Romans reading

I've had a couple of recent requests for info on what's recent and worth reading on Romans.

Here's an email reply...

Hi Philip,

Lovely to hear from you and apologies for a slow response!

depends what you're after of course. Tom Schreiner and Doug Moo are both about to publish the second editions of their commentaries which will substantially update those very strong works. Both due end of this year I think which may come too late for you.

Will Timmins has published his PhD on Romans 7 - it'll be a key part of the debate for decades I suspect -  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Romans-Christian-Identity-Testament-Monograph/dp/1107197090

John Barclay's Paul and the Gift has some very stimulating material on Romans and is well worth engaging with.

On the Greek text, John Harvey's volume in the EGGNT series is very helpful for keeping Greek fresh ;)

David Peterson's commentary (Holman - Biblical Theology for Christian Proclamation series) looks good though I've not dug deep yet.

David Starling has a super article in Themelios - 'For Your Sake We Are Being Killed All Day Long': Romans 8:36 and the Hermeneutics of Unexplained Suffering.

Sigurd Grindheim is also a writer I've always enjoyed and I notice he's written a couple of journal articles on Romans lately:

 “A Theology of Glory: Paul’s Use of Δόξα Terminology in Romans,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136.2 (2017): 451–65;

 “The Kingdom of God in Romans,” Biblica 98.1 (2017): 72–90.  If they are of interest it's always worth seeking an author out on Academia.edu /social media and asking for a PDF...

Trust things are well at your end,

Yours in Christ,

David.

delegalising the gospel

Three helpful paragraphs from an essay on ‘Forensic Metaphors in Romans’:

"As far as his dealings with believers are concerned, this judge [God] shocks all expectations. He sides with the guilty; he takes painful measures to vouchsafe their acquittal; he shows mercy where he should have punished severely; he acquits unconditionally. Instead of judicial objectivity and equity, mercy is now the norm. The only requirement is that they should accept his offer. Instances of pardon were well-known in Romans legal practice, but these were spasmodic, eclectic, frequently qualified and conditional, and very often politically motivated. A timeless, universal and absolutely unconditional pardon like the one here in Romans, was totally unheard of."

"Metaphors have their strengths and weakness. Paul’s forensic imagery also has its limitations. As such, it can only depict sin as guilt before God. Other metaphors are necessary to portray, for example, its enslaving, estranging or defiling aspects. It also cannot describe the specific effect of Christ’s salvific work. For that purpose Paul had to resort to other metaphors like deliverance (Rom 3:24), atonement (3:25) and reconciliation (5:10-11). An additional weakness is that, apart from their new status as righteous and the imperative resulting from it, the forensic imagery focusses pre-eminently on believers’ entry into the new community. It reveals very little about the nature of their new life in Christ."

"On the other hand, Paul’s forensic metaphors are pre-eminently suited to highlight the sovereign activity of God, the radicality of sin and the even greater radicality of grace. In order to highlight the surprising otherness and the joy-bringing “goodness” of the good news to his Romans addressees, the apostle could scarcely have made a better choice. This was the language they would understand Ironical as it may seem, exactly by using forensic imagery, Paul completely delegalized the Christian message. In God’s gospel court room grace reigns supreme (Rom 5:20-21)."

Andrie B. du Toit ‘Forensic Metaphors in Romans and their Soteriological Significance,’ Salvation in the New Testament: Perspectives on Soteriology, ed. Jan. G. van der Watt (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 213-246 (this quote on 242-243, emphasis original).

reviewing Wright

A few choice moments from John M.G. Barclay's review of N.T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Freely available here

“Wright develops his claim that Paul’s theology constitutes an unspoken but persistent challenge to the claims of Caesar, such that Paul saw all the ‘powers’ of the cosmos ‘coming together and doing their worst precisely in and through Rome itself’ (1311). Paul of course never says this, and the thesis requires that Paul left unspoken in all of his letters his real analysis of the world.”

“A crucial move, on which ‘a good deal hangs’ (775) is the claim that Paul reads the election of Abraham/Israel as designed to undo Adam’s sin and its effects (784), to deal with evil (907), in short, to save or to rescue the world (814, 839, etc.). This hypothesis is advanced by a reading of Genesis, where parallels between the creation story and the story of Abraham are taken to suggest that Abraham is called to undo Adamic sin, a reading which Wright confesses is unsupported by most commentators on Genesis (785n27). The assertion that this reasoning is evidenced in Second Temple Judaism is unconvincing: apart from a citation from Genesis Rabbah (794), a text written many centuries after Paul, Wright produces no Jewish texts which suggest anything like the claim that Israel was the means by which God would rescue the world. And, crucially, there is nothing in Paul to substantiate this claim… a central load bearing pillar in Wright’s edifice looks dangerously weak.”

“Wright’s reading of the justification of the ungodly (4:5) as the justification of the Gentiles (despite the immediate context in Rom 4:1-8, the backdrop of 3:10-20 and the parallel in 5:6) reflects a persistent failure to grapple with the radicality of Paul’s gospel of the unconditioned gift. A wholistic reading of Romans 4 reveals that Paul tells the story of Abraham not only to show that the Abrahamic family includes Gentiles but also that its origin is incongruous grace.” [NB this is new reading of Rom 4 that Wright's been offering since 2013. More to follow on this...]

“Those who know the Reformers and their writings will wince at some of the generalisations (to put it generously) articulated here.”

"According to Wright, Lutherans tend to say ‘that God has cut off the Israel-plan and done something completely different’ (499). Reformation thought is divided: ‘is the law a good thing (Calvin) or a bad thing (Luther)?’ (514). This is so crude, and so misleading with regard to Luther, that one wonders what level of readership Wright expects."

God does not treat us like that

In the last post I was recommending F.F. Bruce’s book on the relationship between Paul and Jesus. In it he helpfully distinguishes the ways in which Paul’s gospel is traditional and yet also involved fresh revelation from Jesus concerning the significance of his death, resurrection and ascension.

Having teased out those distinctions Bruce then shows that Paul and Jesus have a common theology of what he calls ‘the way of salvation.’ Interestingly, one of his main arguments is their agreement on justification by faith.

“Nowhere has Paul more fully entered into the heart of Jesus’ teaching about God and man than in his insistence on justification by faith.” (Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 52)

The language of justification is there in Luke 18 of course: the tax collector and not the Pharisee goes home justified. But Bruce argues that the content of justification is taught far more frequently by Jesus than we might think simply by counting the number of times the language appears. Consider, for example, of the parable of the prodigal son:

“When the black sheep of the family came home in disgrace and started off with the fine speech he had so carefully rehearsed, his father might easily have said "That's all very well, young man we have heard fine speeches before.   Now you buckle to and work as you have never worked in your life, and if we see that you really mean what you say we may let you work your passage.  But first you must prove yourself; we can't let bygones be bygones as though nothing had happened."  Even that would have done the young man a world of good, and even the elder brother might have consented to let him be placed on probation.  And that is very much like some people's idea of God. But it was not Jesus' way of presenting God - nor was it Paul's.

For - and here is where the Pauline doctrine of justification comes in - God does not treat us like that.  He does not put us on probation to see how we shall turn out - although, if he did so, that in itself would be an act of grace. But then we should never be really satisfied that we had made the grade, that our performance was sufficiently creditable to win the divine approval at the last. Even if we did the best we could - and somehow we do not always manage to do that - how could we be sure that our best came within measurable distance of God's requirement? We might hope, but we could never be certain.  But if God in sheer grace assures us of our acceptance in advance, and we gladly embrace that assurance, then we can go on to do his will from the heart as our response of love, without constantly worrying whether we are doing it adequately or not" (F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 54)

Although he doesn’t have the parable of the Prodigal Son in mind John Barclay develops this a bit further. He argues that the similarity between Jesus and Paul extends beyond an emphasis on grace to the sense in which their view of grace is offensive as well as inclusive. They both “enact and express a paradigm of God’s grace that is simultaneously welcoming to the lost outsider and deeply challenging to the insider – challenging to the point of scorching away the secure marks of a bounded system” (John M.G. Barclay, “‘Offensive and Uncanny’: Jesus and Paul on the Caustic Grace of God,” in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 17).

That, of course, is exactly what we see in the parable – the prodigal son, the lost outsider, and the tax collectors and sinners with whom Jesus kept company, they are welcomed by God’s lavish grace. And yet the same grace deeply challenges the self-righteousness of the elder brother and the Pharisees who lamented the breadth of Jesus’ social circle.

So, what unites Paul and Jesus? Among other things, the message of the offensively inclusive grace of God.

Paul: disciple or distorter of Jesus?

From time to time the idea goes round that Jesus founded an inclusive, loving, knit-your-own-sandals kind of community before Paul came along and went and invented intolerance, bigotry and institutionalized religion.

Happily there have been those who have defended Paul – David Wenham has been doing a splendid job in recent years (see e.g. here). Before Wenham though, there was F.F. Bruce whose 1974 work Paul and Jesus (see what he did there? ‘Paul and Jesus’ not ‘Paul or Jesus’) is one of the most helpful books on the subject of their relationship.

Central to the book is the insight that Paul’s gospel involves both tradition and revelation. On the one hand there is tradition. Paul describes himself as someone who has been passing on the traditional gospel:

-         I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you. (1 Cor 11:2)

-         So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. (2 Thess 2:15)

-         I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand… For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor 15:1-4)

As Bruce outlines, Paul passes on ethical teaching, traditions about Jesus (in particular concerning the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor 11) and shares a basic gospel message as he outlines in 1 Cor 15. Most likely he received such traditions during his time with Peter and James (described in Gal 1:18-20) and then again later with Peter, James and John (Gal 2:1-10)- indeed it’s hard to imagine Paul not pressing Peter, John, and Jesus’ brother for all the stories they could tell about their time with Jesus. And as he is at pains to emphasize he fulfills the criteria he sets out later in 2 Tim 2:2 – he himself has proved reliable in passing on these traditions.

On the other hand one of the strange features of Paul’s letters is the relative absence of detail about Jesus’ life, teaching and miracles. How do we explain that? Is it because he is pursuing a radically different agenda? Bruce says no and offers a few explanations. In part it is because his letters are occasional – responding to the needs of the congregations. He mentions Jesus instituting the Lord’s Supper because that’s an issue he needs to address in the church in Corinth. But there is a more fundamental reason, namely that Paul’s message also constitutes fresh revelation in light of the fact that Jesus is now raised and ascended and enthroned.

“Paul, wrote Albert Schweitzer, ‘shares with Jesus the eschatological worldview and the eschatological expectation, with all that these imply. The only difference is the hour in the world-clock in the two cases. To use another figure, both are looking towards the same mountain range, but whereas Jesus sees it as lying before him, Paul already stands upon it and its first slopes are already behind him.’ Without some such appreciation of the eschatological factor, it will be difficult to discern the true relationship between Jesus and Paul.” (F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus, p17)

Bound up with that eschatological factor is the idea that Paul has received fresh revelation. He is not simply preserving memories of the earthly ministry of Jesus. Rather, he is given insight into the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. One of the main ways he describes this is in terms of mysteries now revealed:

The mystery hidden for ages by God

Romans 16:25 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages

Ephesians 3: 8-9 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things

Colossians 1:26 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints.

The mystery revealed to Paul, proclaimed by Paul and passed on by Paul

Ephesians 3:3-4 how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ

Ephesians 6:19 [Pray] also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel

Colossians 4:3 At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison

1 Timothy 3:9 [Deacons] must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.

The mystery concerning Christ

Ephesians 1:9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Colossians 1:27: To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Colossians 2:2 that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ

Which is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

1 Corinthians 2:1 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the mystery of God with lofty speech or wisdom.

1 Corinthians 2:7-8 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

And yet this mystery is being embraced by the Gentiles during a time of hardening for Israel, which itself is a mystery:

Romans 11:25  Lest you be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

In many ways this is the key to understanding the relationship between Paul and Jesus. Back in 1974 Bruce helpfully focused attention here and so it’s surprising that no-one until very recently has explored the theme of mystery in Paul in much more depth. Happily though there is now Hidden but Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery by Greg Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd (see here) which works through each of these texts of Paul and is well worth a read…

For now though, as much as Paul’s gospel involves fresh revelation, it’s worth noticing that you still can’t drive a wedge between Paul and Jesus because

-         The revelation was made by Jesus (Acts 9, 22, 26)

-         The revelation was made to the apostle appointed by Jesus (Gal 1:1, cf. the same Acts passages)

-         the revelation is about Jesus (the mystery now made known is Christ and his work – Col 1:27, 2:2)

-         In all of this Paul sees himself as the slave of Jesus (Rom 1:1, Phil 1:1, Titus 1:1)