Joshua Jipp | Pauline Theology as a Way of Life

So Paul in theology as a way of life.

So there's been so much ink spilled about Paul's writings.

Perhaps more than any other portion of scripture, you can find out all this stuff about Paul or read theologies of Paul.

But from my perspective, it seems like a lot of that is around Paul's theology as kind of an intellectual development, his ways of thinking.

But you frame Paul more as expounding a way of life rather than just what we might think so talk to us a little bit why how you started seeing

that yeah for sure i mean i i think i was just in a lot of ways thinking okay whatever pat whatever paul is i mean for sure great intellectual mind you know That's pretty obvious, I think, been established that people have been fascinated by him as a thinker.

And that's good and right.

And for sure, my book draws upon that.

But I was like, whatever Paul's doing sort of with all these letters and with all his theologizing and all of his bold and audacious claims, ultimately they were in service of you know, real life communities and real life people that were navigating, you know, grief and suffering.

We're experiencing friendships, but also, you know, breaks in their friendship.

They're singing, they're eating, they're just real people.

And so all of this theologizing that Paul engages in, yeah, we can systematize it or we can use it as raw materials for, you know, for this or that.

But at the end of the day, it's ultimately in service to trying to teach people how to be a certain type of people and how to live a certain way and how to think, you know, about their whole life in a certain sort of way.

And it was just, you know, very much something that's existential and on the ground and engaging for real people.

So, Yeah, I wanted to try to do something that took the best of Paul as a thinker, but then tried to make it a little bit more existential in terms of this.

Ultimately, Paul's theologizing is for the sake of living a certain way of life.

So...