by N. T. Wright
Through him we have received grace and apostleship to bring about believing obedience among all the nations for the sake of his name. That includes you too who are called by Jesus the king. . . .
I’m not ashamed of the good news; it’s God’s power, bringing salvation to everyone who believes—to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek. This is because God’s covenant justice is unveiled in it, from faithfulness to faithfulness.27
Here we have it all—David’s true son, marked out as such by the resurrection and hence exalted as Lord over all human authorities, inaugurating a reign of true justice and salvation for all who would be loyal.
So too at the close of the great argument:
The Messiah became a servant of the circumcised people in order to demonstrate the truthfulness of God—that is, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, and to bring the nations to praise God for his mercy. As the Bible says:
That is why I will praise you among the nations,
and will sing to your name.
And again it says,
Rejoice, you nations, with his people.
And again,
Praise the Lord, all nations,
And let all the peoples sing his praise.
And Isaiah says once more:
There shall be the root of Jesse,
The one who rises up to rule the nations;
The nations shall hope in him.28
It is noticeable that this final peroration is introduced with the clear imperative to the Roman house-churches: “Welcome one another, therefore, as the Messiah has welcomed you, to God’s glory.”29 The unity of the Messiah’s people across traditional divisions is part of the vital way in which the followers of Jesus will be a sign of his worldwide rule, already inaugurated. The “root of Jesse” (David’s true heir, in other words) is the one who rises to rule the nations. The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of a genuinely Pauline political and social theology—as well as of everything else that Paul believed about him.
Romans, then, is a many-sided letter, but with a single line of thought. It would be silly to try to give an adequate summary of it in a book like the present one. Those who want to do business with Paul the man, Paul the thinker, Paul the pastor and preacher will sooner or later want to sit down and try to figure it all out for themselves. Reading it straight through at a sitting, perhaps often, is something few modern readers attempt, though it is of course how it would first have been heard, when Phoebe from Cenchreae, having been entrusted with it by Paul, read it out loud in the congregations in Rome. She probably expounded it too, answering the questions that would naturally arise. It would then have been copied and read again and again, normally straight through. We may then assume that it was studied in shorter sections by some at least, particularly the teachers, in the Roman congregations, and indeed in the other churches to which copies would have been sent (we have early evidence of a copy in Ephesus from which the long list of greetings to Rome was omitted). That discipline, of reading straight through and then studying section by section, all bathed in the praying and worshipping life of the community, remains essential to this day.
But something at least must be said as a start. God has done what he always said he would, Paul is saying, and this is what that means today. The gospel events—the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the spirit—have burst upon an unready world, and also upon a Jewish world that was looking the other way. But God has thereby unveiled his faithfulness to the covenant, the covenant with Abraham and Israel through which he always purposed to put the whole creation right at last. God’s creation has been spoiled by human idolatry and sin, and even his chosen people have appeared unable to do anything about it. But now (that’s one of Paul’s favorite phrases, for example, in Romans 3:21) God has revealed that what his covenant purposes had always involved was the “putting forth” of Jesus the Messiah as the means of establishing a new reality, a single family whose sins are forgiven, a Jew-plus-Gentile covenant family, as he always promised to Abraham. That is the thrust of the first part, chapters 1–4.
Here at last Paul pulls out that saying that he knew from the traditions of “zeal” studied in his boyhood. Phinehas killed the idolatrous man, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; in other words, God established a covenant with him. Maybe so, Paul now thinks, but according to Genesis 15:6 Abraham believed God—believed, that is, the promise that he would be the father of an uncountable family that would inherit the whole world—and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. This faith, this trust, this loyalty was Abraham’s covenant badge. A covenant, Paul saw, to which the One God had been faithful in the events of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. A covenant in which all who believed in “the one who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” were now full members.
Now, therefore, the loyal faith by which a Jew or Gentile reaches out to grasp the promise, believing “in the God who raises the dead,” would be the one and only badge of membership in Abraham’s family. The family could not be created either by circumcision (which was added later than Gen. 15) or by following the law (which was added hundreds of years afterward). It could only be by a fresh act of God’s grace, received by faith. The use of Romans 1–4 in popular teaching today to declare universal human sinfulness and “justification” by grace alone and through faith alone is fine as far as it goes. Sadly, it routinely shrinks what Paul is actually saying in these chapters and fails to see that they are only one part of a larger argument and do not make full sense without the material that then follows. Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes the Roman church urgently needed to understand.
What was the point, after all, of being part of Abraham’s family? Simply this (as Paul had expounded it in one synagogue after another across Turkey and Greece): according to Genesis itself and to many subsequent Jewish traditions, the call of Abraham was the divine answer to the sin of Adam. What we have in Abraham is therefore the promise that God will deal once and for all with sin and with the death that it brings in its wake. That is how the first four chapters of Romans work. And with that Paul has a natural transition to the second main section of the letter, chapters 5–8.
This time he tells more explicitly the story of the human race from Adam to the Messiah and on to the final promise of renewed creation. These chapters offer an astonishingly rich and multilayered account of the new Exodus, which was such a strong theme in early Christianity. The whole section is carefully structured in paragraphs almost all of which lead back to Jesus the Messiah. After the basic statement of “from Adam to the Messiah” in 5:12–21, Paul retells the Exodus narrative. Coming through the waters of baptism (chapter 6) is like going through the Red Sea, leaving behind slavery and discovering freedom. But then Israel arrives at Mt. Sinai and is given the Torah—which promptly declares that Israel has already transgressed. Indeed, as Deuteronomy made clear, the Torah simply brought Israel to the place of exile, of a new kind of slavery. The lament at the close of chapter 7 is the lament, seen with gospel hindsight, of “the Jew” who rightly celebrates the Torah and longs to be loyal to it, but finds that loyalty thwarted by the dark Adamic strain that runs through all humans, Jews included.
This is the complex problem—Adam’s problem, if you like, magnified enormously in the rebellion of God’s own people—to which Romans 8 is the matchless answer. The death of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit together do “what the law was incapable of doing,”30 that is, giving the life the law promised but could not bring about because of human (and Israelite) sin. Throughout chapter 8, Paul hints at a key theme from Exodus and from early Christianity as a whole: as the glorious divine presence guided the children of Israel through the wilderness, coming to dwell in the Tabernacle,31 so the spirit leads the Messiah’s people to
their inheritance, which turns out to be not a single “promised land,” but the entire renewed creation.32
Because the whole renewed creation is the “inheritance” of the Messiah and his people, as in Psalm 2, this means that human beings are at last, as in Psalm 8, “crowned with glory and honor” and given the authority over creation that had been promised originally. As throughout Paul’s thought, and especially in 2 Corinthians, written so recently before Romans, the highly paradoxical mode of this “glory” is in fact suffering and the prayer that is wrenched from that suffering in “groanings too deep for words.”33 But in all these things, he concludes triumphantly, “we are completely victorious through the one who loved us.”34 That is the point to which he always returns when speaking from his deepest heart and mind: “the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”; “the Messiah’s love makes us press on.” Now nothing in all creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.”35 God’s covenant was always the bond of love and the promise of that love having its full effect. Now, in the Messiah and by the spirit, that covenant love is seen to be victorious. Romans 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerfully sustained climax anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.
Romans 5–8 (and indeed Romans 1–8) have often been allowed to stand by themselves as though they constituted “the gospel” and the rest of the letter was a mere succession of appendixes or “practical applications.” It is true that one can take these first two sections, perhaps especially 5–8, and let them have their own impact. Perhaps it is even good to do that from time to time to be sure that their full flavor has been realized. But if we are to understand Paul at this moment in his career, at an exciting but fateful transition, we are bound to conclude that, though these two opening sections have their own integrity, they are in fact designed as the foundations for a building of a very different sort. Romans 9–11 and 12–16 are part of Paul’s direct appeal to his Roman audience, or, as we should presumably say, audiences. Knowing that this was where he was going has colored and shaped chapters 1–4 and 5–8 as well. Unless we see the ultimate goal, we will not fully appreciate those sections for what they truly are.
Romans 9–11, the third and in many ways decisive section of the letter, is one of the most careful and sustained arguments anywhere in Paul’s letters. People sometimes talk as if, in this passage, Paul is just winging it, blundering ahead in the dark and trying out ideas, only then to modify or reject them and propose something else instead. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For a start, the section is carefully framed, in classic Jewish fashion, in prayer. Like many psalms, it opens with lament and closes with ringing praise. The long opening section (9:6–29) is matched by the long closing section (11:1–32); in between, the heart of the argument is found in 9:30–10:21, which itself focuses on a text that was vital throughout the Second Temple period, namely, the closing chapters of Deuteronomy, coming at the point where Paul has just finished the story of Israel as set out in the Torah. The Five Books of Moses, in fact, telling Israel’s story from Abraham to the warning of exile and the promise of restoration, remain the gold standard. Paul retells that story, just as many Jewish writers of his time had done and were to do again. At the vital point he insists, as he had done in synagogues from Antioch to Corinth, that the goal of the Torah, the aim and ultimate purpose of the whole great narrative, was the Messiah. Telos gar nomou Christos, “The Messiah is the goal of the law,”36 so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.
This, then, is Israel’s story, the story of God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel, with Israel’s Messiah as its climax. It is not, and never can be, a story cut loose from the story of Israel, as Marcion would argue later on and as perhaps some in Rome were already supposing. Paul wants them to know of his “great sorrow and endless pain,”37 not now the anguish he suffered in Ephesus, but a more long-lasting torture of the heart, which started with the looks of rejection when he returned home to Tarsus for those ten silent years, continued as interest turned to anger in one synagogue after another, and climaxed in plots and violence from the very people who, he might have thought, ought to welcome their Messiah now that Paul had explained so clearly the scriptural basis for understanding the events concerning Jesus. (Paul was not alone in this sad reflection: “He came to what was his own,” John wrote of Jesus, “and his own people did not accept him.”)38 That is the substance of Paul’s lament, as also of the prayer “for their salvation.”39 And the way to that is stated in the clearest terms at the very center of this section: “If you profess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”40
Jesus, then, had not started a “new religion,” and Paul was not offering one. Either Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which means, as any first-century Jew would know, that God was reconstituting “Israel” around him—or he was an imposter and his followers were blaspheming. There was no middle ground. And it was because of this Jewish, scripturally based vision of covenant fulfilled, of messianic reality come to birth, that there was such a thing as apostleship; in other words, Paul is saying to the church in Rome, “This is why I do what I do, and why I want you to back me as I do it all the way to Spain.” How are the nations to call on the Messiah without believing in him? How are they to believe if they don’t hear? “And how will they hear without someone announcing it to them? And how will people make that announcement unless they are sent?”41 Paul once again links his vocation to the “servant” passages in Isaiah and then pans back to show from the Psalms, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy (Writings, Prophets, and Torah) that God has done what he always said he would, however shocking and unexpected it now appears. And this brings us, he implies, to where we are today.
Romans 11 then forms a sustained argument of its own, thinking forward into this new and unprecedented moment in the story of God and Israel. Paul here, we remember, is writing to head off any suggestion in the Roman church that it’s now time for the followers of Jesus to cut loose from their Jewish context and see themselves as simply a Gentile community. We who know the equivalent diabolical forces in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can readily imagine how easily this might fit in with the social and cultural pressures in Rome. Paul will have none of it. He himself is a Jew; there is a remnant, marked out by grace and faith, and he is a representative of this group. But if that remnant is what it is by grace and faith rather than national privilege then, instead of shrinking to nothing, such a remnant can and will grow. “If they do not remain in unbelief, they will be grafted back in.”42 (We should note that “unbelief” here is more or less a technical term for “not recognizing Jesus as Israel’s Messiah”; Paul is well aware that the Jews of whom he speaks have a strong faith in and zeal for the One God, as he himself had had.)43
People have probed Romans 11 for specific promises about what it would mean for Jews to abandon this “unbelief,” in other words, when and how they might come to see Jesus as Messiah. Popular myths abound, some even suggesting that Romans 11 predicts the return of Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (which at the time of his writing they had not left). That is not the point. Paul is not trying to second-guess what God has in mind. He is saying, as strongly as he can, to a church in danger of Marcionism, of rejecting its Jewish heritage: “Don’t boast over the branches,”44 the branches that have been broken off from the original olive tree because of unbelief. God can graft them back again. What is more, the present fate of unbelieving Israel is itself the long outworking, as though in a shadow, of the messianic vocation itself:
By their trespass, salvation has come to the nations, in order to make them jealous. If their trespass means riches for the world, and their impoverishment means riches for the nations, how much more will their fullness mean?
Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Insofar as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I celebrate my p
articular ministry, so that, if possible, I can make my “flesh” jealous, and save some of them. If their casting away, you see, means reconciliation for the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?45
I do not think that Paul is here attempting, as it were, to tie God’s hands. He is not saying what exactly will happen or when. He is not even saying, “You in Rome must evangelize your local synagogue members”—though his opening statement in the letter, that the gospel is “for the Jew first, and also, equally, for the Greek,” presumably means that when he arrives in Rome, he intends to follow his usual pattern and that, assuming there are Jewish communities in Spain, he will do so there as well. He is saying that Jews are always to be part of God’s faithful family and that God can and will bring “some of them” to that faith.46 But the point, as throughout Romans, is the faithfulness of God. God has been loyal to what he had promised. The messianic pattern now etched into history shows that “God has shut up all people in disobedience, so that he may have mercy upon all.”47 If the Roman church can hold on to that, they will be able to live with the true messianic mystery.
The final section of Romans, chapters 12–16, opens with broad general instructions about communal and individual life for the church, starting with a theme we know to be dear to Paul’s heart: Paul wants them to learn to worship the true God with their whole selves and to that end learn to think as people who live in the new world. “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable, and complete.”48 As so often in Paul, the general exhortations home in finally on love, balanced by the bracing ethic, consistent across all Paul’s writings, of living now in the light of the day that has already dawned and will one day dawn completely.49 Framed within that is the short but important reminder of the normal Jewish view of civic authorities.50 A robust monotheism knows that the Creator wants there to be such authorities, and they are themselves responsible, whether they know it or not, to God himself. The gospel does not sanction the apolitical spirituality of gnosis, nor does it sanction the one-dimensional revolution for which many of Paul’s countrymen were even then preparing. He does not want the Jesus movement to be confused with the zealotry of Jerusalem. That shallow “loyalty,” to say it again, was “not based on knowledge.”51 The Christians in Rome had to grow up in their thinking beyond those disastrous reductionisms.