Coming home to St Paul? Reading Romans a hundred years after Charles Gore

Abstract

Charles Gore's two-volume commentary on Romans (1899, 1900) showed his heartfelt delight in the grace and love of God. Gore questions whether Luther had really understood Paul, thus in certain respects anticipating the so-called 'new perspective' of E. P. Sanders and others. He manages, in a way that Sanders does not, to hold together 'justification' and 'being in Christ', though he does not integrate these with Romans 9-11. When we today explore Paul more fully, we see that Romans was yet more integrated than Gore had realised, and that two of Gore's principal emphases, the vital importance of holiness and the social and political dimensions of the gospel, have a more solid exegetical basis than he realised. © 2002 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd.