This book breaks a significant impasse in much Pauline interpretation today, pushing beyond both "Lutheran" and "New" perspectives on Paul to a noncontractual, "apocalyptic" reading of many of the apostle's most famous — and most troublesome — texts.

In The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell holds that the intrusion of an alien, essentially modern, and theologically unhealthy theoretical construct into the interpretation of Paul has produced an individualistic and contractual construct that shares more with modern political traditions than with either orthodox theology or Paul's first-century world. In order to counteract that influence, Campbell argues that it needs to be isolated and brought to the foreground before the interpretation of Paul's texts begins. When that is done, readings free from this intrusive paradigm become possible and surprising new interpretations unfold.