We had a lively discussion of 1 John in exegesis class today and we were struck by the epistle’s (mostly) straightforward Greek and its brilliance of weaving together relationality with God and with others in the Christian community.

Our all-too brief engagement with 1 John has motivated me to jump into Paul Rainbow’s Johannine Theology, which treats the Gospel, the epistles, and the Apocalypse in an exegetically sensitive biblical theological manner.

I carefully worked through Rainbow’s previous work, The Way of Salvation: The Role of Christian Obedience in Justification and found it a nuanced and creative theological engagement with some difficult texts. It looks like this new work is more of the same, which is certainly a welcome development. It looks like the perfect textbook for a course on New Testament Biblical Theology.