Theopedia

Thomas Schreiner

Overview

Thomas R. Schreiner (b. 1954) is an American New Testament scholar and theologian known chiefly for his work on Pauline theology, Romans, and the doctrine of election. Since 1997 he has taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he holds the title James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation.1 Across a series of commentaries and monographs he has argued against the New Perspective on Paul’s reading of Second Temple Judaism and defended an effectual, individual reading of divine election in Romans 9.

Life and Ministry

Schreiner earned degrees from Western Oregon University and Western Seminary before completing a PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary under Donald A. Hagner.1 He taught at Bethel Theological Seminary and Azusa Pacific University before joining the Southern faculty in 1997. He has also served in local church ministry: he was Pastor of Preaching at Clifton Baptist Church in Louisville from 2001 to 2015 and continues to serve there as an elder.1 He served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2014, co-chairs the Christian Standard Bible’s Translation Oversight Committee, and served as New Testament editor of the ESV Study Bible.1

Theological Contribution

Schreiner’s 1993 monograph The Law and Its Fulfillment: A Pauline Theology of Law is cited repeatedly in Reformed dissertations as a standard rebuttal to E. P. Sanders’s “covenantal nomism,” the New Perspective’s account of Second Temple Judaism as fundamentally grace-based rather than legalistic. Schreiner argues that the “history of the Christian church amply demonstrates that a theology of grace does not preclude legalism in practice,” adding, citing Robert H. Stein, that “if Judaism were not legalistic at all, it would be the only religion in history that escaped the human propensity for works-righteousness.”2 Aaron O’Kelley’s dissertation-length critique of the New Perspective likewise draws on both this monograph and Schreiner’s Romans commentary to argue that the New Perspective’s grace/works antithesis is a sociological reconstruction rather than an exegetical one.3

Schreiner has also defended an individual, effectual reading of election in Romans 9 against corporate-election readings of the passage. In a 2006 journal exchange with Brian Abasciano, he argued that Paul’s language of divine “calling” cannot be reduced to a corporate designation or an invitation available to all, since Paul links that same calling directly to justification in Romans 8:30: those God calls, he also justifies.4 Philip Sears’s dissertation on Romans 9-11 follows this reading, citing Schreiner’s Romans commentary and the Abasciano exchange to argue that God’s hardening of unbelieving Israel presupposes an individual, effectual call rather than a merely corporate one.5

On the New Testament’s warning passages, Schreiner and Ardel B. Caneday’s The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance and Assurance (2001) argues that such warnings function as a God-appointed means by which he secures the perseverance of genuine believers, rather than as evidence that a true believer could actually fall away. The work is cited across several library-held theses as a standard statement of this “means” view of the warning passages, including one Reformed Baptist covenant-theology thesis that calls the approach, together with speech-act readings of the warnings, “generally persuasive.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Thomas R. Schreiner,” accessed September 20, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_R._Schreiner, a non-library source used here for biographical and career facts (degrees, teaching posts, church ministry, editorial roles) not otherwise found in the sources cited elsewhere in this article. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Thomas R. Schreiner, The Law and Its Fulfillment: A Pauline Theology of Law (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 115, quoted in Andrew Michael Hassler, “The Problem of Jewish Legalism,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 35-69. ↩

  3. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 159-207, citing Schreiner, The Law and Its Fulfillment, 179-204, and Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 104-45. ↩

  4. Thomas R. Schreiner, “Corporate and Individual Election in Romans 9: A Response to Brian Abasciano,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, no. 2 (2006): 380, quoted in Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 132-190. ↩

  5. Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” 159-161, citing Schreiner, Romans, 484. ↩

  6. David Salter, “The Abrahamic Covenant in Reformed Baptist Theology” (thesis, 2015), 51-52, citing Thomas R. Schreiner and Ardel B. Caneday, The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance and Assurance (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2001). ↩