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[The series continues and now concludes the fifth in-person session.  Find the last post here .] Continuing comment on Galatians 1:1—“who raised him from the dead.”   Luther tackles this phrase about resurrection, and—interestingly—he wants to interpret what Paul says here about resurrection from the dead as a gloss on God’s righteousness. [1] He thinks that Paul is talking about the righteousness of God in that Christ rose to justify and save us, underscoring that we’re justified by Christ's righteousness and not by anything we do. This is passive righteousness. For Luther, our justification happens in the resurrection because we see there the righteousness of God that saves us. For Luther, we’re going to be resurrected with Christ literally in the last days. More recently, Rudolph Bultmann reframed things to suggest that we’re resurrected from the dead spiritually whenever any of us come to faith. We participate in Christ’s resurrection as we are resurrected in fait...

In God's Ghostwriters , an engagingly written and wide-ranging work, Candida Moss endeavors to bring to the wider reading public something that specialist scholars have known for some time—the people that most folks think wrote the books of the New Testament did not, in fact, write the books of the New Testament. At least not in the way that we tend to think of authorship. Rather than being a solitary labor of individual writers channeling spiritual inspiration into words on a page, the writing of these books was an intensely collaborative process. And very often--and connecting the dots here is, perhaps, Moss's most substantial contribution in this volume--the people collaborating in this process did not necessarily want to collaborate. As Moss sums things up (bold is mine): “Hidden behind these names of sainted individuals are enslaved coauthors and collaborators, almost all of whom go uncredited” (p. 12). Candida Moss, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the ...