The Justice and Deliverance of God: Integrating Forensic and Cosmological in the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’

Abstract

Recent ‘apocalyptic’ interpretations of Paul often highlight a distinction between ‘forensic’ and ‘cosmological’ varieties of apocalyptic eschatology. This essay surveys this phenomenon against the backdrop of the Bultmann/Käsemann debate. Various scholars have attempted to resolve the tension between these two poles, whether through circumscribing the forensic by the cosmological, or vice-versa, generating a spectrum of approaches within which this question is generally framed as a zero-sum game. This essay outlines a ‘non-competitive’ construal of this duality and examines a selection of integrative approaches in recent theological interpretation that allows for both forensic and cosmological aspects of Paul’s apocalyptic thought.