Both groups, I suspect, suffer from the habit of dislocating Paul from his original context and mission. N. T. Wright insisted that the New Testament “must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas.’”8 When we unmoor the Epistles from their larger story, we tend to think of Paul as a disembodied voice affirming or unsettling our own points of view, rather than a religious, first-century Jew whose life was upended by an encounter with Jesus Christ.
