St Paul and Philosophy

Olivier Boulnois, a celebrated specialist in medieval thought, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, takes up the relation between Paul, as apostle of Jesus Christ, and the philosophy that is sometimes at work in his letters.

Boulnois's lays bare the manner in which Paul adapts Greek thought to his own purposes. This sheds light on the work of an entire range of philosophers who have identified themselves with the Pauline effort to hold thinking open to the claims of Christian life and doctrine, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, as well as more recent figures who have engaged Paul from some greater distance: Heidegger and Ricoeur. Boulnois also draws on modern and contemporary scholarship, and makes plain his reservations about the turn to Paul appearing in European philosophy of the past twenty-five years in the work of thinkers such as Agamben and Badiou. Successive chapters take up Paul's Christology; cosmology (creation and time); approaches to being in the world, law, evil and good; messianism; and salvation and history.

Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge and at the Institut Catholique de Paris, St Paul and Philosophy is once a painstaking study of Paul's own thinking and an open exploration of its continued relevance for modern and contemporary reflection on Christian religion. This book is an important demonstration that theology and philosophy are at their best when brought into dialogue with one another around perennial questions and themes.