Paul is frequently viewed as the one who broke with the Jesus movement and became the key figure in a new religion focused on the atonement accomplished by Jesus’ death. It is even thought that Paul provided the grounds for later doctrines of JesusÂ’ deity and of the Trinity. It is supposed that in contradistinction with the message of Jesus, a beautiful way of life centered on love, Paul taught that we must believe certain things about Jesus and the efficacy of JesusÂ’ death in order to escape GodÂ’s wrath and punishment. Paul is also depicted as having fastened on the church particular patterns of morality, with special attention to sexual morality, emphatically forbidding homosexual acts, and insisting on the subordination of women to men.
It is our judgment that this is an almost total misrepresentation of Paul. We do not deny that the later church has employed some passages from Paul, including passages from Romans, in support of teachings along some of these lines. But we do deny that those who did so understood Paul correctly. In relation to issues that are of concern to us today, we do not claim that following Paul exactly is either desirable or possible. But we do claim that when Paul is more accurately read, there is much in his writings of which todayÂ’s church stands in dire need.
In this book we will, of course,
concentrate on one letter of Paul, the one to “all God’s beloved who are in
It is our aim to be as accurate as possible in stating what Paul meant by what he said in this letter. But we have learned that there can be no such thing as pure objectivity. The meaning of a passage cannot be derived from a grammatical study of the text alone. The text often poses acute difficulties. It is open to multiple interpretations. In passage after passage we encounter fundamental questions about what Paul was saying. Fortunately, many of these technical problems have little effect on the overall impact of his argument. But at a number of places this is not so. Alternative readings of the Greek text can lead to quite different theological statements. Sometimes the translatorsÂ’ own theologies or the traditional theologies of the church have influenced the usual translations. Sometimes a more straightforward reading of the text, or a fresh look at the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the Greek texts, can open up a quite different understanding of PaulÂ’s own vision.
Every word derives its sense from its usage in the letter itself, and in the wider society. Every passage in Romans gains some of its meaning from its location within the letter as a whole, so that judgments about the overall purpose of the letter affect the reading at every point. Judgments about the overall purpose of the letter are affected by judgments about how Paul understood the context in which he was writing. Judgments about his understanding are affected by judgments about what that context actually was. At no point can we arrive at certainty.
Nevertheless, those who give up the quest for objectivity, and regard every interpretation simply as a new creation, go too far. Even though there is no completely secure starting point for any judgment, some judgments are more plausible than others. We can learn something from close textual study. We can go back and forth between individual passages and the book as a whole until we arrive at more coherent conclusions. We have some reliable information about the context in which the letter was written.
Progress in interpretation—and there is real progress—comes from putting forward hypotheses that those who approach the text in diverse ways can test. We intend to make this kind of contribution. Since we have noted that such interpretations are largely influenced by judgments about the context in which Paul was operating, we offer first a brief account of what we judge to be the most important elements in Paul’s context when he wrote Romans.
Today, Christians take for granted that the good news is addressed to all, but originally this was by no means evident. Jesus was a Jew who ministered to Jews. He was not rigid on this point, so that the Gospels have several stories of his ministry to Gentiles as well. There is no indication, though, that Jesus sought out such opportunities (see, for example, Mk 7:26-30 and Mt 15:22-28). These incidents expressed the breadth of JesusÂ’ compassion, rather than his sense of primary vocation. The movement that Jesus led was a Jewish movement.
The Jewishness of this movement did not change with the resurrection appearances, which were all to Jews. The message they confirmed and initiated was a Jewish one. Especially in light of the resurrection appearances, some Jews viewed Jesus as the long hoped for Messiah, even though he fit the standard expectations rather poorly. Much thought was given to redefining the messianic role, and to promising a return in which other aspects of the role would be fulfilled. But this whole process remained thoroughly Jewish.
To be Jewish in those days did not mean total
exclusion of Gentiles. A significant number of Gentiles were attracted to
Judaism, and they were allowed a secondary place in many synagogues. On the
whole, though, clear boundaries were maintained. As a Jewish movement,
followers of Jesus had to work out their relations with Gentiles. Probably this
was not a major issue for most of them, but from LukeÂ’s perspective, that of a
Gentile follower of Jesus, how they dealt with this question was of primary
interest. His Acts of the Apostles tells the story.
For most of the apostles, as for Jesus,
decisions on this matter were largely ad hoc. In LukeÂ’s account,
Peter, because of a vision, baptized a Gentile family into the community of
those who believed in Jesus (Acts 10). According to Paul, however, Peter later
acceded to the segregation of the community of believers in
Given this ambivalent attitude toward the inclusion of Gentiles, it is not surprising that there were two types of missions to them by those who proclaimed Jesus as Messiah: one law-observant and one not.[2] Paul was committed to the latter. The law-observant mission may have come first, although it may, as the tradition has supposed, have been a reaction to the mission that denied the need for Gentiles to observe the law.
These two missions agreed that the
conversion of Gentiles in response to the gospel signified their turning from
idols to
PaulÂ’s context was much wider than
this debate within the Jesus movement of his day. All parties to the debate
lived in the
If we knew more about the situation
in
On the other hand, it takes no
further research to know that, in the
Jews, on the other hand, had long seen
the unity of the religious and the political. No Jew could be unaware of the
tension between Jewish devotion to God and the claims of the state to ultimate
loyalty. This tension was not a minor matter! It had led to persecution and
revolt, and the situation only became worse with the passage of time. At best
there could be compromise and accommodation. The Jews extracted special
concessions from
Followers of Jesus, whether Jew or Gentile, shared with the Jewish community this deep tension with the imperial environment and its expectations. The empire was a context that could not be ignored. Every reaffirmation of the importance of devotion to God heightened the tension. The claim that a crucified Jew was GodÂ’s supreme instrument heightened the tension still further. It invited persecution.
A popular view of Paul is that he
was the creative source, if not founder, of what became the Christian church,
distinct and separate from Judaism. Paul certainly played an important role in
this development. But he was not the first follower of Jesus to engage in the kind
of mission to the Gentiles identified with him. Before Paul began his mission,
according to Acts 6-8, “Hellenists” spread “the word of God” in
PaulÂ’s letters confirm this general picture of this
Gentile mission. In them, he drew on hymns (such as Phil 2:6-11) and other
references to traditions (such as 1 Cor 15:1-7) that were part of the Gentile
mission prior to his participation. In his letter to the churches in Galatia,
Paul also recounted a tradition about himself—in his own time—that he was now
proclaiming “the faith he formerly tried to destroy” (Gal 1:23). This can only
be a reference to his gospel to the Gentiles—the same gospel that he defended
in his letters to the Galatians and Romans. That means that this gospel to the
Gentiles was already the center of the “
Paul defined himself as “an apostle
to the Gentiles” (Rom
Paul claimed the support of the
leaders of the Jesus movement in
Acts gives a somewhat different
picture of the views of the
Â
Paul expressed his rethinking of the role of law in
bits and pieces in all of his letters but, except for Romans, he wrote these in
response to localized issues in particular communities. In this one letter, to
a community he had never visited, Paul provided a sustained account of his
understanding of the gospel, which justified and informed his mission to the
Gentiles.
Perhaps Paul felt a need for his
own sake to work through the position to which he had come. He was preparing to
go to
Paul was also planning ahead. He
wanted to go to
PaulÂ’s commitment was not only to
evangelizing the Gentiles. It was also to bringing about their obedience, which
he understood to be “faithfulness” (Rom 1:5 and
Paul wrote Romans, like all his
letters, on a particular occasion and in a particular context. These shaped its
purpose and content. The occasion was his plan to travel to
If the account in Acts is correct,
PaulÂ’s theological arguments were not successful in
The letter Paul wrote to commend himself to the Roman community became far more important than he could have imagined. It did much to shape the way that future Christians came to understand themselves. Ironically, the very letter that Paul wrote with the hope of preserving the unity of all in the Jesus movement in continuity with his Jewish heritage actually contributed to the separation of a Christian church from the rest of historic Judaism. The capacity of Romans to shape Christian thinking is as strong and rich today as ever.
The central issue Paul addressed was “salvation.”
This issue, however, was as much social as theological. The social dimension
had to do, not with the relation of Jews and Gentiles as a whole, but with the
relation of Jewish and Gentile converts to the gospel. The question was whether
these groups could live together as equals within an undivided and inclusive
community, or at least as a closely knit network of diverse communities. For
Paul, that was the only acceptable option. Exclusion or segregation of any
group was unacceptable. In his letter to the Romans he gave his fullest
explanation and defense of why that was so.
The theological side of this issue within the communities of followers of Jesus was whether acceptance of the gospel by Gentiles brought the full benefits of GodÂ’s saving action in Jesus, or whether GodÂ’s act benefited them only when they observed the Jewish law, whether in whole or in part. At stake for Paul was the character of God. His letter to the Romans was his fullest explanation and defense of the righteousness and freedom of God and the efficacy of GodÂ’s saving action in Jesus Christ.
Everything, then, depended on how
salvation was understood, and that in turn depended on defining the need for
salvation. From what did the world require saving? Paul began the body of his
letter with this topic (
However, wrath was not GodÂ’s deepest relation to
the world (Rom
The tendency of Luther, and especially of Calvin, to emphasize the inability of human beings to do anything for their own salvation downplayed or even rejected this last point. Their teaching led to a systematic position that presented God as the only decider and actor in the process of redemption. This minimization of the human role was in marked tension with PaulÂ’s conviction that what was accomplished in Jesus Christ opened the way for all, both Jew and Gentile, to participate with him in the new relation to God that he incarnated and taught.
PaulÂ’s point was not that human
beings are inherently powerless to act rightly but that following the law did
not achieve the goal for which it was intended. Only in Jesus Christ was the
way of salvation actualized. Through him, God condemned the power of sin, which
had until then both held all in slavery and exploited the law for its evil purposes
(Romans 6-8). Now those who gladly heard PaulÂ’s message and participated in
JesusÂ’ faithfulness were free from the law, as well as from sin and death. This
was true for both Jews and Gentiles.
Paul used “law” in three ways. He sometimes meant the basic Jewish scriptures, the books of Moses, what Christians call the Pentateuch and Jews call the Torah. He sometimes meant the collection of laws that were found in these scriptures. He sometimes meant any moral principles or rules, whether found in the Jewish scriptures or apprehended by Gentiles in any other way.
The revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ was independent of “the law” in all these senses. This point was crucial to Paul’s message, but it was extremely hard for Jews, including Jewish followers of Jesus, to accept. Surely, what God wanted of all, both Jews and Gentiles, was righteousness, and surely God had given directions as to the form that righteousness took. No doubt many Gentiles felt the same way about the ethical teachings of their philosophers and sages, but for Paul as a Jew the issue focused on the Jewish law. He must show that, whatever value this law had for Jews, and its value was great, Gentiles came to the knowledge of God’s righteousness, and lived by it, quite apart from the Jewish law—namely, through Jesus Christ and the Spirit.
To the understanding of what GodÂ’s
righteousness required of human beings, as laid out in the Jewish or any other
law, Paul juxtaposed life in the Spirit, enjoyed by all who participated in the
faithfulness of Jesus Christ (Rom 8:2). In this life in the Spirit, there were
no commands to be obeyed; there was only a desire to serve God and neighbor,
which led to that behavior and those relationships at which the law
fundamentally aimed (Rom 13:9-10 and Gal
To Torah as a collection of laws requiring obedience, Paul juxtaposed pistis, which is usually translated “faith.” It is primarily to Paul, and specifically to Romans, that the church is indebted for the centrality of “faith” in its thought and life. One reason for returning to Romans again and again is to reflect on the meaning of pistis.
Of course, Paul knew that his proclamation of freedom from the law could be, and generally was, misunderstood. To the charge that it encouraged sin, he replied that pistis in response to the gospel overcame the power of sin that efforts to obey the law only heightened. Since the power of sin did not disappear when one first believed, he exhorted believers to struggle against it, but by relying on the Spirit, not on the law. The primary mark of life in the Spirit was love, and Paul appealed to believers to love, and to express love, wisely. Love was for him, as for Jesus, both the replacement and the fulfillment of the law.
Building on the Jewish monotheistic
conviction that God was impartial (Rom 2:11), Paul argued in chapters 1-8 that pistis
was the sole basis for receiving the salvation offered in Jesus Christ—for Jews
and Gentiles alike. That raised the question about GodÂ’s faithfulness to GodÂ’s
promises to
Paul felt the rejection of Jesus by the larger Jewish community with great personal pain. His intention had been to share the gospel with the Gentiles on the assumption that others were proclaiming it to the Jews. His Gentile mission had been remarkably successful, but the conversion of the Jewish people had not occurred. In the climax of his letter, Paul takes up what all this could mean (Romans 9-11).
From time to time, Paul faced the question whether this was simply a new religion, disconnected from Judaism altogether. To this he answered, emphatically, “No!” On the contrary, it was the fulfillment of the law and of the twofold Jewish scriptures, containing “the law and the prophets,” which, at their deepest level, pointed to pistis, rather than to obedience to laws, as central to one’s response to God. Even with respect to the Jewish law, he defended it as holy, just, and good (Romans 7). The problem was not the law itself, but the sin it evoked and intensified. Paul identified Jesus and the revelation God brought through him as that which was foretold by the prophets, and he repeatedly cited the Jewish scriptures as support for his arguments.
Paul as a Jew was certain that God
worked in history, so that believers could discern something of GodÂ’s
intentions in historical events. He speculated that the rejection of Jesus by
A question that naturally flowed out of the discussion of law in the earlier chapters was about what should guide the life of the new mixed communities of Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus Christ. That question was especially pressing, since a major burden of PaulÂ’s argument in the letter had been that they were no longer bound to the Jewish law or any law. Paul answered this question repeatedly in the earlier argument, but he returned to it, with illustrative explanations, in 12:1-15:13.
PaulÂ’s letter to the Romans has a
special place in Protestant history. In his “Introduction to the Letter to the
Romans,” Luther described it as “the principle part of the New Testament and
the purest gospel.” John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience occurred as he listened
to a reading of this introduction. Karl BarthÂ’s commentary played a decisive
role in transforming the theological scene in central
Romans has attracted theologians partly because it came closer to being a theology than anything else in the New Testament. Paul was the most theological writer in the New Testament, and Romans was his most theological letter. The idea of “theology” as it has developed in the church is a formulation of the church’s teaching that gives more attention to theoretical issues and less to the diverse problems of particular communities. Although Paul always wrote with particular purposes in view, Romans came closer than his other letters to being “theology” in this sense.
Among those who followed Jesus,
Paul won the argument about the relevance of the Jewish law. No one now
recommends restricting Christianity to law-observant Jews or requiring
Christians to observe the Jewish law. Although some today would restrict the
church, or at least its leadership, to law-observant Christians, what they mean
by “law” is different from the Jewish law to which Paul referred. Beginning in
the twentieth century, the circumcision of male babies born in the
In its rootedness in a particular context, PaulÂ’s letter is not different from later theologies. Human beings always think in concrete historical situations. What they think about and how they think about it are always informed by the situation. To understand any great theological system, whether created by Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, or Schleiermacher, requires knowledge of the context and of the issues confronted by the writer. Nevertheless, comparison of different theologiansÂ’ answers to recurrent topics and issues, in some detachment from their historical context, can be fruitful.
Christians today are divided from all these theologians, as from Paul, by profound changes in worldview. Even if they feel close to one or another religiously, they cannot simply affirm what the earlier thinker affirmed. They cannot think of God and the world exactly as any one of them did. Modern historical consciousness separates the present day understanding of Jesus from theirs. Many are also distanced from them by repentance for Christian anti-Judaism, exclusivism, patriarchy, and repression of sexuality.
Christians today can minimize or magnify this distance. If they wish to accent their indebtedness to one of these great thinkers of the church, they can develop those features of his thought that are most relevant and helpful, passing over, or trivializing, others. On the other hand, if they want to accent the need to break with an oppressive past, they can feature his teachings on topics where the distance is greatest and show that much else of what he wrote was affected by these now objectionable teachings. For example, they may show that the patriarchal bias explicit here and there actually infects his teaching pervasively. Both types of treatment have their place. They are often called “the hermeneutic of understanding” and “the hermeneutic of suspicion.”[5]
Those who have approached past thinkers with suspicion have shown much about them that would not otherwise have been noticed. It has been all too easy, for example, to overlook the close connection between the Christologies that have been most influential in the church and the anti-Jewish attitudes that led to the Holocaust. Christians today are deeply indebted to those who have practiced the hermeneutic of suspicion!
Nevertheless, great thinkers of the past, including theologians, had insights and arguments whose claim on our attention is not undercut by their participation in, even their positive contribution to, now abhorrent beliefs and practices. To focus only on what is objectionable is to stop listening to what mattered most to them. The church cannot overlook the repressive attitude toward sexuality of many of them, but its presence does not mean that their anthropologies or soteriologies have no truth or value. In their own minds and intentions, other insights and affirmations were typically central. The wisdom of today is not so complete that contemporary thinkers no longer need to encounter the wisdom of other times and places. Hence a hermeneutic of understanding has a large, even primary, role.
Both approaches are possible also with Paul, and specifically with his letter to the Romans. Historical methods emphasize his immersion in the cultural patterns of his day, the derivation of his ideas from this or that tradition, and, in general, the distance between his world and ours. Scholars can probe his writings for their contribution to subsequent Christian anti-Judaism, exclusivism, patriarchy, sexual repression, and homophobia. They can also read Paul for his potential positive contributions to contemporary thought.
The historical, objectifying approach to biblical writings distances them, but it also helps to make them less objectionable. This may be especially true in the case of Paul. Because so much of later doctrinal formulation was inspired by Paul and was intended to be faithful to him, it has been almost inevitable that Paul be read in light of those doctrines. Some of these alienate many Christians. Viewing Paul as the forerunner of such teachings occasions some of the contemporary antipathy to him. Objective scholars are peeling back these layers of interpretation, firmly implanted in standard translations and interpretations of his writing. Although such scholarship does not do away with the distance, encountering Paul afresh sometimes leads to the discovery of more relevant and more attractive directions for Christian reflection.
More is at stake here than with other classical theologians. Unlike their writings, PaulÂ’s belong to the Christian canon. This location gives them an authority in the church that the later theologians cannot claim. Accordingly, if some Christians emphasize only what is abhorrent in PaulÂ’s thought, they separate themselves from the Christian community, which treats these writings as authoritative.
Although scholarship that clarifies the meaning of PaulÂ’s writing in his own historical context is helpful to the church, it does not suffice. That context is remote and alien to ours. Unless there are present in his writings meanings that transcend the specificities of his situation, those writings cannot function authoritatively today. If Paul, then, for some Christians, simply falls back into the past, they, too, are separated from the church he has so deeply influenced.
Some Christians are prepared to make these moves. For some, authentic faith is to be part of the Jesus movement. They view Paul as having broken with, or at least radically corrupted, that movement. They are correct in thinking that PaulÂ’s proclamation about Christ is different from JesusÂ’ teaching, especially as that has been recovered in recent scholarship. Can both have normative importance for Christians today? Or must one choose? If a choice is necessary, which choice is better? Either choice would involve a break with historic Christianity, but the break is sharpest if the choice goes against Paul.
As PaulÂ’s critics emphasize, historic Christian teaching has understood Jesus in light of interpretations inspired by the resurrection. Paul played a decisive role in this development, which also influenced the writing of the Gospels. To regard this whole history of interpretation primarily as distortion is incompatible with the historic ethos of the Christian church. To participate in this church requires participation in the effort to understand the meaning of JesusÂ’ death and resurrection, as well as his ministry and teaching, for later believers.
Christians today may disagree with Paul on many
points without ceasing to be full participants in the ongoing and
ever-developing tradition. But if they do not affirm central features of his
theology, their position becomes untenable within the church. Central to PaulÂ’s
message in Romans is that the gospel is open to Gentiles apart from the law.
Unless those Gentiles who propose to follow Jesus but not Paul accept this
Pauline teaching, they will have to become Jews and struggle with the question
of the Jewish law. Few are inclined to follow that course.
Much is at stake, therefore, in the decision how to approach a commentary on Romans. We cannot, today, write such a commentary without feeling the weight of these issues. Should we present Paul in as attractive a light as possible, striving to minimize the need to choose between him and Jesus? Or should we accent the alien and unacceptable views of Paul so as to contribute to promoting the Jesus movement as the authentic spirituality for our time? Or should we simply present the results of what we take to be the most objective recent historical scholarship without raising our own theological issues? We will clarify the position we have chosen in discussion with Barth and Bultmann.
Karl Barth thought that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship had objectified and distanced Romans in such a way that PaulÂ’s message was no longer heard in the church. Paul, Barth believed, heard and reflected the Word of God. BarthÂ’s task, as a faithful Christian, was to enable Paul to speak again. For that purpose, the complex paraphernalia of scholarship could be put into the background.
The premier New Testament scholar of the day, Rudolf Bultmann, was surprisingly supportive. He, too, wanted to put scholarship in the service of the proclamation of PaulÂ’s message. But he argued that, in addition to hearing and reflecting the Word of God, Paul also heard and reflected other voices. The commentator should sort these out, so that the gospel itself would stand out clearly over against the culture of the day.
Barth replied that everything Paul wrote was affected by these other voices. One cannot separate the pure passages from the impure. The commentator must let Paul speak, knowing that his intention everywhere was to be faithful to the Word of God. Accordingly, BarthÂ’s goal was to affirm the text without criticism.
We can agree with BarthÂ’s judgment here without adopting his conclusions. If everything in Paul expresses both GodÂ’s truth and cultural influences, then we can also agree with Bultmann that some expression of our own judgment about GodÂ’s Word is in order. Of course, our judgment, too, will express the same mixture. We, too, are guided by GodÂ’s truth, and we, too, are influenced by cultural factors.
Our strategy is to do our best to hear what Paul intended to say in all its remoteness from us, forming it as little as possible to answer our questions or fit our vision and values. We will then make explicit our own questions, visions, and values—the ones we bring with us to the text.
It is as important to reflect on our own context as on that of the document we are studying and its author. The interests and concerns of commentators determine the issues and topics in the text that are highlighted and the way they are discussed. They do not fully determine what is said, since the encounter with the text involves an “other,” and the intention is to respect that other in its otherness. Current interests and concerns, however, influence both the selection of material for major discussion and how that material is interpreted.
We have spoken of “we” and “our,” but clearly it matters a great deal in this regard who the “we” are. Primarily, we are John Cobb and David Lull. But the two of us share convictions and an orientation with a much wider community. This community is composed of contemporary Protestants who are repenting of historic anti-Judaism, exclusivism, patriarchalism, and repressive sexual teaching. It has absorbed historical consciousness and assumes that, in understanding the natural world, Christians should take the findings of modern sciences fully into account. This community finds itself in a religiously pluralistic world, and it recognizes similarities and differences among diverse traditions, each of which has much to commend it and much unhelpful baggage.
This community has been deeply influenced by Paul, and specifically by this letter. For example, the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which Luther drew largely from it, has shaped the whole Protestant tradition, even when the meaning of the doctrine is debated. Deep divisions arose between the Reformers and Roman Catholics over this doctrine. Also, divisive quarrels sprang up among Protestants over what actual change is effected in the lives of believers by this justification. The questions, values, and visions Protestants bring to the letter, therefore, are not those of outsiders.
Accordingly, much is at stake for “us” in writing yet another commentary on Romans. We hope that others in the community with which we identify will find this engagement with Romans as important for them as it is for the authors. We hope that other Christians will also find our wrestling with the texts honest and interesting.
We approach the text, then, as persons who belong to a community in which it has significant authority and who have been personally influenced by it. We do not believe that this authority sets it beyond critical study or in any way reduces the importance of achieving as much objectivity as possible in trying to understand it. We believe that much of its influence on the church and on us has been positive but that it has also done damage. We know that much of its influence has been distorted by misunderstanding. We want to make use of the best historical scholarship to become clearer about what Paul was actually saying. We want to be as objective as possible about what Paul meant before we evaluate or try to appropriate for ourselves. We think that setting him clearly in his own, very different, context enables us more appropriately to learn from him.
Needless to say, the declining old-line American denominations are very different from the growing communities of Gentile believers of PaulÂ’s time. We cannot answer our questions directly from the text of his letter. Nevertheless, we have analogous problems.
This is a theological commentary. That means that the writers intend that their interests and concerns shape the questions they ask of the text. The next section will identify topics or issues that we find addressed in Romans and that are of special interest to us. However, this is a theological commentary. We will not write a set of essays on these topics. On the contrary, we will follow PaulÂ’s account closely, respecting and noting his arguments, even when they do not directly respond to our concerns. Sometimes the text addresses us in surprising ways, altering our questions. Indeed, we could not have identified the topics listed in the following section before completing a draft of the commentary as a whole. We believe that if the churches would open themselves on these and other topics to the wisdom of Paul, they might arrest and reverse their spiritual decline.
1. One central topic is the understanding of evil.
This question is as widely asked today as when Paul wrote. Its importance is
not simply the satisfaction of human curiosity. It is also determinative of our
multifold response to evil. Paul blamed the widespread evil of his world on
idolatry. The idols he had in mind are not so important today. But to focus on
idolatry—that is, giving ultimate commitment to creatures instead of to God—as
the source of evil may be as illuminating today as it was to PaulÂ’s first
readers.
2. Paul saw the most vivid consequence of idolatry in sexual excess and the most disturbing form of that excess in same-sex sex. PaulÂ’s statements have supported Christian condemnation of such sex throughout the centuries. Today, many Christians believe that much same-sex sex need not be any more connected to idolatry than is heterosexual sex, and that they are called to end blanket condemnation of either form of sex. This divergence of views is tearing apart the old-line churches. The relevance of PaulÂ’s statements in Romans to the crisis in the old-line churches is obvious.
3. Those today who abhor same-sex sex rarely connect it with idolatry. However, many feel revulsion to what they see as “unnatural” sex. Some people in Paul’s day would have called it “unclean.” Today, some people call that revulsion “homophobic.” Whether or not this religio-psychological feeling guides the hostile response, the opposition to same-sex sex typically expresses itself in prohibitions that are part of a legal code intended to govern life—at least in the church. Although Paul’s treatment of idolatry and sexuality was brief, his discussion of the role of law for believers was very extensive. The role of such law in contemporary Protestantism is also quite extensive. If we place the question of same-sex sex in the context of this central theological question, the church may be able to come to authentically Pauline conclusions. In any case, quite apart from its relevance to disputes about same-sex sex, this issue of legalism is of enormous importance for old-line Protestant churches.
“Legalism” plays a large role in our exposition. We use the term to mean what Paul was opposing. This was far more than what is often meant by the term. Many whom we regard as legalistic typically define legalism as referring to others—namely, those who teach that people can save themselves through obedience to law. No doubt such an understanding of life exists, and Christians are right to make their rejection of those ideas explicit. But Paul did not have anything of this sort in mind when he declared the law irrelevant to salvation. The Jews with whom he disputed about the law held to no such view. For them salvation was God’s gift. Conformation to God’s will as expressed in the law was the appropriate human response to that gift. The dispute was about the desirability of this response. Paul and his adversaries certainly agreed that the one thing both desired was “righteousness.” The issue was whether obeying laws was the way to achieve that end. This question was of great importance, especially to Gentile followers of Jesus in Paul’s day. It is equally important today.
4. Many Christians today, like PaulÂ’s critics in his own time, suppose that living apart from moral principles, guidelines, patterns, rules, codes, or laws cannot lead to true righteousness. Paul was sure that it would if one were rightly related to Christ. For him this relation involved love of neighbor, which led to fulfilling the purpose of the law. The new life in Christ was to be a life led by the Spirit. Understanding, encouraging, and proclaiming this alternative are urgent tasks for the church today.
The lack of rules or laws does not mean that the issues that arise in Christian life and community are to be settled arbitrarily. On the contrary, they are to be thoughtfully considered in terms of what love requires. There is no certainty that such reflection will always lead to the right answer. But it remains of crucial importance that we take seriously PaulÂ’s reflections on such issues. They are excellent models for our reflections.
We emphasize equally that conforming to laws need not be legalistic. One may decide to conform for many good reasons. Paul often conformed and encouraged Jewish believers in Jesus to do so. To forbid conformation would be as legalistic as to demand it.
5. Much of Paul’s letter is devoted to discussing the nature of this law-free life informed by the Spirit. He struggled with the fact that, even as the faithful experienced the Spirit working in them, they still experienced “the flesh” resisting and opposing. Freedom from the law does not mean freedom from deep tension and struggle. We think it important to understand Paul’s view of the life of the faithful and also to consider its relevance in the ongoing life of the church.
6. Protestant churches today speak confusedly and confusingly on the fundamental question of what constitutes “salvation” and how it is attained. For the most part, Paul spoke of “salvation” as future. With respect to what already characterized the lives of the faithful, Paul spoke of their having been declared and made righteous and of the work of the Spirit within them. They anticipated being resurrected with Jesus and the final glorification entailed in that, along with the liberation of all creation. That was for Paul “salvation” in the full sense, although he could use the word to refer to the whole process that moved to this final end.
7. Closely related to the question about the nature of salvation is the question of what enables people to enter this path. Paul points to the death of Jesus as a crucial event in this regard. The most common explanation today is that JesusÂ’ death atoned for human sins and that the redemptive effects of this atonement can be claimed through faith. This doctrine is supposed to be Pauline. We will carefully examine the text to which appeal is made in support of this idea, and we will propose a different reading of PaulÂ’s understanding of the efficacy of JesusÂ’ death.
8. Luther famously thematized the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He derived it primarily from Romans. The questions of legalism and salvation are clearly bound up with this doctrine. But recognizing their importance leads us to ask again just what the words we translate in this way meant to Paul. The focus of the debate has been on “justification.” This idea is important to Paul and even more central to the Reformation, but the term has lost its currency in the contemporary church. We think we need to recover its natural and important usage and that close attention to Paul will enable us to do this. We will both explain the importance of forensic justification—that is, God’s judging us as righteous apart from actual righteousness on our part—and also argue that the contrast between this forensic justification and actually becoming righteous has been overdrawn in the tradition. Paul deals with this more wisely.
9. This latter point depends on clarifying what Paul meant by pistis, the Greek word usually translated as “faith.” Our proposal is that it is usually better translated as “faithfulness.” This makes clear that it was, for Paul, an encompassing way of being in the world and not simply an interior attitude of belief or trust to be contrasted with outward behavior.
When pistis is understood in this way, the old debate about whether justification is simply GodÂ’s acceptance of us in our unchanged sinfulness, or involves some transformation of our character, is largely superseded. Understanding pistis as faithfulness not only changes the understanding of the relation of pistis and works but also provides new ways of understanding the process of salvation.
10. Closely related to the way pistis is understood is the relation of pistis to Jesus. Just how Jesus functions as our savior is clearly a question in todayÂ’s churches. Especially those who do not accept a notion of substitutionary atonement are often at a loss to see how faith in Jesus can save. Many find PaulÂ’s language perplexing. The main problem, we now believe, is that theologians and translators have supposed that Paul was not interested in JesusÂ’ own pistis. Therefore, where Paul spoke of JesusÂ’ pistis, they interpreted it as referring to the pistis of believers directed toward Jesus. If we recognize this error, and see that Paul was deeply interested in JesusÂ’ faithfulness to God, much makes sense that is otherwise obscure. The connection between Paul and Jesus, which today is again being presented as an irresolvable difference, becomes much closer, and the nature of JesusÂ’ saving work becomes more intelligible.
11. This is closely related to the larger question of the relation of Paul and Jesus. Sometimes a contrast is drawn between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Certainly there is a difference. But, if Paul taught that we should participate in JesusÂ’ faithfulness and righteousness, the difference is not so sharp a contrast. Further, their understanding of God and of the centrality of love, their strong condemnation of judging others, even their understanding of the law have more resemblances than differences.
12. Luther and Calvin are among those who have derived from Romans a strong insistence on the primacy of GodÂ’s action over human ones. Paul wrote that only pistis is required for human salvation, so that no one has a basis for boasting. The Reformers insisted that pistis also is GodÂ’s gift and appealed to PaulÂ’s account of predestination to show that the saving action is entirely on GodÂ’s side. This fit with the widespread doctrine of divine omnipotence. On the other hand, Christians have always held human beings responsible for their sins. We will inquire how Paul dealt with this nest of theological issues.
13. This is related to the role of GodÂ’s wrath and judgment, which the first chapters of Romans emphasize. Today many Christians find this notion offensive. But Paul also was engaged in showing that wrath and judgment are not the deepest expressions of GodÂ’s righteousness. In JesusÂ’ faithfulness to death GodÂ’s righteousness is manifest as love. In this context, how are we to understand the talk of GodÂ’s wrath and judgment?
14. Paul’s language was often that of mutual immanence and participation. He often wrote of the mutual indwelling of the faithful and Christ or the Spirit, and of the participation of the faithful in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Yet the way reality was conceptualized in the Greco-Roman and Medieval worlds forced thinkers to interpret what Paul wrote about Christ, his death and resurrection, and the Spirit in terms of external relations—that is, as realities or events that do not, indeed cannot, effect any essential change in the faithful. Modern thought, with its understanding of reality as consisting of unrelated, static substances, only intensified this need. Partly as a result, many people are looking outside the old-line churches for a fuller experience of their relations with God and with one another and a more adequate interpretation of that experience than sophisticated thought has allowed them in the Western church.
Process or process-relational thought, to which the authors of this commentary subscribe, recovers the understanding of mutual immanence and participation in such a way that PaulÂ’s teaching can be taken much more straightforwardly. We believe that if the old-line churches appropriate PaulÂ’s understanding on these matters, they can respond far better to the spiritual hungers of our time. Furthermore, when Christians understand that, for Paul, faithfulness was participation in, or internalization of, JesusÂ’ faithfulness even to death on the cross, we can see how pistis leads to righteousness/justification both as GodÂ’s acceptance of sinners in their sinfulness and as their participation in the righteousness of Jesus.
15. For Paul, salvation in the full
sense named a future state, rather than the present condition of the faithful.
His thought is often described as “apocalyptic,” because Paul envisioned a
future when God would transform the entire universe in a climactic, unilateral
act as the consummation of GodÂ’s salvation of the world. Today apocalypticism
is once again widespread in popular Christianity, and affirmed by some old-line
theologians as well. On the other hand, it seems incredible and unattractive to
many Christians. Some of its expressions in proposals for public policy—with
respect to
Nevertheless, PaulÂ’s vision repays careful attention. It is quite different from most forms of apocalypticism. Paul certainly rejects any this-worldly understanding of salvation, but his view is far removed from millenarian speculations and ideas of individualistic rewards and punishments when we die.
16. We live in a world in which the relationship of Christians and Jews suffers from centuries of persecutions of Jews by Christians. Few things are more important than Christian repentance for the anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior in and of the church, and rejection of the theological teachings that have supported them. Although it would be ridiculous to charge Paul, the Jew, with being anti-Jewish, his formulations, especially in Romans, have encouraged later anti-Jewish teaching. On the other hand, the effort to counter that teaching has led to downplaying PaulÂ’s anti-legalistic emphasis. We hope to show that in interaction with Romans we can develop the grounds for a faithfulness to PaulÂ’s teaching that supports respect and appreciation for Jews and Judaism in their otherness and difference, while also appropriating PaulÂ’s clear rejection of all forms of legalism for followers of Jesus.
17. Christianity has tended to view salvation in individualistic terms. This emphasis was intensified in evangelicalism, even when it accepted an apocalyptic understanding of salvation. The understanding that faith as an act of belief by an individual is the one requirement for salvation supports this individualism. It seems to make concern for broader historical events secondary or even unimportant, so that the quest for social justice, for example, becomes optional for the believer.
Paul, on, the other hand, seems to have subsumed the destiny of individuals in a larger narrative of the history of salvation. That specific narrative may be inaccessible to people today. But the questions of how individual destiny is related to the wider course of historic events and of how this in turn relates to salvation are important today as well. They are important with respect to Christian-Jewish relations, but not only those. We will seek to learn what we can in dialogue with PaulÂ’s rich account of salvation history.
18. Paul has been vilified for his acceptance of hierarchical institutions. Slavery and the patriarchal family are two examples. Yet there is much in his message that cuts against hierarchy. Romans is not the best source to study the role of women and slaves in his thought and practice, but the concluding chapter does provide indirect light on these matters. These are issues of such importance with respect to the present appropriation of Paul that we will learn what we can.
19. All the points emphasized thus far have dealt chiefly with the church and its beliefs. The text of Romans is explicitly addressed to questions of this sort. But we have become more aware of how our lives as Christians today are bound up with the global situation. And as this has forced itself on our attention, we have also become aware that PaulÂ’s text relates to the wider world in which he wrote. In the remainder of this section, we will consider the economic and political issues that we can engage in dialog with Paul.
Although the economy has always been decisive for the very survival of every human society, the contemporary situation is new in that the global order is now structured primarily around explicit economic considerations. What makes for wealth is understood to be good, and what inhibits that process is evil. This view is sometimes connected rhetorically to biblical themes of concern for the poor, but these are used chiefly to justify policies that lead to the further concentration of the newly created wealth in the hands of the elite. The quest for wealth is proclaimed without embarrassment as the normal and normative way of life, and social institutions are reshaped in order to support it. Governments are judged by their contribution to wealth-creation. Whether this in fact helps the poor is given little attention. In fact, the lot of the nationÂ’s poor, and even more dramatically, the worldÂ’s poor, grows worse.
This faith in wealth creation informs the attitudes and assumptions of most Americans, including most who are members of Christian congregations. A Christian theology that is unaware of the dominance of this other theology, which can be called “economism,” cannot be faithful to the Christian heritage. Such thinking did not tempt Paul. His communities developed an entirely different economy, radically subordinating the economic order to the health of the community.
Paul lived during the height of the
Our nationÂ’s move toward empire is
an issue for us not only as citizens of the
The Romans liked to believe that
they had acquired their dominions justly, by fighting for their own security or
for the protection of their allies. Victory had conferred on them the right to
rule over the conquered, and they were naturally conscious that this right was
profitable to them, nor were they ashamed of the booty and tribute they
exacted. However, they preferred to dwell on the sheer glory of empire, which
made
A comparable vision of American innocence and the divine sanction of its global domination not only pervades the culture in which we find ourselves but also characterizes many church people. In PaulÂ’s letter we find a vision that sharply contradicted the political theology of his day. He couched this in apocalyptic terms, which are not directly accessible to us, but the vision nevertheless speaks powerfully.
The separation of theology from the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the world is a modern phenomenon unthinkable in PaulÂ’s time. It is time to recover an understanding of Christian faith that relates it to the whole of life and thought. It is not easy to do this. Scholars as well as lay people have been reading Romans for centuries from the perspective of a theology that focuses on narrow, if fundamental, aspects of human existence. There is a new scholarship that has studied Romans in the wider context of the Roman world, but some of it, too, suffers from the compartmentalization of political thinking from the dimension of personal life, seeming to belittle some of PaulÂ’s deepest concerns because they were not obviously political. The intellectual context from which we write is one that is fragmented into disciplines, and we have not overcome that fragmentation. The best we can achieve is to see how PaulÂ’s affirmations were at once religious and political. Still, we write as those who seek a more holistic vision, and we look in PaulÂ’s letter for clues as to how we might advance in that direction.
There is little disagreement about
much of the basic outline of Romans. The letter begins with introductory
material in 1:1-17 and ends with concluding material in
About how Romans
Our choice is to treat the material through chapter 5 as one unit and chapters 6-8 as another. In the first of these parts Paul dealt broadly with “salvation history.” His theme was that there had been, through the faithfulness of Jesus, even to death, a great shift from the dominance of God’s wrath to that of God’s righteousness now revealed as mercy and love. This change was valid for Gentiles as well as Jews, and the great practical issue with which Paul wrestled in these chapters was the meaning of this change for his mission to the Gentiles.
PaulÂ’s solution to this problem was to reject the use of the law by Gentiles. In chapters 2-5 he recognized, and briefly responded to, some strong objections to this position. But he knew those responses were insufficient. In chapters 6-8 Paul provided a sustained discussion of how and why faithful life dealt with sin without appealing to law. Since he was writing about the nature of life in communities of followers of Jesus, the history of salvation, while presupposed, was in the background and an account of faithful living was in the foreground.
In chapters 9-11 Paul returned to
salvation history, especially the respective destinies of
In the fourth section, 12:1-15:13, Paul returned to the life and community of the faithful in a practical and hortatory mood. In chapters 6-8 he explained how participation in the faithfulness of Jesus, orienting life to God, and being infused by the Spirit enabled the faithful to fulfill the purpose of the law without observing it. Beginning in chapter 12, Paul showed how this worked out with respect to particular issues in the life of the community.
Our four main parts, then, are “The
Wrath and Righteousness of God” (
[1]
Scripture quotations throughout this commentary are our own translations unless
otherwise noted. For our own translations, we are heavily indebted to Walter
Bauer, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature,
3rd edition (
[2] See J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, Anchor Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
[3] In our commentary on Romans 1:1-17, we give our reasons for this translation of the phrase that the NRSV and other translations render “the obedience of faith.”
[4] For a discussion of various theories about the occasion, purpose, and form of Romans, see Karl P. Donfried (ed.), The Romans Debate, Revised and Expanded Edition (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991).
[5] The word “hermeneutic” is derived from a Greek verb that means “translate, interpret, or explain.”
[6] P. A. Brunt, “Laus Imperii,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), p. 25.