Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:2 (Summer 2023)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Book Reviews

In the Fullness of Time: An Introduction to the Biblical Theology of Acts and Paul. By Richard B. Gaffin Jr. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022, 448 pp., $44.99 paper.

Richard Gaffin is Professor Emeritus of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS) in Philadelphia, where he has been teaching courses in New Testament as well as biblical and systematic theology since 1965, the same year he was ordained as a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). In addition to his many influential decades as both a seminary professor and a minister, Gaffin also has written dozens of published articles and has authored or edited a number of significant books, such as Perspectives on Pentecost (1979), Resurrection and Redemption (1987), By Faith, Not by Sight (2006, 2nd edition published in 2013), and various edited translations of the works of Geerhardus Vos—including Vos’ massive, five-volume Reformed Dogmatics. In his most recent project, In the Fullness of Time, Gaffin attempts to consolidate the course material from his annual lectures at WTS on Acts and Paul down into a single book.

From the outset, Gaffin clarifies that the aim of this work is not to “provide a full or rounded-out presentation of the theologies of Acts and Paul” (19). Rather, the focus is “on the significance of Pentecost for the theology of Acts and on eschatological structure, including the resurrection, for the theology of Paul” (20). What links these two separate discussions together, however, is the way in which Paul’s teaching, along with that of the other apostles, “provides necessary amplification and elaboration of the teaching of Jesus,” who had himself established “important roots for the teaching of the apostles” (62–63). Among other things, one of the most crucial aspects of Jesus’ teaching was his kingdom proclamation, which spelled out a three-stage coming of the kingdom of God’s realm and rule: (1) the period of his earthly ministry culminating in his death and resurrection, (2) the period between his resurrection and return, and (3) the period beginning with his return (78). The apostles, Gaffin maintains, then took this “three-stage eschatological structure announced by Jesus,” and developed it “from within stage two of the fulfillment that Jesus proclaimed” (81).

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Pentecost figures into this discussion by serving as the pivotal event that “inaugurates the second stage of the eschatological kingdom” (138). Gaffin argues that rather than being a normative experience of ordo salutis, Pentecost functions “as an epochal or climactic event” within historia salutis, as the hinge upon which Luke-Acts turns (120–21)....