection as Salvation, Tom McGlothlin offers a measured, nuanced, and highly persuasive analysis of early Christian accounts of resurrection. He drills deep in the primary sources, reading them in the context of broader developmental themes in the thought of their authors, with sensitivity to the specific and technical sense in which authors use terms, in nuanced dialogue with scholarship published on specific issues within each author’s thought, with an eye to how each concept treated fits into the patterns of the author’s wider theological perspective, and with precise attention to the texts in the original languages (McGlothlin provides his own translations except for some texts of Methodius available only in Slavonic). While reading this book, I found myself harboring few, if any, doubts, even of a minor nature, about McGlothlin’s central thesis and his support of it through readings of specific texts. When doubts of this nature did arise, the author had an uncanny way of anticipating and promptly allaying them. In what follows, therefore, I will not take issue either with the more minor arguments McGlothlin makes in interpreting early Christian authors or with his major thesis. Instead, I will take the opportunity to consider some of the larger implications of his findings for questions about the relative merits of various streams of the Pauline and New Testament legacy on resurrection, how to adjudicate between these streams, and how to characterize each thinker’s overall approach in relation to them.

This monograph does what it says it will: treat the reception of Paul’s view of resurrection as salvation in pre-Nicene thinkers. But it also serves as an introduction to early Christian anthropology that manages to keep in its purview the reception of biblical teaching on resurrection more broadly, of which Paul is but one, if the strongest and thickest, strand. By using resurrection as a lens, McGlothlin brings into focus the diversity of early Christian thinking on the nature of the human person. McGlothlin demonstrates how early Christian thinking on resurrection kaleidoscopically reflected, multiplied, and recombined a more basic diversity inherent in the biblical text itself.

McGlothlin distinguishes between two streams common to both second temple Judaism and the New Testament. According to the first, typified in the gospel of John and Revelation, resurrection is a prerequisite for judgment, a universal human experience that precedes the meting out of reward and punishment. According to the second, resurrection is itself the salvific reward granted to the righteous. Paul develops this view in the context of a rich theological framework of interconnections, which McGlothlin dubs “the Pauline resurrection schema.” For Paul, McGlothlin argues, the resurrection of Christians cannot be reduced to a singular event, circumstance, or state of being. Instead, it is a diachronic process involving christological, pneumatological, and eschatological aspects.

In Resurrection as Salvation McGlothlin deftly demonstrates how an array of second- and third-century figures worked to integrate this Pauline legacy into their anthropologies while negotiating a cumulative biblical inheritance that did not always cohere obviously with Paul’s teaching. The results varied drastically.

McGlothlin’s vivid descriptions of these contrasts lead naturally to a normative question. How ought we to weigh the relative merits of the approaches of these thinkers? This comparative question, in turn, raises a more basic query: what criteria are most helpful in assessing these contributions? We may consider how questions come into play in the concrete evaluations McGlothlin offers of the figures he treats.

Irenaeus’s progressive, Spirit-driven anthropological vision is deeply Pauline, both materially, in that he locates resurrection at the nexus of pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology, and structurally, in that he sees resurrection as a reality gradually realized over time. But Irenaeus also affirmed a more Johannine general resurrection, including a resurrection of the wicked.

According to McGlothlin, Irenaeus did not satisfactorily reconcile these two aspects of his biblical inheritance or even grant them equitable attention (94–95). He kept the Johannine perspective on resurrection dutifully in the corner of his eye, but—following Paul—fixed his gaze on resurrection as salvation. The idea of a general resurrection of the good and the bad marred the larger picture of his thinking like a puzzle piece forced into a space in which it did not belong: it was ill-fitting, largely ignored, and detracted from the bigger picture. By failing to integrate it, Irenaeus also failed to integrate the Pauline resurrection schema “into every aspect of [his] theology” (95; see also 87). Yet at this point the reader may wonder: given that Paul himself does not integrate his views with a Johannine perspective,1 does this failure really entail that “the Pauline resurrection schema” is taken less seriously than it would be if the schema were more thoroughly reconciled with the Johannine account? In fact, why shouldn’t one argue just the opposite, that Irenaeus’s reading—while wooden, perhaps—in fact takes Paul more seriously than more thoroughly integrative approaches in that he adheres more strictly to the bounds of Paul’s own thinking?

Tertullian, in whom McGlothlin finds a reversal of Irenaeus’s priorities, comes in for criticisms at least as strong as those pertaining to Irenaeus. While nodding in the general direction of Paul, Tertullian privileges resurrection as prerequisite for judgment. In an effort to underline the bodily character of this universal resurrection, Tertullian weakened Paul’s connections between resurrection and the moral transformation and conformity to Christ’s own death and resurrection brought about by the Spirit in this life. On balance McGlothlin’s critique of Tertullian seems even a bit sharper than that of Irenaeus, though McGlothlin points to a structural parallel between the two thinkers: both compromise faithfulness to the “full breadth” of the New Testament (159).

Is this impression correct? In McGlothlin’s judgment, is Tertullian’s view of resurrection, privileging the Johannine account, less persuasive than that of Irenaeus, which privileges Paul? If so, why? Would McGlothlin argue that Christian theologians ought to develop accounts of resurrection out of a center in Paul? It would seem that Tertullian’s view, as compared with the others treated in Resurrection as Salvation, most closely approximates the traditional views of resurrection that tended to be held by the ecumenical Christian church, i.e., that resurrection referred primarily or foundationally to a general, bodily resurrection of all human beings after death. Hence if his view is to be deemed inadequate vis-à-vis other options already on the table in the second and third centuries, this would seem significant for assessing the hermeneutical persuasiveness of subsequent accounts of resurrection that took on significant influence in later centuries. And conversely, if Tertullian’s went on to become, or most significantly shape, the dominant view, this would raise questions about how its future appeal and success might be explained—or not—vis-à-vis its hermeneutical features.

McGlothlin praises the two Valentinian texts—Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip—for being “faithful to the Pauline resurrection schema in a way that Tertullian and Irenaeus were not” (139). Yet, as he goes on to point out, at least in the case of Treatise on the Resurrection, whether the postmortem resurrection it discusses is “fleshly” is unclear (139–40n15). Genuine resurrection, in this work, is opposed to “the flesh of this illusory world” (146). In fact, it would seem that it is precisely the weakening of the connection between embodiment and resurrection that strengthens the link between resurrection now and resurrection later (146). Both resurrections are spiritual in such a way as to be opposed to the flesh of this world. If connecting the two resurrections comes at the cost of a clear affirmation of the bodily character of the second resurrection, does this cost attenuate the “Pauline” character of these two Valentinian works (given texts such as Rom 8:9–11)?

In the case of Origen, McGlothlin calls attention to how the Alexandrian is able to synthesize the relevant scriptural data (264) by building creatively on Paul with his suggestion that resurrection involves a continuum or gradation of bodily states (172–73). For Origen, bodily resurrection is no more uniform than the body itself. There is a spectrum of different types of resurrection, more and less glorious. Because resurrection bodies exist in different forms, all of which are pedagogical and none of which are merely punitive, resurrection is at once salvation and a means of universal judgment. Origen makes Paul and John cohere with the glue of this innovative, extrabiblical solution.

But there is one aspect of Origen’s account that seems not only to go beyond Paul but also to stand in tension with him. This is the idea that the resurrection (even of Christ—see pp. 190–91) is contingent upon moral transformation. In McGlothlin’s words, “Individuals are progressively transformed to reflect that glory [that of Jesus] and its concomitant heavenly way of life through their growth in the virtues—a process that actually constitutes the resurrection of Jesus himself in its soteriologically significant sense” (194; see also 191). But does not this kind of contingency invert Paul’s logic? For Paul, does not a sharing in Christ’s resurrection become a reality in the believer precisely “even when we were dead through our trespasses” (Eph 2:5) and not on the basis of preexisting qualifications? If there is a genuine tension between Paul and Origen with respect to the contingency of resurrection upon moral transformation (on this contingency in Origen, see 194, 195, 196, 197, 202), this would seem to mitigate the extent to which Origen’s connection between moral transformation and resurrection may be seen as accounting for all the relevant data from scripture or even all the relevant data from Paul.

Methodius offers another creative, if highly unusual, approach to combining Pauline and Johannine views of resurrection. His solution is to retain the Pauline connection between moral transformation and resurrection, but reverse the vector of the relationship, so that the latter gives rise to the former. Resurrection after death will complete the process of moral transformation begun in this life; in the end, sin will be purged from everyone. Yet reward and judgment will be meted out to the resurrected based on their efforts in this life. While this account sacrifices the Pauline emphasis on the reality of resurrection in the Christian life at present, Methodius maintains the Johannine teaching of a universal resurrection that is a prerequisite for judgment, while also preserving the Pauline resurrection schema’s connection between resurrection and moral transformation. Some of the thematic breadth of Paul’s resurrection schema is preserved, even as it is chronologically constricted to an eschatological frame.

In taking stock of Methodius’s attempted solution, McGlothlin observes that Methodius failed to “relate the general resurrection to the resurrecting work of Christ in the incarnation” (253). At the same time, McGlothlin points out that Methodius does seem to build his unusual perspective on one text from Paul, Romans 6:7, and to make (a very literal interpretation of) that verse the governing principle for his understanding of resurrection, even though a great number of other Pauline texts (as McGlothlin shows so ably in his introduction) suggest that the road to the second resurrection is paved with moral transformation. This case in Methodius again brings up the issue of what faithfulness to Paul means. Does this require a thinker aligning points of emphasis with Paul’s own accents or is it sufficient to have a basis for one’s arguments in Paul?

McGlothlin’s treatment of Methodius, like his consideration of the other early Christian thinkers and texts that appear in his study, leads the reader to reflect on a number of larger questions. What should be the criteria for comparing the various views McGlothlin presents? Fidelity to Paul? To the New Testament more broadly? Subsequent reception and historical importance in various tributaries of the Christian tradition? What kinds of complexities pertain to assessing on the basis of these criteria and weighing them against each other?

In addition to raising the hermeneutical questions I have listed above, I would like to highlight four virtues of McGlothlin’s book in the spirit of thinking through these broader implications. On the formal front, McGlothlin demonstrates an admirable restraint and repeatedly resists overinterpreting the evidence. This pattern first emerges on p. 24, but is repeated throughout the book. McGlothlin does not inflate his arguments, but consistently argues in a modest and cautious way. Second, McGlothlin addresses thinkers on their own terms, showing how the theme of resurrection relates to the distinctive inner logic of each author’s thought. With respect to the material content of the work, McGlothlin’s book drives home for its readers two essential points, not only about early Christian treatments of resurrection, but also about early Christian literature more broadly. First, this book demonstrates in an unmistakable way that the idea of early Christian literature as a monolith, whether funded by the intent to valorize or to demonize, is a myth. Even as each of the thinkers McGlothlin treats dealt with a common biblical inheritance, the theories of resurrection that resulted differed drastically. And second, McGlothlin’s book points to the deeply biblical character of early Christian thinking on the resurrection. These authors differed in their convictions about how resurrection was effected by God, and even in their understandings of what resurrection was. Yet they all struggled to make sense of their common biblical inheritance. In leading readers to these crucial insights by using Paul’s resurrection schema as a prism, McGlothlin has injected new life into the ancient, dry bones of another inheritance: the inheritance of debates about resurrection in early Christianity.

Thomas McGlothlin has done a great service in analyzing the diverse tracks of early Christian thought on the function of the resurrection. He points out that these varied lines of thought take up important threads in the biblical texts themselves. Paul, for example, seems to presuppose that resurrection is an aspect of salvation, whereas Revelation assumes that resurrection is a prerequisite for universal judgment. Paul’s distinctive view of the resurrection is tightly bound up with his understanding of the Spirit’s work in the present age. Evidently, for Paul, it is only those who are conformed to Christ by the Spirit in present moral transformation who will be conformed to his resurrection by the Spirit in future bodily glorification. This is what McGlothlin calls the “Pauline resurrection schema” (38). As McGlothlin notes, it is not obvious in Paul how present conformity to Christ is related to future conformity to Christ. The former might cause the latter, or the two could be correlated because of a common agent: the Spirit. Nevertheless, it is clear that the work of the indwelling Spirit now is aimed at resurrection in the future age, and that the work of the Spirit in conforming the believer to Christ now ensures conformity to his resurrection in the future (Rom 6:5, 8; 8:11). The future resurrection is thus the inevitable end result of the operation of the Spirit in the present.

By highlighting this connection in Paul between the present work of the Spirit and the future resurrection, McGlothlin provokes reflection on a problem that has long been implicit in Pauline scholarship and yet has been rarely addressed: if the future resurrection is the necessary correlate of the Spirit’s work in the believer in the present, why is this work and its result countered and interrupted by an opposing movement, namely mortality and death?

This problem has arguably haunted the discipline as a whole for quite some time. The issue arose pressingly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when scholars such as William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer contended that, in the wake of the work of Christ and the Spirit, conformity to Christ’s resurrection was a present reality for the believer, and not simply in a moral sense.1 Schweitzer in particular claimed that by the believer’s union with Christ, mortality in the believer’s body was already being displaced by the immortality of Christ’s resurrected body.2 If this were the case, though, how could believers die? Neither Wrede nor Schweitzer answered this question adequately.

This older interpretation has analogues in present scholarship that provoke the same problem. Recent interpretations of Paul have claimed that the pneumatic body—which, according to Paul, is an immortal body (1 Cor 15:44)—is already being realized in believers. In these readings, the material pneuma pervades and transforms the believer’s body materially even now.3 While the apocalyptic school tends to focus less on the change of the body in the present,4 here interpreters highlight that in Christ and the Spirit, God has overcome the powers of sin and death and thus has radically altered the conditions in which humanity exists.5 Yet if death is in fact conquered, why does it still afflict humanity, particularly those in whom Christ and the Spirit dwell?6 The fundamental outlines of this interpretation, even when attenuated, can be discerned in Pauline scholarship more broadly. Whenever interpreters expound on the “already” / “not yet” in Paul’s thought, they emphasize some of the same basic elements that raise the same question: God intends to overcome death in creation, he has already begun to do so in Christ, and the Spirit is already at work in believers to bring them into conformity with God’s eschatological goal in creation by conforming them to Christ.

Given this broad agreement in Pauline studies about the way that God works in Christ and the Spirit in the present to overcome death, one question becomes unavoidable: why do Christians still die at all? Only two major scholars have even noticed the question. J. Christiaan Beker asked, in light of Paul’s understanding of the “already” that Christ and the Spirit have inaugurated in believers’s lives (and creation more generally), “How can [Paul] . . . leave room for the ‘not yet’?”7 Martinus de Boer also flagged the question.8 Neither scholar actually answered the question, though, and since their work in the 1980s, no one has taken up the call to address this question.

McGlothlin’s work breathes new life into this question for Pauline scholars. Given the connection between the present and future work of the Spirit, how do we deal with the ongoing reality of death? Does Paul give us any pointers here? To take the obverse of McGlothlin’s question (what work is the resurrection doing), we may ask what work mortality is doing in Paul. In light of God’s activity in the Spirit to overcome death and to orient the believer’s existence toward resurrection, what use does God have for death anymore? Why does God permit death to remain?

In keeping with the spirit of McGlothlin’s work, we may bring the patristic and biblical authors into conversation. The question of the purpose of death was hardly overlooked by patristic writers. John Cavadini has recently claimed that there were roughly two tracks in early Christian thought about the purpose of mortality.9 One track, which Cavadini notes is often heuristically associated with Augustine and the West, viewed mortality as an evil in itself from which God could nevertheless draw good, as when the deaths of the martyrs become a witness to their faith. The other track, which Cavadini points out is commonly linked with Irenaeus and the East, was to regard mortality more positively as part of God’s instruction of humanity. To be sure, this instruction took a different form than it would have in an unfallen world, but death is now part of God’s way of shaping humanity into what he intended it to be. For Irenaeus, in Eden humanity by its sin had squandered its opportunity to trust God. Yet God graciously restores this opportunity to humanity by letting them experience mortality. Now in the fallen world, humanity has the opportunity to trust God once again.10

Paul himself does not address this question in the direct way that Irenaeus and Augustine do, but he does provide material that lets us broadly discern what function mortality has in Christian experience and formation. It is not clear in Paul as it is in Irenaeus just how directly God wills this element of struggle from the outset. Yet it is unambiguous in Paul’s writings that mortality distinctively shapes Christian faith, hope, and love. As Paul describes these realities, they take on their specific form in the face of death.

One of the clearest passages in this regard is Romans 4, where Paul narrates the experience of Abraham. As Paul recounts Genesis, Abraham’s faith acquires the shape it does because he confronts the reality of death. When God promises to make Abraham the father of many nations, Abraham believes him, despite the fact that his body is already overcome with death and his wife’s womb is already dead (Rom 4:19). Incidentally, it is Paul’s telling and not the Genesis narrative that highlights “death” as the problem Abraham faces. If Abraham had been a vibrant young man, his faith in the promise would not have required him to believe God despite the reality of death. It is only because he is already confronted with death that his faith obtains its distinctive profile. For Abraham, faith becomes the reality of clinging to God’s promise of life even though all hope is gone from a human perspective (Rom 4:18–21).

Abraham’s experience in the face of death bears on Christians as well. Paul closely correlates Abraham’s faith with Christian faith, going so far as to say that Christians follow in the footsteps of Abraham, essentially having the same sort of faith he did (Rom 4:12). Christians not only have faith in light of what God has done in Christ to overcome death (4:25). Like Abraham, their hope takes shape as they face death in their own lives. They too face mortal threats (5:3; 8:35–36, 38), and yet, far from undermining their hope, these tribulations serve to establish their hope (5:3–4). It is precisely as they bear the weight of their physical corruption that they look to God to give life to their mortal bodies (8:11, 23). It is in the midst of their mortality that their hope acquires its profundity.

Elsewhere Paul explicitly says that God allows him and his fellow Christians to come up against the reality of death “so that they might not rely on themselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor 1:9; cf. 4:7–12). Yet in 2 Corinthians, we learn not only that mortality deepens human reliance on God, but also that it becomes a space where humans enter into deeper solidarity with each other because of the way God is present with them in the face of death. God meets people and comforts them in the midst of their mortal afflictions (1:3–4). Those comforted by God then comfort others in affliction (1:4). In the hands of God, then, mortality becomes a means to deepen the reality of Christian love.

Mortality and death play a crucial role in Paul’s understanding of faith, hope, and love. Not by themselves, but because of what God does, mortality and death open up a space where Christian faith, hope, and love can come to their deepest and fullest expression. Insofar as we receive any indications from Paul, this seems to be the purpose they serve.

McGlothlin’s work provides valuable insights that open up paths for interdisciplinary dialogue. I have aimed to give one example from the stance of New Testament scholarship of how McGlothlin’s work might be brought to bear on Pauline studies to press us to consider questions that have been latent in our own field. In analyzing the relationship between the present work of the Spirit and the resurrection, McGlothlin has pushed us to confront a problem that has been implicit in Pauline studies and yet has remained inadequately addressed. For urging us to consider such problems more deeply, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

At the end of a long and winding letter to his Messianic assembly at Corinth, the Apostle Paul finally treats the question that commentators believe undergirds many of the letter’s ethical admonitions. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul defends the fact of the bodily resurrection, both Jesus’ as well as that of those who are “in Christ.” Paul evidently had to emphasize this doctrine as a historical and eschatological reality because some in Corinth were skeptical that bodies as we now know them, whether dead or alive, could inherit the kingdom of God. Paul defends the fact of the resurrection by answering the how of the anthropological problem head-on: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?’ ‘With what sort of body do they come?’” (1 Cor 15:35). Paul’s answer to the how question, in short, is that in the resurrection the body will be transformed into a pneumatic substance appropriate for the kingdom (1 Cor 15:36–57).

We find buried in the middle of 1 Corinthians 15 a separate justification for the fact of the resurrection: “Otherwise, what will those who are baptized on behalf of the dead do? If the dead are not actually raised, why are they baptized on their behalf?” (1 Cor 15:29). Paul’s reference to baptismal practices on behalf of the dead was meant to point out that ritual practices are bound up with and reinforce particular confessions about the sacred. He asks the Corinthians to consider why they continued to practice the ritual if they now denied its intended telos: resurrection. The inner logic of the practice is not immediately apparent to the modern reader, and has confounded many Pauline commentators, but we have to assume that it was in line with general Pauline thinking on the nexus between baptism and eschatological resurrection. Paul, after all, does not decry the practice. It is the logic, or the why, of resurrection that is the subject of Thomas McGlothlin’s recent book Resurrection as Salvation: Development and Conflict in Pre-Nicene Paulinism (2018, Cambridge University Press). Rather than treading the overly-worn anthropological path by trying to understand ancient discourses on the nature of the resurrected body, McGlothlin explores the teleology of resurrection in early Jewish and Christian literature, with a focus on how what he calls the “Pauline resurrection schema” (i.e., the Pauline logic of resurrection, which is connected for Paul to the logic of baptism) evolves out of a particular strand of Jewish thought about the purpose of resurrection—salvation—and how it is variously treated in the discussions of resurrection found in Irenaeus, Tertullian, the Valentinians, Origen, and Methodius of Olympus. Resurrection as Salvation, then, is both an exploration of a particular strain of Pauline reception in early Christianity and a series of detailed textual studies on the soteriologies of important early Christian thinkers and texts (in the case of the Nag Hammadi literature).

McGlothlin argues that there were two discernibly different strands of thinking about the purpose of the resurrection in Second Temple Judaism, and thus in the New Testament. The first, which envisions a general resurrection of all, understands resurrection as “a prerequisite for judgement” (p. 1) and can be found in Daniel, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Gospel of John, and Revelation. The second understands resurrection as “God’s reward for the righteous” (1) and can be found in 2 Maccabees, Josephus’s description of the Pharisees, and the Pauline Epistles. McGlothlin finds no evidence of a general resurrection unto judgment in the Pauline Epistles. Rather, the canonical Pauline Epistles evince what he calls the “Pauline resurrection schema,” which is shorthand for the inner logic that binds together “the Pauline connections between resurrection, righteousness, and Spirit-driven conformity to the resurrected Christ” (3). McGlothlin is not blind to modern scholarly skepticism about the authenticity of some of the Pauline Epistles, but largely sidelines questions of authorship since they are irrelevant for how Irenaeus and others received the corpus as a whole. Taken together, a “familiar pattern” of Pauline thinking on the resurrection appears: “(1) The ground for a morally transformed life of righteousness (2) is present conformity with the resurrected Christ established in baptism; (3) there remains, however, a future dimension to this conformity” (38, emphasis original).

By the time that the Pauline Epistles were circulating as a whole and beginning to exert influence on early Christian theology (mid- to late second century CE), we find writers holding alongside one another both Paul’s view of resurrection as salvation as well as the widely held belief in a general resurrection as a prerequisite for judgement. McGlothlin asks, “How did early Christian debates and discussions about the resurrection reflect the problems and possibilities presented by the juxtaposition of these two understandings of the purpose of resurrection?” (46–47). With his focus on the “Paulinism” (i.e., strand #2) of early Christian authors, McGlothlin fails to narrate the development of the widespread and perhaps more fundamental early Christian belief in a general resurrection unto judgment (strand #1). By at least the late second century it seems to have found a fixed place in various Christian regulae fidei throughout the empire (cf. Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1; Tertullian, Praesc. 13; Origen, Princ. Pref.5). Resurrection and judgment are already linked before that in the so-called Apostolic Fathers (cf. Polycarp, Phil. 7.1; 2 Clem. 9:1). The description of the tension McGlothlin perceives between these two authorities—Paul and the regula—as well as of the difficulties that early Christian writers had in bringing them together would have benefitted from some indication of just how fixed both of them had become by the period of his post-Pauline investigation. As it stands, the general resurrection appears in McGlothlin’s study unconnected to the development of the Christian faith and thus as an awkward-fitting piece in a Pauline puzzle, rather than the other way around.

The contributions of Resurrection as Salvation are numerous. McGlothlin is clearly in control of the early Christian authors he seeks to explicate. He systematizes the data without overreading or feeling the need to tie up all the loose ends, plainly articulating the tensions that are left unresolved in the Fathers. Over and against the heterogenous patristic evidence, he identifies the Valentinians, at least as their thought is represented in the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip, as those who best appropriated the structure of the “Pauline resurrection schema” (14). Without any commitment to a general resurrection unto judgement, the sacramental and participatory aspects of Christ’s resurrection in Paul can be fully incorporated into the Platonizing tendencies of their thought. This seems right, if there is no general resurrection in the Pauline corpus.

As someone who thinks a lot about the reception of Pauline traditions in early Christianity, I find another strength of McGlothlin’s book to be the many places where he points out how the Pauline epistles themselves require some hermeneutical ordering for each of their interpreters. The ethical orientation of “flesh” and “spirit” in Galatians 5:17–24 are controlling for Irenaeus’ understanding of the metaphysical 1 Corinthians 15:50: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (78; cf. also my Remembering Paul, 78). The Valentinians emphasized a spiritual resurrection in the present by making Ephesians 2 and Colossians 3 central to their thinking. The Treatise on the Resurrection, for instance, draws the eschatological Romans 8:17 into the present by reading it in combination with Ephesians 2:5–6 (138, 140). Tertullian counters this kind of presentist understanding of resurrection by reading Colossians 2:12, 20; 3:1–5 within the future and thus eschatological resurrection described in 1–2 Thessalonians (103). Origen is able to preserve the freedom of human agency in salvation by interpreting Romans 5:10–11 in light of a process of reconciliation that he finds in the language of Ephesians 2:14, 16 (“tearing down the dividing wall” and then “putting to death the hostility”). Methodius, in an attempt to cut off the denial of a future resurrection of the body, seems to avoid altogether those Pauline passages that refer to a present resurrection (i.e., of the soul), like Colossians 3:1a (243). He cites Romans 6:4 only once, but in doing so he rereads it to signify the new life that comes at the eschatological bodily resurrection described in 1 Corinthians 15 (245). All of this highlights that the reception and interpretation of the Pauline epistles in early Christianity was fundamentally similar to the task of Pauline commentators ever since. Paulinism, understood by McGlothlin as “the project, undertaken by later authors, of articulating and developing the theological emphases of Paul ‘the Apostle,’ usually in conversation with insights drawn from other authoritative authors” (9), always requires processes of remembering and forgetting, of bringing forward for consideration and leaving to the side (and thus hidden), various portions of the variegated earliest textual layer of the Pauline tradition, such that his apostolic authority could and can remain productive for the ever-shifting present.

In the interest of spurring dialogue, however, I do want to pose a few questions to McGlothlin regarding the framework and thus the argument of Resurrection as Salvation. These are not rhetorical questions. I actually have no decided opinion on them. They do seem worth asking, however. First, do we have two clearly definable and irreconcilable teloi of resurrection in the Second Temple period? Do the several verses on resurrection in 2 Maccabees and Daniel, for instance, give us enough data to reconstruct any firm understanding of their authors’ views on the generality of the resurrection? McGlothlin seems aware of the limitations of the data, particularly with respect to 2 Maccabees (24). He bolsters the likelihood of his reading of resurrection in this text by pointing to Josephus’s description of the Pharisaic belief in resurrection as reserved only for the righteous. Josephus is not, however, our only witness to the Pharisaic belief in the resurrection. The author of Acts, writing around the same time, emphasizes that Paul’s views on the resurrection were tied to his Pharisaism (Acts 23:6–8). And for the Pharisaic Paul of Acts, the resurrection was for both the righteous and the unrighteous (Acts 24:15). We actually have split witnesses to the who, and thus the why, of the resurrection for the Pharisees.

Second, is it the case that there is no resurrection unto judgment in Paul? Second Corinthians 5:10 is tossed aside very quickly in a footnote on p. 40 (n47). The purpose of appearing before the “judgment seat of Christ” according to Paul is to be “repaid for what was done through the body, whether good or evil.” This suggests that judgment succeeds bodily resurrection (à la Tertullian, Res. 43.6–9), and that there are multiple possible contrasting outcomes in this judgment (Paul does mention the “fear of the Lord” in next verse). McGlothlin points out that notions of postmortem judgment in early Judaism did not require a general resurrection (p. 26, on Josephus’s description of the Pharisees) and leverages this point to sweep aside Romans 2:9–10 and Philippians 2:10–11 (39n46). I just do not think that this is sufficient for explaining the language of 2 Corinthians 5:10. “We all” may refer to Christ-believers only, as McGlothlin contends, but this is not at all clear from the context. If Paul is an annihilationist (44–45), why can’t the annihilation of the wicked (including the Christ-believing wicked whom he threatens in 1 Cor 5:5; 6:9–10; Gal 5:2–4, 19–21) happen after their resurrection unto judgment of the body as depicted in 2 Corinthians 5:10? Those who possess the Spirit and walk by the Spirit in this life are given at the resurrection completely pneumatic bodies in order to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and enter into the kingdom of God, while those who walk in the flesh are raised as such, face judgment in the body, and are then destroyed. They were not “in Christ.” I do not see why a general resurrection unto judgment and salvific resurrection cannot function alongside one another in Paul. As McGlothlin notes, the Gospel of John clearly expresses both views (30–32). In the end, perhaps the perceived tensions that exist in the Fathers are not the unique product of their varying commitments to both Paul and the regula in their own contexts, but rather reveal a deeply seated tension already present within the first generations of Christ-faith.

The first and most important thing to say about this monograph is that it is an outstandingly fine one—to this reader, indeed, unusually striking and memorable in its combination of textual subtlety and hermeneutical acuity. I learned an enormous amount from this book, and I plan to go on thinking about its contents for some time to come. The author is also extraordinarily clear in his expression: it is rare, in my experience, for scholars of the New Testament and the patristic corpus to keep such a focussed analytic eye on competing lines of influence running through multiple complex texts without losing the wood for the trees, and indeed to sustain at the same time a coherent theological argument throughout that endeavour. But this is what makes Resurrection as Salvation such a generative book for a systematic or philosophical theologian to muse upon. And it is to respond to that dimension of the book that is my job in this particular symposium.

In what follows, therefore, I shall not repeat what the other commentators in this symposium have already done so ably: résumé-ing the core arguments of the book, reflecting on what might have been said that was not, or pushing back exegetically on some dimensions of what has been essayed in it. Instead, I shall make just three comments, als Systematiker, which respond to the book as a whole, but more particularly to the very suggestive bookends of the monograph (introduction and conclusion)—which themselves display, albeit in undeveloped form, the admirably “systematic” intuitions of the author.

1. The two NT resurrection “models”: are they incompatible? First, I share with Han-luen Kantzer Komline’s discerning analysis of the unfolding logic of the book a query, indeed systematic concern, about McGlothlin’s final, normative, view about the relation of the resurrection-for-judgment theme (in Second Temple Judaism, Revelation and John 5), and the “Pauline resurrection schema” (PRS). It is of course the core achievement of this monograph to draw fresh attention to this apparent disjunction in the New Testament and beyond, even though what follows in the narrative of early patristic negotiations of it reveals a range of rich and creative possible ways of reconfiguring the tension. McGlothlin is absolutely right to say that contemporary theological scholarship has been far too much obsessed, in contrast, with the question of “bodily” vs. (supposedly) “non-bodily” renditions of resurrection in this early period,1 and that this concern has distracted it from the much more interesting question of the core constellating focus involved in any one early theologian’s explication of the topic—whether the PRS or the general resurrection/judgment expectation. But a puzzle remains. As Kantzer Komline has also noticed (and I too, as a systematician, seized upon with some bemusement), McGlothlin wavers inconsistently throughout the book as to whether his patristic authors are to be congratulated or criticized for emphasizing one focus over the other, for extending and enriching the PRS, or for seeking to do justice to the full range of “resurrection” themes in the New Testament. Which is to be preferred? Must one choose between the two alternatives, or is it somehow meritorious to seek to ride out the tension? It is doubtless revealing that McGlothlin saves for his final pages a quotation from Wolfhart Pannenberg to the effect that the two basic models of “resurrection” are “irreconcilable,” and that therefore the theologian must perforce choose between them.2 By this time it is too late for McGlothlin to question whether Pannenberg’s forced choice is a correct or misleading one; and indeed in his final paragraph he seemingly fudges that issue with intent.3 But to this reader, at any rate, this forced Pannenberg-ian choice seems to have oddly bewitched McGlothlin throughout the monograph, and at the same time to have distracted him from what seems a much more obvious conclusion arising from his own textual labours, viz., that the two models coexisted in the early Christian “archive” in a mutually-fecund but ultimately unresolved tension, generating ever-new variations of reflection on the mystery of resurrection life. Indeed, if the witness of Acts 24 is to be believed, this was no less true of the teaching of Paul himself. Is this, then, an insuperable problem? Is there, after all, any logical reason why one should not hold these two presumptions about resurrection side by side? I personally believe not; but to respond to this initial exegetical question more adequately, I need now to move to my second point.
2. Is “resurrection” an essentially multivalent concept? A more ambitious “systematic” thought arises from this first query, that is, the possibility that “resurrection” (like other rich and mysterious topics in the loci of “systematic theology,” such as the nature and origins of sin, or the means of Christ’s salvific atonement) are by nature incapable of being dealt with under one “concept,” but are essentially multivalent, and even paradoxically so, often conjoining a variety of mutually tensive renditions of their theme. In other words, the very idea of “resurrection” has an excess of meanings, which social scientists of the Lévi-Straussian structuralist tradition have at times explained as performing the function of “mediating contradictions,” that is, precisely as holding together differing thoughts which challenge the attempt to provide precise logical coherence.4 It is also noteworthy that the foundational doctrine of Christ’s own resurrection, and of the hope of the “life of the world to come,” are absolutely core doctrinal items conciliarly itemized in the creeds but that have never, unlike Trinity and Christology, been the subject of further conciliar treatment in terms of clarification, let alone of pruning, of possible meanings.5 And if we consider the range of meaning-associations of “resurrection” in the tradition outside the early patristic time frame covered in this monograph, we find an enormous further expansion of different points of focus “as time goes by”: the obsession with body parts and their reassembly at the general resurrection in the twelfth century; the concern with the Inzswischen state of the dead and its relation to the question of indulgences in the early period of the Lutheran reforms; the purported locus of Christ’s resurrection body and its relation to divergent views of the Eucharist in the sixteenth-century Abendmahlstreit; the choice between “immortality of the soul” and “resurrection of the body” in the distinctively modern Cartesian challenge on selfhood and its continuity; the scepticism over “resurrection” in general (whether Christ’s or ours) arising from nineteenth-century developments in modern science (the problem of “miracle”) and historiography (the problem of corrigible historical evidences); and finally the great divergence in twentieth-century theology between those defending the reality of Christ’s own resurrection (whether as investigable “historical” event, or as revelatory theologoumenon), and those retreating to some kind of “subjective hypothesis” in the existential response of the disciples. Meantime, the issue of “judgment” in relation to a general resurrection has arguably suffered a double fate of neglect: that of contemporary, “liberal” squeamishness about eschatological judgment in general, and that of a continuing contentiousness about “universalism,” tout court.6 Does this seemingly messy history threaten to destabilize the very undertaking of a “systematic theology,” given the necessarily foundational place of Christ’s own resurrection in the history of the church and of Christian belief itself (1 Cor 15:14)?

McGlothlin bridles, at the start of his monograph, at various attempts in recent decades in “religious studies” contexts to explain away the early debates on “resurrection” in terms of some other concern—ecclesiastical power, or social structures, or bodily processes, for instance (see Resurrection as Salvation, 5–6), and his query has point, even if these sociological insights, too, are worthy of at least some consideration. But, conversely, the deeper and unanswered question for McGlothlin seems to me that by which the whole monograph is itself haunted theologically: the quest for a normative and univocal theological meaning of “resurrection” in which “the resurrection of Christ [is] the cause and paradigm of the resurrection of others” (Resurrection as Salvation, 270). To repeat: I am just not certain that the Christian tradition has, or indeed can, yield one answer to this question, and there may be a rather principled reason why this is so—the necessarily multivalent evocations of such a rich and mysterious topic. Of the patristic authors studied in this book, Origen was perhaps the most aware of this problematic dimension of the theme. And it is under the inspiration of Origen’s reception of Paul (as so illuminatingly expounded anew by McGlothlin) that I posit my third and last question.

3. Is the PRS a neglected resource in contemporary theologies of the resurrection precisely as a means of transcending the realism/subjectivism debate about Jesus’s resurrection? This is not of course a question that McGlothlin himself addresses, since it falls outside the particular remit of his book. But his sensitive account of the coexistence of pneumatological and christological themes in Paul’s account of “resurrection as salvation,” and his emphasis on the importance of Romans 6 and Romans 8 (even over 1 Corinthians 15) as key to Paul’s vision of baptismal entry into the death and life of Christ, puts back into centre stage (as it was perhaps even more thoroughgoingly in Origen’s construal of the same theme) the idea of Christian life as an epistemic, spiritual and moral journey, one in which truth is disclosed at various depths of maturity at different times to different people. This is indeed an idea that has been lost on much, if not most, theology of the resurrection from the birth of modernity, if not well before that. It follows, surely, that the capacity to respond to the transcendent reality of Christ’s own resurrection may itself constitute a spiritually developmental issue, rather than either merely a matter of extrinsic historical investigation or an act of obedient accession to creedal authority. To make this point is precisely not to veer over to the “subjective vision” hypothesis (as is often presumed),7 but rather to begin to spell out the epistemic conditions under which the Spirit’s effects on the believer’s mind and heart (and indeed body) begin to change the shape and contours of the questions asked, and thus the ability to respond to the demanding mystery of what confronts it. I have myself attempted to spell out such an alternative in terms of what Origen and Gregory of Nyssa termed “spiritual sensation,”8 and it is indeed these two patristic authors who (in my view) present us with the richest, expanded, insights in the patristic heritage on the PRS approach. It is one of the great achievements of McGlothlin’s book that he reinvigorates our understanding of the PRS and its reception with such richness and clarity; but it remains my conviction that he would have done better to press the positive contemporary systematic significance of this schema for resurrection belief in toto, over his nagging Pannenberg-ian worry about its purported inconsistency with themes of eschatological judgment. Resurrection belief is, and I suspect always has been, impossible to constrain into a single schema. The more urgent contemporary issue is whether it is believable at all.9 What this splendid book poses afresh, therefore, is the Pauline challenge to journey into it (in baptism, prayer, sacrament, moral and spiritual formation) in order to discover that problem epistemically transformed precisely as faith deepens and matures. Thomas McGlothlin deserves our gratitude for opening up that Pauline vista afresh, and illuminating it the more through its rich early patristic reception.