Customer Reviews

Understanding Paul: The Early Christian Worldview of the Letter to the Romans

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This book is great. It is a fast and easy read, but it is full of great insights. Westerholm has a way of making the ideas of Paul easily understood. He uses great analogies to get his point across as well. If you are interested in Paul, in my opinion, this is a must read book.

I used this book to prepare for a class on Christian Worldview according to Paul and found it very helpful. Westerholm does a great job of helping us look beyond modern biases to see the world and Pauls's calling as PAUL would have seen it. His description of the "goodness" of God and his creation and the "parasitic" nature of evil are wonderful.

Stephen Westerholm is an elegant writer, which made this an enjoyable read for me even before considering the content!

The book is divided into 12 chapters which cover the 16 chapters of the book of Romans. Within each chapter Westerholm uses stories to make the concepts he wants to convey acessable, and there is no academic jargon.

Throughout the book he emphasises the theme of trusting in God.

The Old Testament passages he quotes to support his understanding of Paul seem to have been drawn a bit narrowly and/or selectively and it would be interesting to see if a wider range of Scripture would still support some fo his conclusions. However given that this is an introduction to Paul's thought and the size of the work the extra data is not really missed.

This book will not be useful to you if you are looking for an introduction to the issues and questions in contemporary Pauline studies, as he surveys such issues in other books.

If on the other hand you are looking for something to help you read Romans more clearly this is a great place to start.

As someone who subscribes to the "New Perspective" on Paul, to which Westerholm does not, I still found this book very engaging.