Ebook
In Paul’s New Creation: Vision for a New World and Community, Sejong Chun presents inter(con)textual readings of Paul’s new creation passages from the perspective of the Korean immigrant church in America. Chun focuses on Paul’s new creation’s cosmic dimension and ecclesiastical character and proposes the ekklēsia as a tangible embodiment. The author suggests that Paul, as a middleman, accomplishes the collective project of the Jerusalem collection with his Gentile churches to declare independence from the Jerusalem church authority and to demonstrate God’s alternative economy against the exploitative system of the Roman Empire.
Introduction
Chapter One: Methodology: Inter(con)textual Dialogue
Chapter Two: Life Context for Reading: The Situations of Korean Immigrants in The United States
Chapter Three: (New) Creation in Romans 8 and 2 Corinthians 5
Chapter Four: New Creation in Galatians
Chapter Five: New Creation and Power Dynamics
Chapter Six: New Creation and God’s New Economy
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
Sejong Chun’s new book, Paul’s New Creation: Vision for a New World and Community, tackles one of the most palpable themes in Paul’s vocabulary, “new creation.” Chun elaborates on this theme critically and contextually, placing the new creation in the lives of Korean immigrants in America, elucidating it in a world full of dangers and uncertainties. This topic is timely, and readers may benefit from this book because it takes new creation seriously and connects it to our lives. This book is an essential guide to “new creation theology” by Paul.
Paul’s New Creation: Vision for a New World and Community by Sejong Chun is a remarkable illustration that any biblical interpretation is necessarily inter(con)textual – i.e., a production of meaning for the readers’ life context – by juxtaposing his striking analysis of the power dynamics in the history of Koreans immigrating to the would-be “paradise” of America (Haiti and Los Angeles) to his scholarly reading of Pauline texts about “migration” into a new creation (Romans 8, 2 Corinthians 5, and Galatians 6) and the power dynamics between Paul and Jerusalem. From this inter(con)textual Korean perspective, the Pauline texts gain a remarkable depth of meaning.
This book offers a fresh interpretation of the celebrated Pauline phrase “new creation” by engaging in the two passages that contain it, 2 Cor 5:17 & Gal 6:15, through the so-called inter(con)textual reading strategy. The author specifically means incorporating both the historical and linguistic aspects of the Pauline (con)texts and the concrete socio-political realities of the historical and contemporary Korean immigrants in the US. As an “interested” audience of the bible, these Korean immigrant Christians are being empowered by the author of this book to make their own contribution to the construal of the meaning of the biblical text. This is a successful attempt at practicing the Gadamerian hermeneutics of “merging the two horizons” to produce an existentially meaningful interpretation. It is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the reader-oriented hermeneutics of the Pauline epistles.
Sejong Chun is visiting professor of the New Testament at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.