THE NEW INTERPRETER’S BIBLE

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, Including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to Abingdon Press, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203.

The New Interpreter’s Bible: general articles & introduction, commentary, & reflections for each book of the Bible, including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books.

Full texts and critical notes of the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible in parallel columns. Includes bibliographical references.

Quotations from the NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION OF THE BIBLE. Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Hebraicall and Graecall fonts used to print this work are available from Linguist’s Software, Inc., PO Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580. Tel (425) 775-1130. Web www.linguistsoftware.com

Romans is neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul’s lifework, but it is by common consent his masterpiece. It dwarfs most of his other writings, an Alpine peak towering over hills and villages. Not all onlookers have viewed it in the same light or from the same angle, and their snapshots and paintings of it are sometimes remarkably unalike. Not all climbers have taken the same route up its sheer sides, and there is frequent disagreement on the best approach. What nobody doubts is that we are here dealing with a work of massive substance, presenting a formidable intellectual challenge while offering a breathtaking theological and spiritual vision.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it remains the case that anyone who claims to understand Romans fully is, almost by definition, mistaken. It is common to list saints and Christian leaders whose lives have been changed by reading this letter; the catalog could be balanced by a similar number who have radically misunderstood it. Troublingly, the lists would overlap. Having studied this letter intensively for much of my adult life, I, of course, believe that my current opinions on its historical and theological meaning, though humble, are accurate. But the example of others and the memory of my own past changes of mind, leave me under no illusions as to the provisional nature of my conclusions.

Equally, anyone who claimed to have read all the commentaries (let alone all the other secondary literature) on Romans would be lying. Likewise, anyone who tried to refer to it all, let alone enter into debate with it all, would produce an unreadable book. I am indebted to far more colleagues, ancient and modern, than can be mentioned in the footnotes or bibliography; but the purposes of this series are better served by exposition of the view to which the author has come, with occasional debates with other major interpretations, than by endless listing of and interaction with the many alternative readings that have been put forward. At the end of almost every sentence the reader should imagine an invisible footnote: “For more information, alternative views, and secondary literature, see the recent commentaries.” Though in my earlier work I studied and interacted with interpreters from many generations, I have here deliberately tried to engage in debate the more recent writers, not least the two major Roman Catholic commentaries of Fitzmyer and Byrne and the two major Protestant ones of Dunn and Moo.^¹

It has become customary to approach a biblical book by asking when, where, why, and by whom it was written and then, as a second stage, what it actually says. Some of these initial questions, fortunately, are not controversial in the case of Romans; nobody doubts that Paul wrote it in the middle to late 50s of the first century, from Corinth or somewhere nearby, while planning his final voyage to Jerusalem with the intention of going on thereafter to Rome and thence to Spain. But the remaining question, “Why?” has proved remarkably difficult. Romans stands as a reminder that “why” and “what” are more organically related than we have sometimes liked to think. Theories about why Paul wanted to write this letter to this church at this moment must remain in constant dialogue with the complex discussion of what the letter itself actually says. As in other disciplines, the greatest strengths of a hypothesis or theory are to make sense of the data, to do so within an appropriately simple overall design, and to shed light on other areas of cognate research. These large aims are in view in what follows.

It is no good picking out a few favorite lines from Romans and hoping from them to understand the whole book. One might as well try to get the feel of a Beethoven symphony by humming over half a dozen bars from different movements. Romans is, indeed, a symphonic composition: Themes are stated and developed (often in counterpoint with each other), recapitulated in different keys, anticipated in previous movements and echoed in subsequent ones. Although the demands of a commentary mean that headings will be offered for its different sections we should not thereby be misled into supposing that each paragraph is simply “about” one particular topic. That is not how Paul wrote, at least not here. He was far more likely, in individual sentences, paragraphs, and sections, to state a point in a condensed fashion and then steadily to unpack it, in the manner of someone unfolding a map stage by stage so that each new piece offers both a fresh vision and a sense of having been contained within what had gone before. At almost no point in this letter does he offer detached reflections on isolated “topics” (13:1-7 is perhaps an exception, which is one reason, though not the main one, why some have suggested that it may be an interpolation). Although Romans, written within the general Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman world, shares some rhetorical features with other letters of the time and place, it is impossible either to pigeonhole it within a particular genre or to use such possible parallels to infer what the letter is about independent of full-scale consideration of its argument. We must follow the sequence of thought, the inner logic, of the whole work.

The easiest thing to determine about Romans is its basic shape. Its four sections emerge clearly: chaps. 1-4, 5-8, 9-11, and 12-16. From time to time, impressed by the way in which chap. 5 draws out and in a way completes the thought of chaps. 1-4, some writers have suggested that the key break occurs between chaps. 5 and 6 rather than between 4 and 5;^² but most are now content with the outline suggested, not least since it is clear that the opening of chap. 5 states in summary form the themes that are then developed through to the end of chap. 8. In any case, to note the divisions is not to say that Paul is doing more than rounding off one train of thought before proceeding to a closely cognate, and logically consecutive, idea. As we shall see, the most abrupt and decisive breaks-those at the ends of chaps. 8 and 11 – by no means indicate that he is now going to write “about” something else altogether. Attempts to impose a formal structure on the letter are either trivial (e.g., pointing out that the opening of chap. 1 functions as the “Greeting” and 15:14-16:27 as the “Conclusion”) or tendentious (e.g., suggesting that 1:18-11:36 is the “body of the letter,” thereby implying that chaps. 12-16 are a mere exhortatory postscript – a view challenged in the commentary).

In fact, to see how the different parts of the letter hang together and to understand why Paul wanted to say just this at just this moment to these people, the most important thing to do is to grasp the main theme of the letter and to see why it was important to first-century Jews in general, to Paul in particular, and to him in this setting most specifically.

“God’s Righteousness.” It is not difficult to discover the main theme of the letter. “God’s gospel unveils God’s righteousness”: That, in effect, is Paul’s own summary in 1:16-17, and the letter does indeed unpack this dense statement. Unfortunately, though, even this apparently simple sentence is controversial, and we must clarify what is meant and justify, at least preliminarily, the decision to treat the passage, and the letter, in this way. As often in Paul’s writings, to understand one key phrase we need to draw on a range of evidence and pick our way through a minefield of arguments. Before we can even address the question of why Paul wrote this particular letter, we must examine the broader question of why a Jew like him would be concerned with this overarching issue.

“God’s Righteousness” in Paul’s Judaism: Covenant, Lawcourt, Apocalyptic. The phrase “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεου dikaiosynē theou) summed up sharply and conveniently, for a first-century Jew such as Paul, the expectation that the God of Israel, often referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures by the name YHWH, would be faithful to the promises made to the patriarchs. Many Jews of Paul’s day saw Israel’s story, including the biblical story but bringing it up to their own day, as a story still in search of a conclusion – a conclusion to be determined by the faithfulness of their God. As long as Israel remained under the rule of pagans, the great promises made by this God to the patriarchs, and through the prophets, had still not been fulfilled.

Thus, although the Babylonian exile had obviously come to a literal end some centuries before, the promises made at the time – promises of a glorious restoration of the nation, the Temple, and the whole Jewish way of life – were widely regarded as still awaiting complete fulfillment (see the Commentary on 9:6-10:21).^³ Loyal Jews living under the various post-Babylonian powers (Persia, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and finally Rome) continued to tell the whole story of Israel in terms of promises made to the patriarchs; of an early golden age under David and Solomon; of rebellion, decline, and exile; of a long period of waiting for restoration; and of the eventual new day of liberation that would dawn in God’s good time. They believed that YHWH had entered into covenant with them to do all this; paradoxically, the exile was itself, as Jeremiah, Daniel, and others had insisted, part of the covenant, since it was the result of Israel’s disobedience. But their God would remain loyal to the covenant, and this loyalty would result in the great day of liberation coming to birth at last.^⁴ The phrase that captures this whole train of thought, occurring in various forms in the Scriptures and post-biblical writings, is “God’s righteousness,” in the sense of God’s loyalty to the covenant with Israel (see, e.g., Ps 33:4; Isaiah 40-55; Jer 32:41; Lam 3:23; Hos 2:20). The overtones of the phrase thus bring its semantic range very near to another great biblical theme, that of God’s sure and steadfast covenant love for Israel – a point of considerable importance for understanding Romans, as we shall see.

Never leaving behind this covenantal meaning, the word “righteousness” is also shaped by the Second Temple Jewish setting of the lawcourt. In the lawcourt as envisaged in the OT, all cases were considered “civil” rather than “criminal”; accuser and defendant pleaded their causes before a judge. “Righteousness” was the status of the successful party when the case had been decided; “acquitted” does not quite catch this, since that term applies only to the successful defendant, whereas if the accusation was upheld the accuser would be “righteous.” “Vindicated” is thus more appropriate. The word is not basically to do with morality or behavior, but rather with status in the eyes of the court – even though, once someone had been vindicated, the word “righteous” would thus as it were work backward, coming to denote not only the legal status at the end of the trial but also the behavior that had occasioned this status.^⁵

The word “righteousness” applied not only to the accuser or defendant; it also denoted the appropriate activity of the judge. His duty was clear: to be impartial, to uphold the law, to punish wrongdoing, and to defend those who, like the orphan and the widow, had nobody else to defend them. Thus the “righteousness” of the judge, on the one hand, and of the parties in the case, on the other hand, are very different things. Neither has anything directly to do with the general moral behavior or virtue of the persons concerned.

Covenant and lawcourt are far more closely linked than often imagined. Behind both categories there stands a fundamental Jewish self-perception, which, if we grasp it, will enable us to understand things Paul holds together in many passages in Romans, but which interpreters have consistently separated. Through many and various expressions of covenant theology in the biblical and post-biblical periods, a theme emerges that, though by no means central in all Second Temple Judaism, has a claim to represent a deep-rooted and biblical viewpoint. It can be stated thus: The covenant between God and Israel was established in the first place in order to deal with the problem of the world as a whole. Or, as one rabbi put it, God decided to make Adam first, knowing that if he went to the bad God would send Abraham to sort things out.^⁶ The covenant, in other words, was established so that the creator God could rescue the creation from evil, corruption, and disintegration and in particular could rescue humans from sin and death.

In biblical thought, sin and evil are seen in terms of injustice – that is, of a fracturing of the social and human fabric. What is required, therefore, is that justice be done, not so much in the punitive sense that phrase often carries (though punishment comes into it), but in the fuller sense of setting to rights that which is out of joint, restoring things as they should be. Insofar, then, as God’s covenant with Israel was designed, at the large scale, to address the problem of human sin and the failure of creation as a whole to be what its creator had intended it to be the covenant was the means of bringing God’s justice to the whole world. Since “justice” and “righteousness” (δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē) and their cognates, translate the same Hebrew and Greek originals, we discover that God’s righteousness, seen in terms of covenant faithfulness and through the image of the lawcourt, was to be the instrument of putting the world to rights – of what we might call cosmic restorative justice.

The images of covenant and lawcourt thus draw together, within one complex range of imagery, a familiar Second Temple perception of the Jews’ own story in relation the rest of the world. Many Jewish writings of this period tell the story of Israel and the pagan nations in terms of a great cosmic lawsuit: When the psalmists beg God to vindicate them against their adversaries, they are expressing a characteristic standpoint (e.g., Psalm 143). The pagan nations are oppressing Israel; whether they are thought of as accusers and Israel as a defendant or whether Israel is accusing the pagans of wrong-doing is unimportant. YHWH is not simply Israel’s God, but the creator of the whole world and its judge; as such, YHWH is under an obligation to set things right, not least to vindicate the oppressed. True, there are some biblical passages in which YHWH is Israel’s adversary at law; but, although Paul recognizes this as a theoretical and problematic possibility (see the Commentary on 3:5), his argument sticks to the more usual conception. YHWH is the judge, the nations that make war upon Israel are to be tried and condemned; Israel is to be vindicated. This scene is classically portrayed in the seventh chapter of the book of Daniel.

It takes only a little reflection, and a little acquaintance with the Jewish history and literature of Paul’s period, to see that a tension or conflict could arise between the covenantal and lawcourt meanings of “righteousness.” YHWH was supposed to come to Israel’s rescue because of the covenant obligations between them; but YHWH was also the judge in the cosmic court, committed to judging justly between Israel and the nations and to establishing an appropriately just rule over the whole world. Is Israel also guilty? What will YHWH do then?^⁷ That was a puzzle for many Jews in Paul’s world, and we may suppose it had been so for Paul as well; as a zealous Pharisee (his own self-description; see Gal 1:13-14; Phil 3:6), he must have longed to see God’s righteousness revealed against wicked pagans and renegade Jews alike, vindicating covenant-faithful Jews like him. Although recent scholars have emphasized that there is no evidence for the pre-Christian Paul suffering from a bad or troubled conscience in the post-Augustinian sense, we must insist that there is every reason to suppose that he agonized over the fate of Israel, longing for YHWH to act decisively in history, but uncomfortably aware that if this were to happen many Jews would face condemnation along with Gentiles.

All this brings into view a final dimension of the phrase “God’s righteousness.” Precisely because the term evoked covenant loyalty, on the one hand, and commitment to putting the whole world to rights, on the other, it was perhaps inevitable that Jews who longed for all this to happen would come to describe it in what we now call “apocalyptic” language. We need to be clear, however, what we mean by this. In common with many scholars, I use the term “apocalyptic” to denote not so much a state of mind or a set of beliefs about the future, but a way of writing that uses highly charged and coded metaphors to invest space-time reality with its cosmic or theological significance. “The stars will not give their light, and the sun and the moon will be darkened” (Isa 13:10); what Isaiah had in mind was the destruction of Babylon. Four beasts will emerge from the sea; what Daniel had in mind was the rise of great empires. “One like a son of man will come to the Ancient of Days”; what Daniel had in mind was “the saints of the most high” receiving the kingdom (Daniel 7). Even so, “God’s righteousness will be revealed” was a coded way of saying that God would at last act within history to vindicate Israel. The word for “is revealed” in Rom 1:17 is αποκαλύπτεται (apokalyptetai), suggesting precisely, within the first-century Jewish world, the final unveiling within history of the secret plan that Israel’s God had all along been hatching.

However, just because apocalyptic language was not designed to denote literal cosmic events (the collapse of the space-time universe, for instance), that does not mean that first-century Jews did not suppose that their God would act suddenly and swiftly to bring about these long-delayed purposes. On the contrary, as the night grew darker, as pagan power increased, and as disloyalty within Israel itself became more rife, Jews like Paul must have prayed and longed for actual space-time events that would demonstrate beyond any doubt that Israel’s God was the creator and judge of all the world. Through God’s actions on behalf of Israel, the world would see the truth for which it had longed, the justice for which it had striven. Since this expectation of a radically new event breaking into history is in any case what some mean by “apocalyptic,” we can assert that “God’s righteousness” is to be understood within a framework of thought in which “covenant,” “lawcourt,” and “apocalyptic” language and thought forms are joined together in mutual compatibility.

“God’s Righteousness” as Paul’s Christian Question. Paul’s world of thought was a variation on the Second Temple Jewish worldview. However much his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus challenged and changed him, and however much he saw himself as “the apostle to the Gentiles,” he still thought like a Jew and, most important, regarded his own Jewishness as significant (see the Commentary on 11:1-6). He quickly came to regard the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the apocalyptic moment for which he and others had longed, and he rethought his previous way of viewing the story of Israel and the world as a result.

This can be seen precisely in Paul’s vocation to be “the apostle to the Gentiles,” a theme of considerable significance for Romans. Paul did not take the message of Jesus the Messiah to the Gentiles out of mere frustration that his fellow Jews had refused it, as a kind of displacement activity, but rather out of the conviction that, if God’s purposes for Israel had indeed now been fulfilled, it was time for the Gentiles to come in. As becomes increasingly clear, his Gentile mission was an eschatological activity – that is, a task to be undertaken once God had acted climactically and decisively within history. It was a key feature of the new age that had now dawned, part of Paul’s sense that God’s future had arrived in the present, in the person and achievement of Jesus and the power of the Spirit. Although Paul clearly believed that there was a further and final event still to come, which he describes variously at different points in his writings, the great promised “end” had already begun to happen (see particularly 1 Cor 15:20-28).

This, of course, forced him to reconsider what it was that Israel’s God had promised. If this was how the promises had been fulfilled, had God suffered a change of mind? Or had Israel misunderstood God’s intentions? Jesus’ death and resurrection, seen as the messianic events through which Israel’s God had brought the covenant story to its unexpected climax, functioned for Paul not unlike the way the fall of Jerusalem functioned for the author of 4 Ezra: as the catalyst for a serious rethinking of God’s promises and intentions, Gods covenant faithfulness. Paul’s point, to which he stuck like a leech throughout his different debates, was that Israel’s God had been true to the covenant and the promises. Paul resisted all tendencies to move toward what would later be called Marcionism.^⁸

This notion emerges particularly in Paul’s view of the Torah, the Jewish law, which will be touched on a good deal in the commentary. Paul’s fundamental insights here, which have earned him much criticism from his fellow Jews from that day to this, are (1) to uncouple the Mosaic law from the Abrahamic covenant and thus (2) to regard the Abrahamic covenant as fulfilled “apart from the law” (3:21); (3) to see the Torah as applying to Jews and Jews only, and hence not being relevant to the eschatological period when the Gentiles were coming in to God’s people; (4) to see the Torah as intensifying the problem of Adam’s sin for those who were “under the Torah,” and thus as something from which its adherents needed to be freed; and (5) to claim, nevertheless, that the Torah had been given by God, had performed the paradoxical tasks assigned to it, and was now strangely fulfilled in the creation of the new people of God in Christ and by the Spirit. Romans makes a substantial contribution to this complex but coherent picture.

Paul thus stuck to, and argued at length for, a view of what God had done in Jesus the Messiah according to which these events were to be seen as the fulfillment of what God had promised to the patriarchs. It was of course a sudden and surprising fulfillment, overturning cherished expectations breaking in unexpectedly upon the worldview that Paul himself had cherished. Recent debates have highlighted the need to stress both the continuity, in Paul’s mind, between his gospel and that which had gone before in Judaism and the discontinuity, the sense of radical newness, of a divine purpose suddenly and shockingly unveiled. To soft-pedal either of these strong points is to miss the inner tension and dynamic of Paul’s thought. It is, in particular, to miss the peculiar force and glory of the letter to the Romans.

“God’s Righteousness” as the Theme of Romans. Romans has suffered for centuries from being made to produce vital statements on questions it was not written to answer. All that has been said so far by way of historical and theological introduction will seem strange to those traditions of reading the letter that assume its central question to be that of Martin Luther: “How can I find a gracious God?” If we start there, as many commentaries will reveal, Paul’s discussion of Israel and its Torah either takes second place or, worse, is relegated to a more abstract and generalized discussion of the sin and salvation of humans in general, in which the question of Israel’s fate is essentially a side issue.^⁹ Within such a reading, it has been common to highlight the doctrine of “justification by faith,” in which humans must realize their inability to make themselves “righteous” and must instead trust God’s action in Christ, because of which they will be reckoned as “righteous” despite not having obeyed “the law” – that is, a general or universal moral code.

This “righteousness,” the status now enjoyed by God’s people in Christ, is described in Phil 3:9 as “a righteousness from God [ή έκ θεου δικαιοσύνη hē ek theou dikaiosynē],” from which many have suggested that this status, too, is what is referred to in Rom 1:17 and elsewhere as the dikaiosynē theou, “the righteousness of God.”^¹⁰ Although etymologically possible, this is historically very unlikely. When the latter phrase occurs in biblical and post-biblical Jewish texts, it always refers to God’s own righteousness, not to the status people have from God; and Jewish discussions of “God’s righteousness” in this sense show close parallels with Paul’s arguments in Romans (obvious passages include Deut 33:21; Judg 5:11; 1 Sam 12:7; Neh 9:8; Pss 45:4; 72:1-4; 103:6; Isaiah 40-55 [e.g., 41:10; 45:13; 46:12-13]; Dan 9:7-9, 14, 16; Mic 6:5; Wis 5:18; Ps Sol. 1:10-15; 2 Bar 44:4; 78:5; 4 Ezra 7:17-25; 8:36; 10:16; 14:32; TDan 6:10; 1OS 10:25-6; 11:12; 1QM 4:6). I believe the detailed exegesis will bear out this interpretation.

In particular, the flow of thought through the letter as a whole makes far more sense if we understand the statement of the theme in 1:17 as being about God and God’s covenant faithfulness and justice, rather than simply about “justification.”^¹¹ It brings into focus chapters 9-11 not as an appendix to a more general treatment of sin and salvation, but as the intended major climax of the whole letter; and it allows for the significance of 15:1-13 as a final summing up of the subject. Within this larger theme, there is still all the room required for that which other readings have traditionally seen as the major subject – namely, the justification and salvation of individual human beings. But in this letter at least (remembering again that this is not, after all, a systematic theology but a letter addressed to a particular situation), these vital and highly important topics are held within a larger discussion. Paul’s aim, it seems, is to explain to the Roman church what God has been up to and where they might belong on the map of these purposes.

Accustomed as we are to translating dikaiosynē as “righteousness,” we should recognize from this account that the other obvious meaning of the word, “justice,” is not far away. The sense of covenant faithfulness and the sense of things being put to rights, held apart within both the Reformation and the Enlightenment as “theology and ethics” or “salvation and politics,” were not far removed in the mind of a Jew like Paul. Just as the Messiah was destined to be Lord of the world, so also, and for the same reasons, God’s covenant with Israel had always been intended as the means of putting God’s world to rights.^¹² When, therefore, God’s righteousness was unveiled, the effect would be precisely that the world would receive justice – that rich, restorative, much-to-be-longed-for justice of which the psalmists had spoken with such feeling (e.g., Pss 67:4; 82:8). Even a quick skim through Romans ought to reveal that this is indeed what Paul was talking about, though of course full justification of the point awaits the detail of the commentary.

But we need to remind ourselves to whom Paul’s great letter was sent. Looming up behind the various discussions of why Romans was written is an issue not usually noticed. Paul was coming to Rome with the gospel message of Jesus the Jewish Messiah, the Lord of the world, claiming that, through this message, God’s justice was unveiled once and for all. Rome prided itself on being, as it were, the capital of justice, the source from which justice would flow throughout the world. The Roman goddess Iustitia, like the Caesar cult itself, was a comparative novelty in Paul’s world; the temple to Iustitia was established on January 8, 13 CE, and Iustitia was among the virtues celebrated by Augustus’s famous clipeus virtutis, the golden shield set up in the Senate house and inscribed with the emperor’s virtues (27 BCE). So close is the link between the new imperial regime and the virtue Iustitia that this goddess sometimes acquires the title “Augusta.”^¹³ So, without losing any of its deep-rooted Jewish meanings of the covenant faithfulness of the creator God Paul’s declaration that the gospel of King Jesus reveals God’s dikaiosynē must also be read as a deliberate challenge to the imperial pretension. If it is justice you want, he implies, you will find it, but not in the εαγγέλιον (euangelion) that announces Caesar as Lord, but in the euangelion of Jesus.^¹⁴ The rest of Romans will show that this meaning is indeed in Paul’s mind at point after point.

Nor is this meaning an indication that Paul is, as it were, shuttling to and fro between Jewish” and “Gentile” contexts of meaning. Part of the whole point, for him, of the Jewish claim to be the covenant people of God was that the divine purpose for the whole creation would be revealed through Israel. In other words, when God at last fulfilled the covenant, the Gentile world would see, unveiled, what its own life was about. Applied to Rome, this meant that the very Jewish, very biblically based, revelation of the divine righteousness/justice was necessarily at the same time the revelation of the true Iustitia, that which really did accomplish what Caesar’s Iustitia had claimed to do-namely, the putting to rights of the entire creation. We have only to think for a moment of Isaiah 40-55 to see how similar the train of thought is: Israel’s God will reveal righteousness and salvation, confronting pagan empire as the sovereign creator and rescuing the covenant people in the process. All this, too, will emerge at various points throughout the letter and the commentary.

We may, therefore, offer the following highly compressed summary account of the flow of thought in the letter, which gradually unpacks the summary statement of the introduction (1:1-17).

Chapters 1-4: God’s gospel unveils the fact that in the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel has been true to the covenant established with Abraham and has thereby brought saving order to the whole world. In the face of a world in rebellion and a chosen people unfaithful to their commission, God has, through the surrogate faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, created a worldwide – that is, a Jewish and Gentile – family for Abraham, marked out by the covenant sign of faith.

Chapters 5-8: God has thereby done what the covenant was set up to do: to address and solve the problem expressed in biblical terms as the sin of Adam. In the Messiah, Jesus, God has done for this new people what was done for Israel of old in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham: Redeemed from the Egypt of enslavement to sin, they are led through the wilderness of the present life by the Spirit (not by the Torah), and they look forward to the inheritance which will consist of the entire redeemed creation. This is how the creator will finally put the whole world to rights. All this is the result of God’s astonishing, unchanging, self-giving covenant love expressed completely and finally in the death of Jesus.

Chapters 9-11: This section highlights the peculiar tragedy of the gospel’s revelation of God’s righteousness-namely, the ironic failure of Israel to believe in the Messiah. This, too, however, turns out to be held within the strange purposes of God, whereby Israel’s fall, acting out on a grand scale the death of Jesus, is the means by which salvation can extend to the whole world. This cannot mean that Jews themselves are thereby forever debarred from participating in the covenant blessing; Paul himself is a counter-example, and God desires that even now, by recognizing that it is indeed their promised blessings that the Gentiles are enjoying, more of Paul’s fellow Jews will come to share in new covenant membership. Gentile Christians, therefore, are warned severely against anti-Jewish arrogance. The section ends with a paean of praise for the strange but glorious purposes of God.

Chapters 12-16: The community that is created by this gospel must live as the true, renewed humanity, in its internal and external life. In particular, it must reflect God’s intention that Jew and Gentile come together as one worshiping body in Christ. Paul’s own plans are bent to this end, and his greetings to different groups in the Roman church may indicate his desire to bring together disparate groups in common worship and mission.

Such a summary, which of course depends at every point on the commentary for explanation and justification, nevertheless enables us to ask, in conclusion: How then may we understand the letter’s situation, and how does the shape and detailed content of the letter address it?

The letter appears to have two main “situational” aims that surface in the great climactic passages 11:11-32 and 15:7-13. Each has in view the relationship between Jews and Gentiles; the former, however, addresses Christian Gentiles who are faced with non-Christian Jews, and the latter addresses a community in which Christian Gentiles and Christian Jews find themselves in uneasy coexistence. Although the details remain unclear, it is certain that a large proportion of Rome’s substantial Jewish population had to leave the city in the late 40s CE following rioting that may have resulted from early Christian preaching among the Jewish community in Rome.^¹⁵ The expulsion edict came from the Emperor Claudius after whose death in 54 the new emperor, Nero, rescinded his decrees, making it possible for the expelled Jews to return. This historical sequence produces a situation into which Romans fits like a glove.

Consider” on one hand, the position of Gentile Christians vis-a-vis non-Christian Jews. The Roman anti-Jewish sentiment, for which there is abundant evidence in late antiquity, would create a context in which many Romans would be glad to see the Jews gone and sorry to see them return.^¹⁶ How easy, then, would it be for the Gentile Christians who remained in Rome through the early 50s to imagine that God had somehow endorsed, at the theological level, what Caesar had enacted at the political level and that God had in fact written the hated Jews out of the covenant altogether. How easy, also, when the Jews returned to take up their property and positions in society, to suppose that, though the new faith would spread to include other Gentiles, there was no point in attempting to win over any more Jews.

But Paul was coming to Rome with a gospel that was “God’s power for salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16). If the Roman church were to accept his gospel, and indeed to support him in his missionary intention to go on from Rome to Spain, it was vital for them to realize that, even as the apostle to the Gentiles, he remained under obligation to his fellow Jews as well. Paul’s travel plans in chap. 15 are thus woven into the same picture: Having been undermined by the apparent failure of his earlier home base in Antioch to support him in his practice of incorporating believing Gentiles into the same social structure as believing Jews (see Gal 2:11-21), he was determined that in the western Mediterranean he was going to make things clear from the start.

Consider, on the other hand, the position of Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles in relation to them. Paul will have known of some Jewish Christians who had returned to Rome and who, alongside Gentile cobelievers, would now be facing the difficult question of how to live together as one family with those who cherished very different cultural traditions, not least food taboos. Paul knows that this will not be solved overnight and stresses instead a doctrine of adiaphora: There are some practical things over which Christians can legitimately disagree, and they should not impair common worship. Underneath it all is Paul’s desire that the Scriptures should be fulfilled: “Rejoice, you Gentiles, with God’s people!” (15:10, quoting Deut 32:43).

Romans 9-11 and 12-16 thus are explicable in terms of the double situation of the Roman church and Paul’s agendas in addressing them. Why, then, does he write chaps. 1-8? Are they just an extended introduction before Paul reaches his real point?

By no means. If he is to address the deep-rooted problems of the interrelationship between Jews and Gentiles within God’s purposes, Paul must go down to those deep roots themselves, to the foundations of Jewish and Christian thinking: to creation and fall, covenant and Torah to Israel’s covenant failure and God’s covenant faithfulness. He must show how the death and resurrection of Jesus, the basic announcement of “the gospel,” are God’s solution to the complex problems of Israel and the world and how these events have called into existence a people, composed of Jew and Gentile alike, led by God’s Spirit and defined not by Torah but by faith, in whom all the promises of God have come true. Only so can his hearers sense the poignant tragedy of Israel’s situation in Romans 9 and so move toward the main thrust of the letter. Only so can they appreciate the subtle logic of the argument that he then mounts. And only so can they be equipped for the larger questions that hover in the background – questions of the relation of Jesus’ new empire with that of Caesar, of the justice of God facing the justice of Rome.

At the same time, the chapters in which he lays the foundation for his specific arguments can stand almost on their own as a statement of what God has done in the Messiah for the whole world. Here we must be careful. Romans is a tightly knit, coherent whole with an inner logic that affects every word and sentence. But the arguments of chaps. 1-4, on the one hand, and chaps. 5-8, on the other, have their own integrity. This is perhaps particularly true of chaps. 5-8, with their christological refrains tolling like a great bell at the end of almost every section. Here, if anywhere, Paul is clearly making Jesus the lens through which one may see the saving plan of God working its way out. At the same time, one must quickly add that it is precisely this section, for just this reason, that sets up the argument of chaps. 9-11. It is not simply that, having written chaps. 1-8, he finds he has to go on to 9-11; it is just as much that, because he wants to write chaps. 9-11, he finds he must write 1-8 in this way. Thus in key passages in Romans 1-8, Paul seems deliberately to set up problems and questions that he then leaves hanging in the air, only to resume them in chaps. 9-11 (the most obvious place where this occurs is 3:1-8, on which, see the commentary).

There are, of course, many other matters often covered in an introduction to a biblical book. But these are the things of most value for the intended readers of this series to understand before proceeding further. Others will be covered at the appropriate points in the commentary itself.

Bryan, Christopher. A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Brief and helpful; copious reference to frequently overlooked ancient literature; interesting and original ideas and practical comments.

Byrne, Brendan. Romans. SP 6. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996. Deep scholarship; a light and wise touch; fresh insights.

Cranfield, C.E.B. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. ICC. 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T- Clark, 1975, 1979. Already a classic. A model of lucid, wide-ranging and judicious exegesis; a major contribution not just to Romans but to NT theology as a whole.

Dunn, James D. G. Romans 1-8 and Romans 9-16. WBC 38A and 38B. Dallas: Word, 1988. No none left unturned; some of the details that crawl out from underneath (innumerable secondary discussions in the unfootnoted text) may be more than the ordinary reader wants. A major representative of the so-called new Perspective on Paul.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans. AB 33. Garden City, NX: Doubleday, 1993. Thorough on bibliography and background details, not always reliable (though often very stimulating) on theological judgments. With Byrne, the most important Roman Catholic commentary of recent years.

Kasemann, Ernst. Commentary on Romans. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. London: SCM, 1980. Possibly the most important book on Paul since the Second World War. Rigorous in exegesis, robustly Protestant in theology, bracing in application. Not for the beginner, but exhilarating for those ready for a challenge.

Moo, Douglas J. The Epistle to the Romans. NICNT Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. The most thorough and learned of recent Protestant expositions. Solidly evangelical but not afraid to find his own way through interpretative dilemmas.

Donfried, Karl P. The Romans Debate. Rev. ed. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991. Useful collection of 23 important essays on the background, occasion, and content of Romans.

Dunn, James D.G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Full, detailed, thoroughly annotated, but clear and readable. Modeled in outline on Romans: at one level, a traditional presentation of topics in Paul; at another, many important fresh interpretations (e.g., on “works of the law”) for which Dunn has become famous.

Hay, David M., and E. Elizabeth Johnson, eds. Pauline Theology. Vol. III: Romans. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Papers from the SBL Pauline Theology seminar, including several important discussions.

Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Seminal monograph, already something of a classic. Explores Paul’s complex use of Israel’s scriptures; a one-line quotation can evoke a whole biblical passage or context, thereby revealing deeper meanings in Paul.

Horsley, Richard A., ed. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997. Essays, with important introductions by the editor, highlighting the Roman imperial context (including ideology and emperor cult), whose significance for understanding Paul is only now beginning to be felt.

Sanders, E. P. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983. Sequel to the same author’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), which marked a watershed in Pauline studies. Detailed discussions of key texts, including several from Romans.

Wagner, J. Ross. Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul “In Concert” in the Letter to the Romans. NovTSup 101. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Isaiah was one of Paul’s most important biblical sources; this book discusses what he did with it. Full of patient and wise scholarship on the meaning of the letter.

Wright, N. T. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Detailed discussion of key texts on christology and the law, including several on Romans.

--------. The New Testament and the People of God. Vol. I of Christian Origins and the Question of God. London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992. Early Christianity within its historical and theological settings.

B. 1:18-3:20, The Challenge for God’s Righteousness: Gentiles and Jews Alike Under God’s Wrath, Guilty of Idolatry and Wickedness

A. 9:1-5, Paul’s Grief Over Israel’s Failure to Believe, Despite Being Promise Bearer

B. 9:6-29, The Story of Israel, from Abraham to the Exile, Displays God’s Justice in Judgment and Mercy

D. 11:1-36, The Salvation of “All Israel” in Fulfillment of God’s Unbreakable Promises

F. 14:1-15:13 God’s Call to Unity of Life and Worship Across Barriers of Custom and Ethnic Identity

The letter’s main subjects are laid out in the first four chapters. The introduction (1:1-17) offers a dense statement of the theme: In the gospel announcement of the risen Jesus as Messiah and Lord, the one true God has unveiled covenant faithfulness and justice, God’s own faithfulness and justice, for the benefit of all who believe. Paul then launches into a description of the world that has worshiped other gods and has reaped a harvest of dehumanization, moral deterioration, and condemnation (1:18-3:20). Though the spearhead of this attack (1:18-2:16) corresponds to regular Jewish polemic against the pagan world, Paul sharpens it up with specifically Christian notes, and he hints that Israel itself is included in the general indictment. He turns in 2:17-29 specifically to his own people, the Jews; while endorsing their claim to be the people chosen by God to bring light to the world, their own prophets indicate that they have failed in this vocation and are in danger of relinquishing their special status.

This raises acutely these questions (3:1-9): What is the point of being part of God’s chosen people in the first place? How is God righteous in the whole sequence of events? Putting off these questions for the moment with very brief answers, Paul stresses both the faithlessness of Israel and the abiding faithfulness of God. But to place the issue beyond doubt he mounts a list of biblical passages (3:10.18) that all point one way: The Jews have joined the Gentiles in the dock, with nothing to say in their defense. All are equally guilty before the impartial judge.

This conclusion poses a classic question within world of Second Temple Judaism. What happens when God’s intended covenant faithfulness appears to be in conflict with the demands of impartial justice--when the double meaning of “the righteousness of God” seems to contradict itself? Paul’s answer is emphatic (3:21-4:25): In Jesus the Messiah, God has been true both to the covenant with Abraham and to the demands of justice. As a result, there is now a Jew-plus-Gentile people of God, the true children of Abraham, marked out by faith rather than works of Torah.

All this has come about “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah” (3:22). Jesus has accomplished--to put it another way, God has accomplished through Jesus--what Israel failed to accomplish. God’s own covenant faithfulness is thus unveiled at last, an event to which the law and prophets pointed but that they could not bring about. The “faithfulness” of the Messiah, the subject matter of the gospel itself, denotes specifically his death, seen as the culmination of his whole “obedience.” This faithful obedience (or obedient faithfulness) was the means of dealing with sin and hence of creating a forgiven people. The badge of membership in the renewed people of God is faith, not works of the Torah, which would have restricted apparent membership to Jews and proselytes and would in any case have condemned everyone (since all alike are sinful). However, since the gospel of Jesus thus creates a single family for the one God of Jews and Gentiles alike, the Torah itself, in which confession of this one God is central, is strangely fulfilled.

All this has come about in fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham (4:1-25). Abraham is the father, not just of Jews, but of all who believe. In a lengthy exposition of Genesis 15 (the chapter in which God made the initial covenant with Abraham), Paul demonstrates that the promises to the patriarch were not conditioned by works (Rom 4:2-8), by circumcision (Rom 4:9-12), or by Torah (Rom 4:13-15). God has now created, through faith, the single family promised in the first place (Rom 4:16-17), consisting of believing Jews and believing Gentiles. In a closing peroration (Rom 4:18-25), Paul echoes his indictment of pagan humanity in 1:18-32 and shows by implication how the problem has been undone. Abraham’s faith is the characteristic mark of genuine, God-honoring humanity. This new family, called into being by the gospel, is marked out by faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 4:23-25; for Paul’s view that the gospel was already, in a sense, preached to Abraham himself, see Gal 3:81.

The first main statement of Paul’s chests is thus complete. The gospel of Jesus the Messiah unveils the righteousness, the covenant faithfulness, the justice of God in such a way as to bring into being the single family promised to Abraham, characterized by faith in this Jesus. Paul has constructed this argument in such a way as to prepare carefully for the points he wishes to address in chaps. 9-11 and 12-16. To develop these lines of thought, however, and to address the questions connected with them, he needs to lay still deeper foundations. Chapters 1-4, by also leading naturally into chaps. 5-8, point to where those foundations are to be found.

NIV: ¹Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God-- ²the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures ³regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, ⁴and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. ⁵Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. ⁶And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

NRSV: ¹Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, ²which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, ³the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh ⁴and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, ⁵through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, ⁶including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

Paul introduces himself in terms of his vocation and defines that vocation in terms of the gospel. The opening seven verses of the letter move swiftly from Paul to the gospel, back to Paul and his ministry, and out into the world, which includes the Roman Christians. As usual, he introduces, within the formal structure of a letter opening, the themes that will occupy him in what is to come.

1:1-2. Paul announces himself with the word that, above all others in his world, carried overtones of social degradation. Slaves had no rights, no property, and no prospects; they were simply there to do what they were told. Modifying this to “servant,” as though Paul were a free agent who happened to have a job as a cleaner or butler, misses the point. Paul will claim no social standing in his approach to the greatest imperial capital his world had ever known.

Slave though he be, however, his master is the King before whom other kings should quail, and he can thus hold up his head not on his own account but on that of “king Jesus.” By transliterating Χριστός (Christos) rather than translating it, most English versions of Paul have encouraged the view that the word had already become a proper name for Paul. This, however, is misleading: Paul’s careful and differentiated usage of “Christ,” “Jesus,” and for that matter “Lord” leads to the conclusion that he intended each word to carry its own set of overtones.^¹⁷ And the overtones of “Christ”--i.e., “Messiah”--are, as we shall presently see, clearly royal: The Messiah is the anointed king of Israel who in Scripture was supposed to be the ruler of all other earthly monarchs (see, e.g., Pss 72:8-11; 89:27; Isa 11:1-4). It is because Paul is the slave announcing the king that he can call his message “gospel” (see below).^¹⁸

Paul’s two further self-designations, building on the slave-of-the-king status, are both significant for this letter. First, he is “called apostle” or “apostle by God’s call” (NEB). “Call” in Paul’s writings usually refers, not to the specific vocation of which a Christian may gradually become aware, but to the moment when the gospel message of Jesus first makes its saving impact on him or her. Here, in the light of Gal 1:15-16, the two ideas seem to be run together: Paul’s “conversion” was also his “vocation” to be the apostle to the nations. There is a further consonance between the words; elsewhere Paul seems to define what he means by “apostle” in terms of those who had actually seen the risen Jesus (1 Cor 9:1), alluding not least to his own moment of seeing Jesus on the Damascus road. For him, conversion and calling were both contained in the one event.

In parallel with this vocation, Paul has been marked off from others, including (it seems) from other apostles, others who had seen the risen Jesus. The word translated “set apart” (άφορίζω aphorizo) indicates God’s intention: If a slave is a piece of property, the owner has set this piece apart from other uses and focused it on one in particular, the service of “the gospel.” “Set apart” may also reflect, with wry irony, the self-description of a Pharisee who had considered himself “separated” from the common herd of ordinary Jews. If Paul is in any sense a Christian Pharisee, it is because he has now been separated out as a slave, given a particular commission by which he is defined from now on.

“The gospel of God” is thus at the heart of Paul’s self-definition and self-understanding. The word “gospel” (εύαγγέλιον euangelion) referred in early Christianity to the proclamation about Jesus before it was used to denote particular books; Paul uses the term to denote the message, or announcement, that he was making around the Mediterranean world. In Paul’s Jewish world, the word looked back to Isa 40:9 and 52:7, where a messenger was to bring to Jerusalem the good news of Babylon’s defeat, the end of Israel’s exile, and the personal return of YHWH to Zion. In the pagan world Paul addressed, the same Greek word referred to the announcement of the accession or the birthday of a ruler or emperor. Here already we find Paul at the interface of his two worlds. His message about Jesus was both the fulfillment of prophecy, as v. 2 indicates, and the announcement of one whose rule posed a challenge to all other rulers.^¹⁹ Though the word “gospel” itself occurs infrequently in Romans, it is truly part of the main theme, since its content, Jesus Christ, forms the substructure of the entire train of thought.

The gospel is not, strictly speaking, Paul’s own property (though he refers to it as “my gospel” in 2:16); it is God’s. As noted in the Introduction, the word “God” occurs far more times, proportionately, in Romans than in Paul’s other writings. This letter is about the way in which, though the lens of the gospel, the covenant plan and purpose of the one true God have been unveiled before the world. Paul’s view of God remained deeply Jewish; he believed that the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the creator of the world, had now brought world history to its climax in Jesus. Paul is urging the Roman Christians to understand this purpose, and their own place within it, so that they can then live and work appropriately and, indeed, support Paul’s apostolic task as well. The fact that the gospel is God’s means that Paul is entrusted with an awesome responsibility. He is like one in charge of distributing royal bounty.

1:13a. The gospel is a message about God’s Son. This is another key phrase that, although it occurs quite seldom in the letter, naturally takes center stage. Paul, in fact, lived at a moment of transition in the history of this phrase and helped it on its way to subsequent development. In the OT, “son of God” can refer to angels (Gen 6:2; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Dan 3:25; cf. Dan 3:28; Song of Three 26). But its better known referents are Israel, adopted as God’s child explicitly at the time of the exodus and looking back to that moment in order to plead for subsequent deliverance (Exod 4:22; Jet 31:9; Hos 11:1; 13:13; Mal 1:6); and the king, adopted as YHWH’s firstborn son--the seed of David who is also the son of God (I Sam 7:14 [quoted with this sense in 4Q174 10-13; cf. 4Q246 2:1]; 1 Chr 17:13; Pss 2:7; 89:26-27).^²⁰ These two senses belong together, since in some Jewish thought the Davidic king represents Israel, so that what is true of him is true of the people. To belong to Israel, in a passage that seems to have become proverbial, is to be “in David” or “in the son of Jesse, (1 Sam 19:43-20:2; cf. 1 Kgs 12:16: 2 Chr 10:16). The natural meaning of the phrase “God’s gospel concerning his son,” therefore, is “God’s announcement, in fulfillment of prophecy, of the royal enthronement of the Messiah, Israel’s anointed king, the lord of the world.”

There is a huge difference between all this and the much later Christian usage in which “son of God” comes to be a simple predication of Jesus’ divinity. We should not allow this difference, however, to obscure the fact that already in Paul, at least as early as Gal 4:1-7, we find the phrase used in a way that, while still rooted in this Jewish tradition of Israel/kingship, now draws on other Jewish imagery, such as God’s sending of Wisdom to make the point that the “son” is one sent into the world not only as a messenger but also as the personal expression of God’s love and purpose. As we shall see later in Romans, the arguments work only if we postulate a fundamental identity between “the son” and God’s own very self--alongside, of course, the differentiation inherent the father/son division. This raises further questions to which Paul provides no answers, only hints. But it does suggest that the earliest Christian incarnational theology known to us remained deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, however much it was saying things no one had said before.

1:3b-4. The “son” is then described in a complex double statement concerning Jesus’ human descent, on the one hand, and the meaning of his resurrection, on the other. Like many of Paul’s more formulaic passages, this passage has generated speculation that we are here dealing with that hypothetical entity the “pre-Pauline formula,” which Paul has quoted, quite possibly adapting or modifying it as he did so, in order not least to establish his credentials with an audience to whom the formula would have been familiar.^²¹ It is, of course, quite possible that Paul might use formulae known to his readers but not otherwise to us, and the present passage might indeed be a case in point. But it must be stressed, here and elsewhere, that the reason why Paul quoted things, if he did, was that they expressed exactly what he intended to say at the time. As we shall see throughout this commentary, the christology of 1:3,4 is by no means an isolated statement attached loosely to the front of the letter but not relevant to its contents. It is the careful, weighted, programmatic statement of what will turn out to be Paul’s subtext throughout the whole epistle (see also 9:5; and 15:12, the final scriptural quotation of the main body of the letter).

In particular, the “discovery” of pre-Pauline fragments such as this has sometimes been employed as a way of distancing Paul from the precise emphases of the passage. Often this is done to make him appear less “Jewish” than the statement seems to be (see the Commentary on 3:24-26). In the present case, it is pointed out that Paul nowhere else refers to Jesus’ Davidic sonship; it is often assumed (less often argued) that Paul had moved away from Jewish messianic ideas altogether.^²² Themes are more important than words; once we understand how messianic ideas functioned for Paul we discover them throughout his writings. In particular, as we shall see in its proper place, his incorporative christology (“in Christ” and similar expressions) is best explained in terms of the Messiah’s role of summing up his people in himself. There is also a persistent tendency in traditional Pauline scholarship to play down Jewish messianic ideas on the grounds that this makes Paul’s theology more political. One could equally well argue the other way: Because Paul’s theology, and for that matter his life, was so obviously political, in senses to be explored in the commentary, it is scarcely surprising that we discover Jewish messianic ideas at the center of his writings.^²³

Whether or not Paul wrote vv. 3-4 from scratch himself (and we must guard against assuming that a writer such as Paul was incapable of dictating an apparently formulaic statement off the top of his head, especially as he had had countless occasions to sum up his message orally before a wide variety of audiences), the passage as it stands offers a striking statement of that messianic view of Jesus that we shall discover at the heart of the letter. God’s son, declares Paul, was born of the seed of David and marked out as “son of God” by the resurrection. As it stands, shorn of extra explanatory (but also, to us, confusing) clauses and granted what has been said about the meaning of “God’s son” in Jewish tradition, this is a reasonably straightforward two-part statement of Jesus’ Messiahship.^²⁴ (1) Jesus was born of David’s line;^²⁵ (2) the resurrection declared to the world that he really was the Messiah and had been so all along.^²⁶ This, indeed, was almost certainly where Paul’s Christian thinking began: with the recognition, at or shortly after his Damascus road experience, that the Jesus he had thought to be a false Messiah was after all the true one (cf. Gal 1:16; Acts 9:20, 22, where it is clear that “son of God” and “Messiah” are virtually interchangeable).^²⁷

To the first phrase Paul adds “according to the flesh,” intending, of course, to clarify the sense of Jesus’ Davidic descent, but also thereby opening a can of worms for the interpreter. Earlier readers, still reflected in the NIV, took the double statement as expressing Jesus’ “humanity,” on the one hand, and his “divinity,” on the other, and thus read “according to the flesh” as referring to his “human nature.” But “flesh” (σάρξ sarx) is never simply “human nature” for Paul; nor is it simply a reference to physical humanness as opposed to nonphysical aspects, such as soul or spirit. It is always human nature seen as corruptible, decaying, dying, on the one hand, and/or rebelling, and deceiving, and sinning, on the other. “Flesh” always carries negative overtones somewhere on this scale, whereas for Paul being human was not something negative, but good and God-given and to be reaffirmed in the resurrection. In any case, Paul has given no hint at this stage in the letter that he intends “son of God” to be taken in an explicitly “divine” sense. Since Messiahship (which in the Jewish world, of course, carried no overtones of “divinity”) is the main theme of the passage, we should be careful not to overexegete it in the light of other, fuller Pauline statement--or, indeed, of later Christian tradition.

Others have seen “according to the flesh” as Paul’s way of hinting that, while Jesus was indeed of the seed of David, this was not the most significant thing about him. In other words, this was Paul’s way of distancing himself from Jewish messianic beliefs in order to hurry on to the more important point about Jesus’ divine sonship. This, too, is misleading for the reasons already given. The whole point of Paul’s gospel is that Jesus, precisely as Israel’s Messiah, is now Lord of the world. That belief informs and undergirds much of this letter.

This relationship between 1:3-4 and the rest of Romans indicates what Paul means by adding “according to the flesh” and “according to the spirit.” Jesus the Messiah is the one in whom God’s people find their identity and salvation; he has come where they are in order to rescue them (more fully stated in 8:3-4; cf. Gal 4:4-5). His human, “fleshly” (in Paul’s sense) identity is the place where he does for Adamic humanity that which Adamic humanity could not do for itself. Verse 3 thus looks ahead to 5:12-21 and all the elements of chaps, 6-8 that follow from it. It is also evoked by 9:5, which, as we shall see, restates a very similar two-part christology, making it the ground plan of the argument of chaps. 9-11: Jesus is Israel’s Messiah according to the flesh and is also (now at last explicitly) “God over all, blessed for ever.”

Although, therefore, “according to the flesh” Carries negative connotations, Paul is not denying or playing down Jesus’ physical Davidic descent and Jewish Messiahship. They are part of God’s saving plan. But, as Paul knew, Jesus’ public career and horrible fate had been very different from that expected of a Messiah. We know of several other messianic movements in first-century Judaism, and none of them looked like this--though many of them ended up equally horribly and were thereby shown up as false, as non-messianic.^²⁸

One still frequently meets the suggestion that the pre-Christian Paul rejected Jesus’ Messiahship for purely theological reasons--e.g., that Jesus had been crucified and was, therefore, according to Deuteronomy, cursed by God. This proposal comes from a milieu where “history of ideas” has ousted history itself. A crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah; no first-century Jew would have needed theological exegesis of a particular text in order to make that point. The Messiah had a task: to rebuild or cleanse the Temple, to defeat the pagans, to rescue Israel and bring God’s justice to the world. Anyone who died without accomplishing these things, particularly one who attacked the Temple and died at the hands of the pagans he should have been defeating, leaving Israel unredeemed and the world still unjust, was obviously not the true Messiah. This is why it took something utterly extraordinary to make anyone suppose that Jesus was in fact the Messiah, Paul is clear: It was the resurrection that marked Jesus out as “son of God” (v. 4). The resurrection reversed the verdict that all thoughtful first-century Jews would have passed on Jesus at the time of his crucifixion. If such a Messiah could not be fitted in to existing conceptions of what Israel’s God was supposed to be doing, that was too bad. The existing conceptions would have to be rethought around him. That, indeed, was the intellectual dimension of Paul’s lifework.

Jesus was declared to be son of God “in power.” This phrase seems to refer both to the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead (see I Cor 6:14; 15:24, 43; 2 Cor 13:4; Eph 1:19-20; Phil 3:10) and that thereby declared his identity as Messiah, and to the powerful nature of his sonship, through which he confronts all the powers of the world, up to and including death itself, with the news of a different and more effective type of power altogether. Paul, of course, sees this same power at work now, by the Spirit, through the proclamation of the gospel and in the lives of those who are “in the Messiah” (see, e.g., 1:16; 11:23; 15:13; 1 Cor 1:24; 2:4-5).

Balancing “according to the flesh” in v. 3 is “according to the spirit of holiness” in v. 4. This apparent semitism (“Spirit of holiness” for “Holy Spirit”) is unique, lending some further weight to the suggestion of a pre-Pauline formula--which would, nevertheless, thereby include the characteristically Pauline flesh/spirit antithesis. It is just conceivable that Paul intends to mark, by this phrase, the difference between the Spirit by whom Jesus was raised from the dead and the Spirit, now to be known as the Spirit of Jesus, who dwells in the hearts of believers. Even though these are ultimately the same Spirit, there are two different stages of operation. The point is that, for Paul, God raised Jesus from the dead by the power of the Spirit (see 8:11), in line with scriptural promises that attributed to the breath, wind, or Spirit of God the promised new life on the other side of death, and more particularly the new hope for exiled and desolate Israel (Ezek 37:5, 9-10, 14; Joel 3:1-5; the same Hebrew word [חור rûah] stands for “breath,” “wind,” and “spirit”; so too with the Greek πνεΰμα [pneuma]). This formulation, therefore, provides further grounding for Paul’s coming description of God’s rescue, in the Messiah, of the old, fleshly humanity and God’s constitution, in the Messiah, of the new humanity, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit” (8:4). This contrast has nothing to do with that dualism that denies or downgrades human physicality. The spirit was, after all, responsible in Paul’s view for Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Rather, it has to do with the direction of a person’s life, in both senses: the question of who is directing it and the question of which route it is taking.

The spirit thus marked out Jesus as son of God “by the resurrection of the dead.” The word “dead” is plural in the Greek. The NIV reads “his resurrection,” which obscures the point; for Paul the Jew, “the resurrection” was something that would happen at the end, when all God’s people would be raised to life together. What had happened to Jesus, Paul believed, was the bringing forward into the present of this general resurrection, in one particular case, which still belonged organically to, and anticipated, the total “resurrection of the dead” (cf. I Cor 15:20-22; and see the Commentary on 6:9). This is important for understanding Paul in general and Romans in particular: Paul saw the event of Easter as the start and foretaste of God’s long-promised new age, “the age to come” that he and many other Jews had been expecting.^²⁹ The resurrection told Paul not only who Jesus was (the Messiah), but also what time it was (the start of the “age to come”).

Paul’s initial summary of the gospel is rounded off with Jesus’ full Pauline title: “Jesus, Messiah, our Lord.” “Jesus” for Paul regularly refers to the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, now risen and exalted but still the same human Jesus. When Paul writes “Christ,” he still means “Messiah,” the one in whom Israel’s destiny is summed up and brought to proper fulfillment; the word is on its way to being a name (denoting Jesus but no longer connoting Messiahship), but it has not reached that point in Paul. “Lord” expresses both the exalted humanity of Jesus, including his superior position to all other “lords” in the world, and the sometimes explicit ascription of divinity. This is seen most clearly when Paul, speaking of Jesus, quotes passages from the LXX where “Lord” (κύριος kyrios) stands, as he well knew, for “YHWH,” the divine name (e.g., Rom 10:13). The possessive pronoun “our” is not a way of limiting the sphere of Jesus’ lordship, but of giving explicit allegiance to the one who is, for Paul, lord of the whole world, supreme over all others.

This, then, is Paul’s shorthand summary of “the gospel of God.” Despite the unusual diction of these verses, their meaning is not only consonant with his theological views of Jesus but is closely tied to the letter’s developing line of thought. Note that for Paul “the gospel” is not a system of salvation, a message first and foremost about how human beings get saved. It is an announcement about Jesus, the Messiah, the Lord.^³⁰

1:5. The shorthand summary complete, Paul returns to his introduction of himself and his vocation. Through this Jesus, Paul has received “grace and apostleship” (possibly a hendiadys--two words used to express one idea--meaning, “the grace of apostleship”) with a particular purpose: to call the έθνη (ethnē, “nations”), the Gentiles, into covenant relationship with the one God of Israel so that the name of Jesus might be glorified throughout the world (cf. Mal 1:5, 14).

The shorthand expression he uses to describe this relationship is “the obedience of faith.” It is possible that by this dense phrase he means, as in the NIV, “the obedience that comes from faith,” but it is much more likely that he means “the obedience which consists in faith.”^³¹ “Obedience” is a more prominent theme in Romans than elsewhere in the NT (elsewhere in Paul only in 2 Cor 7:15; 10:56; Phlm 21 ). It serves as a shorthand both for the total work of Jesus the Messiah, over against that of Adam (5:19), and as the sphere or realm into which, or under the rule of which, Christians come through baptism (6:12-17). Paul can again use it as a summary of that which he seeks to bring about among the nations (15:18; cf. 16:19) and in a concluding formula that closely echoes this opening one (16:26; on the textual status of this verse see the Commentary on 16:25-27).

What overtones should we hear in this dense phrase? “Obedience” in Greek is ύπακοή (hypakoē, a compound from the verb άκούω akouō, “hear”). Regularly in the LXX it translates עמש (šāma’), which carries not only the meaning “hear and obey,” but also the connotation, emphasized in the regular Jewish daily prayer, of personal covenant obligations: “Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one; and you shall love YHWH your God” (Deut 6:4-5). To bring the nations into “obedience” would therefore mean to bring them into the family of this one God. The fact that Paul refers explicitly to the Shema prayer at the very point when he is saying just this (3:29-30) is a further indication that this train of thought is in his mind, albeit here expressed in very compact form.

Of course, the actual notion of “obedience”--doing what one is told--is itself important. Generations of theologians have worried whether this emphasis on obedience, so early in a letter supposedly about “justification by faith alone,” does not suggest the priority of good moral works rather than pure faith.^³² Such anxiety misses the point. When Paul thinks of Jesus as Lord, he thinks of himself as a slave and of the world as being called to obedience to Jesus’ lordship. His apostolic commission is not to offer people a new religious option, but to summon them to allegiance to Jesus, which will mean abandoning other loyalties. The gospel issues a command, an imperial summons; the appropriate response is obedience.

The “obedience” Paul seeks to evoke when he announces the gospel is thus not a list of moral good works but faith. Faith, as Paul explains later (10:9), consists in confessing Jesus as Lord (thereby renouncing other lords) and in believing that God raised Jesus from the dead (thereby abandoning other worldviews in which such things did or could not happen, or not to Jesus; cf. too 4:23-25). This faith is actually the human faithfulness that answers to God’s faithfulness. As we will discover in chap. 3, that is why this “faith” is the only appropriate badge of membership within God’s true, renewed people. Despite the anxieties of some, therefore, that Paul is undermining his own doctrine of “justification by faith” before he has even stated it, v. 5 really does look ahead to Paul’s exposition of justification, even though it places that theme in a rather different context from that which some expositors have assumed.

1:6-7. Paul has now drawn a miniature map of God’s purpose, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, proclaimed in the apostolic gospel. To this he adds a pointer: “you are here.”^³³ The church in Rome, predominantly Gentile, though now once again including some Jews (see the Introduction), is included among those who have given allegiance, “the obedience which consists in faith,” to the gospel of Jesus. They are, therefore, literally “called of Jesus Christ.” As the translations (e.g., the NIV) suggest, this can be expanded as “called to belong to Jesus Christ,” but we should not thereby place the emphasis on “belong” at the expense of “called.” For Paul, the “call” was God’s powerful word, creating new life--creating indeed, the response it sought, as a word of love is always capable of doing. And it is to the love of God that Paul now appeals, not for the last time: God’s beloved in Rome,” he labels the church, “called to be saints.” Both of these phrases, while carrying their own echoes of love and holiness, look back inevitably to the status of God’s people in the past, the people whom Paul sees as now renewed and expanded so as to include believing Gentiles as well as Jews.

The greeting that follows, after this densely packed introduction of Paul and his gospel, is straightforward, though this should not deceive us into treating it lightly. “Grace” and “peace” are two of Paul’s greatest words for God’s gift in the Messiah. The former reaches out to those currently in rebellion; the latter gives them the central covenant blessing. And, consonant with the gospel itself, Paul couples “the Lord Jesus Messiah” with “God our Father” as the source of these gifts. The latter phrase, too, is clearly rooted in the OT, indicating that Paul is claiming for himself and his readers the status of Israel before God--indicating, too, in the light of the gospel, that the people of God are to be seen as siblings of the firstborn son (8:29). (See Reflections at 1:16-17.)

NIV: ⁸First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. ⁹God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you ¹⁰in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you. ¹¹I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong-- ¹²that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. ¹³I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. ¹⁴I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. ¹⁵That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.

NRSV: ⁸First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the world. ⁹For God, whom I serve with my spirit by announcing the gospel of his Son, is my witness that without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers, ¹⁰asking that by God’s will I may somehow at last succeed in coming to you. ¹¹For I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you-- ¹²or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. ¹³I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as I have among the rest of the Gentiles. ¹⁴I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish ¹⁵--hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

This section actually runs on without a break into the next one (vv. 16-17). Since, however, the latter forms such a crucial summary of the whole letter, it will be better to treat it separately.

As usual, Paul follows his introduction with a report of the prayer he offers for the recipients. The formal style does not indicate mere formality. Paul’s writing is set in the context of an ongoing ministry of prayer, and if he had to choose between praying and writing, he would have regarded prayer as more important. Here he reports his regular thanksgivings for the faith of the Roman church and his unceasing prayer that he might be able to visit them. This passes naturally into a further statement of his own apostolic vocation, amplifying what has already been said in 5 and explaining further his desire to come to Rome. This in turn leads to his summary of the letter’s thesis in vv. 16 17.

1:8-12. Hyperbole it may be, but it is still no mean thing to say that the faith of the Roman church was proclaimed “in all the world.” Presumably this means that travelers known to Paul, not least Jewish Christians who had had to leave Rome under Claudius, were reporting the arrival in the capital of this strange new sect, neither ethnically Jewish (all the Christians in Rome for five years being Gentiles) nor pagan. There is unlikely to be a particular reason why he stresses their “faith” here, rather than, say, obedience (as in 16:19) or love (as in Col 1:8). What matters is that they are an authentic Christian congregation, for whom Paul thanks God through Jesus the Messiah (another formula that is hardly a formality). Paul often speaks of his “unceasing” prayers, referring probably to his keeping of regular times of prayer each day, though not excluding the sense of being “in prayer” at all times, standing in the presence of God with the churches on his heart and mind.

He calls God to witness to this in a somewhat strange phrase (v. 9). Although regularly translated as “whom I serve with my spirit by announcing the gospel” (it is unclear why the NIV has “whole heart” for “spirit”), the verb in question (λατρεύω latreuō), when it has a divine being as its object, regularly means “worship.” The thought is not so much that Paul performs service for God by announcing the gospel, but that Paul worships God in his spirit (cf. Phil 3:3; there may be an implied contrast with the temple cult, with its geographical focus and physical activity), and that he does so “in the gospel” (the literal translation), either in the sense that his announcing of the gospel constitutes in itself an act of worship or in the sense that he worships the Cod he sees revealed in “the gospel of his son” (i.e., as in v. 3, the gospel concerning the son of God).

Paul’s primary request, in these constant prayers, has not been so much for the growth in Christian character of the Roman church, as we might have expected, but that he will be able, in God’s good time, to visit them. However, the ultimate purpose remains similar: He hopes to be able to impart “some spiritual gift” to strengthen them. Speculation about what he had in mind in this cryptic phrase should be quickly put to rest by v. 12, which may be intended to preempt any suggestion that the Roman church, founded by someone other than Paul, was lacking anything basic in its status as a Christian community. Paul’s hope is simply for the mutual encouragement that comes from meeting and sharing in fellowship with others who have the same faith (Paul expands this further in 15:14-29).

1:13-15. “I do not want you to be unaware,” Paul’s slightly heavy-handed double negative indicates caution. This springs, we may guess, from his anxiety about building on someone else’s foundation (cf. 15:20). He is facing the implicit question, “Why would you, a pioneer evangelist, want to come to a place where a church already exists?” To this his answer is twofold, in both cases presenting a personal appeal.^³⁴

First, he has been eager to come for a long time, so that he can “reap some harvest among you, as among the other nations” (v. 13). Since there were at this time probably not more than a few dozen, or at most a couple of hundred, Christians in a city of roughly a million, this would not indicate a lack of confidence in the Roman church’s own evangelistic performance or prospects. Anyway, so far his eagerness has come to nothing. “I have been prevented” may indicate a sense that God has not permitted it or perhaps that Satan has hindered it, or even both. (The Corinthian correspondence indicates well enough how Paul’s plans could be thwarted; see, e.g., 2 Cor 1:15-19.) Either way, he remains undeterred.

Second, Paul’s commission places him under obligation, not just to God, but to all categories of non-Jewish humanity, Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish (v. 14). He does not mean that they have done something for him for which he owes a them a return, but simply that God has entrusted him with a message for them; until he has discharged this commission he is still, in that sense, in their debt, retaining in his possession something that properly belongs to them. Thus, even though there may already be a church in Rome, his sense of obligation includes that city also (v. 15). This double reason is presented as a personal desire and obligation, appealing to the Roman Christians as fellow Christians, members of the same family (cf. Gal 4:12.20 for a similarly personal appeal). (See Reflections at 1:16-17.)

NIV: ¹⁶I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. ¹⁷For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

NRSV: ¹⁶For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.

This brings us to the great statement of the letter’s theme, which is noted in the Introduction. Paul offers it as the further explanation of his desire to come to Rome and announce the gospel there. It consists of an opening statement and two successive explanations, backed up with a scriptural quotation. This style of arguing, with clauses linked by the word “for” (γάρ gar), is characteristic of many passages in Romans and elsewhere. Frequently the final explanatory clause expresses the deepest thing Paul wishes to say: A is so because B; B is so because C; C is so because D; and D is thus the foundation of the whole sequence. This is undoubtedly the pattern here.^³⁵

1:16. Just as King Herod looms over much of the Gospel narratives, so also Caesar, the Roman emperor, looms unmentioned over several passages in Paul’s works. Caesar was the current lord of the world, whose position was by implication challenged and threatened by the Jewish Messiah, who claimed the same role. To come to Rome with the gospel of Jesus, to announce someone else’s accession to the world’s throne, therefore, was to put on a red coat and walk into a field with a potentially angry bull. (This proposal might seem to be in tension with 13:1-7, but see the commentary there).

Paul is determined not to shrink from this calling; he is “not ashamed of the gospel.” There may be a hint here of the tradition of Jesus’ words to the disciples about people being ashamed of him (Mark 8:38 and par.). The explanation (gar) for Paul’s not being ashamed is not simply that he is a brazen optimist, marching cheerfully toward danger while sensible people are fleeing in the opposite direction. The explanation is that the gospel, this message about Jesus that he has outlined in vv. 3-4, is itself God’s power. It not merely “possesses” God’s power or “is accompanied by” God’s power but simply is God’s power. Paul has discovered in practice, in city after city, that announcing the good news--that there is one God who now claims the world as his own through the crucified and risen Jesus--is in itself powerful and that the power is all God’s (cf. 1 Cor 2:4-5; 1 Thess 1:5).

Paul, as so often, has expressed this point in such a way as to evoke a biblical tradition. “In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust,” says the psalmist; “let me never be ashamed, deliver me in thy righteousness” (Ps 71:1-2: cf. Pss 31:13; 143:1; Psalm 71 continues to emphasize the same theme in vv. 15-16, 19, 24, by which time it is the psalmist’s opponents who are “ashamed,” while he continues to speak of God’s righteousness). “Shame” in such a context is what God’s people feel when their enemies are triumphing; it is what Israel (and many other peoples) felt in Paul’s day, suffering at the hands of Rome. The gospel, and the power it carries, enables Paul to share the position of the psalmist, celebrating God’s righteousness and so remaining unashamed in the face of enemies and gainsayers.^³⁶

The power unleashed within the gospel message is “for salvation.” “Salvation” is another of those “Christian” technical terms, like “son of God,” for which most readers today assume a particular meaning that is actually a much later development. Paul’s readers had not had the dubious benefit of expositions of “salvation” that focused simply on the state of post-mortem bliss enjoyed by the redeemed in a more or less disembodied “heaven.” Of course, Paul’s view of God’s saving purposes included, as we shall see, the belief that death itself was now a defeated enemy; his doctrine of salvation was in that sense ultimate, not merely penultimate. It had to do, not merely with rescue from evils in the present life, but with rescue from ultimate destruction. But the context of meaning remained Jewish, and in that setting “salvation” had far more to do with the rescue of Israel from pagan oppression, from Egypt or Babylon or, now, Rome, than with “life after death.” Insofar as Romans 5-8 expound Paul’s theology of “salvation,” it is of the utmost importance to note that the climax of that passage is the redemption of creation itself. If we are right to hear all these overtones, we will also hear in this word, in the present context, a mention of that benefit that Caesar was supposed to give to his loyal followers. As in Phil 3:20-21, Jesus turns out to be the reality of which Caesar is the parody. Just as there is only one “lord of the world,” so also in the last analysis there is only one “savior.”^³⁷

The salvation in question is “for everyone who believes.” Paul will explain the significance Christian faith in chap. 3, and further explanation will be deferred to that point. Here as there, however, part of the point of faith is that it is open to all, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Paul has expressed this in such a way as to insist both upon the temporal primacy of the Jew within the purposes of God (“to the Jew first,” corresponding’ to the Messiah’s mission to “the circumcised” in 15:8) and the absolute equality of status now granted to the non-Jew (“Greek” here is a way of saying “Gentile”).^³⁸ If faith is a major theme in Romans, so is the equality under the gospel of what, from the Jewish point of view, are the two great divisions of humankind. These themes, as we shall see, are inseparable. Every word, every phrase in the second half of v. 16 supports the first half; that is to say, the whole clause governed by the second “for” in the verse (“for it is God’s power to salvation for all believers, Jew first but equally Greek”) explains why Paul is not ashamed of the gospel.

1:17. The third “for,” undergirding the other two, goes to the heart of the matter, explaining in turn every aspect of v. 16b. In the gospel, God’s righteousness is unveiled. This revelation happens, not just in the events referred to in the gospel, true though that is, but in the very announcement of the gospel. The death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah form the initial disclosure of God’s righteousness, the major apocalyptic event that burst upon an unsuspecting world and an uncomprehending Israel; now the apocalypse happens again, every time the message about Jesus is announced, as God’s righteousness is unveiled before another audience.

The gospel message about Jesus, in other words, opens people’s eyes to see for the first time that this was what God had been up to all along. It enables Jews to see how the promises they had cherished had been fulfilled, quite otherwise than they had expected. It enables Gentiles to see that there is one true God, the God of Israel, the creator; that this God has purposed to set the world to rights at last; and that this God has now in principle accomplished that purpose. And when we say “enables to see,” we should not think merely of propositions commanding intellectual assent. Paul believed that the announcement of the gospel wielded a power that overcame the unseen forces, inside people and around them, that prevented them from responding in obedient belief and allegiance (see 2 Cor 4:1-6).

It is important to note that the NIV translation (“a righteousness from God is revealed”) presupposes what I argued in the Introduction to be the wrong understanding of the phrase. Instead of God’s own righteousness, it suggests that Paul is referring here to the status that Christians have as a result of God’s justifying action. Although this is a possible meaning of the Greek, there is no warrant for it in Paul’s Jewish background; it makes the reading of 3:21-26 very problematic; and it effectively splits off other sections of Romans, notably chaps. 9-11, from the early chapters, since in 9-11 the questions Paul is addressing are precisely those summarized in Jewish literature by the notion of God’s own righteousness.

God’s righteousness is revealed “through faith to faith” (NRSV). By itself this is too dense and cryptic for a modern reader to be certain of its meaning. As it stands, the phrase could mean “by faith from first to last” (NIV) or one of a number of other options.^³⁹ But in the light of 3:21-22 and other passages, its most natural meaning is “from God’s faithfulness to human faithfulness.”^⁴⁰ When God’s action in fulfillment of the covenant is unveiled, it is because God is faithful to what has been promised; when it is received, it is received by that human faith that answers to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, that human faith that is also faithfulness to the call of God in Jesus the Messiah.

Paul finishes the summary statement by quoting Hab 2:4, “the righteous shall live by faith.” This innocent-looking quotation has generated enormous discussions. These have to do with the apparent shifts in meaning between the original Hebrew text (“the righteous shall live by his faithfulness”), the LXX (“the righteous shall live by my faithfulness”), and Paul’s own quotation (“the righteous shall live by faith[fulness]”), and also with two particular questions: Does “by faith” modify “live” or “righteous” and where, therefore, does the emphasis fall--”the righteous shall live by faith” or “the one who by faith is righteous shall have life”? And how does Paul intend the quotation to support what has gone before? All these matters, obviously, interlock.^⁴¹

We should avoid a minimalist solution on the last question. Some have suggested that Paul merely ransacked his mental concordance for passages in which “righteousness” and “faith” occurred side by side, came up with this passage and Gen 15:6, and proceeded to quote them in Romans 1 and 4 (and in Galatians 3) without regard for their original context and meaning. His general use of Scripture and the particular sense of this passage and of Galatians 3 indicate otherwise. We need to inquire as to the wider context of the original sentence and the echoes Paul may have intended alert readers to hear.^⁴²

The original passage in Habakkuk belongs within a book full of woe and puzzlement. The Chaldeans are marching against Israel; all seems lost. What is Israel’s God up to in allowing it? This is, once more, the question of the righteousness, or justice, of God (this alone should warn us off the idea that Paul was quoting at random a verse that merely happened to contain his two catch-words). By way of answer, the prophet is given a vision, but it is a vision for the future, to be revealed at a later date (Hab 2:3). At the moment God’s true people, the righteous within a sinful nation, “will live by faith.” “Faith” here, whether the human faith, as in the Hebrew text, or God’s faithfulness, as in the LXX, is the key feature of the interim period.

What does this mean in practice for the prophet? It means believing that God will eventually punish the idolatrous and violent nation (2:5-20), that God will remember mercy in the midst of wrath and bring salvation to Israel (3:2-19). This thematic parallel with Rom 1:18-3:20 and 3:21-4:25 is striking and continues to suggest that Paul does, indeed, have the larger context from Habakkuk in mind. Faced with pagan idolatry and arrogance, the devout first-century Jew longed for God’s righteousness to break forth, bringing wrath on the nations and salvation for Israel.^⁴³ Paul, however, has seen God’s purpose unveiled in the gospel and believes, like the prophet, that this vision is the key to understanding all that will now take place. This solution to the problem of first, century Israel produces a second-order problem: Much of ethnic Israel is failing to believe the gospel, while Gentiles are coming in droves. Paul will deal with that in due course. For the moment he contents himself with the cryptic, but evocative, quotation. He is not ashamed of the gospel, because it is God’s power to salvation for all believers; because, faced with a world in idolatry and ruin, God’s righteousness is revealed in the gospel, a matter of divine faithfulness reaching down and calling out the response of human faithfulness. In this setting, “the righteous shall live by faithfulness”; whether divine or human or both, Paul does not need to say. The sentence remains cryptic until we reach 3:21-4:25.

Part of the strength of this exegesis of v. 17 is the sense it makes of the transition to v. 18 which has long been a puzzle to students of Paul’s flow of thought. But before moving to the next section of the letter, a word is needed about the road we have traveled thus far.

Romans has been thought of for centuries as the letter in which Paul expounds his doctrine of “justification by faith.” This half-truth has opened up some aspects of the letter and concealed others. As will become clear, the theological content of this substantial opening section contains “justification by faith” within it by implication, but this is not the stated theme of the letter. The theme is, to repeat once more, the revelation of God’s righteousness, God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s justice, in and through the gospel proclamation of the crucified and risen Messiah. Like the two opening themes of a classical sonata, Paul’s summary of “the gospel” in 1:3-4 and his summary of “God’s righteousness” in 1:16-17 will do further business with each other as the work progresses, and their contrapuntal interweaving will support other tunes, other harmonic progressions. But this letter has announced itself as a treatment, not so much of humans, their plight and their rescue (though all of that has its proper place), but of God--God’s gospel, God’s righteousness. We will not understand Romans unless we grasp this from the outset and remember it throughout.

1. Despite the many surface differences between Paul’s world and ours, we, too, live in an age where the question of God’s righteousness, God’s justice, weighs heavy upon us. The wars and atrocities of the twentieth century have left major questions in the air: How can a good God allow such things? Where was God in Auschwitz? Where is God in Rwanda? In the Balkans? Where was God on September 11, 2001? It is now the world as a whole, not simply the Jewish people, that cries out for redemption, that recognizes increasingly the folly and dehumanization of idolatry, and that asks Habakkuk’s questions of “Why?” and “How long?”

Our own setting, therefore, enables us to appropriate Paul’s discussion of God’s righteousness, here and throughout the letter, with a sense of the coming together of “covenant faithfulness” and “justice.” If God is the creator of the world, and has promised to bring all things into justice, peace, and harmony, then the cosmos as a whole, and the human race within it, is called to believe in this justice and the faithfulness that will bring it about. The church’s ministry to the world in our generation includes, and perhaps even focuses upon, this task: to unveil God’s righteousness once more through the gospel of Jesus the Jewish Messiah, knowing that as this happens the power of God for salvation is unleashed, so that where there is faith the blessings of God’s future may be brought forward into the present.

2. “The gospel,” in Paul’s terminology, was not primarily a message about sinful human beings and how they attained justification and salvation. We can, of course, use words however we wish, but if we are to understand and appropriate Paul we will do well to use his words in his way. For him, “the gospel” was the sovereign message, from none other than God, concerning Jesus the Messiah, God’s unique son. This message was not simply the offer of a new reordering of one’s private spiritual interiority, a new clearing up of a morally dysfunctional life via forgiveness for the past and new moral energy for the present. It was not simply a new vocation to live for God and for others in the world. It was, rather, news about God and about Jesus; news that this Jesus had become the spearhead of God’s “age to come”; news that, within this new age, the principalities and powers, including earthly rulers, the powers of darkness, and sin and death themselves had been defeated and were now summoned to allegiance. “The gospel” was a command requiring obedience, much more than an invitation seeking a response.

Always the command comes out of the blue, unexpected and in many ways unwelcome. Paul’s contemporary Jews neither expected nor wanted a crucified Messiah. Paul’s contemporary Gentiles neither expected nor wanted to worship and serve a Jewish figure, still less a Jewish failure (cf. 1 Cor 1:18-2:5). Our own contemporaries, long schooled to regard the climax of world history as having occurred in Western Europe in the eighteenth century (giving birth, of course, to modern North America), neither expect nor want to hear that the true climax in fact occurred in Palestine in the first century ce. They will urge counterexamples: Surely the world has not in fact improved (did Paul say it had or would?); surely Christianity has been responsible for many great evils (in part, yes, though often demonstrably when in rebellion against the gospel itself); surely we now know that Christianity is untrue (actually, no, we don’t). These objections must be taken seriously; yet they may also be smoke screens to hide the fact that the grandiose claims of “modernity” are now themselves looking increasingly threadbare. The command of the gospel is a summons to give the allegiance of body and mind, heart and soul, to Jesus; and its basis is neither more nor less than the event that constituted him in Paul’s eyes as Messiah and Lord--namely, his resurrection. And it is in the proclamation of this gospel, and its acceptance in faith, that people begin to glimpse a great curtain being drawn aside and the covenant faithfulness and justice of God displayed to view. Faced with that sight, it is impossible to remain a mere spectator.

3. Paul’s self-portrait and personal introduction in these verses is both stark and subtle. Content to be defined simply by the gospel--think how much of his personal history and background he could have mentioned here, as he prepares to visit the senior city of the empire, but chooses not to--he presents himself as a slave bearing a commission from royalty. At the same time, he will not simply barge in upon the Roman church, relying on his God-given commission to give him the necessary status. He will pray for them, thank God for them, and in that context think into their possible anxieties about his coming and meet them with a personal appeal. Conscious of the biblical story, stretching ahead into his own time and catching him up within it (see the Commentary on 9:6-10:21), he is also very aware of the human stories with which his own personal story must intertwine. His prayer functions not least as a way of ensuring, so far as he can, that these stories will work together in harmony.

4. Already in these opening verses we find a major theme that creates huge problems in our world, and for practicing Christians. How, we ask, can the gospel message be for both Jew and non-Jew? We stand appalled at the incalculable crimes committed against Jews in our supposedly civilized world. Man feel, understandably, that for Christians to say any word to Jews about the gospel of Jesus Christ is now inappropriate. I have wrestled with these questions elsewhere and will revisit them more than once in what follows.^⁴⁴ But it is impossible to suppose that Paul, for whom Jesus’ Messiahship was the central content of the gospel and for whom the Jewish question of God’s righteousness had in principle been addressed and solved precisely by Jesus’ messianic death and resurrection, would have been content to keep this gospel only for non-Jews. Time was when the nuances of justification by faith aroused passions around the world; these days it tends to be the political overtones of the gospel that make people angry. But these issues cannot be easily either solved or wished away, and Romans remains one of the great stimuli and sourcebooks for dealing with them.

ROMANS 1:18-3:20
THE CHALLENGE FOR GOD’S RIGHTEOUSNESS: GENTILES AND JEWS ALIKE UNDER GOD’S WRATH, GUILTY OF IDOLATRY AND WICKEDNESS

The first major section of the letter is a courtroom scene. It opens with the sentence being passed; it moves back to explain the grounds for the verdict, highlights the problems the judge has had to cope with in hearing the case, and concludes with the guilty parties in the dock, with nothing to say in their defense.

Romans 1:18-3:20, in other words, is all about God’s righteousness’ both in the sense that God is the judge in the cosmic lawcourt and in the sense that God is in covenant with Israel, the covenant that causes the peculiar problems when Israel, too, is found guilty in God’s sight. The whole section serves as a further explanation of 1:16-17; hence the γάρ (gar, “for”) that links 1:18 to the previous passage (omitted in the NIV). In particular, 1:18-3:20 explains why the gospel is God’s saving power for all who believe: because God’s wrath is revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness (1:18), and it turns out that “all sinned, and came short of God’s glory” (3:23, summing up 1:18-3:20). Apart from the gospel, there is no alternative route to salvation.

The section, though, is not simply about “the human plight.” It is about God’s own problem and gives a preliminary statement of God’s way of dealing with it. God created humans to bear the divine image within the creation and called Israel to shine the divine light into the dark world. Faced with human rebellion and Jewish faithlessness, will God abandon these projects? This section repeatedly emphasizes that God will remain faithful, though it does not yet explain how--except that God’s wrath means precisely the determination not to give evil the last word, to root out from the good creation all that defaces and destroys it. Already, therefore, we find ourselves looking ahead both to the end of chap. 8, with the renewal of humans and of creation, and to the end of chap. 11, when “all Israel shall be saved.” It is because the creator God remains implacably opposed to all the forces of evil that there is hope. The revelation of wrath is itself, however paradoxically, part of the good news (see the Commentary on 2:16). As in Habakkuk, quoted in v. 17, the whole world is in turmoil, but God remains sovereign. This prepares the way for the solution: As in Habakkuk once more, God’s people are defined, at this moment of crisis, in terms of faithfulness. The portion of the letter that begins with 1:18 does indeed explain and unpack what is implicit in the in the dense statement of 1:16-17.

Two elements of Paul’s strategy throughout the section are worthy of note. First, he draws extensively on traditional Jewish critiques of the pagan world. This section, particularly the first long paragraph, echoes Wisdom 12-16, which, under the guise of describing the wickedness of the Canaanites and Egyptians at the time of the exodus, launches a polemic against paganism in general, describing it in terms of idolatry and the consequent fracturing of human society. Paul agrees with this assessment of paganism, but he goes further, and by doing so effectively undercuts Wisdom’s eventual point. Wisdom argued that the Israelites, rebellious in the wilderness, escaped with punishments that served as a warning and a reminder of God’s law (Wis 16:5-6, 10-11). Paul will not have it. The Jews, he declares, are just as guilty as the pagans; all alike end up in the dock (Rom 3:19-20).

Second, he argues his case by a process of gradual unfolding. At first sight, 1:18-32 seems to be directed solely against the Gentiles; but, as we shall see, at two points in particular he alludes to scriptural passages that suggest that Israel, too, has behaved in a pagan manner and will receive the appropriate reward. Then in 2:1-16 he seems to be aiming at the tradition of pagan moralism; but, not least with Wisdom in mind, it is reasonable to suppose that he is also thinking of the virtuous Jew (including his own pre-Christian self, of course), looking with disdain on the ungodly and dissolute pagan world. So when he turns explicitly to the boast of Israel in 2:17, only to deconstruct it from Scripture itself, he is bringing into the open what has already been hinted. From then on the section focuses almost entirely on Israel: Israel failing in covenant obligations (2:17-24); Israel being upstaged by a new covenant family, which includes Gentiles (2:125-29); Israel joining the pagans in the dock (3:1-20).

A good deal of the material in 1:18-3:20 looks ahead to later passages in the letter. The devastation of humanness brought about by idolatry, described in chap. 1, is reversed through the gospel, as chaps. 4, 6, 8, and 12 bear witness. The covenant purposes of God for Israel, to which Israel was unfaithful, are fulfilled in the faithful Messiah (3:21-26; 5:12-21, and throughout). The exodus, the subtext of the Wisdom passage upon which Paul draws in 1:18-32, forms the subtext, too, of Paul’s exposition of the new people of God in Christ in chaps. 5-8. Above all, the problem of God’s righteousness, highlighted in the dense little argument of 3:1-8, looks ahead to the whole theme of chaps. 9-11, where Paul will draw on another image from Wisdom: the potter and the clay (Wis 15:7; cf. Wis 12:12; Rom 9:19-22). The present section, then, is far from being a mere exposé of human sinfulness. Within the architecture of the whole letter, it begins the construction of several great arches, which, having reached their various peaks in reference to Jesus the Messiah, come back to earth in the specific conclusions of the different stages of the argument.

NIV: ¹⁸The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. ²¹For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²²Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. ²⁴Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. and worshiped and served created things rather than the creator who is forever praised. Amen. ²⁶Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. ²⁸Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

NRSV: ¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. ¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; ²¹for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. ²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools: ²³and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. ²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to Impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. ²⁶For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. ²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind, and to things that should not be done. ²⁹They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors, of evil, rebellious toward parents, ³¹foolish, faith less, heartless, ruthless. ³²They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die--yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

After the lofty and evocative introduction, the body of the letter begins with energy, verve, and passion. With so many cross threads of thought going to and fro, it is best to begin by seeing it as a whole.

The thought moves from an explanation and denunciation of idolatry to an explanation and denunciation of the fracturing of human life that results from it. Paul saw no reason to dissent from the Jewish insight that regarded “sin”--living in a less-than-fully-human fashion, missing the mark as regards God’s intention for his human creatures--as the result of worshiping something other than the creator.^⁴⁵ And, again with Jewish traditions, be regarded idolatry itself as culpable and worthy of appropriate punishment, since the creation was full of the signs of the creator’s hand. Over the whole sorry picture, therefore, stand the bracketing statements: The wrath of God is revealed (1:18); they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die (1:32).

The connecting threads of the paragraph appear in the thrice-repeated “God gave them up” (vv. 2d, 26, 28). In each, Paul spotlights some aspect of human corruption and degradation that results from a failure in worship. The first is a general statement; the second, a specific comment about the fracturing of gender roles. The third is general again and gives rise to the climax of the paragraph, a sprawling, squirming catalog of vices that demonstrates in equal measure Paul’s disgust at dehumanized behavior and his rhetorical skill in describing it.

1:18-23. The opening section, which leads up to the first of these hammer blows (“God gave them up”), introduces us to a major theme within Paul’s indictment of the human race. The problem is not just wrong behavior, but wrong thought patterns--the latter, indeed, being the cause of the former. Humans suppress the truth (v. 18); they refuse to acknowledge what they in fact know (v. 21 a); their reasoning becomes futile, their heart darkened (v. 21 b); claiming to be wise, they become fools (v. 22). This theme echoes through the rest of the chapter (vv. 25, 28, 32) and anticipates the problem highlighted in 7:7-25, where the “wretched person” knows what ought to be done but cannot do it. Equally, it points on to 12:1-2, where the “renewal of the mind,” enabling one to think clearly about what God approves, is the key to presenting the body in God’s service.

1:18. God’s wrath, a prominent theme throughout Scripture, was a major problem for an older liberal theology, which struggled, rightly enough, to avoid any suggestion of God as a malevolent despot, hurling thunderbolts at those who broke arbitrary laws.^⁴⁶ The tide has turned now, and the great wickednesses of the twentieth century have reminded us that unless God remains implacably opposed to the evil that distorts and defaces creation, not least humanity, God is not a good God. Paul’s whole theology, not least the expression of it in Romans, is grounded in the robust and scripturally rooted view that the creator is neither a tyrannical despot nor an indulgent, laissez-faire absentee landlord, not yet, for that matter, the mere inner or spiritual dimension of all that is. God is the creator and lover of the world. This God has a passionate concern for creation, and humans in particular, that will tolerate nothing less than the best for them.

The result is “wrath”--not just a settled attitude of hostility toward idolatry and immorality, but actions that follow from such an attitude when the one to whom it belongs is the sovereign creator. The content of this wrath is not merely the process (described in the rest of the chapter) of God’s “giving people up” to the result of their own folly. That, rather, is simply the anticipation of the final judgment itself, the “death” spoken of in 1:32 and the ultimate judgment described in 2:5-6, 9. The two are, of course, organically connected. Present moral degradation (and physical, too, in many cases) anticipates the ultimate degrading of humanness in death itself.

This wrath is revealed “from heaven,” in the present time. As with all of Paul’s “apocalyptic” theology, the “end” expected by Second Temple Jews had split into two; the end had in one sense happened, but in another sense was yet to happen fully (see esp. 1 Cor 15:12-28). Thus, although the wrath is still to be revealed in the future (2:5), the last day has in some sense been brought forward into the present. Granted the rest of Paul’s thinking about how future and present fit together, this can only mean that something in the events concerning Jesus has unveiled the wrath of God in a new way. Paul’s point is not that the moral corruption of the pagan world provides a fresh revelation of God’s wrath. Pagans have always behaved like that, at least when seen from Paul’s Jewish standpoint. He must mean that, in some way or another, the fact of Jesus has drawn back the veil on the wrath to come.

How has this happened? The answer is provided in 2:16. God, writes Paul, will judge the secrets of humans, according to my gospel, through the Messiah, Jesus. Drawing on the Jewish tradition that the Messiah would be the judge of the whole world, Paul sees that his gospel involves the announcement that God has fixed a day on which the world will be called to account; that the agent of this divinely appointed judgment will be none other than Jesus himself; and that the proof of the matter is to be found in Jesus’ resurrection (see Acts 17:31; other links between Romans 1 and Acts 17 are noted below).

This explains the train of thought that leads Paul into 1:18. The same gospel message that functions as God’s saving power (1:3-4, 16) also names the judge through whom the world will be brought to account and confirms his appointment to that role. From then on nothing can be the same again. A new moment of world history has come to birth. Between the resurrection and the final judgment, the world, whether it acknowledges it or not, lives before the unveiled gaze of the judge.

But it does not, of course, acknowledge the fact. Paul’s basic charge (like so many of his introductory sentences, it contains the rest of the passage in a nutshell) is that humans, in their ungodliness and injustice, suppress the truth, and do so precisely by means of that injustice. The word rendered “wickedness” in the NRSV and the NIV is άδικία (adikia), not just general evil but injustice, the crucial symptom of the world’s out-of-jointness. This human injustice contrasts sharply with God’s justice (v. 17); Paul’s language is too tightly integrated to allow for loose translation here. The truth is dangerous--so rebellious humans suppress it, hide it away, try to prevent its leaking out. Not only in war is truth an early casualty.

1:19-21. Characteristically, Paul fills out his initial statement with three layers of explanation. God’s self-revelation has displayed what can be known; this revelation takes place in the created order, rendering all without excuse; humans have refused to honor God in the appropriate way.

These verses have had to bear the weight of debates about “natural theology” (the question of whether, and to what extent, the truth of God is accessible through the created order without the aid of special revelation).^⁴⁷ As with some other doctrines that have wandered to and fro seeking biblical support, this one has fastened upon certain brief passages, in this case the present one and a few others (notably Acts 17:22-31, which has other affinities with this passage in Romans) none of which offers a full-dress exposition of the matter, but only an allusion on the way to making some other point. Nevertheless, however brief the statement, Paul clearly does believe that when humans look at creation they are aware, at some level, of the power and divinity of the creator. The problem, of course, is that this knowledge does not save those who possess it, but only renders them guilty. Paul does not say that saving knowledge of God may be had through observing the creation; nor, however, does he say that there is nothing that can be known of God that way. Indeed, granted his belief in the renewal of the human mind by grace, we must assume that in his view the Christian can indeed discern the truth of God by observing creation. But that is not his point here. In fact, like several of his Jewish contemporaries, he believes--consonant with the Jewish belief that the world was made by a good creator--that signs of the creator are visible within this world (see, e.g., Wis 13:5).^⁴⁸ But these never permit humans to gain over the creator the kind of power that comes with knowledge. On the contrary, they are simply enough to ensure that when humans rebel--as they do--they are manifestly, guilty.

The appropriate response to the divine self-revelation in creation would have been worship and thanksgiving. Instead, however, human thought became futile and foolish, and human hearts (not “minds” as NRSV, though the two ideas are not far apart in Paul) became darkened. This unfolding of the dense v. 18b prepares the way for vv. 22,24-25 and above all vv. 28 and 32.

1:22-23. The result of the refusal to know through creation is the false boast of humans, the corruption of the worshiping instinct into idolatry. Here Paul is deliberately, though covertly, retelling the story of Genesis 3, on the one hand, and of Israel in the wilderness, on the other.

Talk of God the creator has prepared the way for the first of these. When, in Genesis 3, the serpent tempts Eve, what is on offer is fruit that will, supposedly, make humans wise (Gen 3:6). The primal sin was a matter of obeying instructions, or at least suggestions, not from the creator in whose image humans were made, but from an agent within creation itself. Instead of recognizing wisdom as an attribute of the creator, to be gained by worshiping and serving that God, humans boasted in a wisdom that consisted in supposed independence. But this wisdom consisted in the greatest folly possible--namely, giving allegiance instead to images of humans and also of birds, animals, and reptiles.

This “exchange” of God’s glory for an idol echoes Ps 106:20, which speaks of Israel in the wilderness swapping the living God for the golden calf. Here Paul corrects the implicit narrative of the Wisdom of Solomon, written most likely not long before his own day, by referring back to Scripture: In Wisdom, Israel in the wilderness may commit sins, but it will receive only a mild, correcting rebuke. In general, the people stand out from the pagan Egyptians. For Paul, as for the psalmist. Israel rejected the covenant God and fell away into copying the pagans (see further the Commentary on 7:9.11; 9:15.16).^⁴⁹ This not only anticipates the explicit turn in the argument at 2:17, but it also looks ahead to 7:7.12, where once again the narratives of Adam and Israel are woven together.

The first part of Paul’s basic charge is now complete. The human race, called to worship and reflect the image of the creator, has turned to idolatry--and has sought to dignify it by claiming it as the true wisdom. The results follow swiftly.

1:24-27. “God gave them up.” This repeated phrase carries scriptural echoes from Ps 81:12. This psalm is itself a hymnic telling of the exodus narrative, warning of idolatry, bemoaning the fact that Israel has not heeded the warning, and appealing for the people to return to YHWH. Thus, again, Paul’s surface text describes paganism, but the subtext quietly includes Israel in the indictment. The result, for pagan and Jew alike, is that the creator allows all to reap what they have sown. The punishment not only fits the crime, but directly results from it as well: Those who worship images of their fellow creatures must not be surprised if their own bodies are dishonored as a result of the lusts (NRSV) or desires (NIV) of their hearts (έπιθυμία [epithymia] need not have a negative sense, but here and elsewhere in Romans it certainly does; cf. 6:12; 7:7.8; 13:9; 13:14). This condition is further evidence of Paul’s general charge, focused in a new way in v. 25: Humans have swapped God’s truth for a lie and have given allegiance to that which is not God. Paul, unusually, pauses to express his own allegiance to “the creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen” in this typically Jewish word of praise.

The exchange of truth for a lie results in the second “God gave them up.” After the general comment about dishonoring of bodies, Paul now describes particular “lusts of shame”--that is (so NRSV), passions that degrade human beings, making them less than the full humans they were meant to be. Paul notes homosexual practice, both female and male, adding the comment that those who do these things receive in their own persons the reward of their error (the NIV’s “perversion” is perhaps too exact a word, since the Greek indicates a more general wandering off course). Out of the many things Paul could have highlighted in the pagan world, he has chosen same-sex erotic practices, not simply because Jews regarded homosexual practice as a classic example of pagan vice, but more particularly because it corresponds, in his view, to what humans in general have done in swapping God’s truth for a lie.^⁵⁰

The underlying logic seems to be as follows. Those who worship the true God are, as Paul says elsewhere, renewed according to the divine image (Col 3:10). When this worship is exchanged for the worship of other gods, the result will be that this humanness, this image-bearing quality, is correspondingly distorted. Paul may suppose that in Genesis 1 it is male and female together that compose the image of God; or he may simply be taking it for granted that heterosexual intercourse is obviously the creator’s intention for genital activity. Either way, his point is that homosexual behavior is a distortion of the creator’s design and that such practices are evidence, not of the intention of any specific individual to indulge in such practice for its own sake, but of the tendency within an entire society for humanness to fracture when gods other than the true one are being worshiped. The point is: Exchange your God for an idol, and you will exchange your genuine humanness for a distorted version, which will do you no good. What particular physical ailments Paul believed resulted from homosexual practice is not clear, but the last line of v. 27 is in any case an aside, rather than a main plank in the argument.

1:28-32. The remaining five verses, all one sentence in the Greek, fill in the picture with strokes as broad and general as the previous two verses were specific and focused. The third “God gave them up” is again a close punishment-and-crime analysis: They did not see fit to have true knowledge of God, so God gave them up to an unfit mind (neither the NRSV nor the NIV retains the wordplay that encapsulates Paul’s point). And the unfit mind becomes the source of inappropriate deeds; Paul’s view of sin, once more, is not that it is the breaking of arbitrary divine rules but that it is subhuman or nonhuman behavior, deeds that are unfitting for humans to perform. Such people are full, Paul says twice, of all kinds of evil; like jugs filled to overflowing with noxious liquids, they are brimful of wickedness, ready to spill over at any moment. Paul’s catalog of vices, arranged for maximum rhetorical effect, reads better in Greek than in any possible English version, ending with four resounding words: άσυνέτους (asynetous), άσυνθέτους (asynthetous), άστόργους (astorgous), and άνελεήμονας (aneleēmonas). The NIV comes closest to the verbal effect: “senseless,” “faithless,” “heartless,” “ruthless.” Paul’s main concern has not been to provide an exhaustive or logically ordered list of all the ways in which idolatry defaces human behavior. His intention, rather, is to paint a picture in the richest verbal colors and patterns that he can.

The final comment (v. 32) is the most devastating. They know God’s just decree (for δικαίωμα dikaiōma see the Commentary on 8:4)--namely, that those who do such things deserve to die. Paul is again appealing to something that, in theory at least, the whole human race is aware of. He cannot mean that all humans have heard of a law that prescribes the death penalty for certain specific types of behavior. Rather, he asserts that humans in general have an innate awareness that certain types of behavior are inherently dehumanizing, to their practitioners as well as to their victims. Those who behave in these ways are destroying themselves, and at a deep level they are aware of the fact.

Nevertheless, they not only do these things but also applaud (NRSV) those who practice them. It is one thing to live a self-destructive life-style, recognizing it for what it is, grieving over it, and urging others to avoid it if they can. It is another, more sinister, thing to call evil good and good evil. Once light and darkness have been renamed, the process of dehumanization is complete and may well prove irreversible.

1. One still meets, from time to time, the belief that there is nothing really wrong with the human race. It is unhealthy, we are told, or perhaps morbid to dwell on sin or always to be drawing attention to it; it is pathological to approve of punishment, still less retribution. It is bordering on blasphemy to suppose that God would ever be wrathful.

Romans holds these notions up to the light and exposes the counterfeit theology they contain. There is such a thing as human wickedness, and if God does not oppose it relentlessly, then God stands accused of conniving at destructive and dehumanizing practices. The generation that has known both mid-century totalitarianism and late-century apartheid and “ethnic cleansing” should be in no doubt of systemic injustice, rooted in the reality of wickedness deep within the human heart. Within such settings, “embrace” (a gentle liberal toleration of different viewpoint is not enough; there must also be “exclusion,” the making and implementing of judgments that risk pronouncing a “no” as well as a “yes.” Finding the appropriate coexistence of those two is an urgent task for our day.^⁵¹

2. Our generation has seen the resurgence, in the Western world, of various forms of paganism. The worship of blood and soil, and the symbols that evoke them, was characteristic of the Nazi movement and remains all too familiar within the tribal and geographical disputes that still disfigure our planet. The worship of Mammon, granting absolute sovereignty to “economic forces,” whatever the human cost, is endemic in much contemporary culture of both East and West. Eros, the god of sexual love, claims millions of devotees who genuinely believe they are bound to obey its every dictate, however many times its grandiose promises prove hollow. Mars, the god of war, is worshiped by many, tolerated by many more, and still wreaks havoc. And serious nature worship is on the increase, as the old “god” of eighteenth-century Deism has disappeared from view, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the “forces” within the created order, producing various kinds of pantheism.

We cannot, then, dismiss Paul’s analysis of idolatry as relevant only to his own age. In some cases we can easily see how such idolatry leads to dehumanized and dehumanizing behavior--when, for instance, worship of Mammon by the few leads to widespread poverty for the many and when, faced with the call to remit large-scale and unpayable international debt, many in positions of power and financial security kick and scream rather than give up a single dollar of “owed” interest. Paul’s thesis that dehumanizing behavior is rooted in the worship of idols deserves full contemporary exploration.

3. Paul’s comment about homosexual behavior is deeply controversial today. Attempts have been made to mitigate its force by saying (for instance) that he is only referring to a deliberate swapping from heterosexual to homosexual practice, not to what in recent years has been regarded as an innate homosexual condition, or that he was only concerned with practices directly related to idolatrous cults. As in some other matters, it would be wrong to press 1:26-27 for a full analysis of same-sex desires or practices; but equally it is wrong to minimalize or marginalize what Paul teaches here. He is not saying, as in an individualistic culture he is inevitably read as saying, that individuals who are aware of same-sex erotic tendencies or who engage in the practices that result have themselves been worshiping idols. He is not proposing a case-by-case analysis. Rather, his argument is that the existence of homosexual practice in a culture is a sign that that culture as a whole has been worshiping idols and that its God-given male-and-female order is being fractured as a result.^⁵²

We cannot isolate these verses from Paul’s larger argument, both in this paragraph and in Romans as a whole. From this it is clear that he regards homosexual practice as a dangerous distortion of God’s intention. It is quite logical to say that we disagree with Paul or that in the light of our greater knowledge of human psychology we need to reassess the matter. That can be argued either way. What we cannot do is to sideline this passage as irrelevant to Christian ethical discourse, or for that matter to the argument of Romans, or to pretend that it means something other than what it says. It is, of course, important to remind ourselves also that Romans 1 is followed at once by Romans 2, with its emphatic warning against a moral superiority complex. As the argument goes on its way, Paul’s most damning condemnation is reserved, not for those who engage in what he sees as dehumanizing practices, but for those who adopt a posture of innate moral virtue while themselves failing in their most basic vocation, to be the light of the world.

4. Paul’s concern with truth, and with the tendency of humans to deceive themselves about it, addresses precisely the clash in contemporary culture between modernity and postmodernity. The Western Enlightenment bequeathed an intellectual climate in which it was assumed that “truth” could be known “objectively,” by scientific and similar observation. Clear and hard thought, it was supposed, would probe into and lay bare the secrets of all subjects. Suspicion about this has been aroused in recent years as postmodern thinkers have pointed out, following Friedrich Nietzsche, that claims to truth are often covert claims to power. The old Roman legal question, cui bona? “who stood to gain by this.” formerly restricted to criminal deeds, is now asked of every human action and statement.

Paul’s warnings about the ways in which humans distort the truth and come to believe and approves lies remind us of the postmodern critique. There is such a thing as a darkened heart, a mind made foolish or futile through idolatry. The practice of injustice does indeed “suppress the truth” (1:18). However, postmodernity proves too much. Not only does it, quite appropriately, self-destruct. (How do we know that the postmodern claim about knowledge is itself true? Might not it, too, be subjective posturing?) It runs the risk of ruling out what Paul emphatically claims, that despite all suspicion there is such a thing as truth, and it can be known. However, since for Paul the truth is ultimately not something objective, discovered by observation and reason alone, but something personal, given in encounter with the living God, the debates of recent centuries are transcended within a Christian epistemology. Though modernists may sneer and postmodernists gnash their teeth at the very thought, there is in Paul’s book such a thing as a mind renewed by the Spirit, and he is so bold as to suggest, in Romans and elsewhere, that this is attainable in Christ (see, e.g., 1 Cor 2:14-16).

NIV: ¹You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. ²Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. ³So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? ⁴Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance? ⁵But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. ⁶God “will give to each person according to what he has done.” ⁷To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. ⁸But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. ⁹There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; ¹⁰but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. ¹¹For God does not show favoritism. ¹²All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. ¹³For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. ¹⁴(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, ¹⁵since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) ¹⁶This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

NRSV: ¹Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. ²You say,a “We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.” ³Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? ⁴Or do you despise the riches his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? ⁵But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. ⁶For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: ⁷to those who by patiently doing good seek glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; ⁸while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. ⁹There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, ¹⁰but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. ¹¹For God shows no partiality. ¹²All who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. ¹³For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. ¹⁴When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. ¹⁵They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them ¹⁶on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.

The scene is set for final judgment. The judge is impartial; the truth will out; the world will be put to rights at last. This typically Jewish depiction of the last great assize is now transposed into a Christian key: The judgment will be “through the Messiah, Jesus” (2:16). What is more, God’s impartiality means that Jews and Gentiles will be judged alike.

This paragraph, completing Paul’s depiction of the revelation of God’s wrath” (1:18), appears to be addressed to anyone who, faced with the vices mentioned in chap. 1, tries to adopt a superior posture. There were, after all, many pagan moralists in Paul’s world, not least in Rome itself, who disdained the behavior Paul condemns just as much as he did and who regarded their philosophy as raising them above it. The question, though, of who Paul is really talking to here is complex. This is a problem we shall meet again.

Paul adopts, here and elsewhere, the prose style known as diatribe, familiar enough from classical works of the same period, such as those of the philosopher Epictetus (and not to be confused with our contemporary meaning of the word, “bitter and abusive speech; ironical or satirical criticism”).^⁵³ In this style, the writer engages in debate with imaginary opponents, putting them on the spot, asking them rhetorical questions, answering their supposed objections. Paul had had plenty of experience of real debate and knew which arguments might come up; but he does not, we must assume, expect his real opponents, non-Christian pagans or Jews, to be reading this letter. He therefore creates a double audience: the real one (the Christians in Rome) and the fictitious one (the hypothetical opponent).^⁵⁴

This is not designed simply to enable the Roman church to listen in on his debates and so be better equipped for similar ones themselves, though that might be important too. The point is that he wants them to think the argument through with him, to see why these things must be so and not otherwise; and the fiction of a hypothetical interlocutor enables him to do this. In particular, since part of his aim is to show that the justice of God upstages all the justice that the pagan world had to offer, he is prepared, not least in this paragraph, to use technical terms known in Stoic philosophy, taking (as he says in 2 Cor 10:5) every thought captive to obey Christ (see the Commentary on 2:14).

So far so good; but, as with chapter 1, Paul here has in mind not only pagan moralists but also Jews. This does not become explicit until 2:17 (there, too, it is a literary fiction; Paul does not expect the letter to be read by non-Christian Jews). But, just as the scriptural echoes in chapter 1 indicated that Israel shared in the idolatry and immorality of the Gentile world, so the repeated emphasis on “the Jew first and also the Greek” in 2:9-10, and the emphasis on those under the law and those outside the law being treated the same in 2:12-15, make better sense if, behind the screen of “whoever you are” in v. 1, Paul envisages as his hypothetical listener not just a pagan moralist but a moralizing Jew.

To understand this section of Romans, then, we must envisage Paul intending his Christian audience in Rome to listen in on a conversation between himself and imaginary Jewish interlocutors whom he is addressing, for the moment, as if they were pagan moralists. The multiple resonances and echoes that this complex scenario sets up go some way to explaining why the text is sometimes dense and difficult. They also prepare us for later stages of the letter, in which similar many-sided writing plays a critical part.

The thrust of 2:1-16 is that God’s judgment, when it arrives, will leave all without excuse. To make this point, Paul sketches one of the fullest descriptions of the final judgment in all early Christian writing. He emphasizes that the judgment is indeed unveiled through the gospel; this may come as a surprise to modern readers, for whom “the gospel” has come to mean salvation from judgment, but for Paul “the gospel” is the announcement of Jesus as Messiah, and according to one strand of tradition the Messiah was expected to be the judge at the last day.^⁵⁵ In addition, as the psalmists never tire of repeating, judgment--the putting of things to rights at last--is itself good news for those (the majority of the human race past and present) who suffer injustice and oppression. Long exegetical tradition has schooled us to read this part of Romans as simply about individuals being shown up as sinners. This is indeed one element in Paul’s argument, but it falls within his larger theme: the good news that, in Jesus the Messiah, the one God of Jews and Gentiles is finally setting the whole world to rights.

This is by no means simply bad news for all humans. To the surprise, again, of those whose traditional readings of the letter lead them to expect that Paul will here simply declare that all are sinners, so that justification can be by faith alone apart from works of the law, he announces on the contrary that at the last assize justification will be on the basis of works (v. 6), and that there will not only be tribulation and wrath for all wrongdoers, but glory, honor, immortality, eternal life, and peace for all who seek for these things in the appropriate way (vv. 7, 10).

As well as a description of the last judgment itself, Paul offers a classic apocalyptic view of the period leading up to that moment (2:4-5). Again both drawing on and interacting with the book of Wisdom, he describes God as being extremely patient, holding back from summary judgment to give people a chance to repent--but thereby inevitably storing up all the more wrath for the hard-hearted, who still refuse to do so.

2:1-3. The “therefore” at the start is puzzling, since the person addressed is ex hypothesi not guilty of the charge at the end of 1:32.^⁵⁶ They at least have not called evil good and good evil. Perhaps the underlying thought is that, by stand ing in judgment on others while being guilty of similar offenses (in a way yet to be explored), they have been similarly deceitful, holding up their own behavior as an example when it should in fact have been condemned.

Verse 2 is sometimes taken, as in the NRSV, as a quotation from the hypothetical interlocutor, to which Paul then responds. This is not impossible. Paul almost certainly does this sort of thing in I Cor 6:12-13; 8:1, 4, and in the latter two verses he introduces the phrase, as here, with “we know that.” The problem with all such theories, though, is the difficulty of proving that Paul intended it and that the readers would have understood. Here the strength of the proposal is that v. 3 seems to be picking up what is said in v. 2 and tossing it back, expanding v. 1 (“you who condemn”) into “you who condemn those who do such things,” which is what, according to the theory, the interlocutor has just done. In this case, the sequence of thought runs: “You are without excuse when you condemn others, since you are doing the same things. Yes, you will no doubt say that `God judges those who do such things’; but when you judge ‘those who do such things’, do you really suppose that you will escape that same judgment?”

This train of thought is possible, maybe even plausible. But even in this case Paul does not dissent from the thought of v. 2; and in several other passages “we know that” introduces, not a remark from an interlocutor, but something that Paul can take for granted as common ground between himself and his hearers. It may well be, then, that v. 2 is simply Paul’s preliminary move, before repeating and amplifying in v. 3 the warning of v. 1: Remember, God’s judgment is in accordance with truth! In other words, there is no hiding place at the last assize.

2:4-6. One who presumes to stand as judge over others, whether a pagan moralist or a Jewish critic of the pagan world, may be presuming the stance outlined in Wisdom and elsewhere: God is kind and forbearing, at least toward Israel, so that Israel’s sins appear as mere peccadilloes, regrettable no doubt but not serious like those of the pagans (see Wis 11:9-10; 15:1-6; 16:5-12; 18:20-25). Thus, while Paul’s thought echoes that of Wisdom to the extent of seeing God mercifully allowing a space for people to repent (Wis 11:23), he urges that all need to avail themselves of this chance and that not to do so means despising God’s patience and storing up wrath for the final day.

On that day God will indeed render to each according to works. Paul quotes more or less exactly from Ps 62:12 (61:13 LXX) and Prov 24:12, both of which, in context, offer warnings against pride. The psalm, which ends with the phrase quoted here, sees God’s just judgment according to works as an expression of God’s power and mercy. This deep-rooted Jewish tradition is not denied by Paul, but rather celebrated. If one of the purposes of the letter is to show that God’s justice upstages that of Caesar and Rome, we could expect nothing less. We must reserve for a later point the important question of how this final judgment according to works, described as “justification” in v. 13, relates to the “justification by faith” spoken of in chap. 3 and elsewhere.

2:7-11. Paul now expands what it will mean that God judges according to works. He describes the contrasts in the sequence a, b; b, a: the godly and the wicked, the wicked and the godly. The first contrast, in vv. 7-8, sketches out the underlying attitude of the two classes; the second, in vv. 9-10, emphasizes their final state and insists that Jew and Gentile will be judged fairly and impartially.

The attitude of the two groups is not described in moralistic terms. Paul does not, as a rabbi might have done, produce a list of things that will qualify or disqualify for “the age to come.” Rather, the one group, by “patience in well doing,” seeks for glory, honor and immortality. Paul does not say that they earn them or grasp them; merely that they are seeking them.^⁵⁷ The other group, seeking their own selfish gain,^⁵⁸ does “not obey the truth, but obey injustice” (again the word is άδικία [adikia], more specific than “wickedness” or “evil”). The first group is defined in terms of that for which they seek and the means by which that quest is pursued; the second, in terms of that which is obeyed and not obeyed. We are left to fill in the gaps and to presume that the former do obey the truth and that the latter do not patiently seek for glory. What we are not encouraged to do is to draw up a checklist of things done and not done, to weigh them against one another and thereby to arrive at the final verdict. This suggests that Paul is being careful not to endorse the merit measuring schemes that, despite not being at the covenantal heart of Judaism, nevertheless played some role in discussions of final judgment.

Paul then sums up the two attitudes in terms of the most general moral language (vv. 9-10): The one group works evil; the other does what is good (cf. 12:9). This time the contrast is between the two final states: tribulation and distress, on the one hand, glory and honor and peace (finding that which they had sought, in other words), on the other hand. And the great emphasis here, which colors the reading of the whole chapter, is on the universality of the judgment. Condemnation and glory will alike come “to the Jew first and also, equally, to the Greek” (the “equally” is implied by Paul’s careful Greek construction, just as in 1:16).

The impartiality of God as judge is known, though not a major theme, in Jewish tradition.^⁵⁹ Of course, when Jews thought reflectively, rather than urgently, on God’s justice, impartiality was seen to be a vital element in it. But this is where the problem outlined in the Introduction comes into view: What happens when God’s impartiality as the cosmic judge appears to conflict with the covenant promises made with Israel, to which God might also be supposed to be bound? How, so to speak, does God’s lawcourt justice work together with God’s covenant justice? The answer will be revealed in 3:21-4:25. For the moment, like a rich but unresolved musical sequence, Paul’s argument makes its striking point, that God has no favorites, and passes on.

2:12-13. The whole of vv. 12-16 explains further what is involved in vv. 7-11.^⁶⁰ God will judge Jew and Greek alike, in complete impartiality, for those without the law and those within the law will be judged justly. Paul may well be responding to an implicit Jewish interjection. “We at have Torah; that sets us apart from the Gentiles.” Here we meet for the first time a crucial point without which much of Romans remains incomprehensible: “Those apart from the law” means quite simply “Gentiles,” and “those under law” (literally “those in the law”) means “Jews.” “The law,” here and more or less throughout Romans, means “the Jewish law,” the Torah given to Moses on Mount Sinai, the law that defines and directs Israel, enabling them (supposedly) to be God’s people. Gentiles were not “under the law, unless of course they became proselytes, voluntarily submitting to the Jewish code and becoming members, of a sort, within Israel.^⁶¹

The point of v. 12, then, is once more the justice with which the condemnation will be meted out. God will not use the Jewish law to condemn Gentile sinners, but will use it to condemn Jewish sinners. The force of v. 13 is further to undergird God’s impartiality; it cannot be the case that mere possession of Torah, hearing it read in Synagogue, will carry validity with God. Torah was meant to be obeyed, not merely listened to. This is the beginning of a great theme that recurs frequently in Romans: Possession of Torah had become, in much Jewish thought, a badge of privilege, a talisman, a sign that Israel was inalienably God’s people. No, says Paul. What counts is doing Torah. It will take him eight or ten more chapters to explain finally what he means by “doing” Torah, and we must follow the argument through to understand him at that point (see on 8:1-4; 10:5-11). For the moment, he is content to assert the point: Israel’s ethnic privilege, backed up by possession of Torah, will be of no avail at the final judgment if Israel has not kept Torah. Justification, at the last, will be on the basis of performance, not possession.

2:14-15. These verses, or part of them, are sometimes considered an aside, letting the main thrust of the paragraph jump from v. 13 straight to the conclusion in v. 16 (So NIV; KJV includes v. 13 too, in the bracket). This once more ignores the γάρ (gar, “for”) that introduces the passage. Paul intends to explain something he has just said, and there is no need to suppose that the thought of v. 15 cannot run on into v. 16 just as well, if not better, than that of v. 12 or v. 13.

But how do vv. 14-15 explain vv. 12-13? By providing an example of doers of the Torah who are not hearers of it; people, in other words, who perform what Torah requires even though, not being Jews, they have not sat in the synagogue and heard it read. Their thoughts may be confused on the last day, but they will show that “the work of the Torah” had been written on their hearts.

Who are these Gentile law-keepers? There are three basic ways in which scholars have taken these passages.^⁶² Some have said, in the light of the conclusion of the larger argument in 3:19-20, that this is a purely hypothetical category. Paul is indicating that, when God judges the secrets of all hearts, if there should be any who succeeded in doing good, they would indeed reap the appropriate reward; but he is holding up a mirage that will disappear when the argument is complete. There may, in other words, be Gentiles who fulfill part of the law, but in the end this will count for nothing. Others have taken the opposite line and seen 2:1-16 as evidence that Paul does not after all hold that all humans are sinners. He is aware, they say, that in both the Jewish and the pagan world there are some humans who really do that which God intends, who avoid vice and practice virtue, and who will be suitably rewarded in the end.^⁶³

Both of these positions are difficult to maintain. The first has Paul leading his readers far further up the garden path than the demands of a rhetorical strategy would suggest. The second falls foul of Paul’s emphasis on the universality of human sin, in the overarching theme stated in 1:18 and concluded in 3:20. (A further option--that the passage does not really represent Paul’s thought, but is either a synagogue homily thrown in here for some reason or is a train of thought that Paul should have assimilated more fully to his own mature views--is I believe a counsel of despair.)^⁶⁴ The third way through is that, just as in chapter 1 Paul was hinting at Jews sharing in the judgment that would fall on pagans, a theme waiting to be explored more fully in due course, so here he is hinting at a theme he will explore later in the letter, namely that the people in question are Christian Gentiles (vv. 14-15)--indeed, Christian Jews and Gentiles alike (vv. 7, 10).^⁶⁵ There are problems with this reading, too, but they are not so insuperable as sometimes supposed.^⁶⁶

Throughout the section so far Paul has been saying things that cry out for further explanation, which he will provide as the letter moves forward. He is at this point sketching a scene, not filling in all the details. But by the end of chap. 2 he has revealed a little more (see on 2:25-29 below); the picture will be colored in fully in 8:1-11; 10:5-11; and 13:8-10. Paul’s view, to anticipate the later argument, is that those who are in Christ, who are indwell by the Spirit, do in fact “do the law,” even though, in the case of Gentiles, they have never heard it. The law, in Paul’s view, pointed to that fullness of life and obedience to God which comes about in the Messiah; those who attain that fullness of life and obedience are therefore “doing the Torah” in the senses that, to Paul, really matter. He is well aware that this is paradoxical, but well aware also that to say anything else would be to imply, which he never does, either that the Torah was a bad thing, now happily left behind, or that Gentile Christians are second-class citizens in the kingdom of the Messiah. He will have it both ways; they are not under the Torah, but at the same time they are essentially doing what Torah really wanted.

The main problem with taking vv. 14-15 to refer to Gentile Christians is the word φύσει (physei) in v. 14, translated “by nature” in the NIV and “instinctively” in the NRSV. It is commonly thought both that this modifies the verb “do,” and that Paul here echoes Stoic thought about a “natural law.”^⁶⁷ Neither of these is as secure as it might appear.

Physei comes in the middle of the clause: όταν γάρ έθνη τά μή νόμον έχοντα φύσει τά τοΰ νόμου ποιώσιν (hotan gar ethnē to mē nomon echonta physei ta tou nomou poiōsin, “for when nations not having Torah by nature do the things of Torah”). “By nature” could, grammatically, go either way, in Greek as in that English translation. It could modify “having Torah” instead of “doing the things of Torah.” (One might have expected, if Paul was going to say the first of these, that physei would come between τά [ta] and μή [mē], τά φύσει μή νόμον έχοντα [ta physei mē nomon echonta], but that is by no means certain; hypothetical reconstructions of what Paul might have said remain insecure.) Paul’s point would then be the obvious one: that Gentiles do not, by nature--that is, by origin and parentage--possess the Torah. This is exactly the sense that Paul gives to φύσις (physis) thirteen verses later when, making an almost identical point, he describes Gentile Christians as ή έκ φύσεως άκροβυστία τόν νόμον τελοΰσα (he ek physeōs akrobystia ton nomon telousa, “the by-nature uncircumcision that fulfills the Torah”]. “Nature” cannot here refer to something that is common, innate, to all humans. Jews, too, are born uncircumcised; that is, in that sense, their “natural” state. It must refer to Gentile humanity as opposed to Jewish (cf. Gal 2:15). I suggest that this is so for 2:14 as well.

If it is insisted that the Stoic echoes of “natural law” are so strong in this passage as virtually to force the reading “do by nature what the law requires,” I still maintain, for the reasons given earlier, that the people Paul has in mind must be Gentile Christians. In that case, however, he would be providing a polemical twist of his own to the phrase “by nature.” I doubt, frankly, whether Paul would suppose that any pagan could actually fulfill the Torah “by nature” in that sense. What he would be saying, with one eye on a Stoic interlocutor, would be, in effect, “you vaunt your celebrated ‘natural law,’ and think you can obey it. I will show you some people who have a different sort of law in their ‘natures’--because, as I shall show, their ‘natures’ have been renewed in Christ and by the Spirit.”^⁶⁸

Further evidence in favor of this overall interpretation is provided by v. 15a. To have the work of the law “written on the heart” is one of the promises of the new covenant in Jer 31:33 (see also Jer 32:40; cf. the “new heart” in Ezek 36:26). Paul clearly believed, and elaborated this at various points, that the covenant had been renewed, according to this promise, through Jesus, and that this renewal was being implemented by the Spirit in those who were “in Christ.” This phrase is a further indication that he has Christian Gentiles in mind. Their conscience bears witness to this; nothing here, or in Paul’s other references to “conscience,” implies that he accords this faculty the status of offering direct revelation of moral truth, and indeed he envisages, in 1 Corinthians 8, persons who have “weak” consciences and need to be treated accordingly.^⁶⁹ Here the thought is simply that the Gentile Christians who, living in the Spirit, are in fact fulfilling the Torah, are aware deep within their own hearts that they are right with God.

Why then do their thoughts become confused as they approach the judgment, as the end of v.15 indicates? Perhaps because their situation, being outside the Torah and yet fulfilling it from the heart, leaves them with questions that may produce a moment of panic in even the most settled believer. Perhaps because, as Paul has said in v. 7, they have not earned glory, honor, and immortality, merely sought it; they know it remains a gift, however much it will turn out to be in accordance with the life they have in fact lived. Perhaps because the doctrine of assurance, which is indeed Pauline and is based securely in Romans, especially chaps. 5-8, leaves room, as it did in Paul himself, for times of “fighting, without and fears within” (2 Cor 7:5), for times of utter despair (2 Cor 1:8). Perhaps because, as the hymn writer puts it, “they who fain would serve thee best are conscious most of wrong within.”^⁷⁰ Paul is clear though, about the outcome.

2:16. On the day of judgment--Paul reserved this climactic statement for the end of the argument, picking up the scriptural theme of day of YHWH”--God will judge the secrets of human hearts. Nothing will then escape scrutiny. God will be seen to be just. And this judgment, as we have already noted, will be “through the Messiah, Jesus.” God’s justice will be revealed, fulfilling scriptural promises and putting all other justice (Caesar’s included) to shame. Why so? Not least precisely because this revelation will expose and assess the secrets of all human hearts. Just as Jews cannot hide from the judgment by pleading their Jewishness, so no human can hide from the judgment by relying on outward appearances and covering up the secrets of the heart.

1. It is important not to jump too quickly into a blanket condemnation of moralism. Our culture has a strong inbuilt prejudice against moralizing. We much prefer either a laissez-faire tolerance or the street-level existentialism that reduces all morals to “do what you feel like as long as you don’t hurt anyone.” We are thus all too eager to read Romans 2 as a denunciation of moralism and then to feel self-righteous because we are not self-righteous. This is to miss Paul’s point.

He clearly believed that morals mattered to society and to persons and was not frightened to state what those morals were and how disregarding them brought disaster. Of course, he set all this in a different context from that of either Judaism or the pagan moralists (and from that of contemporary secular or postmodern moralists, for that matter), but he did not object to people holding or propagating high moral standards. What he did object to was doing so while failing to practice what one preached. It is interesting to note that his great contemporary Seneca was criticized, both in his lifetime and after his death, for preaching one standard and living another. Seneca responded, somewhat lamely, that it is the duty of moralists to hold out the highest conceivable standard even if it turns out to be impossible for themselves. For Paul this would have been nonsense. What he objected to, here at beast, was the hypocrisy of denouncing faults while secretly practicing them oneself.

2. This is a problem familiar from psychology. We project aspects of our character--the aspects of which we are ashamed and perhaps even ignorant--on to other people and then blame them angrily for the very same things. This happens, notoriously, between parents and children. It also occurs, for instance, when journalists (the main source of moralizing in our society), whose own lives might not always bear public scrutiny, take delight in exposing, in the rich and famous, failings of which they themselves may be privately guilty. Behind Paul’s specific argument here there stands an assumption, spelled out in other places, that the Christian should be so open to the searchlight of the Spirit that the dark corners of his or her life and inner motivations are increasingly spotlighted and dealt with. Only then will an authentic holding forth of standards of behavior be possible. Only then will one be able gently and firmly to articulate a standard and to denounce evil.

3. Belief in a final just judgment remains excellent news for millions in our world, as it was in Paul’s. Of course, when this belief is downgraded into vague hopes for a better life hereafter and vague warnings about possible unpleasant consequences of wrongdoing (or for that matter when it is artificially pumped up into shrill hell-fire denunciations and casual self-satisfied salvation-assurance), the clarity of the Christian view of future judgment is lost, and with it both the moral imperative and the true hope of the oppressed. Indeed, as Marx pointed out, projecting hope for a better life forward into the future can then be used by oppressors to keep their subjects, if not happy at least not rebellious. But that is a parody, a caricature, of Paul’s teaching. There is indeed a promise that wrongs will be put to rights, offering a strong and sure hope that can sustain those who suffer oppression and injustice. But in Jesus the Messiah this hope has come forward into the present. Those who give allegiance to Jesus, so far from being agents of oppression by reinforcing a vague future hope and hence a passivity about the present, are charged with realizing God’s justice in the present time in all ways possible.

4. It still needs saying, though it remains difficult to say, that the creator of the world has no “favored nation clause.” No one, no culture, no nation, no ethnic group, can say “because we are x, y, or z, God will be gracious to us come what may.” In a world of increasing ethnic and tribal tensions, often exacerbated by different religious affiliations (including, alas, different sup posedly Christian affiliations; one cannot but think of Northern Ireland), this message needs to be heard afresh.

5. The most disturbing application of this passage is surely to the world of professing Christians. Paul seems to take it for granted that Christians will not be in the position of his imaginary interlocutor; but we are sadly familiar with those who preach or profess allegiance to Jesus as Messiah and Lord but do not practice it. Romans 2 can serve as a second-order reminder of the folly and danger of thus presuming on God’s kindness and forbearance. To name the name of Jesus is, as 2:16 makes clear, to invoke the one to whom all, especially his own, will give account.

NIV: ¹⁷Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and brag about your relationship to God; ¹⁸if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; ¹⁹if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, ²⁰an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth-- ²¹you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? ²²you who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? ²³You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? ²⁴As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” ²⁵Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. ²⁶If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? ²⁷The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker. ²⁸A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. ²⁹No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.

NRSV: ¹⁷But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God ¹⁸and know his will and determine what is best because you are instructed in the law, ¹⁹and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, ²⁰a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, ²¹you, then, that teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? ²²You that forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you rob temples? ²³You that boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? ²⁴For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” ²⁵Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. ²⁶So, if those who are uncircumcised keep the requirements of the law, will not their uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? ²⁷Then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you that have the written code and circumcision but break the law. ²⁸For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. ²⁹Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart--it is spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God.

We now arrive at the point to which the whole section has been building up. Israel, resting on God’s special vocation, has not fulfilled that vocation, and must face the challenge from those who, though not ethnically Jewish, are now inheriting Israel’s role in God’s purposes.

In addressing “the Jew” Paul was, of course, talking to his own former self. More; he was aware, as 9:1-5 will make clear, of deep personal grief, witnessing “his flesh” in rebellion against the gospel message of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus. All that now follows must be seen in this light.

We should beware of the natural tendency, within our individualistic culture, to assume that when Paul uses the second-person singular (“If you, singular, call yourself a Jew”) he is referring to a typical individual. Just as in chap. 7 his rhetorical use of “I” arguably indicates the nation as a whole, so here his “you” focuses and makes dramatic that which is said of the whole Jewish people. Paul is not for a moment suggesting anything so absurd as that all Jews steal, commit adultery, rob temples, and so forth. His point is rather that the national boast of ethnic Israel, that of being the creator’s chosen people, is falsified if theft, adultery, and so forth are found within the nation. The presence of misbehavior within ethnic Israel renders void the national, ethnic boast; it prevents Israel from fulfilling its calling to be the light of the world.

The passage, then, is not simply part of a long demonstration that all humans are sinful. That is indeed one of the major thrusts of the section 1:18-3:20, but within that overarching purpose these verses introduce a quite different idea. Faced with a general denunciation of the pagan world, many educated Jews--including, presumably, Paul himself in his pre-Christian life--would say that this is of course true of pagans, but that God has chosen Israel as the light to the nations and has given Israel the Torah so that it can fulfill this role. Israel is the solution to the world’s plight (see, among countless possible examples, 2 Bar 48:20-24). The problem he is outlining at this point in the argument, and to which he will offer a solution in the section beginning at 3:21, is not simply that all are sinful and in need of salvation, but that the bearers of the solution have become part of the problem. Israel, called to be the light of the world, has become part of the darkness. How then can God’s covenant plan be fulfilled? The problem of Israel is thus also a problem for God. It is, in fact, a further dimension of the problem of God’s righteousness. Only if we appreciate this will the transition from chapter 2 to chapter 3 make any sense.

Paul’s turn to “the Jew” in 2:17 has some analogies with the rhetorical ploy of Amos, denouncing the surrounding nations before turning to Judah (Amos 2:4) and particularly the northern kingdom, Israel (Amos 2:6). But this is not the whole truth of this passage. For a start, as we have seen, Paul has had Israel in mind all along, hinting darkly in chap. 1 that his fellow Jews were as guilty of idolatry as were the pagans, strongly suggesting in 2:1-16 that their would-be superiority was no better than that of the pagan moralists. But his point now is not so much to bring out into the open a charge that they are sinful like the rest. He will rub that in in the middle of chap. 3 (and say it again, from another angle, in 7:7-25). The point here is that Israel should have been--had been called to be--the divine answer to the world’s problem; and that, instead, Israel is itself fatally compromised with the very same problem. Israel’s sinfulness is at the heart of the charge, but the charge itself is that the doctor, instead of healing the sick, has become infected with the disease.

The ethnic boast of “the Jew” is thereby called into question. How can a nation that so manifestly falls to be the light of the world claim to be keeping Torah? In the second paragraph of this section (2:25-29), Paul advances a stronger and more detailed form of the argument he made in 2:13-15. Supposing, he says, there exists a people, not sharing Israel’s ethnic privileges, in whom the purposes of God as expressed in Torah are coming to fulfillment. Will they not thereby upstage ethnic Israel? Yes, he declares, such people are members of the renewed covenant. That is what being “a Jew” is all about.

Thus, just as Paul built into his exposition of human sin (1:18-32) elements that hinted at what was to come, so now, in the same way, he is building in to his statement of the complex problem of sin--human sin and the failure of Israel to be the solution-bearer--hints of the solution. This, too, challenges normal simplistic views of the construction of Romans. We can only fully understand 2:26-29, dense and proleptic as it is, with help from elsewhere; but when we grasp its meaning we see why Paul has included it here. Not only is the existence of a parallel company of non-ethnic “Jews” and uncircumcised “circumcision” a direct, albeit oxymoronic, challenge to Israel’s ethnic boast; it sharpens up the question Paul must raise at the start of chap. 3 if the solution, when he finally unveils it in 3:21 and thereafter, is to make the full sense he intends. If God has called this parallel company of “Jews” into existence, what is the point of being a Jew, the point of there being an “Israel,” in the first place? What is God up to?

2:17. Paul’s introduction is designed as a challenge: You claim the name “Jew,” but are you true to it?^⁷¹ Do you know what it really involves? Certainly a Jew such as Saul of Tarsus would be ready enough with the answer, beginning with “reliance on Torah,” “boasting in God,” and quite possibly the vocation to be “the light of the world.”

The first two of these need more nuance. The word translated “rely” principally means “rest on”; it is a matter of finding security and comfort, not a matter of using the Torah as a ladder of good works, up which to climb to a position of moral superiority or a self earned salvation. The attitude Paul describes would say: “God gave Israel the Torah; our possession of it is the rock on which we stand; it is what makes us Jews God’s special people.”

The attitude to God is much the same. The NIV’s “brag about your relationship to God” sounds as though “the Jew” is telling people about a marvelous personal friendship between him or herself and the true God; but this is not Paul’s meaning. (The word “relationship” is responsible for too many fudged arguments in contemporary theology.) The NRSV’s “boast of your relation to God” is a little better, but the word “relation” still sounds, in our culture, as though it is referring to a “personal relationship” in the sense of two persons engaged in active friendship. Neither expression catches the depth of the Greek, which simply and literally means “boast in God”; the point is the Jewish claim, supported throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, that the creator of the world is Israel’s God, and vice versa.

The word “boast” is difficult, too. In contemporary English it is almost always negative, whereas Paul is not only capable of using it in a positive sense (e.g., 5:11 ), but is here both reporting and commending the attitude of “the Jew” as good and God-given. “Celebrate” would bring out the point: “the Jew” celebrates the fact of election, of being God’s chosen people. Neither here nor in the verses to come does Paul regard these claims with contempt, or try to undermine them. The Torah really was given to mark out Israel as God’s people. God really was “their God.” Paul does not for a moment reject the specialness of Israel. At this stage in the letter, he simply questions whether those making the claim have forfeited the right to do so.

2:18-20. This basic picture is filled out with more of “the Jew’s” self-description. Verse 18 states two ways in which Torah enables the Jew to attain true moral knowledge, as a result of which (vv. 19-20) Israel should be in a position to instruct the nations, again because of Torah. This prepares the way for the charge in vv. 21-23, which consists of four moral challenges and a question about Torah, backed up with a quote from the prophets. In this paragraph Paul is concentrating on Torah in the following one on circumcision; these are the badges that marked out Jews from their pagan neighbors.

Possession of Torah should enable “the Jew” to know God’s will and “distinguish things that differ” (v, 18), in other words, to make moral judgments, determining what is best (NRSV) or approving what is superior (NIV; the NEB, for once, comes closest to the literal meaning with “you are aware of moral distinctions”). The point is that Torah’s instruction enables the Jew to see to the heart of moral issues. As a result (vv. 19-20), Israel is in theory the light of the nations, the world’s moral teacher, because in Torah Israel really does possess “the embodiment of knowledge and truth.” The term μόρφωσις (morphosis, translated here “embodiment”) means “the outward manifestation”; Paul is acknowledging, and endorsing, a remarkably high, almost incarnational, view of Torah, which should be kept in mind during subsequent discussions.

2:21-22. Granted your possession of this lofty privilege, Paul enquires, what have you done with it? Remembering that the “you” in question is not “every Jewish individual,” but “Israel as a whole,” the answer must be: Israel has squandered its inheritance. Like the biblical prophets, one of whom he will presently quote, Paul charges Israel with infidelity (see also Ps 50:16-20 and the other passages quoted in 3:10-18). The first question serves as a heading for the others: Teacher of others, will you not teach yourself? Theft and adultery exist in Israel, both literally in many cases and spiritually wherever people “rob God” (Mal 3:8) or are unfaithful to him, as a bride to her husband (e.g., Hos 2:2-13).

The charge of temple robbery is, at first blush, more surprising, both because it seems a less obvious offense than theft or adultery and because it seems even less likely that many Jews were involved in such a practice. The best explanation is, once again, that Paul is not so interested in demonstrating that “all Jews are sinners” (as we have seen, his argument scarcely proves this point), as in showing up Israel’s failure to be the light of the world. One is unlikely to demonstrate to the watching pagan world that there is a better way to be human by stealing from pagan temples. This practice, though probably not widespread, was not unknown. Some Jews had evidently used the scriptural polemic against idols to argue that, since idols have no real existence, things given to them are nobody’s property, and hence may be taken with impunity.^⁷² Paul’s point is that the practice exists and brings discredit on Israel precisely among the people to whom “the Jew” is supposed to be acting as the light of the world. This charge shows once more (a) that his concern here is with Israel as a whole, rather than every individual within it and (b) that his point about Israel as a whole is not simply Jewish sin, important though that is, as the fact that this sin results in the failure of Israel to be God’s light to the Gentile world.

2:23-24. This opens up the substance of the charge. The real problem is Israel’s failure to bring God worldwide honor. That was the purpose for which Torah had been given. What Israel has done with Torah has instead brought dishonor: The pagan nations scorn the true God on the basis of the behavior of the covenant people. Breaking Torah nullifies boasting in Torah. Israel, in fact, is in the state spoken of by Isaiah in 52:5. Exile has come because of Israel’s sin (the pagan behavior among YHWH’s own people that caused YHWH’s displeasure), because the pagan nations, looking at Israel, now blaspheme Israel’s God. The same theme appears in other prophetic passages, notably Ezek 36:20-23, a passage that (as we shall see) Paul almost certainly has in mind as well.

As usual, Paul evokes with a single quotation a whole world of scriptural resonance. His point throughout the paragraph is something that few Jews in his day would have contested: that Israel as a whole is not living up to what YHWH would desire and that Israel’s continued subservience to the pagan nations, which had begun with the Babylonian captivity, was a sign that the great promised redemption had not yet arrived. In other words, Israel’s “exile” was still continuing, not in a geographical, but in a theological, spiritual, and moral sense. The prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others had not yet been fulfilled. As the book of Daniel had emphasized, the seventy years of exile had become seventy weeks of years (Introduction, 398 [and footnote 3]). And the very point to which Paul draws attention, in both Isaiah and Ezekiel, is the point at which YHWH declares that, now that the pagans are blaspheming, and the very name of God is dishonored among, them, it is time to act. Isaiah goes on at once to speak of the herald who announces good news to Zion (52:7. quoted by Paul in 10:15); Ezekiel goes on at once to speak of covenant renewal, involving a change of heart and the gift of a new spirit through which God’s people will at last keep the statutes of the law. Paul, with these larger contexts in mind, has called up the one element of the prophetic critique that makes his present point--that Israel has failed in bringing honor to God’s name among the nations--and also hints at the renewal of the covenant and the gift of the Spirit.

2:25-29. He comes at this latter point by introducing, in parallel with the point about Torah, the question of circumcision. This was not seen in Judaism as a quasi-moral “good work,” or as a “ritual” designed to earn God’s favor, but as a key badge of Jewish identity, marking out the Jew from the pagan world around. Bringing circumcision and Torah together, Paul declares that the former only means what it is supposed to where Torah is kept; and, once again, Torah has been broken. The badge therefore tells a lie. But if the prophecies of Ezekiel and others about covenant renewal seem to be coming true elsewhere--if there are people with new hearts, new spirits, who are keeping the ordinances of Torah--then, whether they are circumcised or not, they will by their very existence show up the brokenness, the invalidity, of the covenant membership of those who still, despite their circumcision, break Torah.

Paul’s description of this parallel “Jewishness,” this new sort of “circumcision,” is replete with overtones of “new covenant” passages both in scripture and elsewhere in his writings. The problems that this causes, for Paul and for contemporary readers, will emerge later in the letter, together with the solutions Paul proposes (see the Commentary on 3:27-31; 8:1-11; 10:1-13).

2:25. The initial statement, out of which the rest emerges, is sharp. Circumcision is of value (this will be raised again in 3:1) for one who keeps Torah. In other words, keeping Torah is basic, and Without it circumcision becomes an empty sign, a meaningless talisman (cf. 1 Cor 7:19, which puts the point even more strikingly: Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters, since what matters is keeping God’s commands! Paul must have known that this was paradoxical to the point of being funny, since the command to circumcise loomed so large in Judaism and in the written Torah itself). Indeed, to break Torah means not just that circumcision is meaningless, but that it “becomes uncircumcision”; in other words, it works in reverse, marking you out as not a member of God’s people. It becomes a badge of exclusion rather than of inclusion (cf. Gal 5:26, albeit with reference to ex-pagans). Paul will have more to say on this topic (which was, of course, central in the Galatian controversy) in chap. 4.

2:26-27. Paul now explicitly introduces a category of people that is central to his thought and that will occupy him for much of the letter. These are people who, though uncircumcised, “keep the decrees of Torah.” The words he uses are, in effect, an abbreviated version of Ezek 36:27, carrying other biblical echoes as well (notably Deut 30:16 [φυλάσσεσθαι τά δικαιώματα phylassesthai ta dikaiōmata, the same root words as here]; cf. Lev 18:5; both these passages recur in Rom 10:5-11, which develops the present thought; see the Commentary on 10:1-21). Of these people Paul declares that their uncircumcision will count as circumcision; in other words, that God will recognize their physically Gentile state, paradoxically, as the badge of their membership in Israel. As though this were not scandalous enough, Paul goes on to state that these persons, law-keeping though “naturally” uncircumcised through their Gentile origins,^⁷³ will judge those who, despite having the “letter of the law” and physical circumcision, nevertheless transgress the law.

By referring to the law as “the letter” Paul has carefully introduced the category that will enable him to contrast two types of covenant membership in the climactic verses that now follow.

2:28-29. By way of explanation (γάρ gar, “for”) as in the NRSV; unwarrantedly omitted by the NIV), Paul sets our two types of “Jew.” The section began with “the Jew” that claims that name, and that calls Torah and God to witness it. Paul now transfers the name, and the validation, to a different group. In the previous verses he has referred to Gentiles who, though uncircumcised, keep the law’s regulations; he can only mean Gentile Christians, since this passage, explaining what has gone before, is clearly about membership in the new, or renewed, covenant. But the primary category he is describing is not restricted to Gentiles; Paul explains the narrower point (vv. 26-27) by setting out a broader one. He most certainly regarded himself, and his fellow Jewish Christians, as part of the same new covenant people of God.

The contrast he makes is between that which is open, visible, and obvious, and that which is secret. This boils down, more or less, to the “outward/inward” distinction (NRSV, NIV, and most others), but we should beware of importing into Paul a Platonic either/or that is foreign to him. His sentences are clipped and dense at this point, and paraphrase is almost inevitable; literally, what he says is, “For the one in visibility is not a Jew, nor is the one in visibility (in the flesh) circumcision; but the one in secret is a Jew, and circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit not the letter.” We should note that he does not say, as the NEB and others do, the “true” Jew, the “true” circumcision. His point is more stark. The name “Jew,” and the attribute “circumcision,” belong to the secret/heart/spirit people, not to the visibility/flesh/letter people (cf. Phil 3:3, where a closely accurate translation might be “the ‘circumcision’ means us”). It is as shocking as that. As if to emphasize that he really means it, Paul will at once go on to challenge himself on the point and to think through what follows.

In referring to the secret/heart/spirit people, Paul clearly means to designate those in whom the gospel of the Messiah has done its work. The promises of God through Deuteronomy 30, Ezekiel 36, and elsewhere have come true. God has done, in Jesus and the Spirit, what he had promised; the result is the creation of the people of the new covenant. Paul’s clearest statement of this point may be found in 2 Cor 3:1-6, where the letter/spirit contrast is again prominent.^⁷⁴ There are several other passages in which a similar theological understanding maybe discerned, not least Romans 8 and 10. Resistance to finding the notion of “covenant” in Paul has proved remarkably strong, not least among those for whom the center of Paul’s thought is the radical newness of God’s action in Christ; but once it is appreciated that Paul’s covenant theology is precisely about the radically new and unexpected, even shocking, way in which God has fulfilled the promises of Ezekiel and elsewhere, and that “covenant” and “apocalyptic,” so far from being antithetical categories, belong closely together in Second Temple Judaism and in Paul himself, the problem should fade away.^⁷⁵

The paragraph carries a typically Pauline sting in the tail. This new covenant people, the ones who fulfill Torah whether or not they are circumcised, the ones who carry the covenant marks on their hearts rather than in their flesh--this people show that they have the right to the name “Jew” because “their praise is not from humans, but from God.” Paul is alluding to, rather than making, a pun that would be obvious to an educated Jew; in Hebrew the word “Judah” means “praise.” They receive the name “Jew,” in other words, from God, as a gift of grace. These are the ones who can now “celebrate in God” (2:17), as he will declare in 5:11.

Paul has introduced this brief description of the new covenant people into his argument without full explanation. Within 2:17-29, its primary purpose is simply to highlight the failure of Israel to be the covenant people of the creator God, the light of the dark world. As so often, however, Paul’s tantalizing asides serve other purposes as well; here he has introduced one of the major themes of the letter, to be elaborated more fully in due course and has done so not least in order to raise the questions that he will glance at in chap. 3 and then return to more fully in chaps. 9-11. In fact, 2:26-29 stands to 3:1-8 much as 5-8 stands to 9-11. Paul’s thought in this letter moves in a great expanding upward spiral; when we reach chap. 8, we shall be able to look down from a greater height and see this dense little statement more or less exactly beneath us.

Like many other things in chap. 2, this passage must wait for further elaboration in subsequent chapters. In addition to the questions Paul asks at once at the start of chap. 3, the reader, ancient or modern, wants to know: In what sense do these people “fulfill the Torah,” or “keep the ordinances of the law”? Here, as so often, the exegete needs patience, which is itself, after all, one of the fruits of the Spirit.

1. The alarming conclusions of the previous paragraph are further reinforced. Who today sets themselves up as teachers of the foolish, guides to the blind? At one level, of course, politicians and journalists--who, routinely enough in many cases, show by their own behavior that they have not taken their own advice. At a different level altogether, there are some Jews, particularly some idealistic Zionists, who cling to the belief that the modern state of Israel is supposed at last to be the light to the nations. If that were so, it would not take a particularly cynical reading of contemporary Middle Eastern social and political realities to say that things are very far from where they should be. Indeed, a good many Jews, including many who themselves live in Israel, would heartily agree. One does not have to be unsympathetic with the ambiguous plight of that state to recognize the problem; indeed, the more sympathy, the more agonizing over the way things are.

But at another level altogether, a Christian reader cannot escape the acute discomfort of saying that the church, in both its local, denominational and international manifestations, stands equally under the condemnation of a passage like this. Those who read the Sermon on the Mount in the course of regular worship hear themselves now called to be the light of the world, and to embody, in secret as well as in public, the generous love of the creator God. There are many churches, of course, where the gospel is lived out in its full transforming reality. But equally there are many that must hang their heads in shame at the question, You who would teach others, can you not teach yourself?

This question arises particularly in the question of Christian unity. Part of the point of Paul’s gospel is that there is one God, who, therefore, desires one people (see on 3:30). Paul fought against splitting the church along ethnic or cultural lines; Christian denominations often reflect precisely these splits, using dogmatic differences as a cloak for continuing tribal identity. Sometimes this becomes openly scandalous, as in Northern Ireland or the Balkans. But as long as those who name the name of Jesus Christ cannot at least share the Eucharist, cannot in some cases even pray together, the name of God will continue to be blasphemed among pagans.

2. The claim that those who belong to the new covenant, in the Messiah and by the Spirit, are now entitled to the name “Jew” was deeply controversial in Paul’s day and has again become so in the twentieth century. Until we reach Romans 9-11 we cannot attempt a full treatment of the subject; but we must note again both that Paul’s writing about “the Jew” was writing about himself, and that when he spoke of the failure of his own people he did so with tears.

These concessions will not, of course, mollify those for whom any claim by Christians, including Jewish Christians, to be the people of the renewed covenant is downright offensive. The offense comes at at least three levels. First many Jews in today’s world, all too aware of centuries of persecution by soi-disant Christians, are highly sensitive to the early Christian claim that the events concerning Jesus were the fulfillment of prophecy, the unveiling of the “righteousness of God”--and in particular, of course, to the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was and is Israel’s promised Messiah. To make such claims, it has again been urged in our day, is itself an act of anti-Judaism, perhaps even now of anti-Semitism (the former a rejection of Judaism as a way of life, the latter a rejection of a particular race, with overtones of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial theories).^⁷⁶

Second, many Christians have thought long and hard about the meaning of the ghastly events in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and have arrived at a firm conviction that the massacre of six million Jews in the Nazi “final solution” was the result of, among other things, an emphasis on claims such as those made by Paul in this passage. The moral imperative seems then inevitable: The church must back off from all such claims and should at the most express its faith in terms of a way of spirituality, based on the Jew Jesus of Nazareth, which many non-Jews have found life-giving. A corollary has sometimes been mooted: Paul is to be rejected as a paganizer of the Jewish message of Jesus.^⁷⁷

Third, a position that many consider “modern,” but which is rooted, at least in its current expressions, in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. According to this, all religions are inadequate approximations to truth, and, despite what many of them say, none has exclusive rights to it. The appropriate stance is therefore mutual tolerance. This is, of course, a covert way of saying, among other things, that (at least) Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all actually misleading, since all of them make, at the very heart, claims that the others are bound to deny if they are not to lose their very identity. Nevertheless, this secularized agenda has seeped into both Jewish and Christian circles, often coupled with the laudable desire for humility and mutual respect, sometimes using that as a pretext for a highly arrogant liberalism that challenges all truth claims while pressing its own with remarkable intolerance.

Two points only can be made at this stage. First, Paul’s own position was that of a Christian Jew. He regarded this as natural and normal, indeed the most appropriate thing possible. Though his own vocation was to declare to the pagan world the Jewish gospel message (that the one God of the whole world, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who gave the Torah, had now unveiled in Jesus the final stage of the plan to bring justice and healing to the world), he knew, and insisted in this letter, that the gospel remained “for the Jew first,” however much it was also “and equally to the Greek.” Any suggestion that Paul would have countenanced a split, a twin-track salvation-history, in which Jews should remain Jews and Gentiles might become Christians is without the slightest foundation in his thought or writings (see the Commentary on 9:1-11:36).^⁷⁸

Second, there is a curious anomaly within the Christian position outlined above. On the one hand, we are urged to reject non-Jewish styles of Christianity, to recover the Jewish roots of our faith, and to cherish and nourish such echoes of Jewish ways, Jewish rituals, Jewish understandings, as we can. Christian versions of Seder meals have become common. This, it seems to me, is a healthy corrective to the many ways in which Christians so easily slip into non-Jewish modes of thought, taking their color and agenda instead from the pagan world around. On the other hand, the same people who urge this agenda regularly also press upon the church the need to renounce all claim to be “the Jew,” “the circumcision.” “Supersession” is the magic word here, or perhaps we should say the demon-word. It is wheeled out again and again, implying that in such a view the church has taken Israel’s place in God’s plan, leaving no room any longer for non-Christian Israel, Israel (in Paul’s phrase) “according to the flesh.”

This double position is grossly inconsistent. The more we examine the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, the more we are bound to discover that all the early Christians known to us defined themselves with joy as God’s Israel, living in and seeking to share the blessings of the messianic age that had dawned with Jesus, the new age for the whole world that began when Jesus rose from the dead. This is hardly supersessionism, unless we were to charge Isaiah, Ezekiel, Deuteronomy even, and figures like John the Baptist, and indeed the Essenes, with that crime as well. Making the totally Jewish claim that God will renew, or has renewed, the covenant, throwing its membership open far and wide, was unpopular when the prophet did it, when Jesus did it, when Paul did it. There is no easy answer to the large-scale question underneath this discussion. If there were, Paul would have given it, rather than mounting the massive argument we find in chaps. 9-11. But let us at least talk sense, however humbly, in wrestling with it.

NIV: ¹What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? ²Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God.

³What if some did not have faith? Will their lack of faith nullify God’s faithfulness? ⁴Not at all! Let God be true, and every man a liar. As it is written:

⁵But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argument.) ⁶Certainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world? ⁷Someone might argue, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” ⁸Why not say–as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say–”Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is deserved.

NRSV: ¹Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? ²Much, in every way. For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. ³What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? ⁴By no means! Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true, as it is written, “So that you may be justified in your words, and prevail in your judging.” ⁵But if our injustice serves to confirm the justice of God, what should we say? That God is unjust to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) ⁶By no means! For then how could God judge the world? ⁷But if through my falsehood God’s truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? ⁸And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”? Their condemnation is deserved!

The force of this section is only grasped when two things are appreciated: the “symphonic” structure of the letter (see Introduction), in which themes are hinted at in advance of their full statement, and the underlying subject of God’s faithfulness to the covenant and Israel’s vocation to an answering faithfulness through which God’s purpose for the world will be accomplished. Paul is concerned here not so much with the sinfulness of all Jews, important though that is, as with Israel’s failure to carry out the divine commission, to the means of the world’s salvation. The thought remains dense and sometimes elliptical, but the clear point emerges: God remains faithful to the covenant plan even though Israel has failed in the covenant task.

Israel’s failure puts God into an apparently award position. Will not the divine righteousness at one level generate unrighteousness at another? Paul rebuts these charges briefly without actually answering them fully; he will return to them in due course.^⁷⁹ For the moment his aim is to assert the continuing faithfulness of God, despite Israel’s failure; this then clears the ground for the point (which many have assumed was the only one in the entire section) that Jews have joined Gentiles in the dock, guilty as charged.

3:1-2. What then of Israel? The question is natural in view of the end of chap. 2. If God is capable of calling “Jews” from among the uncircumcised, what was the point of being Jewish, or being circumcised, in the first place? Paul, given the chance to offer a radically Marcionite answer (e.g., “None whatever!”), has no intention of doing so. The God revealed in Jesus Christ, as he will make clear In the next two chapters, remains the God of Abraham, the covenant God. His answer gives the clue to his real concern throughout the paragraph. The Jews were entrusted with God’s oracles. (Paul says “in the first place,” but never gets round to saying “in the second place.” Until, that is, chap. 9.)

“The oracles” τά λόγια (ta logia) is an unusual phrase, found only here in Paul (it is used for the “oracles” of the prophet Balaam in Num 24:4, 16 and often for words spoken by God to Israel; e.g., Deut 33:9 and frequently in Psalm 119; in the NT, see Acts 7:38; Heb 5:12; 1 Pet 4:11). In its pagan usage it often referred to oracles in the technical sense: short utterances given, supposedly under inspiration, at shrines such as Delphi. A ruler would send emissaries to an oracular shrine, who would return entrusted with the (often cryptic) words of the deity, not for themselves but for their master. In addition, the priest or priestess at the shrine would themselves be “entrusted” by the god with the message for the recipient. This explains well enough the sense of Paul’s comment. The Jews were “entrusted” with messages for the world: not simply with Torah itself, but, through their living under Torah, with words of instruction, of life and light, for the Gentile world. They were to be God’s messengers. The fact that this theme is so evident in the present paragraph is further proof of the reading of 2:17-29 proposed above.

3:3. Paul’s basic answer is the central point of the paragraph. Israel’s faithlessness cannot nullity God’s faithfulness. He expresses this as a question, but the Greek construction demonstrates that he clearly expects the answer “No.” We should note, despite the NIV’s translation “What if some did not have faith?,” that Paul is not so concerned with whether they “had faith” in the sense of “Christian faith,” a personal trust in the God who raises the dead, but rather with their faithfulness--faithfulness (that is) to the commission to be God’s messenger people. The Greek word πίστις (pistis), used here for the first time in the body of the letter (i.e., since 1:17), is much broader than the English “faith,” particularly in some of its theological developments, and encompasses the meanings “trustworthiness” and “loyalty” as well as what we have come to think of as its more “religious” meanings (personal trust in, and knowledge of, God and belief in true statements about God). It is clearly the broader meaning that is on view here, both in its negative form, applied to Israel (unfaithfulness, untrustworthiness) and in its positive form, applied to God (faithfulness, reliability). The πίστις θεου (pistis theou), “God’s trustworthiness,” is thus clearly one aspect of, one way of referring to, the δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou), “God’s righteousness.” God’s covenant always envisaged Israel’s being faithful to the commission to be the light of the world; Israel’s untrustworthiness does not abolish God’s trustworthiness. It merely sharpens up the question: What will God do now?

3:4. To back up the point, Paul quotes Ps 51:4 (50:6 LXX), the great prayer of repentance ascribed to David after his adultery with Bathsheba.^⁸⁰ The verse indicates the abject sorrow of the penitent, acknowledging that when God condemns this sin there will be no question about the rightness of the verdict. God’s words are true, even if all human words prove false. It is interesting to observe that when Paul alludes to or mentions David, here and in 4:6-8, it is in connection with sin and forgiveness.^⁸¹ The psalm goes on, of course, to speak of the new heart that God will create within the penitent and the gift of the Holy Spirit--”new covenant” themes, in other words, that tie in, via Ezekiel 36, with the close of chap. 2. The verse Paul quotes stresses that sinful humanity, and sinful Israel, can have no claim on God.

3:5-6. This raises an apparent problem, caused perhaps by the language of the psalm as much as anything else. It might seem as though God were acting as judge and executioner in a case where the two parties at law were Israel and--God’s own self! This would constitute flagrant injustice; how could the party on trial also judge the case fairly? But Paul is quick to point out that God is not actually at law with Israel; God is the cosmic judge, who must bring justice to the whole world. Some scriptural passages do speak of God having a lawsuit against Israel, but the more fundamental truth is that God is the judge.^⁸²

3:7-8. The same objection is now put from another angle, returning to the truth/falsehood antithesis of v. 4. This is not so much a legal dilemma, but an apparent absurdity at a less formal level.

Paul slips into the first-person singular (“my falsehood,” “why am I condemned?”). This does not mean that he is thinking of himself as an individual, nor simply that he is personalizing the argument for the sake of rhetorical impact. He is in effect anticipating the rhetorical move of 7:7-25 (see the commentary at that point), where the “I” is a way of talking about Israel while not seeming to stand over against “his kinsmen according to the flesh.” The fact that he moves back to treating Jews in general in v. 9 strongly supports this reading. The question is then, if Israel’s falsehood means that God’s truthfulness shines out all the more brightly, why should God object? Surely “I” should not then be condemned--in other words, surely God cannot actually endorse what was said in 2:17-29, not least 2:27? The deepest charge against Israel in 2:17-24, after all, was that God’s name was being blasphemed because of Israel’s disobedience to Torah. Very well, if God’s glory is enhanced by this process, surely God will now be pleased? Why should “I” then be condemned as though “I” άμαρτωλός (hamartōlos), a “sinner,” a mere pagan, one of the lesser breeds outside the Torah?^⁸³ (This question again reflects the charge Paul has been mounting throughout the previous paragraphs: The condemnation incurred by the pagans falls on Israel as well.)

Paul does not deign to answer this question, but instead amplifies it by referring to a still more blatant attack on the integrity of his theology. Some, he says, have been slandering him (lit., “blaspheming” him; but the word had a more general sense); some are reporting him as saying “let us do evil that good may come.”^⁸⁴ In other words, the “evil” of Israel’s failure has brought the “good” of the gospel--a point one can understand people thinking on the basis of, say, Rom 11:11-15--so why not apply the principle more generally?

Paul’s only comment on this is the heavily ironic one: Here at least is someone whose condemnation is manifestly just. If nothing else about God’s judgment is certain, it is thoroughly deserved by people who can say such a thing--either in general, or as a caricature of Paul’s teaching.

Why has Paul allowed himself even to note these problems, providing so much puzzlement for subsequent readers, without giving answers? Part of the answer, as we hinted earlier, is that he had to acknowledge them after what he had said in 2:25-29 (and indeed 2:13-15). But a further and deeper reason, which will emerge in 3:21-26, is that the gospel itself reveals God’s righteousness, precisely that righteousness that is called into question in the ways outlined so briefly here.

The fuller answer, though, comes in chaps: 9-11, where the same questions recur:

3:3, “Has Israel’s failure impugned the faithfulness of God to the words previously . issued?” corresponds to 9:6, “it is though God’s word had failed”;

3:5, “Is God then unjust?” corresponds to 9:14, “Is there injustice with God?”;

3:7, “Why am I still condemned?” corresponds to 9:19, “Why does God still find fault?”

3:9, as we shall see below, corresponds in all sorts of ways to 9:30-10:21. In addition, the narrative logic of chap. 3, in which the failure of Israel leads to the fresh revelation of God’s righteousness (3:21-26), corresponds closely to the narrative logic of the whole of 9-11, focused particularly on 10:1-4.

We should also note that in 7:7-25 we find a much fuller presentation of Israel’s failure and of the strange way in which the Torah was involved in it, which develops the thought of 2:17-29 and prepares the way for chaps. 9-11. There, too, the first-order problem is not “legalism” so much as lawbreaking. The second-order problem there is the plight of Israel, called to be under Torah and yet discovering that it condemns rather than giving life--again, not too far from 2:17-29, and ending with a cry of frustration that bears some relation to the (admittedly more cynical) questions of 3:7-8. There, too, the statement of the problem in 7:7-25 prepares the ground for the statement of the solution in 8:1-11, just as the present passage prepares for 3:21-4:25, both “solutions” hinging on the death of Jesus. All in all, then, the present paragraph is thoroughly integrated into the rest of the letter.

All this indicates how Paul’s mind works as he paints on this grand theological canvas, and how vital it is, if we are to grasp his full picture, to look to other places where the same theme is treated. At the same time, we must remember the role of the passage in its own context. Paul is doing much more than rehearsing the same argument two or three times, in more detail perhaps, just for the sake of it. So what role does the rapid listing of questions in 3:1-8 play within 1:18-3:20, the section within which it belongs?

The paragraph forms a vital part of three things that are going on simultaneously here. First, it is part of the specific theme of universal human sinfulness (see below on 3:19-20). If Jews are to be included in this indictment--the basic problem being not that they are legalists or moralists, but that their boast is undercut by their own lawbreaking--this raises questions that must be addressed, or at least noted, before the conclusion can be drawn (3:10-20). Thus the sequence of thought runs: 2:17-29, initial accusation against Israel; 3:1-8, weighty theological objections to such an accusation (if it is true, what does that do to your wider theology?); 3:9-20, confirming the truth of the initial accusation.

Second, the paragraph belongs also with the second-order charge that Paul levels against Israel: that, commissioned to be God’s messenger people, the light of the world, it was disloyal to God and failed in the commission. Since the commission was God’s answer to the problem of idolatry and dissolution (1:18-32), the problem might now seem insoluble. Paul here asserts that God will remain faithful; in other words, that despite Israel’s failure the problem of universal sin will be addressed and dealt with.

Third, therefore, and overarching both of these, the paragraph is part of the larger theme of God’s righteousness revealed in the gospel. The character of God is a major theme here; within vv. 2-7 alone Paul deals with God’s oracles, God’s faithfulness, God’s truth (twice), God’s justice, God’s wrath, God’s judgment, and God’s glory. He has already argued in 1:18-2:29 that the gospel reveals God’s impartial judgment, enabling one to understand present moral chaos as an anticipation of the coming wrath. Objections to this are noted in 3:1-8 (it seems to impugn God’s character), and they are answered in such a way as to prepare for the description of the unveiling of God’s righteousness (3:21-4:25). If God is to be true to character, if the promises are to be fulfilled, what is needed is a faithful Israelite who will act on behalf of, and in the place of, faithless Israel. Paul will argue in 3:21-26 that God has provided exactly that.

First, however, the lawcourt scene must be rounded off. The Gentile world has long since been arraigned and found guilty. Paul will now insist that all Jews belong in the dock as well, with nothing to say in their own defense. (See Reflections at 3:9-20.)

NIV: ⁹What shall we conclude then? Are we any better ? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. ¹⁰As it is written:

¹⁹Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. ²⁰Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

NRSV: ⁹What then? Are we any better off? No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, ¹⁰as it is written:

¹⁹Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. ²⁰For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

“Whatever Torah says, it speaks to those under the law” (lit., “in the law,” 3:19). This is the clue to the present paragraph, with its string of scriptural quotations. Having already argued for the universality of Gentile sin and guilt, Paul now needs to emphasize that the Jews must be seen in the dock alongside the pagans. This has been where his argument has been going for some while, but 2:17-29 and 3:1-9 are not just part of the indictment; they are aimed at answering potential objections, at getting rid of excuses, before the final word is spoken.

The biblical quotations come from Israel’s Scriptures and are themselves indictments, not of pagans, but of Jews. Scripture itself, in other words, bears witness against those to whom it was entrusted, leaving the whole world accountable to God (cf. 10:19-21). Paul sums up the problem in terms of the impossibility of anyone being justified by Torah, since all Torah can now do is to point to sin. This will enable him to move at once to demonstrate how the revelation of God’s righteousness in the gospel has dealt with precisely this problem.

3:9. The words of v. 9 could, as they stand, bear several different meanings. Once the train of thought of the chapter as a whole is grasped, however, the options are reduced effectively to one.^⁸⁵ Paul has been arguing that the privileges of the Jews are real, even though they have been squandered; he has answered his own question of v. 1 with “much in every way.” This verse asks a different question: So, then, are we Jews in a better position, in absolute terms? Are we still, in J.B. Phillips’s translation, “a march ahead” of everyone else? Since the answer is filled out not only in the second half of v. 9 but also in vv. 10-20 as a whole, we can deduce that it almost certainly should be “no, not at all.”^⁸⁶

Paul now begins a lawcourt metaphor, which he will develop further in vv. 19-20. He has already laid a charge, like a plaintiff in a case; a charge against both Jews and Greeks (“Greeks” here, as usual, is a metonym for “Gentiles in general”), alleging that they are both “under sin” (NIV, taking the text exactly), i.e., “under the power of sin” (NRSV). By “already charged” he is referring back, obviously, to the argument that began in 1:18. He has not, however, mentioned the word άμαρτία, (hamartia, “sin”) up to this point and has only used the cognate verb άμαρτάνω) (hamartanō) in 2:12, first of Gentiles and then of Jews (see also άμαρτωλός hamartōlos in 3:7). Clearly Paul regards “laying a charge of being under (the power of) sin” as an accurate summary of all that he has said so far. This introduces us to another major theme in the letter, that of “sin” as a personified force and of the slavery of humankind to this force.

In Paul’s usage, “sin” refers not just to individual human acts of “sin,” of missing the mark (the basic meaning of the word) as regards the divine intention for full human flourishing and fulfillment. “Sin” takes on a malevolent life of its own, exercising power over persons and communities. It is almost as though by “sin” Paul is referring to what in some other parts of the Bible is meant by “Satan” (though Paul can use that language too; e.g., 16:20); this is particularly striking in 7:7-25. By analyzing the human plight in this way he is able to introduce the notion of enslavement to sin (e.g., 6:20) and thereby to clear the way for his own version of the story of the exodus: for Pharaoh, read “sin”; for Passover and Red Sea, read the death and resurrection of Jesus; for the arrival at Sinai and the giving of Torah, read the Spirit; for inheriting the promised land, read the renewal of all creation. This sequence of thought, as we shall see, determines a good deal of the shape of Romans 5-8. In the present chapter this is anticipated in the dense description of the death of Jesus in 3:24-26 (on which see below).

3:10-18. Paul arranges his string of biblical quotations quite carefully.^⁸⁷ He opens with the general charge that no one is “righteous,” anticipating the conclusion in v. 20. The rest of the description is framed by charges of impiety: Nobody understands, or seeks after God (v. 11); nobody keeps the fear of God before their eyes (v. 18). Within this, he draws up a comprehensive charge of going astray (v. 12), wicked speech (vv. 13-14), and violent behavior (vv. 15-17).

As always with Paul’s biblical quotations, it is worth checking the contexts to see whether he might have intended wider reference than simply the words quoted.^⁸⁸ After the opening line, which corresponds both to Eccl 7:20 and Ps 14:1, Paul quotes at length from Ps 14:53, which ends with a prayer that God would deliver Israel out of captivity. He then moves to Ps 5:9, the denunciation of those whose throat is an open sepulcher and who deceive with their tongue; the previous verse prays that YHWH would lead the psalmist “in your righteousness.” Continuing in vv. 13-14 the theme of the wickedness of the mouth and tongue, Ps 140:3 adds to Paul’s list of charges that the unrighteous have adders’ poison under their lips, and Ps 10:7 that their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Both psalms beseech YHWH that he would act at last, to judge the wicked and establish the kingdom for ever. All of these wider themes, clearly, fit within the overall subject matter of Romans 1-3.

We then move in v. 15 to Isa 59:7-8, the com. plaint that the wicked are swift to shed blood, bring ruin and destruction, and do not know the way of peace. Of all the chapters in the Hebrew Scriptures, this is the one that most strikingly depicts YHWH discovering that there is no righteousness to be had in the world, and so putting on the clothes of righteousness and salvation to rescue the covenant people and judge their adversaries (59:16-18). The chapter ends with YHWH coming to Zion as redeemer--a passage Paul will quote in 11:26--and establishing the divine covenant with Israel, putting the divine spirit within them. Psalm 36:2, the final quotation (“there is no fear of God before their eyes”), moves on to a paean of praise of God’s mercy and faithfulness (36:5), God’s righteousness and judgments (v. 6), and ends with a prayer for God’s mercy and righteousness to abide with Israel and for the wicked to be judged at last (36:10-12).

This is too much for coincidence. What looked at first like a repetitious list of biblical quotations, apparently laboring the point that all are deeply wicked, turns out to be a subtle sequence of thought, linking in at virtually every point with the themes from Paul’s surrounding argument. The surface meaning of the text is clear, that all who are “under the law” are condemned as sinners; but the subtext is saying all the time, “Yes; and in precisely this situation God will act, because of the divine righteousness, to judge the world, to rescue the helpless, to establish the covenant.” Had Paul been a composer, we may suspect that he would not only have written strong, clear tunes; he would also have been a master of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration.

3:19. To conclude the matter, Paul returns to lawcourt imagery. The Torah (here taken as the whole of the Jewish scriptures, not merely as the first five books) addresses those “in the law,” so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world be accountable to God. The stopping of the mouth, by placing a hand over it, was a conventional sign to indicate that one had no more to say in one’s own defense; if an obviously guilty defendant continued to speak, the court might of course order that his mouth be stopped for him (cf. Acts 23:2; the NIV’s and NRSV’s “silenced” describes the effect, but loses the forensic significance of the physical stopping of the mouth). The term ύπόδικος (hypodikos, “accountable”) probably carries a negative sense; not just “answerable” (which might imply that a good answer could be forthcoming), but “guilty and punishable.” This is confirmed by the “because” at the start of the next verse, explaining as it does why the only evidence that can be produced is evidence of sin. The case has been heard; the defendants have no more to say; they stand in the dock awaiting the verdict, which can only go one way.

3:20. The διότι (dioti) that opens v. 20 certainly means “for” (NRSV) or “because,” not “therefore.”^⁸⁹ This verse offers the logical ground for 3:19, not the other way around. The Torah speaks to those under the Torah, says Paul, with the result that every mouth is stopped, because (v. 20a) nobody will be justified by works of Torah, because (v. 20b) through Torah comes knowledge of sin.^⁹⁰ To remove all doubt, turn the sequence the other way around: Torah brings knowledge of sin, therefore no one will be justified by “works of Torah,” therefore when Torah speaks it leaves those “under Torah” without any defense. Paul has, no doubt, left this point (about the role of Torah in the process) until last in order that he may then state the new point of 3:21 with maximum rhetorical effect.

This verse is one of those points in a Pauline argument where each phrase needs to be weighed with particular care.

To begin with the Subject of the sentence: “No human being” (NRSV) and “no one” (NIV) do not capture the nuance of Paul’s phrase. In alluding to Ps 143:2 [142:2 LXX], it is striking that he says, literally, “all flesh [πασα σάρξ pasa sarx] shall not be justified,”^⁹¹ “Flesh,” as we saw at 1:3, is a heavily loaded term for Paul. It designates, not so much ordinary physicality as opposed to non-material existence, but rather humankind seen as physically corruptible and morally rebellious, heading for death in both senses. It can also carry the sense of Jewish “flesh,” sharing the problem of “fleshly” humanity, with the “fleshly” badge of circumcision only serving to emphasize this identification. That, indeed, is an important part of the argument of Galatians. Although, therefore, Paul’s “all flesh” here means the whole of humanity, it is strikingly appropriate, within his wider theology, that he should use it when insisting that the Jews must join the Gentiles as guilty defendants before the judgment seat of God.

Though Paul is not quoting the psalm verbatim, he clearly intends to refer to it. Once more he seems to have the wider scriptural context in mind.^⁹² Psalm 143 is a prayer invoking the faithfulness and righteousness of YHWH (Ps 143:1), pleading for deliverance, not on the basis of any merit (since, as v. 2 says, no one living is righteous before God), but simply for the sake of God’s name and God’s righteousness (v. 11). Though the surface level of Paul’s argument demands that he quote v. 2, the underlying theme of the whole section now drawing to a close, and of that about to begin, is the righteousness of God. God, being righteous, must judge the wicked; but those who are not righteous themselves may nevertheless cast themselves on God’s righteousness to find deliverance.

What, then, does Paul mean, “by works of the law shall no flesh be justified before God”? How does this relate to 2:13, where “the doers of the law” shall be justified?

The question can only be answered fully in relation to the many other passages where Paul speaks of “works of the law.” But a preliminary answer may be given here, to be filled out as the commentary progresses and with additional side-long glances at Galatians.

Justification, in this passage, is clearly a lawcourt term. We may remind ourselves that the Greek words “justify” (δικαιόω dikaioō) and “justification” (δικαιωσις dikaiōsis) belong to the same root as “righteous” (δικαιος dikaios) and “righteousness” (δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē). Attempts to clarify this in English by choosing one of the two roots and forcing it through (“just, justice” rather than “righteous, righteousness”; “rightwise, rightwising” rather than “justify,” “justification”) bring other problems and have not commanded general assent. As noted in the Introduction, when Paul uses this language he has three interlocking spheres of reference in mind. The language most naturally belongs in the lawcourt;^⁹³ the overarching concept in Paul’s mind is God’s covenant with Israel, the covenant through which (as though in a cosmic lawcourt) the world will be put to rights. And the critical turn in the argument is eschatological: Paul’s affirmation that the final lawcourt scene has been brought forward into the present, that the divine “righteousness” has been disclosed already in Jesus the Messiah.

Put simply, then, Paul’s point here is that the verdict of the court, i.e., of God, cannot be that those who have “works of Torah” on their record will receive the verdict “righteous.” We remind ourselves again that he is not speaking of Gentiles here, but of Jews; we already know, from 1:18-2:16, that Gentiles will not be justified as they stand. “The Jew” of 2:17 will come into court, metaphorically speaking, and “rest in the Torah,” producing “works of Torah”; these, it will be claimed, demonstrate that he or she is indeed a member of Israel, part of God’s covenant people. No, says Paul. To cite one’s possession of Torah as support will not do. Torah will simply remind you that you are a sinner like the Gentiles. That was the point of the hints in 1:18-2:16 and of the direct charge in 2:17-29--not, as is sometimes said, that the Jews are “legalists,” but that they have broken the law they were given. And transgression of Torah shows that Jews, like Gentiles, are “under the power of sin” (3:9). To appeal to Torah is like calling a defense witness who endorses what the prosecution has been saying all along. (This is the point that Paul will develop, via such apparent throwaway lines as 5:20, in 7:7-25; cf. too 1 Cor 15:56.)

What then are these “works of Torah”? How does this indictment against those who have “works of Torah” on their record square with what Paul says about himself in Phil 3:6, that concerning “righteousness in Torah” he had become “blameless”? How does it fit with wider, non-Christian evidence for Jewish beliefs about Torah in Paul’s day?

The only pre-Christian Jewish text we possess that uses the phrase “works of Torah” is a recently published Dead Sea Scroll, the already well-known 4QMMT.^⁹⁴ “We have indeed sent you,” writes the author to his readers, “this selection of works of the Torah according to our decision, for your welfare and the welfare of your people.”^⁹⁵ However, this cannot be used as a template for Paul’s meaning of the phrase itself, since the “works” spoken of there are (a) post-biblical rulings concerning temple purity, aimed at (b) defining one group of Jews over against others. It is clear from Romans and Galatians, as we shall see, that when Paul speaks of “works of the law” he is thinking rather of (a) biblical rules that (b) defined Jews (and proselytes) over against pagans. The phrase is, after all, quite general, and we may suppose that it had a wider currency than just Paul and Qumran, even though only they out of our surviving literature use it, and that infrequently.

The main positive thing that this Qumran text contributes to the present discussion, though, is a sense of how “works of the Torah” could function within the language of justification. The third and final section of MMT tells the story of Israel, from the promises and warnings of Deuteronomy up to the writer’s own day. Deuteronomy 30 promised a historical sequence: covenantal blessing, curse, then blessing again. The initial blessing and curse, says the text, came upon Israel in the time of the monarchy, with the curse being, more or less, the exile. Now, however, the second blessing promised by the same text has come upon Israel, precisely in the life of the sect, the secretly inaugurated new covenant people, yet to be finally and publicly vindicated. The members of the sect are already marked out as the eschatological Israel, ahead of the time when they will be vindicated as such. The thing that marks them out in the present is precisely the specific “works of the Torah” that the text urges upon its readers--the detailed post-biblical regulations deemed necessary by the sect. These “works of Torah,” then, were the sign that the future verdict (God’s vindication of the sect) was anticipated in the present; the sect could be confident now of their membership in the renewed covenant, the community of fresh blessing, the “returned-from-exile” people spoken of in Deuteronomy 30. When we widen the horizon from the sectarian “works” mentioned in the scroll to the more fundamental biblical “works” Paul has in mind, the position he is opposing can be stated thus: “works of Torah” are the sign, in the present, of that membership in Israel, God’s covenant people, which will be vindicated in the future when the long-awaited “righteousness of God” is finally unveiled in action.

It is vital to keep our balance at this point. One of the great gains of the last quarter of a century in Pauline scholarship has been to recognize that Paul’s contemporaries--and Paul himself prior to his conversion--were not “legalists,” if by that we mean that they were attempting to earn favor with God, to earn grace as it were, by the performance of law-prescribed works.^⁹⁶ Paul’s fellow Jews were not proto-Pelagians, attempting to pull themselves up by their moral shoelaces. They were, rather, responding out of gratitude to the God who had chosen and called Israel to be the covenant people and who had given Israel the law both as the sign of that covenant membership and as the means of making it real. Paul’s critique is not that the Torah was a bad thing that the Jews should not have followed, nor that their Torah-observance was done in order to stake a claim on God that God had not already granted in the covenant. His point, rather, was that all who attempted to legitimate their covenant status by appealing to possession of Torah would find that the Torah itself accused them of sin. If “the Jew” appealed to Torah to say “This shows that I am different from the Gentiles,” Torah itself, according to Paul, would say “No, it doesn’t; it shows that you are the same as the Gentiles.”

The “works” that were regarded in Paul’s day as particularly demonstrating covenant membership were, of course, those things that marked out the Jews from their pagan neighbors, not least in the diaspora: the sabbath, the food laws, and circumcision. A strong case can therefore be made for seeing “works of the law,” in Romans and Galatians, as highlighting these elements in particular.^⁹⁷ This case rests on the larger thrust of Paul’s argument, in which “the Jew” is appealing not to perfect performance of every last commandment, but to possession of Torah as the badge of being God’s special people. Special they are, but also sinning; and sin means that the specialness is of no ultimate avail.

Why, then, could Paul say of himself, in Phil 3:6, that concerning “righteousness under the law” he was “found blameless”? Presumably he meant that, as a good Jew, he regularly used the means of forgiveness and purification that were on offer in the Temple and the sacrificial cult and took part in the great fasts and feasts through which the devout Jew was assured of God’s forgiveness and favor. Thus at any moment he was a Jew in good standing; not that he had always done what Torah prescribed (we must not suppose the pre-Christian Paul to have been so ignorant of his own motivation and behavior), but that he had always repented and sought God’s forgiveness through the appropriate methods. Torah, he might have said, can show me that I am a sinner and can also show me the way of forgiveness. We must assume that someone who followed this path would consider themselves “blameless according to the law.”

Further discussion of this point must be postponed until we arrive at 7:7-25, since that passage needs to be factored into the argument in various ways. But one major difference between what Paul says in Philippians and what he says in Romans 3 is that in the present passage his primary concern is not to analyze every single individual and to demonstrate somehow that he or she really is sinful, but rather to show that possession of Torah itself cannot sustain the claim that “the Jew” is automatically in covenant with God, automatically a cut above the Gentiles. And, in referring to those (like his own former self) who are “under the law,” he looks at them in their totality, sin included. Just as Israel cannot be affirmed in the present as the inalienable covenant people of God because of the presence, within Israel, of various kinds of sin that demonstrate the failure of the national vocation (2:17-24), so no Jews, however blameless in terms of current status, can be affirmed as they stand as complete and adequate human beings, since all alike commit sin. If God is the righteous judge, God cannot allow particular members of that nation to escape the judgment they incur just as do all Gentiles.

If, however, God is truly “righteous” in the widest senses, including that of keeping the covenant promises made long ago, how then can that “righteousness” be put into operation without contradicting itself? This question was raised extremely sharply for Paul’s near-contemporaries by the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. For Paul, it had already been raised, and answered, by the events concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Paul is now in a position to address this question, one of the most fundamental that he and his contemporaries were ever to face.

1. Before we “translate” or “apply” these severe and often dense verses to our own day, we must consider the relevance of their own unique meaning in Paul’s own time. Part of the burden of eschatology--part of the problem, that is, of believing in a God who (though always active within the world in various ways) acted uniquely and decisively at one moment in history, and part of the problem of living on the basis of that one-off action--is that one is committed to getting inside that historical situation in all its differentness to our own day, to understanding what it was that God was up to then. Preachers of the gospel cannot escape the task of being ancient historians. The alternative is shallow anachronism.

Paul insists that God will be just and faithful, despite the faithlessness of the particular humans to whom the divine oracles had been entrusted. In the post-Enlightenment world, ironically, the goodness and justice of God are often called into account precisely because of the suggestion that God might act in a particular and decisive way, in one place and time rather than at another. The rhetoric of the last two hundred years has been in favor of broad general truths, timeless and abstract religious or ethical norms or guidelines. Projecting our hard-won (and often deeply ambiguous) democracy onto the heavens, we demand that all humans should have the same vote and voice. How, we ask, can a unique act of God be fair?

This question is, at one level, a manifestation of the old discussion, associated with Barth and others, as to whether Christianity is a “religion” or rather a “revelation.” In these debates, however, it was often assumed that the Jews followed a “religion,” and were indeed the archetypical manifestation of homo religiousus, religious humanity. (This is a major theme in the great commentary of Ernst Käsemann.) We have learned, painfully enough, the danger of such caricatured generalizations. What Saul of Tarsus and his contemporaries were longing for, in any case, was a revelation, an unveiling, the fresh action of their God within history. That was how wrongs would be put right, how justice would come at last. The irony of our changing points of view, the transformation of assumptions between Paul’s day and ours, is that this idea of a specific and decisive act of God, in one place and time beyond all others, is itself now felt to be wrong or unjust. We here reach basic questions of worldview, and choices have to be made. The whole New Testament witnesses to a unique act of God, such as Saul of Tarsus had expected, but at a different level, of a totally different kind. Yes, says Paul the Apostle, God has acted in history to unveil that faithfulness of which Scripture spoke. But no, the action was not what Israel, Saul of Tarsus included, had expected.

The “modern” objection to the idea of God’s acting decisively and uniquely is based, it seems, on a false impression about what such actions mean. If the main purpose of divine revelation were to convey information to humans, or to give a set of rules to be kept, then it would seem unfair and arbitrary to give these to some and then to judge the others despite their disadvantage. If the main purpose was to straighten out a few design faults in creation, to perform “miracles” that helped certain people out of insoluble or life-threatening situations, this too would seem grossly unfair; why would a good God, capable of doing this sort of thing, not do it at other times, when faced (for instance) with the chance to prevent genocide?

These are, however, by no means the only possible models of divine action in the world. All analogies are imperfect; but we can conceive of other, perhaps better, ways of looking at the question. An architect has to produce a single blueprint at one time and place, so that the building may be constructed for the benefit of all. A medical researcher has to produce medications at one time and place, so that all may eventually be cured. A gardener has to plant a fruit tree in one place and at one time, so that there may be fruit for all. God, in the Jewish thought that Paul reflects, needed to act decisively at one time and in one place, so that there might be salvation for all. We should not allow the rhetoric of modernity to rob us of the glory of the gospel; a God with muddy boots and dirty hands, busy at the center of the mess so that all may be cleaned up and sorted out.

2. The question of the point of being Jewish, once its own unique dimensions have been grasped, broadens out in our own day to the question of the point of being human. This has been asked in the twentieth century over and over, as philosophers, writers, and artists, as well as theologians, have reflected on the horrors of our “civilized” world, producing ever more cunning machines for making war but still unable to invent one that will make peace. Just as the Jewish vocation was to bring God’s light to the Gentiles, so the human vocation was to reflect God’s image into the world. Manifest human failure to do this could lead to the equivalent, for this question. of the Marcionite rejection of Judaism as a whole, i.e., a denial of the entire God-given human vocation. This, indeed, is what we find in some New Age thinking today, with humans being regarded as simply part of the world’s problem, rather than potential contributors to the solution.

But Paul would be as adamant on this point as he is on his own topic: Let God be true, though everyone should prove false. God has created humans to reflect the divine image in worship and service, and God will be true to that promise. “The righteousness of God” can be called upon to fulfill the purpose of creation, not just of Israel. How this will happen, Paul will work out from 3:21 through to the end of chap. 8. To claim that it will happen is the equivalent, for these questions, of Paul’s brief and clipped responses in 3:1-8. That it has already happened s the burden of his song in 3:21-4:25, summed up in 5:12-21: God has provided an obedient human being, in whom the original purpose of Genesis 1 has at last been fulfilled (see also 1 Cor 15:20-28; Phil 3:20-21; and, further afield, the whole argument of Heb 2:5-10).

3. The charge of universal human sinfulness is of course as controversial today as ever. Nobody, almost by definition, likes the humiliation of recognizing their sinful condition (or, if they do, we may raise questions about their balance of mind). Just as much psychology tacitly avoids the category of “evil,” preferring to see varieties of human behavior in less threatening terms, so many Christians, eager for the great acceptance. the astonishing welcome, of the gospel, use this as a reason for denying human sinfulness. But, of course, if humans are not deeply sinful the gospel is no longer astonishing; indeed, it s not good news at all, since there was no problem to which it was the shocking, startling answer. Tragically. just as those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it, so those who turn a blind eye to wickedness are always in danger of perpetrating it. If there is no disease, why worry about precautions, let alone cure? If the human race is morally sound (no doubt with a few glitches here and there), we should eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall live. Oddly enough. at the same time as postmodernity is urging us to be suspicious of every action, every word, and every motive, the imperative it sanctions--to be true to oneself, even though “oneself” may be constantly changing--is itself deeply suspect. Tyrants, bullies, extortioners, adulterers, and murderers are all being true to themselves. And those who look at such activities and thank God that they are not like that need once more to go deeper (2:1-16), to examine the secrets of their own hearts.

4. There is much to learn from the way in which Paul has pulled together the awful catalog of sin in 3:10-18. Under the surface-level indictment there is hope, precisely because this wickedness is shown up by the righteousness of God, which can then be appealed to for mercy. How easy it is for preachers either to denounce wickedness in a dualistic fashion, or to abstain from such denunciations because they sound too depressing, too dismissive. Paul’s denunciations, for those with ears to hear, are always hinting at the solution. His robust faith in. God’s forgiving faithfulness enables him to call a spade a spade.

5. The dismissal of’ “works of the law” as the means of justification has all kinds of overtones. Paul’s fundamental meaning is that no Jew can use possession of the Torah, and performance of its key symbolic “works” of ethnic demarcation, as demonstration in the present time that they belong to the eschatological people of God, the people who will inherit the age to come. Torah is incapable of performing this function: When appealed to, it reminds its possessors of their own sin.

This Israel-specific and context-specific argument and meaning, vital though it is, must send off warning signals in other spheres as well. To the Roman moralist of Paul’s day, it might have.: said that clear thought and noble intention were not enough; the clearer the thought, the nobler the intention, the more this clarity and nobility would condemn the actual behavior. To an anxious monk of the early sixteenth century, fretting about his own justification, Paul’s words rang other bells. Performance of Christian duties is not enough. Despite the Reformation, the message had still not been heard by the devout John Wesley, until a fresh hearing of Luther’s commentary on Galatians caused light to dawn. In the post-Enlightenment period, many, including many Christians, have assumed that “the law,” here and elsewhere, refers to the Kantian idea of a categorical moral imperative suspended over all humans, and have preached this “law” to make people recognize their guilt, in order then to declare the gospel to them.

These are important overtones of Paul’s statement here, but they are not its fundamental note. If we play an overtone, thinking it to be a fundamental, we shall set off new and different sets of overtones, which will not then harmonize with Paul’s original sound. Sadly, this has occurred again and again, not least within the Reformation tradition, which, eager for the universal relevance and the essential pro me (i.e., “for me”) of the gospel, and regarding Israel mainly as a classic example of the wrong way of approaching God or “religion,” has created a would-be “Pauline” theology in which half of what Paul was most eager to say in Romans has been screened out. Provided, however, one is careful to tell again the unique story of Israel and Jesus, not as an example of something else but as the fundamental truth- of the gospel, many of the things the Reformers wanted to insist on can be retained and, indeed, enhanced.

It should now be clear that the great theme Paul will unveil in the new section is “the righteousness of God,” meaning by that the faithfulness of God to the promises long ago announced to Israel. That divine faithfulness, which seemed to be called into question by Israel’s failure to be the light for the Gentiles, is now revealed through the faithful Israelite, Jesus the Messiah. The plan has not failed; rather, it is focused on, and accomplished through, one person. Through him, God has kept the promise made to Abraham.

Paul is therefore speaking, without using the word, of the covenant. This biblical term, found occasionally in Paul, is in my view a useful and appropriate shorthand for drawing attention to the fact that in this section, as in Galatians 3, Paul is evoking one chapter in particular, namely Genesis 15. In that chapter, God established the covenant with Abraham, promising both that he would have countless descendants and that his seed would attain their inheritance by passing through slavery to freedom (Gen 15:5, 13-16). Referring to Paul’s “covenantal” theology at this point, as I and others have sometimes done, means simply this: Paul intends to affirm that what God has done in Jesus the Messiah is the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. This, indeed, is the answer, or at least, the initial answer, to the string of questions in 3:1-8. Despite the unwarranted suspicions of those who assume that to refer to the covenant is to flatten out the contours of Paul’s telling of the story of God, Israel, and the world, to reduce the sharp impact of the crucifixion, or to capitulate to a particular type of Reformed theology, this proposal passes the most important test of all: It makes excellent sense of the relevant texts, as we shall now see.^⁹⁸

The place of Abraham in the argument of the present section, and its partial parallel in Galatians 3, is therefore far more than as an “example” of someone who was justified by faith, as is still commonly supposed.^⁹⁹ Paul is doing something much more large-scale, much more intricately crafted, than merely “stating a doctrine” in 3:21-31 and then “offering a proof from scripture” in chap. 4. He has not merely introduced Abraham because his opponents, real or imagined, would have made Abraham a strong part of their own argument. Nor is Abraham’s faith the sole or central feature of chap. 4; indeed, by making it so, as we shall see, commentators have introduced puzzles into the exegesis that disappear once the larger theme is grasped.

The proposals cited here as inadequate have entered the exegesis of Romans not least because many readers have come to the text with questions other than Paul’s. In particular, the broad questions of human sin and of justification by faith have dominated the discussion, so that Paul’s own much more specific questions in Romans, not least those of the coming together of Jew and Gentile in Christian faith, and of the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises, have been marginalized, to the detriment of exegesis and, in my view, of the life of the church.

Exegesis has been hampered in particular by a misunderstanding of δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou, “the righteousness of God”) in 3:21-26 (on “righteousness” language, see the Introduction). Once the wider context (of 3:1-8, on the one hand, and 4:1-25, on the other) is appreciated, and the specific argument of 3:21-26 itself fully grasped, it is quite impossible that this phrase should mean, as NIV, “a righteousness from God,” that is, the righteous status that believers enjoy as a gift from God and in God’s presence. Paul does indeed hold that those who believe the gospel are reckoned “righteous” (e.g., 3:26, 28), and he can speak of this as “a righteous status from God” (ή έκ θεου δικαιοσύνη hē ek theou dikaiosynē, Phil 3:9). But this status, which Paul describes in that significantly different way, is not the same thing as God’s own righteousness. It results from the revelation of that righteousness, of God’s salvific covenant faithfulness; the present passage is, in fact, the fullest statement of this. If we wish to press for an alternative to the technical tern “righteousness,” with all its attendant puzzles and possibilities for misunderstanding, perhaps the best current option is that of the NJB: “God’s saving justice.”

Paul declares (3:21) that the Torah and the prophets bear witness to this saving justice. What was it, then, that they said, to which God has now been faithful?

The main subject Paul expounds in this section is God’s creation of a single worldwide family, composed of believing Jews and believing Gentile alike. Since the main thing standing in the way of this achievement is human sin, the central focus of the paragraph describing how God has done it is the way God has dealt with sin through the death of Jesus. “Justification,” in its Pauline contexts regularly includes both aspects: the rescue of sinners from their sin, and the creation of the worldwide family of forgiven sinners. The universal scope of this eschatological Abrahamic family is emphasized in the “all” of 3:23 and the sustained arguments of 3:27-30; 4:9-12; 4:13-15; and 4:16-17. It is not so much that Paul, wanting to emphasize “faith,” shows incidentally that it happens to bring together the different ethnic groups; rather he wants to emphasize the coming together of Jew and Gentile in Christ and, therefore, demonstrates that this aim is achieved through faith. God’s aim in calling Abraham in the first place was to put the world to rights. Only through the creation of a single forgiven family, comprising Gentiles as well as Jews, can that purpose be fulfilled.

Once this is grasped, several problems can be seen in their proper light. Despite what is sometimes supposed, for instance, Paul does not intend to offer here (i.e., specifically in 3:24-26) a full “doctrine of atonement.” He is rather summing up a much larger train of thought, which we can observe at various points in his letters, in order to use this whole train of thought within his present argument. Romans has frequently been pulled out of shape by the insistence that it should provide full information at each point on the “topic” that dogmatic theology has been expecting at this point in the argument. Only when we allow Paul to develop his own trains of thought in his own way will we avoid doing violence to the text.

Recognizing the centrality of the Jew/Gentile question in the present argument explains Paul’s running sub-theme that appears in the phrase “apart from the law” (3:21). Despite the fact that Torah and prophets bear witness to God’s faithfulness, Torah itself not only sustained the division between Jew and Gentile, now overcome in Christ; it also condemned those “under the law” by showing them up as sinners. Both these themes are present in 3:21-4:25 (e.g., 3:27; 4:13-17).

Paul emphasizes throughout this section that this single worldwide family is “justified” in the present time. Thinking within the same overall frame of thought as 4QMMT, he looks ahead to the future time when God will finally make all things new and will reveal once and for all who his own people are. He has already spoken of this in 2:1-16; failure to factor that passage properly into the argument has led to the ignoring of the eschatological dimension of his teaching on justification. The whole point is this: The verdict “righteous,” to be issued in the future on the basis of the totality of the life led, is brought forward into the present. But, whereas MMT regarded the performance of certain specific post-biblical purity regulations as the present defining badge of those whose future justification is thereby assured, Paul regarded faith, specifically faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, as this badge (see 4:24-25; 10:8-10),

Justification in the present is possible, Paul argues, because the grace of God deals with the sins of the people through the death of Jesus. The people in question are, therefore, a forgiven family (4:5-8). The covenant with Abraham existed all along to deal with the problem of Adamic humanity; the echoes of the latter in 3:23, which sums up so much of 1:18-3:20, and the anticipation here of 5:12-21, indicate clearly enough that this is what Paul has in mind.^¹⁰⁰ God’s faithfulness, when met with answering human faithfulness, creates the genuine humanity that idolatry so cruelly distorts (4:18-22, reflecting and reversing 1:18-25). And Paul also hints at the wider purpose he believes God had in view in the original creation: The promise to Abraham and his seed was that they should inherit (not the land, but) the world (4:13; cf. 8:18-25).

God has, then, been faithful in Jesus the Messiah to the promises made to Abraham, to the covenant established with the Jewish people and, through them, with humankind and the entire creation. The short, straightforward way of saying this is: “God’s righteousness has been unveiled.” Chapters 5-8 will show how the revealing of this righteousness works for the wider circles of humankind and creation as a whole, laying the foundations for Paul’s arguments in chaps. 9-11 and 12-16. And this divine righteousness, Paul declares, has been revealed in and through the Messiah, Jesus, for the benefit of all who believe.

The dense and unusual language of 3:24-26 is best explained on the premise that Paul is here briefly summarizing an argument he could in principle have spelled out far more fully, and to which he also alludes in many other places both in Romans and elsewhere. I regard this as preferable to the proposal, which has been adopted by several scholars, that the passage contains a pre-Pauline formula that Paul is here adapting.^¹⁰¹ Though the language is dense and formulaic, this is not itself an indication that Paul is quoting from a source. When the theory proposes, as it does in some forms, that he is using a formulation in which “God’s righteousness” meant God’s faithfulness to the covenant, but that Paul himself was broadening this into a different sense of “righteousness,” we may suspect that the real motivation for the “discovery” of the formula was to protect Paul from such a “Jewish-Christian” idea. The text, though difficult, call in fact be read adequately without recourse to this hypothesis, as I hope do show.^¹⁰²

Paul’s purpose in 3:21-26 is not, then, to give a full “doctrine of atonement,” a complete account of how God dealt with the sins of the world through the death of Jesus. Rather, as one part of his argument that on the cross the righteousness of God was unveiled, he is content to state, not completely how, but simply that this had been accomplished. Fuller statements elsewhere indicate that for Paul the resurrection of Jesus was also significant in God’s dealing with sins (e.g., 1 Cor 15:17). Had crucifixion been the end of Jesus’ story, no one would ever have ascribed saving significance to the event. The resurrection casts a retrospective coloring over the crucifixion, revealing it to be the decisive, heaven sent saving act of God. That is presumably why, when Paul spells out the nature of Christian faith in 4:24-25, he describes it as faith “in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”

Jesus’ achievement is thus to have done what Israel should have done but failed to do (see 3:2-3). He has been the light of the world, the one through whom God’s saving purpose has been revealed. Through him God has at last dealt with the sin of the world, the purpose for which the covenant was made. Although the statement of this is already compact, Paul can summarize this, too, in shorthand form: “the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah” (3:22). This notion has become something of a storm center in recent debate, and all we can do here is to summarize what seems to me the correct way forward.^¹⁰³

When Paul summarizes the present train of thought in 5:12-21, he uses the term “obedience,” and means something very similar to what he says here. The Messiah’s “obedience unto death” (cf. Phil 2:6-8) is the critical act--an act of Jesus, and also in Paul’s eyes an act of God--through which sins are dealt with, justification is assured, and the worldwide covenant family is brought into being. In making this point it is important to be clear what is not being said. Paul is not speaking of Jesus’ “faith” either in the sense of the things Jesus believed, or Jesus’ exemplary trust in God, or Jesus’ religious experience. Nor is he suggesting that Jesus’ “obedience” was somehow meritorious, so that by it he earned “righteousness” on behalf of others. That is an ingenious and far-reaching way of making Paul’s language fit into a theological scheme very different from his own.^¹⁰⁴ Rather, he is highlighting Jesus’ faithful obedience, or perhaps we should say Jesus’ obedient faithfulness, to the saving plan marked out for Israel, the plan by which God would save the world. On the cross Jesus accomplished what God had always intended the covenant to achieve. Where Israel as a whole had been faithless, he was faithful: 3:22 answers to 3:2-3.

Jesus’ faithfulness unto death is here, as in some other Pauline passages, described in sacrificial terms (for the details, see the comments below). This is one of the trickiest passages in Paul in terms of precise nuances, but the context appears to be that reappropriation of the Levitical sacrificial language, particularly from the Day of Atonement scene in Leviticus 16, which we also find in, for instance, the Maccabaean literature (4 Macc 17:22).^¹⁰⁵ There, as here, the setting is (1) the great wrath that hangs over Israel (and, in this case, the world), because of sin; (2) the death of the martyrs as somehow dealing with that wrath on behalf of God’s people; and (3) the liberation from wrath that comes as a result. And, like the Maccabaean passage, this one arguably carries overtones also of that other great reworking of Levitical themes, the fourth Servant Song of Isaiah (Isa 52:13-53:12). Jesus is, for Paul, more than a mere martyr, but not less. Paul is here drawing together several rich biblical and post-biblical strands of thought to make the point that Jesus, in his death, completely fulfilled the saving plan of God. Through his death, sin and its results have been dealt with. Wrath has been turned away from God’s people.

It is Jesus’ death, therefore, that reveals God’s righteousness. The puzzles of 3:1-8 are hereby resolved, at least in preliminary form. God has been faithful to the promises, while remaining impartially the God of Jews and Gentiles alike; God has dealt with sin as it merited and now rescues those who cast themselves on the divine mercy. This act of grateful trust in the God who raised Jesus is the characteristic Christian “faith,” which plays such a large role in Paul’s thought; it is the “obedience of faith,” the proper response to grace that God always sought. Though faith has an affective content (being aware of God’s presence and love), a propositional content (believing that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead), and an actively trusting content (casting oneself on God’s mercy), we should not ignore the meaning the word has in the same passage when applied to Jesus: faithfulness. Paul does not so easily distinguish, as we do, between believing in God and being loyal to God. Notice how closely verbal confession and belief in the heart are linked in 10:9-10.

This faith then becomes the badge that identifies, in the present time, the members of the people of God. This is the meaning of Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith.” The verdict of the last day has been brought forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah; in raising him from the dead, God declared that in him had been constituted the true, forgiven worldwide family. Justification, in Paul, is not the process or event whereby someone becomes, or grows as, a Christian; it is the declaration that someone is, in the present, a member of the people of God. This is inevitably controversial, but is I believe borne out by careful study of the relevant texts.^¹⁰⁶ We may remind ourselves of the triple layer of meaning in Paul’s “righteousness” language: The covenantal declaration, seen through the metaphorical and vital lens of the lawcourt, is put into operation eschatologically. The verdict to be announced in the future has been brought forward into the present. Those who believe the gospel are declared to be “in the right.”

Christian faith is thus the appropriate badge of membership in God’s renewed people. It is accessible to all, not, like the Torah, restricted to Jews only. It perfectly expresses both that self-abandonment that refuses to claim anything as of itself, but simply casts itself on God’s mercy, and, paradoxically, that genuine humanness that honors God, trusts God’s power to raise the dead, and so truly worships the true God and is remade as a true human being in God’s likeness. That is the point, made finally in 4:18-22, toward which the present discussion is moving.

NIV: ²¹But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. ²²This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, ²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ²⁵God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished– ²⁶he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

NSRV: ²¹But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

3:21-22a. “But now”--commentators and preachers love to roll this vintage Pauline phrase around the palate. Expressing both logical and temporal transition, it carries all the flavor of Paul’s inexhaustible excitement at what God had done in Jesus the Messiah. It was, after all, news: not a new religion, nor a new ethic, but an event through which the world, Paul himself, and the situation described in 3:19-20 had been changed forever. It was the new wine that had burst the old bottles once and for all.

The paragraph thus begun--not the only time when a couple of words hint at the entire coming train of thought--continues with a summary statement of the revelation of God’s righteousness. The initial mention is flanked by carefully balanced statements about the Torah, and gives rise to the fuller proposition: God’s righteousness is revealed through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah and is for the benefit of all who believe.

The Torah has been the main theme of vv. 19-20. The first thing Paul must now do, to emphasize the newness of the good news, is to stress that this revelation has taken place “apart from Torah.” This performs two functions. Most obviously, it is Torah that has pronounced the Jews guilty, standing them in the dock alongside the pagans; if there is a new word from God, this is good news for the Jews. Less immediately obvious, but vital for Paul’s developing argument, it is Torah that has erected a barrier against Gentiles; if there is a new word from God, it may be good news for Gentiles also. This double meaning, of course, corresponds negatively to Paul’s emphatic and repeated statement, “to the Jew first and also the Greek” (1:16; 2:9-10).

The revelation is, however, “witnessed to by the Torah and the Prophets.” Paul could no doubt have added “and the Writings,” the third division of the Hebrew Bible, containing among other things the psalms, from which he will shortly quote; but the phrase “the law and the prophets” was a regular way of summarizing the whole Jewish scripture (cf. Matt 5:17; 7:12). It is vital to Paul that the fresh revelation takes place “apart from Torah,” but it is equally vital that, new though it is, it is the very thing that God promised beforehand (1:2; cf. 15:7-13, the final theological summary of the whole letter). This is not just a matter of being able to “prove” the gospel from ancient authoritative scriptures. It signals the continuity and reliability of God’s purpose, which is part of the meaning of God’s covenant faithfulness itself.

“The righteousness of God is revealed” (not here and in v. 22 a righteousness “from” God, as in the NIV); in other words, that for which the prophets (particularly Isaiah) and the psalmists longed had come to pass. God had unveiled the covenant plan, had drawn back the curtain on the grand design; and this had been done, not in the sense merely of communicating information, but in action, as had always been promised. “Revelation” here means more than just the passing on of knowledge, important though that is as well; it means the unveiling of God through a historical event. Though it would not be strictly accurate, it would not be a very great hyperbole to say that, for Paul, “the righteousness of God” was one of the titles of Jesus the Messiah himself. God’s saving justice walked around Galilee, announced the kingdom, died on a cross, and rose again. God’s plan of salvation had always required a faithful Israelite to fulfill it. Now, at last, God had provided one.

This righteousness, this world-righting covenant faithfulness, has been revealed “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.” Though the phrase could mean “through faith in Jesus the Messiah,” the entire argument of the section strongly suggests that it is Jesus’ own πίστις (pistis) that is spoken of and that the word here means “faithfulness,” not “faith” (see the NRSV note and the secondary literature referred to in the Overview). This is not to say that Jesus himself was “justified by faith.”^¹⁰⁷ Nor does Paul envisage him, as does Hebrews, as the “pioneer” of Christian faith, the first one to believe in the way that Christians now believe (Heb 12:1-3). Nor is his “faith” a kind of meritorious work, an “active obedience” to be then accredited to those who belong to him. To be sure, Paul would have agreed that Jesus believed in the one he called Abba, Father, and that this faith sustained him in total obedience; but this is not the point he is making here. The point here is that Jesus has offered to God, at last, the faithfulness Israel had denied (3:2-3).

A further reason why πίστις Ίησοΰς Χριστου (pistis Iēsou Christou) here is likely to refer to Jesus’ own faithfulness is that, if taken instead to refer to the faith Christians have “in” Jesus, the next phrase (“for all who believe”) becomes almost entirely redundant, adding only the (admittedly important) “all.” The train of thought is clearer if we read it as “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who believe.” This then corresponds closely to the reading suggested above for 1:17: from God’s faithfulness to answering human faith. (It is also very close to Gal 3:22, where similar discussions have taken place.)

The paragraph’s opening statement, then declares that God’s long-awaited faithfulness has been newly disclosed in the events concern In Jesus the Messiah. His faithfulness completed the role marked out for Israel and did so for the benefit of all, Jew and Gentile alike.

3:22b-24. The explanation, and with it the drawing out of further meaning in the opening statement, focuses on the universality of both plight and solution. “For there is no distinction^ (the NIV, as often, omits “for”); Jew and Gentile, as we have seen, are in the dock together. Verse 23 sums up 1:18-3:20, but with a new emphasis: Human rebellion led to the loss of the glory of God (cf. 1:23). “For all sinned”--the tense is aorist, indicating a single moment, despite the almost, universal perfect tense (“all have sinned”) in the translations (the JB is a solitary exception, but the NJB has reversed this decision, going back to the perfect). Paul seems again to be thinking of Adam, hiding under the argument as in 1:18-25 and 7:7-12, emerging into daylight only in 5:12-21. This is confirmed by the next clause, “and they come short of God’s glory.” Here the tense is present, the continuing result of a past event. In Jewish literature of the period, losing God’s glory is closely associated with the fall of Adam, just as the sense of regaining Adam’s glory is one of the key features of the expected redemption.^¹⁰⁸

Paul does not at once announce that the glory has been restored, that humans are as it were rehumanized in the Messiah (he will come to that in chap. 5). Instead, he announces the necessary step toward it: They are “justified” (cf. 8:30: those God justified, God glorified). Only the KJV keeps the participle of the Greek (“being justified”), which perhaps indicates that vv. 226-23 are partly parenthetical (referring back to the point already made at length in 1:18-3:20), and that in Paul’s mind v. 24 continues the main theme of the paragraph, begun in vv. 21-22a and now to be developed in detail.^¹⁰⁹ This also explains, what Paul will repeat in v. 26, who the subject of this participle is; it is scarcely the “all” of v. 23 (except insofar as “all” here emphasizes “Jew and Gentile alike”), but rather the “all who believe” of vv. 22, 26, 28-30.

This “justification” takes place in the present time, rather than in the future as in 2:1-11. This particular “justification” is the surprising anticipation of the final verdict spoken of in that passage, and carries both the lawcourt meaning that we would expect from the sustained metaphor of 3:9, 19-20, and the covenantal meaning that we would expect from 2:17-3:8--these two being, as we have already explained, dovetailed together in Paul. It is God’s declaration that those who believe are in the right; their sins have been dealt with; they are God’s true covenant people, God’s renewed humanity. This astonishing declaration needs explaining. How can the righteous judge, spoken of at the start of the chapter, make such an announcement about those who a moment ago were standing in the dock, guilty and without defense?

Paul offers three explanations, of which the third is then developed further. This justification happens “freely”; it is neither deserved nor paid for, but is pure gift.^¹¹⁰ More particularly, it is “by God’s grace”--the first mention of “grace” since the introduction (1:5, 7), but another theme that is now going to dominate, particularly in chapters 5 and 6. “Grace” is one of Paul’s most potent shorthand terms, carrying in its beautiful simplicity the entire story of God’s love, active in Christ and the Spirit to do for humans what they could never do for themselves. This, indeed, is what he at once explains in the present passage, with the last phrase of v. 24: “through the redemption that is in the Messiah, Jesus.” About this there are three vital things to grasp.

The first thing to notice is that what happened in the Messiah was the gift of God’s grace. Paul has no conception, as in some medieval paintings and their accompanying theology (some of which has lingered on to this day), of a stern Father-figure on a throne with the Son pleading with him, against (as it were) his better judgment, to exercise clemency. Rather, what takes place in Jesus and supremely on the cross is all from God’s side. As Paul will insist in 5:6-10, the death of Jesus reveals the love of God. God does not, so to speak, have to be persuaded that Jesus’ death makes a good enough case for sinners to be justified. It was God who initiated the movement in the first place.

The second point is the meaning of “redemption.” At one level, this is a metaphor from the slave-market, but it is much more besides. As with the lawcourt setting of “justification,” the obvious first level of metaphor is only the front door to the many-storied home of Paul’s allusive writing. “Redemption” was, to be sure, a word with overtones of slaves being bought back, finding their freedom; but Israel could scarcely hear the word without thinking of Egypt, of Passover, of the Red Sea, the wilderness wanderings, and the promised land. Paul has already hinted that the whole human race languishes in the Egypt of sin (3:9--a point he will develop more explicitly in chapter 6); what such people need is a new exodus, the cosmic equivalent of what God did for Israel long ago. As we shall see, the exodus provides a key subtext, a hidden but very powerful metanarrative, for a good deal of the rest of the letter, particularly chapters 5-8.^¹¹¹

“Redemption,” in other words, is not simply one term among others, a metaphor chosen at random as another bit of street-level color for the meaning of Jesus’ death. It stands at the head of the dense statement that follows, evoking a whole world of thought, offering a biblical lens through which to view what Paul is about to say. In particular, we may notice again that in Genesis 15, the passage Paul will expound in chap. 4, God promised Abraham, as the focal point of the covenant, that his seed would dwell as slaves in a foreign land and would be rescued at the proper time (Gen 15:13-16). “The redemption that is in Christ Jesus” is thus the complete fulfillment of God’s covenant promise to Abraham. This is how God’s covenant faithfulness is unveiled (3:21, 26; the “redemption” of the individual is linked with “the righteousness of God” in, e.g., Ps 71:19, 23-24).

Third, this redemption happens “in the Messiah, Jesus.” This is where Paul makes explicit the compressed point of 3:22, that when Jesus acts in faithfulness and obedience he does so as the Messiah, Israel’s representative, the one “in whom” Israel is summed up. We shall have more to say about “in Christ” when discussing chaps. 6-8; for the moment we notice that Paul’s messianic christology is explicit here, at the point where he is stating how the world has been brought from guilt to grace. What the world needed (3:2) was a faithful Israelite, to carry out God’s saving purpose. God has now provided one. And, because Israel itself has joined the rest of the world in the dock, this Messiah is also God’s Israel for Israel. All have become disobedient, that mercy might be shown to all (11:32).

3:25-26. Every word and phrase in these two verses has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. It is vital to keep our bearings and remind ourselves, before examining the trees, of the shape of the forest. Paul’s overall point is clearly that Jesus’ death demonstrates God’s righteousness, being the reason why sinners are now justified. But why has he said it like this? And what extra overtones and nuances are hereby built in to the overall argument of Romans, to be developed and picked up elsewhere?

It will not do to detach all or part of these verses, declare them a pre-Pauline fragment, and so relativize their force within the current argument. It is by no means impossible that Paul was making use, in what is after all a highly charged and densely packed statement, of phrases already familiar in early Christianity. But, here of all places, he is very unlikely to have allowed himself to say something he did not mean; and, once we have grasped the meaning of “God’s righteousness” in 3:21, it should be clear that the repeated emphasis of the same point in 3:25, 26 is not (as some have said) an intrusion from a “Jewish Christian” context in which God’s covenant faithfulness was important, but which Paul himself has all but left behind (see the Overview). For Paul, we must not tire of repeating, God’s covenant faithfulness did not mean a reaffirmation of a supposed “favored nation clause”; nor did it mean that salvation-history proceeded in a smooth developmental line. Rather, it meant that God was fulfilling the promise to Abraham that he would have a faithful family composed of Jews and Gentiles alike. We are right, then, to see these verses as expressing the heart of that which Paul began to say in 3:21.^¹¹²

We are right, also, to interpret this dense statement of the meaning of Jesus’ death in the light of the other statements in subsequent passages. We should neither press one or two words here to say more than they do, nor forbid the recognition, by reference to other passages in the letter, of a larger world of thought in the light of which the present statement makes the sense Paul intends (cf., e.g., 4:24-5; 5:6-10, 15-21; 8:3-4; we could also, of course, appeal to other letters--notably Galatians--but it is important to keep the argument here as tight as possible).

We may remind ourselves again that the covenant was put in place precisely to deal with sin. Abraham was called so that through his family God might undo the problem of Adam--the problem (in other words) Paul has set out extensively in 1:18-3:20. This is exactly the sequence of that larger logic in which 3:21-4:25 replies to the preceding section. If, then, God has been faithful to the covenant, it must be clear that sins have indeed been dealt with. This is a matter not simply of lawcourt “justice,” but of covenant theology; the latter includes the former and must not be played off against it. God’s creation of a new Jew-plus-Gentile family was the aim; forgiveness of sins the necessary means.

Hence the double statement about the demonstration of God’s righteousness in 3:25b-26, which we may take first in order to give ourselves maximum purchase on the difficult 3:25a. God has put Jesus forward (see below) in order to display, to prove, to demonstrate that covenant faithfulness, that saving justice, which would otherwise be called into question (3:1-8).^¹¹³ In particular, God had passed over, that is, left unpunished, acts of sin committed in former times. God, it seems (Paul here takes this for granted), had been for bearing, patient, unwilling to foreclose on the human race in general or Israel in particular. Paul had emphasized this in 2:3-6, where the same word is used, and he now refers back to that point.^¹¹⁴ The first question at issue, then--the aspect of God’s righteousness that might seem to have been called into question and is now demonstrated after all--is God’s proper dealing with sins--i.e., punishment. Whatever Paul is saying in the first half of v. 25, it must be such as to lead to the conclusion that now, at last, God has punished sins as they deserved.

The second half of the double statement, which occupies v. 26, repeats almost verbatim the phrase about demonstrating God’s righteousness (or covenant faithfulness, or saving justice), but this time takes it in a different direction. First, Paul adds “in the present time”; this is cognate with the “but now” at the start of the paragraph and emphasizes both that the past problem has reached a present conclusion and that the future verdict has been brought forward into the present time. One does not now have to wait for a future judgment to see the covenant people of God manifested (nor, as Paul will stress in vv. 27-30, can one see this through works of Torah). They are revealed in the present time by God’s action in Christ.

This means that God is now seen to be “just, and the justifier.” God, as both the covenant God and the “righteous judge” of the lawcourt metaphor, displays “righteousness,” not simply through dealing with sins as they deserved, but also, in his summing up of the case, through finding in favor of this category of people. We must remind ourselves again that this declaration, this decision of the judge, is what constitutes these people as “righteous.” The word is primarily forensic/covenantal and only secondarily (what we would call) “ethical.” God’s justifying activity is the declaration that this people are “in the right,” in other words, announcing the verdict in their favor. Calling them “righteous,” as one must on this basis, should not be misunderstood to mean that God has after all recognized that they possess ethical characteristics that have commended themselves, caused their sins to be overlooked, and persuaded the judge that they deserved a favorable verdict. To say that they are “righteous” means that the judge has found in their favor; or, translating back into covenantal categories, that the covenant God has declared them to be the covenant people.

The point, anyway, is that the display of God’s righteousness in the death of Jesus is the basis for God’s justifying declaration of this category of people.^¹¹⁵ As we come closer to the hardest part of the passage, v. 25a, we notice at this stage that Paul clearly intends that clause to prepare the way for this statement of God’s justifying declaration. Whatever precisely Paul intends to say, it must have to do with the means by which the righteous God could, without compromising that righteousness, find in favor of the ungodly (4:5).

Paul’s final description (v. 26b) of the object of God’s justifying declaration is very elliptical: τόν έκ πίστεως Ίησου (ton ek pisteōs Iēsou, “the one”; lit., “out of the faith[fulness] of Jesus”). (We may compare the condensed descriptions in 2:29.) Here the referent is not in doubt; the person concerned is a Christian. But is “of Jesus” an objective or subjective genitive? In other words, is Paul referring to the Christian’s “faith in Jesus” (as NIV), or, as in v. 22, to Jesus’ own “faith(fulness)”?^¹¹⁶

It could in principle be the former. Paul has already referred to Christian faith in 3:22 (and perhaps in 3:25a, on which see below). He is about to mount an argument in 3:27-31 in which the faith of Christians is central. But he normally speaks of the object of Christian faith not as Jesus, but as God--as, for example, in the striking phrase in 4:24, “those who believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead.” Granted the importance of Jesus’ faithfulness in the argument of this passage, stated proleptically in 3:22 (see above), it is more likely that what he means here, stated still in condensed form, is that God justifies the one whose status rests on the faithful death of Jesus. Even there, of course, the notion of the believer’s own faith is not absent, since it is this faith that precipitates God’s announcement of the verdict in the present time. But the basis for this faith is precisely the faithfulness of Jesus seen as the manifestation of the covenant faithfulness of God.

We must now return to the opening words of v. 25, whose meaning we have seen to be constrained by vv. 25b-26. Somehow, what Paul says here is designed to explain how it is that God has now dealt with sins on the one hand and declared “the one out of the faithfulness of Jesus” to be in the right on the other.

The initial surprise, granted that such language has not made its way into Romans until now, is that v. 25a is heavily sacrificial in content. God “put Jesus forth,” says Paul, using a quite rare verb many of whose LXX uses are to do with the shewbread in the Temple (cf. Exod 29:23; 40:4, 23; Lev 24:8; 2 Macc 1:8). Jesus was put forth as a ίλαστήριον (hilastērion)--a term whose precise translation focuses the problem of the clause but is undoubtedly cultic in context. And this was effective “through his blood,” again a clear sacrificial reference. How does this work? What is Paul’s train of thought? Why does he here refer to Jesus’ death in sacrificial terms? How does sacrificial language come together with the overarching exposition of the righteousness of God? And how does the sacrifice of Jesus mean that sins have now been dealt with, creating a “righteous” people and leaving God’s righteousness unimpeachable?

The language Paul uses goes back to Leviticus. In Lev 16:2 the hilastērion was the “mercy-seat,” the lid on top of the ark of the covenant, the place where God appeared in the cloud to meet with Israel (cf. Exod 25:17-22; 31:7; 35:12; 37:6-9 [38:5-8 LXX]; Num 7:89; Amos 9:1). In this chapter, which prescribes the ritual for the Day of Atonement, the “mercy-seat” has a crucial role: It is the place where Aaron is to sprinkle the blood of the bullock and goat of the sin-offering (vv. 14-15), having first lit the incense to create a cloud around the mercy-seat, so that he may not die from being ho the presence of God (v. 13). The sprinkling of the blood is to make atonement for the holy place, because of the Israelites’ uncleannesses, transgressions, and sins (v. 16). The LXX verb for “make atonement for” (έξιλάσκεται exilasketai) is from the same root as hilastērion.

Paul’s other references to Jesus’ death indicate that sacrificial ideas, though not his only grid of reference, were not far from his mind when he thought of the cross. In particular, elsewhere in Romans he refers to the crucifixion in terms of the sin-offering, in a context that makes it clear that he intends this precise reference to be heard (8:3, on which see below). But he does not elsewhere refer explicitly to the great Day of Atonement. He does not, for example, develop the idea of Jesus as sacrifice, or indeed as priest, in the way we find in the Letter to the Hebrews. However, on a broader canvas it is a natural Second Temple Jewish perception to see God’s faithfulness to Israel (and Israel’s answering loyalty to God) expressed through the temple cult and to see God’s righteousness expressed in the face of Israel’s sins through the sacrifices in general and the Day of Atonement in particular. To put it another way, if Israel is in trouble because of sin, the Day of Atonement will put things to rights.^¹¹⁷ To that extent, what Paul has done is simply to declare that God has done the same thing on a once-for-all, grand scale; he is, in that sense, alluding to Jesus as the place where the holy God and sinful Israel meet, in such a way that Israel, rather than being judged, receives atonement.

But this does not plumb the full depths of what Paul is saying here. In particular, it does not provide an explanation of the intimate connection Paul is assuming between a human death and this sacrificial language; nor between this sacrificial death and God’s dealing with Israel’s sins such as would justify the immediate conclusion of v 25b; nor between this whole complex of thought and “the righteousness of God.” What other contexts of meaning were available to a Second Temple Jew that might explain all this?

The most obvious answer can be found in the stories of the Maccabaean martyrs. Whatever actually happened in the torrid years of Syrian oppression in the 160s BCE, the story as it was told in Paul’s day sometimes interpreted the martyr’s deaths in sacrificial terms. Second Maccabees clearly regards the suffering of the martyrs as bound up with God’s special purposes for Israel. Other nations, says the author, go unpunished, in the patience of God, until finally they reach the full measure of their sins; but Israel’s punishment is brought forward, being visited on the righteous, in order that God’s mercy may remain with Israel (2 Macc 6:12-16). Though this is not exactly Paul’s meaning, there is close similarity with the thought he expresses in 2:3-6 and in the mention of God’s patience in the present verse. It is in this setting that the youngest of the seven famous martyred brothers declares that their suffering will soon bring an end to the wrath of the Almighty that had justly fallen upon the whole nation (2 Macc 7:38, the climax of the speech). The writer of 4 Maccabees is even more explicit: As Eleazar is being martyred, he prays that the punishment he and the others are enduring may suffice for the nation, that his blood may be their purification, and that his life may be received in exchange for theirs (4 Macc 6:28-29). Their death, says the writer, purified the land; they became as a “ransom” (άντίψυχον antipsychon) for the sin of the nation. Through their blood, and through their death seen as a hilastērion (NRSV, “atoning sacrifice”), divine providence has preserved Israel.^¹¹⁸

It was, then, thinkable in Paul’s period that the suffering of the righteous Jew might in some way atone, as a sacrifice did, for Israel. These Maccabaean passages, in fact, belong within a larger world of thought for which there is no space here.^¹¹⁹ But even this does not completely explain how Paul’s whole sequence of logic fits together. The Second Temple trains of thought that enabled some writers to construe martyrdom in terms of sacrificial and other redemptive actions went back, in the biblical tradition, to passages in the book of Daniel, such as 11:35 and 12:1-10, where imagery from the temple cult is applied to human suffering. And behind Daniel itself, clearly alluded to there and in much other literature familiar in Paul’s day, stands Isaiah, particularly chaps. 40-55.^¹²⁰ Although the attempt to read Paul, and particularly Romans, in the light of these chapters has been controversial, the argument so far shows that there is a good deal to be said for such an allusion as at least part of the explanation of the present passage.

The major point to be made here is that in Isaiah 40-55 we have a sustained exposition of the righteousness of God, focused more and more tightly on a suffering figure who represents Israel and fulfills YHWH’s purpose of being a light to the nations and whose sufferings and death are finally seen in explicitly sacrificial terms.^¹²¹ We have, that is, exactly that combination of elements that we have observed, and that are otherwise puzzling in exactly that combination, in Rom 3:21-26. In other words, the sacrifical language of 3:25, used in connection with the violent death of a righteous Jew at the hands of pagans, makes sense within the context of the current martyr stories; but those martyr stories themselves send us back, by various routes, to Isaiah 40-55; and when we get there we find just those themes that we find in Romans 3.

Neither in the fourth servant song (Isa 52:13-53:12) nor at other key points in the prophet do we find the same sacrificial language that Paul uses in 3:25. However, what we do find is that the language and thought of Isa 52:13-53:12 crop up at key points in Paul’s subsequent argument, leaving us in little doubt (unless we are arguably far too stringent in what we will allow as an allusion) that Paul did indeed have this passage in mind. Thus in 4:25, summing up the entire train of thought from 3:21, Paul uses the verb παρεδόθη (paredothē, “he was given up”), which occurs twice in Isa 53:12, with the active form (“the Lord gave him up”) in 53:6; in both cases this happened “for our sins,” as in 4:25.^¹²² And when in 5:15, 19 Paul speaks of Jesus’ act of obedience availing to justify “the many,” this is a clear allusion to Isa 53:11-12 (some also see a reference to Isa 53:5 in Rom 5:1). Further afield, Paul quotes Isa 52:15 in Rom 15:21 and Isa 53:1 in Rom 10:16.

The significance of Isaiah 40-55 here lies in its ability to tie together and explain what otherwise is inexplicable, namely why Paul should imagine that the death of Jesus, described in sacrificial terms, should be supposed not only to reveal the righteousness of God but also to deal properly, i.e. punitively, with sins. The idea of punishment as part of atonement is itself deeply controversial; horrified rejection of the mere suggestion has led on the part of some to an unwillingness to discern any reference to Isaiah 40-55 in Paul.^¹²³ But it is exactly this idea that Paul states, clearly and unambiguously, in 8:3, when he says that God “condemned sin in the flesh”--i.e., the flesh of Jesus.

All this may be of help when it comes to the precise meaning of hilastērion. By itself, as we saw, it meant “mercy-seat,” the focal point of the great ritual of the Day of Atonement; and, thence, the place and/or the means of dealing both with wrath (or punishment) and with sin.^¹²⁴ Dealing with wrath or punishment is propitiation; with sin, expiation. You propitiate a person who is angry; you expiate a sin, crime, or stain on your character. Vehement rejection of the former idea in many quarters has led some to insist that only “expiation” is in view here. But the fact remains that in 1:18-3:20 Paul has declared that the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness and that despite God’s forbearance this will finally be meted out; that in 5:8, and in the whole promise of 8:1-30, those who are Christ’s are rescued from wrath; and that the passage in which the reason for the change is stated is 3:25-26, where we find that God, though in forbearance allowing sins to go unpunished for a while, has now revealed that righteousness, that saving justice, that causes people to be declared “righteous” even though they were sinners.

The lexical history of the word hilastērion is sufficiently flexible to admit of particular nuances in different contexts. Paul’s context here demands that the word not only retain its sacrificial overtones (the place and means of atonement), but that it carry the note of propitiation of divine wrath--with, of course, the corollary that sins are expiated. It should go without saying that this in no way implies, what the start of the verse has already ruled out, that God is an angry malevolent tyrant who demands someone’s death, or someone’s blood, and is indifferent as to whose it is. The point Paul is making, carried by the word hilastērion, is that Jesus’ death was God’s answer both to the plight of the world and to the problems outlined in 3:1-8--the problems, that is, for God’s own justice, truth, and faithfulness. To the objection, that sacrifices in Leviticus and other biblical texts do not seem to be propitiatory, the response must be that, as we have seen, by Paul’s time sacrifical language was used inexactly this way, precisely of the righteous Israelites whose deaths somehow exhausted the divine wrath that was otherwise suspended over Israel. To see Jesus as the place where atonement is made (the narrow, focused meaning of the word) and hence as the means by which atonement is made sin the broader context of the echoes set up by the word, and the entire passage) is exactly what is needed at this point in the passage.

There remain the two phrases by which hilastērion is qualified: “through faith” and “by means of his blood.” These are most likely intended as independent modifiers of the noun, rather than the former modifying the latter (“through faith in his blood,” as though the blood of Jesus were itself the object of faith). In addition, the reading we have cautiously recommended for “faith” in 3:22 and 3:26, i.e., the faithfulness of Jesus, his obedience to the divine Saving plan, inclines one to the possibility--it can hardly be stronger--that this is Paul’s meaning here as well. Jesus’ faithfulness was the means by which the act of atonement was accomplished, by which there took place that meeting between God and the whole world of which the mercy-seat was the advance symbol. Furthermore, Just as the mercy seat fulfilled its function when sprinkled with sacrificial blood, so Paul sees the blood of Jesus as actually instrumental in bringing about that meeting of grace and helplessness, of forgiveness and sin, that occurred on the cross. Once again, the sacrificial imagery points beyond the cult to the reality of God’s self giving act in Jesus.

I suggest, therefore, that Paul has here condensed, in typical manner, three trains of thought into a single statement, to which he will then refer back, explaining himself more fully as he does so. First, the righteousness of God is revealed in God’s giving of Jesus as the faithful Israelite, through whom the covenant plan to save the world from sin will be put into operation at last, despite universal failure. Second, Jesus’ faithfulness was precisely faithfulness unto death, a death understood in such sacrificial terms as would evoke not only the Day of Atonement but also the self-giving of the martyrs and, behind and greater than that, the sacrificial suffering of the Servant. Third, Jesus’ self-giving faithfulness to death, seen as the act of God, not of humans operating toward God, had the effect of turning away the divine wrath that otherwise hung over not only Israel but also the whole world. Thus is God’s righteousness revealed in the gospel events of Jesus’ death and resurrection: God has been true to the covenant, has dealt properly with sin, has come to the rescue of the helpless and has done so with due impartiality between Jew and Gentile. Although Jesus’ death is the means by which God’s righteousness is revealed, and that righteousness is the main subject of the section, Paul does not supply a more extensive treatment of Calvary. But what he says here is one of the key foundations for what he will go on to argue. In order to expound his major themes, he needs a firm basis in what subsequent writers would call atonement-theology. This passage has now provided it.

1. The most important point for all subsequent Christian generations to grasp from this dense but explosive paragraph is that the righteousness--the saving justice, the covenant faithfulness--of the creator God was unveiled once and for all in the death of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah. This claim appears counter-intuitive in the contemporary world, the usual reason given being the fact that the world, and often enough the church, does not look as if Jesus’ death has made a dramatic difference to them. Justice has not come to the world. Regularly, therefore, the meaning of Jesus’ death has been reduced to that of an example, albeit the supreme one, of the love of God--a general truth that happened to be exemplified in one specific instance, rather than an event through which the world became a different place. Or it has been used to construct a particular kind of “atonement theology” that rescues souls out of the world while leaving this--worldly injustice unaffected. Either way, theology and exegesis have retreated from Paul’s vision of God’s justice unveiled on the cross.

There are, in fact, other agendas that press upon the contemporary world and insist that nothing significant can actually have happened when Jesus died. The Renaissance world saw itself as the new beginning--the revival of the best of the past, to be sure, but the new start through which everything would now be different. Whoever invented the idea of the “Middle Ages,” thereby designating their own age as the start of the new period, was not only one of the most powerful figures in the history of ideas, but also the perpetrator of the belief that the real change in history had not come about in the first century of the common era, but at some much more recent time. The Enlightenment swapped the idea that history had turned its critical corner in Palestine in the first century for the belief that the moment had happened instead in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. The tacit assumption of this point of view is the deeper reason why the Pauline claim sounds simply incredible to so many. It offers a rival eschatology to that by which our culture has lived.

The claim makes the sense it does, of course, within a broadly Jewish, i.e., biblical, worldview. It was first-century Jews like Paul who were expecting their God, the creator and covenant God, to act in history in such a way that the world might recognize the divine power and faithfulness. However, precisely because this Jewish/biblical worldview posited a God who was the creator of the whole cosmos and who intended to address all humans, neither the worldview nor the Pauline claim could ever be conceived as mere private opinions. They warn for all, and if they remained meaningless for all they might be thought to have failed. Hence Paul’s Gentile mission, which is in view already in 3:23-24: Jew and Gentile alike sinned, but Jew and Gentile alike are now declared to be God’s people as a free gift. The revelation of God’s righteousness is an event of cosmic significance.

The task of teaching Christian people to think and live on the basis of a unique event that happened in the first century, but that was the turning point of cosmic history, is therefore, hard though it may seem, one of the most Pauline tasks facing, a preacher and teacher today. The resurrection (vital, though unmentioned, in the logic of this paragraph) is, of course, the event that anchors this eschatological belief; if Christ is not raised, as Paul says elsewhere (1 Cor 15:17), faith is futile and we are still in our sins. In other words, if the resurrection has not happened, God’s new world has not begun. We could still use Jesus as an example, his teaching as a wonderful and teasing challenge. But none of Romans would make any sense.

2. God’s covenant faithfulness, that saving justice of which Paul speaks, demands further exploration. The loyalty of God to promises made, the unbreakable commitment to working through Israel even when Israel became faithless, is a theme not sufficiently remarked on or thought through. But only in this light can we grasp the full meaning of Jesus’ Messiahship. Only thus can we comprehend his taking on of Israel’s vocation to be God’s faithful partner in the project for which Abraham had originally been called.

The wider dimension at which this hints is God’s faithfulness to the human project itself, and indeed to the whole cosmos. To this we shall return in chapters 5 and 8, and in the wider reflections on chapters 9-11. Because Paul eventually opens up these other dimensions, we do well to remind ourselves here that the present paragraph, though its prime focus is on how God was true to the promises made to Israel and through Israel for the world, points beyond itself to the promises and commands given by God to all humankind. The challenge is then to work out how the cross of Jesus unveils, in a decisive action, those promises as well; and how to live on the basis of the belief that it does so.

3. Within that, of course, the paragraph states in sharp and concise form the extraordinary and still earth-shattering proposition that the creator God has acted to provide the deeply costly remedy for the plight that hangs over all humankind. Not to be deeply moved by this is to fail to listen. “Freely … by God’s grace … God set him forth … that God might be savingly just, and the justifier.” God’s initiative, energy, and commitment to carrying through the project of the, justification of sinners is at the heart of Paul’s message and is the true source of all genuine’ Christian devotion. Verses 24-26 could stand as a heading over one gospel passage after another, as though to say, “This is what this story is all about.”

4. Within that again, these verses highlight one aspect of Paul’s complex portrait of Jesus: his faithfulness. Given a vocation, he was true to it, though it cost him everything. This is not said in order to be an example, to make us feel guilty once more about our own faithfulness, our half-heartedness in pursuing our own tasks, though no doubt this may be an accidental side effect. It is a matter awe and gratitude. Paul does not here note the way in which this action of Jesus impinges on ea believer personally, but those with ears to hear will detect, just below the surface of the paragraph his words in Galatians: The son of God loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 2:20). It is this utter faithfulness, seen as an act of love, that will sustain the whole argument of Romans from this point to the end of the letter; and it can also sustain the believer and the Christian community through all the trials that beset them. It is significant that at the point where Paul says exactly this, his normal mode of speaking about “the love of God” slips, and he speaks instead of “the love of the Messiah” (8:35). It is that kind of subtle change that tells us where his heart really is.

NIV: ²⁷Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. ²⁸For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. ²⁹Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, ³⁰since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. ³¹Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.

NRSV: ²⁷Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. ²⁸For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. ²⁹Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, ³⁰since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. ³¹Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

The connection of this paragraph to what precedes, and the internal logic within it, have both sometimes seemed difficult.^¹²⁵ This is largely due to the interpretation, within the Reformation tradition and elsewhere, that treats “justification” as meaning “how someone becomes a Christian,” “law” as a general moral code rather than the Jewish Torah, and “boasting” as the activity of “legalists” who, having kept whatever moral code they may be aware of, believe that they have thereby established a claim upon God, have somehow “earned” their status of “righteousness,” their designation as “righteous.” Within this, Paul’s contrast of “works of law” and “faith” becomes more a matter of method than content: “Works” have to do with achievement, and “faith” is the abandoning of one’s own efforts and trust in God instead. Paul is thus supposed to be standing alongside Augustine in his battle against Pelagius, alongside Luther in his fight against Rome. Further, though this is not always noticed, Paul is often aligned thereby with the Enlightenment in its elevation of abstract truth against this-worldly reality (“faith” as a “spiritual” matter, “works” as having to do with material things); with the Romantic movement in its elevation of feeling over outward reality, ritual, and so on; and with twentieth-century existentialism in its insistence on being true to one’s inner motivations rather than being constrained from outside. Not for nothing could Rudolf Bultmann read Heidegger into the New Testament and claim to be a good Lutheran.

It is important to say that the battles of Augustine and Luther were not entirely mistaken. Paul’s whole thought is characterized by the free grace of God, and any suggestion that humans, whether Jewish or Gentile, might somehow put God in their debt, might perhaps earn their good standing within God’s people, would be anathema to him. This, however, is not the issue he was facing. Contemporary studies of first-century Judaism indicate that Paul’s contemporaries did not think like Pelagius or Erasmus; they were not bent on earning their justification, or their salvation, from scratch by performing the “works of the law.” The overarching context of the covenant embraced all Jewish law-keeping; the most detailed exploration of what living by Torah involved must be seen as falling within the category of response to grace, rather than the attempt to merit it.^¹²⁶ In any case, whether or not we allow this point, we find that some of Paul’s key arguments, when taken to refer to the problem that Luther thought Paul was talking about, simply do not work. The exegesis does not come away clean. The present paragraph is a case in point (see the Commentary on chap. 4; 9:30-10:13). The proof of the theories must lie, ultimately, in the coherence of the exegesis. Much of Galatians could be called as further evidence.

The link between 3:21-26 and 3:27-31, made initially by the “therefore” at the start of v. 27 (“then,” NIV, NRSV), indicates that Paul is now drawing the conclusion he has always had in mind from the brief and dense statement of the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus’ messianic faithfulness unto death. He is returning, in fact, to the question he raised in 2:17-24, that of the “boasting” of “the Jew” (see the Commentary on 2:17). The point here is that Paul is now ruling out the “boast” whereby “the Jew” maintained a status above that of the Gentiles. Paul is not addressing the more general “boast” of the moral legalist whose system of salvation is one of self-effort, but the ethnic pride of Israel according to the flesh, supported as it was by the possession of the Torah and the performance of those “works” that set Israel apart from the pagans.

This explains the crucial turn in the paragraph. If the statements of vv. 27-28 are not true, this would mean that God is the God of Jews only, not of Gentiles also. The point of the whole paragraph, not just vv. 29-30, is that, because there is one God--the central Jewish belief, of course--there must ultimately be one people of God; and, therefore, that people must be marked out by something other than the Jewish law, which would have left a high fence down the middle of the church, with Jewish Christians on one side and Gentile Christians on the other. That, again, is the main thrust of chap? 4, to which the paragraph points in several particulars, and also of Galatians 2-3, with which the present paragraph has many points of overlap.

3:27. Boasting is excluded. It is always risky to guess at how onomatopoeia might have worked in an ancient language, but the verb έξεκλείσθη (exekleisthē) has, to my ear at least, the ring of a door being slammed shut. The revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus’ death shuts out once for all any suggestion that there might be a special status, a “favored nation clause,” for ethnic Israel. God’s righteousness, in other words, has not been revealed, as had been expected, in some great victory whereby Israel overcame her enemies and obtained national liberation. It came about through the Messiah’s dying at the hands of the pagans, as the great act of atonement needed not only by Israel but also by the whole world. This is why a crucified Messiah is “a scandal to Jews” (1 Cor 1:23) and why Paul can speak of his having been “crucified with the Messiah” (Gal 2:19). A crucified Messiah is either an impossibility (as Paul would have said before his conversion) or it must spell the end of Israel’s ethnic “boast.” This, of course, will be followed up in a good deal more detail in chaps. 9-11.

The means of boasting’s exclusion is then stated compactly. Israel’s status depended on the gift and performance of Torah; how is the new arrangement undergirded? What sort of Torah sustains it? The Torah characterized by “works”? No; the Torah characterized by “faith.” It is, of course, controversial to take νόμος (nomos) here as “Torah” throughout; a long tradition, represented by NIV, has taken it as “principle”--which then causes the mistranslation of των έργων (tōn ergōn; lit., “of works”) as “on [the principle] of observing the law.” Paul’s point is more subtle and is once again so dense here that we need to call on the fuller statements later in the letter (in this case 8:1? 6; 9:30-10:13) to come to our help?^¹²⁷

He is already beginning that line of thought that, in 7:7-25, will see Torah cleared of blame, though itself helpless in the cause of justification or salvation, and that, in chap. 10, will see him describe Christian faith as that which really fulfills Torah, even where the believers, if they are Gentiles, have never heard it. Paul has already hinted at this line of thought in 2:25-29: “uncircumcised people who keep the law’s decrees” is an oxymoron, unless Paul is thinking of a deeper “keeping of Torah,” a “fulfillment” of Torah (2:27, τόν νόμον τελουσα ton nomon telousa) that takes place not in the letter and the outward works that define Jew from Gentile, but in the heart (see also 1 Cor 7:19)?

Paul is thus distinguishing, not for the last time in the letter, between the Torah seen in two different ways. On the one hand, there is “the Torah of works”--this is Torah seen as that which defines Israel over against the nations, witnessed by the performance of the works that Torah prescribes--not only Sabbath, food-laws and circumcision, though these are the obvious things that, sociologically speaking, give substance to the theologically based separation.^¹²⁸ On the other hand, there is the new category Paul is forging here: “the Torah of faith,” in a sense yet to be explained (like many things in chap? 3), gives the indication of where the true, renewed people of God are to be found. He is unwilling, it seems, to give up the belief that the God-given Torah defines the people of God. What he has done is to deny that performing “the works of Torah,” the things that define Israel ethnically, is the appropriate mode of use for Torah. Rather, the Torah is to be fulfilled through faith; in other words, where someone believes the gospel, there Torah is in fact being fulfilled, even though in a surprising way (on this whole topic, see the Commentary on 9:30-10:13).

3:28. Paul now explains the antithesis between “the law of works” and “the law of faith” by declaring that a person is “justified by faith apart from works of the law.” This, interestingly in view of the history of interpretation, is not itself a conclusion for which he has so far argued in the present letter (despite the KJV’s “we conclude” and the NEB’s “for our argument is”); it is a further belief that he is simply stating, as part of his present actual argument that Jewish boasting (“we possess Torah, therefore we are inalienably God’s people”) is excluded by the revelation of God’s covenant faithfulness. The actual argument for justification by faith comes in the next chapter. The word for “we hold” (NRSV) or “we maintain” (NIV) is in fact λογιζόμεθα (logizometha): “we reckon,” “we calculate.” Paul is reporting on a calculation that has taken place, not in the present passage, but elsewhere, which he will shortly unveil.

The greatest problem facing the contemporary reader in understanding what Paul means by “a person is justified” is that centuries of usage of the English word “justify,” and of its Latin root and its French and German equivalents, have assumed that “to be justified” meant much the same as “to be converted,” “to be born again,” “to become a Christian.”^¹²⁹ The further debates that have occurred have often taken their starting-point from there, distinguishing for instance between the beginning of the the process of becoming a Christian and the continuation of that to the end. The question of an ordo salutis, the sequence of events that takes a person from outright unbelief through to final salvation, has been hugely influential in some circles, and I recognize that my insistence on letting Paul say what he means by his own key terms does violence to many such well-loved frameworks of thought.^¹³⁰ This is not, by the way, a matter of the so-called “new perspective” on Paul, though insights from Sanders, Dunn and others, critically sifted and factored in where appropriated, must make their contribution. It is a matter of exegesis; and when we exegete Paul we find that when he talks about what later theology denotes as “conversion” and “regeneration” he speaks of God’s “call” through which, by the work of the Spirit, people come to faith. “Those God called, God justified; those God justified, God also glorified”: Rom 8:30 is Paul’s clearest ordo salutis, and we will not go far wrong if we stick to it.

Of course, what Paul means by “justification” is closely linked to the question of how people who start off as sinners end up being glorified; but the word “justify” and its cognates do not refer to the event of “conversion” or the process of Christian living, for which he uses other language (see, for instance, 1 Thess 1:5; 2:13). They refer to God’s declaration that certain persons are members of the covenant people, that their sins have been dealt with. Nor is it true--as anxious opponents of the “new perspective” are wont to say--that I am here simply reverting to the old either/or made famous by Wrede and Schweitzer, that Paul only talks about justification and the law in order to address a particular problem in the church. When we understand the place of Israel within his vision of God’s purposes for the world, the relation of Jew and Gentile can never be an incidental side-issue.

Anyway, Paul’s point in the present passage is quite simply that what now marks out the covenant people of God, in the light of the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus, is not the works of Torah that demarcate ethnic Israel, but “the law of faith,” the faith that, however paradoxically, is in fact the true fulfilling of Torah. There is no problem in adding the word “alone” to the word “faith”--a tradition that goes way back beyond Luther, at least to Aquinas--as long as we recognize what it means: not that a person is “converted” by faith alone without moral effort (that is true, but it is not the truth that Paul is stressing here), nor that God’s grace is always prior to human response (that is equally true, and equally not Paul’s emphasis here), but that the badge of membership in God’s people, the badge that enables all alike to stand on the same, flat ground at the foot of the cross, is faith.

That this is his meaning is at once demonstrated in the following verse. That those who insist on other meanings are not following his train of thought is demonstrated by the trouble they have with it.^¹³¹

3:29-30a. If justification were through “works of Torah,” God would be shown to be the God only of Jews; whereas in fact God is the God of Gentiles also, because God is one. If justification were through Torah, God’s impartiality would be impugned (2:11), and the whole fabric of the δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou), the justice and faithfulness of God, would start to unravel. Here we are at the characteristic point of tension in all Paul’s thought: God’s faithfulness to the covenant with the Jewish patriarch, Abraham, and his descendants, can only be fulfilled through the creation of a worldwide, Jew-plus-Gentile, family. The whole question of “Paul and the Law” can only be comprehended within this framework. What Israel has always been tempted to forget, from Paul’s point of view, is that the God who made the covenant with Abraham is the creator of the whole world and that the covenant put in place precisely in order that through Israel God might address the whole world (cf. 2:17-24; 3:2).

To prove the point, Paul quotes the most fundamental Jewish confession of faith, the Shema: “since God is one.”^¹³² That which defines Israel at the deepest level, the belief in and commitment to the one God of heaven and earth, itself points to the conclusion that this one God must ultimately create a single family not only of Jews but also of Gentiles.^¹³³ The Shema is itself the ultimate summary of Torah (as Jesus also believed, Mark 12:29), and this summary points away from the possession of Torah and the use of it as a national badge, toward a different sort of fulfillment altogether. The very word עמש (śāma’) itself, meaning “hear (and obey),” a meaning picked up in the Greek compound ύπακούω (hypakouō, “obey [as a result of hearing]”), points to Paul’s concept of ύπακοή πίστεως (hypakoē pisteōs), “the obedience of faith” (1:5; 16:26), signaling the way in which the “faith” of which Paul spoke was, for him, the true “obedience” the Torah sought, responding of course to the “faithfulness,” the “obedience,” of the Messiah through which God’s faithfulness was revealed. God is one, and therefore recognizes as the true covenant family all those who offer this “obedience” to the gospel, whatever their ethnic origin.

3:30b. Paul now explicitly draws the conclusion: God will justify circumcised and uncircumcised alike, on the basis of faith. That is, God will declare that wherever this faith is found, the believer is a true member of the covenant family. Only faith can have this role, not because faith is a superior type of religious experience to anything else, nor because faith is an easier substitute for “works,” putting it within the range of the morally incompetent (it is remarkable how many people still suppose that this is what Paul was talking about),^¹³⁴ but because faith--this faith, to be defined in 4:18-25 and 10:9--is the appropriate human stance of humility and trust before the creator and covenant God, the stance that, only possible through grace, truly reveals the heart in which new covenant membership has been inscribed by the Spirit (2:29; cf. 1 Cor 12:3; Eph 2:8-10).

Paul makes the slightest of distinctions in phraseology, suggesting that the circumcised are justified “on the grounds of” faith and the uncircumcised “through” faith (the NRSV and the NIV both have “the same” faith, perhaps bringing out the fact that the second occurrence of “faith” has the definite article in the Greek). If Paul intends any difference, it is that the circumcised are already, in a sense, within the covenant and now need to be declared true covenant members on the basis of faith, while the uncircumcised, being outside the covenant, need to come in through the doorway marked “faith.” The distinction only applies to their starting-point, not to their destination or to the badge that demonstrates that they have arrived there.

3:31. The density of Paul’s argument has led some of his readers to miss the hints he has been throwing out at various points about the way in which, in this new covenant dispensation, the Torah is in fact fulfilled. What has been most striking, following 2:12-15, 17-20, 26-27; 3:19-20 (in all of which Paul is clearly affirming Torah as God’s law and its verdict as true), is the way in which, beginning with 3:21 “apart from Torah,” he has now declared that “the works of Torah” cannot be the badge of membership in God’s people. Being an ethnic Jew, with Torah to prove it, does not establish a special inalienable status; being circumcised is neither here nor there when it comes to justification. The natural question that must follow is: Have we then abandoned the affirmation of Torah stated up to 3:20. Do we then abolish the Torah, make it null and void, through faith? (The NIV and the NRSV, by translating “this faith,” again bring out the force of the definite article.)

This is just the question some readers of Paul are waiting for. Those who follow an ultra-Protestant reading, in which “the law” refers to the legalistic, moralistic, or ritualistic practices designed, at least in the eyes of their opponents, to establish a claim on God, and those who follow an ultra-liberal (or ultra-Romantic) reading of Paul, in which “the law” refers to any moral code imposed on human beings from without--and who have therefore celebrated the victory, respectively, of low-church piety on the one hand and spontaneity on the other--will naturally want to answer “Yes!” to this question. They will perhaps feel that Paul’s own answer (“On the contrary! We uphold the law”) is illogical, that it represents the old Pharisee peeping out from his hiding.^¹³⁵ Or they will water it down to merely “Well, I can prove the point from scripture; watch me expound the Abraham story in the next chapter.” But that is to miss the inner logic and subtlety of Paul’s actual argument.

Likewise, those in the Reformed tradition who are deeply concerned for the continuity of the new covenant with the old, for the abiding validity of the Old Testament, for the rejection of all that even smells of Marcion, will find that, while their sensitivities are much closer to Paul’s, their emphasis, too, is not quite his, or not at this point.^¹³⁶ His answer is completely genuine. We “establish” (so NASB) Torah; that is perhaps better than “uphold” (NRSV, NIV, REB). Paul is indeed concerned that what God said in the past is shown to be right and true; he will argue the point in detail in 7:7-8:11 and 9-11. But at the moment he is doing two rather different things. First, he is drawing out the significance of having the Shema itself as a pointer to the Jew-plus-Gentile quality of the new family (and, behind this, of the paradoxical “fulfillment of the Torah” spoken of in 2:25-9, referring to those in whose hearts the Spirit has been at work). Second, he is pointing ahead, as so often at this stage of the letter, to the dark and deep arguments yet to come, in which, through the fulfillment of God’s overall purpose in Christ and by the Spirit, even Torah, with all its negative side fully allowed for, will be seen to have accomplished its strange vocation.

The rhetorical force of the paragraph, and of 3:21-31 as a whole, is thus to say that God has unveiled in Jesus the Messiah, and supremely in his death, that covenant faithfulness, that saving justice, through which the outstanding problem of sin and wrath has been dealt with, so that now a new covenant family emerges, consisting of Jews and Gentiles alike, characterized by the faith that answers to the faithfulness of the Messiah.

This is offered as a summary statement; Paul now proceeds to the detailed argument (not merely “proof from scripture”) to back it up. What was the covenant with Abraham all about in the first place?

1. It was one thing for Paul, looking back at his own life “under Torah,” to declare that possession of Torah, and the accomplishment of its “works,” was not the way by which the people of God were demarcated. It is quite another, after a checkered history, for Christians to declare the same thing as though nothing dangerous or subversive were being said. We must never forget that Paul’s gospel remained “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” He never for a moment implied that Jews were not just as much the objects of God’s love and grace; indeed, the crowning passage of this letter mounts a long argument to exactly this end. It is easy for Christians who live in areas where there is little or no visible Jewish presence to make “the Jews” a soft target, repeating the slogans of former theological polemics without realizing how damaging, taken out of context, such things can be, using this straw figure as a way of attacking their own opponents without imagining that there might be some real Jews listening in on the conversation, for whom this would be deeply offensive.

Of course, we must quickly say, Paul’s gospel was offensive, not only to Gentiles (who often did not take kindly to being told that there was now another lord of the world, and a Jewish one at that), but also to Jews, for whom the idea of a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms, while the idea that God might now admit Gentiles into the covenant family on equal terms was close to unthinkable. Contemporary Western culture, in which being inoffensive has become the supreme virtue, hops from one foot to another to avoid saying anything that anyone might take exception to, forgetting that, according to the prophet, God’s word is like a hammer that breaks rock in pieces. Often, of course, it is not actually Jews who are most offended by Christian claims, but rather those post-Enlightenment thinkers for whom any idea of God acting, choosing, doing specific things, appears undemocratic, not in keeping with the spirit of our age. Mainstream Judaism, and for that matter mainstream Islam, is just as offensive to this mood as mainstream Christianity.

In particular, there is no avoiding the Pauline insistence that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” One can understand why it is that, for instance in Palestine/Israel today, there are some churches where only Arab Christians worship, and others where only Jewish Christians worship; just as one can understand why there are some churches that are black only (or, indeed, white only), not by law but by choice, in multiracial communities on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere. But one must insist on the basis of Romans 3, that all such situations, understandable though they may be, are regrettable and fraught with danger. Such communities are always likely to forget the truth Paul insisted on in the present passage: that the only thing uniting Christians is their faith in the God made known in Jesus Christ. To suggest by one’s social or cultural behavior that the one God has any kind of “favored nation clause” is to fly in the face of the revelation of God’s righteousness in the gospel. In this context, the concept of a “national” church,” or “state church,” needs very careful thought (the writer speaks as member of the established Church of England) if it is not to overthrow the gospel itself.

2. This applies not only to churches but also to communities and nations. The post-colonial world in Africa and elsewhere has seen the resurgence of tribalism; the post-immigration world in Europe has seen the resurgence of racism; the post-Cold War world of the Balkans has seen the resurgence of enthocentric nationalism. A British writer looking at Northern Ireland, where the two militant sides are still often referred to as “Catholic” and “Protestant” (now rightly being replaced by “Republican” and “Unionist”), can only hang his head in sorrow. The church’s witness, so often compromised in these situations by the easy assumption that the Christian God was on the side, shall we say, of the Orthodox Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims--or the Croatian Catholics!--must shine out again, precisely with the message of Romans and Galatians, that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, and if so then certainly neither Catholic nor Protestant.^¹³⁷

3. This latter hard lesson--Romans, after all, has been seen for many generations as the bastion of “Protestant” theology--is of course reinforced once we realize what Paul’s teaching on “justification” actually is. The Protestant polemic of half a millennium has been directed against the “religion” of Catholicism, and by extension against any teaching or practice that seems to suggest a desire to “earn” justification, favor with God, or even salvation, by the correct performance of religious or sacramental duty. It must be said, sadly, that one does indeed still find, not only in some popular expressions of Roman Catholicism but also in many Protestant churches and writings, the idea that at the last the reason why God will be merciful to humans, if that will indeed be the case, is that the humans in question have performed certain deeds that will outweigh their undoubted misdeeds. The notion of free forgiveness, of

is so vast, so shocking, so radically life-changing, that many seem to prefer, when all is said and done, a simple religion of good deeds and bad. Let it be said as clearly as possible that, though this is not basically what Paul is writing about, he would have had only one thing to say about it: It stinks.

Nevertheless, the Protestant polemic has gained more targets as it has gone on, and they have less and less to do with any questions that Paul would have recognized as relevant. The Enlightenment, by rehabilitating the dualism of the spiritual and the physical, aligned quite closely with the dualism of reason and contingent historical reality, was able to introduce within Protestantism the sense that anything to do with physical objects or behavior was somehow “worldly” as opposed to “godly,” thus compounding the original Reformation protest against the theology of “works-righteousness” with a subtly different protest against Christian belief having anything to do with the present world. It is that separation, of course, against which liberation theology has made a necessary, albeit sometimes perhaps a misguided, protest.

The effect on the church’s worship has also been dramatic, producing a low-church mentality in which, despite all the verbal protestations about the priority of grace, the unworthiness of the worshipers, the offer of free forgiveness and the Spirit’s inspiration of all that is performed in faith, any suggestion of liturgical movement, gestures, objects, robes, or even the fact of liturgy itself, can be rejected as constituting a compromise of the gospel, a collapse back into a human-centered religion, a kind of legalism, rather than a living relationship. This attitude, frankly, owes nothing to Paul, however much it claims him as its patron saint. Of course, all worship activities can come to be regarded as “things we do to earn God’s favor.” But that is just as true of the still and silent Quaker meeting, of the informal (and yet often secretly formal) charismatic prayer meeting, of the unscripted, yet totally predictable, public prayers in some “free” churches, as it is of the full Orthodox or Roman Catholic liturgy. It is time to recognize these debates, important though they may be, as having little or nothing to do with what Paul is talking about in his rejection of “justification by works.”

And there is more. The Romantic movement, seeking, after the sterility of eighteenth century Rationalism, to recapture a sense of integration with the natural world, and awe and wonder when faced with it, encouraged the belief that the only “authentic” way for humans to do anything was to act as it were spontaneously, allowing things deeply felt and known to come forth as from a hidden spring. Poetic inspiration, as practiced by the Lakeland poets, became a kind of model; the suggestion that one might have to work at a poem, to cross things out and try different words here and there, seemed shoddy, second-rate, indicative of a less-than-complete inspiration.

This view would not be maintained by many writers or philosophers today; but it has left its legacy in the Christian churches in the form of the desire for spontaneity, for freedom from rules and hence also from liturgies. (I doubt whether Luther, at least, would have recognized this movement as a legitimate extension of his theology.) And this, too, is often supposed to have something to do with “justification by faith apart from works.” There is of course great value in the stumbling prayer that comes from the heart as against the beautifully phrased prayer read from a book while the heart is busy elsewhere. But many, perhaps most, of the greatest spiritual guides would regard this as a quite false antithesis. Often somebody else’s words will act as lightning conductors, enabling one’s belief in, and sense of, God’s presence to go down to the very center of one’s being. The drama of the eucharistic liturgy is the reenactment of the story of Israel, focused on Jesus and supremely on his death; to break up its lines, to avoid any sense of drama in case it became a new “works-righteousness,” can itself be an act of human-centered arrogance, declaring one’s independence from the very gospel events themselves. Some forms of Christianity still use Paul’s words, filtered through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic movements, to justify practices, or the lack of them, in a way that has everything to do with personal, social, and cultural preferences and prejudices and nothing whatever to do with Paul.

Indeed, at a deeper level, Paul’s positive point in this paragraph cuts against many such attitudes, bound up as they are with cultural differences (e.g., Northern European or Mediterranean cultures, with their various transatlantic offshoots). A good deal of polemic that disguises itself with theological language is in fact the determination to preserve one particular cultural way of doing things; and that itself is ruled out by Paul’s whole argument. When we arrive at 14:1-15:13, the final great climax of the letter, we will discover that justification by faith, as expounded in chap. 3, is designed to result in “fellowship by faith,” in which different cultures, different ways of doing things, respect and celebrate one another’s practices within the fellowship of the one Lord, worshiping the one God. How the church may learn to distinguish that which is of the essence of the gospel, to be preserved at all costs, from that which is part of a local culture, and hence a matter of theological indifference is of course a well-known and exceedingly difficult problem. To put it another way, one of the main challenges facing the Western church in the twenty-first century is how to preserve the celebration of different cultures from degeneration into a mere postmodern smorgasbord of options in which everything, including morality and theology, are up for negotiation. But for Paul it was precisely part of the essence of the gospel, of the revelation of God’s impartial saving justice in Jesus, that Jews and Greeks belonged together in God’s family and should learn to work that out in practice. And if that division could be overcome how much more those that still divide Christians in our own day.

Once we recognize the main subject of the section (3:21-4:25) and its place within Paul’s larger argument, we find that chapter 4 itself comes into its own. It is not simply, as it has so often been labeled, a “proof from scripture,” or even an “example,” of Paul’s “thesis” of justification by faith in 3:21-31 (for the idea that Paul simply ransacked his mental concordance for texts about “righteousness” and “faith” and came up with Hab 2:4 and Gen 15:6, see the Commentary on 1:17). The chapter is, in fact, a full-dress exposition of the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 15, showing at every point how God always intended and promised that the covenant family of Abraham would include Gentiles as well as Jews.^¹³⁸ Irrespective of what we might say about a systematic presentation of Paul’s ideas, in his present argument this is the main topic, to which “justification by faith” makes a vital contribution, rather than the other way round.

The three main points in the argument concern works (vv. 2-8), circumcision (vv. 9-12), and the law (vv. 13-15). In the second and third cases obviously, and in the first case arguably, the discussion does not concern the question normally supposed, of how someone becomes a Christian (and whether religious ritual, “works of the law” in that sense, has anything to do with it), but rather the question, does Abraham’s family consist just of Jews, or also of Gentiles? To answer this question, Paul quotes or refers to Gen 15:6 in vv. 3, 9-12, 13, 18-22, 23, arguing in detail for its meaning in its own context and for the relation of that meaning to surrounding passages in Genesis, particularly chap. 17.

This strongly supports one particular reading of v. 1, and with it the whole argument. The question Paul faces here is whether covenant membership means, after all, coming to belong to the physical family of Abraham (the question, of course, at stake in Galatians). This reading also means that the climax of the chapter can properly be located in vv. 16-17, where the remark about Abraham being the father of many nations, so far from being a parenthesis as sometimes suggested, is in fact the answer to the question of v. 1, the decisive point in the whole sequence of thought. Abraham is indeed the “father” of the covenant people of God, but he is not the father “according to the flesh.” He is the father of all, Gentile and Jew alike, who believe in the God who raised Jesus.

Genesis 15:6 (“Abram believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”), which ties the chapter tightly together, is one of only two passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that speak of something being “reckoned as righteousness” to someone (the other is Ps 106:31 (105:31 LXX), referring to Phineas; see also 4QMMT C 31, on which see below). It is not a usual phrase in classical Greek, either.^¹³⁹ The Hebrew of Gen 15:6 has no word corresponding to “as” in the regular translation, but simply says הקדצ ול הבשחיו (wayyahšëbehā lô sëdāqâ, “he reckoned it to him righteousness”).^¹⁴⁰ The LXX is as Paul quotes it. Paul does not, of course, leave the phrase cryptic; his frequent repetitions and paraphrases of it throughout the chapter give us a clear idea of what he takes it to mean. It is about trusting the God who justifies the ungodly (v 5) and can be explained by a psalm passage about the forgiveness of sins (vv. 6-8). When the original phrase says “he reckoned it to him,” the “it” is clearly Abraham’s faith (v. 9); and the resulting status Abraham enjoys can then be described as “the righteousness of faith” (v. 11), in a passage where “righteousness” is directly equivalent to “covenant” in the original Genesis passage. This “faith” can then be imitated, and those who share it will also have “righteousness” reckoned to them (vv. 11, 24). Verses 18-21 describe how, having received the promise of Gen 15:5, Abraham came to believe despite all the contrary factors; this offers a remarkable midrashic account, almost psychological in content. The conclusion of the chapter demonstrates that all those who share Abraham’s faith will have “righteousness” reckoned to them on this basis, so that Paul can go on at once to say “Being then justified by faith” in 5:1.

Paul is arguing, then, that Abraham’s faith is the sole badge of membership in God’s people, and that therefore all those who share it are “justified.” He offers a description of this faith, showing, on the one hand, that it is the stance of true humanity before the creator God, reversing the rebellious and idolatrous stance of 1:18-25, and, on the other, that it is the same faith that Christians demonstrate when they believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. This enables him to round off Romans 1-4 with a pregnant christological formula that sums up everything he has said so far. Jesus’ death has dealt with the sin described in the first three chapters; his resurrection, by demonstrating that he was indeed God’s faithful one, God’s “son” (1:4) and that, therefore, his death was God’s victory over sin, establishes justification. And, by there alluding to Isaiah 53, Paul is able to make again the point that, though often ignored by commentators, runs most of the way through Romans 1-4: Jesus has done what Israel was called to do. His faithfulness, his obedience (as Paul will refer to it in 5:12-21) reveals the covenant faithfulness, the saving justice, of God. This perfectly prepares the way both for the development of the argument in 5-8 and for its new and decisive turn in 9-11.

A comment is necessary about why Paul goes to all the trouble of this complex argument about Abraham and his family. It has long been assumed, by those who think of Paul as opposing “Judaism,” that he would not have brought Abraham into his argument (here, in chap. 9, and in Galatians 3-4) had he not been forced to do so by hypothetical “opponents.” Were there, some ask, “Judaizers” or Jewish sympathizers among the Roman church, to address whom Paul felt obliged to bring Abraham into the picture? Or was he deliberately snatching the best argument away from potential opponents?^¹⁴¹

These suggestions may have some secondary part to play. Paul may have been aware, in writing these passages, of people (the so-called “Judaizers,” perhaps) who would appeal to Genesis in favor of a theology and practice that enshrined Jewish ethnicity as a necessary, perhaps even a sufficient, condition of membership in the people of God. We have no independent evidence for this, however; and the suggestion that Paul would not otherwise have brought Abraham into the argument strikes me as the thin end of a Marcionite wedge. Paul’s whole theme in Romans is the faithfulness of God to the covenant, the divine saving justice by which the world is both condemned and rescued. Here, not as an aside, a semi-apologetic or semi-polemical exegetical footnote, but as his own choice of passage and topic, he presents the story of Abraham to show that, in Jesus Christ, God has done what had been promised from the beginning and has thereby created the family whose defining mark is faith in God the life-giver.

NIV: ¹What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter? ²If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about–but not before God. ³What does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

⁴Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. ⁵However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. ⁶David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

NRSV: ¹What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? ²For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. ³For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ⁴Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. ⁵But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. ⁶So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works:

⁷”Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered;

4:1. “What then shall we say? Have we found Abraham to be our forefather according to the flesh?” This is not, of course, what any of the commentaries or translations say, but it has a strong claim to represent Paul’s mind.^¹⁴² Three reasons stand out. First, it introduces the chapter Paul is writing, as opposed to the one that many think he should have written; in other words, a chapter about the scope and nature of Abraham’s family, rather than a chapter about “justification by faith” as a doctrine about how people become Christians. This, as we shall see, results in the straightforward solution of at least one major exegetical problem. Second, it recognizes that when Paul introduces an argument with Τί οΰν έρουμεν ti oun eroumen, “what then shall we say?” this phrase is frequently complete in itself, requiring a question mark at once. (There is, of course, no punctuation in the earliest MSS.) Obvious examples are 6:1; 7:7; see also Τί οΰν (ti oun) in 3:9. Third, it avoids at a stroke the awkwardness of sense, and hence of translation, in the usual readings (of which the NRSV and the NIV are typical) in which Abraham is the subject of εύρηκέναι heurēkenai, “to have found,” rather than the object as in the reading proposed; since it is not clear what “to have found” could possibly mean in this context, the sense of the verb has to be stretched as in the NRSV (“was gained by”) and NIV (“discovered”), neither of which lead in to what Paul is actually going to say.^¹⁴³ The proposal, then, is that Paul raises in v. 1 a possible conclusion that could be drawn from what has been said so far, in order to argue against it.

At this point, however, I diverge from the meaning Hays gives to his own proposed reading. He suggests that Paul wants to say “Have we Jews normally considered Abraham to be our forefather only according to the flesh?” I suggest, rather, that the whole of Romans 4 hinges on the question, whether 3:21-31 means that we Christians, Jews and Gentiles alike, now find that we are to be members of the fleshly family of Abraham (note how the word “find” suddenly makes perfect sense).^¹⁴⁴ In other words (Paul is proposing this as a hypothetical question), if in Christ God has been true to the covenant with Abraham, might that not mean, as the Galatians had been led to believe, that members of the Christ-family in fact belong to Abraham’s fleshly family? When we read Romans 4 as the answer to this question, it gains in coherence and force.^¹⁴⁵

4:2. Verses 2-8 are regularly appealed to by those who still argue that Paul was after all attacking a theology of self-help legalism, in which “righteousness” is earned by moral effort. By themselves these verses might indeed bear that sense. But within the present argument they are much better understood as a further metaphorical expansion, rather than the inner substance, of Paul’s point.

Paul’s main argument is that “works” (i.e., of Torah) were not the reason for Abraham’s justification; and the idea of “working” is then expanded metaphorically in vv. 4-5 into the idea of doing a job for which one earns wages. The critical connection is established with “for” at the start of v. 2 (“in fact” in the NIV is a loose way of making the same point) and depends on the link between “works of Torah” and “Jews only” that Paul had established in the immediately preceding verses. It is ethnic Jews who possess Torah; so if Abraham were the forefather of an ethnic family only, this family would be defined by Torah, and hence defined visibly by Torah’s “works.” Thus (v. 2a) if Abraham was reckoned to be in covenant with God (i.e., was justified) on the basis of works of Torah, he and his family would be able to “boast,” in the way that Paul described in 2:17-20 and then firmly excluded in 3:27-30. Verse 2a, in other words, explains the question of v. 1, as follows: If Abraham’s covenant membership was indeed defined in terms of “works of Torah” (v. 2a), then he and his family would be able to sustain an ethnic boast, and so (v. 1) 1 any Gentiles wishing to belong to this family would then have to consider themselves ethnic Jews--would, in other words, need to become proselytes, with the males among them becoming circumcised.

Paul’s response, to be filled out as usual in what follows, is brusque: “but not before (lit., “toward”) God,” i.e., “not as far as God is concerned.” Verse 2b is thus Paul’s initial reaction to the suggestion, rather than part of the “if … then” clause of the earlier part of the verse.^¹⁴⁶ This now forces Paul into saying what is true “before God,” to cut the ground from under any potential ethnic boast, and: to establish once and for all the non-ethnic nature of Abraham’s true family, on the basis of the original covenant itself.

4:3. By way of explanation (γάρ gar, omitted in NIV), Paul quotes Gen 15:6: Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as “righteousness.” The word “reckoned” is a bookkeeping metaphor, indicating either the placing of something in a column of figures to be added up or the result of the addition itself; so NIV’s “credited” is helpful. The Greek construction of the whole phrase, however (“to credit something to someone unto something”), is rare, and the precise meaning Paul intends must be sought principally in the Genesis account itself on the one hand and in the rest of Romans 4 on the other (Ps 106:31 and MMT C 31 largely restate the problem).

Genesis 15 opens with Abraham’s puzzlement. YHWH has made great promises to him, but he has no children. Who then will inherit after him? Back comes the promise: God will give Abraham a family as numerous as the stars in heaven. This promise is what Abraham “believed,” at which the writer comments that God “reckoned” it (presumably, Abraham’s believing of the promise) “to him (as) righteousness.” The passage goes on at once to speak of God’s further promise, echoing that in chapter 12, to give Abraham the land of Canaan as his inheritance. Abraham asks how he may know that he will inherit it. God commands him to prepare a covenant ceremony, which then takes place, in which God solemnly tells him that his seed will languish as slaves in a foreign country, but that God will bring them out and give them the land. The whole chapter, of which the covenant ceremony forms the climax, is thus all about Abraham’s promised seed and the route by which they will come to their assured inheritance. Within this context, the key statement of 15:6, cryptic and almost unparalleled as it is, appears to be proleptic, referring forward to the covenant ceremony about to take place. Its overall meaning must then be something like: “God counted Abraham’s faith as constituting covenant membership”; or “Abraham’s believing the promise was seen by God as the sign that Abraham was ‘in the right,’ was to be upheld.”

There are thus three levels of meaning in the dense phrase as Paul quotes it in 4:3.

The most obvious metaphorical level is the bookkeeping one (“reckoned”). God made an entry in Abraham’s ledger, writing “faith,” or more specifically “faith in this promise,” in the column marked “righteousness” (i.e., “covenant membership”).

The second level is the lawcourt one, which is clearly in Paul’s mind through the way he develops the idea. God, as the judge, declares that Abraham’s faith in this promise is the sign that he is in the right in some hypothetical lawcourt. We should be careful not to assume, as normal English usage of “righteousness” might lead us to do, that (a) “righteousness” means “moral goodness,” and that (b) “faith” is then either a form of, or a substitute for, such moral goodness. When Abraham’s faith is “counted as righteousness,” it means that this faith is the sure sign that his acquittal or vindication has already taken place. Both of these meanings, the bookkeeping one and the lawcourt one, are metaphors.

The third and deepest level of meaning is the one that dominates the chapter: the covenant and membership within it (on “righteousness” and “covenant,” see the Commentary on 4:11). Abraham’s faith was the sure sign that he was in partnership with God; and God sealed this with the covenant ceremony and the detailed promises about Abraham’s seed and their inheritance. Both these themes play an important role in later parts of the chapter and the letter.

We must, then, resist the easy temptation to misunderstand Paul’s quotation from Genesis in either of two misleading ways. First, Paul does not mean that God was looking for a particular type of moral goodness (referred to as “righteousness”) that would earn people membership in the covenant, and that, failing to find this, was prepared to accept faith as a substitute.^¹⁴⁷ Faith, for Paul, is not a “substitute” qualification because it is not a qualification at all; nor is “righteousness” the same thing as moral goodness. “Righteousness,” when applied to humans, is, at bottom, the status of being a member of the covenant; “faith” is the badge, the sign, that reveals that status because it is its key symptom. Once that is grasped, the way is open not just for the rest of Paul’s argument in the present passage to unfold smoothly, but also for the nuances carried by faith and the law later in the letter to be understood clearly.

4:4-5. By way of showing what he means in 4:3, Paul develops the bookkeeping metaphor in the direction of employment and wage-earning. This is the only time he uses this metaphorical field in all his discussions of justification, and we should not allow this unique and brief sidelight to become the dominant note, as it has in much post-Reformation discussion. Verse 4 indicates the metaphorical situation that might have obtained if Abraham had after all been justified by works; v. 5, by contrast, shows the true position. Through this contrast, Paul is able to build into his developing picture two further important elements: God’s declaration of justification is a matter of grace (v. 4), and it has to do with God’s justifying the ungodly (v. 5).

The danger in a contemporary reading of the contrast is to suppose that v. 5 is a straightforward reversal of v. 4: Workers get paid not by grace but by debt, but believers get paid not by debt but by grace. This then smuggles back again the possibility that faith is something for which one gets paid, a substitute or alternative work, even if payment is ex gratia (the fact that we use that Latin phrase for an uncontracted payment shows how easily the language slips). The two sentences are not in fact balanced, partly because Paul pulls himself out of the bookkeeping metaphor halfway through v. 5 and returns to his main points, the lawcourt and the covenant. What Paul says in v. 5 not only contrasts with v. 4 (“working” and “not working”), but also deconstructs the whole frame of thought: The alternative to “working” is to “trust the one who justifies the ungodly.”

This description of God is striking for three reasons. First, nothing so far has prepared us for the description of Abraham himself as “ungodly.” In the Genesis story he has already obeyed God’s call (chap. 12) and, though moments of apparent disobedience are part and parcel of the story (calling Sarah his sister rather than his wife, Gen 12:10-20; 20:1-18), he appears for the most part to be worshiping and obeying God. Does Paul mean, then, that though Abraham was not ungodly, the God in whom he believed was nevertheless the one who justifies the ungodly? Probably not. The links between v. 5 and what precedes strongly imply that Abraham is still in mind. Paul is presumably thinking of Abraham’s whole history, from his background in pagan Ur through to YHWH’s call and the establishing of the covenant. Jewish tradition knew of Abraham’s background in idolatry and tended to regard him as the first one to protest against this and to worship the one true God instead.^¹⁴⁸ Paul does not entirely dissent from this tradition. As he will show in the rest of the chapter, Abraham is thus the forefather quite specifically of Gentiles who come to faith, not merely of Jews. This is, in fact, the beginning of a daring theme: that Abraham is actually more like believing Gentiles than he is like believing Jews.

Second, God’s action in justifying the ungodly is, of course, exactly what, according to Scripture, a just judge should not do. Exodus 23:7 declares, in words Paul echoes, ου δικαιώσεις τόν άσεβη (ou dikaiōseis ton asebē), “you shall not justify the ungodly”; and Proverbs 17:15, with different phraseology but the same intent, declares that those who justify the unjust, or condemn the righteous, are alike an abomination (cf. too Deut 16:19; 27:25; Prov 17:26; Ezek 22:12; Susanna 53). Paul’s striking phrase simply overthrows this in the case of God; the only possible grounds for this are the revelation of God’s impartial saving justice spoken of in 3:21-26. The death of Jesus has explained why it is that God was right to pass over former sins. That which was unjust in the human lawcourt is now contained within a higher justice, reminding us again that, just as the bookkeeping metaphor is not Paul’s basic point, so the lawcourt metaphor too does not reach to the heart of what he is saying. What matters is the covenant, established by God with Abraham while he was “ungodly,” and now extended by sheer gate to any and all who, despite their ungodliness, trust in this God. The covenant was always intended to be God’s means of putting the world to rights; the key moment in this promised accomplishment comes when, because of the unveiling of God’s righteousness in the death of Jesus, God not only can but must declare the ungodly to be set right, to be within the covenant. Paul is here preparing for the climax of the chapter, in which he defines faith as belief in “the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (4:24). Throughout the passage, in fact, Paul is wrestling not simply with the question of Abraham’s faith, but with the question of God’s character and identity. He insists on seeing these in the light both of Abraham and the covenant and of the events concerning Jesus.

Third, the word “ungodly” takes us right back to the start of Paul’s description of human idolatry and wickedness in 1:18: The wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and injustice of those who suppress the truth through injustice. That Paul intends this reference back, demonstrating how, within the Abraham story, one can see God’s proposed solution for the problem of 1:18-3:20, will become clear in vv. 18-22.

One who believes in this God, therefore, will discover that this “faith” will be regarded, not as a meritorious spiritual act (how could that be, for the “ungodly”?), but as the badge of covenant membership given by God in sheer grace. And already the answer to the opening question of v. 1 is starting to emerge: We (Jewish and Gentile Christians alike) have not found Abraham to be our father according to the flesh, but according God’s promise (see the same contrast in 9:8).

4:6-8. Paul now calls a second witness: At one level the choice of David may be determined by the key word “reckon” in Ps 32:2 (31:2 LXX). At another, it may be that the multiple references to sin enable him, as in v. 5, to cast an eye back again to 1:18-3:20. But it is interesting to note that David is mentioned as a forgiven sinner and thereby takes a place not merely as an example but as part of covenantal history, in one Second Temple Jewish text.^¹⁴⁹ There, however, David is described as having been “one of the pious,” and it is clear that his forgiveness is seen as stemming from his observance of Torah; the implication is, if you keep Torah you, too, will be forgiven many sins. For Paul, however, it is just a matter of God not “reckoning” sins; nothing in the psalm, or in Paul’s quotation from or comment on it, implies that David had been able to claim forgiveness on any grounds whatever. It was free and undeserved. David “pronounces the blessing on the person to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works” (v. 6). This gives us a further important unpacking of “reckoning righteousness”; the psalm does go on to speak of the forgiven as “the righteous” (32:11; an important indication that “the righteous” does not, there either, mean “the morally perfect”), and Paul can assume that “reckoning righteousness apart from works” and “not reckoning sin against someone” are equivalents. The covenant, we must always remind ourselves, was there to deal with sin; when God forgives sin, or reckons someone within the covenant, these are functionally equivalent. They draw attention to different aspects of the same event.

Paul has now laid the foundation for the specific point he wants to make, namely that Gentiles are welcome in the covenant family on the basis of faith and faith alone, without having any of the badges of Jewish membership--and, indeed, that there is an appropriateness, a natural relation as it were, between them and Abraham, precisely because of the condition he was in at the time when the covenant was established. He was then uncircumcised; he did not then possess the Torah. (See Reflections at 4:23-25.)

NIV: ⁹Is this blessedness only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? We have been saying that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. ¹⁰Under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised, or before? It was not after, but before! ¹¹And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. So then, he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them. ¹²And he is also the father of the circumcised who not only are circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

¹³It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. ¹⁴For if those who live by law are heirs, faith has no value and the promise is worthless, ¹⁵because law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression.

NRSV: ⁹Is this blessedness, then, pronounced only on the circumcised, or also on the uncircumcised? We say, “Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness.” ¹⁰How then was it reckoned to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. ¹¹He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, ¹²and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised.

¹³For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

4:9-12. Paul now repeats, in sharper form, the question of 4:1, in order to address it head-on in the light of verses 2-6. Does all that has been said about Abraham and David apply only to Jews, i.e., to the circumcised? Should Gentile Christians, in other words, be required to become circumcised if they want to inherit the Abrahamic covenant blessings, not least forgiveness of sins? In addressing this question, Paul builds on 2:25-29 and 3:30, the previous mentions of circumcision. Is what he said there about the new family, composed of uncircumcised and circumcised alike, contradicted by the story of Abraham and the terms of the original covenant? Certainly not. Beginning again from Gen 15:6, Paul is able to show (v. 10, which by its question and answer ensures that the reader cannot miss the point) that, since Abraham was not circumcised until Genesis 17, his “reckoning righteous” took place before he was circumcised; in other words, that in Genesis 15 he was an uncircumcised member of the covenant.

The stress of the paragraph thus falls not so much on the method or timing of Abraham’s justification, important though that is, but on what follows from it: that uncircumcised believers are every bit as “justified” as Abraham was (v. 11b). Indeed, vv. 11b-12 seem to imply almost that uncircumcised believers are the more obvious children of Abraham and that it is circumcised ones who come in on their coattails--and even then, Paul underlines, not on the basis of their circumcision, but on the basis of their following in the footsteps of Abraham’s “uncircumcised faith” (v. 12b). In this passage, therefore, for the rhetorical purposes of stressing the free and glad welcome that grace gives to Gentiles who believe the gospel, Paul is almost reversing the sequence of 1:16, saying, “To the Gentile believer first and foremost--and also, equally, to the Jewish believer.” So far from it being necessary, in other words (still answering v. 1), for Gentile believers to “discover” Abraham as their physical father--that is, for them to get circumcised--it is necessary for Jewish people to “discover” Abraham to be their uncircumcised father--that is, to share his faith. Paul does not go on to say that they should therefore remove the marks of their circumcision, since for him that would now be irrelevant (cf. 1 Cor 7:18-20). But his argument means that their circumcision is completely beside the point as regards covenant membership.

In case of any suggestion (as in 3:1) that circumcision is therefore a bad thing, Paul gives it a place of honor in v. 11a. It was a “sign or seal” of the “righteousness” that was Abraham’s on the basis of the faith he had while still uncircumcised. Paul does not say here, as he does in Galatians 3, that the covenant of circumcision with Abraham’s ethnic family, and for that matter the territorial covenant concerning one piece of land, was designed by God as a temporary staging-post on the way to the time when, with the coming of the Messiah and the universal availability of Abrahamic faith, all nations and all lands would be claimed by God’s grace.^¹⁵⁰ But his thought here is not far off. By designating circumcision as a sign or seal of Abraham’s status of faith-demarcated righteousness, Paul reclaims it rather than renouncing it: Faith is the indication of covenant membership, and circumcision was supposed to be a pointer to that status and, apparently, to that mode of indication. The implication is that to use circumcision as a pointer to a status “according to the flesh” is to abuse the sign. This too is, then, part of Paul’s developing answer to the question of v. 1.

We should note, in particular, that Paul’s effort. less rewording of Gen 17:11 indicates clearly, what we have argued all along, that for him a primary meaning of “righteousness” was “covenant membership.” God says in Genesis that circumcision is “a sign of the covenant”; Paul says it was “a sign of righteousness.” He can hardly mean this as a radical alteration or correction, but rather as an explanation.^¹⁵¹ The whole chapter (Genesis 15) is about the covenant that God made with Abraham, and Paul is spending his whole chapter expounding it; if he had wanted to avoid covenant theology he went about it in a strange way. Rather, we should see here powerful confirmation covenantal reading of “righteousness” language in 1:17 and 3:21-31. “He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the covenant membership marked by the faith he had while still uncircumcised.”^¹⁵²

There may be a hint here, also, that Paul is thinking of baptism as the Christian version of circumcision--a pointer to the covenant status people have in Christ, by the Spirit, and whose badge is Christian faith. He seldom uses the word “sign” or “seal,” but the few occurrences of the latter root are mostly found in probably baptismal contexts (2 Cor 1:22; Eph 1:13; 4:30), and in the one passage where baptism and circumcision are brought together it is clear that, for Paul, baptism in some ways at least plays the same role within the establishment of the Christian covenant people that circumcision played within the Jewish family, i.e., that of marking out the covenant people with the sign that spoke of their unique identity (Col 2:11-12). If this is a correct understanding, it prepares the way for the developed statement of chapter 6, where we shall pursue the point further (see also on v. 13 below).

So far, then, the argument is developing step by step. First step: Does the faith family have to regard Abraham as its physical father? No. Abraham was justified freely, by grace, without works, as was the sinful David; and this faith was faith precisely in the God who justifies the “ungodly,” i.e., the Gentile idolaters, the outsiders. Second step: Abraham was justified while uncircumcised, establishing the pattern for other uncircumcised people also to be justified. “That righteousness might be reckoned to them also” in v. 11b (“also” reflects the καί [kai, “also” or “even”] that in some good MSS stands before αύτοΐς [autois, “them”]; the NRSV and the NIV assume its omission) anticipates the conclusion of the chapter’s argument: “that we too will have righteousness reckoned to us, we who believe in the God who raised Jesus” (v. 24). Paul is not, then, using Abraham primarily as an example, but as the basis of his argument about who God is and who God’s people are. He is still, we must remind ourselves, expounding God’s covenant faithfulness.

4:13-15. These verses do not introduce a new topic; they explain what has just been said (the NIV yet again omits the γάρ, “for”). This is a further indication that Paul is not simply going through a list of three items, “works,” “circumcision,” and “Torah,” but is rather mounting a sustained and developing argument about the extent of Abraham’s promised family. He has now reached the point he has had in mind ever since the χωρίς νόμου (choris nomou) of 3:21: Torah itself cannot be the boundary marker of the covenant family (the NIV, keeping the generalized “law” throughout these verses, is in danger of obscuring Paul’s focus on the Jewish law as Israel’s boundary marker; the NRSV rightly keeps the definite article (“the law”) throughout). He introduces this here as the further explanation of why circumcision is neither necessary nor sufficient for membership in this family. That would absolutize Torah as the badge of membership; but Paul has already shown that Torah simply condemns those who possess it. Torah brings wrath (4:15a, referring back to 3:19-20, and behind that 2:12b); if the divine promise is to be fulfilled, it must be in a realm apart from Torah (4:15b, referring back to 3:21). That is the thrust of these verses.

Into this dense statement, though, Paul has built hints of other points to be developed as his argument progresses. First, he reads the geographical promises of Genesis 15 in terms of God’s intention that Abraham’s “seed” would inherit, not one territory merely, but the whole cosmos. Paul is here close to one strand in Second Temple Jewish thought that developed the idea of Gen 12:3; 18:18; and 22:18 (all nations being blessed in Abraham) through the prophetic promises of Isa 11:10-14; 42:1, 6; 49:6; 54:3; 65:16; Jer 4:2; Zech 9:10 (Israel as a light to the nations, the ruler of the nations, etc.), and the psalmic visions of Ps 72:8-11 (the Messiah’s worldwide dominion; cf. Exod 23:31; 1 Kgs 4:21, 24) to the post-biblical thought of Sir 44:21 (which brings together Gen 12:3 and Ps 72:8) and Jub 19:21 (where Jacob’s family is spoken of as Abraham’s had been). One destination of this line of thought is 2 Bar 14:13; 51:3, where the promised inheritance is a new world entirely, distinct from the present one; as we shall see, this is not Paul’s view (see the Commentary on 8:18-27). Paul remains distinct from the other post-biblical developments too. Whereas in Sirach and Jubilees the thought, as in Psalm 72, is of a geographical expansion through which Israel, still based in the promised land, and still identified ethnically, rules an increasing area until it has brought the rest of the world into subjection, in Paul’s thought ethnic, national Israel will not rule the world. God will rule the world, and will do so through Jesus the Jewish Messiah, in such a way as to bring all nations equally into God’s family (see 9:5; 10:13). Paul’s development of the “inheritance” theme, so important in Genesis 15 and elsewhere in the Pentateuch, here takes a decisive turn that looks ahead to 8:12-30.^¹⁵³

The point of v. 13, then, that this inheritance, promised repeatedly in Genesis, was not to be made over to Abraham’s seed (“descendants” [NRSV] and “offspring” [NIV] are accurate enough, but “seed” is such an evocative biblical term, and one that Paul exploits so interestingly elsewhere, that it seems worthwhile retaining it) on the basis of Torah. This is then explained (gar) in v. 14. In Galatians 3:17-18 Paul argues a nearly identical point, but with a different line of thought, corresponding more to that which he has just used in the present passage in relation to circumcision: The Torah, coming later than the promise, cannot be allowed to annul it. This time he uses a different strategy but to the same end: If “those from the Torah,” in other words ethnic Jews, were to be the heirs, then nobody at all would inherit. This would make faith useless (that of Abraham, we must suppose, and that of anyone trying to copy him) and would nullify the promise, since God would ultimately be giving Abraham neither a seed nor an inheritance.

Why? Paul’s explanation for this cryptic conclusion, given in v. 15a, is terse: the law works wrath. Putting this shorthand statement together with that in 3:19-20, we arrive at the composite that explains them both. (a) Torah shows up sin within ethnic Israel; (b) sin invokes wrath. Therefore (c) if the inheritance were confined to ethnic Israel, (d) nobody at all would inherit. Those outside would be kept there; those inside would be subject to God’s wrath.^¹⁵⁴ This does not cast a slur upon Torah; Torah is simply doing its job, and Paul affirms that it is right to do so. He does not yet address the question, raised by the similar argument in Galatians, as to why God would give the Torah (Gal 3:19); he will deal with it fully in chap. 7, having allowed the problem to build up further through similar hints in chaps. 5 and 6.

The other cryptic hint given here of the wider theological scheme invoked is in 15b: “Where’ there is no law, there is no transgression.” In view of his entire earlier argument, Paul can scarcely mean by this that Gentiles, being outside the Torah, are guiltless; there is, presumably, still sin, the miscellaneous missing of God’s intended target for human beings, but there is no explicit disobedience to a known commandment (NRSV, “violation”; see the Commentary on 5:14). The point, however, is that (a) Abraham, not possessing the Torah, was not in this technical sense a “transgressor”; (b) Gentiles can inherit the promises made to Abraham without finding Torah standing in their way; they are not transgressors.^¹⁵⁵

This prepares us for the climax of the chapter. The covenant is fulfilled in the creation of a worldwide family marked out by Abraham-like faith. (See Reflections at 4:23-25.)

NIV: ¹⁶Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring–not only to those who are of the law but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. ¹⁷As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed–the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

NRSV: ¹⁶For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, ¹⁷as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”)--in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Paul now gives the full answer to the question he asked in v. 1. This is the significance of the introductory Διά τουτο (Dia touto): “Thus it comes about that…” (cf. 5:12; 2 Cor 4:1; Paul can, of course, use the phrase in many other less climactic contexts, e.g., 1:26; 13:6). The main sentence has neither verbs, subjects nor objects, not least because Paul is hurrying on to what he most wants to say in the whole chapter: literally, “Therefore by faith, so that by grace, so that the promise might be valid for all the seed, not only for the one from the Torah but also for the one from the faith of Abraham.”^¹⁵⁶ The universal availability of the promise is Paul’s main thrust, and he backs it up at once with the explanation that answers v. 1: Abraham is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations.”

This in turn is backed up with the great statement of the other main theme of the chapter, the character of the God in whom Abraham believed. Just as Paul answered his own hypothetical suggestion in v. 2 with the brusque remark “but not before God,” so now the statement of what is in fact the case is backed up with “in the presence of the God in whom he believed the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that do not exist.”

Faith, grace and promise, then, are vital to this chapter, but they are not its main subjects. The main subjects are Abraham, his family, and his God. This is what we should expect if the overall subject of the larger section is indeed the revelation of God’s covenant faithfulness and the creation of a Jew-plus-Gentile family. The present verses have often been read exactly the other way round, resulting in the bracketing, by the NRSV, of the key statement in vv. 16b-17 a (the KJV and the JB simply bracket 4:17a; the RSV begins its parenthesis after “to all his descendants”). When exegesis comes out smoothly it shows that we are approaching the text from the right angle; when it comes out awkwardly, with phrases and sentences that do not fit, we should take it as a sign that the chapter is being forced in the wrong direction. Romans 4 is not a “proof from scripture” of “justification by faith,” into which Paul has inserted some remarks about the fatherhood of Abraham and the character of God; it is an exposition of the covenant God and the way in which the covenant promises to Abraham were fulfilled, with justification and faith playing their part within that overall argument. Verse 17b does indeed seem a bit abrupt, immediately after the biblical quotation; but putting v. 17a in a bracket, with or without part of v. 16, does nothing to ease the suddenness of the change of topic. The abruptness, however, corresponds closely to the opening of v. 16, where Paul is virtually writing in shorthand, and to the suddenness of 4:2b (“but not before God!” which is making the same point as v. 17b (“in the presence of the God in whom he believed”). Once we grasp this, vv. 16-17, instead of seeming awkward and broken up, appear to sum up neatly the argument of the chapter so far.

In particular, the passage makes explicit something about the character of God as revealed (albeit to Paul’s Christian hindsight) in Genesis 15, something Paul will then use brilliantly to bring his discourse round to where he wants it to be at the end of the chapter. God is the God who gives life to the dead--something the pagan gods did not even claim to do--and calls into existence things that do not exist. This is, of course, a characteristically Jewish view of the one true God, the creator and lifegiver (cf. Wis 16:13; Tob 13:2; 2 Bar 48:8; belief in God’s giving life to the dead is expressed in the second of the Eighteen Benedictions, part of daily Jewish prayer); and it corresponds, within the present argument, to the description of God in v. 5 as “the God who justifies the ungodly.”

Within this overall statement, there is one slightly puzzling note. In v. 16 he speaks of “the whole seed”--all Abraham’s multi-ethnic family, in other words^¹⁵⁷--as consisting of (literally) “not the one from the Torah only but also the one from the faith of Abraham.” Taken by itself, this might imply that Jews who kept Torah formed one part of the family, while the other part consisted of Gentiles who, though not having Torah, shared Abraham’s faith. This possibility is ruled out by everything Paul has said from 3:19 to the present point? “The one from the Torah” is simply here a shorthand for “the Jew”; and Paul has already insisted in 4:12 that Jewish ancestry, signaled by circumcision, is only of any value if the person concerned follows in the steps of Abraham’s faith (cf. 2:25-29; 10:1-13; 11:23). This should alert us to the interesting overtones of the double description of God at the end of v. 17: God is the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (so NRSV; the NIV, closer to the Greek, has “calls things that are not as though they were”). This may perhaps correspond to the double road into justification hinted at in 3:30. When God brings a Gentile to faith, this is a creation out of nothing; the person had no previous covenant membership of any sort. “Call” is, after all, a strange word to use of creation, but it is one of Paul’s regular ways of speaking about the effect of the gospel on someone’s life (see, e.g., 9:24, in a similar context). When God brings a Jew to share the faith of Abraham, this is more like a life out of death, a renewal of covenant membership after the threat of being cut off (cf. 2:25-29; 11:11-16, esp. 11:15, on which see the Commentary on 11:12-32).

Verses 16-17 form a striking and original argument that belongs recognizably within Second Temple Judaism but which cuts across the line of thought we might expect. Paul’s emphasis contrasts with that of Sir 44:19-21 (NRSV):

Here, Torah and circumcision are the central features, along with Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22, which is absent from Romans 4).^¹⁵⁸ Sirach also highlights Abraham’s faith(fulness) (εύρέθη πίστος heurethē pistos, “he was found faithful,” 44:20), but this does not have the sense of “believing the promise” that Paul has drawn out. The two belong on the same map; but Paul’s new construal, his new way of telling the story, grows directly out of what he now believes about God because of the events concerning Jesus, resulting in the establishment of the Jew-plus-Gentile family with faith as its central demarcating feature.

NIV: ¹⁸Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” ¹⁹Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead–since he was about a hundred years old–and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. ²⁰Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, ²¹being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

NRSV: ¹⁸Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” ¹⁹He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. ²⁰No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²²Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

The revelation of God’s character to Abraham called forth, Paul now argues, a specific form of faith. Abraham’s faith was not just a general religious belief, an awareness of “the other” or of a mysterium tremendum. It was a trust in specific promises that the true God had made, which, if fulfilled, would show this God to be what Paul has described in v. 17b: the lifegiver, the creator out of nothing.

Paul’s fulsome description of Abraham’s faith and what it involves, which corresponds to nothing in previous Jewish expansions of the biblical text, seems to be designed with two things in mind. In vv. 18-22 he demonstrates that when Abraham believed this promise he was exemplifying what it meant to be truly human, in contrast to the human disintegration in 1:18-3:20. In vv. 23-25, which conclude the chapter and section, he shows that this type of faith is the same as that which Christians demonstrate when believing that God raised Jesus from the dead. This, he argues, is why Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, share the faith of Abraham and consequently share the justification spoken of in Gen 15:6.

The theme of the unity and equality of believing Jews and believing Gentiles now fades from view. Paul concentrates instead on the nature of the faith that unites them, and on the certainty of the justification that follows. Are justification and faith then after all the main themes of chap. 4? By no means. Paul has finished in vv. 16-17 the main argument that began with 4:1; he now returns to the overall argument not only of 3:21-4:25 but of 1:18-4:25. He is rounding off the larger section of which 3:21-4:25 was the second main part. He therefore widens the horizon of chapter 4, to speak more directly of the true God, the nature of faith in the true God, and the way in which this faith is the hallmark of genuine humanness as opposed to the corrupt variety.

He thus also points forward to chapters 5-8. There, in order in turn to lay a platform for the specific arguments of 9-11 and 12-16, he leaves the discussion of the Jew-plus-Gentile nature of the family out of explicit consideration for the moment, focusing instead on the way in which the story of Israel has reached its climax, and its true recapitulation, in Christ and the Spirit.

4:18-19. Paul returns to Genesis 15, this time to the verse that precedes his key phrase: God showed Abraham the stars, and declared, “So shall your seed be” (Gen 15:5). This was the promise that Abraham believed. Paul has linked this with the quotation from Gen 17:5 already referred to in v. 17, “1 have made you the father of many nations”; he assumes that having offspring like the stars of heaven and being the father of many nations amount to the same thing. Abraham believed this promise, he says, “Hoping against hope” (so NRSV, using a well-known English idiom that more or less matches Paul’s slightly more complex phrase)--in other words, persevering in hope when all reasonable expectation (“hope” in a more neutral sense) would have urged that it was impossible. He faced the fact of his own physical condition,^¹⁵⁹ and that of Sarah, without any weakening in his faith. Paul draws a veil over the various episodes such as Abraham’s passing Sarah off as his sister and the whole matter of Hagar and Ishmael (Sarah: Gen 12:10-20, and particularly 20:1-18, which occurs between the promise concerning Isaac [18:1-15] and his birth [21:1-7]; Hagar: Gen 16:1-16). The feature of this faith to which Paul draws attention is its persistence in hoping for new life when Abraham’s and Sarah’s bodies were, in terms of potential childbearing, as good as dead because of their age. This builds on 4:17 and looks directly forward to 4:24-25.

4:20-21. Paul now describes Abraham’s faith in lavish detail. He shows that Abraham was exactly unlike the human condition described in 1:18-32. Paul is rounding off the larger argument. This, in principle, is how humanity is restored.^¹⁶⁰ We may tabulate this as follows:

To this may be added the overall point, that Abraham in this passage worshiped, trusted, and believed the true God and so was given power to be fruitful and to obtain the promised inheritance, whereas human beings in chap. 1 turned away from the true God to idols and so were given over to dishonor, unfruitfulness and corruption. The stress on Abraham’s faith/faithfulness also contrasts powerfully with the faithless Israel described in 2:17-3:20, notably at 3:3. Abraham was given grace to be in faithful covenant relation with the true God and thereby to embody and exhibit, initially in his faith and subsequently in his fruitfulness, the marks of genuine humanity. The whole thrust of 4:20-21 is the God-centeredness and God-honoringness of Abraham’s faith, worshiping and relying totally on the faithful, lifegivng creator-God. This stands in close relation to what Paul had said in 3:21-22, where God’s covenant faithfulness is unveiled for the benefit of those who believe.

4:22. Therefore, declares Paul, Abraham’s faith was “reckoned to him unto righteousness.” The word “therefore” could, if we were not careful, send shock waves back through Paul’s previous argument. Is he really saying, after all his language about grace, that this type of faith was so special so virtuous, so remarkable, that Abraham was rewarded for his faith by having it “reckoned as righteousness”? Is Abraham then the one conspicuous exception, prior to Jesus Christ, to the general rule laid down in 1:18-3:20, that “none is righteous, no not one”? Why, if so, did the full redemption have to wait for two thousand more years? Why did it not happen then and there, with Abraham himself?

Paul does not address these questions, which arise for us when we determine to give Abraham his full place in Pauline theology rather than being shunted into a siding as a mere polemically useful “example.” But it is clear that Paul did not think that Abraham’s faith was meritorious, something to boast about; rather, it was his response to grace (vv. 2, 4, 16, corresponding to 3:24), the grace that had called him in the first place and that now addressed him with lifegiving promises. When, therefore, Paul says that the reason Abraham’s faith was “reckoned as righteousness” was because it was this sort of faith, he does not mean that Abraham earned special favor by having a special sort of faith. He means that precisely this sort of faith, evoked by sheer grace, is evidence of that redemption and renewal of humanity as a result of which there appears evidence of a human life back on track, turned from idolatry to the worship of the true God, from disbelief to faith and from corruption to fruitfulness. Faith is the sign of life; life is the gift of God. Justification is God’s declaration that where this sign of life appears, the person in whom it appears is within the covenant.

NIV: ²²This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.” ²³The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, ²⁴but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness–for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. ²⁵He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.

NRSV: ²³Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, ²⁴but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, ²⁵who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

There remains but one task for Paul, and the first section of the letter is complete. He has not talked specifically about “us” (i.e. himself and his audience) since 1:5-15. Insofar as he has been addressing anyone, it has been the hypothetical debating partner within the “diatribe” style; for the rest, the argument has remained at a general level. Now at last he places his readers on the carefully drawn map; from here the next four chapters will develop, in which “we,” and “our” status before God, are a major theme. This is a vital clue to the relation between chaps. 1-4 and 5-8, to the transition between them, and to the way in which both sections together lay the foundation for the second half of the letter, which contains the more particular thing Paul wants to say to the Roman church,

4:23. As often, Paul declares that a biblical passage had, in God’s intention, a wider meaning than simply its historical reference (see, e.g., 1 Cor 9:9-10; 10:11; and above all Rom 15:4, on which see the Commentary on 15:1-13). This is not arbitrary or fanciful. Precisely because of the covenantal way Paul reads scripture, he insists that what was said and done by way of foundation determines the shape of the whole building. What God said in scripture (“it was written” is a way of saying that scripture says what God intended) opens out to include all those who share Abraham’s faith--which, not surprisingly, granted the full explanation of this faith in 4:17-21, is seen as faith in God the lifegiver. Abraham’s faith was evoked by the word that spoke to him of his great family, even though he was as good as dead; Christian faith is called forth by the word of the gospel, which speaks of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (1:4) and the disclosure thereby that he was and is Israel’s Messiah, the Lord of the world.

4:24. Christian faith is thus, for Paul, irrevocably resurrection-shaped. Like Abraham’s faith, it is by no means simply a general religious awareness or trust in a remote or distant supernatural being, but gains its form, as well as its content, from the revelation of God’s covenant faithfulness in the events concerning Jesus (see 10:6-13, and the Commentary thereon). “Faith,” for Paul, is never a thing in itself, but is always defined, as Rom 4:16-22 makes clear, in relation to the God in whom trust is placed. The purpose of a window is not to cover one wall of the house with glass, but to let light in and to let the inhabitants see out.

Paul is careful, therefore, to speak of Christian faith as “believing in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.” God, not Jesus, is the primary object of Christian faith (one of many reasons why πίστις Χριστου [pistis Christou], “the faith of Christ,” is more likely to mean the faithfulness of Jesus himself than the faith people put in Jesus). This description of God is important for Romans, being echoed at another memorable point, 8:11; for Paul it is axiomatic that the resurrection took place by God’s initiative and power (see, e.g., 10:9; 1 Cor 6:14; 15:15; 2 Cor 4:14; 13:4; Gal 1:1. 2 Cor 4:14 is very close to the present phrase and to 8:11), so that the meaning of the event is the meaning God intends (1:4), namely, that Jesus is thereby marked out as God’s Son, the Messiah, Israel’s representative, the one in whom God’s promises of redemption have finally come true. Confessing that Jesus is Lord, therefore, and that God raised him from the dead (10:9), means sharing the faith of Abraham; and that faith, as Paul has now argued, is the one and only badge of membership in Abraham’s family. Paul does not in this passage spell out the implication, but the rest of the chapter, along with 3:27-30, should still be echoing in the mind. Because there is only one badge of membership, all those who share this faith are members of God’s redeemed and forgiven people, no matter what their ancestry. Paul is not making a substantially new point at this stage in the chapter. Rather, he is for the first time putting himself and his readers on the map he has drawn. It is the map of the Abrahamic family, created by the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus the Messiah, the family in which the distinction between Jew and Gentile, maintained by Torah in particular is set aside once for all, the family whose sole identifying badge is Christian faith.

Remarkably enough, this verse is the first mention of Jesus’ resurrection since the programmatic and formulaic 1:4.^¹⁶¹ But, as we have seen at various points, the rest of the argument would be incomprehensible without it. For neither the first nor the last time, Paul reveals at the very conclusion of an argument something that has been foundational to it all along. Thousands of other young Jews were crucified by the Roman authorities in the first century; several would-be Messiahs were killed one way or another. What distinguishes Jesus from the rest, quite apart from his teaching and actions (which would scarcely by themselves have sustained the sort of movement that Christianity rapidly became), was obviously the resurrection. It is what gives the crucifixion the remarkable meaning it has, enabling Paul to say, by way of a closing christological summary (this, too, anticipates the careful writing of chaps. 5-8), that Jesus was “given up because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification” (for the resurrection as giving meaning to the cross, see 1 Cor 15:17-18).

The point of this verse, then, is that those who believe the gospel of Jesus, which involves believing in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, are thereby sharing Abraham’s faith, and will, like him, be reckoned “righteous” in the senses already outlined. Paul has now shown how the bald assertions of 3:27-30 are grounded in the original covenant and promise, thus explaining the λογιζόμεθα (logizometha) of 3:28: When Paul said “we reckon,” “we figure it out,” he was referring not so much to the argument he had already sketched in 3:21-26 as to the full picture he was intending to draw in chap. 4. Having stated in 3:28 the result of the calculation, he has now shown his detailed working.

4:25. All this has been accomplished, of course, through Jesus himself. Paul lays bare, in conclusion, the foundation of the whole structure. This was where God’s righteousness, God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s saving justice, was displayed. Jesus “was given up for our transgressions and raised for our justification.”^¹⁶²

This pregnant formulation may well have been stated in this or a similar way by Paul himself and/or by other early Christians, many times before.^¹⁶³ But if it was in that sense pre-Pauline, or at least pre-Romans, Paul has used it here because it sums up exactly what he has been saying, under the general heading of 1:3-4, throughout the letter so far. (It is not, in other words, a non-Pauline formula, quoted here for merely phatic purposes, i.e. to make a pleasing Christian noise unrelated to what has gone before.) Paul has spent the best part of three chapters demonstrating that all human beings were “under the power of sin” (3:9); very well, Jesus was “given up because of our trespasses” (3:24-26, in other words, answers exactly to the problem of 1:18-3:20.) Paul has spent the last thirty or so verses arguing that because of the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus the Messiah all who believe are justified; very well, Jesus “was raised for our justification.” This is another way of saying that the lifegiving God, in whom Abraham believed and was justified, gave life to Jesus, in whom we believe and are justified. This much is at once clear. But there are other questions lurking beneath the surface.

To begin with, Paul seems to be quoting, or at least deliberately alluding to, Isa 53:5, 12 (see the Commentary on 3:24-26; see also the Commentary on 5:18-19).^¹⁶⁴ This should not come as a surprise. Isaiah 40-55 is one of the central scriptural passages in which the righteousness of the creator God is said to be revealed, both to confound the pagan nations and their gods and to rescue sinful and wayward Israel from its sin and exile, and in which this task is accomplished supremely through the death and resurrection of “the servant of the Lord.” Once we recognize the large themes that tie together Romans and the central section of Isaiah, there ought to be no problem in recognizing that when Paul alludes to one central verse in this passage in Isaiah he intends a reference to the whole. Just as 4:25 expresses for the first time the theological point that turns out to have been foundational for the whole preceding passage, so it is reasonable to suggest that Isaiah 40-55 has been implicit throughout as well.^¹⁶⁵

This strongly implies that, though the death of Jesus has only been mentioned so far in 3:22-26 (taking references to Jesus’ “faithfulness” to include a reference to his death), it has remained basic to the whole theology of justification, and of the non-ethnic covenant family, which Paul has expounded from 3:27 through to 4:24. This, again, should not surprise us. To see the cross as the basis of the coming together of Jews and Gentiles is certainly Pauline. The cross is central to the whole argument of Gal 2:11-4:11, with its exposition of Abraham’s single family, justified by faith (see also Eph 2:11-22). This prepares us for the repeated emphasis on Jesus’ death in chaps. 5-8. Paul is not changing course there, but drawing out what is latent in the present section.

But what, more precisely, does the present verse say about the meaning and effect of Jesus’ death and resurrection? He was handed over, says Paul, “because of” our trespasses and was raised up “because of” our justification. The word in each case is διά (dia), which, when governing the accusative (as here), indicates the reason why something happens, that “on account of which” something occurs?

The first half of the verse is fairly clear. “Our trespasses” were the reason or cause for Jesus’ “handing over”; as in Isaiah, he was so identified with “us” that he suffered the fate we deserved. What then of the second half of the verse? It is much harder to envisage, let alone establish, a causal connection in Paul’s mind by which “our justification” could have been the cause of Jesus’ resurrection, as would be required if the two halves of the verse were as closely parallel in logic as they are in literary form. The nearest Paul comes to saying something like that is 1 Cor 15:17-18: If the Messiah has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Seen from that point of view, the resurrection demonstrates that Jesus’ death accomplished the forgiveness and justification of God’s people; one might almost say, in those terms, that the accomplishment of justification was the “cause” of the resurrection.^¹⁶⁶ But this seems, frankly, a strange and roundabout way of saying it, and Paul has not prepared us in Romans (or Galatians) for any such statement thus far. It seems to me more likely that two other meanings come together at this point.

First, the servant of Isaiah 53 is raised to new life after his vicarious death (53:10b-12); his task then, as God’s righteous one, is “to make many righteous” (v. 11, alluded to in Rom 5:18-19). Carrying this meaning into Romans 4, as the allusion invites us to do, would suggest that Jesus’ resurrection took place “because of our justification” in the sense of “because God intended thereby to justify us.”^¹⁶⁷ This is not exactly parallel in meaning to “because of our trespasses” in the first half of the verse, unless, of course, Paul there means “he was handed over because God intended thereby to deal with our trespasses.” But it is not necessary to insist on a strict parallelism of content; Paul uses the matching form to cover, by way of a shorthand summary, the two topics that have occupied him throughout the last four chapters.

This is supported, second, by the one previous mention of the resurrection in the letter (1:4). There God declares, by raising Jesus, that he really was and is God’s Son, the Messiah. The resurrection unveils to the surprised world, Israel included, that this was after all the age-old saving plan of the creator God. In particular it declares, as in a lawcourt, that God has vindicated Jesus. Jesus is shown to be in the right. His life and death were the true faithfulness for which God had created Israel in the first place. Thus, if faithful Jesus is demonstrated to be Messiah by the resurrection, the resurrection also declares in principle that all those who belong to Jesus, all those who respond in faith to God’s faithfulness revealed in him, are themselves part of the true covenant family promised to Abraham. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus can at this level be seen as the declaration of justification. And this can perfectly well be expressed as “He was raised because of our justification.”

Romans 4 thus leads us to a high rock looking back over the landscape we have covered. From the same vantage point, looking ahead, we can glimpse the route we are now to take.

First, the view backward. The events concerning Jesus the Messiah, and the gospel message in which these events are announced, unveil the covenant faithfulness, the saving justice, of the creator God; because in these events the promises made to Abraham have at last been accomplished. These promises were designed to redeem the world, by creating a worldwide family in whom the grim entail of human sin and its consequences (present corruption, future wrath) would be dealt with. This has now been achieved through the sacrificial death and the resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus. Through Jesus’ faithfulness, God has thus fulfilled the purpose for which the people of Israel were called into being in the first place and marked out with circumcision and Torah. Torah, however, cannot be the boundary marker of covenant membership, since it inevitably points to Israel’s sin. God’s creation of the non-ethnic covenant family is therefore an act of supreme grace, modeled on the way in which grace came to Abraham to begin with, bringing forgiveness of sins and present justification to all, Jew and Gentile alike, who believe in “the God who raised Jesus.”

Every line in this argument, every turn in the thought, will be vital for the specific points that Paul wants to make to the church in Rome in chapters 9-11 and 12-16. From our vantage point we can see, in the distance, the outline of these passages.

In 9-11, Paul wrestles with the problem of Jewish unbelief and tells again the story of Israel, from Abraham to the Messiah and on into the future. He explains how God has in fact been faithful to the promises and how, within that framework and without smuggling in favoritism by the back door, God has not written off the Jewish people. The point of the section is found chapter 11, where Paul warns the largely Gentile church in Rome not to despise the non-Christian Jews, who are still the objects of God’s saving love and purposes.

Then, in 12-16, Paul sets out the parameters for the church to live as the renewed humanity within a pagan society. The key is again the unity, across traditional barriers, of all who believe in the God revealed in Jesus (14:1-15:13). The latter passage closes, dramatically, with the quotation of Isa 11:10, which speaks of the Messiah and his resurrection as the means by which the Gentiles will be brought under the rule of the God of Israel (Paul uses a version of Isaiah that makes this point more clearly than most translations of the prophet indicate). Paul thereby completes a huge circle with 1:3-5. The mission and unity of the church, grounded in a covenantal understanding of what the one true God accomplished in Jesus the Messiah, are the thrusts of the last two sections.

This is not the only view, however, that we gain from the end of chapter 4. As we saw when examining Paul’s gospel and the way it reveals God’s justice, this message offers an implicit challenge to the world Paul and his readers inhabited--the world in which Caesar ruled supreme, in which his justice had rescued the world from chaos and had established a single empire embracing all nations. Paul is not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus, because in it God’s saving justice, his covenant faithfulness, is revealed. The living God thereby upstages Caesar.

What about the landscape in between our vantage point at the end of chap. 4 and the two great sections 9-11 and 12-16? How do chaps. 5-8 grow out of 1-4 and pave the way for what is to follow? This is perhaps the central question about the thought structure of Romans. It would be artificial to answer it in any other way than by introducing chaps. 5-8, which is the next exegetical task.

1. The most important reflection to arise from Romans 4 is the non-negotiable task of persuading those who believe in Jesus as Messiah and Lord to see themselves as the children of Abraham (and indeed of Sarah). Abraham is not merely an example of a biblical character who happened to be “justified by faith”; he is, declares Paul, “the father of us all.” To this picture 1 Pet 3:6, and by implication Gal 4:28-31 and Heb 11:11-12, adds that Sarah is our mother. The Pauline picture of the people of God is inescapably rooted in the history of Israel from Genesis 12 onward.

This has immediate implications. First, the Christian is committed to a rigorously non-Marcionite view of the Jewish scriptures, the history to which they bear witness, and above all the God of whom they speak. The God revealed in Jesus the Messiah is the God of Abraham; the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the meaning those events acquire when seen as the fulfillment of the promises made by this God. Christian living is characterized by faith in this God, by loyalty to the project of this God for creation, by the renewing, healing, and sanctifying power of the Spirit of this God (see chap. 8). Christians read the story of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, and of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel as their own story, as an earlier act in the great drama that reached its climax in the Messiah, Jesus (cf. 9:4-5), and has now opened up to embrace the whole world.^¹⁶⁸ Paul struggled to persuade his Gentile converts to see themselves this way, rather than to imagine that they belonged to a new group (certainly not a new “religion”!) lately sprung up from nowhere. Largely Gentile churches in our own day need to engage in the same struggle.

Second, however, the Christian is committed to believing that this family of Abraham is not defined in terms of the Jewish law. This inevitably appears a contradiction in terms to those who, for whatever reason of personal involvement or study, know from the inside the way in which devout non-Christian Jews have thought of themselves, their traditions, and above all their Torah, from that day to this. Paul, as himself a supremely devout Jew, faced exactly this problem and made every effort to convince his readers that this surprising turn of events was in fact what had been promised and intended all along. This is the main argument of the present chapter, and indeed of Galatians 3, and it bears repeating frequently, not least in Jewish-Christian discussions. It is most revealing to compare the two quite different traditions of reading Genesis 15 in, say, Paul and the rabbinic midrashim.

The questions raised by this in our own day are not addressed in this chapter. We defer, therefore, to Romans 9-11 the matter of the continuing relationship between those who see themselves as the children of Abraham defined by faith in the lifegiving God revealed in Jesus and those who see themselves as the children of Abraham defined by the possession and keeping of the Mosaic Torah.

2. Within the family given by God to Abraham, there is no room for sub-definitions. It is hard to live in community or. the basis of nothing more nor less than belief in the God who raised Jesus. Humans naturally gravitate toward communities of similar background, personality, speech, or indeed social position or bank balance; Christians are no exception. Within Western society, particularly in urban areas, this leads to choosing one’s Christian fellowship and church membership for reasons that Paul would have regarded as irrelevant, possibly damaging. This in turn leads to the suspicion that others, whose faith is in fact every bit as well founded, are somehow less Christian, or maybe not even Christian at all, because of their different social or cultural idioms. Every effort must be made to overcome this. Once Paul had shown that the barrier between Jew and Gentile had been overcome in Jesus, and that God had wonderfully achieved the worldwide community promised originally to Abraham, there was no excuse, and there remains no excuse, for thinking that one’s own culture is so deeply important, even important to the gospel, that it must not be compromised by fellowship with others who do things differently.

3. Within this, Christians must embody in their church life the truth articulated in 4:4-8: the fact that the family promised by God to Abraham is a family of forgiven sinners, rescued by grace alone from the personal and communal disintegration that results from idolatry and sin. The God we worship is the God who justifies the ungodly, not the pious. There is, no doubt, a danger in setting up a social or even a theological inverted snobbery, of imagining that because we are socially inferior, or poor, or casual rather than devout in worship, or even that we are morally careless rather than legalistic, that this in turn somehow establishes us, rather than the devout, as the true people of God. This, indeed, is the implication, and sometimes more than the implication, of some writing on Paul and Romans, in which the problem Paul is addressing is the problem of “religion” and the apparent human attempt to use religious practices as a means of earning God’s favor.^¹⁶⁹ But if piety will not earn God’s favor, nor will impiety; if religion will not do, nor will irreligion; if moralism will not qualify us, nor will immoralism.

When this bit of ivy, which easily winds itself around church life, has been uprooted--it is not, after all, what Paul is talking about--the tree is free to use its energy for proper growth. And the point at which we need to grow continually is in making real, to ourselves and one another, and particularly in the way we structure our corporate life, the fact that we believe in, and celebrate, the God who justifies the ungodly. Forgiveness remains one of the most astonishing gifts, and the church should be the place where people are regularly astonished by it.

4. Romans 4 urges us to examine the way in which true faith reflects, and feeds on, the character of God, and the way in which it leads to the rehabilitation of the true image-bearingness of human beings. Abraham’s faith, analyzed in detail in vv. 18-21, is focused on, and gains its character from, the true God at every turn. It looks fully at the human and worldly situation, filled as it is with death and decay; it acknowledges that this is the state we are in; and it also looks steadfastly at the God who raises the dead and creates out of nothing. Worshiping this God (4;20), and acknowledging that this God has the power to deliver on promises of new life in the place of death, is fundamental to Christian faith. It is also the reversal and undoing of that idolatry outlined in 1:18-25, and therefore cannot but issue in a life that undoes and reverses the consequent behavior spoken of in 1:26-31. Paul does not develop this further here, but those who want to live with the meaning of Romans 4 cannot avoid looking further, not just to chap. 6, but also to chap. 12, where he holds out a model of remade humanity in which the faith spoken of in chap. 4 has its full effect in transforming mind, character, and behavior.

5. The centrality of faith in God’s raising of Jesus from the dead emerges with peculiar clarity from this chapter. In Western liberalism it has often been thought quite acceptable, sometimes even desirable, sometimes actually mandatory, that one should disbelieve in the resurrection of Jesus. There is much misinformation on this topic. It is often assumed that people who believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection hold a pre-scientific worldview without knowledge of the real facts of the world. To this mentality Paul’s statement in v. 19 is especially relevant. It was not the case that Abraham was living in a fool’s paradise, refusing to face the facts about himself. On the contrary, he looked them in the face and went on believing in the God who raises the dead. It will not do to declare that we modern persons now “know” that no such thing as bodily resurrection occurs. It does not help to cite the fact that in all cases observable to us dead people have in fact stayed dead. The testimony of the early church was precisely that, though of course all other humans remained as dead as Abraham’s and Sarah’s bodies (in terms of their childbearing possibilities), in this particular case the creator God had acted in a decisive, striking and as yet unique way, to give to Jesus a new bodily life--not merely a resuscitation into the same sort of bodily existence as before, but a new dimension of bodily existence. There is, no doubt, room for endless discussion about what form precisely Jesus’ resurrection took and how best we might speak of it in subsequent generations. But there is no room, as far as Paul is concerned, for that impossible hybrid, a Christian who does not in any sense believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

Romans 5-8 is a majestic statement of some of Paul’s greatest themes. The love of God embodied in Jesus’ death; the hope, even during suffering, enjoyed by God’s justifed people; Jesus’ reversal of Adam’s sin and its effects; Christian freedom from sin, the law and death itself; the life-giving leading of the Spirit. Parts of this section are sure to feature in anyone’s selection of favorite biblical passages. Countless Christians, faced with life’s greatest trials, have found strength and joy in Paul’s closing words: “Neither height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

At the same time, these chapters contain some of Paul’s densest and most difficult writing. The Adam/Christ contrast of 5:12-21 is cryptic and elliptical: trying to read its Greek after the measured sentences of 5:1-11 is like turning from Rembrandt to Picasso. Chapter 7 has produced dozens of conflicting interpretations: it has been both hailed as a profound analysis of the human condition and dismissed as a tortured and self-contradictory rambling. The description of cosmic liberation (8:19-22) is seen by some as a great climax, by others as an irrelevant aside. The section offers, in short, just what every Pauline exegete really wants: good, strong themes to enjoy, knotty problems to puzzle over.

Not everyone has agreed that 5-8 constitute a discrete section. Some have suggested that 1:18-5:11, or even 1:18-5:21, should be seen as the real first main section of the letter, with 5:12 or 6:1 starting the new symphonic movement. Paul’s argument does indeed run on without a break here, unlike the deep breath between chaps. 8 and 9 or between chaps. 11 and 12. The two main paragraphs of chap. 5 (vv. 1-11, 12-21) sum up what has gone before as well as setting out material to be further explored (e.g., 5:9 looks back to 3:24-26 and to the “wrath” of 1:18; 5:12-21 refers back to the implicit “Adam” theme in 1:18-25; 5:20 picks up 2:17-24 and 3:19-20). The chapter and paragraph divisions of Romans are of course a late invention. If Romans had concluded with personal greetings after 5:21, some might feel let down, but nobody would suggest that 5:1-21 belonged to a different world of thought from chaps. 1-4.

Nevertheless, the subject matter of 5:1-11 and 5:12-21 contains so many differences from that of chaps. 1-4 that most exegetes have concluded, rightly in my view, that they belong more naturally with what follows than with what precedes. Paul here speaks of God’s love, not (principally) God’s righteousness. Abraham is not mentioned, nor (apart from 5:1-2) is faith (see also 6:8; this is not part of a discussion of “faith” per se, but refers to a particular thing that Christians believe). The whole “Jew-plus-Gentile” theme, strikingly, is never mentioned; the law is again a major theme, but “works of the law” is not. Jesus, hardly mentioned in 1:18-4:25, is everywhere. Equally telling, Paul says a good deal in chaps. 5-8 about “we” and “you,” whereas in the preceding section he has not spoken of “us” until the very last verses, and the earlier “you” passages are rhetorical, addressing imaginary interlocutors, whereas here he is speaking to his own actual audience.

There is a marked contrast of style. Instead of expounding passages of Scripture, Paul develops his own line of thought, alluding to Scripture frequently, and indeed retelling one of Scripture’s greatest stories, but without regular quotation or exposition of specific passages. And instead of the diatribe style and its rapid-fire verbal tennis match, addressed to imaginary debating partners, we have a sustained line of thought, addressed to “my family” (άδελφοί adelphoi; lit., “brothers,” 7:1, 4; 8:12; some translations. anxious about the gender-specific “brothers,” replace it with “friends,” but for Paul the family identity and consequent unity of God’s people is paramount), building from one point to the next with an extraordinary integration of complex thought (Paul uses elements of the previous rhetorical style in, e.g., 6:1-3, 15-16; 7:7, 13--in other words, to turn particular corners in the argument, rather than to develop particular points).

This sequence of thought is opened up initially with four paragraphs of very similar length (5:1.11, 12-21; 6:1-11, 12-23), each rounded off with a christological formula that is not just added on for effect but sums up the paragraph. This then gives rise to two larger expositions. The first concerns the law: this is introduced in 7:1-6 and developed in 7:7-8:11. While completing this subject, 8:1-11 simultaneously introduces the second theme, that of the Spirit and of Christian and cosmic hope (8:1-30). Paul then returns to the topics with which the section began (8:31-39 repeats the themes of 5:1-11, with all the rhetorical stops pulled out), concluding once more with an emphatic christological summary.

Romans 5-8, then, is a carefully crafted unit. Here, more than anywhere else in Paul’s surviving writing, we have a sense of a piece that might well have been composed earlier. Some have even argued that it is just that and that its placing between Romans 1-4 and 9-11 is, in effect, the combining of two quite different writings.^¹⁷⁰ However, even if we suppose that Paul has thought it all through ahead of time and perhaps already committed some or all of it to writing (but would he really have left the grammar of 5:12-21 like that?), we are still faced with the question: why did he insert it here? When we add that chaps. 5-8 grow naturally out of 1-4 and prepare the way for both 9-11 and 12-16, we realize that the problem is not solved by the surgeon’s knife. We must enquire further how the actual train of thought of these chapters develops the larger argument that Paul is actually mounting in the letter--as opposed, unfortunately, to the argument that various traditions, both Christian and scholarly, have assumed that he is mounting. It is easy here to analyze the trees and ignore the forest. We here offer a preliminary solution, to be filled in as the exegesis progresses.

Romans 5-8 has played a vital role in mainstream Protestant readings of Romans. If chaps. 1-4 are held to be about “justification by faith,” this section, starting from this point (5:1), is about something that follows from justification. Since the Reformers’ exposition of justification regularly led to the question of Christian behavior, often framed in some such way as in 6:1 or 6:15, and since the word “sanctification” occurs twice in chap. 6 (vv. 19, 22), some concluded that chaps. l-4 were “about” “justification,” and chaps. 5-8 were “about” “sanctification.” However, though there is indeed a sequence of thought from justification to something else in these chapters, this particular reading is unlikely to be accurate. The scarcity of the word “sanctification,” and the fact that when Paul sums up the argument in 8:30 the final line reads “those he justified, them he also glorified,” point in a rather different direction. If 1-4 is in any sense “about” justification, we might expect 5-8 to be “about” glorificafon.^¹⁷¹

This is strikingly confirmed by the last phrase of 5:2, which completes the introductory sentence (5:1-2), and by the argument of 8:18-25, which has a good claim to be the point toward which the rest is moving. Of course, “glorification” here serves as a shorthand for the entire Christian hope, to which Paul can equally well refer by such phrases as “eternal life” (e.g., 2:7); but the point seems to be, throughout, that what God has done in Jesus the Messiah, and what God is already doing through the Spirit, guarantees that all those who believe the gospel, and are thus “justified by faith,” can be assured of their final hope. They will be delivered from wrath (5:9), in other words, “saved.”^¹⁷² They will be given the new bodies of resurrection life that will correspond to that of Jesus (8:11). And, since “glory” is another way of speaking of the presence of God, dwelling in the wilderness tabernacle or the Jerusalem Temple, the line of thought that runs from 5:2 (“we celebrate the hope of God’s glory”) to 8:30 (“those he justified, them he also glorified”) involves specifically the indwelling of God, by the Spirit. The whole passage thus emphasizes that what God did decisively in Jesus the Messiah is now to be implemented through the Spirit. Paul points to ways in which the Christian’s present status and future hope determine life in the the present, but the real theme is the secure future. All is guaranteed by the unshakable love of God--which is in turn demonstrated in the death of Jesus (5:6-10; 8:31-39). This is the argument that emerges most obviously from the surface of chaps. 5-8.

Beneath the surface, however, and poking out like the tips of a huge iceberg at various key points, there runs a different theme, not so often noticed. A word is necessary about the detection of apparently submerged themes. For centuries nobody minded when exegetes declared that Romans 1-4 was “about” justification and 5-8 “about” sanctification. These were regular topics in the systematic theology that sustained many churches and preachers; it seemed reasonable that Paul should develop his argument along such lines, and some sense could be made of the text on that basis (with little exceptions like 7:7-25; 8:18-25). The fact that Paul nowhere said that this was how he was dividing his material, and that so far as we know “justification” and “sanctification” did not function in his mind (or anyone else’s in the first century) in the same way as they did in the church, did not seem to matter. But when people today propose alternative underlying themes, even when they are far more plausible within the mind of a Second Temple Jew, they are often howled down. “How can you be sure?” they are asked. “Why does Paul not say it more openly if that’s what he meant?”

The argument for all such interpretations is cumulative. It consists of a hypothesis that one obtains not deductively (starting with the material before us and seeing what we can deduce from it), but by induction (moving from the particular to the general) or abduction (moving from data to larger theory).^¹⁷³ As in much scientific procedure, the aim is to postulate a framework that, when examined, may turn out to explain the data before us better, with more complete satisfaction, than the alternatives.^¹⁷⁴ Like all serious readings of literary texts, such a proposal is to be verified, or as it may be falsified, not by the knock-down arguments of pseudo-scientific “proof,” nor by the largely irrelevant question as to whether Paul’s first audience would have seen the point at first hearing,^¹⁷⁵ but by the overall sense that results. There are times when the answer to the objection, “But I don’t see that in the text,” is “Try looking through the telescope the right way round,” or perhaps, “Try looking at the forest, not just the trees.”

In case it seems that one protests too much, let me propose the reading of chaps. 5-8 of which I have become convinced and that, as I shall attempt to show, allows fully both for the integrity and distinction of these chapters as a section in their own right and for their careful integration with the four chapters that precede them and the eight that follow-in other words, for the advancement of the overall argument of the letter. Paul, I suggest, is telling the story of the people of the Messiah in terms of the new exodus. Jesus’ people are the liberated people, on their way home to their promised land.^¹⁷⁶

The theme of “new exodus” is a major topic in Second Temple Judaism. It is a central way by which Jews in Paul’s day expressed, symbolized, and narrated their hopes for the future--for the time when, as the prophets had foretold, their God would repeat, on their behalf, the great acts whereby their forebears were liberated from Egypt (e.g., Isa 11:11; 35:3-10; 51:9-11; 52:4-6; Jer 16:14-15; 23:7-8; Ezek 20:33-38; Hos 2:14-23). One biblical passage in particular stands out as carrying the themes of Romans 1-11 as a whole:

The days are surely coming, says YHWH, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “YHWH is our righteousness.”

Therefore, the days are surely coming, says YHWH, when it shall no longer be said, “As YHWH lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” but “As YHWH lives who brought out and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where I had driven them.” Then they shall live in their own land. (Jer 23:5-8)

The Messiah, the righteousness of God, and the new exodus. Allowing for Paul’s new perspective, whereby the promise of the land has been redefined into the promise of inheriting the whole cosmos (4:13; 8:18-25), the pattern is exact, Paul, like many other Second Temple Jews, longed for the day when God would fulfill the promises made to Abraham by bringing Israel back from exile, repeating what had been done at the exodus. Only this time, through the work of the Messiah, it would be on a different scale. This time the whole cosmos would be involved. This would be the revelation of the righteousness of God before the whole world. Paul’s mind has already been moving in this way in chaps. 2 and 4; now he will develop the picture far more extensively. If he is talking about salvation, he is talking about the new exodus.^¹⁷⁷

The case for this reading of chaps. 5-8 can be seen to good advantage by working backward from its most obvious point, Rom 8:12-25. Paul speaks of those who are led by the Spirit of God being God’s children (8:14]; the phrase is very similar to that of Deut 14:1, looking back (as do all such ascriptions of divine parentage) to Exod 4:22 (see also Isa 1:2; Hos 1:10; Sir 1:10). The contrast between “the spirit of slavery” and “the spirit of adoption” (8:15) can well be construed as the contrast between Israel in Egypt and Israel journeying through the wilderness; Paul’s appeal is that his readers should not think, as Israel sometimes did, of going back to slavery rather than on to full freedom. And the crowning point of the paragraph is that God’s children are also “heirs.” Paul’s word here (κληρονόμοι klēronomoi) employs the root that occurs dozens of times in the LXX, not least in Deuteronomy, usually standing for the Hebrew roots שרי (yrs) or לחנ (nhl), in reference to the promised land, or part of it, as the “inheritance” God’s people would acquire when the wilderness wandering was complete. For Paul, as we saw in Rom 4:13, the promise to Abraham concerning one particular piece of land has been transformed into a promise concerning “the world” (ό κόσμος ho kosmos) or, as here, “creation” (ή κτίσις he ktisis).

This answers to the deepest level of the problem outlined in 1:18-32. God fulfills the promise to Abraham by redeeming the human race; when the human race is redeemed, the whole creation will be set free. Paul applies to creation as a whole the same exodus language he uses of God’s people in chap. 6 and elsewhere: creation itself “will be set free from its slavery to corruption, into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21). The argument is based upon a retelling of the exodus story, in which not only God’s people but also the whole creation are set free from “Egypt”--that is, sin, decay, and death. God’s redeemed people are given the “glory” that humans lost at the fall (3:23), receiving “the world” as their inheritance.^¹⁷⁸ God’s creation currently shares the futility and corruption of the human race; when humans are set free, creation will be liberated as well.

Within the argument of Romans, the motif of slavery and freedom goes back at least to “redemption” in 3:24, but is highlighted especially in chap. 6 . In 6:16, Paul personifies “sin” and “death” as the slavemasters who have kept the human race captive, and “obedience” and “righteousness” as the new owners under whom humans find freedom. He then continues the metaphor, recognizing its limitations (6:19a), through to the end of the chapter, and builds it in to the theme of the next section (7:6, 25). This, clearly, is anticipating the “exodus” passage about slavery and freedom in chap. 8. But 6:16-23 is the development of the earlier part of the chapter, where the key event is baptism, uniting the Christian with the Messiah in his death and resurrection. Baptism, it appears, is the event through which, by means of this uniting, those enslaved to sin and death are now set free. But baptism, elsewhere in Paul, becomes a symbolic reminder of the crossing of the Red Sea (1 Cor 10:2--a passage in which Paul is urging his readers to think of themselves as in the same position as the wilderness generation, set free from Egypt and on the way home to their inheritance).^¹⁷⁹ My proposal is that the journey that ends in chap. 8 with the glorious inheritance began in chap. 6 with the new covenant version of the crossing of the Red Sea, the event through which the slaves are set free.

This gives a new narrative coherence to the central section of 5-8--namely, 7:1-8:11. It is not just that Paul must now address, head on, the problem of the law to which he has referred several times (3:19-20; 4:15; 5:20; 6:14). Paul, unfortunately for his interpreters, is aware of no obligation to explain all the puzzling one-liners scattered throughout his writings. He is writing a letter, after all, not a doctoral dissertation. The deeper reason for writing chap. 7 is that he is following the storyline. After the Red Sea, and before the journey to the promised inheritance, comes Mt. Sinai and the giving of the Torah.

Using the exodus-story in this way carries, of course, a certain ambiguity. Paul does not think in terms of a simple typology whereby a pattern repeats itself over and over, but of a continuing narrative in which the new sequence, for all it repeats the old and gains its meaning from that repetition, also in some senses replaces the old and even undermines it. This ambiguity comes to its head in the parallel between the law and the Spirit: Torah itself has become part of the problem, part of the thing from which one needs to be set free. Paul’s task in chap. 7 is then to exonerate Torah from blame, while demonstrating that only in Christ and the Spirit can its underlying intention--to give life--be realized. As an abstract theological proposition, this has always seemed difficult to maintain, and this difficulty has been produced as the reason for Paul’s dense and problematic argument. When seen within the context of an overarching narrative in which the events of the exodus are recapitulated in Christ and by the Spirit, in which the promises of the law and the prophets are fulfilled “apart from the law,” it makes considerably more sense, and leads naturally into the passage we have already drawn attention to as the most obvious “new exodus” allusion (8:12-25).

At the head of this whole sequence of thought stands 5:12-21, where the Messiah is set in parallel, and also sharp contrast, with Adam. Adam, of course, was the one to whom, in Scripture, the whole creation was given as his inheritance. His “glory” consisted not least in his rule over the rest of God’s world. The result of the fall was that the inheritance and the glory were lost; this is the picture Paul drew in 1:18-32, and summed up in 3:23. Now, in the Messiah, inheritance and glory are given back to the human race. They are to become truly human at last. Romans 5:12-21 functions as a programmatic statement, awaiting the fuller explanation of 8:12-30.

The story is more complicated than that, of course, because Israel was itself called to be the people through whom this should happen. The failure of Israel, expounded in 2:17-3:20 and presupposed here, has left a double task to be performed. The Messiah has not only reversed the fall of Adam; he has accomplished the redemptive work of Israel. His “obedience,” which means almost exactly the same as his “faithfulness” (3:22), has accomplished that for which God called Israel in the first place. Torah was not, then, the means of redemption, but rather a further of the problem, a further twist of the knife; and God has dealt with that as well. Verses 12-21, summing up where the argument of the letter has got to so far, plant the seeds that will bear fruit for the rest of 5-8.

The theme of 5:1-11 is clear, introducing the line of thought that will be summed up at the end of chap. 8: those who are justified are glorified, because of the love of God effective through the death of Jesus. It is the move from faith to hope; from the one-off work of the Messiah to the inaugurated, but not yet consummated, work of the Spirit. This is Paul’s other great theme, here and in 5-8 as a whole: those who are on this pilgrimage know the presence of the living God, not now in the pillar of cloud and fire, but in the Holy Spirit, who pours the love of God into their hearts, so that “reconciliation” (5:10-11) is not merely a fact but an experienced fact.

What contribution, then, does Romans 5-8 make toward the developing argument of the letter as a whole?

At one level, it functions as the natural sequel to 1-4. The argument for the assurance of salvation--the argument, that is, on the surface of the text--answers to one of the main strands of thought in the opening chapters. All sinned, came short of God’s glory, and faced wrath. Despite what is commonly thought, 3:21-4:25 is not Paul’s main answer to this problem, but rather the groundwork for the answer. The full answer comes in 5-8: there we are told that those in Christ will escape the wrath and inherit God’s glory. There it is explained that those who are justified are also glorified. There Paul shows how the human race is renewed, to bear God’s image afresh in Christ (8:29).

Chapters 5-8 are also where the achievement of Jesus, supremely in his vicarious messianic death, is set out most fully. The dense and cryptic statement in 3:24-26, vital though it is, points ahead to the fuller statement in 5:6-11 and 5:15-21, which are then developed in key summaries throughout the following chapters (6:3-11; 7:4; 8:3; 8:31-39). Throughout it is clear that the death of Jesus, seen here as the ground of Christian hope and Christian life, functions as such because it is first the ground of justification. Once more, 5-8 completes the train of thought in 1-4.

The theme of assurance, and of the salvation of the human race in Christ, is given power and depth by the latent exodus-narrative. When, in Genesis 15, God promised Abraham a family, the promise was explained in terms of the exodus. Now, developing the larger vision that Paul discovered in the Abrahamic promise, the human race as a whole has its exodus: its rescue from the slavery of sin and death, the indwelling presence of God by the Spirit, the present journey through the wilderness, and the hope of the final inheritance. As in 1 Corinthians, one of Paul’s aims, particularly when writing to a largely Gentile church, is to implant in their worldview the scriptural narrative through which they will discover their own place on the map of God’s purposes.^¹⁸⁰ The gospel unveils the righteousness (that is, the covenant faithfulness) of God; God’s people in Christ must learn to tell the story of that faithfulness and to live within it. Again, Romans 5-8 completes a strand within chaps. 1-4.

The theme of “Jew first and also Greek,” so prominent in 1-4, may be absent from the text of 5-8, but it is not forgotten or left behind. What Paul says in 5-8 he says to, and of, the church as a whole. But only his Jewish and proselyte readers had been “under the law.” The freedom from the law that looms so large in the middle of this section (7:1-8:11; anticipated in 5:20-21 and 6:14-15) and that gives rise to Paul’s central statement of the death of Jesus, the indwelling of the Spirit, and the promise of resurrection (8:1-11), belongs to the story of how Israel’s history reached its climax in the Messiah, and did so for the benefit of the whole world. In each case, however, the completion of one line of thought raises a further question. If salvation is assured because of Jesus’ messianic death and the work of the Spirit, what about the people to whom the promises were first made? If God has accomplished the true exodus, what about the people of the original exodus? How can their story be truly told in the light of the full unveiling of God’s righteousness in Jesus the Messiah? The opening of Romans 9 indicates that Paul is raising exactly these questions in exactly this way. The problem addressed in Romans 9-11, therefore, is introduced precisely as the dark side of the new exodus. Furthermore, Paul’s account of Israel’s privileges in 9:4-5 lists the very things that throughout chaps. 1-8 have been attributed, through Christ and the Spirit, to the wider family of Abraham described in chaps. 4-8. In other words, the first eight chapters of the letter raise particular questions about God’s faithfulness to ethnic Israel that must be addressed for the sake of completeness.

But it would be a mistake to see chaps. 9-11, or for that matter chaps. 12-16, simply as necessary outworkings of an inner logic latent within 1-8. That would be to collapse back once more into regarding Romans 1-8 as “the things Paul really wants to say” and 9-16 as ,the things he is now forced to deal with because of what he has said.” Without sliding into the opposite mistake (supposing that chaps. 9-11 and/or 12-16 are the “really important” parts, and chaps. 1-8 a mere preliminary), it is vital to see that one of the reasons Paul has set his argument out like this is precisely so that he can move forward from here to address the major issues that face the church in Rome. We postpone more detailed examination of this point to the introduction to chaps. 9-11.

It is possible, in other words, to read Romans 5-8 without reference to what has gone before or what comes after. It stands as one of the most central and majestic statements of all that Paul most passionately believes and articulately expounds. But to take it out of its context is like looking at a tree without considering its roots or its fruits. What Paul says here grows out of chaps. 1-4 and is designed to bear fruit in chaps. 9-11 and 12-16.

The first paragraph of the new section states and develops the theme that overarches the next four chapters: those whom God justified, God also glorified. In typical fashion, this is stated densely to start with (5:1-2). It is then developed with two new elements, suffering and the Spirit (5:3-5), explained and grounded (in the death of the Messiah) (5:6-9), and finally further explained and celebrated (5:10-11). As usual, Paul’s successive explanations do not add new points to the opening summary, but rather explore what is contained by implication within it.

The theme is that of inaugurated eschatology. God has accomplished the justification of sinners; God will therefore complete the task, saving those already justified from the coming wrath (cf. Phil 1:6: when God begins a work, God will complete it). God’s decisive disclosure of covenant faithfulness in the death of the Messiah (3:21-4:25) is now expressed in equally covenantal language, that of God’s love (5:8). The argument is simple: if God loved sinners enough for the Son to die for them, God will surely complete what was begun at such cost. Those who have left Egypt will be brought to Canaan, even though suffering awaits them on the journey. Part of Christian assurance is learning to tell this story and to understand its inner logic.

The three tenses of salvation (as they are sometimes called) are thus unveiled. Paul presupposes and builds on his exposition of justification by faith in 3:21-4:25, though in 5:9-10 he will reveal its further depths: being “justified by (Christ’s) blood” is functionally equivalent to “being reconciled to God through Jesus’ death.” This is the past tense of God’s action in the Messiah. The future tense is supplied by the word “salvation” (5:9-10); this means “rescue from the coming wrath” (5:9; cf. 1. Thess 1:10) through Jesus’ life. The present tense, held between these two, consists of peace, celebration, suffering, hope, love, reconciliation and (once more) celebration.

Paul is not, then, describing a mere formal or legal transaction. The whole paragraph is suffused with the personal relationship between the justified person and the God revealed in Jesus. It is a relationship of love on both sides, in which reconciliation has replaced enmity (5:5, 10). This intimacy comes about through the gift of God’s Spirit, the presence of God with the newly constituted community and within the redeemed person, not least in their present wilderness sufferings. Verses 1-11 thus reveals something that had all along been at the heart of chaps. 1-4, though often hidden underneath Paul’s legal imagery and the long tradition of its forensic interpretation: all that God said to Abraham, all that God accomplished in the Messiah, was dome out of love, and designed to call out an answering love. The intimacy and ecstasy of 5:1-11 are a necessary further dimension of the doctrine of justification by faith.

NIV: ¹Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ²through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. ³Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

NRSV: ¹Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ²through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. ³And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

5:1-2. Justification results in peace with God, in access to God’s loving favor, and thereby, unstoppably, to the hope of glory. Thus Paul opens the paragraph and section with a characteristically dense statement of the past event, the present result, and the future promise. The whole thing is built on what has gone before: “therefore,” as often, provides a key transition.

The emphasis of v. 1 falls on “we have peace.” Many good manuscripts read έχωμεν (echōmen, “let us have peace,” imperative), rather than έχομεν (echomen, “we have peace,” indicative), and some scholars have made a case for this reading.^¹⁸¹ The argument for the indicative, though, is strong: (a) the two main verbs of the second verse are in the indicative (the second could be either, but the first seems determinative); (b) the difference between a long and a short “o” was not very marked in the pronunciation of Greek when the manuscript was being copied and perhaps redictated; (c) “peace” at the start of the paragraph relates closely to “reconciliation” at its end, and reconciliation is there spoken of not as something to be striven for, but something “we have received.”

God’s justice has led to peace: the echoes of the world Paul was addressing are strong. Augustus Caesar had established the Roman Pax, founded on Iustitia.^¹⁸² His successors, enjoying among their titles “Lord” and “Savior,” maintained the powerful imperial myth not least through the imperial cult. Paul is revealing to his Roman audience a different justice, a different peace, in virtue of a different Lord and a different God: the God of Abraham, the world’s creator, who has now established peace “through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This peace, the first characteristic Paul mentions of the present tense of salvation, includes the deeply personal reconciliation between each believer and the true God, but can hardly stop there; already Paul is sowing the seeds for that communal peace he longs to see come about in the whole Roman church (14:1-15:14; see esp. 14:17, 19), the work, indeed, of “the God of peace” (15:33; 16:20). It is this peace, embracing alike each person and the whole community, that reveals to the wider world the existence and nature of the alternative empire, set up through the true Lord, the Messiah. In one short verse Paul manages to articulate both the heart of Christian personal experience and the politically subversive nature of Christian loyalty.

By way of explaining this peace, Paul uses the language of the cult: we have obtained, he says, “access” to grace, the same root being used as the regular verb for approaching the altar with a sacrifice.^¹⁸³ “Grace” is here clearly a shorthand, not so inch for God’s action on behalf of undeserving sinners. but for the sphere of God’s continuing love. The metaphor envisages grace as a room into which Jesus has ushered all who believe,^¹⁸⁴ a room where they now “stand,” a place characterized by the presence and sustaining love of God. Just as the Temple symbolized and actualized Israel’s meeting with the gracious God, so now Jesus has effected such a meeting between this God and all who approach by faith.

The result of past justification and the present status of grace is the future hope: “we celebrate the hope of the glory of God.” The NRSV’s “boast” keeps the same English word that the Greek had in 2:17 and 3:27; the NIV, understandably regarding “boast” as purely negative, replaces it here with ‘rejoice.”^¹⁸⁵ Part of the difficulty is that we think of “boasting” as self-advertisement, (which we, unlike the world of Paul’s day, find distasteful), whereas Paul’s Greek has a larger significance: it has to do with the grounds for confidence when facing both present and future. Hence, “celebrate”: this brings together the two senses of joy and confidence. What could not be attained through Torah--namely, a secure confidence in being God’s people--is on offer through Jesus Christ (see the Commentary on 8:3-4).

The content of the hope is “glory” This is an advance statement of the theme developed in 8:18, 21, 30 (cf. Col 1:27). Adam’s lost glory (3:23) is regained in the Messiah: not simply dazzling beauty, but the status and task of being God’s vicegerent over creation. That this is what Paul has in mind becomes clear in 8:18-27, where the revelation of God’s children and their glory leads to the liberation of the whole created order. When humans are restored to be as they were intended to be, then the whole of creation will be renewed under their lordship. At the same time, the cultic context, and the mention of the Spirit at the end of the next sentence, suggests that Paul has in mind also the glory of God dwelling in the Temple: God’s glorious presence, at work already in the hearts of believers, will one day flood their whole being. This, too, is borne out by the development of the subject in chap. 8. This is the hope that supplies confidence and joy.

5:3-5. Paul now approaches the same result from a different angle. Present Christian existence is not simply a matter of peace with God, but also, paradoxically, of suffering. This suffering, though, is to be understood as part of a larger story that again ends with hope. This time, instead of characterizing the hope by “glory,” Paul speaks of the indwelling Spirit, who elsewhere, not least in the climax to chaps. 5-8, is the one who guarantees the future hope for the suffering people (8:12-30). In early Christian thought, as at Qumran, the Spirit is a sign of the in-breaking new age.

So, then, we celebrate our sufferings; a typically counterintuitive Pauline comment, in our day as in his own, where suffering was more likely to be regarded as a sign of the gods’ displeasure. Paul tells a different story: Suffering produces patience (the NRSV’s “endurance” and the NIV’s “perseverance” both bring out aspects of the same idea, which is not so much of pressing ahead in adversity as simply staying put without dismay). The point of this is not simply that patience is a virtue worth cultivating, but that out of patience grows “character”--a difficult word, since, although “a person of character” implies good character, we can also speak in English of “a bad character.” The Greek has the overtone of “tried and tested,” what we mean when we speak of someone as “firm as a rock.” This, too, is valued not so much as a virtue in its own right but because from it springs hope. On the surface, there is no obvious logic in this. The Stoicism popular in Paul’s day valued patience under suffering and prized a tried and tested character, but came up with little or no hope as a result. Within Paul’s narrative world, however, there was plenty of point: the long journey through the wilderness leads to the promised land. In addition, Paul had personal evidence, from his own life and that of friends and colleagues, to back up the story and theology. When the patience is Christian patience, and the tried and tested character a Christian character, the result is neither shallow optimism nor settled fatalism, but hope.

This hope does not make us ashamed. “Does not disappoint us” may well express part of the true understanding: this hope will not let us down. It will be fulfilled. In that case, the evidence he offers (the love of God in our hearts by the Spirit) functions the same way as in 8:23. It is the first-fruits and guarantee of God’s ultimate saving work (see 2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; see also the Commentary on 10:11-13, where “not put to shame” is functionally equivalent to “saved”). But it is possible, not least in view of the present tense Paul chooses, that by “not ashamed” he means, rather, that the Christian’s present condition, living in hope, is nothing to be ashamed of (cf. 1:16). Though Christian living is often paradoxical and deeply painful, one can hold up one’s head, because the present experience of the Spirit fills the heart with love. This reading fits well with 8:24-28, where the thought of the section is coming full circle, and where Paul again wants to explain that unfulfilled hope is nothing to be ashamed of.

In this connection, it is worth giving serious consideration to the minority understanding of “the love of God” in v. 5.^¹⁸⁶ The phrase could mean either God’s love for us (subjective genitive) or our love for God (objective genitive); the NRSV and the NIV in different ways foreclose on the ambiguity, settling for the former. This is in line with most interpreters, who, rightly noting that God’s love for sinners is the major theme in vv. 6-10, assume that “the love of God” in v. 5 has this meaning too. Theological reasoning has also played a part, preferring to see hope as grounded on something about God (and indeed noticing that this is the logic of vv. 6-10) rather than something about ourselves.^¹⁸⁷

Nevertheless, the Spirit’s work, to which Paul is here ascribing the pouring out of this love in the heart, is precisely within the innermost beings of believers, and as we have seen this is frequently referred to as the sign, foretaste and guarantee of eventual salvation. (This in no way compromises justification by grace through faith; rather, as with everything in Paul’s descriptions of present Christian life, it is the result and outworking of that.) And the parallel passage in 8:24-28 indicates that Paul is well capable of speaking, precisely at this point in the argument, of “those who love God,” just as in 1 Cor 2:9; 8:3, the latter in an explicit invoking of the Shema, the Jewish daily prayer (“Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one; and you shall love YHWH your God,” Deut 6:4-5.) A further argument for taking “the love of God” to mean our love for God is this: Why would Paul suggest that God’s love for us was poured out into, and thus thereafter located in, our hearts?^¹⁸⁸

It is then possible, and preferable, to read “the love of God” in 5:5 as a similar allusion to the Shema, and to take it therefore as the objective genitive: our love for God. This then links up with two previous programmatic passages in the letter: 1:5, where Paul speaks of “the obedience of faith” as the result of the gospel, and 3:30, where the monotheism of the Shema undergirds justification itself. If this is right, 5:5 is tied closely to the exposition of the worldwide family of Abraham in chap. 4: the Shema is now fulfilled by all those who love the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah. This fits well with several other passages in the letter (e.g.. 2:25-29; 8:4-9; 10:6-11), and provides a striking reason for not being ashamed to be living in hope, which is after all what the present passage is about. To find in one’s heart a Spirit-given love for God is itself more than consolation. To realize that this love fulfils the central command of Torah is to discover oneself to be a member of the renewed people of God.

NIV: ⁶You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

⁹Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

NRSV: ⁶For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. ⁹Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. ¹⁰For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. ¹¹But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

The compact introduction over, Paul settles to a more leisurely description of how the death of Jesus, by revealing God’s love for sinners and by accomplishing their justification, assures those who are justified that they will be saved at the last. This is the larger explanation (γάρ gar, v. 6) for the whole statement of vv. 1-5, rather than for one particular part of it. It is, equally clearly, part of the overarching theme of the whole section, since Paul returns to the same point in 8:31-39.

5:6-8. The outline argument is straightforward, the details occasionally tricky. Verse 6 states the basic premise, v. 7 comments on it, and v. 8 draws the conclusion. The Messiah died for the ungodly; people do not normally die even for worthy people; the Messiah’s death is thus the measure of God’s extraordinary love. Verse 6 emphasizes the unworthiness of the recipients of God’s generosity: we were still weak, still actually ungodly.^¹⁸⁹ This links in, deliberately no doubt, with the description of God “justifying the ungodly” in 4:5, and prepares for the third member of the sequence in v. 8: when we were still “sinners.”

God’s love appeared on the scene “at the right time.” Paul does not refer, we may suppose, to a particular chronological scheme (though such things were reasonably common among educated Jews looking for the coming of God’s kingdom.^¹⁹⁰ Nor is he suggesting that the Messiah’s death had happened at a moment of particular weakness or sinfulness on the part of Israel and the world. (Was the human race “weaker” in the first century than before?) Rather, with hindsight, he recognized, as in Gal 4:4, that “the time had fully come” (cf. Tob 14:5). He believed that God had brought to fulfillment a plan that, though opaque before, was now open to view.

The main contrast Paul is making in what follows is between worthy people, for whom one would still be unlikely to die, and unworthy people, for whom God gave the Messiah. But v. 7 also contains a contrast between two types of worthy people: a “righteous” person, for whom, he says, one would scarcely die, and “the good person” for whom, he says, one might even brave death.^¹⁹¹ Commentators have sometimes tried to portray the “righteous” here as the cold, legally correct person, in order to contrast such qualities with a warmer, more appealing goodness. But the positive overtones of the word “righteous” in Paul hardly allow for the distinction necessary if the verse is to express that meaning. One possible explanation might be that “the good man” (the word has the definite article, unlike “righteous” earlier in the verse) could actually be an allusion to Jesus himself. Paul, knowing that martyrdom was always possible (e.g., Phil 1:20-21; 2:17), might intend to say here what he says in 8:36 (“for your sake we are being killed all day long”). This is hardly provable, and may seem fanciful; but it deserves considering. The conventional, and perhaps safest, approach is to suggest that “the good man” refers to someone’s benefactor.^¹⁹²

Such a death would still require huge courage and dedication. The qualification added in v. 7 b has not damaged the basic contrast: what God did, freely and gladly, demonstrates a love far beyond anything human love can attain. We were, after all, not merely weak or ungodly, but actually sinners: Paul includes himself, and his fellow Jews, in a word that technically described “those outside the law,” the pagans who, not possessing the law, were inevitably sinful (cf. Gal 2:15, where the word is used in this technical sense). That was our condition, Paul says, when “the Messiah died for us “--a basic statement of primitive Christian belief (cf. 4:25; 1 Cor 15:3). The “for” in “for us” is not explained, though what follows fills it out somewhat, and the frequent references to Jesus’ messianic death on behalf of others in the chapters that follow develop the thought in various directions.

5:9-10. The love of God seen in action in the death of the Messiah is then the basis for a standard type of argument, the “how much more”: If God has done the difficult thing, how much more will the easy thing now be done.^¹⁹³ God has already done the unthinkable; how much more will God do something relatively obvious! Paul opens up this thought in two stages, first (v. 9) offering a conclusion in terms of justification and salvation, and then (v. 10) explaining it in terms of God’s reconciling love. This, too, like so much in the present paragraph, is picked up at the end of the section (8:32).

The first stage indicates that Paul is still consciously addressing the problem stated in 1:18-3:20. “The wrath” hangs over the human race (the NRSV and the NIV both specify that the wrath is God’s; this is true, but Paul does not say so here). Paul thinks in terms of a coming day of wrath, not simply the individual fate of unbelievers after death (cf. 2:5, 16). Those already justified by Jesus’ sacrificial death, he says, will be rescued from this coming wrath (“by his blood,” picking up 3:25, clearly refers to Jesus’ death as a sacrifice; see the Commentary on 5:2; the only other Pauline references to the blood of Jesus are 1 Cor 10:16; 11:25, 27; Eph 1:7; 2:13; Cor 1:20). This is the negative side of the promise whose positive side is “sharing the glory of God” (5:2). (Just to be clear: “salvation” describes the future of God’s people in terms of their rescue from a terrible fate; “glorification’ in terms of the status they will enjoy; “resurrection” in terms of their new embodiment the other side of death; “justification,” when applied to the future as in 2:13, in terns of their acquittal in the final Assize. In each case the event is the same, the connotation different.) Hope for this rescue is securely based. Paul says, expanding 5:8, because God has already effected reconciliation when we were not just weak, ungodly, or sinful, but actually God’s enemies (cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19; Eph 2:16; Col 1:19-22). The fact that this deeply personal notion is offered in explanation of, rather than in addition to, the mention of justification in the first half of v. 9 indicates that the meaning and effect of justification is to bring humans into the forgiven. reconciled family of God.

Upon whose side was the enmity? At one level, clearly, on ours; we were, says Paul, “god-haters” (1:30), though this word would hardly apply to many pious Jews, or even to the Gentile “god-fearers” who probably made up a significant proportion of the Roman converts. Objectively, though, Paul sees all humans as being at enmity with God through sin. Reconciliation is, after all, effected from God’s side, by the initiative of love. However, Paul has just mentioned the wrath, which (as in 1:18 and 2:5-11) clearly means God’s wrath. This wrath stood over against us, and God’s love has saved us from it. We should not, I think, cut the knot and suggest that the enmity was on our side only. God’s settled and sorrowful opposition to all that is evil included enmity against sinners. The fact that God’s rescuing love has found a way of deliverance and reconciliation is part of the wonder of the gospel.

Paul here elaborates the christological basis of both reconciliation and salvation. We are reconciled, he says, through the death of God’s son. This is the first mention of Jesus’ divine sonship since the programmatic 1:3-4, and looks on to 8:3 and 8:32 in particular. Paul uses the title sparingly--not, it seems, from any reluctance, but rather to save it for the really weighty statements. Though “son of God” is still a messianic title for Paul, the logic of this whole passage, in which Jesus’ death reveals God’s reconciling love, demands that he express some identity between Jesus and God, and this is Paul’s chosen way of doing just that. As in 8:3 and Gal 4:4, Jesus as “son of God” is the one sent from God to accomplish that which God alone must perform.

As in 4:25, Paul here sees the cross accomplishing one task, and the resurrection, or at least the risen life of the Messiah, accomplishing another. However, whereas in 4:25 the resurrection was associated with justification, he here assigns reconciliation (in parallel with justification in v. 9) to the cross, and salvation to Jesus’ “life.”^¹⁹⁴ Presumably we should not make too hard and fast a distinction between the effect of the cross and the effect of the resurrection; for Paul the cross was always the death of the one whom the resurrection proved to be the Messiah, resurrection was always the raising of the crucified one. There is, however, a particular point here: being saved in the life of the son of God looks ahead to chap. 6, where it is precisely “in Christ” that the baptized are brought to new life, indeed, to eternal life (NRSV “by” and NIV “through” both obscure this link).

5:11. The final point of the paragraph is perhaps less expected: we celebrate, we boast, in God! The NIV’s “rejoice,” though true, does not catch either the echo of 2:17 or the note of real triumph that goes with the reversal of that passage: that which was impossible under the Torah, a boasting in God that reflected pride of race and culture, is strangely possible under the gospel. The gospel has already reduced all human boasting to nothing (3:27-30; cf. 1 Cor 1:29-31); the Christian status and hope may look foolish in the world’s eyes, and is clung to in the teeth of suffering (5:3-5); but when looking at “our Lord, Jesus, the Messiah,” and celebrating the reconciliation with God that he has effected, the Christian can say, with the psalmist, “this God is our God, for ever and ever; he will be our guide unto death” (Ps 48:14). Or, indeed, with Paul at the climax of the present section: “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (8:31). The non-Christian Jew of Paul’s day would no doubt be as offended by this as the relativist in our own (the pagan of Paul’s day, and of our own, would no doubt scoff); but Paul reflects the clear and universal early Christian claim. Those who believe in Jesus the Messiah are the true people of the creator God, the God of Abraham. That is what it means to “boast in God,” to celebrate the reconciliation between the creator and those who bear the creator’s image. The paragraph ends, as do most in this section, with a christological summary: We boast in God through our Lord, Jesus the Messiah. Other lords, Paul implies, should take note.

l. The deeply personal reconciliation between the creator God and the human race in and through Jesus the Messiah can hardly be explored too often, or too thoroughly. It is the theme that lies at the heart of the Christian experience and claim, the point at which believing certain things about God is swallowed up in personal knowledge of God. To be sure, it is easy to be deceived at this point, not least through the arrogance that quickly and conveniently forgets that our knowledge and love of God are but the reflex of God’s knowledge and love of us (1 Cor 8:2-3). It is easy to imagine that one is knowing the living God when in fact one is worshiping, and deriving spurious comfort from, an idol of one’s own imagining. That is why, as in the present paragraph, it is vital to keep Jesus, and the cross and resurrection, at the center of the picture, and to invoke the Holy Spirit through whom God’s love floods our hearts.

This knowledge and love of the true God is evoked and sustained most chiefly, as here, through meditation on the death of Jesus. Again, it is possible to get things out of focus at this point, to concentrate morbidly on Jesus’ suffering in the same frame of mind that lures people to drool over some great natural or human disaster. But the abuse does not detract from the reality. The Gospel writers tell the story of Jesus’ last days and hours in lavish detail; those who allow themselves to be caught up within that story will discover its life-changing power. Here the entire narrative is boiled down to a single sentence: God’s love is demonstrated in that, while we were yet sinners, the Messiah died for us. Those whose first thought is to analyze that statement in terms of theological or literary derivations do more damage to it, even if their analysis is accurate, than one who knows no Greek but whose heart is strangely warmed in reading it. Paul is often criticized for being too logical or lawcourt-minded. That may be true of some of his interpreters. For Paul himself, the language of the lawcourt was a powerful metaphor, but the language of love spoke literal truth.

2. The logic of divine love is here pressed into service as part of the argument for assurance. It is ironic that, when many Western Christians are flirting with universalism, there is simultaneously an underemphasis on the eternal security of all Christian believers. It is almost as though we are trying to say that everyone else may well be saved but that we cannot be too sure about ourselves. This may, no doubt, express a proper reaction against triumphalist arrogance, but nothing is gained by ignoring Paul’s central argument, here and throughout Romans 5-8: believing and baptized Christians are assured that, by the indwelling Spirit, they will be brought to resurrection life at the last. Paul was well aware, as his other letters show, of the problems of professing Christians whose behavior seemed to make a mockery of their faith (1 Corinthians wrestles with this problem on almost every page). But one of his greatest, most securely grounded, most sustained arguments is precisely this: Those whom God justified, God also glorified. To fail to grasp this, and be grasped by it, is to miss not only the heart of Paul, but, Paul would say, the heart of God.

3. Celebrating one’s suffering sounds depressingly morbid. Western Christians easily imbibe from our culture an inclination to regard not only the pursuit but also the attainment of happiness as an inalienable right, and if suffering strikes we look either to technology to solve it or to the lawyers to apportion the blame. Paul is unspecific here about which sufferings he means (he is more explicit in 8:35), but his approach is steady and realistic: suffering produces patience, and patience produces a tried and tested character. Neither of these qualities is much in evidence--or indeed highly prized--in contemporary Western society, which wants everything at once and wants to be free to change character according to the mood of the moment. As a result, we should not be surprised that we are in many respects a society without hope. Those who believe in Jesus the Messiah are called to model communities, familes and personal lives in which the sequence of faith, peace, suffering, patience, character and hope is lived out, sustained by the Holy Spirit’s work of enabling us to know God’s love and to love God in return.

4. The political challenge implicit in this passage should be pondered and drawn out. God has established the true peace, so different from the pax Romana, on the foundation of true justice, so different from the Roman Iustitia, and has done so through the Lord Jesus, so different from the lord Caesar. This challenge, of course, had more than a little to do with the sufferings Paul endured. The church as a whole has yet to take seriously the question of how to translate its allegiance to this Lord, who established divine justice and peace through his own death, rather than through the death of those who stood in his way, into action in the world. Comparatively little attention has been given to the question, How might God’s reconciling action in Christ become the ground and model for the reconciliation of human enemies? Too often those who have focused attention on the saving death of Jesus have concentrated exclusively on its relevance for final salvation and current spiritual growth, while those who have wanted to make the gospel politically relevant have ignored Paul’s theology of Jesus’ death. Fresh integration is called for if we are to hear and live Paul’s many-sided gospel in a new century and millennium.

NIV: ¹²Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned– ¹³for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. ¹⁴Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

¹⁵But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! ¹⁶Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. ¹⁷For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

¹⁸Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. ¹⁹For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

²⁰The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, ²¹so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

NRSV: ¹²Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned--¹³sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. ¹⁴Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

¹⁵But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. ¹⁶And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. ¹⁷If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

¹⁸Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. ¹⁹For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. ²⁰But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, ²¹so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The next paragraph is as terse and cryptic as the previous one was flowing and lucid. Like an artist in a hurry, Paul paints with a few large, sweeping strokes on a giant canvas, creating an overall picture without many details. It is the picture, in bold, stark outline, of his whole argument to this point; and it may help if we think of him, then, in chaps. 6-8, standing in front of this picture to talk us through the next sequence, pointing back at the extraordinary painting to show us where his different themes belong and how they fit together. As we have seen, the overall argument of 5-8 is outlined in 5:1-11, so that in summing up where he has now got to Paul is not, as it were, making the first in a sequence of logically ordered points, but rather setting up the grid on which all that follows will be plotted.

The paragraph outlines the way in which the creator and covenant God has successfully dealt with the problem of human sin and death. The hypothesis that saw Adam hiding under the argument of 1:18-25 and in isolated statements such as 3:23 is vindicated by Paul’s summarizing here where he has got to, not (as has sometimes been thought) adding a fresh point or simply providing an illustration. The opening διά τουτο (dia touto) should thus be read not simply as “therefore,” but “so it comes about that”: not a new point to be deduced, but a summary, a conclusion that can be drawn because of what has been said briefly, in advance, in 5:1-11. We have seen, in miniature, that the death of Jesus, the great act of obedient covenant faithfulness, has dealt with sin, that God’s love revealed on the cross will certainly bring to salvation those who are justified, and that the Spirit has been given to pour the love of God into the hearts of believers, transforming them so that they become God’s true humanity. This enables us to line up the problem outlined in 1:18-3:20 (sin and death) with the solution articulated in 3:21-5:11 (justification and life) and draw the conclusions. That is what Paul does here.

The shape of the argument needs clarifying. The main point Paul is making is begun in v. 12, but broken off to allow for two different sorts of explanation and modification (vv. 13-14, 15-17). He then returns to his main statement in v. 18, further explained and restated in v. 19. Verse 20 adds a further complication, showing how the law fits within the Adam-Christ picture; v. 21 restates the point of vv. 18-19 allowing for this further dimension. Thus the shape of the paragraph is like this:

5:12: opening statement, awaiting completion: just as sin entered and brought death

5:18: initial completion of opening statement: just as the trespass, so the act of righteousness

5:20: where the Law belongs on this trap: intensifying the problem, but grace deals with this too

5:21: triumphant conclusion: the kingdom of grace triumphs over the kingdom of sin

Within this. Paul introduces a theme almost unique in his writings, but very important within early Christianity: the clash of the kingdoms. Five out of the nine occurrences in his writings of βασιλεύω (basileuō, “to rule as a king,” “to reign”) come in these verses; one of the others, picking up this passage, is at 6:12.^¹⁹⁵ Paul does not speak here of the kingdom of Satan, but instead personifies “sin” and “death,” speaking of each as “reigning” (5:14, 17a, 21 a). He does not speak here, either, of the reign of God, or even of Jesus; rather, as in the admittedly ironic 1 Cor 4:8, he speaks of believers as reigning (5:17b), and then finally of the reign of grace itself (5:21b). The last, clearly, is a personification, a periphrasis for God. This theme of kingly rule, coming so soon after the grand statement of justice, peace, and lordship (5:1), cannot but be seen as a further indication of Paul’s overall mission: to announce the kingdom of God in the face of all the principalities and powers of the world, not least those of Rome itself (cf. 8:38-39 and the pregnant conclusion of Acts 28:30-31).

The other themes work in groups. Sin and death obviously belong together, and are joined by trespass,^¹⁹⁶ disobedience, and condemnation. On the other side are grace, righteousness, free gift (χάρισμα charisma), gift (δωρεά dōrea or δώρημα dōrema), act of righteousness/justification/acquittal (δικαίωμα dikaiōma, δικαίωσις dikaiōsis, and δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē). There are no doubt fine distinctions between these terms, but there is also broad overlap and flexibility; we may assume that part of Paul’s reason for choosing different words, in some cases at least, is to avoid repetition. To grasp the main thrust of the argument, it helps to see these two groups as solid blocks, from which Paul can draw the particular nuance he wants at any given point.

The substance of the paragraph is the parallel, and contrast, between Adam and the Messiah. Paul alludes more briefly to this in 1 Cor 15:21-22, and develops the theme in one direction in 15:45-49. The context of his thinking is the fairly widespread Second Temple Jewish belief not merely about Adam as the progenitor of the human race and indeed the fountainhead of human sin (e.g., Wis 2:23-24; 2 Bar 17:3; 23:4; 48:42; 54:15 [but cf. 54:19]; 4 Ezra 3:7; 3:21; 7:118), but about Israel, or the righteous within Israel, as the new humanity, the inheritors of “all the glory of Adam.” This theme is particularly prominent in the Qumran scrolls.^¹⁹⁷ Adam, in other words, points forward to God’s ultimate intention for the human race; reflection on Adam gives a particular shape to eschatological hope. In particular, as will be important in Romans 8, Adam’s sovereignty over creation will be given to the true Adam at the end. This lies at the heart of Paul’s view of Jesus’ lordship (e.g., 1 Cor 15:27, quoting Ps 8:7), and also of the kingly rule of Jesus’ people (5:17). This paragraph, then, demonstrates that, by fulfilling the covenant promises to Abraham, the creator God has addressed and dealt with the problem of Adam; a new humanity has come into being for whom sin and death have been conquered. “The age to come” has arrived in the present with the death and resurrection of the Messiah; those who belong to the Messiah already share in its benefits. That which Israel, or groups within Israel, thought to gain has been appropriately attained by the true Israelite, the Messiah, the obedient one. He now shares this status with all his people.

The balance between Adam and Christ, which is the main point of the paragraph, is not absolute. Verses 15-17 insert two notes of imbalance, where Paul insists that the act of Christ, and its results, far outweighs what was done, and lost, by Adam. Christ did not begin where Adam began: His task, which was actually Israel’s task, the vocation outlined (but not acted upon) in 2:17-24 and 3:2, was to take the weight of the human catastrophe upon himself and deal with it. Nor was the result a mere restoration of where Adam was before: in Christ the human project, begun in Adam but never completed, has been brought to its intended goal. In both cases Christ has done what Israel was called to do.

What then of Israel itself? Would Israel not say that the Torah was given in order to enable it to escape the entail of Adam’s sin? Paul takes a very different line. Following his earlier statements in 2:25-29: 3:19-20; and 4:15a, he sees the Torah entering the picture with apparently disastrous consequences (5:20). God has, however, dealt with this too. Through Jesus Christ the righteousness of God, which is revealed apart from Torah, has become the means whereby grace can usher in the age to come (5:21, with an oblique echo of 3;21). The main statements of the paragraph, holding the subsidiary and explanatory additions in place, thus come in vv. 12, 18, and 21 (see the outline on p. 523).

The “obedience” of Jesus is thus the means by which God’s faithfulness to the covenant has been effected. This theme, picking up the “faithfulness” of Jesus in chap. 3, awakens echoes both linguistic and theological from Isaiah 53, which were already hinted at in 4:25. As in Phil 2:6-11, Paul has drawn together his view of Jesus as the true Adam and the true Israel. Both themes are focused on Jesus’ obedient death, seen as the act of grace by which the true God is revealed.^¹⁹⁸

This paragraph is not only the thematic statement out of which chaps. 6-8 are quarried; it provides, too, the groundwork for chaps. 9-11 and 12-16. Paul’s basic thesis about Israel according to the flesh is that they, too, are “in Adam.” This, worked out in agonizing detail in 7:1-25, is then thought through in 9:6-10:21: Israel recapitulates Adam’s trespass (5:20; 7:7-11; 9:32; 11:11-12). But God has dealt with the sin of Adam, and has also dealt with that of Israel; there is therefore life and hope for Israel, too, not because Paul has smuggled in a renewed nationalism after all, but because he believes in the victory of grace. Israel, even “according to the flesh,” remains the people of the Messiah (9:5); thus their “casting away” means “reconciliation for the world” (11:15, echoing 5:10). Key elements of the discussion thus grow from the thematic statements in chap. 5.

The great appeal of chaps. 12-16 is for unity in the church: “We, the many, are one body in Christ.” This is worked out through the argument of 14:1-15:13 in particular. Here, working backward, we find the clue to the way in which 5:12-21 draws out the theme so prominent in 1:16-4:25--namely, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. This subject, so far from being ignored between chaps. 4 and 9, should actually be seen as highlighted in 5:12-21, through Paul’s repeated emphasis on “one man … for many/all.” “Many” and “all,” in the light of the whole thrust of 1:18-4:25, must clearly be seen as meaning “Jew and Gentile alike.” The problem was universal; the solution is universal. Torah’s entry into the picture (5:20) did not create a race apart; rather, it exacerbated the problem. The solution is the same for all: grace, working through God’s covenant faithfulness, resulting in the life of the age to come, through Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, the Lord of the world, appropriated by faith; God’s love, responded to with answering love inspired by the Spirit. The appeal for the unity of the church in the letter’s closing chapters (see especially 15:7-13) is firmly rooted in this same crucial paragraph. With this, we are ready for the details of the text.

5:12. Paul begins the great comparison between Adam and Christ, but breaks it off halfway through, to insert two explanations. On the face of it, v. 12 seems fairly straightforward, granted the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3 and its interpretation in the Judaism of Paul’s day. Given a commandment, to break which meant death, the unhappy pair broke it and (eventually) died. Sin and death, here personified, continue as “characters” in Paul’s narrative through to chap. 8. In terms of his overall argument for assurance, they are the forces that must be defeated if the Christian is to be sure of eternal life. In terms of his underlying new-exodus story, sin and death play the role of Pharaoh: Paul imagines them as alien powers, given access to God’s world through the action of Adam. Once in, they had come to stay; staying, they seized royal power. Linked together as cause and effect, they now stride through their usurped domain, wreaking misery, decay, and corruption wherever they go. No one is exempt from their commanding authority.

Straightforward in some ways this may be. But it has created huge problems of interpretation for subsequent readers, not least those eager to press Paul for solutions to problems he was not addressing. In part these are historical problems, or at least problems about whether the history really matters: Did sin really enter the world through one man? Was death really a stranger in the world until the first Homo sapiens “worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator”? And--a question that has exercised theologians for most of the years since Paul wrote these words--in what sense did “all sin” when Adam sinned? These are questions more of interpretation than of of exegesis, but unless they are addressed they threaten to derail the contemporary reader before the paragraph has even properly begun. Since this passage constitutes the driving heart of the letter, it is vital to stay on the track.

Paul clearly believed that there had been a single first pair, whose male, Adam, had been given a commandment and had broken it. Paul was, we may be sure, aware of what we would call mythical or metaphorical dimensions to the story, but he would not have regarded these as throwing doubt on the existence, and primal sin, of the first historical pair. Our knowledge of early anthropology is of course sketchy, to put it mildly. Each time another very early skull is dug up the newspapers exclaim over the discovery of the first human beings; we have consigned Adam and Eve entirely to the world of mythology, but we are still looking for their replacements. What “sin” would have meant in the early dawn of the human race it is impossible to say; but the turning away from open and obedient relationship with the loving creator, and the turning instead toward that which, though beautiful and enticing, is not God, is such a many-sided phenomenon that it is not hard to envisage it at any stage of anthropoid development. The general popular belief that the early stories of Genesis were straightforwardly disproved by Charles Darwin is of course nonsense, however many times it is reinforced in contemporary mythmaking. Things are just not that simple, in biblical theology or science.

One potentially helpful way of understanding the entry of death into the world through the first human sin is to see “death” here as more than simply the natural decay and corruption of all the created order. The good creation was nevertheless transient: evening and morning, the decay and new life of autumn and spring, pointed on to a future, a purpose, which Genesis implies it was the job of the human race to bring about. All that lived in God’s original world would decay and perish, but “death” in that sense carried no sting. The primal pair were, however, threatened with a dif. ferent sort of thing altogether: a “death” that would result from sin, and involve expulsion the garden (Gen 2:17). This death is a darker force, opposed to creation itself, unmaking that which was good, always threatening to drag the world back toward chaos. Thus, when humans turned away in sin from the creator as the one whose image they were called to bear, what might have been a natural sleep acquired a sense of shame and threat. The corruption of this darker “death” corresponded all too closely to, and seemed to be occasioned by, that turning away from the source of life, and that turning instead toward lifeless objects, which later generations would call idolatry.

The final clause in the verse is deeply controversial. Most interpreters take the opening phrase (έφ’ ω eph’ hō’) to mean “inasmuch as,” or simply “because”; death spread to all, “because” all sinned. The question is, does the verb refer to actual sins committed by all people (as in the “many sins” of v. 16), or to the primal act of Adam seen as the time when “all sinned”? Since the verb is aorist, as the NIV rightly sees (“because all sinned”), not perfect, as the NRSV implies (“because all have sinned”), it might seem better to take it as a reference to Adam, even while it is clear from 1:18-3:20 that Paul believes that all humans have committed actual sin. However, the fact that that earlier argument can be summed up with an aorist at 3:23 (“all sinned, and came short of God’s glory”) may indicate that too much weight should not be placed on the tense. What matters is that all human sin can now be lumped together into one. “All sinned.”

Faced with this dilemma, some scholars emphasize the responsibility of each individual, white others, not least those anxious to maintain Paul’s parallel between Adam and Christ, emphasize the primal sin as somehow involving all subsequent humanity (it is not necessary, to hold this view, to espouse along with it any particular theory of the mode by which sin is then transmitted). Others, maintaining a delicate balance between these alternatives (the former unlikely, the latter unwelcome), suggest that this is a shorthand way of saying that when humans actually sin, as they all do, they are not merely imitating the primal sin but acting from within a human nature, and indeed within a world, radically conditioned by that prior disobedience. Fitzmyer has recently challenged the reading of eph’ hō’ as “because,” and proposed instead “with the result that.”^¹⁹⁹ This does not, he suggests, remove the sense of causality between Adam’s sin and those of his descendants, but it allows for a “secondary causality,” and so personal responsibility, between individual sins and individual death. The problem in this, it seems to me, is that it makes the last clause of the verse relate, not to its immediate predecessor (“and so death spread to all”), with which it seems naturally to belong because of the repeated “all,” but to the first verb of the sentence (“sin entered the world”). Otherwise Paul would be saying that death spread to all, with the result that all sinned--the opposite of what he actually says throughout, which is that sin causes death.^²⁰⁰ Fitzmyer’s proposal must, I think, be regarded as at best not proven. Paul’s meaning must in any case be both that an entail of sinfulness has spread throughout the human race from its first beginnings and that each individual has contributed their own share to it. Paul offers no further clue as to how the first of these actually works or how the two interrelate.

5:13-14. Paul said “just as” in v. 12, but there is no corresponding “so.” As most translations see, we must insert a dash or bracket at the end of v. 12; v. 13 breaks in to the train of thought, and not until v. 18 is it begun again and finally completed. Paul is here addressing a perceived problem, concerning the generations between Adam and Moses--that is, those who lived before the coming of the law. How did they know what was sinful and what was not? This might seem a rather abstruse problem; the patriarchal generations, after all, seem to have known that there was such a thing as good and evil, even though they did not always abide by it. But the underlying problem may well be that if Paul were to tie sin too closely to the Torah he would not only have a theoretical difficulty with the period between Adam and Moses, but would also run into a more pressing problem about the status of Gentiles “without the Torah” (cf. 2:14).

What Paul needs to explain here is that sin did indeed spread to all people, including those who might at first sight (from a Jewish point of view in which sin meant breaking Torah) have seemed to be without sin. His explanation is simple: sin must have been there (5: 13a) because death was there, ruling like a king (5:14a). He acknowledges (5:13b) that sin is not reckoned up, not logged in any register, in the absence of the law. (We might note that, although it would be easy to take “law” here in a more general sense than the Mosaic Torah, the context makes it quite clear that Torah is what Paul has in mind; a good lesson to learn for the reading of the following chapters.) As a result, the subjects over whom death ruled, though sinners, were not the same type of sinners as Adam had been, that is, sinners against a specific known commandment. They did not, he says, sin “in the likeness of the trespass of Adam.” “Trespass” (“transgression,” NRSV) means, as we saw, sinning against a commandment (NIV, “sin by breaking a command,” is a paraphrase designed to bring this point out).

This is important for what it implies as well as what it denies. It denies that the generations between Adam and Moses, being lawless, were also sinless. But it also implies that those who come after Moses, and who do have Torah, do in fact imitate Adam. This will be further stated in 5:20, echoed in 6:14-15, and will become a major theme in chap. 7.

Adam, he says, is “a type of the one who was coming.” This is one of only two places where Paul uses “type” in this technical sense (the other being 1 Cor 10:6; see also 1 Cor 10:11). The thought is of a die or stamp that leaves its impression in wax: Paul’s meaning seems to be that Adam prefigured the Messiah in certain respects (other candidates for “the coming one” are sometimes suggested, but it is virtually certain that Paul intended to refer to Jesus), notably in this, that he founded a family that would bear his characteristics. Thus we may hear another hint of the coming argument. Sinning “according to the likeness of the trespass of Adam” is balanced by God’s plan to bring Christians “to conform to the image of his son” (8:29). The middle term in this story is supplied, evocatively in this context, by 8:3: “God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh.”

Paul has thus clarified a problem that might have come back to haunt him. But he is still not ready to resume the train of thought begun in v. 12. Before he can set out the parallel between Adam and Christ, he needs to head off the idea that they are merely or solely parallel.

5:15-17. “But not ‘as the trespass, so also the grace-gift.’” That is a more literal rendering of the opening line of this difficult sub-section. It is not simply, as with the NRSV and the NIV, that Paul is denying similarity between the gift and the trespass; he is denying that there is a balance between them. The gift far outweighs the trespass; Christ has not merely restored that which Adam lost, but has gone far beyond. The remainder of v. 15 explains, somewhat complicatedly, what Paul means. The many died because of the trespass of the one (Adam); but God’s grace, and the grace-gift through the one (Jesus), abounded for the many. The imbalance here seems to be between the simple progression from sin to death and the astonishing reversal whereby, faced with the result of Adam’s sin, God’s grace has flourished in what had seemed a hopeless situation. The two sequences are, in other words, out of all proportion to each other: in the one case, sin bred death because that is what sin does; in the other, the gift of grace is nothing short of new creation, creation not merely out of nothing but out of anti-creation, out of death itself.

A second imbalance is then presented in v. 16, with one of Paul’s most tortuous shorthand sentences: literally, “and not ‘as through the one man sinning, the gift.’” Again, despite the NRSV, the NIV, and others, Paul is denying not merely similarity, but balance, this time in terms of the judicial result of the process and in particular of the conditions in which it took place. The key contrast he wishes to draw is between the one sin, which brought the sentence of condemnation, and the gift that, after many trespasses, brought the verdict “righteous.”^²⁰¹ In other words, God’s action in the Messiah did not start where Adam’s started, and, as it were, merely get things right this time. God’s action in the Messiah began at the point where Adam’s ended--with many sins, and many sinners. The result in each case is hardly comparable; condemnation and acquittal may seem equal and opposite, but only from the point of view that they are the two alternative results from a trial. In terms of what they actually mean for the people concerned they are different sorts of things; the one a denial and ending of life itself, the other an affirmation, opening up new possibilities.

Paul offers in v. 17 a further explanation of the imbalance between Adam and Christ, this time in terms of the two “reigns.” But it is not, as we might have expected, “death” or “sin” on the one hand, and “God” on the other. It is the reign of death, far outweighed by the reign of--believers! Those who were pronounced dead under the haughty and usurping kingdom of death are themselves to be the rulers in God’s new world. Paul describes believers in a roundabout and telling fashion: they are “those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness.” Paul has spoken of “the many” on both sides of the equation (v. 15) and will do so again (v. 19); he will speak of “all humans,” on both sides, in v. 18. Here, however, he presents a significant modification: it is those who “receive this gift” who will reign in life in God’s kingdom (cf. 1 Cor 4:8). The rest of Paul’s theology, not least in Romans, makes it clear that he is thinking of those who believe the gospel of Jesus the Messiah.

They will reign, he says, “in life.” This refers, we assume, both to the resurrection state in which their final rule will take place and to the “life” of the age to come, over which they will exercise dominion. Paul seems to have got from apocalyptic tradition the belief that God’s final rule would be exercised through God’s people. When the Ancient of Days takes the throne, the sovereignty is given to “the people of the saints of the Most High” (Dan 7:27). Here, as throughout the passage, Paul is thinking in terms of the promised blessings that Israel hoped for in the age to come being achieved by the Messiah and shared with his people. (This, of course, is what makes 9:1-5 so poignant.)

5:18-19. Paul is ready at last to resume his argument where he broke it off at 5:12. The opening phrase (αρα οΰν ara oun) is resumptive as well as consequential: “so, then,” not simply “therefore.” The key sentence, however, in which Paul at last says what he has been waiting to say for five verses, possesses neither subject, verb, nor object in either half. Literally it reads “as through the trespass of the one unto all people unto condemnation, so also through the righteous act of the one unto all people unto acquittal of life.”^²⁰² There may be good theology behind this odd grammar: Paul is talking about an entire story over which he sees the creator God presiding. His non-use of subjects and verbs may have an air of reverence, as well as a positively Tacitean density.

The balance he is asserting, after all the imbalances of the previous verses, lies in the universality. Adam brings condemnation for all; Christ, justification for all. Our minds instantly raise the question of numerically universal salvation, but this is not in Paul’s mind. His universalism is of the sort that holds to Christ as the way for all. “Condemnation” and “judgment” have been important themes in the letter since the second chapter; Paul here, as usual, refers to the final coming judgment, the time when there will be wrath for some and life for others (2:5-11). The theme remains central in the coming chapters, reaching its dramatic climax in 8:1 (“there is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus”) and 8:33-34 (“it is God who justifies; who will condemn?”). By referring to Jesus’ messianic action on the cross (this, of course, is what the second half of the comparison in each verse has been about) in terms of an “act of righteousness” or “act of acquittal” (the word is δικαιώμα dikaiōma, as in v. 16), Paul again draws on the thought of 3:21-26 and 5:9-10. Christ’s dikaiōma in the middle of history leads to God’s dikaiōsis on the last day. What was accomplished on the cross will be effective at the final judgment.

As so often, Paul at once explains himself further (γάρ gar), and in doing so elaborates his meaning. This time, in v. 19, it is in terms of disobedience and obedience. With audible overtones of Isa 53:11, he declares that, as Adam’s disobedience gave “the many” the status of being “sinners” (see the Commentary on 5:8) so Christ’s obedience has given “the many” the status of being “righteous.” Jesus, whisper the Isaianic echoes, is the servant of YHWH, whose obedient death has accomplished YHWH’s saving purpose. He has “established” or “set up” his people with a new status.

To be a “sinner” is, to be sure, more than a mere status. It involves committing actual sins. But it is the status that interests Paul here. Likewise, to be “righteous,” as will be apparent in the next chapter, is more than simply status, but again it is the status that matters here. Justification, rooted in the cross and anticipating the verdict of the last day, gives people a new status, ahead of the performance of appropriate deeds.

What does Paul suppose the Messiah was obedient to? A long tradition within one strand of Reformation thought has supposed that Paul was here referring to Jesus’ perfect obedience to the law.^²⁰³ In this view, Christ’s “active obedience” and his “passive obedience” work together. His active obedience acquires “righteousness,” which is then “reckoned” to those “in Christ”; his passive obedience, culminating in the cross, deals with his people’s sins. Powerful though this thought is, and influential though it has been (even in liturgy, where “the merits and death of Christ” are sometimes mentioned in this double sense), it is almost certainly not what Paul has in mind here. The Isaianic servant, to whom reference is being made, was obedient to the saving purpose of YHWH, the plan marked out for Israel from the beginning but that, through Israel’s disobedience, only the servant, as an individual, can now accomplish. The “obedience” of the Messiah in 5:19 therefore corresponds closely to the “faithfulness” of the Messiah in 3:22. It refers to his obedience to God’s commission (as in 3:2), to the plan to bring salvation to the world, rather than his amassing a treasury of merit through Torah obedience. Obedience to the law would be beside the point; the law has a different, and much darker, function in the argument than is often supposed. That, indeed, is the subject of the next verse.

5:20-21. If a devout Second Temple Jew were telling the story of Adam and the Messiah--from, we may assume, a pre-messianic point of view--the Torah would be bound to play a large and positive part in the narrative. As Paul says in 2:17-20, reflecting the attitude he himself would have had before his conversion, the Torah provides the form of knowledge and truth. It is the thing that, above all, enables Israel to escape the entail of Adam’s sin, to be different from the pagan world around. Not so, he says here. When Torah came in, its effect--apparently its deliberate effect--was “to increase the trespass.”

Each part of this sentence is tricky. The word that describes the law’s entrance is παρεισέρχομαι (pareiserchomai, “came in alongside”).^²⁰⁴ The result was that the trespass increased; was this also the intention, or just the unintended result? The NRSV opts for result; the NIV for purpose. Though the latter seems harder (why would God, giving the Torah, intend trespass to increase?) it is almost certainly correct; this half-verse anticipates the whole argument of 7:7-25, and there it is clear that both the law itself and the effect it had were somehow, mysteriously, intended by the giver.

The clue is to link “the trespass” with its previous occurrences in the passage, where the trespass is of course Adam’s. The Torah, so far from delivering its possessors from the entail of Adam’s sin, actually appears to exacerbate it for them. This is more or less, after all, what Paul already said in 3:19-20. To sin outside the law is still to sin; Paul has made that clear in 5:13-14; but to sin under the law--in other words, to transgress, to break a known commandment--is to make the problem worse. Think of sin as a small color transparency; the law puts a bright light behind it and a large screen in front of it. That is what Paul means by “increase the trespass.” Just as in 2:17-24, which follows on from 1:18-32, Adam’s sin is writ large in Israel. Paul is stating the theme that will dominate chap. 7.

At the moment, though, he is still painting the canvas with broad brush strokes, and he sweeps on: the problem of Adam’s sin was magnified by the Torah, but God has done what Torah could not. Grace has superabounded where sin abounded--that is, in Israel itself, where the full effects of Torah’s magnification of Adam’s sin were felt. The superabundance of grace in Israel is presumably a further reference to the messianic work, and particularly the messianic death, in which Jesus offered to Israel’s God the faithful obedience that Israel had not. In Christ, God has come to where the Torah has magnified sin, and has dealt with it. This points ahead to 8:3-4.

All this leads to the full and climactic statement of the Adam-Christ balance in v. 21. When we stand back and look at the two kingdoms, they are those of sin on the one hand and grace on the other; and if “grace” is a periphrastic (or indirect) personification for “God,” we may suppose that “sin” is an indirect way of saying “Satan.” Paul is once again summarizing the whole train of thought of 1:18-5:11, and doing so in a way that will launch the next phase of the letter’s argument: the reign of sin is matched, and outmatched, by the reign of grace, and sin’s entail of death is beaten by the entail of life that follows from grace, working through “righteousness” (not “justification,” as in the NRSV). Give these words their full Pauline value, and the sequence of thought becomes clear, despite the fact that the verse is packed with technical terms. Grace (the sovereign, loving purpose of God) is ruling through covenant faithfulness (God’s accomplishment in Christ of that which had been promised to Abraham), and the result is the ushering in of the age to come, “eternal life,” or, better, the life of the coming age.^²⁰⁵ And all has happened, of course, “through Jesus the Messiah, our Lord.” The outstretched arms of the crucified one, embodying the love of the creator God, provide the ultimate balance of the paragraph, the place where the kingdom of sin did its worst and the kingdom of grace its triumphant best.

1. The overwhelming impression left by these verses is the superabundance of grace. However much theologians and preachers know this with their heads, and can explain it as a theory, it remains strange and surprising that it should actually be true, that it should be the central characteristic of the world in which we--even theologians and preachers!--are called to live surrounded as we are day by day with so many signs and symbols of sin and death, and living in a culture that has reinvented a secularized version of the doctrine of Original Sin under the guise of the hermeneutic of suspicion (see below), all our instincts tell us that life is hard, cruel and unfair. If there are signs of life and hope, they tend to be those we make for ourselves. Our culture thus oscillates between despair and self-salvation.

Into this world the news of grace, of the undeserved gift of abundant life, bursts again and again, in the message of Jesus, offering a radical alternative, an entirely different way of construing reality, a new way of conceiving our whole experience of the world and indeed of God. At every point where the seeds of wickedness have been planted, bearing deadly fruits of all kinds, there the grace of God has been planted alongside, a vibrant plant that will take over the soil and produce a life-giving harvest. Of course, it takes faith to believe this and act on it; precisely the faith that believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that therefore his cross was indeed “the free gift following many trespasses,” “the one man’s obedience.” But once the world has been glimpsed in this light, everything is different, not least Christian mission and the prayer that accompanies it.

2. At the center of the picture, and always worth further exploration and meditation, is the achievement of Jesus himself. Though the word “cross” is not mentioned, and though Jesus’ own death is not spoken of explicitly, we should not miss the fact that in this passage we have one of Paul’s fullest statements of what in shorthand we call atonement theology. People often try to glean a full theology of the cross from 3:21-26, where Paul is writing about several things at once and drawing on a dense statement of the meaning of Jesus’ death in order to do so. We would do better to see that passage, together with the further statements of 4:25 and 5:6-10, as leading the eye up to the present argument, which is admittedly still terse and clipped. This is the high mountain ridge from which we look back to the earlier statements, and on to subsequent ones (6:3-11; 7:4; 8:3-4, 31-39).

Central to Paul’s understanding of the cross, therefore, is the belief that it is the free gift of God to a wicked and corrupt world. This point, stressed again and again in these verses, was and is offensive to those who want to make their own unaided way through life, or who suppose that nothing much is wrong with the world or the human race, or indeed themselves. Free grace is obviously correlated, here more than anywhere else, with a radical view of human wickedness and the threat posed by death. For those who want to remain independent, being ruled by grace appears almost as much of a threat as being ruled by sin and death. But this is, of course, absurd. Grace is undeserved love in powerful action; and love seeks the well-being, the flourishing, of the beloved, not their extinction or diminution. To look love in the face and see only a threat is the self-imposed nemesis of the hermeneutic of suspicion.

But this free gift is offered through the obedience, the faithfulness, of Jesus himself. Here, as in Phil 2:6-8, Paul sees the voluntary death of Jesus as the messianic act par excellence, the triumphant accomplishment of that covenant plan for which Israel was called in the first place, the completion of the purpose for which God called Abraham. Not for Paul the currently fashionable idea that Jesus had not intended to die but that the church--Paul himself included!--used theological hindsight to impose upon that death a meaning Jesus himself had never envisaged. Paul’s illusions in this passage to the fourth servant song, highlighting his own reference to Jesus’ obedience, tell the story of one who knowingly went to the place where Israel’s sin and shame, and the world’s sin and shame, were heaped up together, and took the full weight on himself. How this could be, theologically speaking, is hinted at in 5:20, and will be explored further in the explosive 8:3-4.

3. Paul’s personification of sin and death, and his highlighting of these forces as the deepest problem of humans and of the world, will win him few friends among those for whom sin is merely an outdated neurosis and death an unfortunate problem that the medical profession has not yet solved. One might have thought that the twentieth century, which elevated sin to a technological level previously unimagined, and meted out violent death to more people, more efficiently, than ever before, would have been only too glad to embrace Paul’s analysis of the problem, and eager to rediscover his solution. But, as so often, the patient is fearful of hearing the true diagnosis, not least because the treatment may be humiliating. Fancy having to admit, thinks the late modern Western skeptic, that one had been wrong all along, that those boring and out-of-touch Christians had had the answers! No: we will die as we have lived, in ironic agnosticism, worshiping Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, maintaining consistency (even in our inconsistency!) rather than embracing salvation.

Part of the problem, of course, is that traditional Christianity has frequently operated with a truncated view of sin, limiting it to personal, and particularly sexual, immorality. These things matter enormously, of course, but there are other dimensions, of which the last century has seen so many examples, which are often untouched by traditional preaching. Equally, those preachers who have focused attention on structural evil within our world, on systematic and politically enshrined injustice, have often left the home base of Pauline theology in order to do so, not realising that there were resources there from which to launch not only critique but also promise and hope. This passage invites us to explore a reintegrated view of sin and death, rebellion and consequent dehumanization, as the major problem of humankind, and thereby to offer diagnoses of our world’s ills that go to the roots of the problem and prepare the way for the cure.

4. As a culture, the Western world of the late twentieth century has seen the growth, and the application on a wide scale, of the hermeneutic of suspicion. Every text, every artefact, every piece of popular culture, is interrogated: whose perspective does it represent? Who is it oppressing? Who is implicitly marginalized by it? This process, fueled by the great liberationist movements, not least that of women and (in the United States) of African Americans, has pinpointed many evils, and awakened consciences to many real abuses. But left to itself it functions as the secular shadow of that kind of sub-Christian teaching where the doctrine of original sin was well known but that of free grace was somehow forgotten. It produces, in other words, a gloomy, guilty mind-set, where people feel ashamed of being what they inalienably are, and apologize for innocent actions. When we meet this in an individual, we advise them to see a psychiatrist. Someone who is always apologizing, always overeager to confess their sins, needs pastoral help. But we are well on the way to creating the social or corporate equivalent; that is perhaps what neo-moralism was bound to do. It also produces, as a reflex, a “victim culture” in which those who are, or feel, “oppressed” or “marginalized” become blameless, and any criticism of them is categorized as further oppression.

This naive new morality, a crude attempt at re-erecting ethical frameworks in the wake of the perceived failure of secularism’s amorality, would do well to rediscover the Pauline doctrine of which it is the parody. A true analysis of sin, structural and personal, should lead to a true discovery of grace, again both structural and personal. Applying the Pauline doctrine of grace to the larger questions faced in our culture would mean rediscovering, beyond proper and necessary suspicion, that there is such a thing as trust, and that healthy societies, as well as individuals, thrive on it.

This is not quite the same question as theologjans and commentators have been eager to discover at this point, namely: granted justification by ace through faith, what is the place of ethics, and of moral effort, in the Christian life? This latter question is, in fact, contained within the former, but we must not, in our eagerness for relevance, ignore Paul’s actual argument. The question of 6:1, and even that of 6:15, is not, despite frequent assertions, exactly the same as that which Paul cites, and scornfully dismisses, in 3:8 (“Let us do evil that good may come”). Verse 1 is primarily about status, not behavior, as is apparent from the argument about status that follows in 6:2-11 (behavior is included as well, and is highlighted in 6:12-14, but it is not the primary focus). And 6:15, while clearly about behavior, introduces an important argument about the two kinds of “slavery”: Paul is still concerned to get his hearers thinking about where they are within the framework of chap. 5, as is evident from the way in which the conclusion (6:23) directly echoes 5:21.

Paul’s question is this: Do Christians find themselves now in the Adam solidarity or in the Christ solidarity? Do they still live under the reign of sin and death, or do they live under the reign of grace and righteousness? Since God’s grace reaches down to the kingdom of sin to rescue those who are there, must Christians regard themselves as still being in that dark sphere in order that grace may do its proper work? And must they then live in the manner appropriate to that old kingdom?

To this question there can be only one answer, but the manner in which Paul gives it is revealing. Christians, he says, have left the old solidarity, and belong to the new; they must behave accordingly. The transfer is effected by dying and rising with the Messiah. And the event in which this dying and rising is accomplished is baptism.

This comes as a shock to many a good Protestant reader, accustomed to regard baptism simply as an outward expression of a believer’s faith, and anxious about any suggestion that the act itself, or indeed any outward act, might actually change the way things are in the spiritual realm. (This anxiety has at least as much to do with the legacy of the Enlightenment, of Romanticism, and of Existentialism, as with the theology of the sixteenth century, let alone of the first; but that is too remote a topic for now.) The words “sacramentalism,” “ritualism,” and even “magical,” spring naturally to mind, and are not dispelled by those writers, like Albert Schweitzer, who have been eager to assert the significance, in Paul, of physical baptism as the key event in which sinners are brought into the kingdom.^²⁰⁶ It is in this context that the older debates, as to whether Paul was here dependent on, or at least alluding to, the mystery religions and their initiatory practices, comes into play; the massive scholarship that has been brought to bear on this issue has now returned a negative verdict.^²⁰⁷ At the opposite extreme, some have suggested that Paul is not here primarily referring to the actual event of water baptism, but only using the language as a metaphor for Christian beginnings, conversion and initiation, in general.^²⁰⁸ As most commentators have agreed, this is unlikely. First-century Christian beginnings included water-baptism; the discussion in vv. 4-5 seems to allude to the physical rite; Paul’s readers would naturally understand the passage in a literal sense. We are back with the question: what did Paul mean by baptism, and why does he suddenly introduce it here?

The most obvious explanation, and one that fills the present chapter with fresh meaning both in itself and in its relation to its surrounding context, is that Paul understood baptism in terms of the new exodus. Paul had already made this link, strikingly, in 1 Cor 10:2, speaking of the wilderness generation (“our fathers”), being “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” There he brings out the parallel between their “sacramental” experience and that of Christians, the new-exodus people, and stresses the ethical obligations that lie upon Christians as a result. As we saw in introducing chaps. 5-8, the long argument that is launched by 5:12-21 includes, toward its climax, a passage (8:12-27) in which Christians are characterized as the new wilderness generation, on their way home to the promised land, accompanied by the presence of God through the Spirit. The roots of this full statement are found here in chap. 6.

From a historical point of view this meaning is not just comprehensible, but compelling. The baptism of John is best explained as a new-exodus movement, along with other similar movements that gathered people in the wilderness and looked for signs of salvation. There is every reason to suppose both that Jesus himself saw John’s baptism as the starting-point for his own work, not just chronologically but thematically, and that the earliest church likewise looked back not just to Jesus but to Jesus as the leader of the movement that had begun with John’s baptism.^²⁰⁹ Christianity was a new-exodus movement from the beginning; baptism in the earliest church, we must assume, retained this character and overtone. Moreover, the death of Jesus at Passover time, and the meal he shared with his followers on the night he was betrayed, so interwove the theme of new exodus with the fact of Jesus’ death that the two became inextricable. “The redemption” had occurred, not now when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, but when Jesus died as Israel’s Messiah and rose again. The movement that had begun symbolically with John at the Jordan came of age at Easter. And already Jesus himself, whose mission and vocation seem to have been given focus and direction in his own baptism by John, had used baptism as a metaphor for his own coming ordeal (Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50). We may suppose that the earliest Christian assumption about baptism was that it was both a dramatic symbol of the new exodus and a sign of Jesus’ death.

This is further confirmed both by the parallel between the present sequence of thought and Col 1:13-14, and by the sense this reading makes of the rest of chap. 6. God, says Paul in Colossians,^²¹⁰ “has delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” This, as has often been pointed out, is exodus language.^²¹¹ Similarly, in our present passage, 5:21 sets up the two kingdoms, and chap. 6 argues that Christians have been liberated from the first to belong to the second. A main theme of the rest of the passage is that of the rescue of the slaves: Verse 6 speaks of no longer being enslaved to sin, v. 9 of death no longer being one’s master, vv. 12-14 of sin no longer reigning over one. The whole discussion of vv. 16-23 hinges on the notion of slavery recently abandoned and freedom newly found. It simply will not do to say, concerning an argument written by a first-century Jew who has expounded the promises to Abraham two chapters before and will herald the entry into the promised land two chapters later, that this is merely a slave-market illustration taken from the Hellenistic world. It cries out to be interpreted in terms of the exodus. And when we find that the key event through which slavery is abandoned and freedom is gained consists of passing through the water, reenacting the death of Jesus, which was already interpreted in terms of Passover imagery, the case can be closed. Exodus is not a distant echo here. It is a main theme.

We may reckon, then, that when Paul says “do you not know” in v. 3, introducing his statement about baptism and Jesus’ death, this is not a rhetorical trick but a genuine assumption. Baptism would not have been seen as a miscellaneous cleansing rite, or a generalized sign of initiation, but as that which brought people into the historical narrative of the new exodus. The master-narrative had been enacted when Israel’s history was focused on the Messiah and his death and resurrection. The life-stories of individual people, Jews and Greeks alike, needed then to be brought within this larger narrative by the appropriate symbolic means. Just as faith in the God who raised Jesus was common for all, Jew and Gentile alike, so baptism in the name of Jesus had to be undergone by all. It constituted the new people as the single new-exodus people of the one God (cf. Gal 3:26-29). Since what was at stake was the renewal of the people of God, and indeed of the whole creation (8:18-30), the event that brought together the individual life-story and the larger story of God, Israel and Jesus would itself be tangible and physical. That event, clearly, was baptism.

The community into which the baptized person came was the family, the people, of the Messiah. I have argued in detail elsewhere that Paul’s incorporative language about Jesus hinges on his understanding of messiahship; the Messiah represents his people, so that what is true of him becomes true of them. The present chapter, indeed, is one of the classic passages on this theme (others include Galatians 3). Paul, it seems, could use the word Χριστός (Christos) not only to refer specifically to Jesus himself as Messiah, but to the whole company of the messianic people.^²¹² That is why, whereas he regularly says “through Jesus Christ,” referring to that which God has done by the agency of the human being Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Messiah and Lord, he regularly says “in Christ Jesus.” This is not a mere stylistic variant, but a key indication that he is using the words with a sense of precision. If by Christos he means, along with a reference to Jesus himself, “the messianic people; the people who belong to the story of the new exodus,” his language in the present chapter becomes clear. People join this family through baptism; that is, they are baptized into Christ (v. 3). That which is true of the Messiah is therefore now true of them; that is, what happened to him happens to them with him, as in the famous string of words beginning with σύν (syn, “with,” vv. 4-8). Their status and condition now, therefore, is that they are in Christ (v. 11), so that his having died to sin and being alive to God is true of them also. This is the logic of incorporative Messiahship, and hence of baptism.

One of the great gains of this approach to Romans 6 is that we can move away once and for all from seeing chaps. 6-8, or even 5-8, as expressing a different kind of theology, or even a different train of thought, from chaps. 1-4. As we noted in the introduction, the promises made by God to Abraham in Genesis 15 envisaged the exodus. Paul, expounding those promises in Romans 4, sees them fulfilled in the creation of a Jew-plus-Gentile family through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and envisages them looking forward to the time when Abraham’s family will inherit the world (4:13). What more appropriate way of describing the manner of that family’s coming together than through the event that evokes the exodus? More particularly, the keynote of chaps. 1-4 is “God’s righteousness.” which is alluded to in 5:21 as the means through which grace has come to reign through Jesus Christ. Now, in chap. 6, “righteousness” becomes a periphrastic (or indirect) way of referring to God (vv. 13, 16, 18, 19, 20; the periphrasis gives way to literal statement in v. 22). God’s covenant faithfulness is the overarching characteristic of the sphere into which the Christian comes through baptism.

Nor is there any conflict between “baptism” as a physical act (a “ritual,” in the loaded sense that is still sometimes used) and “faith” as an interior event--or between either of these and the flooding of the heart by the Spirit of which Paul speaks in 5:5. As a first-century Jew, Paul was happily innocent of the dualistic either/or that keeps such things apart in some contemporary Christian thinking. He was well aware of the problems that arose when baptized persons, regularly attending the eucharist, gave the lie to these symbols by the way they were living; he addresses this problem in 1 Corinthians. Yet he never draws back from his strong view of either baptism or the eucharist, never lapses back into treating them as secondary. Indeed, in the present passage one might actually say that he is urging faith on the basis of baptism: since you have been baptized, he writes, work out that what is true of Christ is true of you (v. 11). The point here is not to set out a systematic ordo salutis in which different things happen to the Christian, outwardly and inwardly, in a particular sequence, but to expound that which is true of the baptized and believing Christian in such a way as to make it clear that one’s basic status now is with Christ rather than with Adam, in the kingdom of grace rather than the kingdom of sin and death.

Into this sequence of thought, as with 5:20 within 5:12-21, comes the law (6:4-15). It looks at first like an odd non sequitur, since the law has not been mentioned in the chapter until this point: sin shall not have dominion over you, Paul says (v. 14), because you are “not under law but under grace.” Place the whole discussion in the context of the end of chap. 5, however, and the problem disappears. The law has come in to the Adam/Christ dialectic on the side of Adam. If baptism brings you out of the Adam-sphere, it also brings you out of the law-sphere. Paul is arguing on a knife-edge here, since his exodus theme might have suggested that the freed slaves now needed, as at Sinai, to embrace the Torah as their way of life. He will address that question in the next chapter. For the moment he is content to explore more thoroughly the inner meaning of slavery and freedom in relation to the human condition in general (vv. 15-23). Only when this is done will he at last turn his full attention to the question: what then do we say about the law?

Chapter 6 falls naturally into two main sections, introduced by the questions of v. 1 and v. 15. Verses 12-14 form a small paragraph that applies, and rams home, the lesson of vv. 1-11, as well as preparing the way for the second half of the chapter. The NIV’s breaking of the first half of the chapter--vv. 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-14--is idiosyncratic and ignores the way in which Paul builds carefully up to v.11.

NIV: ¹What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ²By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

⁵If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. ⁶For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin– ⁷because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

⁸Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

¹¹In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

NRSV: ¹What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

6:1-2. As so often, the tight-packed introduction contains all that is to come. The regular rhetorical opening, familiar from earlier in the letter (e.g., 3:1; 4:1), enquires what conclusion might be drawn from what has just been said, and suggests a possibility that is then firmly rebutted. The apparent logic of the question comes from 5:20-21, where Paul spoke of sin “abounding” and grace “superabounding.” The question is primarily about status, with behavior included but not the sole or main topic; the NIV’s “shall we go on sinning” has jumped the gun somewhat, looking ahead to vv. 12-14 rather than to the primary answer found in vv. 3-11. The NRSV’s “shall we continue in sin” sounds to a contemporary ear as though it means much the same thing as the NIV, but the Greek has the definite emphasis of remaining in a place, in a status. Of course, to “remain in sin,” in English and for that matter in Greek, will mean to go on committing sin, but Paul is interested here in where one is first and foremost; it is like saying “shall we remain in France,” with the assumption that if one does one will continue to speak French. At the end of chap. 5, “sin” was a dark ruling power, not primarily a style of conduct. In those terms, Paul’s whole argument is that one has been moved out of one country into another; and that therefore (v. 12) it is no longer appropriate to go on speaking the same language. If the logic of the question were to be upheld, one should regard oneself as forever in the kingdom of sin and death, since that is where God’s grace has reached to in Christ. This is not a question Paul expected the Roman church to raise--the device is here rhetorical--but that it had been raised many times in his regular preaching and teaching there is no reason to doubt.

The question is clearly wrongheaded. With the familiar μή γένοιτο (mē genoito, “let it not be so!”), Paul states his basic answer: We are those who died to sin, so how can we live in it any longer? Without the rest of the paragraph it might be difficult to see exactly what he meant by this, so we may proceed at once to his fuller explanation, noting only that his statement about “we” is slightly stronger than the translations make out. “We are the kind of people who …” would be better: “we are people whose main characteristic is precisely that we have died to sin.”

6:3. Without the wider context it is not immediately clear, when Paul says “do you not know” (cf. 7:1), whether this is actually a new piece of information, imparted with a transparent rhetorical flourish, or something he genuinely expects his audience to be aware of. It has been argued earlier that in this instance he assumes they will know this meaning of baptism, at least in its basic form: those who are baptized into the Messiah, Jesus, are baptized into his death. Jesus himself had spoken of his death as a “baptism”; and that meaning is held in place by the larger new-exodus meaning of baptism from the time of John onward, seen through the early community’s awareness of Jesus’ death as linked to, and interpreted by means of, the events of Passover. We have no reason to suppose that baptism was ever a merely arbitrary entry rite, with a purpose (to mark out those who belonged) but without any meaning of its own. Like many other things in early Christianity, we have little access to early thinking on this topic, and we are heavily dependent on Paul, as our earliest source, for help. Though his fertile theological mind no doubt developed and expanded the earliest understandings more than a little, we should not question that at this point he is reflecting something that was widely known and believed in the early church.

The key word is of course “into”: baptism is into the Messiah, and hence into his death. Like King David in the scriptures, the Messiah could be thought of as one “in whom” those who belonged to him were summed up. “We have ten shares in the king,” said the men of Israel, “and in David also we have more than you” (2 Sam 19:43). When rebellion is sounded, it is precisely this solidarity that will be broken: “We have no portion in David, no share in the son of Jesse!” (2 Sam 20:1; 1 Kgs 12:16). What matters for Paul is the opposite movement, coming “into” the king, the Messiah; and that is effected in baptism. The point is that if the Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen one, then belonging to the messianic people means being characterized by cross and resurrection, by dying and rising. This is at the heart of that dense (and deeply personal) passage Gal 2:15-21, which contains many parallels to the present argument.

6:4-5. What then does it mean to be “baptized into the Messiah’s death”? Paul now explains this further, and draws the preliminary conclusion to back up his original statement of v. 2. Baptism involves being “co-buried” with the Messiah; Paul employs a rare word (only here and Col 2:12 in the NT), the first in a string of syn- compounds, to bring out the significance that what happened to the Messiah must be regarded as having happened to those who are “in him” by baptism. The prefix syn- means “with,” and the verb here means “co-buried”--that is, “were buried with.” Those who are “in” the Messiah died with him, were buried with him. It is possible, indeed likely, that the symbolism of baptism, with the candidate being plunged under the water, naturally suggested burial to Paul; unless we assume that this is his meaning, it is not clear why he should highlight Jesus’ burial rather than simply his death. That seems to be the explanation, too, for “the likeness of his death” in v. 5 (see below). But, if this visible parallel was in his mind, it was as an offshoot of a connection already established between Jesus’ death and baptism, rather than its original cause.

This opens the way for the main theme of the rest of the paragraph. The Messiah’s resurrection means that those who are “in the Messiah” now stand, and must walk, on resurrection ground. Some have disputed whether Paul here speaks of Christians already being raised with Christ, or whether that is an idea belonging only to Colossians and Ephesians within the larger Pauline corpus; but there should be no doubt. The whole point of the argument is that Christians no longer belong in the world of death; Paul does not here suppose that one should wait until the final bodily resurrection (8:11) before beginning to “walk in newness of life,” and this “walk” is based on a present status, not merely anticipating the future reality.^²¹³ The argument of these verses is not simply that one has died to sin and hence must not live in it anymore, but that one is already “alive to God in Christ Jesus” (v. 11) and must now live accordingly. We must allow the past tense of glorified” in 8:30 to have its full weight (see the Commentary on 8:18-30).

This is the second point at which the programmatic statement of 1:3-4 starts to come into its own (the first being 4:24-5). From here on it will become a dominant note. The resurrection of the Messiah from among the dead is the reason why his death had any salvific meaning at all.^²¹⁴ Here, and throughout chaps. 6-8, it is the ground for the hope not only of Christians but of the whole created order. Neither here nor in Colossians and Ephesians does Paul offer either an unrealized or a completely realized eschatology: the baptized are in one sense already raised, and must behave accordingly, while in another sense they are still to be raised in the future. Paul emphasizes the parts of this complex truth he needs in different contexts, and we should not play his various statements off against one another. As all theologians know, it is impossible to say everything one believes in every sentence one writes, and there are always some readers who insist on imagining that what one has left out on this occasion one does not believe.

Paul adds, apparently unnecessarily in terms of his ongoing argument, that Jesus was raised “through the glory of the Father.” This is to be linked with 4:24; there, too, as in 8:11, it is the Father by whose agency Jesus was raised. Why, then, does Paul speak of God’s “glory” as the agent in this event? In the light of 4:20, and further off 1:21, it appears that to recognize “the glory of God” at work in the resurrection of Jesus is part of the attitude of faith in which sin and corruption are replaced with obedience and life (see the Commentary on 4:20; see also John 11:40). The point at issue here, though, is that those who have been buried with the Messiah must reckon that, as he has been raised, they too are called to “walk” with a new quality of life. “Walk” as a metaphor for human conduct is rabbinic (חכלה halākāh, “walking,” hence “conduct”; from ךלה hālak, “walk”); this is the conduct than will follow from the status, but it is the status that Paul is emphasizing. A further clue may be found here as to why Paul ascribes Jesus’ resurrection to the agency of God’s glory: the “glorification” that is God’s gift to all the justified consists not merely in their final resurrection (cf. 8:11, 17, and 29-30), but in that which anticipates the resurrection in the present, namely, the practice of holiness of which Paul speaks both here and in 8:12-17 (see also Col 3:1-4, where exactly the same connections are made).

He offers a further explanation in v. 5, which literally reads: “for if we have been united with him in the likeness of his death, we shall also be of his resurrection.” For the full English sense we must supply, as the translations do, a repetition of the first verb: “we shall also be [united with him in the likeness] of his resurrection.” The word for “been united” comes from a root which means “grown together,” and this, together with the word “likeness” (όμοίωμα homoiōma), has occasioned much debate on Paul’s precise nuance. The NRSV simply says “united in a death like his,” which is not quite as strong as Paul’s Greek; the NIV omits the idea of “likeness” altogether. It seems to me preferable to suppose that Paul is continuing to regard baptism as in some way a re-enactment of Jesus’ death, a making real for the individual of the once-for-all event of Calvary (compare again Gal 2:19-20). This would explain the unusual phrase “grown together”: in baptism, the existence of the Christian is, as it were, intertwined with that of the Messiah, like two young trees whose trunks grow around one another.

The main point, however, is in the second half of the verse. Granted the identity with the Messiah’s death, however we fine-tune our statement of it; the result is that the baptized will share the likeness of his resurrection also. It is just possible that Paul may have in mind the early Christian practice, reflected elsewhere in the NT, of the newly baptized being clothed in white, symbolizing their commitment to holiness of life (e.g., Col 3:12-15). This, again, would make baptism a visible prefiguring of the point at issue. But we do not have to suppose this to make sense of the verse, which looks at three results simultaneously: the ultimate future, in which the Christian is assured of resurrection (cf. 8:11); the present status, where the Christian stands on resurrection ground; and the present behavior, which must reflect present status and anticipate the future ontological reality (see Col 3:1-4). We must, therefore, take the second half of v. 5 as indicating present status and behavior, not simply the future resurrection.^²¹⁵

6:6-7. Paul explains further, arriving as he does so at the central statement of the paragraph. “Knowing this”--again, one may question whether Paul expected his hearers to know this already--that “our old person was co-crucified” (another syn- compound, paralleled in Gal 2:19). To understand Paul’s meaning we must go back again to 5:12-21. The “old self” (ό παλαιός ήμων ανθρωπος ho palaios hēmōn anthrōpos), which used to be translated “our old man,” denotes, not some particular part of the human person, but rather the whole person, the entire self, seen as someone “in Adam.” Call this “the old Adam,” perhaps, but that phrase, too, has too many associations with an older pietism in which this “old Adam” still lingered on somewhere in the background, causing trouble from time to time; and Paul’s point is precisely that in baptism the old Adamic solidarity is decisively broken. The “old self,” whole and entire, is put to death once and for all. This does not mean that the Christian cannot sin; but Paul’s sharp point should be felt before caveats and nuances are allowed to dull it. In baptism the whole person leaves the Adam-world for good, leaves it by death, a final one-way journey.

The purpose of this--the divine purpose, one must assume Paul means--is “so that the body of sin might be abolished” (the NIV’s “rendered powerless” is a possible meaning of the Greek, but Paul’s intention seems to be to insist that this “body of sin” should be destroyed, not simply left to one side without power), “so that we should no longer be under the lordship of sin.” We are still within the world of 5:21, the world of the two realms, sin and grace. Paul underlines the location of Christians on that map, emphasizing which of the two countries they now live in and (more to the point) which of the two overlords now rightfully claim their allegiance. “The body of sin” could have meant the whole human being, seen as the entity that “sin” has made its own. (“Body,” as often in Paul, means not “physical body,” but something more like our word “person,” including the physical aspect but also hinting at the “personality” that goes with it.) This would make good sense, were it not for the fact that it would then approximate very closely to the meaning of “the old self,” and since the abolition of “the body of sin” is the result of the crucifixion of “the old self” they cannot be identical. It is probably better to take “body” in the wider sense of “solidarity”: “the old self was crucified with Christ, so that the solidarity of sin might be broken, and we should no longer be enslaved to sin.” As in 5:21, the sovereign rule of sin has been decisively challenged by grace, the grace operative in Jesus’ obedient death and resurrection. When that grace enfolds the baptismal candidate, entwining the Jesus-story and the Jesus-reality with theirs, the communal solidarity that sin has created, generating the sense and the fact of helplessness as humans go along with all that sin suggests, is broken, and they are free to live under a different lordship.

Paul explains yet further with a cryptic aside (v, 7): the one who has died is freed from sin. That, at least, is what he clearly means; but the verb he uses, puzzlingly to us, is δεδικαίωται (dedikaiōtai, “has been justified”). Many commentators conclude that Paul is here invoking a well-known rabbinic principle about death paying all debts. I agree with Cranfield that this is unlikely, since Paul nowhere suggests that physical death settles all accounts in God’s sight. Verse 7 is not, then, a general principle invoked to explain the more specific point of v 6, but a comment about the one who has been co-crucified with Christ; such a one has been “justified from”--that is, cleared from--their sin.^²¹⁶ Once more, we may compare Gal 2:19-20: “I through the law died to the law.” Why, then, “justified,” rather than “freed”? The answer must be that, unlike most of his recent readers, Paul is able to keep the lawcourt metaphor still running in his mind even while expounding baptism and the Christian’s solidarity in Christ. The Christian’s freedom from sin comes through God’s judicial decision. And this judicial decision is embodied in baptism.

6:8. Having reached the heart of his analysis in v, 6, Paul now builds toward the conclusion in v. 11. As usual, a terse preliminary statement (v. 8) is drawn then filled out (vv. 9-10), before the conclusion is drawn (v. 11). The preliminary statement is this: “If we co-died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall also co-live with him” (συζάω syzaō “co-live” is another (συν- [syn-] compound). This “shall,” like the future in v. 5, is best taken as the logical future after “if.” It obviously has a future referent as well in the eventual resurrection life, but it cannot support the conclusion of v 11 unless it refers to the present time.

6:9-10. “We know” (this time we can be sure that Paul’s hearers did know this, at least in principle) “that the Messiah, raised from the dead, will never die again.” Jesus’ resurrection was not a mere resuscitation, like those of Jairus’s daughter, the widow’s son at Nain, or Lazarus (Mark 5:21-34 and par,; Luke 7:11-17; John 11:1-44). It is basic to all early Christian thinking on the resurrection (Paul is, of course, our chief witness, but what he says tallies well with the strange stories in the Gospels) that what happened at Easter involved the transformation, not merely the revival or resuscitation, of Jesus’ body, so that it entered upon a new mode of physical existence, which Paul saw as the beginning and sign of the renewal of all creation (see particularly 1 Cor 15:50-57; Phil 3:20-21). The transforming of Christians’ bodies at their resurrection is modeled, in Paul’s thought, on the transformation of Jesus’ body at his. Transformation, new creation, had already happened within God’s world, and would in the end happen on a grand scale. Paul once again insists that what happened to the Messiah happened also to those “in him.” He cannot emphasize strongly enough that the rule of sin and death has been decisively broken, and that Christians are no longer subject to it. “Death has no longer any sovereignty over him”; Paul is still working out the implications of 5:21, and urging his readers to do so too.

The balanced explanation of v, 10 has rhetorical force that should not be overpressed for theological precision. The Messiah did not die “to sin” in the same sense that he now lives “to God.” Paul’s meaning is that the Messiah came under the rule, the sovereignty, of sin and death; not that he himself sinned, but that he came, as Paul says in 8:3, “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” “To die to sin” meant, for the Messiah, that he died under its weight, but that in doing so he came out from its domain. And this happened έφάπαξ (ephapax), once and for all. There is no room here for the idea that the Messiah, or more especially his people, still live with a foot in both camps, or with one foot in the grave and the other by the empty tomb. Jesus, the Messiah, died once and once only, and was thereafter finished with death. If Paul had wanted to say (as some cautious interpreters, aware of the danger of a shallow perfectionism, have wanted him to say) that Christians have not completely “died to sin,” that the old Adam still lingers on in some way, he has chosen an extremely misleading way of saying it.^²¹⁷

“In that he lives, he lives to God”; in other words, the life Jesus now lives he lives in God’s domain, the realm of grace and righteousness. Paul has told Jesus’ story in terms of the two spheres of existence in 5:12-21--which is somewhat ironic, since there he himself represented the second of the spheres--in order that, through the identity of the Messiah and his people that is now established, he might demonstrate the true status of those “in Christ.”

6:11. The key word here is “reckon,” the same root as in 4:3 and elsewhere, and with the same bookkeeping metaphor in mind. Do the sum, he says; add it up and see what it comes to. The Messiah has died, once for all, and been raised; you are, by baptism, in the Messiah; therefore, you, too, have died, once for all, and been raised. The “reckoning” in question is to take place in the believing thought-processes of the Christian. The NRSV’s “consider” is fine, provided it is taken in a strong sense and not allowed to become more vague (“reflect on this”); the NIV’s “count yourselves” is an attempt to keep the bookkeeping metaphor alive. The point is not, as in some schemes of piety, that the “reckoning” achieves the result of dying to sin and coming alive to God, any more than someone adding up a column of figures creates the result out of nothing; it opens the eyes of mind and heart to recognize what is in fact true. It is here that one might almost say that Paul appeals for faith on the basis of baptism. Those who have received the sign of the new exodus in the Messiah are urged to think through, and to believe, what has in fact happened to them.

The point is this: on the map of 5:21, the Christian belongs in the second half, the kingdom of grace and righteousness, not in the first half, the kingdom of sin and death. Paul is well aware that sin remains powerful and attractive for the most well-trained Christian, and that physical death awaits all except those for whom the Lord’s return comes first (see 1 Cor 9:26-7; 15:51-52). He is speaking of a different level of reality. If someone challenged him and said that sin and death were just as powerful to them as they had been before their coming to faith, he would reply that they had not yet considered the seriousness of their baptism; just as if someone claimed that, now they had been baptized, evil had no attraction whatever for them, he would no doubt reply that they had not yet considered the seriousness of sin. From his whole corpus of writings, we know that Paul was a realist, about himself, about his fellow Christians, about suffering, pain, depression, fear and death itself. These were not enemies he took lightly. But his entire argument in this chapter so far, which anticipates that of 8:31-39, is that the Christian, facing these enemies, stands already on resurrection ground. This is ultimately a truth about the Christian’s Lord, the Messiah, but because of baptism it becomes a truth about the Christian himself or herself. “Reckon yourselves,” calculate yourselves, count yourselves, “dead to sin and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus.” This is the full answer to the question of v. 1.

NIV: ¹²Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. ¹³Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. ¹⁴For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

NRSV: ¹²Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. ¹³No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. ¹⁴For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

The three verses that follow are a genuine bridge from one half of the chapter to the other. They follow, obviously, as imperatives that bring the indicative of vv. 2-11 into practical reality; but they also set the terms for the discussion of slavery and freedom that is to come. They, like the rest of the chapter, still belong within, and explore, the world of 5:12-21, and vv. 20-21 in particular.

6:12. If the reign of sin has been broken in Christ, and if the Christian truly lives in Christ, then sin has no business continuing to rule his or her life. And it is now the Christian’s responsibility to make sure that this is so. If it is asked, as well it might be, what chance sin has got to rule, if the Christian has died to it, Paul’s implicit answer here has to do with the sphere over which sin, though no longer enthroned, can exercise powerful attraction: the “mortal body.” The Christian still possesses a body--that is, a whole person--which will die and, indeed, in terms of ethics, must be “put to death” (8:13), since it still has desires that must not be obeyed. This “mortal body” is not far from what Paul means by “the flesh,” which will be discussed in due course; it is one of his ways of indicating the continuing ambiguity of the life of the Christian, an ambiguity that in no way takes back the trenchant and definite statements made in vv. 2-11. The idea of “obedience,” which, of course, belongs will, the idea of being ruled by a sovereign, looks back to 5:21 and on to vv. 10,17; that of the bodily desires (έπιθυμίαι epithymiai) to 7:7-8.

6:13. The same appeal is now put positively, in terms of “presenting” or “offering” oneself obediently to a master--a theme that will recur frequently in the next few verses. The verb translated “present” can have sacrificial overtones, as indeed in the similar context in 12:1, but here it seems more general. The choice is stark, though Paul does not express it as an exact balance. Do not, he says, present your members to sin, but present your selves to God. Still on the map of 5:21, Paul is working within the logic of 6:1-11: it is no now technically impossible for the Christian to present his own or her own self to sin, since the self has died with Christ and been raised “in order to live to God.” What is possible--all too possible, alas--is for the Christian to present his or her members, the varied parts of personality, mind, or body (what some have misleadingly termed the “old Adam”), to sin.

Paul’s argument here is that this is illogical. To present one’s members to sin is to be out of tune with the reality of what a baptized Christian is, one who has been brought from death to life (drawing on v. 11). In spelling out the two possible courses of action, he sets the terms for the discussion of slavery that begins with v. 16: instead of sin/death and grace/righteousness, as in 5:21, it is now sin/unrighteousness and God/righteousness. Paul will now, for a few verses, actually use righteousness” as a metonym for the whole God-side of the picture, and hence even as a metaphor for God. He will add other terms as well, without changing the basic antithesis. For the moment he allows the argument of vv. 2-11 to issue in a clear appeal, reinforced with a promise in the next verse.

6:14. Sin, he says, will not have dominion over you.^²¹⁸ The reason is clear; you have transferred your abode, your status. You no longer live within the sin/death solidarity, but within the grace/righteousness/life solidarity. Sin, therefore, as a power, a force to be reckoned with, may still be at large in the world, but it has no authority over the Christian. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is precisely for this reason that Romans 6 is a call to that characteristically Pauline combination of faith and clear thinking. For the moment he undergirds the claim about being quit of sin’s dominion by the initially unexpected explanation: “for you are not under law but under grace.”

If he had said “for you are not under sin and death but under grace and righteousness,” we might have been less surprised. But clearly Paul is working toward a different point, parallel in some ways with the question of 6:1, which is now to be addressed in the second half of the chapter. Like a composer suddenly modulating into a new symphonic development, Paul turns the argument in a subtly different direction, toward the role of the law. This itself belongs within the passage (5:20-21) that has been the basis for chap. 6 so far. The terms are set in 5:20: The law came in alongside, so that the trespass might abound, but where sin abounded, grace superabounded. Paul has restated the antithesis of 6:1-13 in terms not of 5:21 but of 5:20, in order both to ward off possible misunderstandings that might arise and to prepare for his treatment of the law in chap. 7.

The idea of being “not under the law,” which occurs already in Gal 3:23 and 5:18, belongs closely with Paul’s previous negative statements about Torah. God’s righteousness is revealed “apart from the law” (3:21); justification is by faith “apart from works of the law” (3:28); it was “not through the law” that the promise came to Abraham and his seed that he would inherit the world (4:13), because “the law works wrath” (4:15). Romans 5:20 has hardly explained this negative point, though it has sharpened it up; the law stands on the Adam-side of the equation. It is sometimes said that Galatians has a negative view of the law, and Romans a positive one. This is a very inadequate way of describing the problem, as the evidence already demonstrates. In the present context Paul’s point is plain: those who belong to Christ, who have died and been raised in baptism, do not live in the Adam solidarity, and hence do not live under the law. This is exactly what we find in Gal 2:19: “I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God.” The implication is striking. When we set the theological explanation of 6:14b alongside 6:14a, Paul is saying that, if one did live under the law, sin would indeed have dominion. That will take all of chap, 7 to explain.

NIV: ¹⁵What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey–whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. ¹⁸You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

¹⁹I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. ²⁰When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. ²¹What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! ²²But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. ²³For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

NRSV: ¹⁵What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, ¹⁸and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

²⁰When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. ²²But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. ²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

6:15. Having examined the possible drastic consequences of embracing 5:21 the wrong way, Paul now turns to the possible drastic consequences of embracing 5:21 in the light of 5:20: supposing one is no longer under law, does that mean one is now a sinner? This question, like that of 6:1, is not confined to committing actual acts of sin. As the parallel in Gal 2:17 demonstrates, part of the point is that to come out from the sphere of Torah, for a Jew, meant that one was joining the “sinners,” the άμαρτωλοί hamartōloi), the lesser breeds without the law. “Shall we then be ‘sinners?’”

As Paul’s answer indicates, however, this time the emphasis is far more on actual behavior and far less on status, important though that remains. Once again the terms of his argument are the two spheres in which humans can belong, and the thrust is on the appropriateness of certain types of behavior for those in the God/grace/righteousness sphere.

6:16. As usual, he sets up the categories in an introductory sentence. “Do you not know”--this time he is invoking a general, fairly obvious, principle of human life, not a piece of Christian teaching—”that you are slaves of the one to whom you give yourselves in obedience?” The choice is between two obediences; but in Paul’s eagerness to state this he allows “obedience” to do duty both for the activity itself and for the one to whom it is offered: “whether to sin (which leads to death] or to obedience [which leads to righteousness].” The “obedience” to which one offers obedience is, of course, a periphrasis (or circumlocution); behind it stands the obedience of Christ in 5:19, enabling the word and concept to function as another synecdoche for the entire grace/righteousness sphere. This explains, though it hardly excuses, the unclarity. Paul’s point is that all human existence takes place in slavery, to one slavemaster or the other; his problem is that he wants to say as well that serving God in Christ is true freedom. That is why he apologizes for the language in v. 19. The two slaveries are not equal and opposite; the difference between the slavemasters produces a totally different sort of life for those who obey them.

6:17-19a. Paul places his readers within the diagram of the two slaveries, casting the sentence into the form of a prayer of thanksgiving (cf. 7:25; l Cor 15:57, and elsewhere). They were in the Adam solidarity; now they are in the Christ solidarity (again, the transition is definite, and cannot be watered down). He makes the point twice, from different angles. First, they were slaves of sin, but now have become obedient to Christian teaching; second, they were set free from sin, and have become enslaved to righteousness. It is the latter point, with all its latent absurdity in terms of “slavery” to the very thing that sets one most truly free, that draws from him the comment “I am speaking in human terms, because of the weakness of your flesh” (v. 19a); in other words, I am using a very basic illustration, to bring the point down to a level that anyone can understand.

The first of the contrasts, that in v. 17, has surprised many readers. Why does Paul not simply say “you have become obedient to grace,” or indeed “to righteousness”? Why has he developed the second half of the sentence in this unexpected way: “you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were committed”?

Commentators went through a phase, two generations ago, of questioning whether this whole clause might be a later addition to Paul’s text.^²¹⁹ This had more to do with wanting Paul to conform to a particular theological framework than with a serious attempt to read Romans. The “pattern of teaching” to which he is referring may well be a basic Christian confession. This could even be the baptismal confession itself, since the affirmation that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised him from the dead (cf. 10:9), is so clearly germane to what he is saying at this very point. Indeed, had he said “you were slaves of sin, but now you are under the lordship of the Messiah,” no one would have questioned the verse. Dunn’s suggestion, that by “the pattern of teaching” Paul is referring to Jesus Christ himself, nearly amounts to the same thing, but the phraseology of the verse points more to a particular teaching, such as we find in baptismal contexts in other letters (e.g., Col 3:1-17), than to the person of Jesus himself. What is more, instead of speaking of the teaching being given to them, he says that they were “handed over” to the teaching; something about the passivity of baptism may be reflected here, as the candidate submits to the dying and rising of the Messiah and acknowledges his lordship. This would then fit with the fresh meaning proposed by Gagnon on the basis of parallels in Hellenistic Judaism: “the imprint stamped by teaching, to which (imprint) you were handed over.”^²²⁰

The point, anyway, is that having been slaves of sin Christians have now been transformed, so that they have become obedient to this new pattern “from the heart.” Though this precise phrase is unique in Paul, it fits well with his emphasis on the heart in, e.g., 2:29; 5:5; 10:8-9. This is usually connected closely to the new covenant work of the Spirit, transforming the heart from the dark condition described in 1:21 to the renewal and illumination described in 2 Cor 3:2-3; 4:5 (the NIV’s “wholeheartedly” is slightly misleading; Paul’s emphasis is not on how much of the heart is put into obedience, but on the fact that it comes from the heart as opposed to being mere outward conformity; cf. 2:25-29). This is the point Paul will pick up in 7:6.

The result can be stated simply though paradoxically (v. 18): liberated from sin, you were enslaved to righteousness. “Righteousness” here is not so much “virtue” or moral goodness, but rather (as Paul will eventually make clear) a periphrasis for “God”; it is the divine righteousness, revealed in the death and resurrection of the Messiah (3:21-6), the righteousness through which grace has operated (5:21). It would in any case be odd, in view of the whole chapter, to think of Christians being enslaved to “virtue,” a quality they are to exhibit and even possess, rather than in some sense to God. Since Paul’s basic point throughout is the exodus motif of the freeing of the slaves, he is well aware that suggesting an alternative slavery is in principle odd, and is only introduced to make the point of the alternative allegiance more sharply; he uses this human illustration, he says, (literally) “because of the weakness of your flesh.” Whereas elsewhere such a phrase might refer to moral disability, it here simply denotes potential slowness of understanding. How Paul knew they would possess this “weakness of the flesh,” and how he imagined this remark would not be provocative, we can only guess.

6:19b. By way of explaining vv. 17-18 (γάρ gar, omitted by the NIV), Paul restates the command of v. 13, with minor variations. It is not clear how much a command can actually explain something, but it requires little elaboration to see how Paul’s logic works. He is explaining the balance of the two “slaveries,” and hence further unpacking the paradox of being “liberated” into a different “slavery”: just as you once presented your members as slaves to uncleanness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness. “Uncleanness” was part of the problem in 1:24, and is now one of the things at which the Christian must look back, as the Israelites looked back at the fleshpots of Egypt. Paul expands the category of the former slavery: “and to lawlessness unto lawlessness,” perhaps meaning “from one degree of lawlessness to another.” This word, in this context, has nothing to do with the theological category of being “not under the law”; it merely refers to wild and uncontrolled behavior.

The challenge comes in the balance of “so now” with “as then.” The energy and initiative that were put into uncleanness and lawlessness must now be put into the “slavery” to righteousness, which leads to “sanctification.”

Here for the first time we meet the word that for so long was regarded as stating the topic of this entire section (chaps. 5-8). It is clearly important, but not that important. Its primary meaning, in any case, is focused not so much on ethical qualities as on that which is necessary for a person to approach the presence of God; this has clear and demanding behavioral consequences, but the main emphasis takes us back to v. 11: “alive to God.” (The NIV’s “holiness” is therefore slightly misleading--unless one takes that term, too, in its strict sense, referring not just to behavior but to access into God’s presence.) “Slaves to righteousness unto sanctification” is thus God-oriented all through. Christians owe allegiance to the God whose covenant faithfulness rescued them in Christ; the result of this allegiance is that they become fit, through the obedience that wells up from the heart, for the presence of this same God. Paul is here unpacking further what was said so densely in 5:1-2.

6:20-22. By way of yet further explanation, he introduces a new element, which simultaneously brings the chapter back to its starting point at 5:21 (grace reigning through righteousness to eternal life) and points forward into the new topic of chap. 7 (the “fruit” borne by the two ways of life; cf, 7:4-5; this link is obscured by the NRSV’s translation of the same word here as “advantage” and the NIV’s “benefit”). What, he asks, was the result of the previous slavery? It carried a certain “freedom”: free from God and God’s righteousness. But the old slavery was a plant that bore a particular fruit, and the fruit was shame, leading to death. The new slavery, however, which Paul at describes explicitly as slavery “to God,” produces the fruit of sanctification, which leads to the life of the age to come. We are back on familiar territory.

There is a problem about the punctuation of v 21: Does the phrase “in regard to the things of which you are now ashamed” go with “what fruit did you have” or with “their goal is death”? The NRSV and the NIV take the former route. The NEB and the REB follow the Nestle-Aland Greek text in the latter, which is probably to be preferred because of the γάρ (gar), significantly untranslated in the NRSV and the NIV, at the end of the last clause (“things that now make you ashamed, for their end is death,” REB). The thought is the mirror of that in 5:5a: hope does not make us ashamed, because it truly leads to life; sin produces shame, because it leads to death. Here “shame” is not simply associated with the feelings of disgrace or humiliation that belong to the deeds of sin themselves, but with the fact that conduct of that type leads to the human disintegration of death (cf. 1:32). The contrast is with the new slavery, slavery to God, which brings Christians into “sanctification,” qualifying them for access to God’s presence, and so for the life of the age to come.

6:23. We are, then, back with 5:21, having thoroughly explored the territory it opens up. The two paths of humankind are characterized by sin and death on the one hand, and by God and life on the other. But, as in 5:15-17, they are not balanced exactly. Sin pays wages in proportion to what has been done. God gives generously, beyond all imagining, and the measure of that gift is the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah: “the gift of God is eternal life in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.”

In particular, chap. 6 has explored the meaning of 5:12-21 in terms of the human renewal that results from the “new exodus” of baptism. Paul’s main concern has not been, at this stage, to offer a detailed agenda for ethical action, though the general commands in chap. 6 are easily strong enough to sustain such a thing. His concern has been to emphasize that when Christians look at the Adam/Christ contrast they should be in no doubt that they belong on the “Christ” side of it. This must, of course, be put into effect by the moral effort of not letting sin reign in the “mortal body”; but this ongoing struggle is not to be thought of in terms of the Christian being some kind of a hybrid, half in Adam and half in Christ. The theology of baptism, both in terms of the “new exodus” and in terms of the dying and rising of the Messiah, prohibits such a thing. That which has happened has happened once and for all.

Paul has thus prepared the way for one of his greatest and most complex arguments. Add the Torah to this Adam/Christ contrast, and what do you get? As 5:20a indicated, an increase in “the trespass” (7:7-25). What is God’s response? As 5:20b-21 stated, the gift of superabundant grace, doing that which the Torah could not (8:1-11). What is the result? The renewal of the covenant, the prophetically promised replacement of the “old letter” by the “new Spirit,” resulting in nothing less than resurrection and the renewal of all creation (8:12-30). At the heart of it all stands the sending, the death and the resurrection of the Messiah, God’s son, to take on himself the weight of Adamic and Torah-driven trespass, and then to welcome into new life those who through suffering and prayer are led by the Spirit toward the promised inheritance. This is where we see at last what “the obedience of the Messiah,” the theological driving heart of 5:12-21, really meant.

1. Romans was not written to provide “a theology of the Christian life,” but Paul’s larger argument demands that at certain points he write more or less exactly that, and chapter 6 is one of the two clearest examples (the other being chapter 12). Among the principal things it insists on is that being a Christian means living from within a particular story. It is the subversive story of God and the world, focused on Israel and thence on the Messiah, and reaching its climax in the Messiah’s death and resurrection. No Christian can ever tell this story too frequently, or know it too well, because it is the story that has shaped him or her in baptism and that must continue to shape thought, life, and prayer thereafter. Otherwise one will be living a lie, allowing sin to continue exercising a sovereignty to which it has no more right.

The exodus story, which stands behind so much of this chapter, remains decisive. Many parts of the Christian church, fortunately, have retained it in their liturgy, particularly at Easter and the renewal of baptismal vows, reflecting an instinct sometimes superior to that of the church’s exegetes. The story of coming out of slavery into freedom--with all the new puzzles and responsibilities that freedom brings!--is the story of the gospel, the narrative within which Jesus deliberately framed his own final moments with his followers, the story on which he himself drew to give meaning to his death. And, just as the Jewish people discovered in the exodus story the character of their rescuing God, so the covenant faithfulness of this same God has been fully unveiled in the paschal events of Golgotha and Easter. Learning about the Christian fife and learning about the God revealed in Jesus Christ are two sides of the same coin.

2. It is a measure of how deeply this narrative has been woven into the consciousness of Western culture that a great many movements, national, political, social and cultural--including some that have been opposed to each other!--have told their own stories as liberation narratives. This reflects more than simply the influence of the Magna Carta on the subsequent British world and its derivatives; it is the sign of a culture stamped with the word “freedom” at a deeper level than that. The cry for freedom is one we instinctively recognize and want to respond to. At this point the exodus story offers itself as the true story of the human race, and the Christian retelling of this story in terms of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ must do so as well. This story, if true, cannot simply be one “little story” among others, as though it could take its place happily on the cultural smorgasbord, offering a certain kind of “religious experience,” alongside other stories that effectively enslaved humans and led them off to die. Even the postmodern critique that insists that all large metanarratives are instruments of slavery appeals to, and gets its power from, one story that, it assumes, is not: and that story is precisely its own version, filtered through many layers of cultural accretions, of the exodus narrative, the freeing of the slaves from Pharaoh’s yoke. The Christian gospel is, at this level, telling the story that all humans know in their bones they want to hear.

3. It is true that in appealing to this story all kinds of things have been said and done that in some way or other distort it, or even threaten to destroy it outright. The magicians of Egypt are also adept at producing miracles to validate their position. At the level of international politics, the word “liberation” has often simply meant that a particular country has been taken over by a different form of virtual political enslavement. At both a personal and a global level, the financial loan that announces it will set you free to do all sorts of undreamed-of things will then enslave you until you have paid it back. In terms of personal morality, the freedom of one person to expand their business empire may well be at the cost of the freedom of their neighbor to remain in business; and the freedom of people to express their sexual potential regularly results both in the diminution of the freedom of others (to put it no more strongly for the moment) and also in their own enslavement to destructive and dehumanizing habits of mind and body. Telling the story of freedom is, by itself, not enough. As Paul seems to have recognized in the second half of chap. 6, freedom from the slavery of sin involves a new kind of “liberated slavery,” obedience to the God who loves us and seeks our true freedom, our true humanness. Thus we have discovered, in the political sphere, that freedom from oppressive external regimes is not enough for a struggling country, in Africa or in the Balkans; with freedom come new responsibilities, to oneself and to one’s neighbors, and without these one may be worse off than in the original slavery itself.

4. This chapter shines a bright spotlight on the dangerous half-truth, currently fashionable, that “God accepts us as we are.” Indeed, the question of 6:1 could be read as raising exactly this question: Will “God’s acceptance” do as a complete grounding of Christian ethics? Emphatically not. Grace reaches where humans are, and accepts them as they are, because anything less would result in nobody’s being saved. Justification is by grace alone, through faith alone. But grace is always transformative. God accepts us where we are, but God does not intend to leave us where we are. That would be precisely to “continue in sin, that grace might abound.” Unless we are simply to write Romans 6 out of the canon, the radical inclusivity of the gospel must be matched by the radical exclusivity of Christian holiness. There is such a thing as continuing to let sin reign in one’s mortal body, and it will require serious moral effort to combat this tendency. The idea that Christian holiness is to be attained by every person simply doing what comes naturally would actually be funny were it not so prevalent. True freedom is not simply the random, directionless life, but the genuine humanness that reflects the image of God. This is found under the lordship of Christ. And this lordship makes demands that are as testing and difficult as they are actually liberating.

5. The pattern, the motive and the moral power to live in true freedom (in other words, in “slavery” to God) are found in that weaving of our life story together with the death and resurrection of the Messiah that happens in baptism. We are all too aware that thousands, perhaps millions, of the baptized seem to have abandoned the practice of Christian faith and life, but we are nevertheless called to allow the dying and rising of Christ in which we have shared to have its force and way m our own lives. If Jesus and his dying and rising are simply a great example, we remain without hope; who seriously thinks that they can live up to that ideal in their own strength? But if the fact of the messianic events has become part of our own story through the event of baptism, and the prayer and faith that accompany it, and above all the gift of the Holy Spirit of which Paul will shortly say more--then we will indeed be able to make our own the victory of grace, to present our members and our whole selves, as instruments of God’s ongoing purposes.

The main theme on the surface of Romans 7--and of the first paragraph of Romans 8, which belongs closely with it--is the Jewish Law, the Torah. This conclusion is unwelcome to some, not least because it appears to make the passage irrelevant for those who have never lived “under” the Torah. But Paul is here telling the story of Israel under one particular guise; this is the story that climaxes with the story of Jesus (8:3-4), and the way in which it does so is vital for understanding the basis of Christianity.

Paul is still, in fact, unpacking the last sentences of 5:12-21, and at this point 5:20 in particular: “the law came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out; but where sin abounded, grace superabounded.” The whole passage is held within the rubric of 5:21: “sin reigned through death, but grace reigns through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The antithesis between the two states, which has already been explored in chap. 6 from the standpoint of baptism and the release of the slaves, is repeated or alluded to several times in the present passage: 7:5-6 serves as an introductory statement; 8:5-10 offers further development, leading toward the conclusion, with echoes of 5:21 still prominent, in 8:10-11. This is where Paul shows, more fully than before, how it is that grace, i.e., God (8:3, 11, “the one who raised the Messiah from the dead”) reigns through righteousness (8:10) to eternal life, i.e., resurrection life (8:10-11 ), through Jesus the Messiah, God’s son (8:3-4, 9-11). Here, too, we see a further explication of the programmatic statement of 1:3-4: God’s gospel concerns the Son of God, David’s descendant “according to the flesh” (cf. 8:3), marked out as Son of God in power by the resurrection (8:10-11). What we have here, in other words, is part of the inner meaning of Paul’s gospel, and one of the central passages in the whole letter. The theology of this passage is not to be played off against “justification by faith,” either theologically or in terms of Its background in the history of religions. It is part of the continuous, unbroken argument of the whole letter.

In particular, this passage stands at the heart of the great section, chaps. 5-8. If the two very different paragraphs of chap. 5 form a foundation, and chap. 6 an initial platform built on that foundation, 7:1-8:11 must be seen as the main part of the building. It is not the whole; there is a further floor to go on top (8:12-30), and the view from there will be magnificent (8:31-39); but the passage now before us forms the working heart of the section--and, as we shall see, a vital part of Paul’s groundwork, also, for the argument of chaps. 9-11.

Romans 7 is not, then, a mere aside, as has sometimes been thought. True, Paul here does finally address the question that has been buzzing like an angry wasp around the edge of the argument so far: what exactly is being said about the law? Ever since 2:17-29; 3:19-21, 27-31; and 4:15 this has been a pressing matter; 5:13-14 and 5:20 sharpened it up, and 6:14-15 merely increased the tension. But it would be wrong to say, as many do, that Paul is therefore simply paying off an old debt, explaining something he should really have explained before. It is just as likely that the hints and suggestions he has already dropped are to be seen as anticipations of the argument he knew he was going to have to make, fragments of a main symphonic theme stated in advance.

What Paul is here doing, as the parallel between 7:5-6 and 2 Cor 3:1-6 should make clear, is setting out how God has renewed the covenant in Christ and by the Spirit. “What the Torah could not do, God has done” (8:3). The whole section is, at one level, a vindication of Torah against the imputation that it was identified with sin, or that it was responsible for death. But this vindication, which is also a vindication of the God who gave Torah in the first place, serves the larger purpose, which has been in view since at least 2:17-29, of showing how the continuity of God’s purposes, clearly seen in 3:21-4:25 and 5:12-21, includes within its purview the discontinuity between the dispensation of Torah and the dispensation of the Spirit. Second Corinthians 3, in fact, functions as an oblique but important commentary on this theme, as, of course, does Galatians.^²²¹ Covenant renewal involves, of course, covenant affirmation: to renew something is to affirm it, not to abolish it. Yet renewal also implies the transcending of the old; when, as in this case, the old involves sin and death, renewal is needed to produce righteousness and life (5:21). The logic of 5:20-21 is then worked out as follows: the renewal of the covenant (7:1-8:11) results in the renewal of creation, and of God’s people with it (8: 12-30).

The passage is therefore an integral part of Paul’s argument for assurance. His overarching theme in chaps. 5-8 is that God glorified those whom God justified. What stands in the way of this glorification? Sin and death, of course; but also Torah. “Condemnation,” in other words--eschatological condemnation, the final sentence of judgment--still appears to hang over those who have come, by faith, into the Christ-family, the worldwide Abraham-family. It is all very well to demonstrate from Genesis 15 that those who believe the gospel are declared to be God’s “righteous” people. But must they not face the final judgment of which 2:1-16 spoke so powerfully? Is there not still a κατακριμα (katakrima), a condemnation, awaiting them on the basis of their present behavior? Romans 7:1-8:11 is designed to show, by way of reply, that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1; for the way in which this verse functions as the “conclusion” of the argument, even though coming at the start of a long final paragraph, see the Commentary on 8:1-11). Paul’s analysis of Torah, and now of Christ and the Spirit, shows that the condemnation that might have been supposed to be still future has been dealt with. Those who are in Christ, who are indwelt by the Spirit, can face the future with confidence.

At the same time, as chap. 11 makes clear, Paul is anxious that those who have come out from under Torah, in some sense, should not turn and despise that God-given dispensation. With an increasing number of commentators, I assume that Paul’s audience, though predominantly had mostly been either God-fearers or maybe even proselytes before their conversion to the Messiah, Jesus. That is, they had in some sense been “under the law,” even though not, for the most part, Jews by birth. To be sure, the significance of Paul’s argument in this dense and dramatic passage cannot be confined to its “relevance” to one sub-group of one church at one moment of history. If this is truly how the covenant was renewed, it is of abiding importance for all Christians at all tithes, if Torah, rightly understood as God’s law, poses a threat to God’s people, rather than a promise, the threat must be shown to have been dealt with. But, precisely because of the increasingly complex situation in the young church at large, Paul must provide, simultaneously with the argument that one is “not under the law” (precisely because he is not dealing with the Galatians, who were all too eager for the Jaw, but with the Romans, who may have been all too eager to get rid of it!), a vindication of Torah against the slurs that it might all too easily incur; 7:1-8:11 accomplishes all these tasks.

The other major theme of chaps. 5-8, which here also reaches its center, is that of the new exodus. 7:7-12 contains several echoes of the story of the children of Israel at Mount Sinai. But that is just one telltale symptom of what is going on. If chap. 6 speaks of the coming through the water by which the slaves are freed, and chap. 8 speaks of the wilderness wanderings, led by the strange presence of God, through which God’s people journey toward their promised “inheritance,” what we should expect in between is an account of the covenant formed between God and the people, the covenant that in the biblical story took place on Sinai, with the giving of Torah on the one hand and the presence of YHWH, dwelling with Israel in the tabernacle, on the other. That, it seems, is more or less exactly what Paul has written.

With, of course, heavy irony. Torah, the original covenant bond between YHWH and Israel, has now become part of the problem. As 5:20 declared, it has exacerbated the sin of Adam. It cannot, as it stands, constitute Israel as the promised eschatological people of God, the true people of Abraham (see 4:15). The story of the new exodus is thus in tension with the story of the first one, and this tension gives the whole passage its peculiar flavor and its central problem. I can imagine someone objecting to the scheme I have just proposed on the grounds that it appears too complicated, too clever; and the obvious response is that exactly that complexity, exactly that “cleverness,” is what we then find in the detail of Romans 7. The “problem of Romans 7,” as articulated in its closing summary, is of someone--the celebrated “I,” about which more anon--who has been freed and who has not been freed, who appears to be both liberated and still in Egypt. This person serves the law of God with the mind, but with the flesh the law of sin. In terms of chap. 6, this person appears to be on both sides of the either/or that Paul so clearly set out: enslaved to God, enslaved to sin. The exodus both has and has not happened. This is exactly Paul’s analysis of the plight of Israel under Torah. In terms of the original exodus, Israel is the free people of God. In terms of the new one, the exodus from sin and death, Israel is still in slavery. The very Torah that spoke of the original freedom reminds Israel daily of that continuing servitude, and its consequences.

Paul’s view of Torah here is, however, more subtle still. As 1 have argued elsewhere, 8:1-11 constitutes among other things the vindication of Torah itself.^²²² When God does what Torah wanted to do but, through no fault of its own, could not, Torah is affirmed. Torah is not, as in some sub-Pauline theological schemes, a bad thing, to be jettisoned with a sigh of relief; it is a good thing, given by God, no longer the defining boundary-marker of God’s people, but given a position of honor. In particular, this passage shows the positive role that Torah has played in the history of salvation, even at the very moment when it might seem most negative. We should not miss the significance, in a Jewish writer like Paul, of the little word ϊνα (hina), especially when repeated. “The law came in alongside, so that the trespass might abound” (5:20); “sin, so that it might appear as sin, was working death in me through the good thing [i.e., the law]” (7:13b); “so that sin might become exceedingly sinful through the commandment” (7:13c). This is none other than the purpose of God; this is the reason, according to this passage, why Torah was given in the first place.^²²³ The end of that line of thought comes in 8:3, where Paul affirms that, having heaped up sin into one place, God condemned it all at once. Where sin abounded through Torah, grace superabounded.

At the center of Paul’s argument for assurance, therefore, and his exposition of the new exodus, we find one of his clearest statements of the meaning of Jesus’ death (8:3-4). To be sure, neither here nor anywhere else does he offer a complete “doctrine of atonement.” But, whereas he often refers fleetingly in the course of an argument to Jesus’ death, leaving us to fill in the gaps and make assumptions about his total meaning, here the sending and death of God’s son (a rare phrase, as we noted earlier, but always decisive when it appears) stands structurally at the apex of the long argument, providing relief for the tension that had built up in chap. 7, and setting the tone for what is to come. “God condemned sin in the flesh”; that is the primary reason why there is now “no condemnation for those who are in the Messiah, Jesus” (8:1). And the means whereby God passed that judicial sentence in that flesh, the flesh of Jesus, was that sin had there been drawn together into one place: “where sin abounded, grace super-abounded.” What appeared to be the negative work of Torah thus has the deeply positive result: God has dealt with sin once and for all on the cross, and now the life of the Spirit is given to bring the new-exodus people home to their promised inheritance (5:1-5, 6-10; 8:12-30).

It will be clear from all this what answer 1 give to the question that is often referred to as “the problem of Romans 7.” Who is the “I” that dominates 7:7-25?

The first vital move is to rule out any possibility that Paul might here be referring to the “normal Christian.” Despite the powerful advocacy of commentators like Cranfield and Dunn--and the present writer knows the force of the argument, since he held it himself for several years before coming to his present view--we must give full weight to Paul’s repeated assertions, throughout 6:1-8:11, that the baptized Christian is not “in sin,” not “in the flesh,” not “under the law.”^²²⁴ The whole point of the argument of chap. 6 was to emphasize that the Christian is not “in Adam,” but that “the old man” has died with Christ, thus being now, theologically speaking, “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.” The fact that sin could still, however illogically, “reign” in one’s mortal body (6:12) does not affect this question of status, or the question of being “not under law, but under grace” (6:14-15). The section 6:17-18 could hardly be clearer: you were once slaves of sin, but you are now slaves of righteousness; 6:22 repeats the point. Verses 4-6 of chap. 7 then repeat it again from another point of view: “you died to the law … so that you might belong to another”; “when we were in the flesh, the passions of sin, through the law, were at work … but now we are set free from the law … to be enslaved in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter.” It is simply impossible, after this oft-repeated statement, to suppose that Paul will then expound a view of the Christian in which he or she is, after all, “fleshly, sold under sin” (7:14), or that he or she is “enslaved to the law of sin” (7:25). And just in case we had still missed the point, Paul makes it abundantly clear in 8:9: “you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.”^²²⁵

This is not to say, of course, that normal Christian experience knows nothing of moral struggle and frustration. Part of the problem in the history of exegesis of this passage is precisely that preachers and theologians have read Romans 5-8 as a “theology of the Christian life” and, finding here a portrait of moral struggle that seemed familiar to the sensitive Christian striving after holiness and ever more aware of falling short, assumed that that was what Paul was talking about. Conversely, those who from time to time have taught that it is after all possible for a Spirit-filled Christian to be sinlessly perfect in the present life have spoken eagerly, as part of their theme, about leaving Romans 7 behind and going on to Romans 8. Romans 7 then becomes a transcript of the “experience,” either of the non-Christian, or of the Christian who is still struggling to live a holy life by means of “law” (not usually conceived, in such schemes, as the Torah, but rather as a more general moral law one tries to follow by one’s own efforts instead of relying on the Spirit). The debates that these and similar views have occasioned within popular piety are as endless, in their way, as the scholarly debates that have circled around the same passage but with rather different agendas (why one should assume that scholars are not interested in holiness I do not know, but it some times appears to be the case, just as pietists are not always interested in what the text actually says). Many of those who have taken a firm stand on the “Christian” reading of 7:14-25 have done so, it appears, out of a desire to rebut the shallow teaching on holiness that the alternative seems to inculcate.^²²⁶

These debates are rendered beside the point when the passage is read in its full context within the ongoing argument of Romans, and with full attention to the meaning of “the law” throughout the passage. “The law” here, to repeat, is the Mosaic law, the Torah, and this is one of Paul’s fullest discussions of it. And those who are “under the law” are, basically, Jews, and, by extension, those who attach themselves to Israel, i.e., God. fearers and proselytes.

The “I” of 7:7-25, which on any showing is a remarkable rhetorical feature, may then be approached within Paul’s two main controlling narratives: (a) the story of Adam and the Messiah, and (b) the new exodus. Torah intrudes within the first (5:20); Sinai is a key moment in the second. Within these, Paul appears to be speaking of Israel: of Israel under Torah; of Israel at the time when Torah arrived (7:7-12); of Israel continuing to live under Torah thereafter (7:13-25). But he is not thereby speaking of how Israel under Torah would itself analyze the problem. Though in a sense this is Paul’s own story, as a Jew who had lived under Torah himself, it is not a transcript of “how it felt at the time.”^²²⁷ Against this idea, and all psychologizing interpretations that have derived from it in the history of research, stands Paul’s own statement in Philippians 3: in his pre-Christian life he had been “blameless” in regard to “righteousness under the law.” Even granted that he is there making a different point, requiring a positive statement of his pre-Christian position, it is virtually impossible to square that clearly autobiographical passage with a would-be autobiographical reading of Romans 7.^²²⁸ The present passage seems, then, to be a Christian theological analysis of what was in fact the case, and indeed what is still the case for those who live “under the law,” not a description of how it felt or feels. It is a vivid, rhetorically sharpened way of saying something very similar to what Paul said in 2:17-29: those who embrace Torah find that Torah turns and condemns them. It is not impossible that Paul has in mind at least a sidelong reference to the rabbinic discussion of the two “inclinations,” the evil inclination and the good inclination; but his picture of the “I” is not in fact exactly like the rabbinic one, and the passage can in my view be understood without making this a central motif.^²²⁹

The point of the “I,” as a rhetorical device, then becomes clear. Though we can learn a certain amount on this topic from considerations of how “autobiographical” language was used in ancient rhetoric, the main thing this teaches us is simply that such language could be used for purposes other than literal descriptions of one’s own actual experience.^²³⁰ Paul must be allowed to make his own use of the rhetorical possibility. And his motive here is not far to seek. Particularly in view of where his argument will take him in chaps. 9-11, he will not describe the plight of his “kinsfolk according to the flesh” as if this were some foreign or alien concern. This is his own story, and he will feel its theological tension and pain as his own (see 9:1-5; 11:14, referring to non-Christian Jews as ή σάρξ μου [hē sarx mou, “my flesh”); see also the Commentary on 3:5, 7). It is a way of not saying “they,” of not distancing himself from the problem, from the plight of Israel.

Crucial to most interpretations of the “I” has been the change of tense in the middle of the long “I” passage, the switch (that is) from the past tense in vv. 7-12 to the present in vv. 14-25, with v. 13 as a bridge between them. This has sometimes been explained in terms of Paul first looking at his own previous experience, or perhaps that of someone else, in vv. 7-12, and then turning to describe his own current experience in vv. 14-25. This, though attractive within the non-exegetical schemes of thought mentioned above, is unwarranted when the letter is understood in its own terms. The change of tense has to do, rather, with the change from the description of what happened when Torah first arrived in Israel, the time when Israel recapitulated the sin of Adam (5:20a; 7:9-11 ), to the description of the ongoing state of those who live under the law, who find themselves caught between the one exodus and the other, freed from Egypt and yet not freed from the “Egypt” of sin and death.

Among the other things the rhetorical “I” enables Paul to accomplish is the analysis of sin under Torah in such a way as to show that the death of Jesus has provided its perfect remedy. The reference to the “sin-offering” in 8:3 (see the notes) exactly suits the context, since that sacrifice was designed to deal with unwilling or unwitting sin, and Paul has so described sin-under-the-law as to make it just that. This explains, at least in part, the lengthy descriptions of moral inability (“that which I do I know not,” and so forth) in vv. 15-16, 19-20.

A further explanation for the lengthy description of “life under the law” may perhaps be found--though this can never be more than a likely guess--in the pagan parallels to 7:14-20. In a long tradition from Aristotle to Ovid and beyond, pagan moralists had observed the puzzling fact that even the most morally acute among them could see, and approve, the good, while still continuing to choose and perform evil.^²³¹ Paul’s description is at certain points strikingly reminiscent of this theme, which must have been well known among serious-minded Greeks and Romans. It is probable that Paul is deliberately echoing, or alluding to, this tradition. But why?

Help is at hand in Galatians. In Galatians 5 Paul argued, with polemical intent, that if one put oneself under the law one would simply reside once more in the realm of the “flesh.” In other words, becoming Jewish (by getting circumcised and taking on the yoke of Torah) will simply bring you back to the same pagan state as you were in before--exactly the argument of Gal 4:8-11. The parallel between Gal 5:16-18 and Romans 7 is quite close: “the flesh lusts against the Spirit,” writes Paul in Gal 5:17, “and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are opposed to each other, so that you cannot do the things you want.” And then the punch line: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” Precisely the point of Rom 7:1-8:11.

What happens when we transpose this back into Romans 7? If Paul’s point is that Torah increases and exacerbates the plight of humankind “in Adam” (so that, for instance, 2:17-29 places “the Jew” firmly on the map of 1:18-2:16, 3:19-20 re-emphasizes the point, and 5:20 draws it together in a striking summary), what better way of elaborating this insight than by so describing the situation of Israel under Torah as to place Israel by implication fair and square on the map of the puzzled pagan moralist? This is simultaneously, of course, a way of saying that the gospel of Jesus Christ upstages the best in the pagan tradition, too. But Paul’s point, I take it, is the other way around: when Israel under Torah--including himself, Paul, in his former life!--does its best, delighting in God’s law in the inner person, longing to perform it to perfection, all Israel in fact attains is the same level as--Epictetus, Seneca, and Aristotle himself. “The law came in, so that [Adamic, general-human] trespass might abound.” “The flesh,” that which Israel shares in common with all humankind, prevents any boast in the Torah. The Torah simply shows up sin (3:19-20).

The consonance of this exposition with what Paul has said about Torah and Israel already in the letter gives supporting weight to my overall case. And this argument then dovetails nicely with the wider allusions we have observed at regular intervals to key features of Roman culture--the gospel, the justice of God, and the peace of God, all of which challenge and upstage Caesar’s equivalent. Without for a moment leaving the home base of Jewish and biblical thought that provides the foundation for all his theology, Paul has directed a typically Jewish challenge to the pagan world. Within that again--also as a typically Jewish move!--he has suggested that those who do not embrace his own construal or Judaism--i.e., allegiance to Jesus as Messiah--are themselves no better than pagans.

All that has been said so far indicates that when Paul is talking about “sin” in this passage—and the word, in one form or another, occurs over twenty times in these thirty-six verses--he means exactly what he means in the letter so far. “Sin” is a power let loose in the world, a deceptive and corrosive parasite that has entwined the whole human race in its tentacles and is slowly choking it to death. And the manifestation of sin is the performance of actions that run counter both to God’s purpose for humankind in general (actions that result from idolatry, as in 1:18-32) and of actions that cut across God’s law, the Torah, in particular (as in the present passage and, e.g., 6:19). There is no warrant, in other words, for the theory that was popular in Germany in the mid-twentieth century, following the expositions of Kümmel and Bultmann in particular, and is still to be found in some commentaries and expositions: that when Paul here spoke of “sin” he did not mean so much the breaking of God’s law as the attempt to keep it and so to earn a “status” for oneself independent of God and God’s grace.^²³² On this view Paul was charging Israel, and all humans who live “under the law” in a sense far wider than simply the Mosaic Torah, with a kind of meta-sin; not the breaking of the law, but pride in keeping it, or in attempting to do so. This theory gained its apparent force from the combination of the Lutheran critique of “human works,” the attempt by human beings to make themselves righteous, and the existentialist critique of a life lived inauthentically, by human arrogance. But it has little to commend it as exegesis of Romans 7. The problem of the “I” is not that it can perform the law but ought not to try, but that it rightly delights in the law but cannot perform it. Bultmann’s exegesis ends up with a negative view of Torah that has little to do with Paul’s more subtle exposition.

Little, but perhaps not absolutely nothing. One of the effects of Romans 7, in its analysis of the plight of Israel under Torah, is to ground the further critique of Israel that Paul will mount in chaps. 9-10. There he does indeed describe Israel as “seeking to establish its own righteousness.” I shall argue at that point, to be sure, that this sentence, too, cannot be taken in the Bultmannian, and indeed more broadly Lutheran, sense; that it refers, not to human works attempting to establish a moral claim upon God, but to the claim of ethnic Israel to be, permanently and inalienably, the covenant people of God. But Paul does indeed charge Israel here with a kind of meta-sin, albeit not the one Bultmann and others thought. And it is true that this charge looks back, within the spiraling argument of Romans, to the present passage, not least with Paul’s assertion that Israel is “ignorant” of God’s righteousness (10:3): that which Israel does, Israel does not know, as in 7:15. But the meaning of chap. 10 cannot be read back into chap. 7. Paul is not simply repeating himself. He is making a new point, developed from, but not identical to, the present one.

The present passage is notable for the sudden entry of the Spirit, like a fresh character in a play. There have been isolated hints earlier on (1 :4; 2:29; 5:5), but nothing at all by way of exposition. Parallels with other passages where the Spirit plays a leading role might have led us to expect more before now (see the parallel between Romans 4 and Galatians 3, where, in v. 14, the Spirit plays a key role in fulfilling the Abrahamic promises; see also 2 Corinthians 3). It is almost as though Paul has been deliberately holding back in order now to unleash this theme with full impact. 7:6 announces what is to come: we are now slaves, he says, “in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter.” Then at last, in 8:2-11, there are no fewer than eleven references to the Spirit, followed by a further nine in vv. 12-27.^²³³

The role Paul here assigns to the Spirit is that of doing what the law could not. Or rather, this is the role Paul gives to Christ and Spirit together; we must not make the mistake as is sometimes made, of supposing a neat antithesis of either Law/Christ or Law/Spirit. Paul has not simply extracted “the law” from a theological scheme and dropped in “Christ” or “Spirit” instead. Things are richer and more complicated than that. He is not, after all, constructing an abstract soteriology, but telling the story of God and Israel, which reaches its strange, paradoxical, yet deliberate and consistent, climax in the sending of the Messiah and the sending of the Spirit (cf. the close parallel with Gal 4:1-7). He is describing how it is that the covenant with Abraham is fulfilled, and the covenant of the Torah renewed.

The main function he gives to the Spirit in this passage, therefore, is that of giving life: the life the Torah promised but could not give (7:10), the life that will consist ultimately of the resurrection of the body (8:11). But this life is not merely future. As in chap. 6, the Christian already stands on resurrection ground; and the status affirmed in 6:4-5, 8-11 is here filled out with practical content, as the Spirit who will give life to the “mortal body” anticipates the resurrection by enabling those “in Christ” to have a new mind-set, to submit truly at last to God’s will, even to God’s law (!), and to please God in their behavior (8:5-8; cf. 1:21-2, 28; 12:2; the last is especially important). This then gives rise to the exposition of the “wilderness wanderings” of God’s renewed people (8:12-27), led by the Spirit who enables them to leave slavery behind and to live as God’s children.

The Spirit can thus be spoken of in exodus-language, as having been instrumental in the ultimate liberation of God’s people: “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (8:2). That is to say, (a) the Spirit has been located on the outline map provided by 5:21--sin and death ranged against grace, righteousness and life; (b] the Spirit is part of God’s way of making grace superabound where sin abounded (5:20b). This is the “exodus” of chap. 6 described now in terms of the analysis of the problem in 7:7-25. Only if we keep a clear eye out for the connections in Paul’s ongoing argument will we discover just how tightly woven the texture of Romans actually is, how interconnected all the themes actually are, and hence how consistently Paul is making, and developing, his main point.^²³⁴

What then opens up to our gaze is that Paul has described the sending of the Messiah, and the gift of the Spirit, in language that, precisely within the “new exodus” theme that characterizes so much of Romans 5-8, can be seen in terms of the presence of YHWH with Israel in the wilderness, dwelling in the tabernacle, in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. The “sending” of the son, as is often enough remarked, belongs within second Temple Jewish thought in terms of the “sending,” or the coming to Israel, of Wisdom, or the Shekinah, or sometimes both together. In Sirach 24 the divine Wisdom comes to dwell in the Temple in Jerusalem, and is simultaneously embodied in the Mosaic Torah (Sir 24:8-12, 23; cf. Wis 9:9-10). We now find that the “indwelling” of the Spirit (8:9, 11) belongs very closely with the same theme. This is “Temple” language, echoing the Jewish belief that the Shekinah “dwelt” within the wilderness tabernacle and then the Temple itself. Whereas, before, the indwelling force was “sin” (7:17-18, 20), now it is the Spirit. In the two other passages where Paul says the same thing he makes the point more explicitly: you, Christians, are therefore God’s new Temple (1 Cor 3:16; 2 Cor 6:16). In the latter passage Paul quotes Lev 26:11, and, as in Romans 8, goes on to expound the identity of Christians as God’s sons and daughters; in 2 Cor 6:18 this involves a quotation of 2 Sam 7:14, in which the promise to David, that God will build him a house, is democratized to include not only David’s son but all Christians. See also 1 Cor 6:19.

The exposition of the Spirit’s work in Romans 8, therefore, belongs not only with the theme of assurance but also with that of the new exodus, confirming and filling out the picture we have drawn so far. The people of God, having come out of the Egypt of sin and death, are led through the wilderness by the Son and the Spirit, the new realities to which the old language of Wisdom, Shekinah, and even Torah itself are now seen to point. (So closely are the Son and the Spirit identified in this passage, while still being distinguished in thought, that Paul can speak of the Spirit as “the Messiah’s Spirit,” 8:9, and of “the Messiah” being “in you,” 8:10). Paul has taken some of the central Jewish language about the way in which Israel’s God is known in action, saving and leading Israel to the promised inheritance, and has reused it dramatically of Christ and the Spirit. As might be said of the parallel passage in Gal 4:1-11, so we might truly say here: from this point on, if the doctrine of the Trinity had never existed, we might be forced to reinvent it. Paul cannot say anything more exalted than this about the Messiah and the Spirit; but what he has said belongs exactly on the map of Second Temple Jewish language about YHWH, the one God of Israel, and the saving presence and action of this one God.

It only remains to draw attention to the way in which the argument of the present section advances the thought of the letter as a whole. By explaining the renewal of the covenant, the vindication of Torah, and the way in which God gives resurrection life to those in Christ, this passage fills out the argument for assurance, providing the basis for the picture of new creation that follows, and hence for the great celebration at the close of chap. 8. But, precisely because it does this by highlighting the failure of Israel according to the flesh, the failure not because of their own will but because of indwelling sin (the latent “Adam” within Israel, so to speak), it intensifies the problem that must then be dealt with in chaps. 9-11. Or, to put it the other way around (since chaps. 9-11, too, are not to be seen simply as an aside, dealing with an awkward matter that has come up in the course of the letter, but rather as one of the main things Paul wants to say), in order to show what God has been doing with the ethnic family of Abraham, Paul needs first to show in graphic detail how their life under Torah has been the means of sin’s being magnified--how, in other words, “the law came in so that the trespass might abound.” This is the depth-dimension of the problem of Israel that Paul must address. It is not merely that a majority of Jews has not, as it happens, believed the gospel, but rather that the God-given Torah has been part of the problem, part of their stumbling over the stumbling-stone (9:32). Israel’s failure as mapped in chap. 7 is the foundation for that further failure of which Paul speaks in 9:30-10:4: Israel has been ignorant of God’s righteousness, and has sought to establish its own righteousness. The problem of the church’s attitude toward unbelieving Israel cannot be addressed unless this dimension is fully grasped; Paul needs, in other words, to write Romans 7-8 before he can write Romans 9-11. At the same time, the sequence of thought we have observed between 5:20; 7:13; and 8:3--the sequence in which the strange God-given purpose of Torah was to heap up sin precisely in order that it might be dealt with in the “flesh” of the Messiah--stands at the heart of Paul’s analysis of Israel’s strange fate in 9:14-29, and of the solution he offers in chap. 11.

Romans 7:1-8:11 also stands behind chaps. 12-16, though further in the background. The central argument of that section, presented in 14:1-15:13, is that Christians from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds should accept one another as fellow members of the family. It would be wrong to see 7:1-8:11 as merely a coded way of making this point to one or other particular group within the church, as has sometimes been suggested.^²³⁵ But it should be clear that the present passage, in its exposition of the new covenant as doing that which the Torah offered but could not perform, provides the theological groundwork for what Paul will there say.

The passage 7:1-8:11 is thus part and parcel of Paul’s larger argument about the righteousness of God. (With this, indeed, the question of relevance with which this overview began--of how a passage about the Jewish law might be of abiding interest to those who have never lived “under” it--is also answered.) This, Paul is saying, is how God has been faithful to the covenant: to the promises with Abraham, and now, strangely, even to the Torah itself. What God has done “apart from Torah” nevertheless claims, so to speak, the backing of the Torah: “the Torah and the prophets bear witness to it.” And what has been done is, of course, done supremely in and through Jesus the Messiah: the death of Jesus in 8:3 is the spelling out of the “righteous act” and the “obedience” of Jesus in 5:18-19, and behind that in 3:24-26. Thus “the gospel of God” (whose content is the Son, born of David’s seed according to the flesh, marked out as Son by the Spirit through the resurrection) unveils the righteousness of God. And here all this advances the specific argument: those whom God justified, them God also glorified.

The argument of the passage falls into clear paragraphs. The introduction (7:1-6) leads to the question of whether the law and sin are identical (7:7-12). This produces the second-order question, whether the good law, despite being exonerated from the first charge, is nevertheless the cause of death (7:13-20). This in turn leads to Paul’s paradoxical conclusion about the law (7:21-25). Paul can then expound the divine answer (8:1-11). which also, naturally, serves as the foundation of the further exposition of life in the Spirit (8:12-30).

NIV: ¹Do you not know, brothers–for I am speaking to men who know the law–that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? ²For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. ³So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man.

⁴So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. ⁵For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. ⁶But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

NRSV: ¹Do you not know, brothers and sisters--for I am speaking to those who know the law--that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime? ²Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. ³Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.

⁴In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. ⁵While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. ⁶But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.

7:1. The NRSV and the NIV both omit the first word of the chapter, which in Greek is the single letter η (ē, “or”). As usual with Paul’s connections, the word matters: he is looking back to 6:14-15. “You are not under the law … or do you not know that the law only rules over someone during their lifetime?” In other words, you could only assume that as a Christian you were still under the law if you ignored one of the most basic things about how the law operates. Paul will emphasize in the first six verses of the chapter that a death has indeed occurred that results in the Christian’s being “no longer under the law.”

We are still working, then, within the picture set out in chap. 6: the death of the “old human” (6:6) because of which the baptized Christian is no longer “in Adam” but rather “in Christ.” With this we should recognize, too, that Paul has in mind the further twist in Adamic humanity noted in 5:20. The law intensified the Adamic problem, but grace has dealt with matters at that very point (cf. 1 Cor 15:56-57). Sin will not have dominion over those who were under the law but are now in Christ. They are no longer in the position where the law exacerbated sin; rather, they are the recipients of that grace that has superabounded where sin abounded. This is Paul’s subject here.

He is speaking, he says, “to those who know the law.” He calls them his family,^²³⁶ and seems to want them to identify themselves with him in this argument, just as he is himself identifying with ethnic Israel, Israel under Torah. This, indeed, may be part of the reason why, having spoken of “I” throughout 7:7-25, he suddenly switches to the second-person singular, “you,” in 8:2 (on which see the Commentary on 8:1-11). He is addressing them as people who know the law. This could, of course, mean Roman law in general, in which, as in Jewish law, death pays all debts; but in view of the subject matter it is far more likely to mean the Jewish law. When this is put together with the statement in 7:4 that “you [pl.] died to the law,” it becomes the more likely that most of his addressees had actually been in some sense “under the law.” Since the majority among his readers was probably Gentile, this must mean that they had been either God-fearers or proselytes. (The alternative, that he is here addressing only the Jewish minority within the Roman church, seems unlikely in view of the central role of this passage within the central section of the letter.)

The point at issue, picking up what 6:7 said about sin, is that the law can only rule a person during that person’s lifetime. Death brings a Person out from under the rule of the law. The commentators find parallels for this in rabbinic and other codes, but the point is so wide and obvious that we do not need to explain it further. That is hardly the case, however, with what follows.

7:2-3. By way of explanation, Paul offers what is sometimes taken as an illustration (the NIV adds/ “for example,” supporting its subheading “an illustration from marriage”). But what job does Paul intend this picture to do? That depends on how we see it fitting in to the rest of the passage, especially v. 4. It is frequently stated that Paul’s argument does not quite work. He seems (it is said) to envisage the “marriage” being between the person concerned (“you”) and the law; but then it is the person, not the law, that dies.^²³⁷ To put it like this, however, is to miss the extent to which the entire chapter, including the “marriage” scene, grows directly out of 5:20-21 and the whole of chap. 6, and continues to unfold its meaning.

The point of vv. 2-3 is not difficult: the law is the thing that binds the wife to the husband, so that if the husband dies the wife is free, both from the husband and from the law that bound her to him. Thus, while the husband is alive, she will be an adulteress if she goes with someone else, but if the husband dies she is “free from the law” (Paul is already hinting at the direction of this argument, and indeed at its roots in 6:14-15). This does not mean that the law was the “first husband,” but that the law bound the woman to the “first husband.” Thus, if she takes another husband she will not be committing adultery. So far, so good.

7:4. The problem can then be stated succinctly: “you” died, but “you” now belong to another! Paul is not arguing from the detail of the “illustration,” seen in the abstract; he is making the point he wanted to make anyway, to which the marriage picture contributes. The latter half of the verse appears to suggest that the Christian is now, in some sense, the “bride” of Jesus the Messiah (“the one who was raised from the dead”), and it adds the extra detail, that this new union will “bear fruit for God” (for the Christian as the bride of Christ, see 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:25-32). This picks up the image of fruitbearing from 6:21-22, but sets it now within a context where its meaning is more precisely childbearing.

What then about the first half of the verse? “You died to the law”; the thought is very close to Gal 2:19, “1 through the law died to the law” (another use of the “autobiographical” mode of speech, which Paul will presently adopt here). It means “by death, you came out from under the law’s domain,” as v. 1 implies.

But who is it, then, that has “died”? The previous chapter gives a clear, unambiguous answer, and indeed repeats it seven times: “we died to sin” (6:2); we “were baptized into Christ’s death” (6:3), “we were buried with him into death” (6:4), “we were planted with him in the likeness of his death” (6:5), “our old person was co-crucified” (6:6), “we died with Christ” (6:8), “reckon yourselves dead to sin” (6:11). It might seem tedious to list all these, were it not for the fact that chap. 6 is so little invoked to explain 7:4, and that commentators who have referred to 6:6 to do so are frequently waved away by those who insist on treating chap. 7 as though it were an entirely separate discussion. Once we link the law with sin, however (the point of 5:20, which Paul will address in 7:7), “you died to the law” can only have one meaning. “You” in the first half of 7:4 is the “former husband”; “you” in the second half is the “wife.” Or, if we prefer, “you” in the first half is the “old human being” of 6:6--the “old Adam,” or perhaps better “the person ‘in Adam.’ “You” in the second half, at least when the “re-marriage” has occurred, is the person “in Christ.” Just as later in the chapter the argument hinges on the double “I,” so here it hinges on a double “you.”

What then does Paul mean by qualifying “you died to the law” with the phrase “through the body of Christ”? Presumably something close to what he meant in Gal 2:19 by saying “I am crucified with Christ,” as the explanation of “I through the law died to the law.” Here, again, the proximity to chap. 6 should help. The whole clause appears to be a shorthand way of saying three things simultaneously: (a) the bodily death of Jesus the Messiah is the representative event through which the Messiah’s people die “with him” (6:4-11 ); (b) you are in the Messiah by baptism, and therefore shared that death; (c) your solidarity with the Messiah can be expressed in terms of your membership in his “body.” The extent to which this last thought is strongly present (see, for instance, 12:5) is a matter of debate, but not of great importance. What matters is to recognize that the thought is built on the first half of chap. 6, itself an elaboration of chap. 5.

7:5-6. Paul now explains v. 4 with a two-sided description of the old life and the new. This, as is widely recognized, functions as the double heading over the two following sections, 7:7-25 and 8:1-11. It also awakens echoes of the “new covenant” theology of 2 Corinthians 3; this is the means by which Paul, evoking various biblical passages, can affirm the goodness of Torah without affirming its abiding validity as the boundary-marker of God’s people.

“When we were in the flesh”: this striking formulation tells us once and for all that “flesh” for Paul does not mean simply the physical substance of which humans are made.^²³⁸ “The flesh” denotes physicality seen on the one hand as corruptible and on the other as rebellious; it is another way of saying “in Adam,” of demarcating that humanity that is characterized by sin and consequently by death. To be “in the flesh” for Paul is to be determined by “flesh” in this sense, i.e., to live under the domain of sin and death, and thus to be in the condition marked by the first half of the various antitheses both of 5:12-21 and of 6:16-23. It does not mean, in our sense, “to be physical,” in some Platonic divide between the material and the non-material (see 1 Cor 15:50: “flesh and blood” cannot inherit the kingdom of God--but the resurrected or transformed body can and will; cf. Phil 3:21). It is clear from 8:9 that Christians, even while living ordinary human lives and facing ordinary human suffering and death, are, in Paul’s terminology, “not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.”

Those “in the flesh” discover that “the passions of sins” are at work in them to bear fruit for death. That much we could have gathered from 5:12-21, and indeed from 1:18-2:16. But Paul adds a vital extra phrase: these passions are “through the law,” which both the NRSV and the NIV gloss as “aroused by the law,” in the light (no doubt) of 7:9. Paul does not at this point explain what he means, though he shortly will. Here we merely note that, strange though it is to think of the law arousing sinful passions, this is consonant with 6:14-15 and, behind that, with 5:20 yet once more.

“But now we have been released from the law.” “But now” awakens echoes of 3:21 and 6:22, introducing the moment of freedom, of redemption. The verb Paul uses is the same as in v. 2 (“she is released from the law concerning the husband”). Though the root meaning of the word is “annul,” “make ineffective,” or “abolish,” which might more properly have gone with the law than with the person who is (or has been up until now) “under the law,” when used of the person it must mean “discharged” or “released,” the force being that they and the law have nothing more now to say to one another. Paul explains this again by reference to “our” death: “having died [to that] in which we were held captive.”^²³⁹ “Having died” is another reference to the death of the “old human being,” as in 6:6; “the thing which held us captive” is the law once more. And the result is, again as in chap. 6, that the old slavery has been exchanged for a new one: we now serve, literally, “in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter” (the word for “serve” is δουλεύω [douleuō, “to serve as a slave”], hence making the link with 6:16-22, as explicitly in the NRSV).

The contrast of the old and the new ways of being a slave evokes 2 Cor 3:6, where it is explicitly “new covenant” language: “God has qualified us,” says Paul, “to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” This generates the great contrast of 2 Cor 3:7-18, whose multiple overlapping associations with Paul’s thought throughout Rom 7:1-8:11 are too numerous and complex to track here.^²⁴⁰ What matters for our present purpose is that, rare though Paul’s explicit references to the “covenant” may be, that word can appropriately reflect something absolutely foundational to his thinking: the faithfulness of God to all that had been revealed and promised in the past. This is not undercut by the fact that, because of sin and death, it was necessary for God to do something that seemed totally new in the present. Underneath the radical discontinuity caused by the gospel’s breaking in upon Israel and the world, caused indeed by the earth-shattering death of the Messiah, there remains the faithfulness of the creator and covenant God to the promises made to Abraham, and indeed to the implicit though ineffective promise in the law, the promise of new life for a worldwide family, despite the sin and death brought into the world “through the one man” (5:12).

Pauline “covenant theology,” then, is not opposed to “apocalyptic” theology, to a sense of the radical inbreaking of God’s judgment and salvation in Christ. The covenant provides the fuller context for that. And, as the present passage and 2 Corinthians 3 make clear, the new covenant is designed precisely to take account of the problems inherent in the original covenant. The latter was written in letters on tablets of stone, but the former is to be written on the heart.

We are here very close, too, to Rom 2:29. There Paul distinguishes “the Jew who is one in secret” from one who is so merely “in what is manifest,” i.e., outwardly; and he thus contrasts “the circumcision of the heart,” which is a matter of the Spirit, with “the letter.” This elliptical formulation, on which see the notes, brings together several things simultaneously: the contrast of two groups of people, their characterization as “the Jew” and “the Jew outwardly,” circumcision of the heart and circumcision of the flesh, and the letter and the Spirit. The point of all this for Romans 7 is to confirm that here Paul is dealing with “the Jew,” living under the “letter” of the Mosaic law, and contrasting this with the Spirit-given new life in Christ; and to show that throughout 7:1-8:11 we should keep in mind the discussion in chap. 2, which, demonstrating the inadequacy of the Torah to create and sustain ethnic Israel as God’s people, pointed forward to the creation of a new people in whom God’s will would be done, described somewhat oxymoronically as “the uncircumcision that keeps the law” (2:26-7). At that stage it was impossible, without more explanation, to see who was being spoken of. The present passage provides that explanation.

A new mode of service, then, has been opened up, a mode to which Torah pointed but which it could not bring to pass. God has renewed the covenant in Christ, and what the Torah could not do has now been done. The new “enslavement”--enslavement to “obedience” (6:16), to the “pattern of teaching” (6:17), to “righteousness” (6:18), to God (6:22)--is one in which the heart is transformed by the Spirit (5:5), in which the whole person is promised new life (8:10-11). This life in the Spirit will dominate chap. 8.

Verses 5-6 introduce the rest of the passage, not least by saying something so outrageously provocative that it must at once raise the question that will lead in to Paul’s main argument. If “the passions of sins” are aroused by the law, what are we saying about the law? Is it virtually identical with sin itself?

NIV: ⁷What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” ⁸But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. ⁹Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. ¹⁰I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

¹¹For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. ¹²So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

NRSV: ⁷What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” ⁸But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. ⁹I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived ¹⁰and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. ¹¹For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. ¹²So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

The new paragraph extends, not to v. 13 as in several editions and translations, but to v. 12. The larger unit (vv. 7-25) is clearly subdivided, as can be seen from Paul’s careful and logical connectives, into vv. 7-12, 13-20, and 21-25. The first asks, “Is the law sin?” and answers the question by telling the story of the law’s arrival on Sinai and Israel’s recapitulation of the sin of Adam. This was not the law’s fault; the law was the unwilling tool of sin itself. The second, following the sin/death logic that dominates the entire section, asks: “Did this good law, then, cause ‘my’ death?” The answer again is, No. The point this time is made by telling the story of those who live under the law, emphasizing that it is still sin, not the law--and not the “I,” remarkably enough!--that is responsible. The third paragraph draws the conclusion in terms of the the double-sided law, corresponding to the double-sided “I”: because of sin, the law cannot give life, and the “I” cannot attain it. This states the problem of the law, and of the “I,” in the terms Paul will address in the first paragraph of chap. 8.

7:7a. The opening question faces at last the issue that has been in the background since 2:17-29, more sharply since 5:20, and most urgently since 7:5. If the law stirs up the passions of sins, surely this means that the law and sin are virtually identical?

7:7b-8a. Paul’s initial response is to deny the charge (“certainly not!” NIV), and to state again the point that seemed to lead to it (“yet, if it had not been for the law I would not have known sin,” NRSV; the NIV, translating άλλά [alla] as “indeed,” misses the force of this: Paul is actually conceding the point that had led to the charge, not yet undergirding his emphatic rebuttal of it; cf. the similar use of alla in 7:13, omitted altogether by the NRSV, but correctly translated as “but” in the NIV). But what does it mean “to know sin”? The NIV takes it simply in terms of information, knowing about sin: “I would not have known what sin was.” The same problem is repeated in the next line, which Paul intends as an explanation (γάρ gar): I should not have known covetousness had the law not said “you shall not covet.” This time the NRSV joins the NIV: “I would not have known what it is to covet.” Yet v. 8 surely indicates something stronger than simply information (cf. 3:20: through the law comes the έπίγνωσις άμαρτίας [epignōsis hamartias, “the knowledge of sin”]). It is not so much that the law gave the “I” information about sin in general, and coveting in particular; the law produced coveting, and hence sin. Sin, that is, “seized its opportunity”^²⁴¹ in the commandment (Paul regularly uses ή έντολή [hē entolē, “the commandment”] in this chapter, more or less as a synonym for “the law,” though sometimes with specific reference to the particular commandment just quoted). And, exploiting this opportunity, sin “worked in `me’ all kinds of covetousness.”^²⁴² The law, in other words, was the channel not only for knowledge about sin but for knowledge of sin in the sense that, as a result of the process, “I” knew, from the inside, what sin meant in practice. This still, of course, appears to be an indictment of the law, though Paul is building in to his picture the description of “sin” at work that will result in the law’s exoneration four verses later. The law, weak, was not the source of the problem, merely the unwilling channel.

But what event is Paul describing? The reference to the tenth commandment in v. 7b (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:21) might indicate that he was referring to the time when the law was first given on Mount Sinai. Alternatively, many exegetes, taking the “I” literally, have supposed Paul to be referring to his own experience on first becoming aware of the commandments, perhaps at his bar mitzvah, especially if that coincided with the onset of puberty and hence of sexual desire (the tenth commandment, as 4 Maccabees 2 implies, was often taken to refer to sexual desire in particular, while obviously being of wider application). But the larger context in Romans indicates well enough what event Paul is thinking of. 5:20, once again: the law came in, so that the trespass might abound. This is not about Paul himself; it is about the moment in Israel’s history, and indeed (5:13-14) in the history of humankind, when the arrival of the law meant that, as at the beginning, humans were faced with a specific command, so that the miscellaneous sin that had existed “from Adam to Moses” (5:14) would again become “trespass,” breaking a known law.

That explains, as will become clear in the next three verses, the fact that Paul seems here to be referring also to the “fall” of Genesis 3 (particularly with v. 11: sin “deceived me … and killed me,” alluding to Gen 3:13; cf. 2 Cor 11:3). We should not attempt to decide between these two (Sinai and Eden): Paul’s point is precisely that what happened on Sinai recapitulated what had happened in Eden. Other Jewish exegesis linked the two moments; Paul’s view falls well within recognizable Second Temple understandings of the meaning both of covetousness and of the primal sin.^²⁴³ What he has done here is so to tell the one story, that of Israel, that echoes of the other, that of Adam, are clearly heard. This is, of course, just what we should expect if he is indeed expanding the programmatic statement in 5:20: “the law came in, so that the trespass might abound.”

7:8b-10. Paul’s next statement seems to sit uncomfortably with 5:13-14. There, sin was not counted apart from the law, but was “in the world” even in the absence of the law, its presence being witnessed by universal death. What then does Paul mean, “apart from the law, sin is dead”? He seems to indicate some kind of potential life for sin beyond simply producing death; when individuals sin and die, sin is not growing, not flourishing in new ways. When, however, the law appears, then sin gains, as we might say, a new lease of life. “I was once alive apart from the law” (for the last phrase, cf. 3:21); this, we must assume, refers within Paul’s controlling narrative to Israel in the pre-Mosaic state, corresponding to Adam in the garden before the fateful command had been issued. “But when the commandment arrived,” i.e., on Sinai, “sin sprang to life, and I died.” There may be an allusion, here and indeed throughout this passage, to the fact that, in the exodus story, the giving of the commandments was the moment when Aaron and the children of Israel made the golden calf--the incident to which some subsequent rabbinic writings looked back with sorrow as the time when Israel imbibed iniquity (see the Commentary on 1:23). Sinai and Genesis 3 still go hand in hand.

The result (v. 10b) is that the commandment that promised life proved to be death for “me” (cf. 4 Ezra 9:33-37: those who received the law and sinned perished; the law, however, does not perish but remains in its glory). The allusion to the tree of life in Genesis is hidden here under the more direct reference to Lev 18:5 (which Paul quotes in Rom 10:5, in a section belonging closely with the present one] and to the covenantal passage in Deut 30:15-20, passages that promise life for those who keep Torah (see Deut 4:1; 6:24; 8:1; cf. Ps Sol 14:1; see also the Commentary on 10:5-11 ). This is, for Paul, the real irony of Torah, and it points forward to the paradoxical fulfilling of Torah’s intention by the Spirit in 8:1-11. Torah intended to give life (Paul personifies Torah, though not as obviously and regularly as he does “sin”), but because of sin all It could give was death.

7:11. By way of explanation, Paul repeats what he had said in v. 8 about sin “taking its opportunity” through the commandment. This time, instead of merely showing that sin produced in “me” all kinds of covetousness, he draws the conclusion: sin deceived me, and so killed me. It is at this point that the disguise of the personified “sin” is close to disappearing: we are clearly talking about the serpent in the garden, though Paul has told the story in such a way as to allow other levels to be heard as well, which, had he been more explicit, might have been drowned out. The preliminary picture is complete: (a) sin and the law are quite distinct; (b) sin has taken over the law, the law that promised life; (c) using it as a base of operations, sin has produced the opposite of that which the law promised. This is of course why “no human being will be justified” in God’s sight on the basis of Torah (3:20); it is why the Torah became “a dispensation of death” (2 Cor 3:7-11); it is why, despite the glory of the first exodus and the first covenant, a new exodus and a renewed covenant were necessary. However, this is not the whole story. As will shortly become apparent, through Paul’s raising of the necessary second question, even the apparently negative side of Torah has its remarkable and positive purpose in the strange divine plan.

7:12. The Torah, cleared of identity with sin, can be reaffirmed as God’s law, holy and just and good. This statement ranks with 3:31b as among those places where Paul most vehemently affirms the goodness of the Torah, rejecting outright the road that would lead, and did lead in the next century, toward Marcionism. This, indeed, in the light of 1 11:11-32, may be seen as one of Paul’s math aims in various parts of Romans: to warn Gentile Christian readers, especially those who had had some connection with Judaism before their con. version and would now be tempted to reject everything to do with it, against such a course. They cannot cut off the branch on which they are sitting, or rather the trunk of the tree of which they are branches (11:16-24). At the present stage of the argument, it is vital that they do not react against the Torah itself (as so many of Paul’s subsequent readers, since at least the second century, have been tempted to do), but that they see instead the strange but vital role it has played within the saving purposes of the one God. Romans 7 is poised between 3:1-9 on the one hand and 9:30-10:13 on the other, facing the same question (was God’s covenant with Israel simply a mistake?) and giving it the same answer (no, but its purpose was stranger than had been imagined).

NIV: ¹³Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

NRSV: ¹³Did what is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.

¹⁴For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. ¹⁵I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Though v. 13 forms in a sense a bridge between vv. 7-12 and vv. 14-20, it stands naturally at the head of the latter section. It asks, and gives the preliminary answer to, the question that determines the direction and shape of the verses to come. Too little attention has been given to the actual arguments Paul mounts here; the passage is not a string of loosely connected musings, but a carefully structured sequence of thought. Verse 13a raises the question, whether the law, now proved to be good, was nevertheless the cause of death; v. 13b gives the initial answer, that it was sin, rather than the law, that brought death; this is then further explained (γάρ gar) by v. 14 and what follows. Verse 14 can hardly, then, be the start of a new section, as has so often been supposed.^²⁴⁴

Verses 13-20 then further subdivide. Verses 13-16 are basically about the goodness of the law, despite sin and death in the “I”; vv. 17-20 develop the thought of the paradoxical behavior of the “I” in order to show that it is not really the “I” that is at fault, but once again sin.^²⁴⁵ The “I” here, as I argued in the overview, is to be seen primarily as Israel under Torah, with the point being made that, even under Torah, Israel belongs in the Adam-sphere, the realm of sin and death (5:20; cf. 6:14; 7:5).

7:13a. The question is the natural one, granted that Paul is still thinking in terms of 5:20-21. “Sin reigned in death,” and Torah seemed to have exacerbated that rule; 7:5 has repeated the point vividly. But was the good law, now firmly distinguished from “sin,” thus responsible for death? Granted that sin was responsible for the initial deceit, using Torah as a base of operations, is Torah then responsible for what happens as a result, i.e., death? Once again Paul answers: of course not! His main object will now be to back up that denial, and in so doing to advance the underlying argument about the power and sinfulness of sin itself, toward the point where it is finally dealt with (8:3).

7:13b. All the blame attaches once more to sin itself. Sin was at work in “me” through the law (“the good thing”); and that work of sin, not of the law itself, produced death. This is the basic explanation that goes behind the dense statement of 7:5, and exonerates Torah from willing complicity in the process. But Paul has here built into this answer a double statement of purpose: it was sin, so that it might appear as sin, working death in me through the law, so that sin might become exceedingly sinful through the commandment. This is the key to understanding not only the sequence of thought that leads from here to the decisive statement of 8:3-4 but also, in a measure, Paul’s whole mature thinking about the purpose of Torah, or, better, the purpose of God in giving Torah.

We must obviously assume that the repeated ϊνα (hina) indicates not the intention and purpose of sin itself, but the intention and purpose of God. This reflects the similar hina in 5:20: the Torah came in alongside, so that the trespass might abound. But why would God want the trespass to abound? Surely this is counterintuitive?

Not if we understand Paul’s point in this passage (and, more compactly, in Gal 3:21-2). God’s way of dealing with sin, it appears, is not to hold it at arm’s length. It is not a matter of damage limitation, attempting to restrict the operation of sin. Torah, apparently, was not after all given in order that Israel might become a sin-free zone. Rather, God’s way with sin takes account of the fact that sin has infected the entire human race, Israel included, and that no law could possibly be given that would deal with the problem. If life could come by the law, then the law would have been the means of covenant membership and hence of life (Gal 3:21b; cf. Gal 2:21). If “the commandment which was unto life” (Rom 7:101 really could have given life, God would not have needed to do anything further (8:3-4). No: sin needed dealing with in a more radical way, at the place where it had become resident, that is, at the heart of the human race itself. And it was Torah’s peculiar task to draw sin to its height, to let it appear in all its true colors, to be shown up as “exceedingly sinful.” Sin must be seen to be sin.

But not only seen. The point of 7:13, coupled with 5:20, is that it looks on to 8:3, God gave Torah in order to draw sin into one place, in order that it might there be dealt with fully and finally. Where sin abounded, there grace superabounded; and that latter phrase is, of course, a periphrastic reference to the death of Jesus as the decisive event of obedience through which sin is condemned and the human race freed from its clutches. Thus the κατάκριμα (katakrima), the “condemnation,” of 5:18 is removed (cf. 8:1: there is therefore now no katakrima for those in Christ Jesus), precisely because sin itself has been condemned once and for all (8:3). The place where it has been condemned is in the “flesh” of the Messiah, representing the Israel where “sin had abounded,” and thereby representing the human race whose Adamic “flesh” was where sin had taken up residence. We shall say more about this at 8:3 itself. But it is vital that we notice already where Paul’s thought is moving, The double hina of v, 13 points to the understanding of the cross that emerges from the entire argument.

7:14. In order to exonerate Torah, Paul now analyzes further the “1” that is caught up in sin and hence in death. To do this, he contrasts the true nature of Torah with the nature of the human being (and the Jew precisely as a person “in Adam”), Torah is spiritual, he says, but “I” am “fleshly,” sold under sin, i.e., a bond-slave to sin. He does not here explain what he means by “spiritual”; this is part of the vindication of Torah, and belongs with 7:12. But in appealing to the basic spirit/flesh contrast that runs through so much of the present section, and which effectively extends and clarifies the Adam/Christ contrast of chap, 5 and the slave/free contrast of chap. 6, he is now placing Torah on the God-side, the Christ-side, of the equation, and placing the “I” on the Adam-side. (We should beware, here as elsewhere in Paul, of supposing that the spirit/flesh contrast had anything very much to do with the contrast of non-physical/physical.)^²⁴⁶

He does, however, explain a bit more what he means by “of the flesh.” The word here (σάρκικός sarkinos) is rare, and takes its meaning in Paul not so much from its original lexical force but from the heavy weight of Paul’s technical term σάρξ (sarx, “flesh,” with all its connotations; cf. I Cor 3:1, 3; 2 Cor 3:3; 10:4). Paul appears to use both sarkinos (“fleshly in type”) and sarkikos (“fleshly in character”) in both senses. The point he is making is that the “I,” the Jew, Israel “according to the flesh” (cf. 9:5; 11:14; 1 Cor 10:18), belongs within the Adamic solidarity, still held as a slave within the “Egypt” of sin and death; and that the law, in its promise of life, is ontologically as well as morally mismatched with Adamic humanity, Israel included. The problem is not the Torah, but the sort of person “I” am.

7:15. Paul’s explanation of “I am fleshly” is an account of the behavior of the “I” (that v. 15 explains v. 14 is clear from the initial γάρ [gar, “for”], omitted in both the NRSV and the NIV; these connectives are, as usual, all-important in keeping a grip on Paul’s argumentative strategy). The initial clause is the key: “what I do, I do not know.” The NRSV and the NIV, perhaps not unnaturally, flatten this out into “I do not understand.” The word γινώσκω (ginōskō) can indeed mean “understand,” and that is part of the meaning here; but the way Paul develops the thought through to 8:3 suggests that he is saying something stronger than that the “I” is intellectually puzzled by its own behavior; he is referring to the actions in question as “sins of ignorance.” This is further explained (a second gar) in the second half of the verse in terms of unwilling sin: what “I” do is not what “I” want, but what “I” hate. Here is the, paradox of Israel under Torah; seeing what is the right thing to do, delighting in it and wanting to perform it, and yet discovering that what is performed instead is the thing the mind had rejected as hateful. But precisely within this paradox Paul has hinted at part of the solution; ignorant sins, and unwilling sins, are both taken care of within God’s atoning plan (see on 8:3).

We must stress, as with 2:17-29, that Paul is not here talking about each individual Jew. He knew himself to have been “blameless in terms of righteousness under the law” (Phil 3:6). He is talking of Israel as a whole. As a nation, Israel delighted in Torah formally and officially (as it were), but was always aware that for the most part Torah was not followed. Israel was not a holy nation, obeying Torah gladly; sin, Adamic life, was evident all through. In the light of his Damascus road experience, and his whole subsequent body of belief, Paul would turn this critique upon himself and his “former life in Judaism” (Gal 1:13), believing that even in his zeal for Torah, in fact specifically in the actions to which this zeal had led him, he had been missing the way quite radically.^²⁴⁷ This has to do, however, with the next major turn in the argument (9:30-10:4), and is not the primary meaning of the present paragraph. His point here is rather, through the vivid rhetorical “I,” to present the plight of Israel-as-a-whole under Torah, seeing Torah’s picture of a truly human life, deeply honoring to God, and constantly failing as a people to attain it.

7:16. The conclusion from vv. 13-15 can then be drawn, reinforcing the “certainly not” of 13a: If, then, I do the thing I do not wish, I agree that the law is good. In other words, any charges against Torah--that it might have been evil in itself, that it might have caused “my” death--are dropped by the “I.” The “I” basically agrees with Torah, and confirms its goodness, even while observing that in its own life it cannot perform the good things Torah prescribes.

7:17-20. The next four verses say nothing about Torah, but concentrate wholly upon the “I” and its own relation with sin. Torah has been exonerated; Paul will presently draw conclusions about it (vv. 21-25), and will then show God’s remedy for the whole situation (8:1-11). But for the moment, having thus cleared Torah of complicity in sin and death, he must focus on the “I,” and particularly on its “fleshly” state, developing what was said in vv. 14b-15 in order to do so. Contrary to much popular opinion, this small section does not portray what is usually meant by the “cloven ego” (this increases the probability that Paul is not here dependent on the rabbinic idea of two “inclinations”; see the Overview). The “I,” though frustrated, is actually, like Torah, exonerated, with the blame going (of course) to sin. Paul, having moved the problem off Torah on to the “I,” now moves it one stage further, on to sin itself.

7:17. “Now, however”; this is a new point, getting to the heart of the problem. “It is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells in me”: a remarkable statement of not just diminished but abrogated responsibility. The “indwelling” of sin is a new idea, introduced for the first and only time in Paul’s writings, perhaps formed on the analogy of the indwelling of the Spirit, which Paul will contrast with this condition in 8:9, 11. Just as blaming sin for death was Paul’s means of excusing Torah from complicity, so now sin is blamed for the present “fleshly” state of the “I.” The underlying point seems to be not so much that humans in general are not responsible for their evil actions (“it was sin that made me do it”), as that Israel qua Israel is not responsible for the particular sin of breaking Torah. This verse functions, then, as a new proposition, which the next two verses will explain, and which v. 20 will then restate in conclusion.

7:18-19. The idea of being indwell by sin is now advanced in its negative form, to explain the remarkable statement of v. 17 (gar, “for,” which links v. 18 to v. 17, is omitted by the NIV). It is sin that dwells within the “I,” that is, within its flesh, not “a good thing.” Paul may perhaps be alluding to “the good thing”--i.e., the law--as in v. 13, though this remains uncertain.^²⁴⁸ He would then be repeating the contrast between the Torah and the self from v. 14. The point he is pressing, in any case, is that what indwells someone is what gives them power to perform that which otherwise they would want to do but remain incapable of: literally, “for to will lies close to me, but to perform the good, not.”^²⁴⁹ Without something “good” “dwelling in me,” the “I” cannot bring the good will into reality; again, Paul is preparing the way for the contrast with the Spirit’s indwelling, doing what the law could not, in the following chapter. His further explanation in v. 19 is a near-repetition of v. 15b, with the addition of “good” and “bad,” and the replacement of “the thing I hate” with “the thing I do not want.” The effect of all this is to drive a wedge between the “I” that wills. or does not will, certain things, and the “flesh,” where sin dwells and where “the good thing” does not dwell.^²⁵⁰ The “I,” Israel according to the flesh, is then on the same side, so to speak, as Torah; but, like Torah, it is powerless to prevent sin from doing what it chooses in the flesh, and eventually bringing death.

7:20. The conclusion is then drawn, repeating virtually word for word what was said in v. 17, which opened the subsection: “if, then, this is indeed my state, that I do that which I do not wish, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.” It is exceedingly rare that Paul repeats anything in this way, and it gives us pause. Why does he emphasize this point so strongly? Have traditional readings missed something within the dense jungle of chap. 7?

My suggestion is that, as well as being concerned to exonerate Torah from any blame, while nevertheless showing how it has been used within the kingdom of sin and death, Paul is simultaneously anxious to show how the “I,” though fleshly and the dwelling-place of sin, is also exonerated, though still subject to sin and death. To remind ourselves what the “I” refers to--Israel according to the flesh, Israel “in Adam,” Israel whose “Adamic” condition has been exacerbated by Torah--is to glimpse the solution. Paul is concerned to say that, though all the charges laid at the door of Israel, from 2:17 onward, are true, valid, and indeed grave, there is nothing wrong with being Israel in itself. Just as, with 7:5-6, were back close to Paul’s argument in 2:26-9, so now we are aware of the next question and answer Paul there had to address (3:1-2): What is the advantage of being a Jew? Much in every way. As with 2:17-3:9 and 11:1-32, Paul is determined simultaneously to maintain both the God-givenness of the covenant with Israel, the goodness of being Jewish, and the impossibility of finding eschatological life through that Jewishness alone. At the heart of Paul’s exposition of the effect and meaning of Torah, indeed so hidden within it as usually to go unnoticed, we find a key part of Paul’s root-and-branch rejection of what would later become Marcionism. Israel itself, the “I” that continues to live under Torah, and continues to discover that it points to sin within Israel and so condemns it to death, is God-given; Israel’s delight in Torah (think of Psalm 119!) is a good, not a bad, thing; the problem is simply that that which is wrong with the rest of the human race--namely, indwelling sin--is wrong with Israel too, and Torah can do nothing about it. Here, in the middle of Romans 7, we find a short passage that picks up the theme of the vindication of Israel from early in chap. 3 and anticipates the full-dress statement, as the spiral of argument gradually unwinds, in chap. 11.^²⁵¹

NIV: ²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God–through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

NRSV: ²¹So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. ²²For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, ²³but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

7:21. The argument, which as we have seen has been both about the Torah and about the Israel that has lived under Torah, is now brought to its double conclusion. As usual, Paul opens with a broad statement, which is then filled out by a couple of explanatory verses, before he moves to a conclusion--though this time the conclusion is more of an outburst.

“This, then, is what I discover about the law”: Paul is here drawing the conclusion from his long argument. This proposal about the meaning of 7:21 can be sharpened up by pointing out that the verb here (εύρίσκω heuriskō, “I find”) can have the sense, not merely of “come upon by accident,” but of “reaching one’s findings” as a result of a careful deliberation.^²⁵² One could translate it, “This, then, is my conclusion about the law.”

But the real problem here is: What is the “law” that he now refers to? Most commentators and translators, including the NRSV and the NIV, have supposed that what Paul finds is not “the law,” but “a law”--a general principle, a theory, a fact of observation, with nothing to do with “the law,” the Torah, at all: “I find it to be a law,” in the sense of “a regular pattern.” Such readers have then gone on to suggest that in the remaining verses of the chapter, and in the first few of chap. 8, Paul is as it were playing with the word νόμος (nomos, “law”), using it in a bewildering variety of senses, few if any of which refer in any direct way to Torah.

This must be addressed case by case. But our presupposition, if we are reading Romans with an eye to its overall drift and the careful integrity of its long argument, must be that when Paul says nomos, here of all places at the climax of an argument about Torah, he means what he has meant throughout. Paul is well capable of wordplay; he is no stranger to rhetorical flourishes. But the questions of 7:7 and 7:13 are the questions to which his entire argument has driven him, questions precisely about Torah and its identity and effects; we are in a chapter that began with a complex argument about Torah, which grew directly out of 5:20 and 6:14 where there is no question that nomos meant Torah; and we are now at the point where, with the argument nearly complete, the writer is summing up, drawing the threads together. Are we really to say that at precisely this point he will start twisting and turning and saying “this then is my conclusion--that I find a law”?

“Certainly not!” (μή γένοιτο mē genoito), as Paul himself would say. The present verse does indeed introduce the concluding section of the passage, a section in which “the law” remains one of the two principal subjects (the other being the plight of the “I”). And, though this is not always noticed, Paul refers here not to a nomos in general but to the law: εύρίσκω αρα τόν νόμον (heuriskō ara ton nomon), “this is what I find about the law.” The definite article is highly significant. Any first-century reader or hearer, coming fresh through the discussion of 7:1-20, where the subject in almost every verse is ό νόμος (ho nornos) in the sense of “the Torah,” and then reading heuriskō ara ton nomon, would be bound to understand it as “this, then, is what I find about ‘the law’”--”the law,” that is, that has been the subject all along. The present verse must be able to stand on its own feet. Paul, it is true, is quite capable of building up gradually to a dense and difficult point, but here, when he is introducing the summing-up of a long argument, we must assume that what he says would make clear sense.

The initial conclusion picks up from the description of the “I” in vv. 15-16, 17-20, in order to work back from there to what can be concluded about “the law.” “This is what I find about the law: it means for me, when I want to do the good, that to me evil lies close at hand.” If Paul in 7:7-12 alluded to Adam, hinting strongly (as had already been said in 5:20) that when Torah arrived in Israel, Israel recapitulated Adam’s sin, the allusion here, somewhat fainter but still audible for those with ears attuned to echoes not only of Scripture but of Jewish traditions about Scripture, is to Adam’s son, Cain.^²⁵³ “Sin is lurking in wait for you,” said God to Cain, facing him with the choice between good and evil. Cain, choosing evil, committed murder, and found himself a wanderer and a fugitive, bearing forever the memory of his brother’s blood.^²⁵⁴ “Wretched man that I am.” says the “I” of Romans 7; “who will deliver me from this body of death?” When Torah arrived, Israel acted out Adam’s trespass; living in the present under Torah, Israel continues to act out the sad paradox of Cain. Paul will show in chap. 8 how God has addressed this problem, too.

7:22-23. Paul now puts together into a fresh formulation what he has said about Torah on the one hand and about. the “I” on the other. This statement obviously anticipates the final conclusion of 7:25b, and must be taken in close conjunction with it.

At this point many commentators have again balked at reading nomos as “Torah” throughout. “The law of God” in v. 22 is clearly the Mosaic law, they say, but surely this phrase itself shows that Paul is then talking about a different law altogether when he says έτερον νόμον (heteron nomon, “another law”) in v. 23. So too with the formulation “the law of sin” at the end of v. 23, repeated at the close of v. 25. This is clearly a prima facie problem for anyone who wants to interpret nomos as “Torah” right through the passage; yet it is a nettle that must be grasped. The point to be stressed by way of reply is that these “negative” formulations simply pick up and spell out what Paul has said about Torah in 5:20; 7:5; and particularly 7:8-11 and 7:13. We may compare 1 Cor 15:56: “the sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is Torah”; the fact that Paul goes on at once to say, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 15:57), paralleling Rom 7:25a so closely, indicates well enough that this embodies the same train of thought as we find at the end of Romans 7. Paul has not said anything new here, even though he has said it in a sharp and striking fashion. Precisely by demonstrating that Torah itself is “holy, just and good” (v. 12), while simultaneously explaining how sin “worked death in me” through “the good thing” (v. 13), he has already stated the paradox in principle, and now simply displays it in its simplest form. Insofar as the Torah is given by God, and is in itself holy, just and good, it is something rightly to be delighted in. Insofar as Torah has been made into sin’s base of operations (vv. 8, 11) it has been taken over by sin, and has become “the law of sin.”

Nothing is gained by lessening the force of Paul’s paradox, by avoiding the thought that Torah might be its own shadowy doppelganger. This has been, after all, the whole point of the section so far, and indeed the whole point of the paradox inherent not only in 5:20 but as far back as 3:19-21. The attempt to suggest that Paul might mean something else at the climax of his argument, just when he is drawing all the threads together, reminds me of the attempt by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musical editors to make sixteenth- and seventeenth-century choral music more palatable by removing the false relations that contain not only the harmonic logic but also, frequently, the pathos and tension of the whole piece. After all, if we say that Paul means something other than Torah by some of his uses of nomos in this passage, we are already saying that he is writing in a deliberately paradoxical and many-sided way; if we allow this, why not allow that he is actually referring to Torah throughout, albeit highly paradoxically and many-sidedly?

The double Torah then fits the strange double identity of the “I,” of Israel under Torah. The “I” itself, as Paul has been argued in vv. 17-20, is in principle exonerated; but insofar as this “I” is in Adam, is sarkinos (v. 14), sin and death are at work within its “members” (v. 23, repeated; cf. 6:13, 19; 7:5, another indication that Paul is making the same point as there). In the present verses Paul expresses this duality in terms of the “mind” on the one hand and the “members” on the other, further explaining the former with the phrase “the inner person” (lit., “the inner human”; the NRSV’s “my inmost self” is perhaps a shade too strong). With this “inner being” (NIV) the “I” delights in God’s law; Paul may well have in mind the perfectly genuine delight that Israel, even Adamic Israel, finds in the study and contemplation of Torah, as expressed classically in Psalm 19 or 119. “To will ]the good] is present with me” (v. 18); this is a reality, and it is not to be denied or mocked, for instance by those who say that “the Jew” was wrong to delight in Torah. The problem here is not “legalism” or “nomism,” nor yet homo religiosus, but sin: that sin that has taken over Torah, made it a base of operations, and is now-continuing the implicit military metaphor from vv. 8, 11--producing a full-scale war between “another Torah,” the Torah as it appears in 5:20 and 7:5, and the holy, just, and good law of God. And in this war the “I” is taken captive, a prisoner of war under the rule of “the Torah of sin.” Paul, still exploring the depths of 5:20, is again describing the captivity, the enslavement, the “Egypt” of sin and death, exacerbated by Torah, from which Christ and only Christ can deliver. This, seen with Christian hindsight, is the plight of the “I,” of Israel, including the pre-Christian Paul himself, under Torah.

7:24. Paul’s famous cry of despair, put into the mouth of the “I,” echoes but goes beyond the great tradition not only of the biblical psalms of lament but of subsequent Jewish lamentations such as the Qumran Hodayot. “Wretched man that I am”: the NRSV, using the well-known phrase, for once allows the gender-specific noun, though ironically the Greek here is ανθρωπος (anthrōpos, “human being”). This, indeed, is the point: that Israel too is “in Adam,” is a human being like all other human beings. Like Cain, bearing about the mark of his brother’s death, the “I” finds itself unable to escape from “this body of death,” referring perhaps both to its own “fleshly” state but also to the solidarity of sin, of Adamic humanity, with which it is unavoidably bound up (cf. 6:6). The problem is clearly stated: it is not so much sin itself, but the death that results from it. The promise of life held out by the law (with Eden’s tantalizing tree of life remembered in the background) appears a mirage. Like a moth trying to fly to the moon, the “I,” Israel under Torah, remains frustratedly earthbound. “Sin reigned in death,” and Torah merely tightened the noose (5:21, in the light of 5:20); the “I” finds itself enslaved under that regime. “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is Torah” (1 Cor 15:56). What the “wretched person” needs is deliverance, and Paul, bringing the passage’s rhetoric to its height, cries out for it: “who will deliver me?”

7:25. The full answer is about to be given in chap. 8, and indeed in the passage that, building on chaps. 5-8 as a whole, speaks of the salvation that is still open to ethnic Israel along with the Gentiles (chap. 11). But, as in 1 Cor 15:57, Paul cannot resist anticipating these answers right away, in an expostulation whose sense is clear even if its grammar is oblique. The answer to the question is “God”; “Thanks be to God, (the one who will deliver me) through Jesus the Messiah, our Lord.” This verse looks back to 5:21, where “grace” is obviously a periphrasis for “God” (cf. too 6:23), and on to 8:3, where ό θεός (ho theos, “God”) is the emphatic subject of one of the most important sentences in the entire letter. The full triple statement of Jesus’ identity--Jesus, the Messiah, our Lord--serves as the weighty christological summary at the end of this stage of the argument, matching those in 4:24-25; 5:11, 21; and 6:23, and pointing toward the christology and consequent soteriology of 8:1-11, 17, 29-30 and supremely 31-39.

Verse 25b is not an anticlimax, nor (as used sometimes to be suggested) a dislocated verse, still less a gloss introduced by a later scribe into Paul’s argument.^²⁵⁵ The double identity of the “I,” and the double identity of Torah, are stated in terms of the double slavery that has ironically characterized the whole passage. The αύτός έγώ (autos egō, “I of myself”), apparently ignored by the NRSV, is emphatic, but controversial. It has, inevitably, been pressed into service to support various different readings of the whole passage. By itself, though, it cannot exercise sufficient leverage to determine the meaning of the chapter one way or another. It does, however, fit very well within the line of thought I have been expounding. “I of myself” means, I suggest, “I, Paul, as part of the solidarity of Israel according to the flesh.”

We may cautiously use 9:3, the other Pauline occurrence of the same phrase, in support. There Paul expresses his solidarity with his “kinsmen according to the flesh” whom he sees in rebellion against the gospel, in a passage whose deepest point (9:14-23) is as we shall see to be understood very closely together with 7:13-25. He is saying that “I of myself” could pray to be accursed, cut off from the Messiah, for their sake. He does not say that this is in fact his prayer; it is what, left to himself as a Jew according to the flesh, he would pray; but that is not who he now is. He is “in the Messiah,” by baptism and faith, and cannot and will not charge that. He will wrestle with the problem of his “kinsmen according to the flesh” until a better solution, better than merely exchanging his own salvation for theirs, to light.

The contrast between the two things that are true of the “I” is made by separating out the “mind” and the “flesh.” These are both clearly used in a technical sense; we should once more beware of taking them in terms simply of a non-material thinking capacity on the one hand and physicality on the other. At the same time, we should also beware of trying to understand “mind” univocally in Paul; here it clearly refers to the intention or will spoken of in vv. 15-16, 18-21, and to the “inner person” of 7:22. It goes with the phrase “the law of my mind” in 7:23. It would be a mistake, fatal to the understanding of the whole passage, to insist that it must mean exactly what it does in two of the four other references in Romans, namely 1:28 and 12:2, where the mind is first darkened and then renewed. Clearly the “mind” in the present case, though delighting in God’s law, remains powerless to put it into practice, whereas that in 12:2, being renewed by God, is the source of that full transformation in which the person is able to discover in practice what God’s will actually is (cf. 8:5-8). The “I” of chap. 7 remains frustrated, rightly delighting in the Torah but finding that the solidarity of Israel with Adam prevents performance and, consequently, bars the way to life. That is the contrast Paul is emphasizing.

The Torah itself, then, simply binds Israel to Adam. Without the death of the “old human,” as in 6:6 and 7:2-3, that is what Torah will inevitably do. When this plight is fully understood, however, the remedy can at last be unveiled. When the sickness is properly diagnosed, it can be treated. God has done what Torah could not do--not, of course, to indicate that Torah was bad, or not God-given, but that, through sin and the “flesh,” it was weak, and could not give the life it promised.

NIV: ¹Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ²because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. ³For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ⁴in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

⁵Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. ⁶The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; ⁷the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. ⁸Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.

⁹You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

NRSV: ¹There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ²For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. ³For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. ⁵For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. ⁶To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. ⁷For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law--indeed it cannot, ⁸and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

⁹But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. ¹¹If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

The first eleven verses of Romans 8 lie at the very heart of Romans 5-8 as a whole. They simultaneously complete the thought of the section that began with 7:1 and begin the majestic sequence that sweeps on through to 8:30. As tightly argued as any piece of Pauline logic, they are at the same time suffused with a sense of exultation. and celebration.

Many regular readers of the Bible will find this passage almost too well known to be any longer audible. As was once said of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is “full of quotations.” Liturgies and private prayers have drawn freely on it. Almost every line evokes, and has indeed produced, hundreds of sermons. Johann Sebastian Bach made it the backbone of a whole cantata (Jesu, meine Freude). How can we avoid the two equally unhelpful reactions of having heard it all before, on the one hand, and of focusing too narrowly on particular verses, and the theological topics they evoke, on the other? How can we hear the symphony, not just the notes?

The clue is to remind ourselves, not for the first time, that we are still watching the unfolding of the Adam/Christ contrast of 5:12-21, and in particular the exposition of the great statement in the last verse of that seminal passage. “As sin reigned in death” (and we must remind ourselves of the role of the law within that reign, as in 5:20), “so grace also reigned through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” From this tight-packed statement, the key contrast for the present passage is that between death and life: “life” is the golden thread that runs through 8:1-11, the gift of God that the law wanted to give but could not, the gift that comes because God’s Son has dealt with sin and death and God’s life-giving Spirit has replaced sin as the indwelling power within God’s people. The promise of resurrection with which the passage concludes is not added for extra effect at the end of the paragraph. It is where the whole argument is leading.

The shape of the paragraph then becomes clear. The opening statement (v. 1) is at once explained, in Paul’s usual fashion, first with another dense and cryptic statement (v. 2, linked to v. 1 with gar), which is in turn explained (another gar) by the complex and powerful statement of vv. 3-4, a sentence that has as good a claim as any to represent the very center of what Paul is saying in Romans 5-8, if not in his whole theology. Verses 1-4 together serve as the platform for the step-by-step argument that explains how precisely it is that God has given the life that the law could not. Verses 5-8 rule out any way to life for those “in the flesh,” but declare that the Spirit is the key source of that life. Verses 9-10 apply this to those who are “in Christ” and hence “in the Spirit,” those who have the Spirit, or indeed Christ himself, dwelling in them. And verse 11 draws the conclusion: The indwelling Spirit will give new life to the mortal body of the Christian, despite the necessity of physical death.

What has happened, of course, is that the shape of 5:21, still clearly visible in vv. 2, 10, has been filled in with the more detailed content of 7:5-6. “Sin reigned in death” has been expanded, by means of 7:5 and 7:7-25, in terms of two further factors, namely, “the law” and “flesh,” and is here summarized in 8:26, 7-8, and the middle phrase of 8:10 (“the body is dead because of sin”). The problem that has thereby been so carefully analyzed is equally carefully dealt with: the death of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit are shown to be exactly what was necessary. “Grace reigned through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ” has been expanded, by means of 7:6, to include the Spirit as the key agent of that reign.

The paragraph thus offers, as its opening statement suggests, the ultimate response to the problem set out in 2:1-16. Final “condemnation” hangs over the heads of all people. All have sinned, and in chapter 2 it was not clear how there could be any who would come into the category Paul held out in 2:7, 10. The hints of 2:13b-15a were by themselves too oblique to build on; the fuller statement in 2:26-29 can at last be seen for what it is, an advance statement of what Paul can now say clearly. Romans 8:1-11 is focused on those who, whether circumcised or not, submit to God’s law in the power of the Spirit, and in whom therefore the positive verdict, the δικαίωμα (dikaiōma) of the law is fulfilled. This at last explains how the verdict issued in the present on the evidence of faith alone (3:27-30) embodies God’s justice, how (in other words) God is right to declare that Abraham’s true worldwide family consists of all those who believe in the gospel. As Paul says elsewhere, the one who began a good work will bring it to completion (Phil 1:6). The Spirit who was at work in the coming to faith of those who heard the gospel (1 Thess 1:4-5; 2:13) will continue that work until the final moment of resurrection itself.

This in turn is made possible because the “condemnation” of sin, the real culprit all along, has taken place on the cross. Verse 3 refers back to the theme of Christ’s “obedience” in 5:12-21, and stresses that what was done there was the act of God in Christ, not (as it were) the action of Christ upon God. The central sentence of 8:3-4, around which so many vital subordinate clauses hang like bunches of grapes on a vine, is simply this: “God … condemned sin.” No clearer statement is found in Paul, or indeed anywhere else in all early Christian literature, of the early Christian belief that what happened on the cross was the judicial punishment of sin. Taken in conjunction with 8:1 and the whole argument of the passage, not to mention the partial parallels in 2 Cor 5:21 and Gal 3:13, it is clear that Paul intends to say that in Jesus’ death the condemnation that sin deserved was meted out fully and finally, so that sinners over whose heads that condemnation had hung might be liberated from this threat once and for all.^²⁵⁶ This densely stated but clearly thought out atonement-theology (as it would later be known) is not the main subject of the paragraph. That place belongs to the Spirit’s gift of life. But, as John saw equally clearly, the outpouring of the Spirit depends on the prior achievement of the cross (cf. John 7:37-39; 20:19-23).

The paragraph is remarkable, finally, for its dense and many-sided concentration on the work of God. In Jewish thought at this time, the activity of the one God, not least the supremely self-revealing and saving divine activity on behalf of Israel, had been spoken of in many ways. God’s Word would go forth to renew Israel and the world. God’s Spirit, that breathed on the waters at the beginning, would blow again like a mighty wind, animating the dead bones of God’s people. God’s Wisdom, the divine agent in creation, would enable humans to live truly human lives, and would be sent by God to live in Israel. God’s Law, again at this period sometimes conceived as a preexistent divine agent, would guide God’s people along the path of life. And God’s own Presence, God’s Glory, would dwell in the Temple in Jerusalem, the source of life and glory for Israel (and, in some readings, for the whole world).^²⁵⁷

Paul has not expounded these aspects of the character and presence of God in any systematic fashion. But they undergird and explain this whole paragraph. The way to understand the christology of v, 3, for instance, is not simply to study the phrase “Son of God” on its own. Rather, we must observe the way in which the sending of God’s Son in this passage, as part of God’s doing that which the law could not, belongs, together with the indwelling of the Spirit, as part of Paul’s reworking of the Jewish Wisdom theology, and Shekinah theology, in which God’s character was revealed in the act of bringing salvation to Israel. If the main topic of the paragraph is the gift to God’s people of the life the law promised but could not give, the main foundation upon which that topic is built is the saving presence of the one God of Israel in the cross of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit.

There is thus, we even dare to say, an implicit trinitarianism in this paragraph, which becomes more explicit as chap. 8 unfolds. We glimpse, in other words, how it is that the gospel outlined in 1:3-4 does indeed reveal the δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou, 1:17), thus becoming “God’s power unto salvation for all who believe” (1:16). We are still left, of course, with the question as to how this works out “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Paul’s answer to this question, given spectacularly in chaps. 9-11, is constructed with considerable care on the foundations he is laying in the present passage. Here, too, what lies at the heart of it all is a vision of God.

8:1. The opening statement, with its connecting “therefore” (αρα ara), comes as a shock. How can the analysis of 7:7-25 lead to such a conclusion? “I of myself … serve the law of sin; there is therefore now no condemnation!” The answer is that Paul has leapfrogged over the middle premise of his argument. Instead of the normal pattern of a syllogism, a plus b therefore c (“donkeys have crosses on their backs; this animal has a cross on its back; therefore this animal is a donkey”), Paul has created a striking effect by advancing c and explaining it with b: “I serve God’s law with my mind, but sin’s law with my flesh; there is therefore no condemnation, because God has dealt with sin in the flesh, and provided new life for the body.” The “now” picks up the “but now” of 3:21; 7:6 (see also 5:9, 11; 6:22), emphasizing the eschatological nature of God’s achievement in Christ and by the Spirit. The verdict of the last day has been brought forward into the present. This is, quite simply, the solid foundation for Christian joy.

The “condemnation” spoken of here is the final judgment that God, the righteous judge, will mete out at the last. It is the necessary reaction of the justice loving God to all injustice; of the God who created image bearing human beings to all that defaces and destroys that likeness. Like so much in this part of Romans, it looks back to chap. 5 (here, vv. 16, 18), and behind that to 2:1-16.

The reason why there is now no condemnation is not far to seek. Sin’s condemnation has been effected in the cross of God’s Son (v. 3), and those who are “in the Messiah, Jesus” discover that what is true of him is now true of them. His death means that, as far as they are concerned, the condemnation that must rightly fall on sin has nothing more to do with them. Thus “in Christ Jesus” at the close of v. 1 offers not just a designation of the people for whom there is no condemnation, but, in compact form, the reason why this is the case.^²⁵⁸

8:2. Paul’s fundamental explanation for v. 1 is God’s act of liberation. He has already spoken of this at length in chap. 6 and developed it in 7:1-6. As we have already seen, talk of setting slaves free is exodus language: the present paragraph is describing how those who are in the Messiah, and indwelt by the Spirit, are brought out of the Egypt of sin and death and promised citizenship in the kingdom of life. There is no question but that Paul is referring in this verse to the same composite event that he has been describing in the previous chapters--namely, the messianic (and hence representative) death of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit.

The object of this liberating act is “you,” singular.^²⁵⁹ Some MSS, followed indeed by several translations, have “me” rather than “you” (KJV, RSV, NIV, “me”; NEB, NRSV, “you”). But “you” is sufficiently well supported to be quite possible, and sufficiently unexpected, after a long paragraph where “I” and “me” are the main focus, to be likely. Why would a scribe alter the expected “me” to “you”? At the same time, Paul is not only addressing each reader as an individual with this striking and joyful message of freedom. He is ensuring that each individual reader, not only those who had in some sense been “under the law” and hence in the precise situation of 7:7-25, would know himself or herself to be included in this joyful news. Like those old portraits whose eyes follow each onlooker around the room, this statement of freedom is aimed at every single hearer of the letter, whoever and wherever they may be.

The liberating action has taken place “in Christ Jesus.” Certainty here is impossible, but it is likely that the last phrase belongs with the verb rather than modifying either “law,” “Spirit,” or “life.” Paul is quite capable of writing lengthy strings of mutually modifying nouns and phrases, but I think it more probable that in this instance the NIV and the NEB are correct. The NIV is wrong, though, to change “in” to “through.” Paul is always careful about these prepositions; the action has taken place “in the Messiah” so that those who are “in him” may benefit from it. “There is no condemnation for those in Christ, because in Christ God has set you free.”

The subject of the verb, and the description of that from which one has been liberated, presents us with a new version of the problem we encountered in 3:27-31 and 7:21-25: can Paul conceivably mean “the law,” the Torah, by these uses of nomos? This question is linked to that in 7:21-25, since the gaoler from whom “you” are now free is described in almost identical terms here to those of 7:23, 25. As I argued there, so it seems to me compelling here that the “law” in question is not a general principle, “the old vicious circle” as J.B. Phillips renders it, but the Torah itself, seen from one angle, specifically the angle described in 4:15; 5:20; and 7:1-6 (to say nothing of 7:7-25). The situation of all humankind was “under sin and death.” Torah, rightly, endorsed this verdict, tightening the grip of Adamic humanness on those who were “under” its sway, and shutting out altogether the “Gentile sinners” (Gal 2:15) who were not. God’s act of liberation has broken this stranglehold once and for all.

But Paul does not actually mention God as the subject of the sentence. Can it really be that “the law of the spirit of life” is a further reference to Torah, introducing now a new facet to Torah not visible in chap. 7? Most commentators draw back from this conclusion. I am persuaded, however; that reaction is wrong. When scaling the sheer rock of Paul’s thought it is important not to lose one’s nerve and settle for an apparently easier path, a seemingly more natural route. The explanation of v. 2 after all, is found in vv. 3-4; and there, as the heart of the chapter so far, we find that the “righteous verdict of the law,” the δικαίωμα του νόμου (dikaiōma tou nomou), is now fulfilled “in us who walk … according to the Spirit.” We then find, by implication, that whereas “the mind of the flesh” does not submit to God’s law, the mind of the Spirit actually does (v. 7), and that by the Spirit God will do what the law wanted to do but, through no fault of its own, was unable to do (8:3, 10-11; cf. 7:10). It is not fanciful, then, but strictly in keeping with the thrust of the whole passage, to say that when Paul speaks of “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” he is indeed referring to Torah, in a way for which we have only distantly been prepared by 3:27, 31. After all, ho nomos in vv. 3, 4, and 7 is clearly Torah. How obscure do we suppose Paul to have been? More will be said on the subject when we arrive at 10:4-8, which plays a similar role in the argument of chaps. 9-11 to that played by 8:1-4 within chaps. 5-8.

It would have been easy to write “for the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free,” but Paul seldom settles for the easy option. He has spent a whole chapter arguing that, despite appearances (and despite many commentators!), the Torah remains God’s law, holy and just and good, and that it is not guilty of causing the death that comes to those who embrace it. Now he takes a step further: When God acts in Christ and by the Spirit the Torah is somehow involved as well, somehow present and active. Speaking of Torah, after all, was a thoroughly Jewish way of speaking of God’s saving action. Though Paul has spoken with eloquent passion of the way in which Torah locks the door on those who are imprisoned within Adamic humanity, he has never forgotten its promise of life. He can therefore speak, with deliberate but comprehensible paradox, of the law itself as the agent of that which God has accomplished in the Messiah and by the Spirit.

The Torah, then--why, after all, should we be surprised at being surprised by Paul?--is the hidden agent of what God has achieved, which is the life of which the Spirit is the personal giver. This, as we saw, is the main thrust of the paragraph. And it answers the otherwise puzzling question at the start of the next verse.

8:3-4. What was it that the law “could not do”? Some have assumed that Paul meant by this somewhat awkward phrase (lit., “the impossible thing of the law”) to refer to law-abiding behavior, as though the main thrust of the paragraph were to fall on (what we would call) the “ethical” passage of vv. 4b-8. This then goes with an understanding of τό δικαίωμα του νόμου (to dikaiōma tou nomou) in v. 4a in which δικαίωμα (dikaiōma) would mean “righteous decree” or “requirement” (NRSV) in the sense of moral commands to be obeyed. But (to deal with that problem first) there are two outstanding objections to this reading. First, when dikaiōma is used in this sense it is usually plural (e.g., 2:26; elsewhere in the NT, Luke 1:6; Heb 9:1, 10; Rev 15:4; 19:8). Second, in the passage to which the present one looks back, where dikaiōma is contrasted with katakrima, as here (5:16, 18), the dikaiōma is unquestionably God’s righteous decree or verdict, not the required behavior of God’s people. A similar use appears, in a negative sense, in 1:32. It is highly likely, therefore, that to dikaiōma tou nomou here refers to the verdict that the law announces rather than the behavior which it requires. And, in the light of 5:16, 18 and the argument of the present passage, this is clearly (unlike 1:32) the positive verdict: “do this and you will live” (cf. on 10:5). That this is the correct reading of 8:4a, and with it 8:3a, is confirmed by three things: Paul’s highlighting of this intention of the law at 7:10; the whole thrust of the argument of 8:1-11 (with 5:21 in the background); and the point about the life-giving Torah in 10:5-11 (see the notes on that passage). What was impossible for the law? That it should give life. It offered it, but could not deliver.

It could not do so because it was “weak because of the flesh.” Despite many commentators and preachers who have been eager to see Paul say negative things about the law, he declares, summing up the argument of chap. 7, that there was nothing wrong with it in itself. The problem lay elsewhere: in the “flesh”--not the physicality of human nature, which was God-given and will be reaffirmed in the resurrection (8:11), but in the present rebellious and corruptible state of humankind, within which sin had made its dwelling (7:18, 20, 23, 25).

The main sentence with which Paul then explains how God has done what the law could not do must then be understood as follows: God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus, so that the life the law offered could rightly be given to those led by the Spirit. The latter was the long-term purpose of the former, the former the necessary precondition of the latter. Each half of this double statement must now be explored in detail.

God, says Paul, condemned sin. Paul does not, unlike some, say that God condemned Jesus. True, God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus; but this is some way from saying, as many have, that God desired to punish someone and decided to punish Jesus on everyone else’s behalf. Paul’s statement is more subtle than that, it is not merely about a judicial exchange, the justice of which might then be questioned (and indeed has been questioned). It is about sentence of death being passed on “sin” itself, sin as a force or power capable of deceiving human beings, taking up residence within them, and so causing their death (7:7-25). To reduce Paul’s thinking about the cross to terms of a lawcourt exchange is to diminish and distort it theologically and to truncate it exegetically. For Paul, what was at stake was not simply God’s judicial honor, in some Anselmic sense, but the mysterious power called sin, at large and destructive within God’s world, needing to be brought to book, to have sentence passed and executed upon it, so that, with its power broken, God could then give the life sin would otherwise prevent. That is what happened on the cross.

For this to be done it was necessary, and Paul here spells this out, that the place where the sentence was executed was indeed the true “likeness of sinful flesh” (the NIV’s repeated “sinful man” fails to highlight the link between Paul’s expression here and the cognate ones elsewhere in the argument). The difficult word here translated “likeness” (όμοιώμα homoiōma) is certainly meant to indicate that Jesus’ humanity was indeed the genuine article; it is not a cover for a smuggled-in Docetism in which Jesus was not actually human but only seemed to be. Why, then, has Paul not simply said “sending the son in sinful flesh”? Presumably because, though Jesus’ humanity was true and genuine, Jesus was himself not guilty of sin--a remarkable fact that appears at various points within early Christian tradition (cf. John 7:18; 8:46; 2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15; 7:26; 1 Pet 2:22). For Paul, it would have been axiomatic that sin was not necessary to genuine humanness. Sin was an intruder, not a native inhabitant, of God’s good world (5:12). To debate whether Jesus’ humanity was therefore “sinful humanity” or “sinless humanity,” whether “fallen” or “unfallen,” seems to me beside the point. What matters is that it was genuine humanity, not a sham (cf. Phil 2:7, where έν όμοιώμτι άνθρώπων (en homoiōmati anthrōpōn, “in the likeness of humans”) does not mean “like a human being, but not actually one,” but rather “a true human being, bearing the true likeness.” Jesus could and did suffer and die, truly and really; he was in principle capable of sinning, but unlike all other humans did not. It was God’s design that, in his truly human death, sentence would be meted out on sin once for all.

But how could Jesus’ human flesh, and his human death, be the appropriate locus of this judgment? Why, if Jesus was himself in some sense sinless, would it make any sense that sins be condemned in him? I have already suggested that part of the answer lies in the phrase “in Christ Jesus.” Because (as the resurrection revealed) Jesus was the Messiah, he represented his whole people; what was true of him was true of them. His death could therefore be counted as theirs. That is the underlying logic, rooted in the biblical picture of Israel’s monarchy, that binds the unique event of Calvary to the status of all those “in Christ” from that day to this.

But the other part of the answer is found in the whole sequence of thought that, begun deep in chap. 7, reaches its climax in this verse. This is the point envisaged by the repeated “in order that” (ϊνα hina) of 5:20 and 7:13, the point indeed that must be grasped if the further argument of Romans 9 is to become comprehensible. Once again we are following through the train of thought over which 5:20-21 stands like a gold-lettered heading on a page. The law came in in order that the trespass might abound; sin worked death through the law in order that it might be shown up as sin, in order that sin might be exceedingly sinful. The law caused sin to be heaped up in one place, to flourish and abound in that single location. As many have seen, the “place” implied in 5:20-21 was Israel. As not so many have seen, God’s purpose in and through all of this--in giving the Torah with this strange intention--was that sin might be drawn together. heaped up, not just in Israel in general, but upon Israel’s true representative, the Messiah, in order that it might there be dealt with, be condemned, once and for all. God sent the Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh” to bring this sequence to its appointed climax, that in his death Torah might do the necessary, if apparently negative, work for which it was designed. We are not far, here, from what Paul says in Gal 3:22: Scripture (i.e., God, working through the written law) shut up everything under sin, in order that the promise, effective through the faithful obedience of Jesus the Messiah, might be given to all believers. And now we are not far, either, from the conclusion to the argument of Romans 9-11: God shut up all in disobedience, in order to have mercy upon all (11:32). In the strange plan of God, to deceive and defeat “the rulers of this age” (1 Cor 2:6-8), the personified forces of Sin were lured onto the one field where they were bound to lose the decisive battle. Sin, the real culprit throughout chap. 7, needed to be condemned; on the cross, it was.^²⁶⁰

Paul expands his condensed reference to the cross by adding “and as a sin-offering.”^²⁶¹ The phrase καί περί άμαρτίας (kai peri hamartias) can, it is true, mean simply “and to deal with sin” in a more general sense. But this is the regular phrase that, in the LXX, translates the Hebrew terms for the specific sacrifice known as the sin-offering.^²⁶² Why would Paul refer to this sacrifice here in particular? Because in the biblical codes that deal with the whole sacrificial system the sin-offering is designed to deal, not with any and every sin, but with sin that has been committed ignorantly or unwillingly. Either one did something without realizing it was sinful; or, knowing it was sinful, one did it despite intending not to. Without one or other of these saving clauses, of course, any sin would be deliberate, knowing the act to be wrong and intending it none the less. This, known as “sinning with a high hand,” is unpardonable; the person who acts thus is to be “cut off from among the people”--that is, put to death (cf. Num 15:30-31).

The sin-offering thus answers exactly, not indeed to any and every sin (that is not what this phrase was designed to do), but to the problem so carefully analyzed in chap. 7. The “I” of 7:15, as we saw, does not “know,” and does not “will,” the actions committed. The sin in question is precisely, in Jewish terms, sin of ignorance, unwilling sin. When we meet, in the passage where Paul is explaining how God has dealt with the problem of chap. 7, the very phrase the LXX uses regularly to refer to the sin-offering, the sacrifice that deals with this sort of sin, there can be no excuse either for rejecting the sacrificial meaning or for ignoring the tight interlinking of the argument, and its various implications.

In particular, as we shall see when dealing with 10:3, Paul is aware that in the next stage of his argument (i.e., chaps. 9-11) he will need to stress that his kinsfolk according to the flesh are “ignorant of God’s righteousness.” Here the point of adding “and as a sin-offering” is to emphasize that the death of Jesus has been the means, not simply of condemning sin in general, but of dealing specifically with the problem set out in the previous chapter, the problem of the “I.” Paul’s argument from this point on is not focused on the problem of Israel under Torah, but it is important to show, as part of his larger statement, how Israel’s peculiar plight has also been taken care of.

I have left to the end of v. 3 what is arguably the most important phrase in the whole verse. If Paul thus sees the death of Jesus as the means whereby the judicial punishment on sin itself was meted out, he blocks off the possible misunderstanding of that (as in much medieval thinking and iconography, and some more recent expressions as well) as the act of a merciful second person of the Trinity placating a hostile first person. The whole action comes from God in the first place, as in 5:6-10. Paul does not use the word “love” at this point, but his dramatic summary of the whole argument in 8:31-30 shows that this is what he has in mind. The condemnation of sin in the flesh of Jesus happened as a result of divine grace, of “God sending his own Son.”

The echo of 5:10 here, and behind that of 1:3-4, is obvious, as is the important parallel with Gal 4:4 and the anticipation of 8:32. Without leaving the home base of meaning for “Son of God”--Israel in general, the Messiah in particular (on “Son of God,” see the Commentary on 1:3-4; see also Gal 2:20)--and indeed while needing precisely that for his argument to work, Paul has exploited the phrase so that it becomes a way of saying what some Second Temple Judaism said about God’s action in the world and Israel through Wisdom, Torah, Shekinah, Word, and Spirit, that God had sent, or would send, Wisdom or the others to embody the divine presence, and to be the means of the divinely originated salvation.^²⁶³ Here and elsewhere Paul has worked from within the Second Temple Jewish awareness of God’s personal action in the world and in Israel. He has exploited the image of “father and son,” which already carried the messianic overtones on which his argument depends, to produce genuine and appropriate innovation from within current Jewish language about God. The fact of Jesus himself, the truly human being in whom, as the resurrection revealed, God’s saving plan had been put into effect, called forth from Paul the formulation that, while rooted in the pre-Christian soil of Second Temple language about God and God’s action, laid the foundations for the developed Trinitarian thought of later theologians (whose main aim, of course, was to retain Jewish-style monotheism while affirming a distinction between Father and Son). The present expression forms the middle term in a crescendo: Starting with 1:3-4 and 5:10, both of which simply refer to Jesus as God’s son, 8:3 speaks of God’s sending “his own son” (τόν έαυτου υίόν ton heautou huion), and 8:32 speaks of God’s not sparing, but handing over “his very own son” (ός γε του ίδίου υίου ούκ έφείσατο hos ge tou idiou huiou ouk epheisato). The sending and death of the Son of God forms, in fact, one of the key threads that run through the entire letter so far.

Verse 4 then falls into place. The introductory “so that” (the hina, as in 5:20 and 7:13, clearly expresses the divine purpose) states God’s intention: that the righteous verdict of the law might be fulfilled “in us.” The life the Torah intended, the indeed longed, to give to God’s people is now truly given by the Spirit (for this interpretation, see above). The balance with v. 3 might have led us to expect δικαίωσις (dikaiōsis) at this point, but Paul may have chosen δικαίωμα (dikaiōma) not least because of its formal balance with the κατακριμα (katakrima) of v. 1, exactly as in 5:16.^²⁶⁴ As argued earlier, the dikaiōma could conceivably have referred to the behavior the law commanded rather than the verdict it pronounced. Paul could have said that the intended result of sin’s condemnation was that God’s renewed people might be able at last to do what the law required (in some sense that does riot require either circumcision or observance of the food laws; cf. 2:27; 13:8-10; 14:1-23; 1 Cor 7:19). Yet the singular formulation (ignored by the NIV, which translates “righteous requirements”), taken in conjunction with the larger thrust of the paragraph as a whole, strongly suggests the reference to the law’s “righteous decree” of life.

This does not, of course, exclude the former point, since it is precisely by “walking according to the Spirit” that those in Christ “seek for glory, honor and immortality” (2:7). The commandment that was “unto life” brought death because of sin residing in the flesh (7:10); now the same commandment brings life because of the indwelling Spirit. On the “life/death” choice see again Lev 18:5 and Deut 30:15-20, with the discussion below on 10:5-11.

As I pointed out earlier, this in no way compromises present justification by faith. What is spoken of here is the future verdict, that of the last day, the “day” Paul described in 2:1-16. That verdict will correspond to the present one, and will follow from (though not, in that sense, be earned or merited by), the Spirit-led life of which Paul now speaks. Once again Torah is vindicated by God’s action. As a detailed analysis of Paul’s underlying narrative here will reveal, Torah is the main “character” at this point in the story, and here emerges triumphant.^²⁶⁵

Those who will find Torah’s righteous decree fulfilled in them--those, that is, who will share in the resurrection life (8:10-11)--are those who in the present do not “walk” according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (on “walk” as a Jewish metaphor for conduct [flattened out by the NIV’s “live”] see the Commentary on 6:4). Here Paul highlights the Spirit/flesh contrast, already seen in 1.3.4, which will dominate the rest of the paragraph. The “flesh.” not in the sense of physicality but in the sense of rebellious and corruptible human nature, is not the sphere of existence in which the Christian lives. Paul is capable of expressing things slightly differently elsewhere, as when, for instance, he speaks in Gal 2:20 of “the life I now live in the flesh,” or when he distinguishes in 2 Cor 10:3 between “walking in the flesh,” which there simply means “living an ordinary human life” (albeit with the overtones of mortality and decay not far off) and “waging war according to the flesh,” which means “adopting the standards of rebellious and corruptible humankind.” But in the present passage, as in 7:5 (“when we were in the flesh,” implying that this is no longer the case), he brings together “in the flesh” (8:8-9) with “walking according to the flesh” (8:4) and “being according to the flesh” (8:5), seeing all these expressions as referring to the status and way of life of those without faith, those not baptized, those not in Christ, those not indwelt by the Spirit. “Flesh,” then, carries here its fully nuanced negative meaning, not of physicality per se, but of humanity both mortal and rebellious. And part of the point of the passage, as will become clear in chaps. 9-11, is that unbelieving Israelis precisely “in the flesh.”

The contrast with “flesh” is “Spirit”; not “spirit,” or “on the spiritual level,” as though Paul were after all contrasting the merely physical and the merely non-physical. With 1:4 in the background, and the climax of 8:9-11 coming up in the foreground (to say nothing of 8:12-27), he is clearly referring, throughout the present paragraph, to the Holy Spirit. Romans 8 contains one of Paul’s greatest expositions of the work of the Spirit, emphasizing constantly the way in which the Spirit’s present work anticipates the Spirit’s future work of resurrection. In the present passage, it becomes clear that the Spirit “indwells” God’s People in Christ, as the Shekinah “indwelt” the tabernacle in the wilderness or the Temple in Jerusalem; so we should not be surprised to discover in the following paragraphs that the Spirit takes the role, within the new wilderness wanderings of the liberated people of God, that in the exodus story was taken by the pillar of cloud and fire. Once again Paul, as a theologian in the strict sense (that is, one who thinks and writes about God), is innovating appropriately from within the Second Temple Jewish tradition. The result, as in a more compressed form in Gal 4:4-7, is that the one God of Jewish monotheism now begins to be known in three usually (though not always) distinct ways. Though Paul does not use the language of “person” to distinguish these three ways, he sets up a universe of discourse within which some such development would ultimately appear necessary.

Here the point is simply this: through the action of the Spirit in the present, those who are in Christ are walking on the road that will lead to the resurrection of the body. Indeed, the more we allow for Shekinah and Temple overtones in what Paul is saying, the more a further interesting possibility opens up: that Paul is hinting, as he speaks of the resurrection of the body, of the rebuilding of the Temple. In any case, the same Spirit who will raise Christ’s people at the last inspires within them in the present a life that is neither corruptible--it will stand at the judgment (cf. 1 Cor 3:10-17)--nor rebellious, but which conforms to God’s will for humankind. Torah is thereby vindicated; the problem of Romans 7 is thereby solved; and, as the rest of the chapter will make clear, the whole new creation is thereby brought into view.

8:5-6. The next pair of verses offer a two-stage explanation of why those who walk according to the Spirit inherit life. The logic works like this: (a) The two categories, walking according to the flesh and the Spirit, are each characterized by a certain manner of thinking. (b) Whereas the thinking that goes with the flesh is death, the thinking that goes with the Spirit is “life and peace” (the NEB and the REB have coalesced the two verses, producing a single complex statement instead of a two-stage one). Paul will then develop this contrast in vv. 7-8 and 9-10, using it as the bridge into the climax and conclusion of the paragraph. Both verses begin with gar; it seems to me more likely that both independently explain vv. 1-4, rather than that v. 6 is intended to explain something about v. 5. (The NIV omits both connectives; the NRSV, that in v. 6; the NEB, that in v. 5. If a connection between v. 5 and v. 6 is sought, it may be that Paul is meaning “and the reason I highlight the thinking of flesh and Spirit is because….”) When the verses are taken together, leading to the point about “life and peace” at the end of v. 6, and the flow of thought of the whole paragraph is kept in mind, then the meaning of the connections becomes apparent. Like a pianist needing to keep the coming climax of the movement in mind through a tricky middle section, it is important to sustain the theological rhythm of these verses in their context rather than treating them, as some translations and commentaries have done, as isolated remarks about what it is like to live according to the flesh and the Spirit.

Instead of “walk,” Paul merely says “are”: “those who are according to the flesh.” The NIV and the NRSV both say “live,” but the Greek is simply όντες (ontes), those who “are.” In the second half of v. 5 Paul omits both this and the verb for “think,” so that 5b simply reads “but those according to the Spirit the things of the Spirit.” Verse 6 follows swiftly: the thinking of the flesh is death, but the thinking of the Spirit is life and peace (the death/life contrast throughout the passage, with its echoes in 10:5-11, makes it more certain that these verses are about the true fulfillment of Torah). The Greek (τό φρόνημα της σαρκός to phronēma tēs sarkos and τό φρόνημα του πνεύματος to phronēma tou pneumatos) leaves it open as to whether these expressions refer to the thinking, the thought processes, that are characteristic of flesh and Spirit in themselves and are then, as it were, incarnated in human beings, or whether the “of” is objective, as in the NRSV (“to set the mind on the flesh … to set the mind on the Spirit”; the NIV breaks the contrast: “the mind of sinful man … the mind controlled by the Spirit”). I incline somewhat to the former view: the flesh, personified, “thinks” in a certain way, which then becomes embodied in particular individuals; so too with the Spirit. Certainly the partial parallel in 8:27 suggests this meaning here too.

The reason why Paul highlights the thought-processes, rather than the outward actions, that are characteristic of flesh and Spirit will emerge as the paragraph develops, but we may draw attention to the way in which, as the argument of the letter unfolds, it is the Christian mind that must become the initial, and transformative, locus of renewal (12:2, contrasting with 1:22, 28). As frequently in his thinking about how humans beins operate, Paul here envisages thought as the key to action; not, however, just the process of ideas through the brain, but in the stronger sense of the settled and focused activity and concentration that characterizes the one state or the other.

The important point here, and the reason why these verses help the overall argument forward, is the contrast of “death” and “life and peace” that characterize the two “thinkings.” The contrast of death and life is familiar enough in this argument, and has been so since at least chap, 5; but why (apart from the echo of 5:1) add “peace”? It is not simply that the phrase “life and peace” carries distant covenantal overtones.^²⁶⁶ The evidence Paul is about to adduce for his assertion that walking, or “being,” “according to the Spirit” is the guarantee of “life” is precisely that “flesh-thinking” is at enmity with God, whereas “Spirit-thinking” is in tune with God. At least, that is the implication of the next verses, though this time the entire thought involves an ellipsis, which must now be explained if the paragraph is to yield its complete secret.

8:7-8. What follows offers itself as the further explanation of what has gone before. Verse 7 begins with διότι (dioti), which (despite the NRSV’s idiosyncratic “for this reason”) normally means “because” or “for.”^²⁶⁷ What Paul intends to say appears to be: (a) flesh-thinking is death, Spirit-thinking is life and peace; (b) because flesh-thinking is hostile to God, (c) whereas Spirit-thinking is at peace with God [thus explaining “peace”]; (d) and the Spirit is the source of resurrection life [thus explaining “life”]; (e) and you, therefore, being indwelt by the Spirit in the present, are assured of resurrection life in the future. What he has done, however, is to foreshorten this train of thought simply to (a) (v. 6), (b) (vv. 7-8), and a combination of (d) and (e) (vv. 9-11). For neither the first nor the last time, he has omitted to make explicit the link in the thought (here [c]) that might have clarified things for those attempting to think his thoughts after him--an ironic reflection on a paragraph one of whose central subtopics is “thinking.”

Paul does at least explain stage (b) quite fully. Picking up from 5:10, and rounding off hereby the negative line of thought expounded in chap. 7, he explains that flesh-thinking is hostile to God. Interestingly, his further explanation of this (v. 7b, introduced with gar, omitted by both the NIV and the NRSV), is that flesh-thinking does not submit to God’s law, a point that is further explained on the grounds that it cannot. As chap. 7 has made clear, the “flesh” serves “the law of sin”; however much this may, paradoxically, turn out to be the Torah in another role, at this point “the law of God” is clearly a positive thing to which humans ought to submit, not the quasi-demonic thing some Marcionite schemes of thought have imagined. The law in its full God-given glory is, after all, a spiritual thing, so that there is a mismatch between it and the person who is “fleshly, sold under sin” (7:14 and 8:7 thus belong very closely together). The implication, of course (the omitted stage [c] in the argument), is that Spirit-thinking will now fit Torah perfectly; however counterintuitive this may seem in some theological circles, it fits well with Paul’s other statements about Christian fulfillment of Torah (e.g., 2:25-9; 10:4-11; 13:8-10; perhaps also 3:27).

Paul’s final and most revealing comment about flesh-thinking (v. 8) is that “those who are in the flesh” are incapable of pleasing God.^²⁶⁸ Despite its prominence in various Pauline passages, the idea that one can actually please God, or the Lord, is foreign to much thinking and writing on the apostie, perhaps because it suggests to some the thin end of a wedge that will end in works-righteousness. Paul had no such scruples (see, e.g., 12:2; 14:18; 1 Cor 7:32; 2 Cor 5:9; Eph 5:10; 1 Thess 4:1). Those in the flesh cannot please God; but, by strong and clear implication, those in the Spirit can and do,

8:9-11. Paul clearly believes that his readers are “in the Spirit,” no longer “in the flesh.” The evidence for this is that the Spirit of God dwells in them; the result is that they are assured of final-resurrection. Verse 11 thus gives the complete answer to the question of 7:24, the answer anticipated in 7:25a.

That much is clear; this is the main thrust of these three verses. But the way in which Paul has said it is complex, and potentially confusing. Three levels of complexity need to be unraveled for clarity to be attained.

First, Paul switches bewilderingly between describing Christians as being “in the Spirit” and describing the Spirit as being “in them.” The latter is what Paul wants to emphasize at this point, using the image of “indwelling” that evokes the idea of the Shekinah dwelling in the wilderness tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple (cf. 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19, etc.). The formulation “in the Spirit” is more of a technical description, formed ad hoc to contrast with “in the flesh”; nowhere else does Paul make this contrast in exactly this way, though there are pointers in this direction in 2:29; 7:6, and he can speak of Christian thoughts, prayers, and actions as taking place “in the Spirit” (e.g., 9:1; 14:17; 15:16; the contrast of “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit,” as in 8:5, is found again in Gal 4:29). When speaking thus, the “in” seems to denote a basic condition or situation, rather than having precise locative force. Part of the problem in all these formulations is that Paul’s picture of the Christian is not simply the mirror-opposite of his picture of the non-Christian. At one level “Spirit” contrasts with “flesh”; at another, “Spirit,” as the indwelling power within the person, contrasts with “sin.” At another, the Spirit is doing that which the law could not. And so on. We would be wrong therefore to accuse Paul of inconsistency in his terminology. He is carving out language to say what had not been said before. As long as we allow him to explain where he is going he will not mislead.

Second, the terms he uses to denote the indwelling Spirit move in an initially confusing fashion between “the Spirit,” “the Spirit of God,” “the Spirit of Christ,” and then simply “Christ.” This, too, we must assume, is the result of Paul hammering out patterns of thought where none had existed previously. For him, the same Spirit is the Spirit of God and of the Messiah--an interesting indication, we note with a sidelong glance, of the status the Messiah already has in his thinking!--and he can move to and fro in his description according to the particular shade or nuance of the actual point being made.

Third, Paul also shuttles to and fro in his description of Jesus the Messiah himself. As elsewhere, he refers to him as “Messiah” not least in order to stress the solidarity between him and his people, He refers to him as “Jesus” when focusing attention on Jesus himself as a specific individual human being, This, too, enables him to impart to his statements particular nuances and subtleties within the clear overall point being made.

Verse 9, then, introduces the argument that will lead to the triumphant conclusion of v. 11, making the contrast with vv. 7-8: you, he says (the “you” is plural, placing all his readers in the picture) are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. The evidence for this is precisely that God’s Spirit dwells in them. The nuance of the middle clause of v. 9 is hard to catch, since “if” (NIV) appears too doubtful and “since” (NRSV) too certain. The Greek εϊπερ (eiper) hovers in between these two, meaning something like “if after all” or “if, as is indeed the case”; we may compare its use in 3:30 or 8:17. If it contains a shadow of doubt it does so within a basic affirmation. The doubt, however, is raised in the last clause of the verse, which, being introduced by δέ (de) also implies that the middle clause was more of an affirmation than a question: “but if anyone does not possess the Messiah’s Spirit, that person does not belong to him.” The equivalence of “being in Christ” and “belonging to Christ” is clear in Gal 3:27-29; these are different ways of saying the same thing, denoting the people of God as redefined around the Messiah. Paul does not at this stage of his argument want to raise serious doubts as to whether some of his readers may, after all, be sham Christians; though it is important for later debates to note that, for him, the idea of a Christian who did not possess the Spirit of Christ was a contradiction in terms. Paul’s strong incorporative theology of the church is balanced by an equally strong view of the necessity of each individual member of the community being indwelt by the Spirit. The final clause in v. 9 highlights the fact that the Spirit in question is the Spirit of the Messiah. This enables Paul to draw on all that he has said about the Messiah in previous chapters to make the key point of v. 10.

If the Spirit is the Spirit of the Messiah, then the Messiah himself lives in the Christian. Paul, of course, more regularly speaks of the believer being “in Christ”; this is not interchangeable with “Christ in you,” which always refers to the indwelling within believers of that divine presence, variably spoken of as Christ or the Spirit, which empowers them in the present and will transform them in the future (see also Gal 2:20; 4:19; Eph 3:17; Col 1:27). Being “in Christ,” as we have seen frequently, particularly in 6:114, means that the Messiah’s death and resurrection become true of all his people. Because of the indwelling of the Messiah’s Spirit, however, this is no longer seen simply as a matter of status, but of actual power.

Paul’s way of saying this in the rest of v. 10 may again appear oblique, but will be clear, yet once more, when the background in 5:21 is kept in mind. “The body is dead because of sin”; in other words, even Christians are subject to the laws of decay and death, still living as they do in “the body of humiliation” (Phil 3:21). This is not in itself intended as a description of something that results from Christ being “in you”; the logic is “if Christ is in you, then (though the body is dead) the Spirit is life.” Sin has reigned in death, and since sin has indwelt believers prior to their baptism and receiving of the Spirit death must surely follow. But “grace reigns through righteousness to eternal life”; because of God’s covenant faithfulness, revealed in the Messiah’s saving death and resurrection, the Spirit gives life the other side of death. Artificial schemes for dividing up Romans (and indeed Paul’s thought as a whole), designating the first four chapters as lawcourt theology and the next four as incorporative theology, lead to commentators expressing surprise at the use of “righteousness” here, but in the light of 5:21 there should not only be no surprise but no question as to the word’s referent. The Spirit, dwelling within Christians, is the lifegiving power; Paul simply says “is life,” to make the contrast with “the body is dead” in the previous clause.^²⁶⁹ And this is so because of God’s faithfulness to the covenant, God’s own righteousness (other alternatives offered to explain this sudden reference to “righteousness” include “righteous behavior,” following from v. 4b, and the righteous status Christians have as a result of God’s justifying action). We look back her all the way to Abraham, who in chap. 4 believed precisely in the life-giving power of God upon which the covenant depended, the covenant to which God has now been faithful in Jesus the Messiah. Paul’s pithy formulation of all this is a sign not of imprecise thought but of rhetorical power as he hastens on to v. 11. This verse is both the goal of the argument that began in 7:1 and the foundation of the still greater argument that will take him through to 8:30.

The point of v. 11 is straightforward, and its inner logic can be spelled out as follows: (a) The Spirit dwells in you; (b) the Spirit is the Spirit of the God who raised Jesus; (c) Jesus is the Messiah, and you belong to him; (d) the God who raised Jesus the Messiah will raise all the Messiah’s people, you included. Once again, this sequence of thought has been compressed tightly, almost epigrammatically. As in 4:24, summing up the train of thought at that point, God is referred to as “the one who raised Jesus from the dead,” repeated here at once with the significant change of “Christ” for “Jesus”; this can only be explained on the basis that “Jesus” is the individual human being and “Christ” the one who royally represents his people, so that what is true of him is true of them. The key assumption Paul makes is that the raising of Jesus is the act of God, as in 6:4; and the conclusion is of course described at much greater length in 1 Corinthians 15. Jesus the Messiah is the firstfruits (cf. too Col 1:18), the first to rise from the dead; all those who belong to him will be raised as he was raised. This final resurrection will, like that of Jesus, be the act of none other than God. In 6:4 Paul said that Jesus was raised by the glory of the Father; in 1 Cor 6:14 he says that God raised the Lord, and will also raise us, by the divine power; here he says that God will accomplish this by his Spirit. A case has recently been made for the strongly attested variant reading, that God will give life to your mortal bodies because of, rather than “through,” the indwelling Spirit (cf. NRSV margin); but the argument of the chapter seems to me to fit well with the thought that the Spirit is God’s agent in the final resurrection, not merely God’s reason for accomplishing this great act of new creation.^²⁷⁰

This, then, is the answer to 7:24b, no longer as a bare assertion of faith (as, by itself, is 7:25a), but as a tight theological argument. Who will deliver from this body of death? Who, in other words, will give life to the dead? The law, though holy, just and good, cannot do this; God will, through Christ and by the Spirit and will thereby do what the law held out (Lev 18:5; Deut 30:15-20) but could not perform.

At the end of this central passage we may reflect on the nature of Paul’s achievement so far. This is the heart of his argument for assurance (those whom God justified, them God also glorified). For the Jew--for Paul himself prior to his conversion--the basis of assurance was membership in the covenant, whose outward badges were circumcision and Torah. The story of the exodus formed the backdrop to the Jewish expectation that the covenant God would once again act within history to deliver Israel. Paul has retold the story of the exodus, the freedom story, demonstrating that the Egypt of sin and death has been decisively defeated through the death of the Messiah, and that the Spirit is now leading God’s redeemed people to their promised inheritance. Baptism has marked out God’s renewed people; the Spirit is now “the one thing that distinguishes those who are Christ’s from those who are not.”^²⁷¹ The sign of the Spirit’s work is first and foremost faith (1 Cor 12:3) and indeed faithfulness; and the fruit of the Spirit’s work is the final resurrection. Thus is the path from justification to glorification, from “passover” to the “promised land,” laid out in this passage. Paul will now develop this picture, drawing on several interlocking images from the exodus story, and widening the angle of vision to include, not just humans, but the whole created order.

1. It is important to see this long and central argument (7:1-8:11 1 as a whole, before drawing small-scale lessons from its different parts, which by themselves could easily betaken senses somewhat different from those which the overall context suggests. The passage goes to the heart of the self-identity of the people of God. Israel at its best looked to Torah as the basis of its status as the chosen people of the creator God; Paul has insisted that Torah informs Israel in no uncertain terms that it is instead simply a subset of the people of Adam, in slavery to sin and facing death. Where then can assurance be found? Only in the death of the Messiah and the life-giving presence and power of the Spirit. Insofar as the church remains the people whose family story goes back to Abraham--and Paul would insist that this is a non-negotiable part of being God’s people--this story must be told again and again as part of the foundation of who the church is. It is not, in other words, simply a story about how ethnic Israel faced a particular problem and how this problem was overcome--a story that might seem somewhat remote and irrelevant to Christian living in any subsequent century, let alone two millennia later. Like the story of Jesus itself, it is the story of how God’s people, the church’s forebears, had to pass through the anguish of Romans 7 in order that, through the Messiah and the Spirit, new hope might be born.

2. Within the overarching theme of assurance, the central character in the story of 7:1-8:11 is of course Torah. This is Paul’s classic defense of Torah against all the charges that might be, and perhaps were being, laid against it. Torah, he insists, is holy and just and good; it is not responsible either for sin or for death. Indeed, it just goes to show the exceeding wickedness of sin itself that it can as it were make its nest in Torah, twisting Torah so that it becomes a dark and sinister replica of itself, condemning rather than giving life. When God acts in Christ and by the Spirit to give life to those indwelt by the Spirit of Christ, Torah looks on with, as we might say, a sigh of relief and approval: this was, after all, what it had intended all along. It should be clear from this, despite those whom C.E.B. Cranfield memorably called “Marcionites and semi-, crypto-, and unwitting, Marcionites,”^²⁷² that Paul solidly and emphatically reaffirmed the goodness and God-givenness of Torah. Any suggestion that law in general, or the law in particular, were or are shabby, second-rate, primitive, destructive of true religion, and therefore to be abolished, set aside, or treated as irrelevant in the bright new day of a law-free faith, must be ruled out. Paul’s theology contains many apparent paradoxes, and this point must be held in careful tension with the next one; but nothing is gained, certainly not in understanding of Paul or attempting to live and work in the light of his writings, by the shallow rejection of Torah.

3. Having said all that, we must also insist, against some current attempts to reinstate or rehabilitate Torah either within the church or (for instance within contemporary Israeli society) in wider social and political contexts, that the Torah is by itself weak. Not only can it not give the life to which it points; it accents, and indeed accentuates, the Adamic condition, the sinful and death-bound position, of those who embrace it. There is always a danger within the church that some Christians, anxious about Marcionism of whatever variety, and eager to insist that the whole Bible is the Word of God will fail to heed the words of Jesus and Paul and will attempt to live by Torah in matters (for instance) such as the death penalty. There are some Christians today, despite the letter to the Hebrews and indeed the entire temple-based christology and pneumatology of the New Testament, who seem to believe that the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem could still be God’s will equally, there are some who, no doubt with considerable inconsistency (I do not hear them calling for a reappropriation of patriarchal marriage customs, for example), want to see the Jewish law as in some way(s) normative for Christians today. This is to make the mistake of treating revelation in a flat dehistoricized fashion. As Paul’s own writings make abundantly clear, what we find in Scripture is above all a narrative: the great story of God and the world, and of God’s people as the people of God for that world. Torah stands as the headline over that story from the time of Moses to the time of the Messiah (Galatians 3 is the classic exposition of this); but the story, which started before the giving of Torah, moves on beyond the time when Torah was the determining factor, and Torah itself celebrates this fact. To say that its primary role was acted out in an earlier act in the drama than that in which Paul believed himself to be living is not to diminish its God-given role, but rather to celebrate it. To say that it goes on applying equally in the era of Christ and the Spirit is to ignore not only what Jesus and Paul said at several points but, if anything more important, the story Jesus enacted in his life, death, and resurrection, the story Paul took as his starting-point. This is not, of course, to deny what is said in 10:5-11 and 13:8-10 (on which see below).

4. On the day I sat down to write this part of the commentary I received a letter from a parish priest, asking whether the end of Romans 7 might not reflect Paul’s sense of standing vis-à-vis his kinsfolk according to the flesh much as Moses had stood in Exodus 33, seeing Israel as a whole in rebellion against God and agonizing over what could be done. This, I believe, reflects a true insight, not so much as exegesis of Romans 7 but as anticipation of Romans 9. As we have had occasion to observe, the argument of Romans proceeds in a series of long spiraling loops, and Romans 7 does indeed provide part of the foundation for what Paul will say in Romans 9, whose introduction evokes exactly the picture, proposed by my correspondent, of Moses standing between God and the rebel people. However, there may be something more to say here as well. In Galatians 1 Paul describes himself as being, in his pre-Christian days, “exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” We know that this kind of “zeal” could be described as zeal for God (cf. Acts 22:3; Rom 10:2) or for the law (Acts 21:20). When Paul wrote in Romans 7 of delighting in God’s law, but observing in his “members” another law bringing about death, I think it is at least worth enquiring whether he had in mind the way in which the zeal for Torah, which he and others had been exhibiting, was not only bringing death to those they opposed but also pulling down death on themselves, driving them closer toward the brink of a war with Rome that they could not possibly win. If this is in any way a valid reflection, it offers a series of concentric circles of application, relating not only to Middle Eastern politics in the twentieth as in the first century, but also to many other areas of conflict around the world, where zeal for ancestral traditions, which may or may not have been good in their way and place, leads to idolatrous behavior that is as destructive for the perpetrators as for the victims. If Romans 7 could help the church to speak more clearly on such issues we should be grateful.

5. Though Paul is not, in Romans 7, writing first and foremost about the plight of the whole human race, but only about that of Israel under Torah, it is nevertheless possible to work outward from what he says to a more general analysis of the puzzle of human moral inability. This, after all, is already hinted at in his (probably deliberate) sidelong allusions to the tradition, from Aristotle to Epictetus and beyond, that spoke of approving the better course but practicing the worse. If the point of Paul’s analysis is that Israel is like everyone else only more so, it is perfectly legitimate to reason back from that to what must be true of “everyone else.” When we do this we find, consonant with Rom 2:1-16, that even when the human race embraces and affirms some moral code, or even some moral principle, living up to it proves impossible. This does not mean that the code or the principle was wrong or misleading; just that there is a twist within the human race, as it presently finds itself, which distorts the best intentions, and exposes self-interest at the heart of apparent altruism. A glance at political and religious leadership in the Western world (to point the finger only at my own part of the human race) would offer many examples.

Someone is bound to respond to this by saying that the same is true of Christians also. I am bound to agree. Does this not call into question my whole exegesis? Is the passage not after all about Christian existence as well as anyone else’s? No. The Christian is not “under law,” and is not “sold under sin.” There is a great irony here. In the 1960s many people within the church, as well as outside it, trumpeted loudly that the old moral codes (they often meant the sexual ones, but it applied more widely as well) were no longer relevant, since we now knew that one should live simply by love, not by law. The moral chaos that has resulted, in mainline churches in particular, over the last generation has been pitiful to behold. When people from within that same tradition now say that Christians are no better than anyone else, it seems to me somewhat unfair to hold up as the prime evidence those parts of the church that have exhibited major disloyalty to traditional Christian teaching over many years. Why not look at the many other parts of the worldwide church where Christians today can still be spoken of, as the second-century apologists spoke of their comrades, as people in whom a different way of being human, a way of holiness and joyful self-sacrificial love, was truly being modeled? Yes, it is also true (so I am told) that the greatest saints remain conscious of depths of rebellion and unholiness within them that will not be rooted out until death itself (not even, according to some traditions, until some time after that). But there is such a thing as Christian holiness, however flawed it may still be; and these flaws, and the tensions that result, are not the same as those described in Romans 7.

6. The villain in the drama is Sin. Paul is capable of speaking of Satan, but he does so sparingly (only ten times in the entire Pauline corpus, and only once [16:20] in Romans). But when he speaks of Sin, he means not simply human acts of rebellion or lawbreaking, but a personified force at work in the world and in humans. He speaks of it nineteen times between 7:1 and 8:11, building on the seven occurrences in 5:12-21 and the sixteen in chap. 6. (To get some idea of the scale of this treatment, there are four references in Romans prior to 5:12, two after 8:11, and only seventeen in the whole of the rest of the Paulines.) Writing after a century in which many Western Christians have regarded it as something of a social or even liturgical faux pas to speak of sin, let alone Sin, it is important to stress that our soft-pedaling of the New Testament’s analysis of the depths of the human problem has done no service to either the church or the world. Of course, there are healthy and unhealthy ways of speaking about sin. The church has often allowed itself to lapse into a dualism in which certain parts of life are labeled “sinful,” in order to create an artificial sphere of “holiness” that is, in fact, no more than an imposed social convention. But to say that there is such a thing as a shallow diagnosis of the human condition is not to deny that there might be a deeper one. Politicians and the media used to pretend that a . little more social progress, a little more Western-style democracy in the world, would solve the ills that were still visible. We now know that this was a lie: not only is the world not a significantly better place for having more democracy, but the Western powers themselves have been shown up as riddled with corruption, selfishness masked as public service, and sexual and financial scandals. Cynicism about the political process and those who run it has become endemic. It is time once again to hold out the analysis of human behavior offered in the New Testament. There is such a thing as Sin, which is more than the sum total of human wrongdoing. It is powerful, and this power infects even those with the best intentions. If it could make even the holy Torah its base of operations, how much more the muddled intentions of well-meaning do-gooders.

7. Such an analysis, comes the response, is so gloomy. It will produce a human existence dogged by guilt, paranoia, and self-hatred. Nonsense. With the diagnosis goes the remedy. Not surprisingly, of course, those who dislike the Pauline analysis of sin routinely despise the Pauline remedy--namely, the cross and the Spirit. But this double answer to the problem remains foundational to genuine Christian understanding and indeed, of course, to genuine Christian living. It is, to be sure, a deep mystery that on the cross God “condemned sin” in the flesh of the Messiah. But this stands at the heart of Christianity, d offering the way forward through the Red Sea, leaving behind the Egypt of sin and death, and pointing onward to the land of promise. The victory of the cross over the principalities and powers, with sin and death as their chief, provides a solidly grounded freedom from guilt in the present; there is no need for anyone to collapse into that guilty self-absorption, which passes so quickly into self-hatred, which the older liberal denials of sin and guilt were so desperate to avoid. God’s love has proved itself stronger than all the powers of darkness. Nor is there any need to fear for the future; the whole point of Romans 8 is to substantiate the great opening shout: there is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. This truth, which always appears surprising even to those who have known it for years, needs constant reiteration in preaching, liturgy, and pastoral counseling. No techniques In these areas can substitute for the truth. But what is needed equally urgently in today’s world is the application of these truths to the wider world that has neither diagnosis nor remedy for the huge and horrible problems it faces. Since Paul goes on in Romans to show how God applies the victory of the cross to the liberation of the entire cosmos, is it too much to hope that this victory might have its effect in the realm of human society, government, and law as well as in the hearts and lives of individuals?

8. This brings us to the subject of Christian assurance. Once again, caricatures abound, which put many off the truth itself. Christian assurance is not self-assurance. Some self-assured people happen also to be Christians, and some Christians use their Christian assurance to give off an air of self-assurance; but distortions do not invalidate the reality. In some Christian traditions it has been customary, as a sign of humility, to question whether one can ever know in the present life that one is truly saved, just as in some others it has been customary, as a sign of sound doctrine, to proclaim one’s certainty on every occasion. It is perhaps significant that the greatest New Testament step-by-step argument for Christian assurance, of which this passage forms the heart, emerges from the deepest wrestling and struggling. It comes as the answer to the cry of despair that, though Paul places it in the mouth of the Torah-loving Jew, awakens echoes across every continent and in every century. Who shall deliver me? God will, through Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, Christian assurance is then built up, as in the argument of 8:1-11, on the basis of what has happened in Jesus the Messiah, and on the solid and unbreakable link between the Messiah and his people, of which faith is the sign, baptism the symbol, and the Spirit the personal guarantee.

9. This passage sees the start of one of Paul’s greatest descriptions of the indwelling of the Spirit. “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, that person does not belong to him.” There is no such thing in New Testament theology as a Christian who does not have the Spirit dwelling in him or her, Paul will speak in the next passage of some of the signs of that indwelling-which are by no means as narrowly defined, or as obvious, as some teachings have made out. For the moment it must be noted that there can be no split-level Christianity, no division between those who have the Spirit and those who do not. This must challenge both those whose more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit’s presence tempt them to despise those with the less spectacular, and those who are in fact unwitting passengers in the church, who think of themselves as Christians but in whose heart and life the Spirit has not taken up residence, and who are still therefore living “according to the flesh,” whatever form that may take. Christian assurance is always balanced by warnings against complacency. And, though this is not the main point of the paragraph, we cannot ignore the way in which the presence of the Spirit produces what we would call “ethical” consequences. Reading between the lines of Paul’s compressed argument in vv. 5-8, it is clear that a person in whom the Spirit dwells will begin to be at peace with God; they will submit to God’s will; they will begin to live in a way that is actually pleasing to God. Paul will spell out later more of what this looks like. He has already spoken of the love for God that the Spirit inspires in the believer (5:5). For the moment it is important to draw attention to the fact that the presence of the Spirit will make a difference not just to how someone feels, but to how they live.

10. As with Romans as a whole, so with this central passage: it is basically about God. The God of whom Paul speaks here is mysterious, as all true speech about God must acknowledge. The purposes of this God, in which the strange work of Torah described in 7:7-25 finds apparently a central place, are darker and more unexpected than either the devout Jew or the serious pagan, or for that matter most Christians, have allowed for. There is more to learn down this line, as chaps. 9-11 will disclose. But at the same time this one true God is now made known in two complementary and interlocking ways, which call not for intellectual recognition so touch as for worship and love. This God has been made known in the sending of the Son, not so that God could remain distant and detached while someone else did the difficult and painful work, but precisely so that God might be personally and intimately present at the point where sin and death had been heaped up to their full height. To imagine for a moment a world in which incarnation and cross had never happened and could never happen--this may be a hard task for a Christian, but it is a salutary one--is to imagine a world in which the rumor of incarnate love would either never be heard or be heard as a dream that was daily defied by waking reality. Without the cross of God’s Son, the Scriptures of Israel would indeed speak of a God who embodied covenant love, a God who rescued slaves so that they might be a people of praise for the sake of the world. But it would remain a private story, incredible to the outside world and increasingly puzzling within an embattled and beleaguered Israel. Without the cross, the world at large would continue to believe that might and money were the things that mattered, that sexual pleasure was the highest human good, and that killing people was the way to get things done. Alas, in much of the world, even in much of the would-be Christian world, these things are still implicitly believed. It is time for a genuinely incarnational theology to be let loose again upon the world, so that the rumor may become a report, and the report a life-changing reality. And for that to happen it is vital to grasp as well that the God who sent the Son now sends the Spirit of the Son. A fully Trinitarian theology, calling forth worship, love, and service, is the only possible basis for genuine gospel work that will bring life and hope to the world.

The stage is now set for the final act of the drama that Paul has been playing out since the start of chap. 5. “Being therefore justified by faith … we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God”; we even rejoice in our sufferings, and our hope “does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (5:1-5). Spirit; hope; suffering; glory; love: these are the themes, stated in advance at the head of the argument, to which Paul has now worked his way back.

Thus 8:12-30 offers a celebratory, description of present Christian existence, rooted in God’s past action in Jesus Christ, assured of God’s future action for Christ’s people and for the whole world, and sustained in the present by the Spirit. It is the conclusion of the argument for Christian assurance, for the belief that those whom God justified God also glorified (8:30). It is also, as we have noted in advance at various places, the moment when the exodus theme, latent under so much of the argument of chaps. 5-8, comes out fully into the open: what God did for Israel at the Red Sea, what God did for Jesus at Easter, God will do not only for those who are in Christ but for the whole created order. This passage is also, therefore, the completion of the basic statement about God’s righteousness, God’s saving justice, God’s covenant faithfulness. The covenant was established in order to put the world to rights; now we see, on the large scale, how this is to happen. God has been faithful not just to the Abrahamic promises but to the whole creation.

As we should expect, God’s faithfulness is revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, are the assumed subtext of this entire section, opening out to include the dying and rising, and the adoption as God’s sons and daughters, of all those “in Christ.” The statement in 8:29 that God’s purpose was to make Jesus the firstborn among many siblings is in fact a concise summary of these nineteen verses: “adoption” or “sonship” (the nongender-specific alternatives “siblinghood” and “son-and-daughtership” are out of the question) is a major theme, running through vv. 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, and 21 before being triumphantly summed up in v. 29.

When we put together the themes of new exodus and Christian adoption, as in this passage, they generate the theme of inheritance, which belongs closely in this passage with that of glory. In Paul’s scriptural background, the “inheritance” was, of course, the land, promised to Abraham and his family, and promised again to the Israelites after the exile (see, e.g., Gen 15:7; Num 34:2; Isa 57:13; 60:21; Ezek 36:12; cf. Pss 25:13; 37:9). Now, in line with 4:13, it has become the whole world, the whole creation made by the one creator God, itself renewed and redeemed. Part of the meaning of “glory” in this passage--the glory that has been promised to all God’s children in Christ--is precisely that they are to receive this inheritance. And this inheritance means that those in Christ are forever indebted to the God who promises and gives this inheritance. This, indeed, is the note on which the passage opens.

But the beating heart of the whole sequence of thought is found in Paul’s description of the prayer that the Spirit inspires within God’s children (vv. 15-16, 26-27). The “Abba” prayer that echoes Jesus’ own prayer, and provides the clearest evidence that one is indeed a child of God, is balanced by the “inarticulate groaning” in which the Spirit calls to the Father from within the hearts of Christians, expressing the longing of all creation for full redemption. In this, too, those in Christ are conformed to the image of the Son (8:29), standing between the pain of the world and the love of God, discovering that their own sufferings, including the ones they cannot begin to comprehend, are somehow themselves becoming the vessels and vehicles of God’s redeeming love.

The passage, filled as it thus is with rich themes about the Christians’ status, prayer, and future hope, follows a clear line of thought that could be summed up as “debtors to God’s grace.” We are in debt to God, because, being God’s children, we are also God’s heirs (8:12-17). We are fellow heirs with Christ, since, sharing his sufferings, we also share his glory (8:17-27; v. 17 is the bridge between the two movements in the long paragraph). God is utterly and unalterably purposed to bring all those in Christ to their glorious Christ-shaped inheritance (8:28-30).

NIV: ¹²Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation–but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. ¹³For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, ¹⁴because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. ¹⁵For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” ¹⁶The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. ¹⁷Now if we are children, then we are heirs–heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

NRSV: ¹²So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-- ¹³for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. ¹⁴For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. ¹⁵For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” ¹⁶it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, ¹⁷and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Once again it is important, reading a complex passage like this, not to get bogged down in detail but to keep in mind the overall direction and underlying argument. Paul’s point is to draw the conclusion (αρα οΰν ara oun, “so then,” is a quite emphatic transition) that arises not only from 7:1-8:11, but also from chaps. 5 and 6: the basic truth about Christians is that they are debtors to God, the God who has made them children and heirs. Precisely because this is the argument for assurance, it is framed as an appeal to gratitude.

8:12-13. Following a habit that the reader of Romans is by now used to, Paul never actually finishes the sentence he begins. “We are debtors,” he says--but breaks off to say what his readers are not indebted to, leaving them to work out from the way the argument proceeds who they are in fact indebted to. Paul works back there quite quickly, using the flesh/spirit contrast of vv. 12-13, repeated here from vv. 5-9, as the springboard to speaking of Christians as God’s children and hence heirs; so the basic import of v. 12a is not lost. (The NEB flattens out the paragraph opening: “It follows, my friends, that our lower nature has no claim upon us”; the sense of an unresolved harmony, driving the reader forward to the gift and promise of God, is lost.)

First, though, Paul will warn against any going back to the former way of life. Just as in 8:9 he could raise the question as to whether some of his hearers did not in fact possess the Spirit, and hence did not after all belong to the Messiah, so now he warns against continuing to live “according to the flesh.” This is not, as some would have it today, a lapse into dualism, a rejection of the God-given body and all its possibilities.^²⁷³ It is a recognition that the present body, corruptible and heading for death, is not all it might be and not all it will be in the resurrection, and that to use its possibilities and potentialities as the yardstick for what one ought to be doing is to take orders from that which will turn to dust, and so to come back again under the tyranny of death. “We are indebted, not to the flesh; live that way, and you will die.”

The alternative is to see the death-bound inclinations of the present body for what they are, and to anticipate the verdict of the grave by putting them to death here and now. (The NIV rightly interprets the phrase “the deeds of the body” as the misdeeds of the body; Paul obviously does not want Christians to do nothing at all--the body, after all, is to be the means of grateful service to God, 12:1.) As in Col 3:5-11, which explains Paul’s meaning in more detail, he sees that there are styles of behavior that, like weeds left to grow unchecked, have the capacity to take over the garden and choke all the flowers. There is only one way with such things: they must be uprooted, killed off. This is, of course, impossible for those who are still “in the flesh”; but those who are led by the Spirit will find that the Spirit’s inner agency enables them, if they will, to say “no” to the practices that carry the smell of death with them.

8:14. The γάρ (gar) with which v. 14 is linked to what precedes is best understood as explaining not only why this Spirit-led action of killing off “the deeds of the body” leads to life, but also the suppressed statement of that to which, of rather the one to whom, Christians are indebted. “Mortification leads to life because the Spirit that enables it also assures us of our divine adoption”; and also “We are indebted (to God), for, being led by the Spirit, we are God’s children [and so God’s heirs].” There may also be a further logical connection, depending on the scriptural context, not least the exodus narrative; it is because the people were God’s children that holiness was enjoined upon them (see Deut 14:1; cf. Isa 1:2).

It is those who are “led by the Spirit” to whom this status of divine adoption is given. The image here is taken from the wilderness wanderings of Israel, led by the pillar of cloud and fire (Exod 13:21-22; cf. Exod 14:19, 24; 40:38; Num 9:15-23; 10:34; 14:14; Deut 1:33; Neh 9:12, 19; Pss 78:14; 105:39).^²⁷⁴ Those symbols of God’s powerful presence are here replaced, as we might have guessed from the “indwelling” theme in 8:9-11, by the Spirit, who now does for God’s people that which the tabernacling presence of God did in the wilderness, assuring them of divine adoption and leading them forward to their inheritance. The idea of Christians as God’s sons and daughters is rooted in the same exodus narrative, again reapplied in the prophets (Exod 4:22; cf. Isa 1:2; Hos 1:10; 11:1). As in Gal 4:1-7, the God who sends the Son now sends the Spirit of the Son in order to adopt as sons and daughters all those in whom the Spirit dwells, or (as here, still within the exodus imagery) those who are led by the Spirit.

8:15. The exodus context gives depth, too, to the comment that follows. We did not receive, says Paul, a spirit of slavery; that would lead us back again into fear. In other words, the pillar of cloud and fire is not leading you back to Egypt. Having come to know God, or rather to be known by God, he says in the parallel passage in Gal 4:8-11, how can you embrace what is simply a new form of slavery? No: the Spirit you have received, precisely because it is the Spirit of Jesus, the Son, is the Spirit of sonship, of adoption.

There is a problem of punctuation to be addressed here. The last six words of v. 15 (έν ω κράζομεν αββα ό πατήρ en ho krazomen abba ho patēr) could go with what precedes, as in the KJV (“Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”; see also the REB). Although the NIV treats these six words as a separate sentence, they function more in relation to what precedes than to what follows (“And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’”). Or they could go with what follows, as in the NRSV (“you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God”). The issue is finely balanced, and not very much hangs on it; Paul clearly believes that it is by the Spirit that Christians learn from the heart to call God Father, and he clearly believes also that the Spirit, in doing this, bears witness with us that we are Gods children. The NEB is perhaps the most helpful, allowing the thought to flow more seamlessly forward: “a Spirit that makes us sons, enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ In that cry the Spirit of God joins with our spirit in testifying…”

More important than the punctuation is Paul’s assumption, here and in Gal 4:6, that Christians will find themselves prompted by the Spirit to call God “Father,” and to use the Aramaic word that, according to Mark 14:36, Jesus himself used in his prayer in Gethsemane (and, by implication, at other times as well). Paul’s addressees were basically Greek speakers, even in Rome, where a sizable portion of the population spoke Greek rather than Latin; but this Aramaic term was clearly known as a regular form of address to God. This may imply that the Lord’s Prayer, too, was known in Aramaic, but what matters above all is the sense, which Paul can presume throughout the church of whatever language, that God was known in an intimate, familial relationship for which this term, used by adults as well as children but still tender and personal, was entirely appropriate. It was a way of making one’s own all the exodus promises of the Scriptures, of calling upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for deliverance. It was a way, above all, of making Jesus’ prayers one’s own, and hence of sharing the sonship of Jesus.^²⁷⁵ It was a way of expressing from the heart something at the very center of the gospel: that in Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, the covenant faithfulness of God had been revealed for the salvation of all who believe (see 1:3-4, 16-17).

8:16. The result of this work of the Spirit, leading through the wilderness and inspiring the cry of “Abba,” is that our own human spirit is assured that we are God’s children. Throughout the passage some have questioned which uses of “spirit” refer to the Holy Spirit and which to the human spirit that each person has; some, for instance, have seen the human spirit rather than God’s Spirit in 8:10, though that is increasingly a rare position. But here, as in 1 Cor 2:11, there is no question. The Spirit’s very own self comes alongside our human spirit to bear witness that we are God’s children.

8:17. This is the fulcrum about which the whole discourse now pivots. Once Paul has established that all those in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit are “children of God,” the end of argument is in sight: If we are God’s children, we are also God’s heirs. This is the real reason why he implied that Christians were indebted to God (8:12), and it indicates the substance of the paragraph to come. Paul quickly explains in raft detail what it means to be God’s heirs: It means that one is a fellow heir with the Messiah. As Christians have shared his prayer, as a symptom of their sharing in his sonship, so they will share also in his inheritance. If he is to be Lord of the world, ruling over it with sovereign and saving love, they are to share that rule, bringing redemption to the world that longs for it (cf. 1 Cor 6:2-3; Paul takes this idea for granted, strange though it may be to us, and assumes that his hearers do so too). But, as Jesus himself solemnly warned, there is a cost involved (see Mark 8:34-38). The road to the inheritance, the path to glory (the two are now, at last, seen to be more or less synonymous) lies along the road of suffering.

NIV: ¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

²⁶In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. ²⁷And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

²⁸And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. ²⁹For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. ³⁰And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

NRSV: ¹⁸I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. ¹⁹For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

²⁶Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. ²⁷And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

²⁸We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. ³⁰And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Paul has now reached the point he mentioned in the introduction to the whole section (5:3-5): suffering is itself a cause of celebration, because it produces patience, character, and a hope that does not leave one ashamed, because the love of God has flooded the heart through the Spirit. So here the present suffering--Paul does not at this point say what this suffering consisted of, but 8:35-39 gives several suggestions--leads to patience and hope (vv. 18, 23-24) for those in whom the love of God is present (8:28). And, just as one might have gathered from the context and layout of chap. 5, and indeed from the careful christological base of the whole argument from that point to this, the aim of it all is that the Christian should be “conformed to the image of God’s Son” (8:29); or, as he says in 8:17b, “provided that we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Glory--the splendid reign over the world for which the human race was designed from the beginning, and the splendid form of human existence that will be appropriate for that role--was lost through sin, but regained through the Messiah in his resurrection (cf. 6:4). That which is true of him is, and will be, true of his people, and Paul will now show the route by which they must travel for this to be true of them in fact.

8:18. By way of explanation of his cryptic opening statement in 8:17 (the connective is gar, omitted in the NIV and the NRSV), Paul launches the substance of this paragraph with a somewhat expanded declaration of where his calculations about the future have taken him (“I consider” in the NIV and the NRSV translates λογίζομαι [logizomai], the same bookkeeping metaphor as was used in 3:28; 6:11). This is not merely a feeling or a private opinion: It is something Paul has thought through. It fits together logically. The main point, echoing 2 Cor 4:17, is that the glory that is to be revealed will far outweigh the sufferings that have to be endured in the present. The idea that, because Christians are “in Christ,” the true life is already present, but hidden, and waiting to be revealed when Christ is finally revealed in glory, is familiar elsewhere in Paul (e.g., Col 3:1-4). Paul’s wording here, though, is slightly unexpected: he speaks of “the glory that is to be revealed toward us, or into us (είς ήμας eis hēmas), implying not merely that we are to be shown a vision of glory (as the NRSV implies), nor simply that a glory will appear within us (as the NIV implies), but that the future revelation will bestow glory upon us, from above, as a gift. The way Paul now justifies this opening statement is to describe that future glory, and the present situation of waiting for it, in order to explain both his calculation and the present in-between situation both of creation and of the Christian--and, we might even say, of God.

8:19-21. The first stage of this explanation focuses on something at which Paul has hardly hinted up until now, and hardly mentions anywhere else in his writings, but which he has clearly thought out carefully and intends not lust to mention but to highlight at this dramatic stage of the argument. The reason why present suffering cannot compare with the coming glory is because the whole creation is on tiptoe with excitement, waiting for God’s children to be revealed as who they really are. Suddenly we have turned a corner. Whereas, up until now, it might have been possible to think that Paul was simply talking about God’s salvation in relation to human beings, from here on it is clear that the entire cosmos is in view. Nor is this a strange oddity, bolted on to the outside of his theology, or of the argument of Romans, as though it were simply a bit of undigested Jewish apocalyptic speculation thrown in here for good measure. No: it is part of the revelation of God’s righteousness, that covenant faithfulness that always aimed at putting the whole world to rights. This is why, as we saw in 4:13, Paul declared that God’s promise to Abraham had the whole world in view.

Paul could hardly express the longing of creation more dramatically. Literally, he writes, “For the eager expectation of the creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God,” an obvious pleonasm (use of extra or redundant words for effect) that makes its own point. The whole creation--sun, moon, sea, sky, birds, animals, plants--is longing for the time when God’s people will be revealed as God’s glorious human agents, set in authority over the world. But why? Why should creation be so eager for this? And how does Paul know such a thing?

He answers by explaining the present state of creation, drawing on Genesis 3 and other Jewish traditions. Creation itself is in bondage, in slavery, and needs to have its own exodus. It has been “subjected to futility,” not deliberately (it did not rebel as humankind rebelled), but because God subjected it to corruption and decay, creation’s equivalent of slavery in Egypt (“the slavery which consists In corruption,” v. 21). God did precisely in order that creation might point forward to the new world that is to be, in which its beauty and power will be enhanced and its corruptibility and futility will be done away. And, if one dare put it like this, as God sent Jesus to rescue the human race, so God will send Jesus’ younger siblings, in the power of the Spirit, to rescue the whole created order, to bring that justice and peace for which the whole creation yearns. (This cannot be reduced to the old liberal Protestant “social gospel”--from which the resurrection, which Paul here presupposes, was usually bracketed out.)

The basis of Paul’s belief here must be a combination of two things: the biblical promise of new heavens and new earth (Isa 65:17; 66:22), and the creation story in which human beings, made in God’s image, are appointed as God’s steward over creation. Putting the picture together, in the light of the observable way in which the created order is out of joint, and the clear biblical and experiential belief that the human race as a whole is in rebellion against God, Paul, in company with many other Jews, saw the two as intimately related. After the fall, the earth produced thorns and thistles. Humans continued to abuse their environment, so that one of the reasons why God sent Israel into exile, according to the Scriptures, was so that the land could at last enjoy its sabbaths (Lev 26:34-43 [cf. 25:2-5]; 2 Chr 36:21). But the answer to the problem was not (as in some New Age theories) that humans should keep their hands off creation, should perhaps be removed from the planet altogether so as not to spoil it any further. The answer, if the creator is to be true to the original purpose, is for humans to be redeemed, to take their place at last as God’s imagebearers, the wise steward they were always meant to be. Paul sees that this purpose has already been accomplished in principle in the resurrection of Jesus, and that it will be accomplished fully when all those in Christ are raised and together set in saving authority over the world (see 1 Cor 15:20-28). That is why, Paul says, creation is now waiting with eager longing.

That for which creation is longing is not, then, that it might be “brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (NIV) or might “obtain” the same glorious freedom that those in Christ will have (RSV, NRSV). The closing words of v. 21 (lit., “unto the freedom of the glory of the children of God”) could be intended to be run together like that; Greek often expresses adjectival relations through genitives. But here, in the light of the previous verses, the thought seems to be not that creation and Christians will simply all be free and glorious in the same way, together, but that the freedom for which creation longs, and which it will be liberated into, is the freedom that comes about through the glorification of the children of God. Paul never says that creation itself will have glory.” It will have freedom because God’s children have glory; indeed, their glory will consist quite specifically in this, that they will be God’s agents in bringing the wise, healing, restorative divine justice to the whole created order.

8:22-27. By way of yet further explanation (gar; once again omitted by the NIV and the NRSV), Paul states a broader truth about the way the world is, and about Christians within it. These verses stand at the very heart of his theological description of the Christian life, set within the still-to-be-redeemed world, on the one hand, and held within the powerful love of God, on the other. He draws once more on Jewish tradition, this time the theme of the great tribulation, the great woes, that would come upon the world in order for the new world to be born.^²⁷⁶ This (essentially female) image of the birth pangs of the new age is applied first to the world, then to the church, and then, remarkably enough, to the Spirit. This creates the context within which, as he wants to explain to the Roman church, patience and prayer are the appropriate stance and activity for God’s people while awaiting the final redemption. Within Paul’s overall argument for assurance, this is vital: he needs to explain why (if all that he has said about Christ and the Spirit is true) things are still so often so painful, and also why Christians can nevertheless be confident of God’s final victory and their final redemption.

8:22. He deals first with creation: groaning together and travailing together, which the NIV and the NRSV rightly treat as one large idea, “groaning in labor pains.” This is the present state of creation. Part of the point of the image is that the coming new world will involve, not the abolition of the present one, but its transformation: birth (particularly in the culture of Paul’s day, both Jewish and pagan) speaks of new life that is at the same time the mother’s own life, delighting her, despite the pain of labor, with a fresh fulfillment. This continuity between the present world and the future one is the reason, one may assume, why the present passage has been marginalized in many expositions of Paul and Romans on the part of those for whom a more dualist theology was a working assumption.

8:23. But how will the new world come to birth? Not of its own energy and potentiality, but only through the glorification of God’s children (v. 21). That is why, within the groaning creation, the church also groans, longing for its own “adoption”: longing, in other words, for the “child” to be born that is its own true self. Here we strike once more the characteristic note of “now and not yet” that runs right through Paul: we have already received “the spirit of υίοθεσία [huiothesia, “sonship/adoption”]” (v. 15); we are already “children of God” (vv. 16-17); and yet there is a form of this “sonship/adoption” for which we still eagerly long. The link between present and future is made, again as usual, by the Spirit, who is the “first fruits,” that part of God’s future redeeming power that is brought forward into the present, so that the prayer of the child in the present time (vv. 15-16) truly points on to the future resurrection glory (vv. 11, 17).^²⁷⁷ This idea is closely cognate with the similar statement that the Spirit is the “guarantee,” using the metaphor of a down payment, of the full salvation yet to come (e.g., 2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:14). Here “the firstfruits of the Spirit” looks back to 8:46, 9-11, and 13b-17. Summing up that whole train of thought, Paul can declare, here and in vv. 26-27, that the present “groaning,” though at one level a sign of the present not fully redeemed state, is at the same time a sign of the Christian’s sure and certain hope.

The “adoption/sonship” of which Paul here speaks--the full and final thing of which the Spirit’s work is the beginning and guarantee--is precisely the final redemption of the body, of which Paul has already written decisively in 8:11. “Redemption,” mentioned here for the first time since the highly significant 3:24, carries once more the gentle overtones of the exodus theme that underlies so much of the present passage. We ourselves have come out of “Egypt,” but our body, which still needs to have its deeds put to death (v. 13), is still awaiting redemption from the slave market (Paul uses the singular “body” rather than the expected plural, as in v. 11, but there seems no particular significance to this change). The body is intended to be glorious, splendid, fashioned after the model of Jesus’ own resurrection body, no longer subject to weakness, humiliation, sickness, sin, and death (cf. 1 Cor 15:54; 2 Cor 5:1-5; Phil 3:21). The Christian in the present time is but a pale shadow of his or her future self.

8:24-25. “For we were saved in hope.” Not in “this hope,” as the NIV interprets; that, though true, is not the point Paul is making here, as the further explanation makes clear. The logic of these verses, explaining what has gone before, is as follows: (a) we ourselves groan while awaiting our complete adoption; (b) this is so because we were saved in hope; (c) if we were saved in hope, this must mean that our future salvation is not yet visible; (d) the appropriate Christian stance is therefore patient expectation. Paul’s concern is to stress that, while salvation is already a reality for the Christian (“we were saved”: the tense is aorist, denoting a one-off event), it carries an inevitable future component. Hope is bilt in to Christian experience from the start, and remains one of its central characteristics (see 5:2-5; 15:13). But if this is so, Paul is stressing, one cannot expect present Christian living to be anything other than a matter of straining forward for what is yet to come, for what is yet unseen. (See Phil 3:13; 2 Cor 4:18; the present passage makes it clear that the distinction between “seen” and “unseen” things in 2 Corinthians is contrasting present and future, not [in a Platonic fashion] the world of space, time, and matter, on the one hand, and the world of ideas, on the other). One does not anxiously scan the horizon for a boat already in port.

If this is so, the Christian is called to patience. But patience is no mere dispassionate passing of the time. The word Paul uses for “wait” here is άπεκδεχόμεθα (apekdechometha) the same root that was used in v. 19, where most interpreters recognize a note of eagerness, of excited expectation. The last three words of v. 25 thus have an almost oxymoronic flavor, with the emphasis failing not, as in most English translations, on “with patience” (lit., “through patience;’ δι’ ύπομονης di’ hypomonēs), but on “eagerly await”: if we hope for what we do not yet see, then, with steady patience, we maintain an eager expectation.

Paul has now described the whole creation groaning in labor-pains; he has shown that God’s people in Christ share the same struggle and groaning. Where is God in all this? Not, as in so many theological schemes ancient and modern, standing to one side, or hiding a long way off. God is present in the midst of the pain. God, indeed, is groaning in labor too.

8:26-27. The groaning of the church, in the midst of the groaning world, is sustained and even inspired by the groaning of the Spirit. Paul clearly intends these to be seen in parallel, since he introduces the verse with ώσαύτως (hōsautōs, “in the same way”). The Spirit, he says, helps us in our weakness--or, literally, “The Spirit helps our weakness.” He has not spoken of “weakness” before in the present argument, and we must assume that he uses this term to sum up the state he has just described, the state of not yet being fully redeemed. Those who cannot see that for which they eagerly hope need assistance to peer into the darkness ahead and to pray God’s future into the present. It is that assistance that the Spirit provides, coming alongside to help (συναντιλαμβάνεται synantilambanetai; this is the word Martha used in Luke 10:40 to say what Mary should have been doing for her).

Here, as in vv. I5-16, Spirit-inspired prayer is a key part of the experience of inaugurated eschatology (cf. Zech 12:10, where, in the context of the coming great eschaton, God pours out upon the house of David, and upon Jerusalem, “the spirit of grace and supplication,” producing mourning in the midst of the promised glory). It is God’s intention that redeemed human beings should be set in authority over the world, should indeed thereby be the agents through whom the cosmos that still groans in travail should be set free. At the moment, however, these human beings are weak, since their own bodies, that part of creation for which they have the most immediate responsibility, are still subject to decay and death. In this condition they do not even know what to pray for, how it is that God will work through them to bring about the redemption of the world. Paul here assumes both that the church is called to the task of intercession and that the church finds this very puzzling--a double truth that most great teachers of prayer from that day to this would endorse. But, just as it is the Spirit’s task to inaugurate genuine humanness within the Christian in the form of holiness (vv. 12-14) and the Abba-prayer (vv. 15-16), so here it is the Spirit’s task to enable genuine humanness, that stance of humbly trusting God and so being set in authority over the world, which is to be anticipated in the life of intercessory prayer.

Many writers, from various standpoints, have suggested that Paul here refers to the gift of glossolalia, “speaking in tongues.” This is quite possible in terms of Paul’s belief about the latter gift and its place within the church, and a strong case can be made out for it.^²⁷⁸ The present writer certainly has no prejudice against finding such a reference here, as some appear to have. Yet I find it strange that Paul, if he wished to refer to speaking in tongues, for which words of the λαλέω (laleō) root would be used (“to speak,” or, of inanimate things, “to make a noise,” “to give forth a sound”; see, e.g., 1 Cor 12:30; 13:1; 14:2), should here use the word άλαλήτος (alalētos, “speechless” or “voiceless”) to describe the practice. It is important to say that, if he is not referring to speaking in tongues, nor is he simply referring to silent prayer such as is commonly practiced in private Christian devotion in the contemporary Western world (in Paul’s day most people would have prayed aloud, just as people used to read aloud, even when alone). Rather, he is speaking of an agonizing in prayer, a mixture of lament and longing in which, like a great swell of tide at sea, “too full for sound or foam,” the weight of what is taking place has nothing to do with the waves and ripples on the surface. Whether Paul expected all his readers to know this experience in prayer (as he seems to have expected them to know the Abba-experience) is difficult to judge. Then as now, perhaps, his words may have come as a challenge to a deeper wrestling with the pain of the world and the church, a struggle in which, like Jacob, Christians might discover that they had after all been wrestling with God as well as with their own weak humanness, and had prevailed.

The point Paul is making, in any case, is that the Spirit’s own very self^²⁷⁹ intercedes within the Christian precisely at the point where he or she, faced with the ruin and misery of the world, finds that there are no words left to express in God’s presence the sense of futility (v. 20) and the longing for redemption. It is not (as some early scribes added to the text, followed by the NN) that the Spirit intercedes “for us”; that misses the point, and makes Paul repeat himself in the following verse. What Paul is saying is that the Spirit, active within the innermost being of the Christian, is doing the very interceding the Christian longs to do, even though the only evidence that can be produced is inarticulate groanings.

The good news about this is that God, the living, transcendent God, is in intimate touch with the Spirit, so that these inarticulate but Spirit-assisted groanings come before God as true prayer, true intercession. To say this, Paul uses another remarkable periphrasis for God (see the Commentary on 8:11; see also the Commentary on 4:24): “the heart-searcher.” The Spirit’s work (lit., “the mind of the Spirit,” as in 8:6), deep within the human heart, is known to the heart-searching God. We may compare 2:16; 1 Cor 4:5; 1 Thess 2:4; since these references (the first two certainly, the third arguably) are to a future judgment at which the heart’s secrets will be laid bare, what we have here appears to be yet another example of inaugurated eschatology; God’s searching of hearts anticipates the final putting to rights of all things (see also Heb 4:12-13). The Spirit, he says, intercedes for God’s people, whom he refers to as “the saints”; he often designates Christians thus, set apart as they are for God, and this is a particularly appropriate context to do so, as God’s people are caught up in the inner life of God. The Spirit’s intercession is “according to God’s will” (lit., “according to God”). This hints at something deeper than merely praying in the way God wants or approves; God’s own life, love, and energy are involved in the process. The Christian, precisely at the point of weakness and uncertainty, of inability and struggle, becomes the place at which the triune God is revealed in person.

8:28. Triune? Has not Paul only spoken of the first and third persons of the Trinity? No. The suffering of the church, groaning in longing and prayer for the redemption of the world, and of the present body, is the means by which Christians are “conformed to the image of God’s son” (v. 29). As usual, Paul has steadily worked his way back to the point at which he began, in this case 8:17b: we are fellow heirs with the Messiah, so long as we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him. This is the theme that dominates as the paragraph, already one of Paul’s most remarkable, draws to its unique and uniquely powerful climax.

Verse 28 does not represent a completely new thought (as is sometimes implied by paragraph divisions in translations, such as the NIV and the NRSV). It is not simply an extra devotional aside about the wonderful workings of providence. It is bound in tightly to the sequence of the argument. The introductory δέ (de) is the “but,” not of opposition, but of logic; not “I hoped he would come but he didn’t,” but rather “Donkeys like carrots; but this is a donkey; therefore let’s give him some carrots.” The train of thought is, “God knows the mind of the Spirit; but we know that God works all things together for good for those who love God; therefore (implicit but vital) God works all things together for good for us, we in whom the Spirit is operating.” (This, after all, is where the longer paragraph started, with the Christian being in God’s debt [v. 12]). The intercession spoken of in v. 26 will be heard and answered in ways that, though we cannot at present see them or even conceive them, will turn out to be that for which our groaning prayers have been yearning. “All things”--not just the groanings of the previous verses, but the entire range of experiences and events that may face God’s people--are taken care of by the creator God who is planning to renew the whole creation, and us along with it.

I have assumed that “God” is the implied subject of “works together.” Two other views have been taken. A minority, represented by the NEB, make “the Spirit” the implied subject. The strength of this view is that the Spirit has been a main topic, perhaps the main topic, ever since 8:1, and is the subject of the immediately preceding clause. However the subject of the previous main sentence is God, not the Spirit; and, with several commentators I regard the sudden and unexplained change of subject at the end of v. 28 (from the Spirit to God) as a fatal objection to making the Spirit the subject here.^²⁸⁰ A more widely held view is that “all things” are the subject: so, famously, the KJV, “All things work together for good to them that love God.” There are considerable problems with this, not least the sheer oddity, for Paul, of giving “all things” such apparent theological priority (even if we understand, as devout readers usually have, a strong theology of providence behind the statement).

The NRSV, echoing the King James, implies in its footnote that to make God the subject is to endorse the variant reading of several good MSS, according to which “God” (ό θεός ho theos) was to be read after “works together.” But this is not strictly the case. Even with the shorter text (which is surely correct; it would be easy to add the word “God” but very odd to omit it), the implied subject must still be that of the previous verse--namely, “the heartsearcher”: God. The verse runs on, without any indication of a change of subject, to “those whom [God] foreknew” in v. 29, and indeed to the implied subject of “called according to [God’s] purpose” at the end of v 28. Had Paul not intended “God” as the subject of συνεργεΐ (synergei, “works together”), in fact, he really should have specified a change of subject to “God” toward the end of the present verse. Paul is, of course, capable of omitting connections, subjects, verbs, and anything else that he hopes will be understood by someone clinging to the tail of his fast-moving argument. But here it seems unlikely.^²⁸¹

Paul, pulls together the threads of his treatment of the triple groaning of world, church, and Spirit. The whole letter has been about God, God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s gospel revealed in the Son and the Spirit, and above all--not that this is a separate topic from all those--God’s love. The heart of the argument for assurance is the unshakable and sovereign love of God, and the certainty that this love will win out in the end. That, indeed, is the theme that is now emerging as the major subject of the end of the chapter. We are debtors, he says, to God, from whom we have received the Spirit of sonship/adoption, and from whom we shall receive the inheritance, the glory, the sonship/adoption in its full form; and the move from present to future is undergirded, made totally secure, by the fact that God works all things together for good to those who … now keep the most basic command of Torah.

That most basic command is, of course, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one; and you shall love YHWH your God.” Paul has already alluded to the Shema more than once in the letter (1:5; 3:30; 5:5). Now he comes back to it, with a hint of the positive side of the equation of which 8:7-8 was the negative. Those in the flesh do not and cannot submit to God’s law; they cannot please God; but those in the Spirit now do that which the law commanded but could not of itself produce. They love God from the heart (cf. 1 Cor 2:9; 8:3). Just as Paul can vary his epithets for God, so here he pulls out a new epithet for the people of God in Christ and by the Spirit: they are the God-lovers, in other words, the true law-keepers, the true Israel.

This epithet, “the God-lovers,” is again not a new idea introduced into the passage, but sums up what has been said in vv. 15, 26-27. In v. 15, those who are led by the Spirit are taught to address God in the language of familial love. In vv. 26-27, those who groan as they await their redemption discover that from the depths of their own heart there issues an inarticulate cry of faith, hope, and love to God. This, the work of the Spirit’ is what qualifies them to be described in this way in the next verse (of which the clause “to those who love God” is the first substantial part). It is as though Paul had written: “because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people, calling from their own hearts with love to God; and for those who thus love God, God works all things together for good.”

This same people can also be described with another Israel-epithet: they are those who are now “called according to God’s purpose.” That purpose--namely, that God would sum up all things in Christ (Col 1:15-20; Eph 1:10); that God would be all in all (1 Cor 15:28); that the whole creation would be liberated into the freedom that goes with the glorification of God’s children--this whole purpose was always designed to be fulfilled through the agency of God’s image-bearing children, the human race. This purpose has been decisively fulfilled in Jesus Christ (5:12-21), but that which was thereby inaugurated has now to be consummated. Those in Christ are the people through whom God intends to accomplish this task. They, like Israel, are assured that they have been called for a purpose--namely, to show forth the praises of the one true God in all the world (cf. Eph l: l1-12; 1 Pet 2:9). And--this is still the thrust of v. 28--those who find themselves in this category can be assured that the purpose will be fulfilled. God will accomplish it.

8:29-30. In order to show the branches that they are indeed to bear blossom and fruit, Paul demonstrates that the tree is securely planted and well rooted. In order (that is) to complete his argument from justification to glorification--the argument that began with 5:1-2--he goes back behind justification itself to God’s purpose and call, and behind that again to God’s foreknowledge. God’s purpose is the overriding thought of these verses, summing up the line of thought through the whole chapter, but particularly from v. 17: God’s plan from the start was to create a Christ-shaped family, a renewed human race modeled on the Son (once again the line of thought from 1:3-4, through 5:6-10, to 8:3 emerges at a crucial point in the argument). Heirs of God, said Paul in v. 17, and fellow heirs with the Messiah: fellow children, younger siblings of the Firstborn (see Col 1:15, 18). This would come about through a process of God’s adopted children being shaped according to the likeness of the Son. Though this process will only be complete when the body itself is transformed either in resurrection or at the Lords coming (cf. 1 Cor 15:51-55 with Phil 3:21), it is to begin here and now precisely through the holiness, suffering, and prayer of which Paul has written in the preceding verses (see also 2 Cor 3:18).^²⁸²

This process will bring God’s renewed people to the point where they reflect the Son’s image, just as the Son is the true image of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15; 3:10). They are, that is, to become true, because renewed, human beings. This is the point, at last, to which the long argument beginning with 1:18 was looking forward. The image of God, distorted and fractured through idolatry and immorality, is restored in Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God; and the signs of that restoration are visible in those who, like Abraham, trust in God’s life-giving power and so truly worship and give glory to God (4:18-22). But the purpose is never simply that God’s people in Christ should resemble him, spectacular and glorious though that promise is. As we saw in vv. 18-21, it is that, as true image-bearers, they might reflect that same image into the world, bringing to creation the healing, freedom, and life for which it longs. To be conformed to the image of God, or of God’s Son, is a dynamic, not a static, concept. Reflecting God into the world is a matter of costly vocation.

That, indeed, is the thrust of vv. 28-30, which otherwise can easily degenerate, as the history of interpretation shows, into an abstract theory of personal predestination and salvation. God’s purpose for those in Christ is precisely Christ-shaped. They are chosen and called in order to advance God’s purpose in and for the world. The five great verbs (foreknown, foreordained, called, justified, glorified), crashing chords at the end of the movement, are all to be understood as Christ-shaped. That which is true of the Messiah is true of his people.

Conformity to the Son means, of course, conformity to his death. This is familiar enough elsewhere in Paul (e.g., Phil 3:10-11, a passage very close to the present one in theme and expression). Here it is the major subject of the unit of thought that, beginning with v. 17, reaches its climax in the present verse. It is by reproducing the likeness of the Messiah, not least in suffering and “groaning,” that Paul’s apostolic labor went forward; that is the subject of 2 Corinthians, especially chapters 4 and 6, and it is summarized in other passages such as Col 1:24. But it is not merely apostles to whom the privilege of sharing the sufferings of the Messiah is granted. It is, in some measure at least, all Christians. Though the last sections of Romans 8 are often (rightly) thought of as triumphant, it should never be forgotten that the triumph is announced and celebrated, with irony and paradox, from the midst of circumstances that would be simply unbearable, were it not for faith in God the life-giver, and for the hope and above all the love that accompany this faith.

Thus, in v. 29, Paul is explaining both the general point of v. 28, that God works all things together for good, and the more specific point, what is meant by being “called according to God’s purpose.” The concept of “foreknowledge” is by no means simply that of God being able to see the future and so to know things in advance as we know things in retrospect (though presumably more accurately). The biblical concept of “knowing” is richer than the mere transfer of information. We might invoke Gal 1:15 as at least a partial explanation. There Paul speaks of God “setting him apart” for a particular purpose, and then “calling” him by grace; the language is reminiscent of various biblical passages, including Jer 1:5, “before I formed you in the womb I knew you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (cf. Isa 44:2; 49:1). In Romans, we might compare 1:1, where Paul speaks of his “call” to be an apostle and of being “set apart” for God’s gospel, the latter verb (άφορίζω aphorizō; also used in Gal 1:15) being a compound from the same root as προώρισεν (proōrisen, “foreordained”) in the present verse. God’s “knowing” and “call,” however, are not just for prophets and apostles but for all God’s people, each in their own vocation and fashion, but all according to the same pattern of Christ. Foreknowledge is a form of love or grace; to speak thus is to speak of God reaching out, in advance of anything the person may do or think, to reveal love and to solicit an answering love, to reveal a particular purpose and to call forth obedience to it.

More particularly, this foreknowledge produces God’s foreordaining purpose. The word proōrisen, often translated “predestined” here and in v. 30 (the NEB is an exception with “foreordained”), often sends shivers down the spines of readers because of its association with the word “destiny,” and the link in much popular thinking between this and “fate” (the NJB makes matters worse on this front by simply translating “destined”). Is Paul after, all a determinist, believing in a blind plan that determines everything, so that human freedom, responsibility, obedience, and love itself are after all a sham?

One can easily imagine Paul’s own reaction: μή γένοιτο (mē genoito, “Certainly not!”). What we have here, rather, is an expression, as in 1:1, of God’s action in setting people apart for a particular purpose a purpose in which their cooperation, their loving response to love, their obedient response to the personal call, is itself all-important. This is not to deny the mystery of grace, the free initiative of God, and the clear divine sovereignty that is after all the major theme of this entire passage, here brought to a glorious climax. But it is to deny the common misconception, based on a two-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional understanding of how God’s actions and human actions relate to each other, that sees something done by God as something not done by humans, and vice versa.

One could appeal (scholars often do) to the Hebrew, or the Middle Eastern, mind-set in which paradoxes and apparent antinomies are held together without difficulty (e.g., talk of God’s building the new Temple does not mean that there will not be human architects and stonemasons). But there is more to the problem than this. God’s actions and human actions are not, as it were, on the same plane. Already in describing the Spirit’s work Paul has shown that the groanings that seem to come from the depths of one’s own heart are actually the Spirit’s groaning within; and that the heartfelt cry of familial love, Abba, Father, is itself likewise the result of the Spirit’s prompting. Woe betide theology if discussions of grace take their coloring from the mechanistic or technological age where all actions are conceived as though performed by a set of machines. God’s foreknowledge and foreordination, setting people apart in advance for particular purposes, are not equal and opposite to human desires, longings, self-questionings, obedience, and above all love. You do not take away from the one by adding to the other. Even the analogy of human love breaks down, since no lover is ever in the position of playing God to the beloved. Yet love, in which love affirms the otherness of the other at precisely the same time as appearing to merge wills, souls, hearts, and bodies into one, offers some parallels, however oblique, with the workings of divine grace. Christian faith, ultimately irreducible to any analogy, and certainly not reducible to terms simply of “yet another odd paradox,” involves wholeheartedly and responsibly answering the call of sovereign love, grace, and commission with a love, gratitude, and obedience that come from the depths of one’s own being and are simultaneously experienced as a response to a sovereignty, a compulsion even, to which the closest parallel remains that of the highest love.

The emphasis of vv. 29-30 falls clearly on conformity to Christ; this remains so throughout the dramatic closing words, focused on the four last aorists (pre-shaped, called, justified, glorified). All has been accomplished in Christ: the fore-shaping of Christ’s people to be his younger siblings; their call through the gospel that announces his lordship; their justification by faith in the God who raised him from the dead; their glorification, so that they are now already seated in the heavenly places in him (see Eph 2:6, and in the light of that, Eph 1:20-22; Col 3:1-4). There may even be a backward glance to the story of Jesus himself: his incarnation, his baptism, his resurrection, his ascension--though this remains speculative. In any case, the christological basis explains the final aorist, which is otherwise very puzzling, coming as it does after so many futures (8:9-11, 13, 17-18, 23). All these things, including “glorification,” have happened already to and in Jesus, the Messiah; and what is true of the Messiah is true of his people.

Pre-shaped; called; justified; glorified--the one link in the chain not already explained in this letter is the second. Paul uses the verb “call” in a more specific sense than some other NT writings (e.g., in the Gospels it simply means the general call to which a variety of answers might be given; e.g., Matt 22:14). For Paul the “call” is what happens when, through the preaching of the gospel (or, in his own case, the revelation of the risen Jesus; but Paul does not suppose this will happen to anyone again), the Spirit works in the heart to produce faith, hope, and love. This “call” is, in the language of an older theology, “effective”; Paul knows that not all hearers of the gospel respond in faith, but when people do he describes the event as their being “called” by God (cf. 1 Thess 1:4-5 with 2 Thess 2:13-14). This will be an important category in chap. 9 (see 9:7, 11, 24-26). Paul can use the word almost synonymously with “conversion”--that is, to describe the moment of coming to faith; though it retains the sense not of a switch in religion (that might happen as well, but it is not the point of this verb) so much as the response to a sovereign command (see 1 Cor 7:15-24; Gal 1:6, 15; Eph 4:4).

Those who respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ with “the obedience of faith”--those, that is, who are “called” in this sense--are declared by God to be part of the new covenant family, the sin-forgiven worldwide people of God, on the basis of this faith alone. “Those whom God called, God also justified”; v. 30a thus sums up 3:21-4:25. And those who are justified by faith now rejoice in the hope of the glory of God (5:2, the introductory summary of 5-8); in other words, “those whom God justified, God also glorified” (v. 30b, the concluding summary). The detailed argument is done, and the four emphatic aorists of v. 30 are the last four blows of the hammer to ensure that every vital nail in the structure is in place. The steady beat of the verbs within Paul’s solemn rhetoric underscores the steady beat of God’s unshakable purpose set forth in the Messiah and completed by the Spirit.

It remains to note the way in which, under the general heading of “glorification,” Paul’s entire future hope for Christians and the world can be spoken of in so many different but overlapping and interlocking ways. To begin with, Paul can speak simply of “life” (8:11) for the mortal body: in other words, resurrection life, the new or transformed physicality that will correspond to the physically renewed body of the risen Jesus (1 Cor 15:50-57). This is what he means, of course, by “eternal life,” much misused though that phrase may be in some Christian writing to permit a non-physical interpretation of the final state. But this resurrection life is never something to be enjoyed simply for itself. Those renewed at the last, those who share the glory of the Messiah, will receive an inheritance, which will be the entire world. There they will have tasks to perform, tasks to do with the liberation of creation from the injustice, misery, bondage, corruption, and death that at present characterize it. (This picture, set out briefly in 8:18-22, is what underlies such otherwise peculiar statements as 1 Cor 6:2; cf. Wis 3:5-9; 4:16. On the future work of the redeemed in God’s new world, see Rev 21:22-22:5.) This is the “glory” of which Paul speaks. And this is the hope that puts Christians permanently in God’s debt.

One final reflection may be in order, to which we shall return in due course. If it is indeed true that Paul saw the gospel, with its revelation of God’s saving justice and peace, as the truth of which Caesar’s “gospel,” and the “justice” and “peace” that flowed from it, were parodies, it may also be the case that he intends, at this end of his argument, to hint at a particular way in which this gospel makes its way in the world, and will eventually take the world over. Caesar’s cult was instantiated around the empire by means of images of Caesar himself, soon to be divine, and of his son(s), heir(s), and other family members, themselves all divinities-in-waiting. These images, housed in various places but particularly in temples of the growing Caesar-cult, were there partly in order to be worshiped, and partly in order to remind the local residents whose empire they were living in. Here, at the climax of the argument that God’s saving justice and peace are revealed in the gospel of Jesus, the true Lord of the world--at the climax, also, of the passage about the Spirit dwelling within Christians, like the presence of God within the Temple--Paul states that God’s purpose is for Christians to be “conformed to the image of God’s Son.” They are to be image-bearers, forming the Temple of the living God, the people through whom in the present as well as in the future it is to be made known that the God of Abraham is the only God, that Jesus, his Son, is the world’s true Lord, and that one day the world will be liberated from its present slaveries, as Israel was from Egypt, to be the true Empire in which justice, peace, and freedom will make their home.

1. The main emphasis of the whole section is on Christian living in terms of being indebted to God’s grace. Much has been said and written in the last century about a human “coming of age” that renders unnecessary and undesirable all obligation, all indebtedness, all human dependence. Anything else, we have often been told, leaves us immature as human beings. The pattern of the exodus has even been used to suggest that one ought to escape all overlordship, even including that of God. Theologies that deny this, and that insist, insist, like Paul, on permanent indebtedness to grace, are sometimes vilified as perpetrating a bullying or dominating God. The present passage not only contradicts this, but explains that the condition of permanent indebtedness to God is not a diminution, but rather an enhancement, of full human dignity.

When one considers all that has been said in Romans about “sin” and “the flesh,” to protest against grace on the grounds that one ought to be independent, standing on one’s own feet, is about as sensible as a drowning person protesting against being thrown a life belt. That is basic to all Paul’s theology. But this passage goes further. The biblical theology of humanness that Paul here echoes, endorses, and develops is that of being made in God’s image and being remade in the image of God’s Son. There can be no greater human dignity that this. To seek for a status independent of this is indeed, on the one hand, to shake one’s fist, Prometheus-like, at the creator, and on the other, inevitably, to worship some part of the created order (perhaps even oneself), and so to be remade in the image of that which is enslaved to decay and death. Like human stories in which people try to live without depending on anyone, only finally to be overwhelmed by love and discover a fulfillment, a self-realization, through self-giving and self-abandonment, so the story of grace is one in which humans find themselves by losing themselves, endlessly indebted to the God whose own true self-expression was found in the self-giving love of the Son. Being indebted to grace is like the permanent indebtedness that exists between those who have given themselves freely to one another in lifelong human love: a state of wonder and gratitude in which one’s own humanness is enhanced rather than diminished, ennobled rather than belittled.

2. Within this, the wider vista that Paul opens up is the invitation to the Christian to live within the horizon of God’s new creation. This great project, the global and cosmic dimension of salvation, has begun with the resurrection of Jesus, and will continue until the whole world is transformed under the just and healing rule of God’s children. Though the question of what this will look and feel like, and the question of levels of continuity and discontinuity between the present creation and the new one, are exceedingly difficult to answer, that does not mean that there will not be a reality to which, in retrospect, this language will be seen to have been a true, if inadequate, pointer--much as, with Christian hindsight, the variegated prophecies of the Old Testament can be seen, and are seen in the New Testament, as true pointers to a reality that could not, however, have been fully or adequately described by them alone.

If the Christian is called to live (to use one standard jargon) at the overlap of the old and new creations, this is hardly a matter of passive acceptance of a difficult and tense moment in God’s purposes, or of sitting back to await better times when the overlap is done and the new creation fully present. Rather, as the bracing ethical imperatives of 8:12-14 and the call to groaning in prayer in 8:26-27 make clear, the Christian is to embody the tension involved in bringing the new to birth already within the old. The challenge to holiness cannot be put off until some future date; nor can the challenge to bring all things in subjection to the saving rule of God’s people, a task that must begin with inarticulate prayer and continue forward from there.

It is under this rubric that all Christian work in the areas of ecology, justice, and aesthetics is to be conceived. If the creation is to be renewed, not abandoned, and if that work has already begun in the resurrection of Jesus, it will not do simply to consign the present creation to acid rain and global warming and wait for Armageddon to destroy it altogether. Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s eventual full healing to bear upon the created order in all its parts and at every level. If the world is to be put to rights, brought under the saving lordship of God’s restorative justice, and if that work has already been unveiled prototypically in Jesus’ death and resurrection, it will not do to concentrate on individual justification while allowing wider issues of justice to go unaddressed. Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s healing justice to bear upon the world that is still full of corruption, injustice, oppression, division, suspicion, and war. And if the world is to attain its full beauty and dignity as God’s liberated new creation, a beauty and dignity for which the present evidences of God’s grandeur within creation are just a foretaste, it will not do to regard beauty, and its creation and conservation, as a pleasant but irrelevant optional extra within a world manipulated by science, exploited by technology, and bought and sold in the economic marketplace. Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s fresh beauty to birth within the world, signs of hope for what the Spirit will yet do:

3. The vocation of the church to live thus in the wrinkle of time that is inaugurated eschatology is focused here on the life of prayer. Paul holds together in this passage the intimate prayer that knows exactly what to call God (i.e., Abba) and the groaning prayer that has no idea what to ask for or even what words to use. Prayer itself is a matter of both knowing and not knowing, of security and insecurity, of “having nothing yet possessing all things” (2 Cor 6:10). The Spirit is equally and characteristically at work at both extremes, enabling the “now” of glad and assured adoption, of the child/parent relationship with God wherein Christians grow to full human maturity without ever ceasing to be the child of this parent, and enabling also the “not yet” of groaning in travail to be expressed, in the inarticulate depths, in a way that God the heartsearcher knows, hears, and understands. The latter kind of prayer is also, it appears, part of what it means “to love God.” The opening of 8:28 relates, after all, quite closely to 8:26-27, for what does it mean to love God but that in the depths of one’s own heart and spirit there is a call of love, trust, and hope for which the ultimate explanation is that the Spirit is there at work?

The call to this kind of inarticulate prayer is not, it seems to me, exactly the same thing as the discipline of silence practiced by some who have made long journeys into the realms of prayer and have come back to share their insights with the rest of us. It is not simply contemplation. Nor yet is it contemplation’s parody, that stream-of-consciousness prayer in which random musings and daydreams pass before the mind and are vaguely brought into the presence of God. It is, rather, an agony that would come into speech if only it could, part of whose agony indeed is that to bring it to speech, to name the problem and hence to envisage its solution, would be to attain some measure of relief. The problem of evil is not so easily solved. The achievement of the cross and resurrection, and the power of the indwelling Spirit, have not produced that kind of inaugurated eschatology where everything is now laid out neatly awaiting completion, like a row of beans ripe and ready to be picked. Let no one suppose that Paul’s emphasis on what has already happened in Christ leads to that kind of casual ease about the present unredeemedness of the world, or about tasks that lie ahead. However, no one should suppose, either, that the continuing appropriate agony of expectant prayer to which the whole church is now called casts any doubt on that other experience of which the same passage speaks, the Abba knowledge of that is also a Christian based on the work of the Messiah and the gift of the Spirit. The two go together in Paul and in Christian experience.

4. Intercession for the world that is groaning in travail is not, then, an optional extra for the Christian. Within this, intercession for the parts of one’s own life that are in trouble cannot be discounted either. There is a false humility about some protests against such intercession, discounting it as trivial or self-centered. To the contrary: the groanings of each individual, caught between redemption accomplished in Christ and redemption still awaited (8:23), are all part of, the groaning of creation. As long as one does not imagine that the world, and the love of God, revolve around one’s own life and concerns--as long, in other words, as one is a mature and adult child of God and not still a spiritual baby--one’s own concerns have their proper place, and can indeed be the starting-point for awareness of, and hence prayer about, the wider groanings of the whole cosmos. Just because we must not be self-centered, that does not mean we should ignore the self and its concerns. If we are God’s beloved children, our small as well as our great concerns matter.

5. Suffering is a mystery, indeed. It is to be rejected as a final good--as though the Christian were after all to embrace some kind of masochism!--and yet embraced both as a sign of the time at which we live and even as a part of the means whereby redemption comes to the world. There is a terrible danger in this very Pauline theme, which feminism and other recent movements have not been slow to point out: The redemptive value of suffering has all too often been preached by the comfortable to the uncomfortable, by the elderly to the youth going off to war, by masters to slaves, by men to women. Yet the abuse does not invalidate the use, and if corruptio optimi pessima is a dire warning to those in danger of corrupting the best it is also a reminder to those who are all too aware of the worst.

At the heart of Paul’s picture of the suffering church is the fact that, as he says in 8:10, “the Messiah is in you.” If this truth undergirds the hope of future resurrection, it also means that Christian suffering in the present is somehow “messianic,” which means it is somehow, in ways that will rightly and inevitably pass our comprehension, redemptive. As we saw in the notes, 2 Corinthians was written not least as an elaboration and defense of this as applied to Paul’s apostleship. For millions of Christians in the contemporary world, in places such as China, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Sudan, and elsewhere, daily suffering for the faith is simply part of what being a Christian means. When, in 1998, Westminster Abbey decided to fill the ten vacant niches on the West Front with statues of twentieth-century Christian martyrs, there was no shortage of candidates.^²⁸⁴ For millions of others in comfortable Western churches, such suffering as comes their way often seems incidental to the practice of faith. Yet this too can be transformed, and transformative, if brought through prayer into the divine dialogue spoken of with bated breath in 8:26-27.

6. In a way that is characteristic of Romans 5-8 as a whole, Jesus is seldom mentioned yet everywhere present. “Fellow heirs with the Messiah” (8:17) means being “conformed to the image of God’s Son” (8:29). The pattern of Jesus--his sonship, his kingdom. his suffering, his prayer, his death, and his resurrection--shapes and undergirds the whole paragraph. Paul has certainly not allowed Jesus to become a mere cipher: he remains the assured goal, the inspiration, the companion, the pattern, the older brother. It would not be fanciful to see Gethsemane standing behind 8:18-27, if not in Paul’s conscious mind, nevertheless in the strong tradition of the early church reading these words (see Heb 5:7-9). It would be profitable to study the portrait of Jesus as it emerges throughout Romans 5-8, and to reflect on the way in which this picture had already made its way, within less than thirty years, into the imagination and subconscious thought of Paul and the other New Testament writers.

7. The rootedness of the entire discussion in the narrative theology of the exodus enables one to suggest a pattern of Christian reading of the Old Testament that is neither simply historical nor simply typological. On the one hand, it is important that the original events are seen in their own right, as the formative events of the people of Israel. (The question of what precisely happened, and of how “historical” the stories accessible to Paul and to ourselves may actually be, is not our present concern.) On the other hand, as many different strands within Second Temple Judaism bear witness, the exodus story was used as a template for the great expectations that were cherished in the time of Jesus. God would, many believed, accomplish something for which the original exodus would be both the historical starting-point and the pattern. Paul, in company with many other early Christians, believed that this had happened in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and in the sending of the Spirit by which the church was enabled to go forward to the promised land of new creation. This suggests a reading of the Old Testament that gives due weight to original meanings and contexts, and to different understandings that were available in the first century, while yet suggesting, as the distinctively Christian meaning, the belief that the new exodus both had happened in Jesus, and was still to happen in the resurrection and the consequent transformation of the whole created order. This, I suggest, reflects part of what Paul, and presumably the rest of the early Christian movement (since he is quoting early common tradition) meant by saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection had happened “according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4).

NIV: ³¹What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³²He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? ³³Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died–more than that, who was raised to life–is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. ³⁵Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶As it is written:

³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

NRSV: ³¹What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ³²He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? ³³Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. ³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written,

³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul’s substantial argument in chaps. 5-8 is done. The style as well as the content of 8:28-30 indicates as much. What remains is to celebrate, and to do so in a way that draws together the threads of all that has been said so far--all, that is, in chaps. 1-4 as well as 5-8, which explains the strong presence of justification, as well as glorification, in this concluding passage.

As Paul does so, the theme that emerges with particular strength is that of God’s love. This is only the second time in the letter Paul has spoken explicitly of God’s love (counting 5:5-8 as a single reference, if 5:5 is read the way most scholars do); yet it now becomes clear that this has been the underlying theme all through. An overemphasis in some quarters on the lawcourt setting of Paul’s justification terminology has led some sensitive Christians to feel that the apostle is lacking in the great theme of God’s love, so obvious (for instance) in John. This, it turns out, is a false antithesis. Not only is John’s Gospel replete with forensic language and imagery, a subject that cannot be pursued here.^²⁸⁵ Paul’s whole argument is undergirded by the emphasis on the love of God: the fact that it is the main theme in what is obviously a concluding summary proves as much, and indeed warns against taking lexicographical absence to indicate conceptual absence. The thing may be present when the word is not.

The argument of this paragraph is, in fact, the same as that of 5:6-10: that since God’s love has done for Christians all that has been done in Christ, there is no power that can shake that love now, or turn it aside from completing the job. The love of God, enjoyed already in the present, will outlast and defeat all enemies, including death itself; the close links between this passage and 1 Cor 15:20-28 indicate clearly enough where the thought is going. Love is the ultimate assurance, stronger than logic, even the great logic of Romans 5-8; love is not an idea to be worked out, but a fact, an experienced fact, something that cannot be denied any more than one can stop breathing. And if the clouds of present suffering hide the sun for a while, the unshakable evidence of God’s love is seen, as Paul had already said in 5:6-10, in Jesus’ death. Not much is added here to 5:6-10 in terms of actual argument; this increases the sense we had in that passage (see the notes) that 5:1-11 was a full advance statement of the entire argument of 5-8. What we have now in 8:31-39 is the performative expansion of 5:11: “we celebrate in God through our Lord Jesus the Messiah, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.”

The internal theological shaping of the paragraph usually goes unnoticed amid the flurry of ideas, the problems about punctuation, the lists of potential dangers and enemies, and the general tone of celebration. Paul’s argument proceeds through a series of rhetorical questions, each of which is followed, not by an answer to the question itself, but by a statement that shows that the answer must be “nobody.” The first of these questions and answers is broad, introducing the set; the following three fill out and explain the first. The last two verses, explaining and celebrating the answers just given, round off the whole section of the letter with the appropriate mixture of rhetoric and solemnity. Thus the paragraph works as follows:

(A) First question and answer (introductory): if God is for us, who is against us? Answer: [nobody, because] God, having not spared his Son, will now give us all things (vv. 31-32).

(B) Second question and answer (specific focus on God): Who shall bring a charge against us? Answer: [nobody, because] God is the justifier (v. 33).

(C) Third question and answer (specific focus on Christ): Who shall condemn us? Answer: [nobody, because] Christ died, was raised, and now intercedes (v. 34).

(D) Fourth question and answer (specific focus on the link of love between God and those in Christ): Who shall separate us from God’s love ? Answer: none of the possible candidates, because as God’s faithful people we are victorious “through the one who loved us” (vv. 35-37).

(E) Final explanation, summing up: nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ (vv. 38-39).

There may be the hint of a trinitarian shape to the B-C-D sequence (vv. 33-37), picking up and celebrating the picture of God in the chapter, and indeed the letter, so far. Though the Spirit is not mentioned, the careful structuring of questions and answers may suggest, not least in the light of 8:12-16 and particularly vv. 26-28, that the Spirit is the one through whom God’s love enables those in Christ to be “more than conquerors”; or, to put it another way, that over against the list of things that might separate us from God’s love, it is the Spirit who joins us to God’s love, making it a fact of experience, not merely a theological belief.

Within this structure, furthermore, Paul has created a remarkable web of biblical allusions and echoes, summoning up three passages in particular.^²⁸⁶

The first, in v. 32, is the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. In that passage, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only beloved son is the reason given for God’s greatest blessings on him; here, God’s actual sacrifice of the only Son is the demonstration of a love that will thereafter stop at nothing. The role of the “binding of Isaac” in the Jewish thought of Paul’s day has been controversial. Though most of the evidence for this as a major theme is later, and some indeed may have developed as a response to early Christian atonement-theology, it is likely that Paul was familiar with some rabbinic traditions in which Genesis 22 had some role to play, at least in anticipating the events of Passover night and perhaps of the Day of Atonement, in providing theological justification for God’s forgiving of Israel’s sins and for the liberation from slavery that would follow.^²⁸⁷ Whether Paul is responding to such beliefs, or whether, with his own exposition of Abraham still in mind, he is simply following through his own train of thought, it is difficult to say; but his main point is clear, that God “gave up” the only Son “on our behalf.” Remarkably enough, Paul managed to write a whole chapter about Abraham (Romans 4) without mentioning this incident. Now it comes in, not however (as in some of the relevant Jewish traditions) to highlight an achievement of Abraham and Isaac, because of which ethnic Israel would receive blessing or atonement, but to emphasize, almost by contrast, the powerful love of God in going even further than Abraham had done.

The second allusion is to the (so-called) third Servant Song in Isa 50:4-9. Though, of course much Christian tradition has understood the servant songs in specific relation to Jesus himself, as Paul himself arguably does in Phil 2:6-8, in this reworking it is the church, remarkably enough, that takes on the role of the servant, here standing before hostile adversaries, trusting totally in God, and awaiting vindication (8:33-34). However, it is precisely the church “in Christ” that can take this stance. Paul’s point throughout Romans 5-8 is that the identity of the church is discovered in the Messiah. The reference to the Messiah’s heavenly intercession in v. 34 may, in fact, be an allusion to Isa 53:12; and the reference to being like sheep for the slaughter within the following quotation (v. 36) may again deliberately echo Isa 53:7.^²⁸⁸ At the same time, declaring that the Messiah is now .at God’s right hand” summons up Ps 110:1, one of the most frequently cited passages in early Christian exploration of Jesus’ status.^²⁸⁹ Jesus is now sharing the very throne of God; and his place at God’s right hand was from early on seen as an encouragement to the suffering church, both because he was interceding on its behalf and because his location provided assurance of eventual vindication (see Mark 12:35-37 and par.; 14:62 and par.; Acts 2:33-34; 7:55-56; Eph 1:20; Col 3:1; Heb 1:3; 8:1; 10:12; 12:2; 1 Pet 3:22; Rev 3:21).

The third biblical reference is an explicit quotation. In v. 36 Paul quotes Ps 44:22 [43:23 LXX]: “for your sake we are being killed all day long; we are reckoned as sheep for slaughter.” This psalm, like its longer cousin Psalm 89, begins by celebrating the love of God for Israel seen in terms of great victories over national enemies, all looking back, of course, to the exodus story, leading to the claim that “we have boasted in God continually” (44:8). Then the psalm turns to complaint: everything has gone wrong, the enemies are prevailing and mocking, and Israel is covered with shame (vv. 9-16). However, this is not because of Israel’s disloyalty; this time at least, Israel is not guilty of disobedience, of idolatry, of breaking the covenant. God knows the secrets of the heart (v. 21 ). Rather, it is “for your sake” that “we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” It is precisely by being loyal to YHWH that Israel has pulled down the wrath of the pagan nations upon its own head. Therefore, the psalm concludes: It is time for God to wake up and act, to help and redeem. It is time for God’s own covenant faithfulness to be unveiled in action.

There can be little doubt that Paul had the entire context in mind, and intended the alert reader to hear its overtones of faith in the midst of tribulation, of covenant loyalty and covenant hope--in fact, of the major theme of Romans. More particularly, the idea of it being somehow God’s purpose that “we are killed all the day long” fits so closely both with the servant allusion in vv. 33-34, and with the christological focus of the whole chapter, that we can go further and suggest that Paul is here reflecting again what it means to be “conformed to the image of the Son,” and to share the Messiah’s sufferings and glory (vv. 17, 29). There may also be the suggestion, lurking In Paul’s mind as he himself faces the charge of being a disloyal Jew, that his own sufferings are the result not of infidelity but precisely of fidelity.

By skillful use of this complex web of biblical allusion and quotation, Paul is underscoring his basic contention from 3:21 onward. Those who believe in Jesus the Messiah, who respond with love to God’s loving action in his death and with faith to God’s raising of him from the dead, are constituted as the renewed Israel of God. They are the true children of Abraham; they are the true servant people; they are the people who claim and sing as their own the psalms of the faithful covenant people. Law, prophets, and writings are thus called in as witnesses to the fact that, in the midst of suffering and oppression, the one God of Israel has, in long-promised redeeming love, reconstituted Israel in and around Jesus the Messiah. All who belong to Jesus are the true people of this one God.

Thus is concluded the thesis of chaps. 5-8. Thus is concluded, too, one part of the argument of 1:18-8:39. And thus is formed once again the great question that takes up the other part, and will lead into some of Paul’s densest argumentation: what then about Israel according to the flesh?

8:31. Seven rhetorical questions--four of which are structurally important, as we have seen--make up the bulk of this paragraph. They are proffered not as a challenge to Paul’s readers to think up clever answers or counterexamples but as a demonstration of the certainty of his case. As so often, the opening (in this case, the first two questions) functions as an overall statement of what is to come, which is then unpacked in successive stages.

Unlike some other occurrences of an initial “What then shall we say?” (see the Commentary on 3:1; 4:1; 6:1), the opening question is not introducing a possible conclusion that Paul will then deny. Traces of this rhetorical move still remain, however, in the questions that follow, all of which invite hearers to suggest reasons why the security of God’s people in Christ might be less than absolute, only for Paul to deny that such reasons could be found. By adding “to these things” (NIV) or “about these things” (NRSV), Paul is rhetorically inviting responses to the argument he has just completed, rather than, as in other “what shall we say?” questions, looking for logical corollaries that might follow.

The opening challenge says it all: “if God is for us, who can be against us?” The statement that “God is for us” is about as basic a way as can be conceived of summing up the revelation of God’s saving justice in the gospel. Elsewhere, of course, Paul uses “for us” in one form or another as a basic way of explaining the death of Jesus (see 5:6-8; 14:15; 1 Cor 15:3; 2 Cor 5:14-15, 21; Gal 1:4; 2:20; 3:13; Eph 5:2, 25; 1 Thess 5:10; Titus 2:14). Nowhere else is he so bold as to say simply “God is for us” (it is admittedly conditional, but only as a rhetorical device). “Who is against us?” is clearly expecting the answer “nobody”; but there are plenty of candidates lined up to be considered, once Paul has amplified this basic statement. He is writing, furthermore, not from a comfortable armchair with the world at his feet, but on his way to fulfill a difficult and dangerous mission (delivering the collection to Jerusalem) that might cost him his life for one reason (opposition from Torah-observant Jews), and to begin another perhaps even more dangerous and difficult mission (to Rome, and thence to Spain) that might cost him his life for a different reason (the clash between his gospel and Caesar’s kingdom). These, together with the normal hazards of his life as a missionary, and the threats from spiritual as well as human and natural forces, will be noted presently. But Paul stands firm as a Jewish-style monotheist: there is one God, and if this God is on our side, then no force on earth or elsewhere can ultimately stand against us.

8:32. The third question, the rhetorical response to “who is against us,” carries the force: “nobody is against us, because of what God has done.” God did what even Abraham had not done: Isaac was spared, but Jesus was not (the particular echo is of Gen 22:16, where Abraham is commended, and then richly blessed, because he had not spared his only son; for the significance of this, see the Overview). God’s willingness to give up the only Son is cited as the key evidence for God’s utter reliability. This fills out, exactly as we would have expected from 5:6-10, what is meant by God’s being “for us.”

The same passage in chap. 5 explains the rhetorical question that then emerges: “How will God, then, not also give us all things with him?”--i.e., with the only Son. If God has done the hard part, there will be no problem with the easy part. If God has given the most valuable treasure possible, everything else will follow (for “give” Paul here uses the quite rare verb χαρίζομαι [charizomai], cognate with χαρίς [charis, “grace”]). Instead of amplifying the negative aspect of the question of v. 31b (“who can be against us?”), Paul moves to the positive: God will give us all things (and therefore no power can stand against us). This way of refer. ring to the final state of blessedness, corresponding to “salvation,” “glorification,” or “life,” picks up from vv. 17-25 the theme of inheritance, of the fact that the world as a whole belongs to the Messiah and hence to those who are his. “All things are yours,” says Paul in 1 Cor 3:21-23, anticipating the flourish at the end of the present chapter. You own the world--a statement that can only be made with integrity, perhaps, by one who was facing the perils described in v. 35. The grand, sweeping statements of assurance are balanced with the clear recognition of what is still to be faced within the inaugurated eschatology that dominates the horizon. Once again, 2 Cor 6:10 comes into view: “as having nothing, yet possessing all things.”

8:33-36. The next two verses, continuing the sequence of rhetorical questions, have caused problems to interpreters because of uncertainty over punctuation, reflected in the different translations. RSV, for example, treats the second half of v. 33 (“It is God who justifies”) as the first half of a sentence, the second being the question in v. 34a, “who is to condemn?”; and then translates the rest of v. 34, not as a statement (“It is Christ Jesus who died,” NRSV), but as a question: “Is it Christ Jesus [i.e., Is it Christ Jesus who is to condemn?]?” This, indeed, is only one of many possible permutations.^²⁹⁰ But the most likely reading, because it accords best with the rhythm and rhetoric of the whole paragraph, is to see vv. 33a and 34a as questions to which vv. 33b and 34b give oblique answers, as, in their different ways, in the NRSV and the NIV.^²⁹¹ The answers are oblique because they are not offering candidates by way of reply; they are saying, rather, that because God is (he justifier, and because the Messiah has died, was raised, and now intercedes, there can indeed be no one to lay a charge against God’s elect, no one to condemn. The passage then flows naturally:

a. Who can be against us? No one; God, after all, did not spare the Son (vv. 31 b-32).

c. Who will condemn? No one; Christ Jesus, after all, died, was raised, and intercedes (v. 34).

d. Who will separate us from Christ’s love? (Expected answer: No one; the Spirit, after all, has poured out love for God into our hearts.) Paul’s answer, after a list of possible agents of separation, is, however: No, we are more than conquerors through the one who loved us (i.e., presumably God, at work by the Spirit; “through” here means “through the agency of” [διά dia with genitive]; a few MSS altered this to “because” [dia with accusative]). There may have been a trinitarian sequence in Paul’s mind, such as (for instance) we find in 1 Cor 12:4-6 or Gal 4:4-7, but the exuberance of the passage has prevented it from reaching full expression.

Whatever we think about that, with vv. 33-34 we are back in the lawcourt, as in the middle of chap. 3. In 2:1-16 the whole human family faced the judgment of God; in 3:19-20 the whole world was in the dock, with no defense to offer against massive charges. Now we look around for possible accusers, and find none. Any that might appear have to face the fact that God, the judge, is the justifier; in other words, that the verdict has already been pronounced by the judge whose righteousness has been fully displayed. And that verdict--that those in the Messiah, marked out by faith, are already to be seen as “righteous,” even ahead of the final vindication--is precisely what the lawcourt dimension of “justification” is all about. We should note that at this point Paul is once again speaking of the final day of judgment, as in 2:1-16 and 8:1. As he looks ahead to that future moment, he puts his confidence in the past event of justification and hence the present standing of God’s people that results from it, knowing that “those God justified, God also glorified.” The logic of justification comes full circle.

Very well, then, if there is no one to bring a charge, is there anyone who might offer a verdict of condemnation? Leaving aside the problem of envisaging a judge other than God--and here the close link between 33b and 34a comes into play, with the echoes of Isa 50:8--all thought of a negative verdict, even supposing there were any charges to come to trial, must be put out of view by the sight of the Messiah, with the whole sweep of his accomplishment. His death was the condemnation of sin (8:3); his resurrection, the announcement that sin had been dealt with, and hence the achievement of justification (4:24-25; 1 Cor 15:17); his glorification, the glorification of his people (8:17, 29-30). Paul here adds a further element, familiar from the letter to the Hebrews (7:25; 9:24) and the first letter of John (2:1), occurring only here in his writings: the present activity of the Messiah, in his life in the heavenly realm, is to intercede on behalf of those he represents. As the servant songs have already been alluded to in this passage, it is possible that, with Jesus’ atoning and justifying death also mentioned, we should detect a reference to the intercessory work of the servant of the Lord in the fourth song, at Isa 53:12.

The thought switches from the lawcourt metaphor to something that is no metaphor but the deepest reality: The love of God, which, shown forth in the Messiah, forms the unbreakable bond between God and the believer. Paul here speaks of the love of the Messiah.^²⁹² This may simply be a telescoped way of saying “the love of God in Christ,” as in v. 39; or it may actually be a deliberate reference to the love of the Messiah himself, as in Gal 2:20 (“the Messiah loved me, and gave himself for me”; see also 2 Cor 5:14; Eph 3:19). The question Paul raises is the one that will now take him through to the close of the chapter: who can separate us from this love? As suggested above, it is possible that Paul was thinking of a “Spirit”--response to this question, to follow “God” in v. 33b and “Christ” in v. 34b. Certainly, if we take the logic of the questions, and think back through all that has been said about the Spirit in chap. 8, this would make excellent sense--just as it would be typical of Paul to interrupt himself and then hurry on to his larger conclusion leaving his readers to fill in the blanks on the way.

The actual answer to the question, in any case, is again, “No one.” But there is a formidable list of potential enemies who seem bent on separating believers from God’s love, and Paul must list them, place the conflict with them on the map of God’s purposes for the chosen people, and declare them beaten. Paul speaks of that which he knows; he had himself faced all these enemies, except perhaps the sword, and he must have known that at any moment this too might come his way, whether judically in a Roman court or casually on the road (cf. 2 Cor 11:23-29).

Facing these foes, as he was to do again in Jerusalem and on the voyage to Rome, he took comfort in the scripturally based knowledge that this was part of the vocation of God’s people. Though it seemed that calamity had sent God to sleep, had caused the Almighty to shut up his mercy, yet in fact, as the psalmist affirmed, these sufferings were after all part of the plan. For the people of God, suffering was not just something from which God would deliver, but something as a result of which God would deliver; this belief, held by some (though apparently not all) Jews of the period,^²⁹³ had for Paul and the other early Christians reached its astonishing climax in the death of Jesus, but still obtained as part of the life of the new-covenant people of God. Somehow, as Paul elsewhere affirmed of his own sufferings (2 Cor 4:7-15; Col 1:24), the suffering of Christians was to be taken up into the ongoing purposes of God, not to add to the unique achievement of Jesus the Messiah but to embody it in the world.

If Paul has been thinking implicitly of the Spirit, this would further explain the mode of his answer in v. 37, not indeed to the question of v. 35a, but to the problem raised by all the instruments of suffering in v. 35b. “In all these things we are more’ than conquerors”; in other words, we are not only able to win a victory over these enemies, we are able to see them off the field entirely. This is part of the meaning of v. 32b: God will “give us all things” with Christ. It goes closely, of course, with the promise in 1 Cor 15:24-28, that God will put all enemies under the feet of the Messiah, the last being death itself. “The one who loved us” is most likely God, though with v. 37 poised between v. 35 and v. 39 it could equally be Christ; but the way in which this love sustains the Christian is through the agency of the Spirit, as in 8:26-27. The present tense does not imply that Paul thinks he, or his readers, are able in the present time to defeat all these enemies and so to maintain a tranquil and trouble-free pursuit of happiness. This is, in other words, a shout not of triumphalism but of exuberant faith, faith in the victory that, as Easter had proved, had already been won on the cross and would finally be won at the moment of complete liberation. “We are more than conquerors,” like the claim “God also glorified them,” is a past truth about the Messiah, a future truth about all his people, and hence a present reality in faith for those living on the basis of that past and in the hope of that future.

8:38-39. The final γάρ gar of this section explains the shout of triumph in terms of the set, tied conviction (grounded on what Paul knows about the Messiah, Jesus, the Lord of the world and “our Lord”) that the one true God has poured out, through this Jesus, love of the most powerful and unbreakable kind. Even justice is not the last word about this God; love is. Of this, Paul is -persuaded” (the literal meaning), in other words, “convinced” (NIV, NRSV; cf. 14:14; 15:14). This is no passing impression, feeling, or imagination. He has thought it through and reached an unshakable conclusion.

In v. 35 Paul listed physical events, threats, and circumstances that might separate one from God’s love; now he lists the forces that might stand behind those physical threats. Of these, death itself is the most obvious, at least for a Jew; some parts of the Hellenistic tradition, reflected in some later Christian thinking, saw physical death in a less threatening light, because it valued physical life less highly, but for Paul death remained the last and greatest enemy (1 Cor 15:26). “Life” is presumably not simply included as the natural pair to death”--this list manages to avoid at least one other natural pair, “principalities and powers” (see Eph 3:10; Col 2:15)--and certainly does not refer to the “life” that is the promise of God and the gift of the Spirit. Rather, it seems to envisage the present life, with all its many delights and problems, as a potential separator between God and the believer. Angels, rulers, and powers--presumably the “rulers” here are heavenly ones, corresponding to the “elements” of Gal 4:3, 9 and Col 2:8, 20, though perhaps their earthly counterparts are not ruled out--might try to break the bond of love between God and the church, but they are a defeated rabble and, though they can make a lot of noise, they can now wield no power at the level required to separate God’s people from God’s love (cf. Col 2:14-15). Time present and time future, space high and low--the whole world, as we say, of space and time as it stretches out before us--can have no power to break the love God has for those in the Messiah. (Time past is irrelevant; the cross and resurrection have dealt with anything it could do.) The chapter, and the section, end with the characteristic christological summary that demonstrates, not simply Paul’s rhetorical skill (cf. 5:11, 21; 6:11, 23; 7:25a), but the very height and depth of his entire theology.

We are back with the picture that has been there in Romans from the beginning: God and creation, with the human race poised in between, belonging within the latter but called to reflect the image of the former. Idolatry had reversed God’s intended order: humans had worshiped that which was not God, had ceded power to that which, being itself corruptible, could only bring death. Now, in the Messiah, Jesus, humanity has been restored; death has been defeated, and creation itself, so far from being shunned as essentially evil, awaits its redemption. Christian assurance, despite caricatures, is the very opposite of human arrogance; it is the fruit of humble, trusting faith. Those who follow their Messiah into the valley of the shadow of death will find that they need fear no evil. Though they sometimes seem sheep for the slaughter, yet they may trust the Shepherd, whose love will follow them all the days of their life.

1. The security of which Paul has spoken throughout Romans 5-8--the security, that is, of final glorification for all those who are justified by faith--is based firmly on the trinitarian revelation of God in the gospel, reflected at least in part in the shape of the present passage. At a time when the question of God is again central in some quarters at least, it is vital to stress that Paul’s theology, agenda, spirituality, faith, and hope are all focused on this very specific God. Not for him a vague Deism, a distant God known only through a thick cloud, a God to whom there could be many routes and of whom there could be many equally valid revelations. Not for him a generalized sense of “the sacred” such as could be encountered with equal validity in all, or at least most, religious traditions. After all, the religious traditions of Paul’s day included many that were demonstrably dehumanizing; the most powerful new religion in Turkey during Paul’s lifetime was the cult of Caesar himself. The way to the confidence and joy of which Paul here speaks is not through a general or vague sense of religion, or indeed of God, but of the specific and focused belief and trust in this God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

It is noticeable that in the post-Christian world of the modern West this belief has been misunderstood, misrepresented, and then scorned. Trinitarian belief is labeled incomprehensible, a philosopher’s dense answer to a question nobody today would ask, and is set aside in favor of either a variation on Deism’s distant God, or some kind of pantheism (as in some New Age thinking), or a form of panentheism.^²⁹⁴ What we find in Paul, if one may coin the phrase, is instead “eschatological the-enpanism”: instead of everything existing “in God,” true though that may in one sense, Paul insists that at the last “God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28; cf. Eph 1:15-23; 4:10). What is more, this is something to be accomplished, not simply a steady state of affairs. The task began with the call of Israel, reached its climax in the presence of God as a human being within the world of space, time, and matter, and is now to be implemented through the Spirit of this Jesus, until the whole creation is filled with the presence and love of God in a way that at present it is not. The created order is good, but incomplete; God intends to complete it, and thereby to liberate it. To seek for God at the moment within the created order, or to try to think or pray one’s way to God solely on the basis of the created order, is at best an invalid form of realized eschatology (only when God is “all in all” will this be possible), and at worst taking the broad road toward idolatry. This is not to say that the creator is not in principle knowable through creation (see 1:19-20); only that to search for a divinity within the created order is out of the question.

It is not surprising, then, that such theological schemes do not produce the kind of assurance of which Paul speaks. Indeed, they often inveigh against it, treating assurance as mere cockiness, self-satisfaction, or spiritual arrogance. It is, of course, perfectly possible for Christians to hold a form of assurance that is guilty of any or all of those things. But once again abuse does not nullify proper use. In particular, we might suggest that a form of Christian assurance that has not actually faced the challenges of vv. 35 and 38-39 may still be at best immature; not that all Christians must face all the problems that some face some of the time, but that all should be committed to the full gospel, which will mean that hostility at either an earthly or a spiritual level will come their way sooner or later. When that happens, nothing short of a trinitarian view of God will supply the assurance that is needed. But when these trials are faced, and this God is known in the midst of them to be reliable, powerful, and above all loving--that is when one may expect to hear the shout of genuine Christian joy.

2. This confidence, this assurance, is kept in place by the Bible. To put it another way, the reading, praying, and singing of Scripture is one of the key ways in which trust in the triune God, and the security of this God’s love in Christ, is maintained. Paul, as we saw, here brings together law, prophets, and writings in a web of allusion and echo to which (it seems to me) only the most pedantic of scholars can remain deaf, in order to say in practice what he says explicitly in 15:4: these things were written for our encouragement, “so that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures we might have hope.”

For too long scholars have sneered at Paul’s use of Scripture, implying that for him it was a blade of grass that could be blown in any direction by any powerful wind. Preachers have taken their cue from this, often saying quite casually that Paul’s use of Scripture is simply unprincipled and peculiar; sometimes, indeed, this is used as an excuse for similarly eccentric usage on the part of the expositor. We have seen, however, that his allusions and echoes are not accidental, but fall into a clear pattern. This pattern is completely explicable on the assumption of an overall covenantal reading, in which God’s people from Abraham to the Messiah form the advance guard, not of course without paradox and ambiguity, of the people now created in the Messiah and the Spirit. To be sure, there has been a dramatic and decisive explosion in the middle of the sequence, with the Messiah’s shameful death and all that went with it. But this, too, Paul insists, was what the covenant God had in mind all along. The people of God in the present are not simply a creation out of nothing; they are, however unexpectedly, the family promised to Abraham. The problems faced by Abraham’s family before the Messiah’s coming, notably the question of how Israel’s God was going to fulfill the covenant and deliver Israel, were problems Paul believed had been answered in Christ. The resurgence of apparently similar problems in the church was to be answered in terms of life in Christ and the victory of the Spirit. God has revealed the divine covenant faithfulness, and the proclamation of the gospel continues to unveil it. The church’s task, in its own use of the Scriptures, is to hear both the earlier stages of its own story and the continual resonances, amplified in the echo chamber of the messianic events concerning Jesus, which will inform and guide its own journey through the wilderness. Learning to hear these multiple resonances with the proper blend of imaginative attention and discipline is a major part of Christian teaching and discipleship.

3. This passage offers, for the first time in Romans, a description of the kinds of suffering that Paul and his fellow Christians faced in the first century. Only 2 Corinthians 6 and 11, in fact, go into more detail, though the fact of suffering is everywhere apparent. Not only is there physical affliction to be faced, some from natural causes and some from violent opposition, but there is also the constant threat from supernatural or cosmic forces. Paul does not often speak explicitly about these, but throughout his writings we sense a shadow of danger, threat, and struggle that took these and other forms.

His response, clearly, is very different from that which seeks to attain a higher state of consciousness in which physical pain and suffering are irrelevant and can be ignored. The battle is real; it matters because the physical world is God’s world and cannot be played down in favor of a “spiritual” reality. Suffering comes as a result of the gospel, which, by its announcement of Jesus as Lord, challenges all other lordships, many of which, at both the cosmic and the terrestrial levels, will fight in defense. (There are many forms of Christianity on offer today that pose no threat to any principalities and powers, and indeed make a virtue of not confronting anyone with anything. What kind of authenticity can they claim?) Once more, we must not confuse the necessary confrontation between the gospel and the powers of the world with the belligerence of some would-be preachers and evangelists, who are often enough propagating not the gospel itself but a particularly brittle parody of it, which can only be defended by shouting louder. For Paul, the message of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, and his enthronement as Lord of the world, never failed to arouse the wrath of the powers in one way or another. If this message were to catch on, the world would be turned upside down, and a lot of vested interests with it.

Woe betide the church, therefore, if it becomes sidelined into offering an apparently “spiritual” version of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” A recent book by a best-selling Christian author assures us that “golf, next to marriage and parenthood, can routinely be the greatest of life’s learning opportunities,” and that “golf can be a wonderful spiritual path of growth toward God.”^²⁹⁵ I have no quarrel with golf. No doubt it, like many games, can teach wise players important things about themselves. Golf can also, of course, produce special kinds of suffering, both for those who play and for those who listen afterward. But I think I know what Paul would say to these propositions-and not out of any killjoy spirit, either. The Western church is in danger of becoming so concerned with Christianity as a way to further its own goals of self-advancement that it has forgotten what its siblings in many other countries know day by day, often literally in their (broken) bones; that the gospel confronts the principalities and powers with the news that their time is up, and that the true way to Christian joy lies in discovering in practice that this message is true.

4. The greatest theme of the paragraph is the love of God. This topic is a vast sea to put into a small bottle; far better to swim in it or to set sail upon it. Paul speaks of God’s love as the ultimate security. Learning to look at the cross and to see there the strong evidence of how much one is loved is among the most basic and vital Christian disciplines, matched by opening one’s heart and life to the tidal wave of that love, displacing all other rivals. The mind is to learn, and the heart is to know in experience, “the love of Christ which passes knowledge” (Eph 3:19). If Christian ministry does nothing but help, encourage, and enable people along these paths, it will have done well.

But God’s love is also the ultimate human fulfillment. Much of Romans 5-8 has been about the genuine model of humanness, over against the spurious models offered by sin and the flesh. In a world that is currently lurching from “I think, therefore I am” to “I shop, therefore I am,” the challenge to find one’s human identity in being loved--Amor ergo sum, I am loved, therefore I am--is central to discovering the genuine way of being human. And when, with or without specific human loves to incarnate it, human beings discover afresh that they are loved and embraced by the God who made heaven and earth, then what is found is a fulfillment that can never be self-centered, a personal enrichment that has nothing to do with self-help programs. Being loved by the true God, we are to become truly human beings in sharing that love. Not to do so is to cast doubt upon which God it was whose love was being felt in the first place.

Once again, the themes of the letter pose a standing challenge to the imperial system of which Paul, himself a Roman citizen, was a critic from within. If it is indeed true, as some have suggested, that already at this period some in Rome thought of the “secret name” of the city as AMOR, “love” (“Roma” spelled backward), it is a further indication of something we would have to stress anyway: that a community founded on, and sustained by, the sovereign love of the creator God is a political threat, not least to anything like a totalitarian system.^²⁹⁶ People who find themselves loved by the Lord of the world tend not to care quite so much as others what happens to them. They care passionately about justice, and many other causes great and small, but in terms of ordinary politics they are often at best seen as mavericks (the compliment that political regimentation pays to freedom of conscience) and at worst as dangerous loose cannons. In Paul’s case, believing in amor Dei; the Love of God, and finding himself embraced by it, and discovering an answering love in his own heart, made him a highly dangerous citizen within a system that claimed to embody love, perhaps even to be a deity with that name. Citizens within all kinds of systems today need to work out the equivalent in their own terms.

The love of God, finally, offers itself as the key to the truest mode of knowing--knowing about God, knowing about other people, knowing about the world, knowing about oneself. We have learned, often painfully, that when somebody seems to be offering you something for nothing you need to be suspicious of their motives. We have learned that expressions of love are all too often a cover for manipulation and exploitation. God help us, some today even accuse God of these things. We have learned, in other words, the hermeneutic of suspicion, which is a fancy philosophers’ way of saying that we have rediscovered the doctrine of original sin by the back door, shortly after the theologians had abandoned it as being historically unfounded, psychologically unwarranted, and pastorally unhelpful. What this passage would teach us, however, as one contemporary application of Paul’s message about the gospel of Jesus Christ conquering the world of sin and death, the world of which the hermeneutic of suspicion warns but from which it, like the Torah, cannot free us, is that the love of God is the deepest truth in the cosmos, and that to trust this love is to open oneself neither to manipulation nor exploitation but to a richer and fuller humanness--suffering included--than one would ever know, and to a share in the loving liberation and remaking of the cosmos itself. The love of God, in other words, proposes a hermeneutic of trust: not a casual or shallow trust of any person or proposition that comes along, but a deep and hard-won trust, a knowing that is born of being loved and of loving in return. There is much that could be said about this, but it is important at least to point out that if we are thus rediscovering the doctrine of sin, we have in Romans the greatest exposition of the victory of the God of love over sin and its consequences. We would do well to apply this to the places in the world, and in our lives, where sin still reigns in death.

We paraphrase, in conclusion, the final two verses of the section. Paul has spoken, and we must speak, of the love of the one true God. I his love of God calls across the dark intervals of meaning, reaches into the depths of human despair, embraces those who live in the shadow of death or the overbright light of present life, challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham, looks at the present with clear faith and at the future with sure hope, overpowers all powers that might get in the way, fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos, and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world’s true Lord, and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, overmastering love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his pastoring, and his suffering, with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus. This is the love because of which there is no condemnation. This is the for because of which those who are justified are also surely glorified. And this is the love, seen supremely in the death of the Messiah, which reaches out to the whole world with the exodus message, the freedom message, the word of joy and justice, the word of the gospel of Jesus.

Everything about Romans 9-11 is controversial. Even its place in the letter has been challenged: C.H. Dodd, notoriously, regarded it as an old sermon that Paul happened to have by him. He slipped it in here, Dodd suggested, even though it broke the train of thought, which would otherwise have run on smoothly from chap. 8 to chap. 12.^²⁹⁷ At the other extreme, many have seen this section as the real climax of the letter.^²⁹⁸ Exegesis has attempted to negotiate positions between these two extremes, and there is now a general consensus that the section is extremely important both within the letter and for Paul’s wider theology. A good many lines of thought in other letters besides Romans, and indeed in other parts of the New Testament besides Paul, raise the question of which this is the premier discussion: What has God been doing with Israel?

Like almost every part of this letter, 9-11 has suffered from being seen as the classic treatment of certain topics--topics that interpreters have brought to Paul rather than letting him dictate his own terms. Chapter 9 has long been seen as the central NT passage on “predestination,” though as we shall see the theological tradition from Augustine to Calvin (and beyond) did not grasp what Paul was actually talking about here. Subsequent debates about how people get saved have used the section to balance the options: In chap. 9 (it has been said) everything flows from divine sovereignty, in chap. 10 everything hinges on human responsibility, and in chap. 11 it turns out that God will in any case have mercy upon all.^²⁹⁹ More broadly, those who have seen Paul’s view of God and salvation as being essentially outside space and time have discovered in this passage something that to them seems very strange: a historical “dimension” to salvation. In the light of the interpretation of the first eight chapters, this has the feel of someone who, only knowing Beethoven’s symphonies in piano transcription, suddenly discovers a fully orchestrated version of the third movement of his Ninth, and discusses it as a curious sideline rather than being alerted by it to what those transcriptions had been trying to say. It remains, however, the implicit view of a good many readers who have managed, despite Paul’s best efforts, to screen out the “Israel” dimension from all that has gone before.^³⁰⁰

The major topic that has come to the forefront of theological discussion in the second half of the twentieth century, and is obviously much closer to what Paul is really talking about, is the question of the ethnic people Israel. The horrors of Auschwitz have haunted two generations, and we shall not quickly forget what can happen when a culture demonizes an entire people, particularly when that culture professed, in some measure at least, to be Christian. Those of us whose early years were overshadowed by the memory of the Nazi horror are simply incapable of reading texts on relevant subjects--and Romans 9-11 is certainly a relevant subject--without reflecting on the ways in which they relate to what has been a major moral question of modern times.

Yet even this reflection may produce distortions. Just as modern Pauline studies have taken account of the fact that, despite Martin Luther, Paul was not after all writing about the pope, so it may be time to pause and reflect that Paul was not after all writing about Adolf Hitler. The controversial revolution in Pauline studies that produced the so-called new perspective of the 1970s shifted attention away from late-mediaeval soul-searchings and anxieties about salvation, and placed it instead on (in Sanders’s phrase) the comparison of patterns of religion.^³⁰¹ It was a self-consciously post-Holocaust project, aimed not least at reminding Paul’s readers of his essential Jewishness. But this should not blind us to the fact that, precisely as a Jewish person, Paul begins this section with grief and sorrow--because he sees his fellow Jews rejecting the gospel of their own Messiah. Paul is not writing a post-Enlightenment treatise about how all religions are basically the same; nor is he writing an essay on the modified version of the same project--namely, how the one God has made two equally valid covenants, one with Jews and the other with Christians.^³⁰² Nor is he writing a postmodern tract about how everybody must tell their own story and find their own way.^³⁰³ As we shall see, these chapters remain profoundly Christian--that is, centered on Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Paul does not accommodate himself to our agendas and expectations any more than he did to those of his contemporaries.

But what is he actually saying here? What is his argument, and how does he develop it? And, looking wider, how does this section advance the argument of the letter so far? Is Romans 9-11 peripheral or central to the purpose of the letter? Here we meet once more the question of a distinction between the sequence of thought in a particular letter and the hypothetical logical order of Paul’s underlying theology.^³⁰⁴ Part of the difficulty, here as elsewhere, is that Romans has for so long been held to be a statement precisely of Paul’s underlying theology, his most fundamental beliefs, that there has always been a tendency to assimilate the actual exegesis of this specific letter to the terms, or sequence, of what the interpreter assumes as rock-bottom Pauline thought. We must beware of this trap, while not ruling out the possibility that Paul has indeed said some things here that serve as the clearest statements of some of his fundamental themes.

It will be particularly important to note the ways in which this section does indeed build on, and develop the argument of, chaps. 1-8, and the ways In which it leads naturally into 12-16. We should note as well, however, that Paul here frequently comes back to topics and questions he handles elsewhere. The letter, we remind ourselves, has not only a linear flow but also something of a spiral shape, in which (for instance) the discussion of the law in 9:30-10:13 looks back to that in 7:1-8:11, and behind that in turn to 2:17-29--and on to some elements of 14:1-15:13.

Two questions dominate these three chapters: the question of unbelieving Israel, and the question of God’s faithfulness. The two are, of course, intimately connected: the latter is raised by the former. Israel’s refusal (as a whole) to believe the gospel of Jesus raises in its sharpest form the question of whether God has in fact been faithful to his promises. It is somewhat paradoxical that Paul does not spell out these questions themselves; they are, it seems, too huge and obvious. He begins the section by simply addressing them, letting them come to the surface bit by bit. His heartbreaking grief in 9:1-3 speaks eloquently of the first; his opening denial (“God’s word cannot have failed!”) in 9:6 shows that the second is his primary concern. And when we turn to the end of the section and find the salvation of Israel guaranteed by God’s gifts, call, and overall purpose (11:26-32), we can be sure we have correctly identified the double theme.

This double theme comes to focus as the question of God’s covenant faithfulness, the δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou), which is discussed in the Introduction and in relation to such key passages as 1:17 and 3:21-31. In case there is any question of this, the buildup of questions in 9:6, 14, and 19, echoing the questions of 3:1-9, leads Paul’s discussion to the central and decisive statement of 10:3: Israel has been ignorant of God’s righteousness, and, in seeking to establish a righteousness of its own, has not submitted to God’s righteousness. God has done what God always promised, but this does not look like what Israel had come to expect, had come to take for granted as its automatic right. God’s righteousness--which means God’s faithfulness to the covenant promises, and, beyond that, God’s determination that through those promises the world would be put to rights--appears to be called into question by Israel’s failure to believe the gospel. The reason why Paul has to write this whole section is that a huge hole has been ripped in the story of God and Israel as he and others had imagined it. We may say, somewhat like Karl Barth, that those eagerly awaiting the divine Yes had heard instead a resounding No. Paul here explores the mystery of how nevertheless this No was the necessary preliminary to an ultimate Yes--albeit a redefined one.

Is the section, then, really after all an “aside,” even if a vitally necessary one? Some have suggested so.^³⁰⁵ The problem of Israel’s unbelief, they have proposed, is the obvious and major counter-example to Paul’s thesis to this point, which is that salvation is assured to all who believe because God can be trusted to keep promises. But this, though certainly true at one level, does not yet plumb the depths of what Paul has been saying in chaps. 1-8 or will now say in chaps. 9-11. The question of Israel--of God’s promises to Abraham and of how they are fulfilled--has been central, not peripheral, to the letter all through. The questions of chap. 9 are the questions Paul noted at the start of chap. 3; they were raised by 2:17-29, and are now raised again, more intensively, by chaps. 5-8. This is part of the point of 9:4-5: the privileges of Israel, there enumerated, correspond quite closely, and surely not accidentally, to the things he has been saying in 5-8. This warrants us in reading 9-11 in the light of 2:28-29, where the question of who counts as a “Jew” is critical, and where the answer is given in the language of covenant renewal--which is now open to all, Jew and Gentile alike.

If these are the questions F Paul must face, how does he go about answering them? It is of primary importance in reading Romans 9-11 to realize that its backbone is a retelling of the story of Israel, from Abraham to (Paul’s) present day. From 9;a to 10:21, Paul is retelling the great narrative every Jew knew. His retelling belongs with (though it subverts) other Second Temple retellings of the Jewish story: It is a retelling that speaks to what God had been doing all along, and that leaves Paul in a position to mount the Fresh argument of chap. 11. If this is what the story of God and Israel in fact looks like, he is saying, the present position and obligations must be under stood accordingly. Only if we fail to see the essential narrative substructure of the section do the biblical references and allusions “distract” us from the point.^³⁰⁶

The way the story is told is central. There were many retellings of Israel’s story current in Paul’s world. Obvious examples, themselves important for Romans 9-11, include such different writings as 4 Ezra, Wisdom 10-19, and 4QMMT column C.^³⁰⁷ A word about each will make the point. Fourth Ezra wrestles with the question of God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Israel in the face of the disaster of 70 CE.^³⁰⁸ Wisdom reaches back to Adam, like Paul in Romans 5, in order to concentrate on the exodus story, as I have argued that Paul did in Romans 8. The exodus story was told in Wisdom not as a bare historical account, but in order to highlight the strange sovereign ways of God, the potter who molds the clay (15:7)--and particularly as an encouragement to first-century Jews to trust this God for deliverance from the pagan heirs of ancient Egypt. A short, selective version of the story is told in 4QMMT highlighting the covenant promises of Deuteronomy 29-30, and claiming that the promises of covenant renewal are being fulfilled in those who observe the particular ceremonial practices of the sect (see the Commentary on 10:5-9). Like 4 Ezra, Paul tells Israel’s story to vindicate God’s faithfulness. Like Wisdom, he recounts the narrative to make points about the way in which God always behaves. Like the author of 4QMMT, he tells the story in order to say: this is where we belong within it. We are the heirs, the new-covenant people promised long ago. His telling, in other words, is exemplary (the story offers examples of how it is with God and Israel), but it is more importantly eschatological (the story is going somewhere and including the present readers within it). Eschatology is the framework within which examples may be understood.

The main thrust of all this, within the present letter, is to arrive at the questions of 11:1 and 11:11 with both feet on firm ground. Paul’s aim throughout chap. 11 is to argue from basic principles that God still intends to save ethnic Jews. Why does he need to do this? It seems there is a danger that Gentile Christians in Rome will assume, or even argue, that God has cut unbelieving Jews out of his plan for good, has left them without hope.^³⁰⁹ Paul does not say that Roman Gentile Christians should themselves engage in evangelism among their unbelieving Jewish neighbors. But he declares that part of the point of his own Gentile mission--the primary focus of his work, or so he says here--is to make presently unbelieving Jews jealous, jealous of seeing their privileges now shared by non-Jews, and so to bring them to salvation through faith (11:23).

Why does he need to say this to the Roman church at this stage of its history? He does not say, but three historical answers present themselves, each of which has plausibility and may have combined to give him a sense of urgency. To begin with, Rome had a long tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment.^³¹⁰ The prominence of some Jews in the imperial court had only increased the sense of many in Rome that this race of foreigners was at best a mixed blessing, at worst an enemy with a dangerous set of beliefs. Gentile Christians in Rome, especially during the period when Jews had been expelled from the capital after the riots in the late 40s, might have found it all too easy to assimilate this popular belief: although Christianity had begun among the Jews, they might suppose, God had now written them off (see the Introduction). Second, the return of considerable numbers of Jews to Rome after Claudius’s death in 54 CE--supposing for the moment the truthfulness of the various accounts of expulsion, and the probability of such a return^³¹¹--cannot but have had an impact on the small, young church in Rome. Assuming that the church numbered no more than a few dozen (the argument would still hold if it numbered a thousand, but this is unlikely), it must have seemed threatening for thousands of Jews suddenly to reappear in the capital, for the synagogues to be full again. It would be very easy for the church to demonize them, to regard them as the enemy. Third, by the late 50s there was increasing tension in Judaea and Galilee. The crisis over Gaius’s plan to set up his statue in the Temple had passed, but revolutionary fervor had not waned, and successive governors seemed to go out of their way to provoke rebellion. Any Jew hearing news of this would feel involved, even hundreds of miles away across the Mediterranean. Any Gentile Christians in Rome, particularly any groups that were influenced by the two considerations just mentioned, would be eager to distance themselves from any sense of complicity with the impending revolt. Paul himself had declared that God’s wrath had come upon the Judaeans at last (1 Thess 2:16); how much more might a Gentile Christian in Rome be eager to assign unbelieving Israel to the scrap-heap of history.^³¹² We only have to think of Marcion, less than a century later, to see how perceptive Paul was in spotting the problems that might arise.^³¹³

From this perspective, we may suggest that the retelling of Israel’s story in 9:6-10:21 is itself designed not only to suggest a new way of reading Israel’s own history but also quietly to undermine the pretensions of Rome itself. Rome, too, told stories of its own history, going back to the brothers Romulus and Remus a thousand years earlier, coming through the long story of the republic and finally arriving at the emperor who was now enthroned as lord of the world.^³¹⁴ Paul, having declared in 9:5 that Jesus, the Messiah, is “God over all, blessed forever” (see below), returns to the point in 10:12: Jesus is Lord of all, Jew and Gentile alike. Israel’s history, climaxing in Jesus, is designed to upstage Roman history, climaxing in Augustus. This helps to create the right atmosphere for chap. 11: This is a Jewish way of construing world history, of telling its story over against the story of pagan empire, and this is the ground that the Christian continues to stand on, the ground that makes it impossible to dismiss unbelieving Jews as forever outside God’s ongoing purposes.

Paul’s own role and vocation become topics within the story. His mission to the Gentiles is the necessary consequence of the covenant renewal that has taken place in Christ for the benefit of Jew and Gentile alike (10:14-15). The puzzle of its results--continuing Jewish unbelief, while Gentiles flock in--is itself to be understood in terms of the fulfillment of law and prophecy (10:16-21). But that fulfillment itself offers the key to the next stage in God’s plan: “jealousy,” Israel’s jealousy of Gentiles who are inheriting the promises (10:19; 11:11, 14). It is this jealousy, aroused precisely by the success of Paul’s work among the Gentiles, that will bring Israel to faith at last (11:14). Paul is himself an example of the fact that Jews can still be saved (11:1-6); he is part of the “remnant,” in the sense there explained. But he is not just an example; he is, through his mission and the “jealousy” of his fellow Jews that results, part of the means by which God will save “some of them” (11:13-14). And all this, we must remember, is held within a discussion introduced by Paul’s personal grief (9:1-2), producing an astonishing potential prayer (9:3) and a firm actual one (10:1). He is himself part of the answer to his own prayer, not by becoming “anathema from Christ,” as he would have been prepared to be (9:3), but by continuing with his vocation to the Gentiles, so that in looking-glass fashion this may bring back into the family after all. The self-references that emerge from the tightly knit texture of chaps. 9-11 take their place within Paul’s self introduction as we find it in 1:8.17 and 15:14.29.

There remains one underlying introductory question. What can be said about the apparent dis. junction between the subject-matter of Romans 5-8 and that of 9-11? Granted that chaps. l-4, which are, indeed, the ground and basis of chaps, 5-8, have more in common with chaps. 9-11 in terms of subject matter, we are nevertheless left with an obvious break. To look no further, Jesus Christ is mentioned explicitly about twenty-five times in 108 verses in Romans 5-8, with numerous additional references to “he,” “him,” to the “one man” in whom Adam’s trespass is undone, and perhaps above all to “God’s son.” Yet in chaps. 9-11, after the three mentions in the first five verses, all we are left with is 10:4-13 and the isolated (and textually challenged) 10:17. Even more striking, perhaps, is the vivid presence (eighteen occurrences) of the Spirit in chap. 8, and its total absence, after 9:1, until 14:17 (11:8 is hardly to be construed as a reference to the Holy Spirit; 12:11 probably refers to the human spirit). These indicators have led some, notably the influential scholar Krister Stendahl, to ask whether the entire section is in fact an exposition of a different point of view, a way of salvation in which Jesus Christ plays little or no direct part.^³¹⁵

With due deference to Stendahl, whose seminal essay on Paul started many of us thinking in fresh ways a generation ago, I regard this as misleading.^³¹⁶ Romans 5-8 is a formal, almost stylized step-by-step presentation of what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ. But underneath this presentation, as we saw, is the story of Israel, looking back to its beginnings in Abraham, set in the context of God’s promise to undo the effects of Adam’s fall, and working through exodus. Sinai, and the wilderness wanderings on the way to the inheritance, the new creation promised in Isaiah. The surface story is about Jesus, the deeper dimension is about Israel. In 9-11, I suggest, it is more or less the other way around--though to be sure when Jesus the Messiah appears in 10:4-13 this is not incidental, but, like the “righteousness of God” in 10:3 with which Jesus is closely correlated, as the explicit statement of what is everywhere implicit. The surface story is that of God’s people, from Abraham to Paul’s own day; but the deeper dimension is the story of the Messiah’s people according to the flesh (9:5).

Romans 9:5 stands at the head of chaps. 9-11, in fact, much as 1:3-4 stands at the head of chaps. 1-8 and of the letter as a whole: the opening messianic statement in the light of which everything that follows is to be understood. Israel, Paul is saying, is Messiah-focused. The long story that began with Abraham reached its climax, its goal, its τέλος (telos) in him. And Israel is also Messiah shaped. The pattern of Israel’s history (rejection, failure, and exile followed by astonishing covenant renewal) is none other than the pattern of death and resurrection. That is why, when Paul sees God’s righteousness unveiled in the Messiah (10:3-4), our minds inevitably go back to 3:21-26, where it was Jesus’ death in particular that accomplished God’s saving plan. And that is why, when we look ahead to 11:11-16, where Paul is arguing for the restoration, the “receiving back,” of Israel, he alludes to key steps in the argument of chap. 5 (see the detailed exposition). He is treating Israel as precisely the Messiah’s own people, according to the flesh; his argument is that in Christ, and nowhere else, can we understand what has happened, is happening, and will happen to ethnic Israel.

Hence, crucially for the interpretation of both chaps. 5-8 and 9-11 and of the relationship between the two, the complex discussion of the Torah in 7:1-8:11 turns out to have laid foundations for the equally complex passage 9:30-10:13. The details of this must be explored in their proper place. Suffice it to say here that in this new context we encounter once more Israel’s stumble over the God-given Torah, and God’s once again doing, through the Messiah, what the Torah always intended, in other words, the fulfillment of the dikaiosynē theou (10-3-4). The strange but God-given negative purpose of the Torah (remember the repeated ϊνα [hina] of 7:13 and the sequence of thought ending with 8:3) is picked up in the strange but God-given purpose whereby, again through the Torah, Israel trips and stumbles (10:32-33). But God’s purpose goes forward to embrace the Gentiles--and Israel itself can in turn be restored. This helps, as we shall see, to explain the harsh predestinarian passages in chap. 9: the double hina of 7:13 has become the double όπως (hopōs) of 9:17. As in 7:1-8:11, so here, the purpose of God through Torah and in Israel was to draw God’s history with the world to the single point of the Messiah, in order to deal with sin and death and create a new world the other side. Since this vocation could only be undertaken by the Messiah as an individual, it was necessary that Israel be led along the strange path of being God’s people but being called to be cast away--just as the Messiah himself was called to be crucified for the sins of the world. That, it seems, is the logic that underlies 9:6-29 and 11:11-15, and which is focused on the central passage of the whole section: 10:1-13.^³¹⁷

If this reading of chaps. 9-11 is correct, and if in particular we are right to see 10:6-13 as an essentially “new covenant” reading of Deuteronomy 30, then we are justified in claiming that the Holy Spirit, though not explicitly mentioned in these chapters, is indeed “underneath” the argument in at least one passage. In 10:9 Paul uses language very close to that of 1 Cor 12:3, where the Spirit is the main subject. In fact, 10:9-13 is close in theme to 2:27-29, where the letter/spirit contrast is crucial. And in the final verse of the section (10:13) Paul quotes from Joel 3:5 LXX, a passage that in its best-known occurrence in the NT (Acts 2:21) was cited on the day of Pentecost as part of the interpretation of the outpouring of the Spirit. Paul has no need to stress the work of the Spirit at this point in his argument; but it is impossible to claim that these three chapters present a theology from which Christ and the Spirit have been systematically excluded. This point illustrates, incidentally, a major factor in the exegesis of the section: again and again we can find cities to Paul’s meaning in the larger context of the biblical passages he quotes, not least in the light of how those passages were being read in his day.

How do chaps. 9-11 relate to the final chapters of the letter, 12-16? The question is partly answered by realizing that the central passage of that closing section consists of 14:1-15:13, which emphasizes the coming together of different cultures in obedience to the same Lord. That passage is, in that sense, the long-range outworking of the theme we have seen again and again in this letter: the faithfulness of God to Jew and Gentile alike, and their coming together in the Messiah. The main thrust of Romans 11 has to do with the attitude of Christian Gentiles to non-Christian Jews, and the main thrust of Romans 14 and 15 has to do with the mutual attitudes of Christians from different ethnic backgrounds; but the underlying theology is the same. And the historical narrative of God’s people in chaps. 9-10 leaves Paul precisely with the sort of community he is addressing in chaps. 12-16: the worldwide, multiethnic people who give allegiance to Abraham’s God in and through Jesus the Messiah, called now to live out their lives within the wider pagan world, needing instructions that at one level are closely analogous to those needed by Jews in their diaspora, but at another level have been rethought around the death and resurrection of the Messiah and the consequent fact that the people themselves have been redefined, given new boundary markers, called to a new sort of life.

Chapters 9-11 present, then, a complex and integrated whole, which in turn is closely integrated into the warp and woof of the rest of the letter. Building on the foundations already laid, Paul is developing one of the urgent points he wants to make to the Roman church: that they, more especially the Gentile Christians, should not despise non-Christian Jews or regard them as essentially unsavable. His personal involvement in this topic is passionate; he wears his heart on his sleeve, as he does only rarely elsewhere. (We might compare, e.g., 2 Corinthians, esp. 6:11-13, and Gal 4:12-20.) This is presumably not just because he feels strongly about the subject, but because he is bringing every rhetorical ploy to bear to convince the Roman Christians, more especially the Gentiles among them, to look at the world this way--from the point of view of a thoroughly (though subversively) Jewish telling of the world’s story, leading up to the Messiah and now implementing his saving rule.^³¹⁸ To treat these chapters as marginal to Romans is to misunderstand the whole; the letter will simply not work without them. But this is not merely a literary judgment. To revert to the earlier image: to ignore the fact that we have here a fully orchestrated “salvation history,” and to suppose that one can then read the rest of the book as referring to an ahistorical salvation or Christian life, is to remain deaf not just to the structure and flow of the letter but to the subject Paul is dealing with. To imagine that one can bypass these chapters in the interest of a simpler or smoother reading of the letter is to settle, not just for second best here, but for a severely truncated view of everything else as well.

ROMANS 9:1-5
PAUL’S GRIEF OVER ISRAEL’S FAILURE TO BELIEVE, DESPITE BEING PROMISE BEARER

NIV: ¹I speak the truth in Christ–I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit– ²I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. ³For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, ⁴the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. ⁵Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.

NRSV: ¹I am speaking the truth in Christ--I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit-- ²I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. ³For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. ⁴They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; ⁵to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.

The odd thing about the first five verses of Romans 9 is that Paul never states what the problem actually is. He tells us of his awful grief; he tells us how he would like to pray; he tells us why the problem is so acute. But the problem itself, like a character in a Beckett play, hovers offstage, a brooding presence, all the more powerful for never being seen directly.

We can, however, accurately infer what he is talking about both from subsequent statements and from the shape of the unfolding argument. In 10:1 he prays for the salvation of his fellow Jews; in 11:1 and 11:11 he asks the critical questions about whether they are to “fall” permanently; and in 11:23 he declares that they can be grafted in again if they do not remain in unbelief. The whole argument implies, in other words, that the problem can be stated as follows: the great majority of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries have not believed the gospel of Jesus Christ, and Paul believes that they are therefore, at the moment, excluded from salvation. And this in turn generates a second-order problem, which only comes into view in 11:13 and thereafter: Paul is worried that Gentile Christians in Rome may be happy that Jews should stay forever in that condition.

This packed, tense opening statement is built around the central statement of v. 3, which is a wish or prayer that Paul feels he could express but implies he should not. Verses 1-2 build up to this with a solemn declaration of inconsolable grief; vv. 4.5 explain the enormity of the situation by listing the spectacular privileges of Paul’s kinsfolk.^³¹⁹

9:1. The shock of the abrupt transition from the exalted heights of chap. 8 to the depths of anguish of 9:2 is made the more acute by the solemn declaration in v. 1. Why Paul needed to make such a powerful affidavit, with its triple emphasis (I’m telling the truth; I’m not lying; my conscience agrees) and its invoking of both Christ and the Spirit, we can only guess; but the guess must surely be that he knew he had an uphill struggle to persuade the Gentile Christians in Rome to concern themselves now, after the last exhilarating chapter, with the plight of Israel according to the flesh. His hearers needed to know that this was not just a rhetorical ploy to gain a little sympathy for a while. It was truly heartfelt. Elements of the solemn opening words are familiar from other contexts (2 Cor 11:31; Gal 1:20; 1 Tim 2:7), but only here in his writings does he say it so fully: “I’m speaking the truth in Christ.” Paul invokes two witnesses to vouch for him: his conscience, and the Holy Spirit. The way he joins the two (“my conscience bears witness in the Holy Spirit”) is revealing. Paul can speak of the conscience of the unbeliever (e.g., 2 Cor 4:2), but most of his mentions of conscience are of Christian conscience (frequently, e.g., in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10). Only here, however, does he speak of conscience and the Spirit as working in this close partnership. This gives the strongest possible emphasis to what he is about to say.

9:2. His heart (here, as often, metaphorical for the very center of the personality) is afflicted by grief. He uses two words for this. The first is λύπη (lupē), which refers to a state of heart related to something sad outside itself (i.e., “sorrow,” “grief”); the second is όδύνη (odynē), which refers to the state of the heart in itself--”sharp pain,” “anguish.” The first is “great,” the second “unceasing” (presumably intended as a hendiadys: the second is also great, and the first also unceasing). We should remind ourselves that the hearers of the letter would not yet know, at this point, what he was talking about; the effect of this statement would naturally be to excite sympathy and concern. Paul has led them to the point where they may, perhaps, be ready to listen to the topic he must now raise, if only because they have learned to trust him. If he now turns to a matter of such agonizing concern to himself, they should share it as well.

9:3. Paul delays mentioning the people over whom he is grieving until he has expressed the most extraordinary prayer: that he himself might be cut off from the Messiah. Granted the previous eight chapters, and the promises and privileges he has enumerated to date, this prayer is shocking in the extreme.^³²⁰ Paul uses the word άνάθεμα (anathema) to describe the condition he has in mind: not only separated from the Messiah, undoing all that has been poured into the phrase “in Christ” in the previous chapters, but under a solemn religious ban (see 1 Cor 16:22; Gal 1:8-9).^³²¹ The word carries overtones of the curse put on various people in Israelite history, and that seems to be where Paul’s mind is; he cannot be unaware of the moment when the greatest prophet of old, Moses himself, stood before God at Sinai and asked that he might himself be blotted out from God’s book if only the people as a whole, under condemnation for idolatry when the Torah was first given, might be spared (for the curse, see Num 21:3; Deut 7:26; for Moses’ prayer, see Exod 32:30-34, a passage of considerable significance for the argument of Romans 9).

Paul declares that he could pray the same prayer; that he could pray it, not necessarily that he is doing so, for that would involve him to a direct contradiction of what he has already said in the letter. And it is possible that by describing himself as “I myself” (αύτός έγώ autos egō) he intends not so much to stress “this really is me, Paul, speaking” but rather to hint, as perhaps in 7:25, that this is what “I, left to myself” might think as opposed to “I, speaking as a man in Christ.” But the sentiment is so sharp that, even if he expresses it in such a way as to make it clear that he is not in fact praying like this, the reader is brought up with a shock. What can make this man, this apostle, this towering theologian of the love and justice of God, speak in such a way? The answer comes with rhetorical force: it is on behalf of “my brothers and sisters” (the NRSV’s “my own people” retains inclusivity at the cost of the intimacy that άδελφωοι [adelphoi] carries for Paul)-a phrase Paul elsewhere reserves for his siblings in Christ: “my kinsfolk according to the flesh” (cf. 1 Cor 10:18: βλέπετε τόν Ίσραήλ κατά σάρκα [blepete ton Israēl kata sarka; lit., “consider Israel according to the flesh”]). The referent is obvious: Paul means his fellow Jews. But the way he has described them is once more designed to gain maximum sympathy from the start.

“According to the flesh” is a phrase that carries a variety of overtones, all in some ways negative (on “flesh,” see the Commentary on 1:3). Here it serves to distinguish Paul’s fellow Jews from his siblings in Christ, both Jewish and Gentile. (It is logically possible that the phrase here could denote all Paul’s fellow Jews, including Christian ones; but the subsequent argument, not least 10:1 and 11:11-14, rules this out.) And it hints at the line of thought that is to come. Paul has shown already how God deals, in Christ, with “the flesh”; the whole of 7:1-8:11 stands behind this phrase, and points to the way in which the present situation will be dealt with in 9:6-10:13. And when, two verses on, he describes the Messiah himself as coming “from them, according to the flesh,” we should realize what is going on. His “kinsfolk according to the flesh” are to be understood precisely as “the Messiah’s people according to the flesh.” That is their privilege, their tragedy, and their hope. The chapters to come will explain each of these.

9:4.5. Paul lists the privileges of his kinsfolk.^³²² He does so, at one level, to heighten the immediate rhetorical force, the plea for sympathy: these are the people to whom so much has been given. At another level, the list functions as a point of high irony: most of these privileges are what he has argued in the preceding chapters now belong to those (from whatever race) who are “in the Messiah.” Thus, obviously, 8:12-30 has much to say about “sonship” in Christ; chaps. 5 and 8 assure believers that the “glory” lost by Adam (3:23), is guaranteed in Christ; 7:1-8:11 tell the complex story of the “giving of the law,” and its strange fulfillment in the Spirit; and chap. 4 spells out the promise to Abraham, the great patriarch. The whole letter, of course, is in one way or another about the Messiah, and 1:3-4 offered an opening statement of the gospel message of which he is the subject, a statement that stands at the head of the whole letter as this statement stands at the head of this section. The force of the list is thus to say: the privileges that now belong to all those in Christ--”not least,” Paul might add, “those of you in Rome” (see 1:7, 15)--are actually the privileges God promised to Israel according to the flesh. You Christians have come, as he says explicitly in 11:17 and 15:27, to share in the spiritual blessings of Israel. You must now spare a thought, and a prayer, for their present plight.

Three of the privileges he mentions do not so obviously relate to specific earlier parts of the letter, but they are linked by implication. The title “Israelites” itself, which prepares the way for the opening discussion of 9:6, looks back to the many discussions of Israel and its privileges throughout the opening chapters, and especially 2:17-3:9.^³²³ The “covenants” have not been mentioned specifically before, but it is at least arguable that by this phrase Paul refers, in shorthand as it were, to the relationships God established with Abraham, with Israel through Moses, and with David. These are the subject of chap. 4 (Abraham); 7:1-8:11 (Moses); and 1:3 (taken with 15:12) (David). Finally, Israel’s “worship” has not been an explicit topic, but if we were right to see “the obedience of faith” in 1:5 as, among other things, a reference to Israel’s central prayer, the Shema Israel (see the Commentary on 3:30; 8:28), then the worship that God commanded Israel--the true worship of the true God, as opposed to the idolatry that characterized the Gentile nations (1: 18-32)--is at least implicit in much that has gone before.

The point, then, is that God, having called ethnic Israel to be the light of the world, has now shone that light lavishly on the wider world, while Israel seems to have chosen to remain in darkness. Israel, called to be God’s messenger to the world (3:1-2), has seen the message successfully delivered while itself failing to give heed to it. The irony and tragedy of this situation is the reason both for Paul’s anguish and for this poignant way of expressing it.

The final privilege, though, is the one through which Paul intends to view this problem and bring it to a solution. “From them,^³²⁴ according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen” (NRSV). The word order in the Greek runs thus: “from whom [is] the Messiah, the one according to the flesh, who is over all God blessed for ever, Amen [ό Χριστός τό κατά σάρκα ό ών έπί πάντων θεός εύλογητός είς τούς αίωνας άμήν ho Christos to kata sarka ho ōn epi pantōn theos eulogētos eis tous aiōnas amēn].”

Word order is one thing; punctuation is another. There is little or no punctuation in the earliest manuscripts, and not much in some of the later ones. This leaves the interpreter of the NT with fascinating puzzles, of which this half-verse is one of the best known. As the various alternative translations in the NRSV and the NIV indicate, there are several possible ways of punctuating, and hence of understanding Paul’s intended meaning. In particular, should there be a comma or a full stop after “according to the flesh” (κατά σάρκα kata sarka)? And should there then be any punctuation after “who is over all” and before “God blessed for ever”? If so, what?

The reason for the puzzle is obvious: does Paul here refer to the Messiah as “God”? Elsewhere, as we have seen, he certainly thinks of Jesus Christ as “son of God” in a divine, not merely messianic, sense (e.g., 1:4; 8:3). Classic passages in other let-ters celebrate Jesus’ divinity within a continuing framework of Jewish monotheism.^³²⁵ But this cannot settle, a priori, the question of whether in this passage he refers to him as “God,” so apparently baldly, without (for instance) qualifying him as “son” (see 1 Cor 15:28). Within this large question there is a secondary one: Does the phrase “who is over all” (ό ών έπί πάντων ho ōn epi pantōn ) belong with “Christ according to the flesh,” which precedes it, or with “God blessed for ever,” which follows it? These are the questions that have generated the multiple possibilities evident in the translations, of which the most important are these:^³²⁶

i. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen.

ii. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all. God be blessed for ever, Amen.

iii. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh. God who is over all be blessed for ever, Amen.

Grammatically the arguments weigh heavily on the side of (i); in other words, on the side of saying that Paul does indeed here ascribe divinity to Christ.^³²⁷ Of the various arguments here, perhaps the strongest is that it would be highly unusual for Paul to write an asyndetic doxology--that is, ar. expression of praise that is not linked to a word in the immediately preceding sentence (see, e.g.. 1:25).

More compelling than gammar alone is the consideration of how v. 5, read according to (i) above, makes sense in its wider context. We have already remarked how the complex theological statement of the gospel in 1:3-4 serves as an introduction to the whole letter, especially to chaps. 1-8. In this statement, Jesus is described as both “of the seed of David according to the flesh” and also “son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness.” This leads to an emphasis on his universal rule and a call to allegiance. A double statement in which the Messiah’s “fleshly” descent is balanced by his universal sovereignty would form a close parallel to this, creating a probability that at least “who is over all” goes with “Christ.” This would seem to favor (i) or (ii), but it has to be said that the abrupt final sentence of (ii) is even less likely than the longer but nevertheless “unbalanced” sentence in (iii). In other words, if 9:5 is intended to be the same kind of double statement that we find in 1:3-4, (i) is the most likely reading.

But there are also indications that Paul intended 9:5 to serve in this way--not as a detached christological statement (he was not given to sudden statements of doctrines, however important, in isolation from actual arguments), but as a kind of heading for what is to come. The whole argument of 9-11, as we have suggested, moves toward, and finally affirms, the universal sovereignty of Jesus as Messiah and Lord, with 10:4-13 as the decisive statement. Though Paul does not there call Jesus θεός (theos, “God”!, he calls him κύριος (kyrios, “Lord”), in one of the many passages where he is quoting from a Septuagint passage in which kyrios stood unambiguously for the Tetragrammaton, the sacred name YHWH. “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, rich in mercy to all who call upon him; for ‘all who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’” (10:13, quoting Joel 3:5 LXX; see the Commentary on 10:13). The stress on “all” in this central passage picks up exactly the point of “who is over all” in 9:5, and increases the strong probability that Paul intended the word “God” there to be understood as a predicate of the Messiah. Chapters 9-11 close with the intention of God toward “all” ( 11:32), and a burst of praise to God (11:33-36) that also echoes the brief “blessed for ever” of 9:5 (cf. 14:5-12).

If we read v. 5 in this way, what force does it add to the opening paragraph as a whole? Just this: that the Messiah who is from Israel’s own race, their highest privilege and final hope, is the very embodiment of their sovereign Lord, their covenant God. And it is he whom they have rejected; this is precisely the point Paul makes in 10:21, at the close of the main “story” of chaps. 9 and 10. Just as Israel rejected their God on Mt. Sinai, precipitating Moses into his extraordinary prayer see above), so now Israel according to the flesh has rejected its God as he came in the flesh, precipitating Paul into his own version of that prayer and his own great, unceasing grief. Israel’s highest privilege, when spurned, becomes the cause of Israel’s greatest tragedy.

But even that tragedy contains within itself the seeds of hope. Just because the Messiah “according to the flesh” is also “God over all, blessed for ever,” and particularly because his “flesh” was the place where God “condemned sin” (8:3), so the strange and sad story of Israel’s fate, to which Paul will now turn, is designed to lead on and out into new life. Read in this way, 9:5 becomes an exact, if ironic, summary of both parts of the argument that will now unfold.

1. Paul’s deep, constant, and unresolved grief is a standing rebuke to the shallowness that forbids Christians to grieve on the grounds that all shall be well. Earnest preachers have sometimes read 1 Thess 4:13 as forbidding grief of all sorts, whereas what that passage forbids is grieving of a particular kind (“after the manner of pagans who have no hope”). To hold firmly to the Christian hope is not to pass beyond grief; indeed, not to grieve is not to love, since grief is the form love takes when the beloved is taken away. Paul himself speaks elsewhere (Phil 2:27) of the grief he would have had if Epaphroditus had died (“grief upon grief,” he says); no suggestion there of simply “rejoicing that his friend had gone to a better place.” As long as death is real, grief is real too. If it is not acknowledged, and expressed appropriately, it can be poisonous.

At the same time, it is vital to learn the lesson that this deep and inconsolable grief can coexist with the joy and celebration that fill the previous four chapters. The many-layered texture of Christian experience has room for both, and more besides. Learning how to live with these different layers, giving each its proper place, is part of Christian maturity; pointing to this task, and helping people to engage in it, is a vital part of Christian ministry. What happens between Romans 5-8 and Romans 9-11 at the level of literature must be facilitated at the level of prayer and Christian self-understanding.

2. The specific grief Paul feels is not, however, for those who have died, but rather for those who have rejected the gospel of Jesus. This calls into question (as do 10:1 and 11:23) any of the easygoing universalistic solutions that have been offered from time to time: Paul really does believe that those who do not believe the gospel are, to put it no stronger, given no promises of sharing in the life of the age to come. Had there been any suggestion that his nonbelieving fellow Jews were on a parallel path to salvation, exercising their rights under a covenant different from that sealed with the blood of the Messiah, his grief would have been neither deep nor unceasing; it would have consisted merely of the frustration of their not at present seeing things from his point of view. This grief is bound to be felt by those who share Paul’s theological conviction and who see close family members or friends turning away in deliberate disbelief from the gospel of Jesus.

At the same time, we should note carefully that Paul does not speak of this in terms of him self being superior to them. His grief drives him to feel that it would be better for him to be cast away and for them to be saved in his place, if that could somehow happen. Though he knows it is impossible, his instinct here shows itself, paradoxically perhaps, as a deeply Christian one, formed on the basis that God gave his own son for sinners in the first place (5:8; 8:32), generating a spirituality of self-giving even to the point of wishing to be cut off from the Messiah for the sake of others. If the belief that those who belong to the Messiah are justified and glorified (8:30) is held with total conviction, it issues not in arrogance but in grief over, and in prayer for those who at present do not share that belief.

3. Here, as throughout 9-11, we face the question of the Christian stance vis-a-vis unbelieving Israel, then and now. We reserve fuller comment on this for later, but we cannot miss at this stage the difference between Paul’s stance and two equal and opposite distortions. On the one hand, any church that took Romans 9:1-5 seriously would find it impossible to engage in any of the anti-Jewish, still less the anti-Semitic, rhetoric that has disfigured would-be Christian discourse for many centuries. On the other hand, Paul’s position is clearly incompatible with the Enlightenment position that treats all “religions” as equally valid paths to God, or to “the divine,” or the local variation on this that sees Judaism and Christianity as parallel though separate “covenants.” The whole point of vv. 4-5 is that what has happened in Jesus the Messiah is indeed the paradoxical fulfillment of God’s Israel-shaped promises and purposes. Only if we follow Paul’s own argument through the section will we understand his own unique proposal for a way forward from this impasse. But it is already clear that we should not settle for the too-easy solutions that are still propounded in many quarters. Paul demands that we think harder, not settle for comfortable answers.

ROMANS 9:6-29
THE STORY OF ISRAEL, FROM ABRAHAM TO THE EXILE, DISPLAYS GOD’S JUSTICE IN JUDGMENT AND MERCY

NIV: ⁶It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. ⁷Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” ⁸In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. ⁹For this was how the promise was stated: “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.”

¹⁰Not only that, but Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. ¹¹Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad–in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: ¹²not by works but by him who calls–she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” ¹³Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

¹⁴What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! ¹⁵For he says to Moses,

¹⁶It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. ¹⁷For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” ¹⁸Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.

¹⁹One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” ²⁰But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “ ²¹Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

²²What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath–prepared for destruction? ²³What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory– ²⁴even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? ²⁵As he says in Hosea:

NRSV: ⁶It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, ⁷and not all of Abraham’s children are his true descendants; but “It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.” ⁸This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants. ⁹For this is what the promise said, “About this time I will return and Sarah shall have a son.” ¹⁰Nor is that all; something similar happened to Rebecca when she had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac. ¹¹Even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, ¹²not by works but by his call) she was told, “The elder shall serve the younger.”

¹⁴What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! ¹⁵For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

¹⁶So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. ¹⁷For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” ¹⁸So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses. ¹⁹You will say to me then, “Why then does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” ²⁰But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” ²¹Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? ²²What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction; ²³and what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory-- ²⁴including us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

“Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,” and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’” ²⁶”And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they shall be called children of the living God.”

²⁷And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, “Though the number of the children of Israel were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved; ²⁸for the Lord will execute his sentence on the earth quickly and decisively.”

“If the Lord of hosts had not left survivors to us, we would have fared like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.”

To see what Paul is doing in the passage that now follows we must recognize that he is telling a single story. Not just any old story, either; this is the story of Israel, from Abraham to the exile and beyond. This passage is the first part of the continuous narrative that runs through to 10:21. It is the story of Israel told in such a way as to bring out some often-overlooked features: the story, both in promise and fulfillment, was always a story of grace, but was simultaneously one of tragic failure, of Israel being narrowed down further and further to a final “remnant.” The point of this aspect of the narrative, in Paul’s telling of it, is that this, too, was not outside the purpose of God, but was what had been promised all along.

This, after all, is the surface meaning from 9:6 onward. Has Israel failed to believe the gospel? Well, maybe, but it is not as though God’s word has failed; for God had always specified one son and not the other, one twin and not the other, one small group while the rest fell away, one tiny remnant while the rest were lost to view, exiled apparently forever (on “exile” as a continuing theme in Second Temple Jewish thought, see the Introduction). What God promised, God has performed. This may not be the way Israel was used to telling its story (though there are affinities here with the prayers in Ezra 9 and Daniel 9), but this narrative has a strong claim, reinforced by numerous quotations and echoes, to be biblical.

Paul is not, then, producing an abstract essay on the way in which God always works with individuals, or for that matter with nations and races. This is specifically the story of Israel, the chosen people; it is the unique story of how the creator has worked with the covenant people, to bring about the purpose for which the covenant was made in the first place. It is the story, in other words, whose climax and goal is the Messiah; that, as we shall see, is the meaning of 10:3-4.

That said, we are in a position at last to under. stand the vexed question of the predestinarian passages such as 9:13 and especially 9:15-23. It should not need saying, but the compartmentalized ways in which Romans has been read probably require that we should say it anyway: The key to this passage is to be found in its relation to the relevant earlier parts of the letter, particularly 7:1-8:11 (to be understood, as we saw, as an expansion of the compressed statement of 5:20-21). There, the role of the Torah was to draw “sin” on to one place, magnifying it there, making it “exceedingly sinful”--and making those “under Torah” live the puzzled life of people who delighted in Torah but found that it increased the hold that sin and death had on them. This led to the conclusion, in 8:1-4: God has now done what Torah could not, condemning “sin” in the flesh of the representative Messiah, and creating by the Spirit that which the Torah wanted to create, but could not because of the “sinful flesh.”

All of this is now presupposed in the unwinding spiral argument of the letter. In the present passage and the one immediately following, the story of Israel is again presented as one of puzzlement and apparent failure, to be resolved through the Messiah and (by implication) the Spirit. Romans 9:30-10:13 is the equivalent passage, at this point in the “spiral,” to 7:1-8:11, with the climax of the present passage falling at 10:3-4 as that of the earlier one did at 8:3-4. The multiple resonances between the two passages (and the earlier relevant ones such as 2:17-3:9; 3:21-4:25) are as fascinating and complex as a room full of mirrors, but the main point is this: what the Torah has accomplished in Israel, even though it appears negative, is in fact part of the larger positive purpose that God had for Israel all along, part of what God had in mind in making promises to Abraham in the first place. The mystery of Israel is seen in this: that God called Israel (Abraham and his family) to undo the sin of Adam, but that work was bound to be Christ-shaped, cross-shaped, to involve being cast away that the world might be redeemed. Just as the Torah’s effect in 7:7-25 was not simply negative, but served the larger positive purpose of drawing sin (the sin of the whole world!) on to one point so that it could be dealt with there--that is, in the flesh of the Messiah, so here God’s purpose in election, designed to narrow Israel down to a single point (the Messiah), had in view the extension of God’s saving purpose to the whole world. That something like this has been in Paul’s mind all through the letter is apparent from 2:17-29 and 4:13-25. That it is indeed his point here is underlined when, later in the section, he comes to build on it. In 11:11-12 and 11:15 he puts it like this: by their trespass salvation came to the nations; their trespass means riches for the world, their diminution means riches for the Gentiles; their casting away means reconciliation for the world. (Each of those points is a shorthand way of saying what he says extensively in 9:6-10:21, not least in 9:17 and 9:22-23, some of the verses that have been felt to be the most difficult in the whole passage, indeed in the whole letter.)

The passage divides unevenly into three: vv. 6-13, vv. 14-18, and vv. 19-29, the latter of which comprises an argument (vv. 19-24) and scriptural proofs (vv. 25-29). These sections tell the story of Israel’s patriarchal foundation (vv. 6-13), then of the exodus (vv. 14-18), and then of God’s judgment that led to exile and, through it, to the fulfillment of God’s worldwide promise to Abraham (vv. 19-24).^³²⁸ In each case Paul shows that what God himself said, through the Torah and the prophets, is what God has done-namely, that Israel was called not to be an ever-expanding empire, but to be the appropriate context for the Messiah’s coming and consequent worldwide redemptive rule.

Each section is introduced by either a question or an implied question: Has God’s word failed? Is God unjust? and Why does he find fault? These are the main questions that dominate the short but vital section 3:1-9. Verse 6 corresponds to 3:3 (“Does their faithlessness nullify God’s fidelity?”), 9:14 to 3:5 (“Is God unjust to exercise wrath?”), and 9:19 to 3:7 (“Why am I still being condemned as a sinner?”). Here again we are aware of the “spiral” pattern within the line of thought of the letter as a whole. These are the questions, already raised by 2:17-29, which Paul mentioned but could not at that stage address. Now, with chaps. 3-8 behind him, he can at last return to them.

Romans 9:6-13 thus tells the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in such a way as to say: God always intended that only some of Abraham’s descendants would carry forward the saving purpose. This had nothing to do with their respective merits, but only with the divine purpose. Most of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries would have been happy with this understanding of the patriarchal narratives; it was his application of the same principle to the subsequent narrative that would have been controversial.

9:6a. This verse opens with the statement that, as we have seen, remains thematic for the whole section to the end of chap. 11: God’s word has not failed, indeed it is impossible that it should do so. There is here a thematic echo of Isa 55:11, which in turn looks back to 40:8: God’s word accomplishes its purpose (see also Num 23:19; 1 Sam 15:29; Ezek 24:14). Paul will refer to Isaiah 40-55 elsewhere in this section, and this makes it the more likely that he intends some such echo; the story he tells, as does the prophet, is of Israel, God’s servant people, being narrowed down to a single point through which God will fulfill a worldwide purpose, revealing the divine righteousness to all the nations.

The word for “failed” in 9:6a means, literally, “fall,” and though several transferred senses such as “fail” are well attested we should note that Paul uses the language of “stumbling,” “tripping up,” and “falling” several times later on in the argument. The answer to the implied question is: it is Israel that has stumbled, not God’s word. In fact, Israel’s stumble has been because of God’s own Torah (9:32f.).

9:6b. The exposition of Israel’s story begins with a firm dogmatic statement: not all who are from Israel are in fact Israel. There is an “Israel” and an “Israel,” just as there is an “I” that delights in Torah and “another I” in 7:21-5; here, as there, the “flesh” is set against the purposes of God. Paul has put down a marker that from this point on the word “Israel” has two referents, just as with the word “Jew” in 2:28-29. Additionally, if that earlier passage is a precedent, the second “Israel” need not be simply a subset of the first, a “true Israel” taken from within the larger group of the physical family. That, to be sure, is what we find in the next verses; but by the time we get to v. 24 the picture has broadened out as it did, proleptically, in 2:29. This double meaning of “Israel” will be crucially important when we reach 11:25-26.^³²⁹

9:7. This verse offers a further explanation, in relation to Abraham. Abraham was, of course, last mentioned in chap. 4, where Paul’s point was that his family consists of all, whether Jewish or Gentile, who believe the gospel of Jesus. But for the moment, at the head of the long narrative he will now lay out, his point is simply that a distinction must be made (corresponding to the distinction between “Israel” and “Israel” in v. 6b) between Abraham’s “children” and his “seed.”

But which is which? Literally the verse reads “nor [is it the case] that seed of Abraham all children.” Some (including the NIV) have thought that “seed of Abraham” refers to the larger category--that is, all Abraham’s physical offspring, and that “children” refers to the smaller, the chosen ones. But that seems unlikely^³³⁰ Paul’s confirmation of the point with the quotation from Gen 21:12, using “seed” as the positive, more limited category, means that we must read “seed of Abraham” as ` denoting the “chosen” ones. Abraham, in other words, had two “children,” Ishmael and Isaac; but only one, Isaac, was designated “seed.” This is strongly backed up by the following verse, where being “reckoned as seed” (NRSV, “descendants”; NIV, “offspring”; both these obscure the link with 9:29, on which see below) means “being part of the elect group, as opposed to merely physical descendants” (see the similar emphasis in 9:29).

The quote from Genesis 21 invokes that whole chapter, in which--as Paul lays out in more detail in Gal 4:21-31--a distinction is made between Abraham’s older son Ishmael, born to him by the slave-girl Hagar, and Isaac, born from Sarah. The point Paul is making here is, however, different from that in Galatians. There he was distinguishing between the true family and the false in order to show the spuriousness of his opponents’ claims. Here, with an eye to a very different problem--potential Gentile “boasting” against unbelieving Jews--the distinction does not relate to a particular group threatening the church, but rather to the numerous unbelieving Jews over whom, as he has emphasized, he has unceasing sorrow and anguish. He is not content to sit back and casually observe the strange ways of God.

9:8-9. Paul explains with another, closer, echo of Gal 4:21-31. He distinguishes the two groups in terms of “flesh” and “promise”: The family divides into “children of flesh” (i.e., children merely of the physical family--remembering the close associations “flesh” gives them with Paul, as in v. 3, and with the Messiah himself, as in v. 5) and “children of promise.” This ties in again to the exposition of God’s promise to Abraham (4:13-22), to give him an innumerable seed (i.e., family) from “many nations.” Here the picture is more focused, though in the light of chaps. 9-11 as a whole we must see the same end in view: the family in question will be brought into existence through Isaac. The promise he here quotes from Gen 18:10 (repeated in 18:14) was that Sarah would have a son. This is matriarchal history, not just patriarchal. These were the promises, along with the earlier ones discussed in chap. 4, that Abraham believed; and they referred, not to all his physical descendants, but to the chosen “seed,” who was Sarah’s child, Isaac. The point here, in case we missed it in the flurry of detail, is that God has done what was promised. The word of God has not failed (the “word” here refers back to 9:6). God promised a son (Genesis 18); then, when time came for a choice (Genesis 21), God reaffirmed the earlier word concerning Isaac.

9:10. The sequence continues in the next generation, only this time the point is more acute. Someone might have responded to the Ishmael/Isaac story by pointing out that the boys had different mothers, or that their characters were different. The first objection Is ruled out by Paul’s introducing the next phase with Rebecca rather than with Isaac; she, the mother of them both by a single father,^³³¹ received the promise concerning Jacob’s selection. Paul’s thought runs ahead of him here, producing paraphrased translations in both the NIV and the NRSV; from the way he starts the sentence, it looks as though he intends to go straight from mentioning Rebecca to quoting the promise made to her, “The elder will serve the younger.” Before he gets there, he inserts three qualifying clauses. The first, occupying the rest of v. 10, explains that her children were from a single father; the second, in v. 11a, explains that at the time of the promise these children were not yet born and so had no moral track record; the third, in vv. 11b-12a, gives the reason for this prenatal promise--namely, that it emphasizes the sovereign purpose of God. This third explanation is where the weight of the short paragraph lies. This is the lesson Paul wants to take from the story, to use later on in his argument.

9:11-12. The second explanation occupies center stage in this brief telling of the Jacob/Esau story: it cannot be that God’s selection of Jacob had anything to do with Jacob’s merits, since the promise was made before he and his brother were born. God’s choice has nothing to do with merit observed. Nor (to meet the objection of a later theology) could it have been foreseen, and hence explained in terms of God’s knowing how the brothers were going to turn out; Jacob’s behavior as a young adult, cheating and twisting this way and that, would scarcely have earned him favor with an impartial deity. The point is, though, that Paul is not here discussing what an abstract, impartial deity would or should have done; he is discussing the long purposes of God for Israel, and through Israel for the world. Central to those purposes is the principle that all must be of grace, “not of works, but of the one who calls.”

In the immediate context of Romans 9-11, this phrase sets up a resonance with 11:6, where Paul insists that the remnant that now exists, the group of those Jews who have believed in Jesus, is created by grace, not works. In that context, Paul is ruling out any suggestion that the “remnant” is a small group of Jews who have managed, through obedience to Torah, to avoid the verdict of “disobedience” that had come on everyone else (11:32). If there is a remnant of believing Jews, they can only have come into being by the same route Paul himself took: “I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God” (Gal 2:19). Of course, the phrase “not by works” occurs in many other contexts, not least in Romans, and as we have argued elsewhere its primary emphasis is on the “works of Torah” as the practices that mark out the Jew, the one who knows and (supposedly) does God’s will (cf. 2:17-24), from the surrounding pagan world. In the present passage, though the emphasis is on “works” as the doing of good rather than evil, the background in Paul’s mind is most likely the regular rabbinic exegesis according to which the patriarchs were already obeying the Torah, even before it was given to Moses. Paul’s point, as part of his answer to the question posed by unbelieving Israel, is that God’s stated purpose always involved a division within the family. The quotation from Gen 25:23 gives us, finally, the word that was spoken to Rebecca concerning her unborn twins, reversing the natural assumption concerning the rights of the firstborn.

9:13. This is supported in turn by the sharp quotation from Mal 1:2-3: “I loved Jacob, but hated Esau.” It will not do to flatten this down by suggesting that “hate” here really means “loved somewhat less”; even that would be arbitrary, and would merit the question of v. 14 just the same.^³³² The context in Malachi makes it clear what is meant: Esau, the people of Edom, have suffered devastation, and their attempts to rebuild will be thwarted. However, in context this passage of Malachi is not written to provide “Jacob” with a sense of effortless superiority, leading to arrogance. On the contrary, it is meant to undermine such a thing, and to provoke instead a sense of gratitude for the unmerited love of God.

To repeat: Paul’s aim throughout this first section (9:6-13) has been to say that God’s word has not failed, because he always declared that he would work through Isaac not Ishmael, and through Jacob not Esau, thus setting a pattern that continued through the whole story and on to Paul’s own day. This, however, raises for Paul, as it does for contemporary readers, the major question: Has God been unjust? To answer this, Paul continues the story of Israel with its next major moment: the exodus from Egypt.

9:14-18. When faced with a dense and difficult passage like this, one wise course is to examine its roots earlier in the letter. In this case there are at least three relevant passages.

The question of 9:14, as we saw, is parallel to that of 3:5: is God unjust to inflict wrath? There Paul answered abruptly that this could not be so, since God is the world’s judge, and as such is bound to punish evil. Here as there, Paul is not talking about people who are, so to speak, morally neutral; he is talking about sinful human beings. The contexts of the quotations from Exod 33:19 and 9:16, in vv. 15 and 17, make this clear. In the first case, God is speaking to Moses about those who sinned by making the golden calf. In the second, God is speaking through Moses to Pharaoh, explaining why, despite his arrogance in opposing God’s plan to set Israel free, God has not struck him dead on the spot, but has allowed him to go on, hardening his heart so that the long-term effect would be the spreading of the news of God’s power and reputation.

In both cases, then, the question is not: granted that human beings are a blank slate, what is God writing on that slate? Instead, it is this: Granted that Israel has followed Adam into sin (5:20 and 7:7-25 are the second relevant passages), what will God do with it? The answer Paul gives, continuing his story of Israel from Abraham to the present day, is that God has allowed Israel, like Pharaoh, to stand--that is, he has withheld instant judgment, in order that mercy may spread into the world. This is where the third earlier passage comes into play: God’s kindness is meant to lead to repentance (2:4-6), though those who do not avail themselves of the chance will become hardened, to fit them the more thoroughly for the coming judgment. That this is what Paul has in mind is clear from the reprise of the present argument in 11:25-32. As with the previous paragraph, then, it is vital that we see the present statements in the larger context of the narrative Paul is constructing from 9:6 to 10:13 and beyond. What is happening to Israel in the present time serves the purpose of God’s covenant intention, to spread the gospel to all the world.

9:14. The question, whether God is guilty of injustice, is essentially the same question as Paul grappled with in chap. 3, that of the δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou). It has to do with God’s covenanted obligation to bring salvation to the Gentiles through Israel, and with his simultaneous obligation to deal with sin; both of these are brought into sharp focus by Israel’s failure. In 3:21-4:25 Paul addressed the question by declaring that the Messiah, in his faithful death and resurrection, had unveiled God’s righteousness in action, for the benefit of all who believe. In the present passage he is working toward a very similar conclusion, which he gives in 9:30-10:13. In 3:5-6 he was content with a brief answer to the charge of God’s injustice (God remains judge of the world, and must act accordingly). Here he spells this out in terms of the exodus story.

9:15-16. He begins with a statement of God’s sovereignty, not in the abstract but when faced with rebellious Israel. The golden calf incident (Exodus 32) became a byword for Israel’s sin, all the worse because it happened at the very moment when God was entering into solemn covenant with his people in the giving of the law and the instructions for making the tabernacle (Exodus 19-20; 24; 25-30; cf. Ps 106:19; Acts 7:41; Exod. Rab. 21.1; 30.7; Pesiq. Rab. 14.10; Tg. Neofiti). In that context, as Moses stood before YHWH and begged forgiveness, offering to take Israel’s place in being blotted out of God’s book--as Paul had thought to do in v. 3--God had declared that, though severe judgment was bound to fall, some would be spared--namely, the ones God chose. God’s purposes, in other words, would continue, though all of Israel be guilty (the very point Paul insisted on in 3:4). The surprise, in other words, is not that some were allowed to fall by the wayside, but that any at all were allowed to continue as God’s covenant people, carrying the promises forward to their conclusion. This, in turn, shows that the status of being God’s promise-bearing people has in the last analysis nothing to do with whether Israel intends to do what God wants (“human will,” NRSV; “man’s desire,” NIV), or whether Israel expends energy on the task (“exertion,” NRSV; “effort,” NIV; lit., “running”; for the “running” metaphor, see 1 Cor 9:24-26; Phil 2:16; 3:12-14). What matters, what carries the saving plan forward even though all human agents let God down, is God’s own mercy. “Mercy” is in fact a key theme of these chapters, and Paul clearly sees it as such by making it the transition into chap. 12. (The verb έλέεω [eleeō] and the noun έλεος [eleos] occur in 9:15-16, 18, 23 and 11:30-31 [twice] and 32; see also 15:9 and Gal 6:16. The verb οίκτίρω [oiktirō] occurs in parallel with eleeō in 9:15, and the noun οίκτίρμός [oiktirmos], summing up the train of thought of chaps. 9-11, in 12:1.)

9:17-18. The same point is made graphically with another scene from the exodus narrative, that of Moses before Pharaoh. Again Paul first quotes the passage (in this case, Exod 9:16) and then draws the implication. As with Israel after the golden calf, Pharaoh is guilty; God could have punished him at once. God has, instead, “made him to stand,” “raised him up” in this sense, rather than cutting him off instantly.^³³³ The reason is so that God’s power might be displayed in him, and that God’s name might be made known in all the world. The moral Paul draws in the next verse shows that he regards God’s “making Pharaoh to stand” as the equivalent of “hardening”; Exod 9:16, that is, picks up 9:12 (“the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart”), itself part of a longer sequence (Exod 4:21; 7:3, 13, 22; 8:15, 32; 9:35; 10:1; 14:8; cf. Deut 2:30; Josh 11:20; Isa 63:17). What God has done to Pharaoh is not arbitrary. Pharaoh has already enslaved God’s people and resisted the call to set them free. God has in view not the protracted punishment of Pharaoh for its own sake, but the worldwide proclamation of God’s power and name. This is how the language of “hardening” works in at least one strand of Second Temple Jewish thinking. (See the suggestive 2 Macc 6:12-16: God’s suspension of judgment means that the pagan nations will thereby reach the full measure of their sins, v. 14; cf. Gen 15:16; Wis 19:4. Israel, meanwhile, though chastened, is eventually granted mercy.) We ought at this point to hear echoes of earlier statements regarding Israel’s disobedience (1:18-23; 2:1-11, 17-24), and to detect a line of thought that runs from those passages, through the present one, on to the decisive 11:25-26.

Paul is not, then, using the example of Pharaoh to explain that God has the right to show mercy, or to harden someone’s heart, out of mere caprice. Nor is it simply that God has the right to do this sort of thing when someone is standing in the way of the glorious purpose that has been promised. The sense of this passage is gained from its place within the larger story line from 9:6-10:21--that is, as part of the story of Israel itself, told to explain what is now happening to Paul’s “kinsfolk according to the flesh.” God’s action upon Pharaoh was part of the means, not only of rescuing Israel from slavery, but of declaring God’s name to the world. In much the same way, as Paul will explain in 11:11-14, God’s action at the present time upon Israel “according to the flesh” is part of the means of bringing the gospel to the nations, of declaring God’s name--and, now, the name of the Lord, the name of Jesus Christ!--to the nations (10:9-13). This in turn precipitates the questions of 11:1 and 11, which deal with the problem that remains at the end of it all. Reading this part of Romans is like riding a bicycle: if you stand still for more than a moment, forgetting the onward movement both of the story of 9:6-10:21 and of the letter as a whole, you are liable to lose your balance--or, perhaps, to accuse Paul of losing his.

9:19-24. That, of course, is very tempting at this juncture, and Paul is well aware of it. The question of 9:19 (“Why does he still find fault?”) is natural and proper, however much Paul in v. 20 rebukes the creature for answering back to the creator.^³³⁴ Paul is dealing, after all, with the topic of God’s righteousness; if there is complete disjunction between God’s justice and everybody else’s, it would be better not to use the term at all.

But here, just when it appears that Paul is going to dig himself even deeper into the hole he seems to have dug in vv. 14-18, we must again notice where he is within the story that began at 9:6. He has begun with the patriarchs; he has continued with the exodus; now he moves to the exile.

There were, perhaps, other options at this point. Some tellings of Israel’s story (including one attributed to Paul himself in Acts) moved from the exodus to the establishment of judges and then of the monarchy (Acts 13:17-25). But Paul here waits to mention monarchs until he reaches the king himself in 10:4. Instead, he goes to those passages where Israel, in its own tellings of its own story, knew that God had acted in judgment, to prune the nation right down to a tiny remnant--and he finds, in those same passages, the clue to what God was up to. Once more God’s action, evoked in the relevant biblical passages, is to be understood within the larger purposes not only for Israel but through Israel for the world. The setting, again, is not Israel as tabula rasa, but Israel as the sinful, rebellious, idolatrous people to whom God, after years of pleading, threatening, promising, and cajoling, could in the end only respond with devastating judgment. Paul here stands on the same ground as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the rest, the prophets who interpreted the exile as God’s necessary action not only to punish Israel for its long-term infidelity but strangely, through that process, to set forward the ultimate covenant purposes. It is not a matter of echoing this or that passage which speaks, in the abstract as it were, of particular theological doctrines; it is a matter of echoing passages that speak of God’s ongoing story with Israel.^³³⁵

The central image of this passage is that of potter and clay. Paul awakens echoes here of two biblical books, and of one written around his own time. The classic passage is Jer 18:6: the prophet watches the potter remold a spoiled vessel into another one, and hears YHWH’s word announcing that the same thing will happen to Israel. Israel is acting in the stubbornness of its evil will (18:12), forgetting its God and turning to idols (18:13-17). God therefore claims the right to do with Israel what the potter does with the clay (18:5-11). This is one of Jeremiah’s many images of exile and restoration: Israel will be judged severely, but a new covenant will be established the other side of that judgment (Jer 31:31-4; see Rom 2:25-29).

The second passage echoed here is Isa 29:16. The context speaks of God’s judgment against an Israel that has become careless, blind in their understanding and hollow in their devotion. Somehow, God will do a new thing, after the time of judgment: God will restore the fortunes of his people. Similar themes recur in Isa 45:9, where God decides to bring Gentiles from far away both to rescue his people and to join them. The image of potter and clay makes the point that Israel has no right to complain if God does such a thing. God is, after all, the creator (45:12). More particularly, the image of potter and clay affirms God’s faithfulness to the promises despite full-scale rebellion on Israel’s part.^³³⁶

The other echo is of a very different book: the Wisdom of Solomon (there are many other uses of the image in Second Temple Judaism--though most of these, like Lam 4:2, are incidental imagery, not part of a larger implicit narrative; see Sir 33:13; 38:29-30; 1QS 11:22; 1QH 1:21; 3:23-24; 4:29; 10:3; 12:26, 32; 18:12; T. Naph. 2.2, 4). This is one of the Second Temple Jewish books where, as in Paul himself, we find retellings of the story of Israel, particularly of the exodus, drawing out points for those who inherit the story as their own. Paul’s account of Pharaoh in the previous verses came close to saying what Wisdom said in its story concerning the Canaanites: God left them unpunished for a while because he was giving them an opportunity to repent, even though he knew they were thoroughly wicked and would never change (12:3-11). In 12:12 Wisdom asks: “For who will say, ‘What have you done?’ Or will resist your judgment?” And the passage goes on to speak of God’s unchallengable righteousness, God’s justice as judge of all, God’s power and sovereignty as the source of it all, and God’s right to judge with mildness and forbearance if he so chooses (12:13-18). Then, in the middle of his denunciation of idolatry, the writer describes the potter who forms from the same clay “both the vessels that serve clean uses and those for contrary uses, making all alike” (15:7). In context, the point is this: those who make idols fail to realize that they are themselves made of the same clay from which they manufacture their false gods (15:8). This then forms part of the denunciation of the Egpytians in particular, the idolaters from whom God rescued Israel. The theme is not identical to Paul’s, but the two writings converge in this point: faced with human evil, God has the right both to remake nations and peoples in a new way and to withhold judgment for a while in order that salvation may spread to the rest of the world.

9:19. The question echoes 3:6: why am I still being condemned? God is sovereign; are we not all puppets?

9:20. Paul again refuses to take the easy way out, to assure his readers that humans are free to do what they want. Continuing to reflect on the story of Israel, hopelessly disobedient and provoking its God to wrath and judgment, and ultimately to exile, Paul responds like Isaiah or Jeremiah. Israel has no right of appeal, no right to answer God back. This in turn echoes a more fundamental problem, that of humans as creatures cross-questioning the creator, or humans as sinners arguing with the holy God.

This is the point where, not surprisingly, some have declared that Paul’s argument is hopeless. I suspect that Paul would have replied, with Anselm, that post-Enlightenment thought, like many other systems, has not yet considered the seriousness of sin. If Bonhoeffer was right that putting the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God was indeed, and remains, the primal act of human rebellion, then for a human to set up a standard and demand that God keep to it already smacks of such rebellion.^³³⁷ And where the humans are themselves among the sinners who have no claim on God except for judgment, their choice is in fact between accepting that judgment at once and accepting instead God’s strange purpose in remolding them to carry forward his larger plans. Paul’s quotation of Isa 29:16 indicates that this is what he has in mind: the judgment on Israel, following its utter infidelity, will be the prelude to a new beginning, and Israel has no right to complain if this is so.

9:21. Paul then develops the basic potter-and-clay image, without leaving behind its exile-and-restoration overtones, in an echo of Wis 15:7. The potter has the right to make different vessels from the same lump, one for honorable use and one for dishonorable. This verse states the principle that vv. 22-23 will then apply to the particular case of Israel.

9:22-23. Supposing, he says, this is what God had in mind. The force of this two-verse sentence is: “Wouldn’t that put the matter in a different light?” To answer this question, though, we have to understand what exactly Paul is saying; and there are two competing ways of doing this. The question hinges on how we read the opening participle (θέλων thelōn, “willing”). Is it causal (“because God willed”) or concessive (“although God willed”)? The NIV (“choosing”) and the NRSV (“desiring”) seem to take it that Paul means “because”: “God wanted to show his wrath and power, and therefore bore with patience.” The NJB, however, reads it as concessive: “although all the time he wanted to reveal his retribution and demonstrate his power, [God] has with great patience gone on putting up with those. …” And a good case can be made for this.^³³⁸ Within the theological position Paul has sketched out in 2:1-11--echoing several roughly contemporary Jewish writings--it makes good sense to see God as not inflicting wrath, even though it has been richly deserved, but rather creating a breathing space in which there is time to appeal to Israel, and for mercy to spread to more people (see 2 Chr 36:15-16, in the context of Rom 9:11-21 as a whole). Granted, in v. 17 God declares that he wants to display his power through making Pharaoh “stand.” This may mean that it is wrong to insist on a straight choice between causal and concessive meanings of “willing.” Paul’s basic meaning may be “although,” but within that there may remain a sense that since this was what God ultimately wanted to do, his long-suffering “bearing with the vessels of wrath” may in fact have been the means whereby, in the longer term, his wrath and power would be displayed all the more clearly.

Paul is saying, then, that the context for God’s action is God’s right and proper desire to put the world to rights, and to do so swiftly, showing that God, the creator, is also the just judge. This, after all, is what all questions of theodicy seek: the assurance that God is both powerful and just, despite appearances. Verse 22b then explains why those appearances are, in fact, lacking: For the sake of longer-term fulfillment of his wider purposes (we must never forget that this argument continues to 10:12-13 and beyond), God has patiently put up with the Pharaohs of this world, who now alas include much of his own people Israel, as the prophets themselves said over and over again. They are “vessels of wrath,” not in the sense of being God’s agents to bring wrath on others (as with the identical Greek phrase in Jer 50(271:25; cf. Isa 13:5; 54:16), but in the sense that they are the appropriate recipients of wrath. As throughout this chapter, Paul is speaking at two levels. He is talking of the pre-exilic generation, with whom God bore patiently despite their persistent idolatry, sending prophet after prophet to them until the only reaction left was the devastating judgment of exile. And he is talking of his own generation, those upon whom, as he said in 1 Thess 2:16, wrath was now coming “to the uttermost.” His own generation belong, properly, at the end of the story (10:19-21); but, as with 9:6-13 and 9:14-18, he is looking ahead, noting the pattern of the story, even while retelling its earlier segments.

God, then, has borne with much patience the “vessels of wrath.” The theme of God’s patience (μακροθυμία makrothymia) is another link back to 2:4, and forward thereby to 11:22; 2:4 links God’s patience with his kindness (χρηστότης chrēstotēs), which is the subject of 11:22.

As in the parable of the sheep and the goats, there is an imbalance between what is said about the “vessels of wrath” and what is said about the “vessels of mercy” (Matt 25:34, 41). The former are “fitted for destruction,” leaving it at least ambiguous whether they have done this to themselves by their impenitence or whether God has somehow been involved in the process. The latter, though, have been “prepared for glory” by God himself.^³³⁹ And their glory, picking up the theme that runs from 5:2 to 8:30, is God’s ultimate objective. Had God simply condemned Israel at once, following its decisive rejection of Jesus as Messiah, there would have been no space either for Jews to repent (beginning, one may suppose, with the disciples themselves), or for Gentiles to be brought in. Instead, God’s patience has served the larger good. God will in the end still display the appropriate wrath and power, but, more important, there will be also displayed “the riches of his glory,” the glory, in this case, which God will give to, or share with, the “vessels of glory.”

9:24. The grammar at the start of the verse is tricky, because Paul never completes his “what if” sentence of vv. 22-23, but instead moves sideways from the reference to “vessels of mercy.” There is no question, though, who Paul has in mind as these “vessels of mercy.” It is “we, whom he has called.” The language of “call,” as in 8:30 and indeed 9:12, is one of his regular ways of describing the process whereby the gospel’s sovereign summons evokes the obedience of faith. Paul is preparing the way for the texts from Hosea he is about to quote, in which the idea of “call” is prominent. But the point of the present verse, reached with a sense of triumph after the long journey through the mysteries of Israel’s narrative, is that once the exile has done its work, once Israel has gone through the remolding that the potter has the right to accomplish, then the renewed people who emerge, the “vessels of glory,” will not be drawn only from Jews, but also from Gentiles. This hugely significant point, which will become a major subject of the next section (9:30-10:21), ties the present telling of the story of Israel to that in 3:21-425 (cf. Galatians 3-4). This is how God is keeping his word to Abraham, the word that spoke both of an ongoing selection from within his physical family and also of the worldwide people who would eventually be brought in.

9:25-29. There remain the biblical quotations, two (run together) from Hosea and two from Isaiah. Together they round off the first stage of the argument of 9-11: what God said he would do is what he has in fact done. The echoes of Abraham in all these quotations make it clear that Paul intends to complete here an initial circle of argument from 9:6.

9:25-26. The two quotations from Hosea (2:23 [2:25 LXX] and 1:10 [2:1 LXX]) speak of restoration the other side of judgment. In their original setting they refer to the Israel that has been cast away for infidelity, and has thus become not my people. and “not beloved.” Paul takes these phrases in a wider sense, understanding them to refer to people who had never been within the covenant: Gentiles. And the “call” in question, as we just noted, is not simply a matter of the giving of a name--though in the biblical world name giving was often a sovereign act of character formation. The “call” here is the call of the gospel, through which both Jews and Gentiles are summoned to believing obedience, and hence to a new identity as “sons of God” (9:26). This looks back not only to the theme of “children of God” in g:8, the children of promise who are “reckoned as ‘seed’ “ (see the Commentary on 9:27-29), but also to the whole theme of sonship in 8:12-30, the theme then drawn together in the reference to υίοθεσία (huiothesia, “sonship”) in 9:4. Together, the two Hosea passages speak of the restoration Israel can expect after exile: it will be a strange reversal of judgment, in which a new word of grace will be spoken to a new people.

9:27-29. To round off the argument that began with God’s promise to Abraham, Paul selects two passages from Isaiah that allude in one way or another to that promise and show what God has had to do to accomplish it. In the first passage, Isa 10:22-23, God declares that even if the Abrahamic promise (of descendants as numerous as the sand of the sea) comes true, only “a remnant” will be saved. This also forms a link with the passage from Hos 1:10 (LXX 2:1) quoted immediately before, since that verse begins with the same reference back to Gen 22:17, likening Abraham’s promised family to the sand of the sea (see also Gen 13:16; 28:14; 32:12).

When faced with rebellious Israel, in other words, God’s first word must be judgment. At the right time, God will act swiftly and decisively (v. 28). Isaiah 10:22 adds the phrase “overflowing in righteousness”; since God’s righteousness is Paul’s main topic throughout this section the quotation seems designed to strengthen his overall argument. That, presumably, is why several manuscripts have added the phrase, though Paul almost certainly left it unwritten, albeit implied.

At the same time, Isa 10:22 itself is echoed by Isa 28:22, which links us to the crucial passage about the messianic “stone” that Paul will quote from Isa 28:16 in v. 33. The present passage flows directly into the next one, where the Messiah, the one who comes “from them according to the flesh” (9:5), will be seen as the goal of the entire history laid out here. The story Paul has told in vv. 6-29 is the story of what it means for Israel to be the people of the crucified Messiah. Nothing said of Israel in all this passage lies outside that rubric. This is the hidden dimension of God’s strange purpose of election: Israel has been called, exactly as in 5:20 and 7:7-25, to be the place where sin gathers itself into one place in order to be dealt with at last. Israel is the people through whom the evil of the world is funneled down on to the representative Messiah. The story of Abraham’s family through the exodus and exile to the Messiah himself is a story of the cross casting its shadow ahead of it. The extraordinary things Paul says about God’s strange ways with Israel, especially in 9:14-24, all reflect the theology of the cross he stated in 8:3. The judgment on Israel--including its “hardening” in unbelief!--is the result of the divine purpose, that the Messiah would bear, all by himself, the weight of the world’s sin and death. This in turn looks on to the conclusion in chap. 11, as we shall see.

Out of the judgment, then, will emerge a “remnant” (v. 27). This remnant will be the “seed” (v. 29)--that is, the true “children of God” promised to Abraham (vv. 7-8). If it had not been for this, Israel would have ended up like Sodom or Gomorrah, the cities of the plain destroyed by God at the very time when he was promising Abraham that Sarah would have a son (Gen 18:16-19:29). The mention of these cities is therefore yet another link to the beginning of the argument in 9:6-9. Paul is working within a dense web of textual echoes, and the cumulative force is not only to declare that God has indeed done what he said he would do but that the pattern of devastating judgment, from which a tiny remnant would escape, is built in from the beginning (cf. Gen 19:29, in which Lot and his family escape from Sodom because “God remembered Abraham”--a foretaste of the exodus [cf. Exod 2:24 with Pss 105:8-9, 42; 106:45], and now of the new exodus that happens in the gospel).

The “remnant,” the “holy seed” (cf. Isa 6:13; Ezra 9:2; Mal 2:15), is critical to Paul’s argument in chap. 11, and we shall take up the theme there. For the moment we may sum up what he has achieved through this many-layered construction of texts and evocation of contexts.

He has told the story of Israel, from Abraham to the promises of return from exile. At every point the story declares that God intended to affirm, as the true covenant people, not all Abraham’s physical family, but only those upon whom he decided to have mercy in order to be faithful to his promises. The background for this is found in chaps. 1-8: all Israel, like all the Gentile world, is guilty of sin, and if God simply left Israel to itself not only would it have ceased to exist long ago but the promises made through Abraham to the whole world would never have come to pass. Hence, at last, Paul has returned to the sequence of thought in 3:1-8, and has spelled out its full implications. Now he can move on in the story to the point that corresponds, at this stage of his argument, to 3:21-4:35 on the one hand and to 8:1-11 on the other. Having explained how God’s righteousness requires that he deal properly with sin, he will now explain how that same righteousness, God’s faithfulness to the covenant, generates a world wide family characterized by faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord and in God’s raising of him from the dead.

1. Many readers in our own day will find Paul’s argument not only opaque but--at least on the surface--repellent. Our traditions of liberal democracy, not only in Western post-Englightenment civilization but also in many Protestant churches, have made us instinctively recoil against any exercise of sovereign power, even when the one exercising it happens to be the almighty, all-wise, and all-loving creator God. We cherish our freedom, even if we use it to send ourselves or our neighbors to hell (being “free” to deal in heroin, or to perpetrate racist bigotry). Without questioning the value of the liberal democratic tradition, and without pointing out its latent ambiguities and weaknesses, we must insist that the instincts it has engendered have the capacity to cast aspersions on the God of both Jewish and Christian tradition. This, of course, was part of the intention of at least some Enlightenment thinkers. The first step toward appropriating this passage will therefore be, for many, the readiness to think again about who the creator God really is and who we are in his presence.

2. Within that, a second humiliation for us, the heirs of the Enlightenment, is to entertain the thought that the story of Israel is the central story of the true God and the world. This is not a new idea in Romans 9, and it will become more important in chap. 11; but to be grasped by this passage we are bound to see the story Paul tells here as the root of our own story. Romans 9:24 is where for the first time in the section we see the worldwide church, with Jew and Gentile belonging together, the long fulfillment of what God promised Abraham. The humility required of Gentile Christians in admitting that Israel’s story is the groundwork, the beginning, of our own story is something that many generations of Christians have refused, with devastating results.

3. We are, however, in a double bind at this point. Paul’s necessary language about the failure of ethnic Israel, and God’s consequent judgment, “swift and decisive” (9:28), has been used as a stick with which to beat unbelieving Jews from that day to this--with, again, terrible consequences. We shall explore this further when dealing with chap. 11. But for the moment we note the double danger: danger if the church ignores its Jewish roots, danger if the church supposes that, having those Jewish roots, it can look on with anything other than tears and awe at the path God called Israel to tread, the path of being (as he says in 11:15) cast away for the reconciliation of the world. To gloat over Israel as it goes through the story Paul here lays out would be to share the mood of the gloating authorities at the foot of the cross. Israel in this passage is acting out what it means to be the Messiah’s people according to the flesh. Those who cherish the death of Jesus Christ, seen in all its Pauline glory as the means of God’s dealing with and forgiving their own sin and death, are here summoned to watch in horror and gratitude at the cost of that unique achievement.

The cost is borne by the people who, sometimes knowingly but mostly unknowingly, found themselves called to be members of God’s bomb squad, called to take the explosive charge of the world’s sin to the waste ground outside the city and there let it be detonated in safety. Paul looks on in tears as most of the team, precisely because they are proud to have this vocation, become unwilling to stand back and allow the crucified Messiah to take the full force of the explosion. By denying that Jesus, the crucified and risen one, is the Messiah, they thereby themselves become caught up in the danger zone. Paul, as we shall see in chap. 11, is anxious that they should leave before it is too late. But he is not sanguine about their chances if they refuse to do so.^³⁴⁰

4. At a more general level, and once this overall meaning is understood, there are many moments in the passage that can be, and have been, of great comfort to those who find circumstances and obligations overwhelming them. “It isn’t a matter of willing, or running, but of God’s mercy” (v. 16); that text alone, even without its context, can bring solace to a troubled and anxious heart. That, indeed, is part of the point of expounding God’s sovereignty: not to terrify us with the sense of an unknowable and possibly capricious deity, but to assure us that the God of creation, the God we know in Jesus Christ, overflows with mercy, and that even negative judgments have mercy in view all along, if only people will have the humility and faith to find it where it has been placed. To be able to rest in the sovereign mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ is one of the most valuable aspects of the Christian’s calling.

ROMANS 9:30-10:21
GOD’S COVENANT FAITHFULNESS REVEALED IN THE MESSIAH
OVERVIEW

The second half of Paul’s new version of Israel’s story brings us from the exile--with the promise of a remnant, and of both Jews and Gentiles called to be God’s people--up to the Messiah, and to the renewal of the covenant through him. Through this covenant renewal, the gospel message of Jesus goes out to all the world, though Israel remains recalcitrant. This is the crucial part of the story Paul is telling; it is not an aside or an excursus, but central to the argument of 9-11 as a whole.^³⁴¹

This way of reading the passage, like all other possibilities, is bound to be controversial. Yet it is, I believe, solidly based. There are two main points to note, each of which will be amplified in the detailed notes as appropriate.

First, the notorious 10:4 is to be given its full value: τέλος γάρ νόμου Χριστός (telos gar nomou Christos). The Messiah is the … end? completion? fulfillment? No: he is the goal of the Torah. The story that Torah tells--the story which Paul has been rehearsing since 9:6--comes to its appointed goal in him, as we might have guessed from 9:5, where already he is the climax and crown of the list of Israel’s privileges. This reading of 10:4 holds together the entire larger section, 9:6-10:21; the verse forms a pivot around which the argument moves.

Second, Paul’s reading of Deuteronomy 30:12-14 in 10:6-8 belongs with two other Second Temple readings of this passage as a prediction of the true return from exile, the covenant renewal. In both Baruch and 4QMMT we find a similar understanding of the passage, though applied to the authors’ own times and groups. Paul is using the same passage to make an equivalent point. Exile, the punishment of Israel’s sin, reached its height in the death of the Messiah; now, with his resurrection and universal lordship (10:9), the new order promised in Deuteronomy 30 has begun, offering a new way of “keeping Torah.” Whereas, however, Baruch saw this new way as an invitation to search for the true divine Wisdom, and 4QMMT saw it as a tightening up of purity regulations in the Temple, Paul sees it as faith: confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead.

The actual story of Israel, from Abraham to covenant renewal, hinging upon the coming of the Messiah, thus reaches its actual conclusion in 10:13, with Jew and Gentile coming together under the rule of the one Lord (cf. the same conclusion in 15:7-13 and the anticipations in 2:25-29; 3:27-31; 4:13-25). The final part of the chapter (10:14-21) does not add to the narrative line, but explores what has happened at that point. An urgent mission to Gentiles is under way, leading to Gentile inclusion in God’s people (10:14-18), while ethnic Israel remains recalcitrant (vv. 19-21). This sets the scene for the fresh discussion of possibilities in chap. 11. Balancing vv. 14-21, at the start of the present section, 9:30-33 does not add a new stage to the story, but sums up where Paul had got to at 9:29, with Gentiles coming in and ethnic Israel tripping up over the “stone.” Both parts of this are important. Despite a long tradition of seeing “the failure of Israel” as the main theme, the incoming of Gentiles, via the apostolic mission (9:30; 10:14-18), is just as important.^³⁴²

The discussion in 9:30-10:13 is complicated by the sudden reappearance, four times in 9:30-31, six in 10:3-6, and one final time in 10:10, of the word δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē), regularly translated “righteousness” (this is assuming that the second occurence in 10:3 is part of the original text; see the Commentary on 10:3). I argued earlier for a particular and nuanced understanding of this term, and I regard the coherence that results when this is applied to the present passage as one of the strongest arguments in favor of this understanding. Of course, what strikes one person as coherent may strike another as puzzling, and all such arguments have a necessary circularity about them (reading the word this way makes sense of the passage; reading the passage this way makes sense the word). However, the circle need not vicious. Let me briefly rehearse the position, as applied to the present text.

First, dikaiosynē here primarily denotes a status that human beings may or may not possess. It is, obviously, a status that Gentiles have come to share but which ethnic Israel as a whole seems, for the moment at least, to have forfeited, though they attempted to establish it, or something like it. The status in question is, however, available through the Messiah, and the badge of it is faith. This explains most of the occurrences in this passage (the four uses in 9:30-31, the second of the three in 10:3, the single ones in 10:4-6 and 10).

At the same time, second, the word also denotes a status that is God’s (10:3, the first and third occurrences). It is possible, of course, out of context, to read these as also referring to the status human beings have, marking that status out now as “coming from God” or something similar (see the full discussion, 397-405). But not only do the earlier arguments on δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou) tell heavily in the other direction; the present context does so as well. It will not do to say “since nine out of eleven occurrences refer to a status that humans have, isn’t it easier to see the other two that way as well?” Adding “of God” to a word must be allowed to make a difference! The discussion from 9:6: onward, the whole theme that concludes in 11:28-36, is ultimately about God’s own character and actions; and, thus far, it has all circled around the question, Has God been faithful to his promises? In doing so, has he been guilty of άδικία (adikia, “unrighteousness”)? This, as we have seen, sends us back to 3:1-8, where the main subject is God’s own “righteousness.”

Third, the subject matter of chaps. 9-11 indicates strongly that the ongoing theme is the covenant relationship between God and Israel. The word διαθήκη (diathēkē) is rare in Paul in general, and in these chapters is only found in 9:4 and 11:27. But the word “covenant” is the simplest shorthand way known to me of referring to that complex of themes that are drawn together frequently in Paul but seldom in such a concentrated fashion as here. Briefly, they comprise God’s promises to Abraham; the intention that through Abraham s family God would solve the problem of sin that besets the whole human race; the Torah, with all its ambiguities, as the charter of ethnic Israel, the bond of its relationship with YHWH; and the promise of renewal, of a new mode of being God’s people through which exile would be undone, a new way of serving God made possible and actual, with the whole thing being opened up, as originally envisaged, for non-Jews to share. This is what I mean, in these contexts, by “covenant.”

All this--it is a story, really, but it includes elements of various sorts--is bound up with the fact that God has been δίκαιος dikaios, “righteous.” Nor is it simply that God made covenant promises and has now kept them (as one would, in that sense, be “righteous” if one had promised to cut down a tree and had then done so). The notion of God’s “righteousness” itself carries “covenantal” meaning. The great majority of occurrences of dikaiosynē and its cognates in the LXX reflect an underlying occurrence of הקדצ (sëdāqâ) and its cognates; and that Hebrew root draws together, not least in books like Isaiah, which Paul drew on extensively, what appear to us as two distinct ideas but that fused together in Jewish thought: legal rectitude or equitableness on the one hand, and covenant on the other.^³⁴³

These two ideas were not sharply distinguished by Paul, because as we have seen he believed that the covenant God made with Abraham was God’s appointed means of putting to rights the world in general and the human race in particular. The covenant thus included, as one vital element, God’s dealing with sin and securing forgiveness for sinners. A good deal of chaps. 1-8 is taken up with this one way or another. In the present passage, however, things are different: The word άμαρτία (hamartia) and its cognates, which occur literally dozens of times in chaps. 3-8, are found precisely once in chaps. 9-11, and that in a biblical quotation, albeit an important one (11:27, quoting Isa 27:9; cf. Jer 31:34). Thus, though in 9:30-10:13 Paul is coming back over territory already familiar from 3:21-4:25 and 7:1-8:11, the spiral of his argument has got to a different point. He can now presuppose God’s dealing with sin; here his purpose is to develop the theme that was already bound up within the earlier arguments--namely, the inclusion of Jews and Gentiles together in the single family promised to Abraham.

Though the questions of sin on the one hand and the unity of Jew and Gentile on the other have been held at arm’s length in much exegesis and theology, for Paul they are closely intertwined. For him, the whole point of people having their sins forgiven was so that they could then join in the single family who would together and forever sing the praises of the one creator God (15:7-13). This is how, at the level of ethnic structures as well as individual forgiveness and salvation, the world is to be put to rights. And the present section of the letter is where he explains, within the larger story of Israel, and within his overall argument about the faithfulness of God, how that has come about.

NIV: ³⁰What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; ³¹but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. ³²Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the “stumbling stone.” ³³As it is written:

NRSV: ³⁰What then are we to say? Gentiles, who did not strive for righteousness, have attained it, that is, righteousness through faith; ³¹but Israel, who did strive for the righteousness that is based on the law, did not succeed in fulfilling that law. ³²Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, ³³as it is written,

“See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall,

The first passage of the section stands back from the detailed story Paul has told so far, and asks: Where have we got to? Without doing more than summarize the previous section, we could answer: Israel has succumbed to judgment, with only a remnant to be rescued from the condemnation of exile; meanwhile, God has used the process described in 9:14-24 as a way of now calling “vessels of glory,” not only Jews but also Gentiles. This is more or less exactly what Paul now says, though he adds a new and all-important element to his explanation: the dialectic of law and faith.

9:30. “What then shall we say?” Sometimes when Paul says this he introduces a conclusion that might be drawn, but which he will then reject or drastically modify (see the Commentary on 4:1). It is possible that we should read the rest of the verse in this way: “What then shall we say? Shall we say that Gentiles, not seeking righteousness, have received righteousness? Well, in a sense--but it is a righteousness out of faith.” But this may be overly subtle.^³⁴⁴ Paul certainly does want to affirm that Gentiles have attained “righteousness”; and, as he will explain in 10:6-11, this is in fact the kind of “righteousness” that the Torah always envisaged as God’s gift in covenant renewal. The point is that the Gentiles who were not interested in belonging to God’s covenant, who were reasonably content with their pagan beliefs and practices, have now received covenant membership, the “being-put-to-rights” status accomplished in the Messiah. But this membership is, of course, marked out not by their keeping of the Jewish Torah--they would have had to “seek” or “strive for” that, and in any case Paul has already declared that nobody will be “put-to-rights” by the Torah (3:20)--but by faith, in the way described in chaps. 3 and 4. That is basic to his argument; he is clarifying, by reference back to what he has said earlier, what he meant in v. 24.^³⁴⁵

9:31. Israel, however, finds itself in the opposite situation: That which it was, in fact, seeking, it has not in fact found. We expect Paul to say “Israel, pursuing righteousness, did not attain it”; but Paul seldom says just what we expect, and here he adds the twist we would only have anticipated had we realized the extent to which his thought here is grounded in 3:21-4:25 and particularly 7:1-8:11. “Israel, pursuing the law, did not attain to the law.” Some scholars suggest that Paul is simply unclear, since he “undoubtedly” means that Israel had been pursuing, and did not attain, “righteousness.”^³⁴⁶ But, as so often, if we give Paul the benefit of the doubt, and are prepared to revise our expectations, he will not let us down. The thought, in fact, is here not far from 7:21-25: the more Israel clung to the law, the more it found that evil lay close at hand, and that covenant membership could not be had that way. Paul makes this more complicated by adding “of righteousness” to the first mention of “law”; as, again, in chap. 7, he will not imply that the law was not God’s law, holy and just and good (the phrase “law of righteousness” occurs in Wis 2:11, but in a very different, and scarcely relevant, context). Covenant membership would indeed have been defined by Torah had that been possible, just as the Torah would have given life had it been capable of doing so, instead of having to work with material that was doomed to die (7:10; cf. Gal 3:21). In that context, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass, those who were the most determined to walk toward a particular goal were the ones who never reached it, while those strolling in the opposite direction found themselves arriving at once.

9:32a. Paul’s explanation is almost equally paradoxical. The reason Israel did not attain Torah, the covenant charter, is because they were pursuing it, not by faith, but “as though by works”--the implication being “which it never was,” or at least “which was an impossible route.” Here is the subtlety, so often missed, in Paul’s view of the Jewish law. Paul does not suppose that the Jewish law, the Torah, is bad, shabby, or even second-rate, to be pushed out of the way in favor of something else. The law is God’s law, and covenant membership is marked out by attaining to it. The only question is, what counts as “attaining to it”? The full answer to this is given, brilliantly, in 10:6-9, using the “new covenant” passage in Deuteronomy 30. But those who remember what Paul said in 8:1-11, especially 8:4-8, and behind that again in 2:25-29 and 3:27-31, may already have a clue. Strange though it may seem, there is a “keeping of the law” that is open to all, Jew and Gentile alike. This, Paul has already suggested and will shortly argue, is what, so to speak, the Torah really wanted all along. To suppose that it could be fulfilled—to suppose that covenant membership could be secured for all time-simply by the “works of the law,” either in the sense of the complete list of commandments, or in the (more normal) sense of the works that marked out the Jews from their pagan neighbors, falls foul of Paul’s dictum: by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified (3:20; cf. Gal 2:16). In the present context, it is the second sense of “works” that dominates the horizon. What Israel has sought, and what 9:6-29 has been at pains to deny, is an inalienable identity as God’s people for all those who possess Torah, for (that is) ethnic Israel as a whole. Paul, assuming his whole argument to date, declares that this can never be the appropriate fulfillment of, or attainment to, Torah. The God who gave Torah is the God who made promises to Abraham, promises about a worldwide family. Unless we are to suppose (which Paul never does) that Torah was a bad idea that God subsequently abandoned (see the Commentary on 10:4), we must conclude that God always envisaged a kind of Torah-keeping, a kind of law-fulfillment, of a different order from that pursued so vigorously by the zealous Jews of Paul’s day, including himself in his earlier days (Gal 1:14; Phil 3:4-6). The subtlety of this is allowed for here not least because Paul does not include a verb in the sentence: we are bound to supply “pursued,” but the precise meaning of this is left open, so there is no problem in the idea of “pursued by faith.”^³⁴⁷ What this means will become clearer in chapter 10.

9:32b-33. Drawing now on the dark theme he has expounded in vv. 6-29, particularly vv. 14-24. Paul declares that what Israel did, pursuing Torah but not attaining to it, was like a sort of tripping up; and the stone that tripped them up was put there, not by some demon, but by the covenant God himself. We are back once again with the paradox of chap. 7. The law was God’s good and holy law, but when it was given sin sprang to life and “I” died (7:9). When Israel continued to live under the law, sin lay close at hand (7:21), creating a “law of sin” (7:23, 25). So, here, God’s good law, placed there by God’s own self, has tripped up Israel as with a stone put there on purpose. We can only begin to understand this in the light of what has already been said about God’s purpose for Israel, and of what will become clear in 11:11-16. God’s intention was all along that Israel should be the Messiah’s people according to the flesh; that is, that like the Messiah himself they should be cast away that the world might be redeemed.

The Messiah himself provides, so it seems, the final twist to this constantly surprising little paragraph. Paul’s double text about the “stone,” taken from Isa 28:16 and 8:14, makes use of a motif familiar in several different strands of early Christianity, very likely going back to Jesus’ own fresh use of Jewish traditions including Daniel 2.^³⁴⁸ But who or what is the “stone”?

One’s initial impression, reading the quotation in its present setting, might be that Paul intends the stumbling-stone to be understood as the law itself. The Torah, it seems, has been at least the proximate cause of Israel’s stumble; Paul has just spoken of the correct way to pursue the Torah as being by faith. Hence the marginal translation in the NRSV, “whoever trusts in it,” rather than “him.”^³⁴⁹ Further reflection, however, suggests two other options. On the one hand, there is God, who according to Isa 8:12-14 is both a sanctuary for those who fear him and a stone of stumbling for those who do not. On the other hand, however, Isa 28:16 is likely to have been understood in a messianic sense; and that, indeed, was how at least some rabbis understood Isa 8:14 too.^³⁵⁰ And, just as in Rom 8:9-11 we detected the theme of the rebuilt Temple, the place where God came to dwell by his Spirit, so in the present passage we would be right to hear at least the overtones of the standard Second Temple idea that the “stone,” probably the Messiah, would be the “foundation” of the new “Temple,” which would consist of all his followers, the community that would be established around him.^³⁵¹ Whatever the strength of this resonance--and since the Temple is not mentioned in Romans we cannot easily assess this--we note, as of crucial importance, that the same text that concludes v. 33 recurs in 10:11, where it is clearly Jesus as Messiah who is meant by “him.” Nor is this an isolated occurrence: Throughout 10:6-10, which is then summed up in 10:11, the faith in question is faith in, or at least focused upon, the Messiah himself. The positive link between the law and the Messiah in 10:4 (however controversial it may be to put it like this; see below) completes the circle. We conclude that Paul intends the stumbling-stone to be the Messiah himself, the one who is “of them according to the flesh” (9:5). It is through faith in him, or at least through that faith in God which has Jesus’ messianic achievements at its cognitional core, that the Torah is attained, as 10:4-11 will explain in detail. Those who “attain … by faith,” then, will not be put to shame (cf. 1:16; see also the Commentary on 10:13). And since, for Paul, Israel’s Messiah according to the flesh is also “God over all” (9:5; see above), we should not be surprised that there are echoes as well, through the reference to Isaiah 8, to God as both the stumbling-stone and the object of faith.

But in what way is the Messiah the stumbling-stone? How has Israel stumbled over him? At one level the answer is obvious, and leads us back to the lacuna in 9:1-5: ethnic Israel as a whole has failed to believe in the Messiah, because his crucifixion is a scandal to them (1 Cor 1:23; Gal 5:11).^³⁵² This is without a doubt Paul’s basic referent. But behind this again lay, as he knew, the rejection by the Judaean leaders of Jesus himself on his last visit to Jerusalem, and his consequent death at the hands of the pagan authorities (see Acts 13:27-9; 1 Thess 2:15). This double answer is bound up in Paul’s mind with Israel’s attempt to “attain to Torah” by “works”--the attempt, which he will describe further presently, to confine grace to race, to create a covenant status for Jews and Jews only. Paul sees this attempt in fundamental conflict with Jesus the crucified Messiah, and hence with the whole covenant plan of God that has reached its goal in him. This, too, we should remind ourselves, is not, according to Romans 9, something outside the many-layered purpose of God. Israel stumbled over the stumbling-stone because God “laid it in Zion.” The present passage is, after all, part of an argument that “God’s word has not failed” (9:6). If Israel is to be “cast away” for the “reconciliation of the world” (11:14), both Torah and Messiah are drawn into that process. The Messiah remains the key to what God has done with Israel; or, to put it another way, Israel remains the Messiah’s people according to the flesh.

NIV: ¹Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. ²For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. ³Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. ⁴Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.

⁵Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law: “The man who does these things will live by them.” ⁶But the righteousness that is by faith says: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ “ (that is, to bring Christ down) ⁷”or ‘Who will descend into the deep?’ “ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). ⁸But what does it say? “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: ⁹That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. ¹¹As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile–the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, ¹³for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

¹⁴How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? ¹⁵And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

¹⁶But not all the Israelites accepted the good news. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our message?” ¹⁷Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. ¹⁸But I ask: Did they not hear? Of course they did:

NRSV: ¹Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. ²I can testify that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. ³For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness. ⁴For Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.

⁵Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” ⁶But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) ⁷”or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). ⁸But what does it say?

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. ¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

¹⁴But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? ¹⁵And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” ¹⁶But not all have obeyed the good news; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our message?” ¹⁷So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.

“Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

²¹But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”

Romans 10:1-13 must be seen as a whole if its parts are to be properly understood.^³⁵³ Too often scholars and preachers have allowed vv. 3-4 to stand almost by themselves; it is revealing that neither the NRSV nor the NIV translates the γάρ (gar, “for”) that connects v. 5 to what has gone before. In Paul’s mind, vv. 5-9 explain and undergird vv. 1-4, so that neither can be understood without the other, nor 1-9 as a whole apart from 10-13. In fact, the whole passage is joined together in such a close chain of explanation (vv. 2, 3, 4, and 5 all link to their predecessors with gar, vv. 5-9 then form a unit, the exegetical heart of the passage; then vv. 10, 11, 12a, 12b, and 13 all open with gar).^³⁵⁴ This is as tightly linked a chain as any in Paul’s writings.

The main theme of the passage is the covenant renewal, and covenant redefinition, that has taken place in the Messiah. God has done what he always promised; and what he had promised, in the crucial Deuteronomy 30, was that after the punishment of exile he would restore Israel, enabling it to keep the law in a new way. The Israel of Paul’s day, his kinsfolk according to the flesh, did not understand this; they did not, In other words, understand the dikaiosynē theou, the righteousness of God. They did not understand either how God had been true to the covenant: all along, or how he was now doing exactly what he had promised in renewing that covenant and bringing Gentiles into membership, by faith, alongside believing Jews. But the covenant renewal that has taken place in and through Jesus the Messiah, the world’s true Lord, is--so Paul argues--the renewal spoken of in Deuteronomy 30. At its heart is faith: faith in this Jesus, faith that is open to all, faith by which all may be saved.

The paragraph, in fact, begins and ends with salvation (vv. 1, 13). This is what covenant renewal in the Messiah has achieved. But we should watch carefully where the emphasis of the paragraph falls. It is easy, in the midst of Paul’s enthusiasm for the opening of salvation to the Gentiles, to miss the fact that the paragraph opens with his prayer that Jewish people should be saved. It is, after all, part of the argument for which 9:1-5 was the curtain raiser. In other words, when he is expounding Deuteronomy 30 in vv. 6-9 he is insisting, along with the general welcome to Gentiles, that faith in the Messiah--faith that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead--is the way to salvation for all, Jew as well as Greek. This emphasis continues in the following paragraph (vv. 14-21), which Paul exactly summarizes in 11:13-14. He celebrates his own apostleship to the Gentiles in order to provoke his Jewish kinsfolk to jealousy, and so to bring them to salvation. Verse 1 thus states the theme that remains central throughout the rest of the section.^³⁵⁵

10:1. At the start of chap. 9 Paul expressed a wish, or prayer, which he could imagine himself praying but from which, in fact, he drew back. He knows that such a thought--that he should himself be cut off from the Messiah on behalf of his kinsfolk--is not the way forward. God did not accept that prayer when Moses offered it, and would most likely not do so now. Besides, how would the casting out of an apostle benefit his fellow Jews? If God had acted in the Messiah to renew the covenant and create a way of salvation open to all, the focus of any prayer on their behalf must be that they would attain this salvation by the route God had set up.

That is why, now, he announces the prayer that he is in fact praying: that his fellow Jews may be saved. This is the desire of his heart, the desire that springs out of the grief and pain that reside there (9:2); and this desire turns into prayer. When, therefore, we find him a few verses later speaking enthusiastically of the way by which people come to salvation, and when this is grounded in a biblical passage that speaks of how God restores the fortunes of his people after the punishment of exile, we should conclude that it is the salvation of his fellow Jews that he has primarily in mind. If you confess … and believe … you will be saved (v. 9); belief and confession lead to salvation (v. 10); all who call upon the Lord’s name will be saved (v. 13). This, to be sure, is combined with his new point in 9:24 and 9:30: Gentiles are becoming equal members in God’s people. But he knows that is happening anyway. His urgent prayer is that it should happen for Jews as well.

This verse has the effect of curbing any false impressions that might be received from chap. 9. Paul addresses his readers as άδελφοί (adelphoi, lit. “brothers”), the same word he had used for his kinsfolk in 9:3, though he modified it there by adding “according to the flesh.” He wants to draw his largely Gentile audience in Rome (11:13) to share his earnest desire for the salvation of Jews, not to allow them, through a half-understanding of chap. 9, to settle back comfortably and acquiesce in their present plight. This verse already looks forward, then, to the argument of 11:11-32; that passage cannot rightly be understood unless we see it as presupposing what is said here.

10:2. The sense of this verse is straightforward. Paul describes his fellow Jews, and would describe his own former self, as zealous but ignorant. Paul testifies to his kinsfolk that they have “a zeal for God,” as he himself had had before his conversion (Acts 22:3; Gal 1:14; Phil 3:6). He can use the word “zeal” both in the specific sense of Jewish “zeal for Torah” or “zeal for God,” referring to that burning desire for God’s honor, for Torah to be upheld, which had led him to use violence to preserve “the traditions of the fathers,” and in the broader sense of any burning energy that made people make much of a person or cause (e.g., 2 Cor 11:2; Gal 4:17).^³⁵⁶ But this zeal is, literally, “not according to knowledge” (the NRSV’s “not enlightened” may perhaps import a hint of gnostic superknowledge, but Paul is talking not about private illumination but about what God has revealed in the Messiah). He will explain further in the next verse what it is that they are ignorant of.

But if the sense of v. 2 is clear, what is its connection with v. 1, the connection Paul intends with gar, “for” (omitted by the NRSV)? His meaning might be taken to be that they were, so to speak, halfway there; they were at least zealous for God, and it was worth praying that they might complete the rest of the journey. But this is unlikely. Even supposing that he thought their type of “zeal” would have counted as such, which Phil 3:6-7 would call into question, Paul did not suppose that salvation was a final gift that came to crown a life of unaided human virtue. The more natural connection is to see v. 2 explaining, not the appropriateness of praying for them, but their need of salvation; and the part of v. 2 that explains this is “not according to knowledge.” “Salvation is what I’m praying for on their behalf; they need it because, zealous as they are, they remain without vital knowledge.”

10:3. Paul now explains (again, with gar) what it is they are ignorant of, and what they have been doing as a result. Unfortunately, his meaning has remained obscure because of the different ways in which the phrase dikaiosynē theou and its variants have been understood, and we have some tidying up to do before we can proceed.

The NRSV (following the RSV) and the NIV assume that the first occurrence of the phrase denotes the status that God’s people have, a status now bestowed upon faith; and that calling this “the righteousness of God” draws attention to the fact that this status comes from God (as opposed, say, to arising from human effort).^³⁵⁷ The assumption is then that the second occurrence refers to the kind of status people attempt to set up for themselves, which in much traditional interpretation has been the status of a “works-righteousness” resulting from keeping the law, or a more general moral effort.

On the basis of the arguments advanced earlier (see the Introduction; Commentary on 1:17; 3:21-26),^³⁵⁸ I propose a different way of reading the verse, which makes more detailed sense in itself and in its relation to the wider context. The most natural way of taking the first and third occurrences of δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē in the verse are to refer to God’s own “righteousness”--the quality of equitable covenant faithfulness that has been the main theme of Romans in general and of 9:6-29 in particular. The second use (τήν ίδίαν δικαιοσύνην tēn idian dikaiosynēn) refers to the covenant status that Israel according to the flesh had thought to set up for itself.^³⁵⁹ The verse should then be understood, I suggest, as follows: “For, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish a righteousness of their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.”

There is no need, in fact, for each occurrence of “righteousness” to refer to the same thing. On the contrary, the sense is much clearer if they do not. It is true that the status of “righteousness” that believers enjoy is a gift from God; but this is not, here or elsewhere, what the phrase “the righteousness of God” indicates. The final use in the verse is telling: “they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” This is difficult to square with the idea of “a status that comes from God”; one would “receive” this, not “submit” to it.

How then does the verse, read this way, fit in to the larger sequence of thought? As in 1:17 and 3:21-6, God’s righteousness is God’s own equitable covenant faithfulness, God’s utterly reliable loyalty to the promises to Abraham. And the whole point of 9:6-33 is that this is what it has meant for God to be utterly reliable and loyal to his promise to Abraham. This is what “God’s righteousness” looks like in practice. It is not as though the word of God has failed. The problem is that Israel according to the flesh never realized this, never understood what God was doing, in fulfillment of the promise and through the strange Messiah-shaped purpose. “God’s righteousness” is shorthand, here, for the entire sweep of covenantally loyal actions God has undertaken from Abraham to the Messiah. Paul’s kinsfolk, like his own earlier self, have remained ignorant of it all, unaware that this was what God was up to and that it was what God had said all along.

As a result, they have not submitted to this covenant history. They have resisted it, like the wicked tenants in Jesus’ parable (Mark 12:1-12 and par., culminating in the rejection--and vindicatdon--of the “stone” the builders refused), hoping to claim the inheritance for their own. They have attempted, in other words, to set up a status of covenant membership in which the principle of 9:6-29 would be quietly set aside; this would be a status for all Jews, and only for Jews. No pruning down to a remnant; no admission of Gentiles (except by becoming full Jews through proselyte initiation). This is the “righteousness” they sought to establish: a status that would be “their own.” This does not refer to a status they might have achieved by moral effort, by climbing up a ladder called “works,” but to a status that would be theirs and theirs only. Romans 10:3 is a central statement of what Paul principally objects to, on the basis of the gospel, within the Judaism to which he had himself belonged. He does not regard his contemporaries as proto-Pelagians, trying to pull themselves up by their own moral bootstraps in order to be good enough for God and to earn “works-righteousness” of that sort. Rather, they believed that God’s covenant with Abraham was their exclusive and inalienable possession, whereas Paul had come to believe that, through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, the long covenant story as set out in the Scriptures had all along had a different shape. Paul is not turning his back on Judaism and its traditions. He is claiming to interpret them in their own terms, through their own Scriptures, and around their own Messiah (9:4-5).

This makes good sense, too, of what follows. Verses 5-9 do not contrast, as has often been thought, moralistic self-help “righteousness” with a simple trust in God. It expounds what Deuteronomy set out as the charter for the new covenant, the return from exile. It is a contrast of eschatology, not of rival and parallel systems of justification or salvation; it is the difference between what was said to Israel in the beginning and what was said by way of invitation to covenant renewal after the exile. And the source of it all is the covenant faithfulness of God as unveiled, in action, in the Messiah. Thus, just as in 3:21-26 the dikaiosynē theou was revealed through the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, crucified and risen, so now God’s own righteousness, his faithfulness to the covenant, has been unveiled in the Messiah as the resurrected Lord. In both cases, the badge of belonging to the covenant people is, of course, faith. This, I submit, is the clearest reading of 10:5-9. We shall expound it more fully presently. It strongly supports the understanding of v. 3 that has just been outlined.

To sum up: Paul declares that his fellow Jews are ignorant of God’s righteousness, of what God has all along been doing, in faithfulness to God’s own word and promise as described in 9:6-29 and now unveiled in the Messiah. Instead, they have sought to establish a covenant membership that would be for Jews and Jews only. As a result, they have not submitted to God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s decisive action in Jesus the Messiah in fulfillment of the promises. Just as “the mind of the flesh” cannot “submit to God’s law” (8:7), so now that same mind cannot and does not submit to God’s righteousness--the righteousness to which Torah and prophets bore witness, but which Torah by itself could never produce. We are here, that is, at the point of the spiral of Paul’s argument directly above 8:1-11. That should help us to understand the next verse, which presents one of the most famous problems in all of Paul.

10:4. The problem in this short verse does not lie in the meaning of the main theological terms. Law, Christ, righteousness, faith--we have met them all many times before. The problem comes when we put them together, and add at the front the word τέλος (telos). Usually translated “end,” this word can, like the English “end” itself, mean both “cessation, termination” and “goal, fulfillment.” At this point lexicography can offer us options, but exegesis must decide which better fits the flow of thought.

The mainstream opinion, at both scholarly and popular levels, has for many years been the Lutheran or similar understanding, in which “the law” simply leads people into works-righteousness or self-righteousness, into the attempt to achieve their own justification and salvation.^³⁶⁰ If we come to the verse with that assumption, it appears natural to read it, like the NEB, as “Christ ends the law and brings righteousness for everyone who has faith,^³⁶¹ or, with the JB, “But now the Law has come to an end with Christ, and everyone who has faith may be justified.”^³⁶² This reading has become extremely common at a popular level, and one is used to hearing it. quoted as an excuse for any and every form of antinomianism. At that level, too, it has become a focus of controversy between broadly Lutheran views (seeing the law as a negative force) and Calvinist ones (seeing it as positive). But the broadly Lutheran view has the widest currency.

There are, however, three problems with this, simply at the level of translation of the Greek text, and much larger ones at the level of Paul’s thought in the context, in Romans as a whole, and in his other letters. (To oppose the Lutheran view, by the way, is not to say that a Calvinist reading is to be accepted instead. It is after all possible that neither of the great sixteenth-century European Reformers got fully inside Paul’s first-century Jewish skin.) We should note before launching into the detail that most early readers of Paul took him to mean “goal,” “culmination,” or something similar.^³⁶³

The first problem is that the second half of the sentence expresses, grammatically, the result, and probably also the implicit (divine) intention, of the first. It is not a second, different point from the first. Literally translated, the verse reads “For end of law Christ unto righteousness to every believing one.” In such a sentence, we assume that “Christ” is the subject, “end of (the) law” is the complement, and that Paul wants us to understand “is.” But “unto righteousness to every believer” cannot be a different, second thought. There must be something about Christ’s being the end of the law that, in Paul’s mind, itself enables or causes “righteousness for all believers.” (Nor can “unto righteousness” modify “law,” making the meaning that “Christ is the end of the ‘law-unto-righteousness.’ “)^³⁶⁴ One can just about imagine such a meaning: if “the end of the law” means “the abolition of Torah,” this could conceivably mean “so that now, with Torah out of the way, a different system can come into operation,” but it is interesting that those translations that take the verse that way find themselves pushed toward making the second half of the verse a separate thought (NEB, REB, JB). As with 9:30-31, the text itself resists the reading that many have assumed it “must” bear.^³⁶⁵

The second problem is closely linked with this. Reading telos as “termination” tends to push translations into turning the noun “righteousness” into a verb (RSV: “so that everyone who has faith may be justified”; so too NJB). Paul could have written ϊνα δικαιωθήσονται παντες οί πιστεύοντες (hina dikaiōthēsontai pantes hoi pisteuontes), “so that all who believe may be justified,” and no doubt what he has said is not far from this. But he has chosen to speak, not of an event, but of the status believers now have. He is saying that the Messiah’s being the τέλος νόμου telos nomou makes that status available. And with 9:31 close behind we can see why, provided we do not lose our exegetical nerve there as well. Israel pursued the νόμον δικαιοσύνης (nomon dikaiosynēs), but did not attain to that νόμος (nomos); the Messiah is the goal of the nomos, resulting in dikaiosynē for all who “pursue” it the right way Israel’s pursuit failed because it was undertaken, not by faith, but as though Torah and the status of righteousness it offers were to be attained through works; the Messiah is the goal of the Torah so that there may be righteousness--the righteousness of the “Torah of righteousness”.!--for all who have faith. Once we allow Paul to have said what he meant, instead of saying nearly, but not quite, what we expect him to have meant, the passage will come clear.

The third problem with the mainstream reading is Paul’s use of the word telos and its cognates elsewhere, not least in Romans itself.^³⁶⁶ The only other occurrences of the noun in this letter come in 6:21-22: “the end of those things is death … the fruit you have is unto sanctification, and its end is eternal life.” By itself, we might be misled into reading the first of these as meaning “termination,” but the second makes it clear that what Paul means is “goal.” Sanctification leads to, points toward, eternal life, and is consummated and completed thereby. The same is true of the shameful deeds that lead to death. A similar meaning accounts for two of the other Pauline references (2 Cor 11:15; Phil 3:19). Similarly, when Paul declares “then comes the end” in 1 Cor 15:24, he does not simply mean “then everything comes to a full stop,” but rather “then comes the moment when everything is accomplished and God is all in all.”^³⁶⁷ The other references are either indeterminate or too controversial to be included as evidence.^³⁶⁸ So, too, with Paul’s use of the cognate verb τέλος (telos). Though the verb can mean “bring to an end, finish,” Paul’s three uses of it all carry the other sense, “accomplish, perform, fulfill.” In 2 Cor 12:9 God’s power is “accomplished, fulfilled, made perfect” in weakness;^³⁶⁹ in Gal 5:16 he speaks of “accomplishing” the works of the flesh. And in Rom 2:27, at a critical early point in the argument that anticipates both 8:1-11 and the present passage, Paul speaks of “the uncircumcision which fulfills the law [ή … άκροβυστία τόν νόμον τελουσα hē akrobystia ton nomon telousa].” He does not mean “which brings the law to an end,” but rather “which completes, fulfills the law”--even though, of course, he has in mind a “fulfillment” that, like the one in 10:6-9, is paradoxical, involving no outward marks of Jewish covenant membership, but instead the inward marks of the spirit through whom the covenant is renewed.

This already points us to the wider context, where again the meaning “conclusion, abrogation” is challenged, and the meaning “goal, completion” supported. As we have seen, the whole passage from 9:6 onward has been a retelling of the story of Israel, from the promises to Abraham, through exodus and exile, and on toward the long-awaited covenant renewal. This is the story that Torah itself, in its widest sense, tells; this is the story, as 9:31 indicates, of how Israel has pursued “the Torah of righteousness” but has not “attained Torah.” It is not that Israel has attained Torah but missed righteousness; that frequent misunderstanding, with its consequent mistranslations (see above), goes with the common, but mistaken, view of 10:4. It is, rather, that Israel has not “attained Torah,” because the mode of “works” is not the way whereby one can attain it. Torah, Israel’s covenant charter, leads the eye forward along the story line from Abraham all the way to the Messiah, who is the goal of Torah. That is how the story works. It is the narrative logic of the entire section.^³⁷⁰

Powerful support for this reading of 10:4 is found in 2:27-29; 3:27-31; 8:1-11; and 10:5-13. More details on each are found in the relevant sections of the commentary; here we simply summarize. (Notice how the “termination” reading of telos in 10:4 goes with the marginalization of 2:27-29, the misreading of “law” language in 3:27-31, the ignoring of the positive view of the law in 8:1-11, and the non-eschatological reading of 10-5-9; all telltale signs that Paul’s theology has been forced on to a Procrustean bed.)

In 2:17-29 not a word is said about the law being a bad thing that needed to be brought to an end. Israel’s problem here is that, despite boasting in Torah, it dishonors God by breaking it (v. 23). The solution is not to abrogate Torah, but for God

to find a new method whereby people can keep it. There is to be a way of torah-observance open to uncircumcision (v. 26)--a shocking oxymoron, parallel to 1 Cor 7:19, for those aware, as Paul was, that circumcision was itself commanded in Torah. Such people are described as “the uncircumcision that fulfils Torah” (v. 27). How this happens Paul merely hints. It is a matter of secret identity, the heart, and the Spirit (2:29).

In 3:27 the critical question as to how boasting is excluded is amplified: “By what sort of Torah? A Torah of works?” and the answer comes back, “No; by a Torah of faith” (3:27). This remains cryptic, but pregnant, until the point we have now reached. God’s righteousness is revealed “apart from Torah” (χωρίς νόμου chōris nomou, 3:21), but justification by faith is “apart from the works of Torah [χωρίς έργων νόμου chōris ergōn nomou]” (3:28). This corresponds exactly to the theme of 9:30-10:4. We do not overthrow the law, says Paul; on the contrary, we uphold it (3:31). So, too, 10:4 does not undermine 3:27-31; on the contrary, it reinforces it.

Romans 7:1-8:11, likewise, does not undermine Torah. It does not suggest that when God acts in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit Torah is abrogated or made to look bad. On the contrary: it is “the mind of the flesh” that cannot submit to God’s law (8:7). In Christ and by the Spirit God has at last done what Torah wanted to do but could not do, that is, to give life (7:10; 8:11). This points on to the theme of 10:5-9. In fact, if we wanted to summarize 2:17-29; 3:27-31; and 7:1-8:11, one good way of doing so might be to say: “Christ (and the Spirit) are the goal of Torah, so that all who have faith, all who are in Christ Jesus, may have righteousness and life.” In none of these cases, despite the frantic efforts of some exegetes and theologians, would the translation “termination” do justice to what Paul actually says.

I conclude that in 10:4 Paul does not intend to declare the law’s abrogation in favor of a different “system,” but rather to announce that the Messiah is himself the climax of the long story of God and Israel, the story Torah tells and in which it plays a vital though puzzling part. God’s purposes in Torah, purposes both negative and positive, have reached their goal in the Messiah, and the result of that is the accessibility and availability of “righteousness” for all who believe. Both of those

emphasized words are important, underlining the contrast (a) with the restriction of “righteousness” to Jews, and (b) with the badge of covenant membership seen as “works of Torah” in the sense already discussed.

This means, too, that there is an end, a termination, to the period of time that lasts from Moses to the Messiah. That is, of course, a main theme of Gal 3:16-29. But this termination is not like the termination of a journey when the car breaks down halfway and we are left stranded in open country. It is like the termination of a journey when the car has taken us to the very place we wanted to go and can now be rested with its task completed. In that sense, every “goal” implies a “termination” of sorts, but the opposite is emphatically not the case. If I stop writing because the telephone rings, that is not the same as when I stop writing because I have finished the book.^³⁷¹

10.5-11. Further proof for this line of interpretation is found in these verses, a difficult but vital passage.^³⁷² At first sight, admittedly, it seems to run the other way: here is Moses telling people to keep the Torah, and here is something called “the righteousness of faith” telling them simply to believe! It has been easy in post-Enlightenment thought to line up Paul with Deuteronomy and against Leviticus; that is what a good deal of particularly Protestant thinking has wanted to do.^³⁷³ In fact, however, once we discover what Paul is doing in these verses--and they display one of his more subtle readings of Scripture--we shall see that here, too, somewhat as in 8:1-11, he envisages the fulfillment, not the abrogation, of Torah.

For a start, it would be naive to think that Paul supposed, or imagined his hearers might be tricked into supposing, that Deuteronomy was not a book of Moses just as much as Leviticus was. It would also be out of character for Paul to set up one passage of Scripture against another.^³⁷⁴ But that is only a surface point. More important is the entire context of Deuteronomy 30 (the passage Paul is working with in vv. 6-8) and the way in which it appears to have functioned in Second Temple Judaism.^³⁷⁵ To draw on this wider world of thought is not “eisegesis,” as is sometimes suggested; it is to replace the unspoken assumption that Paul was talking about what modern readers expect him to be talking about with the hard-won historical awareness that he was more likely to be talking about what readers of his day would be expecting. The task facing the interpreter is always to think one’s way into a world of thought that Paul would have taken for granted. This is the move that lies at the heart of vv. 5-11 and that, once grasped, makes sense of the entire sequence of thought.^³⁷⁶

Deuteronomy 30 comes immediately after the chapters in which Moses has held out to the people the covenantal blessings and curses. The curses, it must be said, far outweigh the blessings: Deut 28:1-14 lists the blessings that will follow obedience to Torah, but vv. 15-68 give a far longer list of curses, which are then reinforced in the warnings of 29:18-28. The final and most emphatic curse is exile: Israel will not simply suffer blight, mildew, barrenness, poverty, sickness, and a hundred other evils in the land, but will ultimately be driven off the land itself, scattered among the nations of the earth (28:63-68; 29:22-28; see esp. 29:28[27]: “YHWH uprooted them from their land in his anger, wrath, and indignation, and cast them into another land, as at this day”). It is assumed that all these things will come to pass; Deut 29:4 bewails the fact that Israel has remained hardhearted, and the curses are bound to follow.

But after they have all happened, and in particular after the exile has done its worst, then there will come a great reversal. Deuteronomy 30 is a prediction of the return from exile, pointing to the spiritual and moral renewal that will make that return possible and appropriate. Israel will return to YHWH with all its heart and soul (30:2, 6). YHWH will turn Israel’s captivity around, and regather his people (vv. 3-5). YHWH will circumcise Israel’s heart, to love YHWH, so that Israel may live (v. 6). Blessing will once more follow, if Israel will now be obedient (vv. 8-10). And the central blessing is life itself: God has set life before them (v. 15), the life that results from keeping the commandments (v. 16) as opposed to disobeying and so incurring death (vv. 17-18). Life is what they must choose (v. 19). They must love YHWH, obey his voice, and cleave to him, “for he is your life, and the length of your days” (v. 20). The whole chapter might be entitled, “the new obedience which brings new life.”^³⁷⁷

In the middle of Deuteronomy we find vv. 1:1-14, the passage Paul quotes in 10:6-8. The commandment is not too hard; it is not far off. You do not need someone to go up to heaven and bring it down, so that you may hear it and do it; you do not need someone to cross the sea and fetch it, so that you may hear it and do it (this language about impossible quests to the deep, or to heaven, has become proverbial in 4 Ezra 4:7-8). “The word is near you; it is in your mouth, and in your heart, so that you may do it” (v. 14). The chapter, in other words, presumes that Israel has been sent into exile and is now going to turn to YHWH from the heart, and proceeds to explain what it really means to “do” the law and so to “live.” This lifegiving “doing” will be a matter, not of a struggle to obey an apparently impossible law, but of heart and mouth being renewed by God’s living “word.” It will not be a matter of someone else teaching it to them as from a great distance. Verse 14, significantly, omits even the mention of “hearing” the commandment; it will be inside them, in their mouth and heart. We cannot but think of Jer 31:33-34: In the restoration after the exile, the people will not need to be taught the commandments, because they will be written on their hearts. And this cannot but remind us of Rom 2:25-29, a passage that Paul is about to echo in 10:9-10. It should be clear already that Paul has the context, and overall meaning, of Deuteronomy 30 firmly in mind. This is anything but a clever prooftext taken out of context.

This should make it clear, too, that Paul’s quotation of Lev 18:5 in 10:5 is not set in opposition to Deuteronomy 30. He is not setting up a straw person (“Moses encouraged that stupid and impossible system we know as works-righteousness”) in order then to knock it down with a bit of clever but slippery eisegesis of another part of the Pentateuch. Nor, as Barth and some later writers have suggested, was Paul envisaging the Messiah himself as the one who performed the law perfectly and gained life thereby.^³⁷⁸ Lev 18:5 brought together two things, “doing the law” and “living”: “the one who does these things shall live by them.” This is what the “righteousness which is from the law” declares; that is how Leviticus 18 was heard in Paul’s own day.^³⁷⁹ Had Paul really meant that Christ is the termination of the law, we should have expected him to oppose such a view. But he does not suppose that Deuteronomy does any such thing. It offers, he insists, a fresh explanation, granted exile and return, for what “do the law and live” might actually mean.^³⁸⁰ In the original passage, the lines Paul quotes each end with “so that you may do it.” Here, as in 2:25-29 and elsewhere, Paul’s point is that those who share Christian faith are in fact “doing the law” in the sense that Deuteronomy and Jeremiah intended. Those who believe that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised him from the dead, are the new-covenant people, the returned-from-exile people. The story of Israel in 9:6-29 took us as far as exile, pointing ahead to what might happen beyond (9:24). That story reached its dramatic climax in the Messiah, the one upon whom the curses ultimately fell (Gal 3:13). Now all who believe in the Messiah, whether they be Jew or Gentile, are thereby “fulfilling the law”; they are “doing” it in the sense Deuteronomy 30 intended; and they thereby find “life,” as 8:9-11 demonstrated, the life that Torah: wanted to give but could not (7:10), the life that can now be spoken of more specifically as “salvation” (10:9, 10, 13). And that, of course, was all along the point of the paragraph (10:1-13). Paul has prayed for the salvation of his kinsfolk; now, starting with Torah itself, he has shown the way by which that salvation may be found.

Important confirmation of this reading of Deuteronomy 30 is found in one of the final Dead Sea Scrolls to be released, the so-called 4QMMT.^³⁸¹ Though Pauline scholars have noted that this text speaks of “justification by works of the law,” the setting of this within an explicit exegesis of Deuteronomy 30, and thus its fascinating parallel to Romans 10, has not been explored.^³⁸²

The scroll has three sections, A, B, and C; it is C that concerns us, specifically lines 12-32. This passage begins by quoting Deut 30:1-3: when the blessing and the curse have come upon you, then you will take it to heart and return to him with all your heart and with all your soul, “at the end of time” (a significant addition), so that you may live. The text then explains that Deuteronomy is to be read as predicting a three-stage history for Israel: first blessing, then curse, then restoration and renewed blessing. The blessings, it says, came upon Israel in the days of David and Solomon (C 18). The curses then came from the time of Jeroboam son of Nebat, climaxing in the Babylonian captivity (C 18-20). But then, “at the end of days,” the return from exile will happen; and this is the time the writer believes Israel is now in. This is the time, then, for making it clear what precisely the Torah now requires, so that when the final end comes “it will be reckoned to you as righteousness” (C 30-31). The practices of Torah in question are those outlined in parts A and B, specifically, regulations for the Temple.

Deuteronomy 30, in other words, is being read as a prediction of the eschatological time when God restores the fortunes of Israel after the exile. This eschatological time, the writer believes, is now coming to pass. Those who, in the inaugurated eschatology of the present time, observe this “selection of works of the law” (the phrase that, via its Hebrew original, gives the work its modern title),^³⁸³ are assured thereby that at the end of time they will be reckoned within God’s true people. The structure of this doctrine of justification is identical to Paul’s (a future “end,” at which some will be vindicated, who are marked out in the present time of inaugurated eschatology by the appropriate indicators), while the content is different. The “works of the law” the writer urges are not the 613 commands in Torah. Nor are they the “works of the law” that Paul warns against, the works (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath) that mark out Jews over against their pagan neighbors. Nor, again, are they “works” done to earn a moralistic or proto-Pelagian “righteousness”; they are to demonstrate fidelity to the renewed covenant.^³⁸⁴ They are the particular “works” that will mark out this sect, with its specific practices, over against other Jews. For Paul, the thing that marks out members of the renewed covenant, the people envisaged by Deuteronomy 30, over against all others, Jews and pagans alike, is Christian faith. And the substance and object of that faith--the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and the confession of his universal lordship--is, of course, what determines the difference.

A second striking use of Deuteronomy 30 in Second Temple Judaism is found in Baruch 3, a very different text to 4QMMT and all the more significant as a parallel use of the passage Paul is working with here.^³⁸⁵ The fictive setting of Baruch is the Babylonian exile; the actual setting, it is normally assumed, is in the Jewish diaspora some time in the first or second century BCE.^³⁸⁶ In view of the “continuing exile” theme in much Second Temple thought, however, we may question whether a geographical diaspora situation is required. What matters is that the writer (or compiler) is clearly working with the idea of “exile,” and is drawing on a wide range of classic biblical texts to do so. Exile is explained, as in Daniel 9--and as in Rom 9:6-33!--with a firm belief in God’s righteousness (Bar 1:15; 2:1, 6, 19-23); that is, God has carried out the warnings issued by the prophets, and also in Deuteronomy 28 and 32. In this context, what Israel needs is to learn where wisdom is to be found; here, from 3:9 onward, the writer draws on Proverbs and Job, but the setting of exile-in-need-of-restoration has not been left behind. Wisdom is, in fact, the same thing as Torah (4:1; cf. Sir 24:23), and when Israel seeks God with all its heart, holding wisdom/Torah fast, then Israel will live. In that setting, we should not be surprised that the writer draws on Deuteronomy 30 to encourage his readers to seek wisdom/Torah so as to become the true returned-from-exile people (cf. 3:7 with Deut 30:1; 4:1 with Deut 30:19).

That is the wider context within which the explicit reference to Deut 30:12-13 occurs in 3:29-30: “Who has gone up into heaven, and taken her [i.e., wisdom], and brought her down from the clouds? Who has gone over the sea, and found her, and will buy her for pure gold?” The answer is clear: it is none other than God. “He found the whole way to knowledge, and gave her to his servant Jacob, and to Israel, whom he loved. Afterward she appeared on earth and lived with humankind” (see Sir 24:8-12; Wis 9:9-10). In that context, the writer turns to exhort his kinsfolk to take courage; salvation is at hand. Significantly, much of the rest of the short book, like Romans, is replete with echoes of Isaiah 40-55. God, concludes the book, “will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that are with him” (5:9).

The parallel between Rom 10:6-8 and Baruch 3 is frequently noted; the overall narrative context, of exile and return, and the repentance required for the latter, is not. That is why some have been able to suggest that the Baruch passage is not particularly relevant for interpreting Romans.^³⁸⁷ If all it supplies is a parallel use of Deuteronomy 30, and a general suggestion that the “Wisdom” Sought or propounded by various Jewish writers at the time might be a source for Paul’s christology, we might in part agree (cf. Sir 24:5). But it supplies far more than that (though not, we should note, less), Baruch, like 4QMMT, envisages a narrative within which writer and readers find themselves at home: the narrative of exile and restoration.

For all their radical differences of style and content, 4QMMT and Baruch thus reflect a similar understanding of how God is at work in Israel’s history, and what is required to be a faithful, true Jew at this moment. Both take Deuteronomy 30 as pointing to what will happen when God restores the fortunes of Israel after exile. MMT sees the intensification of Torah as what is needed; Baruch urges his readers to seek the divine wisdom in which Torah is embodied. Both see this as the way to attain the salvation that God long ago promised would succeed the time of desolation and devastation. Together they create a Second Temple context of meaning within which Paul’s fresh understanding, generated by his grasp of the gospel, makes full and rich sense.

With all this in mind--Deuteronomy 30 as a whole, with its emphasis on “doing” and “living,” and the eschatological reading of it in two other Second Temple writers--we may offer a preliminary reading of vv. 5-9.

First, it must be noted that the passage, introduced as it is with gar, is advanced as the explanation of why the Messiah is the goal of the law for righteousness to all who believe (this explanatory connection is ignored in the NRSV, the NIV, and several other translations). The gar, in fact, governs vv. 5-9 as a whole, not simply v. 5. Paul’s explanation runs as follows: “For, while Moses does indeed write concerning Torah-righteousness that ‘the one who does them shall live in them,’ what ‘doing’ and ‘living’ come to mean, when God restores Israel after exile, defined afresh by Deuteronomy 30, not in terms of an impossible demand, but in terms of God’s gift of God’s own word; and this ‘word’ is the word of faith, faith that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.” This, taken as a whole, explains v. 4, and thereby, in turn, explains how salvation is now available for all who share this faith. In other words, while opening the promise to those of any and every ethnic background, Paul is more specifically showing how his prayer in 10:1 is to be answered. This is how God will restore the fortunes of Israel. Just as MMT urged its readers to make their status in the renewed people of God secure by particular temple regulations, and just as Baruch urged his readers to seek the divine Wisdom, so Paul urges people of every race to discover the risen Lord Jesus as Messiah and find thereby the renewed covenant membership of which Deuteronomy spoke. Verse 5 is not a statement of a legalism that Paul will then sweep aside. The δέ (de) that links vv. 5-6 does not indicate a direct antithesis or contradiction, but a modification, a redefinition: “Yes, Moses does write Lev 18:5; but its key terms are then further explained in Deuteronomy 30.”^³⁸⁸

He introduces the citation with an allusion to an earlier passage in the same book, Deut 9:4 (cf. too 8:17). This too is significant in itself.^³⁸⁹ “Do not say in your heart,” Moses warns Israel, “it is because of my righteousness that YHWH has brought me in to occupy this land.” It is a warning, in other words, against exactly that fault that Paul had highlighted in 10:3. The chapter goes on to emphasize the way in which Israel provoked YHWH to anger at Sinai by making the golden calf, and the fact that they only survived because of Moses’ intercession. These, as we have already seen, are vital parts of the biblical background Paul has in mind throughout Romans 9. Even in this introductory formula me echoes of what Paul is saying throughout the argument are too strong for us to suppose that he chose the phrase at random. Now much more has he chosen, now, to give a fresh and creative reading of Deuteronomy 30.^³⁹⁰

We have already argued that he, like two near-contemporaries, understands the passage as predicting that renewal of the covenant that he believed to be taking place in the movement to which he belonged--that is, in Paul’s case, the messianic movement of the Lord Jesus. It makes sense, therefore, consistent with his view of Jesus elsewhere, that here he casts Jesus himself in the role that other Jewish thinkers gave to Torah or to Wisdom. Jesus the Messiah is himself God’s lifegiving, covenant-renewing, community-defining gift to God’s people. His “coming down from heaven” and his “coming up from the deep” are the events through which this gift is made available to all. This passage belongs closely with Paul’s other expressions of Wisdom christology, such as Col 1:15-20.^³⁹¹ The emphasis falls on the Messiah as the embodiment of God’s own Wisdom, the human being in whom, as in 8:3, God does what Torah could not. And the faith that accepts and celebrates this gift is then the true wisdom, the true Torah-observance, the sign of membership in the renewed covenant. Paul’s line-by-line reading of Deut 30:12-14, which has some affinities with the “pesher” exegesis found at Qumran, is not simply a fanciful allegory or metaphor, nor is it “historically outrageous.”^³⁹² Like Qumran itself, Paul saw the community he was addressing as the people of the renewed covenant. Like many Second Temple Jews, he understood Deuteronomy to be telling a story, the story in which he himself and his contemporaries were now living, the story of restoration after the curse of exile.

Why then does Paul refer to Deuteronomy 30 as “the righteousness from faith [ή δέ έκ πίστεως δικαιοσύνη hē ek pisteōs dikaiosynē]”? Because this, in the light of the whole argument of the letter so far, and especially 3:21-4:25, serves as a shorthand for his belief that in the Messiah God has at last done what he promised to Abraham, and, as here, what he promised in Deuteronomy 30. He has thereby established the renewed covenant; “righteousness,” as a status that people can enjoy, denotes membership in that covenant. And the badge of membership is faith. Paul’s exegesis of Deuteronomy 30 thus explains what he means by the Messiah’s being the goal of Torah: this covenant renewal, this promised life for those who discover that the word is not far off, but very near to them, this status of being God’s people, evidenced by faith in God’s Messiah--this is what Torah envisaged all along, but in and of itself could not perform. The parallels with 7:7-8:11 should be obvious.

10:6-7. The two moments of the Messiah’s work that Paul highlights in vv. 6-7 are his “coming down” and his “raising up.” There is no problem about the latter; Jesus’ resurrection has been a main presupposition of this letter from its very opening (1:4), anchoring the argument at some of its most decisive moments (4:24-25; 8:11, 34; the descent into the abyss echoes Ps 107:26). But what does Paul mean by the Messiah’s “coming down from heaven”?

There are two main options. The first is to see this as a reference to his coming from God, the incarnation of God’s pre-existent Wisdom. The second is to understand it as his coming from heaven in the parousia.^³⁹³ Each has something to be said for it, but in my judgment the balance of probability tilts to the first. It fits with the Wisdom christology of Col 1:15-20; it belongs with Rom 8:3, which as we have seen is anyway close in meaning to the present passage; it prepares the way for the confession κύριος Ίησους (kyrios Iēsous), “Jesus is Lord,” in v. 9;^³⁹⁴ it belongs with the double emphasis on Jesus as God’s son and David’s son in 1:3-4; it goes with the incarnational stress of 9:5, echoed as we saw in 10:11-13. I suggest that Paul intends his fresh reading of Deut 30:11-14 to say: “the covenant has been renewed, following the devastation of exile, through the Messiah’s coming from God and his resurrection from the dead. This has meant that God has brought his ‘word’ near to you, placing it on your lips as you confess Jesus as Lord, writing it on your heart as you believe that he was raised from the dead.”

10:8. This, he says, is the “word of faith” that “we preach.” For the first time, Paul’s apostolic vocation becomes part of the actual argument of chaps. 9-11; this will grow through 10:14-18, and play a crucial role in 11:13-14. From that perspective, we can see what he is saying: his own announcing of Jesus as the risen Lord, summoning people to “the obedience of faith” (1:5), is itself part of the answer to the prayer of 10:1. That is why, in v. 9, he goes on to explain that when faith happens it leads to salvation, that for which he prayed at the start of the chapter.

10:9. Paul then explains this with a remarkable statement, one of the clearest in all his writings, of what precisely Christian faith consists of. It is not, for him, a vague religious awareness, a general sense of the presence of a benevolent deity. It is the confession of Jesus as Lord and the belief that God raised him from the dead.

This, of course, is what undergirds the earlier argument of the letter, as is apparent from 1:3-5 and 4:24-25. Verbal confession of Jesus as Lord was a primitive baptismal formula (see Acts 22:16; 1 Cor 12:3; 2 Cor 4:5; Phil 2:11);^³⁹⁵ it also, from early on, lay at the heart of the confrontation between the kingdom theology of the early church and the ideology of imperial Rome. Jesus’ resurrection was, for Paul, the demonstration that he really was the Messiah; his belief in Jesus as the turning-point of Jewish and world history, the bearer of God’s purposes, the climax of the story of God’s covenant, is unthinkable without it. The resurrection is to be understood, as always in Paul, as the action of God (see 4:24; on the centrality of Jesus’ resurrection for Paul, see 1 Thess 4:14; 1 Corinthians 15). And when Paul declares that belief in Jesus’ resurrection is located in the heart, he links the argument with 2:28-29 and 5:5 (see also 2:15; 6:17; 8:27); the very core of the personality is where the renewal must take place, and belief in the resurrection is the telltale symptom of that renewal (Paul’s fullest statement is 1 Corinthians 15; see also 1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 4:14; Gal 1:1). Belief in Jesus’ resurrection is thus not an arbitrary dogmatic test, a demonstration that one is prepared to believe something ridiculous on someone else’s supposed divine authority. Genuine heart-level belief can only come about, Paul believed, through the action of the Spirit in the gospel. This faith is the sure sign that the gospel has done its work.

10:10. He then explains v. 9 in more detail, separating out “righteousness” and “salvation.” He is probably not intending to say that “belief” only goes with “righteousness,” or that “confession” only belongs with “salvation”; he may well be saying nearly the same thing from two different angles. However, it is noteworthy that, unlike many people who have thought to summarize his thought, he does not normally speak of “salvation by faith,” but rather “righteousness by faith” (as in v. 4, we should note that Paul uses the noun “righteousness,” though the NIV and the NRSV turn this into the verb “justified”--as they do in the second half of the verse, turning “salvation” into “saved”). The two are closely correlated but not identical. “Righteousness” denotes the status people have on the basis of faith: a present legal status that anticipates the future verdict of the divine lawcourt, a present covenantal status that anticipates final affirmation of membership in God’s people. “Salvation” denotes the actual rescue from sin and death effected in the future by the promised resurrection, and likewise anticipated in the present (so, e.g., 8:24). “Salvation” is not a status but an event, and it is promised to those who have “righteousness” as their status.

The connection of righteousness with faith is clear; the connection of salvation with verbal fession of Jesus as Lord is not so obvious. It may well be that Paul is thinking of “Jesus is Lord” as the baptismal confession, and that, as in Romans 6, he is it understanding baptism as the present anticipation of final resurrection--that is, salvation from sin and death. This would make good sense, but, unlike most of the other places where we are able to fill in the gaps in his dense, almost shorthand writing, it is a connection he nowhere makes explicit.

10:11. The final explanation in the present sequence consists of the quotation from Isa 28:16, which returns us to where we were in 9:33. This helps us to appreciate the flow of thought in seeing 10:11 as a whole, from the prayer about more Jews being saved, through the exposition of the messianic covenant renewal in which that prayer can be answered, to the affirmation of salvation for all who believe. “The one who believes in him will not be put to shame” (the NIV’s “disappointed” is weak and breaks the implied link with 1:16 [see also 5:5], not to mention 9:33; “not put to shame” is clearly intended as equivalent to “saved” in v. 13). Paul has inserted, at the start of the quotation, the little word πας (pas, “all”). Everyone who believes in him will be saved. Here there is no question that the “him” is Jesus the Lord, the risen Messiah. But once we have understood Paul’s use of Deuteronomy 30, there is no problem, either, in seeing this Jesus as the law’s true fulfillment and goal. He is both the stumbling-stone and the object of faith: a scandal to Jews, folly to Greeks, but God’s wisdom and power for those who are called, Jew and Greek alike (1 Cor 1:2324). This universality is the point with which Paul will now round off the paragraph.

10:12-13. “There is no distinction.” We are back once more, in the long and unwinding spiral, at a point as it were directly above 3:22-23. There, the fact of there being no distinction between Jew and Greek highlighted the fact that all alike were in sin, and all alike were redeemed and justified by the faithful death of the Messiah and through faith in God’s covenant action in him, not some other way. The present passage has no mention either of sin, or of Jesus’ death to deal with it. That is now taken for granted, and the argument has moved on round the spiral to consequent topics, already outlined in 3:27-30. Jew and Gentile come together in sharing the common faith in the same Lord (Paul is already looking ahead to chap. 14). And the “Lord” in question, while identified from the earlier verses as Jesus the Messiah, is equally the κύριος (kyrios) of the LXX. This is where the breathtaking assertion of 9:5, that the Messiah who belonged to Israel according to the flesh is also “God over all, blessed for ever,” shows up at the heart of the argument. This is where christology determines ecclesiology--including where the church stands vis-a-vis the pagan emperor!--as well as soteriology. “The same Lord is Lord of all.”^³⁹⁶ That was what Caesar claimed, and it was what Paul claimed for Jesus. At the same time, Paul is picking up, and transforming, a regular Jewish theme: one God, therefore one people of Israel (cf. Zech 14:9.17).^³⁹⁷ Where, before, “no distinction” was explained by “for all have sinned” (3:23), now it can be explained by “for there is one Lord of all.” As in 3:27-30, monotheism undergirds the universality of the gospel--though, as elsewhere in Paul, it is monotheism with Jesus at the heart of it.^³⁹⁸

Paul does not stop to theorize about this christology, but unless we recognize that this is what he has in mind here we will not have grasped the heart of his argument. Romans 10:12-13 is basically a statement about God, as indeed the whole section of chaps. 9-11 is an argument about God. The idea of God being “rich,” already mentioned in 9:23, looks ahead to 11:33. Paul’s expression here is dense; literally, it means “being rich toward all.”^³⁹⁹ God’s own riches are the underlying subject of the section, and it is on that basis that “all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”^⁴⁰⁰

The “all” of Joel 2:32 (LXX 3:5) has cast its shadow before it in Paul’s addition to Isa 7.8:16 in v. 11 and in the repeated “all” of v. 12. The quotation from Joel is a further point at which we are right to hear echoes of God’s renewal of the covenant.^⁴⁰¹ Joel 2 sits comfortably alongside Deuteronomy 30 as a powerful statement of how God will restore the fortunes of Israel after devastating judgment. When we read the whole chapter there are various echoes of what Paul has already said. The children of Zion are to rejoice in YHWH their God, because of his gift of the early rain for their vindication (είς δικαιοσύνην eis dikaiosynēn) (2:23). God declares (2:26) that “my people shall never again be put to shame” (ού μή καταισχυνθή ό λαός μου ou mē kataischynthē ho laos mou), and repeats it with emphasis a verse later (ού μή καταισχυνθωσιν ούκέτι pas ό λαός μου είς τόν αίώνα ou mē kataischynthōsin ouketi pas ho laos mou eis ton aiōna, “all my people shall never, ever, ever again be put to shame”). Joel 2:26-27 is thus extremely close to Isa 28:16, supplying the “all”; perhaps we should regard the scriptural quotation in 10:11 itself as a combination of Isaiah and Joel.

Looming up behind these detailed points, we should not miss the force of v. 13 in relation to the argument of chaps. 9-11 as a whole. If “those who call on the name of the Lord” is a regular biblical designation for “Israel,” then v. 13 is an exact functional equivalent of 11:26a: “All Israel shall be saved.”^⁴⁰² Verse 13 supplies Paul’s initial answer to the problem of 10:1, and suggests the correct way of understanding 11:26a.

The Joel passage supplies another strong hint, which we might have guessed from where we are in the “spiral” of Paul’s thought, and indeed from the other use to which the same passage is put in the NT. There is here, I suggest, an allusion to the work of the Spirit in renewing the covenant, in restoring the fortunes of God’s people (see 2:27-29 and 8:1-11, both of which are thematically close to the present passage; elsewhere in NT see Acts 2:16-21, the day of Pentecost). In Joel 2:28-29, God promises to pour out the divine Spirit on all the members of the community (the “all” is again emphatic). There will be portents in heaven and on earth; and at that time “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape” (LXX άνασωζόμενος anasōzomenos), and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls” (καί εύαγγελιζόμενοι οϋς κύριος προσκέκληται kai euangelizomenoi hous kyrios proskeklētai, 2:32 [LXX 3:5]). The LXX readings indicate, indeed, that for Paul this text also projects him forward into the next passage, linking with “those who preach the gospel” in Isa 52:7. But the main point to note is that here, in the close hinterland of Paul’s thought, we are right to see the Spirit at work, through the preaching of the gospel of Jesus as Lord, to bring people to faith and confession and so to righteousness and salvation. People, we note once more, of all sorts: Jew and Greek, alike and together. This is the initial answer to the prayer of 10:1.

The message of 10:5-13 is so positive and upbeat--God renewing the covenant through the dramatic, even apocalyptic, events concerning Jesus, and throwing open membership to all and sundry--that if Paul had stopped there we would wonder what the problem was. Why the grief of 9:1-5? Why the earnest prayer of 10:1? Surely all that is now needed is for the message of this new covenant, this inbreaking love of God, to be announced, and people everywhere, especially the Jewish people, whose Scriptures were being fulfilled, whose Messiah had now arrived--surely they would all believe it and enjoy the new day that was dawning? Sadly, no. The renewal of the covenant is also the word of judgment, of God’s confrontation with human wickedness, including Jewish wickedness (2:17-24). The problem of chaps. 9-11 is that Israel does not want to hear such a scandalous message. Verses 14-21 do indeed take the story forward into the new world that has come into being as a result of the messianic events. But the paradox that cuts right across any sense of a smooth line, of God’s purposes going ahead with no problem, comes to the fore in Israel’s persistent recalcitrance. The excitement of the apostolic mission and the heartbreak of Israel’s refusal come together in the final part (10:14-21) of this section (9:30-10:21), and together set the scene for chap. 11.

10:14-21. The key to this whole part of the chapter is found in 11:13-14: Paul celebrates his apostolic vocation to preach to the Gentiles in order to make his “flesh” jealous and so save some of them. Verses 14-15 explain, in a burst of rhetorical questions, that for the renewed covenant to operate people need to be sent with the news. This puts Paul himself on the map of biblical fulfillment (10:16-18): Isaiah 52-53 spoke of God’s coming actions through the Messiah, and of the people who would take the message to the whole world, even though not everyone would listen. But, tragically (10:19-21), Israel according to the flesh remained by and large aloof from it all. They knew from their own prophecies, including Deuteronomy 32, that God would bring Gentiles in to share their blessings; but they have remained unbelieving. This is as close as Paul gets to an explicit statement of the problem that haunts Romans 9-11 as a whole. The passage is about more than simply “Israel’s accountability”; it is about the inclusion of Gentiles so as to make Israel “jealous.”

10:14-15. Four questions and a quotation explain the need for the Gentile mission that constitutes Paul’s apostolic vocation, and place it on the same map of biblical prophecy that Paul has been sketching for several verses past. The questions--a unique rhetorical device in Paul--take us from the picture we have seen in 10:5-13, of people of all sorts coming to share in the covenant blessings by faith, through to the necessity, and the biblical mandate, of the apostolic mission. For people to “call on the name of the Lord,” as Joel says they must, they must first have faith; but this is impossible unless they hear of the Messiah so that they can believe in him. For this, in turn, they need someone to announce him to them; and for that, the announcers need to be “sent” (άποσταλωσιν apostalōsin, “apostles”). So far, the argument is simply: if people are to be saved under this new covenant, what has to happen is for God to “send,” to commission as “apostles,” people to take the message to them. Paul adds Isa 52:7: How beautiful are the feet of the messengers of good news!^⁴⁰³ As the following passage seems to indicate, Paul understands the message concerning YHWH’s servant in Isaiah 52-53 as the message about Jesus the Messiah. The people who announce the servant-message are therefore the people who now, in his own day, proclaim Jesus. The effect of vv. 14-15 is to say: this is how my own apostolic ministry fits into the large narrative of exile and restoration, of God restoring the covenant in the Messiah and calling both Jews and Gentiles into the renewed community (9:24).

Paul’s apostleship was, as he says often enough, aimed at the Gentiles (1:5; 15:18; Gal 1:16; 2:2, 7; cf. Acts 9:15; 15:12; Eph 3:8; 1 Tim 2:7). It was not his primary task to take the message to Jews, though according to Acts he regularly began by it speaking in synagogues (suffering the consequences, as he describes in 2 Cor 11:24; cf. Acts 13:5, 14; 14:1; 17:1-2, 10, 17; 18:4, 19; 19:8; see also 28:17, 23). He reports in Gal 2:9 a division of labor: he and his coworkers should go to the Gentiles, leaving Peter and others to go to Jews. When, therefore, he refers to his apostleship here, we may assume he is primarily thinking of speaking to Gentiles. However, as he says in 11:13-14, this is undertaken with one eye over his shoulder to see what effect it will have on his kinsfolk.

It is possible to take another view of this passage: to see vv. 14-18, as well as vv. 19-21, referring to a (largely unsuccessful) mission to Jews.^⁴⁰⁴ This is a further example of a problem we met earlier in the letter: when does the subject turn to Israel specifically (see chap. 2, where the explicit turn to the Jews in 2:17 corresponds to the explicit statement here)?^⁴⁰⁵ Here, however, the passage itself does seem to give a clear indication of what Paul has in mind. Not only does 10:19 specify “Israel” for the first time; had that been the subject all along, Paul would most likely have been content, as in vv. 16 and 18, with a simply third-person plural verb, “they …” More important, when he asks whether Israel “knew” (v. 19), the thing Israel did in fact know, highlighted with the quotation from Deut 32:21, is precisely that God would bring in Gentiles to share Israel’s privileges, thus making them jealous. The probability, then, is that in vv. 14-18 he is talking about the (partially successful) Gentile mission, and that only with vv. 19-21 does he turn, by contrast, to the (mostly unsuccessful) Jewish mission. The final paragraph of the section thus corresponds to the opening (9:30-33): Gentiles (to their own surprise) are coming in, while Jews are stumbling over the “stone.”

10:16-17. In vv. 14-15 Paul has explained the need for his mission to the Gentiles, looking back to his opening statement in 1:5. Now he refers to another element in the same verse: the “obedience of faith.” Not everyone, he says, obeyed the gospel (“accepted,” NIV, is scarcely a translation of ύπήκουσαν [hypēkousan], but reflects instead the un-Pauline assumption that “the gospel” is something offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than an authorized summons from the world’s rightful Lord). This is unlikely to be a wry, understated comment on the large-scale failure of Jews to obey the word; that, after all, is the central problem of the entire section, not something to be introduced obliquely in this way. It is far more likely to be a comment on the Gentile mission, in which, though many did believe, many more did not.^⁴⁰⁶

Paul’s aim here is not so much to face an objection (“But, Paul, if that’s how the gospel is meant to work, why doesn’t everyone obey it?”) but to confirm the chain of events in vv. 14-15 from a second angle, summarized in v. 17. He links this chain to the previous one by quoting a closely adjacent passage of Isaiah to the one just mentioned (i.e., Isa 52:7). “Lord, who believed our report?” (Isa 53:1); this is the prophet’s plaintive cry at the start of the main section of the fourth “servant song” (52:13-53:12). Paul sees himself as embodying, in his mission, the prophetic task of announcing the Messiah to the world. The word Isaiah uses for “message” is άκοη (akoē). Though this word can also refer to the faculty of hearing, the act of hearing or listening, and the organ with which one hears (i.e., the ear), the meaning here is the thing that is heard: the report or message (see also Gal 3:2, 5; the KJV’s “faith cometh by hearing” is thus misleading, as is “act of hearing”).^⁴⁰⁷

This enables Paul to construct the sequence in v. 17: faith comes from the message, and the message happens through “the word of the Messiah,” or perhaps “the word about the Messiah,” or perhaps even “the word which is the Messiah.”^⁴⁰⁸ The word for “word” here is ρήμα (rhēma), which is rare in Paul; apart from the present passage, it is found only in 2 Cor 12:4; 13:1 (also an OT quotation); and Eph 5:26; 6:17. He much prefers to use λόγος (logos). The chances are that he uses rhēma because his mind has still not left Deut 30:14, quoted in v. 8 (έγγύς σου τό ρημά έστιν eggys sou to rhēma estin, “the word is near you.” This, indeed, may be the reason for quoting Ps 18:5 in the next verse, where “their words” (τά ρήματα αύτων ta rhēmata autōn) go out to the end of the earth. The causal chain Paul is establishing is not simply (a) the preached message, (b) the message as heard, and (c) faith; indeed, for there to be a significant difference between the “message” and the “word of Christ,” it is likely that the latter phrase denotes something more than “what preachers like me say about the Messiah.” When we put v. 17 alongside v. 8, the sequence is clearer: faith comes from the message, and the message occurs through “the word which is near you,” the word that has come down from heaven and up from the depths of death, the word that is the Messiah himself, God’s self-revelation, God’s wisdom, Torah in person. The chain is thus (a) the “word” in this full sense, (b) the preaching of this “word” (i.e., of Jesus as Messiah and Lord), and (c) faith.

10:18. The worldwide “hearing” of the message is now, it seems, undergirded by the grand claim of Ps 19:4 [19:5 MT, LXX]: “their sound went out into all the world, and their words to the ends of the earth.” This is offered as the answer to “did they not hear”: to restrict this to Jews, when the whole point of the verse is its worldwide universality, is to force a narrow interpretative scheme onto Paul’s text.^⁴⁰⁹ But what precisely Paul means is, at first sight, a puzzle. The verse can scarcely refer to Paul’s own apostolic mission, since (a) the psalm refers to the glory of God displayed in the created order and (b) it suggests a universality that neither Paul nor all his fellow apostles together have yet achieved. Option (a) is especially intriguing: If the message were so effectively proclaimed by creation itself, the need for apostles, carefully set out in vv. 14-17, would be undermined. It is possible that Paul means here what he means in Col 1:23, where he speaks of the gospel having been announced to every creature under heaven; this is best taken as a reference to the cosmic message that went out at the resurrection of Jesus, the message that death had been defeated and that the world was now a different place.^⁴¹⁰ This message still needed Paul as its “minister.” There may be something of that here, though the explicit reference to revelation through the created order itself is hardly the same thing, and puts us in mind rather of the revelation mentioned in 1:19-20, a revelation that, though true, proved not enough to save those who received it. It is also possible that, if Paul has the rest of Psalm 19 in mind, he may have taken vv. 1-6, as well as vv. 7-11, as referring to Torah, in which case he could be celebrating the fact that the “word” of Deut 30:14 was now freely available to all, as God always intended. The link between the occurrences of rhēma in vv. 8 and 17-18 seems to point in this direction. That seems to me the most likely understanding, though certainty here is perhaps out of reach.^⁴¹¹

The Gentile world, then, has heard the gospel. Not all have believed; but, as he said in 9:30, Gentiles who were not looking for covenant membership have received it. Meanwhile, Israel, embracing the Torah, which did indeed hold out the status of “righteousness,” the prospect of covenant membership, has not attained to that Torah. Instead (and this is what is driving the whole section), Israel has to look on as outsiders come to share the blessings that had been promised, blessings to which they had looked forward for so long. This is the point with which the chapter now closes.

10:19-21. Did Israel not know? “Know” here is preferable to “understand” (NRSV, NIV, and several others; the NEB’s “failed to recognize the message” shows that the point has been missed). Not only is it the more basic meaning of the word; the answers Paul gives, quoting from Deuteronomy 32 and Isaiah 65, are not a demonstration that Israel did after all “understand” the gospel, or recognize it for what it was. They are a demonstration that Israel had long ago been warned that Gentiles would be coming in to share, and even apparently to take over, the blessings they had been promised. What Israel could not claim ignorance of, in other words, was not “the gospel,” as is sometimes suggested, but the more specific point that Paul had stated first in 9:30-31.^⁴¹² This is what the first two quotations are about.

The first is from Deut 32:21. Deuteronomy 32 is the song of Moses, a great, sprawling poem mixing powerful praise to God and scathing indictment of Israel. It is clearly a significant passage for early Christian writers; there are three direct quotations from it in Romans alone, and numerous allusions (in Romans: Deut 32:35 at Rom 12:19; 32:43 at 15:10). The rebellious ways of Israel are detailed in Deut 32:15-18; they ungratefully spurned God after all that had been done for them. In 32:19-25 the judgments that God will visit upon them are listed. According to 32:20, they are “children who do not have faith”; and 32:21 declares that as they have provoked YHWH to jealousy with their idols, beings that are not real gods, so YHWH will make them jealous with “those who are not a people” (perhaps, in Paul’s mind, an echo of 9:25-26). Paul clearly takes this as a prophecy of God’s call of Gentiles to enjoy Israel’s privileges.^⁴¹³ He will in the next chapter use this key category of “jealousy” as the fulcrum around which to turn his crucial argument.

The second quotation is from Isa 65:1, leading to the third, which is from the following verse. Isaiah, declares Paul, announces the shocking result: “boldly” (NIV) is a reference to the stark, almost horrifying content of what is said, more than to the prophet’s state of mind. Again the theme (the continuing answer to the question “did Israel not know?”) is the bringing of Gentiles, who were not seeking YHWH or membership in the chosen people, into good standing, just as in 9:30-31. Isaiah 65 comes straight after the long prayer for God to intervene at the time of Israel’s devastation (63:15-64:12), a prayer that Paul himself might have been imitating in 10:1. This larger passage has several echoes of Romans 9-10. God is Israel’s father, whether or not Abraham acknowledges it (03:16; cf. Rom 9:7-9); God has hardened their heart, making them go astray (63:17; cf. Rom 9:17.18); Israel’s righteousness is like an unclean garment (64:6; cf. Rom 9:30-10:3); no one calls on YHWH’s name (64:7; cf. Rom 10:13); but nevertheless God is the potter and Israel the clay (64:8; cf. Rom 9:20-23). But God’s response is clear (65:1-2): “I was found by those who were not looking for me; I said ‘Look, here I am’ to a nation that was not calling on my name. Meanwhile, I stretched out my hands all day long to a rebellious people.” Paul understands the first verse to refer, as in 9:30, to the Gentiles who are coming in even though they were not expecting or wanting to, and the second to refer, as in 9:31-3, to Israel itself, remaining recalcitrant, “unbelieving and opposing.”

The argument has come full circle. Paul has brought the story up to date. From Abraham to exodus, from the exile to the Messiah; and now that the Messiah has come, the new mode of covenant membership, of Torah-observance, of “righteousness,” is open, and those who confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead share not only this status but also the salvation promised as a result. Paul sees Gentiles entering this heritage as he announces the gospel around the world. He is praying that his fellow Jews may enter it too. At the present time, though, he sees the majority of them as Isaiah saw them: unwilling to countenance this fresh revelation from their God. The implied question of 9:1-5, and the prayer of 10:1, are thus left hanging in the air. What will happen next? Having told his version of the story about God and Israel in the past, Paul will now move cautiously to tell a story about God and Israel in the future.

1. The most important thing Paul does in this section is to explain where he, his readers, and the people he is discussing are within God’s story with Israel and the world. Learning to think like this--to understand a grand narrative that is larger than ourselves, that may be challenging or even threatening to us--is a major task for those who undertake to live with Scripture. Of course, in our day grand narratives of all sorts have been called into question. They are felt to be hegemonic, attempts to snatch or guard the citadel of power; and, of course, they can be used like that. But the story Paul tells resists all such attempts to deconstruct it. It is the story of how people who had no airs and graces of their own, no thought of being sought by Israel’s God, the creator, nevertheless found themselves grasped by the divine call and love as an act of sheer grace. And it is also the story--here Paul is doing some deconstruction of his own--of the shock received by the people who thought the God-and-world story could only be told, and would always be told, with them coming out on top. The climax of their own history was a Messiah who, from their point of view, was as it were an anti-Messiah. The king came, and instead of setting his people free he died their death and invited them to follow him. Only if they do so will they find the fulfillment of their own story: He is, indeed, the true King, the world’s true Lord, and will give salvation to all who call on his name.

2. At the level of learning to read the Bible, both the ancient Scriptures of Israel and the strange writings of the early Christians, we are bound to be struck by the sheer demand of a text like this. Isaiah, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah again, Joel, Isaiah once more, twice more, a psalm, Deuteronomy again, then Isaiah again: and each text Paul quotes opens up a world, a story, an argument, a celebration, a warning, which needs to be understood as a whole, riot sim-ply in the short passage quoted. Paul’s mental world is furnished by entire biblical arguments and sequences of thought, and when he quotes or alludes to them he wants the whole passage to resonate. And many of the texts he quotes are themselves caught up, both in their biblical originals and in the ways they were read in Second Temple Judaism, in a complex web of allusion and intertextual echo, creating more meanings, sustaining old stories and inventing new ones, so that we sometimes despair of ever recovering more than a fraction of what was in the mind not only of Paul but of a hypothetical ideal first-century reader.

We should not despair. We may never understand it all, but we can make some strides in the right direction. And the lesson we should learn, at the level of method and Christian education, is that (to put it crudely) it is always worth looking up references. Indeed, it is always worth having a Bible with good cross-references; the current fashion for printing Bibles without such aids to inner-biblical reference may save money, but it leaves readers thin on information that could change how they approach the text, and ultimately how they understand and live it.

3. The story Paul tells, of the Messiah as the climax of Israel’s history and the strange stumbling of Israel and ingathering of Gentiles, is unique. He does not expect this sequence of events to be played out in other settings and at other times, or in relation to other peoples. The Messiah is not an example of a general pattern in history, still less church history. The protestant tendency to expect a revolution in each generation, and to justify it from the events of the first generation, needs to be held in check by the equally important protestant principle that the death of Jesus Christ was “once for all” (6:10). Yet a shadow from this story may indeed fall across the pages of church history from time to time. There may sometimes be people with apparent privilege who need to see themselves as “ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own.” There may be people on the margins who need to be brought in by God’s surprising and unimagined grace. And, however unique Paul’s apostleship, there needs to be a steady supply of people to be “sent” to announce the message, to tell the world of its rightful Lord. Isaiah’s promise of the messengers whose very feet are blessed can be just as true in the twenty-first century as it was in the first.

4. At the heart of the passage is the message of covenant renewal, drawn out of Deuteronomy with breathtaking and yet historically grounded exegesis. The Messiah has brought the long story of Torah to its climax and goal, and all are now summoned to the faith through which Torah finds itself strangely fulfilled, even by those who did not know it (see also 2:25-29). The challenge of this in our own day is that “new covenant” theology is deeply unwelcome to two groups of readers. The first are those for whom any continuity between God’s ways with Israel in the past and God’s ways now, after Calvary and Easter, is under suspicion for failing to take the cross seriously enough. This charge will not stick in the present context: The cross is woven into the very fabric of Paul’s argument throughout chaps. 9-11, as the Messiah’s people “according to the flesh” discover what that means in practice. The second group are those who are so concerned to stress (like Paul himself) that God has not finished with Israel according to the flesh that they are anxious about even the talk of renewal. What, they say, was wrong with things as they were? And they are ready to label as oppressive, or otherwise incorrect, any possible answer Paul or anybody today might come up with.

At this point the exegete and theologian have to hold their nerve. Just because there have been substandard versions of the Christian story that have had devastatingly awful consequences for Jews (and others, for that matter), this does not mean that the Christian, not least the serious reader of Paul, must back off from making the central Christian claim, that Jesus of Nazareth was and is Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord, and that the one God did indeed renew the ancient covenant in and through him. Indeed, as we have remarked before, not to make claims like this is, ironically, to de-Judaize Christianity, leaving the way open for Christians to demonize Jews as “the Other.” Paul takes the apparently risky route--but it is the only one available--of trying to teach his readers to think in a Messiah-shaped fashion about God’s dealings with the whole world, including Israel, in the belief that this will lead, not to demonization, but to Christians being grateful to the Jewish people (9:4-5) and praying to God on their behalf (10:1). This is not the last word on the subject. The chapter that follows will insist on humility replacing arrogance. But it is certainly one of the first words that needs to be said.

5. The sequence of short questions in 10:14-17 has often, rightly, been seen as pointing to the vocation, which remains in force, to announce the gospel of Jesus throughout the world. Many reading these words, have had that strange sense of being confronted with a challenge that they dare not ignore. All Christians, reading them, should at least ask themselves, and more important ask God in prayer, whether they are among those who will be “sent” as heralds, enabling women, men, and children in every country and race to hear the good news, so that some at least may come to believe. Paul never promises, any more than the prophets did (think of Isa 53:1, quoted in 10:16; think, too, of Isa 6:9-13), that this will be easy, successful, or popular, Indeed, he normally implies the opposite. But the light that keeps shining through in his writings, the joy that insists on bubbling up to the surface of the toughest argument and the saddest problem, and the sense of purpose that sustains writer and reader through the long and winding discussions, remind us that the surface problems and sufferings, many though they may be, cannot be compared with the glory that will be revealed to us.

ROMANS 11:1-36
THE SALVATION OF “ALL ISRAEL” IN FULFILLMENT OF GOD’S UNBREAKABLE PROMISES
OVERVIEW

The conclusion of the section brings Paul to one of the most majestic sustained arguments in all his writing. Unfortunately it is also one of the most controversial. At the very point where he wants to bring his readers to the mountaintop and show them the glorious view all around, centuries of rereading and misreading have created a fog in which interpreters wander to and fro, speculating as to what the view might look like if only we were able to see it. And yet the main thrust of the chapter, in itself and in its place within Romans 9-11 as a whole and indeed the epistle as a whole, ought not to be in doubt.

The questions Paul raised at the start of chap. 9 had to do with God and with Israel according to the flesh. The problem he faced is that Israel has, by and large, not believed the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, and that it looks therefore not only as though Paul’s kinsfolk are forfeiting salvation but also as though God’s own credibility, competence, wisdom, and glory are being called into question. We should not be surprised, then, that this concluding chapter draws together the threads by talking at length, head-on, about God and Israel according to the flesh.

In particular, he seizes upon the motif of “jealousy,” introduced by his quotation of Deut 32:21 in 10:19, in order to develop his central point: that the fact of Gentiles coming to share their blessings is designed to make Paul’s “flesh” jealous and so bring them to salvation (11:14). The way to that salvation is along the route already mapped out so carefully in 10:1-13, on the basis of Deuteronomy 30. It is faith (11:23), by which Paul continues to mean confession that Jesus is Lord and belief that God raised him from the dead. This reading of 11:11-24, as we shall see, does full justice to the text.

In 11:25-26a, however, Paul declares that, through the strange process of the hardening of Israel and the incoming of Gentiles, “all Israel shall be saved.” This has caused readers down the years to believe that what Paul ultimately had in mind was not just the coming to Christian faith, during the course of ongoing history, of more Jews who, like himself, believed the gospel, but the sudden salvation of “Israel according to the flesh” in its entirety, at the very end. Many have puzzled over what exactly this means; many theories have been advanced as to how it might happen. Does he mean all Jews alive at the end, or all Jews of every age? Will this salvation be conditional on a large-scale awakening of Christian faith, or does it occur on some parallel track of divine grace? Will it be the prelude to the parousia (11:26b has often been taken to refer to Jesus’ “Second Coming”) or the result of it? Or what?

These questions have been sharpened in the last hundred years or so by two factors. First, “dispensatonal” theology, popular in America in particular, has highlighted the belief that, as part of the events leading toward the “millennium,” ethnic Israel must return to and be established in the Holy Land, to play a crucial role in the drama that will unfold as ancient prophecies are fulfilled. Romans 11 is seen as a critical text in predicting the eventual salvation that will follow; the internationally recognized state of Israel established in 1947 is seen as the fulfillment of prophecies in the Hebrew Bible and as foreshadowing the fulfillment of Romans 11 itself.^⁴¹⁴ Second, the horrible devastation of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis has led conscience-stricken Christian theologians not only to search out and blame seemingly anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament, but also to highlight the present passage as offering a “two-covenant” alternative to what is seen as “supercessionism,” the belief that Christianity has “superseded” or “replaced” Judaism.^⁴¹⁵ The popularity of the former views among many large and vigorous churches, and of the latter in influential scholarly circles, has ensured that Romans 11 is firmly fixed in many minds as a prediction that God will act on behalf of “Israel according to the flesh” in a way that bypasses what Paul saw as the normal process of coming to Christian faith. Any attempt to argue for another view is seen by some as an an exegetical equivalent of arguing that the earth is flat. (There are other pressures as well, not least the decline of a belief in “hell” and the popularity of Universalism--to which Paul is then supposed to have given support in 11:32.)

Yet to decide on the meaning of a passage first and to do the exegesis afterward is always a recipe for disaster. We have seen all along that Paul’s arguments in Romans, particularly in chaps. 9-11, are tightly interwoven both within the letter itself. In the context of his other writings, and in the complex and dense web of scriptural echoes and allusions. Everything he has said so far in the letter, understood both at a surface reading and in its allusive depths, inclines the reader to believe that if Romans 11 envisages ethnic Jews coming to salvation it will be by the same route as Paul himself, that is, through faith in Jesus as Messiah.^⁴¹⁶ Consider what he has already said. He has spoken again and again of the renewal of the covenant through the Messiah, Jesus, and by the Spirit. He has made Christian faith--belief that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised him from the dead--central to his argument and pivotal for salvation, urging that this faith, and the “life” that results from it, are what the Jewish law really intended all along. He has argued in great detail that not all Abraham’s physical descendants inherit the promises, but that Abraham’s family is instead opened up, through faith, to people of every race. He has listed the Messiah as the crowning privilege of ethnic Israel (9:5)--and by the Messiah he obviously means Jesus himself. As we shall see, 11:1-24 is most naturally read as continuing this line of thought, developing strands already there in the argument. Since 11:25 begins with γάρ (gar), we should assume that it and v. 26a (“and so all Israel will be saved”) are an explanation of what has gone before, not a new and radically different point, and if they can be read that way, with a clear line of thought going through to v. 32, the normal canons of exegesis demand that they should be. Unless, of course, Paul has contradicted himself-a possibility that several have seized upon, with variations, as the correct solution.^⁴¹⁷ The eventual judgment depends upon the cumulative weight of several exegetical details, and will be argued for step by step.

Paul introduces the two main stages of his argument with key questions in 11:1 and 11:11: “has God forsaken his people?” and “have they (i.e., ethnic Israel) stumbled so as to fall?” Paul answers each with an emphatic “No!” To put the same point in a positive fashion, we could paraphrase the two questions: “Can any Jews then be saved?” and “Can any more Jews then be saved?”--the answer being an emphatic “Yes!” Verses 11-32 then form one sustained argument, which breaks down into three closely interrelated sections (vv. 11-16, 17-24, 25-32), and leads into theology (11:33-36).

NIV: ¹I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. ²God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah–how he appealed to God against Israel: ³”Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me” ? ⁴And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” ⁵So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. ⁶And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.

⁷What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened, ⁸as it is written:

NRSV: ¹I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. ²God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? ³”Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars; I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.” ⁴But what is the divine reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” ⁵So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. ⁶But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

⁷What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, ⁸as it is written,

Paul introduces the two questions that shape this concluding chapter with a solemn λέγω οΰν (legō oun), a formula found nowhere else in his extant writings. Elsewhere when he uses λέγω (legō), apart from the places where it introduces an explanation of what has just been said (e.g., 1 Cor 7:8), it introduces an emphatic statement (e.g., 12:3; 15:8); here it has a solemn ring to it: “So this is the question I must raise at last…”

The first question examines what might seem a possibility after the sorrowful opening of 9:1-5 and conclusion of 10:19-21. Israel according to the flesh appears to have failed completely. God has done everything possible and no response has been forthcoming. That would generate a “replacement” theology, indeed: God would have “replaced” the Jewish people with Gentiles. But that is certainly not Paul’s view. He himself is both an example of a Jew who is now part of the “remnant” spoken of in 9:27, and part of the means by which God will increase the size of that remnant. But this remnant is not a small minority for whom “works-righteousness,” in the senses already explored, is after all effective. It is “according to the election of grace,” that is, according to the principles enunciated in 9:6-29, the negative side of which is the “hardening” spoken of in that same passage. It is misleading, therefore, to say that the “hardening” is “only partial”; the remnant that now exists, with Paul as its example, does so not by escaping the verdict of judgment but by coming through it to new life (see Gal 2:19-21).^⁴¹⁸

11:1-2a. As often, Paul introduces a new thought by proposing a conclusion that could be drawn from what has been said and then explaining why it is wrong. “Has God rejected his people?” (so NRSV; the NIV is technically correct to make this aorist: “Did God reject his people?” but the sense seems to be that of the NRSV and most translations--i.e., perfect, the present situation that results from a past event). As evidence for his rejection of this proposal, Paul cites his own case.^⁴¹⁹ He is a Christian, confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead; and he, of course, is a Jew, an Israelite, from the seed of Abraham (the NRSV and the NIV have “descendant,” but in view of 9:7-8 it is important to note that Paul says σπέρμα [sperma; lit., “seed”]). What is more, he is of the tribe of Benjamin--one of the few tribes left in his day that could trace their ancestry all the way back, being from the southern tribes, who returned after the Babylonian exile (on Paul’s sense of his own Jewishness and its privileges, see 2 Cor 11:22; Gal 1:13-14; Phil 3:4-6).

His own example enables him to quote emphatically from 1 Sam 12:22: “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew” (NRSV; on God’s “foreknowledge,” see the Commentary on 8:29). The quotation also fits Ps 94:14 [93:14 LXX] quite closely, with only the the verb’s tense being different; the context of Ps 94:12-16 offers some suggestive wider links with Paul’s argument, but the 1 Samuel reference still appears primary. This passage brings two particular overtones into Paul’s context. First, the statement is Samuel’s, as part of his promise that he will never stop interceding for Israel, despite their sin and folly. Samuel stands in the tradition of Moses interceding for Israel; Paul has stood in the same tradition in 9:1-5 and 10:1, and the implication here is that he is not only an example of a Jew who has been faithful to the gospel but is also part of the means, through his prayer, of Israel’s continuing not-forsakenness. He highlights this praying role, as the next part-verse makes clear (11:2b): the link between v. 2a and v. 2b is Elijah’s intercessory task. Second, the Samuel passage is all about God’s provision for Israel through the choice of the first king, Saul; and Saul was from the tribe of Benjamin. Paul, whose own Hebrew name was Saul, seems content here to suggest, by implication, that just as God provided for Israel through the choice of the Benjaminite Saul a thousand years ago, so now he has done the same thing.

11:2b-4. Paul more naturally, though, identifies himself with the prophetic tradition than the kingly. In 10:14-17 he appeared like Isaiah, telling the good news of the servant-Messiah. In 9:1-5 and 10:1 he has prayed like Moses, and now (as it appears) like Samuel. But the prophet with whom the young Saul of Tarsus seems to have identified above all, and with whom the converted Paul still felt a strong affinity, was Elijah.^⁴²⁰ Paul’s early “zeal” was in the tradition of Elijah’s zeal against the prophets of Baal; but now he saw himself in a subsequent part of the story, standing all but alone before God as the true, and persecuted prophet, praying for the people (Paul here uses the verb έντυγχάνω [entygchanō, “intercede”]; his only other uses of this verb have as their subjects the Spirit [8:27] and the ascended Christ [8:34]). But, like Elijah, he receives the assurance (the word for “the divine reply” or “God’s answer” is χρηματισμός [chrēmatismos, “oracle”), a word found nowhere else in the NT) that he is not alone: God has created a “remnant” of those who have not bowed the knee to Baal, “leaving” them in the manner spoken of by Isa 1:9, quoted in 9:29.

11:5-6. Who then is this “remnant” in Paul’s day, and how do they come to have escaped the fate of the rest of the nation, so graphically portrayed in 9:6-10:21? Can it be that, despite 2:17-3:20; 7:7-25; and 9:6-10:21, there are some ethnic Jews who have succeeded in obeying Torah, attaining “their own righteousness” (10:3), and establishing a status of covenant membership based on their belonging to Abraham’s physical family and maintaining its distinctive outward markers? No. These two verses make it clear that this “remnant” (λεΐμμα leimma; the only use of this word in the NT) is not a small minority for whom the way of national status actually worked, a tiny group who found that Israel’s privileges could after all (in terms of Phil 3:4-7) be counted as “gain” rather than “loss.” No: the present “remnant” is “chosen by grace” (NRSV, NIV), literally “in accordance to the election of grace.” Paul has already spoken of God’s έκλογή (eklogē, “selection,” “choice,” 9:11), and will return to it in summing up the chapter and section (11:28). In the present passage he can use the word both for the act of choosing, as here, and the ones so chosen, as in 11:7. This remnant, he emphasizes, is “not according to works,” otherwise the whole principle of grace would be violated. This cannot, then, be a small number for whom “works” are after all effective.

Paul’s doctrine of the remnant in this passage is thus significantly different from that of some of his contemporaries. The best example of an opposite view comes from Qumran: the sect regarded itself as the small minority who had remained true when all others had fallen away, the diminishing number who were still holding lighted candles as the night got darker and darker.^⁴²¹ Paul, characteristically, sees it the other way around: those who believe in Jesus, those who are called by God’s grace, are the small but increasing number by who are awake, and lighting their lamps, before the coming dawn (this is how his metaphor works in 13:11-14 and 1 Thess 5:5-10). And part of the point about this image is that if there are already some who are waking up, the other side of the dark night, then there can be more. If Paul and the other Jewish Christians are a new kind of “remnant,” called by God’s grace in the gospel of Jesus, there is no reason why others should not join them. That is the argument of 11:11-16 and beyond.

11:7-10. But for the moment he pauses one more time to describe the state of Israel according to the flesh. This is not a new point, but merely amplifies and underlines what has already been said in 9:25-10:3 and 10:19-21. While “the elect” obtained what Israel as a whole sought, Israel as a whole did not, falling instead into the condemnation already spoken of by (we are not surprised to learn) Deuteronomy and Isaiah.

11:7. It is possible that we should read v. 7 as opening with two questions, the second being answered by Paul’s statement about “the elect”: “What then? What Israel sought, did it not obtain? Well, the elect obtained it--but the rest were hardened.” Whereas in 9:30-31 Paul distinguished between Israel, seeking and pursuing but not obtaining, and believing Gentiles, not seeking but obtaining, here he offers simply a division within Israel itself, the division between “the remnant” and “the rest.”

Of “the rest” he says that they have been “hardened.” This looks back to and summarizes one strand of 9:14-24. Since it is also a vital move in the decisive statement at 11:25, it is important to understand it clearly. Paul is drawing on the Jewish tradition that runs like this: when God delays outstanding judgment, those who do not use this time of delay to repent and turn back to him will be hardened, so that their final judgment, when it comes, will be seen to be just. This apocalyptic context of “hardening” is vital; ignoring it leads interpreters either into abstract discussions of predestination and reprobation or into the idea of a temporary “hardening,” which is then reversed.^⁴²² As the analogy with Pharaoh in 9:17-18 indicates, this “hardening” is not something that comes for a while, during which something else happens, and which is then removed. The “hardening,” rather, is what happens during a temporary suspension of the judgment that would otherwise have fallen, to allow time for some to escape. In the case of Pharaoh, the result was the exodus from Egypt, seen as a sign of God’s glorious power and the reputation of the divine name (9:17). In the present case, the result is that there is time not only for the Gentiles to come in (11:11-15), but also for more Jews, like Paul himself, to recognize that the risen Jesus is indeed Israel’s Messiah and to serve him in “the obedience of faith.”

For those who do not, Paul does not need to invent comments of his own; the Jewish Scriptures themselves declare God’s judgment on those within Israel who remain stubborn. Deuteronomy 29, following the long list of the curses that will fall upon disobedience and idolatry, has Moses looking sorrowfully at Israel and seeing nothing but rebellion. Isaiah 29:10, closely related to one of the most-quoted words of judgment from that prophet (i.e., Isa 6:9-10, quoted frequently in the NT: e.g., Matt 13:14-15 and par.; John 12:40; Acts 28:26-27), is taken from the devastating warning in which the saying about the potter and the clay (29:16) forms part of the indictment. These are both, obviously, contexts that have been in Paul’s mind for much of the section so far; the quotations from Deuteronomy 29 and Isaiah 29 simply make more explicit what has already been said. It is the Jewish Scriptures themselves that speak of YHWH pouring out a “spirit of stupor” (Deut 29:4 [29:3 LXX]), and making eyes not to see and ears not to hear. Tragic though it is, this is part of what God had said all along, part of what Israel already should have known (10:19). The result is that unbelieving Israel is hardened permanently; that is, there are no promises to be made of a reversal of the “hardening,” except in the context of a coming to faith (see 11:23). But this does not mean that any particular individuals are unable to come to faith and so, like Paul, join the increasing “remnant”; on the contrary, some have already done so and many more will follow.^⁴²³

The psalm quotation that follows in vv. 9-10 (Ps 69:22-23 [68:23-24 LXX]) is linked to the combined quotation from Deuteronomy and Isaiah by the reference to eyes that do not see.^⁴²⁴ But there is a closer link still with Paul’s overall theme, and this gives us a clear indication of what Paul thinks is going on here. Elsewhere in this letter, and frequently in the NT, this psalm is seen as a prediction of the sufferings of the Messiah. (See, e.g., Rom 15:3, quoting Ps 69:9; elsewhere Matt 26:37 and Heb 12:2 quoting Ps 69:20; Matt 27:34, 48 and par. quoting Ps 69:21; John 2:17 quoting Ps 69:9; John 15:25 quoting Ps 69:4; Acts 1:20 quoting Ps 69:25). The judgment that is called down upon impenitent Israel in this passage is not something separate from the central gospel events, the events concerning Jesus. If they are the fulfillment of the sufferings portrayed in the psalm, then those who have mocked and tormented the sufferer have these judgments invoked upon them. How much thought Paul gives to the specifics of the “table” becoming a snare, a trap, a stumbling-block and a delusion it is hard to say; but he did of course hold that the pure table fellowship that excluded Gentiles (cf. Gal 2:11-21) was now done away with in the Messiah, who had himself become a “stumbling-block” to his own kinsfolk (1 Cor 1:23; Gal 5:11). This judgment is simply the other side of the coin of ethnic Israel’s rejection of the crucified Messiah. The judgment, moreover, will not be reversed; as long as ethnic Israel refuses to see the crucified one as Messiah and Lord, their eyes will be darkened (v. 10) and their back bent (cf. 2 Cor 3:14-15).^⁴²⁵ Though a case can be made out for understanding διά παντος (dia pantos) as “continually,” the NRSV and the NIV are probable true to Paul’s meaning to translate “for ever.”^⁴²⁶ As the next passage will make clear, Paul does not suppose that any particular ethnic Jews are subject to this condemnation; there is always room for them to come to faith. The perpetual condemnation, as far as this passage is concerned, lies upon, the rejection of the crucified Messiah, not upon this or that person who has acquiesced in that rejection. We should not be surprised at this. Granted all that Paul has argued so far, not least in 3:21-4;25, if God’s covenant faithfulness has been revealed in the death of the beloved son, we should not expect the covenant to be effective for any who reject that son, and that death, as the long-awaited unveiling of God’s saving plan. But, as we should ‘ continually remind ourselves, and as Romans itself insists frequently, it is only when the word of judgment has been fully heard that the word of mercy and grace can sound forth their proper harmony. Judgment must be judgment if grace is to be grace. (See Reflections at 11:33-36.)

NIV: ¹¹Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. ¹²But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring!

¹³I am talking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I make much of my ministry ¹⁴in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them. ¹⁵For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? ¹⁶If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches.

¹⁷If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, ¹⁸do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you. ¹⁹You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” ²⁰Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. ²¹For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.

²²Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. ²³And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. ²⁴After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!

²⁵I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. ²⁶And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written:

²⁸As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, ²⁹for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. ³⁰Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, ³¹so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. ³²For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

NRSV: ¹¹So I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! But through their stumbling salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. ¹²Now if their stumbling means riches for the world, and if their defeat means riches for Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean!

¹³Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry ¹⁴in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them. ¹⁵For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead! ¹⁶If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy.

¹⁷But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree, ¹⁸do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. ¹⁹You will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” ²⁰That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. ²¹For if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you. ²²Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off. ²³And even those of Israel, if they do not persist in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. ²⁴For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree.

²⁵So that you may not claim to be wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this mystery: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. ²⁶And so all Israel will be saved; as it is written,

“Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.”

²⁸As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; ²⁹for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. ³⁰Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, ³¹so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. ³²For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

The major section of the chapter is a long argument, with (to be sure) pauses and breaks, but essentially to be seen as a single flow of thought. It is sent on its way by the second of the two questions that structure the chapter: Granted that Israel according to the flesh has “stumbled,” has this stumble meant a permanent “fall”? Certainly not, Paul replies.

He argues the contrary in three stages. Each stage depends on, and expounds further, ideas already set out both in chaps. 9-11 and in Romans as a whole.

(1) What has happened to Israel has been for the good of the Gentiles, so there is every reason to suppose that Israel itself will become “jealous,” and some of Paul’s kinsfolk will thereby be saved (11:11b-16). This is the point where Paul picks up language about Adam and Christ from earlier in the letter, notably chap. 5, and applies it to Israel according to the flesh.

(2) Unbelieving Jews are like branches broken off God’s cultivated olive tree, while Gentiles are like wild branches grafted in surprisingly; how much more can God graft the natural branches back in “if they do not remain in unbelief” (11:23)? This argument (11:17-24) is aimed specifically against Gentile arrogance, the point to which Paul has been working around: do not, he says, suppose that you can boast against the branches without yourself becoming at risk.

(3) The mystery of God’s dealings with Israel and the Gentiles is thus unveiled. The “hardening” on Israel, and the “coming in” of Gentiles, is God’s means of saving “all Israel.” The covenant will be fulfilled in the way God always intended, that is, by being renewed through the Messiah for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever Jewish people come to faith in Jesus as Messiah, this is a further sign that God is faithful to the promises made to the patriarchs (11:25-32). The end of this specific argument is thus the end of the whole discussion that began with 9:6. All that remains, balancing the cry of anguish in 9:1-5, is the cry of praise in 11:33-36.

11:11-12. Paul picks up the language of “stumbling” from 9:32-33; the words are different but the idea closely related. Have they, he asks, tripped up in such a way as to fall headlong permanendy?^⁴²⁷ Certainly not. He advances his counter. argument in two stages, vv. 11b-12 and vv. 13-16. Each stage further subdivides; v. 11b is the basic statement, with v. 12 as a further conclusion; then vv. 13-14 are his major statement, explained and elaborated by v. 15 and, in turn, v 16.

Verse 11b looks back to 10:19 and on to v. 14. It adds to the discussion an element that appears new but that, it turns out, was hidden in the argument of 9:6-10:21 all along: that Israel’s stumble over the stumbling-stone was not just something that happened at the same time as the Gentiles’ coming in to faith, to righteousness, and to salvation itself, but was actually part of the means by which it happened. We can understand this at one level by saying that Israel’s hardening relates to Gentile salvation somewhat as Pharaoh’s hardening relates to the exodus (9:17); this, it seems, is what 9:22-24 is all about, and the point is confirmed by the echo in v. 12 of the mention there of God’s “riches.” Somehow, God’s bearing patiently with the “vessels of wrath” is part of the intention to bring these “riches” to the Gentiles. “Through their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles.”

But if this is so then 10:19 is also in play: this will make ethnic Jews “jealous.”^⁴²⁸ The background to this within Romans ought to be clear from 2:1.7-29--and from the whole sequence of thought that runs from the major statement of Christian identity in chaps. 5-8 into the sorrowful rehearsal of the same privileges in 9:1-5. But, whereas in Deut 32:21, and its quotation in 10:19, this “jealousy” appeared purely negative, it is turned to positive effect in v. 14; and Paul is already preparing the way for this. They (Paul does not use the word “Israel” between vv. 7 and 25) have “transgressed,” and the world has been enriched; they have been “diminished,” and God’s riches have been given to the Gentiles. How much more, then, if they are brought back up to full strength (πλήρωμα plērōma)?

Before we explore this “full strength,” let us note, so as to be quite clear, what the whole “jealousy” theme presupposes. It assumes (as argued above) that when Gentiles come to Christian faith they do indeed come to share in the blessings God promised to Israel according to the flesh (not, interestingly, the land; see the Commentary on 4:13; 8:18-27; the whole world is now seen as God’s holy land, to be redeemed in the new creation). We cannot escape the force of this and retreat into the idea that Gentile Christians have a parallel track to salvation that does not intersect with the Jewish one. Nor, therefore, can we suggest that the way for Jews now to be saved is something radically different from the way Gentiles are saved--by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus as Messiah, apart from works of the law.

What then might their “full strength,” their complete number, mean? This is the first moment that Paul has suggested an increase in the number of Jews who come to be not merely Abraham’s physical descendants but his “seed” in the full sense of 9:7-8. Up until 10:21 the number seemed to be diminishing, whittled down to a remnant. Even in 11:1-10 this “remnant” seemed to consist simply of the small number who, like Paul, had through God’s electing grace abandoned the status based on “works” and embraced the messianic faith focused on Jesus. Now for the first time he begins to say that something further may yet happen. Israel according to the flesh has been “diminished”; now it will be brought to fullness.^⁴²⁹ “Fullness” is itself a rare term in Paul, but there is another parallel occurrence close by in 11:25. Other parts of that verse are controversial, but at this point we are on safe ground: by the “fullness of the Gentiles,” we may confidently say, Paul means “the total number of those Gentiles who believe the gospel of Jesus.” He is well aware that large numbers of Gentiles do not believe it, and never will. The “fullness” will consist of all those who eventually do. There is no reason to suppose that “the fullness” of Israel will mean anything more than this: the complete number of Jews, many more than at present, who likewise come to faith in the gospel.^⁴³⁰

We should note at this point the way in which vv. 11-12 echo the language and argument of 5:15-21. Paul here describes Israel’s “stumble” as a παράπτωμα (paraptōma, “trespass”), echoing the key term used six times there in as many verses. What is more, the “trespass” in question forms the first half of a “how much more” argument celebrating the grace of God which overcomes human stumbling. “If, by the trespass of the one, the many died, how much more has God’s grace … abounded to the many.” “If, by the trespass of the one, death reigned … how much more will those who receive the gift of righteousness reign in life” (5:15, 17). A moment’s thought will show what is going on. This is no accidental allusion. Paul’s brief statement in 5:20 (“the law came in so that the trespass might abound”), set out at length in 7:7-25, and developed to its final stage in 9:30-33 where the “stumbling” metaphor is crucial, indicates that through Torah Israel has recapitulated the sin of Adam, has acted it out on a grand scale. But, whereas the trespass of Adam brought sin and death to the world, the “trespass” of Israel has brought salvation and “riches” to the world! How much more, then--this is the force of 11:12--should Israel now receive “fullness.” Paul’s two simultaneous guiding lights for understanding Israel according to the flesh are these: Israel, like everyone else, is “in Adam”; but Israel is also, according to the flesh, the Messiah’s own people. Verses 11-12 develop the first of these. The following three verses will now develop the second.

11:13-16. Paul moves a little closer toward his rhetorical target, which will come into full view in w. 17-24 and then, decisively, in v. 25. He is speaking to “you Gentiles.” This does not mean that all Christians in Rome were Gentiles (see Introduction). Nor does it necessarily mean that only at this point is he necessarily “turning” to them specifically.^⁴³¹ Rather, this section of the letter is an argument against Gentile arrogance, against Gentiles falling into the trap of assuming an ethnic superiority, the trap Paul sees the Jews having fallen into (this is hardly, then, just an aside; the REB was right to correct the NEB’s “But I have something to say to you Gentiles” to “It is to you Gentiles that I am speaking”). What Paul does not want Gentile Christians to think is that God cannot and will not save any more Jews; that, though there may be a Jewish remnant, Paul himself included, there will not be any more.

After this personal address to one part, perhaps the majority part, of the Roman church, this little argument has three moves:

1. Paul’s oblique missionary intent toward kinsfolk (vv. 13b-14): his Gentile ministry is aimed at making “his flesh” jealous and saving some of them.

2. The explanation (v. 15): like their Messiah, their “casting away” means reconciliation for the world, and their “receiving back” will be like a resurrection.

3. The conclusion: Israel as a whole is “holy,” because of the “first fruits” and the “root.” This latter image will then open up Into the central argument of the passage (vv. 17-24).

11:13-14. Paul’s aim is to exploit the “jealousy’ of which Deuteronomy 32 had spoken. Knowing, certainly, what a bold and even provocative move this was, he celebrated and “glorified” the ministry he had, his call to be the apostle to the Gentiles (see the Commentary on 1:5; 10:14-17). He was taking to the Gentiles the news that Israel’s God, Abraham’s God, was welcoming them into the one family now reconstituted around the Messiah (4:1-25). And he was seeking to hold this up before his fellow Jews so as to make them see what was happening and, becoming jealous, long to have a share in the eschatological blessings themselves. No wonder, we think wryly, Paul was beaten in synagogues. Such conduct must have seemed a deliberate and flagrant snub to some of Israel’s most cherished assumptions. But he is undaunted. This is the way that some of them will be saved--and again, with this echo of the prayer of 10:1, we should hear also the solid soteriology of 10:9-13 that explains how the prayer will be answered.

To understand the roots of his argument, we should follow the Greek closely in v. 14. He does not say “my own people” (NJB, “the people who are my own blood-relations”; NEB, “the men of my own race”), but “my flesh.” This picks up his phrases in 9:3, 5 (“my kinsfolk according to the flesh,” and “from them, according to the flesh, is the Messiah”). Equally important, it echoes the whole argument of 7:1-8:11. There Paul, seeing his “flesh” as the place where Adam’s sin was being worked out through the Torah itself, grieved over the situation but announced that God would give resurrection life to the “mortal body.” Here, echoing Romans 5-8 in various ways, he sees his “flesh” in rebellion against the gospel, following through Adam’s “trespass”; and he intends to make this “flesh” jealous, and so provoke it to salvation--by the route, we trust assume, that he has sketched in 10:1-13, in other words by faith. He does not expect that all his fellow Jews, or even most of them, will travel this route. Verse 14 has a sober realism about it, parallel to that of 1 Cor 9:22, where the rhetoric cried out for him to say “all” but theology and missionary experience knew he had to say “some” (“I have become all things to all people so that by all means I might … some”; the Greek is briefer [τοΐς πασιν γέγονα πάντα, ϊνα πάντως τινάς σώσω tois pasin gegona panta, hina pantōs tinas sōsō]; the rhetorical pressure to write πάντας [pantas] instead of τινάς [tinas] was too strong for some MSS). But even “some” will enable him to answer “no” to the double question of 11:1 and 11:11: God will always be faithful to the promise to Abraham. This is not, then, a contrast with “fullness” in 11:12 and “all Israel” in 11:26.^⁴³² There will always be some of Abraham’s physical descendants who are included in the true “seed.” That is all that the promise envisaged; that is the whole point of 9:6-29; and God will be true to the promise.

11:15. The explanation sends us back again to chap. 5. Israel truly is the Messiah’s people according to the flesh; it was the Messiah’s death, his “casting away,” that achieved “reconciliation” for the world, and it is his risen life that now provides salvation (5:10; see the Commentary on 11:21 and the parallel there with 8:32). Now, in parallel fashion, the casting away of the Messiah’s fleshly kinsfolk has accomplished reconciliation for the world, and their reacceptance will mean “life from the dead.”

The idea that the failure, the rebellion, the “casting away” of Israel means reconciliation for the world is clearly a development of what was said in 11:11b-12a. It is a striking way of putting the same point, attributing redemptive, salvific significance to the tragedy that has befallen Israel, a significance that can only be explained on the assumption that Paul is indeed thinking of his own Christology under the argument all along. The “rejection” is indeed, in this sense, God’s rejection of Israel, not (as is sometimes suggested) Israel’s rejection of God.^⁴³³ Israel has acted out the representative death of its Messiah; the Gentiles are the beneficiaries. Paul returns to the same point from yet another angle in 11:30b: You Gentiles received mercy “by their disobedience.” He never explains more explicitly what he means, but something like the following can perhaps be said. Paul does not envisage Israel actually “dying” for the sake of the world, as the Messiah himself has done; the Messiah’s work is unique, standing over against Jew and Gentile alike. But the “hardening” that has come upon Israel, as in 9:14-24, was the necessary context for the Messiah’s death, and as such has become part of the saving plan. That is one of the main points of 9:6-10:21. The “hardening,” then, has been the means of suspending the judgment that might otherwise have fallen, creating a breathing space in which Gentiles can be brought in (9:24, 30). In that sense, Israel’s “casting away” has been instrumental in the salvation of the Gentiles.

Israel’s “receiving back again” (πρόσληψις proslēmpsis, the only occurrence of this word in the NT) must then be explained in terms of vv. 12 and 14. If, after all that has happened, Jews come back into the family, hearing and believing the gospel as in 10:6-13, then, says Paul, the significance of this will be like a kind of resurrection. “Life from the dead” here has sometimes been taken to indicate-anticipating one reading of 11:25-26--that when Israel comes back to faith this will be the signal for, or perhaps the result of, the general resurrection.^⁴³⁴ But v. 15 is introduced as an explanation gar, not a new point. Just think, Paul is saying to the Gentile Christians in Rome: once you realize that their “casting away” was like the death of the Messiah, when they are brought back again it will be like a little Easter--and you should celebrate! He is saying what 4:17 had already indicated: Abraham’s family will consist of those who are brought back from the dead (i.e., Jewish converts) and those who are created out of nothing (i.e., Gentile converts). The “now” of 11:31 strongly suggests that Paul is not postponing this hoped-for salvation to some distant future.^⁴³⁵

11:16. This phase of the argument is drawn together, and the ground prepared for the next one, by a further conclusion (for εί δέ [ei de] as drawing the conclusion, see 8:10-11). The point of this verse is that the whole is sanctifed by the part: the lump by the first fruits, the branches by the root.

The first of these images depends on the sacrificial tradition of the Feast of Weeks, represented in Num 15:20: “Of the first of your dough you shall offer up a cake as a heave offering”; the point being that once the first part of the dough has been offered to God, the entire batch is considered holy, consecrated and ready for Israel to use.^⁴³⁶ The second image has no particular biblical background, but is introduced by analogy with the first in order to lead to the extended metaphor of the olive tree that then follows. In both images the referent of the second term is clear: the “whole lump” and the “branches” are of course Israel according to the flesh, the Israel that has not as yet recognized its Messiah.^⁴³⁷ But who or what is the first fruits? Who or what is the root?

The answer to these two is not necessarily the same. The argument so far, and some of Paul’s other uses of the same image, would lead us to assume that the “First fruits” refers to the “remnant” chosen by grace, including Paul himself (see particularly 16:5; 1 Cor 16:15; 2 Thess 2:13). Some Jews according to the flesh have already been converted; that is, part of the lump of dough has already been offered to God. The rest must therefore be treated as sanctified, not as common or disposable. (By “holy” here Paul clearly does not mean “automatically saved,” but rather something like “sanctified by extension” or “by their relationship”; the closest parallel is in 1 Cor 7:14, referring to the non-Christian partner and the children in a mixed marriage.)^⁴³⁸ In other words, Gentile Christians, recognizing the fact of a “remnant” of believing Jews, must regard other Jews as holy by extension.

It is possible to take the image of “root and branches” the same way: the remnant by grace are the root, and the branches are the as yet unbelieving Jews. But it seems harsh, in view of the way Paul develops the picture, to do so. The remnant itself, within Paul’s image, consists not of a root that has always been there, nor yet of branches that were never broken off, but of branches that were broken off for a short while and then grafted back in again. Otherwise Paul’s protestations about grace in 11:5-6 would be undermined: the remnant really would be a permanent part of God’s people, a small group for whom ethnic membership and Torah-observance really had proved valid. It is much better to take the “root” as something, or someone, more permanent; suggestions include the patriarchs, the Messiah, even God.^⁴³⁹ Of these I am inclined to prefer the Messiah. It is possible that Paul already has in mind the text that he will use at the climactic and concluding point of the letter’s theological exposition, highlighting “the root of Jesse,” whose resurrection installs him as the Gentiles’ true ruler (15:12, quoting Isa 11: 10). But even if that is too far away in the letter to be allowed, the Messiah has been at the center of the argument, either implicitly or explicitly, for much of chaps. 9-11, and it is the messianic pattern of casting away followed by life from the dead that Paul has been thinking through in the preceding verses. The olive tree in the illustration is Israel, the true seed of Abraham, into which wild branches have been grafted but into which, far more easily, natural branches can be regrafted. And the crowning privilege of Israel, the human and historical focus of the nation’s long story as God’s people, is the Messiah (9:5). It is considerably easier, I think, to see the “root” that “bears” both Gentile and Jewish Christians (11:18) as the Messiah than as the patriarchs.

Does that mean that we would be right to see the Messiah as the first fruits as well, making v. 16a more of a parallel to 1 Cor 15:20, 23? Probably not. The buried reference to the Messiah in 11:15 might sway us in this direction, but it is not necessary to take the two halves of the verse as making exactly the same point in two different ways.^⁴⁴⁰ If the καί (kai) that starts v. 16b is read as “moreover,” there is no problem in seeing Paul making a transition at this point to the new picture he is about to draw. Paul of all people is adept at mixing his imagery, and in a dense and allusive argument a transition like this is perfectly comprehensible.

We conclude that 11:11-16 begins the argument that God still wants and intends to save more Jews by lining up Israel according to the flesh with both Adam and the Messiah, as the argument of chaps. 5-8 might have prepared us for. Israel has acted out both the trespass of Adam and the redemptive “casting away” of the Messiah. Within this, Paul addresses a warning to the Gentile Christians in Rome: even the Gentile mission in which he exults has this as its oblique purpose, to bring more Jews to faith and so to salvation. For Jews to embrace the gospel now, after all they have gone through, would be like resurrection from the dead. They are, after all, the relatives according to the flesh not only of the existing remnant, but of the Messiah himself.

11:17-24. This leads Paul to one of his most famous extended images. Paul is often criticized for his apparent failure to manage such passages; in the present case some have even mocked him for being a city dweller who did not understand horticulture!’^⁴⁴¹ Paul is however well aware that what he is proposing is, in terms of the metaphor he is using, “contrary to nature” (v. 24). A gardener does not normally graft wild branches on to a cultivated stock, but the other way around, directing the energy of the wild plant toward the focused fruitfulness of the cultivated one. There are exceptions to this, noted in ancient literature; we cannot tell whether Paul knew them or not.^⁴⁴² Most likely he did not: he intends us to understand that what God has done with the olive tree is a miracle of grace, not the sort of thing that people do all the time.

The olive tree in the illustration clearly stands for the people of God, the people stretching back to Abraham and now including both Gentiles and Jews (the main OT reference is Jer 11:16-17: Israel as an olive tree whose branches are broken off in judgment; see also Ps 52:8; Hos 14:6). The Messiah (most probably) is the “root” through whom the tree now gets its life (v 17), the one who holds the whole thing in place, enabling Gentile members to gain life (v. 18). The force of the illustration is to make the Gentile Christians realize their place within God’s saving purposes; they are not the new aristocracy, they are the wild country’ cousins brought in, to everybody’s surprise, to share the inheritance. If that is so, they have no business to give themselves airs over those of the unfortunate original family members who have for the moment been ousted. God is, after all, well capable of bringing them back again. That is the thrust of this passage.

11:17-18. Paul’s first main point is: Do not boast. His exclusion of “boasting” in 3:27-30, ruling out any kind of Jewish boast of ethnic superiority based on possession of Torah and performance of its “works,” is now balanced by this stern warning to Gentile Christians--a warning that, as the history of Marcionism bears witness, was needed but not heeded.^⁴⁴³ The branches that are broken off are, clearly, Jews who have not believed the gospel; Paul’s view of them is not that they are on a parallel track to salvation, but that at the moment they are separated from the parent tree, gaining no life from the root. They are the ones he was grieving over in 9:1-5 and praying for in 10:1. The wild olive branches (i.e., the Gentile Christians), however, have been grafted in, and are sharing the rich oily sap that is the olive’s chief glory, and that comes through the root (the NRSV’s “the rich root” does not quite convey the force of the phrase, lit., “the root of the richness of the olive,” i.e., the root through which the richness comes). This is yet another way of saying what Paul already said in 9:24,30, and 10:4-13: Gentiles, to their surprise, are inheriting the blessings promised to Israel. But if that is so, they must remember their origin and refrain from crowing over those who have been, for the moment, cut off. They must remember who the Messiah is, and who they themselves are as his utter dependents. They do not support the root, as though Jesus Christ were now the private possession of Gentile Christians. He, Israel’s Messiah according to the flesh, supports them. Paul’s sudden use of the second person singular throughout vv. 17-24 24 (contrasting with the plural in vv. 13, 25-32) makes his point all the more sharply.

11:19-21. Paul then envisages a conversation between himself and the newly ingrafted branches. The Gentile branches will declare that other branches were broken off to make room for them--the very point, they might say, that Paul himself has made in 11:11-12 and 15. The “stumble” or “trespass” of Israel has been the occasion of Gentiles coming in. Paul does not disagree; but his point is made sharply by drawing attention to the attendant circumstances both of the breaking off of some branches and the grafting in of others. What counted then, and counts still, is faith: they were broken off because of unbelief, but you stand firm by faith (the NRSV adds “only,” which as in 3:28 is a fair explanation though strictly an addition to Paul’s text; on the idea of “standing,” i.e., remaining firm in a particular status, see 5:2; 14:4). The accusation of unbelief or unfaithfulness (or “untrustworthiness,” or “disloyalty,” άπιστία apistia), goes back to 3:3; this was the basic charge leveled against Israel in the beginning of Paul’s argument. Abraham is specifically contrasted with this in 4:20: he did not waver in unbelief.

This leads to a more specific warning: Gentile Christians must not just avoid boasting, but must also maintain their faithfulness. They must not permit themselves an attitude of superiority (see the Commentary on 12:3, 16), but must keep humble, in the proper fear of God. Verse 21 explains why, drawing on the fuller picture Paul has in mind that becomes explicit in v. 24: God is quite capable of doing to a Gentile church what he has done to “the natural branches.” If they were not spared, perhaps God will not spare Gentiles either.^⁴⁴⁴ Here, too, there is a strange echo of an earlier passage, 8:32: God did not spare the beloved son. Once again, Paul is thinking of the Jews as the Messiah’s people according to the flesh; but this time their fate is held up as a warning to Gentile Christians. This is what happens if you regard yourself as automatically part of God’s people, instead of continuing by faith alone. Faith remains the only valid badge of membership; anything else will lead inevitably to “boasting.”

What does the threat of being cut off actually mean? After the long argument of 3:21-8:39, it is highly unlikely that Paul would envisage individual Christians being justified by faith at one moment, assured of “sharing the glory of God” (5:2; 8:30), and at another moment losing both faith and salvation. On the contrary; his regular view is that when God begins a good work, through the gospel and the spirit, that good work will come to completion (Phil 1:6). What is more likely is that this is a warning to an entire church (as, for instance, in the messages to the churches of Asia in Revelation 2-3). Individual Christians may be muddled or sinful, but they will be saved, even if only, in some cases, “as through fire” (1 Cor 3:15). A church, however, that begins to boast in the way Paul is warning against may not last another generation. The only way forward is through faith; and faith, by its very nature, means dependence on God, rather than confidence in human status, birth, privilege, or merit.

11:22-24. Paul sums up the argument, as is fitting for part of a larger section whose main subject is God, by drawing attention to two balancing attributes of God. These create a setting in which Gentile Christians must learn where they stand, what they risk if they do not remain there, and, particularly, what God can and will do with the Messiah’s presently unbelieving kinsfolk according to the flesh. Paul has already spoken of God’s “kindness” (χρηστότης chrēstotēs) in 2:4, in describing how God’s patience and forbearance were meant to lead to repentance, and in warning that a hard and impenitent heart that refused God’s generosity would lead to wrath. Now, with a not dissimilar point about to emerge (11:25), he is warning that God’s blend of justice and mercy, of kindness and severity,^⁴⁴⁵ has been applied to Israel according to the flesh and will be applied to Gentile churches as well. This is backed up with a reminder of God’s “power” (v. 23b), echoing the same point earlier in the letter (1:16, 20; 4:21; 9:17, 20).^⁴⁴⁶

God’s severity is seen in the treatment of those who have “fallen,” in other words, Jewish unbelievers. In v. 11 Paul declared that they had not “stumbled so as to fall,” but he was there referring to Jewish unbelievers as a whole. Paul does not ignore the fact that some have indeed fallen, nor does he rule out the possibility that some individuals may remain in that condition. He is arguing, though, that God is well capable of grafting them back in to their own olive tree, “if they do not remain in unbelief” (v. 23). As in v. 20, faith and its opposite--and in the light of 10:4-13 “faith” can here only mean explicit faith in Jesus as the risen Lord--are the determining factors. Meanwhile, God’s kindness is seen in the astonishing welcome to Gentiles who were neither looking for it nor deserving of it (9:30; 10:20); but they must “remain in God’s kindness,” in other words, maintain their position simply by trust in God rather than by reliance on their own social, cultural, or ethnic status. If they do not, they in turn can perfectly easily be “cut off.” The force of the passage does not lie on the warning about what might happen to arrogant Gentile churches, but on what can perfectly well happen to presently unbelieving Jews: God can graft them back into the olive tree, if they will only follow the path laid down in chap. 10, abandon their present “unbelief,” and believe the gospel. Verse 24, explaining how it is that God is capable of grafting them back again, provides a climax to the whole chapter so far, showing incidentally that Paul knew all along how unnatural his horticultural image had been. If God, against ‘ all the normal laws of nature and gardening, eau cut you out of your natural wild olive and graft you in to a cultivated olive, then the branches that have presently been cut off can certainly be grafted back in again (Paul is aware of the horticultural near-impossibility of regrafting old branches; as in 4:17 and 11: 15, what he is describing is a kind of resurrection). The emphasis of the whole chapter so far falls, apparently quite deliberately, on words that stress what Paul had said in 9:1-5; Israel remains God’s cultivated olive tree; Jews, even unbelieving ones, belong to it by nature; it is “their own olive tree.” That is the point Paul most wants the Gentile Christians in Rome to grasp. It is the point that the following, decisive subsection will then explain fully and finally.

We remind ourselves, arriving at this controversial passage, what Paul at least seems to have intended chaps. 9-11 to be all about. This section is all about Israel, and all about God. Israel according to the flesh has failed to believe in the gospel of the Messiah, the gospel that is God’s power to salvation to all who believe (1:16), since all who confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead will be saved (10:6-11). However, God made promises to Abraham and his descendants, and God’s word has not failed. That sets up the problem to which, at least in Paul’s mind, the present passage is the decisive answer.

Paul continues throughout this section to address Gentile Christians; when he says “you” in vv. 28, 30-31, he refers to them specifically. In those verses (11:28-32) he outlines a scheme of interchange and mutual obligation between Gentile and Jew that looks forward to 15:7-13 (which concludes the letter’s theological exposition) and also to 15:27, where the Gentiles have shared in the “spiritual things” of the Jews, and are consequently under an obligation to minister to them in “fleshly things.” This interchange is grounded, it seems, in the very plan of God, as Jews and Gentiles play out their unexpected roles, bringing all the human race into “disobedience” in order to have mercy upon all (11:32). (“All,” as we noted earlier, cannot here mean “all individuals without distinction,” but rather “the whole human race, that is, Jew and Gentile alike.”)

11:25-27. Before this summary (vv. 28-32), Paul pulls together his long argument into a succinct statement--too succinct, it seems, for subsequent interpreters, who have continued to puzzle over what precisely he meant. This statement consists of an introduction, with its own explanation (“For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, of this mystery, so that you may not think too highly of yourselves,” v. 25a; cf. Prov 3:7, a warning against trusting one’s own judgment rather than God’s); a statement of what has happened to Israel (v. 25b); the statement that “all Israel shall be saved” (v. 26a); and a composite scriptural quotation (26b-27). Each part of this has been variously understood, and the combinations of possibilities are multiple and intricate.^⁴⁴⁷

11:25a. The first thing to notice is that Paul at least thinks this passage explains what has already been said. Most translations ignore the opening “for” (few translations represent the gar that joins the verse to what precedes it; the NEB, however, does: “For there is a deep truth here”), but Paul is quite capable of starting a new point without that or any other connecting word, and if he wrote it, he meant it. The introduction is somewhat formal (“I do not want you to be ignorant”), a tone Paul adopts when he wants special attention (cf. 1:13; 1 Cor 10:1; 12:1; 2 Cor 1:8; 1 Thess 4:13). He emphasizes once more that the point of saying all this is lest the Gentile Christians become conceited; the phrase he uses here is not easy to translate, as the versions indicate, but the overall sense is clear.^⁴⁴⁸ So far, there is nothing to indicate that Paul is making a new point, except for one thing: the fact that he speaks of “this mystery”

“This” here clearly looks forward to the “that” (ότι hoti) later in the verse: “this mystery, namely, the fact that. …” Paul does not often speak of “mysteries.” But the other uses both in the undoubted letters and in Ephesians and Colossians suggest that he probably intends the word to refer, not to a hidden truth open only to initiates, but to an aspect of the long-range plan and purpose of God that has now been unveiled through the gospel of Jesus the Messiah (see 16:25; 1 Cor 2:1, 7; Eph 1:9; 3:3-9; 6:19; Col 1:26-27; 2:2).^⁴⁴⁹ Calling what is still to come a “mystery” does not of itself indicate that this is a new point introduced here for the first time, different to what has been said before; that could be the case, as 1 Cor 15:51 indicates, but is by no means necessary. Rather, referring to his summary statement here as a “mystery” simply indicates that it is part of God’s previously hidden plan that Paul wants his readers to understand.

11:25b. What, then, has happened to Israel? An attentive reader of 9:6-11:10 could have answered without difficulty: a hardening has come upon them. Paul has already said this in 11:7, summing up the sequence of thought in 9:14-24. And such a reader could also have said what this means: such a “hardening” is what happens, through the forbearance of God, to those who do not accept the gospel. “Hardening” is what happens when otherwise immediate judgment is postponed but people do not avail themselves of the chance to repent and believe. According to the regular Jewish tradition represented here by 2:1-11, such “hardening” has only two results. Either the person comes to their senses, recognizes God’s forbearance, and repents; or they are fitted the more fully for the judgment that will ensue.

To this statement, which acts as a summary of previous material rather than a new point, Paul addes two phrases, both modifying the phrase “a hardening has occurred to Israel.” The first phrase is άπό μέρους (apo merous), which often means “in part” but can also mean “for a while”; an example of each is found later in the letter (“in part,” 15:15; “for a while,” 15:24).^⁴⁵⁰ We should note that this phrase is normally adverbial, not adjectival, making it probable that it modifies γέγονεν (gegonen, “has happened”), rather than πώρωσις (pōrōsis, “hardening”). It is unlikely, then, that Paul means “a partial hardening”; even if apo merous means “in part,” it will mean “has happened in part.” The temporal meaning would fit, more or less, with the phrase that follows (“until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in”), in which case it would mean that the “hardening” is temporary in the sense that it postpones judgment but cannot hold it off forever. But it is more likely that, following 11:7, it implies a division between the Israel that is hardened and the Israel that has become the “remnant”: “the remnant obtained it, but the rest were hardened.” This reminds us that from the very beginning of the discussion Paul made it clear that there were two categories of Abraham’s children (9:7-8), and indeed two categories of “Israel” itself: “not all who are of Israel are Israel” (9:6). Paul probably means, then, that a “hardening” has “partly come” upon Israel, in other words, that while one part of “Israel” now constitutes the “remnant,” the other part of “Israel according to the flesh”--the great majority--has been “hardened.”

The second modifying phrase indicates how long this “hardening” will last. It is holding back the judgment while the Gentile mission happens, and will be complete when “the fullness of the Gentiles” has come in. As we noted before, Paul does not envisage that all Gentiles everywhere will believe the gospel, any more than they have done so far. He believes, rather, that there is a mode of “completion” (perhaps, when the gospel has been announced to all the nations?) in God’s mind. (It is less likely that he imagines God to have a complete mathematical number of future Gentile converts in mind.) Until this has been reached, final judgment will be delayed, leaving those still impenitent in their state of “hardening.” And this “hardening,” as we saw, leads to judgment, unless those subject to it come to their senses, repent, and believe (2:3-6). Otherwise we are forced to read into the sequence of vv. 25-26 a temporal progression that, as we shall see, is not what Paul has in mind.

11:26a. So far, Paul has still not said anything that goes beyond what we might have deduced from the entire argument to date. But that changes with “and so all Israel shall be saved.” This is the sentence--a mere five words in the Greek (καί οϋτως πας Ίσραήλ σωθήσεται kai houtōs pas Israēl sōthēsetai)--around which whole new theories have been built, theories not only of a new theological position but of fresh revelations suddenly received, visions of the end suddenly unveiled, an eschatology of almost Deus ex machina proportions in which God will put everything right and leave the late-modern world, never mind Paul, with no more questions. We should make no mistake: that is the magnitude of what is regularly proposed as the meaning of this half-verse. Whether it is the last-minute large-scale conversion to Christian faith of all Jews living at the time, or even of all Jews of every age; whether it is the eventual salvation of most or even all Jews, irrespective of Christian faith; whether it is the physical and geographical return of Jews to the land of Israel in the twentieth century, and/or their formation to be the leaders of the world after the church has been snatched away to heaven; the combinations and permutations of things that have been taught on the basis of these five words seem endiess.^⁴⁵¹

The main positions, though, consist of various answers given to three questions: who is “all Israel.’ when will its “salvation” occur, and how will it be accomplished? Cranfield lists four options for the first: (a) all the elect, Jews and Gentiles alike; (b) all the elect of the nation of Israel; (c) the whole nation of Israel, including every individual; (d) national Israel as a whole, but not necessarily every individual.^⁴⁵² The options on the timing are: (a) during the course of present history; (b) immediately before the second coming; (c) at the second coming. The answers to “how” are (a) through the people concerned coming to (Christian) faith; (b) through their own faith, whatever that might be; (c) through some direct divine intervention, perhaps through the agency of Christ at his second coming, which may or may not involve some kind of Christian faith.

To speak personally for a moment. When I began my study of Romans I was strongly committed to answering either (b) or (d) to the first question, either (b) or (c) to the second, and (c) to the third: that is, to understanding Paul to be saying that a very large number from national Israel would be saved at or around the time of the second coming, through the fresh revelation of the gospel that that event would supply. I changed my mind reluctantly, because of what seemed to me strong exegetical arguments; and, though this has put me in a minority even among my friends, let alone among the guild of New Testament scholars, I have seen no reason to change my mind again. I remain convinced that the right answers are (a), (a) and (a): God will save “all Israel”--that is, the whole family of Abraham, Jew and Gentile alike; this will take place during the course of present history; it will happen through their coming to Christian faith.

The principles of sound exegesis include reading short phrases in their contexts. We shall come to vv. 26-27 presently; that is part of the puzzle, though as we shall see it strongly supports the view of v. 26a that I shall propose. But we must be clear. The weight of the whole argument of Romans is on the side of the reading I propose. If v. 26a does indeed teach a special kind of salvation for all or most Jews, with or without Christian faith, awaiting them at the end of time, then it is exegetically out of step with the passage before it (11:1-24) and, as we shall see, with the one that follows (11:28-32); it is theologically incompatible with the entire argument of 9:6-10:21; and it undermines what Paul has emphasized again and again in Romans 1-8. If Paul has indeed, while writing the letter, received as some have suggested a fresh revelation to the effect that the whole Jewish race will at the last be saved by some special means, he did the wrong thing by adding it to what he had already written. He would have done better to put the previous eleven chapters on the fire.

In addition, there are more problems with the prevailing view than normally recognized. It is not clear why saving only the final generation of Jews would get God off the hook. That is a bit too reminiscent of some secular utopias that have justified the evils of history by reference to what will happen when progress has finally achieved its goals.^⁴⁵³ But if a large-scale salvation of ethnic Jews is envisaged, that is what we would have to postulate: Paul clearly does not believe that most of his own contemporaries are being or will be saved (if he did, 9:1-5 is a sham and 10:1 a mere formality). Nor is it clear why switching modes of salvation at the last moment would make God look any the less arbitrary; that is exactly what Paul has argued that God has not done up to now.^⁴⁵⁴

But there is, fortunately, no pressing reason to move in this direction. We are not forced to suppose that “all Israel” must mean “all Jews, or all living at the time of the end.” The phrase “all Israel” is familiar from at least one well-known rabbinic saying, and it is at once followed by a list of exceptions.^⁴⁵⁵ Indeed, Paul may well be echoing that saying: “All Israel has a share in the age to come”; it would certainly fit with his view of “salvation” to see it as the functional equivalent of the rabbinic “age to come.” And, where the rabbis provided exclusion clauses to indicate that not all ethnic Jews did in fact qualify, Paul, in exactly the way we would guess from not only the whole of Romans but also Galatians and Philippians, modifies the phrase more radically. Abraham’s true family are “not those of the law only, but all who share Abraham’s faith” (4:16); “the Jew is the one in secret” (2:29); “you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus, and, if you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise” (Gal 3:28-9); “it is we who are ‘the circumcision,’ we who … put no confidence in the flesh” (Phil 3:3-4). These are simply the tip of the iceberg. Paul has spent half his writing life telling his readers that Abraham’s family, Israel, the Jews, the circumcision, are neither reaffirmed as they stand, nor “superseded” by a superior group, nor “replaced” with someone else-that is what he is arguing against in 11:13-24--but transformed, through the death and resurrection of Israel’s own Messiah and the Spirit of Israel’s own God, so that Israel is now, as was always promised, both less and more than the physical family of Abraham: less, as in 9:6-13; more, as in 4:13-25.

In particular, 9:6 gives the lie to the constantly repeated assertion that one cannot make “Israel” in 11:26 mean something different from what it means in 11:25.^⁴⁵⁶ “Not all who are of Israel are in fact Israel”; Paul opened his great argument with a clear signal that he was redefining “Israel,” and here the argument comes full circle. Romans 11:25 itself notes that a division has come about within ethnic Israel. Nor does this mean that “all Israel” must simply be a subcategory of ethnic Jews, As we saw in 10:1-13, Paul there announced that he was praying for the salvation of his fellow Jews, and described in detail how such salvation would come about, in accordance with Deuteronomy and Joel: all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved (10:13). That verse, as we noted, is actually a clear pre-statement of 11:26a: “All (who call on the name of the Lord; i.e., Israel) will be saved.” Paul intends that sentence both as the answer to the question of 10:1, the question of salvation for presently unbelieving Jews, and as the indication that God’s mode of salvation, held out in Deuteronomy, is one that, as 9:24 had already indicated, would include Gentiles as well. The “all” of 11:26 left back to the “all” of 10:11-13, and behind that of 4:16 (“all the seed … Abraham as the father of all of us”). Paul does not intend to say something radically different in 11:26 from what he has said already. The “mystery” is not a new revelation, standing over against the previous argument. It is the unveiled righteousness of God, of which Paul believed his kinsfolk to be ignorant (10:3).

In particular, of course, 10:13 looks back to 9:5: the Messiah is “God over all.” The dramatic theological redefinition in 10:13, whereby “the Lord,” which in the original clearly referred to YHWH, now refers to Jesus, undergirds the dramatic redefinition of God’s people, whereby “Israel,” as in 9:6 and Gal 6:16, now refers to the whole people of God, Gentile and Jew together. When, therefore, at the height of one of his most careful and long, drawn-out arguments, Paul declares with dramatic irony that “all Israel shall be saved,” we must stand firm against the irresponsibility that would take the phrase out of its context and insist it must mean something he has carefully ruled out over and over again. However much we might want Paul to have said something else, exegesis will not sustain it.^⁴⁵⁷

The phrase “all Israel,” then, is best taken as a polemical redefinition, in line with Paul’s redefinitions of “Jew” in 2:29, of “circumcision” in 2:29 and Phil 3:3, and of “seed of Abraham” in Romans 4, Galatians 3, and Rom 9:6-9. It belongs with what seems indubitably the correct reading of “the Israel of God” in Gal 6:16.^⁴⁵⁸

When, therefore, is this salvation of “all Israel” to take place? The key is the phrase καί οϋτως (kai houtōs), which introduces “all Israel shall be saved.” Translating this phrase “and so,” as do the NRSV, the NIV, and many others, is technically not incorrect; but it may be misleading if it is supposed that Paul has a temporal sequence in mind, as many commentators have urged and many translations have indicated--in other words, if we imagine that “and so” really means “and then.”^⁴⁵⁹ In English, can mean, effectively, “then,” or even “afterward.” But the Greek οϋτως (houtōs) simply does not bear this sense.^⁴⁶⁰ It regularly means “thus, in this way, after this fashion, by this means.” Often occurring in a pair with καθώς (kathōs, “just as … even so”), it describes the manner in which, rather than the time at which, something happens. To look no further than the present epistle (though a larger search through the NT would underline the same point), in every other occurrence in Romans houtōs obviously means “in this way,” and never comes close to meaning “then” or “after that” (1:15; 4:18; 5:12, 15, 18-19, 21; 6:4, 11, 19; 9:20; 10:6; 11:5, 31; 12:5; 15:20; other Pauline instances of kai houtōs include 5:12; 1 Cor 7:17, 36; 11:28; Gal 6:2; 1 Thess 4:17; in each of these cases manner, not timing, seems clearly meant). In the present context it must mean “and in this way,” or “and that is the way in which.” It is the difference between saying “I do all the other chores first, and wait for the right moment, and then I go out and work in the garden” (a temporal sequence in which the last clause represents a new point) and “Every day I water the plants, mow the lawn, and sweep up the leaves; and so the garden will be at its best for the great day” (an explanatory addition in which the last clause draws attention to the significance of what has been going on all the time).

Does “in this way,” then, refer to what Paul has just said (“hardening has come in part on Israel, the Gentiles are being saved--yes, and that is how God is saving ‘all Israel’ “)? Or does it refer to what he is about to say (“and this is how God will save ‘all Israel’: he will do it in the way that scripture indicates”)? The former is considerably more likely Paul can on occasion reverse the normal order of καθώς … οϋτως (kathōs … houtōs, “just as … even so”); an obvious example is Phil 3:17 (“mark those who behave οϋτω houtō in this way, καθώς kathōs just as you have an example”); but mostly he retains the normal order, and we would have to have good extra reason to suppose that on this occasion he reversed it.^⁴⁶¹ In addition, the phrase καθώς γέγραπται (kathōs gegraptai) is such a standard formula that the apparent sequence houtōs … kathōs is likely to be a coincidence. The best interpretation of what Paul is saying is this: “A hardening has come upon part of Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in; and that process is the way in which God will save ‘all Israel.’ This is in fulfillment of the scripture. …” (On “hardening” see Deut 29:4; Isa 6:9-10; 29:10; 2 Macc 6:12-15; see also the Commentary on 9:14-18.)

11:26b-27. At this point some will no doubt protest. Surely the quotations from Isaiah that now follow are intended by Paul to refer to the parousia? And does not this mean that he is thinking, throughout this passage, of a large-scale last-minute fresh act of salvation, not the steady process of “jealousy,” and consequent coming to faith, that he has spoken of throughout chap. 11 so far?

This reading of 11:26b-27 has undoubtedly been popular.^⁴⁶² But it is demonstrably mistaken. Even a glance at the contexts of the passages Paul actually quotes--which is usually, as we have seen, an excellent guide to his meaning--show that he intends these biblical quotation to describe once more the same process of God’s dealing with Israel’s (and the world’s) sins that he has already described in 9:24-6 and especially 10:6-13, with 2:25-29 and 8:1-11 in the immediate background. These texts, read from the point of view of a Second Temple Jew like Paul, speak of the same events, of exile being undone and sins forgiven, of covenant renewed and the word of faith put in the heart by the Spirit.

The backbone of the scriptural citation comes from Isa 59:20-21. Isaiah 59 opens with a lament for Israel’s continuing sinfulness; this includes vv. 7-8, which Paul has quoted as part of his indictment in 3:15-17. Then we read of YHWH himself intervening, wearing righteousness as a breastplate and salvation as a helmet (v. 17). YHWH will bring terrible judgment, so as to be feared by the nations of the earth, from east to west (vv. 18-19). In that context, “a deliverer will come to Zion [or: he will come to Zion as deliverer], and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression.” At least, that is the meaning of the MT. The LXX has already altered this to mean “the deliverer will come on behalf of Zion, and will turn ungodliness away from Jacob.” Paul has altered this again; the deliverer, he says, shall come out of Zion (ήξει έκ Σιών ό ρυόμενος hēxei ek Sion ho rhyomenos). Perhaps he still has Deuteronomy in mind as well, because in 33:2, the beginning of the blessing of Moses, which ends with the salvation of Israel (33:28-29), we find “The Lord comes from Sinai” (Κύριος έκ Σινα ήκει Kyrios ek Sina hēkei).^⁴⁶³ So far from pulling the text toward the parousia, he seems rather to be emphasizing the opposite: the redeemer, by whom he must mean Jesus the Messiah, “comes” from Zion into all the world, like YHWH “coming” from Sinai to establish the covenant and give Israel its inheritance. As the Messiah does so, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob. Once again texts that were unambiguously about YHWH in the Scriptures are taken by Paul to refer to Jesus.^⁴⁶⁴ And once again texts that looked forward to a future event are taken by Paul, not indeed to exclude the many still-future elements of his gospel (see Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15),^⁴⁶⁵ but to highlight the significance of what is already happening through the gospel.

“And this,” continues Isaiah, “will be my covenant with them”--at which point Paul switches text, merging seamlessly into Isaiah 27. Had he continued with Isaiah 59, the description of the “covenant,” which in context is obviously the covenant renewed after the exile, would tally closely with what he has said throughout the letter so far: “this is my covenant with them, says YHWH: my spirit that is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your seed … from now on for ever.” This language of covenant renewal, replete with echoes of Joel 2, Ezekiel 36, and Jeremiah 31, also sends us back to Deuteronomy 30, as expounded in 10:6-11. God’s Spirit and God’s Word, placed by God in the mouths of the people, together renew the covenant. And, to move with Paul to Isa 27:9, with strong overtones of Jer 31:33-34 (38:33-34 LXX),^⁴⁶⁶ the substance of the covenant is this: God will take away Israel’s sins. This is not, then, an alternative “covenant,” a way to salvation for Jews and Jews only, irrespective of the entire apocalyptic salvation history Paul has laid out in 9:6-10:21. Nor has it much to do with the “pilgrimage of the nations to Zion,” anticipated in some biblical and post-biblical prophecy (e.g., Isa 2:2-3; Ps. Sol. 17:26-46). At most, it would be an ironic reversal of that whole idea.^⁴⁶⁷ This is the same covenant renewal Paul has spoken of again and again in the letter. The hope for Israel according to the flesh lies not in clinging to its privileged status and hoping that, despite everything, God will in the end make a way of salvation other than that revealed in Jesus the Messiah and by the Spirit. Nor does it make any sense to suppose that in the last minute massive numbers of Jews alive at the time will suddenly arrive at Christian faith. What would Gentiles alive at the time say about God’s impartiality, one of the major underlying themes of the whole letter? What might they say about God’s constancy? No: the hope of salvation lies in the Messiah as the τέλος νόμου (telos nomou), the Torah’s true goal, and in the renewal that remains available through him. God’s salvation must be found where God has accomplished it, revealed it, and proclaimed it.

The combined texts in vv. 26b-27. then, undergird, rather than undermine, all that Paul has said so far in chaps. 9-11, and indeed in chaps. 1-8. Verses 25-27 as a whole fit perfectly into the flow of the chapter’s argument, instead of sticking out from it like a sore thumb. This, Paul is saying, is how God is saving “all Israel,” the people promised long ago to Abraham. God is doing it, not by having two tracks, a Jewish one and a Christian one (what would the “Christian one” mean for Paul if the “Jewish” bits were removed from it?); not by having a “Christian” scheme in the present and then re-inventing a “Jewish” one at the last minute; nor by suddenly relenting and allowing a partial, last-minute version of the “favored nation clause” that had been sternly ruled out up to that point; but by God doing, throughout the period that begins with the Messiah’s death and resurrection, what had always been promised in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and elsewhere. This is probably the implication of the last clause of v. 27: “Whenever I take away their sins” (όταν άφέλωμαι τάς άμαρτίας αύτων hotan aphelōmai tas hamartias autōn). That is, God is providing in the present time the path and the means of covenant renewal, of forgiveness, of healing and transformation, of life in and by God’s Spirit: the way (in other words) of faith. Paul meant what he said in 11:23, picking up 10:1-13: They can be grafted in again, if they do not remain in unbelief. That rules out any suggestion of a mode of salvation, or a path to salvation, which does not involve the faith spoken of in chap. 10. I therefore conclude that in this passage Paul speaks of the ultimate salvation of all God’s people, not only Gentiles but also an increasing number of Jews, a salvation to be brought about through the suspension of judgment (involving the “hardening” of those who do not believe) so that the gospel could spread to the Gentile world, and so by that means ethnic Jews might become “jealous” and so come to believe in their own Messiah.

11:28-32. The conclusion of the argument, like the conclusion of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, comes in a succession of crashing theological chords, hammer-blows to round off the exposition, development, and climax. We have three typically Pauline statements, the first one with its own explanation, the second one explaining and clarifying the first, and the final one explaining and rounding off the entire sequence.

11:28-29. Paul has` now spelled out the balanced view that will enable Gentile Christians to live by faith and without arrogance. He sums it up in v. 28, explaining the second part of it in terms of God’s word not having failed (cf. 9:6) in v. 29. In terms of the gospel, he says, “they” (i.e., unbelieving Jews) “are enemies on your account.” “The NRSV adds the words “of God” after “enemies,” but this is a case of protesting too much. Saying “on your account” makes it clear enough that unbelieving Israel is not the enemy of the church, but is rather hostile to the gospel itself, opposing it as a scandal and a nonsense. That, indeed, is the problem that sparks off the entire section, the problem that is heightened because of God’s elective purposes and promises (9:11). The idea that unbelieving Israel is “beloved because of the ancestors”--that is, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob (and Leah and Rachel) (9:7-13), certainly does not mean that every Jew from that day to this, or every Jew in some hypothetical final generation, will eventually be saved. It means, rather, that God’s own desire, like Paul’s, is for them to find salvation in the full and final way it has now been achieved and unveiled. God has not written them off; that is the main point Paul is making. The contrast of “enemies … beloved” puts us in mind once more of 5:6-11, which explains yet again how it is that this “beloved” status can itself be the means whereby enmity can be overcome.

Why then does Paul say that they are “beloved because of the ancestors”? Once God has made promises, focused on gifts and callings, these cannot be revoked (v. 29). The word Paul uses here for “gifts” (χαρίσματα charismata) is used for “gifts” such as tongues and prophecy in 1 Corinthians 12 and for more general gifts of ministry in Rom 12:6; but Paul has also used it earlier in 5:15-16; 6:23 (see also 1:11) in the sense of the gifts of life, redemption, etc. We are back again to 9:6: God’s word has not failed, it cannot fail, and it will not fail. God said that Abraham’s family would be the bearers, as well as the recipients, of salvation, and this is what will happen. There will always be ethnic Jews among the “true Jews” of 229: there will always be physically circumcised people among the “true circumcision” of Phil 3:3; there will always be some from “Israel according to the flesh” (see the Commentary on 9:1-5, comparing 1 Cor 10:18) among “all Israel.” Sin may have abounded through the Torah (5:20), but that was where grace more than abounded; and God will not revoke that grace.

11:30-31. As often, Paul’s explanation of an initial compressed statement consists of an expanded version of the same point. In the present case, he retells once more the story of 9:6-10:21, to highlight particular features of it. He does so in two parts, the past (v. 30) and the present (v. 31). You Gentiles, he says (v. 30), were once disobedient to God. Now, however, you have received mercy--all because of their disobedience! He assumes again the connection, never fully spelled out, between Jewish disobedience to the gospel and the coming to faith of Gentiles (see the Commentary on 11:11-16). The point he is stressing is that, under God, the Gentiles depend for their chance at salvation on the “casting away” of Israel according to the flesh. They should no more look down on this Israel, therefore, than they would on the Messiah himself because of his salvific death. This leads naturally to the statement of the present situation (v. 31): in the same way, they have now been disobedient, but this is so that they too may now receive mercy.

What about the extra clause, “by the mercy shown to you”? In the Greek it is much more natural to take it with the verb “they have been disobedient.” But the balance of the two verses, and the sense, make it likely that the NRSV and the NIV are correct to take it with “that they may receive mercy.” The sense, in fact, is exactly that of 10:19 and 11:13-14: the mercy shown to Gentiles is meant to make unbelieving Jews “jealous,” and so bring them to faith and salvation. If, however, the more likely meaning of the Greek is followed, Paul’s sense must be that Jewish disobedience was in some way “caused” by the mercy shown to Gentiles--a new idea to the section, which is in itself unlikely at this moment when he is summing up.^⁴⁶⁸

But when does this mercy happen? The word “now,” included in the text of both the NRSV and the NIV, is missing in some good MSS. Others, however, have it, and the fact that a few lesser ones read “subsequently” suggests that there was a word at that point that some scribes have seen fit to alter.^⁴⁶⁹ Even if this “now” were missing, however, the earlier occurrence of the same word in v. 31, together with the hint that this mercy comes about “because of the mercy shown to you,” would be enough to tell us what Paul thinks is going on. The mercy that is shown to Israel according to the flesh is not something for which they will have to wait until some putative final day; it is not, therefore, something that can get the church off the hook by postponing a serious reckoning with contemporary Judaism until a conveniently delayed eschaton--as the laissez-faire thought of the Enlightenment might urge.^⁴⁷⁰ It is available “now”; and Paul’s kinsfolk can, he hopes and believes, be provoked into seeking it by being “jealous” of the way in which Israel’s privileges are being enjoyed by Gentiles. And this is precisely where the section began (9:1-5).

11:32. The final explanatory statement, as is appropriate, is about God. In an echo of Gal 3:22, Paul declares that God has locked up the whole human race in a prison called “disobedience,” in order that what they then receive will be a matter of sheer mercy (for the sense of “mercy on all,” see Wis 11:23).

In order to understand and appreciate the point Paul is making, we have to cast our minds back through the long argument of the letter so far. He declared, and demonstrated, that the whole human race was under the power of sin. All were “in Adam,” and Israel’s Torah only bound the nation the more tightly to sin and thence to death. But Israel was nevertheless the bearer of the promise, and the promise would be honored by God even if all humans failed. The Messiah, coming as the faithful Israelite, succeeded where all others had failed; his faithful, obedient death and resurrection accomplished salvation for all who believed. But how could God bring salvation not only to Gentiles--who were so far outside that it was obvious they could only come in by sheer grace and mercy--but also to Jews? How could God prevent it from seeming as though there were, after all, a “favored nation clause”? Paul’s answer is that God has imprisoned Israel, too, within “disobedience,” so that, if and when Jews according to the flesh come to faith in Jesus as the risen Messiah and Lord, the justification they enjoy, and the salvation they await, will be for them, as much as for Gentiles, a matter of mercy from start to finish. The word of God has not failed. God has been true to the covenant; God’s righteousness has been unveiled in the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, “to the Jew first, and also equally to the Greek” (1:17). Verse 32 is the conclusion, not only to chaps. 9-11, but to the whole letter so far. (See Reflections at 11:33-36.)

NRSV: ³³O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

³⁴ “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”

³⁶For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.

The concluding doxology emphasizes the sovereignty and inscrutability of God. Paul does not think that God’s ways and purposes are now still invisible; they have been revealed in the Messiah. But he does believe that without the revelation granted in the gospel nobody would ever have worked them out. And yet, seen with hindsight, God’s way of putting the world to rights, God’s way of doing all things from creation to new creation, turns out to be spectacularly right, full of wisdom and insight, of appropriate judgment and overflowing mercy.

This is the longest of Paul’s doxologies, almost as long as his two great christological poems (Phil 2:6-11 and Col 1:15-20), and not without echoes of both. It is rooted, as his thought often is, in the Jewish Wisdom tradition (see, e.g., 1 Cor 1:17-2:16; 3:18-23; 8:1-6; cf. 2 Bar 14:8-9; 20:4; 1QH 7:26-33; 10:3-7).^⁴⁷¹ What is revealed in the gospel of Jesus is not something other than the wisdom that ancient Jewish sages sought and celebrated, but the very same thing now made known for the salvation of the world.

11:33. Paul’s opening words of praise stand on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the fathomless sea of God’s riches. Sometimes, in prayer, one gets a glimpse like this, and the vastness, the teeming life, the power, the overall order and beauty, are beyond words. All one can do is point, and that is what this first sentence does. Look, he says, at the riches of God; look at God’s wisdom and knowledge. The historical sweep of the divine purpose; the intimate understanding of human motivation; the interlocking of justice and mercy, kindness and severity, that bear patiently with terrible human wickedness and grieve over terrible human loss and tragedy, that yearn for humans to come back to the one in whose image they were made and find true life! All this is contained in these words: riches, wisdom, and knowledge. Paul can only stand in awe. (The NRSV’s “riches and wisdom and knowledge” is more likely than the NIV’s “riches of wisdom and knowledge.”)^⁴⁷²

But it is not only what God has and is. It is also what God decides and does. God’s “judgments,” decisions about the world and about humans, cannot be searched out. We humans glimpse them from time to time, we trace small parts of them, but for the most part they are far out of our sight, where they belong. Human arrogance seizes upon this inscrutability as a reason to doubt, to mock, or to question God’s wisdom or goodness; the humility proper to faith stands in awe that the God of all creation is the God of the gospel of Jesus, whose utter trustworthiness was demonstrated once for all in Jesus’ resurrection.

11:34-35. At the heart of the hymn of praise Paul places one more double scriptural quotation, partly from his beloved Isaiah and partly from the book of Job, the greatest of biblical wrestlings with the problem of God’s justice and human suffering. “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” asks Isaiah (40:13) at the start of his mighty exposition of God’s creative power, the power now placed at the service of Israel-in-exile, God’s unchangeable might now to be unleashed to bring about the return from exile through the work of the servant. Paul has cast himself in the role of present-day prophet, announcing the Isaianic gospel of the servant (10:14-17); now he celebrates Isaiah’s God, the one through whom that gospel is initiated and confirmed. The quotation from Job 41:11 [41:3 LXX] comes from one of the most astonishing biblical statements of the sovereignty of God over all creation. God is in nobody’s debt; nobody ever gives God a gift and stands back smug in the knowledge that God must now repay. All is of grace, and only of grace; to think otherwise is not to forget merely some fine-tuned or subtle bit of theology, but rather to forget the meaning of the word “God” itself in the biblical tradition. The God whom Paul has glimpsed in the gospel, whose justice and mercy he has been expounding in this his greatest letter, is vast and mysterious as the sea, near and intimate as breath, decisive and compassionate as a Galilean holy man on his way to a cruel death. The Wisdom tradition, the prophetic tradition, the Pentateuch, the psalms--all are now poured out in justice and mercy, through the gospel of Jesus the Messiah and the power of the Spirit. Let us not imagine that because neither Jesus nor the Spirit are named in vv. 33-36 Paul has forgotten them. If Romans 11 was not built foursquare upon Romans 8 it would not be able to stand upright.^⁴⁷³

11:36. But stand it does, because the God of whom it speaks is the one from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.^⁴⁷⁴ Elsewhere, when Paul uses this language (1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:15-20), he is quite explicit. Jesus the Messiah, the Lord, the Son, is the one “through whom” the one God, the Father, has acted and does act in creation and redemption. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Son, is the one through whom Father and Son act together to renew the covenant with a worldwide family, to bring the “word” very near, on the lips and in the heart. Paul has no need to spell out the detail in this short doxology, because he has already painted it in from so many angles and now just wishes to stand back and gaze in wonder. To this God, he concludes, be glory forever, Amen. Giving glory to God was what humankind failed to do (1:21), which was why humankind itself fell short of that glory (3:23). Abraham, in faith, gave glory to God (4:20), believing that God was indeed able to keep the life-giving promises. Now, in hope, through the gospel of the Messiah, Jesus, the glory is restored (5:2; 8:30); but the glory remains God’s, God’s to give, God’s to be reflected back to God, God’s own forever.

In Romans 9-11 Paul belongs in the tradition of the great psalmists. He starts with an urgent problem; he wrestles with it in grief and prayer; he retells the story of Israel, laying out God’s acts from of old and in the present. Finally he bursts through to a paean of praise. From this point in the letter we look back and see, as glorious mountain peaks, 4:24-25 and particularly 8:28-30 and 38-39. But where we now stand is higher than them all, so high that some climbers feel dizzy and prefer to return quickly to the lower slopes. Paul is not of such a mind. He will stay and give praise. This, he implies, is what we humans, we Jews, were made for.

l. Of the two most urgent matters that concern today’s interpreter coming to terms with Romans 11, the first is undoubtedly the way in which Christian readers today can make Paul’s argument their own without losing their balance. On the one hand there lies the long, ugly tradition that Paul was doing his best to head off, the tradition of denouncing the Jews and declaring that they are an accursed race. We all know where that leads. On the other hand there lies the overreaction, the eagerness to say that Paul has no critique whatever of Israel according to the flesh, the readiness to pull his text completely out of shape if only we do not (dreaded thought!) have to be so politically ignorant, naive, or simply incorrect as to say that Jesus was and is the promised Messiah and that Paul envisages salvation coming only by the route of confessing him as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead.

Of course, a solution lies close at hand--a solution that many preachers are only too happy to use on other texts. It is perfectly possible to say that Paul says one thing but that we, today, must believe and live by something else. The discomfort one may feel at abandoning the text as authoritative will be more than made up for by the relieved smiles of the congregation, who no longer need be shocked by attitudes that modern and postmodern thought are eager to label as arrogant, imperialistic, or exclusive--not noticing, of course, that to treat texts in this way is to be guilty, oneself, of all those things. Romans 2:1 has hemeneutical as well as ethical implications. Perhaps one problem underlying at least some post-Holocaust theology is that, being eager to avoid the hard, high, and all-embracing claims of the gospel in other areas of our lives, we are a bit too keen to point out ways in which these claims, when misapplied in the social and political sphere, have done damage, and worse than damage, to peoples and communities.

Yet the challenge of Paul’s analysis of the problem of Israel remains, and perhaps only now, two generations after the Nazi Holocaust, can we start to look at it again with the clarity of hindsight not only on the 1930s and 1940s but on that which has been done, with the Holocaust as pretext, in the Middle East over the last fifty years. Christianity and Judaism are, or ought to be, close cousins, yet the very closeness highlights differences as well as similarities, claims made by both that might both be false but that cannot both be true.^⁴⁷⁵ And if Christians remain loyal to Jesus of Nazareth they cannot evade the challenge of his Messiahship, upon which is based his universal lordship. He is not a private or a tame savior, available on tap, like a favorite beer, for those who want some salvation now and then. If he is not Messiah and Lord, the whole of Christianity is indeed based on a mistake and ought to be abandoned. But what if he is?

If he is, then however much breast-beating remains appropriate for Christians after centuries of arrogance and violence toward Paul’s, and Jesus’, kinsfolk according to the flesh, there must still be the agony (not the easy acquiescence) that sees them still in rebellion against the gospel; there must still be the prayer (not merely the patronizing acceptance of “otherness”) that seeks salvation on their behalf. It is noticeable that at no point in Romans 9-11 does Paul say that he evangelizes Jews directly. He remains the missionary to the Gentiles. We assume that Peter and others still undertake their mission to the Jews (Gal 2:9); but all that Paul will say is that his work with Gentiles is designed to make his kinsfolk jealous and so save some of them. He will pray for them; he will do his own work with one eye on them; he will take a collection, no doubt at considerable personal danger both of misunderstanding and of violence on the road, in order to make his kinsfolk see that Gentiles are sharing their blessings, their common life; and he will tell the Roman church in no uncertain terms not to write them off, not to imagine that Jews can no longer be welcomed into the family of the Messiah. That, for Paul, would be the very height of anti-Judaism.

Here, in fact, is the crowning irony of today’s attempt to appropriate Romans 9-11. For Paul, anti-Judaism would mean imagining that Jews cannot come to faith in Jesus. For many today, anti-Judaism means supposing that they can and should. There is no easy way through this dilemma. Imagine what it was like for the Prodigal Son, and his older brother, the morning after party with the fatted calf.^⁴⁷⁶

Paul’s “solution” is itself challenging and worrying. Jews, we ask, “jealous” of Gentile Christians? The very thought is laughable in much of the modern world. The church has cut such a sorry figure, has seemingly done so much to alienate the older brother, that, for all the internal problems and divisions of contemporary Judaism, there is little reason to suppose that today’s Jews look at today’s Christians and say to themselves “there they are, enjoying our privileges!” To ask the question, what might the church have to be like for serious-minded Jews even to think like that for one minute, is to raise all sorts of other questions that Romans 9-11 was not written to address. But it is perhaps the right place at which to start reflecting on how those who wish to take Paul seriously might go about doing and being in our own day what he believed himself called to do and be in his own in relation to his beloved kinsfolk, his people “according to the flesh.”

As one aspect of this, we can scarcely ignore, as is sometimes done as though they were a category mistake, those who in our own churches are ethnically Jewish but Christian by conviction, baptism, and life. They are Paul’s heirs indeed, and need and deserve our prayers for their particular and often painful witness.

2. The second obvious and necessary point is that Paul nowhere gives the slightest indication that ethnic Israel will one day return to their land and set up an independent state, which will in due course become the vehicle of God’s blessing to the world. Of course, in his day his kinsfolk were still living in the land and worshiping in the Temple. Most Jews were already in the Diaspora, but many were living in the holy land, and had been for centuries. There was no thought of that awful second exile, of the desolations of 70 CE and 135 CE, of the banishment to which, in the eyes of many, the creation of the modern state of Israel has provided the answer. But even if there had been, there is nothing in Romans or elsewhere in Paul to give any theological support to the latter notion. The roots of the return-to-the-land theology that has become so extraordinarily popular among some churches in our own day are to be sought in the dispensationalist speculations of the nineteenth century, not in the apostolic writings of the first. As far as Paul is concerned, the promise to Abraham and his family was that they would inherit the world (Rom 4:13), the world that would share in the freedom of the glory of God’s children (8:18-27). Any attempt to give a Christian gloss to the Middle Eastern political events of 1947 and thereafter is without exegetical foundation.

3. At the heart of Romans 9-11 there lies the humility that recognizes God as God and does not try to second-guess or criticize what God has planned and done. Cynics and skeptics of every age, not only the much-vaunted “humankind come of age” of the Enlightenment, have of course questioned everything, challenged everything, put God in the dock and declared that such a being either does not exist or, if he/she/it does, they disapprove of his/her/its actions. Fearful that every authority is necessarily oppressive, and that every order that does not proceed from within oneself is manipulative, our present-day orthodoxy has left God on the margins, an aid to spiritual well-being for those who feel they need it. But if God is the creator, and we are creatures; if God is holy, and we are sinful-and if these two things are not so, why have we kept company with Paul in the first place?--then there is a proper and grateful humility that is neither oppressed nor manipulated, a giving glory to God that enhances and does not diminish our true humanness. There is a time to ask the hard questions, and Paul encourages us to do so. There is also a time for recognizing, like Job, that our questions have missed the point, and that God’s answers are, for the best of reasons, final.

4. Underneath Paul’s repeated warning to the Gentile Christians of Rome we hear a warning that is as important in its different ways in today’s church and world as his was at the time. If Paul has criticized his kinsfolk according to the flesh for their “boast,” he will also point out to the Gentiles, who m Jewish terms had nothing to boast of, that there is such a thing as inverted “boasting.” Most of the “isms” of our time have their reverse side, as different social, cultural, ethnic, gender-based, and agenda-based groups clamber over one another in the anguished quest for the high moral ground. Inverted prejudice, even when completely explicable as defense or natural reaction, as the long scream of the victim, is still prejudice. Where, as in the case of Rome, it may just happen to chime in with a prejudice of long standing in the local culture, it is doubly dangerous.

5. The detailed argument of Romans 9-11 works through the key issue that faced Paul, the issue of unbelieving Jews and of God’s faithfulness to the age-old promises. But the same argument could be applied in several other spheres. Starting from the promise to redeem the whole creation (8:18-27), one could ask the equivalent question and work through to a similar answer: has God forgotten the promise to creation? No, the argument would run if we constructed it in parallel to Romans 9-11, because the promise always envisaged death and rebirth. There are already, however, signs of rebirth, of healing and new life; and God intends that there should be more of them. Just as Paul rules out Jewish privilege on the one hand and Gentile rejection of Jews on the other, so a Christian cosmology would rule out the neo-pagan or pantheistic uncritical affirmation of the created order on the one hand and the dualist rejection of it on the other. Just because we are not pantheists there is no reason to suggest that God will not redeem the whole creation. Indeed, the categories of new covenant and redemption developed by Paul in these chapters could well prove valuable in thinking through several similar or related issues.

6. At the heart of many of these issues, as of Romans 9-11 itself, lies the challenge of teaming to tell the story. Partly this is a matter of unlearning misleading ways of telling the story of God, the world, Israel, Jesus, and the church. It takes a certain skill to unpack the stories that are implicitly being told, in both church and world, and to make the right adjustments, additions, or deletions to bring them into line with the many-stranded but essentially quite simple story Paul himself is telling. Once that is done, and the story is regularly checked for signs of wear and tear--particularly, for signs that it is becoming self-congratulatory or triumphalistic--it becomes one of the most basic tools of Christian thinking, apologetic, and instruction. Stories, not least the large-scale story from creation to new creation, from covenant to renewed covenant, from Abraham to Moses to the Messiah to final salvation, have their own dynamic. They are bottom-line reality--arguably, if Paul is anything to go by, more bottom-line even than “doctrines.” When Paul wants to confront, to comfort, to build up, to worship, his regular way of doing so, admirably displayed in these chapters, is not to offer two or three abstract doctrines. It is to tell the story and invite his readers to make it their own. That remains a prime task of Christian teaching.

Paul may be exhilarated by the vision he has laid before us, but he is by no means exhausted. His main argument is not done yet, despite impressions to the contrary.^⁴⁷⁷ There is, to be sure, a huge turn at this point in both content and (for the most part) style. But the exposition of “the gospel” that began with 1:3-4--the gospel, that is, which announces Jesus the Messiah, whose resurrection demonstrates that he is indeed God’s Son and marks him out as the world’s true Lord this exposition continues right through to its closing statement in 15:7-13, one of the most telling theological passages in the letter, which completes the huge circle begun in chapter 1. So, too, the unveiling of God’s “righteousness,” God’s saving justice, through this gospel, is not complete until Paul has shown how the “justified” community lives its life on the basis of its shared belief in Jesus as Lord; until, that is, what we might call the κοινωνία της πίστεώς (koinōnia tēs pisteōs), the “fellowship of faith,” matches and embodies the δικαιοσύνη της πίστεώς (dikaiosynē tēs pisteōs), the “righteousness of faith.” And as he does so we discover that one of the major theological themes of chapters 1-11--God’s bringing together of Jew and Gentile in the Messiah--now becomes also one of the major practical themes of chaps. 12-16.

But that is only the beginning. Romans 12-16 is the ultimate answer to those who suggest that Paul’s “ethics” are not really related to his “theology.”^⁴⁷⁸ Indeed, the way those two terms have sometimes been used implies that belief and behavior are of their very nature completely separate human activities, whereas for Paul they are inextricably interwoven. They are the breath and blood of Christian living, the twin signs of life. Here as elsewhere we should beware of reading back into Paul the disjunctions of much later philosophy, such as that between “is” and “ought,” between facts and values. Paul has little time for abstractions like “values,” except as they, like every other human thought, are swept up into the revitalized human life that the gospel brings about.

That is indeed the point, and even a glance at the opening of the section (12:1-2) indicates that Paul is stitching the letter together with threads of many colors. It is not just a matter of verbal links and echoes, but of major themes now to be restated, as in a symphony, in a new key perhaps but easily recognizable by all but the tone deaf. God’s “mercies” generate an appeal to those who know and have received them. The renewal and harmony of body and mind looks back to the scene of human devastation in chapter 1, to the initial reversal of this in chapter 4, and especially to the promise of restoration, beginning indeed in the present time, in chapter 8. But-in case anyone should think that therefore, despite all that was said above, the argument does indeed skip from chapter 8 to chapter 12--the underlying thrust of these verses is that Christians, Jew and Gentile alike, now offer to the one true God the full and final sacrificial worship in which Israel’s worship (cf. 9:4) is made complete. It is, in fact, because of 9-11 that Paul can now explain how it is that all the forward pointers in chaps. 1-8 can now be realized. Ecclesiology--if that is the best word for Paul’s rich and nuanced understanding of God’s people in the Messiah--provides both context and challenge for “ethics.”

So, of course, does eschatology. Romans 12:1-2 draws explicitly on the essentially Second Temple Jewish view that ‘world history divides into two ages, the “present age” and the “age to come,” and insists that the two now overlap and that Christians belong in the latter. It is not, then, that the gospel, and the power of the Spirit, simply enable Christians to do somewhat better what other people have tried to do. It is, rather, that the new day has begun to dawn, and that those who belong to the Messiah must live in its light rather than in the darkness of the present world. This indicates, incidentally but helpfully, how this whole section divides up: 12:1-2 points forward to 13:11-14, giving the first two chapters an eschatological framework within which the wide-ranging general instructions of 12:3-13:10 are to be understood (see below), before 14:1-15:13 offer more specific and detailed exposition of a particular issue.^⁴⁷⁹

Nor are ecclesiology and eschatology absent from the final division, 15:14-16:27. Paul’s travel plans (to go on, via Rome, to Spain), and his request for help (15:14-24), are tightly integrated into his vision of his own vocation as the Apostle to the Gentiles and into the inner meaning and dynamic of the gospel itself (see 1:1-7 with 1:8-15). His present preoccupation--that he is about to go to Jerusalem with a gift of money collected from Gentile churches--belongs with the same understanding (15:25-33). The unusually lengthy closing greetings (16:1-16, 21-23), and the other concluding remarks (16:17-20, 25-27), are likewise not simply tossed off to complete the letter, but make their own point in practical outworking of what has been said already.

It is striking that at several points in this section Paul seems to be echoing the teaching of Jesus himself--something that, notoriously, he does very little.^⁴⁸⁰ Specific examples will be noted below; none is uncontroversial, but the cumulative effect may be worth pondering. We cannot tell from what sources Paul knew of such material; nor can we tell (since he never here says “as Jesus taught us” or anything like it) whether the sayings were well enough known that he could appeal to Jesus’ authority by implication, or whether they were little enough known at this stage that he would have remained content for the allusions to go unnoticed. I incline to the former view; Paul, I believe, saw Jesus not simply as the crucified and risen Messiah and Lord but also as the one whose teaching articulated the way of life belonging to the new age he came to inaugurate. That this does not reduce Jesus to the status of a mere moral teacher, or cast doubt on the centrality of his death and resurrection, should be obvious.

This point is underscored by another introductory reflection. The pattern of Christian living that Paul sets out here includes the call not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good (12:21). This challenge, summarizing much of the opening chapter, is then developed further in 15:7-8, where its christological underpinnings become explicit; the pattern of overcoming evil not by revenge but by patient suffering and trust in the justice of God (12:14-21) is one of the most striking themes in early Christianity. The great theological and christological themes may be muted in this section, but we do not have to look very far to see that their lack of explicit mention is a sign, not that they are forgotten, but that they are everywhere presupposed.

To what extent, then, are these chapters “general teaching,” the kind of thing Paul would have said to any church in any situation, and to what extent are they specific to the church in Rome? The attempt to tie down the instructions here, particularly those of chapters 14 and 15, to specific groups and situations in the Roman church was given a new boost by the work of Paul Minear a generation ago.^⁴⁸¹ There is no agreement on how this works out in detail (or on how much knowledge about groups and parties in Rome Paul might actually have had), but many agree that here at least Paul has a particular aim specific to the Roman church, even if we cannot always be sure who precisely the “strong” and the “weak” may have been and to what extent they represented points of view, or church groups, familiar to Paul from other settings as well (see the Overview of 14:1 - 15:13). The view taken here is that chapters 12 and 13 are more general, laying foundations, though not without an eye to the particular situation, and that chapters 14 and 15 are more specific, though not without an eye to other situations (cf. chaps, 14-15 with 1 Corinthians 8-10, for instance) and other related issues, This in turn may help us, as more of the Roman situation comes into view, to understand better why Paul wrote this letter to this church at this moment.^⁴⁸²

As we have seen, it would be wrong to drive a wedge between chaps. 1-11 and chaps. 12-16, or between two things labeled “Pauline theology” and “Pauline ethics.” Paul’s theology is always ethical, and his ethics are always theological, even if some of the letters (not all) seem to divide quite neatly into two sections that invite that kind of labeling (the best example is Ephesians 1-6, which is ironic in view of the majority view that it was not written by Paul; obvious counterexamples include the Corinthian and Thessalonian letters). Romans 6 and 8 are hardly nonethical, just as the present section is hardly nontheological. However, it is striking that in the present section some of the key words and themes from chaps. 1-11 are completely absent. The “righteousness”/”justice” word group (δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē and its cognates) simply does not occur. “Faith” is an important theme (12:3, 6; 14:1-2, 23-24), but its meaning has sometimes been thought different from what was discussed in chapters 3-4 and 10. Jesus the Messiah is not highlighted until 13:14, though he is then omnipresent in 14:1-15:13. We should not suppose that he is absent from Paul’s mind at any point in 12-13; in fact, as we shall see, the apparently incidental reference to being “in Christ” in 12:5 is probably to be taken as thematic. However, there is no extended discussion of him or his work, and no reference in these first two chapters to either his death or his resurrection. Unlike chaps, 5-8 and 9-11, there is no sense that the underlying biblical references, allusions, and echoes are evoking a larger scriptural narrative; the string of references in 15:7-13, to be sure, points to the eschatological and messianic hope of Israel, but neither there nor elsewhere in the section does Paul attempt to lay out the rest of the grand story. He has already done that, and can presuppose it here. Granted that none of this means a move away from theology toward a detached set of behavioral instructions, what does it signify?

It signifies, I think, that Paul has completed the main structure of the letter and does not need to repeat himself. We have reached the summit of the mountain range, the place from which you can see around in all directions; but the journey must now continue, down the other side, without the strenuous work of climbing, but still with a sense of continuity in our aim and goal. From time to time Paul will refer to the height he has now reached, and perhaps to the path up which he has climbed; but what follows now, with the characteristic “therefore” (ούν oun] of 12:1, is about results, not process,

The last five chapters of Romans divide naturally, then, into two: 12:1-15:13 and 15:14-16:27. The former, which is also the last major section of theological exposition in the letter, subdivides into two segments of nearly identical length: 12:1-13:14 (35 verses) and 14:1-15:13 (36 verses), the first part being more general and the second more specific. In turn 12:1-13:14 divides, though this is more complicated and disputed, into six: 12:1-2 (introduction and foundation); 12:3-13 (unity in the church through each exercising their gifts); 12:14-21 (the church’s life, particularly facing those outside); 13:1-7 (responsibility toward authorities); 13:8-10 (the overriding responsibility of love); and 13:11-14 (living in the light of God’s dawning day). Of these divisions, the hardest decision is whether to see 12:9-13 as belonging with 12:3-8 (the view taken here), as a separate section in itself, or as introducing 12:14-21; but this is a matter more of tidiness than of content.^⁴⁸³ More interesting is the place of 13:1-7; as we shall see at the relevant point, the section has often been regarded as something of a cuckoo in the nest of Romans, but in fact it goes very closely with the preceding passage, which deals with avoiding vengeance. Chapters 12 and 13, taken together, thus form a circle or chiasm:

Romans 12:1-2 set out the Christian’s obligation within the dawning “age to come,” which joins up with 13:11-14. The appeal for unity and love (12:38, 9-13) is matched in turn by 13:8-10. This leaves 12:14-13:7 at the center of the section, dealing from two different angles with the problems of living as citizens of God’s kingdom (see Phil 3:20) while also continuing to live in the “present world” with its various challenges.

NIV: ¹Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. ²Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.

NRSV: ¹I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ²Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The opening two verses of the section are as dense as any passage in Paul, and as so often they state concisely a theme that will then be unpacked and explored in various different ways. The key transition word is “therefore”: not the only time Paul draws an ethical conclusion in this letter (see, e.g., 6:12; 8:12), but the most obvious moment of transition between the two major parts of the letter (see Overview). But the key word that tells us what sort of material is to come is the opening παρακαλω (parakalō), the modern Greek word for “please,” as in “Please, will you do…? This is a many-sided word for Paul, ranging from “comfort” to “exhort,” and the present instance is clearly closer to the latter; but this is not an empty exhortation, trying by rhetorical force to make people do things they might otherwise not, but an appeal based squarely on what has gone before. RSV’s and the NRSV’s “appeal” is therefore preferable to the NIV’s and the NJB’s “urge,” though the latter supplies a force to this opening sentence that should not be softened. (The NEB’s and REB’s “implore” sounds like a desperate and emotional begging, which is quite inappropriate.)

The ground of the exhortation is “the mercies of God.” Paul has spoken of God’s “mercy” often enough in the preceding chapters to make it clear that the present appeal is grounded not simply on chaps. 1-8 but on chaps. 9-11 in particular. True, the word he uses here (οίκτιρμων oiktirmōn; the plural reflects underlying Hebrew usage) is unusual for Paul (έλεος eleos is more common, as it 11:31). But its cognate verb has occurred in hi: quotation of Exod 33:19 at 9:15, and it stands here as a way of summing up “the depth of God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge” as invoked in 11:33.

In particular, the opening verse indicates that the foundation of all Christian obedience is that those in Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, are to offer to God the true sacrificial worship to which the cult of the Jerusalem Temple had all along pointed. Romans 12:1 does with temple worship, in other words, what 2:25-29 did with circumcision, just as 15:7,13, at the close of the section and of the letter’s great argument, envisages Jew and Gentile alike joining in worship of the true God under the lordship of the Messiah. This can hardly be overemphasized. Paul has spoken of the “worship” that was one of Israel’s privileges (9:4); now he makes it clear, as with the other elements in that list, that this worship is now offered by all Christians, Jew and Gentile alike (see also 10:9-13).

This sacrificial worship, though not involving animal sacrifices, is not simply “spiritual” in the sense of “not involving physical sacrifices.” Many Jews of Paul’s day and before, not to mention the post-70 rabbis, spoke of nonsacrificial forms of worship as the equivalent of the temple cult. This goes back, indeed, to the psalms themselves (Ps 141:2).^⁴⁸⁴ But here, though this element is certainly present, we should not be too eager to press it. Paul envisages the sacrifices in question as being physical, indeed animal; but the animals are human, and they are not to be ritually slaughtered but “presented” to God, still alive. What are to be presented are the “bodies” of Christian worshipers. As we saw earlier, the word “body” enables Paul to look in both directions; at the Christian still living within the world of space, time, and matter, as here, and as living within the multiple pressures and temptations that this places upon us, as in 8:13 where “the deeds of the body” are indeed to be “put to death.”^⁴⁸⁵ Here as there, however, the point of “body” is not that it refers to one part only of the human totality, but that it refers to the complete person seen from one point of view: the point of view in which the human being lives as a physical object within space and time. This whole self is to be “presented”--the word itself carries sacrificial overtones--to God; this implies that we should expect Christian worship to have an emphaticaly bodily character, however much it is also true that worship must be, in Johannine language, “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). It must also be stressed that, though the primary worship, the primary “presentation” that Paul envisages, is the obedience of the whole person to the commands that follow, it would be foolish to exclude from this the actual occasions of formal and informal worship when the person is physically present and performs bodily actions in the course of that worship,

These sacrifices are “holy” (the word carries here, as often, both its sense of moral uprightness and its allusion to the temple cult; hence the NJB’s “dedicated”), and “well-pleasing to God.” (KJV, RSV, NRSV, “acceptable” is possible, but the word is strong and should not be watered down to give the idea that God might just about be prepared to accept these sacrifices.) Paul, unusually, repeats the word “well-pleasing” in the very next verse, making it clear that for him at least what a Christian does, in Christ and by the Spirit, gives` actual pleasure to God. This is counterintuitive for many Christians, schooled to insist that nothing we do can commend ourselves to God. But Paul insists in several passages that Christian worship and obedience, holiness and unity do indeed please God, and if we have articulated his other doctrines (e.g., justification) in such a way as to exclude this notion, we have clearly misrepresented him. (See 14:18; 2 Cor 5:9; Eph 5:10; Phil 4:18; Col 3:20--all the same word as here; see also the use of άρέσκω [areskō] in 1 Cor 7:32; 1 Thess 2:4; 4:1; and, most strikingly, Rom 8:8, where “those in the flesh” cannot please God but, it is strongly implied, “those in the Spirit” can and do.) In fact, the alternative to “pleasing God” is not simply living at a morally neutral state, neither pleasing nor displeasing; it may well be “to please oneself” (15:1), or (in a bad sense) “to please other people” (Gal 1:10). If we want to enquire further as to how it can be that a human being, a creature and a sinner, can please the living God, the holy creator, the logic of the letter as a whole, and of Paul’s arguments elsewhere, suggests that it might have something to do with being restored in God’s image (see 1:18-25 and the Commentary; 8:29; Col 3:10).

Paul describes this complete human worship as “your spiritual worship.” The word translated “spiritual” by the NRSV and the NIV is not, how ever, πνεύματίκός (pneumatikos), as one might have imagined. It is λογικός (logikos), which as the KJV indicates can mean “reasonable” in the sense of “in accordance with reason.” The JB offers a helpful paraphrase in this sense: a worship “that is worthy of thinking beings.” In Revelation 4-5, the “beasts,” representing creation, worship God totally but unreflectively, and then the twenty-four elders, representing God’s people, declare that God is worthy of this worship, reflecting on who God is and what God has done. Similarly, Paul may here be insisting, however paradoxical this may sound to ears attuned to later dualisms, that the offering of the body is precisely the thing that thinking creatures ought to recognize as appropriate. This is more likely than that he is deliberately echoing or aping Stoic ideas in which the λόγος (logos) formed the true inner core of every human; there are distinct echoes, but the Stoic would not have agreed that offering one’s body to God was the appropriate type of worship.^⁴⁸⁶ Paul is not highlighting a kind of worship that transcends and therefore need not include the actions of the body itself. This “logical worship,” likewise, is more than simply “the worship to which our argument points,” though the phrase could mean that as well and it is no doubt true.

12:2. The second sentence does not unpack the first, but stands alongside it as the head of the whole section. In accordance with what he has said all along, Paul sees the new age, long awaited within Judaism, as having broken in to the present age in the Messiah, and understands Christians as living at their point of overlap, needing constantly to reject the pressures of the present age and to be open to the life of the new, the life offered in the Messiah. Here is the interface, for Paul, between what scholars call “eschatology” and “ethics”: because you are in fact a member of the age to come, if you are in Christ, new modes and standards of behavior are not only possible but commanded.^⁴⁸⁷ This new behavior, like the “living sacrifices,” is pleasing to God, and Christians should be able to think it out and realize why. Thus, if verse 1 focuses on the body, but with the mind being involved as well (the “reasonable worship”), v. 2 focuses on the renewal of the mind, but the result is that people, being thus transformed, can work out in practice what is the right thing to do.^⁴⁸⁸

“Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould” was J.B. Phillips’s translation of the start of verse 2. It remains memorable, catching the sense of pressure and temptation that “the present age” (Phillips missed the eschatological nuance) constantly provides. This is not a mat ter of simply resisting pressure from the outside, and discovering the pure unsullied world “within.” That is the road to various kinds of gnosticism, the discovery of a hidden spark that, already present, just needs to be uncovered. Rather, as Paul insisted in 1:18-32, the human mind and heart are, in their natural state, dark and rebellious, full of wickedness and evil. What is required is not for people simply to learn to live authentically, without external pressure, but for them to be renewed, so that what proceeds from the transformed mind does indeed reflect the image of God.^⁴⁸⁹ The verbs are probably in the present tense, though several manuscripts have aorist instead, reflected in the NIV’s implication (“Do not conform any longer”) that Paul supposes his hearers to have been conforming to the present age up to now. It is more likely that at this point in the letter he is putting forward a general command rather than a specific and urgent one.^⁴⁹⁰

The “mind” is a key category in Paul’s vision of renewal (cf. 7:25 and 8:5-8). Instead of the “unfit mind” of 1:28, Paul holds out a vision of a mind renewed, able now at last to think for itself what will please God, instead of being darkened by the deceitfulness of sin (see also the suggestive “we have the mind of the Messiah” in 1 Cor 2:16). The Christian is not meant to rely simply on lists of ethical commands, but to be able to discern (NRSV), to test and approve (NIV), what God’s will is--God’s will, it seems, primarily for general ethical conduct but also, perhaps, for specific decisions and occasions. Paul’s vision of living sacrifice, and mind renewed, generates a picture of Christian behavior in which rules matter but are not the driving force, in which thought and reflection matter but without reducing ethics to purely situational decisions. And once again Paul insists that God’s will, when found and followed, is “good” good, pleasing, and perfect.” Fear of the various movements that go under the name “perfectionism” ought not to put us off from reflecting that, with all the ambiguities and perplexities of Christian moral life, there is such a thing as knowing and doing God’s will, and that we are commanded to pursue it, as Paul indicates in 1 Cor 3:18-2 humbly but confidently.

1. Paul’s transition from chapters 1-11 to 12-16 is a model of integrated theological and practical thinking and writing, and hence a notable standard for those who preach expository or doctrinal sermons. As I have said, we should beware of assuming too readily that the two parts of the letter correspond exactly to what later generations have called “doctrine” and “ethics,” and we should note in particular the point at which our perception of these things shades off into the decidedly unbiblical “facts and values” distinction. For Paul, the central facts are the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, the world’s true Lord; but if ever facts were value-laden, these are. Genuine humanness, genuine obedient faithfulness to the one God, has appeared on earth, has suffered and been vindicated. Before this fact there are no mere spectators, only subjects and rebels.

2. It is interesting, though, that Paul does not at this stage appeal to the lordship of Jesus as the groundwork of his moral vision. That will come later, in chapters 14 and 15. For the moment he concentrates on the images of new sacrifice and new world, brought about by the work of Jesus. The fact that later in the chapter he seems to draw on or echo the teaching of Jesus should not weaken this observation. He will not turn Jesus into either a schoolmaster to give lessons or a policeman to make sure they are obeyed. The foundation of his ethic is what Jesus accomplished: the whole new world, the “age to come” of Jewish expectation, into which the baptized enter and in which they must live by the Spirit. This is where we see how important it is that in chapter 6 the Christian is precisely no longer an “old human being,” but instead stands on resurrection ground. Because the resurrection itself took place within continuing earthly history, and is indeed always threatened by “historical” enquiry in the sense of would-be “scientific” historiography that excludes certain things from the start, those who are “risen with the Messiah” in the sense of Col 3:1 (which I argued earlier, despite the normal assumption, is present in Romans 6 as well) are always threatened in their moral behavior by the still-unredeemed world with its assumptions and pressures, its sneers and compromises. But the Christian is not left to struggle alone. When Paul speaks of “the renewal of the mind,” he is alluding to the work of God’s own self in the person of the Spirit (see again 8:5-9). The Spirit is even now at work to make the new age a reality; and the space-time location where this must happen, as in chapter 8, is none other than the actual bodies of Christians. Inaugurated eschatology begins at home.

3. Verses 1 and 2 offer a fine balance between sacrifice and fulfillment, between an ethic of self-denial and one of self-discovery. Even the self-discovery, however, is the discovery of the a#* self that one is called to become in Christ and by the Spirit, not the uncovering of a hidden truth or inclination that had been present all along. Grace fulfills nature, but only by putting it to death (the living sacrifice) and bringing it to life again (the renewing of the mind). Exactly as in the bracing commands of Jesus himself (e.g., Mark 8:34-38), the path of self-sacrifice is the path of self-fulfillment, as through true, whole-person worship people discover to their surprise that being truly human is not what the present age supposes. Taking up the cross is the way to life, even though believing this is never easy, whether one has been following Jesus for a single day or a lifetime.

4. The other more obvious balance, or, perhaps better, integration, is that of body and mind within Christian obedience. Neither insincere following of an outward code, nor the easy immorality of keeping the mind (supposedly) pure while the body can do what it likes, will suffice in the new age that began with Jesus’ resurrection. Behind the body/mind integration of these verses we may hear, once again, the biblical command to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength: the Shema, in fact, to which Paul has alluded before (see 1:5; 3:27-30; 5:5; 8:28) and whose fulfillment is now in sight, as it will be when the present passage is unpacked in 13:8-10.

5. Perhaps the most striking and pastorally relevant feature of these verses is the point already stressed in the comments: that worship and obedience of this sort really does “please God.” Centuries of post-Augustine and post-Reformation thought have quite rightly emphasized the free, unmerited grace of God, and the response of faith alone, as the basis of the Christian’s standing in Christ, his or her membership in the family whose sins have been dealt with through Jesus’ death. But this tradition, precisely in order to avoid the impression of compromise at this central point, has often failed to give due weight to the proper and regular Pauline emphasis that those who are justified in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit can, should, and regularly do “please God,” that God is delighted with them not merely because they appear “in Christ” but because of what they are, and are becoming, and are beginning to do. This has nothing whatever to do with justification, and if for a single moment anyone supposed that it did the danger of self-satisfied Pelagianism would again open up before us like a dark pit. It may be difficult to keep one’s balance in these matters. But to insist on the unbalanced and unbiblical view that Christians are incapable of pleasing God, in order to avoid the equally unbalanced and unbiblical view that Christians earn God’s free grace, is like avoiding railway accidents by staying safely at home. We can never avoid the danger of misunderstandings. Christian living is always a risk. But with Paul as our guide we do not need to be gloomy or defensive about this. He was used to walking tightropes.

NIV: ³For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. ⁴Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, ⁵so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. ⁶We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. ⁷If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; ⁸if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.

⁹Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. ¹⁰Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. ¹¹Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. ¹²Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. ¹³Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.

NRSV: ³For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. ⁴For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, ⁵so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. ⁶We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ⁷ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; ⁸the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

⁹Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; ¹⁰love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹²Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. ¹³Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

The present passage has a good deal in common with various other Pauline exhortations to the church to live as a single community, notably 1 Corinthians 12 and Philippians 2. In both cases what really counts is that the community Paul is addressing is to be shaped by the Messiah himself, In particular, in the Messiah Christians are to strive for unity, which will come through the humility in which each thinks soberly about his or her own gifts and role rather than placing too high a value on them. In the present passage, too, we would be right to see the Messiah as the shaping force underneath the argument. We would probably be right to see the reference to the church as being “one body in the Messiah” (12:5) as standing deliberately near the head of the present section (at least 12:1-15:13) much as did the reference to the Messiah being “of their race according to the flesh” in 9:5, and indeed the fuller reference with which the letter itself opens (1:3-4). Certainly the unity of believers in the Messiah continues to be a recurring theme through to 15:13.

Verses 3-13 divide, as we have said, into 3-8 and 9-13; and vv. 3-8 themselves divide naturally into the introduction (v. 3), the main statement (vv. 4-5), and the immediate application in terms of the use of different gifts (vv. 6-8). These are intended for the whole church, not simply for a “charismatic element” within it.^⁴⁹¹

12:3. The appeal that follows is intended, it seems, to explain (γάρ gar, “for”) and thereby, in usual Pauline style, to unpack the dense opening of vv. 1-2. “Offer God the true worship; be transformed by having your minds renewed; because you should be thinking as one people in the Messiah.”^⁴⁹² The “for” thus belongs with the whole sequence of thought, not least vv. 4-5, not simply with v. 3 itself. The basic appeal--which Paul addresses emphatically to every single one of his readers--is not just from Paul speaking on his own authority. He makes it because God has equipped him for a particular task, with “the grace given to me.” Paul remained conscious--as, given his extraordinary vocation, he needed to--that he attempted the tasks he did because God had appointed him to a specific role, which he refers to in this way elsewhere both in this letter and in his other writings (1:5; 15:15; 1 Cor 3:10; 15:10; Gal 2:9; Eph 3:2, 7-8; cf. Col 1:25). Sometimes this introduces a specific reference to his ministry to the Gentiles (cf. 11:13); and since the appeal verse echoes quite closely that of 11:20 and 25, where the respective places and roles of Gentile and Jew are at stake, we may suppose that that thought is not far from his mind. He is, after all, laying foundations here for chaps. 14 and 15, where that mutual relationship is again in view. But for the moment he wants to make the foundation wider and deeper, and so moves to the more general point about all Christians individually learning how to think soberly about themselves.

The appeal itself is couched in quite formal tones, with a repetition of the basic word that is hard to capture in English. “Do not overthink above what you ought to think, but think in wise-thinking ways”; that is more or less it, and as with the emphasis on the mind in 12:2 (cf. 8:5-8) it stresses the role of disciplined thinking as being at the very root of basic Christian living. Here the point is that, just as in 11:25 Gentiles should not think too highly of themselves, so here all Christians should keep guard on their own self-opinion; not, of course, that they should strive for a false or inappropriate humility but that their judgment should be sober and serious.

Paul actually sets up a standard by which one may judge oneself: “the measure of faith” God has apportioned. It is possible that by this he means that every Christian has been given a different “measure of faith,” some greater, some less. That would certainly make some sense in the present passage: one should, according to that interpretation, regard oneself in terms of the amount of faith one has.^⁴⁹³ It might be thought, as well, that this would point on to the discussion of the “strong in faith” and the “weak in faith” in chapters 14-15. But there is more to be said for the rival view: that the “measure of faith” is the same for all. Throughout the letter so far, “faith” is the same for everybody (3:27-30): belief that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead (10:9; cf. 4:24-25). Paul’s point here is not that some should give themselves airs and that others should feel inferior, but that ail should exercise their varied gifts on a level one with another. The last mention of “faith,” in fact, was in a very similar context: branches were broken off because of unbelief, you only stand fast because of faith, and the branches themselves can be grafted in again if they do not remain in unbelief--so do not think too highly of yourselves! (see 11:19-25). The “measure” here, then, is not a kind of measuring-jug containing different amounts of faith, apportioned to different people, but a measuring-rod, the same for all, called “faith.” It is up to each Christian to see where they come against that standard, since it is the only one that matters.^⁴⁹⁴

12:4-5. One of Paul’s most powerful images for explaining the combined unity and diversity of the church is that of the body; and this, alongside 1 Corinthians 12, is one of the two classic passages on the subject. (In Ephesians and Colossians a subtly different point is made, Christ there being spoken of as the head of the body; see Eph 1:22; 4:15; 5:23; Col 1:18; 2:10, 19.) The present passage differs slightly from 1 Corinthians in that there, having set up the analogy in a very similar way to the present passage, Paul says simply “so also is the Messiah,” indicating an identity between the meaning of “the Messiah” (ό Χριστός ho Christos) and the many “members” who together make up his “body,” his complete existence in the world of present space and time (1 Cor 12:12, 27). This needs, and immediately receives in 1 Corinthians, a clear statement of the indwelling Spirit, which, while being paralleled in various ways in Romans, is not matched in chapter 12. Instead, in Romans 12, Paul keeps the picture one stage removed from apparent total identification: “We, being many, are one body in the Messiah.” (It is not clear why the NIV has put “in Christ” at the start of the sentence, distancing it from “body,” or why it has translated έσμεν [esmen] as “form” rather than simply “are.”) In fact, the subtle distinction between 1 Cor 12:12 and Rom 12:5 is more at the level of surface expression, and should not be taken to indicate a shift in underlying meaning; Paul can say similar things elsewhere in 1 Corinthians in a way that indicates that his thought was flexible on this point within a comprehensible framework (see, e.g., 1 Cor 6:15; 10:17). And that framework is, as we have seen several times before in Romans, Paul’s belief that, since the resurrection demonstrated Jesus to be the Messiah, he now in that capacity represented his people, summing them up “in” himself, so that what was true of him was now true of them. This is the logic that underlies chapter 6, and the decisive 8:1, as well as the many other “in Christ” passages elsewhere in his writings (see the Commentary on 6:1-23).^⁴⁹⁵ To be “in Christ,” as here, is to be a member of the Messiah’s people; to speak of “one body in Christ” is to emphasize the unity of that people despite its obvious diversity.

It is possible that Paul is aware, in using this image, that pagan writers had spoken in similar terms about “the body politic.”^⁴⁹⁶ There may even be a hint, though this should not be pressed on the basis of the present passage, that Paul sees the community of the Messiah’s people as an entity over against the great political entity of the time, the state of Rome (see the Commentary on 13:1-7). At the same time, it is noteworthy that, whereas he speaks of the solidarity between the Messiah and ethnic Jews in terms of “flesh” (9:4), something has happened to create a different unity, a different solidarity, which is spoken of instead in terms of “body.” Compare Paul’s language about “my flesh” in 11:14, the background to which is found in 2 Sam 5:1//1 Chr 11:1, where the tribes of Israel say to David, “We are your bone and flesh” (see also Judg 9:2; 2 Sam 19:12-13). This substitution of terms fits so well with Paul’s regular language about the corruptible, dying self (“flesh”) and the self that is to be resurrected (“body”) that we may well wonder whether he is not suggesting that this new entity, the “one body in Christ” as here or the “body of Christ” as in 1 Corinthians, is as it were the resurrected version of “Israel according to the flesh.”

If this is the truth of the united whole, what is true of each one individually? (See the NRSV; the NIV’s “each member” does not quite catch the emphasis of the Greek, which is almost “one by one,” as though Paul were doing a quick head count, pointing to each person in the room in turn.) They belong to one another. We are so used to the word “member” referring to someone who belongs to a society or club that we are in danger of ignoring the fact that here “members” μέλη melē) means “parts of the body,” and belongs with the extended metaphor (the JB and the NJB bring this out by translating “parts”). In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul spells this out in terms of the metaphor: one is an eye, another a foot, and so on. Here, though the point is substantially the same (the passage, indeed, has the flavor of Paul repeating, more swiftly, something he knows he has said before), he launches straight into a list of gifts.

12:6-8. The gifts listed here, which he refers to as “spiritual gifts” (χαρίσματα charismata), is identical neither with the list in 1 Corinthians 12 nor with the similar lists in, e.g., Eph 4:11, though they overlap. It is difficult to know how much weight to put on the fact that seven “gifts” are listed here (prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, and compassion), perhaps indicating the completeness of God’s provision for the work of the church (cf. eight in 1 Cor 12:28, but this omits “interpretation,” which is referred to as though it is part of the same list in 1 Cor 12:10, 30; there are five in Eph 4:11, or four if “pastors and teachers” are the same people). The list itself is incomplete in the sense that several categories mentioned elsewhere are missing. Paul does not mention “apostleship,” possibly because he does not suppose there to be any “apostles” in Rome (though see 16:7). Nor does he mention tongues, interpretation, healing, or special words of knowledge, as in 1 Corinthians 12. There is probably not much of significance to be drawn from this; possibly this list is deliberately general, emphasizing “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary” gifts, because Paul does not actually know what special gifts the Christians in Rome may possess.

His main point is that just as God has given him grace for his task (v. 3), so God gives the church grace for its multiple and mutually supportive tasks, and whatever they are they must be exercised to the full extent of one’s powers. The NIV supplies the verb for this (“let him use it”), which brings out Paul’s intention although, as in the NRSV, there is no corresponding word in the Greek (RSV, “let us use them”; NJB, “let us devote ourselves”). It is possible that Paul intends the participle at the start of v. 6 (“having gifts”) simply to modify the main verb of v. 5 (“we are one body in Christ, and individually parts belonging to one another”), and so means the list to imply “and this will mean that the teacher should get on and teach” and the like.

With most of the gifts in the list, the thrust of the commands is obvious: servers should serve, teachers should teach, and so on, with as much energy and skill as they can. This is clear with the second, third, and fourth “gifts,” ministry (or “serving,” NIV), teaching, and exhortation, where the word describing how one should exercise one’s gift is simply the cognate word of the gift itself. The final three (giving, leading, showing compassion) develop the idea slightly (givers should be generous, leaders should be diligent, compassion should be shown cheerfully), and this leads naturally into the more general commands of vv. 9-13.

But what about the strange phrase in v. 6 that explains how “prophecy” should be exercised? Prophecy, it seems, should be exercised “in proportion to faith” (NRSV) or “to his faith” (NIV, supplying the “his”; NEB, “a man’s”; REB, “our”; the JB paraphrases: “use [the gift of prophecy] as your faith suggests”; NJB, “we should prophesy as much as our faith tells us”). The implication is that the level or content of the “faith” will vary from prophet to prophet, and that a prophet should exercise his or her gift to the full extent of that faith. It is possible, however, that as with the “measure of faith” in v. 3 we should understand this as a reference to “the faith” as the same standard for all, so that the point is that prophets should not feel themselves at liberty to say whatever comes into their heads, but rather should speak in conscious accord with the beliefs that make the church what it is. Since this is the only NT passage in which άναλογία (analogia) occurs, we cannot gauge Paul’s meaning from parallels. But its basic meaning Concerns proportion within a relatfonship,^⁴⁹⁷ and it seems to me more likely that Paul intends to refer to the proportional relationship between the Christian faith as a whole and what individual prophets say, rather than to the proportional relationship between the gift of prophecy and the amount of faith an individual prophet may have.^⁴⁹⁸

12:9-13. There then follows a more general list of ways in which individual Christians and groups or churches are to behave, ways almost all of which are concerned with building up the community as a whole (i.e., not simply with the pur. suit of individual virtue or holiness as though for its own sake).

12:9. Love stands at the head of the list, as often in Paul (see above all 1 Corinthians 13; and also Gal 5:22). We should assume that this word refers not just to the feelings that Christians have for one another (Paul returns to that in v. 10) but to the practical care for each other that marked the early church (see 1 Thess 4:9-12; it is clear there, however, that the words φιλαδελφία [philadelphia] and άγάπη [agapē] are very close in meaning for Paul, so that we should not drive a wedge between vv. 9-10). There follows a string of participles and adjectives; grammatically these appear to modify the main verb of the opening sentence, even though Paul has left it unexpressed ή άγάπη άνυπόκριτος he agape anypokritos; lit., “Love--genuine!”). These are the ways, in other words, in which love will show itself to be the true version rather than a counterfeit, which is all the more interesting in that the list of these ways begins with the most general of moral commands, to loathe what is evil and to cling tightly to what is good (both verbs are strong: “hate” [NRSV, NIV is not forceful enough]. This is best explained in terms of 13:10: Love will always do what is good rather than what is evil, since this will be for the good of the other person. Paul presupposes that there is a large area of moral life that does not need spelling out; everyone knows that some things are good and others evil, and at this point there will be a substantial overlap between the Christian community and their neighbors both Jewish and pagan.

12:10-13. The rest of the list Consists of lightning sketches of ways to build up the community. There must be real affection; Christians should look up to one another (lit., they should “go first and lead the way in showing honor to one another”).^⁴⁹⁹ They should not (v. 11) be lazy what it Comes to diligence and eagerness (this is rather like saying “you mustn’t be slow when you’re being swift,” which seems somewhat obvious, but it appears to correspond to our phrase “not be backward in coming forward”). Their spirits must be constantly aglow, like the fire that burns in an old-fashioned stove to keep the house warm and to be ready for cooking and similar tasks. And they must regard themselves as servants of the Lord, that is, of Jesus himself.^⁵⁰⁰ Their life (v. 12) should be a steady stream of rejoicing in hope, remaining patient under suffering, and giving themselves to prayer (again, the word Paul uses is a strong one, indicating an eager and persevering devotion--the sort of attitude that takes trouble over prayer rather than being perfunctory or “when I feel like it”). And (v. 13) they should share with Christians in need, and be eager to be hospitable, to open their home to those who may need to share it. This, again, is not something other than “love,” but is part of what Paul and other early Christians meant by that large and all-embracing term.^⁵⁰¹

It has been customary to separate out 13:1-7 from its surroundings, but though it is obviously a separate paragraph it belongs closely with the end of chapter 12. Noting this link helps a certain amount in addressing the problem that, outside the central theological questions of justification, the law, and christology, has probably vexed commentators more than anything else. What did Paul mean by “submitting to the ruling authorities” (13:1), and why did he command it?^⁵⁰²

Taking 12:14-21 and 13:1-7 as two halves of a statement of Christian responsibility vis-à-vis outsiders gives to the whole of 12-13, as noted above, a certain symmetry (12:1-2 and 13:11-14 locate Christian living in its wider eschatological framework, insisting on the obedience of bodily life in the present period; 12:3-13 and 13:8-10 expound the obligation of love within the Christian community; now, in the middle, the present two paragraphs deal with the fife of the church over against the surrounding world). It is true that some parts of 12:14-21, especially vv. 15-16, could be seen as speaking still of life within the church, but the transition in v. 14 is quite marked, grammatically as well as in content, and it is probably better to see those parts, though no doubt relevant in church life as well, as dealing principally with Christian responsibility toward outsiders. In particular, 12:19-20 forbids vengeance in terms that link closely to the description of the rulers’ obligations in 13:4, and it seems clear that Paul intends these two passages to be mutually interpretative. There is a balance to be kept between looking outside the Christian community at threatening wolves coming to attack and looking outside at God-given civic authorities whose vocation it is to keep order and peace. If 13:1-7 had been read in this light, some old problems might have been avoided.

NIV: ¹⁴Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

¹⁷Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. ¹⁸If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. ¹⁹Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. ²⁰On the contrary:

NRSV: ¹⁴Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ²⁰No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

12:14. The NRSV and the NIV, and most other translations, are right to treat this as opening a new paragraph (against NEB, REB). Paul switches from the suing of participles to a pair of straight imperatives, with a further string of participles dependent on them (imperatives, v. 14; two infinitives, equivalent of imperatives, v. 15; three participles, explaining these, v. 16a; a further imperative, v. 16b; four participles, vv. 17-19a, giving rise to further imperatives, vv. 19-21). Instead of the Christian community taking care of one another, the attention has now shifted to those who would attack and harm them. We do not know of specific persecution in the Roman church during the 50s, but Paul assumes, here as elsewhere, that persecution will come to those who remain loyal to Jesus (1 Thess 2:14; 3:3-4; cf. 2 Tim 3:12). And the appropriate response to it is blessing not cursing. At this point Paul stands firmly with Jesus and the entire early Christian tradition against all other traditions known to us. The noble stories of the Maccabean martyrs typify the tradition Paul would have received: the seven brothers in 2 Maccabees 7 go to their deaths calling down solemn curses on their persecutors. But in both Jesus’ teaching and his own practice there was a strikingly new note: Hostility was to be met with prayer, and violence with blessing (Matt 5:38-48; Luke 6:28-35; 23:34; Acts 7:60; 1 Cor 4:12; 1 Pet 2:20-23; 3:9; Eph 5:1 should probably be considered in this light as well).^⁵⁰³ It is hard to imagine this teaching becoming the norm in the church, as it clearly did from the very start, unless it was firmly rooted in the words and example of Jesus himself.

12:15-16. In this context it may be best to read vv. 15-16, not as commands about the internal life of the church, but as suggesting how Christians should live alongside their pagan neighbors. They should not keep themselves aloof; if someone in the next street dies, they should be prepared to sympathize and join the funeral procession, and if someone is celebrating, they should throw their hats in the air as well. It will not do, just because the society around is potentially or actually hostile, to adopt a snooty attitude; much better to know how to establish common ground and to find ways of making friends. “Live in harmony with one another” (v. 16) is literally “thinking the same things toward one another,” which sounds like the kind of bracing command Paul can sometimes issue to Christian groups (e.g., Phil 2:2); but here it seems to refer, more generally, to the call to Christians to get alongside their neighbors and fellow citizens (“associating with the lowly,” or possibly “taking on menial tasks”) instead of hiving off to a ghetto. The final sentence of v. 16 is a strong echo of 11:25 and 12:3; clearly the attitude Paul most wants to head off in the Roman church is superiority, either against non-Christian Jews (11:25), or against fellow-Christians (12:3), or against the wider pagan world (12:16).

12:17-18. Paul reiterates the basic command that runs through this paragraph: one must not repay evil for evil (see 1 Thess 5:15; and, in the background, with further echoes, Prov 20:22). Instead, one must take careful thought, prior to any given situation (this “thinking beforehand,” though not implied in the NRSV or the NIV, seems to be present in the prefix of the participle προνοούμενοι [pronooumenoi]), about what will show the watching world that one can hold one’s head up, with nothing to be ashamed of. Of course, there will be times when the world will not understand the points at which Christian standards will not permit those who hold them to go along with the ways of the world (cf. Eph 5:11-14; 1 Pet 4:3-5). But there will be many other times, and Christians should be on the lookout for them, when they can join in gladly and show that they, too, act according to the highest moral standards of the surrounding culture. Paul is realistic: he knows that there will be many times when living at peace with every other inhabitant of the street. let alone the city, will be impossible. But he summons Christians to make every effort in that direction.

12:19-20. This sets the scene for the third appeal against retaliation, which this time is explained, albeit somewhat darkly. Do not curse your persecutors (v. 14); do not repay evil for evil (v. 17); now, do not perform acts of vengeance--that is, acts that try to bring justice to bear in your own disputes. (Unusually in mid-paragraph, he addresses his readers as “beloved,” perhaps already to indicate a reason why this prohibition is given: God’s people are loved by God and must not imagine themselves bereft of his care and hence needing to take matters into their own hands.) The verb έκδίκέω (ekdikeō), as its root suggests, indicates the doing of justice, which Paul is not forbidding; what he prohibits is doing it freelance, in one’s own favor--in other words, what we call “vengeance.”

Instead, he says, “give place to wrath.” Without chapter 13 it might not be clear whether this in fact meant “let your own wrath smolder away quietly,” “leave room for God’s wrath,” or “let the process of moral cause and effect take its course”--though the first one Paul would certainly have ruled out, the second points in the right direction, and the third might not have been foreign to him either. But with 13:4 coming up six verses later, we can be reasonably confident that he means “allow God to do justice--which may well be done through the appointed magistrates.” It is impossible to act in one’s own case with sufficient impartiality; which is why, as Deuteronomy 32:35 had declared, God reserves the sole right to judicial punishment (again, this shows why 13:1-7 is necessary, to make the link between God’s sole right and the delegated rights of rulers). From this point of view, the traditional translation “vengeance” is misleading; what is meant is judicial punishment, which becomes “vengeance” when offended parties take the law into their own hands. Though Paul is not working here with’ the larger story of Deuteronomy 32, it is significant that he quotes verse 35 here, as he had quoted verse 21 in 10:19, and will quote verse 43 in 15:10; this was, clearly, a passage upon which he drew consciously and regularly.

In place of private vengeance, Paul recommends a shockingly positive line of action: feed a hungry foe, give drink to a thirsty one. He quotes here from Prov 25:21-22, and the Bible contains one or two striking examples of this practice, notably I Kgs 6:20-23, where Elisha commanded the king of Israel not to kill enemies who were supernaturally delivered into his hands, but to give them a banquet. In that instance, the Syrian enemies did not return to invade Israel; in Proverbs, the writer says--and Paul quotes him--that taking this course of action will heap coals of fire on the enemy’s head (“and YHWH will reward you,” adds Proverbs). At first sight it might look as though the coals of fire were themselves punishment (however metaphorical); but this would hardly qualify as “repaying evil with good,” since the vengeful intention would still be uppermost. The “coals of fire” are almost certainly intended as the burning shame of remorse for having treated someone so badly. Though the practice of having penitents carrying a literal tray of hot coals is not widely attested, it is not impossible that it was both the source of the original metaphor in Proverbs and also an allusion that Paul’s hearers might pick up.^⁵⁰⁴ The point is then that treating enemies kindly is not only appropriate behavior in its own right, refusing the vengeance that would usurp God’s prerogative; it may also have the effect of turning their hearts.

12:21. Paul sums up the whole paragraph with another possible allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, and to the gospel events themselves, Jesus’ death and resurrection. Yes, there is evil “out there” in the world. But God’s people are to meet it in the way that even God met it: with love and generous goodness. The theology of the cross, in fact, can be glimpsed under this apparently detached ethical maxim: when God came to defeat evil, this was not achieved by using an even greater evil, but by using its opposite--namely, the surprising and initially counterintuitive weapons of goodness. To be consumed with vengeful thoughts, or to be led into putting such thoughts into practice, is to keep evil in circulation, whereas the way to overthrow evil, rather than perpetuating it, is to take its force and give back goodness instead. As with the commands of verses 14 and 17, we may question whether someone in Paul’s tradition of Torah-based zeal could have come to this position had it not been for the example and teaching of the Messiah himself.

NIV: ¹Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. ²Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. ³For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. ⁴For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. ⁵Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. ⁶This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. ⁷Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

NRSV: ¹Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. ²Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. ³For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; ⁴for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. ⁵Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. ⁶For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. ⁷Pay to all what is due them--taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

Theological fashions change, and pressure points move from one exegetical location to another. A previous generation found Romans 9 intolerable, first reading into that chapter a doctrine of absolute predestination to salvation or damnation and then angrily rejecting it. Others have taken a similar view of Rom 1:18-32, hating the very idea of “wrath” as a theologically barbarous concept. Now, after a century in which totalitarian governments have devastated continents, decimated nations, and dehumanized millions of their subjects, it is scarcely surprising that the critical searchlight has swung around and come to rest on the little paragraph now before us. As though by some scapegoating process, these seven verses have been struck out of the canon, vilified, and blamed for untold miseries. They have enabled whole generations of critics to combine their sociopolitical instincts and prejudices with their status as professional exegetes, and to leapfrog over Paul onto what looks like the high moral ground. This is always a deeply satisfying pastime.

But when the sound and fury have died away, we are left wondering what all the fuss was about. Yes, many wicked and powerful governments have appealed to Romans 13 to justify their every move. But have people not done that with words of Jesus himself? If enemies sow weeds in a field of wheat, is the wheat farmer to be blamed? There are many parts of the Bible that can be, and have been, twisted to serve violent and self-serving ends.^⁵⁰⁵ If we cut them all out, there might be little left. Exegesis, and the determination to live at least with its results, and perhaps even by them, is always a risk, part of the risk of an incarnational religion or faith. Romans 13 is no exception.

This paragraph, I shall suggest, neither needs nor deserves opprobrium. It is not a fully blown “Theology of Church and State”; indeed, as is often pointed out, our post-Enlightenment notion of “State” would have been foreign to Paul. One can hardly blame a writer if, in the course of a letter about something else, a small aside does not contain the full sophisticated and nuanced treatment that subsequent generations might have liked. Paul’s point here is essentially quite simple; it fits into the line of thought of Romans 12-13 as a whole; it need not be wished away in an effort to undercut legitimating arguments for totalitarianism, and indeed it needs to be present for the balance of the previous chapter and paragraph to be maintained.

Many theories have been advanced, predictably, as to what Paul was talking about and why. I here list only the major ones.^⁵⁰⁶ (On the unwarranted suggestion that the entire paragraph is a gloss, see the Overview for 12:14-13:7.)

(1) This passage is a general statement about ruling authorities. It applies to all legitimate authorities all the time. It is based on a general belief in the desire of the creator God for order within all societies.^⁵⁰⁷

(2) It is a particular statement about the Roman Empire based on (a) Paul’s belief that it was in some sense God-given, and (b) his experience of sensible magistrates protecting him from persecution, and looking (c) for the safety of the Jewish and/or Christian community in Rome at this historical moment.^⁵⁰⁸

(3) It is a very particular statement about the specific moment in the Roman Empire when, with a new, fresh emperor in the throne (Nero’s early years were as promising as his later years were terrible), Paul believed there was at least a moment when the church should trust Rome and live content within its world.^⁵⁰⁹

(4) It is a statement of something that is now true as a result of the victory of Jesus over the powers of the world in his death and resurrection.^⁵¹⁰

I regard (4) as simply mistaken. Paul does not argue his point on the basis of christology or the gospel. The passage is so close in tone and content to various Jewish writings of the period and before (see below) that there is no reason to suppose that this is a new viewpoint generated by the Christian gospel.

There are further variations within (1), (2), and (3). Maybe Paul intends the paragraph as a general statement (1), but is also influenced by elements of (2) and (3), for instance by the need to distance himself from the groundswell of Jewish resistance against Rome in the Middle East.^⁵¹¹ Maybe he has in mind the particular situation of a tiny Christian group, including many Jews, in the city from which Jews had been expelled a few years earlier for rioting “at the instigation of Chrestus.”^⁵¹² Maybe he held view (2) or perhaps (3) at the time of writing, but found that his subsequent experience in Roman prisons led him to a very different view, which emerges in Philippians.^⁵¹³ Within subsequent interpretation, variants of (2) and (3) have been taken to mean that the passage cannot be insisted upon as relevant for all time.

There may well be elements of particular historical situations visible in the passage; but what Paul actually wrote still looks very much like a general statement about ruling authorities, not a pragmatic assessment of Rome, or the present situation.^⁵¹⁴ This is both, so to speak, good and bad news for those who are anxious about the application of the passage to subsequent situations. The more general the passage, the less it can be taken to glorify Rome, and hence to have Paul legitimating the tyranny that within a decade or so had done grievous violence to the church. The more specific the passage (Paul making a positive comment on the Roman Empire), the easier it appears to relativize it and declare it irrelevant to other times and places. However, there is an irony in this specific reading (as in [2] and [3]). By having Paul declare that Rome is a good thing (and thereby having him say nothing much about other rulers and governments), exegesis finds itself unable to see other parts of Paul, and other parts of Romans, as subverting the Roman imperial ideology: Romans 13 is regularly appealed to as an argument against a “counterimperial” reading of the rest of Paul. However, if Paul really did intend it as a general statement, based on God’s appointed order in creation (as per [1] above), the less it stands in the way of this counterimperial reading. it would be ironic if, in seeking to avoid a totalitarian reading of this one text, we make it so Rome-specific that it blinds us to the far deeper anti-imperial message of Paul’s gospel as a whole.

The wider context gives good reasons to support (1), even if we want to nuance the question of how Paul’s readers would have heard what he was saying. As we have suggested, 13:1-7 goes closely with 12:14-21, which we would be right to assume Paul would have said to any church at any time. Paul is well aware that persecution may come, and even if we date all the prison letters after Romans we are surely not going to say, with 1 Thessalonians and 2 Corinthians behind him (let alone the experiences ascribed to him in Acts), that he had a pragmatically rosy view of authorities in general. Just as in 12:14-21 he seems to have drawn on traditions about the words and actions of Jesus, so there may be a sense here, as in at least one gospel tradition, that even when they are grievously deceived and almost demonic, ruling authorities still have a certain level of divine authorization (see John 19:11; cf. the interesting exchange in Acts 23:1-5).

More especially, the point he stresses throughout 12:14-21 dovetails exactly into what he says in 13:1-7. One must not call down curses on persecutors, nor repay evil with evil, nor seek private retribution; punishment is God’s business. Now we see how Paul supposed, in part at least, that God went about that business. Of course, Paul believed in a final judgment (1:32; 2:1-16; 14:10) when all wrongs would be put to rights. But he now articulates, as a central point in 13:1-7, a standard Jewish and then Christian belief: that ruling authorities are what they are because God wants order in the present world. God is not going to allow chaos to reign even in the present evil age. Chaos and anarchy enable the powerful, the rich, and the bullies to come out on top, and they invariably do. God desires that even in the present time, even in the world that has not yet confessed Jesus as Lord, there should be a measure of justice and order. The point can easily be observed by thinking of situations where magistrates and judges are perceived to be failing badly in their duty to keep this order: before too long, vigilante groups and lynch mobs arise, taking “justice” into their own hands. One of the underlying theses that binds 12:14-21 and 13:1-7 together is therefore this: justice is served not by private vengeance but by individuals trusting the authorities to keep wickedness in check. Knowledge that the authorities are there to look after such matters is a strong incentive to forswear freelance attempts at justice.

This, as I say, looks back to many clear Jewish precedents. Isaiah spoke of pagan rulers accomplishing God’s purposes. Jeremiah urged Israel in exile to pray for the welfare of Babylon, because if Babylon was prospering, Israel would as well (Isa 10:5-11; 44:28-45:5; 46: 11; Jer 29:4-9; 27:6-11 [God gives Jerusalem into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar]; see also Dan 1:2; 2:21, 37-49; 4:25, 32; 5:18; Ezra 6:10; Prov 8:15-16; Bar 1:11; 1 Macc 7:33). The book of Esther turns on the potentially risky but eventually satisfactory position of Jews under pagan rule. Many Jews in the Second Temple period were happy to see God’s hand in the rise, as well as the fall, of great powers, and even though the early hailing of Rome as such a power must have left an extremely bitter taste in later mouths, the principle was established, and articulated in sundry writings of Paul’s period: God intends that there should be good and wise rulers, and if rulers know what their business really is they will seek divine wisdom to help them accomplish it (e.g., Wis 6:1-11).^⁵¹⁵ Romans 13:1-7 belongs fair and square on this map. It occupies a similar space, ironically enough, to that occupied by the more moderate Pharisees, the Hillelites, who were content for the moment to live and let live (though still believing in the eventual Age to Come and the worldwide rule of the Messiah), rather than the fiercer Shammaites who would have seen such a position as a compromise. From one point of view, if Paul’s conversion made him look, on this point, more like a Hillelite than the Shammaite he had been before, that only serves to emphasize how very Jewish, how “natural,” a position like this would seem.^⁵¹⁶

But did Paul not believe, and hint at several points in Romans itself, that the gospel and rule of Jesus the Messiah, the world’s true Lord, subverted the gospel and rule of Caesar, whose cult was growing fast in precisely the cities (Cornith, Ephesus, and so on) where he spent most of his time?^⁵¹⁷ Yes; and this is perhaps part of the point. If the gospel of Jesus, God’s Son, the King who will rule the nations (1:3-4; 15:12) does indeed reveal God’s justice and salvation, which put to shame the similar claims of Caesar (1:16-17; Phil 2:5-11; 3:19-21); if it is true that those who accept this gospel will themselves exercise a royal reign (5:17); and if Paul suspects that his audience in Rome are getting this message--then it is all the more important to make it clear that this does not mean a holy anarchy in the present, an overrealized eschatology in which the rule of Christ has already abolished all earthly governments and magistrates. Precisely because Paul is holding out for the day when all creation will be renewed (8:1-27), when every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus (Phil 2:10-11), it is vital that the excitable little groups of Christians should not take the law into their own hands in advance.^⁵¹⁸ In particular (and with events in Palestine in mind), it is important that his readers do not take his covert polemic against the imperial ideology as a coded call to a Christian version of the so-called fourth philosophy.^⁵¹⁹ This is where Paul’s probable awareness of the riots under Claudius, and the reputation that both Jews and Christians will have gained in Rome because of them, must come into play. God does not intend that Christians should become agents of anarchy, which would replace the tyranny of the officially powerful with the tyranny of the unofficially powerful. The ultimate overthrow of pagan power comes by other means, and Paul has outlined in Romans 5 and 8 what those means are. Rome could cope with ordinary revolutions. Rome could not cope, as history bears witness, with a community owing allegiance to the crucified and risen Messiah as the world’s true Lord.

In fact, reading Romans 13 against the backdrop of the extravagant claims made within the burgeoning imperial cult highlights one point in particular. According to Paul (and the Jewish tradition in which he stands) the rulers are not themselves divine; they are set up by the one God, and they owe this God allegiance. Romans 13 constitutes a severe demotion of arrogant and self-divinizing rulers. It is an undermining of totalitarianism, not a reinforcement of it. By implication, if the rulers themselves are given the task of judging wicked people within their sphere of authority, they themselves will be judged by the God who set them up. Paul does not say this explicitly; but in 13:4 he twice describes the rulers as God’s “servants” (διάκονοι diakonoi), and if he is capable of pointing out that God’s servants in the gospel will be judged on how they have performed, there is every reason to suppose that God’s “servants” within the civic community will themselves also face an ultimate tribunal (cf. 1 Cor 3:10-15; 4:1-5, having described himself and Apollos as God’s diakonoi in 3:5; 2 Cor 5:10). This, however, is not his point at the moment (just as he does not say, in Romans 5-8, what will happen to those who are not “in Christ”), and we must remind ourselves that this is not intended as a full and balanced statement of everything Paul might have wanted to say on the subject. The main thing he wants to get across to the Roman Christians is that, even though they are servants of the Messiah Jesus, the world’s rightful Lord, this does not give them carte blanche to ignore the temporary subordinates whose appointed task, whether they know it or not, is to bring at least a measure of God’s order and justice to the world. Government and magistrates may be more or less good or bad; but--and this is Paul’s basic point--government qua government is intended by God and should in principle command submission from Christian and non-Christian alike.

Reading Rom 13:1-7 in the context of 12:14-21 raises a question, which Paul does not here even touch on: What happens when the “persecutors” (12:14) are the same people as “the governing authorities,” and are using their God-given power for that purpose? Since Paul does not raise the question here, we cannot press this passage for a hint of an answer; but we might again compare Acts 23:1-5. Even if this is merely a stylized scene constructed by Luke, it expresses the same balance we might get by reading Romans the way I have suggested, adding Philippians and the Thessalonian correspondence to the mix, and then returning with the same question. “Paul” in this story declares that God will strike the “whitewashed wall,” the judge who is behaving illegally. When confronted with the news that he is addressing God’s high priest, he apologizes formally, recognizing that he should not speak evil of a ruler. But he does not retract his charge that the ruler in question has behaved illegally and will be judged for it. A similar pattern emerges when Acts places Paul before pagan magistrates. He will submit to their authority, but he will also remind them of their duty (see Acts 16:19-40; 22:22-29; 25:6-12). We may be right to suspect that Paul could see, not far away, the battle that would come, in which Caesar insisted on an absolute allegiance that left no room for Jesus as Lord. Less than a century later, Polycarp died at the stake because of that; but even he, it seems, held on to a view of magistracy very similar to Paul’s.^⁵²⁰

In particular, Paul always insists on seeing the present in the light of the future, Romans 13:1-7 does not describe a new situation brought into being by the eschatological events concerning Jesus; but the obedience of Christians to earthly magistrates takes place under the sign of ultimate judgment (cf. again 2:1-16). This does not mean, as Paul’s own example bears out, that one must be politically and socially quiescent until the great renewal of all things. That is the slur made on the good name of inaugurated eschatology by those who want to insist on the full renewal right away. Preaching and living the gospel must always be announcing and following Jesus, rather than Caesar, as the true Lord. But the eschatological balance must be kept, The church must live as a sign of the coming complete kingdom of Jesus Christ; but since that kingdom is characterized by “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit,” it cannot be inaugurated in the present by chaos, violence, and hatred (cf. 14:17). The methods of the Messiah himself (12:14-21) must be used in living out his kingdom within the present world, passing away though it may be.

Romans 13:1-7 is about the running of civic communities, and the duty of Christians toward them. It does not mention or allude to the interactions between different civic communities or nations. It was because of this that later Christians developed a theory of “just war,” to argue at a new level that under certain circumstances it may be right to defend the interests of a nation or community, by force if necessary; and it is against that in particular that various pacifist movements have protested. Romans 13 is sometimes called as a witness in this discussion, but its relevance may be doubted (see the Reflections).

13:1. “Every person” (NRSV) is literally “every soul”--a clear enough indication, if such were needed, that by “soul” Paul means more than “the immaterial element within a human being.” The word ψυχή (psychē) regularly refers, in the New Testament, to the whole human being seen from the point of view of the person’s interior life, motivation, and intention. Here it is a way of indicating that every person as an individual must obey this command. The command itself is to “be subject” (NRSV), or “submit” (NIV, NEB/REB); not necessarily “obey” (JB, NJB), though that will usually follow. The point is that one must regard the governing authorities as having a rightful claim on one’s submission. The word has echoes of military formation: one must take one’s place in the appropriate rank.^⁵²¹

But who are the “authorities” to whom one owes this submission? Elsewhere in Paul there are times when the “rulers and authorities,” the “principalities and powers,” are primarily spiritual beings, shadowy but powerful entities that stand behind the visible and earthly rulers. This seems to be the case in, for instance, Rom 8:38-39. Sometimes it seems as though he intends to refer simultaneously to both earthly and heavenly powers; this is how 1 Cor 2:6-8 is usually read, and how Col 2:14-15 must be read. But here, though it is unlikely that Paul ever made a complete distinction between earthly and heavenly dimensions of civic authority, his primary focus is on the earthly rulers themselves. They are the ones who bear the sword (v. 4). They are the ones to whom one pays taxes (vv, 6-7).^⁵²²

The problem, of course, at the level of understanding Paul (to postpone for a minute the question of applying him today), is that in 1 Corinthians 2, and again in Col 2:15, Paul declares that the cross of Jesus Christ has defeated the powers. How can he now suggest that one should be subject to them? The answer seems to lie, whether or not Paul wrote Colossians, in the great christological poem in the first chapter of that letter, which it is affirmed that all things, including all powers and authorities in heaven and on earth, were created in, through, and for Christ, and are also reconciled in, through, and to him.^⁵²³ The tension, in other words, is not only between Romans 13 and Colossians 2; it is between Colossians 1 and Colossians 2. And--since Paul seldom sees the need to say everything he could in principle say on a topic every time he brings it up--it is perfectly feasible to propose that Paul in this case was stressing one of the more positive aspects of the “powers.” Some have argued, as noted above, that Rom 13:1-7 belongs with Col 1:20: that Paul commands submission to the powers because they have now been reconciled in Christ. But it seems much more likely that he does so in parallel with Col 1:16: he commands submission because they are part of God’s good created order. The fact that they are in rebellion does not of itself mean that submission is inappropriate.

Paul, characteristically, gives an explanation for the command: all authority is from God, and (the specific form of the general statement) the actually existing ones have been put there by God. This is not a specific commendation of the Roman Empire as against the ruling systems of other times and places; it is a general point about civic authority. It belongs with mainstream Second Temple Jewish tradition, and has parallels, including one surprising one, in the NT (e.g., Wis 6:3-10; John 19:11).

13:2-4. Paul backs up this initial command and explanation with a short discussion of what happens when people resist the authorities, and of the fact that these results are part of God’s appointed order. Resistance incurs “condemnation,” or “judgment” (NRSV, NIV) (v. 2), because rulers hold no terrors for those who do good, but only for wrongdoers (v. 3a). Paul could no doubt have given counterexamples from his own recent biography but his point here concerns God’s intended order, not its corruptions. He then turns the point around (v. 3b-4): if you want to go about your business without fear of the authorities, do what is good, and they will praise you. That is their God-given function. They are “ministers” (diakonoi), stewards” of God for this purpose: their delegated task is to praise good behavior. Conversely, then (v. 4b), if you do evil, you should be afraid, because authority has the right and responsibility to punish. Once again, the authority is God’s “steward,” this time to administer punitive justice--that is, “wrath”; this is the point at which the authority must do what the private individual may not do (12:14-21)--a point regularly missed in many popular-level discussions of the judicial role of civic authority.

13:5. This to-and-fro discussion of the appointed role of “authority” and the way in which “you” may encounter it, for good or ill, leads Paul back to reiterate his initial command, now with an extra reason: one must therefore submit, both because the alternative is “wrath” in this sense, and also because, recognizing the God-given role of authority, the educated Christian conscience ought to become disquieted if it finds itself resisting God’s “stewards.” Paul does not often mention the role of conscience in Christian behavior, but when he does, as here, it appears that this is not because it is marginal in his thinking but because he takes it for granted. The word occurs elsewhere in Rom 2:15; 9:1; most of the other Pauline references occur in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10; see also 2 Cor 5:11.

13:6-7. Conscience, too, prescribes therefore that one must pay taxes.^⁵²⁴ Once again Paul gives the authorities a high status: they are God’s λειτουργοί (leitourgoi), public servants (in a world where “public service” regularly had cultic overtones at least, sometimes explicit association with religious functions).^⁵²⁵ They must therefore receive what is due to them, whether the material dues of direct and indirect taxes (that is the likely distinction between the two words used here) or the non-material dues of respect and honor. This last point shows once more, not least in relation to Paul’s own practice in Acts, what is and is not meant. Paul was always ready to honor the office even while criticizing the present holder. Though of course one hopes that the holder will prove worthy of the office, and one knows that sometimes holders prove so unworthy as to need removing from office, being able to respect the office while at least reserving judgment about the holder is part of social and civic maturity. And, for Paul, being able to say “the existing powers are ordained by God” while living under a system that, as he makes clear elsewhere, was bristling with potential or actual blasphemy and injustice, is part of Christian maturity--a part he urges Roman readers to make their own.

1. Romans 13 has attracted so much opprobrium, particularly in the twentieth century where most thinking Westerners developed a more than justified horror of totalitarianism, that to many it seems counterintuitive to do anything but reject it outright. Either Paul did not write it, people say, or he did not mean it like it sounds, or he was just plain wrong. Whatever else you do with this passage, it is implied, you ought not to be caught agreeing with it.

Until, of course, your house is burgled. Or someone you love is murdered. Or you are cheated in business, or even in sport. Then, quite suddenly, you want someone to be in authority. Nobody enjoys the presence of a referee or umpire when they are trying to foul an opponent, or sneak offside; but everybody appeals to them when the other side do it. Actually, we none of us want to five in a world where the bullies get away with it, except when we are planning to do the bullying ourselves.

Libertarian histories of Western culture read the story of the last millennium as one of increasing social and civic freedom. The long march from Magna Carta to universal adult suffrage was not, in fact, as smooth an upward rise to freedom as it is sometimes made out to be. Oppression and systemic injustice still exist within every Western democracy. But since we tell our story as one of dethroning authorities and discovering new freedoms, we are bound to find Romans 13 a surprise, or even a shock. Unless we are actual anarchists, however, we will soon acknowledge explicitly that all societies need some regulation, some ordering, some structure of authority; and we will soon recognize that this ordering is no use unless everyone is, at least in principle, signed up to it or, failing that, able to be coerced into going along with it.

Romans 13:1-7 then issues commands that are so obvious that they only make sense if there might be some reason in the air not to obey the civic authorities. More or less everyone in the ancient world, with the possible exception of Cynic philosophers on the one hand and occasional radical groups like the extreme Shammaite or “zealous” Jews on the other, would have shrugged their shoulders and accepted that some form of civic authority was a necessary part of an ordered world. If a moral or religious teacher took the trouble to explain the rationale for such authorities, and insisted that those who embraced that moral or religious system were bound to obey them, that would be of itself a sign of what we have, in fact, seen both elsewhere in Romans and elsewhere in Paul: that the average Christian might well have supposed that there might be grounds for not doing so. You only put up “No Smoking” signs where people are likely to want to smoke. And, since Paul himself frequently hints at what the grounds for not obeying the authorities might be, we do not need to speculate for long about them. They are the sovereignty and saving justice of the one true God, unveiled in action in the world’s true Lord, Jesus the Messiah.

Romans 13, in short, carries a hidden “nevertheless” at its heart. Jesus is Lord; nevertheless, his followers must obey their earthly rulers. This is not because the rulers have somehow, in theory, already submitted to his lordship, but despite the fact that they have not done so. The authorities are part of the present world order, the good and wise structure of God’s original creation. Not to submit might look like a noble piece of overrealized eschatology, claiming to belong already to the new world promised when the full day dawns (see 13:11-14); but to make complete claim ahead of time is in fact to move toward a dualism in which the goodness of the present world, even in its not-yet-redeemed state, is denied. That, in fact, is what millenarian and similar movements have classically done.

2. The authority of the state, however, is strictly limited here by the rubric that stands over the whole paragraph: the rulers exist by God’s will and at his pleasure. The book of Daniel is a graphic description of how this works out within a pagan world and how the people of God may find their way through the resultant moral minefield. It is noticeable that even when human rulers become fatally guilty of hubris, and court their own destruction, this does not signal the end of all human rule. Even in the apocalyptic scenario in Daniel 7, the one who eventually sits on a throne dispensing judgment is “one like a son of man.” Just as there is a dialectical movement between Daniel 1-6 (the stories of human kings and God’s people) and Daniel 7 (the enthronement of the Ancient of Days and the vindication of “one like a son of man,” representing God’s people), so in Romans 13 the Christian belongs in the tension between the present existence, owing submission to earthly rulers, and the promised future “day.” Just because we have become horribly aware of the dangers of brutal, self-serving, self-justifying “governments,” it does not follow that there are no errors in the opposite direction.

3. Putting together Rom 12:14-21 and 13:1-7 has the salutary effect of reminding us of one of the most important, if pragmatic, reasons for there being governing authorities. Private vengeance, whether individual or (as in the lynch mob) corporate, is shocking in itself and can easily spiral out of control into vendettas and generations of senseless brutality. Where authorized policing fails, or is felt to be failing, the authority vacuum is quickly filled, and the results are seldom happy. Of course, commanding people to pray for their persecutors, not to repay evil with evil, to live at peace with all, and above all not to avenge themselves, is excellent advice at a purely personal level. People who allow vengeance, however apparently justified, to dominate their motivational life will become eaten up by it. It is a way of allowing the evil that someone has done to you to continue to hold you in its power. Part of the enormous breakthrough achieved by Jesus in his teaching and death is found just here: that to suffer innocently and not to retort or retaliate is to win a far greater victory than can ever be achieved by hitting back. It is to win a victory over evil itself.

4. I write this in the wake of September 11, 2001--a date people will recall for decades, perhaps centuries, and shudder at the memory. Terrorist atrocities against innocent and unarmed civilians, especially on so large a scale, cry out so loudly for punishment that any comment might seem superfluous. Yet in the debates that followed that terrible day Romans 13 was frequently invoked in support of military action by the United States and its allies against other countries; and one of the great problems of Christian moral discourse has been precisely that Romans 13 does not deal with such matters. That is why “Just War” theory was invented, in an attempt to develop the idea of magistracy, of a justice that kept a society in balance, beyond the borders of a particular jurisdiction and into the realms of conflict between nations. The problem with this is, to put it perhaps oversimply, that Romans 13 is dovetailed into an argument against the taking of private vengeance (12:14-21). When punitive and retaliatory action is taken against a nation, or a group within a nation, it becomes difficult to maintain that it is judicial and legitimated by Romans 13. That is not to say that such action is wrong or unjustified, only that this text will not support it. Many have concluded, rightly in my view, that the only way forward is the establishment of a worldwide justice system that will carry moral weight across different cultures and societies. Unfortunately, one of the obstacles to this is precisely the determination of some of the more powerful nations to oppose such a thing, lest they themselves be brought to account for the ways in which they have used, and perhaps abused, their own power. Romans 13 will not help in addressing these issues, then. But the rest of Romans, setting forth God’s justice, freedom, and peace over against those of Caesar, could certainly do so.

NIV: ⁸Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

NRSV: ⁸Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

This little passage on love and the law is clearly a summary of issues that Paul lays out more fully elsewhere (e.g., Galatians 5). It reverts to the theme of 12:3-13, and it may be, as we suggested above, that Paul intends this whole section (chaps. 12-13) as some kind of chiasm (see the Overview on 12:1-16:27). Within this, 13:8-10 plays a similar role within chapters 12-16 as a whole to that played by 1 Corinthians 13 within 1 Corinthians 12-14 as a whole, identifying the characteristic that must be central to all authentic Christian community life.

The thematic difference between this passage and 12:3-13, however, is that there Paul was dealing with life within the Christian community, and here he appears to be advocating a love for neighbors of any and every persuasion. The opening words of v. 8, indeed, if read without a break from what has gone before, look as if they are simply saying “always pay your bills on time”; we must assume that he is still talking about the wider community represented by those who levy taxes and demand respect (v. 7). And this view of a wider community alerts us again to a wider reference within Romans. Just as 12:1-2 looked back to 1:18-32, seeing in Christian worship the reversal of idolatry and dehumanization, so the present passage looks back to 2:17-29 in particular. With 3:27-31; 8:1-8; and 10:5-11 in the background, Paul sketches a brief but telling picture of how the Torah is fulfilled in that love of neighbor which will bring admiration, rather than blasphemy, from the watching world (cf. 2:16-17). Here, in other words, are the “true Jews” (see 2:28-29), those who are bringing God’s light and love to the world. This coheres well with the context of Gal 5:14, the other passage where Paul says almost exactly the same thing (see also 1 Corinthians 13, where, though Paul does not mention Torah, the matchless exposition of love and its abiding permanence reminds us of Jewish eulogies of Torah or wisdom; see Sirach 24).

The passage consists, typically, of an opening statement and explanation (v. 8), followed by an extended explanation of the explanation (v. 9), leading to a summary that repeats and reinforces the original explanation (v. 10).

13:8. Although the idea of “debt,” immediately after instructions concerning money, using the cognate word όφείλάς (ophelias, 13:17; “what is due them,” NRSV; “what you owe them,” NIV), is most naturally taken literally, Paul has twice already in Romans used it as a metaphor, once for his own obligation to bring the gospel to the whole world (1:14) and again to indicate the Christian’s obligation to live by the Spirit and not the flesh (8:12). For the sense of obligation we may compare 4:4; 15:1, 27; the root regularly carries both lit

and metaphorical meanings in early Christian writings.^⁵²⁶ The context thus breathes life into what might be for him a nearly dead metaphor, giving a particular force to the command to love: This is a debt, owed to everyone, that can never be discharged.

The explanation, in the second half of the verse, should not be misunderstood. Paul does not, of course, mean “Love fulfils the Torah; therefore love is the way to earn righteousness with God.” He does not suppose that this was ever the purpose of Torah. Rather, the purpose of Torah was that Israel might be God’s light to the world; Israel was “entrusted with God’s oracles,” but proved unfaithful. Those who are justified by faith “apart from the works of the Torah” (3:28) are now, perfectly logically, instructed to live as the people through whom what the Torah by itself could not do is accomplished (8:3-8; 10:1-11). People who love their neighbors thus “fulfill Torah,” both in the immediate sense that they will never do any of the things Torah forbids, and in the wider sense that through them God’s way of life will be seen to advantage. The Greek for “the one who loves the neighbor has fulfilled the law” could also be translated “the one who loves has fulfilled the other law” (τόν έτερον νόμον ton heteron nomon; cf. τις έτέρα έντολή tis hetera entolē, “any other commandment,” in v. 9). This has sometimes been adopted by exegetes with the supposed meaning that love fulfills, not Torah itself, but the “other” law--that is, the one that Jesus gave to replace it. This is very awkward in view of the quotation from the Decalogue that follows immediately; and Paul rarely uses the verb “love” absolutely, without an object. The apparent echo of heteron nomon in 7:23 is a pure accident.

13:9-10. Paul explains (γάρ gar) what he means by saying that love fulfills Torah. First he simply states that all the commandments are in fact summed up in the command to love (v. 9); then he sums this up to the effect that love does no evil, and draws the conclusion that love is indeed Torah’s fulfillment (v. 10).^⁵²⁷ Loving one’s neighbor is itself, of course, a command in Torah (Lev 19:18, quoted here), though not part of the Ten Commandments. Paul was not the first to see it as a summary of the whole law; this is one of several passages in Romans 12-13 where we are right to detect echoes of the teaching of Jesus himself (Matt 22:37-39 and par.; see also Jas 2:8, where this commandment is described as the “kingly law,” presumably meaning “the command given by the king,” i.e., Jesus; cf. 2 Macc 3:13). The specific commands he lists here consist of four of the last five of the ten (omitting the bearing of false witness, a deficiency that one good ms and a few lesser ones tried to rectify), following the LXX order of Deut 5:17-21 (adultery, murder, theft, coveting) rather than that of Exod 20:13-17 (placing theft before murder).^⁵²⁸ The idea of being able to sum up Torah in a single phrase has a long history in Judaism of which Paul was no doubt well aware.^⁵²⁹

Though v. 10 opens, unusually, without a verbal connection to what precedes, it is clearly intended as a summary of v. 9. It should not be supposed that the full achievement of “love” consists simply in doing no evil; as Dr. Johnson said, to do no harm is the praise of a stone, not a man. Rather, love, on its way to higher and more positive goals, takes in this negative one in a single stride: If love seeks the highest good of the neighbor, it will certainly do no wrong to him or her. We should notice that Paul leaves no room for the slippery argument whereby sexual malpractice has been routinely justified in the modem world; “love,” as the summary of the law, includes the command not to commit adultery, and could never be confused with the “love” that is frequently held to excuse it. One only has to ask the question, whether adultery routinely builds up or breaks down human communities and families, to see the point. Once again, then, the “fulfillment of Torah” does not mean the performance of “good works” designed to put God in one’s debt; rather (and perhaps this is why Paul writes v. 8 in this fashion), it is the discharge of one’s own debt, to one’s neighbor but also to God. This passage takes its place alongside Paul’s several earlier statements about the Torah, confirming the positive understanding of it for we argued earlier, and making it clear once ethical obligation is not undermined but reaffirmed by a proper understanding of justification and Christian life.

In the light of the suggestion that this passage belongs to some extent at least with 12:3-13, we may reflect on both together.

1. The obvious centrality of love within early Christian ethics is so well known that we often overlook how striking, almost revolutionary, this was. Judaism, of course, cherished the command to love, but did not highlight it in the same way. Within the pagan world there was far less emphasis on anything that approximates to the early Christian meaning of “love,” modeled as it was on Jesus himself. This oversight on the part of contemporary readers goes with the more practical problem that we all give lip service to the idea of love but we do not usually reflect on how to do it. Granted the prevailing context of romanticism and existentialism, it is normally assumed that love will “just happen” as long as people are sincere and do what comes naturally. The moral history of the twentieth century should have given the lie to this, but since it is a convenient thing to believe (giving one the feel of virtue without the need for hard moral work) the belief continues unabated, being propagated by most movies, many novels, and a million shallow sermons. We urgently need moral reflection, at every level of church and society, on what exactly love is, what it means and does not mean, and more especially the steps of moral learning and effort required to attain it. The very fact that this sounds so “inauthentic” (“You mean I’ve got to pretend?” one can hear people asking) is a measure of how far we have allowed ethical reflection to diverge from early Christianity.

2. Of course, Paul wants love to be “genuine” (άνυπόκριτος anypokritos, “unhypocritical”). But here is the strange thing. If you try to treat someone you thoroughly dislike as though in fact you cared very deeply for them--if you try to think of how it is to live inside their skin and walk in their shoes--then it may well happen that a genuine sympathy arises, and from that real affection, and finally an unhypocritical love. This is, after all, more or less what Paul is commending in 12:19-21. The love of which Paul speaks is tough; not simply in the sense of “tough love” as applied to the difficult task of bringing up children, though that may be true as well, but in the sense that, since it does not spring from the emotions but from the will, love will grit its teeth and act as if the emotions were in place, trusting that they will follow in good time. If we reduce ethics to emotions, we lose not only consistency of behavior but also the very possibility of moral discourse.

3. The unity of the church, highlighted in 12:3-8, remains a goal to be worked for despite the apparent failure of many unity schemes of the period between 1960 and 2000. Here Paul stresses the need for humility and mutual respect between different gifts within a Christian community; when everyone is doing what they are called to do to the utmost of their powers, the whole body is in good health. The ecumenical task may consist not least in the humble recognition, between the different denominations, that we may after all have different callings--over lapping, interlocking, most likely, but perhaps different as well. This is not to minimize doctrinal differences, which still matter; nor is it to connive at the scandalous fragmentation of the body of Christ, or the “one body in Christ” as here. It is to suggest that within the greater unity for which we must work we should be prepared to allow room for the particular tasks, characteristics, and genius of the different “churches” that have grown up over the years, particularly since the Reformation. The ecumenical movements of the twentieth century had a dangerously modernist feel (bringing everything together into one grand and possibly grandiose structure); maybe the ecumenical movements of the twenty-first century, though they must avoid the postmodern trap of easygoing acceptance of all differences, which results in further fragmentation, should work at ways of humbly affirming appropriate differences while learning how to celebrate and share all we hold in common.

4. In particular, the common life of love in the one body should also give rise, as in 13:8-10, to the command of love for the neighboring non-Christian world. This must of course work on a daily basis at the local level, in the street, the theater, the office, the factory. There will always be room for improvement-and for humility, penitence, and fresh starts-at that level. Equally, we should not ignore the bracing call to whole churches, and to communities and even countries that think of themselves as basically Christian, to act toward their neighbors in the global village with that same love, the debt that can never be discharged. One of our major world problems, bringing a myriad other evils in its wake, is precisely financial debts that can never be discharged because the compound interest increases faster than ailing economies can service it. Since the lending countries belong to the part of the world that, rightly or wrongly, is seen as a “Christian” (and in some cases sees itself thus), we can scarcely avoid the problem, with all its ironies. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor”; working out what that means personally and collectively, and putting it into practice, is one of the most urgent tasks we currently face.

NIV: ¹¹And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. ¹²The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. ¹³Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. ¹⁴Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

NRSV: ¹¹Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; ¹²the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; ¹³let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. ¹⁴Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Paul ends the section where he began in 12:1-2, setting the Christian’s moral obligations in the context of knowing what the time is: It is almost daybreak. This is a familiar image in early Christian writing, again quite possibly going back to Jesus himself; and Paul has developed it elsewhere (1 Thess 5:1-11; see also Matt 24:42-44; 26:45; Mark 13:33-37; Luke 12:35-46; 21:36; Eph 5:8-16; the idea of staying awake to be about one’s Christian tasks is also evident in Eph 6:18). This idea flows consistently from the early Christian belief that with the resurrection of Jesus God’s promised new age had dawned, but that full day was yet to come (see above all 1 Cor 15:20-28). Christians therefore live in the interval between the early signs of dawn and the sunrise itself, and their behavior must be appropriate for the day, not the night. There is such a thing as appropriate and good nocturnal behavior, but as with 1 Thess 5:7 Paul takes “night” as a synecdoche (one part standing for the whole) for the types of evil behavior that flourish away from the light. There is also a trace here of the metaphor Paul develops more in 1 Thess 5:8 (and that reaches fuller expression in Eph 6:10-17): What you need, between dawn and full day, are the “weapons of light” (13:12). Finally there is the command to “put on” the Lord Jesus Christ, an idea paralleled both in Galatians (3:27) and in Eph 4:24. This paragraph, in short, though perfectly at home at this point in Romans, bringing the opening exhortation of chaps. 12-13 to an appropriate and sharp conclusion, is also a window on several aspects of Pauline ethics. It should not pass unremarked that this was the passage read by Augustine after hearing children’s voices chanting “pick up and read, pick up and read”; it was the final push he needed to make a clean break with his past and devote himself entirely to God.^⁵³⁰

13:11. Paul assumes that his readers will know what “time” it is (the word for “time” here is καιρός [kairos], a special moment rather than mere chronological time); as in 12:2, he expects them to be familiar with the idea of the old age, which is passing away, and the new age, which is dawning. (The NIV’s “understanding the present time” is a somewhat ponderous way of drawing attention to the significance of what he says.) He expects them to be up before day breaks fully; this theme, with its echoes of the Easter morning stories, resonates through the early Christian sense of new creation, new life bursting through the wintry crust of the old world. It is, he insists, time to wake up.

The reason he gives is that “our salvation” is nearer now than when first we believed. Paul does not say, as many of his interpreters have supposed that he said, that the final end of which he speaks in Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4-5, and elsewhere, will certainly come within a generation; but he knows that it might well do so, and insists that it is the more urgent that Christians behave already in the manner that will then be appropriate. Though “salvation” can refer to saving events during the present course of history (e.g., Phil 1:19), and Paul can insist in one passage that “the day of salvation” is already present (2 Cor 6:2), here the word has its normal meaning, referring to the final day when God will renew all things in Christ and give all the justified their glorious, risen bodies, and investing that event with its sense of “rescue from disaster” (see Rom 5:9-10; 8:24, 29-30; Phil 3:20-21). The idea of the eschatological moment coming “near,” which Paul repeats in the next verse, carries echoes of Jesus’ original proclamation, as in Mark 1:15 and parallels: God’s kingdom “is near.”^⁵³¹ And now, he says, it is nearer than it was at the time we became believers; this is in one sense obvious, but in another needs saying as a reminder that though to us the passage of time seems to move on without much change we should not forget that the great future moment is steadily coming closer.

13:12. By way of explaining what he means by saying it is time to wake up, he declares that the night is nearly over and the day is breaking, and draws the conclusion in a mixed metaphor: it is time to stop nocturnal activities and put on the “weapons” proper for daylight. (The metaphor is more obviously, and gloriously, mixed in 1 Thessalonians 5, where those who are asleep will go into labor pains, because a thief is breaking into the house, while those who are awake should not get drunk, but should put on their armor.) Though “putting on” is the normal term for clothing or protective armor, the verb anticipates v. 14, where it is “the Lord Jesus Christ” who is “put on.” The weapons here are “of light,” contrasting with the “works of darkness”; “of light” seems to mean “appropriate for daylight,” “the weapons that children of day will need.” (The NRSV and the NIV translate όπλα [hopla] as “armor.” The word properly denotes military equipment, not primarily clothing; however, the verb here and in Eph 6:11 is ordinarily used of putting on clothes.)

13:13-14. Paul has in mind, clearly, what in Galatians he calls “the works of the flesh,” the things that characterize humanity in rebellion against its creator (Gal 5:19). As is often pointed out “flesh” here means much more than “physicality”; for “quarreling and jealousy” (NRSV) you need an unquiet spirit as well as a sharp tongue and an envious eye. Nevertheless his main target here is the abuse of the body, one’s own and often that of others as well: wild parties, drinking-bouts, sexual immorality and licentiousness. These are characteristic nighttime behaviors in the literal sense that they normally happen after dark, and in Paul’s metaphorical sense that they belong with the old age rather than with the new day that is dawning in Christ (see 12:2). We should not forget that “quarreling and jealousy” are put on exactly the same level as immorality; there are many churches where the first four sins are unheard of but the last two run riot.

Instead, Paul commands his readers to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” (NRSV), or, as the NIV rightly interprets, “do not think about how to gratify” the desires that come from the corruptible and rebellious side of human nature. Paul has here returned to the basic commands of 6:12-13 (where, as here in v. 12, he speaks of “weapons,” though there it is the parts of the body that are to become “weapons of righteousness”) and of 8:12-13. And though his particular expressions shift from passage to passage, his underlying terminology is completely consistent. The “body,” which will die but be raised, must already in the present be given to God in service and worship (12:2); the “flesh” will die, and its efforts to drag the Christian down with it must be resisted. There must be no loophole, no secret areas where license is permitted, where the “desires” of the “flesh” are tolerated, let alone encouraged (see 7:4-6).

The ultimate safeguard against the seduction of the “flesh” in this full sense is Jesus himself--the Lord, the Messiah. In Gal 3:27 it is “the Messiah” who is to be “put on”; in Eph 5:24 and Col 3:10 it is “the new human being”; but the imagery of putting on a new suit of clothes, carrying as it may well do overtones of baptism, is used in several different senses and cannot easily be systematized. (In 1 Cor 15:53-4 and 2 Cor 5:3 it is used in relation to the resurrection body; in Col 3:12 it is used of the key Christian virtues; see also the passage about baptism and behavior in Romans 6.) Frequently when Paul uses more than one name or title for Jesus the one he wishes to emphasize is placed first; here, by saying, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” he seems to be drawing attention to the sovereignty of Jesus, not simply over the believer (who is bound to obey the one whose servant he or she is], but perhaps more particularly over the forces of evil that are ranged against the gospel and those who embrace it. The Lord Jesus Christ thus becomes the personification of “the weapons of light” in v. 12: putting him on like a suit of armor is the best protection against the powers of the present darkness (see Eph 6:12). Paul is addressing those who have already “put on Christ” in baptism (Gal 3:27). The assumption must be that he is urging them, as a regular spiritual discipline, to invoke the presence and power of Jesus as Lord of all things to be their defense against all evil, not least the evil toward which they might be lured by their own “flesh.”

1. There are three things this passage highlights as basic to Christian behavior. The first is to know what time one is living at. Though as we have seen there are social and cultural reasons why it seems counterintuitive to say so, the Christian is committed to the belief that the world’s new day dawned with Jesus the Messiah, and that ever since his resurrection the world has been caught in the overlap between the old and the new, seen here as the moment just before full dawn when those who know their business are already up and behaving as in the daytime. The mental, moral, emotional, and spiritual effort required to sustain a belief in inaugurated eschatology may at times seem impossible. But the effort must be made. Without it, Christian moral teaching can easily degenerate into apparently baseless, or even pointless, exhortations. Why bother staying awake at midnight?^⁵³²

2. The second basic point Is the rejection of “the works of darkness,” and the making of no provision for “the desires of the flesh.” The balancing point between unbridled hedonism on the one hand and nervous dualism on the other is very delicate, and Christians who react against the excesses of the one position are often in danger of lapsing into the other. It is important to read the present passage with 12:1-2 in mind, recognizing and celebrating the goodness of the body while (as in 8:12-13) rejecting some of the characteristic things that the body gets up to--which are what Paul calls “the works of the flesh.” Equally, it is important, in celebrating the goodness of the created body, and delighting in the truth articulated in the next chapter, that everything made by God is good (14:14; cf. I Cor 10:25-27; 1 Tim 4:4), not to be led astray into thinking that therefore all rules concerning eating, drinking, and sexual practice are now irrelevant, shown up as unnecessary and probably dualistic restrictions on God-given liberty. Far from it. There are many things that must simply be ruled out, cut off without mercy; and drunkenness and sexual immorality (which often go together, of course) are among them. “As the flesh will make its own demands, there is no need to meet it halfway”^⁵³³

3. Third, there is the positive command to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul never explains what exactly he thinks will constitute obedience to this attractive-sounding but to us opaque command, or to the others like it. Since it is similar to the “putting on Christ” that occurs in baptism (Gal 3:27), we may suppose that he has in mind the spiritual discipline, through daily prayer and meditation, of invoking Jesus himself as Lord (and therefore sovereign over oneself and over all powers that might attack) and savior (and therefore able to rescue one from harm). One of the best ways of doing this, practiced in many Christian traditions, is to meditate on the Gospel narratives about Jesus, placing oneself in the position of one of the onlookers or participants in the story and allowing the presence of Jesus to be felt and known, and with that presence allowing his own struggles against evil, and his call to take up the cross and follow him, to have their full effect. The reading of a gospel passage at a daily or weekly eucharist, followed by the solemn invoking of the risen Lord and feeding on the symbols of his self-giving love, is known in many Christian traditions as an excellent way of steadily obeying this most positive of ethical commands.

ROMANS 14:1-15:13
GOD’S CALL TO UNITY OF LIFE AND WORSHIP ACROSS BARRIERS OF CUSTOM AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

Romans 14:1-15:13 must be treated as a single section. The final paragraph (15:7-13), it is true, also serves as the concluding paragraph for the major theological exposition not only of chaps. 12-15 but of the letter as a whole. That is part of the effect of 15:12, which echoes the theme of 1:3-5 (Jesus as the risen Messiah, the Lord of the whole world). But, as the repetition of “welcome” in 14:1 and 15:7 indicates, 15:7-13 is a summary and indeed celebration of the point that 14:1 has introduced. These two occurences of προσλαμβάνεσθε (proslambanesthe), together with the note that God welcomes someone in 14:3 and that Christ welcomes “you” in 15:76, are the only occurrences of the word in Paul other than Philemon 17.

This exegetical decision strongly inclines me to a particular view of the subject matter of the whole section. It is remarkable that nowhere between 14:1 and 15:6 does Paul use the words “Jew” and “Gentile,” or “circumcised” and “uncircumcised.” He discusses the problems faced by the little church in Rome purely in terms of the different opinions that members and groups have on matters of food, drink, and observance of special days. He talks in considerable detail about the need for patience and love rather than straining one another’s consciences. He speaks in terms of the “strong” and the “weak”; he sees himself as one of the “strong,” but his eventual argument (15:1-6) is that the “strong” should follow the example of the Messiah in not “pleasing themselves.”

Thus far, what he says is compatible with several different readings of the situation, and scholarship has duly come up with them. Divisions and subdivisions have been analyzed with great care, but no consensus has been reached.^⁵³⁴ However, when we add 15:7-13, as I believe we must, we suddenly find that Paul speaks of “the circumcision” (v. 8) and “the Gentiles” (v. 9), and then concludes the entire section with a string of scriptural quotations that celebrate the fact that Gentiles are coming to join the people of the one God, under the worldwide rule of Israel’s Messiah. At this point we are, of course, back on the same map as in Romans 1-11.

The best reading of this problem, I think, is that the divisions Paul knows to exist within the Roman church have at least a strong element about them of the Jew/Gentile tension that has been underneath so much of the letter. This is by no means to say that “the weak” are Jewish Christians and “the strong” are Gentile Christians.^⁵³⁵ Paul is himself a Jewish Christian who sees himself as one of the “strong”; and, if Galatians is anything to go by, there might well be Gentile Christians whom he would categorize as “weak.” Rather, the matters about which disagreement has arisen, threatening to thwart united worship of the one God from people of all sorts, stem not principally from other types of cultural pressures, but from the continuing varied influence of the Jewish law within parts of the Christian community.^⁵³⁶

This explains why he does not mention Jews and Gentiles until the final summary paragraph. To do so earlier would give the wrong impression; the divisions within the church may well not have lain exactly down the ethnic fault-line, since as we noted there might be both “strong” and “weak” Jewish Christians and both “strong” and “weak” Gentile Christians. In addition, to mention too early in the discussion the fact that there was an element of ethnicity about the whole business would have emphasized the very thing he wanted to avoid, drawing the line more firmly in the sand and polarizing those on either side, rather than doing his best to blur the line that was in danger of being drawn, and to insist that people from either side of it should learn to live together and especially to worship together.

It should not be necessary to labor the point that all the people Paul has in mind here are Christians (unlike chapter 11, where he is speaking of Jewish non-Christians).^⁵³⁷ They all give allegiance to Jesus as Lord, a point he makes pivotal in 14:1-12; they all believe themselves to be sharing in the life of God’s kingdom (14:17) and the service of the Messiah (14:18; 15:5, 5-6). They have a duty to one another because they are all brothers and sisters for whom the Messiah died (14:15). This section is not, then, a way of outlining how Christians should live alongside non-Christian Jewish neighbors in Rome. As we might have inferred from the present section of the letter, where chaps. 12-13 have laid a foundation and chaps. 14-15 now build on it, these are instructions for the church.

But we do not know as much about the church as Paul did, or at least thought he did. He assumes much that we cannot even guess. The fact that he writes such a substantial and closely argued section of the letter oriented toward this topic, in the light of the spare and brief comments on several major matters in chaps. 12-13, is a strong indication that he believed he was addressing a real, not a theoretical or merely possible, problem. His basic appeal to “welcome one another” implies that the church was divided into various groups, probably each meeting in a separate small gathering, a different house, with mutual suspicions or even antipathies. It may well be that the problem had become particularly acute when the capital’s Jewish population, expelled five or six years earlier by Claudius, had after Nero’s accession returned en masse, including a number of Jewish Christians who had for the time being, like Paul’s friends Prisca and Aquila, been forced to live elsewhere (Rom 16:3-5; cf. Acts 18:2-3).^⁵³⁸ We may assume that Prisca and Aquila were themselves “strong” Jewish Christians, like Paul; but the tensions between different groups, in terms of practices that some regarded as mandatory and others as irrelevant, was bound to increase under these circumstances. It is possible that some of the tensions that had emerged in the church in Corinth, due (at an earlier stage) to the personality cults reflected in 1 Corinthians 1-4 and (at a later stage) to the “super-apostles” and/or the “false apostles,” whoever they were, mentioned in 2 Corinthians, had arisen in Rome as well (was there, perhaps, a “Peter” party in Rome?). Our comparative uncertainty about the precise details of the Corinthian situation makes it difficult to do more than suggest that parallels might well have existed. We would be safe in assuming that there were several different Christian groups meeting in Rome, involving a spectrum of opinion on these and other debated issues. Paul is determined to address not just some, but all of them, and to use this opportunity to promote their unity.

The tensions we see in this section are therefore similar to those we find in 1 Corinthians 8-10, but with some significant differences. The problem in Corinth seems to have been primarily, in Witherington’s choice phrase, the question of venue rather than of menu.^⁵³⁹ Granted that it was legitimate, other things being equal, to eat meat sold in the market even though it had probably been offered to an idol as a sacrifice, it was not legitimate for Christians to go into the idol’s temple itself and take part in either the cult, or the meals, or other practices associated with it. This question does not seem to be at issue in Rome; the Christians are not, it seems, being tempted to visit idol temples, or if they are Paul does not allude to the fact. But the question of whether to eat meat, and the discussion of how to avoid offending the conscience of a fellow Christian, joins the two discussions together. it is not unlike the different discussions of justification, of the promises to Abraham, and so forth, in Romans and Galatians: a different but related situation causes Paul to draw on the same stock of ideas, producing overlap but not identity.

Paul’s analysis and treatment of the problem is notable for its initial highlighting of “faith” in 14:1-2, and its return to this in 14:22-23. This raises the question, which an extended discussion like this prompts in any case: what is the relationship of the present passage to the entire letter so far? The mention of “faith” obviously gives more specific focus to this, since “faith” has been a major theme, especially in 3:21-4:25 and 9:30-10:21. At first sight it might seem as though chap. 14 had little to do with these previous passages. This is not because it is about “ethics” rather than “theology”; as we saw in introducing chapters 12-16, this is a distinction we bring to Paul rather than find in him. It is rather that when he speaks of some people being “weak in faith,” and of others “believing one can eat anything” (14:1-2), this seems to have nothing to do with the meaning of “faith” in the earlier sections, where it has to do with the confession that Jesus is Lord and the belief that God raised him from the dead (10:9; cf. 4:24-25). Closer investigation, however, suggests otherwise. The first major argument of the section (14:1-12) hinges at every point on the fact that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. The word κύριος (kyrios, or in one case its cognate verb) occurs no fewer than ten times between v. 4 and v. 11 (the occurrence in v. 11 comes within the quotation of Isa 49:18; see below). The heart of the passage, v. 9, declares that the reason the Messiah died and rose was in order to become Lord of both dead and living; and this gives rise, as in 2:1-16, to a statement of the future judgment of God at which everything will be put to rights. When we put this together--Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord of all, with weak and strong alike together facing the future judgment and working out their present status in the light of that--we should probably conclude that this is, in fact, another variation on the same theme that Paul was offering in chaps. 3-4 and 9-10 (on the link with 4:20-21 see the commentary on 14:23). As we might have guessed from Gal 2:11-21, the first time “justification by faith” occurs as a theme in Paul’s writings, part of the meaning of this theme itself is the fact that all those who believe in Jesus as the risen Lord should be able to eat together despite cultural and ethnic differences.

This means that we should probably be open to taking “faith” in the passage as meaning something close to its meaning elsewhere in the letter; and this is in fact what we find. Paul does not imply that those who are “weak in the faith” have any less a grasp on the basic content of the faith (Jesus’ resurrection and lordship) than the others; only that, like those who have a weak conscience in 1 Corinthians 8, they have not thought through and worked out the full implications of that faith. Paul is constantly hinting that they should do so, but he knows from pastoral practice that people cannot necessarily be hurried on such issues and that, provided they share the basic faith itself, its relative “strength” or “weakness” should not hinder Christian fellowship. The “weak in faith,” then, are not people who only accept part of the Christian gospel; they are people whose faith, though real, has not matured to the point where they understand its full implications. Now the real point emerges: “Justification by faith” includes “fellowship by faith” as one of its key elements. All those who believe the gospel of Jesus the risen Messiah and Lord belong together in the same family. Romans 14-15 does not contain, after all, something other than Paul’s central theology. It is not simply “practical instructions” that leave the deep and detailed theology of justification and the rest far behind. It is, rather, what justification by faith looks like when it sits down at table in Christian fellowship.^⁵⁴⁰ And this, as we shall see when we get to 14:9-12, is what ultimately poses a challenge to the surrounding pagan culture itself.

Romans 14:1-15:13 divides up into three segments, which then further subdivide though less obviously. The topic is introduced in 14:1-12 and is given the basic analysis and answer: The weak and the strong must recognize that they have the same Lord, the one who died and rose again to be Lord of all. There will come a judgment at which all will give account, and it is not up to one Christian to pre-empt God’s right in advance. Then 14:13-23 focuses on the issue of how to cope in practice, granted that both sides agree not to condemn the other; here, as in 1 Cor 8:7.13, Paul emphasizes the importance of respecting, and not making demands on, one another’s consciences. This leads to 15:1-13, which moves in two waves to the great conclusion in which all alike praise the one God. Romans 15:1-6 shows the Messiah leading the way to this united praise, in his “not pleasing himself”; 15:7-13 insists again on the mutual welcome, based on the welcoming ministry of the Messiah, and celebrates with a sudden rush of scriptural citations the coming together in worship of Jews and Gentiles under the rule of this risen Messiah, through whom the one God will supply the present church with hope, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

NIV: ¹Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. ²One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. ³The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. ⁴Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

⁵One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. ⁶He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. ⁷For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. ⁸If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

⁹For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. ¹⁰You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. ¹¹It is written:

NRSV: ¹Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. ²Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. ³Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. ⁴Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.

⁵Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. ⁶Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.

⁷We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. ⁸If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. ⁹For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.

¹⁰Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. ¹¹For it is written,

14:1. Without a by-your-leave, Paul launches out from his broad general statement of Christian obligation into a very specific topic, which we must assume had direct relevance to the Roman Christians. There may well have been disputes and dissensions that had reached Paul’s ears: He opens abruptly: “As for the one who is weak as regards faith… .” (The singular is important, giving the opening a sharp focus [as against NRSV, which uses plural for the sake of the inclusive pronoun that follows]. NRSV margin suggests that “conviction” is a possible alternative for “faith,” but though this is possible it would break the link with earlier parts of the letter.) Paul’s command is immediate and to the point: you should welcome such a person. He seems to presuppose that this had not been happening.

Another presupposition emerges at once: Paul assumes that most of those reading or hearing this letter are, like him, “strong” in the sense soon to be developed. The “weak” are perhaps a minority; perhaps not even whole worshiping groups, but individuals within groups. Paul’s point is that they must be made welcome, but that this ought not to become an occasion for people to ask them about their particular views and engage them in disputes over matters that are the subject of genuine questioning. (διακρίσεις [diakrisis] can have a good sense, “distinguishing,” though here it seems to mean “disputes” in a bad sense; likewise, διαλογισμός [dialogismos] can have a positive or neutral sense, “reasoning,” or a negative one, “grumbling,” “disputing”; the range of meaning of the two words is such that the phrase could mean “disputes about disputes,” and perhaps that is more or less what Paul intends to convey.)

14:2-4. The first instance Paul gives contains almost all the elements of the whole first paragraph: (1) naming the disputed area; (2) commanding both sides to back off from passing judgment, on the grounds of God’s welcome of the other; (3) warning against “condemning”; (4) invoking the lordship of Jesus, and declaring that Jesus will vindicate either or both parties.

He begins with the issue that, we may well suppose, lay close to the heart of it all. In Antioch, Peter, Barnabas, and others had originally eaten with Gentile Christians, but had separated themselves after “certain persons came from James” (Gal 2:11-14). This is not an identical issue, but it belongs in the same family of disputes, at the center of which lay the centuries-old Jewish taboos regarding food, both what to eat, how to prepare it, and with whom and in what condition to eat it.^⁵⁴¹ L ike any such deep-rooted cultural issue, it would emerge in different forms in different situations, but with an underlying family resemblance; and it is not difficult to imagine the context of the present warning. If most Christians in Rome seemed happy to eat non-kosher food, or to eat meat bought in a market when it had almost certainly been originally offered in sacrifice to an idol, there were bound to be some for whom this was unthinkable. It went against everything they had been taught from childhood. If Christianity was an entirely new religion they might be prepared to throw away old beliefs. Part of the point, though, was that in the Messiah God had been faithful to the covenant. The Messiah was the goal of Torah. How then could Torah’s forbidding of certain foods be set aside?

These questions are not simple, and Paul could not expect every Christian to come instantly and from the heart to the same conclusion that he and many others had reached: that Torah had indeed been fulfilled but that a new age had thereby been inaugurated that, though it did not deny the goodness and God-givenness of Torah, nevertheless relativized many of its injunctions as relating to the period when God’s people were a single nation (see esp. Gal 3:15-29). But already the two poles of the dispute are set up, as in v. 2: one person believes it is permissible to eat everything, while another only eats vegetables. Paul does not say whether the latter position has been taken because kosher meat was unavailable, or because all meat for sale would have been offered to idols. People would know what he was talking about, namely, the kind of scruple that, because of such dangers, reckons it is best to steer clear of meat altogether.

To say that the first person “believes” that everything may be eaten is to say that, in this person’s construal of the whole Christian faith, this position is a result of their more fundamental convictions about God and Jesus. The NRSV’s “Some people believe in eating anything” is misleading, (a) implying that “eating anything” is the actual object of faith (as though on principle they ate the most peculiar things they could find), whereas Paul surely means that the underlying faith they hold has this as its corollary, and (b) substituting “anything” for “everything,” which gives the phrase almost a contemptuous ring (like “some people think they can get away with anything”). This is not Paul’s point. He is simply reporting the fact that some Christians--himself included--have come to the settled conviction that there are no food taboos in the kingdom of God.

Verse 3 issues the basic command and explanation that governs the whole discussion and that Paul will repeat from various angles until the final statement in 15:7. Neither party must pass judgment on the other, because God has welcomed both. Actually, Paul is a little more nuanced than this: the eater must not despise the non-eater. This can hardly be a matter of condemnation, since the non-eater is not doing anything wrong, merely not exercising a right. The attitude Paul is ruling out is like the disdain shown by a motorist who drives as fast as the law allows and looks down on someone who timidly drives at only half that speed. The non-eater, however, may well “condemn” the eater, because from that point of view eating forbidden foods is actually sinful (the NIV more or less doubles the length of the verse by expanding Paul’s simple words “the eater” and “the noneater” into full paraphrases of the two positions). The “welcome” God has already extended to both is a way of summing up the message of 3:21-5:11, as for instance in 5:2: being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have received access to this grace in which we stand. That this whole strand of thought is not far below the surface will emerge later when Paul, almost casually defining “the kingdom of God” in 14:17, does so in terms that exactly summarize 5:1-5.

In v. 4 he personalizes the point: “Who do you think you are, passing judgment on someone else’s household slave?” (the NRSV’s concern for inclusivity again blunts the sharp force of the sing. “you” and the sing. “slave”). The point is obvious: it is up to the master to judge the slave. For one slave to look into the next room and pass judgment on another is simply inappropriate; it shows a failure to recognize who’s who. Paul expresses this in terms of “standing” and “falling” both as a metaphor for “being vindicated” as opposed to “being condemned” and, perhaps, as a hint of what the Christian “vindication” will consist in: “being made to stand” is an early Christian way of speaking about “resurrection” (see Eph 5:14; for the metaphorical use, see 11:20; 1 Cor 10:12). When Paul speaks of the Lord (or, since he is using the metaphor of household slaves, the “master” as in the NIV--though this is to obscure the emphasis on Jesus as Lord throughout the passage) being “able” to make the slave “stand,” the word for “he is able” is δυνατεί (dynatei), cognate with words for “power” that Paul often uses in relation God’s accomplishment of the resurrection (see, e.g., Rom 1:4; 1 Cor 6:14). His main point is that the Lord, the master of all the household, is able to vindicate servants who eat meat and servants who do not; but the echoes, as he says this, are of the greater vindication that is promised at the last. Since the paragraph ends with an explicit statement of the final day of judgment, we are right to allow these echoes to be heard, and to understand’ the present nonjudging life of the community within its eschatological frame of reference.

14:5-6. Paul now adds to the picture a second cause of contention: the observation of special days. The NRSV, translating literally, brings out the interwoven nature of the argument, as “some judge” one day better than another, while “others judge” all alike. The special days are presumably regarded as “more sacred” (NIV) or “holier” (NJB) than the others, but there is no word in the Greek corresponding to this; Paul simply says “one judges a day above a day, another judges every day.” It is just possible that Paul has in mind the festival days of the wider pagan world, not least the Roman Empire; but it is far more likely that he is referring to the Jewish festival days, some of which, Acts implies, he himself observed (cf. Acts 20:16; it is, of course, possible to take this as a purely chronological reference). It is interesting, if that is so, that he does not refer to the sabbath explicitly. There is an apparent tension between his open attitude in this passage and his strong condemnation of the Galatians for observing “days, and months, and seasons, and years,” the sure sign that by adopting Jewish practices they were, in fact, reverting to another variety of paganism (Gal 4:10). This is the same apparent tension that we find between his open attitude toward circumcision and uncircumcision in 1 Corinthians 7 and his strong condemnation, throughout Galatians, of Gentiles getting circumcised. In both cases the tension is more apparent than real. There seems no question in Romans of erstwhile pagans believing that they had to become full Jews in order to be part of the family of Abraham. The whole emphasis of the letter runs the other way, that the Roman Christians were tempted to look down on non-Christian Jews (chaps. 9-11) and now on Christians who, whether or not because of their Jewish origins, wanted to maintain some of the food taboos and other cultural markers. The “weak” might be condemning the “strong,” but the main problem seems to be that the “strong” are looking down on the “weak.”

Paul’s principle here, which will become more important as the chapter proceeds, is that everyone should be fully convinced in their own mind. He spells out in v. 6 what this will mean: if what is done (observing the day, eating certain foods, or not eating them) is done “to the Lord”--the sign of which, in the case of meals, is the giving of thanks to God--then there should be no cause for complaint.

14:7-9. Paul now explains the argument so far by grounding it in the very heart of the gospel. Verse 7, introduced with γάρ (gar, “for”), states the principle, which is then itself explained (gar in each case) in turn by vv. 8-9 (this sequence of thought is obscured in the NIV by the inexplicable paragraph break after v. 8). The essential point is that everything Christians do is done, not in relation to themselves alone, but in relation to the Lord. To “live to oneself,” the position Paul rules out in v. 7, is to order one’s life in relation simply to one’s own background, culture, desires, and wishes; these may not be wrong in themselves, but everything must be judged in relation to the Lord himself (see the parallels to this idea in 2 Cor 5:15; Gal 2:19-20). The most basic things we do--living and dying--are done in the presence of the Lord, and for his sake: Whichever of these we do, and by implication everything else we do as well, we belong to the Lord (for the idea of “belonging” to the Lord, see Gal 3:29 [“belonging to the Messiah”] and Rom 8:9; 1 Cor 3:23; 6:19-20; 15:23; 2 Cor 10:7; Gal 5:24). In Rom 14:7-9 we are still, by implication, in the metaphorical world of masters and servants. But the mention of living and dying brings Paul to the deepest explanation of the whole business: The Messiah died and lived in order to rule as Lord over dead and living alike (v. 9).^⁵⁴² This “ruling as Lord,” clearly, explains the “belonging to the Lord” in v. 8: it is the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah that means we now belong to him, and that constitutes him indeed as the Lord of the whole world (1:3-5; 15:12). This proves more than Paul needs to prove for the immediate argument, but it points, as we shall see, to the larger issue that stands behind the entire section. The gospel announcement that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the Lord of the whole world is thus appealed to as the reason for unity across the barriers of custom and taboo.

14:10-12. Though the surface argument has developed through the discussion of particular practical matters, and words of command and advice, the underlying sequence of thought has been about God and the Lord. God welcomes all believers (v. 3); the Lord will make them stand (v. 4); the Lord is the one before whom all is done (v. 6), especially when thanks are offered to God (v. 6). The Lord is the one to whom we live or die, to whom we belong, because the Messiah died and rose to become the universal Lord (vv. 8-9). This underlying sequence now reaches its climax in what begins as another rhetorical question about condemning or despising, but is actually a statement of the final judgment, as in 2:1-16 and 2 Cor 5:10, backed up by a passage from Isaiah that was obviously of vital significance to Paul. He has declared in 12:1-2 and 13:11-14 that Christian life is lived in the light of the new age, already breaking in; this is what that eschatological perspective on communal living looks like in practice.

He begins with another question to two imaginary bystanders: “You, there! and, yes, you too!” As in v. 3, one is judging and the other is despising; presumably, again, the weak judging the strong and the strong despising the weak. As they stand there squabbling in Paul’s imagination, they are suddenly commanded to look up: there before them is the tribunal, the βήμα (bēma), and it belongs to none other than God.^⁵⁴³ This does not necessarily mean that God the father will do the judging in person; in Acts 25:10 Paul is standing before Caesar’s tribunal, but they are in Caesarea, not Rome, and it is the governor Festus who is actually hearing the case. We should probably understand here that Jesus, as the risen Messiah, is the actual judge, even though the court comes under the overall jurisdiction of God the creator. In any case, the point for the present is that all disputes between Christians over inessentials are now irrelevant. It is to God that all must give an account (v. 12).

In between the statement or v. 10 and the conclusion of v. 12, Paul has inserted a quotation from Isa 45:23 (“to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall swear to God”).^⁵⁴⁴ This is introduced by “As I live, says YHWH,” a phrase that occurs so often in Scripture that it seems pointless to assign it a particular reference, though Isa 49:18 is often cited.^⁵⁴⁵ This picks up the “lived” of v. 9; in other words, the “living again” of Jesus is the reason why he is thus installed as judge, which in turn is the reason why it would be wrong to collapse κύριος (kyrios) here into a general reference to God, rather than retaining it, however paradoxically, as a reference to Jesus as the risen Messiah and, therefore, the judge. (For “resurrection, therefore Messiah,” see 1:3-4; 15:12; for “resurrection, therefore judge,” see 2:16; Acts 10:42; 17:31; for “Messiah, therefore judge,” see Psalms 2; 72; Pss. Sol. 17; 2 Tim 4:1.) The main quotation, with Phil 2:10 as a close parallel, is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it brings together (as the whole passage has done), “Lord” (kyrios) and “God” (θεός theos) in a way that both echoes the LXX usage and indicates how strong and high Paul’s underlying christology is at this point (see the Commentary on 10:13). Second, it emphasizes the universal sovereignty of the God of Israel, exercised in and through the risen Messiah and Lord; this, going way beyond the detail of the present argument, alerts us again to Paul’s underlying agenda (see below). Third, Paul is once again linking his argument to the theme of Isaiah 40-55, suggesting that his readers should understand their present position in terms of the overall story of that passage, the unveiling of God’s righteousness through the strange work of the Servant. They are the people for whom the promises--and now the responsibilities!--are coming true.

Each Christian, then, must give an account of himself or herself to God. There is no tension in Paul’s mind between this and 8:1, where there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. He has already indicated in 2:1-16 that there will be a coming day when all will be judged; the fact that the Christian believer is assured of a favorable verdict on that day does not make it any less serious, as 1 Cor 3:10-17 indicates well enough. Part of his point is that in the light of the coming judgment we have no business judging one another ahead the time. There may also be a hint that to condemn or despise a fellow Christian is itself an offense for which one should be rebuked.

In another letter Paul envisages situations where a genuine dispute between believers will have to be settled in at least a quasi-judicial fashion. He instructs the community to appoint fit persons for this purpose, on the grounds that they will themselves one day judge angels (1 Cor 6:1-8). He would rather they did not have disputes with one another at all, but if need be this would be the way to settle them, rather than referring to courts of unbelievers. Once again, there is an apparent tension with the present passage; but we must remind ourselves that Romans 14-15 is not about fraud and similar matters, but about disputes over what Paul (controversially, of course) insists on regarding as inessentials. What is more, by analogy with 13:1-7 we could point out that insofar as such persons are appointed by the community, they are not acting as private individuals.

Underneath the whole argument, as a theme at first almost out of sight but emerging gradually until it becomes clear and central in the closing verses, is Paul’s implication that, if Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. The repeated reference to Jesus as Lord throughout vv. 4-8 opens this theme, not least when it is coupled with reference to household slaves; anyone in Rome would know who the ultimate Master was, with a full household of slaves. This by itself might remain a faint echo. But when we find that the Messiah has died and lived in order to rule as lord over dead and living alike (v. 9) we begin to see where it is leading; and when we come upon a reference to God’s tribunal we realize that God and Caesar are here in explicit competition. When Paul then quotes Isa 45:23, just as in Phil 2:10-11 where the Caesar reference ought certainly to be understood,^⁵⁴⁶ we are right to see the theme in full daylight. Paul has said much more than he needs for the purpose of explaining that differences of customs are irrelevant when God has welcomed all sides, and that judging one another is inappropriate in view of the coming divine judgment. If he has labored the point to this extent, he has probably done so for a special reason; and the most obvious reason is that he is emphasizing that the kingdom to which those in Christ belong is a kingdom superior to, and destined to replace, that of Caesar. The subsequent similar hints (14:17; 15:12) offer further confirmation.

But why is Paul saying this here, in this context? He is holding out two implications for the potentially divided Roman church. On the positive side, he wants to assure them that they are truly an outpost of the coming great empire of Jesus himself, the world’s true Lord. Paul, in Rome as elsewhere in Caesar’s territory (including colonies like Philippi and Corinth, and centers of imperial cult like Ephesus), is intent on maintaining communities, united in their loyalty to Jesus as Lord, right under the nose of Caesar, who prided himself on maintaining in the world a unity of peoples under his own rule as Lord. The unity of Christians across traditional barriers is a sign to the principalities and powers that a greater rule than theirs has now begun (see, e.g., Gal 4:1-11; Eph 3:10). Maintaining that unity, then, is not just a matter of preventing squabbles and bad feeling in the church. It is part of essential Christian witness to the one Lord. If the church divides along lines related to ethnic or tribal loyalty, it is still living in the world of Caesar. On the negative side, squabbles over the implications of the gospel could inflame tensions between Jewish and Christian communities in Rome, which could give Caesar an excuse for persecution; memories of the expulsion of the Jews under Claudius were still recent. Differences of cultural practice within the church should not be allowed to give Caesar a chance to exercise his delegated authority in the wrong way.

¹³Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way. ¹⁴As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. ¹⁵If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died. ¹⁶Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil. ¹⁷For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, ¹⁸because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.

¹⁹Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. ²⁰Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. ²¹It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.

²²So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. ²³But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

NRSV: ¹³Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. ¹⁴I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. ¹⁵If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. ¹⁶So do not let your good be spoken of as evil. ¹⁷For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ¹⁸The one who thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and has human approval. ¹⁹Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. ²⁰Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat; ²¹it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble. ²²The faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God. Blessed are those who have no reason to condemn themselves because of what they approve. ²³But those who have doubts are condemned if they eat, because they do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

14:13. All right, says Paul in one of his punning moods: if you are so keen on judging things, here is something to judge--how not to trip each other up!^⁵⁴⁷ Verse 13 thus forms a bridge between the two halves of chap. 14, introducing the new theme, which is the positive side of Paul’s exhortation. It is not simply a matter of giving up passing judgment on, or despising, a fellow Christian; it is a matter of taking positive thought to see how to avoid making life difficult for one another--and particularly how the “strong” can avoid making life difficult for the “weak.”

The paragraph divides into two segments, each one unpacking v. 13, with a conclusion (vv. 22-23). In vv. 14-18 Paul warns that even things that are not unclean in themselves become so if someone believes them to be, and that this could mean ruin for someone lured into going against conscience. In vv. 19-23 he tells them to avoid things that make a fellow Christian trip up. These two cover very similar ground from only a slightly different angle.

14:14-18. In v. 14a, and then again in v. 20b, Paul insists that all foods are “clean.” This was a regular early Christian belief, though it must have been hard to hammer out and maintain (see Matt 15:11, 17-20; Mark 7:18-19; Acts 10:15, 28; 11:9; Titus 1:15). Paul says here that he knows this, and has been “persuaded in the Lord Jesus.” This cannot mean simply that the belief in the cleanness of all foods is part of the truth of being “in Christ: It seems to mean either that in the course of his service of, and love for, the risen Lord, Jesus had made it clear to Paul that all foods were in fact clean; or that Paul is referring to the traditions of Jesus’ own sayings known to us from Matthew and Mark. On balance, and recognizing the ways in which Romans 12-13 as well alludes to (what we think of as) gospel tradition, I think it is more likely that he means the latter. (See 1 Cor 7:10, where the contrast with Rom 14:12 indicates that Paul is aware of having access to some teaching from Jesus himself [‘the Lord”], while on other matters he must think things out from scratch under the influence of the Spirit [1 Cor 7:40].)^⁵⁴⁸

The exception noted in v. 14b, though, is not mentioned in the gospel traditions. The thought that one can make a clean object unclean by regarding it as such is striking, and introduces a main theme of the following verses: the importance of making up one’s mind and acting accordingly. Paul would not, of course, take this to the lengths of contemporary existentialism, in which any behavior at all is approved as long as it is done wholeheartedly (it being conveniently ignored that people who commit genocide, acts of terrorism, and the like are often deeply sincere). What he is allowing for, throughout this section, is that genuine Christians grow to maturity at different rates and that during this process one cannot and must not hurry or harry them to accept positions their conscience at the moment cannot allow.

In particular, one must recognize (v. 15) that actual spiritual harm is caused to people when they are put in this position, and that causing such harm is a failure in the basic Christian virtue of love (13:8-10). The gar at the start of v. 15 (omitted in most trans.) indicates that Paul thinks he is explaining something here, but if so it must be v. 13, not v. 14. Indeed, acting in a “strong” way can even, Paul warns here and in 1 Cor 8:10-13, cause a fellow Christian’s “destruction,” despite the fact that the Messiah died for them. This powerful statement presumably means that one could risk betraying a “weak” person into what was, for them, some form of pagan idolatry, and that this could jeopardize their allegiance to Jesus altogether, putting the “strong” Christian at loggerheads with the Messiah himself, who had given his life for them. Paul then juxtaposes a further command (v. 16); something may be “good” for you, but the weaker Christian may call down a curse on it--and perhaps, the implication may be, on you as well.

This is then explained in vv. 17-18, with one of Paul’s rare statements about God’s kingdom (other Pauline mentions of the kingdom of God: 1 Cor 4:20; 6:9-10; 15:24, 50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; Col 1:13; 4:11; 1 Thess 2:12; 2 Thess 1:5; 2 Tim 4:1, 18). If, however, we avoid slavish concordance-study, we shall learn to recognize themes even when their technical shorthand is absent; and in this case there is a clear earlier discussion: 5:12-21. This is all about the reign of “grace,” and of those who receive it as a gig, over against the reign of sin (see 5:14, 17, 21, cf. 6:12, 14; the key word is βασιλεύω [basileuō, “to rule as king”], cognate with βασιλεία [basileia, “kingdom”]). It forms one of Paul’s central (if highly condensed) statements of the entire Christian worldview and narrative, and plays as we saw a major role in the structure of chaps. 5-8 and hence of the letter as a whole. This of itself might not lead us to postulate a connection between the present passage and chap. 5, were it not that Paul’s instant definition of God’s kingdom in 14:17 happens to form a tight summary of Rom 5:1-5: God’s kingdom does not mean food and drink, but “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Here we have not only stumbled upon what seems to be Paul’s own summary of an earlier passage in the letter, providing an important linking of the present point right back to the most central theological matters, but also a shorthand account of what he thought “the kingdom of God” was all about. The context, both here and in chap. 5, makes it clear that this definition does not mean that the kingdom is a “spiritual” as opposed to a “worldly” matter: 5:12-21 is all about the rule of sin and the rule of grace, the two powers that compete for every cubic inch of creation and every split second of time. What Paul is emphasizing is a matter of priorities: If Rom 5:1-5 is threatened, whatever is posing the threat must take second place. Since v. 17 explains vv. 15-16 (gar) we must take it that Paul’s meaning is as follows: you must not cause your fellow Christian to suffer, possibly even to be lost altogether, by what you eat, because Rom 5:1-5 (“justified … peace … joy … Holy Spirit”) is the most important thing there is, and food and drink, by comparison, rate nowhere on the same scale.

This is the way to behave, he says in a final explanation of the sequence of thought (gar again, v. 18): you are serving the Messiah, the king, and if you do so with his kingdom as your priority (see Matt 6:33) you will be, as 12:2 insisted, “well-pleasing” to God. What is more, other people will recognize and approve what you have done.

14:19-21. Paul then puts a second coat of paint on the same argument. He begins with a summary of the positive aim that one should have in all these things (see too 1 Corinthians 14): peace and mutual upbuilding (v. 19). This leads to a command that covers again the ground of v. 15, but whereas he there stressed the importance of honoring, and not jeopardizing, the Messiah’s achievement in his death, he here emphasizes “the work of God,” perhaps meaning not simply God’s work in that individual but God’s work in creating the church as a whole, which should be built up, as the previous verse says, and not destroyed (cf. 1 Cor 3:17).^⁵⁴⁹ Again repeating the previous segment (v. 20b, echoing v. 14), Paul insists that all things are pure. Whereas before, though, he then declared that food became unclean for someone who believed it so, he here makes the different point: food becomes “evil” (not just “unclean”) for someone who eats it in such a way as to cause someone else to stumble. The “strong” are hereby confronted: they are right to consider all foods clean, but they must realize that some food can become unclean even for them. Paul literally says “unclean for the one who eats through stumbling”; this could mean “for the weaker Christian who eats despite the objections of conscience,” but the next verse suggests that the meaning normally understood is correct.^⁵⁵⁰ Verse 21 then supports this: here is something positively right and good that “the strong” can do: to abstain from meat, or wine, or anything else that makes a fellow Christian, a “brother,” that is, a member of God’s family, to stumble.

14:22-23. Paul concludes with another second-person singular address: “You there!” He returns to the mention of “faith” as in 14:1-2: You must hold the faith you have--that is, the interpretation of faith and its outworking-as a matter between you and God. (Again we note that Paul would not say this about all possible interpretations of Christian faith; had he done so, he would scarcely have needed, for instance, to write the letters to Corinth.) He adds, unusually, a blessing on the one who can make up his or her mind and then have no scruples, no self-judgment, in following it. (Paul never elsewhere coins his own “beatitude” (for the form, see Matt 5:3-11, with its rich Jewish background); the closest he comes is in the direct quotation of Ps 32:1-2 in Rom 4:7-8.) To “condemn oneself for what one approves” may seem somewhat oxymoronic, and there may be a note of irony here: some people may say, for convenience, that they “approve” of doing something when in fact their conscience will be nagging at them that it was wrong all the time. Or perhaps Paul is rubbing in the point of v. 20: you may sincerely approve it, but you are blessed if, when you go ahead and eat it, you do not have to judge yourself for thereby causing another Christian to stumble.

The concluding verse of the segment (v. 23) looks back to 14:1: you must welcome the “weak,” but not in order to have disputes about disputes. Here Paul uses the cognate verb to the first “dispute” word: ό διακρινόμενος (ho diakrinomenos, “the one who disputes” or “the one who doubts”).^⁵⁵¹ In addition, this looks back to a key passage, 4:20-21: Abraham did not “waver” or “doubt” in unbelief (ού διεκρίθη τη άπιστία ou diekrithē tē apistia), but “grew strong in faith” (ένεδυναμώθη τη πίστει enedynamōthē tē pistei), being “fully convinced” (πληροφορηθείς plērophorētheis) that God was able to do what God had promised. This concentration of terms that echo the present discussion in a passage leading to 5:1-5, which, as we have seen, is also in Paul’s mind here, can hardly be accidental. Though Abraham had good reason in human terms to be “weak,” to doubt whether God could give him a child, he believed strongly and without wavering, and this faith became the prototype of Christian faith. The present discussion has not, then, been about something other than basic Christian faith (see the Overview). Paul is seeking to nurture and fortify communities in which that faith--with that content, faith of that type of full conviction--is the basis of identity and unity.

It is perhaps with Abraham and his type of faith in mind that he makes the sharp distinction that sets such a worryingly high standard for all Christian living. To doubt is not to sin; but to act on something when one has serious doubts about it is to fall under condemnation, because the action does not flow from faith. And--a new point, though we might have expected an explanatory gar--everything that is not of faith is sin. in other words, you are either with Abraham or with Adam. You are either living, like Abraham, in unwavering trust in God and God’s promises; or you are turning away from God and living by some other means. It may sound harsh, but within the argument it makes perfect sense. The point here is not just that the weak may be convicted of sin if, though doubting, they go ahead and eat, though that is the first and probably the main level of meaning. The further level is that the strong, knowing this, must take care lest, by eating, they entice the weak into stumbling, and so themselves sin against the weak Iv 20; cf. 1 Cor 8:12). This complex little analysis of motives, responsibilities, and results is a copybook exercise in thinking through the delicate demands both of love (13:8 10) and of humility 112:3-8) within the Christian community.

At this point in the letter some MSS add the closing blessing, which we know as 16:25-27 (see the Commentary on 15:33).

NIV: ¹We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. ²Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. ³For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” ⁴For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

⁵May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, ⁶so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

⁷Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God. ⁸For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs ⁹so that the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy, as it is written:

¹³May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

NRSV: ¹We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. ²Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. ³For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” ⁴For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. ⁵May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, ⁶so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

⁷Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. ⁸For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, ⁹and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,

“Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name”;

¹³May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As with the previous paragraph (14:13-23), the present one gives the appearance of saying the same thing from two not very different angles in its own two segments (15:1-6, 7-13). Both parts open with a command relating to the discussion of chap. 14; both continue with a statement of what the Messiah has done; both support and develop this with Scripture; both declare that this supplies “hope”; and both conclude with the united praise of the one God.^⁵⁵² Since this passage constitutes the final climax of Romans, we should hardly be surprised at this formal; almost formulaic, repetition. The immediate point may be the practical one about mutual welcome across boundaries of custom and conscience, but the underlying message Paul wants to convey is about the glorifying of God in the united worship of Jew and Gentile together in the Messiah.

This paragraph, in fact, offers a triple conclusion: to 14:1-15:13; to 12:1-15:13; and to the letter as a whole, from its very beginning. In the context of 14:1 onward, it draws together the threads in the summons to the strong to support the weak, so that together they may praise God. Within 12:1 onward, it insists on the same humility (“not thinking of yourselves more highly than you ought”) that we find in 12:3-8, and returns to the note of worship and praise with which 12:1 opened: the worship of Israel, God’s people, with all the world now joining in. Within the entire letter, the paragraph celebrates the fact that through the gospel of the risen Messiah, the world’s true Lord, Jew and Gentile come together in God’s single family, demonstrating God’s covenant faithfulness.^⁵⁵³ Thus, if we heard strong echoes of 5:1-5, 17, and 21 in chap. 14, we would be right to hear in the present passage strong echoes of chaps. 3-4 and 9-11, to see in the united praise of God the reversal of that human failure and Jewish failure that was spelled out so graphically in 1:18-2:29,^⁵⁵⁴ and to discover Paul, throughout this passage, returning to the primary theme of the gospel itself--God’s gospel, attested in the Scriptures, concerning his Son, whose Davidic Messiahship is declared in his resurrection from the dead. Indeed, as is fitting in such a dense summary, the gospel events themselves, the death and resurrection of the Messiah and his installation as Lord, are told again through Scripture. They are applied to the point in hand, but also allowed to resonate in tune with everything that has gone before (15:3, 8-9, 12).

The first subparagraph (vv. 1-6) approaches the practical point negatively: Don’t please yourselves, because the Messiah didn’t please himself (15:2-3). The second (vv. 7-13) says the same thing positively: welcome one another, because the Messiah welcomed you (v. 7). Paul’s two closing blessings (vv. 5-6, 13) draw together themes from a now familiar source: patience, encouragement, hope, joy, peace, faith, and the power of the Holy Spirit. These blessings are another summary and echo of 5:1-5. For those with ears to hear, Paul is saying: “This is how to obtain in practice the great central blessings I outlined at the heart of the letter. Allow ‘justification by faith’ to produce ‘fellowship by faith,’ and you will know the peace, patience, joy, and hope that the Spirit brings.”

A major feature of this grand conclusion is Paul’s use of the Scriptures. Psalms, Deuteronomy, and finally Isaiah--no surprises about his choice of books, or the themes he draws from them. But here, unusually, he adds a note, as though reflecting on the many-sided exposition of Scripture he has offered in this letter. The Scriptures, he says, were given to us to be the means of patience, encouragement, and hope--in other words, the very things God promises, the very things the Holy Spirit puts powerfully into effect. Scripture, it Seems, is a means by which God works in the church; in Pauline language, as well as in later technical theology, it is a means of grace. The present passage exemplifies the principle it thus states: the crescendo of scriptural quotations in vv. 3, 9-12 lead the eye up to the source and ground of Christian faith and hope, the Messiah himself, risen to rule the world. So the letter comes full circle, back to Paul’s original self-introduction as the servant of God, the apostle of the Messiah and his gospel. This leads him naturally to 15:14-33, where he sketches in, as the letter moves toward its close, his plans for completing his apostolic task.

15:1-2. Two commands summarize the previous discussion: the strong (including Paul himself) are under obligation to “bear with” (NIV) the weaknesses of the powerless. “The failings of the weak” (NRSV, NIV) is hardly correct; the word translated “failings” is cognate with the word for “weak” (άσθενής asthenēs) throughout the previous discussion, and the word translated “weak” here is άδυνατος (adynatos), a word Paul elsewhere only uses in 8:3. Paul has not suggested that “weakness” is a “failing”; to pull the text that way is to slant his argument. Better to see, now, a subtly new point: “these `weaknesses’ I have been speaking of--the people who possess them are ‘powerless.’ They are who they are, and at the moment they can’t help it. Thus we who are ‘strong’ have an obligation to support and help them.”^⁵⁵⁵ This has the advantage that it gives to the main verb of v. 1 the meaning it has elsewhere in Paul: βαστάζειν (bastazein) does not normally mean “put up with” in the sense of “be prepared to tolerate,” but, more positively, “support, help” (Gal 6:2), or “carry” (Gal 6:5).^⁵⁵⁶ The meaning then is that the strong must help those who, through their own current powerlessless, have these “weaknesses.” They must support and encourage them, not browbeat them with demands for more “strength” than they can presently muster (cf. Acts 20:35 [though the word there is the rare άντιλαμβάνομαι antilambanomai]).

In doing this, the “strong” must not seek their own advantage, must not “please themselves”; as we saw in 12:2, this is the alternative to “pleasing God,” and often “pleasing God” will--despite popular opinion to the contrary--involve precisely not “pleasing oneself.” Instead (v. 2), everyone must please his or her neighbor, with a view to their good and to the upbuilding of the community (the NRSV and the NIV both make “upbuilding” relate simply to the individual neighbor, but in Paul the word regularly refers to the building up of the whole community). This is, clearly, what the love spoken of in 12:3-13 and 13:8-10 looks like at street level. It is the principle Paul himself adopts in contentious matters (1 Cor 10:31-11:1, a passage quite close to the present one).

15:3. This principle derives from the Messiah himself. Paul has as many ways of speaking about Jesus’ messianic death as he has occasions to mention it. Here he draws on Ps 69:9 (69:10 MT; 68:10 LXX), assuming that this great poem of the suffering and vindication of the righteous Israelite found its ultimate embodiment in Israel’s Messiah and his crucifixion.^⁵⁵⁷ This, he says, shows that the Messiah “did not please himself”; he assumes, too, that his hearers are familiar with the basic story of Jesus, perhaps with oral traditions of such scenes as Gethsemane in which the Messiah shrank from his fate (Mark 14:32-42 and pars.; see also John 12:27; Heb 5:7-9; Rom 15:3 may also be illuminated by Phil 2:6-8, which, if not written by Paul, is certainly endorsed by him; and 2 Cor 8:9). “Not pleasing himself” is, of course, a remarkable understatement when we consider (as Paul could and did elsewhere) the shame and horror of the cross. But it makes the point Paul needs for the moment, while beginning to sketch for the last time the story of Jesus that will reach its climax in 15:12.

15:4. By way of somewhat oblique explanation (gar) of this exegesis of the psalm, Paul states that the Scriptures in general (“whatever was written in former days,” NRSV) were written for our instruction, so that through patience and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. This, as we saw, echoes 5:1,5, ascribing to Scripture what is there effected through the Spirit on the basis of God’s work of justification. Granted the theme of chap, 14, and the way in which it seems to be continued in 15:1-2, we might have expected here, on the one hand, a more specific reference to the community being built up through mutual support and readiness to give up one’s rights and cultural preferences, and on the other hand a more explicit comment on the Messiah’s death in relation to achieving that end. Paul, however, already has his sights on the major themes of his conclusion, and it is in the light of that larger picture that the intermediate goal of united worship will become a reality. The Scriptures, and their multiple interpretation of the Messiah’s suffering, give God’s people hope; and in that context (vv. 5-6) they will be able to think the same way and to glorify God together. What they need for the present is not simply willingness to do what Paul has said in 14:1-15:2, but patience and encouragement; and that is what Scripture provides (cf. 1 Macc 12:9), especially once they learn to see the story of Israel as devolved onto, and fulfilled by, Jesus the Messiah.^⁵⁵⁸

15:5-6. Paul turns his thoughts into prayer, the first time he has reported a prayer in relation to the Roman church since 1:9-12, where the theme of mutual comfort was likewise prominent; he is consciously coming full circle. His prayer is that “the God of patience and comfort” will give them a united mind (lit., “to think the same thing among one another according to the Messiah Jesus”).^⁵⁵⁹ This is Paul’s regular appeal, whether or not he thinks a church is actually divided (see Phil 2:2-4, which, in company with 2:5-11, bears close comparison with Rom 14:1-15:13 as a whole). The object of coming to a common mind (όμοθυμαδόν homothymadon, a word found frequently in the early chapters of Acts (e.g., 1:14; 2:46; 4:24; 5:12; 7:57), is thereby to come to a common worship, literally “with one mouth.” The object of this worship, as we might have guessed from the intricate christological dance of the previous chapter, is the God who is now revealed in relation to the Lord: “the God and father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah” (see, e.g., 1 Cor 8:6; 15:28; Phil 2:11; see also the Commentary on 10:13).^⁵⁶⁰

15:7. The final paragraph of the letter’s theological exposition, like the final paragraph of the great central section chaps. 5-8, transforms into a coda of praise and celebration but without any loss of theological poise. Paul opens with the repeated instruction from 14:1, only this time as a command to any and all parties within the church: welcome one another, therefore (the “therefore,” [διό dio] picks up the entire previous argument). Here, as in v. 3, the Messiah’s action is the crucial basis and model for what the church must now do; again, ό Χριστός (ho Christos) undoubtedly means “Messiah,” and cannot be reduced to a proper name.^⁵⁶¹ The Messiah, as he says in the next verse, is the one in and through whom God’s promises to the Jewish ancestors are fulfilled; and this short paragraph is framed at its further end also by a celebration of the Messiah’s work on behalf of the whole world (v. 12). The final clause of the verse, “to the glory of God,” has in view the glorifying of God in praise and worship that is the subject of the rest of the paragraph. Thus, although the Messiah’s welcome is undoubtedly also glorifying to God, this clause goes more directly with the command to welcome one another: “Just as the Messiah welcomed you, so you should welcome one another in order that God may be glorified.” The verse forms a typically Pauline paragraph-opening, containing the various elements that will then be developed.

15:8-9a. What is this messianic “welcome”? Paul explains (λέγω γάρ legō gar) with a complex statement of what the Messiah accomplished, reminding us of the dense messianic formulations that stand at the head of the letter as a whole (1:34) and of chaps. 9-11 (9:5). (There are other echoes of 9:4-5: glory, promises, patriarchs, Messiah [four out of the eight privileges there listed]). There is good reason to suppose that Paul intends here simultaneously to explain the messianic roots of the specific appeal of v. 7, and to sum up the entire letter. This is what he, at least, thinks he has been talking about all the way through.

The heart of the statement rephrases one of Paul’s central presuppositions, which has proved difficult for theologians and exegetes alike to come to terms with: it is by bringing Israel’s history to its climax that God, through the Messiah, has opened the way of mercy to all the nations. It is not that God has done one thing for Jews, and another thing for Gentiles; God has designed mercy for all (11:28-32), but as 9-11 made clear, the purpose for Israel always had the Gentiles in mind, and the purpose for Gentiles was always that they would come in to the fulfilled, returned-from-exile Israel. This, indeed, is what the scriptural quotations about to be produced are taken by Paul to be saying. Thus vv. 8-9a should be read as follows: The Messiah became a servant of the circumcision (i.e., of ethnic Israel) in order to confirm God’s truthfulness.^⁵⁶²

The mention of God’s truthfulness sends our minds back to 3:4, 7 (“Let God be true, though every human be false … if God’s truthfulness abounds through my falsehood to his glory, why am 1 still being condemned as a sinner?” [my translation]), where it is closely correlated with God’s faithfulness and righteousness: Paul has the ancient promises in mind once more. But, here as there, these promises were never simply for ethnic Israel; nor were they divided, with one part belonging to Israel and the other to the nations. The promises were both to Israel and through Israel to the world.^⁵⁶³ This means that we should probably take the next two clauses as both parallel and consequential: the Messiah became a servant (a) to confirm the promises to the patriarchs and (b) so that the Gentiles might glorify God for mercy--but the inclusion of Gentiles is precisely one of the central patriarchal promises Paul highlights, not least in chap. 4.^⁵⁶⁴ The statement is dense because, as well as summing up the entire exposition of God’s righteousness, echoing chapters 3-4 and 9-11 in ways too many and complex to enumerate here, Paul is still conscious of making his final appeal to the community. The Messiah became a servant of the circumcision--so you Gentile Christians should love and serve your Jewish brothers and sisters in the Messiah, and not look down on them; and this was in order that the Gentiles should join with God’s ancient people in united praise--so you Jewish Christians should celebrate the fact that you have people of every race joining with you in the messianic community.

The two clauses thus play out the intertwined results of the Messiah’s work (while at the same time underscoring the early Christian awareness of the fact that Jesus himself had concentrated his work on ethnic Israel, not in order to exclude Gentiles permanently but because the way to save the world was to complete Israel’s destiny; cf. Matt 10:5-6; 15:21-28 and par.; John 4:22-26). “Confirming the promises made to the patriarchs” sums up chaps. 4 and 9, and concisely catches the central meaning of “God’s righteousness,” the major theme of the letter. Nor was this simply a matter of some unfinished business on God’s part, a few promises left unfulfilled that had to be dealt with if only to avoid the charge of unfaithfulness; these promises encapsulated the single, unalterable divine saving plan for the whole world, and confirming them through the Messiah’s servant ministry was the heart of God’s intention.

Thus the second, and consequent, result of this ministry, “that the Gentiles might glorify God for mercy,” follows both in the logic of the divine plan (and of the messianic achievement) and in the logic of Paul’s appeal to the community.^⁵⁶⁵ This is the doxological correlate of justification by faith: the gathering of Gentiles into the one people of God, not by works of Torah but simply by faith in God’s saving action in the Messiah, results in united praise. This, in other words, is where what appear to many exegetes as two different themes in Rom 3:21-31 (God’s saving action in Jesus’ death resulting in justification by faith, on the one hand, and the coming together of Jew and Gentile on the other) are finally revealed as one and the same. This was what the Messiah’s servant work was about all along.

15:9b-11. Paul celebrates the theme of united worship with three biblical quotations, preparing the way for a final quotation (in v. 12) that sums up the entire letter.^⁵⁶⁶ As Richard Hays has persuasively argued, the opening citation from Ps 18:49 (17:50 LXX), when read in the wider context of that psalm, is intended not simply as a messianic prophecy now fulfilled, but as a statement of the embodiment, in Jesus the Messiah, of the pattern of suffering and vindication through which (as the next verse says) God’s salvation and mercy are poured out, not least “upon God’s Messiah, to David and his seed for ever” (Ps 17:51 LXX). The citation thus ties in both with the mention of mercy in the earlier part of v 9 and with the explicitly Davidic statement in v. 12, while itself making the central point that the Messiah himself, understood as the one praying in this psalm, is standing there, surrounded by Gentiles, singing God’s praises.^⁵⁶⁷

For the second citation Paul returns to Deuteronomy 32 (cf. Rom 10:19; 12:19). Here the Septuagint comes to his help; the Hebrew text simply says “Praise his people, you nations,” but in the LXX of v. 43 this has become “Praise, you nations, with his people,” giving Paul not only further grist to his present mill but enabling him thus to tie in this passage with the deuteronomic theme that was so important in chap. 10. He then reverts to the psalter, finding in Ps 117:1 a classic invitation to the whole world to join in the praises of Israel’s God. This, after all, was and is the challenge of Jewish monotheism: that the God of Israel was the creator, the God of the whole world, and that therefore the other nations, though presently stuck in idolatry, ought eventually to come to recognize and worship the same God that Israel worshiped. How this would happen remained an almost complete mystery in the ancient Scriptures. It has been Paul’s theme throughout Romans that it has now been accomplished through the Messiah and by the Spirit.

15:12-13. It should be no surprise, then, that as his last quotation Paul chooses, with great care, a passage from Isaiah (11:10) that says exactly what he wants to say at the climax of 14:1-15:13 and at the same time completes the circle begun in 1:3-4. The Gentiles will come to hope in the Davidic Messiah, the “root of Jesse” (for “root of Jesse” as a title for the Messiah, see Rev 5:5; 22:16); he is the one who “rises to rule the nations.” The echo of 1:4 should leave us in no doubt that Paul intends a reference to Jesus’ resurrection. This is what constituted him as Messiah and Lord of the whole world. Once again the wider context of Paul’s citation fills in the depths of meaning he has no space to spell out: Isaiah speaks here of God’s purpose to renew the whole created order, and to gather the remnant of Israel, together with the Gentile world, into the one community of salvation (Isa 11:1-12:6).^⁵⁶⁸ The idea of a risen Messiah “ruling the nations” is, further, packed with explosive political implications, especially in a letter to Rome whose own emperor claimed to rule the nations. Paul, we may suppose, has had this verse of Isaiah in mind throughout the whole letter, waiting to produce it as the final move in his entire argument.

The note that comes through is “hope,” as in v. 4. This is not what we might have expected; Paul, we might have supposed, would speak of “love” in concluding a passage about mutual welcome in Christ, or of “joy” in a passage about praise. But we should not suppose that he has been careless at this of all moments, especially since he reinforces the point in v. 13, referring to God as “the God of hope” and praying that his readers may “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Hope was, of course, a major theme of chaps. 5-8, and echoes of that section, and of its summary introduction (5:1-5), abound here. Paul’s eye seems to be on the following implied thought: that throughout its struggles to live as one community despite cultural and ethnic differences, what the community needs is precisely that eschatological perspective on their present life that is supplied in 12:2 and 13:11-14: in other words, that in order to be the people they are called to be in the present, they need a constant and lively sense of God’s promised and assured future. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons why chaps. 12-13 were shaped as they were, framed by the eschatological hope: they were designed to provide the right basis for an appeal that would itself depend on the hope that one day Jesus Christ would be seen and acknowledged as Lord of all (14:11; 15:12). Thus the line of thought that runs from God’s promise-keeping in 15:8 to God’s gift of hope in 15:13 (“you can trust this God,” Paul is saying; “remember what he’s already done in the Messiah!”) is what he believes the community should remember as it lives within “the present world,” Caesar’s world, in the faith that Jesus is already Lord because God raised him from the dead, and that soon every knee will bow at his name.

Hope itself is sustained, then, by the “joy and peace” with which the God of hope will fill the community. Here are the notes we would have expected: “joy” is to be experienced in the glad worship of God, and “peace” is to be known within the combined, united community (cf. 14:19). And all is sustained by the power of the Spirit, the power that raised Jesus from the dead (8:10-11) and is even now at work among those who form his one body (cf. 1:4, 16; 5:5; 8:1-11, 12-27; 12:3-5; 15:19; 1 Cor 2:4-5; 6:14; 12:12-13; 2 Cor 13:4; Eph 1:19; 3:20; Phil 3:10; Col 1:11; 1 Thess 1:5; 2 Thess 1:11).

1. Paul’s appeal for unity in 14:1-15:13 is thus grounded in a solidly if incipiently trinitarian theology, and this emphasizes how important it is, for all work for unity within and between churches, that the theological foundations are laid as deeply as possible. The grand schemes for church unity that characterized much of the twentieth century were often allied, unfortunately, with the kind of theology that sat loose to detail in the hope that people would be able to agree on something a bit simpler. Perhaps in the twenty-first century the churches will come to see that unity is a plant that grows best in the deepest soil, and that by patient shared study of our most central beliefs, not least the exploration of who God really is, as revealed in Jesus the Messiah and by the Spirit, and through the shared worship to which this gives rise, we may discover new ways forward in the ecumenical endeavor.

2. Shared worship, indeed, is central to Paul’s vision. He does not say that one should wait to share in worship until all aspects of belief and practice have been hammered out. On the contrary. He sees the mutual welcome, allowing people from very different backgrounds literally to worship together with one voice, as of the essence of the quest for a deeper unity. When we read this alongside Gal 2:11-21, we discover that this is not just a bit of good advice; it grows directly from the doctrine of justification by faith itself. The point of that doctrine is that all who confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead belong in the same worshiping family, and at the same table. Shared eucharistic fellowship should not be the reward awaiting us at the end of ecumenical negotiations and agreements. It should be a central means by which we travel together along that road.

3. Paul’s main point in Romans 14 is that there are some things that appear to divide Christians very deeply in terms of their practice but are, in fact (in the language of later theology), “things indifferent” that should not be allowed to divide them. Most Christians would agree that there are such “indifferent” matters, but the difficulty is that there is no agreement on what those matters are, and on which matters are so centrally important that to disagree on them means dividing the church. Paul clearly believed that there were many things on which it was not a matter of saying “one person believes this, another believes that”; when it was reported that a Corinthian Christian had set up with his father’s wife, his reaction was not that he should be welcomed as a weaker believer but that he should be kicked out on the spot (1 Cor 5:1-5; the whole chapter is important, distinguishing as it does between the importance of continuing to have dealings with the pagan world and the importance of breaking off relations with Christians who behave in grossly pagan ways). One may imagine that for some of the “weaker” Christians in Rome the idea of eating meat that had not been certified as kosher, or that had been offered to idols, would seem just as “pagan” and hence evil as sexual immorality; indeed, granted the connection between idol-worship and licentious orgies, one can understand their point of view. But what Paul is doing here is in fact to articulate not only his view that there are some “things indifferent” that should not divide the church but also his view as to what some of the key ones are.

Significantly, they are among the central boundary-markers of Judaism: food and holy days. Romans 14 is in fact an exposition, in other terms, of justification by faith apart from works of Torah. That is why Paul himself is a “strong” Christian, and clearly believes that if and when the “weak” were able to arrive at a deeper maturity in the faith they would come to that position as well. Only when we are prepared to think through divisive issues in the light of this central doctrine will the church be able to distinguish between the things that matter and the things that do not. This plays back into the whole theme of unity. Unity is not itself a “thing indifferent,” though many, probably most, Christians today regard it as such (“Some Christians believe we should all get together; others believe this doesn’t matter”; can you imagine what Paul would have said to that?).

4. At the heart of the appeal is of course love, as in 12:3-13 and 13:8-10. Love here is not a sentimental reaction, to be provoked simply by seeing a look of hurt or disappointment on someone else’s face; it is rooted in the conviction that the Messiah died for the other person, too, and that, being oneself a beneficiary of his self-giving love, one cannot deliberately put a stumbling-block in the way of another beneficiary. The family identity of God’s people, in which all are brothers and sisters (in a world where family membership meant a closer tie and obligation than today’s Western world imagines possible), meant that taking care of one another, and thinking how to avoid making life difficult for each other, was of prime importance.

5. We should not play down the political significance of this entire passage (see especially the comments on 14:10-12 and 15:12). The present disunity of the worldwide church has multiplied precisely in the historical period when, under the insidious pressure of the Enlightenment, “religion” has been carefully separated off from “politics” and kept in a sealed upper chamber (“what individuals do with their solitude”) where it cannot interfere with real life. The churches have often gone along with this, imagining themselves thereby to have attained some kind of freedom. But the price of this “freedom” is that it leaves Caesar enthroned, doubly defended against any attack on the arrogance of empire that might come from the Christian gospel. First, a church that acquiesces in its own marginalization (especially if it calls it “freedom”) is never likely even to comment on, let alone to engage with, the ruling powers. Second, a church that all too obviously embodies the social, ethnic, cultural, and political divisions of its surrounding world is no real challenge to the Caesars of this world. It is only when representatives of many nations worship the world’s true Lord in unity that Caesar might get the hint that there is after all “another king” (Acts 17:7; cf. Eph 3:10). To settle for comfortable disunity because that way we can “be ourselves” and keep things the way we have always known them is to court disloyalty to the one Lord and failure in the church’s mission to challenge the gospel of Caesar with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

6. We should continue to learn how to tell the story of God, the world, Israel. Jesus, and ourselves so as to bring out its full flavor. It is highly significant that when Paul comes to sum up the whole letter in 15:7-13 he does so with a compressed narrative in which all the elements of the longer stories he tells from time to time are present, selected here of course for the particular needs of the argument but nevertheless reminding us of the fuller story he could have told, and does tell elsewhere. As long as we insist on reducing Christianity to slogans and isolated “doctrines” or rules, rather than seeing it primarily as the great story of what the one God has done, through the one Lord, for the one world, we will never understand what Paul is about, or be able to recapture the excitement and many-sidedness of his writing. There has been of late a fashion for “narrative” readings of Paul. It should not be thought that this is simply a fad, a new game to play with old counters. It reflects something close to the heart of Paul’s own mind: that when you want to understand who God is, what the gospel is, and what our task in the world now is, the foundation for that understanding is the narrative within which the different elements make themselves at home. Revealingly, the two elements of the narrative that much post-Enlightenment thought has screened out, but that a Pauline telling of the story can never forget, are the Israel dimension and the Caesar dimension. The inalienable Jewish roots of the gospel, and the inevitable confrontation with pagan empire, are both embedded in Paul’s narrative here and elsewhere, and only when today’s church comes to terms with both will it become truly faithful to Paul’s vision.

NIV: ¹⁴I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another. ¹⁵I have written you quite boldly on some points, as if to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me ¹⁶to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles with the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

¹⁷Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. ¹⁸I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done– ¹⁹by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. ²⁰It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. ²¹Rather, as it is written:

²³But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, and since I have been longing for many years to see you, ²⁴I plan to do so when I go to Spain. I hope to visit you while passing through and to have you assist me on my journey there, after I have enjoyed your company for a while. ²⁵Now, however, I am on my way to Jerusalem in the service of the saints there. ²⁶For Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. ²⁷They were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings. ²⁸So after I have completed this task and have made sure that they have received this fruit, I will go to Spain and visit you on the way. ²⁹I know that when I come to you, I will come in the full measure of the blessing of Christ.

³⁰I urge you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me. ³¹Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there, ³²so that by God’s will I may come to you with joy and together with you be refreshed. ³³The God of peace be with you all. Amen.

NRSV: ¹⁴I myself feel confident about you, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another. ¹⁵Nevertheless on some points I have written to you rather boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God ¹⁶to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. ¹⁷In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to boast of my work for God. ¹⁸For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, ¹⁹by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum I have fully proclaimed the good news of Christ. ²⁰Thus I make it my ambition to proclaim the good news, not where Christ has already been named, so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation, ²¹but as it is written,

²²This is the reason that I have so often been hindered from coming to you. ²³But now, with no further place for me in these regions, I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you ²⁴when I go to Spain. For I do hope to see you on my journey and to be sent on by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little while. ²⁵At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; ²⁶for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. ²⁷They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things. ²⁸So, when I have completed this, and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will set out by way of you to Spain; ²⁹and I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.

³⁰I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, ³¹that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, ³²so that by God’s will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. ³³The God of peace be with all of you. Amen.

After the exalted tone and the dense, dynamic content of the writing so far, we might expect a more gentle and pastoral tone in the rest of the chapter, rounding off what Paul wants to say before the closing greetings. We get what we expect, but only up to a point. Paul remains himself, and even when discussing in more relaxed mode his recent apostolic work and his future plans he is still drawing on the same controlling story of God, the Messiah and the world, still appealing to Scripture to explain what he has done and is doing, still teasing readers ancient and modern with compact and allusive prose.

This is in fact one of the longest discussions Paul gives anywhere of how he conceives his apostolic work, and why he has made the decisions he has (the exception to this must be 2 Corinthians as a whole). Coming to a church he had neither founded himself nor previously visited, but where several of his colleagues and coworkers now lived, he was conscious of a need to prepare the ground and explain what he was hoping to achieve. We should perhaps remind ourselves that when we speak of the Roman church in this period we are talking of perhaps a hundred people, more or less, in a city of roughly a million. It was hardly the case that there was no room for fresh work for an apostle and evangelist. However, Paul is keen to stress that his main aim is to use Rome as a base for further work in the western Mediterranean, going all the way to Spain; and this gives us a further clue to the purpose of the letter--namely, that if the Roman church is to support him in this work it is vital that they understand the inner dynamic and perspective of the gospel as he announces it.

The passage divides into two, each part dividing again: (1) Paul’s intention to complete his earlier apostolic work by traveling via Rome to Spain (15:14-24); (a) Paul’s explanation of his recent apostolic work as the reason for writing the letter (vv. 14-21); (b) his intention now to come to Rome and thence to Spain (vv. 22-24); (2) his forthcoming visit to Jerusalem (vv. 25-33); (a) taking the collection to Jerusalem (vv. 25-29); (b) requesting prayer in relation to that visit (vv. 30-33). Verse 14 picks up where 1:15 had left off: now at last, in the light of everything he has said in between, Paul can explain the reasons for his forthcoming visit.

15:14. It is sometimes suggested that Paul had been writing to Rome in the knowledge that there were serious doctrinal problems in the church--that, for instance, there was no real understanding of justification.^⁵⁶⁹ There is, though, no reason to suggest that a verse like this one, or its predecessor at 1:8, is not meant seriously. Paul knows several of the Christians in Rome, and is confident that they are not off track but on the contrary are good-hearted people, well instructed, and able to teach one another (νουθετέω [noutheteō] can imply “warn,” “admonish,” but here it simply seems to carry its neutral meaning, “instruct”). Paul, in other words, did not need to write to them because they were in bad shape, but because his apostolic vocation demanded that for his new phase of work they should be brought in as partners, and hence needed to understand in detail where he was coming from. This is not to say that there were not potential or actual problems in the Roman church, reflected not least in 11:11-32 and 14:1-15:13, only that he does not regard these as compromising the basic integrity and maturity of the church as a whole.

15:15-16. Paul’s own view of the letter he is now completing is that it is a “reminder.” He does, after all, say at various points “You do know, don’t you?” and we would probably be wrong to treat all these as merely rhetorical (e.g., 6:3; 7:1). He has put things, he says, with a degree of boldness, a statement no reader of Romans is likely to dispute.^⁵⁷⁰ Once again, as at 1:5 and 12:3, he invokes his own unique vocation by God’s grace, this time to explain what he has been doing in recent years (see too 1 Cor 3:10; 15:10). We who are so familiar with the story of Paul’s missionary journeys, whether from Acts (with all its attendant historical problems) or from Paul’s letters themselves, may forget that he cut a strange figure in the ancient world, a wandering Jew talking, arguing, suffering, praying, celebrating, making tents, traveling, cajoling, weeping, staying in one place for a day and in another for a year, always talking about God and the Messiah, about Jesus as Lord, about the resurrection of the dead. He was like a wandering philosopher, but without many of the accoutrements and with a very different message. He was like a Jewish apologist, but the communities he founded and the company he kept, not to mention the message he brought, though soaked in Jewish Scripture from start to finish, were not something any Jew had ever dreamed of before, and not something many cared to hear. What was he up to, and why should a self-respecting community in Rome take him seriously?

No doubt many of Paul’s friends in Rome could and did speak for him. But his own explanation is striking: he has been a cultic minister of the Messiah with special responsibility for the Gentile world. He has been working in the priestly service of God’s gospel. His task has been to ensure that when the sacrificial offerings are brought before God--the sacrificial offerings that consist precisely of the Gentile world itself!--they are pleasing to God because they have been made holy by the Holy Spirit. This sudden rush of sacrificial and cultic imagery can hardly be accidental; it is not, it seems, one metaphor taken at random. Paul is after all on his way to Jerusalem to bring a highly significant, and hence contentious, gift of money (see below); the thought of going up to the Temple, like a Diaspora Jew going on pilgrimage, is clearly in his mind. But he is talking about more than a single trip or a single gift. He is talking about his entire vocation, to gather up the Gentile world and present it as a surprising but appropriate offering before the world’s creator and its rightful Lord.

This is not the only time that Paul uses sacrificial and priestly language to describe his apostolic vocation, but it is the fullest and most striking such occurrence (see too Phil 2:16-17). He has already spoken of Christian obedience itself in these terms (12:1-2), and since he has just alluded to 12:3 as well (the grace given him in apostolic vocation) we may take it that he sees this as a fuller statement of the way he himself must fulfill the more general instruction he there summarized.

15:17. This, then, is the claim he makes in the Messiah when it comes to his priestly service “concerning the things of God” (the priestly overtones of the latter phrase [τά πρός τόν θεόν ta pros ton theon) are underlined by the parallel with Heb 2:17). Though Paul can speak of his only “boast” as being “in the Lord” and in his cross (1 Cor 1:31; cf. 2 Cor 10:17; Gal 6:14), he can in fact, as in the next verse, speak also of “what God [or the Messiah] has done through me,” and, in consequence, of his beloved churches as his “boast,” his “joy,” or his “crown” (1 Thess 2:19-20; 3:9; Phil 2:16; 4:1). It is because of this “boast” that he has felt not only able but obliged to write the letter (the NIV’s “glory” avoids the apparent self-claim at the cost of Paul’s resonances and underlying meaning).

15:18-19a. He explains this (γάρ gar) by speaking of what the Messiah has accomplished through him. He does so through a rather oblique double negative, perhaps indicating a certain self-consciousness: literally “I will not dare to say anything about what the Messiah has not accomplished through me.” This may be a way of saying “I wouldn’t dare to tell you any stories that aren’t strictly true,” or it may mean simply “I have the right to speak of what the Messiah has done through me.” He then mentions swiftly the various ways in which this work has been accomplished: word and deed, the power of signs and wonders, and (though this is hardly a separable phenomenon) the power of God’s Spirit. We may compare 1 Cor 2:4; 2 Cor 12:12; Gal 3:5; 1 Thess 1:5; and the various scenes in Acts, e.g., 14:8-18. Paul does not often mention this, but he clearly assumes that powerful deeds, particularly healings, were part of his gospel ministry. This is his regular modus operandi; it has led him by strange paths, but his boast is that he has thereby been faithful to his commission.

15:19b-21. The result is an astonishing claim: to have announced the gospel message of the Messiah in a long arc from Jerusalem in the southeast to Illyricum (the Balkan coast opposite Italy on the Adriatic sea) in the northwest. This is surprising, because we have no record, in Acts or in Paul’s letters, of a trip that far north. Philippi and Thessalonica are in Macedonia (northern Greece), south of Illyricum. The claim may be hyperbole, despite v. 18, or it may reflect a missionary journey of which we know nothing, which is after all quite likely considering how many holes there are in the Acts account (cf. 2 Cor 11:23-33 with Acts 13-20). What is more, to make Jerusalem his starting-point, though in a sense validated by Gal 2:1-10, conflicts at a surface level with the picture in Acts, where Antioch was the base from which he set out and to which he returned (Acts 13:1-3; 14:26). But the fundamental point is not in doubt, nor should it be seen as less than remarkable. Before Paul began, neither Asia Minor nor Greece had heard of Jesus of Nazareth; by the time he was writing this letter, there were little communities all over that part of Caesar’s empire (and it was a very significant part of Caesar’s empire, including many centers of the new imperial cult) in which Jesus was being celebrated as the risen Messiah, the world’s true Lord. That is in itself an astonishing achievement, and Paul must have known it.

Among his aims, he says (v. 20), is to announce the gospel in places where the Messiah had not been previously named. Conscious of being a “builder,” he did not wish to go to work on someone else’s “foundation” (see also 1 Cor 3:10-15; 2 Cor 10:15-16). His use of this metaphor is not uniform; in 1 Cor 3:11 he declares that there is only one possible foundation--Jesus the Messiah--so one might have supposed that it would not matter who else built on it, and indeed in the same passage he sees that other people are building on his own foundation. However, his point here may be influenced by his sense that in coming to Rome he is indeed visiting a church founded by someone else. Whether or not this was Peter, and if so whether Paul was aware of this and so was anxious to avoid any suggestion of conflict between the two of them, following previous disasters (Gal 2:11-21), we cannot easily say.

The point can, once again, be stated in terms of the Isaianic Servant theme that Paul has drawn on earlier in the letter (e.g., 10:15-16).^⁵⁷¹ Isaiah 52:13-15 spoke of the servant being announced before nations and kings, startling them with the strange message. Paul has already seen that effect wherever he has gone; but he has also seen people come into glad submission to the Servant, whom he clearly takes here to be the Messiah (the citation serves to explain vv. 19-20).

15:22-24. And so--to Spain! This proposal was bound to come as a surprise. All roads led to Rome, and the church there might well have supposed that once the apostle had reached the great capital he would rest content. But Paul has his eyes on a different target. The prophets in whose works he had steeped himself spoke of the faraway coastlands and islands coming to hear of the one God, of their true Lord (Isa 11:11; 41:1; 42:4, 10; 49:1; 51:5; 60:9; see also Ps 65:5-8). Paul no doubt knows that there are islands and coastlands to be found in quite different directions (going south, for instance, or east to India and beyond), and we have no idea whether he knew of Christian missions going there, or whether he ever dreamed of visiting them himself. What we do know is that, being a Roman citizen, he was able to use his citizenship as a help in traveling within the Roman Empire, and that since Rome was itself the capital of much of the world it made sense to go there, following his apparent strategy of taking the gospel to central points and letting it do its work from there. Seemingly the logical next step was to complete the whole circuit of the north side of the Mediterranean Sea. The southern side, too, was a busy center of Roman culture, from Egypt through Libya and Cyrene, including the important province of Africa itself (the prominent tip of contemporary Tunisia, opposite Sicily, centered on Carthage). Perhaps Paul intended to make the return journey from Spain along the southern shore.

We cannot know, and these speculations peter out in frustration. That may well be, actually, what happened to Paul as well. We have no evidence that he ever got farther than Rome, and though later legend did its best to fill in the gaps and have him complete a Spanish mission and return to Rome a second time, there is no compelling reason to accept this.

First, this tireless program of activity explains why he has been so long coming to them (cf. 1:13). Elsewhere he can speak of “Satan hindering him” in his desire to visit a church; there is no mention of that here, but rather of fruitful work for the gospel (1 Thess 2:18; cf. the Holy Spirit’s hindering in Acts 16:6). He has longed for many years to come to them; now at last the moment has arrived. (Or at least he supposes it has.)

Second, his aims for the eastern Mediterranean have been fulfilled; he no longer has any room for new work. This sounds extraordinary, given the tiny number of Christians we must envisage compared to the population in general; but Paul thinks of himself as a church-planter, and once he has established churches in the major centers of population and culture he has to rely on them to do for themselves the work of continued evangelism in their neighborhoods. So, with Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens possibly, and Corinth established--not without difficulties and anxieties!--he quite genuinely concludes that it is time to move on.

Third, he intends to make them his base for further operations, all the way to Spain. Verse 24 is important for what it does not say; it does not say that Paul intends to stamp his own apostolic authority on the Roman church, or to take over its leadership in some other way. But he does hope to be refreshed in their company for a while (άπό μέρους [apo merous] here has its temporal, not partitive, sense; Paul is not saying that he hopes they will refresh some parts of him).

15:25-29. This leads Paul, with a sense of foreboding that emerges at the end of the chapter, to the immediate task in hand. He was not to know, writing this letter, that his trip to Jerusalem would indeed nearly cost him his life, and that it would be a matter of years, not weeks, before he eventually arrived in Rome (see Acts 20-28). All he knows, at the moment, is that he has put his hand to a particular plow, at considerable personal risk and cost, and that he must not turn back. He has been organizing a collection of money, throughout the churches in the Greek world, to take to the poor church in Jerusalem, whom he here refers to simply as “the saints” (vv. 25-26). Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaea have contributed generously to this--we can see that process going on, with painfully tactful hints and suggestions, in 1 Cor 16:1-4, and especially in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9--and now it falls to Paul and his companions to take the money thus raised as a gift to Jerusalem. Paul does not mention the Galatian churches here, but he does in this context in 1 Cor 16:1. (This might conceivably indicate that the Galatian churches had declined to support the venture, but we should be wary of jumping to conclusions on a point like this.) It is likely that this is in long-term fulfillment of the promise recorded in Gal 2:10: the Jerusalem leaders asked Paul and Barnabas that they would “remember the poor,” meaning not poor people in general but the little and poor church in Jerusalem itself. We may compare Acts 11:27-30, where the Antioch church sends Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem with famine relief; the relation of this passage to Galatians is disputed. The Paul of Acts 24:17 refers in one of his Roman hearings to his having brought “alms and offerings to my nation.”

The collection was motivated, as Paul insists here, by much more than merely the desire, important in itself, to alleviate poverty. Paul saw it as part of a reciprocal action of Jews and Gentiles, to be understood on the larger map sketched in Romans 3-4; 9-11; and 14:1-15:13. The Gentile Christians, he says, are in debt to the Jewish ones: they have come to share in their spiritual blessings, so it is only right that they should minister to them (the word is λειτουργησαι leitourgēsai cognate with Paul’s “priestly” language about himself in v. 16) in material (σαρκικός sarkikos) things; this is one of the few places where the “spiritual/fleshly” contrast in Paul means more or less what it means in our contemporary parlance. But there is more going on than simply redressing a balance, however important (there are echoes here of the to-and-fro movement of 11:11-32). Paul conceives the collection, it appears, as a vital sign and means the unity between the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem (where tensions with the pagan authorities were rising and fierce zealot nationalism brewing) and the Gentile Christians in the wider world. For Gentiles to give money for Jewish Christians was a sign that the Gentiles regarded them as members of the same family; for Jewish Christians to accept it would be a sign that they in turn accepted the Gentiles as part of their family. The collection was thus designed to accomplish, mutatis mutandis, the same thing that Paul had been urging in 14:1-15:13.

This, it seems to me, is preferable to the rival account of Paul’s motivation, which suggests that he wanted to use the collection as a means of putting Rom 10:19 and 11:13-14 into operation--that is, to provoke non-Christian Jews to “jealousy” and so save some of them--perhaps even, in some grander theories, to precipitate the great event spoken of (so many think) in 11:25-27.^⁵⁷² Paul’s coming with the collection would thus be a new version of the long-prophesied pilgrimage of the nations to Zion.^⁵⁷³ In company with some others, I see no evidence for that.^⁵⁷⁴ The “great event” turns out to be a figment of the imagination (see the Commentary on 11:25-27); in the present passage Paul is thinking of the effect on Christian Jews, not on non-Christian ones. All he says about unbelieving Jews is that he prays to be delivered from them, not that they will suddenly see the light as a result of his labors.

He sees the Jerusalem visit with the collection,. however important, as essentially a detour. He has a task to complete, and as soon as it is done he will be on his way to Rome. His language for “completing the task” is strange. The NRSV (“have delivered to them what has been collected”) and the NIV (“have made sure that they have received this fruit”) struggle with what Paul wrote, which literally translated reads “and have sealed to them this fruit” (cf. NJB, “and have given this harvest into their possession”). The basic import is clear: Paul wants to deliver the money safe and sound. But why put it like this? Some have thought he was referring to a literal “seal”; the money was the fruit of his labor in the Gentile world, and he would deliver it to them under his own seal (so NEB; the REB, however, has backed off from this). He may be envisaging himself as a tenant handing over fruit to the owner; or maybe the “fruit” is his whole work among the Gentiles, which this gift will “seal.” Others have suggested that, since sealing is the last act before handing over an article, he simply means “when the matter is complete.”^⁵⁷⁵ In any case, that is the last thing he will do--so far as he knows at present--before coming on, via Rome; to Spain. And (v. 29) he has quiet confidence in God (not in himself) that, when he comes, “the blessing of the Messiah” will accompany him as it always has before.

As with the journey to Spain, we do not know exactly what happened when Paul tried to deliver the money in Jerusalem. Acts, which goes into great detail about that visit, does not mention the money except as part of Paul’s speech to Festus (24:17). But the visit, clearly, was anything but a detour. Paul, according to Acts at its most detailed, was beaten up, nearly lynched, put on trial before the high priest, then before successive Roman governors, and kept in prison for two or more years before finally appealing to Caesar, and so getting to Rome courtesy of an armed escort to stand trial in the capital. This was not, perhaps, what he had in mind in 15:28; but, being Paul, it seems unlikely that he would have objected in the long run.

15:30-33. Aware of the dangers he faces, he concludes with a request for prayer. The request itself is made with a solemn formality: “through our Lord Jesus the Messiah, and the love of the Spirit.” The prayer itself will be a struggle: “wrestle together with me in prayer to God on my behalf,” he urges them (the NRSV’s “join me in earnest prayer” does not get the force of συναγωνίσασθαί μοι [synagōnisasthai moi]; cf. NIV, “join me in my struggle”; NEB/REB, “be my allies in the fight”; see also Col 4:12). He encourages them to a twofold prayer: first, that he will himself be rescued, snatched out of the hands of unbelievers in Judaea [he is under no illusions as to his reputation as a traitor to the nation, the law, and God); second, that his ministry will be acceptable to God’s people--that is, to the Christian Jews in Jerusalem. He envisages this as a difficult and dangerous time, and he speaks of coming on to Rome afterward (v. 31) almost as if he were planning a holiday in order to recover from it. He wants to come to them in joy, through God’s will, and be refreshed with and by them. It is a touching moment, and we who know how the story continued after this letter was written can only look in awe at the faith and hope of the man who planned and wrote of such things.

The letter’s main content is complete. Paul adds (v. 33) a brief blessing--this time invoking “the God of peace”--and moves on to personal greetings.^⁵⁷⁶

But not all scribes left it at that. One very early manuscript^⁵⁷⁷ inserts the concluding doxology we now think of as 16:25-27 at this point, before continuing with what we call 16:1-23 and then concluding abruptly. This interesting detail (not the only oddity in that ms) is actually the tip of the iceberg: Metzger’s Textual Commentary takes over two pages to describe the complex evidence, and a further page to evaluate it.^⁵⁷⁸ Some mss have the doxology both here and after 14:23; two ninth-century mss and a derivative fourteenth-century one omit it entirely [though one leaves a space at the end of chap. 14 as though there might be something to insert); one fourteenth-century ms has it here and then stops, omitting chap. 16 itself completely. A large number of good mss, though, have it where it stands in printed texts today.

Many scholars have regarded 16:25-27 as a post-Pauline addition, but this judgment is reached as much on its content as on its remarkably versatile manuscript location. Since, on the basis of my reading of the rest of the letter, I judge the content to be comfortably Pauline, and since I regard it as likely that Paul would have written a fitting doxology rather than allowed the letter to stop short with a brief blessing such as 15:33 or the spurious 16:24 (see below), I belong to the considerable minority who, on balance, regard the doxology as original, and as originally coming at the end of the letter (see the Commentary on 16:25-27). It is easy to explain the other placings. Scribes faced with a longer than usual list of greetings, involving persons by then unknown, might wish to create a more usable document (i.e., one that could be read out during worship) by bringing the doxology forward. Some of the manuscript displacements are almost certainly due to the influence of the second-century teacher Marcion, who hacked this letter about as he did the rest of (what became) the New Testament, in the interests of producing a text that would validate his particular views (that the God of the Old Testament had nothing in common with the God of Jesus Christ). Some may be due to an early desire, possibly as early as Paul’s lifetime, possibly even under Paul’s direction, to make copies of this extraordinary letter available to churches other than Rome. T.W. Manson, famously, proposed that chap. 16 was added as a “covering letter” to enable a copy of the letter to Rome, which had stopped at the end of chap. 15, to be sent to a church where he knew far more people than he did in Rome, namely Ephesus.^⁵⁷⁹ Educated guesses of this sort have been made, and remain appropriate as ways of explaining the complex ms tradition. But they should not be taken as a solid reason for placing 16:25-27 anywhere other than where it is, still less for deleting it altogether.

1. Paul combines a strong belief in divine providence with an equally strong recognition that one may not always, in this life, understand what it is up to. Just as in Philemon he speculates on the possible reason why God allowed Onesimus to leave his master and come to Paul, so here he makes plans with enthusiasm but also with the request for prayer that potential disaster may be averted (see Phlm 15). “Perhaps,” he says-a wonderful word for combining a belief in Gods overruling mercy with a humility about how much of it we can see. He has seen God do extraordinary things through his preaching of the gospel, and he believes there are more to come; but he knows well enough from previous experience that things seldom turn out exactly as planned, and on one occasion he has had to apologize to a church--or at least explain why an apology was not necessary--because it had looked as though he was changing his plans on a whim (2 Cor 1:15-22). He had Spain in his sights; but with Jerusalem to face before he could turn westward he was not altogether sanguine about the prospects.

That was just as well. According to Acts, Jerusalem was a near-disaster, the trip to Rome happened two years late and under armed guard, and the sea might easily have swallowed Paul and his companions before they ever got to see the Seven Hills. Likewise, we do not know if Paul ever made it to Spain at all, and in the absence of evidence that he did most scholars prefer to play safe and suggest that he probably did not.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from this it is that of Prov 19:21: human minds devise manyplans, but it is YHWH’s purpose that will be established. Paul would have heartily agreed, even when the human mind in question is that of an apostle guided and equipped by God’s Spirit. But this should not lead to a shoulder-shrugging fatalism. On the contrary. One of the most important lessons in Romans 15 might be put thus: God allowed Paul to dream of Spain in order that he might write Romans. No matter that Paul probably never reached Spain. What mattered was that he wrote this letter, which has been far more powerful and influential than any missionary visit. even by Paul himself, could ever have been. Perhaps [that word again) half our great plans, the dreams we dream for our churches and our world, and even for ourselves, are dreams God allows us to dream in order that, on the way there, we may accomplish, almost without realizing it, the crucial thing God intends us to do.

2. Paul cheerfully breaks into “priestly” language when speaking of his evangelistic work, in a way that he does not when speaking of presiding in worship, let alone at the eucharist. The time had not yet come, but was not very far off, when devout Christians would draw on Old Testament typology to speak of such things, and for a while the powerful metaphors could make their own points, as could Paul’s. The time would come later, though, when the metaphorical status of such language was forgotten, as a new “priestly” class grew up through whom alone valid worship and teaching could be offered; and the time would then come when a large part of the church overthrew all this in the name of Paul himself. Nor has the world stood still on these matters since the Reformation. Such questions still bedevil the quest for unity Paul himself would so earnestly urge upon us.

But perhaps (once more) the time may come when we shall be able to re-explore Paul’s metaphors without the sense of having to revive old factions, restore old policies, or follow an antique drum. Maybe “old men ought to be explorers,” and we in the church, creaking and tottering under the weight of unnecessary baggage, could do worse than to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Maybe when Protestants rediscover priesthood and Catholics rediscover evangelism then both will rediscover Paul, and the fire and the rose might become one. We can always hope; and, under the rubric of the previous point, working toward that hope might achieve God’s ends without us even realizing it.

3. The collection and use of money in the church has always been, and probably will always be, a tense and delicate matter. It is worth pondering how Paul and his companions actually carried the stuff; in the days before paper money, still less international banking and credit transfers, they were taking a huge physical risk, just as in organizing the collection Paul was taking a huge risk to his reputation, as we can see reading between the lines of 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. Paul deemed it worthwhile because he knew that money could be of symbolic as well as practical help. Once someone has given to a cause, they will be far more likely to pray for it. Once somebody has received money from an unexpected source, they will feel themselves far more bonded, more part of the family. Paul had been asked by the Jerusalem apostles to “remember the poor”; they might not approve of half of what he did and said on the mission field, but he was determined never to let them say, “he never kept his promise.” The apostolic faithfulness, attempting to bring together Jew and Gentile in one community of love and praise, was meant to mirror the similar faithfulness of God. So with our fund-raising, giving of money, charity work, and indeed famine relief: we have become so sophisticated, so clinical, that we can supply a credit card number from a mobile phone while not taking our eyes off the football game on television. It would not hurt to ask, whenever Romans 15 is read: what are we doing, as a church as individuals that will send the symbolic as well as practical message that the church of Jesus Christ is one body, one family, and that if one suffers, all suffer?

NIV: ¹I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church in Cenchrea. ²I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been a great help to many people, including me.

³Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus. ⁴They risked their lives for me. Not only I but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them.

Greet my dear friend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia.

⁷Greet Andronicus and Junias, my relatives who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.

Greet my dear friend Persis, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord.

¹³Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has been a mother to me, too.

¹⁴Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas and the brothers with them.

¹⁵Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas and all the saints with them.

NRSV: ¹I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, ²so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.

³Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, ⁴and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. ⁵Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ. ⁶Greet Mary, who has worked very hard among you. ⁷Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. ⁸Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. ⁹Greet Urbanus, our co-worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys. ¹⁰Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ. Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus. ¹¹Greet my relative Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus. ¹²Greet those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa. Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord. ¹³Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; and greet his mother--a mother to me also. ¹⁴Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them. ¹⁵Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. ¹⁶Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.

Despite the brilliant suggestion of T.W. Manson that Romans 16 was a covering letter to enable Romans also to be sent to Ephesus, most scholars have continued to regard it as part of Paul’s original letter, to be sent to Rome along with the rest (see the Commentary on 15:14-33). The fact that Romans contains more personal greetings than the rest of Paul’s letters put together alerts us that there may be something special afoot, but this does not increase the chances of chapter 16 being intended for somewhere other than Rome. Indeed, when Paul writes to churches he knows well there is a remarkable absence of named greetings (1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians); there are a few messages from Paul’s present companions, but otherwise general greetings to the church, without specification (1 Cor 16:15-18 appears to be a partial exception, but this is a commendation of the three messengers from Corinth to Paul, not a greeting as such). The closest we come is precisely two names in Colossians (4:15, 17)--significantly, another church Paul had neither founded nor visited. We could almost formulate it as a rule: if Paul knows he church, he does not name individuals. Anyone who has had to make a speech or write a letter to a community they know well will understand why. The ice is thin. Mention one, and you must mention all.

This does not by itself explain the very large number of names here, or how Paul knew so many people in Rome.^⁵⁸⁰ On the latter point, we should take it for granted that there was considerable mobility among the early Christians. Roads were good, travel as easy as it had ever been, and some people, like Phoebe in 16:1, will have been financially independent and able to move about for business or personal reasons.^⁵⁸¹ Others, like Prisca and Aquila (v. 3), had been in both Corinth (Acts 182) and Ephesus (1 Cor 16:19), having traveled there with Paul (Acts 18:18); but, being originally from Rome, it was understandable that they would have returned there once the coast was clear--that is, after Claudius’s death. Nothing is more probable than that they should have stayed in touch with Paul and given him information about the little church in Rome itself, or that several other Christians of his acquaintance had already found their way there.

But why mention so many of them? Here we cannot be sure, but the situation of 14:1-15:13 suggests an obvious answer. In five cases, Paul mentions, along with a name or pair of names, the Christians within a household (16:5 a, 10-11, 14-15). He may or may not have wanted to mention all the individual Christians he knew in the city, but he was certainly keen to mention all the household churches he knew: we can only guess which ones might have been “weak” and which “strong,” but we can be reasonably sure he was careful to greet them all with equal enthusiasm. All sorts of things can be read into accidental omissions. Paul did not want to arrive at Rome and find that he had caused fresh divisions by appearing to favor one group over another.

16:1-2. In his second letter to Corinth, Paul speaks with heavy irony about needing “letters of recommendation” for or from the church there (2 Cor 3:1-3; cf. Acts 18:27; Col 4:10). They knew him and he knew them. To write a letter at all would be to lie about their relationship. But “letters of recommendation” were vital in the ancient world, where, without electronic communication, anybody could turn up in a town claiming to be somebody else. If today we still need letters of reference for employment or immigration purposes, how much more necessary were they in Paul’s world.

The person he commends is Phoebe, whose home is in Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth (in the days before the canal, Corinth had two ports, with arrangements to drag ships across the isthmus). The implication is that Phoebe is a businesswoman who is able to travel independently, and for Paul to trust her with a letter like this speaks volumes for the respect in which she was held; so it is no surprise to discover that she is a deacon in the church. Attempts to make διάκονος (diakonos) mean something else fail: to call her a “servant of the church,” with the NIV, does indeed offer a valid translation of the word, but it merely pushes the problem on a stage, since that would either mean that Phoebe was a paid employee of the church (to do what?) or that there was an order of ministry, otherwise unknown, called “servants.” “Minister” (REB) is imprecise, because that word is used for several pastoral offices in today’s church; “deaconess” (RSV, JB, NJB) is inaccurate, because it implies that Phoebe belonged to a specific order, of female church workers quite different from “deacons,” which would not be invented for another three hundred years.^⁵⁸² She was in a position of leadership, and Paul respected her as such and expected the Roman church to do so as well. He requests, as people did and still do in such letters, the kind of help that a traveler may need; and adds his commendation on the grounds that she has herself been a benefactor to many, himself included. The word “benefactor” means much more, in Paul’s world, than simply “she has been a great help” (NIV): benefaction and patronage were a vital part of the culture, and this makes Phoebe someone to be reckoned with socially and financially as well as simply a sister in the Lord and a leader--of whatever sort--in her local church.^⁵⁸³

16:3-5a. Prisca and Aquila are known from Acts 18:2, 26; 1 Cor 16:19; and 2 Tim 4:19. Acts calls Prisca “Priscilla.” They seem to have been among Paul’s closest friends, being, like him, tentmakers. How they had “risked their necks” for him is not known, but clearly they were well known in both Corinth and Ephesus, being capable of setting even someone like Apollos straight in his teaching. They had now returned to Rome, having left because of Claudius’s edict. Their house is the first of the “house-churches” Paul mentions.

16:5b-16. The details of the names that follow are mostly of interest only in that they may possibly reflect the ethnic composition of the church, though this is inevitably speculative. Prisca and Aquila were certainly Jews, as were Andronicus, Junia, and Herodion; Mary may have been as well. Paul’s comments on the persons concerned, though, are sometimes worth pondering. Epaenetus (v. 5b). was the “first fruits of Asia into the Messiah,” which presumably means he was the first to be baptized, the sign of more to come (cf. 1 Cor 16:15, where Stephanas has the same honor in Achaea). Mary (v. 6) has “worked hard for you,” perhaps in prayer (cf. Col 4:12-13).

Andronicus and Junia (v. 7) are kinsfolk of Paul (this may mean simply that they are Jewish, or, as the NRSV and the NIV suggest, closer relatives) who had been in prison with him, perhaps in Ephesus; since they had been “in Christ” before Paul himself, that must mean that they had been Christians since very early on, certainly before the gospel came to Asia Minor or indeed anywhere much outside the Levant. They were therefore themselves traveling Christians, whose journeys had already intersected with Paul’s, and they had now arrived in Rome, as they had earlier “arrived in Christ,” ahead of him. They are man and woman, perhaps husband and wife or possibly brother and sister.^⁵⁸⁴ This is the more interesting in that they are “of note among the apostles,” presumably meaning that both of them were witnesses of the resurrection (which fits, of course, with their being “in Christ” before Paul). Junia is thus one of the female “apostles,” the only one so called; though presumably others, such as Mary Magdalene, were known as such as well. On Paul’s meaning of “apostle” as “witness of the resurrection,” see 1 Cor 9:1 (cf. Acts 1:22); perhaps the two were among the “five hundred at once” of 1 Cor 15:6.

Ampliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, and Apelles (the last of whom could conceivably be another Jewish member of the list) are greeted briefly (vv. 8-10a). The first three are known to Paul personally, and saying that Apelles is “approved in Christ” perhaps means simply that Paul has heard good things of him though he does not know him personally. The “family” or “household” or Aristobulus (the phrase means simply “those of Aristobulus”) is perhaps another house church (v. 10b); it is implied that Aristobulus himself is not a member, though, and perhaps it simply means that a group of believers had grown up within his household.^⁵⁸⁵ If he was the brother of Herod (see the previous note), it would be natural to mention a “Herodion” in the next breath (v. 11 a), presumably a freedman in the service of the household. What relation he is to Paul, or whether (as in v. 7) this simply means that he too is a fellow Jew, we cannot know. The mention of Narcissus (v. 11b) introduces a famous name in mid-century Rome: a freedman who rose to great heights under Claudius, only to incur the jealousy of many Romans and to be forced into suicide after Claudius’s death. If this is the same man, as most assume, Christians within his household after his death would have occupied a challenging and dangerous position.

Tryphena and Tryphosa (v. 12a) increase the number of women in the list, as does Persis (v. 12b); all three hard workers in the Lord. Rufus (v. 13) may perhaps be the son of Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15:21), though it was a common enough name. His mother, who remains unnamed, had been a metaphorical mother to Paul at some stage, though in what place and circumstances we do not know. (One of the tantalizing things about this chapter is that, like watching a sequence of film clips going by too fast to take in, we catch tiny glimpses into the world of early Christianity that could be very revealing if only we could freeze the frame and ask one or two leading questions. There was clearly quite a subculture growing up, but we know very nearly nothing about it.)

Verse 14 greets five more people “and the family with them,” presumably another house church (where, we want to ask, would they have been on the map of 14:1-15:13? What would they be thinking by this stage of the letter?). Verse 15 greets five more people, including two male and female pairings; some have speculated that Philologus and Julia were husband and wife, with Nereus and his sister being their children. They, with Olympas, play host to another house-church (“all the saints with them”). Verse 16 commands the church to give one another the greeting that was already in common use, “the kiss of peace” or “the holy kiss” (cf. 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 5:14; Justin Martyr Apology 1:65). Christian fellowship must be embodied. A general greeting from “all the Messiah’s churches” concludes the list (v. 16b).

What do we learn about the Roman church, or even about the purpose of the letter, from this list? Not very much; but if we are right to see the extraordinary number of names as a sign of Paul’s attempt to greet the different parts of the church, perhaps including some groups that were not on good terms with one another, we might speculate on the size of the church as a whole. If there are five groups mentioned here (see above), and if each house-church had between, say, six and twenty members, the total number of Christians in Rome would be somewhere between thirty and a hundred. If the Jewish names were more likely to represent communities that still adhered to some Jewish customs (though, as we saw, this would not be true for Paul himself, nor most likely for Prisca and Aquila, and possibly not for Paul’s kinsfolk--which accounts for most of the Jewish names), then we might have a sense of which were the “weak” and which the “strong.” I do not think we shall ever be able to tell. It seems just as likely that there were a few “weak” members on the fringe of otherwise “strong” house-churches, needing to be welcomed in, rather than entire communities that were solidly committed to one line of practice. What we do have, then, is a small, vulnerable church, needing to know and trust one another across various boundaries; a church many of whose members were not native to Rome, living most likely in immigrant communities within particular areas; a church in which men and women alike took leadership roles; a church where families and households formed the basis of worshiping communities. There is some thing both attractive and frightening about this picture: enormous potential, huge risks, a community both lively and vulnerable. This is the community that will now be the first to hear one of the greatest letters in the history of the world.

NIV: ¹⁷I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. ¹⁸For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people. ¹⁹Everyone has heard about your obedience, so I am full of joy over you; but I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil.

NRSV: ¹⁷I urge you, brothers and sisters, to keep an eye on those who cause dissensions and offenses, in opposition to the teaching that you have learned; avoid them. ¹⁸For such people do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded. ¹⁹For while your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, I want you to be wise in what is good and guileless in what is evil. ²⁰The God of peace will shortly crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

We might now have expected greetings from Paul’s companions, and a conclusion, but before that Paul throws in a further sharp word of exhortation. It sounds, actually, as though it had escaped from another letter, though there is no textual evidence to suggest that it originated anywhere but here. Perhaps, as Paul thinks and prays about these small house-churches, he has had a sudden stab of anxiety. Do they, he wonders, need to be warned that there are fierce wolves on the loose, who will not spare the flock (cf. Acts 20:29-31)?

16:17. The opening warning tells them to “watch out for” (NIV) or “keep an eye on” (NRSV) those who cause dissensions and “put obstacles in your way” (NIV), going against the basic Christian teaching that they have received. They are to keep away from them (though how, within a small community, is not clear). This command echoes Paul’s disciplinary warnings elsewhere (e.g., 1 Cor 5:9-13). Whatever particular problems Paul may have in mind, his language here does not seem to reflect the questions at stake in 14:1-15:13.

16:18-20. This is then backed up (γάρ gar, v. 18) with an explanation of what sort of people these may be. They are not serving “our Lord the Messiah” (one of only two occasions when these two titles occur together in the Pauline literature without the name “Jesus,” the other being Col 3:24). Instead, they are serving (literally) “their own bellies,” presumably meaning “appetites” in general (so NRSV and NIV). This is standard polemical language in the Jewish world of Paul’s day, and normally means that the people concerned appear to be denying or abandoning some central part of the faith or teaching; the general tone makes it difficult to insist that the problem must be the same as that in Phil 3:18-19, where similar language is used.^⁵⁸⁶ The danger they pose is that they are smooth talkers, deceiving the hearts of those who are too innocent for their own good. Paul is quick to assure his hearers that he is confident of their “obedience,” since it is well known to all (cf. 1:8); but it is important that they supplement this with a mature wisdom as outlined in one of Jesus’ best-known sayings, being simultaneously shrewd and innocent. See Matt 10:16, “wise as serpents, innocent as doves,” the first adjective there being φρόνιμοι (phronimoi) rather than σοφοί (sophoi) as here; the second is άκεραιοι (akeraioi) in both.^⁵⁸⁷

Once again (v. 20) Paul concludes a train of thought with a blessing. By contrast with 15:5, 13, and 33, though, we catch a darker tone. He evokes Gen 3:15: the “God of peace will see to it that “the satan” will be crushed under your feet (cf. Luke 10:17-19, and behind that Ps 91:13; see also Rev 12:10-11; on “the God of peace,” see the Commentary on 15:33). Paul elsewhere sees the new, young church vulnerable to enemy attack; it was part of his theology of new creation that the church was now, like Adam and Eve, open to fresh deceit (2 Cor 11:3). But his earlier exposition of the victory of God in Jesus Christ over the sin of Adam and all its entail (5:12-21) enables him here simply to promise that the victory promised in Genesis will be theirs, and that it will come soon. He adds a brief greeting (“the grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”), which, like the closing doxology, has wandered to and fro in the scribal traditions; some MSS have it as v. 24, which is now regularly omitted in printed editions.

This short interjection, coming between the greetings to friends in Rome and the greetings from friends with Paul, functions rhetorically like the sudden reminder that breaks into a family farewell scene: “Don’t forget to water the plants!” “Make sure you take your medicine!” It is clearly heartfelt; Paul knows that troublemakers will surface in any church. There is no reason to suppose that he is thinking specifically of the “Judaizing” problem he faced in Galatians, or whatever cognate problems he was warning against in Phil 3:2-3, 17-19. His concern is to warn against any attempt to pull church members away from the central tenets of the faith, what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” However plausible the persuaders, their underlying attempt to change the ground rules of Christian faith and practice usually becomes clear before too long.

NIV: ²¹Timothy, my fellow worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason and Sosipater, my relatives.

²³Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings.

Erastus, who is the city’s director of public works, and our brother Quartus send you their greetings.

NRSV: ²¹Timothy, my co-worker, greets you; so do Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my relatives.

²³Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus, greet you. ²⁴

16:21. Timothy is well known to readers of Paul. According to Acts 16:1-3, he is the apostle’s hand-picked younger colleague, and we see him either by Paul’s side or running his errands at several points in the letters (e.g., 1 Cor 4:17; 16:10; 1 Thess 3:2, 6). Lucius, Jason, and Sosipater are not so well known, but they, like some in Rome, are kinsfolk of Paul’s (see the discussion of vv. 7, 11; συγγενεΐς [syngeneis] may mean “fellow Jews” or it may imply a closer relation). These are a reminder that, though Paul’s grief at his kinsfolk in 9:1-3 was real and deep, some of them at least were alongside him (cf. Col 4:10-11). “Jason” may be the person of that name we meet in Acts 17:5-9; “Sosipater” may be the “Sopater” of Acts 20:4.

16:22. Paul’s amanuensis, having toiled thus far anonymously to take down the apostle’s spectacular flow of thought, peeps for a moment out of hiding. Tertius is still capable of giving unsuspecting readers a fright by claiming to have “written this letter” (NRSV); the NIV softens the impact by translating “who wrote down this letter,” which is, of course, what it means.^⁵⁸⁸

16:23a. Gaius, in whose house the local church meets, and who is playing host to Paul himself, sends greetings. It is not clear whether he is to be identified with one of the other persons of this name in the New Testament; the most likely is the one in 1 Cor 1:14, a resident of Corinth. If, however, Paul is actually staying at Cenchreae while writing, rather than at Corinth itself, Gaius might be the host of the church where Phoebe (vv. 1-2) is a deacon. This might explain why Paul can say he is host to “all the church,” perhaps unlikely in a larger city like Corinth.

16:23b. There is an Erastus known (from an inscription) to have held public office in Corinth at this time, and though identification is never certain this may be the same person, conveying his own greetings.”^⁵⁸⁹ Quartus is not heard of anywhere else; like many others before and since, he has simply been a good though obscure Christian. He stands here for the multitudes of whom we know nothing, but who were lights of the world in their several generations.

16:24. This verse, omitted in what are normally regarded as the best mss, consists simply of the repetition of the closing words of v. 20, with slight variations. Some of the mss that include it omit the words from v. 20.

1. To a modern Western eye, the most striking feature in the list of greetings is that nearly half the people named are women. Some of them are taking leading roles in the church. When Paul declared in Gal 3:28 that there is “no ‘male and female’” in Christ, just as there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, he meant it. Some have criticized him for not making as much fuss about gender as about ethnicity, but that is largely a function of the problems he had to address in his church. If this list is anything to go by, he could take for granted something that much of the rest of church history could not.

2. Reading between the lines, we can see Paul taking care to greet several Christian gatherings in Rome that may have taken different positions on the issues he discusses in chaps. 14-15. Being a bridge builder between different Christian groups and opinions is hard and painstaking work; it is as easy to give a wrong impression of favoring one “side” or the other as it is hard to undo that impression once made. Today’s church badly needs a new generation of bridge builders who will take the trouble to treat the different groups seriously, not only to greet them by name but, as Paul does here, to honor them for who they are and what they are doing, in the Lord. The aim must then be to work with them, with integrity and imagination, to bring them into fellowship and mutual respect one with another. This is not to deny that sometimes a troublemaker must be rebuked, not courted or soothed; vv. 17-20 make that clear enough. But the point to note is that the work of patiently getting to know different Christians and their contexts is demanding, and church leaders need to give attention to it.

3. The blend of wisdom and innocence commended by both Paul (v. 19) and Jesus (Matt 10:16) is needed as much today as ever. Shrewdness without innocence becomes serpentine; innocence without shrewdness becomes naivete. The laudable desire to think well of everyone needs to be tempered with the recognition that some are indeed out for their own ends and are merely giving the appearance of friendliness and piety by their skill at smooth talking. Unless this is spotted early on and confronted, trouble is stored up for later, as an untreated sore is allowed to fester.

NIV: ²⁵Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, ²⁶but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him– ²⁷to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.

NRSV: ²⁵Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages ²⁶but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith-- ²⁷to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.

The manuscript variations in which this closing doxology has been moved to two other places in the letter, causing other dislocations as it goes, have been discussed in the Commentary on 15:33. Hardly any copies omit it altogether, however, and the burden of proof ought to be on those (and there are many) who regard it as a post-Pauline addition. The real trouble is the content. Those who have seen Romans as basically about justification by faith balk at a summary and doxology that do not mention it. Those who regard Ephesians and Colossians as non-Pauline find material here that reminds them of those letters, and declare that therefore this passage, too, cannot be by Paul. When others point out that there are in fact several points of contact between these three verses and the rest of Romans, including some themes that are very important but not so fashionable in traditional interpretations, that then becomes a two-edged sword: precisely, say the critics, and that is because whoever wrote it was trying, cunningly, to give the appearance of summing up the letter. Once an argument gets into that state it becomes like peace negotiations between intractable opponents: Both sides are dug in, and no advance seems possible.^⁵⁹⁰

It is true that Paul does not normally conclude his letters with a doxology like this; but it is also true that Romans, real letter though it be, is not like the other letters. Nowhere else does Paul conclude an argument with a passage like 11:33-36, but we do not for that reason strike out that magnificent paean of praise. Nowhere else does Paul lay out so formal and careful a central statement of the Christian story as he does in chaps. 5-8, replete with closing christological formulae at the end of every stage of the argument; but nobody doubts that Paul deliberately wrote that extended statement at the center of this letter. What is more, the letter is from one point of view about worship, and designed to evoke worship. It is, uniquely in his writings, a book about God (see the Introduction), and one of the running themes is the true response to the true God as opposed to the rejection of this God and the turn to idols (1:5, 18-23; 2:17-24; 4:20-22; 5:12-21; 11:33-36; 12:1-2; 15:6, 9-13). After a book like this, written by a strongly monotheistic Jew, a doxology is just what we should expect. And Paul is a Jesus-centered monotheist, in the sense explored in 10:9-13; a doxology that remains monotheistic while having Jesus at the middle of it, even at the cost of verbal clarity, is somehow exactly right. An imitator might have tried a bit harder to get the grammar to work (see the Commentary on 16:27).

What is more, Paul did in fact introduce the letter and its major themes with a reference to “God’s gospel concerning God’s son,” attested by holy Scriptures (1:2) and with the law and the prophets bearing witness to it (3:21). This was, he said at the start, the gospel in which God’s righteousness was finally “revealed” (άποκαλύπτεται apokalyptetai, 1:17) or “manifested” (πεφανέρωται pephanerōtai, 3:21); so for him to speak, now, of the gospel proclamation as being “according to the revelation [άποκάλυψις apokalypsis] of the mystery that is now manifested [φανερωθέντος δέ νυν phanerōthentes de nun]” echoes his wording at central thematic points, though not in a slavish or obvious way. Above all, the result of the gospel, in a phrase often skipped over in exegesis but placed by Paul at the center of his key introduction, is “the obedience of faith among all the nations” (1:5; cf. 15:18). When we meet in this passage a phrase almost identical to that, but not quite (substituting είς eis for έν en), it looks as though the same person has expressed things slightly differently, rather than that someone else has been cutting flowers out of Paul’s garden and sorting them into a pretty but now rootless arrangement.

16:25a. The doxology is framed by the opening five Greek words and the final seven: To the one who is able to strengthen you … to whom be glory forever, amen!” God’s “power” has been an important theme in the letter (1:16,20; 4:21; 9:17, 22; 11:23), and Paul declared at the start that his aim in coming to visit the Christians in Rome was so that he might impart some spiritual gift to strengthen them (1:11). He is coming to Rome confident that the God he proclaims is able to do this, through the preaching of “my” gospel; as in 2:16, this does not mean that Paul has a different gospel from everybody else, but rather that he has been personally entrusted with it. This gospel consists, at its heart, of the proclamation of Jesus the Messiah.^⁵⁹¹

16:25b-26. This gospel proclamation, the announcement of the royal news of King Jesus, is the unveiling of God’s long-kept secret. This chimes in with Ephesians (1:9; 3:3, 9) and Colossians (1:26-27), but is not to be dismissed for that reason; even if those letters were neither Pauline nor from a close associate, whoever wrote them thought that they were expressing Paul’s thought. Paul’s own apocalyptic language and its specific meaning (1:16-17; 3:21) is well summed up here. In an undoubtedly genuine letter Paul can make the revelation of God’s mysteries a main theme (1 Cor 2:1, 7; 4:1; 13:2; 14:2; and esp. 15:51-52), and he has used the same language at a crucial moment in Romans itself (11:25).^⁵⁹² This mystery, the long-concealed plan of God, has now been unveiled, and is made known to all the nations through the prophetic writings. Readers of Romans may well think of Isaiah and the rest when they hear the phrase “prophetic writings”; those who consider this doxology a later addition may well assume that the meaning is the supposedly apostolic writings, coming from early Christian “prophets.” Perhaps Paul himself could have held these ideas together. His own writings, after all, not least Romans itself, are tightly interwoven with biblical prophecy. The revelation has happened according to the command of the eternal God (see the similar language in 1:20). Its purpose, as Paul said from the start, was to bring about the obedience of faith (see the Commentary on 1:5).

All this is designed to explain the significance of the gospel proclamation of Jesus Christ: when this gospel is announced, it enables people of every nation to see that in Jesus the veil has been drawn back on the eternal plan of the eternal God, and to respond in grateful and obedient loyalty and trust. And it is by this gospel that God is able to strengthen the young church, not least through Paul’s ministry as he comes to Rome (1:11).

16:27. There remains a twist in the tail. Paul regularly moves with bewildering ease between the one God, conceived in thoroughly Jewish terms, and Jesus the Messiah, the Lord. In Romans itself we have seen a full incarnational theology, set out in 1:3-4 as a theme, developed in 5:6-11 and 8:3-4 in particular, restated in 9:5, developed again, strikingly, in 10:5-13, and then used afresh in 14:1-12. Paul has celebrated the “wisdom” of the one true God in 11:33. Now he puts the whole picture together with more regard for underlying theology than Greek grammar, which often comes off worst, after all, in the bustle and verve of his thinking. The NRSV sticks close to the Greek, with its teasing ambiguity: “To the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever! Amen.” (The NIV has smoothed this out: “to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ”; similarly, KJV, RSV, NEB, REB, NJB, and a few [obviously secondary] MSS. The awkwardness of how the Greek actually puts it raises again the question as to whether a careful imitator would have dared to write something like this.)

The question is, To whom does the “to whom” refer? God? Or Jesus Christ? I suspect that Paul’s answer would be: Yes. That, of course, is the meaning of “Amen.”

The praise of God has been central to this letter, as the formal summing-up in 15:7-13 made clear. It should not surprise us that the letter ends in most mss with an invocation of the one true and wise God, made known in and through Jesus the Messiah; or that Paul would draw together so many threads of his argument in this way. The ideal reader of Romans, in fact, is one who is prepared to heed a summons to love this one God with mind and heart alike, and who is ready to let that love transform his or her life at every level. If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob really is the creator, the God of the whole world, and if this God raised Jesus from the dead and thereby announced that he was and is the Messiah, the world’s true Lord, then worship-”the Shema of faith”; the “living sacrifice”--is the ultimately appropriate response. Because humans are made in the image of this God, such worship renews them in this image, and indeed transforms them to bear the image of God’s son, so that he might be the firstborn among many sons and daughters (8:29).

Part of that renewal is the renewal of the mind (12:2). Anyone who has wrestled with Romans will know the challenge of that renewal, and will discover mental muscles, as well as spiritual, that need to be stretched and trained. By summing up so much of the sheer intellectual content of the letter, this doxology challenges readers to turn that mental work, too, into praise, not to rest content with one activity for the study desk and another for the prayer desk.

Ultimately, Paul’s vision of the renewed community is of united worship, based on shared faith (15:6, 8-13). The praise that rises to the one God from the renewed community will thus reflect God’s righteousness, that covenant faithfulness in which the Jew first, and also equally the Greek, are drawn into the one family. That is how the community will be most truly itself. And if it is to be strengthened for shared worship and living of this quality, what it needs, not merely at the beginning of its life but undergirding it all through, is the gospel, the royal announcement of Jesus Christ. That is what this letter has been all about.

1 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993); Brendan Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (CoIlegeville, Minn.; Liturgical, 1996); James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988); James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988); Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

3 This is still controversial, in my view needlessly. See N. T Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 268-71; and Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK, 1996) xvii-xviii, with reference to the massive evidence in Second Temple Judaism. See also N. T. Wright, “In Grateful Dialogue: A Response,” in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed. C.C. Newman (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999) 253-61; and J.M. Scott, ed., Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Even if it is not accepted that most of his contemporaries would have agreed, I would still contend that this is demonstrably Paul’s own point of view. Another Pauline passage that makes excellent sense on this reading is Gal 3:10-14, on which see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991 ) chap. 7; and S.J. Hafemann, “Paul and the Exile of Israel in Galatians 3-4”, in Scott, Exile, 329-71.

5 A good example of this can be seen in Genesis 38:26, when Judah acknowledges that his daughter-in-law Tamar is in the right and he is in the wrong. This states a legal position; only secondarily, and by implication, does it comment on the morality of their respective behavior.

7 This question, and the question of “God’s righteousness” that it raises, is a major theme of the book known as 4 Ezra, written after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. See B.W. Longenecker, Eschatology and the Covenant: A Comparison of 4 Ezra and Romans 1-11 (Sheffield JSOT, 1991).

9 See C.H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1959) esp. 161-63. For a recent commentary in the Reformation tradition, see P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. S.J. Hafemann (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994).

11 Statistically, the word “God” (θεος theos) occurs with far more frequency in Romans (once every 46 words) than any other Pauline work. See L.L. Morris, “The Theme of Romans,” in Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays presented to F.F. Bruce on his 60th Birthday, ed. W.W. Gasque and R. P. Martin (Exeter: Paternoster, 1970) 249-63. Paul’s other letters are also, of course, “about” God, but Romans makes God and God’s justice, love, and reliability its major themes.

12 I have explored this theme in various places, e.g., N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 21-26; The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) chap. 9.

14 This point, though it was developed independently, has close analogies with the argument of Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994) 190-92. See also Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991 ) chap. 4, excerpted in Richard A. Horsely, ed., Paul and Empire : Religion and Power In Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 1997) 148-57. See further Richard A. Horsely, ed., Paul arid Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation: Essays in Honor Krister Stendahl (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 2000) chaps. 1, 10.

15 See Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 354-55; W. Wiefel, “The Jewish Community in Ancient Rome and the Origins of Roman Christianity,” in The Romans Debate, rev. ed., ed. K.P. Donfried (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 1991 )85-101. Some scholars remain doubtful about whether the Jews were really expelled. See P. Achtemeier, “Unsearchable Judgments and Inscrutable Ways: Reflections of the Discussion of Romans, in Pauline Theology vol. IV, ed. E.E. Johnson and D.M. Hay, SBLSS 4 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 3-21; S. Mason, “‘For I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel’ (Rom. 1.16): The Gospel and the First Readers of Romans,” in Gospel in Paul: Studies on Corinthians Galatians, and Romans for Richard N. Longenecker, ed. L.A. Jervis and P. Richardson, JSNTSup 108 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994) 254-87.

16 See Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974). On the Jewish community in Rome see H.J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome, rev. ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 1995).

19 See N.T. Wright, Gospel and Theology in Galatians,” in Gospel In Paul: Studies on Corinthians, Galatians and Romans for Richard N. Longenecker, ed. L. Ann Jervis and Peter Richardson, JSNTSup 108 Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994) 222-39.

21 See ibid., 229-300; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 44-46. Among earlier literature, see J.D.G. Dunn, “Jesus--Flesh and Spirit: An Exposition of Romans 1.34,” JTS24 (1973) 40-68.

22 E.g., J.A. Fitzmyer, The Letter to Philemon, AB 34C (New York: Doubleday, 2000) 99. I have argued elsewhere, and here reemphasize, that this is a mistake. If 2 Timothy is by Paul, we can count 2:8 as another instance. If it is not, we might speculate that 2:8 was a pre 2 Timothy formula, in which case its hypothetical author could, of course, have been Paul himself. See N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) part one, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

23 On the political side of Paul’s work, see Nell Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994); Richard A. Horsley. ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power In Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity. 1997); Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation: Essay in Honor of Krister Stendahl (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 2000). From a different angle, see B. Blumenfeld, The Political Paul: Justice, Democracy and Kingship in a Hellenistic Framework, JSNTSup 210 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001).

24 Although there are no biblical texts that explicitly predict the resurrection of the Messiah (“resurrection,” when it developed as a belief in the post biblical period, was thought of as happening to all God’s people simultaneously), it is possible that some at least read one of the key “son of God” passages. 2 Sam 7:12 (“I will raise up your seed after you”: cf, 1 Kings 11:20). In this sense, not least because of the LXX’s και άναστήσω τό σπέρμα σου (kai anasteso to sperma sou, “and I will resurrect your seed”).

25 “Born” is a better translation for γενομένου (genomenou) than “descended.” Paul reveals no awareness of Jesus’ supposed virginal conception and hence offers no answer to the question raised by Matthew and Luke as to how such a belief is compatible with Jesus’ Davidic pedigree.

27 On the meanings Paul gave to, and deduced from, his experience of meeting the risen Jesus, see Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul Between Damascus and Antioch: The Unknown Years (London: SCM, 1997) 101-5; R.N. Longnecker, ed., The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on his Life, Thought and Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

28 On other messianic and similar movements, see N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 307-20; and Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK, 1996) 481-86.

34 It is noteworthy that he here, unusually in Romans, addresses them as άδελφοί (adelphoí). The Greek word would be understood to embrace both genders (brother, and sisters); “siblings” performs this function, but is sufficiently rare in common usage to be inappropriate. “Family” is perhaps our best equivalent. “Friends,” though a common alternative today, is inadequate, not least in our world of casual friendships, to express the intimacy and mutual belonging that adelphoí would carry for Paul and his readers.

35 The NIV omits the first “for” at the start of v. 16; the NRSV, the second one. Paul is eager to preach in Rome, for he is not ashamed, for the gospel is God’s power, for in it God’s righteousness is unveiled, as it is written. Paul’s little connecting words regularly indicate the way his mind is working.

37 See N.T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Richard A. Horsely, ed., Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, lnterpretation: Essays In Honor of Krister Stendahl (Harrisburg, Pa.; Trinity, 2000) 160-83.

39 See, e.g., Schelkle who, following Augustine, sees 1:17 as describing a transference from faith in the law to faith in the gospel. For Cranfield, Romans, 99-100, the phrase is a rhetorical way of saying “completely by faith. See also Moo, Romans, 76.

40 έκ πίσεως … είς πίστιν (ek pisteōs … eis pistin) in 1:17 corresponds quite closely to διά ... πίσεως είς πάνταν τους πιστευόντας (dia pisteōs ... eis pantas tous pisteuontas) in 3:22 (see also Gal 3:22). For this interpretation, see James D.G: Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988).

41 On these questions see the detailed analysis of Rikki F: Watts, “For I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel’: Romans 1:16-17 and Habbakuk 2:4,” in Romans and the People o! God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed, S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 115.

43 On the use of Hab 2:4 in this context in Second Temple Judaism, see A. Strobel, Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzögerungs-problem, auf Grund der spätjüdisch-urchristlichen Geschichte von Habakuk 2,2 ff., NovTSup 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1961).

47 See the discussion in Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1993) 273. The question of natural theology was tightly intertwined, for German theologians in the first half of the twentieth century, with the ideology of the Third Reich and with the massive protest against it of Karl Barth. That is why, for instance, Käsemann assumes that Paul’s eschatology and christology would militate against anything like the natural theology found in some Hellenistic Judaism. See Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromley (London: SCM, 1980) 41.

48 See also Letter of Aristeas 132; 2 Bar 54:17-22; Philo On Rewards and Punishments 43; and, in non-Jewish sources, Pseudo-Aristotle De Mundo [On the Universe] 399ab; Epictetus Discourses 1,6,19. The essay by G. Bornkamm, Early Christian Experience (London: SCM 1969) chap. 3, remains important.

49 Several Jewish traditions regarded the golden calf incident as a critical turn in Jewish history. These are cataloged in Samuel Vollenweider, Freiheit als neue Schöpfung, FRLANT (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989) 258. See also S.J. Hafemann, Paul, Moses and the History of Israel: The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3 (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson 1995) 227-31.

50 On what follows see the thorough treatment in R.A.J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001) 220-303: and R.B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) 379-406.

54 On the diatribe, see S.K. Stowers. The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans, SBLDS 57 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press. 1981); “Diatribe,” in Greco Roman Literature and the New Testament, ed. D.E. Aune (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988) 7184; and A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

55 The tradition goes back to, e.g., Psalms 2; 72; Isa 11:1-10; in Paul’s day esp. Ps. Sol. 17-18. This is part of the wider belief that the Messiah will be God’s agent in putting the world to rights. See the material surveyed in N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 307-20.

56 F. Godet, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1880-81) 190, holds that Paul’s argument runs thus: If to sin while approving of the sin is criminal, is it not more inexcusable still to condemn the sin of others while joining in it?

57 T. Zahn, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer ausgelegt, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Deichert, 1925), understands glory, honor, and immortality to be the objects of “give”: “to those who seek eternal life. He will give glory and honor and Immortality.” Although this is possible, given the syntax, it is unlikely.

58 The word έριθεία (eritheia) is rare, but probably means something like this. Its only attested use before Paul (cf. Gal 5:20; 2 Cor 12:20; Phil 1:17; 2:3) is Aristotle Politics 5.3. See also Jas 3:14, 16. See esp. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 138n, 14.

59 E.g., Sir 35:15[12], with a similar phrase, reflecting, as does Paul’s rare word (found only here, Col 3:25, and, in the plural, Jas 2:1; cf. similar terms in Acts 10:34; Jas 2:9), the Hebrew idiom of “receiving someone’s face.” On the theme, see above all J.M. Bassler, Divine Impartiality: Paul and a Theological Axiom, SBLDS 59 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982); and “Divine Impartiality in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” NovT 26 (1984) 43-58.

61 Virtually every book on Paul, and every commentary on least Romans and Galatians, takes a position on the meaning of “law.” An important recent collection of essays is J.D.G. Dunn, ed., Paul and the Mosaic Law, WUNT 89 (Tubingen, Mohr-Siebeck, 1996).

63 See C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 2nd ed. London: Fontana, 1959) 61-62; H. Raisanen, Paul and the Law (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 107; E.P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 123-35.

65 See N.T. Wright, “The Law in Romans 2,” in Dunn, Paul and the Mosaic Law, 131-50. See also C.E B. Cranfleld, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 159-63; S.J. Gathercole, “A Law unto Themselves: The Gentiles in Romans 2.14-15 Revisited,” JSNT 85 (2002) 27-49.

66 See esp. the critiques of Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM. 1980) 62-66: Ulrich Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer, 3 vols., EKK 6 (Zurich: Benziger, 1978-82) 1:133-37, 142-46; Moo, Romans, 148-52.

68 See esp. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 109-18. See also T. Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000) 359: Paul knows perfectly well that he is using terms that are familiar how non-Jewish philosophy and is able to use them for his own purposes without either needing to be technically “correct” or to feel himself moving in a totally alien environment. Philosophical treatments of “law” and nature,” and “being a law to oneself,” include, e.g„ Aristotle Rhetoric 1.15.3-8; Nicomachean Ethics 4.8.8-10: Hermogenes “On Ideas” 1.221; Dio Chrysostorn Discourses 36:23.

71 It may have been a typical motif of the diatribe style to have upbraided one’s opponents for not living consistently with the teaching they espouse. See Moo , Romans, 157; Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 112.

72 Deut 7:25-26 and Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 4.287 show that the temptation existed; Josephus Against Apion 1.310-11 reports a Pagan slander against Jews that the name Jerusalem was a pun on the word for “temple robbery” because the Jews who settled it had done so much of it; Acts 19:37 shows that the charge was likely to be levied against Jews in the pagan world. For rabbinic material, see H.L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar Zum Neuen Testament und Talmud and Midrash, 5 vols. (Munich: C.H. Becksche, 1922-61) 3:113-15.

73 The verb here for “keep” (NRSV) or “obey” is τελειόω (teleloō, “fulfill,” cognate with τέλος telos “end” or “goal” on which see 10:4, with the commentary there). To refer to the uncircumcision as “physical” is slightly misleading. By “natually” Paul means, as we saw in reference to 2:14, “in that they are Gentiles.” All males are naturally uncircumcised” in the sense that they are born that way.

82 There may be here an analogy with the book of Job. Job, assuming that he and God are adversaries at law, declares his innocence; Job’s comforters, making the same assumption, declare Job guilty. In fact, Job’s adversary is Satan; God remains the judge and in the end clears Job’s name. God and Job can both be in the right simultaneously. The parallel is not exact, but the analogy holds to this extent; God appears unjust to those who assume that God is a party in the lawsuit, rather than the judge.

83 For the usage, see Gal 2:15. A hamartōlos, from the Jewish point of view, was one who, without having the benefit of Torah, sinned as it were in the dark. When a Jew sinned the result was παράβασις (parabasis, “transgression”), breaking a known commandment. See the Commentary on 5:13-14.

84 The Greek could mean that there are two different groups making similar accusations, the former in a more slanderous fashion (reflected to the NIV). But the NRSV may be right to take the sentence as a hendiadys, a single point expressed in two parallel way.

85 The word translated “Are we any better?” (NIV) or “Are we any better off?” (NRSV, which is to be preferred, since the word refers to position and status, not moral behavior) could also mean “Are we any worse off?”; answer, “No, not at all” (NRSV), could mean “Not completely” or “Not entirely.” The translation is further complicated because the question mark we assume after the opening words Τί οΰν (Ti oun, “What then?”) could belong instead after the next word, προεχόμεθα (proechometha), producing a single question, “In what way, then, are we better/worse off?” But most agree that the meaning in the NRSV is correct. For different options, see C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 188-91; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 330-31; Brendan Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996) 119-20.

87 L.E. Keck. “The Function of Romans 3:10-18--Observations and Suggestions,” in Christ and His People: Studies In Honor of Nils Alstrup Dahl, ed. J. Jervell and W.A. Meeks (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977) 141-57, suggests that this may actually be a pre-Pauline composition.

89 Thus the NIV, showing remarkable disregard for Paul’s connecting links. The penalty for this is to be forced to alter the next connective as well: γάρ (gar), introducing the last part of the verse, means “for,” not “rather,” as in the NIV.

90 The NIV’s “through the law we become conscious of sin” adds a first person plural where Paul leaves the matter abstract. This sentence, which sounds like a restatement of the Lutheran view of the “preaching of the law,” reflects Paul’s meaning only if we remember that “we” would have to mean “those under the law” (see the Commentary on 7:7 12). In addition, “becoming conscious of sin” is not quite the same as having “knowledge of sin” (see 7:7).

93 Paul is assuming, of course, the ancient Jewish lawcourt, not a modern one, as Seifrid accuses me of proposing. See M.A. Seifrid, Christ Our Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Justification (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000) 59.

94 MMT (an acronym for the Hebrew words meaning “a selection of works of Torah,” which, coming in line C27 of the scroll, appear to sum up the text’s main thrust) is reconstructed from six Qumran fragments, none of them complete (4Q394-399). It seems to be a letter, written in the mid second century bce from the leader of the Qumran group to the head of a larger group, of which the Qumran sect was once a part. For the text, translations, and preliminary discussions, see Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4 V: Miqşat Ma’aśe Ha-Torah, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert X (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) 220-28; Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) 358-64; Florentino Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Leiden; Brill, 1994) 77-85. On the relation between MMT and Paul, see also the Commentary on 10:58. Despite Vermes (493), it now appears that the other reference sometimes suggested, 4Q174, frag. 1, 1:7, reads “works of thanksgiving” (דדת ישעמ ma’äśê tôdâ) rather than “works of the law” (דרת ישעמ ma’äśê tôrâh).

96 This so-called new perspective, associated principally with E.B. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977), has now not only taken on a life and literature of its own but has generated a growth industry of opposing publications. See, e.g., R.H. Gundry, “Grace, Works, and Staying Saved in Paul,” Biblica 66 (1985) 1-38, C.H. Talbert, “Paul, Judaism, and the Revisionists,” CBQ 63 (2001) 1-22; D.A. Carson, P.T. O’Brien, and M.A. Seifrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic), whose first volume, The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, appeared just as this commentary went to press.

98 For the debate, see, e.g., N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law In Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture In the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). On the other side, see, J.L. Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997).

101 See Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 95-100; P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, A Commentary, trans. S.J. Hafemann, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 58-59; the summary in Fitzmyer, Romans, 342-43.

102 For shrewd criticism of the theory, see Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 220-21, 240; and, in more detail, D.A. Campbell, The Rhetoric of Righteousness in Romans 3:21-26, ISNTSup 05 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1992) 37-57.

103 The Greek πίστις (pistis) can mean “faith” or “faithfulness,” “trust” or “trustworthiness.” On the whole subject. see esp. L.T. Johnson, “Rom 3:21 26 and the Faith of Jesus,” CBQ 44 (1982) 77-90; R.B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11, 2nd ed.. SBLDS 56 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); S.K. Williams “Again Pistis Chnstou,” CBQ 49 (1987) 431-47; M.D. Hooker, “ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ,” NTS 35 (1989) 321-42; and the debate between Hays and Dunn in SBL 1991 Seminar Papers, ed. E.H. Lovering (Atlanta: Scholars Press) 714-44. Fitzmyer, Romans, 345, and Moo, Romans, 225, both reject the proposal of Hays and others, while Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle to Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 108-10, accepts it.

104 For discussion of this viewpoint, frequent within Reformed theology, see Moo, Romans, 225; R.N. Longenecker, “Till Obedience of Christ in the Theology of the Early Church,” in Reconciliation and Hope: New Testament Essays on Atonement and Eschatology Presented to L.L. Morris on his 60th Birthday, ed. R. Banks (Exeter: Paternoster, 1974) 142-52.

106 On the way in which confusion then arises through subsequent Christian theology using the term in a significantly different sense to that of Paul, see A.E. McGrath, Iusitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2 vols. (Cambridge: James Clark, 1986) 1:2-3; N.T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) chap. 7. See, e.g., Gal 2:15-21, where the question of justification is not “how to become a Christian” but “whether Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians can share table fellowship.”

109 See the helpful discussions in C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 205; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 227.

111 See N.T. Wright, “New Exodus. New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3-8,” in Romans and the People of God, Essays in Honor of Gordon D, Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 26-35.

112 The NIV reveals the weakness of its mistranslation of 3:21 (“a righteousness from God,” repeated at 3:22) when at 3:25-26 it is forced to translate the same word with “justice” and to acknowledge that the justice in question is God’s. This simply deconstructs the tight logic of 3:21-26. Moo, Romans, 219, 240, reveals the same problem as the NIV.

113 ένδειξιν (endeixis, “demonstration’ or “proof” ) makes more emphatic the general πεφανέρωται (pephanerōtai, “is manifested,” 3:21) and άποκαλύπτεται (apokalyptetai, “is revealed,” 1:16), stressing particularly the divine answer to the possible charge of άδικία (adikia, “unrighteousness,” 3:3.5).

114 The phrase έν τη άνοχη του θεου (en tē anochē tou theou, “in the forbearance of God”) opens v. 26 in the Greek editions, but the English versions rightly treat it as part of the unit of thought at the end of 3:25.

115 The meaning of καί (kai) in 3:26 is contested. (1) If rendered “and,” it implies that Paul is making two statements: (a) that God is just and (b) that God justifies the Jesus-faith people. (2) If translated “even” or “namely,” Paul would be saying that God’s justice in this case consists in God’s justifying activity (so most commentators). If translated “even though,” he would be emphasizing that God’s punitive justice is satisfied by Christ’s death so that now sinners can be justified (see Moo, Romans, 242). Although the theological arguments against the last of these (e.g., Fitzmyer, Romans 353; Byrne, Romans, 134) are not strong, the wider meaning of δικαιοσύνη θεου (dikaiosynē theou) elsewhere in the passage suggests that the first is more likely.

116 The NRSV’s note “who has the faith of Jesus” takes the genitive as subjective but implies that Paul’s point would thereby be that Jesus’ own “faith” is somehow either the model for Christian faith or even its substance (as though Jesus’ own faith were somehow infused into the believer). It seems far more likely that, if the subjective genitive is the right reading, that πίστις (pistis) here means “faithfulness.” In any case, to render ton ek pisteōs as ‘who has the faith’ seems to strain the meaning of the Greek almost intolerably.

118 17:22; an alternative reading of the passage takes hilastērion as adjectival, qualifying θάνατος (thanatos), “a propitiatory death,” so H.G.R. Liddell, R. Scott, H.S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), apparently omitting the τοΰ (tou) that in Rahlfs’ ed. of the LXX stands before θανάτου (thanatou). See A. Rahlfs, Septuaginta (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1979).

121 For “the righteousness of God” in Isaiah 40-55, see 46:13; 51:5-6, 8. The idea of God’s covenant faithfulness, through which Israel is redeemed and creation itself is renewed, is central to the whole section, both when the phrase occurs and when it is assumed.

124 For the mass of details, see C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark 1979) 214-18; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 231-36. Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 112, argues, against Cranfield, that the meaning ‘mercy seat’ can indeed make sense here. See also P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. S.J. Hafemann (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 58-59.

129 On the history of the doctrine of justification, see Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). McGrath rightly notes (1:2-3) that the usage of the term “justification” in Christian theology does not correspond exactly to the more precise Pauline meaning; he does not draw out all the ways in which this has vitiated the exegetical endeavors of those theologians who have sought to ground their views in Paul. See N.T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) chap. 7.

130 I have in mind Mark A. Seifrid, Justification by Faith: the Origin and Development of a Central Pauline Theme, NovTSup 68 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and Christ Our Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Justification (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000).

131 The NIV’s omission of η (ē “or”) at the start of the verse is a symptom of the (classical Protestant) misunderstanding that runs its through its translation of the whole of 3:21-31. Fitzmyer’s translation “but” (Romans, 359) indicates the same misunderstanding, as does Barrett’s suggestion that this is a different point to the previous verse. See C.K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (London: A. & C. Black, 1957) 83.

132 The Shema, the Jewish daily prayer to this day, begins with the words of Deut 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one.” The NIV’s “since there is only one God” fails to catch both the stark emphasis of the Greek and the echoes of Deuteronomy 6.

133 For the similar (and similarly dense) argument of Gal 3:15-22, see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) chap. 8. Paul makes a different, though related, use of the Shema in 1 Cor 8:6, on which see ibid., chap. 6. See also the Commentary on Rom 5:5; 8:28.

134 E.g., the telltale aside of W. Sanday and A.C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 5th ed. 1CC (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902) 283, suggesting that faith is “much easier.” Would they still say that at the start of the twenty-first century?

135 John A.T. Robinson, Wrestling with Romans (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979) 51, describes revealingly how C.H. Dodd, arriving at 3:31b during the course of the NEB translation project, exclaimed, “What rubbish!” Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 104, declares that the verse is “incomprehensible” as a conclusion to chap. 3 and that it only makes sense as a transition to chap. 4--i.e., as saying, “I can prove this from scripture.”

138 At this stage of the Genesis story, Abraham is still called Abram. Paul’s regular title for the patriarch is Άβραάμ (Abraam), which corresponds to the longer form. I will follow Paul in using the longer name, although strictly it is anachronistic at this point.

142 See esp. Richard B. Hays, “‘Have We Found Abraham to Be Our Forefather According to the Flesh?’ A Reconsideration of Rom. 4:1,” NovT 27 (1985) 76-98. See also Richard B, Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 54-55. The suggestion goes back at least to J.A. Bain, “Romans iv. 1,” Expository Times 5 (1893-94) 430. It is not clear that subsequent commentators (e.g. Byrne, Fitzmyer, Moo, Bryan) have recognized the force or point of Hays’s proposal; the same is true of S.K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 234, 242, who unlike them claims to follow it,

145 Bain took “according to the flesh” to modify “to have found” and, therefore, assumed that Paul was asking the question, “Have we, by our fleshly efforts, found Abraham to be our forefather?” In other words, have we attained membership in Abraham’s family by performing works of the law? Fitzmyer’s objection to this (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993] 371) in no way damages the reading I am proposing; Fitzmyer does not seem to have noticed that the meaning proposed by Hays is quite different from that of Bain. Stowers, claiming to agree with Hays, is actually agreeing with something more like Bain’s reading?

153 See N.T. Wright , “New Exodus, New Inheritance: the Narrative Substructure of Romans 3-8,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. S. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 26-35.

154 Again, Paul makes a similar point in Galatians with a different argument: in 3:15-22 he urges that God promised Abraham a single “seed,” i.e., family, and that since the Torah would divide the world into two (Jews and Gentiles) it cannot be allowed to stand against the promise. See Wright, The Climax of Covenant, chap. 8.

158 Some have cited Gen 22:17-18 as a parallel to 4:13, but the verse is equally explicable in reference to Gen 12:3; 18:18; in other words, there is nothing specific to Genesis 22. A more likely reference to that chapter is found in Rom 8;32 (see below).

159 Some puzzled early scribes, thinking further to highlight Abraham’s faith, added “not” before the verb “considered,” implying that Abraham simply ignored his own physical condition. Not so: Paul’s point is that Abraham took it fully into account, and still believed and hoped. The NIV (“he faced the fact”) splendidly catches the force of this.

161 It is also only the tenth time--and this is the 116th verse of the letter!--that the name “Jesus” has occurred in Romans (1:1, 4, 6, 7, 8; 2:16; 3:22, 24, 26; and now this passage) and only the fifth in the 99 verses since the introduction. Without Jesus, there would be nothing to say; this alerts us to the way in which Paul by no means always puts the most important parts of the logical structure of his thought into the actual rhetorical flow of a particular letter.

162 This and 5:18 are the only two occurrences of the term “justification” (δικαίωσις dikaiōsis) in the NT--surprisingly, granted its use as a technical term in Christian theology and the regular appeal made to Paul, and Romans in particular, on the topic. It is rare in classical Greek; in the LXX only at Lev 24:22; in Symmachus, at Ps 34[35]:23.

163 On the possibility that this is a pre-Pauline formulation, see P. Stuhlmacher, “Jesus’ Resurrection and the View of Righteousness in the Pre-Pauline Mission Congregation,” in Reconciliation, Law and Righteousness: Essays In Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986).

164 In particular, the strange word παρεδόθη (paredothē, “he was given up” or “he was handed over”), not of itself the most natural word to use for the death of Jesus, is the word used in Isa 53:5 and twice in 53:12. The verses in Isaiah use the word άμαρτία (hamartia) for “sin,” rather than παράπτωμα (paraptōma; lit., “transgression”) as here.

165 On Paul’s use of Isaiah, see F. Wilk, Die Bedeutung des Jesajahbuches für Paulus, FRLANT (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1998);]. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Paul and Isaiah “In Concert” in the Letter to the Romans, NovTSup 101 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

170 See Robin Scroggs, “Paul as Rhetorician: Two Homilies in Romans 1-11,” in Jews, Greeks arid Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honour of William David Davies, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly and Robin Scroggs, Studies in Judaism In Late Antiquity 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1976) 71-98. This is discussed, together with several other similar suggestion, by Leander E. Keck, “What Makes Romans Tick?” in Pauline Theology, volume III: Romans, ed. David M. Hay and E. Elizabeth Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 3-29.

172 It is curious that Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 393, supposes “salvation” to be the topic or Romans 1-4, now left behind. The only mention of the idea (even then, not the key words) in 1:18-4:25 is in 2:7, 10, which look forward precisely to chaps. 5-8.

175 This will be addressed in due course. Most major pieces of writing, and for that matter music and art, reveal their depths gradually. This is not a matter of bad communication but of the impossibility of instantaneously communicating truths that function at many levels simultaneously.

176 A detailed account of the proposal is found in N.T. Wright, “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3-8,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday; ed. S. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 26-35. Though I go some way beyond either, I have learned much from Frank Thielman, ‘The Story of Israel and the Theology of Romans 5-8,” in Romans, vol. 3 of Pauline Theology, ed. David M. May and E. Elizabeth Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 169-95, and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Paul and His Story: (Re)Interpreting the Exodus Tradition, JNSTSup (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999). An earlier statement of one part of the proposal is found in Ignace de Potterie, “Le chrétien conduit par l’Esprit dans son cheminement eschatologique (Rom 8,14),” in The Law of the Spirit in Rom 7 and 8, ed. L. de I.orenzi (Rome; St Paul’s Abbey, 1976) 209-41.

177 Paul uses salvation terms (from the roots σωτηρία sōtēria, σώζω sōzō, and their cognates) in Rom 5:9-10; 8:24 in such a way as to make it clear that this it another way of talking about the “glorification” and the “eternal life” that has already been mentioned, on which see below.

178 See also Matt 5:5, which uses γή (gē “land”) as the object of “shall inherit.” This is ambiguous. It could refer either to the land of Israel (as in Deut 4:38) or the whole world. Cf. Acts 1:8, where “to the ends of the earth” (NRSV) translates εως εσχάτου της γης (heōs eschatou tēs gēs), which could technically mean “to the ends of the land [i.e., of Israel],” but in the light of Acts as a whole seems to mean “to the ends of the world.”

182 For this whole theme, see esp. D. Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 79-104; reprinted in R.A. Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.; Trinity, 1997) 148-57.

183 James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988) 248, casts doubt on this and suggests instead the idea of approaching the emperor’s throne room. This is possible as well, but προσάγω (prosagō, “to bring near”) occurs very frequently in cultic contexts in the LXX. It is true that the verb is used of bringing the sacrifice, not the worshiper, into God’s presence (so Moo, Romans, 300-301), but this is hardly an objection in the light of 12:1 and 15:16.

186 The word for “love,” here and in 5:8; 8:35, 39, is άγάπη (agapē). As is well known, this word attained a new lease of life in early Christianity, quickly becoming, used to denote the self-giving Love of God in Jesus Christ, and the answering love, for God and one another, of those grasped by the gospel.

189 The repeated “still” (έτι eti) is hard to bring out in English, and neither the NRSV nor the NIV succeeds. some mss omit, and some alter, the second occurrence of the word; presumably it was felt odd even in the original.

192 See C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 264-65; full discussion in A.D. Clarke, “The Good and the Just in Romans 5:7,” TyndBul 41 (1990) 128-42.

201 The term dikaiōma, usually “decree” or “righteous deed” here has the sense, according to BDAG, of dikaiōsis, “justification,” “vindication,” or “acquittal.” Perhaps the form Paul used brings with it the sense of this verdict as an action of the judge.

202 The words “of the one” in each case (ένός henos, a single word in Greek) could, instead, be an adjective modifying the noun, “through the one trespass” and “through the one righteous act.” But this is less likely.

204 Paul uses it in Gal 2:4 of false brethren secretly sneaking in; though the word need not have a negative connotation, it certainly could carry one. The NIV “was added” seems to reflect Gal 3:19, which is after all similar in topic.

205 The phrase “eternal life,” the natural one for translators to choose, is nevertheless potentially misleading if it conveys the idea of an endless disembodied bliss, rather than the far more this-worldly meaning of “the life to come,” which sits better with the eschatological vision of, e.g., Rom 8:18-27.

207 See above all A.J.M. Wedderburn, Baptism and Resurrection: Studies in Pauline Theology Against Its Graeco-Roman Background, WUNT (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987). James D.G. Dunn, Romans l-8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988) 309-11, offers a helpful summary of the debate.

211 See N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 109; J.D.G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 80-81.

214 Lit., “out from among the dead ones”; it is basic, and formulaic, in early Christianity that, against mainstream Jewish expectation, Jesus was raised alone while the rest of the dead stayed dead. This is related, of course, to 1:4, where nevertheless Jesus’ resurrection was seen as the beginning of “the resurrection from the dead.”

218 The word “have dominion” is not, despite the NRSV, the same as in v. 12. Here it is from κυριεύω (kyrieuō, “exercise lordship”; in v. 12 it is from βασιλεύω basileuō, “exercise kingship”). The difference is slight; cf. the NIV’s “reign” (v. 12) and “be master” (v. 14).

224 See C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 342-47; James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988) 387-99. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 442-51, provides a careful analysis, taking a similar view to mine.

226 See J.I. Packer, “The ‘Wretched Man’ Revisted: Another Look at Romans 7:14-25,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 70-81.

229 Details in H.L. Strack, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 6 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1922-61) 4:466-83. See W.D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980) 25-27; J. Marcus, “The Evil Inclination in the Letters of Paul,” IBS 8 (1986) 8-21. The parallel is rejected as “incomplete” by Dunn, Romans 1-8, 391. See also the Qumran doctrine of “two spirits,” e.g., 1QS 3:15-4:26.

232 The famous early statement of this was in W.G. Kümmel, Römer 7 and die Bekehrung des Paulus (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929; repr. Münich: Kaiser, 1974). Bultmann’s essay, originally published in 1932, was translated as “Romans 7 and the Anthropology of Paul,” in Existence and Faith: The Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960) 173-85. Perhaps the powerful modern exposition is that of Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 191-212.

233 Depending, in the latter passage, on which references are taken as “Spirit”--i.e., God’s Spirit--rather than “spirit”--i.e., the human spirit. For the whole subject see G. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 1994).

236 Lit., “brothers.” Paul uses this term sparingly in the main argument of Romans (1:13; 8:12; 10:1; 11:25; cf. 12:1; 15:14; 15:30; 16:17), so that its use here and in 7:4 [NRSV, “friends” at 7:4 is an unfortunate flattening down of the intimacy, and rich mutual accountability, of άδελφοί adelphoi) seems the more emphatic.

238 The NIV, translating σάρξ (sarx) as “the sinful nature,” avoids one problem: that most readers of English assume that “flesh” means “physical substance,” the stuff of which humans are composed. But it falls into another one, implying either that human nature in general is sinful or that humans have more than one “nature,” of which one is sinful.” Its rendering of the verb as “when we were controlled by the nature” is further misleading; “controlled by” is not as strong, simple, or morally all-encompassing as “in.”

239 The KJV’s “that being dead in which we were held,” implying a reference to the death either of the law or of the old Adam, is based on a hypothetical MS reading introduced by Beza into the Greek Textus Receptus (1565), without any existing MS support, on the basis of his guess at Chrysostom’s reading. One twelfth-century MS (no. 242) has now been found that supports it.

241 The Greek word here (άφορμή aphormē) carries the metaphorical sense of “a military base of operations,” but it was regularly used in the more general sense of “an opportunity,” especially with the verb Paul employs here. See BDAG.

242 In a work roughly contemporary with Paul, 4 Macc. 2:5-6; a Jewish writer uses the commandment “you shall not covet” to more or less exactly the opposite effect, arguing that since the law commands this it must be the case that “reason” can overcome the passions.

245 In Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 218, I suggested that v. 17 of functioned both as the conclusion to vv. 13-16 and as the beginning new line of thought leading to v. 20. This now seems to me wrong. Verse 10 rounds off the question about the law; νυνί δέ (nyni de) at the start of v. 17 introduces a new point, which, supported by vv. 18-19, reaches its conclusion in v. 20.

246 It may be for this reason that the NIV translates σάρκικός (sarkinos) simply as “unspiritual.” This fails, though, to highlight the link Paul is making, throughout the passage, between the σάρξ (sarx) in which sin has taken up residence and the sarx of Christ where it is dealt with (8:3), and the “fleshly” nature contrasted with the “spiritual” in 8:5-9. It is perhaps better, with the NRSV, to retain the verbal link, thus clarifying the flow of the argument, and to explain what the key terms do and do not mean.

247 See N.T. Wright, “Paul, Arabia and Elijah (Galatians 1:17),” JBL 115 (1996) 683-92. In 1 Tim 1:12-16 Paul’s persecution of the church is described as constituting him chief among sinners (άμαρτωλοί hamartōloi); cf. 1 Cor 15:9-11.

249 This time it is the NRSV that omits “for.” Throughout this passage Paul varies the word he uses for “do” or “perform,” variously using κατεργάζομαι (katergazomai), πράσσω (prassō), and ποιέω (poieō); this is almost certainly to avoid repetition, not to introduce subtle shades of meaning between different kinds of “performance” or “accomplishment.”

255 So, rightly, e.g., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 477, citing various opinions. Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 211, declares that if v. 25b is not a gloss everything he has said so far about Paul’s major topics will have to be reconsidered.

257 For details, see N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK, 1996) 629-31; M.J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: Harper, 1999) chap. 10.

258 Several good MSS add, at the end of v. 1, “who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit,” thus anticipating the point to be made at the end of v. 4. This was not, as has sometimes been asserted, an attempt by later scribes to undercut the sheer grace of v. 1; nevertheless, the shorter text is certainly to be preferred.

259 C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh; T. & T. Clark, 1975) 377, comments, truthfully if nostalgically, on the disappearance of the singular form “thee/thou” from contemporary English, making it almost impossible to convey Paul’s sharply personal address.

260 It is inadequate and misrepresents the whole drift of Paul’s argument to suggest, as several have done (e.g., Fitzmyer, Romans, 487), that this “condemnation” simply means that sin is now merely disempowered. κατέκρινεν (katekrinin) in v. 3 answers directly to κατάκριμα (katakrima) in v. 1 and that verse scarcely means “there is no disempowerment.”

261 The NIV implies that this is the main purpose of God’s sending of the son, with the condemnation of sin being a new idea; but that is not how the Greek works. The NIV does, however, recognize the meaning of kai peri hamartias as “and as a sin offering,” while the NSRV, with most translations, relegates this to a footnote.

262 E.g., Lev 5:7-8; 6:25 (LXX/MT 6:18). For full details, and a more complete presentation of the following argument, see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) chap. 11.

266 “Life and peace” describes the covenant between God and Levi in Mal 2:5. See also the “covenant of peace” in Num 25:12; Isa 54:10; Ezek 34:25; 37:26; Sir 45:24. The prophetic passages in particular are full of overtones that are interesting for Romans 8.

268 Paul changes the phrase from “those who are according to the flesh” in v. 5, apparently treating the two as identical, despite the distinction he maintains in 2 Cor 10:3 and by implication Gal 2:20; in both of these Paul speaks of being “in the flesh,” meaning “still living as a human being this side of the grave,” while not conducting his life “according to the flesh.” In the present passage the distinction is obliterated: “you are not in the flesh,” he says in v. 9.

269 “Spirit” here, as in the NRSV and the REB, is more likely than a reference to the human spirit, as still in most translations, including the NIV. See also N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law In Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Fortress, 1991) 202; G. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 1994) 500.

273 Paul once again moves to and fro between “flesh” and “body,” though his regular usage is to treat “flesh” as entirely negative and “body” as the locus both of present possible sin and of present commanded holiness (12:1), and above all as that which will be redeemed in the resurrection (8:11). It is “the deeds of the body,” not the body itself, that are to be abandoned. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom” (1 Cor 15:50), but the body can and will.

274 Ignace de la Potterie, “Le chrétien conduit par l’Espirit dans son cheminement eschatologique (Rom 8,14),” in The Law of the Spirit in Rom 7 and 8, ed. de Lorenzi (Rome: St Paul’s Abbey, 1976) 225, has shown that references to the story of Israel’s being “led” through the wilderness are frequently found in conjunction, as here, with the theme of Israel as God’s son or of God as Israel’s father. See Deut 8:2, 5; 32:6, 12; Isa 63:14-16; Jer 3:14, 19; 31:8-9; Wis 14:3.

276 See N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 277-79; Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990) 577-79.

277 Paul can use the same image of Christ, as the first to be raised from the dead, guaranteeing the harvest to came (1 Cor 15:20,23) or of the first converts in a particular location (e.g., Rom 16:5; 1 Cor 16:15). See also 11:16; 2 Thess 2:13. In Jas 1:18 Christians are seen as the first-fruits of God’s new creation, an idea that sits very comfortably alongside Rom 8:22. For the biblical background, see the Commentary on 11:16.

279 It seems foolish to say “itself,” since, though the noun “spirit” is neuter in Greek, the reality Paul refers to is deeply personal. The sustained metaphor of groaning in birth pangs suggests “herself’: but this, though attractive in some ways granted the fact that the word for “spirit” is feminine in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, might place too much stress on a point that is at best a matter of nuance in Paul’s extended metaphor.

281 It is easier to understand the train of thought in the KJV and the NRSV, because “those who love God” comes at the end of the clause in English, making a smooth transition to “those whom he foreknew” at the start of v. 29. In Greek, however, “to those who love God” comes near the start of the verse, and the accusative case of “God” does not lend itself so easily to the necessary transition to the subject for the following verbs.

284 The choices were revealing and powerfully evocative both of the worldwide spread of the faith and of the challenge still posed by the gospel to the power of the world, and vice versa: Maximilian Kolbe, Poland (1941); Manche Masemola, South Africa (1928); Janani Luwum, Uganda (1977); Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia (1918); Martin Luther King, USA (1969); Oscar Romero, El Salvador (1980); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Germany (1945); Esther John, Pakistan (1960); Lucian Tapiedi, Papua New Guinea (1942); Wang Zhiming, China (1972).

287 On the Jewish traditions sec G. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1973) 193-227; B.D. Chilton and P.R. Davies, “The Aqedah: A Revised Tradition History” CBQ 40 (1978) 514-46; B.D. Chilton, “Isaac and the Second Night: A Consideration,” Biblica 61 (1980) 78-88. See also Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 531-32.

290 Cf. the NEB with the alternatives noted in its margin. For details of all options, see C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 437-38; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 541.

291 Cranfield, Romans, 437-38, argues in favor of the RV’s variation, which is to put a colon at the end of v. 33, because of the natural link between v. 33b and v. 34a, both through the antithesis of “justify” and “condemn” and because of the echo of Isa 50:8. The sense is not seriously different from the one adopted here. The reading taken in RSV--from which the REB is not far in sense--is flawed. God would not be a likely bringer of a charge (God is the judge, not a prosecutor). True, 2:16 envisages Christ the agent of judgment, so that to propose him as a possible pronouncer of condemnation is not totally unthinkable; but the way all of Paul’s questions and answers in this paragraph function tells against this implication (present in J.B. Phillips: “Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ, and Christ died for us”). See the Overview.

292 Two very good MSS, and some lesser ones, say “of God,” but the weight of evidence is against this. It would be easy for a scribe to “correct” the text in this way to the more predictable reading, not least in the light of v. 39.

298 K. Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) 4; N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 234; J.A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (New York; Doubleday, 1993) 541.

302 J.G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Towards Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); L. Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1987) esp. 135-50. A fuller list is D.J. Moo, The Epistle to Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 549. For more critiques of this view see E.E. Johnson, The Function of Apocalyptic and Wisdom Traditions in Romans 9-11, SBLDS 109 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 176-205; R. Hvalivik, “A ‘Sonderweg’ for Israel: A Critical Examination of a Current Interpretation of Romans 11.25-27,” JSNT 38 1990) 87-107.

304 This is similar s similar to N.R. Petersen’s distinction of “poetic sequence” and “narrative sequence.” See N.T. Wright, “Romans and the Theology of Paul,” in Pauline Theology, vol. III: Romans, ed. D.M. Hay and E.E. Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 32.

305 See C. Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 159. Even Moo, Romans, 547-52, while affirming that this section is “central,” does so because he supposes that Paul is facing opposition and debate on the Jew/Gentile question.

307 Obvious NT examples are the speech of Stephen in Acts 7:2-53, whose polemical selection of material and rhetorical force are well known. See B. Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles: .4 Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 259-77. See also the shorter speech of Paul in Acts 13;13-41 and the list of heroes in Hebrews 11.

310 See the mass of material assembled by M. Stern, Greek and Latin on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy Ethnic Sciences and Humanitites, 1976). For a brief survey, see J.C. Waters, Ethnic Issues in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1993), chap. 2, esp. 28-55.

312 On 1 Thess 2:16 and its relation to Romans 9-11 see W.D. Davies, Jewish and Pauline Studies (London: SPCK, 1984) chap. 7; C.A. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 114-19.

314 On the ideology of the Augustan Empire see esp. P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. A. Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); R.A. Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997) esp. 10-24; and P.A. Brunt “Laus Imperil,” in ibid., 25-35.

315 K. Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), and Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Johnson, The Function of Apocalyptic and Wisdom Traditions in Romans 9-11, 205, agrees with Stendahl that Paul’s argument is “theocentric” rather than christocentric, but insists that “Christology cannot be omitted from the agenda.”

319 Calling them his “coreligionists,” as Fitzmyer does (Romans, 544, 582), is misleading, since it implies that what they had in common was something called “religion,” so easily now misunderstood in a post Enlightenment sense. What Paul says he has to common with them is “flesh” (v. 3).

320 The verb can also mean “wish,” as the NIV and the NRSV take it. See E. Käsemann, Commentary on Romans (London: SCM, 1980) 258. But the implied parallel with Moses suggests that actual prayer to God is probably in mind. See C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 454-57; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 558; Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 159.

323 Moo, Romans, 561, rightly stresses that in chaps. 1-8 Paul regularly speaks of “Jews,” but in chaps. 9-11 of “Israel” (exceptions being 9:24; 10:12). But this does not mean “Israel” in chaps. 9-11 is univocal--as 9:6 signals.

325 On Paul’s high christology elsewhere (e.g., 1 Cor 8:6: Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20), see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) chaps. 4-6. Titus 2:13, though normally regarded as non-Pauline, is sometimes also cited in this connection.

327 With the NIV and the NRSV, following the KJV and many others, and following also UBS³ and Nestle Aland²⁷; against the RSV and the NEB. For the derailed arguments see particularly B.M. Metzger, “The Punctuation of Rom. 9:5,” in Christ and Spirit in the New Testament: Studies in Honour of Charles Francis Digby Moule, ed. B. Lindars and S.S. Smalley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 95-112. Metzger lists eight ways in which the Greek can be punctuated and argues for the one that puts a comma after “flesh” and another one before the final “Amen.” Other writings are listed in Fitzmyer, Romans, 548-49; Moo, Romans, 565-68; Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 170-71--all agreeing with Meager. Commentators agreeing with the RSV and the NEB include James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988) 529; P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1994) 145.

328 Moo, Romans, 569, suggests that vv. 14-24 are an excursus, interrupting the main argument, which consists of vv. 6-13 and 25-29. This ignores the way in which Paul is following, and retelling, the overall biblical narrative of God’s dealings with Israel. Instead, Moo allows his discussion to be or overshadowed by the anachronistic debates between Calvinism and Arminianism (e.g., ibid., 587-88).

330 With Moo, Romans, 575; Dunn, Romans 9-16, 540; against Cranfield, Romans, 473; Fitzmyer, Romans, 559-60. The NIV’s reading turns partly on taking ότι (hoti), the second word in the verse, to mean “because” rather than “that” as it meant in the previous, and parallel, verse. The NIV then covers its tracks by translating σπέρμα (sperma) as “descendants” in v. 7a but as “offspring” thereafter.

331 Or possibly “by a single act of intercourse”; the Greek expression κοίτην έχουσα (koitēn echousa; lit., “having a marriage bed”) can refer to the marriage relationship or to an act or intercourse, or indeed simply to a seminal emission. See Moo, Romans, 579.

332 Against Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans; Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 161; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 563.

333 This sense of “raised up” is very different from that of Isa 41:2; 45:13; Hab 1:6; Zech 11:16, sometimes cited as parallels. See Fitzmyer, Romans, 567; Moo, Romans, 594-95. There the meaning (expressed, in any case, with different Hebrew verbs) is “caused to appear on the stage of history.”

338 Similarly the JB. The NEB text has causal, and the margin has concessive. Scholars in favor of the “causal” reading include C.K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (London: A. & C. Black, 1957) 189-90; C.E.B. Cranfleld, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC. 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 493-94; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 605-6.; Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary or Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 163. For “concessive,” see F.J. Leenhardt, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary (London: Lutterworth, 1961) 258; Fitzmyer, Romans, 569.

340 I cautiously advanced the “bomb squad” illustration in “Romans and the Theology of Paul,” in Pauline Theology, Volume III: Romans, ed. D.M. Hay and E.E. Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 30-67. R.B. Hays offered criticisms of it in his “Adam. Israel. Christ,” in Pauline Theology, vol. III: Romans, ed. D.M. Hay and E.E. Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 82. I still think it has merit.

343 BDAG 247a states somewhat cryptically that “a strict classification of (δικαιοσύνη) in the NT is complicated by freq. interplay of abstract and concrete aspects drawn from OT and Gr-Rom. cultures, in which a sense of equitableness combines with awareness of responsibility within a social context” Quite so: and “awareness of responsibility within a social context,” seen in the context of Second Temple Judaism, takes concrete form in the covenant, in the mutual covenant responsibilities of God and Israel in particular, and in the covenant status Israel had, or hoped to have.

344 Though see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 576-77; Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 165, suggesting that vv. 30b-31 together form a second question.

346 E.g., E.P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 42; Fitzmyer, Romans, 577-78. The NIV’s “a law of righteousness’ picks up the fact that Paul does not write a definite article before νόμος (nomos, ‘law”), implying that this might be something other than Torah; and. at the end of the verse, by translating simply “has not attained it,” leaves the possibility open that Paul means “attained righteousness,” whereas the Greek is very clear in repeating nomos. Since this second use is also without the article, but clearly refers to the law lust mentioned, it is clear that the absence of the article in the first instance is not as significant as the translation would imply. The NRSV, following the RSV, blatantly turns the first phrase around: “Israel, who did strive for the righteousness that is based on the law.” It is possible that this is what Paul meant by διώκων νόμον δικαιοσύνης (diōkōn nomon dikaiosynēs), but he was perfectly capable of writing διώκων τήν δικαιοσύνην τήν έν νόμω (diōkōn tēn dikaiosynēn tēn en nomō) or perhaps έκ νόμου (ek nomou; cf. Phil 3:6. 9) if that was what he meant. The JB and the NJB both fall into the same trap; the NEB and the REB stick closer to what Paul actually says.

348 See 1 Pet 2:6-8, where the two Isaiah passages are separated, with Ps 118:22 quoted in between; Matt 21:42 and pars.; Acts 4:11-12; Eph 2:20. On Jesus’ use (and its Second Temple Jewish context), see N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996) 498-500.

349 See also the NJB: “he who relies on this,” i.e., on the stone--leaving the interpretative option open. So too the REB: “he who has faith in it.” C.K. Barren argues cautiously for the law as the “stone,” though with a christological reference as it were waiting in the wings. See Barrett, “Romans 9-30-10.21: Fall and Reponsibility of Israel,” in Die Israelfrage nach Röm 9-11, ed. L. de Lorenzi (Rome: St Paul vor den Mauern, 1977) 112, Fitzmyer, Romans, 579, proposes the gospel.

351 Isa 28:16 is quoted in 1QS 8:7 8 in reference to the community. See Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 499n. 76. See also Matt 16:18, where the notion of building a community on the “rock” belongs with the same strand of thought: B.F. Meyer, The Alms of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979) 185-88. The Targum on Isaiah understands the reference in this way; and see 1QS 8;7-8; 1QH 6:26-7.

352 σκανδάλον (skandalon), the word translated “scandal” here, is often translated “stumbling block” (e.g., KJV, RSV, NRSV, NEB, NIV on Cor 1:23); but the metaphor of tripping up is absent from its basic meaning, which is to do with enticing to sin. See BDAG 926.

356 On “zeal” in Judaism see above all M. Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I Until 70 A.D., trans. D. South (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989); and N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and The Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 174-81. The Jewish background includes Num 25:11, 13; 1 Kgs 19:10, 14: Ps 69:9; 1 Macc 2:26-7, 58; Jdt 9:4. On Paul’s different senses of “zeal,” see N.T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) chap. 2, Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 632, is wrong to say that the concept is “uniformly praised” in the NT; he does not mention Gal 1:14 or Phil 3:6, where “zeal” leads to persecuting the church.

357 See W. Sanday and A.C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 5th ed., ICC (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902) 283, and many since. The NEB/REB have “God’s way of righteousness,” as though the phrase referred not so much to a status as to a method or system. The JB follows the RSV, but the NJB, interestingly, has “God’s saving justice.”

358 See also Fitzmyer, Romans, 583, against C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 515; A. Nygren, Commentary on Romans (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972) 379.

359 Several good MSS (including A and B) omit δικαιοσύνην dikaiosynēn in the latter phrase. It is easier to explain this in terms of scribes tidying up an apparently overly repetitive sentence than it is to explain the addition of what, by the same token, would have seemed to many a redundant occurrence.

360 See Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 283-84: “Law as a method or principle of righteousness had been done away with in Christ.” See also C.H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1959) 176; Ernst Kässemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 282-83. Luther, interestingly, in his Lectures on Romans, ed. W. Pauck, LCC 15 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961) 288, takes “Christ is the end of the law” as an introduction to what follows, showing that “every word in the Bible points to Christ.”

361 The REB has changed the verb “ends” back to a noun (“Christ is the end of the law”) but still retains the unwarranted addition of an extra verb (“and brings”). The second half of the Greek sentence, though, is the result of the implied verb in the first half, not a second and different thought. The NEB margin is equally unwarranted: “Christ is the end of the law as a way to righteousness for everyone who has faith”; to take είς δικαιοσύνην (eis dikaiosynēn) with νόμου (nomou) in that way is grammatically very harsh.

362 The NJ B, however, has changed this to: “But the Law has found its fulfilment in Christ so that all who have faith will be justified.” One wonders why, in either case, “but” was preferred to “for” as the connective; but at least a connection was provided, unlike the NIV, which omits γάρ (gar) altogether.

365 See too the way in which Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 284, are forced to say that the gar at the start of the verse gives the reason, not for the actual statement of v. 3, but for what was implied--namely, that the Jews were wrong in not submitting to “the divine method.”

368 See esp. 2 Cor 3:13. on which see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 181, esp. n. 25, where I argue that τέλος (telos) can be read as “goal” or “final destination,” even though the phrase contains the idea of the Torah’s dispensation as essentially temporary.

369 BDAG 997 lists this, strangely, as an occurrence of the first meaning on the grounds that to bring something to an end can also mean to bring it to its consummation or perfection; but, granted that the two meanings do shade into each other, if there is a difference between something ceasing to exist or be valid and something finding a fuller, more complete existence and power.

371 Cf. Moo, Romans, 641. with Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 172. For other “double sense” readings see P. Achtemeier, “Unsearchable Judgments and Inscrutable Ways: Reflections of the Discussion of Romans,” in Pauline Theology vol. IV. ed. E.E. Johnson and D.M. Hay, SBLSS 4 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 168; James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988) 596-98 (though leaning heavily toward “termination” as the primary meaning). Fitzmyer, Romans, 584-85, denies that such a double meaning is possible.

372 On which see the suggestive comments of R.B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 73-83. For a stimulating account of the passage see E.M. Humphrey, “Why Bring the Word Down? The Rhetoric of Demonstration and Disclosure in Romans 9:30-10:21,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 50th Birthday, ed. S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 129-48.

373 See Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 285-86; C.H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1959) 177; Dunn, Romans 9-16, 600-602; Moo, Romans, 643-50. Among Catholic commentators this view is taken by Fitzmyer, Romans, 587-89; B. Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996) 317-18.

375 The final chapters of Deuteronomy--the conclusion of the Pentateuch--were often read eschatologically at the time. Good examples are Pseudo-Philo 19; Testament of Moses, and 4 Ezra (see below), on which see R.J. Bauckham, “Apocalypses,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, vol. 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, ed. D.A. Carson et al. (Grand Rapids; Baker Academic, 2001) 171.

377 This was how the chapter was being read in the Second Temple period. See 4 Ezra 7:20-21; Bar 4:1; Sir 17:11. If Paul had wanted to play Leviticus 18 (“do this and find life”) off against some other text, he could hardly have chosen a worse one; this is exactly how Deuteronomy 30 was being understood. See the Commentary on 8:5-8.

378 K. Barth, A Shorter Commentary on Romans (London: SCM, 1959) 127; followed by C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 521-22; Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 168. Criticized by James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988) 601; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 587; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 646-47. The covenantal and narratival reading I am proposing retains the positive sense hoped for by Barth and his followers but within a much more demonstrable Second Temple line of thought.

379 Cf. Sir 17:11; 45:5; Philo Preliminary Studies 86-87; Ps Sol 14:2. Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 175, notes that Lev 18:5 was sometimes used in connection with Gentiles being “righteous.” see bBQam 38a; bSanh 59a. See also Moo, Romans, 648n. 15.

382 A start was made by P. Grelot, ‘Les oeuvres de la Loi (A propos de 4Q394-398),” RQ 16 (December 1994) 441-48; Martin Abegg, “Paul, ‘Works of the Law,’ and MMT,” BAR (November/December, 1994) 52-55, 82; J.D.G. Dunn, “4QMMT and Galatians,” NTS 43/1 (1997) 147-53; M. Bachmann, “4QMMT and Galaterbrief הרותה ישעמ and ΕΡΓΑ ΝΟΜΟΥ,” ZNW 89 (1998) 91-113 (with copious bibliography, including other works by Bachmann). For a preliminary statement of the present position see N. T. Wright, “Paul and Qumran” Bible Review (October 1998) 18, 54.

387 E.g., Moo, Romans, 652-53. A major study of the parallel was that of M.J. Suggs, “‘The Word Is Near You’: Romans 10:6-10 within the Purpose of the Letter,” in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, ed. W.R, Farmer et al, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) 289-312.

391 On which see N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law In Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) chap. 5. Paul, like Baruch, echoes the wisdom literature at various points here. See, e.g., Prov 30:4; Wis 16:13.

393 Most ancient commentators took it to refer to the incarnation. For details and support, see C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 524-25; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 590; Douglas J, Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 655-56. The second is urged by Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W, Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 288; and James D.G. Dunn. Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas; Word, 1988) 605.

396 Cf. Acts 10:36. Detailed discussion in C.K. Rowe, “Romans 10:13: What Is the Name of the Lord?” Horizons in Biblical Theology 22 (2000) 146-50. Among Second Temple references to Israel’s God as “Lord at all,” see 1QapGen 20:13; 4Q409 1:6; Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 20:90.

399 The NIV (“richly blesses all”) and the NRSV (“is generous to all”) do not catch the emphasis, which is on the supreme riches that belong to God and are now shared with others. It is possible for a poor person to be generous; Paul’s point is (a) that God is not poor but supremely rich and (b) that God shares these riches lavishly.

400 “Call upon the name of YHWH” (s a frequent biblical way of designating Israel. See Dunn, Romans 9-16, 610-11. For similar formulae in early Christianity, see Acts 2:21; 9:14, 21 (where the phrase is almost a definition of a Christian); 22:16 (a baptismal context); and 1 Cor 1:2; 2 Tim 2:22.

403 Also Nah 1:15 [2:1 LXX]; but the following verse shows it is Isaiah whom Paul has in mind. The word for “messengers” is εύαγγελιζόμένοι (euangelizomenoi, “gospelers”), which echoes Joel 2:32 [3:5 LXX] the verse Paul quoted in 10:13. For the translation “timely” instead of “beautiful.” see BDAG 1103; Fitzmyer, Romans, 595,597; Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 176.

404 That is presumably the view of the NIV, which heads the section 9:30-10:21 as “Israel’s Unbelief” and adds “the Israelites” as the subject of v. 16. The NRSV, starting a new paragraph at v. 18 and introducing v. 19 with “Again I ask” for Paul’s άλλά λέγω (alla legō; lit., “but I say”), may imply the same understanding; “they” in v. 18 presumes continuity of subject with the previous verses.

405 Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 177, rightly sees v. 19 as the point to which Paul is leading through his exposition of the worldwide mission.

408 Many good MSS have “of God,” but “of the Messiah” has decisive support and, as the more unusual phrase, is virtually certain to be right. Many scribes, like many modern commentators, will have missed the allusion back to v. 8. C.K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (London: A. & C. Black, 1957) 205, has suggested that v. 17 may be a gloss, but most find this implausible.

413 Sirach 50:25-26 declares that the writer’s soul is vexed with two nations, Samaria and Philistia, and also with a third, which is “no nation” namely “the foolish people who dwell at Sichar.” On the various rabbinic interpretations of the “non-nations,” see SB 3.284-85.

414 J.F. Walvoord, Israel in Prophecy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1962); J. Fischer, The Olive Tree Connection: Sharing Messiah with Israel (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1983). The work of the so-called International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem is based on this kind of thinking.

419 The NEB’s translation of μή γένοιτο (mē genoito) as “ I cannot believe it!” reflects Dodd’s idea that Paul’s logic should have made him give the answer Yes and that only residual national pride made him answer No. See C.H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1959) 69, 184. See also Fitzmyer, Romans, 603.

422 See Moo, Romans, 689-90. See also Rom 2:3-7, the language of which Paul picks up later in the present chapter; cf. 2 Macc 6:13-16, discussed in the Commentary on 9:14 18. In the present passage, 11:7 is to be taken closely with 11:25.

424 A “snare” (παγίς pagis) also echoes a curse in Ps 35:8. Paul thus lines up the three elements of the Jewish Scriptures (Law, Prophets, and writings) to demonstrate that his charge against his fellow Jews is not his own invention but is the solemn and sustained witness of their own sacred texts.

426 Against C.E.B. Cranfield. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 552; Fitzmyer, Romans, 607; Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 179.

429 ήττημα (hēttēma), translated “defeat” in the NRSV and “loss” in the NIV, is a rare word (only here and 1 Cor 6:7 in the NT). The cognate verb ήττάομαι (hēttaomai has a range of meaning, including “to be defeated,” “to be inferior,” “to be weaker.” Since it serves here (like “trespass” earlier in the verse) to sum up the whole sequence of 9:6-10:21 and makes the direct contrast with plērōma, a sense of`”diminution” seems plausible. See, however, Moo, Romans, 688n, 26.

437 It is striking that the word for “lump” (φύραμα phyrama) is the same as in the “potter and clay” illustration in 9:21. The point here is not the same--there the lump was clay, here it is dough--but the two passages are thematically quite close. God can and will refashion the “lump” into something that at present it is not.

442 See Columella On Country Matters 5:9-16 (contemporary with Paul); Palladius On Grafting 53-54 (5th cent. CE). See also Moo, Romans, 703n. 33, and the other sources cited there, esp. A.G. Baxter and J.A. Ziesler “Paul and Arboriculture: Romans 11:17-24,” JSNT 24 (1985) 25-32.

444 “Perhaps” in the NRSV translates μή πως (mē pōs), which is missing in some good MSS but present, and hard to explain as a gloss, in several others. See B.M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1971) 526-27. Without it, the verse reads, as in the NIV, simply, “he will not spare you either.” Adding “perhaps” does seem appropriately reverent at this point, though of course the more appropriate it seems the easier it is to explain it as a possible addition.

445 άποτομία (apotomia); its only NT occurrence. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 616, points out that Paul interestingly does not use the regular words for “mercy” (έλεος eleos) and “justice” (δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē).

447 Perhaps the most extreme suggestion is that of C: Plag, Israels Wege zum Heil, Eine Untersuchung zum Römer 9 bis 11 (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1969), that 11:25-27 is an extraneous insertion into a text that, without it, would have spoken simply of the continuous conversion of some Jews.

448 The NJB’S “to save you front congratulating yourselves on your own good sense” is clearly an overtranslation and perhaps misses the point from the previous verses; they are in danger not of imagining themselves to be clever, but of imagining that God is now inalienably on the side of Gentiles against Jews. See also 12:3, where a similar sense has a broader application.

449 On the background to Paul’s use of “mystery,” see the useful notes in Fitzmyer, Romans, 621; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 714; Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 188-89.

453 See the suggestive essay of R.J. Bauckham, “The Year 2000 and the End of Secular Eschatology,” in Called to One Hope: Perspectives on Life to Come, ed. J. Colwell (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000) 249. This is a problem for the view offered by Moo, Romans, 722-23, and many others.

455 m.Sanh, 10:1; cf. T. Benj. 10:11. The phrase “all Israel” is frequent in the biblical background; see 1 Kgs 12;1; Dan 9:11. Usually it means “the great majority of Jews alive at the time,” but in Mal 3:22 it means the whole nation through time.

456 E.g., Cranfield, Romans, 576. Good answers to this objection are supplied by J. Jeremias, “Einige vorwiegend sprachliche Beobachtungen zu Röm 11, 25-36,” in Die Israelfrage nach Röm 9-11, ed. L. de Lorenzi (Rome: Abtei von St Paul vor dem Mauern, 1977) 199-209, 210.

457 Against both the extreme position (God will save all or most Jews irrespective of Christian faith) and the much more plausible reading (God will save a large number of Jews at the end, through Christian faith) of Fitzmyer, Romans, 623-24; Moo, Romans; 724-25.

458 See B. Witherington, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998) 453, J.L. Martyn, Galatians, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 574-77. There has been a considerable shift among scholarly opinion toward this reading of Gal 6:16; we may hope to see a similar shift in relation to Rom 11:26.

459 Cf. the NEB’s “when that has happened, the whole of Israel will be saved.” Among the most explicit is the JB’s “and then after this the rest of Israel will be saved as well.” Significantly, the NIB has modified this to “and this is how all Israel will be saved.” See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 622-23, against, e.g., Barrett, Käsemann, Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 720, appears to agree, but then smuggles back a temporal sequence that the text does not suggest.

461 With Fitzmyer, Romans, 622-23; against P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. S.J. Hafemann (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). See also the similar όυτως … ώς (houtōs … hōs) in 1 Cor 4:1; 9:26 (twice).

462 Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1980) 313-14; C,E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 578; Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 172. For caution on this point, see Fitzmyer, Romans, 624-25.

463 On the not dissimilar re-use of Deut 33:2 in 1 Enoch 1:4 see J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 48, with the comments of R.J. Bauckham, “Apocalypses,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, vol. I: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, ed. D.A. Carson et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002) 142n, 24.

465 The warning of R.B. Hays, “Adam, Israel, Christ,” in Pauline Theology Volume III: Romans, ed. D.M. Hay and E.E. Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 83, against an overrealized eschatology is well taken, but what exegetes all too often embrace here is an underrealized one.

468 On the problem, see Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in its Literary and Cultural Setting, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 193; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 627.

473 We should not ignore the parallel to v. 34 in 1 Cor 2:16, where “the Lord” is, of course, Jesus; see also 1 Cor 3:21-23. We should at least hold open the posibility that the κύριος (kyrios) of v. 34 is the same as that in 10:13.

483 The mention of “good and evil” in 12:9, 21 might suggest that 12:9-21 is a single section; but these are such general terms that using them as a structural marker strains the point somewhat, Against Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 658. The word for “evil” is different (πονηρόν ponēron in v 9; κακόν kakon in v. 21).

486 See Philo Special Laws 1:277; Epicetus Discourses 1:16.20-21; 2.9.2. See also A.J. Guerra, Romans and Aoplogetic Tradition: The Purpose, Genre and Audience of Paul’s Letters, SNTSMS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 157-58; T. Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 262-65.

489 The particular words Paul uses (συσχηματίζεσθε syschēmatizesthe and μεταμορφουσθε metamorphousthe, with their root nouns σχημα schēma and μορφή morphē, both of which mean “outward form,” “shape”) should probably not be pressed for further nuances; in other words, it would not have made much difference if Paul had used συμμορφίζω (symmorphizō) and μετασχηματίζω (metaschematizō), both of which occur in Phil 3:10, 21.

494 So Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 761; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 647. Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 197, suggests that the reference is to God’s own faithfulness.

500 A few MSS read “serving the time” (καιρω kairō instead of κυρίω kyriō), presumably intending it in a sense something like Col 4:5; but this is almost certainly a corruption. See, however, Brendan Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996) 379, who suggests that it means “make the most of the time remaining.”

501 On hospitality, see Heb 13:2. The NRSV’s addition of “to strangers” is perhaps an overexplanation: The word φιλοξενία (philoxenia) and its cognates can be used for hospitality simply within the Christian community, as in 1 Pet 4:9.

502 I leave out of further consideration the desperate expedient, still adopted by some, of striking 13:1-7 down as a later gloss. See the list in Moo, Romans, 791; W. Munro, Authority in Paul and Peter: The Identification of a Pastoral Stratum in the Pauline Corpus and 1 Peter, SNTSMS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 56-67.

503 On prohibitions of vengeance in Judaism (usually referring only to fellow Jews, not to “enemies”) see K. Yinger, “Romans 12:14-21 and Nonretaliation in Second Temple Judaism: Addressing Persecution within the Community,” CBQ 60 (1998) 74-96.

507 This seems to be the position of W. Sanday and A.C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902) 369-72, though they allow for the possibility of some influence from the specific occasion of the letter. They point out (371) that later NT writings (such as 1 Tim 2:1-2; Titus 3:1; 1 Pet 2:13-17) continue to take the same line despite persecution.

508 For (a) see B. Blumenfeld, The Political Paul: Justice, Democracy and Kingship in a Hellenistic Framework, JNSTSup (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001) 389-95. For (b), see R.J. Cassidy, Paul in Chains: Roman Imprisonment and the Letters of St. Paul (New York: Crossroad, 2001) chap. 3 (though see below). For (c), see N. Elliott, “Romans 13:1-7 in the Context of Imperial Propaganda,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. R.A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997) 184-204.

514 Against the view that Paul had a rose-colored view of Nero’s early years, see Borg, “A New Context for Romans xiii,” 381. For the more general point see P.H. Towner, “Romans 13:1-7 and Paul’s Missiological Perspective,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 149-69.

516 On Hillel and Shammai, their “schools,” and the placing of Paul within this spectrum, see Wright, The New Testament and the of God, 194-203; N.T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdamans, 1997) chap. 2.

517 See Richard A. Horsely, ed. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997); and Horsely, ed., Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2000).

519 This is the point made by Borg in “A New Context for Romans xiii,” The “Fourth Philosophy” is Josephus’s way of demarcating the Jewish revolutionaries as a separate party alongside the Sadducess, Pharisees, and Essenes.

522 On the whole question see W. Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament, vol. 1 of The Powers (Philadelphia Fortress, 1984) 45-47; C. Morrison, The Powers That Be: Earthly Rulers and Demonic Powers in Romans 13:1-7 (London: SCM, 1960).

527 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 677, 679, translating οΰν (oun, “therefore”) as if it were gar (“for”), misses the point that Paul is here arguing for this conclusion, not presupposing it.

528 The MT, in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, has murder, adultery, theft. It is unlikely that we should read into Paul’s order any sense that it is Deuteronomy that is fulfilled, rather than Exodus, or that there is particular significance in the omission of bearing false witness.

531 ηγγικεν (ēngiken), as in v. 12; the word in this έγγύτερον (engyteron). On the meaning of Jesus’ proclamation of the “nearness” of the kingdom, see N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) 471-72.

532 This is where the metaphor’s varied NT uses can become confusing. Paul’s regular night/day/staying-awake language is about getting up early and being ready for morning. Sometimes in the Gospels (see references above) it is instead about staying awake late at night so as to be ready if and when the burglar, or the master of the house, arrives unexpectedly.

534 For details of the relevant discussions, see M. Reasoner, The Strong and the Weak: Romans 14.1-15.13 in Context, SNTSMS 103 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An important alternative view is that of R.J. Karris, “Romans 14:1-15:13 and the Occasion of Romans,” In The Romans Debate, ed. K.P. Donfried, rev. ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendriksen, 1991) 65-84. Karris argues that Paul did not know the Roman situation, but was generalizing from experience elsewhere (e.g., Corinth).

536 Horace Satires 1:9:71. Horace describes how a fellow poet, Fuscus Aristius, refuses to talk business on a sabbath day for fear of offending the Jews, describing himself, having scruples about such things, as “weaker” (infirmior), and saying there are many others like him. This reinforces the point made in relation to Galatians: Those insisting on Jewish regulations might actually be Gentiles, while Jews like Paul and his friends might be sitting loose to them.

537 For the opposite view see Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) esp. chap. 3. It is impossible to do justice here to Nanos’s interesting, detailed, but ultimately unsuccessful analysis.

542 It is unusual for Paul to say simply “lived” (έζησεν ezēsen) have than “lived again” or “was raised.” Several MSS, reflecting this, have made adjustments accordingly. Presumably Paul has put it like this because he wants to tie in the gospel events very tightly both to our present obligation (v. 8) and to the universal lordship of Christ (v. 9b) both expressed in these terms.

543 Several MSS, and Polycarp To the Philadelphians 6.2, have “Christ,” as in 2 Cor 5:10; but the best MSS read “God.” Polycarp is in any case quoting freely and probably coalescing this passage and 2 Corinthians 5 in his mind. There are several scenes in Acts involving people (including Paul) appearing before a tribunal: e.g., Acts 18:12, 16-17; 25:6, 10, 17.

544 Paul follows the LXX of the latter passage closely, including the extra “to God” at the end. See the detailed discussion in J.R. Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul “In Concert” in the Letter to the Romans, NovTSup 101 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 336-40.

546 Not least because of the link with Phil 3:20-21, where it is explicit. See N.T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, ed. R.A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 2000) 160-83.

547 This is completely obscured in the NIV (“stop passing judgment … make up your mind”) and the NRSV (“resolve instead”). The KJV keeps Paul’s verbal flourish (“let us not judge one another … but judge this rather”). J.B. Phillips attempts to catch the same echo (“Let us stop turning critical eyes on one another. If we must be critical, let us be critical of our own conduct”), though this implies that the “judging” is always negative, whereas the second “judging” is positive, as in “make a good judgment about this.”

550 The NRSV (“to make others fall by what you eat”) and the NIV (“to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble”) are both paraphrases that, while giving the correct meaning, are some way away from Paul’s own dense wording. The JB has a similar reading (“if by eating it you make somebody else fall away”), but this has been changed in the NJB to correspond to v. 14: “any kind [of food] can be evil for someone to whom it is an offense to eat it.”

551 This negative sense of the verb (as opposed to the “neutral” regular meanings of “make a distinction, evaluate, judge”) is not attested before the NT, though it appears in classical literature afterward, without dependence. See BDAG 231.

552 So L.E. Keck, “Christology, Soteriology and the Praise of God (Romans 15:7-13),” in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. R.T. Fortna and B.R. Gaventa (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990) 86.

553 Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 874, disagrees, noting absent themes. One cannot mention everything explicitly in a few lines; I regard the “absent” topics (justification, grace, etc.) as present by strong implication.

554 See Keck, “Christology, Soteriology, and the Praise of God,” 94: “the theme of the universal praise of God is, in Paul’s view, much more than a rhetorical flourish. It is the actual material soteriological alternative to the root problem of humanity: not giving praise to God or honoring God.”

556 BDAG cites only this reference and Rev 2:3, with Ignatius Polycarp 1:2, for the meaning “bear patiently, put up with.” But the Ignatius passage surely means “help” or “support”; and Rev 2:3, which uses the absolute verb without object, can simply mean “enduring” without the somewhat grudging sense of “putting up with” something.

557 For this understanding of the Messiah as the “pray-er” of the psalms, see R.B. Hays, “Christ Prays the Psalms: Paul’s Use of an Early Christian Exegetical Convention,” in The Future of Christology: Essays in Honor of Leander E. Keck, ed. A.J. Malherbe and W.A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 122-36. The other half of the same psalm verse is quoted in reference to Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple in John 2:17.

558 The unexpected direction of v. 4 led Keck to propose that it be seen as an interpolation. See L.E. Keck, “Romans 15:4--An Interpolation?” in Faith and History: Essays in Honor of Paul W. Meyer, ed. J.T. Carroll et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) 125-36. I agree substantially with Hays’s careful rebuttal of this (“Christ Prays the Psalms,” 132-34).

559 The NIV’s “a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus” manages to paraphrase out Paul’s sharp. meaning at both ends of the clause; Paul is talking about how they are to think, not just feel (as “a spirit” suggests to today’s hearers); and “according to the Messiah,” granted 15:3 and the whole epistle, is more than simply “following,” however high a theology of discipleship we may have.

562 Granted Paul’s use of Isaiah 40-55, it is not entirely fanciful to a reference to the Isaianic “servant” here, though the word Paul uses (διάκονος diakonos) is very rare in the LXX, where the “servant” is referred Pad to as παΐς (pais). This, however, could have been problematic for Paul, since pais, which basically means “child.” would hardly have done in the present context.

565 The change of subject is grammatically harsh (so C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975] 743), but scarcely impossible for the Paul who, precisely in his dense summaries, was capable of all sorts of shortcuts in his Greek. For the use of ύπέρ (hyper) to give the reason for praise or thanksgiving, see 1 Cor 10:30. See also Wagner, “The Christ, Servant of Jew and Gentile,” 479.

566 Keck, “Christology, Soteriology and the Praise of God (Romans 15:7 13),” suggests that Paul has added these verses to an already existing tradition consisting of vv. 8 and 12. This is conceivable, but I do not think it likely.

570 άπό μέρους (apo merous) could modify “quite boldly”--i.e., “a certain degree of boldness”; the NRSV and the NIV take it with “wrote,” to mean “on some points.” It is possible, and perhaps preferable, to see it as modifying “as reminding you.” C.K. Barrett. A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (London: A. & C. Black, 1957) 275, takes it thus, suggesting that Paul means that part of his intention has been to remind, without saying what the other part of his intention was. He is most likely acknowledging that for some hearers it has been more than a reminder.

571 See J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul “In Concert” in the Letter to the Romans, NovTSup 101 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 329-36, noting how appropriate it was to pick a text that spoke of people far away, out of earshot as it were, coming to hear the good news.

572 This theory, found in many variations, is associated with J. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (Atlanta: John Knox, 1959). See also K.F. Nickle, The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (Naperville, Ill.: Allenson, 1966) 129-42.

576 On “the God of peace,” see 2 Cor 13:11: Phil 4:9; 1 Thess 5:23; Heb 13:20; cf. 2 Thess 3:16: “the Lord of peace.” The range of contexts suggests that this was a frequent early Christian title for God, though the communal peace Paul seeks to inculcate in the present section makes it particularly appropriate here.

578 B.M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on The Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1971) 533-36. Other clear discussions include Cranfield, Romans, 5-11; H. Gamble, The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans: A Study in Textual and Literary Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977); L. 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. E.J. Epp and G, Fee (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 185-99; Douglas J, Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 936-37; Joseph A, Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993) 55-67. Brendan Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996) 461, is wrong to state that there is a “virtually unanimous judgment” that the doxology is post-Pauline.

579 T.W. Manson, “St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans--And Others,” in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles, ed. M. Black (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962) 225-41; reprinted in The Romans Debate, rev. ed., ed. K.P. Donfried (Peabody, Mass.: Hendriksen, 1991) 3-15.

582 See 1 Tim 3:11, which seems to refer to women who hold diaconal office (see 1 Tim 3:8). Pliny Letters 10.96.8 speaks of two serving women “whom they call deacons,” ministrae; Pliny would naturally use the feminine ending to avoid apparent solecism, and this word should not be pressed to indicate that there was a separate order. Too much should not be made of the masculine form of διάκονος (diakonos) either, though, since the fem. form was not available and the word could be used with reference to either gender (cf. 13:4). See further the helpful note in Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 184-85. On “deaconesses,” see The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 455-56, with bibliography.

583 See BDAG 885; B.W. Winter, Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), though curiously Rom 16;2 does not appear in the index. Other discussion and refs. in Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 916. See esp. R. Jewett, “Paul, Phoebe, and the Spanish Mission,” in The Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism: Essays In Tribute to Howard Clark Kee, ed. J. Neusner et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 142-61.

584 The KJV has “Junia,” though until recently most other versions read “Junias,” the masc. form. See R.S. Cervin, “A Note Regarding the Name ‘Junia(s)’ in Romans 16.7,” NTS 40/3 (1994) 464-70, demonstrating that the name is certainly fem., despite the desperate attempts of many earlier lexicographers, some MSS, and some translators to this day, to suggest otherwise.

585 On the identification of this Aristobulus with the brother of Herod Agrippa, see Moo, Romans, 925. The name is very rare and the identification quite plausible. This Aristobulus had died in 48/49 CE, but household might well continue to be known under his name.

587 The dominical saying may at least “stand in the background” at this point. See P. Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 253; so, cautiously, James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988) 905; D. Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 198. Moo, Romans, 932 thinks the allusion “probable.”

588 For discussions of scribes, shorthand, etc., at this period, see R.E. Richards, The Secretary in the Letters of Paul, WUNT 2.42 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991) esp. 170-72; A. Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (New York: New York University Press, 2000) esp. 168-79.

590 See the very clear analysis of the problem in Moo, Romans, 936-37. A helpful recent comment is I.H. Marshall, “Romans 16:25-27--An Apt Conclusion,” Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. S.K. Soderlund and N.T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 170-84.

4:17 Abraham believed in God the lifegiver, the creator	1:20, 25 God the creator, ignored by humans
4:19 Abraham’s body as good as dead, yet he believed in God’s promise of new life	1:24 Human bodies dishonored because of idolatry
4:20 Abraham gave glory to God	1:21 Humans did not glorify God as God
4:21 Abraham recognized God’s power	1:20 Humans knew about God’s power but did not worship
4:19 Abraham and Sarah given power to conceive	1:26-27 The dishonoring of bodies by females and males turning away from one another.