Read Paul the way scholars do

If you've spent time in Paul's letters — really spent time — you know both the reward and the frustration. The reward is encountering one of the most extraordinary minds in human history, a man whose thinking about grace, justice, death, resurrection, and new creation continues to reshape how Christians understand everything. The frustration is the sense that you're reading through a window that isn't quite clean: you catch the outline of something magnificent, but the historical distance, the compressed theological argument, the occasional opacity, keeps you from fully entering the room.

That is precisely what this school is designed to change.

I've spent years teaching Paul in settings ranging from academic seminars to Sunday morning adult education classes to one-on-one conversations with pastors who are preparing sermons and finding, to their honest surprise, that they have questions they've never quite known how to ask. What I've found, consistently, is that Paul doesn't become harder the more carefully you study him — he becomes more luminous. The apparent contradictions soften. The logic of his arguments comes into focus. The letters start to feel less like a collection of proof texts and more like what they actually are: urgent, brilliant, pastorally engaged theological correspondence from a missionary who had staked everything on the conviction that God had done something decisive and world-altering in Jesus of Nazareth.

This school takes that conviction seriously without requiring you to share it uncritically. We will engage the major scholarly debates — about justification, about the New Perspective on Paul, about authorship and chronology, about the center of Paul's theology — with the intellectual honesty those debates deserve. We will sit with difficult texts rather than smooth them over. We will distinguish careful exegesis from theological imposition. And we will follow Paul's argument, letter by letter, from the shattering logic of Romans through the crisis correspondence with Corinth and Galatia, through the prison epistles' high Christology and ecclesiology, through the Thessalonian and Pastoral letters, and finally to the contested and vital question of what Paul's entire theological vision, taken together, is actually about.

What I am offering you is not a shortcut to Paul, but something better: a methodical, honest, intellectually serious pathway into him. You will come away with real exegetical tools, real theological understanding, and real capacity to engage scholars and commentators on your own terms. Whether you are a lay person who has always sensed there was more to Romans than you were getting, a pastor who wants to preach Paul with greater depth and confidence, or someone discerning a call to formal theological study, this school will meet you where you are and take you further than you expected.

The door is open. I am glad you are here.