DR. VAN DRIEL WINS 2021 SENIOR ALBERIGO AWARD

Pittsburgh Theological Seminary congratulates the Rev. Dr. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Directors’ Bicentennial Chair in Theology, for winning the 2021 Senior Alberigo Award for his book Rethinking Paul: Protestant Theology and Pauline Exegesis (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

The Alberigo Award, named after religious historian Giuseppe Alberigo (1927-2007) and given by the European Academy of Religion, selects winners from yearly publications across all fields of religious study. Dr. van Driel’s book was chosen to receive this award ahead of 10 other submitted works.

“I take the awarding of this prize as a sign that the book is being taken up in the conversation, and I’m grateful for that,” says Dr. van Driel. “It’s particularly rewarding to receive the award in the context of the European Academy of Religion—an organization which, like its North American sister AAR, is concerned with the full breadth of religious studies. This prize is awarded to a book selected from that whole field. Sometimes there are tensions between religious studies and the specific Christian commitments of Christian systematic theology. My book is an unapologetically theological book. Given that, I’m particularly grateful that it nonetheless was selected by EuARe for this prize.”

In Rethinking Paul, Dr. van Driel reviews the shifts in Pauline scholarship over the last four decades, in which arguments have been made that the Reformers misinterpreted Paul. Dr. van Driel then explores what these insights mean for traditional Protestant theology, since the interpretation of Paul was at the heart of the Reformation project.

“Based on a careful reading of contemporary Pauline scholars, I offer new understandings of core Protestant notions like faith, justification, divine righteousness; I explore what differences these entail for our thinking about topics like baptism, church, and salvation; and I also show how these new readings can be situated fruitfully alongside contextual theological conversation on theological anthropology, social imagination and race, and missional thinking,” Dr. van Driel explains.

The award comes with a research stipend, which Dr. van Driel intends to use for work on his next book. “I’m researching an ecclesiology for a post-Christian world, wanting to come alongside the church in the Western world as it wrestles with a new cultural context,” he says. “I believe the North American church can learn especially from the church in Western Europe, which has lived in a deeply secularized context for some decades now.”

Dr. van Driel traveled to Bologna, Italy, this past June to receive the award and give a lecture on Rethinking Paul