Theopedia

Gordon D. Fee

Overview

Gordon D. Fee is a New Testament scholar and Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.1 He is best known for two things: commentaries on Paul’s letters in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, and a body of scholarship arguing that the Holy Spirit’s active, experienced presence is central to Paul’s own theology. Both are cited often, and across confessional lines, by other scholars working through the same Pauline texts.

Theological Contribution

Fee’s most distinctive argument runs through his two major studies of Paul’s pneumatology, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul and Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God.2 The thesis those books argue, and the one later writers cite him for, is that Paul writes about the Spirit as a reality the churches were expected to experience, not only a doctrine to affirm: an “empowering presence” distinguishing the new covenant from the old.2 Carol Chen’s dissertation on covenant theology draws on that argument directly, citing Fee’s case that the Spirit’s empowering presence is what makes new covenant obedience possible in the first place, distinct from law obeyed from the outside.2

That same emphasis on the Spirit as the ground of right knowledge appears in Fee’s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:10-13, which other scholars have taken up directly. In a 2014 dissertation on the authority of Scripture, John Thomas English works through Fee’s reading of the passage alongside Karl Barth, Ciampa and Rosner, and Leon Morris: Fee traces Paul’s argument to the principle that “like is known only by like,” so that only God’s own Spirit can search the depths of God and reveal them to believers.3 English also draws out Fee’s reading of the Corinthians’ complaint that Paul’s preaching was mere “milk”: Fee argues the charge is ironic, since what Paul withheld from them was in fact wisdom “from the profound depths of God’s own wisdom.”3

Fee’s line-by-line commentaries are the more frequently cited part of his output, and writers who do not share his pneumatological emphasis still treat them as a standing exegetical reference. Michael Kruger’s The Question of Canon cites Fee’s commentary on Paul’s own sense of apostolic authority, quoting Fee’s summary that “to reject Paul’s teaching is to reject God himself.”4 Alexander Strauch’s Biblical Eldership draws on Fee’s commentary on 1 Timothy across several chapters, including Fee’s gloss on the “puffed up with conceit” warning of 1 Timothy 3:6 as a caution against “swelled-headedness” in a novice elder.5 Matthew Barrett’s and Aaron O’Kelley’s dissertations on Pauline soteriology both cite Fee’s commentary on Philippians on the relationship between divine agency and human obedience.67

Fee also worked as a New Testament textual critic before his commentaries made him widely known as an exegete. His monograph on Papyrus Bodmer II (P66) is cited by canon scholars analyzing the manuscript’s date and scribal habits,8 and the Festschrift for Bruce Metzger he co-edited with Eldon Jay Epp is cited by other dissertations as a standard reference on the field’s own method.9

Historical Significance

Fee’s pneumatology has carried the most weight among readers who hold a continuationist view of spiritual gifts: his case that the Spirit’s active, experienced presence is Paul’s own emphasis gave that position an exegetical argument, not only an experiential one. His commentaries reach a wider readership than that. Reformed Baptist dissertations on covenant theology, canon, eldership, and monergism, none of them written from his pneumatological outlook, cite his line-by-line exegesis of the Greek text as a settled point of reference.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 6, 209-34, identifying Gordon Fee as “Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.” ↩

  2. Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 257-316, citing Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 812-13. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. John Thomas English III, “The Procession of the Spirit and the Authority of Scripture,” in Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 158-59, citing Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 110. ↩ ↩2

  4. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 4, “The Authors of Canon,” 119-54, citing Gordon D. Fee, The First and Second Letter to the Thessalonians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 87. ↩

  5. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 14, 151-58, citing Gordon Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, NIBC (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 83. ↩

  6. Matthew Barrett, Reclaiming Monergism (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 329, citing Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 235. ↩

  7. 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 Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 309-10. ↩

  8. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 7, “Manuscripts and Christian Book Production,” citing Gordon D. Fee, Papyrus Bodmer II (P66): Its Textual Relationships and Scribal Characteristics (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1968). ↩

  9. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 62-131, citing Larry W. Hurtado, “The Doxology at the End of Romans,” in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Bruce M. Metzger, ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 185-99. ↩