Svetlana Khobnya, The Father Who Redeems and the Son Who Obeys: Consideration of Paul’s Teaching in Romans (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2014), xvii + 196 Pps., $33.00.
Svetlana Khobnya is Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Nazarene Theological College, Manchester (UK). She is an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene and a member of the British New Testament Society and the Wesleyan Theological Society. This book builds upon her PhD thesis submitted to the University of Manchester in 2011. The study found herein takes up the challenge to keep Christological perspective in balance with the Father-God motif that has its roots in the Old Testament and that is prominent in the Second Temple Jewish traditions. It argues that Paul conceived God as the Father who redeems. In so doing, it challenges the all-too-easy construction of the Fatherhood of God Christologically by Christians that shortchanges the Jewish heritage of Jesus. As such, Old Testament imagery that shaped Israel’s conceptioning of God, that which was a basis for God’s future restoration of the them despite their unfaithfulness, is central to Paul’s explanation of the new salvific act of the Father through Christ, who is the obedient Son.
Intertextuality is critical to the study undertaken herein. Additionally, narrative interpretation plays critically herein. These two work hand-in-hand in Romans, according to Khobnya. In this text, Paul is pictured as doing some redefining of the Jewish traditions of God the Father. God fulfills his premises, for example, through his son, Jesus, including the messianic promises and making the nations the king’s heritage. God is also the father of his people, now refined as Jews and gentiles, who are both able to address Abba through the Spirit.
In sum, the fresh contribution of this study to understanding of Paul’s letter to the Romans is rooted in the seriousness that it takes the Old Testament and the Second Temple Jewish traditions of the Fatherhood of God. A welcome book for all comers with interest in Pauline theology.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary