While thirteen of the New Testament epistles have been traditionally attributed to Paul, practically all modern scholars agree to his authorship of seven of them: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Of these seven, Romans stands out for a number of reasons:
Genseric Sacking Rome - Karl Bruillov
Paul wrote the other six uncontested letters to communities (or, in the case of Philemon, to an individual) whom he had formed in the faith himself. Paul had little to no previous connection to the Roman Christian community, however. It seems that there was a flourishing community of Christians in Rome by the late 40s. The historian Seutonius reports that the Emperor Claudius evicted all Jews from the city of Rome around the year 49 because they were debating about someone called the “Chrestus.” While Claudius’ edict was probably overturned no later than 53, it is not clear if the Roman Christian community in the time of Paul’s writing to them—in the mid-to-late 50s—was primarily Jewish, primarily Gentile, or a relatively even mix of both.
The other six uncontested letters are written in response to particular situations that have arisen in the local community to whom Paul is writing. Romans, on the other hand, is a letter of introduction. Paul asks for the Roman Christians’ support if he were to come to visit them on his way to what he hoped would be a missionary trip to Spain. Paul came to the city of Rome within a few years of writing this letter, but he was brought there as a prisoner of the Empire. It seems unlikely that Paul ever left Rome after his initial arrival there, so he most likely never visited Spain.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans has a different goal than his other epistles. He is explaining how God has been faithful to his promises to the patriarchs of Israel by unifying Jew and non-Jew under the Messiah—or "in Christ"—and how this good news calls this new family to live together as one, to the glory of God. Could it be that Paul, now several years after writing his letter to the Galatians—and perhaps also having written a letter to the Ephesians—realizes how important it is to articulate this tension in a religious movement founded by Jews but quickly becoming dominated by Greeks?
Therefore, Romans is the longest and most systematic of Paul’s letters. It is sometimes nicknamed “The Gospel According to Paul,” but as N. T. Wright begins his 375-page commentary on Romans in The New Interpreter’s Bible, “Romans is neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul’s lifework, but it is by common consent his masterpiece.”
The Influence - and Controversy - of Romans
Battle of Rocroi - Augusto
The lectionary features Romans prominently. We proclaim portions of Romans for 16 consecutive weeks in Year A of the Sunday cycle, including 5 weeks on chapter 8 alone, and for 24 consecutive weekdays in Year I of the Daily cycle, including every verse of chapter 8 over 5 days.
Despite its great influence on Christian thought, Romans is a very dense document and Paul’s logic can be difficult to follow. He does not clearly define the terms that he uses, including “righteousness of God” and “justification by faith,” phrases that are also prominent in Galatians. In the 16th century, Martin Luther and Catholic theologians interpreted these phrases quite differently from one another while developing their arguments about the doctrine of justification, differences that resulted in schism, wars, and the rise and fall of nation-states on several continents.
Therefore, we feel an obligation to delve more deeply into Paul’s theology in Romans than anywhere else in our lectionary series. We contend that the upheaval of the Church in the 16th century was not because of the content of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but because both sides placed preconceived notions upon Paul’s words, notions which Paul never intended to address. In 1999, the World Lutheran Federation and the Catholic Church issued the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which articulates both the significant consensus that Lutherans and Catholics now have on these issues and the seemingly negligible differences that remain between them. The World Methodist Council and the World Communion of Reformed Churches signed onto the JDDJ in 2006 and 2017, respectively.
Rev. Jens-Martin Kruse and Pope Francis, 2016 - photo credit: L’Osservatore Romano
Paul & Judaism in the Time of Jesus
Martin Luther - Lucas Cranach the Elder
Luther had grievances with the late medieval Catholic Church, particularly on issues surrounding the abuse of indulgences. He processed those grievances alongside his own scrupulosity and fear of "the righteousness of God" being carried out against his own sinfulness. He found comfort in St. Paul's teaching on “justification by faith.” The Catholic Church, so Luther thought, had fallen into the same trap as many of the Jews of of the 1st century: an obsession with rule following, a lack of understanding of the grace of God, and a misguided belief that by doing enough good works one could partner with God to save themselves. But was this, in fact, what Judaism was like in the time of Paul? If not, what exactly was Paul arguing about with his fellow Jews, both with those who believed in Christ Jesus and with those who did not?
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Krister Stendahl and E.P. Sanders published landmark works arguing that Western Christian scholars had significantly misunderstood Paul’s intentions. Stendahl demonstrated that Paul’s focus was not on the scrupulous, individualistic “introspective conscience” liberated by an emphasis on faith only apart from moral effort, but rather on the terms under which Gentiles would be incorporated into the family of God. Sanders, in “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” (1977), demonstrated that Judaism was not a religion of “works righteousness” or legalism. Instead, Jews believed that the family of Israel had been saved by God through grace, liberated from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus, and only then given the Law (Torah), which they joyfully obeyed in response to their gratefulness for God’s deliverance. Obeying the Law did not earn one’s salvation; it confirmed one’s good standing in the already-elected, already-”saved” covenantal family of God.
Apostle Paul Preaching on the Ruins - Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Mischaracterizations of Judaism and misunderstandings of Paul’s writings—by Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox—have contributed to Christians perpetuating anti-Semitism and perpetrating great violence against Jews throughout history. There are deep wounds that have yet to fully heal, although many Christian traditions have definitively repudiated anti-Semitism since the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II. (For example, refer to Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church’s 1965 document on the Church’s relationships with other world religions.)
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus certainly upholds the sanctity of the Law (5:17-20), and in some places even intensifies it (5:21-48). His debates with other Jewish religious leaders are not about the importance of following the Law, but about its relative prioritization (12:1-8) in light of the coming kingdom of God.
Similarly, Paul affirms that God “entrusting” the Law to Israel was an “advantage” for the Jewish people (Romans 3:1-2), and that having the Law allowed Paul himself to understand what sin was (7:7-8). Good and God-given as it may have been, the Law was merely a “guardian” for Israel until the Messiah came (Galatians 3:24) and poured out the Spirit as the ultimate eternal guardian of the people of God (Galatians 5:22-26).
Preparing for grafting
What then does Paul mean in Romans 3:28 when he says that “a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the Law”? As an apostle to the Gentiles, Paul’s vocation is to participate in the work of God to “graft in” (11:17) the nations (Greek: ethnoi, Gentiles) to the holy family of God, in fulfillment of the promises God made to Abraham and to the prophets (4:1). If these non-Jews being grafted into the family of God were only able to do so by accepting the ritual entrance marker of the old covenant (circumcision) and by publicly observing ritual identity markers of the Law (e.g. eating kosher and maintaining Sabbath practices), then ultimately God would only be saving Jews. But the God revealed in Christ Jesus is the God of Jews and Gentiles (3:29-31), both of whom are in God’s family (i.e. justified) on the basis of their faithful allegiance to Christ. In other words: “there is no partiality with God” (Romans 2:11). Ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and gender distinctions no longer determine who’s in and who’s out, just as God promised all along. God is righteous and truthful.
The fruits of grafting
When we put all of this together, we realize that the Letter to the Romans, written by a Jewish Christian to a community of Christians likely composed of both Jews and non-Jews, is interested less in the mechanism by which an individual person is “saved” and more in promoting unity in this local body of Christ, a new family redefined and reconstituted by the faithfulness of God in Christ Jesus. Perhaps Paul’s best summation of his argument is Romans 15:7-9: “Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you for the glory of God. For I say that Christ became a minister of the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, but so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”
The
Content of Romans
In order for us to study Romans together as a community, we offer a detailed synopsis of how Paul lays out this complex argument.
Chapters 1-4: The Salvific Power of the Gospel
Writing well before Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John, Paul begins by defining the “gospel.” Jesus, the Christ (anointed king) of Israel, descended from the greatest of Israel’s kings (David), has been declared as the Son of God on the basis of his resurrection from the dead. He is now the one through whom the nations will become part of God’s beloved family. All of this was “promised beforehand” by God through Israel’s prophets. While Paul will later counsel the church in Rome to show government authorities respect and honor (13:1), it’s noteworthy that he identifies Jesus Christ as “Son of God,” a term also claimed by the Roman Emperor himself.
Before elaborating on exactly how God has been “righteous,” or faithful to his promises, Paul establishes that all humankind has participated in sin and brokenness, and all stand condemned and in need of liberation by the just judge. “God shows no partiality” (2:11), and is concerned with “circumcision...of the heart” (2:29), an inward spiritual reality open to both Jews and Gentiles.
Despite this universal reality of condemnation, Israel still held a special role in the economy of salvation: they were “entrusted with the utterances of God” (3:2), a phrase meant to imply that their role was not to merely keep it for themselves, but to deliver it, like a mail carrier, to everyone else. Some might have failed to bring the oracles of God to all the nations, but “does their infidelity nullify the fidelity of God?” (3:3) No! Now, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, rather than through the Law, God’s very own faithfulness to his promises has been revealed. No longer does merely possessing the Law, or being publicly identified as a Jew (especially through physical identifiers, such as the practices of Sabbath, kosher, and especially circumcision), demarcate those who are “in” versus those who are “out.”
In chapter 4, to prove that justification—being declared as a part of God’s family—was never intended to be merely about fleshly membership in Israel forever, Paul draws from the story of Abraham. Looking back to Genesis 15 and 17, Paul explains that Abraham’s trust (faith) that God would give him a family with descendants as numerous as the stars was “credited to him as righteousness” (4:3, quoting Genesis 15:6) before he was circumcised, which Paul sees as God’s way of ensuring that Abraham would eventually “be the father of all the uncircumcised who believe, so that to them [also] righteousness might be credited” (4:11). For non-Jews in the churches to be circumcised (i.e. to become Jewish) would be to invalidate God’s promise to Abraham that he would become “the father of many nations” (4:17). In light of the Christ event, everyone—Jew and Greek—will be declared “righteous” when we trust in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. By doing so, we share the kind of faith that Abraham had and are thus a part of his family.
Chapters 5-8: From Adam to Christ to
New Creation
Now that Paul has established the basis for justification (note that justification and righteousness have the same Greek word root, dikaioō), he can begin to describe the immeasurable grace of God that has been accomplished in Christ. God’s faithfulness and love for all people (and all of God’s creation) go hand in hand: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8). The love of God in Christ, the new Adam, is more powerful than the sin and death that entered the cosmos through the first Adam. The love and grace of God, which overflows even where sin is at its worst, does not mean that we should “persist in sin that grace may abound” (6:1). Rather, those who are in union with Christ are also in union with his death, burial, and resurrection. In anticipation of our own bodily resurrection like his, we participate in the resurrected life of the Lord here and now when we “present [our]selves to God as raised from the dead to life” (6:13).
Paul teaches that everyone will be a slave either to sin and “the flesh” or to God and “the Spirit” (6:20-7:6). Before we “died to the Law” (7:4), the Law pointed out our sin. Sin “seized an opportunity,” “deceived,” and “killed” (7:12). Only through the death and resurrection of Christ were we rescued from slavery to sin and made to be slaves to the Lord instead.
Now that we are in Christ Jesus and vivified by the Spirit, we are no longer condemned to death, but will ultimately be raised from the dead just as Jesus was. We are now “joint heirs with Christ” (8:17), so that what belongs to Christ—and what is true of Christ—belongs to us and becomes true of us, too. It is not just the Church that is liberated from bondage; the entire creation is awaiting for its liberation and resurrection (8:19-25). As we wait for that new creation to be born, the Spirit guides and intercedes for us (8:26-27).
Toward the end of chapter 8, Paul speaks about those who are “called,” “fore[known],” “predestined,” and “elected.” Despite some theologians claiming to the contrary, Paul is not advancing the idea that God has predestined some people before their birth to be saved and others not to be saved. Paul has already made it clear that Christ’s “act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (5:18), and the consistent argument of the letter has been about the blended and justified family of Jew and Gentile together. Therefore, it is more likely that Paul has in mind the collective body of Christ (not an individual person) that is predestined for glory, just as the collective family of Israel was foreknown, elected, and saved as God’s people (11:2). This adopted, elected, predestined, justified family of God cannot be “separate[d] from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).
Chapters 9-11: Hope For Jews Who Do
Not Proclaim Christ Crucified
Paul and Barnabas in Lystra - Jacob Pynas
Thus far, Paul’s primary focus has been on how the Jews and Gentiles, combined into a single community as the body of Christ, reveals the long-promised faithfulness of God. He realizes that his audience is likely wondering, “Why aren’t more Jews recognizing Jesus as their Messiah?” Paul does his best to answer that vexing question.
Although he is the “apostle to the Gentiles,” Paul despairs for his fellow Jews who do not follow Christ, even wishing that he “were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people” (9:3). Still, he confidently states that “it is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham’s children are his true descendants” (9:6-7). If Christ is “the end of the Law” (10:4), then Paul expects that his fellow Jews will be saved through their belief, confession, and trust in God’s fulfillment of God’s promises through Jesus the Messiah, just like the Gentiles (10:5-13).
The irony of the influx of non-Jews—but not many Jews themselves—into the movement initiated by the Jewish Messiah and early Jewish believers isn’t lost on Paul. He recognizes that, at various points in Israel’s history, those outside the covenantal family “found” God while a disobedient Israel stood aside (10:18-21). Paul reasons that he is part of a “remnant, chosen by grace” (11:5) who have been enlightened by Christ, and this remnant, upon seeing the influx of Gentiles worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, will become “jealous,” eventually leading to their “full inclusion” (11:12).
Confusingly, Paul seems to suggest in chapter 11 both that all Jews will eventually take part in the grace of God on offer in Christ (see 11:12, 15, 26, 28-32), and that only some Jews will do so (see 11:14, 23). We’re ultimately left with a universalist-sounding verse at the end: “For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all” (11:32). Perhaps, like Job and Paul, the best response is to exclaim: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” (11:33)
Chapters 12-15: Proper Christian
Behavior
Paul then gives advice on the ways that believing Christians are to live out their faith as they await the second coming of the Lord, both within the whole of society and within the community of faith. Paul emphasizes that each follower of Christ, whether “weak” or “strong,” should do all things in honor of the Lord in accordance with their conscience. However, those whose consciences are “free” should accommodate those who feel restricted. In the specific context of the Roman church, it is possible that those whom Paul (and other members of the community) perceives as “weak” are Jews who remain bound by conscience to specific regulations and instructions in the Law. If this is the case, Paul is asking those who are “strong” to abstain from any practices that cause their Jewish sisters and brothers to stumble when they are together, such as eating non-kosher foods.
Paul again frames the mutual building up of Jews and Gentiles into the one body of Christ—part of the “good news” or gospel—as the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Roman church’s unity and moral purity is meant to be a signpost to the whole world that God is trustworthy and full of love for all people and thereby will bring all of Israel and the nations (Gentiles) to worship the one true God revealed in Christ Jesus and sanctified in the Holy Spirit—as foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. Paul hopes to eventually visit the Church in Rome as they strive to live out that vision.
Chapter 16: Name-Dropping?
Paul sends greetings to various people in the Roman Christian community whom he either knows personally or has heard stories about (perhaps from Priscilla and Aquila, whom Acts 18:2 tells us had previously lived in Rome). By naming these people, Paul is listing those who can vouch for his character, therefore increasing the likelihood that the Roman Christians will welcome Paul and support his missionary venture to Spain.
Fully one-third of the people mentioned in Romans 16 are women, including two to whom Paul gives titles that we usually consider to have been restricted to men in the early Christian Church. Paul says that Phoebe—who most likely delivered and interpreted the letter for the Romans—is a deacon. Paul describes Junia as “prominent among the apostles.”
Deacon Phoebe of Cenchrae - Mark Carroll
The response to the first reading during these weeks is usually from the Book of Psalms, except on the Monday of Week 29, when it is from Luke. The gospel reading is from the Gospel of Luke, chapters 11-16.