Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations and the History of Reception: Volume 1: Romans 1:1-32 9780567681430, 9780567681454, 9780567681447

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Note on Cover Artwork
Preface and Acknowledgments
Foreword : Critical Readings and Receptions of Romans in an Age of Fake News and Alternative Facts
Introduction: Reading Romans after Studying its Receptions
Part 1: Critical Interpretation and the History of Reception of Romans
1. The Receptions of Romans Through History and Cultures: A Challenge for Exegesis, Theology, and Ethics
I When critical exegesis encounters the history of reception
II When theologians and ethicists encounter the history of reception
III Pedagogical implications of our study of the history of reception for teaching biblical studies
2. Critical Exegeses of Romans and the Plurality of Legitimate and Plausible Interpretations
I Discrepancies, contradictions in Paul’s text, and the plurality of legitimate critical exegeses
II Distinctive interpretive lines of reasoning and distinctive critical methodologies: Overall textual choices in exegeses
III The hybrid character of “critical commentaries”
IV Reading hybrid commentaries for their particular choices of an interpretive line of reasoning
Part 2: A Triple Commentary: Three Legitimate and Plausible Critical Exegeses of Rom 1:1–32
3. Reading Rom 1:1–32 for its Forensic Theological Teaching
I A quest for Paul’s theological logic
(A) Resources for our forensic theological reading of Romans
(B) Why the designation of this interpretive line of reasoning as a forensic theological interpretation?
(C) Paul’s letter to the Romans read following behind-the-text methodologies
(D) The forensic theological logic of Romans as communicated through its epistolary style: The letter opening, Rom 1:1–17, and the letter closing, Rom 15:14–16:1–23, 25–27
(E) The body of the letter, Rom 1:18–15:13
(F) The theological logic of Rom 1:18–4:25 as communicated through a preaching-like diatribe style : The Jew is Paul’s main target
II A forensic theological commentary on Rom 1:1–32
(A) Rom 1:1–7: Apostleship, christology, gospel, faith, and related theological themes
(B) Rom 1:8–15: Thanksgiving, prayer, authority of the apostle, transmission of the gospel
(C) Rom 1:16–17/18: The theme of the letter
(D) Rom 1:18–32: Sin, natural revelation, idolatry, homosexuality, wickedness of all kinds, and related themes
4. Reading Rom 1:1–32 for its Call to Mission of an Inclusive Covenantal Community
I A quest for Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic
(A) The contextual grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans
(B) The hermeneutical theological grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans
(C) Critical studies of Paul’s rhetoric and ideological/cultural logic in Romans
(D) Why designate this interpretive line of reasoning as a “reading Romans for its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community”?
II An inclusive covenantal community commentary of Rom 1:1–32
(A) Rom 1:1–12: The Exordium (Introduction)
(B) Rom 1:13–15: The background of Paul’s missionary project ( Narratio )
(C) Rom 1:16–17/18: The thesis: The gospel-story as the powerful embodiment of the justice of the covenant God in inclusive covenantal communities and their mission (Propositio)
(D) Interlude prior to reading the Probatio (“Proofs”): Looking toward the Peroratio (“Conclusion”), 15:14–16:24
(E) Rom 1:18b–32: Revelation of divine anger as rhetorical trap to convince Gentile Christ-followers not to exclude people they instinctively view as sinners
5. Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Vision
I A quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic
(A) Identifying thematic and figurative features of Romans
(B) The plausibility of a realized-apocalyptic/messianic understanding of Paul’s teaching in Romans
(C) Procedures for a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic
(D) Thematic symbols framing Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vision
(E) Thick figures giving life through intertexts to Paul’s realizedapocalyptic/ messianic vision
II A realized-apocalyptic/messianic commentary on Romans
(A) Rom 1:1–7: Messianic transformations
(B) Rom 1:8–18a: The gospel as prefiguration/promise of messianic transformative divine interventions in human experience
(C) Rom 1:18b–32: The wrath of God at work: Idolatry
Part 3: Critical Exegeses and Receptions of Rom 1:1–32
6. The Contextual Character of the Three Legitimate and Plausible Exegetical Interpretations of Rom 1:1–32
I Fossilized remains of three contextual perspectives in critical exegeses of Romans
II Excavating the individual-centered contextual character of forensic theological interpretations of 1:1–32
III Excavating the community-centered contextual character of sociorhetorical inclusive covenantal community interpretations of 1:1–32
IV Excavating the religious/heteronomy-centered contextual character of figurative realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of 1:1–32
7. Receptions of Rom 1:1–32 as Guides for Choosing among Interpretations
I Receptions as ethical interpretive discourses offering guidelines for choosing among interpretations
(A) Receptions as legitimate interpretations, until proven otherwise
(B) Receptions as interpretive ethical discourses
II Individual-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Augustine, Luther, and pastoral care
(A) Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
A vignette
Augustine’s changing receptions of Romans
Augustine’s interpretation of Rom 1:1–32 and Rom 7
Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment
(B) Martin Luther (1483–1546)
A vignette
Luther’s interpretation of Rom 1:1–32 and its context
Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Pastoral care, peasants war, and the Shoah/Holocaust
III Community-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Clement of Alexandria, Abelard, and liberation theologians
(A) Clement of Alexandria (c150–c215)
A vignette
Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: In Alexandria
(B) Peter Abelard (1079–1142)
A vignette
Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (sexual ethics and liberation theology)
IV Religious/heteronomous receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: John Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox interpreters, and Pentecostals/Charismatics
(A) John Chrysostom (c349–c407)
A vignette
Interpretive insights and ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (in Antioch)
Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment (today)
Chrysostom’s interpretive insights for Orthodox hermeneutic
(B) Pentecostal and Orthodox readings of Romans—Florin Cimpean—and Charismatic receptions in Africa
(C) Contextual ethical assessment: Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal/Charismatic receptions in Antioch, Eastern Europe, and Western Africa
Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Chrysostom and Eastern Orthodox
Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Pentecostals/Charismatics
V Conclusions: Braiding together the almost-true, the sometimestrue, and the half-true to make a hut and bring to life the “truetrue” (Patrick Chamoiseau)
Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices about Thirty-One Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1–32
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations and the History of Reception

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations and the History of Reception Volume 1: Romans 1:1-32

Daniel Patte

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Daniel Patte, 2018 Daniel Patte has asserted h right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xii–xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover Image: Detail of “Escape” by Samuel Bak (image courtesy of the Pucker Gallery). See p. xii All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8143-0 PB: 978-0-5676-9329-7 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8144-7 eBook: 978-0-5676-8146-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Franz J. Leenhardt and The editors of the Romans Through History and Cultures series Cristina Grenholm, the co-editor of the series and of three volumes and William S. Campbell, Kathy Ehrensperger, Eugene TeSelle, Yeo Khiok-khng, Kathy Gaça, Larry L.Welborn, Peter S. Hawkins, Brenda Deen Schildgen, David W. Odell-Scott, R. Ward Holder, and Vasile Mihoc.

Contents Note on Cover Artwork Preface and Acknowledgments Foreword: Critical Readings and Receptions of Romans in an Age of Fake News and Alternative Facts Introduction: Reading Romans after Studying Its Receptions Part 1 1

2

Critical Interpretation and the History of Reception of Romans

The Receptions of Romans Through History and Cultures: A Challenge for Exegesis, Theology, and Ethics I When critical exegesis encounters the history of reception II When theologians and ethicists encounter the history of reception III Pedagogical implications of our study of the history of reception for teaching biblical studies Critical Exegeses of Romans and the Plurality of Legitimate and Plausible Interpretations I Discrepancies, contradictions in Paul’s text, and the plurality of legitimate critical exegeses II Distinctive interpretive lines of reasoning and distinctive critical methodologies: Overall textual choices in exegeses III The hybrid character of “critical commentaries” IV Reading hybrid commentaries for their particular choices of an interpretive line of reasoning

xii xiii xv 1

11

13 14 30 39 46 48 53 56 62

Part 2 A Triple Commentary: Three Legitimate and Plausible Critical Exegeses of Rom 1:1–32

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3

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Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching I A quest for Paul’s theological logic (A) Resources for our forensic theological reading of Romans (B) Why the designation of this interpretive line of reasoning as a forensic theological interpretation? (C) Paul’s letter to the Romans read following behind-the-text methodologies

73 74 77 79

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Contents

II

4

(D) The forensic theological logic of Romans as communicated through its epistolary style: The letter opening, Rom 1:1–17, and the letter closing, Rom 15:14–16:1–23, 25–27 (E) The body of the letter, Rom 1:18–15:13 (F) The theological logic of Rom 1:18–4:25 as communicated through a preaching-like diatribe style: The Jew is Paul’s main target A forensic theological commentary on Rom 1:1–32 (A) Rom 1:1–7: Apostleship, christology, gospel, faith, and related theological themes (B) Rom 1:8–15: Thanksgiving, prayer, authority of the apostle, transmission of the gospel (C) Rom 1:16–17/18: The theme of the letter (D) Rom 1:18–32: Sin, natural revelation, idolatry, homosexuality, wickedness of all kinds, and related themes

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Call to Mission of an Inclusive Covenantal Community I A quest for Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic (A) The contextual grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans (B) The hermeneutical theological grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans (C) Critical studies of Paul’s rhetoric and ideological/cultural logic in Romans (D) Why designate this interpretive line of reasoning as a “reading Romans for its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community”? II An inclusive covenantal community commentary of Rom 1:1–32 (A) Rom 1:1–12: The Exordium (Introduction) (B) Rom 1:13–15: The background of Paul’s missionary project (Narratio) (C) Rom 1:16–17/18: The thesis: The gospel-story as the powerful embodiment of the justice of the covenant God in inclusive covenantal communities and their mission (Propositio) (D) Interlude prior to reading the Probatio (“Proofs”): Looking toward the Peroratio (“Conclusion”), 15:14–16:24 (E) Rom 1:18b–32: Revelation of divine anger as rhetorical trap to convince Gentile Christ-followers not to exclude people they instinctively view as sinners

82 85

86 90 90 98 100 112

120 120 124 131 134

143 152 152 168

172 191

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Contents 5

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Vision I A quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic (A) Identifying thematic and figurative features of Romans (B) The plausibility of a realized-apocalyptic/messianic understanding of Paul’s teaching in Romans (C) Procedures for a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic (D) Thematic symbols framing Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vision (E) Thick figures giving life through intertexts to Paul’s realizedapocalyptic/messianic vision II A realized-apocalyptic/messianic commentary on Romans (A) Rom 1:1–7: Messianic transformations (B) Rom 1:8–18a: The gospel as prefiguration/promise of messianic transformative divine interventions in human experience (C) Rom 1:18b–32: The wrath of God at work: Idolatry

Part 3 6

7

Critical Exegeses and Receptions of Rom 1:1–32

The Contextual Character of the Three Legitimate and Plausible Exegetical Interpretations of Rom 1:1–32 I Fossilized remains of three contextual perspectives in critical exegeses of Romans II Excavating the individual-centered contextual character of forensic theological interpretations of 1:1–32 III Excavating the community-centered contextual character of sociorhetorical inclusive covenantal community interpretations of 1:1–32 IV Excavating the religious/heteronomy-centered contextual character of figurative realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of 1:1–32 Receptions of Rom 1:1–32 as Guides for Choosing among Interpretations I Receptions as ethical interpretive discourses offering guidelines for choosing among interpretations (A) Receptions as legitimate interpretations, until proven otherwise (B) Receptions as interpretive ethical discourses II Individual-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Augustine, Luther, and pastoral care

ix 214 214 214 220 224 232 234 246 246

271 308

333

335 340 346 355 370

388 391 391 396 404

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Contents (A) Augustine of Hippo (354–430) A vignette Augustine’s changing receptions of Romans Augustine’s interpretation of Rom 1:1–32 and Rom 7 Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment (B) Martin Luther (1483–1546) A vignette Luther’s interpretation of Rom 1:1–32 and its context Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Pastoral care, peasants war, and the Shoah/Holocaust III Community-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Clement of Alexandria, Abelard, and liberation theologians (A) Clement of Alexandria (c150–c215) A vignette Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: In Alexandria (B) Peter Abelard (1079–1142) A vignette Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (sexual ethics and liberation theology) IV Religious/heteronomous receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: John Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox interpreters, and Pentecostals/Charismatics (A) John Chrysostom (c349–c407) A vignette Interpretive insights and ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (in Antioch) Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment (today) Chrysostom’s interpretive insights for Orthodox hermeneutic (B) Pentecostal and Orthodox readings of Romans—Florin Cimpean—and Charismatic receptions in Africa (C) Contextual ethical assessment: Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal/Charismatic receptions in Antioch, Eastern Europe, and Western Africa Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Chrysostom and Eastern Orthodox Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Pentecostals/Charismatics

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Contents V

Conclusions: Braiding together the almost-true, the sometimestrue, and the half-true to make a hut and bring to life the “truetrue” (Patrick Chamoiseau)

Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices about Thirty-One Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1–32 Bibliography Name Index Subject Index

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475 499 520 526

Note on Cover Artwork The detail of Escape by Samuel Bak (image courtesy of Pucker Gallery)—on the cover of this book—is a poignant figure illustrating Bak’s personal vision as a Holocaust survivor. Escape also illustrates the overall vision that guided the writing of the present book (and of the next two volumes). Romans, the Scripture to which Christians turned again and again especially in times of crisis, barely “escapes” the vicissitudes of history that kept it prisoner, bruised, broken up. What tore and tears Romans (and its spirit) apart? Studies of its very diverse receptions (by Christians throughout history and today across cultures) and of its conflicting scholarly interpretations (by critical exegetes) show that Romans is torn apart by its exclusivist readings. It is a tragedy to ignore and reject other interpretations of Romans, not only because it imprisons Romans, bruises it, and breaks it up, but also and primarily because it turns this text of Scripture into destructive weapons against neighbors. Exclusivist readings tear apart relationships with neighbors/Others, inflicting upon them catastrophe upon catastrophe: the Shoah, the catastrophic destruction inflicted upon Jews by anti-Jewish supersessionist readings of Romans; the persecutions of “heretics” in the name of “orthodox” readings of Romans; the subalternization of “others” (women, gays and lesbians, less educated, barbarians, etc.) in the name of authoritative readings; and many other dreadful effects of its exclusivist receptions. This awful but self-inflicted brokenness must be acknowledged, as the present volume tries to do. Then, with Samuel Bak, we can hope against hope. And we can hope against hope that Romans might still “escape,” still flying with damaged wings, still being inspiring, faithfully wrapped in the remains of its Jewish prayer shawl. On Samuel Bak’s works, see Irene Tayler, editor. Between Worlds: The Paintings and Drawings of SAMUEL BAK from 1946 to 2001 (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2002) – in which “Escape” is found; Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008); Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, ed. Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009); and Gary A. Phillips, Just Is in the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston, MA: Pucker Art Publications/Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018).

Preface and Acknowledgments This is the first volume of a threefold commentary on Romans. The three volumes will ultimately present side by side (in separate chapters) three critical interpretations of Paul’s entire letter (as commentaries do) carefully following contemporary exegetes so as to demonstrate that, despite their marked differences, each is equally legitimate (critical) and plausible (making hermeneutical sense). Obviously, this is a huge task, requiring (at least) three volumes. This first volume is limited to Rom 1:1-32, because it includes many features that are not repeated in subsequent volumes: 1. Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, which demonstrate the need for a “threefold” commentary and present its methodological, hermeneutical, and contextual grounding; 2. The first sections of Chapters 3, 4, and 5, which give detailed presentations of the distinctive exegetical methodologies that frame three kinds of critical commentaries; 3. The demonstration of the plausibility of distinctive understandings of thirty-one key theological and ethical themes of Romans (see Appendix; these definitions will serve as guideposts for the threefold commentaries on the rest of the letter); 4. Chapter 6, which establishes the contextual character of the three kinds of critical exegetical studies; and 5. The first part of Chapter 7, which establishes the relationships between receptions and critical exegeses. All these will not need to be reiterated in subsequent volumes on the rest of the letter. Obviously this volume and the following ones are grounded in the work of the SBL seminar, “Romans Through History and Cultures” and the corresponding book series (RHTC, ultimately at Bloomsbury-T&T Clark). Actually, it is simply writing large the “Overture” (RTHC, 2000)—the programmatic piece (implemented in the rest of the series) that Cristina Grenholm and I wrote on the basis of our observations concerning the ways theologians, church historians, and exegetes worked together in our seminar. Thus, I acknowledge my deep indebtedness to Cristina Grenholm—the “Overture,” the entire book series (that she coedited), and the present volume would not have been envisioned except through the interactions of a learned theologian (presently she is the director of Theology and Ecumenism in the Church of Sweden) and an exegete. I also acknowledge my deep indebtedness to William S. Campbell and Kathy Ehrensperger who took over the direction of the seminar (2005–10) and edited two RHTC volumes, and also to all the other editors of RHTC volumes: Eugene TeSelle, Yeo Khiok-khng, Kathy Gaça, Larry L.Welborn, Peter S. Hawkins, Brenda Deen Schildgen, David W. Odell-Scott, R. Ward Holder, and Vasile Mihoc. This volume is

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Preface and Acknowledgments

dedicated to all of them. Their extraordinary scholarly contributions to our seminar and to our book series provided the fertile ground in which the present volume could grow. Yet, this volume is first dedicated to Franz J. Leenhardt, my mentor. His seminars at the University of Geneva in 1961–64 on Romans and related topics deeply ground this work—as is acknowledged and explained in the Introduction. The final form of this volume owes much to the sharp and learned copy editing by Nicole Wilkinson Duran—her criticisms led me to rewrite quite a number of sections. Mais il va sans dire que ce nouveau livre n’existerait pas sans le constant et patient soutien d’Aline, ma compagne, jour après jour, pendant près de six décades. ***

Foreword: Critical Readings and Receptions of Romans in an Age of Fake News and Alternative Facts

“Reality has a way of catching up with you (and biting you back)!” President Barack Obama, Farewell Addresses (January 10 and 18, 2017)

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations and the History of Reception. The first part of this title (Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations) expresses in an abbreviated form that this volume presents the three main types of current critical exegetical interpretations of Romans as equally legitimate (each is demonstrably grounded in the text) and equally plausible (each makes coherent and consistent hermeneutical sense), despite the fact that they are very different and often contradictory. Obviously, this approach goes against the grain of traditional critical biblical scholarship, which normally strives to demonstrate that one of these interpretations is more legitimate and plausible than all others—a self-centered denial of the learned scholarship of other exegetes. By contrast, this volume affirms and carefully asserts the legitimacy and plausibility of each type of critical exegesis. Furthermore, by the very fact that it shows that several interpretations are equally legitimate and plausible despite their differences, this volume also argues that exegetes have consciously or not chosen a particular exegesis on other ground. But on which ground? The next part of the title (The History of Reception) suggests it. The phrase “history of reception” refers to a collective study of the many ways Romans has been received and understood through history and cultures in particular contexts. Church historians and theologians (who participated in this study with exegetes) assumed that these receptions had at least some legitimacy and plausibility—otherwise, why would one recognize them as “receptions of Romans”? Very different receptions have to be viewed as legitimate and plausible “until proven otherwise” (not everything goes!), with the understanding that their legitimacy and plausibility might be grounded on very different evidence (e.g., the legitimacy might be grounded on the aural/oral character of Romans—rather than on its writerly character, which is the exclusive focus of critical exegeses—and the plausibility on a theology or hermeneutic framed by a non-Western culture). In addition, receptions make crystal clear that they have been formulated on contextual grounds—implicitly or explicitly the authors of receptions discerned that one interpretation was “the best” for their given context. Following the results of this collective study of receptions, this book argues that it is on contextual

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grounds that any readers—including exegetes—implicitly or explicitly choose one among several conflicting critical interpretations. This choice is an “ethical” choice. One interpretation is judged to be “the best” (i.e., the most helpful, the less hurtful) in particular situations. This approach is far from being self-evident. The collective study of receptions to which I refer was itself contextually motivated by a strongly felt need to deal with the conflicting critical interpretations of Romans that emerged since World War II. Thus, in 1997 two dozens of us began working on the project Romans Through History and Cultures (which became an SBL seminar, ultimately involving ninetythree contributing scholars—specialists of church history, theology, and Pauline studies—and numerous participants). In a time when the globalization of Christianity in all its diversity has become so prominent, we sought to clarify how the diversity of interpretations of Romans found today across denominations and “through cultures” matches both the diversity of its interpretations “through history” and the diversity of critical exegeses. In this shrinking world, we cannot but live together with billions of believers who read Romans as Scripture; and therefore we cannot but respectfully account for their readings, including when they differ from ours. Therefore, the urgent question is/was: How should we deal with these conflicting interpretations, including conflicting exegeses? What are the options? To borrow Paul Ricoeur’s title, the “conflict of interpretations” rages and cannot be ignored, especially in the present cultural context in the United States and many other parts of the world. January–November 2017. In the United States of America. I am writing this foreword and copyediting this volume. In 1997, I never imagined that I would draw conclusions from this collaborative “academic” project in a political, sociocultural, and religious context where dealing with conflicting interpretations would be so timely and apropos. The extraordinary (literally!) political campaign that led to Donald J. Trump’s election as president of the United States and the beginning of his presidency raise pressing issues that exacerbate the worst in American culture—racism, misogyny and sexism, patriarchalism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, ultranationalism, nativism, xenophobia, and islamophobia, among others. The urgency of addressing the issues raised by conflicting interpretations has multiplied exponentially. Daily, in all of our lives in the United States and beyond, the issues raised by conflicting interpretations— that label each other “fake news”—confront us with most concrete and tragic consequences for millions of people. Such is the foreboding situation in which I write and that I cannot but take into account as I draw conclusions from the patient and erudite work of the ninety-three contributors to the SBL seminar. January–February 2017. In Europe and other parts of the world. The same issues are already raised, for instance, by Brexit (the British exit from the European Union, June 2016 referendum) and the rise of right-wing political movements in Europe; by the catastrophe in the Middle East (the poster case of human devastation resulting from all kinds of “fake news,” including during the Bush administration); by the extremist regime of President Rodrigo Duterte transforming the Philippines into a killing field on the basis of conspiracy theories. Similar pressing issues seem to arise worldwide, although taking different forms. But my point can sufficiently be illustrated by focusing on the US political campaign and its aftermath.

Foreword

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All these issues concern what constitutes “true discourses”—discourses dependable enough to be the ground upon which we can build our personal and collective lives. These issues were epitomized during the January 22, 2017 exchange (about the size of the crowds during Obama’s and Trump’s inauguration) between a journalist, Chuck Todd, and Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump. Todd: Answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood? Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office. Conway: . . . Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What . . . You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving—Sean Spicer, our press secretary—gave alternative facts to that.

In effect, for Conway, discourses not based on facts—and contradicted by photographic evidence—should be accepted as true discourses. Conversely, the truth of factual discourses might appropriately be contested and labeled as “fake news”—as were reports by major news media (e.g., CNN and the New York Times). This view of discourses was made tangible, urgent, in-our-face, and threatening by Trump’s political campaign, and now by his tweets and his administration. Discourses contradicted by facts were/are held to be true by a sizable percentage of the population, despite carefully researched news reports demonstrating that they are factually untrue. For Todd, Conway’s statement is nonsensical. But Conway knew that such discourses are powerful—indeed powerful enough to help elect a president. Many prophetic voices have long raised the issues concerning what constitutes “true discourse”; but who could think they would become so urgent? From its inception in 1997 our interdisciplinary SBL seminar anticipated such issues and struggled with them. Unfortunately, academic wheels turn slowly. While we learned much by comparing receptions of Romans (in different historical and cultural settings) with critical exegetical studies of Romans, with tin ears, we did not appreciate the urgency of our findings beyond the confines of our classrooms and academic meetings. And indeed, before the confusing times of the last two years, the implications of our study would have simply appeared outlandish, pointless, and even threatening. Preachers and church leaders (and even our students) would have brushed them aside: “Interesting. But, so what?” Actually this has been the usual muted response to the prophetic works of progressive theologians of all stripes, who strive to do “theology after modernity”; however, they might label themselves, for example, postmodern, liberationist, feminist, or postcolonial.1 But now, it is a different matter. In the United

1

I borrow from the title of Ellen T. Armour, Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity (New York: Columbia University press, 2016). See also Laurel C. Schneider, Stephen G. Ray Jr. eds., Awake to the Moment: An Introduction to Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), by a broad array of such theologians and their up-to-date bibliography; and more directly related to the present volume, Joerg Rieger, Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007) and (from one of the leaders of our project) Cristina Grenholm, Motherhood and Love: Beyond the Gendered Stereotypes of Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).

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States, during the election year (and still one year later), members of our churches have been so deeply divided and antagonized that the gospel was often clouded. Despite their pastoral wisdom, many preachers are at a loss: How should they respond to such a situation? One can no longer complacently bask in the security of modernity and its affirmations of factual truths. Postmodernity has emerged in full force. Factual discourses, the work-horses of modernity, are no longer working alone; any given interpretation of a situation can readily be dismissed as “fake” on the basis of obscure nonfactual factors. As Conway expressed, beside factual discourses (focused on facts) there are alternate discourses (focused on “alternative facts”). Yet one should not overlook that in both cases we are speaking about “discourses.” And we should not forget that, as Austin and Searle have long pointed out, any discourse is a “speech act,” with two components: (1) a “propositional content,” which is often a “factual content”, and (2) “effectual features” or “illocutionary force” (in Searle’s vocabulary).2 Any discourse necessarily involves these two features, even as it prioritizes one of them. Thus Conway concurs with Todd that Sean Spicer’s report on crowd size was not primarily a factual discourse (prioritizing its “propositional content”). It was another kind of discourse, about “alternative facts”; it was a speech act that prioritized “illocutionary force”—“effectual features”—with much power on its potential audiences, even if it is not factual. Of course, there are discourses that prioritize their “propositional content” and are primarily about “factual truths”: for example, scientific and technological discourses. Such factual discourses are necessary—otherwise my computer would not work! In “modernity,” historians sought to reduce “true discourses” to their propositional content, envisioning this content as factual-like—unduly co-opting scientific discourses. But such “modern” discourses on history (historicist discourses) and on present-day news (journalistic discourses) pretend that they are exclusively dealing with “facts.” Yet as hermeneutical research has shown this was a delusion. With the possible exceptions of pure mathematical discourses such as string of algorithms (that could be exclusively factual) and of abstract poems (that could be exclusively effectual), all discourses balance these two features. Indeed, historical discourses are “factual” (they deal with factual truths), but they are simultaneously “effectual” discourses (aimed at “moving” audiences): since they deal with values, ideologies, emotions, religious experiences, and the like, historical discourses cannot but have an “illocutionary force” that affects the addressees. The “truth” of such discourses is measured both by their factuality and by their effect upon an audience. Despite the “modern” illusion, factuality is not the sole ground to access the truth of a discourse. In Conway’s words, it is essential to acknowledge that, beside “facts,” there are “alternative facts.”3 Most discourses also are effectual, seeking to affect their audience and to capture its attention through its figures of speech—and the more outlandish an effectual discourse is the more “effective” it

2

3

John  R.  Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 54–71, and Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1–29. See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) and Hugh C. White, ed., Speech Act Theory and Biblical Criticism. Semeia 41. (Decatur, GA: SBL Scholars Press, 1988). I never thought I would agree with Kellyanne Conway!

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is (the more “true” it is), because it makes clear that its “factual” component can be neglected.4 Beside the reality of facts that a discourse (usually) presents, there is the reality of the way in which people are affected by this discourse and its effectual power. If we do not respect it, this latter kind of reality can and does “bite us back” (as Obama says) as much as the former.5 In exegetical studies of Romans this involves asking the question: On which ground are we choosing a particular interpretation as “true”? Of course, on the basis of a carefully argued exegesis of the text (that involves as we shall see choosing certain textual features of the text as more significant than others); this is the propositional content (based on textual facts) of our exegetical discourse. But we are also choosing a particular interpretation as “true,” because of its “illocutionary force” and therefore because of the way it affects our lives and that of our neighbors in a particular contextual situation. Pretending that one has no choice among interpretations—usually by arguing that a particular interpretation is demanded by the “textual facts”—is far from being innocent. Too often it is a matter of life and death for our neighbors: reality “bite us [and our neighbors] back” (see Chapters 6 and 7). But this cannot be true. Of course, by Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ (Rom 1:1) Paul meant one thing and one thing only, isn’t it. Sorry. “What Paul meant” cannot be reduced to one thing/fact (and not even one translation; see Chapters 3, 4, and 5). By arguing, as exegetes often do, that Paul did not mean what believers hold to be “what Paul meant” is in most instances pointless; two centuries of sophisticated exegetical studies failed to convince fundamentalists to abandon their “wrong” interpretations (which actually flourish). Whether we like it or not, we live in a postmodern world. For perplexed professional journalists, the extraordinary political campaign that led to Trump’s election and his first months in office are a striking demonstration of the fact that we are in a postmodern world—or what they call a “post-truth era.” Indeed, in this “postmodern” situation, their factual (“modern”) news reports were demonstrably ineffective to challenge what they appropriately identified as “fake news”: “falsehoods,” (deliberate) “lies,” “conspiracy theories,” and “unsubstantiated reports” with no grounding in any factual evidence, rumors, gossips, ranging from “birtherism” (the denial that President Barack Obama is a natural-born US citizen, a starting point of Trump’s political career), to the distorted news of malicious “bots” (whatever might be their origins), to Trump’s ongoing outrageous assertions and tweets that frame his presidency.6 The professional journalists were left speechless when their “fact-checks” of the candidate’s (and subsequently the president’s) declarations and tweets were ignored by Trump’s followers (who, of course, candidly admitted: “We do not take him literally”). 4

5

6

One of Alinsky’s “rules for radicals” is that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”—a rule followed most effectively by neo-Nazis in their blogs and Trump in his tweets. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971). Note that large numbers of Trump voters were quite aware that his speeches and declarations were not factual. Thus Chapters 6 and 7 underscore that discourses/interpretations always also convey “ethical truths,” providing a basis for pondering how something affects neighbors in the concreteness of the reality of our interaction with them. As prophesied by George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983; c1949).

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Did the journalists not denounce and demonstrate that these declarations are “fake news”? This would have been sufficient and powerful responses in a “modern” culture, when “facts” mattered (if such a culture ever existed). But in a “post-truth” or “postmodern” cultural context, such denunciations proved powerless. And soon enough Trump and his entourage returned the favor: they denounced as “fake news” the professional journalists’ reports. Reporters fulfilled their professional role as journalists by denouncing fake news for what they are: not grounded in factual evidence. They believed that pointing out the flimsiness of all these pronouncements would be, without any doubt, enough to burst the “alternate reality bubble” from which these conspiracy theories and reports emerged. But, as the cultural scientist Clare Birchall anticipated, lo and behold, the journalists’ critical reports had no effect on the electorate: Trump was elected.7 Many factors were involved. But, as President Obama expressed in his farewell address (January 10, 2017), the choice between the two candidates was so stark that it ended up being a choice between two views of reality. November 8, 2016, was not only the day when Hillary Clinton was defeated, but also and more significantly the day when the professional journalists’ well-documented accounts (based upon “factual evidence”) were discounted in favor of an alternative representation of reality and of “alternative facts.” For a significant part of the population, the discourses presenting this alternative reality have a powerful illocutionary force (correctly or incorrectly) linked with perceived positive implications for their individual and community life.8 Is this a return to barbarism (as some liberals suggest)? I would rather say that it is a manifestation—indeed a powerful and twisted manifestation—of the advent of postmodernism. As Amanda Taub wrote in an incisive New York Times article, “Americans’ deep bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a kind of partisan prism for facts, reflecting a different reality to Republicans than to Democrats.”9 As Taub emphasizes, this partisan prism is not limited to Trump’s followers: New York Times journalists also use such a prism. It is urgent to quash fake news—they have devastating effects. But this is not done by proclaiming factual news

7

8

9

Birchall documented that contradicting a conspiracy theory by pointing to factual evidence has no effect whatsoever on those who hold it to be true. See Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006). De Certeau made a similar point concerning the reports on the confusing “event” of May 1968 in Paris, when underscoring that “an event is not what one can see or know about it, but what it becomes” by affecting people (including the person speaking about it). Michel de Certeau, “Prendre la parole,” Études, juin-juillet 1968, 39–54. Unfortunately, the proliferation of deliberately manufactured “fake news” continues—whether they originate from Russian and Eastern European-sponsored industries, or from individuals (making money for each click), or in the United States from certain cable news shows (Fox) or from local TV news stations—apparently mainline, but actually bought by Sinclair Broadcasting—that surreptitiously diffuse such manufactured stories, often along the line of the far-right Breitbart News Network. Amanda Taub, “The Real Story about Fake News Is Partisanship” (New York Times, January 11, 2017, italics added). Taub refers to the works of political scientists Sean Westwood and Shanto Iyengar. See Justin Grimme, Sean Westwood, and Solomon Messing, The Impression of Influence: How Legislator Communication and Government Spending Cultivate a Personal Vote (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) and Shanto Iyengar, Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide (New York: Norton & Co., 2015).

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that would demonstrate that such fake news are not factual. The role of interpretive prisms both for the people who hold fake news as true and for the journalists needs to be exposed. As postmodernist philosophers, literary critics, and theologians have long emphasized, reality is always constructed. And therefore whatever view one has of reality, one’s presentation of this reality is through a partisan prism: this discourse is both factual and effectual, and thus framed by the bubble of a certain partisan context, fraught with partisan ideological values, and shaped by a partisan vision (or a particular figurative perspective). As Taub notes, professional journalists have unwittingly demonstrated throughout this campaign that the remedy to a problematic view of reality (fake news) is NOT to deny any weight to this other view of reality by pointing out “the correct view of reality.” In a postmodern world, such an attitude is dismissed, and indeed resented, by others who perceive it as condescending and as missing the point they seek to make regarding their own view of reality. And while the slogans and tweets of the Trump campaign were/are quite vague and fluid, many recognize in them at least the potential that they are related to the “other reality” they experience in their lives. Journalists cannot be content to point out problems with the factuality of what they appropriately label “fake news.” They must also acknowledge this effectual dimension of the fake news and of people’s response to them. Otherwise their reports are truncated and fall into the trap set for them by postmodernism: in turn, they become vulnerable to denunciation of propagating fake news. Unfortunately journalists seem to ignore that, far from being exclusively focused on factual truths, their own reports are also framed by the effectual goal they (subconsciously) seek. They do not seem to have learned anything from cultural scientists like Clare Birchall or from their own colleagues, such as Amanda Taub, who take into account the research of political scientists. Thus, in November 2017 CNN still emphasized that the role of its reporters is exclusively to tell the factual news; this was done through an ad showing a red apple while a voice proclaims: This is an apple. Some people might try and tell you that it’s a banana. But it’s not. This is an apple. They might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again. They might put BANANA in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it is not. This is an apple.

Saying and believing that it is a banana is fake news. Proclaiming the truth, it is an apple, should be enough to convince people to abandon their fake news. But it is not, because an event is never merely facts; an event also affects people, and this in various ways. Some journalists have understood it. So the motto of Rachel Maddow (who recommends Birchall’s book) is “Watch what they do, not what they say.” Debating with people whether they speak factual truth or not is pointless. Rather one needs to report and challenge the problematic effects of their words (the “effectual dimension” of their speeches) and their behavior. ***

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Strangely enough, twenty years ago (1997) when we first met in the microcosm of what would become an interdisciplinary SBL seminar, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Each of us—church historians, theologians, and exegetes—was reading Romans from her/his own bubble. Each of us offered our view of the teaching of Romans as “the (only) true” interpretation of the letter. At first, the clearest divisions were between theologians and exegetes: a reading of Romans from a theological perspective/bubble necessarily differs from a reading within a critical exegetical perspective/bubble. But as soon as we sat together the number of bubbles multiplied: theologians were far from agreeing with each other; the receptions of Romans through history and cultures studied by church historians were going every which way; critical exegetical interpretations clashed with each other. Happily, unlike the political campaign, we were polite with each other: no vituperation. Yet different interpretations were greeted by “thinly disguised sneers” (Taub, about New York Times articles). “Obviously this interpretation by a theologian would not be acceptable in an exegetical seminar on Romans!,”10 and vice versa. But from the outset, the interdisciplinary character of our seminar forced us to confront these differences head-on. From the very first session, it was clear that theologians and church historians would not participate in the proposed seminar if exegetes had claimed that they alone were in a position to establish the legitimate and plausible interpretation of Romans, or to reject interpretations, because they do not conform to the (factual) textual evidence established by critical exegesis! Thus, we critical exegetes had to acknowledge that—like everybody else, including ordinary believers, church authorities, preachers, theologians—we read from within an interpretive bubble. Claiming otherwise was a falsehood. Such a postmodern perspective should not have been a surprise; it had percolated in all our fields from a century of research in hermeneutics. Yet, for the exegetes in our seminar, acknowledging that we interpret Romans from within a bubble was hard to swallow. Are we not supposed to strive to establish (as mentioned above) “the” interpretation that has the highest degree of probability, according to the “principle of criticism” in historiography, and this in order to debunk those “wrong” interpretations that “read into the text” the interpreters’ dogmatic, confessional, convictional, or positivist pre-understandings. The Introduction and Chapter 1 describe our struggle to step out of this Enlightenment bubble. Like professional journalists who ground their reports in factual evidence, we exegetes have spent a lot of energy developing rigorous critical exegetical and historical methods to ensure that our interpretations of Romans would be solidly grounded in the facts of Paul’s text and its historical context—this in itself would guarantee the value of our interpretation. Thus we commonly joined the “best” critical exegetical school, proclaiming that, with our “school” (“clique?”), we hold “the” interpretation with the highest degree of probability to be “true”—and we reject “incompetent” exegetes with their “obscurantist” misguided interpretations. We do not need to speak with these other exegetes; the SBL meeting is big enough for us to have our own special

10

Such sneers were present in our 1998 sessions on Karl Barth’s interpretation of Romans!

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sessions! In effect, exegetes (each with years of scholarly training!) accuse each other of promoting “fake interpretations” of Romans! Does this sound familiar? The same attitude was prevalent throughout the history of the receptions of Romans among people—mostly believers—who adopted different theological interpretations. For a long time Catholic and Protestant scholars simply ignored each other: What would Catholic theologians have to say about interpretations of Romans emphasizing justification by faith? And of course in the West one can simply ignore Greek Orthodox interpretations of Romans—even though it is related to the interpretations by half a billion Charismatics around the world—that emphasize the transformative power of the gospel. Such interpretations do not use our Western categories! Thus each ecclesiastical group claimed to have “the true” interpretation of Romans. The result is deep schismatic divisions in Christianity. Far from resolving the problem, modern exegetes of Romans exacerbated these divisions by implicitly claiming that their interpretation (whatever it was) was the only true interpretation. By contrast, in our interdisciplinary seminar we made the commitment to respect the people around the table. As a result it soon became evident that among us exegetes, there were proponents of at least three rival types of critical exegetical interpretations of Romans! Of course, each of us carefully grounded her/his exegetical interpretation in Paul’s text—we made sure that our exegeses were not biased. But by respecting each other around the table we were led to recognize that our different critical exegetical methods represent equally legitimate analytical textual choices (see Introduction and Chapter 1). When reading a text one cannot help but select some of its dimensions as “most significant,” while bracketing out other dimensions as “less significant.” We cannot help it: this is due to our human linguistic limitations. But it follows that such choices result in different readings that the (recent) multiplication of critical exegetical methods showed to be legitimate until proven otherwise. In the process we also had to recognize that each of our exegetical interpretations reflects one of several equally plausible hermeneutical choices among different formulations of Paul’s theological and ethical teaching found in Romans. All this is demonstrated in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. In sum, there are several conflicting but equally legitimate and plausible presentations of the “facts” about Romans and its meaning. Respecting each other around the seminar table meant taking the time to recognize the legitimacy (yes, it is grounded in Paul’s text) and plausibility (yes, the results of this interpretation make some kind of sense) of each of our diverging critical exegetical interpretations. Our interdisciplinary seminar demanded this conclusion, even though we had to go against the grain of the critical exegeses we analyzed, because—unlike our seminar—each strived to establish “the” (only) true representation of what Paul said.11 As an SBL seminar, we relatively quickly perceived the broad outline of the different kinds of critical exegesis paired with certain hermeneutical choices. But by demonstrating that each exegetical interpretation is equally legitimate and plausible

11

This is still the case when exegetes “humbly” acknowledge that they merely seek to establish the interpretation with the “highest degree of probability” (following the “principle of criticism”).

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(as is made explicit in Chapters 3, 4, and 5), we had removed the ground upon which exegetes commonly chose one interpretation rather than another. Yet such a choice needs to be made: these interpretations are contradictory. On which ground should we choose one rather than another? We tackled this issue in a series of sessions focused on the receptions/interpretations of passages of Romans about Israel.12 It became clear that any interpreter (exegete, believer, church authority, or theologian) made such a choice through the centuries on the basis of particular contextual concerns. In brief, when one acknowledges that for believers Romans is Scripture—a Word-to-live-by— one affirms that reading this letter is necessarily effectual and thus has consequences in the concrete life situations of the believers and of their neighbors. In the present post-Holocaust context, we first studied receptions of what Romans says about “Israel.” This made clear to us that such contextual choices (of one interpretation rather than another) are always ethical choices. How does our chosen interpretation affect the relations of Christians with Jews? Our choice was/is nothing less than a matter of life and death! In the shadow of the Shoah, the ethical interpretive choice is clear: anti-Jewish interpretations should be rejected, because of the catastrophe/Shoah they bring about; happily there are other types of interpretations that do not promote anti-Judaism. Exposing the ethical consequences of an interpretation—showing that adopting an interpretation (rather than another) is an implicit or explicit contextual ethical choice (Chapter 6)—has an illocutionary force powerful enough to lead people to abandon an interpretation (that they might have viewed as factually true) in favor of another one that they had never envisioned. As we progressed in our study of receptions of Romans (published in ten volumes), such ethical decisions became murkier. In different concrete contexts, different interpretive choices were “good” ethical choices: who is harmed and who is helped is different. And thus, in a particular context, a different contextual ethical choice might be necessary—Chapter 7 discusses several concrete examples.13 It is enough to note here that our study of receptions of Romans showed us that the interpretive ethical question must be raised again and again in each context, even as we respect other interpreters by striving to understand how their different interpretations are legitimate (grounded in the facts of the text) and plausible (make sense). *** January–November 2017. In the United States of America. “Fake news,” “conspiracy theories,” “falsehoods,” “lies,” and “alternative facts” as labels attached by professional journalists to official statements from Trump and his entourage, who respond by using the same labels to designate the professional journalists’ reports. Results: sharp divisions in the electorate between camps that insulted and demonized each other throughout the campaign; then a dark inaugural presidential speech—a populist 12

13

See Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte, eds., Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations. Romans Through History and Culture, 1 (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000). See also Vincent L. Wimbush, ed. with Lalruatkima and Melissa Renee Reid. Misreading America: Scriptures and Difference (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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speech—describing the nation as “American carnage” and tarring the establishment (both Democrat and Republican!) as faithless and corrupt, defiantly insulting all the dignitaries (former presidents, senators, representatives) sitting behind him; then an increasingly divided country. How does one escape this quagmire in a productive way? Indeed we need to and can “escape”—see Samuel Bak’s image on the cover. As noted, media experts have pointed out that denouncing fake news and conspiracy theories as falsehoods is not enough to change the mind of those who hold these as “true.” Our study of the very different and frequently contradictory receptions of Romans agrees with this assessment. Debating the veracity and facticity of presentations of the facts of Paul’s text or the facts in the present political and cultural situation is necessary. But by itself such a debate cannot be convincing: Which exegetical method did you use? What aspect of the present situation did you focus upon? Similarly, debating other people’s ideological perspectives—the theological perspectives debated among interpreters of Romans; the “Republican” or “Democrat” or “populist” ideological perspectives debated among members of Congress—cannot be convincing by itself: such ideologies frame the identities of those engaged in the debate! As our interdisciplinary study of receptions of Romans has taught us, the only practical solution is to change the type of discourse so as to focus on ethical questions: Who is helped and who is hurt when one chooses one interpretation rather than another? How, in the concreteness of their lives, are people affected when one advocates a particular view of facts and a particular ideological perspective? Asking this question shows how “reality bites back” both those who hold a particular view of news, but also and mainly the many bystanders, our neighbors. What are the consequences of holding to a particular interpretation as if it were the only true one? If we do not ask this question, “reality bites back”; we are estranged from neighbors, without the possibility of truly considering the ethical/moral value of both their statements/interpretations and ours. Asking this question is abiding by President Obama’s warning: “It’s not just dishonest, this selective sorting of the facts, it’s self-defeating. As my Mom used to tell me, ‘Reality has a way of catching up with you.’” Nashville, TN. February/November 2017

Introduction: Reading Romans after Studying Its Receptions

Critical exegetical studies of Romans are so numerous that they occupy several rows of shelves in our libraries. This is a signal of conflicting interpretations. Interpreting Romans is an ongoing project, far from over. At least three kinds of critical exegesis of Romans (each with many variants) seem to be irreconcilable. Nevertheless I will argue—against the common practice in the guild—that, despite their differences, they should be viewed as equally legitimate and plausible. After all, erudite scholars developed each kind of interpretation; it would be odd to treat them as if they were dim-witted. Thus, we will have to conclude that being a critical exegete always involves making a choice among equally legitimate exegeses (following one or another wellvetted critical method) and among corresponding plausible interpretations of Paul’s theological and ethical teaching (consistently following one or another interpretive line of reasoning). The receptions of Romans that originated throughout history and in presentday cultures around the world—interpretations by theologians, church authorities, preachers, and Christian believers of all kinds (including monks and nuns, faithful lay-members of the various churches), and also novelists, filmmakers, journalists, celebrities—are even more numerous and diverse than critical studies.1 Of course, our first inclination is to dismiss them. Yet, despite their broad diversity, these receptions need to be viewed as “mother wit.” This is the term Maya Angelou uses as she presents the “lessons in living” she received as a child from Mrs. Flowers: indeed, she “must always be intolerant of ignorance”; but she also must be “understanding of illiteracy.” Although such people might have been unable to go to school, they have “mother wit”: through the “collective wisdom of generations” they have much to teach us.2 So it is in the cases of receptions of Romans. Indeed, they are interpretations by believers who, in most instances, can be viewed as “illiterate”—especially from the perspective of modern Western critical exegetes. Yet, these believers are steeped in “the collective wisdom of generations.” Thus, if we carefully ponder these receptions of Romans, we should not be surprised to find that they bring to light many textual, theological, and ethical features of Romans that modern exegeses overlook—thereby sharpening or challenging one or another kind of critical interpretation. In addition, 1

2

For example, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s, film St. Paul (St Paul: A Screenplay. Elizabeth A. Castelli, trans. Preface by Alain Badiou [London, Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014]); and celebrity Johnny Cash’s novel, Man in White (New York: Harper Collins, 1987). Maya Angelou, The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 79 — in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first published in 1969.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

these receptions include the sermons of modern preachers who, after sifting through various critical commentaries, deliberately choose one of them as a basis for their message, not because it is more legitimate or more plausible than the others, but because it is “better” for addressing particular issues found in the life-context of their congregation. Thus we will learn from receptions that all interpretations, including critical interpretations, involve an ethical choice, precisely because the diverse interpretations do not have the same value; they do not have the same validity. Among the equally legitimate and plausible interpretations, in a particular context (e.g., the life-context of a congregation) one is more helpful than the others—and alternatively one or several might be quite dangerous. We have to assume responsibility—an ethical responsibility—for our choice of an interpretation. And as we shall see, we have much to learn from the “mother wit” of receptions of Romans through the centuries and across cultures today. Consequently, we—critical exegetes and our followers (all those we taught, directly or indirectly)—should resist the knee-jerk reaction of dismissing these different readings, simply because they are from people who are “illiterate” in critical biblical scholarship. But avoiding this knee-jerk reaction is not easy. For us many of these receptions of Romans seem quite fanciful, even when they are from most respected church authorities such as John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Luther. Therefore, our first inclination is to consider them as reflecting the ignorance of their authors. Are they not ignorant of what is involved in critical readings of biblical texts? Therefore, should we not correct them, since we “must always be intolerant of ignorance” (as Angelou prescribes)? Of course, we are gentle when correcting interpretations by authorities such as John Chrysostom, Augustine, or Luther; we cannot simply brush them away. But consider the results. We end up treating them as a collection of interesting but fanciful museum pieces, simply to be dusted and mentioned as counterpoints of the truly critical interpretations of Romans we present.3 But against such condescending attitudes, together with church historians, theologians, preachers, and many believers steeped in the diversity of Christian traditions, in this volume I adopt a much more respectful attitude toward the many and diverse receptions of Romans. We have much to learn from them. We need to benefit from “the collective wisdom of generations” that they represent and ponder the way they assumed responsibility for their choice of a valid interpretation for each of their particular contexts. In sum, both the multiplicity of critical exegetical studies of Romans and the multiplicity of receptions of Romans demand that we acknowledge that Paul’s text offers a plurality of interpretive choices. Each time anyone reads Romans, she/he necessarily chooses to emphasize as most significant certain features of Paul’s text and, as a consequence, necessarily brackets out others of its features. And each of these interpretive choices should be viewed not only as legitimate but also as plausible—it “makes sense,” when one follows a particular interpretive line of reasoning. But learning to acknowledge that there is nothing problematic with making such choices was far

3

Their interpretations are then used as markers to show the progress that critical exegesis made in our understanding of Romans since their times (before the Enlightenment!).

Introduction

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from self-evident for exegetes. The methodological explosion (discussed in Chapters 1 and 2) during the last half century changed everything. Now, each time they propose to critically interpret a biblical text, exegetes must choose a particular critical method and make explicit their choice, which also involves choosing to privilege particular features of Romans (viewed, for one reason or another, as most significant).4 Therefore exegetes, each with her/his expertise, develop a plurality of interpretations of Romans that are critical, even though they are different from each other. This plurality of critical interpretations of Romans can be illustrated in a preliminary way (as a preview of their full discussion in coming chapters). Romans is a “letter.” Therefore it is appropriate to develop a critical exegesis following critical methods devised to study the philological, epistolary, and dialogical/diatribe textual features of Romans. But one should acknowledge that in so doing such a critical exegesis will not account either (1) for Romans’ sociocultural and rhetorical textual features (studied with sociocultural and rhetorical critical methods) or (2) for Romans’ thematic and figurative textual features (studied through a thematic and figurative analysis of Romans). Yet, both these alternatives are legitimate methodological choices. In addition to being a letter (an epistolary discourse), Romans is also a socio-rhetorical discourse and a figurative religious discourse (aimed at conveying a religious vision). Three types of critical readings are therefore found in the scholarship. Can we not incorporate them into a single interpretation that would use these three types of methodologies? Many tried, as I also did at one point. But I soon gave up. The result was—and necessarily is—a confusing vertigo that forces the interpreter to revert to privileging one methodology and therefore to relegating the two other methodologies (and what they reveal about Romans) to a secondary status. This confusing vertigo is not surprising when one becomes aware (as the following chapters will show) that these three kinds of critical exegesis end up formulating three very different understandings of Romans. In very brief, they result in “individual-centered,” or “community-centered,” or again “Other-centered (religious-centered)” understandings of Paul’s teaching. To benefit from these three kinds of teaching, one must respect the differences among these three kinds of critical exegesis. Any attempt to bring them together into a single (“true”) interpretation necessarily results in affirming one kind of interpretation and denying the equal legitimacy and plausibility of the two others. Two teachings (corresponding to two methodologies) are forced into (integrated into) the third one, which alone is claimed to be legitimate and plausible.5 Much of the richness of Paul’s text is lost. By contrast, the present study advocates the acknowledgment that Romans is simultaneously a letter, a socio-rhetorical discourse, and a religious discourse, each of which involves different yet legitimate and plausible teachings, from which readers will alternatively benefit (according to their genuine needs in specific contexts, as Chapters 6 and 7 illustrate).

4

5

This methodological choice is a necessity, because it is impossible to be consistent when one tries to follow at the same time several critical methodologies. As will become clear, I use the term methodology to refer to a family of critical methods, which elucidate a particular coherent set of textual features. Among the recent attempts at such a synthesis, see Ben C. Dunson, Individual and Community in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

4

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

Adopting this methodological attitude—justified and explained in Chapters 1 and 2, and exemplified in the rest of this volume regarding Rom 1:1–32—deeply transforms our perception of the multitude of critical exegetical studies of Romans. In the process, this confronts the traditional practice of critical exegesis in the guild (SBL, to which our seminar belonged; SNTS, where several of us participated in similar seminars). Therefore, objections can be expected from all corners. Are we not supposed to claim that one interpretation—ours, of course—is truly representing what Paul meant? Are we not supposed to dismiss interpretations that reach different conclusions, even if they are advocated by leading scholars? Is this not what critical biblical scholars are supposed to do? Much is at stake. For instance, choosing a community-centered interpretation involves viewing as secondary all the textual features that emphasize individual believers’ personal relationship with God through Christ. “Justification by faith” is no longer the central teaching of Romans! Yet, doing so involves, for instance, taking into account that Paul constantly uses the plural, “we,” again and again emphasizes the church’s mission and ministry, and is constantly concerned by the relationship between Jews and Christ-followers. Yes, dismissing other exegetical studies (or, and this amounts to the same thing, integrating them into one’s own) is a common critical exegetical practice. Yet, such a practice does not make any sense when considered in light of the history of receptions of Romans and also in light of the development of critical exegetical methods. Pragmatically, we must acknowledge that each time we engage in a study of Romans, we find ourselves seeking to establish the (only) true, legitimate, and plausible interpretation, with the expectation that this interpretation (when reached) will be better than earlier interpretations. And therefore we find ourselves implying, again and again, that all the other critical exegeses by erudite scholars on the shelves of our libraries are wrong or at least incomplete—with the implication that these scholars are not as erudite as is commonly thought! This scholarly pursuit of the single true interpretation still dominates the meetings and journals of our guilds. Yet, a sea change is happening. Side-by-side with this traditional biblical scholarship, one finds another kind of scholarly pursuit that acknowledges the plurality of critical interpretations. This became abundantly clear to me in a packed auditorium at the 2012 SBL meeting in a session celebrating the third edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary.6 When I evoked the “ancient” time of the first edition (in the 1980s)—by saying “once upon a time biblical scholarship was exclusively aimed at producing ‘the only true’ interpretation of biblical texts”—my comment was met by a roar of laughter. For the hundreds of mostly young (fifty years or less) female and male feminist-leaning scholars, this view of biblical scholarship was literally laughable! Nearly thirty years after Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her,7 it had become self-evident that any interpretation is necessarily contextual—that is, framed by the sociocultural

6

7

Carol Newsom. Sharon Ringe, and Jacqueline Lapsey, eds., Women’s Bible Commentary: Revised and Updated (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012). Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

Introduction

5

and religious context of the interpreter. This is especially true of interpretations that pretend to be “truly critical”—in the traditional sense of “non-contextual”—even though they are androcentric (i.e., both male-centered and Eurocentric), as feminist scholars have shown.8 Long before this crowd of feminist-leaning scholars made it explicit, another group of sophisticated interpreters of Romans made clear to me that we must conceive of a plurality of legitimate and plausible interpretations. I allude to a group of pastors gathered in Manila (Philippines) to whom I presented a first broad outline of the envisioned project on Romans during a weekend long retreat in 1997. There was a lot of skepticism regarding the possibility of envisioning different interpretations as equally legitimate and plausible! To bring the weekend seminar to a close, I had the temerity to suggest a discussion of multiple interpretations of Rom 1:26–27 (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5). I soon had doubts about my decision, as a heated discussion ensued, questioning the wisdom of affirming that we have a choice among different interpretations of “that” text. I had argued that there are at least three divergent but legitimate and plausible interpretations of 1:26–27 and, therefore, affirmed that whatever we preach about homosexuality on the basis of these verses, we have made a choice. A large group of pastors passionately objected: “What choice? Is it not clear that in these verses Paul teaches us to condemn homosexuality?!” My weekend long teaching was falling apart. But calm was restored when a group of senior pastors quietly said (in substance) to the younger and more contentious pastors: If you are good and faithful preachers—and you are!—all this should be nothing new to you. Each time you prepare a sermon on a biblical text, what do you do? Of course, you consult several commentaries, even if it means struggling to find them in a distant library. Right? And why are you doing this? Because you expect that these commentaries will offer the same interpretation? Of course not! You hope they will have different interpretations. Then, you have a choice, don’t you? And you choose one or the other interpretation as a basis for your sermon. Why? Because you have suddenly become a superlative critical interpreter, able to establish “the” true interpretation? Of course not. You choose one of the different interpretations found in these commentaries, because you prayerfully feel that it is the Word that your congregation needs to hear in this particular time and place.

What wisdom! The contentious pastors acknowledged that they have to assume responsibility for their choice of an interpretation—a responsibility not to be assumed lightly (see Chapter 7). But this group of senior pastors also suggested that “responsible preaching is the model for responsible scholarship and not its stepchild” (as Daniel Boyarin strikingly summarized it)—a perspective we progressively adopted in our interdisciplinary SBL seminar and in the book series Romans Through History and

8

As underscored in Daniel Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: A Reevaluation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1995).

6

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

Cultures [RTHC] (see Bibliography).9 The present volume seeks to implement this fundamental intuition. Since “responsible preaching is the model for responsible scholarship,” far from viewing the receptions of Romans—including by preachers—as secondary in critical studies of Romans, a study of the history of receptions must be viewed as an intrinsic part of our task—necessarily a collective task, in view of the mass of material (twenty centuries of interpretations!). This volume (together with the next two volumes), which draws conclusions from this project, is entitled Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations and the History of Reception. It does contribute to the exegetical task, by helping critical exegetes to make explicit the range of analytical and textual choices available to readers through the use of the entire range of critical exegetical methods. But its goal is also to contribute to the theological and ethical task through the emphasis on the history of reception; it entreats theologians, preachers, and believers to assume responsibility for the hermeneutical/theological and contextual/ethical choices they make as they necessarily foreground particular features of the text, while allowing many others to fade away into the background. As such, it can make a third contribution, this time to the pedagogical task, by inviting teachers to view their students’ interpretations as fresh receptions of Romans and to train their students to analyze and assume responsibility for their own interpretations. The above claims regarding what the present book proposes to achieve would be extravagant if its content were to reflect the research of a single author. Yet, they are realistic, because this book benefits from the expertise of many scholars. First, it benefits from the training I received from Franz J. Leenhardt, while I was studying in his seminars on Romans, New Testament studies, and hermeneutics at the Université de Genève in 1961–64, shortly after the publication of his commentary on Romans, and while he was finishing his next book, La parole et le buisson de feu.10 Leenhardt’s teaching was actually framed by this latter book. He insisted that we should never be satisfied with one type of interpretation and that we should respect the differences among interpretations of biblical texts by three types of readers: (a) by believers who read them as Scripture, that is, as Word-to-live-by (“parole” in a life-context); (b) by believers who read them and experience them as Sacrament (that contributes to the reader’s fiery vision [feu] and religious experience); and (c) by critical exegetes, as exemplified by his commentary on Romans. I did not realize until recently how deeply Leenhardt’s teaching formed me and how it prepared me to initiate in 1997 a Consultation that became a Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature (until 2011), entitled Romans Through History and 9

10

The ten-volume book series Romans Through History and Cultures [RTHC], with Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte as General Editors, was published at first by Trinity Press International, then by Bloomsbury T & T Clark (London and New York). See bibliography. Daniel Boyarin’s quotation is from his “Epilogue: Israel Reading in ‘Reading Israel’” 246–50, in Reading Israel in Romans (2000); see also 1–54 (“Overture: Receptions, Critical Interpretations, and Scriptural Criticism”) for a detailed presentation and justification of this point. Franz J. Leenhardt, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary (London: Lutterworth, 1961). Original: L’épître de saint Paul aux Romains (Neuchâtel, Paris, Delachaux & Niestlé, 1957; 2nd ed. Genève: Labor et Fides, 1981 & 1995); La parole et le buisson de feu: les deux sources de la spiritualité chrétienne et l’unité de l’Église (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1962).

Introduction

7

Cultures, first led by Cristina Grenholm and me, then by Kathy Ehrensperger and William S. Campbell, so as to review the history of reception (Wirkungsgeschichte) of Romans.11 Ultimately, ninety-three scholars—specialists of church history, theology, and Pauline studies—participated in this seminar over a period of thirteen years. The present book directly benefits from all of their contributions (published in the ten-volume book series, Romans Through History and Cultures) as it seeks to draw together in a concise, thematic way the many insights they offered. Two of these volumes are focused on methodological issues, arising from anti-Jewish interpretations and receptions—Reading Israel in Romans—and arising from patriarchal/sexist interpretations and receptions—Gender, Tradition and Romans— while eight volumes are devoted to the receptions of Romans in specific contexts through history or across present-day cultures. Even though the “Overture” (in the first volume) and the “Encore” (in the concluding volume)—both coauthored by Grenholm and Patte—seek to provide a bridge across the volumes, these two methodological essays cannot account for the specificity of the study of each type of receptions. This treasure trove of interpretations and teachings needs to be sorted out in order to be even more useful. Thus as I review the 133 essays in these ten volumes (and many related publications by their authors and other scholars),12 I seek to address the question: From this very long (1997–2011!) SBL seminar on the receptions of Romans, what did we learn?

Through this seminar, what did we learn both about Romans and about ourselves as interpreters? A first and general response to this question is: I/we learned that the fact of treating with respect hundreds of receptions of Romans through history and cultures taught me and many members of our group that we must treat with equal respect the diversity of critical exegetical interpretations of Romans. This process led me/us to recognize that each critical commentary—old and new—makes a special contribution to the understanding of Romans, because it brings to light particular features of the letter that other commentaries ignore or deemphasize. Second, by considering “receptions” of Romans from different cultural contexts through the centuries, this seminar helped me/us to recognize that our critical

11

12

I initiated this seminar in 1997, because I had been asked to prepare a commentary to up-date and replace Leenhardt’s commentary in the Commentaire du Nouveau Testament Series (Labor et Fides). I could not envision writing such a commentary without taking into account the history of reception (Wirkungsgeschichte) of Romans. So I needed help! Including the many articles by members of the seminar in Daniel Patte, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). This encyclopedic dictionary was spearheaded by the leaders of the RTHC project. In the same spirit it underscores the different views of each Christian theological concept and practice found through history and across present-day cultures in the entire range of Christian traditions.

8

Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

exegetical discussions of Romans (as represented by the critical commentaries on the shelves of our libraries) are “Eurocentric.”13 Third, this seminar led us to wonder whether, despite differences (at times, strongly marked differences), these diverse critical interpretations were in fact equally legitimate—that is, appropriately grounded in Paul’s text. This hunch was confirmed by recent hermeneutical studies that led to the diversification of critical methods in biblical exegesis (see the methodological books discussed in Chapter 1).14 Thus, contrary to our common practice of presuming that interpretations that differ from ours are necessarily incorrect, we had to presume that different critical commentaries are to be viewed as equally legitimate “until proven otherwise” (verifying any assertion against counterclaims is still needed). As church historians, theologians, and exegetes learned in our seminar to respect each other’s interpretations, we could have been quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of distinct but legitimate interpretations. But we soon began to recognize that they could be viewed as forming families of interpretations that share with each other a set of particular interpretive choices. How many of such families of critical commentaries exist? As we shall see, the classifications of exegetical methods in the methodological books mentioned above gave us a good heuristic answer: they commonly subdivide critical exegetical studies into three types. We began recognizing that the critical studies of Romans could be regrouped into three families: 1. Commentaries that seek to reconstruct the theological argument of the letter by paying close attention to philology (the linguistic history of each word Paul used) and the epistolary style of the letter. 2. Commentaries that focus their reading upon the socio-rhetorical features of the letter, and therefore also upon the ways in which Paul hopes to influence the intended readers (the “Romans”) by challenging or affirming features of the culture and ideology that the churches in Rome shared with the broader society. 3. Commentaries that read Romans for the religious experience and vision that Paul seeks to share with his readers through his figurative language. This involves reading this religious text for its religious content—a no less legitimate reading than the preceding ones. Thus Part II (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) offers “A Triple Commentary of Rom 1:1-32: Three Legitimate and Plausible Critical Exegeses of Romans” that presents, side-by-side, three families of critical interpretations of Romans—the subsequent volumes will present more succinctly triple commentaries of the rest of Romans. Each of these three chapters of the Triple Commentary (Chapter 3, 4, and 5) is quite long! This could be expected. Each presents an entire critical commentary on Romans 1, following Paul’s text verse by verse! In addition, each chapter carefully takes note of 13

14

See Fatima Tofighi, Paul’s Letters and the Construction of the European Self (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). She shows how much Paul’s main categories are Europeanized and contributed to the establishing of European categories. See, for example, Steven McKenzie and Stephen Haynes, eds., To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993).

Introduction

9

the distinctive ways key theological and ethical themes are understood in each given family of interpretations; these definitions (listed in each chapter, then summarized in Appendix) will become the basis for interpreting the rest of Romans. These lists add to the length, but also facilitate the use of these three chapters and the rest of the volume. Both the differences among the three understandings of Paul’s teaching and the coherence of each of its three formulations become clear. Then one can recognize that these three families of interpretations are not only equally legitimate (grounded in the text, by following particular critical methods), but also equally plausible (each “makes sense,” although it follows a distinctive coherent interpretive line of reasoning). Once it is established that, despite their divergences, very dissimilar critical interpretations are equally legitimate and equally plausible understandings of Paul’s teaching, we will be in a position to appreciate the great diversity of interpretations of Rom 1:1–32 that one encounters in a survey of its receptions through history and cultures (Chapter 7). This concluding chapter explores how the three critical views of Romans (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) are related to particular receptions, and also how these receptions are connected to the particular religious and sociocultural contexts of the interpreters who chose them. Indeed, these choices are not trivial. Readings of Scripture as Word-to-live-by15 (as believers did through the centuries and still do today) always matter, because for better or for worse these readings necessarily affect both the believers for whom this text is Scripture and their neighbors (who might not have read these texts). The same thing is true for “critical exegetes,” “impartial (detached) interpreters”—at times called “scientific interpreters.” We critical exegetes have an ethical responsibility for our interpretive choices. We must assume our ethical responsibility for our choices, because when we (with our perceived authority as “scholars”) promote one or another interpretation of Romans, we have a profound effect in shaping the lives of those believers who read this letter as a Word-to-live-by, and also in shaping the lives of their neighbors (Chapter 6). It can literally be a matter of life and death—as the Foreword and Chapter 7 discuss. A prime example is how certain readings of Romans—and not Romans itself!—promote anti-Judaism, and how these readings were (at least implicitly) used to justify anti-Semitism and the horror of the Shoah (Holocaust).16 Unfortunately, there are many other terrible instances when, consciously or not, readings of Romans bring death, exclusion, and destruction. But in many instances, readings of Romans bring life. Therefore, I will argue that, since we cannot claim that our particular interpretation is demanded by the text—since we make interpretive choices each time we read Romans (as demonstrated in Chapters 3, 4, and 5)—we must assume our ethical responsibility for choosing one reading rather than others (Chapter 6). Thus Chapter 7 seeks to assess the relative validity of different interpretations for different life-contexts.

15

16

See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). This book studies “scripture” as a “phenomenon” across religious traditions, illustrating each time how a “scripture” functions as a Word-to-live-by for believers. See also Dale Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 71–110 (Chapter 3, “Scripture”). See a succinct presentation of this tragic interpretive trajectory in John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

The core of this book—Chapters 3–7—is written so as to make abundantly clear the benefits of our collective research on the receptions of Romans through history and cultures for present-day readers of this letter. But Chapters 1 and 2 are needed to provide a detailed explanation of the above claim that it makes sense to speak of a multiplicity of equally legitimate and plausible interpretations of Paul’s letter. For most of us, this is a nonsensical claim, as it has been for me (and most biblical scholars) before we engaged in this long-term project. This is why these chapters are needed to explain: (1) why and how the legitimacy of diverging conclusions regarding Romans and its teaching found in the history of reception can be critically verified to the satisfaction of critical exegetes, (2) why and how the plausibility of these diverging conclusions can be hermeneutically sanctioned to the satisfaction of theologians and ethicists, and (3) why and how the contextual validity of these conclusions can be discussed, in an appropriate pedagogical strategy, with our students (in our classes in church history, theology, or biblical studies) as well as with any other readers of Romans.

Part One

Critical Interpretation and the History of Reception of Romans

1

The Receptions of Romans Through History and Cultures: A Challenge for Exegesis, Theology, and Ethics

Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. . . . If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutic situation, we are always already affected by history [i.e., the Wirkungsgeschichte, the history of reception]. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what would appear as an object of investigation. Hans Georg Gadamer1

In the Introduction, I claimed (1) that a study of the receptions of Romans through the centuries benefits present-day readers of Paul’s letter and (2) that the legitimacy of many of these very different interpretations can be critically verified to the satisfaction of exegetes. This twofold claim is far from self-evident. I know! I have long brushed these views aside. And so did most exegetes in our interdisciplinary seminar entitled “Romans Through History and Cultures” (a seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL], that also included theologians and church historians). Indeed, several exegetes in our seminar are still not quite convinced. So, I have to assume that many readers of this book are themselves quite skeptical. How could exegetes have anything to learn from receptions of Romans? How could different (and at times contradictory) exegetical interpretations be equally legitimate and plausible? For such readers, the first section of this chapter (“When critical exegesis encounters the history of reception”) explains what changed the mind of most exegetes in our group (a meandering story) and 1

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. (trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; London and New York: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013; first published 1960), 296 and 300.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

how our collective efforts to work together as an interdisciplinary seminar (another meandering story) led us to develop an inclusive critical methodology, scriptural criticism, that could bridge the gaps among our disciplines by demanding from us to acknowledge the legitimacy and plausibility of diverging interpretations of Romans. Scriptural criticism is the methodology implemented in the rest of this book and in the following volumes. For exegetes already familiar with scriptural criticism or similar methodologies this first section will be repetitious – yet it shows the particular trajectory of our seminar. But the second and third sections (“When theologians and ethicists encounter the history of reception” and “Pedagogical implications of our study of the history of reception for teaching Biblical studies”) bring to the surface dimensions of scriptural criticism that exegetes often bracket out.

I When critical exegesis encounters the history of reception For present-day readers, receptions of Romans through the centuries and today in different sociocultural and religious contexts are simply bewildering. The first reason is their sheer number and diversity. The second reason is that these receptions include interpretations of Romans found not only in formal commentaries but also in sermons, liturgies, hymns, literature, artistic creations, and philosophical reflections, as well as in church life and practice in various contexts. These interpretations often seem quite fanciful—including those by most respected church authorities! Yet, as Ulrich Luz underscored in his pioneering commentary on Matthew,2 the fact that these receptions of biblical texts perplex us should be a signal that we have much to learn from them. For a long time, I found this claim to be far from convincing. Luz’s commentary on Matthew is remarkable, because it deliberately includes a constructive use of the Wirkungsgeschichte (a concept equivalent to history of reception) as an integral and constructive part of critical exegesis—rather than viewing these receptions as a collection of interesting but fanciful museum pieces gathered by church historians and at most mentioned in biblical studies as counterpoints to a critical interpretation that alone can claim legitimacy. When I first read (in 1985) Luz’s commentary, though I found it most insightful on many points (e.g., about the Sermon on the Mount), I was not persuaded by the claim of its preface that one of the essential advantages of taking into account the history of reception of a biblical book is that it exposes the preunderstandings that we, exegetes, have.3 I agreed: as critical exegetes

2

3

Ulrich Luz, Matthew: A Commentary (James E. Crouch, trans. Hermeneia; 3 vols.; Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1989–2007), original Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (4 vols.; Zürich: Benziger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1985–2002). “It [the history of reception, Wirkungsgeschichte] illuminates the prehistory of one’s preunderstanding . . . [and] tend[s] to prevent us from making the text naïvely contemporary by passing over the centuries.” Luz, Matthew, vol. 1, 97. See (pp. 95–99) his statements about the importance of Wirkungsgeschichte in the shaping of his commentary—that I first read at the end of 1985 when putting the finishing touch to my own, very different commentary on Matthew. The fact that I do not mention his commentary in mine shows that, at that late stage, I did not know how to integrate Luz’s insights with mine. Yet, I was positively intrigued by it and recommended its translation to John A. Hollar, senior editor at Fortress Press. Regarding the hermeneutical implications of this approach, it

The Receptions of Romans Through History and Cultures

15

we need to deal with our preunderstandings. But for this purpose, does it make any sense to use the receptions/interpretations by people who, in most instances, were not aware of their own preunderstandings or did not see them as a problem? “Of course not!” was my response in 1985. Yet, I could not deny the insightfulness and richness of Luz’s discussion of the history of reception of the Sermon on the Mount (upon which I focused my review). After thinking through the ethical issues raised by our frequent encounter with biblical interpretations originating in different cultural settings—one of the effects of globalization—and after comparing Luz’s interpretation of Matthew with other commentaries on this Gospel, I began to understand why, following Luz, critical biblical scholars should indeed envision to integrate the history of reception as a muchneeded critical tool.4 Therefore, when (in 1996) I was asked to write a commentary on Romans, I agreed, but on the condition that I could first take the time to study the history of its reception, with which I would frame this commentary. At that time, I had only a vague idea of what a study of the history of reception of Romans would entail. I was simply aware that it would be a long process. And it was! It soon was clear that I would need the expert help of scholars with very different specializations: church historians and theologians who specialize in one or another aspect of the vast history of the receptions of Romans (including present-day receptions), as well as exegetes who specialize in Pauline studies and Romans. As a consequence, in the margins of the 1996 SBL national meeting in New Orleans, I invited a few friends for a drink to discuss the possibility of starting a program on the receptions of Romans. I was overwhelmed by the response. The small café was quickly overcrowded! Robert Jewett, Robert Brawley, William Campbell, and Eugene TeSelle joined me in this impromptu gathering, bringing with them a large group of biblical scholars, church historians, and theologians who were already doing research on this topic. Many of them came with detailed proposals and even with complete papers.5 By the end of this informal meeting, we already had the outline of a first multisession

4

5

is important to note with Mark Knight, “Wirkungsgeschichte, Reception History, Reception Theory,” JSNT 33 (2): 137–46, that Wirkungsgeschichte is a concept proposed by Gadamer (Truth and Method, 300–07), because for him “the real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296, emphasis added). Therefore Wirkungsgeschichte (that I translate “history of reception,” though “history of effect” is also used) should be an integral part of any critical study of any text. While Wirkungsgeschichte has profound transformative effects upon biblical studies—as the present book illustrates—it has limitations. Thus Timothy Beal appropriately emphasizes that it needs to be prolonged by a “cultural history” (as I seek to do in my own way in Part III, Critical Exegeses and Receptions of Romans 1:1-32). See Timothy Beal, “Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures,” BibInt 19 (2011): 357–72 (especially, 364–69). See also Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti; Introduction by Paul de Man; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). See Daniel Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: A Reevaluation (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1995); on diverse interpretations of Matthew, see Daniel Patte, Discipleship According to the Sermon on the Mount: Four Legitimate Readings, Four Plausible Views of Discipleship, and Their Relative Values (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1996). We also discussed as a model: Cristina Grenholm, Romans Interpreted: A Comparative Analysis of the Commentaries of Barth, Nygren, Cranfield, and Wilckens on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Uppsala and Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1990).

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

program. A first session was held in 1997 and was followed by yearly SBL seminars until 2011.6 The proceedings of these sessions were published in the book series mentioned in the Introduction and Bibliography. So, what did we learn? Much, indeed! As the following chapters show, the history of reception revealed to the members of our group that Paul’s teaching in Romans has a height, depth, and power far beyond what we imagined at first. When, on the basis of their respective expertise, our colleagues presented to the rest of us parts of this history, we were faced with (1) rich alternate readings for each passage, (2) an array of insightful connotations for each term, (3) inspiring theological perspectives on each doctrinal theme, and (4) enticing visions that drew and still draw believers into a faith practice encompassing their individual, family, community, social, and political lives. But before learning from each other about specific issues regarding Romans and its receptions, we had to discover how to work together.

Interdisciplinary study of the receptions of Romans and critical exegesis: Toward scriptural criticism In my naïveté, I had not anticipated that there would be major obstacles to overcome in order to bridge the diversity of specializations around the table in our seminar. Conversely, I did not imagine that the first steps in our collective project would be such a rewarding learning experience, which can be sketched as follows. The immediate and very pragmatic question was, how would scholars from such very different disciplines work together? From the outset, theologians (joined by church historians) raised a basic question: would biblical exegetes have “veto power” when discussing with church historians and theologians the different and at times contradictory interpretations of Romans? If it were to be the case, theologians and many church historians were not interested in joining this research project. We exegetes were puzzled. We were not claiming any veto power, were we? While theologians granted that we might not do so explicitly, they underscored that we implicitly and instinctively claimed such a veto power whenever we conceived of our task as seeking to establish the only true interpretation of a biblical text. We objected that exegetes have long rejected the positivist claims to present the only true interpretation of any text. We argued that such absolute claims contradict the “principle of criticism” that governs historiography—our umbrella methodology, since we are dealing with ancient texts, whatever might be the particular critical method we use. We exegetes are fully aware that the best we can do is to claim and argue that our conclusions have “a greater degree of probability” than other interpretations.7 Thus, each time we develop a critical exegesis, we carefully point out (through our many 6

7

With a gap of two years, when the Society of Biblical Literature (and its exegetes) and the American Academy of Religion (and its church historians and theologians) did not meet simultaneously. The first session, in 1997, was technically a SBL consultation. See Ernst Troeltsch, “Historiography,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (ed J. Hastings; New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1914), vol. 6, 716–23 and Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

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17

footnotes and references) that we are climbing on the shoulders of previous exegetes by refining their interpretations—and we teach our students to do the same. But theologians were adamant (although church historians hesitated). They insisted that claiming a greater degree of probability for an interpretation has the effect of a veto power; it makes impossible any truly interdisciplinary discussion regarding various interpretations of Romans. They pointedly asked: why would we want to study the receptions of Romans through the centuries if it is in order to reject these as less accurate, as inappropriate, or as incorrect interpretations, because they do not follow the norms of modern critical exegesis? The theologians were right. Our invocation of the principle of criticism (including our “humble” affirmation that as critical exegetes we do not make absolute claim, but simply seek to develop interpretations that have a greater degree of probability) would necessarily involve an a priori rejection of the interpretations of Romans by, for instance, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Karl Barth, Giorgio Agamben, and also those by the theologians among us. Furthermore, since we wanted to be an interdisciplinary seminar on “Romans Through History and Cultures,” all of us—church historians, theologians, and exegetes—needed to be treated and respected as equals, whatever might be our discipline, methodology, and/or field of studies. Our work together must be based on the principle that we can and need to learn from each other. Otherwise, why would we want to participate in this interdisciplinary project? We exegetes hesitantly agreed with this principle. While it made sense, we had the feeling it contradicted our very vocation as critical exegetes. At the outset, it was far from evident how we could both faithfully carry out our task as critical exegetes and abide by our commitment to respect the interpretations of Romans presented by the theologians and church historians in our seminar. The first two years of our seminar were crucial in shaping our work together. As the title of our first collective volume expresses, Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations (2000), we confronted head on the fact that the same passage of Romans has been and is interpreted in several different, and at times contradictory, ways. This was exemplified in the study by Joseph Sievers regarding the conflicting interpretations through history of Rom 11:29. These nine Greek words, ἀμεταμέλητα γὰρ τὰ χαρίσματα καὶ ἡ κλῆσις τοῦ θεοῦ, in the rendering the NRSV (“for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable”) and most modern translations affirm the continuity between Jews as the people of God and the church, since these words refer to God’s gifts to Israel and God’s call of Israel. Nevertheless, through the centuries these words were understood as confirming the rejection of the Jews (as will be discussed in Volume 3 on Romans 11) with massive and tragic consequences.8 8

Joseph Sievers, “‘God’s Gifts and Call Are Irrevocable’: The Reception of Rom. 11:29 Through the Centuries and Jewish-Christian Relations,” 127–72 in Reading Israel in Romans (2000). A longer version, “A History of the Interpretation of Romans 11:29,” was published in Annali di storia dell’esegesi 14 (1997): 381–442. As will be discussed at length in Volume 3, the crucial difference is prompted by the Latin translation of the Vulgate, sine paenitentia enim sunt dona et vocatio Dei (“for without repentance are God’s gifts and calling”) which was too often understood to say that the beneficiary of God’s gifts (the Jews) are “without repentance” and therefore not worthy of these blessings.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

Exegetes in our group pointed out without hesitation that conflicting interpretations are found not merely in the history of the receptions of Romans, but also among existing present-day critical exegetical studies, that is, among interpretations that particular critical exegetes view as demonstrably legitimate. This observation proved to be the starting point of our formulation of a methodological approach, “scriptural criticism,” that all of us—theologians, church historians, and exegetes—could affirm as an appropriate collective critical perspective for framing our respective interpretive endeavors, whether in theological studies, or in church history studies, or in exegetical studies.9 The main tenets of scriptural criticism are that any interpretation of a biblical text— that is, of a text that believers read as Scripture—is the result of an interpretive process that necessarily includes the three types of interpretive choices: analytical textual choices, hermeneutical theological choices, and contextual choices. Any interpretation of a text that is read as Scripture is framed by these three kinds of choices.10 It is fair to say that, before joining this interdisciplinary project, none of us envisioned biblical interpretation in this way. Many of us had already struggled on our own or in other groups with receptions of Romans and related issues from the perspective of our own fields. But as soon as we began presenting our work during the first sessions of our SBL seminar, each of our particular disciplinary perspectives was put into question by the substantive interdisciplinary discussions that followed. Exegetes had to come clean regarding the presuppositions that shaped their studies of Romans; and the theologians and church historians should do the same. It was during these discussions that scriptural criticism progressively took shape. Obviously the process through which we slowly became aware (a thirteen-year process!) of the framing role of each of the three types of interpretive choices involved in any interpretation of a scriptural text was different for each of us, since our starting points were quite different. As can be expected, theologians tend to take for granted that any interpretation of Scripture involves “hermeneutical” and/or “theological” interpretive choices by the interpreters; but this point requires much explanation for exegetes.11 Church historians (as well as “engaged” theologians and exegetes) tend

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The members of our group held various views of scriptural criticism related to their particular field or methodology. I present here the understanding of it that Cristina Grenholm and I presented in the “Overture: Reception, Critical Interpretations, and Scriptural Criticism,” 1–54 in Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations (RTHC, 2000). Take note of this full title. Any interpretation of scriptural texts involves an Analytical frame (resulting from the choice of particularly significant textual features, establishing the legitimacy of the interpretation); a Hermeneutical frame (resulting from the choice of particular theological and/or ideological categories, and thus of a particular line of reasoning establishing the plausibility of the interpretation); and a Contextual frame (resulting from the choice of concerns for particular contextual issues that call for a teaching from the scriptural text—a Word-to-live-by—and that serve as bridge-categories inducing the choice of particular hermeneutical and analytical features of the text as most significant). See Grenholm and Patte, “Overture: Receptions, Critical Interpretations, and Scriptural Criticism,” 1–54 (especially 34–43) in Grenholm and Patte, eds., Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC). Part III and its discussion of parts of the history of reception provides these explanations in greater detail as it discusses how Paul’s letter to the Romans questions our view of the ways Scripture is read by believers. The scornful attitude taken by many exegetes as soon as one affirms the need to take into account the role of “Scripture” reflects a very narrow understanding of the role of Scripture—

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to emphasize “contextual” interpretive choices marked by the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical situation of the interpreters.12 Exegetes readily recognize that their interpretations are framed by their own choices of exegetical methods—that is, by “analytical” interpretive choices that are also “textual,” because each method privileges certain textual features.13 Thus, each of us followed a different path as we progressively recognized that any interpretation of a biblical text involves these three types of interpretive choices. This became clear to Cristina Grenholm (a theologian) and me (an exegete) during the dialogue that led us to write together the “Overture” in which we tried to give form to the procedures that, in our observation, our colleagues had developed in order to work with each other in the interdisciplinary endeavor of our SBL seminar.14 Of course, these opening remarks are far from enough to explain and justify the practice of scriptural criticism. Again, as a group, it took us thirteen years, during which we progressively envisioned it and refined it as we studied the history of reception of Romans. This trajectory was marked by our struggle with specific issues raised by particular receptions of Romans. According to scriptural criticism, when one encounters interpretations that are different from ours—as we constantly did during our study of the receptions of Romans—these should not be “presumed illegitimate (until proven otherwise)”—as is frequently done in the usual practice of critical biblical studies—but rather they should be “presumed legitimate (until proven otherwise) (emphasis in original).”15 This is true whether these interpretations are by exegetes or by theologians and self-effacing believers, including those interpretations found in the history of reception of Romans. All of them are framed by particular analytical textual choices. This is the case even when these interpretations make explicit that they are also framed by hermeneutical theological choices (e.g., the rule of faith [regula fidei] used by Augustine) and/or by contextual choices (e.g., choices made in order to avoid or to denounce sexism and patriarchalism, or anti-Judaism, or other oppressive teachings, as well as choices made

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often limited to some kind of fundamentalist view. Part III will also show why one cannot hold this narrow understanding as soon as one deals with Scripture from a phenomenological comparative perspective. See Smith, What Is Scripture? as well as the seminal works on “scripturalizing” edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008) and Misreading America: Scriptures and Difference (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). This will be illustrated throughout this book in the discussion of interpretations of each theme and passage of Romans, especially those dealing with ethical issues. In dealing with the diverse interpretations of each theme and passage, the following chapters will make explicit the choice of method of each interpretation. See again Grenholm and Patte, “Overture,” 1–54 in Reading Israel (2000). The qualifier “until proven otherwise”—in the phrase “presumed legitimate (until proven otherwise)”—underscores that we are NOT claiming that anything goes in interpretation; as critical exegetes, we can and should demand to have an explanation regarding the textual evidence upon which the given interpretation is based. Yet the interpretation/reception must be “presumed legitimate.” In other words, we should be ready to find that this textual evidence be, for us, totally unexpected—for instance, because it concerns oral/aural features of the text to which, as Western exegetes, we do not pay attention, or because it concerns some other cultural textual features of the text that are totally foreign to our Western cultures, or again because it concerns religious features of the text we did not recognize as they refer to religious practices or experiences we could not envision.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

to preserve the cultural, or socioeconomic status quo for the sake of peace and harmony). Then, conversely, all of us should recognize that all interpretations—including critical exegeses—are always also framed by our own hermeneutical theological choices (even if these are anti-religious) and our contextual choices.16 In sum, the seminar “Romans Through History and Cultures” led us to view the history of the reception of Romans as a treasure-trove of interpretive insights and as an integral and necessary part of the critical exegetical task. I am aware that these affirmations are far from convincing in themselves. This was also our collective experience. In our interdisciplinary group, the above points became clear for each of us only when they became concretely exemplified and explained through the analysis of particular receptions of Romans.

The need to overcome the illusion that a text has a single legitimate meaning The first and greatest hurdle we had to overcome was the view—shared by most exegetes as well as by most modern readers (including many church historians and theologians)—that interpreters do not truly have any analytical textual choice.17 Is it not the case that a text has a single legitimate meaning, namely “what the author meant to say”? Is it not what is presupposed by the exegetical practice of the majority of the members of the SBL and an even greater percentage of the members of the Europeanbased Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS)? Are not exegetes of Romans practicing biblical exegesis as if it was self-evident that the goal of exegesis were to establish, with the greatest level of probability, “what Paul meant to say,” and thus to formulate the (only, single) true, legitimate interpretation of the text? But this self-evident exegetical practice contradicts others of our exegetical practices! Interestingly enough, we exegetes have developed and teach a great variety of critical methods, such as those presented in the recent introductory books discussed below. Each of these distinct critical methods embodies a different analytical textual choice—it considers as most significant particular features of the text and brackets out others as less significant. Consequently, each exegetical method points to a different meaning of the given biblical text.

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Bultmann in his 1957 essay “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?” conceded that critical exegesis was necessarily framed by the exegete’s hermeneutical and theological choices, in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Schubert M. Ogden (New York: Meridian, 1960), 289–95. On the importance of contextual choices as revealed by ideological/cultural, postmodern, and postcolonial studies of the Bible, see, for example, The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah, eds., A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2007). I contrast “modern readers” both with “postmodern readers” and with “ancient readers”—who, at least during the patristic and medieval periods in the West, self-consciously recognized in a biblical text several levels of meaning, such as its literal level (concerning what God and our ancestors did), allegorical level (conveying a faith vision), moral level (conveying rules for life), and anagogical level (concerning eschatological realities). For ancient and postmodern readers there are several meaning producing dimensions in any given biblical text; readers necessarily make a choice to focus on one or the other of these dimensions.

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An examination of the diverse exegetical methods that warrant the legitimacy of very different critical interpretations is therefore a necessary starting point. It helps us recognize in a very concrete way the plurality of analytical textual choices that all interpreters have and make when they read Romans.18 This will explain a general principle of scriptural criticism which makes our work together as an interdisciplinary group possible, namely that we must think long and hard before rejecting interpretations as illegitimate simply because they are different from ours. These other interpretations might be different from ours, simply because they made different analytical textual choices by focusing on different features of the text—textual features that they view as most significant.

Critical exegetes faced with a plurality of legitimate interpretations Many exegetes are puzzled by the fact that a study of the history of reception necessarily leads to the conclusion that a broad range of interpretations are legitimate; that is, are equally well grounded in textual evidence. Yet, these exegetes should not be surprised. The recent multiplication of critical exegetical methods (since the 1960s) has engendered a plurality of different critical (and thus legitimate!) exegeses, each emphasizing certain textual features as most significant, because of a particular set of analytical textual choices. And, as I write, critical exegeses are constantly developing new critical methods, which lead to different interpretations of Romans, multiplying the number of legitimate interpretations. Nevertheless, at first, exegetes in our group were far from ready to acknowledge that there is a diversity of legitimate interpretations. During the first two years of the “Romans Through History and Cultures” project, the fact that there are conflicting critical exegetical studies of the same passage or of the same theme in Romans was illustrated by Robert Brawley. He showed that diverging, equally legitimate, critical interpretations can be deliberately produced by biblical scholars who choose different exegetical methods. As an example, Brawley proposed a multi-vocal interpretation of Rom 4 by using two critical methods: a literary/narrative method (focused on the way characters are constructed by Paul in this chapter) and an intertextual/figurative method (focused on the appropriation of texts from the Hebrew Bible in this chapter). In effect, each of these methods emphasizes as most significant one or another “voice” of the text (or more generally, one or another type of its “textual features”), while bracketing out, at least for a time, the other “voices” (“types of textual features”) as less significant. Brawley underscored that each method leads to different conclusions regarding the meaning and teaching of Rom 4, and concluded: “From the beginnings of its history of reception Romans speaks with multiple voices.”19 By choosing one or another methodology, one chooses one or another voice as most significant; one makes an analytical textual choice.

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In addition, we need to keep in mind that these “modern” and “Western” exegetical methods do not reflect all possible analytical textual choices. Robert Brawley, “Multivocality in Romans 4,” 74–95 in Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC). Quote from page 91.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations

It is Brawley’s essay and its discussion that led members of our interdisciplinary group to the general conclusion that any given interpretation of Romans reflects particular implicit or explicit analytical textual choices.20 These choices are “textual” in the sense that, consciously or not, each given reader chooses to view certain textual features of Romans as more significant than others. For critical exegetes, such choices are explicitly “analytical” in the sense that they choose to give priority to one or another critical method to analyze the text, in order to elucidate a given type of textual features. Yet, it is not merely exegetes who make such choices. All interpreters implicitly analyze the text that they read, by identifying in it what they perceive as most significant and thus what becomes the focus of their reading. This more general point came to the surface as we discussed the receptions of Rom 11:29 under the leadership of Joseph Sievers. Whatever was the proposed conclusion regarding the meaning of this verse, the given interpretation involved choosing to view as most significant the relationship of this verse, 11:29, to a particular set of passages in Romans, while viewing as less significant its relations to other passages.21 In sum, any reading involves the analytical textual choice of viewing certain features of the text as more significant than others.22 Consequently, in each essay concerning the reception of Romans in any given historical period or culture presented in the book series Romans Through History and Cultures (RTHC), one can find the notation [A] repeatedly printed in the margins to signal that, in the judgment of the editors, at these points in the essay the author refers to particular analytical textual choices made by the interpreter under study—with corresponding footnotes briefly characterizing these choices.23 For most exegetes in our seminar, despite our inclination to identify the particular interpretation that has the greatest degree of probability, it was not difficult to agree that any given interpretation emphasizes certain features of Romans as most significant and brackets out other features as less significant. We could therefore agree that any interpretation is framed by a particular set of analytical textual choices, as Brawley illustrated for us. This point is also clear in the common exegetical practice of selecting, very early in the study of a biblical text, one particular critical method that becomes 20

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See the dialogue between Brawley and Thomas Parker (idem, 96–104) and Cristina Grenholm’s response (idem, 105–23). See Joseph Sievers, “God’s Gifts and Call Are Irrevocable,” in Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC), 127–73 and also the response by Günter Wasserberg in “Romans 9-11 and Jewish Christian Dialogue,” idem, 74–186. Although we rarely discussed this in the Romans seminars, it should be noted that in semiotics—a field in which I invested myself as a way of grounding my work in biblical studies—viewing certain features of a text or discourse as more significant than others is a basic and necessary stage in the process through which readers produce meaning as they read. This is the process of “textualization,” through which readers construct a “particular text” by choosing certain semiotic features as particularly significant. See the article “Textualisation” in Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés. Sémiotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1979) and its translation “Textualization,” in Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Translated by Larry Crist, Daniel Patte, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See also Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) and Daniel Patte, The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts: Greimas’s Structural Semiotics. Semeia Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990). The only exception is Gaça and Welborn, eds., Early Patristic Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2005) in which it was not done due to time constraints imposed on the General Editors by the publishing schedule.

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the main frame for our exegetical interpretation (although in many cases we also use other, secondary critical methods to complement our main method). In so doing, we choose certain features of the text as more significant than others, and make them the primary focus of our exegetical investigation.24 In the abstract, the far-reaching implications of this observation are difficult to envision. Brief illustrations of actual exegetical practices using different critical methods and making different analytical textual choices are necessary. Because methodological issues have been more explicitly discussed in Gospel studies, I first take as illustrations a series of traditional exegeses of the Sermon on the Mount, so as to make recognizable the more subtle types of methodological choices made in Romans scholarship.25

“Behind-the-Text,” “In-Front-of-the-Text,” and “Within-the-Text” critical methods: Analytical textual choices in Matthean and Romans studies The variety of critical exegetical methods currently used by exegetes is easily seen in the recent introductory methodological books.26 As each of these books emphasizes in its own way, exegetical critical methodologies can be subdivided in three sets, sometimes called behind-the-text, in-front-of-the-text, and within-the-text methodologies.27 These visual designations graphically identify in each case both the textual location of what contributes to the production of meaning and the type of interaction between the biblical text as a historical entity and its interpreters. Behind-the-text methodologies reconstruct the meanings of the text in certain historical contexts. These include (a) the author’s intentional meaning of the text (“what 24

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This methodological choice does not mean that we ignore the textual features that are of less interest to us. Actually, a given interpretation often involves secondary analytical textual choices that need to be accounted for, as is illustrated in Part II, where we compare different critical interpretations of Romans. For more detailed comments, see my analysis of the scholarship on the Sermon on the Mount up to 1995 in Patte, Discipleship according to the Sermon on the Mount, 1996. See, for instance, Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Mark & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992); McKenzie and Haynes, eds., To Each Its Own Meaning, 1993; Paula Gooder. Searching for Meaning: An Introduction to Interpreting the New Testament (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008); Steve Moyise, Introduction to Biblical Studies, 3rd ed. T & T Clark Approaches to Biblical Studies (London and New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2013). Even the more conservative methodological introductions, such as William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert I. Hubbard Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, Revised Edition (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), pay attention to the great diversity of critical methods and their equal legitimacy. In one way or another, all these make a distinction among “historical approaches” (with a behind-the-text focus), “literary approaches” (with a within-the-text focus), and approaches focused on “the role of the readers” (with an in-front-of-the-text focus). On methodologies used to study Paul’s letters see Jean-Noël Aletti, New Approaches for Interpreting the Letters of Saint Paul: Collected Essays. Rhetoric, Soteriology, Christology and Ecclesiology. Subsidia Biblica 43 (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2012). A more detailed sketch (with short-hand tables) of behind–the-text, within-the-text and in-front-ofthe-text exegetical methods is found in Daniel Patte, Monya Stubbs, Justin Ukpong, and Revelation Velunta, The Gospel of Matthew: A Contextual Introduction for Group Study (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), 46–57, with examples of the use of these methods by interpreters of Matthew presented throughout the book. One can also find a presentation of each discrete method in the introductory books mentioned above.

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the author meant to say”), and secondarily (b) the meaning that the text had for the intended readers/hearers (e.g., the Romans) in ancient history (“what the text meant” for them, which might or might not coincide with the author’s intentional meaning). (c) the meaning produced, intentionally or not, through interactions with the complex historical situations and the cultural/religious views of the time of its composition, and (d) the meaning of certain textual features in certain historical situations prior to or after the production of the text (e.g., in form and textual critical studies). None of these historical meanings are directly available to present-day readers, because of the historical gap that separates present-day readers from the biblical text and its complex context. Consequently, these readers need to go through a two-step interpretive process before being affected by these historical meanings of the text. As Krister Stendahl expressed, in a 1962 article that became a classic,28 behind-the-text exegesis (of various types) needs to reconstruct in a first step “what the text meant” for its author and others in that time. Then in a second step, a particular kind of hermeneutics (a behind-the-text hermeneutics, usually performed by theologians and preachers) seeks to bridge the historical gap by formulating “what the text means” for today, that is, by showing how “what the text meant” applies in present-day contexts.29 For in-front-of-the text and within-the-text meaning-effects, there is no such historical gap between biblical texts and present-day readers, even though these meaning-effects are no less rooted in historical realities than behind-the-text meaningeffects. These meaning-effects of the text are identified by other sets of exegetical methodologies, which recognize that any text or discourse involves features that produce meaning for readers/hearers far beyond the intention of the author/speaker and other concrete historical settings of the text. In-front-of-the text meaning-effects are usually unintentional and occur when readers and their particular contexts (whenever and wherever they might be) are positively or negatively affected by the life patterns that characterize the relationships among persons, groups, and institutions, which the biblical text posits. Once again, these types of meaning-effects are neither extraordinary nor artificial. Any text or discourse presupposes, and is framed by, an “ideology” (in the neutral sense of Althusser’s definition, “ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”).30 The ideology of the text/discourse is another historical dimension of the text, which is commonly adopted by readers/

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Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology,” 418–32, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Vol.  1 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962). This article remains totally appropriate regarding “behind the text” exegesis. Its weakness is that it limits exegesis to this single type. Yet, as he expressed in his endorsement of Reading Israel in Romans, Stendahl evolved beyond this narrow position. He welcomed by 2000 the perspective of Scriptural Criticism and its inclusive view of a diversity of analytical textual choices (and also a diversity of hermeneutical theological choices and contextual choices) as expressed in Grenholm and Patte, “Overture: Receptions, Critical Interpretations, and Scriptural Criticism,” 1–54 in Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC). Although this historical concern and reading might seem to be exclusively a modern preoccupation, it is actually found throughout the history of reception of Romans; for example, in the patristic and medieval fourfold model, it is found at the literal level of interpretation (“concerning what God and our ancestors did”). Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984, reprint, 2008). See especially the first essay, “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.”

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hearers when they identify themselves as receivers of this text/discourse—as most people who read Romans as Scripture did and still do throughout the history of its reception. Thus, critical methods developed in ideological, socio-scientific, cultural, feminist, postcolonial critical studies can readily be used in biblical studies, in order to elucidate how a particular biblical text directly affects its readers through the ideology that frames it. The plurality of in-front-of-the text methodologies are illustrated in Chapter 2 and systematically used for the study of Romans in Chapter 4. Similarly, within-the-text meaning-effects are usually unintentional and occur when readers enter the biblical text and directly share into its narrative, its vision, and/ or its worldview, which are other historical dimensions of the text. This participation in the narrative and figurative features of the biblical text occurred for the original readers as well as for readers in any other time or circumstance throughout the history of reception of Romans (including the present). Once again, these types of meaningeffects are neither extraordinary nor artificial; they are those we commonly engage in, for instance when we read a novel or a poem. Thus, critical methods developed in literary studies (illustrated in Chapter 2 and systematically employed for the study of Romans in Chapter 5) are readily used in biblical studies, in order to elucidate their within-the-text meaning-effects. It is helpful to recognize the three different categories in which critical methods can be subdivided. Yet, this neat classification found in methodological textbooks can be misleading by giving us the feeling that each of these methods is practiced independently from the others, and therefore that there are only three kinds of critical studies of Romans. In practice, each interpretation—including the most sophisticated exegesis—is hybrid, in the sense that it calls upon a particular mix of several methodologies, even though one always predominates and frames the given exegetical interpretation. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find quite a variety of critical exegetical studies of Romans, each with its own set of conclusions. Since we ask different questions about the text when we use different critical methods, we should expect different conclusions. After all, these conclusions are about different textual features and issues, even if we call them “meanings of the text.” And if, in each instance, exegetes are rigorous in their analyses, their conclusions should be “critical,” and thus legitimate (properly grounded in textual evidence), despite their differences. All this should be self-evident. But it is not. Many exegetes are puzzled by the mere suggestion that two—let alone several—diverging interpretations might be equally legitimate. Yet, without this minimal basic presupposition, our collective interdisciplinary study of the receptions of Romans could not be conducted. Why this resistance? Part of the problem is that Romans is a letter, in which Paul introduces himself, speaks in the first person, and addresses a specific audience, “all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints” (Rom 1:7 NRSV). Consequently, is it not the case that this discourse has only one true meaning, namely “what Paul meant to say to the Romans”—a behind-the-text meaning? This is what a majority of (modern, Western) critical commentaries do. They make it explicit by using phrases such as “this is what Paul meant,” following their (explicit or implicit) choice of one among several possible interpretations of a word, a phrase, a sentence, or an argument. But,

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a quick look at the rows of commentaries on Romans in our libraries shows that these commentaries present quite divergent interpretations of “what Paul meant to say.” Does this mean that all these commentaries are wrong, except for the one we happen to support? The preceding paragraphs already suggest that, even though all these commentators are seeking to elucidate the same general meaning, they have most often made different analytical textual choices, leading them to look for “what Paul meant to say about a particular issue (or point).” For instance, we shall see in later chapters that conclusions regarding “what Paul meant to say” about the righteousness or justice (δικαιοσ ύνη) of God and its relationship to “faith” in Rom 1:16–17 can be expected to diverge when one reads these verses (and the rest of Romans) in order to discern what Paul meant to say about the “faith” of individual believers or about the “faith” of the believing community, or about “faith” as a religious experience. In sum, rather than rejecting as irrelevant critical exegetical commentaries with interpretations diverging from ours, we should presume that they are legitimate, until proven otherwise, because we can presuppose (until proven otherwise) that they made different textual choices and concurrently different analytical choices—eventually by choosing different critical methods. This is true even for diverging interpretations belonging to the same category—for example, behind-the-text interpretations—because each of them is hybrid, combining a main method with a variety of secondary ones. The legitimacy of a plurality of diverging interpretations of Romans should be selfevident. Yet, exegetes in our group found it difficult to imagine it for two reasons: (1) because the methodological discussion has been quite limited in the case of studies of Romans;31 and more generally (2) because all of us—theologians, church historians, ordinary believers, and exegetes—commonly oversimplify the meaning of discourses. In order to address the limitation of the methodological discussion regarding Romans, it will be best to briefly allude to examples in Gospel studies, in which the diversity of critical methods has long been accepted. “Traditional” critical studies of the Sermon on the Mount commonly use behind-the-text methods aimed at elucidating “what the author meant to say,” a concern similar to behind-the-text exegetical studies of Romans. In Gospel studies, these are redaction critical methods. A quick look at such studies shows that they are very different from each other, because they combine other methodologies with redaction criticism. For instance, Georg Strecker based his redaction critical study of the Sermon on two other behind-the-text methodologies: source critical studies (e.g., identifying the textual features in the Sermon that belong to the source Q and analyzing them to show Q’s particular theological and ethical perspective) and form critical studies (identifying in the Sermon the traditions that reflect the views and practices of the earliest church, as recognizable by their form). For Strecker, Matthew’s particular theological perspective is what is distinct from his

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This is not to say that methodological issues have not been raised for the study of Paul’s letters. Karl P. Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, Revised and Expanded Edition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991), illustrates the many methodological questions debated regarding studies of Romans. But, as compared with Gospel studies, the range of these methods is quite limited, as is illustrated by the methodological books mentioned above.

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sources and from the early church traditions he used.32 Warren Carter’s redaction critical study of the Sermon reaches conclusions that are quite different from Strecker’s, because he combines redaction criticism not only with form and source critical studies, but also with other behind-the-text approaches that underscore sociopolitical studies and history-of-religion perspectives.33 W. D. Davies and Dale Allison’s redaction critical study of the Sermon reached still different conclusions because, in addition to source and form criticisms, they paid close attention to (1) Matthew’s use of the LXX and its relation with early Jewish interpretations of Scripture, that is, other behind-thetext features of the Sermon, and (2) the figurative features of the Sermon (the figure of Jesus as the New Moses; and the thematic organization of the Sermon), that is, withinthe-text features of the Sermon.34 No wonder, therefore, that their conclusions would be different from that of Strecker and Carter. Similarly, Ulrich Luz’s redaction critical exegesis of the Sermon35 reaches conclusions different from all the preceding ones because, in addition to the combination of approaches used by Davies and Allison, he used, as noted above, the history of reception of the Sermon (especially reception by the radical reformation), an in-front-of-the-text critical approach. As I argued in a booklength analysis of such commentaries, all these (and other) redaction critical studies of “what Matthew meant to say” in the Sermon on the Mount are equally legitimate.36 The marked (and often radical) differences among their conclusions are due to the fact that each of these studies raised a different set of legitimate questions regarding “what Matthew meant to say” about different issues. As we shall see in Part II (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) and in the rest of this book, the same is true of the many critical commentaries on Romans: even though they appear to be aimed at the same goal, elucidating “what Paul meant to say,” they end up combining different critical methods to raise (slightly) different questions about Romans and its teaching; consequently, quite legitimately, they reach different conclusions regarding what Paul meant to say about specific issues. Logical as these observations are, they remain puzzling for most exegetes. In the case of a Gospel, where the author (Matthew) does not directly address his readers, the reconstruction of “what the author meant to say” is open to a broad range of possibilities, because the intentionality of a redactor is not easy to pinpoint. But in the case of a letter, such as Romans, can we not identify the intentional message and the specific issue it addresses, as contrasted with unintentional meanings about other issues also reflected by the text? There cannot be different intentional meanings of a text, can there be? When I say something, I mean it. Actually my own writings exemplify this view: I 32

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Georg Strecker, Die Bergpredigt: ein exegetischer Kommentar (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984); The Sermon on the Mount: An Exegetical Commentary (trans. O. C. Dean Jr.; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988). Warren Carter. Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000). His confession that he “does not undertake a source and redaction study of each pericope” (xx) presupposes that he views his task as a redaction critical study, establishing what Matthew wanted to convey—as is clear when one reads his commentary. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988). Luz, Matthew, vol. 1 (2001). Patte. Discipleship according to the Sermon on the Mount and its shorter version, The Challenge of Discipleship: A Critical Study of the Sermon on the Mount as Scripture (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 1999).

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strive to be as clear as possible, to make sure you understand what I mean to say, and do not misunderstand me! Nevertheless, it is an illusion to think that the intentional meaning is the only meaning I communicate. Any text/discourse, including mine, conveys many unintentional meanings—it has many unintentional meaning-effects— beside and beyond what the speaker/writer wants to convey. The text/discourse does this through other behind-the-text features and through all of its in-front-of-the-text and within-the-text features.

Overcoming the illusion that the intentional meaning of a text is to be privileged I am fully aware that the preceding suggestion that the intentional meaning of a text/ discourse should not be privileged above its unintentional meanings will not convince anyone for whom the only true meaning of a discourse is what the author/speaker meant to say. Such affirmations have never convinced students who arrive in my classes with that view. In order to overcome their skepticism, I have to change the mode of my discourse: I tell them a story.37 This is the story of the diverse responses engendered by a lecture about racism delivered at Vanderbilt University in 1986. Since it repeatedly proved to be most effective with my students, allow me to retell it. This lecture about racism was delivered by a white Methodist South African minister at Vanderbilt University (in the South of the United States) in 1986, that is, during the apartheid period in South Africa and during a period when, for the first time, there was a significant cohort of African American students in the Vanderbilt Divinity School. The intentional meaning of this lecture was clear: it was a strong anti-apartheid and antiracism appeal. The speaker called the audience to join progressive white South Africans and Mandela’s African National Congress in the struggle against apartheid; concretely, it called us to boycott the products of certain American companies that practiced and benefited from apartheid in South Africa and to ask Vanderbilt University to divest its endowment from the stocks of such companies. This intentional message was well received by most European American students and faculty members (including me) in the audience. But African American students heard a very different message: for them, the lecture conveyed racism. How? Through its illustrations of the plight of black Africans under apartheid. As most illustrations, these were ideologically framed. This is not a problem in itself. But for the African American students it was a problem because these illustrations were framed by a racist ideology. Indeed, the

37

In so doing I invite the students to enter this narrative and share its vision (a within-the-text meaningeffect of my narrative). I am not trying to share with them a definite perspective. Indeed, a story’s meaning-effect is not fixed: it varies from student to student, since it combines the student’s vision with that of the narrative—a specific case of what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 306–07.

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discourse described black Africans under apartheid as childish, unable to make good decisions on their own, without culture, lazy, and without true values.38 Some members of the audience supported the speaker’s good intention. But as soon as they became aware of the racist dimensions of the discourse, many European American students and faculty members joined African American students in recognizing as most significant the unintentional, racist message. As I analyze this lecture for my students, I underscore that both the antiracist (intentional; behind the text) meaning and the racist (in front of the text) meaning of this discourse are legitimate interpretations of the lecture: they can readily be established through a “critical” analysis of what the speaker said. The fact that they are contradictory is clear. The question is: Which meaning of this discourse did the audience choose? Its intentional (behind-the-text), antiracism meaning? Or its unintentional (in-front-of-the-text) racist meaning? The audience was confronted by a choice between these two meanings and their ethical implications. Some in the audience chose one; some chose the other; while still others chose both—by boycotting products of certain companies, as the African National Congress also advocated; and by acknowledging the racism of this lecture  .  .  .  and painfully acknowledging the racism of our own teaching.39

Of course, as we will find regarding specific passages of Romans and their receptions, intentional and unintentional meaning-effects are not necessarily contradictory and, even when they are drastically different, the unintentional meaning might be positive (e.g., the author’s convictions about God’s love) rather than negative (as the ideological racism of the preceding example was). But this example should be enough as a first general explanation of the fact that any text or discourse involves intentional and unintentional meaning-producing dimensions (similar to what James C. Scott calls “public and hidden transcripts”) that reflect in some ways the author’s views.40 Consequently, it is legitimate to interpret a particular text in different and often conflicting ways—a point confirmed throughout this book as we review diverse and often conflicting receptions through history of each given passage of Romans. More specifically, our review of the history of reception of Romans will show how each interpretation privileges one or another of three general kinds of analytical textual choices—corresponding to behind-the-text, in-front-of-the-text, and within-thetext critical exegetical methods—and therefore that these different interpretations of 38

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This incident is documented in Howard Harrod, “Social Transformation and Theological Education at Vanderbilt since 1960,” 178–96 (see especially 188–96) in Dale A. Johnson, ed., Vanderbilt Divinity School: Education, Contest, and Change (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001). I (as an exegete, interested in texts and discourses) attended this lecture and remember vividly the details of this discourse. Harrod, a social-ethicist, exclusively focuses and analyzes the powerful and longlasting (social) effects of the responses to this lecture. For me this was the beginning of a long journey which led me to transform my teaching by adopting the pedagogy that undergirds the present book. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Scott does not distinguish these transcripts in terms of their intentionality or lack of intentionality; his concern is with the effects of discourses upon different audiences. But his work involves the same recognition of the plurality of meaning-producing dimensions in each discourse.

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Romans appropriately reach conclusions that have quite different overall orientations. And, of course, as for diverging critical exegeses, each particular interpretation/ reception is hybrid; its secondary analytical textual choices provide additional specificity to it.

II When theologians and ethicists encounter the history of reception Acknowledging the hermeneutical theological choices that frame our interpretations The receptions of Romans through history that we reviewed were often those of church leaders who were also spiritual authorities, theologians, and preachers concerned with ecclesiastical matters. In view of the diversity of Christian experiences and related theological perspectives represented by all these readers of Romans, one should not be surprised that their interpretations of Paul’s letter were framed by quite different hermeneutical theological choices. Generally speaking, one can expect that Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Protestant, and more recently (Neo-) Charismatic interpretations of Romans would reflect core characteristics of the theological stances of each of these Christian traditions. This is indeed what our study of the history of reception exposed—as will become clear in Part III. Traditionally, Orthodox have rejected Catholic and Protestant interpretations, because they were understood to misread Romans by projecting upon it Catholic and Protestant theological convictions; and, of course, vice versa: Catholics accuse Protestants and Orthodox or Protestants accuse Catholics and Orthodox of reading into Romans their theological perspectives. But in our interdisciplinary and also inter-confessional SBL seminar, such accusations of reading into Paul’s text our own convictions had to be excluded. But this is not because we should refrain from calling upon our convictions as we read Romans. We were quickly convinced that one cannot read a scriptural text without using one’s convictions. Actually, as soon as it became clear to us that readers of Romans are faced with a plurality of analytical textual choices that lead to diverse legitimate readings, we had to recognize that these readers are also faced with a plurality of hermeneutical theological choices that lead to a diversity of theological readings. Each reader makes hermeneutical theological choices, in terms of their convictions, each of which must be respected as plausible.41 Consequently, theologians in our group—as well as theologians, preachers, and other believers who heard about our work (among whom our students)—applaud the fact that a study of the receptions of Romans through history and present-day cultures takes their theological interpretations seriously—since they are receptionlike—instead of brushing them aside as exegetes too often do. Indeed, studying the

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It is not necessarily a process of reading our convictions into Paul’s text. While one might choose options consistent with one’s convictions, one might also choose options that contradict or challenge one’s convictions, in an effort to allow Paul’s text to challenge us.

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receptions of Romans cannot proceed fruitfully as long as researchers do not assume that, until proven otherwise, these receptions are legitimate (i.e., grounded in textual evidence) and also that their theological and ethical conclusions are plausible (i.e., making logical, theological and hermeneutical sense), rather than being presumed implausible, as exegetes often view them. Of course, an anything goes attitude is to be rejected; the legitimacy and plausibility of receptions can be challenged by being proven otherwise. Yet, as a first step, one needs to hold positive assumptions regarding receptions—an attitude that was far from self-evident for me and my colleagues before we became involved in the collective project that led to the present book. While theologians, preachers, and other believers appreciate this change of attitude toward their interpretations, their applause soon subsides, when they become aware that this also means that they are themselves deeply challenged. When they read Romans as Scripture, believers wager their lives on the truth of the teaching they discovered through this reading. Therefore they feel deeply threatened by a study that affirms the legitimacy and plausibility of interpretations that are different from theirs. How can interpretations with conclusions that directly contradict those upon which they built their lives be presumed to be appropriate? Indeed, how can they be presumed to be as legitimate and especially presumed as plausible as their own? The vast majority of readers of Romans, namely the more than two billion Christian believers in many cultural and religious contexts around the world who read Paul’s letter as Scripture, want their own interpretations to be respected. And this is what a study of Romans informed by the history of its reception does. But these believers find it very hard to acknowledge the legitimacy and plausibility of interpretations that diverge so radically from theirs. It would be betraying their own faith, wouldn’t it? Should they not reject these interpretations? Are these not interpretations by “ignorant and unstable/weak people [who] twist [Paul’s letter] to their own destruction” (2 Pet 3:16)? The very notion of a plurality of legitimate and plausible interpretations puzzles many theologians, preachers, and believers. And yet Paul exhorts his readers to “welcome those who are weak in faith, without quarreling over opinions” (Rom 14:1).42 Whatever might be the understanding one has of this verse (as discussed in Volume III, Rom 14:1–15:13 is viewed differently when it is read through the lenses of other verses), Paul’s exhortation applies to Christian believers who read Romans. Whether it is for the sake of individual believers living in harmony with one another in the Christian community,43 or for the sake of the community’s collective mission as the body of Christ,44 or because either as individuals or as communities, they should not think of themselves more highly than they ought to and thus in humility look at others as better than themselves,45 they should welcome other readers (weak in faith readers) who propose different interpretations that appear to be childish and pointless.

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Τὸν δὲ ἀσθενοῦντα τῇ πίστει προσλαμβάνεσθε, μὴ εἰς διακρίσεις διαλογισμῶν. Out of his vast crosscultural experience, John Jones reminded me that Paul himself provides this good argument for respecting plurality of interpretations! When Rom 14:1–15:13 is read through the lens of 12:16a “Live in harmony with one another.” When Rom 14:1–15:13 is read through the lens of 12:4–5 and of all the passages about mission. When Rom 14:1–15:13 is read through the lens of 12:3 and 16 (“I say to everyone among you not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think,” etc.).

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Similarly, we, the ninety-three scholars who participated in the collective study of the receptions of Romans, struggled with the notion of a plurality of legitimate and plausible interpretations. It is only progressively that we adopted a positive attitude toward all types of receptions, when it became clear that without this openness it was impossible for us to work as a community of scholars respecting each other, and that ultimately without it there would be no point in proceeding with a study of receptions of Romans—since without this respect for interpreters from other times and contexts we would posit that we have nothing to learn from them about Romans and about interpretation. In sum, all of us are called to treat interpretations (receptions) of Romans—whether by people around us, by people from other times and cultures, and by us—as equally legitimate and plausible, at least until proven otherwise. But this does not mean that everything goes. In most instances, interpretations with the same legitimacy and plausibility do not have the same value. From a theological perspective, the assessment of the validity of our interpretive choices is very significant for Christian believers who read Romans as Scripture. Without this assessment it would be impossible to ascertain which among the various interpretations actually sustain the flourishing of a healthy faith in a particular cultural and religious context; or, by contrast, which among these unfortunately promote a dangerous travesty of faith, such as the idolatrous blindness of senseless and darkened minds (Rom 1:21–23)—or, in modern words, a blind faith comparable to the twisted views found in conspiracy theories.46 But the necessary preliminary condition for proceeding to such an assessment of the validity of particular analytical textual and hermeneutical theological choices is to acknowledge that we do have such a choice among actual legitimate and plausible interpretations. Part II (that presents three verse-by-verse interpretations of Romans reflecting three distinct families of critical commentaries) makes explicit the choices readers have among three types of interpretations that modern critical interpreters have shown to be legitimate and plausible. In Chapter 3, Reading Romans for its Forensic Theological Teaching: A Quest for Paul’s Theological Logic, Chapter 4, Reading Romans for its Call to Mission of an Inclusive Covenantal Community: A Quest for Paul’s Rhetoric and Ideological Logic, and Chapter 5 Reading Romans for its Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Vision: A Quest for Paul’s Thematic and Figurative Logic, we will present at length and justify (a) the plurality of legitimate interpretations that implement the three types of “critical exegesis” mentioned above—respectively, the “behind,” “in front,” and “within” the text critical exegetical methods; and (b) the plurality of interpretations that are plausible in that they follow the logic of three different “interpretive lines of reasoning” that frame three types of hermeneutical theological perspectives, suggested by the titles of the three chapters.47 The Appendix, Threefold Interpretive Choices about 46

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See again the remarkable and prophetic analysis of the devastating impact on cultures and societies of conspiracy theories by Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop. As mentioned above, in this book I will not refer to semiotic theory. But full disclosure requires that I mention that semiotic theory constantly frames my writing of the present book. As my publications show, I heavily invested myself in semiotic research, working closely with A. J. Greimas and his team—for several years (1975–85) giving more papers in semiotic conferences than in biblical conferences! But it was not merely to help semiotic research progress, but because in critical biblical studies it is essential to understand how readers produce meaning with the help of the text. Indeed,

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Thirty-one Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32, provides what I hope will be a convenient summary where one can consult and compare side by side the three diverging interpretations (often with variants) of each given theological or ethical theme of Rom 1.48

Acknowledging the contextual/ethical choices that frame our interpretations Beyond making us aware of the plausibility of a diversity of hermeneutical theological choices (and of the ways they are grounded in legitimate analytical textual choices), our study of the receptions of Romans through history and cultures led us to recognize that any interpretation of Paul’s letter also involves contextual choices, which are also ethical choices. Most receptions of Romans through history—in the different periods of church history as well as in the different church traditions—are meditative and contemplative receptions by individual believers (whether they are church authorities, theologians, or simple believers, in the past and today) and sermons (preserved because they were preached by noted personalities). For instance, the “commentaries” by early and medieval as well as by Reformation commentators are more often than not a collection of homilies.49 All of these are readings of Romans as Scripture, that is, readings that look for pro me (for me) teachings (especially in meditative receptions) and/or pro nobis (for us) teachings (especially in sermons). Such readings are framed by the expectation that the given text of Scripture will help certain believers/readers address particular issues and problems with which they struggle in their present life-contexts. For Christian believers, the scriptural teaching of Romans is the way in which, according to their reading, this text of “Scripture” relates to their lives in all their diversities and concrete

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semiotics is a scientific study of meaning-production through language and other means. Semiotic theory is a theoretical construct of the process of meaning-production, which is most helpful to discern the various meaning-producing dimensions and features of religious texts, as I presented in The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts: Greimas’s Structural Semiotics (Semeia Studies. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990). Yet this theoretical semiotic work needed to be fleshed out with the help of other exegetes, theologians, and church historians through the critical biblical study of the history of reception of a given biblical book, which ended up being Romans. Hence we have the book series Romans Through History and Cultures (RTHC). It remains that, without saying it, I have the semiotic theoretical model (that describes how we produce meaning with any given text) constantly in mind when I read not only Romans but also any given interpretation of Romans—whether it is found in critical biblical commentaries or in theological and philosophical studies, or in sermons, religious meditations, and theological tractates authored throughout church history and present-day cultures. Readers of Romans (including exegetes) often presuppose that each theological or ethical concept has one meaning. In fact through the history of the church each concept has been understood in quite different ways. This is illustrated by the article “Faith” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. It presents six different understandings/interpretations of “faith” (πίστις) across the centuries and the traditions. See, in the RTHC series, Patte and TeSelle, eds., Engaging Augustine on Romans (RTHC, 2003); Gaça and Welborn, eds., Early Patristic Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2005); Patte and Mihoc, eds., Greek Patristic and Orthodox Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013); Campbell, Hawkins, and Deen Schildgen, eds., Medieval Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2007); Ehrensperger and Holder, eds., Reformation Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2008). See also J. Patout Burns Jr. Romans Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdsmans, 2012).

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particularities.50 It follows that the specific kinds of problems that confront believers in their given life-contexts necessarily lead them to make particular interpretive choices as they read Romans. They are making contextual/ethical interpretive choices that reflect their life-contexts. In meditative receptions and sermons, these contextual interpretive choices are commonly made spontaneously and often subconsciously (as is also the case with textual and theological interpretive choices). Yet, one can easily recognize the interpretive role these choices play, by asking a few simple questions concerning how each given interpretation affects the interpreter and her/his neighbors. The scriptural teaching is expected to address problems or needs that interpreters as believers perceive in particular aspects of their actual lives. Consequently, when considering a given interpretation of Romans we can begin by asking: what particular dimension(s) of human experience does a teaching based upon this interpretation address for Christian believers? Is it an aspect of their individual, private life? An aspect of their life in family or community? In society (with its social, economic, political dimensions in all their complexity and diversity)? In culture (with its ideologies, value systems, worldviews)? In the interactions of religious communities and cultures? When considering meditative receptions and sermons based on Romans, the answers to these questions are readily apparent. As a Christian believer the interpreter seeks to discern a Word-to-live-by for a particular situation; the scriptural teaching formulated in meditations or sermons usually alludes to the particular dimension(s) of human experience in which the problem it addresses is located. It is usually readily recognizable what type of problems interpreters perceived as primary in their particular context. In my teaching I found that all the above questions can be effectively reduced to a threefold contextual question: Does the primary problem concern individual-centered, or community-centered, or Other-centered (spiritual/religious-centered) aspects of experience? When studying receptions of Romans, this first type of observation is already quite helpful. It is instructive to recognize that the same passage from Romans had a scriptural teaching which, according to the interpreters and their life-situations, addressed very different concrete contextual issues. This awareness leads us to the recognition that our own interpretation, whatever it might be, involves one or another contextual emphasis. We are becoming aware that, as we read Romans, we (implicitly) made contextual interpretive choices, based upon an (implicit) interpretation of a particular life-context and aimed at identifying the problems it involves: are these individual-centered, community-centered, or Other-centered (spiritual/religious-centered) problems? We can further refine our understanding of these choices by analyzing the nature of the contextual problem that the scriptural interpretation addresses. Since the scriptural teaching formulated by an interpreter strives to discern a Word-to-live-by— or a Word to be acted on (as Wilken would say)—it necessarily addresses something that prevents believers from living by this Word, that is, a certain root-problem that must be overcome so that believers might be in a position to enact this teaching. Since we seek 50

Or, as Robert Louis Wilken says, “For the church fathers biblical interpretation had to do with the bearing of the text on the present. . . . The Bible is a book about how to live in the knowledge of God and of oneself. God’s Word is not something to be looked at but something to be acted on,” xix–xx (emphases added) in Burns, Romans Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators.

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to identify what, according to a particular reception, prevents the “Word from being acted on,” it is helpful to keep in mind what the necessary conditions are for acting in a meaningful way. Without going into the semiotic theories that have developed detailed analysis of these conditions,51 one can readily understand that in order to perform any meaningful act—be it a most trivial act (going to the library located in another building) or a most complex one (writing an essay, performing surgery)—the agent needs to have all of the following: the will to do it (e.g., wanting to go to the library to find a book); the knowledge necessary to do it (e.g., knowing where the library is); the ability to do it (e.g., having the strength to walk to that other building, and if we are disabled being enabled by handicap access). Will and knowledge (and at times ability) are individual-centered conditions for acting. Yet, there are also communitycentered conditions, namely the various aspects of an ideology that give the agent(s) the confidence that this action makes sense from the perspective of our relationship with others and our life-purpose in society (e.g., addressing the question, How does going to the library affect our relationship with and responsibility toward others?). There are also conditions for acting that are Other-centered, that is, centered on spiritual/ religious aspects of experience, namely the various features of a faith/vision that makes the agent(s) envision the given action as truly “real” (and thus realistic; an action for which the agents are enabled) and/or truly “good” from the perspective of those basic convictions that emerge in our deepest relationship with the other/Other (e.g., love). Does this action—going to the library—enact, embody, and acknowledge our ultimate concern (Tillich) or at least does it avoid contradicting it? The agent(s) fail(s) to act when just one of these conditions for acting is deficient— and it can be any one of them. This one deficiency is the root-problem, which brings the meaningful action to a screeching halt, even if all the other conditions are met. It follows that when an interpretation emphasizes one of these conditions for acting, the interpreter has actually already made a contextual choice. For her/him, in a given life-context, believers need a scriptural teaching to help them correct the deficiency related to this particular “condition for acting,” a deficiency that prevents believers from enacting the Word conveyed by this scriptural text. Indeed, any given interpretation necessarily involves such a contextual choice. The preceding statement might be surprising. Indeed, many receptions/ interpretations—especially modern critical interpretations, but also receptions through the centuries—do not refer to the interpreters’ interpretive contexts and even less to their contextual choices. Actually, many of these interpretations commonly deny that they are framed by contextual concerns and especially by any effort to discern a Scriptural Word-to-live-by. But as soon as one has identified the hermeneutical theological choices of an interpretation, one can readily recognize that these theological choices are related to particular conditions for acting, and therefore that this interpretation seeks to address a certain type of contextual root-problem. This will be repeatedly shown throughout this book and illustrated in Chapter 6, as we 51

For me, the most helpful on this point is Greimas’s theory of “modalities” and of the “generative trajectory.” See these articles in Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Vol. 1 & 2. Trans. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. See also Patte. The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts, 73–102 and 221–64.

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deal with the key theological concepts of Romans. But it can already be illustrated in a general way regarding the three types of theological perspectives found in modern critical interpretations of Romans presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 1. When Romans is read as a letter by Paul the preacher who proclaimed the gospel of justification through faith—the interpretation presented in Chapter 3—this letter teaches the content of faith (“that which is to be believed”), namely the revealed knowledge that each believer is graciously “justified” (forgiven) through faith in God’s intervention through Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus it appears that, in Paul’s time as well as in the present time, such interpretations seek to correct a “lack of (or wrong) knowledge” about the gospel and/or a “lack of will” to accept it and live according to it. Therefore, such interpretations—which are, as we shall see, dominant in Western cultures and amplified since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—posit individual-centered contextual situations. Of course, even in such a case, there are problems at the community and society levels. But these contextual problems are to be resolved by “good” individuals who “know” the gospel and have the “will” to live according to it. 2. By contrast, when Romans is read as a letter by Paul, the pastor and missionary for whom the “gospel of God” is the good news of an inclusive covenant into which, through Christ, all people are called—the interpretation presented in Chapter 4—this letter invites its readers into a “covenantal relation with God.” According to such interpretations, Paul affirmed that Gentiles were in a covenantal relationship with God similar to that of the Jews. Thus the envisioned contextual problem concerned the tense relationships between Jewish and Gentile Christian communities in the early church, including in Rome, and similar communitycentered contextual problems in the life-contexts of readers in other times.52 In Paul’s time as well as in the interpreters’ time, such community-centered interpretations envision problems concerning community identity, that is, a contextual root-problem of ideology.53 The letter is read as seeking to correct a wrong ideology that frames the believers’ (and nonbelievers’) conceptualization of their life in community. Such contextual root problems are community-centered or society-centered. It is not hard to imagine present-day situations where communities are torn apart by conflicts; believers then read Romans as a Word-tolive-by that addresses such difficult, warped community contexts.54 This does not mean that for such interpreters there are no problems at the level of individuals. 52

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As we shall see, this perspective characterizes interpretations of Romans in the “New Perspective and Beyond” (see Kathy Ehrensperger, “The New Perspective and Beyond,” 191–219 in Patte and Grenholm, eds., Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013) and is epitomized in Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (ed. Eldon Jay Epp, Hermeneia Series; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). This is understandable when one keeps in mind that, neutrally defined, an ideology provides “the contours and content of people’s confessional interpretation of life, their worldview, the ideas they claim to be true, and the values they idealize . . . an ideology creates a deep bond among all those who share it or, conversely, sets them apart from other communities that do not embrace this ideology.” J. Harold Ellens, “Ideology,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. For instance, while writing his magisterial commentary, Robert Jewett published books such as: Christian Tolerance: Paul’s Message to the Modern Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982); Paul the Apostle to America: Cultural Trends and Pauline Scholarship (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/

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But, from this perspective, individual believers can be “good” only insofar as they participate in a “good” community. Thus community contextual problems must first be addressed by correcting the wrong ideology that engenders them. In this reading, Romans conveys the proper ideology that can frame an inclusive “covenantal” community in the present-day context, in the same way that, in Paul’s time, the letter to the Romans called Christians in Rome to become an inclusive church community (with both Jews and Gentiles) characterized by love for neighbors. 3. When Romans is read as a letter by Paul the apocalyptic apostle, for whom the gospel is the “power of God for salvation”—the interpretation presented in Chapter 5—this letter invites its readers to recognize (to see) that God’s promises are in the process of being realized, a reason to hope for those who are powerless in dire life-contexts. According to such interpretations, the contextual problem is the catastrophic circumstances in which many people are victims of destructive social behavior of all kinds. The contextual problem is therefore the powerlessness/lack of ability to escape the cycles of destructive behaviors in which both the victims and the perpetrators are caught. Unfortunately, such contextual situations exist in all periods of history, whether they are suffered by humans or by creation (8:22). The problem is powerlessness/lack of ability, because these afflictions and oppressions are caused by factors which are beyond human control. They are caused by (evil) “powers” which can only be overcome through divine intervention:55 the gospel is “power of God for salvation” that addresses such contextual problems. But, believers cannot recognize that the promises of the gospel are fulfilled in their present as long as they lack faith/vision. Thus the contextual problem is whatever prevents people from having this faith/vision—namely, as we shall see, some form of idolatry, which like any kind of addiction is debilitating.56

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John Knox Press, 1994); and (with John Shelton Lawrence) Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003). This type of contextual interpretive choice is often dismissed by “optimistic” cultures, including by the triumphalist European-American cultures, which posit that humans are free and therefore in control of their lives. Systemic evil (especially as rooted in idolatry) cannot be imagined. And yet throughout the history of reception of Romans, one finds this realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretation in very diverse contexts when humans have no control over their own lives—for instance, in cases of persecution, famine, poverty, economic oppression, plagues and other epidemic diseases, wars, and other situations when believers are confronted with the reality of death. No wonder that it is found in many of the present-day charismatic movements in the Southern hemisphere and among Christians struggling in difficult economic situations. As we shall see (Chapter 7), it is also an important trend of receptions of Romans in Eastern Christianity (from the Greek fathers to modern Greek Orthodox scholars) that reemerged in Western scholarly interpretations with Käsemann’s commentary, written while being confronted with the massive evil of World War II (and of economic and politic oppression in Latin America). Thus, while in the name of the Enlightenment, one can reject as irrational the contextual choice found in interpretations that posit the reality of “evil powers”—of evil beyond human control—one can also question the naïve optimism that denies the contextual reality of such evil. This interpretive line of reasoning I call “realized-apocalyptic” as a reminder that, while there are already fulfillments (deliverances, transformations), it is only at the End that all God’s enemies will be defeated; thus at present all deliverance from idolatries and their destructive powers are at best partial.

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In the process of elucidating the contextual choices that any given interpretation of Romans involves (whatever might be its analytical textual and hermeneutical theological choices), at minimum one becomes aware of the fact that Romans does offer different teachings for life-contexts other than our own. This becomes apparent in Part III (Chapters 6 and 7), which reviews the contexts of receptions of Romans and their relationship to the three legitimate and plausible interpretations. The concluding chapter (Chapter 7) further emphasizes that, by recognizing the role of contextual choices in interpretation, we cannot but recognize that when we choose an interpretation for textual or theological reasons, this choice also has contextual effects. Any given interpretation posits a contextual teaching—a Word-to-live-by or Word to be acted on—that, as such, leads Christian believers (as individuals or community) to interact with their contexts in particular ways. Since as interpreters we have a choice, whether or not we are ourselves Christian believers for whom Romans is Scripture, we have an ethical responsibility for the positive or negative contextual effects of our interpretive choice.57 If we choose an interpretation that fails to address a pressing contextual issue in our life-context, or an interpretation that provides a teaching that exacerbates the problems in this life-context, our interpretive choice has negative contextual effects. We have the ethical responsibility to offer readings of Scripture (including Romans) that positively address the contextual situations in which we live. The ethical implications of our choice of an interpretation are not a trivial matter. Positively, our interpretive choice might promote love for neighbors and good community life. But our interpretive choices can also have negative, appalling implications. It is such an ethical issue which, directly or indirectly, has been intensely debated since World War II and the Shoah. What is the effect of our interpretive choices for the relationship between Christians and their Jewish neighbors? Are our interpretive choices promoting, condoning, or preventing anti-Judaism—and beyond it, anti-Semitism—among Christians? In view of the “devastating destruction” (Shoah) to which anti-Judaism led, this most important question became the focus of the first volume, Reading Israel in Romans (2000), following the development of the “New Perspective” interpretations, and its many ramifications.58 The question concerning “our ethical responsibilities as readers of Romans” is not, therefore, a secondary issue (relegated to the end of this book!). Rather it has been the very concern that motivated, from start to finish, the entire project of our thirteen-year collective research project in the SBL and the book series RTHC, and it is the thread that holds together the present book; a thread that one can follow from chapter to chapter. Nevertheless, this book does not dictate to its readers—whether Christian or agnostic exegetes, theologians, or believers—what their choice should be. Rather, it explores with its readers the alternatives that are in front of all of us, and how they affect particular contextual situations. This book does not “read Romans for others” 57

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One cannot escape this responsibility either by claiming that, for example, as an agnostic critical scholar, one is not reading Romans as Scripture, or by claiming that one’s choice of reading is a matter of personal or theological inclinations without particular ethical implications. See presentations of this development in Gager, Reinventing Paul, and Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009).

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(a colonialist attitude that would degrade these other readers), but strives to “read Romans with others,” affirming the legitimacy and plausibility of their past or present interpretations (at least until proven otherwise), and acknowledging that a given interpretation might have a devastating effect in a particular context while having a most-needed, positive effect in another context.59 It is this fundamental expectation that we have something to learn about Romans from other readers (in other times and in the present) which allows us to assume our ethical responsibilities as readers of Romans.

III Pedagogical implications of our study of the history of reception for teaching biblical studies All the members of our seminar were teachers. Therefore, directly or indirectly our collective research and debates affected in different ways the pedagogy we implemented in our seminars and courses, whether in theology, church history, or biblical studies. And conversely our pedagogical experiments sharpened and at times reoriented how we proceeded in our collective study of the history of reception of Romans. Since throughout I was regularly teaching a seminar on Romans, our collective study of the history of reception directly shaped my pedagogy. But what I learned in the classroom in turn contributed to shape my participation in the collective quest of the SBL seminar. In the process, it shaped the pedagogy implemented in my seminars. Thus, pedagogy and study of the history of reception are intertwined. Reviewing this pedagogy is a good way of clarifying how we shall proceed in the rest of this book. Therefore, the following paragraphs move back and forth from classroom pedagogy (that benefited from our research on the history of reception) and, as an aside, its implications for studying the history of reception (in indented paragraphs). Implications for classroom pedagogy. For me, the study of the receptions of Romans through history and cultures emerged in the midst of a pedagogical quest for a form of teaching biblical studies that would be both critical and ethically accountable to the very diverse students in our classrooms and to people they affect in their communities and beyond.60 Being ethically accountable to these students first demanded that I 59

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I am using categories based upon Gayatri Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?” 277–313 in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988). From her perspective, claiming that one, and only one, interpretation of Romans is “ethically acceptable” is actually denying the ever-present contextual character of our interpretations. It is actually an “unethical” attitude which prevents us from assuming our responsibilities as readers of Romans. My seminars on Romans at Vanderbilt University have commonly included at different times Christians from various churches (ranging from conservative evangelical churches to progressive and activist Protestant churches and the Catholic and Orthodox churches in all their diversities), Jews, members of other religious traditions (Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists), and secular students; women and men; heterosexuals and homosexuals; younger and older students; African Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, European Americans, Native Americans, and international students; students from affluent, middle-class, and poor economic backgrounds. The concerns for the effects of our teaching and scholarship in communities were fueled for me by Gary Phillips, first in the volume he edited with Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Reading Communities, Reading Scripture

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acknowledge that, as adults, they are partners in the educational process, and that my role as teacher is to empower them to contribute to the seminar, as Paulo Freire underscored.61 Thus, rather than feeding students the proper interpretation and demanding that they abandon their previous interpretations (the demeaning banking system of education), an appropriate pedagogical practice required that I affirm the students’ interpretations of Romans. This amounted to recognizing that their interpretations are particular, present-day receptions of Romans. Implications for studying the history of reception. This pedagogical practice had a definite impact on our conceptualization of the collective project on the history of reception of Romans; it needed to include receptions of Romans not only through the centuries but also through present-day cultures. Consequently, our collective project was named “Romans Through History and Cultures,” and Chapter 7 will include discussion of present-day receptions.

Implications for classroom pedagogy. Classes in biblical studies do need to teach exegetical skills. Therefore, my classes and seminars introduce students to a broad range of exegetical methods (mentioned above in this chapter) and help them to recognize how each method focuses on certain textual features (viewed as most significant by the exegetes using this method) and, therefore, how it involves particular analytical textual choices made by these exegetes. Then, I ask them to analyze several existing exegetical interpretations (of short passages) so as to identify the different analytical textual choices that exegetes made, and to analyze in the same way their own interpretations (= receptions). Consequently, each student is in a position to recognize that her/his own interpretation involves an analytical textual choice related to one of the critical methods.62 For students, the pedagogical effect is that their own interpretations are affirmed as legitimate (even if, as is frequently the case, they proceed to refine them), since their interpretations are now directly or indirectly related to analytical textual choices emphasized by one or another scholarly exegetical method. Conversely, students are also in a position to recognize a first reason why there are differences among their respective interpretations, as well as among the interpretations by scholars, and to appreciate why it is possible to acknowledge these differences. Differences are not something to be ignored or erased by focusing on what interpretations have in common; differences in interpretation can be and should be affirmed as readings that point to other meaning-producing features of the text.63 When I recognize that your

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(Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2002), and then by our discussion of the Wabash National Study mentioned below (that he supervised as Dean). They also emerged as I reflected on pedagogical issues I encountered not only in the United States, but also in Africa (Congo-Brazzaville, South Africa, and Botswana) and the Philippines. See Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos, trans. 20th-Anniversary ed. (New York: Continuum, 1993). He designates the traditional model of education as a problematic “banking system of education.” I do so instead of asking students in my classes to apply these methods to Paul’s text, as I was doing once upon a time. This emphasis on differences in biblical interpretations duplicates the discussion on difference and racism, when it is argued that the solution to the problem of racism is not simply to affirm what we have in common (e.g., our common humanity)—an attitude that denies the value of our ethnicity—

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interpretation is different from mine, and when I respect you as an interpreter, I am in a position to learn something from you about the text—something which was not the focus of my own interpretation. Implications for studying the history of reception. One of the tasks of the study of the receptions of Romans is to identify in each case the interpreter’s particular analytical textual choices, and therefore to establish the legitimacy of each reception (comparable to a student's interpretation). One way of doing it is by showing how its analytical textual choices approximately correspond to those of a particular critical exegetical method (explicitly and successively presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5), or, if there is no such correspondence, by recognizing that the analytical textual choices of the reception call for the development of a new critical exegetical method (for the study of “oral/aural” textual features, most often ignored in critical exegetical studies, even though biblical texts were, by definition, oral/aural).64

Implications for classroom pedagogy. From the perspective of a history of reception, classes in biblical studies need to invite all class members (including their teachers) to perform other types of analysis—hermeneutical and contextual analyses—of existing critical exegeses and receptions. Training students to practice this twofold analysis is a matter of teaching them to elucidate the hermeneutical theological and contextual ethical choices that each interpreter made in conjunction with her/his analytical textual choices. This commonly includes relating to biblical studies what they have learned in other classes (integrating their formation). Students are asked to use hermeneutical and theological reasoning, to which they would (hopefully) have been introduced in philosophical and theological courses. Similarly, they are asked to assess the ethical validity of the different interpretations for particular contextual situations: “Which interpretation is ‘best’—more helpful—in such or such particular situation?” For this, they are asked to use ethical theories and problem-solving practices, to which hopefully they have been introduced in courses in ethics and practical theology. In sum, in this pedagogical dimension students are called to integrate their exegetical study of Romans with what they learn in other disciplinary fields. Implications for studying the history of reception. One of the tasks in studying each particular reception of Romans involves identifying the interpreter’s particular hermeneutical theological and contextual ethical choices, and therefore establishing the plausibility and the ethical validity of this reception for particular contexts (as we shall do in Chapter 7).

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but also both to recognize differences among social and ethnic groups and to affirm the positive values expressed by these differences—an attitude that makes impossible any implicit or explicit claim of ethnic supremacy or ethnocentrism. See Victor Anderson, “Racism and Christianity: Ethnocentrism.” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. For first steps in this direction, see Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); Lou H. Silberman, ed., Orality, Aurality and Biblical Narrative. Semeia, 39 (Atlanta: SBL, 1987); and Joanna Dewey, ed., Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature. Semeia 65 (Atlanta: SBL, 1994).

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Implications for classroom pedagogy. By this stage of the pedagogical process, to the satisfaction of each student, her/his interpretation (often with adjustments she/he proposed) is shown to be legitimate and plausible, and thus affirmed, and its ethical validity is carefully assessed. Yet, as all the interpretations in the classroom are similarly affirmed, students feel very threatened. Conservative students appreciate that, for a change, their evangelical interpretations (emphasizing, for example, justification by faith, the normative doctrinal content of faith, and the sanctification of individual believers) are not dismissed as illegitimate and implausible, but are rather affirmed as legitimate and plausible (with the help of the more conservative commentaries, theological treatises, and ethical studies), and as ethically valid in particular contexts. But they are disconcerted when, in turn, the interpretations by progressive students are shown to be equally legitimate and plausible, and potentially ethically valid, even though they emphasize opposite teachings (e.g., religious inclusiveness, for Jews and Gentiles of all kinds; liberation and justice for all, including the poor, the slaves, the lower-class “barbarians,” women and men, people with different sexual orientations, and creation itself). And, of course, vice versa, the more progressive students are disconcerted when their inclusive, liberation, or feminist interpretations are not taken as normative, but simply viewed as having equal legitimacy, plausibility, and (potential) ethical validity with the conservative interpretations. In such a pedagogy (informed by a study of the receptions of Romans), as soon as students agree to respect the other members of the community of readers (the class), no fundamentalism of any kind is possible. Everything is open to a diversity of interpretations. Confronted by a diversity of legitimate and plausible interpretations, and in dialogue with the community of readers (the class), each interpreter must assess the relative value of each interpretation and make a final, educated interpretive choice by deciding to adopt one interpretation as “the best” for a particular context. This is deciding which one of these legitimate and plausible interpretations has the greater ethical validity in this particular context—because it is better suited to address particular contextual problems, while avoiding the creation of other difficulties. Simultaneously it is choosing the interpretation about which the interpreter can say “I believe” (this is truly a Word-to-live-by) and in a “second naïveté” (Ricoeur) wager her or his life on it. It is indeed appropriate to claim that one and only one interpretation is valid, following a careful ethical and theological assessment regarding which one of the available interpretations best fosters love (for neighbors and thus for God). Consequently, it is also appropriate to claim that one interpretation (and possibly several) must be rejected as invalid, because of its devastating effects in a given situation. Yet, such an assessment cannot be done by a single interpreter, because it is always contextual. As we shall see, one might be tempted to reject as invalid for all contexts, an interpretation which has the potential to carry with it anti-Judaism—until one discovers that others of its features made this invalid teaching a most effective and therefore valid tool to overcome suicide tendencies in certain situations. As we shall see, declaring one interpretation or another as absolutely valid or absolutely invalid is actually what makes interpretations destructive and dangerous. This is why such ethical assessments demand a roundtable to which interpreters bring their different preferred interpretations; then, in an open communal discussion (there is no head to a roundtable!), they can evaluate how flesh

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and blood people (neighbors) in concrete contexts are positively or negatively affected by each interpretation, and therefore assess the relative value of each interpretation—a value that will vary with the particular concrete contexts under consideration (as will be illustrated in Chapters 6 and 7). Implications for studying the history of reception. Similarly, a study of the receptions of Romans through history and cultures undermines all claims (including implicit ones!) that readers commonly make to have reached absolute, solid conclusions regarding the teaching of Romans. Consequently those readers—be they exegetes, theologians, preachers, believers, or secular readers—who agree to enter this study of the receptions of Romans will be disconcerted, or better disillusioned, because their illusion of having absolute, solid conclusions will be shattered. This was also the experience of those of us who conducted this study. As we progressively became aware that our conclusions about Romans, whatever they might have been, were necessarily the results of a whole series of interpretive choices, we lost our naïveté; false absolutes were shattered. But this was a gain! This was doing theology in an iconoclastic mode (in the long tradition of negative, apophatic, theology) and making it possible for us to assume our ethical responsibility for our choice of interpretation (see Chapter 7).65

Implications for classroom pedagogy. Of course, in the classroom, students perceive this iconoclastic pedagogy as deeply threatening.66 Is this an inappropriate or/and dangerous pedagogy? The alternative would be to use a traditional form of pedagogy in which, as authors of commentaries on Romans do, the teacher would argue that one interpretation (and one only!) is legitimate, plausible, and valid. Why not lead our students to abandon what we, teachers, see as their “wrong” interpretations of Romans by demanding that they adopt the “only true” interpretation (ours!)?67 Ironically, this is the pedagogical strategy that liberal enlightened critical exegetes have used since the nineteenth century in order to try to convince fundamentalists to abandon their obscurantist religious interpretations. And, despite anecdotal successes, this strategy was a total failure. Those who were “successfully” convinced to abandon their “wrong” interpretations stopped reading the Bible, because they also learned that one needs to be an expert (e.g., a philologist) in order to read the Bible correctly, hence “the strange silence of the Bible” (as James Smart called it) in liberal churches that welcomed “critical biblical studies” as normative.68 In addition to this success, instead of being

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For the iconoclastic mode of doing theology, see for instance Gabriel Vahanian, Wait Without Idols (New York: Braziller, 1964), No Other God (New York: Braziller, 1966), Anonymous God (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2002). Monya Stubbs, one of the authors of The Gospel of Matthew: A Contextual Introduction for Group Study (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003), readily speaks of teaching as a “confrontational” and “violent experience.” It amounts to the same thing whether the “wrong” interpretation is some type of conservative evangelical interpretations and the “true” one some type of liberal progressive interpretations, or vice versa. James D. Smart, The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970).

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slowed down, conservative fundamentalism flourished (even in mainline churches) by claiming that critical interpretations are deceptive and that conservative interpretations are normative. Does this mean that we should abandon liberal teaching? Is this what we are doing in a pedagogy framed by a study of the history of the receptions of Romans? Of course, not! (Or as Paul would say, μὴ γένοιτο!) Actually, the pedagogy we just described is framed by the typical goals of liberal learning that educators describe as involving: effective reasoning and problem solving, a capacity for lifelong learning, the ability to interact with people from different cultures, moral character, and leadership.69

Classes on Romans as described above train students in “effective” exegetical, ethical, and theological “reasoning and problem solving;” instill in them “a capacity for lifelong learning” by leading them to be ever open to new interpretations by people from different historical, cultural, and religious contexts; enable them “to interact with people from different cultures” and different religious backgrounds; nurture their “moral character” by asking them to assume ethical responsibility for their choices of interpretation, in preparation for their “leadership” roles in a variety of ecclesial or social contexts. Furthermore, making students full partners in the pedagogical process—including by affirming their particular interpretations (whatever they might be), as long as they themselves respect other students’ interpretations as well as existing interpretations in the history of the receptions of Romans (including those by exegetes)—is a pedagogical practice that recent studies showed to be uniquely effective in liberal arts education.70 In sum, this book proposes to show that a study of the receptions of Romans teaches us much, not only about Paul’s letter to the Romans, but also about ourselves as its interpreters who have theological and ethical responsibilities. For exegetes, this new step in our study broadens the range of interpretations that should be viewed as legitimate (appropriately grounded in the text). For exegetes, theologians, ethicists, and also church historians, such a study leads to acknowledging the plausibility of a plurality of interpretations and the contextual character of all interpretations; consequently, it becomes a locus for enriching the dialogue to which each of them can contribute in a level playing field. For teachers and their students, a study of the receptions of Romans transforms the dynamics in the classroom, as the students’ interpretations have to be welcomed and respected as new receptions. Such is the effect 69

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The goals of liberal learning as described in the article by Ernest T. Pascarella and Charles Blaich, “Lessons from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning (March–April 2013). See the webpage (consulted December 2013) http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/study-research/ for a detailed description of effective pedagogical practices in liberal arts education, “High-Impact Practices and Experiences from the Wabash National Study” (PDF), discussed by Pascarella and Blaich, in their article “Lessons from the Wabash National Study.” For our present concern, we need to note that this study underscored the importance of “higher-order learning” (the use of theories and the practice of analysis), “integrative learning” (bringing together different disciplinary fields), “integrative learning” (integrating diverse perspectives), and “reflective learning” (assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your own views), and how this higher order learning needs to be woven with “interactional diversity.”

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of taking seriously into account the fact that all of us, readers of Romans, through our textual analytical (exegetical), hermeneutical theological, and contextual ethical interpretive choices, bring out of the treasure-chest of Paul’s letter a multiplicity of legitimate and plausible meanings which are all potentially ethically valid. This is where this study of “Three Exegetical Interpretations” of Rom 1:1–32 and of “The History of [Its] Reception” will end (Part III)—prior to similar studies regarding the rest of Romans in subsequent volumes. The basic condition for discerning and assuming our interpretive ethical responsibility vis-à-vis our particular religious situations and life-contexts is that we be members of a particular community of readers who openly discuss their own interpretations with others, while respecting those of others. It is only in such communal discussion that certain teachings and readings can be affirmed as most appropriate for the given life-context of the group, while other teachings and readings will rightly be recognized as inappropriate and even dangerous.

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Critical Exegeses of Romans and the Plurality of Legitimate and Plausible Interpretations

As Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” . . . John Keats called “negative capability,” the ability to remain in the midst of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without reaching from some reassuring thought. . . . As for that One and Only Truth, which many are searching for and others claim to have found, luckily for us poets and for everybody else, “La vie est plus belle que les idées,” as the French say. Charles Simic1

Chapter 1 explained how the study of the history of reception of Romans led members of our SBL seminar to acknowledge that as readers we necessarily make interpretive choices. These choices lead to noticeably divergent interpretations that should be viewed, at least provisionally, as equally legitimate and plausible despite their differences. I suggested that three types of exegetical methodologies—philological/ epistolary, rhetorical/ideological, and thematic/figurative—are related to three plausible interpretive lines of reasoning, respectively: the forensic theological argument of Romans (Chapter 3), its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community (Chapter 4), or again its realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision (Chapter 5). It is time to substantiate this suggestion. In order to justify this claim, we turn to recent critical studies of Romans. The first section of this chapter confronts the question: what, in the text of Romans, requires that we envision several plausible interpretations of the teaching of this letter? The answer is provided by a series of recent critical studies that strove to make sense of Paul’s letter despite the numerous ambiguities, tensions, discrepancies, and even contradictions that seem to be present in Paul’s text. Taking these ambivalences seriously (that is, acknowledging that these are really inconsistencies in Paul’s text) led these New Testament scholars to suggest that Paul’s letter involves different coherent

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Charles Simic, “The Prisoner of History,” NYRB LXI, no. 13 (August 14, 2014): 53, an essay in which he speaks of his experience as a Serbian-American poet. He quotes Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1851. Permission from The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Simic.

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textual dimensions—studied by critical exegeses to ground different interpretive lines of reasoning. A review of these studies ultimately shows that there are at least three lines of reasoning in Romans: a theological argument, a pragmatic/social line of reasoning (which is more specifically a call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community), and a horizon of faith (which is more specifically a realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vision). The second section of this chapter outlines these three distinctive interpretive lines of reasoning and how they are interrelated with the three types of exegetical methodologies—three overall textual choices—which exegetes follow in their respective studies. The third section turns to the jarring reality of the critical biblical scholarship represented by commentaries on Romans. In tension with all that was said in Chapter 1 and in the preceding sections of Chapter 2, all the critical commentaries, without exception, are written to present the one and only true legitimate (critical) and plausible interpretation of the teaching of Paul’s letter. Of course, writing this statement I cannot but smile, as I see side by side on the shelves of my personal library some fifty commentaries on Romans, all of them different in some ways, and yet all of them claiming to present the one and only legitimate and plausible interpretation. And their footnotes confirm their claim by arguing against other interpretations and presenting “what Paul actually meant to say.” But this apparently arrogant attitude is not necessarily rooted in the exegetes who wrote such commentaries. Usually they affirm the principle of criticism2 and are fully aware that all that they can claim regarding their interpretation is that it has a greater degree of probability. They truly respect each other’s work—as they often express in the essays they write and in congenial seminar discussions. An examination of the interrelations among these commentaries will show (a) that the problem is with the literary genre commentary that demands the presentation of an authoritative interpretation and (b) how each commentary is characterized by both the critical methodology and the particular interpretive line of reasoning it follows. The fourth and final section of this chapter brings together (a) the demands of the history of reception—namely the need to acknowledge the legitimacy and plausibility of a plurality of interpretations of Romans—and (b) the nature of critical biblical commentaries each claiming to present the one and only true legitimate and plausible interpretation. This is possible by affirming what existing critical commentaries already claim for themselves—namely that each of them is indeed legitimate and plausible. Their differences can be explained by analyzing these commentaries and showing how they claim legitimacy and plausibility; namely, by consistently following a particular critical methodology and a particular interpretive line of reasoning. Then we can recognize that these commentaries can be classified into several families of legitimate and plausible interpretations.

2

The lynchpin of “historiography” as Troeltsch emphasized, as we pointed out in Chapter 1. See again Troeltsch, “Historiography,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, and Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer.

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I Discrepancies, contradictions in Paul’s text, and the plurality of legitimate critical exegeses Critical exegetes who embark on a quest for the one (and only one) meaning of the letter struggle to overcome the ambiguities of Paul’s text, including the so-called exegetical cruxes. What can be the meaning of this phrase or this sentence that seems to contradict other statements that Paul makes on the same issue in other parts of Romans? In many instances, exegetes presuppose that they have misunderstood something and, accordingly, revise and re-revise their interpretations of Paul’s letter, so as to erase all its ambiguities. This is often appropriate. For instance, we need to make sure that we have correctly identified which (Greek) terminology Paul used as well as which of the textual variants represents the most original text. But such hard and careful work is not a guarantee that we will be able to erase all the ambiguities in Romans. Indeed these perceived discrepancies and contradictions in Paul’s text cannot be corrected by a more rigorous exegesis, because they are not due to some kind of misreading. With this awareness a growing number of exegetes—including most prominent scholars—concede, following early twentieth-century liberal scholars, that Paul is often inconsistent. This is what Heikki Räisänen has underscored in his magisterial 1983 study on Paul and the Law, in which he concludes that “both Galatians and Romans are beset with internal tensions and contradictions.”3 This can be briefly illustrated by the following questions that Räisänen raises: ● ●

● ●

● ● ●

What does Paul mean by nomos, literally translated as “Law”? Is it Torah, the “undivided Law, firmly connected with Moses and the Sinai” that concerns the Jews (as seems to be the case in many instances)? But how can this be the case if Gentiles are under the Law as well? Does Paul affirm the Law/Torah in its totality? Or does he reduce the Law/Torah to the moral law? Is the Law/Torah still in force? Or is it abolished, and if so why and how? Then, why is the Law to be fulfilled, and how? Can it be fulfilled? Is or is not the “law of faith” equivalent to Torah?4

According to the passages one considers, one must give different answers to these questions. Below we discuss how these tensions and contradictions regarding what Paul says about the law have been addressed by different exegetes—and in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 we will note similar tensions and contradictions regarding most of the main theological and ethical themes found in Romans. But the tensions about what

3

4

Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 9. See also E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), especially 123–35 where Sanders underscores that key points of Rom 2 are in tension with what Paul says elsewhere. See also Stanley Kent Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 4–6, where Stowers develops a similar argument on the basis of the works of Räisänen and Sanders to show the need and possibility of a “re-reading” of Romans. These are some of the questions, tensions, and contradictions mentioned by Räisänen in Paul and the Law, 16–119.

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Paul says about the Law provide an excellent example of the issues involved in all other cases. Following a detailed study of the various things Paul says about the Law, Räisänen concludes: Contradictions and tensions have to be accepted as constant features of Paul’s theology of the law. They are not simply of an accidental or peripheral nature.5

Since these contradictions and tensions we perceive in Romans are not to be viewed as misunderstandings on our part—as misunderstandings that we should strive to overcome or ignore if we cannot resolve them—they demand that we, readers and critical exegetes, strive to explain why they exist and what they mean. Following Räisänen we first need to raise the broader question regarding the sources of these inconsistencies. Our answer to this question has important implications for our interpretations of Romans. What are the sources of the inconsistencies regarding what Paul says about the Law? A first source of these inconsistencies is that Paul’s views developed throughout his ministry. With Räisänen we can agree that there are inconsistencies regarding what Paul says about a given issue (here the Law) in the various letters he wrote over the years to different churches in order to confront different problems. These inconsistencies might be contextual—some do result from the need to address particular problems in given contexts (in Galatia, Corinth, or Rome). But they might also be developmental; that is, due to the development of Paul’s thought. These explanations apply to our study of Romans, even though, at first, they do not seem to do so, since we are dealing with a single letter. Throughout his book, Paul and the Law, Räisänen examines many other potential sources of Paul’s inconsistencies. He clarifies their interrelations in a more recent essay in which he reviews the work of many exegetes who have struggled with the several factors that disrupted the unfolding of Paul’s theological argument.6 The contextual and developmental factors mentioned above apply to the study of Romans because, as Räisänen argues, we need to take into account that Paul apparently used blocks of previously shaped material. We should not be surprised that Paul re-used material he had previously formulated. This is something lecturers or preachers do all the time. In my own experience, each time I teach on a topic I taught before (e.g., my regular seminar on Paul and Romans that I taught many times), even though I purposefully develop new lectures that address a particular group of students and their issues, I spontaneously draw upon material that I have thought through and developed earlier in another context. In such cases (as my students noticed more than once, asking for clarification!), my comments on such issues are often at least somewhat inconsistent with the rest of my teaching; views formulated for a different context

5 6

Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 11 (emphases in text). See also 9–15. Räisänen, “Interpreting Paul,” in Challenges to Biblical Interpretation: Collected Essays, 1991–2000 (Boston: Brill, 2001), 85–99 (see especially 94–97).

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and in an earlier stage of my development are now re-framed to address a new context and to reflect a more mature understanding of the topic at hand.7 In emphasizing this point, Räisänen follows Jürgen Becker who observes (in the process of refuting suggestions that Romans is a composite letter) that “the internal coherence of Rom 1-8, or 9-11, or 12-13, or 14:1-15:13 is doubtless of a much higher grade than that between the blocks.”8 Apparently, all these blocks (as well as smaller blocks of previously shaped material) had an internal coherence prior to their use in Romans. We can assume that each block had been elaborated by Paul in various contexts—for example, while preaching—and possibly during earlier stages of his theological development. These blocks of previously shaped material convey points of view and teachings related to the earlier situations and experiences in which they were originally conceived. Now, as Paul uses them in the letter, these blocks simultaneously express a) the old points (reflected by their formulations for an earlier audience framed by their original purpose) and b) the new points that Paul tries to convey to the Romans by stitching together these former teachings into a new theological argument. Ambiguities, tensions, discrepancies, and even contradictions become apparent in the text. This developmental explanation, while potentially covering quite a number of cases, does not suffice to explain the contradictions and tensions in Paul’s theological teaching (as Räisänen emphasizes in the body of his book). We also need to consider other factors that play a role in the production of discourses. To begin with, following Räisänen, we must take note that exegetes have repeatedly pointed out that Paul’s discourse is more than an intellectual argument, more than a dogmatic treatise.9 In this same vein, Francis Watson underscores that one must distinguish between the theological/intellectual and the pragmatic/social dimensions of the discourse—two dimensions which are in tension with each other. Then Watson chooses what the more significant textual feature is for him: what frames Paul’s intentional teaching is its pragmatic “social function”— Paul’s practical goal—because the gospel is always manifested in the concreteness of social life; Paul’s theological/intellectual argumentative strategies are at the service of the pragmatic, social function of the gospel.10

7

8

9 10

This is an aspect of what Greimas calls the process of “discoursivization.” Any discourse (or story) is necessarily ambivalent (including discrepancies and contradictions), because it is always at least a twice-told discourse (or twice-told story). This is particularly explicit in didactic discourses, in which the teacher retells in appropriate language for her/his students, for instance, the content of a scientific article. See articles “Discoursivization” and “Didactic” in Greimas and Courtés. Semiotics and Language. Saying that the letter is composite would be another way to explain discrepancies in Romans. Together with Becker, I exclude this explanation because it amounts to denying the existence of the letter to the Romans. Jürgen Becker, Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles (trans. O. C. Dean, Jr.; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1993; German, 1989), 343, see also 340–51. Räisänen, Challenges, 94–96. This choice of a most significant textual dimension—whatever it is—is always carefully argued by each exegete. Thus Watson writes, “The discourse of Romans may be seen not so much as a single linear argument, in which succeeding element is grounded in what preceded it, but rather as a series of interrelated arguments, each with its own relative autonomy vis-à-vis the others. . . . The hypothesis of the ‘pragmatic goal’ (or ‘social function’) [of each textual unit and of the letter as a whole] makes it possible to identify the single strategy underlying the various parts of the letter, but not in such a way as to deprive them of their distinctiveness and their internal coherence.” Paul, Judaism, and the

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Whatever textual dimension is chosen to be the most significant, the discrepancies, tensions, and contradictions in Paul’s text are truly in Paul’s text (they are not misunderstandings on our part). These ambivalences signal that Paul’s discourse includes a plurality of meaning-producing dimensions11—for Watson, the theological/ intellectual and the pragmatic/social dimensions. Thus, one cannot say that Paul’s letter has a single meaning. Paul’s discourse follows both a theological argumentative logic and a pragmatic social logic. It is because Paul’s letter simultaneously follows both of these logics, that it includes tensions and contradictions. Whether one grounds the meaning of Romans in the theological/intellectual argument (as many do, see Chapter  3) or in the pragmatic/social argument (as Watson argues, together with many others, see Chapter 4), Paul’s discourse in the letter to the Romans involves these two types of meaning-producing dimensions. Readers draw different conclusions regarding Paul’s teaching according to which of these two dimensions is given priority. Each reader or exegete chooses as most significant, either a) The theological argument of Paul’s letter that one studies by reconstructing the argumentative logic of Romans—as we shall see, this is what, appropriately, many commentaries have done and still do through a careful reconstruction of Paul’s theological argument, including a philological analysis of the vocabulary he used and of the epistolary characteristics of his discourse; or b) The pragmatic social dimension of the discourse that one studies using some kind of social-scientific approach (sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, ideological criticism) and/or rhetorical criticism to elucidate its pragmatic social logic.12

Beyond this important conclusion based on Watson’s work, with Räisänen we need to note that other exegetes explain the presence of discrepancies in Romans in other ways, namely by pointing out that one needs to distinguish between the theological argument and an underlying meaning-producing dimension that provides a religious frame for the theological argument. Thus Hans Conzelmann argues (sharpening the propositions of his teacher, Rudolf Bultmann) that in Romans the theological argument is an “objectifying presentation of salvation history” (“objectifying” also in the sense that

11

12

Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 194. See also 192–343, where Watson presents more systematically the social functions of each of the units in Romans. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 3 other exegetes argue—with what they view as a strong argument—for the other alternative: giving priority to the theological/intellectual dimension of the discourse. I use the phrase “meaning-producing dimensions” (borrowed from the semiotician A. J. Greimas), because meaning is not a content of textual features; meaning is produced by readers/interpreters as they interact with certain textual features that they view as more significant than others (making textual choices)—and also make hermeneutical theological choices and contextual choices, as we discuss below. Going back to the example of the anti-racism lecture and its racist dimensions discussed in Chapter 1 (see pp. 28–29), the intentional didactic argument was clearly anti-racist, while the racist message was conveyed by the pragmatic social dimension of the discourse, which the speaker subconsciously constructed using ideological categories which were part of the speaker’s habitus. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (trans. Richard Nice; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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it leads readers to view this teaching as the exclusive meaning of Paul’s discourse), which is undergirded by the “horizon of faith” of the discourse characterized by a revelation of the profound human plight and the experience of the supremacy of grace.13 Thus the “horizon of faith” of the letter is in tension with its theological argument. Similarly, using a history-of-religion approach Udo Schnelle makes a distinction between, on the one hand, the (Hellenistic) theological argument of Paul about justification and, on the other hand, the religious experience (through baptism) of “being in Christ,” of new life in Christ, and of possessing the Spirit.14 Likewise, a structural study of Paul’s letter, taking into account both C. Lévi-Strauss’s study of the mythical structure and A. J. Greimas’s structural semiotic that distinguishes between the semantic and syntactic dimensions of discourses, led me to make a distinction between the theological argument of the letter (the syntactic dimension of the letter expressed in terms of salvation history) and the underlying system of convictions (characterized by its mythical structure and reflecting Paul’s religious experience).15 Similarly again, for J. Christiaan Beker, many discrepancies in Paul’s text reflect the tensions between the coherence of the gospel, which frames Paul’s apocalyptic vision about God’s triumph over evil of all kinds and the contingent teaching, which seeks to address situation-bound problems and issues that vary with the circumstances to which this gospel is applied.16 For Beker one should give priority to the coherence of the gospel and the apocalyptic vision it conveys. In short, for Bultmann and Conzelmann, Schnelle, Patte, Beker, and many others, Paul’s discourse in Romans necessarily includes tensions and contradictions, because the message expressed by its theological argument (focused on salvation history) is undergirded by another meaning-producing dimension of the letter that conveys an existential or coherent convictional horizon of faith reflecting Paul’s religious experiences. Therefore, from this perspective, rather than choosing between the theological and the pragmatic social dimensions of the text, each reader or exegete chooses as most significant, either a) The theological argument of Paul’s letter that one studies by reconstructing the argumentative logic of Romans; or c) The “horizon of faith” dimension of the discourse that one studies by using some kind of existential hermeneutical approach, or a history-of-religion approach, or again a structural exegetical approach emphasizing the coherence of the figurative dimension of the letter.

When brought together, these observations lead us to the recognition that the letter to the Romans, as any religious discourse, has three types of meaning-producing dimensions.

13

14

15

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Hans Conzelmann, An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (trans. John Bowden; New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 225–28. Udo Schnelle, Gerechtigkeit und Christusgegenwart: vorpaulinische und paulinische Tauftheologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983). Daniel Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983; Reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2016), and What Is Structural Exegesis? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976; Reprints, 1978, 1981, and 1983 and Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2015). J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). See a more detailed discussion of Beker’s interpretation in Chapter 5.

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Among these dimensions, readers/interpreters necessarily choose one that they view as the most significant, be it: (a) the theological argument, (b) the pragmatic social dimension, or (c) the horizon of faith dimension. In other words, as readers/exegetes we necessarily choose to read this letter either as a theological discourse, or a socio-rhetorical discourse, or a religious discourse. Since it is impossible to follow these three types of interpretive reasonings at once, as we read we have to make a choice among these three types of readings.17 As we read Romans in a given life-context (with its religious, cultural, pragmatic social, and individual components and the concerns they engender), which one of these three dimensions do we hold to be the most significant? Each of the three dimensions is always available to readers as the most significant for their next reading, and therefore can become the focus of other legitimate interpretations. We can now bring these observations together with our discussion of different exegetical methodologies in Chapter 1. In many cases, readers choose to focus upon the theological argument of the letter, which is understood as “what Paul meant to say.” As such these textual features can be called behind-the-text meaning-producing dimensions because they concern the intention of the author that precedes (and is therefore behind) the text. Such textual features are, of course, actual meaningproducing features of this text/discourse as a historical artifact. But, in many instances and for very good reasons, readers and exegetes often choose to view as most significant the ways in which a text affects its hearers/readers through its rhetorical and ideological features (the pragmatic social dimension). Whether these features of the text/discourse are viewed as intentional (with Watson and many others) or unintentional, they are in-front-of-the-text meaning-producing dimensions of this text/discourse as a historical artifact, since they concern how the discourse affected (and continues to affect) the pragmatic life of readers (who are in front of the text). Similarly, and also for very good reasons, readers of religious texts (such as Paul’s letter) view as most significant the horizon of faith of this discourse—its system of convictions or worldview conveyed by thematic and figurative features of the text and reflecting religious experiences of the author and often those of a community. These features—most often viewed as unintentional (when they are envisioned as undergirding the discourse) but possibly intentional (as would be the case for a poem)—are within-the-text meaning-producing dimensions of the historical artifact that we call Paul’s letter to the Romans.

II Distinctive interpretive lines of reasoning and distinctive critical methodologies: Overall textual choices in exegeses Whenever they interpret Romans, consciously or not, readers make a choice among the three types of textual features mentioned above—an overall textual choice (that they supplement with more refined interpretive choices). Critical exegetes are 17

Although no interpreter can follow all three types of reasoning at once, we can and will do so sequentially in the subsequent chapters here. As we shall see inside each interpretive line of reasoning we have to make many other more refined choices.

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different from other readers only insofar as they make explicit their interpretive choices by selecting one type of critical exegetical methods among those recognized as legitimate by the scholarly guild. Each of these methods focuses on a particular type of meaning-producing dimension. Therefore one should not be surprised to find a plurality of diverging exegetical studies of Romans that are demonstrably critical and legitimate—that is, demonstrably grounded in analytical textual evidence as verified by particular critical exegetical methods—even though they reach diverging (and at times contradictory) conclusions regarding the “meaning” of Paul’s letter to the Romans.18 In Chapter 1, this point was made in a general way, through anecdotes regarding the collective project on Romans Through History and Cultures and general methodological discussions. Now, after seeing that diverging interpretations are grounded in ambivalences that exist in Paul’s text, we can be much more specific. The three different types of interpretations of Romans distinguish themselves from each other by focusing upon different meaning-producing dimensions of the letter. In so doing they follow three distinctive types of critical methodologies based on three conceptions of the letter, that allow exegetes to follow three plausible interpretive lines of reasoning. 1. The letter as characterized by a theological argument through which Paul seeks to clarify for his readers (as individual believers) the gospel that he preaches and the content of faith (understood as a series of interconnected theological statements—forensic propositional truths regarding justification/forgiveness by God the gracious Judge—that individual believers should hold to be true),19 so as to overcome potential misunderstandings on the part of the Christ followers in Rome. The commentaries following this individual-centered interpretive line of reasoning will be identified as “forensic theological interpretations.20 2. The letter as characterized by a call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community expressed by a rhetorical and ideological discourse with particular pragmatic and/or social goals. Through this discourse Paul seeks to convince the Christ followers in Rome to participate in the inclusive covenantal community and its mission. This participation includes sharing the way of life and vocation of the 18

19

20

The word meaning (and elsewhere teaching) is written in italics as a reminder that, rather than being a stable content of the text of Romans, it refers to a meaning effect produced by the interaction of text and interpreters. Here theology and theological refer neither to modern systematic theology and modern dogmatic theology (developed as apologetic arguments in response to the Enlightenment) nor to medieval Scholastic theological treatises. Yet, as Keck emphasizes, it remains that, in this perspective, “‘theological’ refers to a comprehensive statement of what Christians believe (or ought to believe), carefully crafted so that the logical relation of all the parts becomes evident as a system of doctrines” (Leander E. Keck, Romans [Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon, 2005], 32). See also Victor Furnish, “Paul the Theologian,” in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul & John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn (ed. Robert T. Fortna and Beverly R. Gaventa; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 19–34; especially 26–30. By calling this interpretive line of reasoning individual-centered (and the two others as communitycentered and as religious experience-centered), I am also beginning to refer to the contextual dimension of each interpretation—as is discussed in Chapter 6. I may also refer to forensic theological interpretations simply as forensic interpretations (or even theological interpretations) according to the issues under discussion.

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body of Christ (12:4–5) and being involved in and/or supporting Paul’s missionary activities and his projected mission to Spain. The commentaries following this community-centered interpretive line of reasoning will be identified in short as Covenantal Community Interpretations.21 3. The letter as characterized by a realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision conveyed by its religious discourse. This vision is Paul’s “horizon of faith” grounded in religious experiences of the New Age that involve recognizing the resurrected Christ and the Spirit at work in one’s present.22 The commentaries following this religious experience-centered (or religious-centered, or Other-centered) interpretive line of reasoning will be identified as realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations. Each of these interpretive lines of reasoning and their respective conclusions can be shown to be legitimate (i.e., grounded in a particular textual evidence) through the use of particular critical exegetical methodologies aimed at elucidating, either 1. The theological logic of Paul’s way of thinking studied by behind-the-text exegetical methodologies—the so-called historical methods” that are individual-centered and aim at discerning Paul’s intention when writing Romans by addressing the question Why did Paul write Romans? and then by elucidating (including through a philological study of his vocabulary) how the different statements of the letter fit together into an argument that allows him to reach its intended goal;23 or 2. The rhetoric and ideological logic of Paul’s discourse framed by the presumed cultural perspectives of its intended readers studied by in-front-of-the-text exegetical methodologies—the rhetorical and sociocultural methods that are community-centered and aim at elucidating how the letter is shaped by its goal to affect in certain ways its readers (plural) and their particular contexts in communities (studied through rhetoric, cultural-anthropology, ideological, sociopolitical,24 feminist, postcolonial critical methods); or again 3. The thematic and figurative logic of the letter as an Other-centered religious discourse that readers are invited to enter so as to share in its religious vision (a realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision) studied by within-the-text exegetical methodologies—that pay close attention to the role and place of religious experience as expressed in the text by its thematic and figurative features (elucidated with the help of history-of-religion, literary, and structural critical methods).

21

22 23

24

This designation points to an inclusive covenantal community that, as the people of God, is “called to mission,” that is, called to follow its vocation. See, for example, Keck, Romans, 35 and 36. See again Furnish, “Paul the Theologian,” 27–30 where Furnish resists the historical critical methodologies for the study of “Paul’s theology” as a comprehensive series of theological arguments, without really presenting an alternative. Narrative approaches, although they seem to be within-the-text methodologies, are often used in conjunction with ideological. sociopolitical approaches—this is actually consistent with structural semiotic theories which would classify ideological, narrative, and sociopolitical features as belonging to various aspects of the syntax of a text (respectively, in Greimas’s terminology, the fundamental, narrative, and discursive syntax).

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These three overall interpretations of Romans, performed by exegetes using quite distinct critical methods, lead to very different understandings of the “meaning” of Romans. As briefly noted in the Chapter 1, and as Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe in detail, these three types of interpretations lead to understanding the teaching of Romans as a letter concerning: 1. The gospel of justification through faith, calling individuals to faith so that they might be “justified” (forgiven by God, the gracious Judge)—a forensic understanding of the gospel; or concerning 2. The good news of an inclusive covenantal community, to which Jews and Gentiles are called to participate in order to contribute to the fulfillment of the vocation of the community and its mission; or again concerning 3. The gospel as the “power of God for salvation” as manifested in the believers’ present religious experiences of the New Age as viewed from a realized-apocalyptic/ messianic perspective.

III The hybrid character of “critical commentaries” At first, it may seem that the task of Chapters 3, 4, and 5—a presentation of three types of legitimate and plausible critical exegeses of Romans—will be simple enough. It is true that each critical commentary is primarily framed (a) by a particular set of exegetical methodologies and (b) by a particular interpretive line of reasoning that leads to a particular kind of understanding of each theological or ethical theme of Romans. Therefore, one might think that each commentary would straightforwardly present one of the three types of critical exegesis and interpretive line of reasoning mentioned above. Consequently, it would be enough to summarize three sets of commentaries that would respectively exemplify the three types of critical interpretation. But as soon as one examines actual commentaries, one discovers that it is not as simple, because the literary genre critical commentary demands that its authors not only present a comprehensive, and coherent critical exegesis that rigorously follows a particular interpretive line of reasoning but also demonstrate that this new interpretation is authoritative by incorporating in it insights from all preceding critical studies, including all those that follow different exegetical methods and different interpretive lines of reasoning.25 Consequently, critical commentaries are necessarily hybrid interpretations. A “simple” commentary that follows a particular interpretive line of reasoning independently of other interpretations already involves a hybridity, as Michel Foucault

25

This requirement that a critical commentary account for all existing critical studies is grounded in the dubious presupposition that there is only one true meaning of a text. Problematically, each commentary is expected to build upon and move beyond preceding commentaries. Thus, any new commentary must incorporate in the proposed new interpretation insights from all preceding critical studies. But, the history of reception, as well as hermeneutics and semiotics, demand that we abandon this linear view and understand the interpretation of a text as the readers’ production of meaning with this text that involves textual, hermeneutical theological, and contextual choices.

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pointed out. A commentary is an ongoing process that expresses what had already been said—it repeats what the text says. Yet, it also expresses something that the text has not said—the comment. As Foucault says, a commentary “allows us to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense completed.”26 This hybridity of commentaries, that Foucault calls “the infinite rippling of commentaries,” is multiplied in the case of critical biblical commentaries, since each new commentary repeats not only the text following its own exegetical methodology and interpretive line of reasoning, but also previous critical commentaries. Because each given critical commentary must privilege and follow one critical exegetical method and one interpretive line of reasoning in order to be coherent and consistent, it has no alternative but to present the other types of interpretations in a fragmented way: as ripples. Rather than respecting the exegetical method and interpretive line of reasoning of these previous interpretations, a given commentary co-opts from others interpretive nuggets that they find useful and integrates them into their own interpretive line of reasoning while rejecting (or discreetly ignoring) the rest of these interpretations. The hybridity of the critical commentary is enhanced, because it now includes interpretive nuggets from other commentaries, which have been co-opted in the sense that they have been detached from the interpretive lines of reasoning (and the exegetical method) in which these insights were first envisioned. The scholarly task in such critical commentaries is envisioned as progressing through what we can call a development-by-accumulation.27 Accordingly, a commentator integrates in his/ her interpretive line of reasoning (and even in his/her critical exegesis) the interpretive nuggets co-opted from other exegetical studies.28 The hybridity of critical commentaries is readily understandable as soon as we take an example. Let us consider the case of the commentary on Romans by Douglass Moo.29 As we shall discuss in Chapter 3, Moo made the (legitimate) textual choice of viewing as the

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29

Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (ed.  Robert Young; Boston: Routledge & Kegan, 1981), 58. Meng Hun Goh reminded me that Foucault makes this point in his College de France Inaugural Lecture (1970) by explaining the nature of the complex relationship between the commentary and the original text. For the ethical problems involved in such co-optation, see Daniel Patte, “Ethics of Biblical Interpretation,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics (ed. Robert L. Brawley; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). With the term development-by-accumulation, I allude to Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), but without suggesting that studies in the natural sciences are directly comparable to the interpretation of texts. This accumulation of diverse and even divergent features may ultimately lead the commentator to adopt a different interpretive line of reasoning, to “shift paradigm”—as becomes clear when one compares earlier and later works by the same scholar. But unlike what happens in science where the old paradigm is rejected, in critical biblical studies the emergence of a new interpretive line of reasoning does not necessarily deny the legitimacy and plausibility of earlier lines of reasoning. Douglass Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996). As explained below, I chose this volume because, at present, it can be viewed as the most comprehensive and up-to-date commentary on Romans as a theological argument. I could make the same point regarding Robert Jewett’s commentary that reads as a rhetorical and ideological discourse (Romans. Hermeneia, 2007 and also Romans: A Short Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) or Brendan Byrne’s commentary with regard to the letter read as a religious discourse that conveys Paul’s “horizon of faith” Brendan Byrne, Romans. Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996). All these commentaries are, of course, hybrid.

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most significant textual feature the forensic theological argument of the letter.30 Moo’s commentary is framed by philological studies aimed at clarifying how Paul’s different theological statements fit together and contribute to the progression of a coherent and authoritative demonstration of the true understanding of the gospel that Paul preached—a theological argument aimed at correcting potential misunderstandings of it. But because he is a good scholar, Moo follows this particular interpretive line of reasoning while simultaneously carefully taking into account all kinds of existing critical studies, including those that support different interpretive lines of reasoning (e.g., those that read Romans as a rhetorical and ideological discourse or as a religious discourse). This is a necessary part of the process of preparing a critical commentary that strives to have a greater degree of probability than previous interpretations. These earlier studies have a lower degree of probability, because presumably they include features with a doubtful degree of probability (to be rejected or corrected). Yet, they should not be ignored, because they contain interpretive nuggets with a high degree of legitimacy and plausibility (to be affirmed and preserved). Thus, among the many existing commentaries on Romans, Moo explicitly identifies twelve commentaries with which he carries an ongoing dialogue, not because he agrees with them all the time, but because he views them as particularly worthy “sparring partners.” These include the commentaries by Barrett, Calvin, Cranfield, Dunn, Fitzmyer, Godet, Käsemann, Kuss, Michel, Murray, Sanday, and Wilckens, to which should be added numerous other commentaries, essays, and monographs to which he refers, though less consistently.31 As can be expected, most of these commentaries (including Barrett, Cranfield, Godet, Michel, Wilckens, and in a different way, Calvin) strive to elucidate the forensic theological argument of Paul’s letter and thus follow a critical exegetical methodology comparable to Moo’s own, reaching conclusions following a similar interpretive line of reasoning. Actually, these earlier commentators contributed to the establishment of the legitimacy (through their critical exegetical comments) of a plausible interpretive line of reasoning, which is anchored on “justification through faith,” by contrast with justification by “works of the law.” In brief these interpretations are framed by consistently following an interpretive line of reasoning that views the gospel as a proclamation of the good news that a believer who has faith in Christ is “justified,” in the forensic sense of being forgiven by God. Moo promotes this line of interpretation in his own words, for example, by saying that an individual believer who has faith in Christ is graciously “acquitted by God from all ‘charges’ that could be brought against a person because of his or her sins.”32 Yet, these older commentaries need to be examined critically—for Moo, they are “sparing partners” with whom he differs on particular points. He rejects some of their propositions, while affirming as legitimate other insights that they offer. In sum, Moo selects what he views as the best features of these commentaries to use them as building blocks for refining and

30

31

32

Moo’s focus on the elucidation of Paul’s theological argument is clear from his subtitles and even clearer in his summary of his major commentary that he entitled Encountering the Book of Romans: A Theological Survey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2002) (emphasis added). Moo, Romans, XIX, and XX–XXV (the bibliography) and also Encountering the Book of Romans, 211–20 (where his more targeted bibliography is annotated). Moo, Romans, 227 on Rom 3:24.

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reinforcing the coherence of their shared interpretive line of reasoning. Moo offers his commentary as progressing beyond these earlier commentaries by making their joint forensic theological interpretations more accurate and consistent. But Moo also takes into account commentaries that offer very different interpretations than the one he proposes, rejecting many of their features even as he is gathering “interpretive nuggets” from them. For instance, one of Moo’s sparing partners is James Dunn’s commentary, who already integrates into his interpretation of Romans the studies of Paul by K. Stendahl and E. P. Sanders.33 These studies will become the basis for covenantal community interpretations, an interpretive line of reasoning which, on the basis of rhetorical and ideological critical exegeses, understand Paul’s teaching about the gospel as the good news of an inclusive covenantal community, and more specifically, as a call to Jews and Gentiles to participate in this community so as to contribute to the fulfillment of its vocation and mission.34 This becomes clear when one reviews the main points of the works of Stendahl and Sanders, then follow how Dunn integrated their works in his own interpretation of Romans, and how subsequently Moo integrated all of these in his own commentary. This is following the making of hybrid interpretations. Because of Stendahl’s deep involvement in the study of early Judaism,35 he could not but recognize the discrepancies between (a) the forensic view according to which Jews were pursuing “justification through works of the law” (understood as seeking to earn forgiveness from God through good works) and (b) the covenantal perspective found in early Jewish documents. Thus in “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (first published in 1960 and 1963), Stendahl emphasizes that “the Reformers’ interpretation of Paul [a forensic interpretation] rests on an analogism when Paul’s statement about Faith and Works, Law and Gospel, Jews and Gentiles are read in the framework of late medieval piety,” based upon an Augustinian understanding of sin as individual guilt to be apprehended through an “introspective conscience.”36 Furthermore, in a 1963 lecture Stendahl emphasizes that, regarding Paul, one should not speak of “conversion” but of “call” (Paul remained a Jew!), not of “forgiveness” but of “justification” (a term used in Romans and Galatians to speak about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, and not about the way human beings are saved), and that sin should be understood as weakness rather than guilt.37 Similarly, in the footsteps

33

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James D. G. Dunn, Romans (Dallas, Tex.: Word Books, 1988). See Vol. 1, lxiv–lxxii, passim. In this 1988 commentary, Dunn abandons significant features of the traditional forensic interpretations, but his commentary still remains framed by a forensic interpretive line of reasoning. By contrast, as we shall see, ten years later, Dunn’s Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998) is by now framed by a Covenantal Community line of reasoning; the paradigm has shifted. Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). The best example (among several excellent ones) is Jewett, Romans. Hermeneia (2007). See also Jewett, Romans: A Short Commentary (2013), esp. Chapter 4. As evinced in his The School of St. Matthew, and Its Use of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968) and The Scrolls and the New Testament (New York: Harper, 1957). Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 85–86. Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 7–52, 7–52.

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of W. D. Davies and confirming the work of others,38 E. P. Sanders underscored that in Judaism the Law was to be understood in the framework of the Covenant— so his insightful phrase “covenantal nomism”39—amplifying the broad-ranging works that many scholars had devoted to the study of early Judaism. Nevertheless, in his subsequent study of Paul, Sanders unexpectedly holds on to the traditional interpretation of Paul’s letters as a forensic theological teaching, and thus concludes: “Paul in fact explicitly denies that the Jewish covenant can be effective for salvation, thus consciously denying the basis of Judaism . . . . This is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity.”40 In sum, Sanders’s interpretation of Paul demonstrates the power of the interpretive line of reasoning that frames our interpretations: he incorporates in his forensic interpretation a historical critical understanding of Judaism, even though this view of Judaism contradicts this forensic line of reasoning. Consequently, Dunn complains, “Unfortunately Sanders did not follow through this insight far enough or with sufficient consistency.”41 The view of Judaism offered by Sanders should lead to a “new perspective on Paul,”42 as Dunn claimed. Thus in his Theology of Paul the Apostle, Dunn’s interpretation consistently follows a covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning.43 But, ten years earlier, in his own commentary, his paradigm has not yet shifted: Dunn’s interpretation is still framed by a forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning. Therefore we could repeat about him what he said about Sanders. But we need to underscore that if Dunn “did not follow through this insight far enough or with sufficient consistency,” it is due in large part to the literary genre critical commentary. Dunn’s commentary cannot but be hybrid, because it must follow a coherent and consistent exegetical method and interpretive line of reasoning. In his interpretation of Romans, Dunn does integrate Sanders’s view of Judaism as emphasizing the grace of God through the covenant (“good works as the fruit of God’s prior acceptance by grace”) by reinterpreting Paul’s warnings against “the works of the law”: Paul regularly warns against “the works of the law,” not as “good works” in general or as any attempt by the individual to amass merit for himself [sic], but rather as a pattern of obedience by which “the righteous” maintain their status within the people of the covenant, as evidenced not least by their dedication on such sensitive “test” issues as sabbath and food laws (see on 3:20 and 14:2, 5). . . . Paul’s negative thrust against the law is against the law taken over too completely by Israel, the law

38

39 40 41 42 43

W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1967 [original, 1948]) and Christian Origins and Judaism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962). See Sanders’s extensive bibliography in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 557–82. He could not refer to Daniel Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), where I reached similar conclusions regarding formative Judaism and I could not refer to Sanders, as our works were simultaneously in production. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 84–107 and 419–28. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 551–552 (emphases in the text). Dunn, Romans, lxvi. Dunn, Romans, lxiii–lxxii. James D. G. Dunn, Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998) (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998)

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misunderstood by a misplaced emphasis on boundary-marking rituals . . .  the law sidetracked into a focus for nationalistic zeal.44

Elsewhere, Dunn does emphasize justification by faith as a way to open the acceptance of the Gentiles within the people of God through Christ and the “social function” of the law45 (two covenantal interpretations). But then he integrates these insightful covenantal nuggets within a forensic theological interpretation of Romans: Expressed as an antithesis to “works of the law” (3:20), it [the faith in Jesus Christ] is clearly intended to denote the basis of a relationship which is not dependent on specific ritual acts, but is direct and immediate, a relying on the risen Christ rather than a resting on the law. . . . It is this humbling recognition—that he has no grounds for appeal either in covenant status or in particular “works of the law,” that he has to depend entirely from start to finish on God’s gracious power, that he can receive acquittal only as a gift—which lies at the heart of faith for Paul.46

Thus Dunn’s commentary is another demonstration of the power that the forensic interpretive line of reasoning has to frame his interpretation. He incorporates in the forensic interpretation of Paul’s theological argument, the new information which at first seems at odds with it. This is an appropriate way of developing one’s interpretation in a critical commentary; even as it uses a particular set of exegetical methods, in order to be plausible it must follow a coherent and consistent interpretive line of reasoning, and therefore it must find a way of incorporating new pieces of information into that reasoning.47 Moo in turn incorporates in his own interpretation not only those of Stendahl and Sanders (and many others), but also that of Dunn’s commentary. While generally accepting the understanding of the covenantal role of the law in early Judaism (although maintaining that Judaism was more “legalistic” than Sanders thinks), and while expressing appreciation for the new interpretations of “no one is justified by works of the law” (3:20)—Moo devotes an extended excursus on these new interpretations48 and concludes that these “new perspective” interpretations are misleading, because ultimately Paul is not so much concerned with “works of the law.” For Moo, what we should learn from these studies of early Judaism is that Paul was primarily concerned with “works” (whether “of the law” or any other “good deeds”) as means of salvation, and the wrong view that “works” would bring about justification/forgiveness (the problem that Paul seeks to address, according to the forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning). Therefore, for Moo, there is no need to reinterpret “justification by 44 45

46 47

48

Dunn, Romans, lxvi, lxxii. Emphases added. See also James D. G. Dunn, “The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith,” JTS 43 (1992): 1–22, in which he goes beyond what he wrote in his commentary, without abandoning his forensic theological interpretation. Dunn, Romans, 178–79 (italics in the text, bold added) on 3:21–26. Freed from the constraint of the critical commentary literary genre (and with the maturation of his thinking), in writing his Theology of Paul the Apostle Dunn will have the freedom to frame his interpretation with a Covenantal Community line of reasoning (as noted above). Moo, “Excursus: Paul, ‘Works of the Law,’ and First Century Judaism,” in Romans, 211–17.

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faith rather than by works of the law” into a teaching focused upon the acceptance of the Gentiles within the people of God through Christ and upon the relationship of Jews and Gentiles—as Stendahl suggested and as Dunn increasingly did while still maintaining a forensic theological interpretation in his commentary (but not as much in his Theology of Paul). One can hold on to the Reformers’ forensic theological interpretation of “justification by faith alone,” while accepting the new information about the covenantal framework for understanding what Paul says about the Law and Judaism. From Moo’s perspective, it is a matter of paying attention to where Paul puts the emphasis in his discussion of the Law and works. Furthermore Moo integrates in his forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning nuggets from the works of scholars who read Romans as a religious discourse that conveys Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision. Thus, Moo quotes again and again Käsemann’s realized-apocalyptic/messianic commentary—for instance, regarding how Paul emphasizes in Rom 6, 7, and 8 the “two-realms” or “two-ages” conception of the transfer of believers from one “compelling power” or “dominion” or “rulership” or “sphere of power” to another.49 Yet, he integrates all these realizedapocalyptic/messianic insights into his forensic theological interpretation, instead of viewing them as parts of the framework of an apocalyptic vision, as it is for Käsemann. And he does the same with J. C. Beker’s and a few other apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of Romans.50 These examples are enough to explain in what sense Moo’s commentary is hybrid— as any critical commentary necessarily is—by integrating in its particular interpretive line of reasoning nuggets of insight found in other interpretations that followed totally different interpretive lines of reasoning. Moo strives to acknowledge the scholarly contributions of the commentators who follow very distinct lines of interpretive reasoning. Nevertheless, the literary genre commentary leads him to disrespect these colleagues’ line of reasoning, and therefore he fails to respect their interpretations. In short, Moo practices what my students call “cherry-picking.” This is not a criticism of Moo (or of any other commentator) but a criticism of the commentary literary genre, which demands such hybridity. Each of the commentaries mentioned above is doing the same thing, because it is demanded by the literary genre “critical commentary.”

IV Reading hybrid commentaries for their particular choices of an interpretive line of reasoning The facts that critical commentaries are hybrid and that they deny the plurality of legitimate and plausible interpretations contradict the demands of the history of reception, according to which we should acknowledge the legitimacy and plausibility of a plurality of interpretations of Romans—as the following chapters strive to do. But the fact that the literary genre “critical commentary” demands, as a proof of legitimacy 49 50

Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980 [German 1973]). Beker, Paul the Apostle, 1980.

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and plausibility, that the commentator be consistent by following a particular interpretive line of reasoning—and thus avoiding others—provides the solution. In addition to identifying the critical methodology at work in it, for each commentary we need to identify its particular interpretive line of reasoning, without being distracted by its hybrid components—even as we show appreciation for the way these hybrid components have been integrated in that particular type of interpretation. By doing so, we can recognize that this commentary can be classified in a particular family of legitimate and plausible interpretations—and eventually be a resource for insights regarding another interpretive line. The question is, therefore: How does one identify the dominant interpretive line of reasoning that characterizes each given critical commentary? As noted in Chapter 1, each (critical) interpretation involves analytical textual choices, hermeneutical theological choices, and contextual choices. Since critical commentaries hide their contextual choices, identifying the differences between them on such choices is too complex. Discerning the differences in analytical textual choices is also difficult, because methodological approaches are the first features of other commentaries which are co-opted. Thus, pragmatically, the most effective way of identifying the characteristic features of the interpretation followed by a commentary is to focus upon its interpretive line of reasoning and the hermeneutical theological choices it includes. Each interpretive line of reasoning includes particular understandings of key concepts and themes that are readily identifiable features of each given commentary, such as (in the order of appearance in the first chapters of Romans): Jesus Christ; Apostle; Gospel; Faith; Scriptures; Grace; Salvation; Sin; Righteousness; Justification; Law; Atonement; Atonement Sacrifice; Hope; Suffering; Reconciliation; Love. The following chapters (Chapters 3, 4, and 5, regarding 1:1–32) will identify the distinctive views of each of these themes (and many more such themes)—summarized in Appendix—found in critical commentaries of Romans following forensic theological, covenantal community, and realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretive lines of reasoning, resulting in distinct hermeneutical theological systems. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, the emphasis will be on the coherent way in which such themes are interrelated on each interpretive line of reasoning to form each time a consistent hermeneutical theological system. By contrast, Chapter 6 will underscore the differences among the three understandings of each concept and theme in the process of taking note of the contextual character of its interpretation (in preparation for its comparison with receptions of Romans in Chapter 7). Before embarking on the threefold detailed studies found in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, we need some orientation to help with our review of critical commentaries and studies of Romans—which are (by definition) hybrid interpretations. A provisional identification of key characteristics of the three kinds of interpretive lines of reasoning they follow will be helpful. A convenient way to do so is to note that any interpretive line of reasoning (and the hermeneutical theological system it generates) includes an understanding of sin, of the human predicament, and of their resolution (salvation). One or another type of understanding of these basic themes necessarily frames and shapes the dominant interpretive line of reasoning of any given commentary, and therefore also shapes the understanding of all its other theological and ethical themes

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(including Jesus Christ, Apostle, Gospel, Faith, etc.), even if their presentation in this hybrid commentary borrows from very different commentaries. The understandings of sin, the human predicament, and their resolution are therefore key markers of the three kinds of interpretive lines of reasoning. We can summarize them here; although it should be clear a) that these brief comments are nothing else than summaries of some of the characteristics of the three types of interpretive lines of reasoning (which are fleshed out in later chapters), and b) that each interpretive line of reasoning is formulated in very different ways by different commentaries as they privilege, for one reason or another, specific passages from Romans. Sin for forensic theological lines of interpretation is individual-centered.51 Sin involves failing to do God’s will. The root of individual sins is, either not knowing God’s will or not wanting to do it.52 Thus sin includes unintentionally failing to love/help others (because one does not know one should do it; sin of omission), or intentionally hurting them (sin of commission). The human predicament is that, as sinners, individuals are guilty, should be condemned and punished by God, the righteous Judge (so “forensic”); thus sinners fear God’s wrath, eternal punishment, eternal separation from God, and the like. Resolution: atonement as “honor and juridical satisfaction”; something that ameliorates God’s wrath, namely the vicarious death of Christ, who was punished (in the past and once and for all) instead of the sinners (propitiation); grace (χάρις) as forgiveness of sins, acquittal; being justified (being set in a right relationship with God) through faith in Christ as the believer’s appropriation of the vicarious death of Christ (3:22-30). Sin for inclusive covenantal community lines of interpretation is communitycentered.53 Sin involves being in competition with others, wanting to be better than others, oppressing others, power plays, wrong sense of honor and shame, prejudices and biases vis-à-vis others; in sum, wrong ideology—such as anti-Jewish and/or anti-Gentile ideologies (governing the Greco-Roman culture as well as the struggles among house churches in Rome), or, for example, patriarchal, sexist, racist, colonialist, imperialist ideologies. The root of these communal sins is sin as rebelling against God and against God’s people—rebelling against God because, accordingly, God blessed other people more than us, because we are angry against God, enemies of God (Rom 5:10), jealous of God’s people. This is so, because the human predicament is that sinful communities and their members have a wrong view of God (God is wrongly viewed as a partial God who favors others rather than us) and therefore a wrong view of God’s people (either conceiving of ourselves as being in a privileged position because included in God’s people; or

51

52 53

Among the three modes of human existence (autonomy, relationality, and heteronomy; see their definitions in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity), the primary locus of sin in this case is autonomy, that is, the mode of existence characterized by freedom to choose, self-confidence, liberty, free-will, knowledge, as well as misdirected will, wrong intentions and decisions in personal life, with consequences in all other aspects of life. The root-problem is therefore either a lack of/wrong knowledge or a lack of/wrong will. Here, among the three modes of human existence (see note 51), the primary locus of sin is relationality that privileges community life and interactions with others.

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vice versa conceiving of ourselves as being excluded from God’s people, which includes others and not us). Resolution: atonement as “moral transformation”; the overcoming of our anger against God and against God’s people (expiation = expunging, taking away our sin/anger against God); atonement as the removing of what separates sinners from God, namely through God’s grace (χάρις) as the gracious welcome of God (whom we do not need to view any longer as a partial God against us, but rather as the faithful God who welcomes all, and calls all to be faithful in a covenantal vocation/mission). Sin for realized-apocalyptic/messianic lines of interpretation is religiouscentered (Other-centered), that is, centered on that part of individual and community life most directly shaped by religious experiences.54 Sin involves wrong, twisted religious experiences, misdirected worship, wrong vision, fanaticism. In sum, the root of religious-centered sin is idolatry (viewing what is not absolute as absolute) and its consequences: having darkened minds, being under the “power of sin,” being enslaved by sin (6:6, 12, 16-17) and by idols (1:22-25, 26a, 28). The human predicament is that all (Jews and Gentiles) are in bondage to evil powers (the “power of sin,” “rulers,” “powers” of all kinds, 8:38-39; 1 Cor 15:24) that lead humans to death (the ultimate power of sin), to self-destruction and to all kinds of destructive attitudes toward others and society (1:24-32). Resolution: atonement as “ransom and redemption from bondage”; sinners being set free in their present from evil powers that keep them in bondage, that is, redemption, through interventions of a divine power in the present of believers—divine interventions that believers recognize through the eyes of faith; redemption is being moved from the sphere of sin to the sphere of righteousness (6:1-18), also the sphere of grace (5:2), because grace (χάρις) is the gracious gift of a transformative divine intervention; being freed from the power of idolatry through a transformative religious experience.

After identifying the dominant interpretive line of reasoning of a given commentary, one can scrupulously respect how its comments on specific passages or themes are to be understood within this line of reasoning—even in the cases when these comments are built upon nuggets of insights borrowed from commentaries following a very different interpretive line of reasoning. Let us take as an example Moo’s comments on Rom 3:9–26 in Encountering the Book of Romans (the summary presentation of his much larger, detailed commentary) in the sections entitled “Concluding Indictment: All Are ‘under Sin’ (3:9-20),” “The New Era of Righteousness (3:21-26).”55 Regarding 3:9–20 Moo notes Paul accomplishes three purposes . . . (1) he concludes his indictment of humanity with the chilling verdict that “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin” (v. 9);

54

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Among the three modes of human existence (see note 52), the primary locus of sin is heteronomy that privileges the structuring of individual and community life by religious experiences of the holy, by convictions (proprioceptive, gut-feeling perceptions). Moo, Encountering the Book of Romans, 74–86.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations (2) he illustrates his indictment from the Old Testament (vv. 10-18); and (3) he draws a conclusion from his indictment: the law cannot save. (p. 74)

Moo’s forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning is clear. His interpretation (here and elsewhere) envisions God as a Judge (see Moo on 2:2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 16, 26, 3:6, 7, 8) who has been offended by sinners who willfully sinned against God; sinners are indicted by the Judge and should be punished for their sins—not even the law can save them. Though sinners may commonly hide their sins (because they feel guilty), God (through Paul) exposes their sins. Nevertheless Moo extensively uses insights and vocabulary borrowed from interpretations that follow a realized-apocalyptic/messianic line of reasoning, according to which the gospel is understood as present-day manifestations of the power of God freeing believers from sin, where sin is viewed as a power that keeps people in bondage. But note that, in Moo’s commentary, all this realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vocabulary (to which I have applied bold in the following quotations) is meant—and thus should be read (and actually “decoded”)—in a forensic sense. Before and outside of Christ, people are helpless captives of sin and are unable to do anything to escape sin’s tyranny. (1:18–3:20) [For believers, it is necessary that someone] secure [their] release from the ultimate slavery: slavery to sin. (see 3:9)56

These statements (along with many similar ones) seem to be taken from a realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretation (as the footnotes in the complete commentary confirm) and seem to describe the human situation as requiring a powerful divine intervention in the present of believers, such as a “release from the ultimate slavery.” The same is true of another of Moo’s sentence: “But God has acted to rescue sinners from their plight.”57 Sinners need to be “rescued” from a “plight” and released from “slavery to sin.” These are apparently straightforward realized-apocalyptic/messianic statements. But notice when this rescue takes place: in the past, when “God has acted.” One does not need to be rescued from the power of sin in one’s present (as the realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretations note); this rescue has already taken place in the past (on the cross). One needs to be put to the benefit of this once-and-for-all intervention of God on Christ’s cross, that is, one needs to be justified (in the sense of forgiven, in the forensic theological perspective). Therefore, for Moo, the “plight” of sinners, the “slavery to sin,” the “tyranny of sin” is NOT to be understood as a power which keeps people in bondage in their present and from which they need to be freed in their present through a powerful divine intervention (as these phrases would be understood in a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation). Rather, as the use of the past tense (“God has acted”) rather than the present tense indicates, they are understood as referring to the impossibility that sinners might do anything to be justified/forgiven by God; they cannot justify themselves through their good deeds (works of the law)—a 56 57

Moo, Encountering the Book of Romans, 82, 84. Moo, Encountering the Book of Romans, 82.

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forensic theological interpretation that Moo summarizes at the end of his comments on this passage. I have used bold to highlight the forensic theological markers that remove any doubt of what Moo’s interpretive line of reasoning is. How could God simply leave them [sins] unpunished? Would not his holy nature demand that he judge those who sinned? Yes, indeed, it would. Paul suggests that it was Christ, our atoning sacrifice, who bore the brunt of that judgment [= propitiation]  .  .  .  God’s attribute of righteousness, that intrinsic part of his character . . . requires sin to be punished.58

In sum, How will we read critically critical commentaries? Contrary to the hybrid practice of this literary genre, in the present book following the lead of the multidisciplinary SBL seminar on Romans Through History and Cultures—that included theologians and church historians as well as exegetes—I strive to respect the distinctive interpretive line of reasoning of each interpretation.59 First, this involves carefully identifying its dominant interpretive line of reasoning. Second, this involves respecting this line of reasoning by interpreting all of its interpretive comments from the perspective of this line of reasoning (and neither from our own perspective nor from the perspective of the original formulations of these comments!), including those comments borrowed from other types of interpretations. This does not mean that there are no divergences among interpretations that follow the same interpretive line of reasoning. Because of the “internal tensions and contradictions” found in the text of Romans, as Räisänen and others have shown, interpreters have to make textual sub-choices by foregrounding one kind of statements (e.g., about the law) while backgrounding the contradictory statements.60 Furthermore, because of the wealth of information found in Romans by each of the interpretive approaches, readers/exegetes end up having to be selective and therefore having to make textual sub-choices. Thus we should expect to find variants among the several readings of Romans as a forensic theological argument, or among the several readings of Romans as a rhetorical and ideological discourse, or again among the several readings of Romans as a religious discourse. Yet, it is helpful to lay out the main characteristics of each of these three types of interpretations as we shall do in the subsequent three chapters regarding Rom 1:1–32. Another apparent source of divergences among interpretations of Romans concerns the variants in the manuscripts of the Greek text of the letter that exegetes adopt. Beside variant wordings of particular phrases (that the following chapters shall discuss as needed) including in the first words of 1:1, the main debate concerns the ending of the letter—which I shall discuss in a subsequent volume. Does chapter 16 belong to the original letter to the Romans (as Donfried and a growing majority of exegetes

58 59

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Moo, Encountering the Book of Romans, 86. As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, acknowledging that modern critical interpretations are a particular kind of “receptions” of Romans, and then treating the multiplicity of modern critical interpretations as we treated receptions of Romans through the centuries. See Patte and Grenholm, eds., Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013). See again Räisänen, Paul and the Law.

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believe)? Or was chapter 16 a note attached by Paul to a copy of the letter to the Romans sent to the church of Ephesus (as Manson, followed by many others, argued)?61 This decision considerably affects the interpretation of the rest of the letter, as does the text critical interpretation of 1:1. It is enough to note here that, throughout, scholars use textual critical methods (aimed at establishing the original text of the letter[s]) in order to eliminate tensions and discrepancies, as perceived from the perspective of a particular interpretive choice—a choice of critical exegetical methodology and of an interpretive line of reasoning. Presupposing that Paul’s discourse should be absolutely consistent, exegetes make textual sub-choices much as others do by foregrounding or backgrounding contradictory statements.62 Thus, the debates about textual variants can simply be treated as instances of exegetical textual choices and of choices of interpretive lines of reasoning. These variants should not distract us from our primary task when “critically” reading critical commentaries, namely, discerning and elucidating in each instance the primary interpretive line of reasoning followed by the commentator. Such will be our main concern as we consider successively interpretations of 1:1–32 focused on the forensic theological argument of Romans (Chapter 3), or focused on Romans as a rhetorical and ideological discourse (Chapter 4), or focused on Romans as a religious discourse (Chapter 5). *** “As for that One and Only Truth, which many are searching for and others claim to have found, luckily for us poets and for everybody else, ‘La vie est plus belle que les idées,’ as the French say.”63 What Charles Simic wrote about poets applies to critical exegetes. Striving to find the “One and Only” true exegetical interpretation of Romans is attempting to remove from life Romans and our interpretations of it. Luckily for us interpreters this is impossible. As Chapters 6 and 7 make explicit as we compare receptions with critical exegeses, our life-contexts necessarily lead us to choose one or another interpretation as the most helpful—and therefore as the truest (the most legitimate and plausible). Of course, this is puzzling and disappointing for many of us, exegetes, who have spent years if not decades trying to demonstrate that our interpretation is the “One and Only” true interpretation—often in our effort to dismiss other interpretations as illegitimate and implausible, and this usually for very good reasons. For instance, among us in the West, since World War II, many exegetes have developed interpretations of Romans that would avoid any supersessionism (that led to anti-Judaism and the devastating catastrophe of the Shoah) or that would help address the shattering manifestations of massive powers of evil (all around the world) by promoting the use of sophisticated 61

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See T. W. Manson, “St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans” (original publication 1962) and Karl P. Donfried, “A Short Note on Romans 16,” in The Romans Debate (ed. Karl P. Donfried; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), 3–15 and 44–52, respectively, and discussion of Romans 16 in each commentary. This is also what Walter Schmithals, Der Römerbrief: Ein Kommentar (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1988) does by dividing Romans into three letters (A: 1:1–11:36 and 15:8–13; B: 12:1–15:7 & 15:14–33 & 16:21–23; and C: the rest of 16) so as to account in part for tensions between chapter 1 and chapter 15 regarding Paul’s travel plans, their purposes, and preaching the gospel in Rome. See epigraph to this chapter.

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critical exegetical methods that focus upon either the rhetorical, ideological, and cultural features of the letter or its thematic and figurative features. But unluckily or luckily, we cannot claim that any of these critical interpretations is the “One and Only Truth”—a reading that could be the basis to reject the other critical interpretations of Romans that focus on its (forensic) theological argument. As Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will argue, each of these can be shown to be equally “true”—legitimate and plausible. Indeed this will make us uncomfortable, until we acknowledge that “La vie est plus belle que les idées”—life is more beautiful than ideas. Indeed the “live interpretations”— the receptions (Chapters 6 and 7)—will show us that any of these interpretations becomes deadly when it is absolutized: viewed as the “One and Only Truth.” But each is life-giving when it humbly acknowledges that it is merely one among other equally legitimate and plausible interpretations (see Chapter 7).

Part Two

A Triple Commentary: Three Legitimate and Plausible Critical Exegeses of Rom 1:1–32

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Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching

I A quest for Paul’s theological logic The letter to the Romans offers a theological teaching, as everyone agrees. Yet, reading Romans by focusing on its theological teaching and its theological argument as most significant is an analytical textual choice.1 Alternatively, one could consider as most significant either the rhetorical, ideological, and cultural features of the letter, or its thematic and figurative features—as the interpretations presented in Chapters 4 or 5 do. Chapters 1 and 2 explained that all these interpretive choices are equally legitimate and plausible. For many (especially in the West), reading Romans for its theological teaching is obviously the right thing to do. How can one “believe in the gospel” that Paul proclaimed, if one does not know and understand his theological teaching? So, for these exegetes and their followers, it seems that there is no choice. And yet viewing as most significant the theological teaching of Paul is actually an interpretive choice. It involves choosing one kind of meaning-producing textual features as most meaningful, and allowing the other two kinds to fade away into the background. For most readers (including critical exegetes) in the West, this choice is often instinctual; certain features of the letter simply catch our attention. Yet, this choice has wide-ranging implications. For many exegetes (and believers) in the West, reading Romans for its theological teaching is the only sensible way of proceeding. How can one read this letter without acknowledging that it includes and conveys a most significant theological teaching? Of course, it does! And this spontaneous interpretive focus leads to a legitimate interpretation (wellgrounded in Paul’s text), as the presentation below strives to establish. We will also see that this legitimate analytical textual choice is complemented by a hermeneutical choice that privileges forensic semantic features of Paul’s theological argument—a plausible view of what gives coherence to the theological argument of the letter. Consequently, as shorthand, we call this reading of Romans a forensic theological interpretation. This chapter will show that this reading is both legitimate (solidly grounded in the text) and plausible (it makes sense). 1

This “theological argument” is not, as we shall soon see, a dogmatic or doctrinal argument, but rather a homiletic argument, a theological diatribe.

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Yet, the presentation in the present chapter constantly presupposes that diverging interpretations are equally legitimate and plausible. This is to avoid absolutizing this forensic theological interpretation. Otherwise this interpretation, which promises to be—and actually is—life-giving through its rich theological teaching, turns into a death-giving caricature of itself, as Paul says of the commandment: “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me,” NRSV2 (ἡ εἰς ζωὴν, αὕτη εἰς θάνατον, Rom 7:10).3 And, as discussed, in the process of denying the legitimacy and plausibility of interpretations that follow a different interpretive line of reasoning, the forensic theological critical commentaries become hybrid by co-opting any good insights they find in these other interpretations. I keep in mind this hybridity phenomenon in order to avoid confusions in the following presentation that seeks to show as convincingly as possible that a forensic theological interpretation is indeed legitimate and plausible (before doing the same for the two other types of interpretations in the following chapters).

(A) Resources for our forensic theological reading of Romans What we call the forensic theological interpretation of Romans is presented by critical exegetes in two forms: in commentaries (and related methodological works) and in thematic studies often entitled Pauline Theology. Of course, all the many forensic theological interpretations (including the Pauline Theologies) are hybrid—they incorporate features from a broad range of other studies. Consequently, they differ from each other on many points—otherwise exegetes would not have written new commentaries or new Pauline Theologies! But they belong to the same family, because they follow the same broad interpretive line of reasoning. The systematic presentations found in forensic Pauline Theologies show most clearly this interpretive line of reasoning by making explicit the framework and theological coherence of Paul’s forensic teaching—even though these Theologies are themselves hybrid. It remains that the critical commentaries have the advantage of showing

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Since the NRSV generally presupposes this interpretive line, unless otherwise noted, I cite in this chapter the NRSV translation—although at times I use a commentator’s translations (marking it by his/her name after the citation) and at times mine (signaled in the same way). Unfortunately, the forensic theological interpretation has proved to be literally death-giving, for instance, by promoting anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the exclusion of “sinners.” This has been repeatedly underscored by “new-perspective” scholars. See Gager, Reinventing Paul, especially 3–42; and Kathy Ehrensperger, “The New Perspective and Beyond,” Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013), 189–219. Both strive to denounce the stereotyping of Judaism and reject the supersessionist “two covenant” theory as they build upon the work of Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); Peter J. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); William S. Campbell, Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context: Jew and Gentile in the Letter to the Romans, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity (Frankfurt am Main; New York: P. Lang, 1991); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), especially 1–41. All these scholars denounced the tragic effects (especially anti-Judaism) of a dominant forensic theological interpretation of Romans (and Paul). But as we repeatedly noted, rejecting forensic theological interpretations by absolutizing another interpretation (proposed as “the one and only true” interpretation) engenders similar death-giving consequences, as discussed in Chapter 7.

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how this interpretation is grounded in the text of Romans (and thus is legitimate) by systematically following the text verse by verse. Consequently, the presentation below primarily follows commentaries. Yet, the verse-by-verse organization of the commentaries has its limitations. It often makes it difficult to keep track of the ways in which theological themes and concepts are interrelated. This is the point at which forensic Pauline Theologies are very helpful. Through their systematic presentations of each given term, they integrate into a single, nuanced concept the several connotations found in different parts of Romans—and in other of Paul’s letters. Among the great number of commentaries that offer a forensic theological interpretation, I chose to follow more closely eleven of these commentaries (listed below), because, beyond their distinct emphases, they represent well the primary characteristics of this interpretive line of reasoning and they have been developed in a broad range of academic and ecclesial contexts. I list the authors of these commentaries in chronological order: Heinrich A. W. Meyer, Adolf Schlatter, M.-J. Lagrange, C. H. Dodd, C. K. Barrett, John Murray, Franz J. Leenhardt, Otto Michel, C. E. B. Cranfield, Ulrich Wilckens, James D. Dunn, Peter Stuhlmacher, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Douglas Moo.4 (In the rest of the chapter, these commentaries are simply referred to by the author’s name, eventually followed by page number[s], when it is not clear that the reference is to the comments concerning a particular verse of Romans.) Since all these commentaries are hybrid—incorporating in the forensic interpretive line of reasoning various features of other interpretive lines of reasoning—each has particular characteristics that need to be decoded. I privilege two of them: Leenhardt’s 4

Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Handbook to the Epistle to the Romans (trans. William Dickson; New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1884); Adolf Schlatter, Romans: The Righteousness of God (trans. Siegfried S. Schatzmann, foreword Peter Stuhlmacher. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995; German 1895); M.-J. Lagrange, Saint Paul: Epître aux Romains (Paris: Gabalda, 1950 [first edition 1914]); C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1932); C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York: Harper, 1957); John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1959, 1965); Franz J. Leenhardt, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary (London: Lutterworth, 1961; French, 1957). This powerful and insightful commentary was my first exposition to a systematic critical study of Romans, as I studied with Professor Leenhardt at the University of Geneva. While it remains framed by a forensic interpretive line of reasoning, it offered valuable openings for covenantal community interpretations by emphasizing that the central theme of the letter is ecclesiology (rather than justification by faith), rejecting the view that Paul’s teaching was addressing problems of individual believers. See Leenhardt, 14–21. This commentary does the same for realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations and thus will also be quoted in Chapters 4 and 5. Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Römer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1963); C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975–79); Ulrich Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer, EKKNT. 3 vols (Zürich: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978–82); Dunn, Romans; Peter Stuhlmacher. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1994); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Also, “The Letter to the Romans,” Jerome Biblical Commentary (eds. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1996). I will also refer to the shorter version of this commentary, which has the merit of underscoring what he sees as key theological themes: Encountering the Book of Romans: A Theological Survey, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2014). I am not discussing on 1:1–32 Richard N. Longenecker, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2016), which became available when this chapter was already complete— but I use many of his articles and this commentary in Volumes II and III for the rest of Romans.

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and Moo’s. Leenhardt’s commentary was formative for me (as I attended Leenhardt’s seminars on Romans shortly after its publication).5 Moo’s commentary was the most recent and comprehensive forensic theological commentary (when I wrote this chapter Longenecker’s was not yet available) and, consequently, it incorporates in its forensic reading interpretive insights from the entire set of existing critical commentaries. Among the forensic Pauline Theologies, those written by scholars who have also published commentaries—Barrett, Fitzmyer—are of course most helpful.6 Yet, those by Ferdinand Prat, S. J., Rudolf Bultmann, D. E. H. Whiteley, Hans Conzelmann, Werner Kümmel, Herman Ridderbos, and Romano Penna are also excellent systematic presentations of Paul’s theology.7 These are also quite different from each other, due to their respective hybrid character—their incorporation in their forensic interpretation of insightful nuggets developed in the framework of other types of interpretations. But each in its own way clarifies the forensic theological framework that characterizes this interpretive line of reasoning and the set of particular theological connotations that each of Paul’s key theological terms has in this forensic perspective.8 Of course, the commentary presented below in this chapter is “Daniel Patte’s Forensic Theological Commentary on Romans.” As I construct this commentary, I proceed very much as any critical commentator proceeds, with the difference that I am fully aware that this forensic theological commentary is one of the three equally legitimate and plausible and yet divergent commentaries that I am presenting. The criteria that I use to identify a particular commentary or theology as forensic theological concern primarily the hermeneutical choices that characterize their interpretive line. When an interpretation involves views of sin, the human predicament, and its resolutionsalvation (as listed at the end of Chapter 2) as well as views of gospel, Christ, faith, grace (found in 1:1–7) that are distinctively forensic, I can anticipate that its views of other theological and ethical themes are also understood from a forensic perspective.

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Leenhardt’s commentary remained forensic; although he was simultaneously teaching us never to be satisfied with one type of interpretation. See my comments in the Introduction on his important book La parole et le buisson de feu, which led me to conceptualize the present book. C. K. Barrett, Paul: An Introduction to his Thought (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1994); Joseph A. Fitzmyer. Paul and his Theology: A Brief Sketch (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1989). As its full title shows, Moo’s Encountering the Book of Romans: A Theological Survey almost falls in this category as it systematically summarizes his interpretation of key theological concepts. F. Prat, S. J., The Theology of Saint Paul (trans. John Stoddard; London: Burns Oats & Washbourne, 1938 [French 1926]); Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (trans. Kendrick Grobel vol. 1; New York: Scribner, 1951–55); D. E. H. Whiteley, The Theology of St. Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964); Hans Conzelmann, An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (trans. John Bowden; New York: Harper & Row, 1969 [German original, 1968]); Werner Kümmel, The Theology of the New Testament according to its Major Witnesses: Jesus-Paul-John (trans. John E. Steely; Nashville: Abingdon, 1973 [German 1969]); Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of his Theology (trans. John Richard de Witt (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans, 1975)); Romano Penna, Paul the Apostle: A Theological and Exegetical Study (trans. Thomas P. Wahl; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996 [Italian original 1991]), especially vol. 2. Penna is the author of a three-volume commentary on Romans: Lettera ai Romani (Bologna: EDB, 2004–08). I do not include here James D. G., Dunn, Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998), because unlike his commentary (of 1988) in this volume Dunn has shifted paradigm, following a covenant community interpretive line of reasoning that we will discuss in Chapter 4. While I consulted all these forensic Pauline Theologies, I will present only quotations from some of them, which are particularly clear and succinct.

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Then in a second step I pay attention to the textual choices involved, that is, how these forensic concepts are grounded in the text and its historical setting.

(B) Why the designation of this interpretive line of reasoning as a forensic theological interpretation? For commentators who view Paul’s theological teaching as the most significant feature of the letter to the Romans, this teaching addresses the needs of individual believers in the church(es) in Rome (and then elsewhere): this teaching is individual-centered. The authors of Pauline Theologies clarify this designation. For them, Paul’s teaching is fundamentally forensic, because it envisions God as a righteous Judge. Bultmann expresses it most succinctly: God is the Judge who demands good deeds of [hu]man (Rom 1:18-3:20). The preaching of faith does not introduce a new concept of God as if God were not the Judge who requires good works but were only the Merciful. No, we may speak of God’s “grace” only when we also speak of his wrath.9

As the righteous Judge, God presides over a divine law-court; that is, “a ‘forum’ (= a law-court—the sense of ‘forum’ from which ‘forensic’ as here used is derived)”; sinners appear before this Judge and unexpectedly receive a verdict of “righteous.”10 Thus it is appropriate to say that the framework of Paul’s theological teaching is “forensic”— or “legal” or “judicial” as some prefer to say.11 Thus, dikaiosynê (δικαιοσύνη) is best translated “righteousness,” because it is a forensic term. 12 A person “has ‘righteousness,’ or is ‘righteous,’ when he[/she] is acknowledged to be such, and that means, in case such acknowledgment is in dispute: when he[/she] is ‘rightwised,’ ‘pronounced righteous,’ . . . is acquitted . . . is acknowledged innocent.”13 One could say that the sinner is “forgiven” by God, and thus viewed as “righteous”; but in saying so one would lose the forensic connotation (the court appearance before God the Judge). The phrase “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ; in Rom 1:17; 3:21–22, or equivalent phrases in 3:5, 25–26, 10:3) is a “forensic category”: it is righteousness as defined by God’s judgment; a person’s righteousness that stands the test of God’s judgment. Ridderbos (163) succinctly expresses this point by noting that the 9 10 11

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Bultmann, 262; emphasis is in text. Bultmann, 272. For example, Fitzmyer, Theology, 36–43. Of course, Fitzmyer carefully reviews the other types of interpretation—those that I called covenantal community and realized-apocalyptic/messianic—and dismisses them because “one must guard against emptying out of the legal or judicial denotation” of Paul’s teaching” (43). Rather than “justice,” as it will be translated in most covenantal community interpretations (and realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations). Note that in all the Romance languages there is a single term (derived from the Latin iustitia) to translate dikaiosynê, δικαιοσύνη; therefore the distinction between “righteousness” and “justice” is not made; nevertheless commentators “mean” either one or the other. For instance, because Prat’s Theology of Saint Paul is translated from the French, δικαιοσύνη is always translated “justice,” although he clearly means “righteousness” (e.g., in Prat, vol.1: 195–96, on Rom 1:18–32). Bultmann, 272.

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“righteousness of God” is to be understood as “not a divine quality but a human quality . . . the righteousness ‘of God’ further defines that quality as righteousness that can stand before God (cf. Rom 2:13; 3:20), which is valid in his judgment, the righteousness that God attributes to [hu]man as opposed to his[/her] unrighteousness (Rom 10:3).” This quotation also illustrates that all these forensic interpretations of Romans presuppose that it is individual sinners who need to be and are “justified” by the divine Judge.14 This presupposition that Paul is primarily concerned with the forensic salvation—acquittal, forgiveness—of “individuals” makes it legitimate to ask with Conzelmann: In which way is “the saving act .  .  . for me”—as an individual?15 This concern for individual salvation presupposes a forensic understanding of sin as “an ethical quantity,” not fulfilling one’s “human responsibility to God.”16 Even though Paul speaks of sin as a power and as a mythical reality (the sin of Adam), in this interpretation “according to Paul, sin comes from sinning”; it is an action for which we are responsible, and therefore for which we can be viewed as guilty.17 One can define sin as resulting from a wrong will (and only individuals have will): for example, as Ridderbos does (in his sex-exclusive language) when saying that sin is “man’s willing-to-have-command-ofhimself, wanting-to-be-as-God.”18 Similarly, for Prat sinners know God and God’s will, but disregard God and “act in a way contrary to their knowledge . . . this is their sin and the cause of God’s wrath” (Prat, vol. 1: 195–96, on Rom 1:18–32). Therefore, for Prat, sin is primarily a matter of wrong will. But for other forensic interpreters, sin results from a lack of knowledge or a wrong knowledge. For instance, Bultmann underscores that sin is “the sinful self-delusion that one lives out of the created world” or that one derives one’s life from the transitory and perishable; sin is an “unthinking recklessness . . . both in the ignoring and transgressing of ethical demands and in excessive zeal to fulfill them.”19 Thus there is much debate among forensic interpreters on these issues; for instance, Ridderbos has a detailed argument against Bultmann that revolves around different understandings of sin.20 Yet, it remains that, whether they view sin as primarily rooted in a wrong will or in a wrong knowledge, these interpretations remain forensic: sinners as individuals are responsible for their sins, are under the judgment of God, and are in need of the righteousness of God— in need of acquittal by God the Judge. These few general points are enough to provisionally explain why readings of Romans that follow this interpretative line of reasoning can be designated as a forensic theological interpretation and can be viewed as plausible. Despite variants (e.g., Prat and Ridderbos vs. Bultmann and Conzellmann), this type of interpretation makes theological sense.

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Note that they commonly refer to a sinner as man (singular), designated by (masculine) singular pronoun, he—a challenge for me as I try to use a sex-inclusive language! Opening the way toward a covenantal reading, Leenhardt, 21, passim, emphasizes that Paul most often uses plural forms and rejects this focus on individual. Conzelmann, 205–12. Ridderbos, 101. Conzelmann, 196, see 192–98; Bultmann, 250–53. Ridderbos, 105–06, emphases added. Bultmann, 239. Ridderbos, 100–07.

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(C) Paul’s letter to the Romans read following behind-the-text methodologies The choice of a theological logic that establishes the plausibility (coherence) of forensic interpretations of Romans is, of course, grounded in close critical studies of the text of Romans, which establish that these theological interpretations and conclusions are legitimately representing what the text says. For such studies exegetes make particular textual choices: they use a plurality of behind-the-text methodologies aimed at elucidating Paul’s intention (a prime behind-the-text component). They strive to show how Paul’s various statements fit together into a theological teaching by paying close attention to the genre of this letter as written/dictated by a preacher, and by striving to set it in the historical context of both Paul and the church(es) in Rome. Simultaneously, exegetes use philological studies to set Paul’s vocabulary in the history of Koine Greek. Thus forensic theological commentaries are often designated in short as historical critical (although other methodologies will also want to claim that they are historical). Beyond this plurality of methodological strategies, exegetes presuppose that Paul’s theological teaching can be formulated as a series of intertwined theological propositions—or propositional truths. While, at first, the theological logic of the letter is not necessarily self-evident, as Furnish argues it can be reconstructed and shown to be coherent.21 During the last two centuries, historical critical biblical scholarship on Romans has followed several avenues to elucidate it. Yet, each commentary integrates, through its hybrid character, all these critical approaches, even as it gives priority to one or another approach and ends up emphasizing particular aspects of the theological teaching—since each carefully reviews previous commentaries. At first, it was common to read Romans as a theological dogmatic discourse—that is, as an “epistle”—rather than a “letter.” This was most recently advocated by T. W. Manson22 and G. Bornkamm for whom Romans was Paul’s “Last Will and Testament,” a document in which Paul summarized and developed the most important themes of his theological message, elevating it “into the sphere of the eternally and universally valid.”23 This dogmatic character of Romans has been debated since F. C. Baur and Bultmann, both of whom argued against it.24 For most commentators since the 1960s, 21

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See Furnish, “Paul the Theologian,” The Conversation Continues, 27–30. Structural semiotic theory shows that the “theological logic” is one of the three dimensions (its syntactic dimension) of a religious discourse (such as Paul’s letter) that readers can legitimately choose as most significant in a religious text so as to produce meaning with them (as forensic theological interpreters do). See Patte, The Religious Dimensions, 173–215 (on “The ‘Syntactic’ Dimension of Believing”). T. W. Manson, “St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” 3–15 in Donfried, The Romans Debate. This essay was first published in 1938. See also Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Römer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955). Günther Bornkamm, “The Letter to the Romans as Paul’s Last Will and Testament,” 16–28 (quote, 28) in Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate. This essay was first published in 1963. Baur, as the “father of historical critical studies of the Bible,” insisted that the theological teaching of Paul was to be understood as a historical/contextual teaching addressing theological and ethical problems that were of particular concerns for the addressees. See F. C. Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teaching (London: Williams and Norgate, 1873 [German 1845]). Bultmann argued (as discussed below) that the theological teaching of Paul’s letters followed a preaching style (and therefore a diatribe style) rather than a dogmatic style. See Rudolf Bultmann,

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this “Romans debate”25 tilted in favor of a “historical” understanding of Romans as a “letter,” that is, as a document written in order to address particular issues that were of concern to particular addressees—the church or churches in Rome. But this was not renouncing the view that the theological argument of Romans is its most significant feature. It simply meant that commentators must be fully aware that this theological teaching is presented in the form of a letter, and not of a dogmatic argument strictly organized according to a dogmatic logic, going from one (abstract) theological proposition to another. Even though such a dogmatic logic can be found in particular subsections of the letter, much of Paul’s theological teaching is found in didactic parts of Romans framed by his concern to address the theological needs of certain people in a certain space and time—“all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints” (Rom 1:7). Consequently, some commentators (including, e.g., Minear) have proposed that everything in the letter should be understood as directly addressing concrete theological and ethical problems that emerged in the historical context of the church/ churches in Rome.26 This seems to be an appropriate attitude when one has concluded that Romans should not be read as a dogmatic discourse but as a letter conveying a theological teaching to a particular audience. In such a case, the theological teaching and its logic needs to be reconstructed by asking behind-the-text questions concerning its historical context, including “Why did Paul write Romans?” and “What was Paul’s intention as he wrote it?” These questions are often viewed as the starting point for behind-the-text exegeses, since, accordingly, their answers should provide a guide for interpreting Paul’s theological teaching. But exegetes are confronted with the problem that all the information regarding Paul’s purpose is found in the letter itself—a situation which easily leads to circular interpretations. Furthermore, because Romans is neither “aggressively” polemical (i.e., seeking to correct specific errors) nor “explicitly” apologetic (i.e., a response to specific accusations),27 it does not provide any definite clue regarding its purpose. Indeed, at first sight the bulk of the letter reads more like an exposition of Paul’s teaching; that is, like a universally valid theological teaching, even though it clearly is not a dogmatic argument. But in opposition to this trend, Minear emphasized that this letter does include significant polemical and apologetic features, which are particularly visible in Rom 14–16 and suggest that at least part of this theological teaching has a definite contextual character.28 Thus, we cannot completely

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Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt und die kynisch-stoische Diatribe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910). To use the title of the book edited by Karl Donfried, which underscores that the primary issue is whether or not Romans was written in order to address a concrete situation in Rome. See K. P. Donfried, “False Presuppositions in the Study of Romans,” The Romans Debate, 102–25. Paul S. Minear, The Obedience of Faith: The Purposes of Paul in the Epistle to the Romans (Naperville, Ill.: Allenson, 1971). As Longenecker underscores. See Richard N. Longenecker, Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul’s Most Famous Letter (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011), 78 (quoted in a subsequent footnote). Thus in a provocative and very insightful way, in Obedience of Faith Minear first comments on chapters 14-16 1-35) then, in this light, comments on chapters 1-13 (36-90), before coming back in two appendices to thematic issues raised by chapters 15-16 (91-110).

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deny the role of particular circumstances that motivated Paul to write. Yet, with many exegetes (including Karris and Longenecker), we have to be fully aware of the limits of an interpretation of the theological teaching of Romans based on a reconstruction of the problems it is supposed to address for the church(es) in Rome. It is easy for the scholars’ formulations of such contextual purposes to be in large part a “mirrorreading,” based upon the scholars’ prior understanding of the theological teaching of the letter!29 Since in many cases what scholars are saying about Paul’s purpose reflects their understandings of Paul’s theological teaching and its logic, and vice versa, purpose and theology need to be discussed together. Beyond variations (which we will discuss as we progress), historical critical commentaries agree that the most significant component of Paul’s letter is its formulation of a theological teaching (instead of its rhetorical and ideological message or its religious figurative vision, as emphasized by other types of commentaries). Beyond this general agreement there are, of course, different answers to the question, “Why did Paul write Romans?” A first answer, the closest to a view of Romans as Paul’s “Last Will and Testament,” is that Paul needed to sort out for himself what should be the apology for the “gospel without the law for Gentiles” that he would need to make in Jerusalem to Jewish Christ-followers, who presumably believed in and practiced a “gospel with the law.” This is the apology that Paul would need to make when, according to Rom 15:25–27, he would bring to “the poor among the saints at Jerusalem” the gifts from the Gentile churches in Macedonia and Achaia—during his visit in Jerusalem, about which he was very anxious (begging the Romans to pray on his behalf, 15:30–31). Thus, from this perspective, Romans was, in a way, a “letter to Jerusalem”; as Jervell said: “Paul sets forth and explains what he, as the bearer of the collection given by the Gentiles for the mother congregation, intends to say, so that he as well as the gift will not be rejected.”30 Jervell’s conclusion that Paul’s major concern was to address the theological and ethical issues concerning the relationship between Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers is also shared by scholars for whom Paul’s overall purpose was understood in very different ways. For instance, Karris reaches similar conclusions, even though for him Paul was addressing general theological problems regarding the relationship between Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers whom he encountered in all kinds of churches throughout his missionary activity. For Karris (who argues against Minear), Rom 12–15, the paraenetic (exhortatory) section of the letter, “has 29

30

Karris writes, “The situation within the Roman community is obscure at best, and mirror-reading from the epistle itself will not dispel that obscurity” (Robert Karris, “Romans14:1-15:13 and the Occasion of Romans,” in Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, 70 [essay first published in 1973]). Longenecker makes a similar point: he views “mirror-reading” as “a somewhat tenuous enterprise with respect to this letter to the Christians in Rome . . . [because] mirror reading works well only where there is a reasonable assurance that one is dealing with either a polemic letter (an aggressive explanation that seeks to counter specific errors, whether doctrinal of ethical) or an apologetic letter (a defensive response to accusations) . . . [and] not just by a desire for contact or communication on the part of the author,” that is, an exposition or discourse. Longenecker, Introducing Romans, 78 (see also 55). Jacob Jervell, “The Letter to Jerusalem,” in Donfried, The Romans Debate, 56 (see 53–64). This essay was first published in 1971.

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no specific referent within the Roman community. It is part of a letter which sums up Paul’s missionary theology and paraenesis.”31 Without going into all the debate between Karris and Minear (and Donfried)32 regarding the occasion of Romans, it is enough for our purpose to note their central point, concerning the necessity to consider two kinds of issues in order to understand the theological teaching of this letter: 1. The epistolary features found at the beginning (1:1–17) and end (15:14–16:27) of Romans, in order to discern in a general way the theological and/or ethical problems that Paul sought to address for the sake of his intended audience. 2. The style of the body of this letter (1:18–15:13)—including its diatribe and dialogical style (by contrast with a dogmatic argumentative style)—that Paul used to communicate his theological teaching.

(D) The forensic theological logic of Romans as communicated through its epistolary style: The letter opening, Rom 1:1-17, and the letter closing, Rom 15:14–16:1–23, 25–27 Commentators primarily concerned with the theological teaching of the letter underscore that, in Moo’s words, “the main body of Romans is a treatise on Paul’s gospel bracketed by an epistolary opening (1:1-17) and conclusion (15:14-16:27).”33 These epistolary features are important for understanding not only to whom Paul was writing and why he wrote this letter, but also how he framed his theological teaching. To whom was Paul writing? This is actually a twofold question: To what kind of church/churches was he writing? And, more specifically, since they were both Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers in Rome, to which group is Paul’s teaching primarily addressed? Regarding the kind of church/churches Paul addresses, the question is: Was Paul writing to a single church community (as Karris and many others seem to presuppose)? Or to several house-churches in Rome? The answer depends in large part on how Romans 16 is read. If very little weight is given to Rom 16—or even if it is viewed as not belonging to the original letter, when Rom 16 is understood to be a note that Paul added to a copy of the letter sent to the church in Ephesus34—the letter is generally viewed as addressed 31 32

33 34

See Karris, “Romans14:1-15:13,” in Donfried, The Romans Debate, 84. See Donfried, “False Presuppositions in the Study of Romans,” in The Romans Debate, 102–25. This essay, where Donfried generally argues in favor of Minear’s interpretation and primarily against Karris, is followed by a response from Karris, “Romans14:1-15:13,” 125–27. Moo, 39. The view that chapter 16 was not part of the original letter is based on (1) the fact that 15:33 is a concluding benediction; 2) the large number of people greeted in 16:3-16 is surprising in a letter to a church that Paul does not know, and several of these have Ephesian association; 3) the sharp admonition against opponents in 16:17–20 contradicts the largely irenic tone of chapters 1-15, as well as on textual evidence (P46, a 200 CE papyrus, that appears to include the doxology of 16:25–27 after 15:33). This view that the bulk of chapter 16 was not part of the original letter has been advocated by exegetes since the eighteenth century (J. S. Semler), the nineteenth century (J. G. Einchhorn and D. Schultz) and throughout the twentieth century. Manson argued in 1962—and convinced many exegetes (including me, see Paul’s Faith, 250–51) that the bulk of chapter 16 (less

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to a single community. Then most commentators with these views conclude that 14:1– 15:13 allude to actual divisions between “the weak” (Jewish Christ-followers) and “the strong” (Gentile Christ-followers) within this single community. By contrast, for a majority of commentators, the letter is viewed as addressed to a plurality of house-churches in Rome. This is what one can conclude, as Minear does, by taking seriously into account chapter 16, which refers explicitly to housechurches at least in 16:5 and 23 (the other references to “church,” 16:1, 4, 16, can also be understood in this way).35 Then one can read 14:1–15:13 as alluding to conflicts among different house-churches. In support for this view, many scholars (irrespective of the interpretive line of reasoning that they follow) take note of the complex social situation in Rome: there were a few prosperous families living in villas, while 90–95 percent of the free population lived in tenement apartments. Consequently, one can envision that followers of Christ participated in house-churches gathering either in the tenement apartments (the more numerous, but less institutionalized, churches) or in the villa of one or another prosperous family—as might be the case regarding the church meeting in the house of Prisca and Aquila (16:3–5).36 This interpretation of the addressees as belonging to a plurality of house-churches is preferred by many scholars, (1) because it is more consistent with critical historical studies of the social situation in Rome,37 and (2) because choosing to envision a single church in Rome (most often a subconscious choice) easily leads to conceive of the addressees as the “universal church” and therefore to read Romans as an “encyclical”—as a strictly dogmatic theological argument. As a consequence, many commentators—including, for example, Cranfield, Moo, and Stuhlmacher38—find that envisioning Paul as addressing a plurality of house-churches is more consistent with a reading of Romans as a letter, which primarily offers a theological teaching expressed through a diversity of textual features, including epistolary and diatribe/preaching style, so as to address (potential) misunderstandings in Rome concerning the gospel he preaches. In order to elucidate the components of Paul’s theological teaching inscribed in his letter, commentators such as Cranfield, Dunn, Fitzmyer, Lagrange, Michel, Moo, Murray, Stuhlmacher, and Wilckens take note of the ways in which Paul made use of, but also transformed, traditional epistolary features of Greco-Roman antiquity, and

35

36

37 38

16:25–27, part of the original letter) was appended to a copy of Romans sent to Ephesus: Manson, 12–14 in The Romans Debate. See also Longenecker, Introducing Romans, 22–28; Moo, Romans, 5–9; and Donfried, “False Presuppositions,” in The Romans Debate, 104, 121–25. While making a fair presentation of these arguments, Longenecker, Moo, and Donfried argue that chapter 16 is an integral part of Romans. See Minear, Obedience of Faith, 23–34, where Minear argues that the long list of greetings reflects a plurality of house-churches, separated either by distance in the greater Rome or by ethnic background or by hostility (27). Verses 16:1, 4, 5, 16, and 23 are the only places in Romans where Paul uses the word ἐκκλησία, church. See Longenecker, Introducing Romans, 84–85. For the complexity of urban life in the Roman Empire, see Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale, 1983) and Abraham J. Malherbe, Social Aspects of Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). See Donfried, The Romans Debate, 102–25 (especially 102–11). Cranfield, 786; Moo, 54; Stuhlmacher, 248.

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to begin with transformed the typical Greek letter opening.39 Beyond the expansion of the typical Greek letter opening—that includes the self-identification of the sender, the designation of the recipients, the greetings, blessings, prayers, etc. (discussed in the commentary on 1:1–7, below), commentators also pay close attention to the overall organization of Paul’s letter, including the relationship of the letter opening and the letter closing. The Letter Closing (15:14–33, 16:1–23, 25–27) needs to be mentioned here, because its epistolary features confirm the forensic interpretation of the Letter Opening (1:1– 17). The Letter Closing is a theological description of Paul’s ministry as a mission (15:14–24) which has many parallels with the Letter Opening. In the forensic interpretive line of reasoning, what Paul says about his mission is that he hopes that it will extend to Spain. Here, mission is understood as a proclamation of the message of the gospel to bring the Gentiles to the obedience of faith, in light of the interpretation of Paul’s statements about his ministry and mission in 1:1–17 (as discussed below). Then he describes his travel plans, including his visit to Jerusalem about which he is quite anxious (15:25–33) and concludes his letter with greetings to coworkers in his missionary activity (16:1–23) and a doxology (16:25–27), which echoes the language and themes of the letter.40 As Moo (886) outlines this Letter Closing, he shows how its content is parallel with that of 1:1–15:41 Commendation of the Romans “Apostle to the Gentiles” Hindrance in Visiting Rome “Indebtedness” Desire to minister for mutual blessing Prayer

15:14 15:15b–21 15:22 15:27 15:29 15:30–32

1:8 1:3, 13 1:13a 1:14 1:11–12 1:9–10

Then the doxology, 16:25–27, is parallel with 1:16–17—through references to the “power” of God (16:25a; 1:16b) and of the gospel (16:25b; 1:16a,b), “revelation” (16:25c–26a; 1:17b), and “obedience of faith” (16:26c; 1:17c and d). Paul’s description of his travel plans—including his visit to Jerusalem about which he is quite anxious (15:25–33), and the conclusion of his letter with greetings to coworkers in his missionary activity (16:1–23) and a doxology (16:25–27)—echoes the language and themes of the letter.42 The concluding doxology (16:25–27) is most appropriate as it emphasizes key themes found in 1:1–17 (see the comparative tables

39

40 41 42

See the commentaries on Rom 1:1–7 by these exegetes. For a good comparison of Paul’s letters with typical Greek papyrus letters, see Calvin J. Roetzel, The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, 3rd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), especially 59–71, and 104–13. See also Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia : Westminster Press, 1986), and most recently and more generally, Owen Hodkinson, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, Evelien Bracke, eds., Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2013). Moo, 936–38. Moo, 886. Moo, 936–38.

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in Moo).43 It is “a doxology in praise of the God who has in the gospel of Jesus Christ revealed the climax of salvation history,”44 which emphasizes “the preaching of Jesus Christ,” a phrase which, for Moo,45 is to be understood as “preaching about Jesus Christ,” and is equivalent to preaching the gospel. The content of the gospel is, for such forensic theological interpretations, the “revelation of a mystery” (Rom 16:25), namely the “revelation of the righteousness of God,” 1:17.46 In such forensic theological interpretations, the epistolary features of the opening (1:1–17) and closing (15:14–16:27) of Romans are focused upon the missionary activity of Paul. As we shall see in the verse-by-verse commentary below, according to the forensic theological interpretation of 1:1–17, mission is understood as the proclamation of the gospel-message, which is in turn viewed as a series of propositional truths to be appropriated, trusted, and obeyed in faith.47 It follows that the body of the letter is understood as providing a theological and homiletical presentation of this “gospel” (as the theological content of faith—what is to be believed/trusted). This gospel-message is already largely spelled out in the Letter Opening, 1:1–17. But to grasp how this forensic theological interpretive line understands it, we need to identify the main characteristics of the body of the letter and to which group (Jewish Christfollowers or Gentile Christ-followers) it is primarily addressed.

(E) The body of the letter, Rom 1:18–15:13 The body of the letter, 1:18–15:13, is subdivided into subsections, the delimitations of which slightly vary from forensic commentator to forensic commentator. For the large majority of forensic commentators the overall organization of Romans is not essential for understanding Paul’s teaching.48 What is essential, according to forensic interpretations, is to recognize that the body of the letter presents a theological teaching in the style to which Paul is accustomed to convey such a teaching, namely in his preaching style. After all (according to this forensic interpretation) the primary role of an apostle is to “preach” the gospel-message. Through his preaching style, which is also a diatribe style, Paul conveys many theological points (propositional truths) that he deems useful, necessary, and significant for his homiletic or pedagogic purposes. Thus the essential theological teachings are found in discrete sections framed by diatribe (preaching style) markers. The body of the letter is a homiletic explanation of the theme posited in 1:16–17/18. Thus each of its sections can be viewed, following Fitzmyer, as a certain part of this “theme” as “explained,” “illustrated,” or “developed” and ultimately put in practice in the life of the church. Thus, for instance, Lagrange,

43 44 45 46 47 48

Moo, 937. Moo, 937. Moo, 938. Moo 938. Moo, 66–67. The exception would be forensic commentators who view Romans as a dogmatic treatise framed by a theological argument moving from one dogmatic point to the next. But as noted, T. W. Manson (in a 1938 essay), O. Michel (in his 1955 commentary), and G. Bornkamm (in a 1963 essay) were the last critical exegetes supporting this view, that the rest of the forensic theological exegetes find a very unlikely conclusion.

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Schlatter, Leenhardt, Wilckens, Cranfield, and Moo represent the general organization of the body of the letter as follows (the subtitles I provide are summarized conflations of their subtitles). 1:18/19-8:39: The gospel of justification preached by Paul—often subdivided in 1:18-4:25,49 justification by faith, and 5:1-8:39, the hope of salvation; 9:1-11:36: Israel and the historical aspect of the Gospel; 12:1-15:13: The ethical aspect of the gospel.

But these subdivisions and subtitles are not the key for understanding the theological logic of the letter. The key to Paul’s teaching about various theological issues and its theological logic is found in discrete units of Paul’s discourse, their terminology (studied with philology) and their framing by Paul’s preaching style punctuated by diatribe markers. In this first volume, it is enough to consider the role of the diatribe/ preaching style in the first subsection of the body of the letter: 1:18–4:25. As we will see, it is essential for understanding the forensic theological interpretation of 1:18–32.

(F) The theological logic of Rom 1:18–4:25 as communicated through a preaching-like diatribe style: The Jew is Paul’s main target Most forensic theological interpretations carefully note, even if it is only in passing, the markers of the diatribe style in Rom 1:18–4:25. This is important in order to avoid much confusion. For instance, one should not assume that Paul is in (polemical) dialogue with actual persons when, in the diatribe style, he is actually using imaginary interlocutors to make theological points.50 More importantly, acknowledging the presence of the diatribe style in Paul’s letter is key for understanding Paul’s theological teaching and how it addresses needs of the churches in Rome. What is Paul’s diatribe style and how should it be interpreted? Let us take as a first example the phrase ἀναπολόγητος εἶ, ὦ ἄνθρωπε (“you have no excuse, O man,” RSV) in 2:1. This is a typical reference in diatribe style to an “imaginary interlocutor,” commonly introduced in polemical dialogues without actually referring to actual opponents or adversaries. Even if such imaginary interlocutors indirectly refer to actual opponents, they are primarily introduced as didactic features through which Paul seeks to make a theological point. Thus, most forensic theological interpretations explicitly acknowledge the ongoing presence of this diatribe style in the letter and all take it into account, often without much ado, in order to understand the theological

49 50

Yet, Leenhardt extends this section up 5:11 and Wilckens up to 5:21. Thus, most forensic scholars find quite problematic Minear’s approach, because it underestimates the diatribe features in the letter, and seeks to identify the identities of the “you” to whom Paul is speaking at any given moment. Minear, Obedience of Faith, 46. See also Karris, “Romans14:1-15:13,” in Donfried, The Romans Debate, 70, footnote 32 and also Donfried, “False Presuppositions in the Study of Romans,” in Donfried, The Romans Debate, 102–21.

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teaching of Paul’s letter.51 As a result these interpretations are actually framed by the fact that they spontaneously pay attention to these diatribe features or their absence in other parts of the text. To clarify the contrast with the rhetorical covenantal community interpretation and with the figurative realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations (in the following chapters), the present chapter underscores the significance of this diatribe preaching style both in Paul’s text and in forensic commentaries. What is the diatribe preaching style of Romans? How should it be interpreted? For help in addressing these questions, forensic theological commentators first turn to the study of the diatribe by one of the main proponents of the forensic interpretation of Paul: Rudolf Bultmann. Here we are not so much interested in his Theology of the New Testament, but in his 1910 dissertation: Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt und die kynisch-stoische Diatribe (mentioned above). To begin with, and most importantly, Bultmann argued that Paul’s letters, including Romans, reflect Paul’s oral preaching style (as Bultmann’s title expresses by associating the style of Paul’s predication with that of the diatribe of the Cynics and Stoics). In other words, the theological teaching of Romans is sermon-like—rather than dogmatic. Reviewing these diatribe features of Romans (as understood by Bultmann) is therefore a good starting point. For Bultmann, the diatribe was a literary genre (Gattung) that Paul spontaneously adopted as his preaching style—Bultmann insists that this was not a conscious or intentional imitation—and continued to use in his writing (as he dictated his letters).52 The diatribe style was practiced by Cynics and Stoic philosophers who had a profound influence upon the cultural, social, and political life of the Hellenistic world and, later, of the Roman Empire—including the renowned practitioners of diatribe discourses Bion of Borysthenes and Teles of Megara (third century BCE), Horace (first century bce, in his satires and epodes), Musonius Rufus (Paul’s younger contemporary) who was the teacher of Epictetus who revived this Gattung in his Discourses (c108 CE).53 Through its dialogical elements the diatribe style established a lively contact and interaction between speaker/writer and listeners/readers. In Romans, this is the effect of phrases such as “do you not know?” (οὐκ οἴδατε, 6:16, 11:2; ἀγνοεῖτε ὅτι, 6:3, 7:1) and “I do not want you to be unaware” (οὐ θέλω δὲ ὑμᾶς ἀγνοεῖν, 1:13).54 But the diatribe style does much more than establishing a lively interaction between Paul and his readers; it also involves what Bultmann calls rhetorical devices (rhetorische Kunstmittel),55 such as introducing “imaginary interlocutors,” who raise objections (to what Paul said) or formulate false conclusions that need to be corrected. The diatribe style also creates dialogical exchanges between these interlocutors and Paul in order to establish key theological points.56 Of course (contrary to Karris), these

51

52 53

54 55 56

But without going as far as Karris, who declared that Paul’s diatribe style demands that one absolutely denies that the letter addressed specific community problems. Bultmann, Stil, 2–3. Bultmann, Stil, 6–9. For a more systematic presentation, see Thomas Schmeller, Paulus und die “Diatribe”: eine vergleichende Stilinterpretation (Münster : Aschendorff, 1987), 100–56. Bultmann, Stil, 10–19, 64–74. Bultmann, Stil, 20–46, 74–96. These are systematically catalogued in Stanley Kent Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans (SBL Dissertation series 57. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), esp. 79–118, but are found mentioned by all the commentaries primarily concerned with the theological argument of Romans.

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imaginary interlocutors might evoke actual persons or groups in the house-churches in Rome so as to address actual issues with which they are struggling. These imaginary interlocutors are never fully imaginary. But, contrary to Minear, one cannot expect that there is necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the situations evoked through the diatribe style and the situations in Rome. Therefore these diatribe features are not necessarily helpful for reconstructing the historical context of the churches in Rome. But for critical commentators primarily concerned with the theological teaching of Romans, these diatribe features as defined and used by Bultmann and his followers are good guide posts for elucidating important theological points in Romans that Paul expressed in his preaching style (rather than in a dogmatic argument), in order to address issues which, according to Paul, his intended audience in Rome might find questionable, surprising, or unexpected.57 Thus, those passages of Romans in which one finds many diatribe features should be viewed as expressing most significant characteristics of Paul’s theological teaching. Conversely, passages without diatribe style features can be viewed as making theological points that Paul expected his readers, the churches in Rome, to find less controversial, and that were less central to his teaching. Regarding the diatribe style of Rom 1:18–4:25,58 it is important to note with Fitzmyer how striking it is that the diatribe features begin only in 2:1 and then continues throughout 2:1–4:25, in which one constantly moves from one diatribe feature to another.59 By contrast, 1:18–32 does not contain any significant diatribe features. Why? Because in 1:18–32, “he (Paul) speaks collectively and describes a de facto situation” developed on the basis of “pre-Christian Jewish thinking.”60 This observation supports Moo’s general conclusion that Paul’s “indictment of the Gentiles in 1:18-32 is an ‘assumed point’ that is really prefatory to the real argument,”61 namely the indictment of the Jews in 2:1–3:20, repeatedly underscored by diatribe features, and (as a counterpoint) a proclamation of the inclusion of the Jews among those who benefit from “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (3:22), as expressed in 3:21–4:25, also marked by many diatribe features. In Moo’s words, Paul’s indictment reveals that the Jew is his main “target.” After all, few people would have to be convinced that Gentiles were in need of God’s righteousness. . . .

57

58

59 60 61

I follow the catalogue of examples in Romans proposed by Stowers, although he rejects Bultmann’s interpretation. Stowers’s own interpretation is presented in Chapter 4. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the same diatribe features when understood as features of the rhetorical structure of Paul’s discourse (rather than as “diatribe features” or “rhetorical devices” that Paul uses in his “preaching style”) will be interpreted in a very different way. I arbitrarily delimit this section. While most forensic theological commentators begin a new section of their commentaries at 1:18, they choose to end it at different places. For instance, Dodd ends it at 3:30; Michel, Barrett, Cranfield, Moo, and Fitzmyer at 4:25; Leenhardt at 5:11; Wilckens and Dunn at 5:21; Schlatter and Stuhlmacher at 8:39; Lagrange at 11:36. These variations do not affect the forensic character of their interpretations, which are focused on much shorter sections, often delimited by diatribe features. Fitzmyer, 91, 296–98. Fitzmyer, 270, 272. Moo, 93.

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But the case was different with the Jews. Were they not God’s people? Had not God already promised them his righteousness through the terms of the Old Covenant? . . . So might the questions run, questions that Paul had to confront often in the course of his missionary work. And so Paul must argue that Jews are as much subject to sin’s power as Gentiles and that the old system of the law, in itself, is quite insufficient to provide for release from sin’s power (cf. 3:20). . . . Paul’s focus is due to his desire to set before the Romans, in preparation for his visit and request for support, the gospel he preaches—and the need for God’s righteousness and on the part of both Jews and Gentiles is an important component of that gospel. . . . In the present section, Paul’s overriding concern is to show that, like Gentiles, Jews are locked up under sin and can receive the righteousness available in the gospel only by faith in Jesus.62

Moo makes explicit in the above quotation—“the Jew is his [Paul’s] main ‘target’”— what most forensic theological commentators simply presuppose: in this entire section of Romans (1:19–4:25), Paul addresses Jewish readers—that is, Jewish Christ-followers who are members of the churches in Rome.63 As Stowers clarifies in Rereading of Romans, the meaning of what Paul says changes quite drastically if one assumes that Paul was addressing primarily Jewish Christ-followers in Rome (while assuming that Gentile Christ-followers in Rome would also hear/read the letter)—as forensic commentators presuppose—rather than assuming that Paul was addressing primarily Gentile Christfollowers in Rome (while assuming that Jewish Christ-followers in Rome would also hear/read the letter)—as rhetorical covenantal community interpreters do.64 According to forensic theological interpretations, in 1:18–32, while addressing Jewish Christ-followers, Paul speaks about “pagan idolaters” (1:22–28) and thus about “Gentile sinners”—despite the fact that neither the term Gentiles (ἔθνη) nor Greek (Ἕλλην) is used, the descriptions of idolaters make it clear.65 Similarly, Paul speaks about Jews in 2:1–3:8 (the term Ἰουδαῖος [2:9, 10, 17, 28, 29; 3:1] always used in the singular, is understood as referring to a “Jew,” a follower of the Jewish religion, rather than as a person from the land of Judea), and thus to Jewish Christ-followers in Rome; and then about all humanity beginning in 3:9 (“all, both Jews and Greeks, are under

62

63

64

65

Moo, 93–94, see also 96–98; emphasis added. As is clear from the tables summarizing the forensic interpretation of key theological theme, Moo’s “God’s righteousness” should be understood as “God’s acquittal, forgiveness” (Moo’s explicit definition). By implications, in this interpretive line of reasoning, being “subject to sin’s power” is being unable to obtain forgiveness from God in any other way than through faith. I emphasized that “the Jew is [Paul’s] main ‘target,’” because this conclusion is distinctive of critical interpretations reading Romans as a letter. Stowers, Rereading of Romans, 29–41. In 29–33, Stowers polemically takes the example of Kümmel’s detailed discussion of Paul’s addressees in Romans, showing that most of the evidence he uses points to Gentile addressees, despite the fact that he concludes that Paul is primarily concerned to address the Jewish Christ-follower minority in Rome. See also following Stowers, Rafael Rodriguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2014)—a book essential for studying Rom 2–4. See Moo, 93. The forensic interpretation is that this passage is primarily about Gentiles, even though most of the passage explicitly speaks about “humans” (ἄνθρωποι)—any humans. As we will see below, 1:19–21 and 1:28–32 concern the sins that pervade humanity.

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the power of sin”). But the question remains, Who is Paul trying to convince with this presentation of the situations of Gentiles, of Jews, then of all humanity? The forensic commentators explicitly posit—as Moo does in his comments on these verses —or simply presuppose that through his entire discourse Paul primarily addresses Jews and Jewish Christ-followers. These general observations are supported, for forensic commentators, by much textual evidence. For instance, is it not appropriate to take note that in 1:18–32 Paul a) assumes that his addressees do not need to be convinced that Gentiles are sinners in need of God’s righteousness (as is shown by the fact that he does not use diatribe features); b) uses well-established Jewish disparaging descriptions of the pagans and their idolatry; and c) assumes that these will be readily recognizable by his addressees—who therefore are to be identified with Jews (Jewish Christ-followers) familiar with Jewish views and literature? This identification of the addressees as Jews and Jewish Christ-followers affects in a drastic way how one understands 1:18–4:25—as becomes clear, when one compares the forensic interpretations (presented below) with the rhetorical interpretations (presented in Chapter 4) for which the addressees are Gentiles.

II A forensic theological commentary on Rom 1:1–32 (A) Rom 1:1–7: Apostleship, christology, gospel, faith, and related theological themes As a forensic theological commentator—primarily concerned with the theological teaching of the letter—one first notes that in these opening verses Paul uses the typical Greek letter opening, involving the identification of sender and recipients and an expression of greetings. But instead of a single and brief opening (e.g., “Paul to those in Rome, greetings”), Paul includes a rich theological teaching underscoring both his status as a legitimate and authoritative apostle and the basic components of the gospel that he preaches. In brief, according to Moo, Paul introduces himself by stating his divine call (1:1), the message that he has been called to proclaim (1:2-4), and the specific task with which he is occupied (1:5-6). Finally comes the address in 1:7a, followed by the usual Pauline salutation in 1:7b.66

Reviewing verse by verse the main features of this forensic theological interpretation— the dominant type of interpretation found, since the Reformation and the Catholic Renewal (Counter Reformation), in the Western European and North American churches and in their missionary fields—will appear unsophisticated. The response of my students to the following comments often was: “Of course! Everybody knows that it is what Paul meant.” But they had never noticed the many implications hidden in the obvious meanings assigned to Paul’s terms and phrases. And they had never taken 66

Moo, 40, emphases added.

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note that these obvious meanings are actually interpretations. With the help of the forensic commentators, the following presentation will strive to make explicit and even to deconstruct these obvious meanings. Although I will not repeat again and again the phrase “according to the forensic interpretation,” everything which follows should be read as qualified by this phrase. Paul’s Call and Mission (1:1; 5-6). How is Paul’s presentation of himself, of the gospel, and of his task understood by forensic theological commentators? First, the traditional letter opening was used by Paul to establish his credentials as an apostle: he has a unique authority to proclaim truthfully the gospel-message. Note that in this forensic interpretation the gospel is a message—therefore, defining its content is essential—and an apostle is primarily a preacher, who is authoritative when his preaching is truthful. Thus, in this interpretation, by using the phrase “servant of Christ Jesus” (1:1a) (as translation of Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ),67 Paul expresses that he views himself as having a comparable authority to that of the prophets of the Old Testament68 Scriptures who accepted God’s call and willingly made themselves “servants of Yahweh.” This conclusion is grounded in the fact that the term δοῦλος (“servant” or “slave”—both translations being understood with the same connotation as someone who has willingly accepted to serve someone else) is used in the LXX to designate, for example, Abraham (Ps 105:42), Moses (2 Kings 18:12), Joshua (Judg 2:8), David (2 Sam 7:5; Ps 78:70; 89:4), prophets like Amos (Amos 3:7), Jeremiah (Jer 7:25, 25:4), Ezekiel (Ezek 38;17), and especially Isaiah (Isa 49:1–8).69 By designating himself as “servant of Christ Jesus,” Paul shows both his total and voluntary devotion to the Lord and the authority that he has by being prophet-like.70 This designation complements Paul’s call (by God) as a (legitimate!) “apostle” (1:1b)—a point that was needed, because (as is shown in his other letters) his apostleship was contested, especially by Jewish Christ-followers (also present in Rome, as 14–15 shows).71 For the Romans (and other believers reading this

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The translation “servant” by the forensic theological commentators, Schlatter, Lagrange, Leenhardt, and Stuhlmacher (as well as NIV, NJB, ESV, NIB, and NRSV) is most consistent with this line of reasoning. Other forensic theological commentators translate “slave” (of Christ Jesus) but comment that this phrase refers to the OT designation of the prophets and expresses a willful “special commitment” or submission to Christ. See, for example, Lagrange, 2; Schlatter, 7; Cranfield, 50–51; Leenhardt, 33; Stuhlmacher, 18–19; Barrett, 15–16; Fitzmyer, 228–29; Moo, 40–41. Sic! “Old Testament” (by contrast with the “New Testament” that supersedes it) is, as we shall see, an appropriate designation for what is designated as the Hebrew Bible in the other two interpretive lines of reasoning. “Old Testament” posits a supersessionist interpretation of Romans. Moo, 40–41. Cranfield, Dunn, Fitzmyer, and Moo translate “slave of Christ Jesus,” but in their comments they emphasize the relationship with the phrase “servant of Yahweh” (in most English translations of the Bible). NRSV has “a servant of Jesus Christ,” positing with a number of manuscripts that “Jesus Christ” is a proper name. By contrast with the interpretations in the two other kinds of interpretation, which take into account other connotations of “slave” that involves being in servitude to (under the power of) a master or Lord. Forensic commentators commonly emphasize that the title “servant of Christ Jesus” is an expression of authority in an office comparable to that of the prophets (e.g., Lagrange, 1–2; Murray, 2; Cranfield, 50–51; Barrett, 17–18; Stuhlmacher, 19) and thus can be viewed as duplicating the title “apostle” as expression of his authority. But others underscore that this phrase necessarily includes the connotations of humility, devotion, and obedience (e.g., Leenhardt, 33; Moo, 41; Dunn, 7–8), and thus complement the title “apostle” that expresses authority.

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letter after them), this means that each believer should accept Paul’s authority, heed his teaching, and imitate him by voluntarily devoting her/his life to serve Christ. Note that this interpretation of “servant/slave (δοῦλος) of Christ Jesus” is marked as part of a forensic theological line of reasoning, by the fact that it is “individualcentered” and focuses on “voluntary/willful” action—in the same way that, in this line of reasoning, sin is intentional, a willful failing to do God’s will.72

The title “apostle” refers to Paul as a “messenger” and thus as a “missionary” (when mission is understood as proclaiming/preaching the theological message that the gospel is)—even though the phrase “set apart for the gospel of God” involves a dual emphasis on the activity of preaching (“set apart for the gospel”), and on God as the origin of the gospel through God’s activity in Christ Jesus which is to be proclaimed.73 Because of his call and of being set apart for the gospel by God (an allusion to his decisive road to Damascus experience and conversion; see Gal 1:11–16), as an apostle Paul has a unique authority:74 he has what can be named either “a divinely given mandate” (1:1b)75 or a Christ-given mandate (1:5)76 with an authority comparable to that of the Twelve;77 he has the authority of proclaiming a gospel he has received, not from humans, but directly “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:12).78 This is further expressed in 1:5a, “through whom [Jesus Christ our Lord] we have received grace and apostleship,” where “grace” is understood as “God’s underserved favour which is the very basis of the Christian life” (“grace” as the “gift of righteousness,” forgiveness)79 or more specifically here as the “underserved favour of apostleship.”80 (Reminder: everything that precedes and follows is according to forensic theological interpretations! Again, in the West, all of this seems to be self-evident, until one considers other legitimate and plausible interpretations – see Chapters 4 and 5.) Through the opening verses (1:1–5) Paul sought to clarify for his readers the main lines of the gospel (as a theological message, the kerygma) that he preached, and this with the purpose of overcoming potential misunderstandings—the letter 72

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We will see the additional role of “knowledge” (having true knowledge or lacking it) in the forensic theological line of reasoning. In my seminar, students discussed two present-day situations where one could presume that Christians were present and should have heeded Paul’s authority and teaching by acting voluntarily (including loving neighbor, 13:8–10). These two situations concerned Christians who were present but pretended to see nothing, stood by, and failed to get involved— paralyzed either by a lack of will or by a lack of knowledge that their responsibility as Christians was to intervene—(1) while an African American man was choked to death and (2) while, at a party, a man gave drinks after drinks (possibly spiked with drugs) to a woman, and then carried her to a bedroom. Moo, 40–43; Fitzmyer, 232–33; Anders Nygren, Commentary on Romans (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1949), 3; Cranfield, 54–55. Barrett, 18. Leenhardt, 34. Dunn, 9. Cranfield, 52. Note that confining the title “apostle” to the Twelve anticipates Acts and later trends not yet present in the time of Paul (Dunn, 9). The “unique authority” of Paul as “apostle” is underscored, for instance, by Fitzmyer, Theology, 106–10; Conzelmann, 45–46; Ridderbos, 448–50. For example, Ridderbos, 173–74. Bultmann, Theology, 281. Cranfield, 65–66.

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was a defense of the true gospel. In this interpretive line of reasoning, the gospel is viewed as the content of faith understood as a series of interconnected theological propositions (propositional truths) which individual believers should hold to be true. It follows that faith—to which Paul the apostle is to bring “all the Gentiles” (1:5)—is primarily understood as believing the gospel (as message, as kerygma). This is selfevident for forensic interpretations, and is expressed concisely by Bultmann: “‘Faith’ is the acceptance of the Christian message.”81 Thus, faith is “believing that certain affirmations are true” (fides quae creditur, in Augustine’s vocabulary), because they are revealed by God (believing “the gospel of God,” 1:1c, that is, here, believing “the gospel revealed by God”).82 Believing and preaching the Gospel that has its origin with God—which is a gift from God—is believing and preaching the Word of God.83 Another consequence of understanding “faith as believing the gospel” is that faith necessarily involves obedience (1:5) on the part of individual believers, because one of the essential tenets of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is our Lord (1:4). Thus faith also includes a willful response (“obedience”) from the believer. Believing the gospel involves submitting oneself to the Lord Jesus Christ. As Moo underscores, Paul called men and women to a faith that was always inseparable from obedience—for the Savior in whom we believe is nothing less than our Lord—and to an obedience that could never be divorced from faith—for we can obey Jesus as Lord only when we have given ourselves to him in faith.84

This is in agreement with Leenhardt, for whom Paul’s view of “faith” (always involving obedience) is accepting as true the Christian message, the gospel. But it is essential to recognize the nature of this message: as becomes clear in Rom 4, the gospel is fundamentally a promise. Faith is always obedience, an act of inner submission to a word which is essentially a promise, an act which accepts as true the word or the person speaking and declaring what he [Christ] is about to do. Faith is the response to a God who acts to open up new possibilities; it clings to a word which is also an action; it trusts in the “good news” which is always the ultimate content of what God says. The object 81 82

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Bultmann, 314, 135, passim. See, for example, Murray, 3; Cranfield, 55; Leenhardt, 34; Fitzmyer, 232, all of whom emphasize that the phrase “gospel of God” should be understood as a genitive of origin: the “gospel from God.” This interpretation of the genitive is demanded by the understanding of “gospel” as the (propositional) content of faith. This view of faith is appropriately called “propositional belief ” in the magisterial book by Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–35; she ultimately argues for what I call a “covenantal community” understanding of pistis against a view of faith as propositional belief, fides quae creditur. Leenhardt, 34–35. This implies that “faith” includes, as a secondary connotation, “believing God” (credere Deo) who revealed the content of faith, as well as the more general connotation of “faith” as “that by which we believe” (fides qua creditor), which is also a gift from God. These formulations of the definitions of “faith” by forensic interpreters are drawn from the third and second definitions (out of six) summarized in TeSelle and Patte, “Faith,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Moo, 52–56. What is posited here is that “obedience of faith” is a genitive of apposition, “the obedience which consists in faith,” as Cranfield does. See also Moo, 51–53.

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations of faith is not an abstract proposition, a static truth. Its object is a person and the word which renders that person actively present.85

These comments by Leenhardt hold on to the forensic understanding of “faith as believing the content of the gospel,” even though this believed gospel is now understood as a promise, which, as preached word “renders that person [Christ] actively present.”86 The Content of the Gospel Preached by Paul (1:2-4). For forensic theological interpretations, Rom 1:2–4 provides the content of the gospel in a nutshell, that is, the content of what Paul as an apostle and missionary proclaimed: [The gospel of God] which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom 1:2–4, NRSV)

1:2. Paul opens these verses by emphasizing that the gospel fulfills the promises of Scriptures. In this way, for the sake of the Roman followers of Christ who might have doubts about the reliability of his ministry, Paul underscores the trustworthiness of the gospel/message that he preaches, as Cranfield underscores.87 Moo explains, By adding the redundant “ahead of time” [= “beforehand”] to the verb “promise” [προεπηγγείλατο], Paul emphasizes the temporal sequence of promise and fulfillment. He therefore touches on what would become two key themes in Romans: the promise (cf. Rom. 4), and the grounding of God’s salvific revelation in his previous purposes and work. .  .  . In Paul’s perspective, as Luther puts it, “Scripture is completely prophetical.”88

What does it mean that “Scripture is promise” and that “Scripture is prophetical” in this forensic interpretation? Moo makes it more explicit in his shorter commentary by introducing the notion of “salvation history.” He notes that Paul is influenced by apocalyptic Judaism (but this does not mean that Moo adopts a realized-apocalyptic interpretation!) which divided the history of God’s work in the world into the “present evil age” and the “age to come,” the new age when the Messiah would come and when the promises of Scriptures are fulfilled. Paul (as well as Jesus himself and other New 85 86

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Leenhardt, 39. This interpretation remains forensic (faith as believing the content of the gospel), although it becomes very close to the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation (Chapter 5 in this book), for which faith is recognizing/believing that the promise of the gospel is presently fulfilled, and this not by preaching of the gospel as word, but by divine interventions. Cranfield, 56–57. See also Karl Barth, They Epistle to The Romans (trans. E. C. Hoskyns; London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 28, where Barth underscores that “the gospel is the word spoken by the prophets from time immemorial, the word which can now be received. . . . The words of the prophets, long fastened under lock and key, are now set free.” This emphasizes both the continuity with the Old Testament and that the proclamation of the gospel supersedes the proclamation of the prophets, a point underscored in a different way by Moo. Moo, 44.

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Testament writers) “adopted this scheme but modified it in light of the two separate comings of the Messiah. Jesus’s first coming inaugurates the new age of redemption without eradicating the present, evil age.”89 Through his use of this apocalyptic dualistic scheme as a framework for his forensic interpretation, Moo shows that he understands that the age of the prophets, and more generally the age of the Old Testament, and all their promises are superseded by their fulfillments in Jesus, in the gospel, in the church, and ultimately in the second coming of Christ “when the present age will cease to be while the new age, in an enhanced form, will remain.”90 Saying that the promises of Scriptures are fulfilled emphasizes both the continuity of God’s work through salvation history (and therefore the continuity between Judaism and the gospel of Christ Jesus, that needs to be understood as the prolongation of the Old Testament salvation history into a new age) and that the gospel now supersedes the Old Testament, the prophets, and also Judaism (so, as noted earlier, the phrase “Old Testament” is appropriate in this interpretation, since the “Old Testament” is superseded by the “New Testament”), a point that Leenhardt also makes in his own words.91 1:3–4. All commentators recognize that in all probability Paul used traditional formulae as he wrote this creed. For a forensic theological interpretation, the question is what precisely is the theological content of the gospel, the kerygma as summarized in 1:3–4? As Moo points out (44–45), everyone can recognize that it is a Christological teaching about “the Son of God” (“concerning his son,” 1:3a) defined in two parallel participial clauses (1:3b-4, written in two columns): “who has come” “who was appointed” “from the seed of David” “Son of God in power” “according to the flesh” “according to the Spirit of holiness” “from the resurrection of the dead”

But this Christological teaching is understood in different ways by three forensic theological interpretations concerned with the way Christ is defined. A. For Cranfield,92 largely following Lagrange,93 these two parallel clauses present successively Christ’s human nature (the incarnated Son of God, “according to the flesh”) and his divine nature (the exalted Son of God in power after his resurrection, who manifests his power by giving the Holy Spirit)—a status “declared” to the world when he was resurrected from the dead. In sum, one can interpret these verses as a presentation of the two natures of Christ—his divinity and his humanity—and how they are interrelated, an ontological Christology that will be debated and refined during the councils of the following centuries.

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Moo, Encountering Romans, 25. Moo, Encountering Romans. Leenhardt, 35. Cranfield, 57–65. Lagrange, 5–9. See also the similar interpretations by Barth, 28–30; Stuhlmacher, 19–20, and 22–25; and Leenhardt, (with a significant variant concerning the interpretation of 1:4a as “declared Son of God in power” [following the Greek fathers] to avoid an adoptionist Christology).

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B. By contrast for Moo,94 one needs to understand “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit of holiness” within Paul’s larger salvation-historical framework: in which two “aeons” or eras are set over against one another: the old era, dominated by sin, death, and the flesh, and the new era, characterized by righteousness, life, and the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit  .  .  . In Jesus’ earthly life (his life in “the realm of the flesh”), he was the Davidic seed, the Messiah . . . Jesus is also, in “the realm of the spirit,” the powerful, life-giving Son of God. In Christ the “new era” of redemptive history has begun, and in this new stage of God’s plan Jesus reigns as Son of God, powerfully active to bring salvation to all who believe (cf. 1:16).95 In other words, “Paul’s typical ‘flesh versus Spirit’ contrast suggests that he is contrasting not two natures of Christ but two stages in his existence. As God’s Son, Jesus came to earth as David’s descendent and accomplished the work of the Messiah; but after his resurrection, and through the work of the Holy Spirit, he entered into a new stage of existence, ‘Son-of-God-in-power’.”96 C. A third forensic theological interpretation – represented by Dunn – reads 1:3–4, at least implicitly, in terms of Phil 2:6–11. “From the seed of David” expressed that Christ was the anointed Son of David, the royal Messiah (called “my Son” by Yahweh in Ps 2:7). But by adding “in terms of the flesh”97 Paul adds a negative connotation: “So far as Jesus’ role in God’s saving purpose through the gospel was concerned, Jesus’ physical descent, however integral to that role, was not so decisive as his status κατa πνεar ” [according to the Spirit].98 Then, 1:4, Christ was “appointed” (not simply declared) Son of God, becoming something he was not before or taking on a role which was not previously his. Through the resurrection he became “Son of God in power.” As Dunn puts it, “In power” . . . indicated that Jesus’ divine sonship (v 3) has been “upgraded” or “enhanced” by the resurrection, so that he shared more fully the very power of God, not simply in status (at God’s right hand [as κύριος]), but in executive authority . . . The gospel was not about Jesus simply as Messiah . . . The full extent of God’s purpose could only be realized through Jesus as Messiah (of Israel) risen from the dead to become the Son of God (for all).99 Thus for Dunn, the twofold presentation of Christ “in terms of the flesh” and “in terms of the Spirit” is neither contrasting the two natures of Christ (Cranfield) nor contrasting two stages in his existence (Moo); rather it is expressing the complementarity of his two roles in God’s purpose: “As Messiah (of Israel)” and as “the Son of God [in power] (for all).”100 94

Moo, 44–51; see also Ridderbos Theology, 64–68. Moo, 50. 96 Moo, Encountering Romans, 42. 97 Dunn, 13. 98 Dunn, 13. 99 Dunn, 14. 100 Here Dunn’s interpretation is borderline Covenantal before becoming fully Covenantal in his Theology (see Chapter 4). Indeed, this understanding of the Christological teaching of these verses 95

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The authors of forensic Pauline Theologies (such as Bultmann and Ridderbos) seek to integrate these three points of view by emphasizing their interrelation in the core of the gospel, namely the “one salvation-process” that Christ’s advent, death, and resurrection form as the inauguration of the time of salvation.101 Greetings (1:7). The addressees are specified—all those in Rome who would recognize themselves as “beloved of God, called to be saints” (Moo). Through these phrases (and the blessing, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”), Paul does not focus on behavior but on status: “Paul implies that they are God’s chosen people; for those phrases echo OT designations of Israel. In so transferring language used of Israel in the OT to Christians, Paul initiates an important theme of the first eight chapters of the letter.”102 The Roman Christ-followers are transformed into “saints,” into God’s chosen people, thereby abandoning their former identity.103 “Grace” (as a variation on a traditional Greek greeting) denotes, in Cranfield’s words, “God’s underserved love revealed in Christ, and so can be said to sum up the whole gospel in a single word.”104 The forensic connotation of “grace” as “gracious forgiveness” received from God the Judge presupposes the individualcentered view of sin of forensic interpretations.105 For this interpretation, “grace” as “gracious forgiveness” is made explicit through its association with justification in Rom 3:24 (“justified freely by his grace,” NIV), which is viewed as the interpretive key for understanding all the other instances of χάρις in Romans.106 In the same way that this forensic interpretation underscores that the fulfillments of the promises of Scripture in the gospel expressed that God’s work through salvation history is marked both by continuity and by progression—thus the gospel supersedes the Old Testament—so this blessing affirms the continuity between Israel and Christians, and also expresses that the Christians are the new chosen people of God, with the implication that the new chosen people supersedes the old chosen people.

could be compatible with the “relational Christology” (by contrast with an ontological Christology) that Tilling finds in Paul’s letters. See Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), especially 63–74, as a good summary of his overall thesis (although he does not comment on Rom 1:3–4). 101 Bultmann, 293; Ridderbos, 44–90. 102 Moo, 54–55. 103 In such a case the identity of Christ-followers is a universal new identity and a universal new condition, a “new self ” that replaces the “old self ” crucified with Christ (6:6). This radically new and universal identity involves a radical subtraction of the “old self ”—Paul abandoning his Jewish identity and the Romans abandoning their Gentile identity. In this interpretation Paul “announces a universalizing operation whereby truth emerges by radically subtracting itself from the differences of ethnicity, culture and sex/sexuality” as Benjamin Dunning says in Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 2), appropriately summarizing Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003; French, 1997). 104 Cranfield, 71. 105 Sin understood as failing to do God’s will either because one does not know it or because one does not want to do it, and thus as intentionally failing to love/help others, or intentionally hurting them—with references to 1:18–3:20 and Rom 7. 106 One finds χάρις in Rom 1:5, 7; 3:24; 4:4, 16; 5:2, 15, 17, 20, 21; 6:1, 14, 15, 17; 7:25; 11:6; 15:15 (and 16:20).

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Romans: Three Exegetical Interpretations For a summary of the forensic theological interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Servant [δοῦλος] of Jesus Christ (Paul a) (a.k.a. slave of); Called (apostle, saints); Apostle (1:1); God; Gospel of God (1:1); Spirit (of holiness) (1:4); Scriptures; Faith (1:5); Obedience (to the Lord) (1:5); Christ Jesus; Grace (1:5, 7); God’s Beloved in Rome (1:7): Saints, called to be (1:7)— see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the first column of the “APPENDIX: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their forensic theological interpretations can be compared/ contrasted with their interpretations in the inclusive covenantal community and realized-apocalyptic/messianic readings.

(B) Rom 1:8–15: Thanksgiving, prayer, authority of the apostle, transmission of the Gospel After identifying the recipients of the letter and giving thanks for them (1:7–8), Paul explains in 1:11–15 why he wants to come to Rome: namely, “to share some spiritual gift to strengthen you” (1:11) and to “reap some harvest among you” (1:13). This amounts “to proclaim[ing] the gospel to you also who are in Rome” (1:15). Such is (in this interpretation) Paul’s obligation as an apostle/missionary “under obligation” to “both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish” (1:14). Paul’s obligation to proclaim the gospel (as summarized in 1:2–4) to all is a result of his call as an apostle by God/Christ; it is part of his “obedience of faith,” that is, of his submission to the Lordship of Christ. For Moo, “what is remarkable about this section is a certain awkwardness on Paul’s part in stating his reasons for wanting to come to Rome.”107 Indeed, Paul almost corrects himself in 1:12 and hesitates to assert his authority (as he also does in 15:14–17). This hesitation might reflect his expectation that the Roman Christians have doubts about his message and ministry (so Michel, Wilckens, and Stuhlmacher), or more likely for Moo (following Meyer, Barrett, Murray, Cranfield), as he writes to a church he did not found, Paul carefully wants to avoid the impression that he is “building on someone else's foundation” (15:20, NIV). Rom 1:8. Paul offers a thanksgiving108 for the Romans, that he addresses to “my God”—an expression of his personal piety, as in 1 Cor 1:4; Phil 1:3, Philemon 4,— adding that he does so “through Jesus Christ.” This means either that Christ, as the risen Lord, acts as the mediator of Paul’s thanksgiving before God109 or that “Christ has created the access to God for such thanks.”110 The rest of the verse (“your faith is proclaimed throughout the world”) is hyperbolic and flattering.111 Paul gives thanks to God for the fact that the Romans have faith, showing “obedience of faith”; this is a compliment for the achievement of the Romans, designed to win them over. This hyperbolic compliment nevertheless expresses a reality: the fact that “people in the 107

Moo, 56. It is noteworthy that thanksgiving is not a theme that requires explanation for the authors of the forensic Pauline Theologies; everybody knows what this term means! 109 Meyer, 41–42; Leenhardt, 42; Fitzmyer, 244, Dunn, 28. 110 Moo, 57. 111 Meyer, 42. 108

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Roman capital had bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus is something that would be widely known.”112 Rom 1:9–10. Paul underscores through a “witness formula” or oath (“God is my witness”) and a description of his ministry (as a “preaching” ministry—interpreting ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ, 1:9b, as “in preaching the gospel”); it is a “service in its vertical aspect as an offering of worship to God,”113 and therefore as a prayerful service, his prayers for the Romans are genuine. In this interpretive line of reasoning, it is posited that prayer is making petitions or supplications to God (Prat, 340–41)114 for someone (because one has personal concerns for a person, Dunn, 29) or for something—as in 1:10b where Paul prays that he might succeed in coming to the Romans. But interestingly enough, here Paul does not “spell out any specific petitions for the Christians there” (Moo, 59), probably (according to this interpretation) in order to avoid claiming any authority over the Romans. Rom 1:11–15. For Moo, by explaining why he wants to come to Rome, “Paul really advances only one reason, which he delineates in three roughly parallel purpose statements: ‘To share some spiritual gift’(11); ‘to have a harvest’ (13); ‘to preach the gospel’ (15).”115 In the three cases, the structure of authority that Paul has as an apostle (as defined above) is the same: Paul has something to share with others (here, the Roman believers) that they lack. In 1:11 he shares “some spiritual gift” that would strengthen their faith and that they lack. Likewise n 1:13, through his apostolic labors, he hopes to have a “harvest” among the Romans, that is, “an increase in the number of Christians through evangelization ‘among’ the Romans and a strengthening of the faith of the Roman Christians themselves.”116 For Paul, this sharing of his spiritual gift and of his apostolic labors to bring a harvest among the Romans is grounded in “his sense of missionary ‘obligation’”: the Greek phrase ὀφειλέτης εἰμί, literally “I am a debtor” (NRSV or “I am indebted”) is understood here as “I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks . . .” (1:14 NIV).117 “Paul is deeply conscious of his calling, of his being set apart for the gospel (1:1), and it is this divine obligation to use his gift (Eph 3:8) that motivates Paul”118 in his mission directed to all of Gentile humanity,119 or to all of humanity (for other forensic theological commentators). Paul’s sense of indebtedness is that he is under obligation toward God and Christ to share the gifts 112

Moo, 57. Moo, 58; Meyer, 42. 114 It is interesting that, except for Prat, prayer, like thanksgiving is not a theme that requires explanation for the authors of the forensic Pauline Theologies. By contrast, for Samuel Wells, vicar at St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), it is essential to define what one means by prayer, because there are several understandings of what prayer is. A prayer of petition or supplication—posited here by Prat, Moo, and other forensic interpreters—is what Wells calls a “resurrection prayer.” It is praying for a divine intervention, for a miracle. Such a prayer presupposes the forensic theological view of faith as “believing that” God can do it. Wells contrasts “resurrection prayer” with what he calls “incarnation prayer” (the inclusive covenantal community interpretation; see Chapter 4) and “transfiguration prayer” (the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation; see Chapter 5). Samuel Wells, “A Different Way to Pray,” Christian Century (April 30, 2014), 51. 115 Moo, 59. 116 Moo, 61. 117 Moo, 61. 118 Moo, 61, his emphasis. 119 Moo, 62. 113

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he received from God for the benefit of others: the Romans, all the Gentiles, and ultimately all of humanity. Similarly, Leenhardt comments, “The grace of God which has made of him what he is imposes on him as it were an obligation which he must fulfill by working at his apostolic ministry.”120 Yet, Paul is aware that these mentions of his apostolic authority might be perceived by the Romans as authoritarian. So in 1:12, without withdrawing the expressions of his authority, Paul uses diplomacy: “He must exercise tact in asserting his authority .  .  . by recognizing the mutual gain that will accrue from his visit.”121 Yet, the structure of his apostolic authority remains intact, as is clear in 1:13–14 (as we noted above). Thus Paul continues, “And so my desire is to preach the gospel (εὐαγγελίσασθαι) also to you in Rome” (1:15; Moo’s translation). This is a reference to the transmission of the Gospel, understood by all forensic interpretation as preaching the gospel.122 Since the Roman Christians are already believers, this verse “is, at first sight, strange.”123 But one can understand it if one understands “preach the gospel” as referring “to the ongoing work of teaching and discipleship that builds on initial evangelization.”124 For a summary of the forensic theological interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Thanksgiving (1:8); Ministry (1:9); Prayer (1:9-10); Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14); Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14); Gospel, Transmission of the, (= gospelize, εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the first column of the “APPENDIX: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their forensic theological interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the inclusive covenantal community and realizedapocalyptic/messianic readings.

(C) Rom 1:16–17/18: The theme of the letter125 Rom 1:16–17 provides a theological formulation of the theme of the letter, or even in Barrett’s words, “a summary of Paul’s theology as a whole”:126

120

Leenhardt, 45. Moo, 60; similarly, Leenhardt, 44. So 1:11 (“sharing with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you”) is here understood as the main focus: Paul with his authority as apostle has gifts that the Romans lack and that he is ready to share with them, so as to put them on the right path. Thus 1:12 is simply “diplomatic”; and συμπαρακληθῆναι ἐν ὑμῖν is understood (following Liddell & Scott) as referring to a mutual exhortation aimed at strengthening each other (NJB) or putting each other on the right path, as 12:1 is understood as “I exhort you”—or as one of its variants: “I appeal to you” (RSV, NRSV) “I urge you” (NIV, NJB, NAV). Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 will propose different options, well grounded in the Greek. 122 For example, Leenhardt, 46. 123 Moo, 62. 124 Moo, 63. 125 I include 1:18 here, first because the forensic commentaries underscore that its content is complementary with 1:16–17; and second because this breakdown of the text is required for the other types of interpretations. 126 Barrett, 27. 121

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For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and then to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is being revealed, from faith for faith, even as it is written, “The one who is righteous by faith will live” [Hab 2:4]. (Rom 1:16–17, Moo)

For all forensic theological interpretations, the theme of the letter expressed in these two verses is “the gospel centered upon justification by faith,” or simply “justification by faith.” This might be surprising at first, since these verses do not use the word “justification” (δικαίωσις, found only in Rom 4:25, 5:18) and do not even speak of “the righteousness of God through faith (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ διὰ πίστεως) in Jesus Christ” (3:22, NRSV). Actually, and this is another surprise, Jesus Christ is not mentioned in 1:16–17, even though these verses are viewed as the theme of the letter, or the summary of Paul’s theology! That is, it is only as a result of an interpretation that forensic commentators can say that these verses are about justification by faith. They have made particular analytical textual choices (including choosing to relate features of these verses to certain parts of the letter rather than to others) and hermeneutical theological choices (especially adopting a forensic perspective). Therefore, as can be expected, forensic commentators have a range of understandings of justification by faith in 1:16–17, all of them remaining in the forensic interpretive line of reasoning. Following Moo we begin by setting the teaching of 1:16–17 about justification by faith within the consistent (and thus plausible) interpretive reasoning of forensic interpretations. This provides the consensus forensic understanding of “justification by faith.” Then, in view of the centrality of “justification by faith,” following the text closely with a whole series of forensic exegetes, we note the divergent forensic interpretations of key themes: gospel and its power; salvation; righteousness of God (and its relation to justification); and faith and its role in justification. In conclusion we will show the coherence (and plausibility) of each of these different forensic interpretations, and briefly point out the contextual implications of adopting one rather than the other. The Consensus Forensic Understanding of “Justification by Faith” is most explicitly presented by Moo as he formulates it over against “inclusive community interpretations” (what we call, inclusive covenantal community interpretations, see Chapter 4).127 Moo does so when outlining his reading of the entire letter in the introduction to his commentary. First, in this forensic interpretation, one needs to understand that for Paul the gospel is about the salvation of “individual sinners” and how God acted in Christ for that purpose. The necessary condition for guilty sinners to be brought in a relationship with God and to be destined to eternal life is to have faith in Christ: justification by faith. Thus Moo writes The bulk of Romans focuses on how God has acted in Christ to bring the individual sinner into a new relationship with himself (chaps. 1-4), to provide for that individual’s eternal life in glory (chaps. 5-8), and to transform that individual’s life on earth now (12:1-15:13). . . . The message of the gospel is that God brings

127

For Moo, foregrounding what Paul says about community unduly emphasizes what is and should remain in the “background” of the letter.

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guilty sinners into a relationship with himself and destines them to eternal life when they believe in his Son, Jesus the Messiah. Moreover, this message is nothing more than what we call justification by faith. . . . Not only does justification by faith guard against the Jewish attempt to make works of the law basic for salvation in Paul’s day; it expresses the resolute resistance of Paul, and the NT authors, to the constant human tendency to make what people do decisive for salvation.128

But beyond these general comments, forensic interpreters disagree among themselves regarding what is involved in “justification by faith,” and thus how this central Pauline concept as expressed in 1:16–17 is to be understood. 1:16a, b: Divergent Forensic Understandings of “Gospel” and its Power. Disagreements about the understanding of “gospel” first surface in the interpretations of 16a, “For I am not ashamed” (of the gospel) that shows Paul’s eagerness to “preach the gospel,” as expressed (according to the forensic interpretation of 1:15) by the conjunction “for.” Everybody agrees that Paul uses a litotes (an understatement) when he says “I am not ashamed.” But why is he not ashamed? There are three answers among interpreters. For a first group of exegetes, Paul might have used an early Christian formula (cf. Mark 8:38, Luke 9:26, 2 Tim 1:8) that demands that believers reject apostasy; then “I am not ashamed” means “I acknowledge” or “I confess.”129 Alternatively, for a second group, Paul might have emphasized his “pride” at being associated with the gospel, despite the fact that for many (including in Rome) it is a shameful message—the foolishness of the word about the cross (1 Cor 1:18).130 In either of these two cases, the gospel is a message to be proclaimed and defended against adversity. For a third group of exegetes, Paul proclaims the gospel without shame despite all obstacles—including the conflicts with Jewish Christ-followers who contest his preaching (in Jerusalem, 15:31, and Rome, 14:1–15:13)—with confidence that the preaching of the gospel (Rom 1:15) will be successful, because it manifests “the power of God,” as the next phrase expresses (1:16b).131 To put it bluntly, the question is, Does the gospel need to be defended (as the first two interpretations imply)? Or can the gospel defend itself? It all depends upon the way one understands “The gospel . . . is the power of God” (1:16b). Fitzmyer proposes: “Whenever the gospel is proclaimed, God’s power becomes operative and succeeds in saving . . . As used here, the phrase formulates the dynamic character of God’s gospel; the word may announce the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the emphasis is on that word as a force or power unleashed in human history.”132 Much is at stake in the interpretation of this phrase because it ultimately concerns “the effects of the Christ event.”133 Thus it is important to recognize the differences between the two forensic explanations which are proposed. For Moo, the gospel is the power of God, because of its content, namely because it proclaims Jesus Christ “Son-of-God-in-power” (v. 4). In Moo’s words, this gospel, “whose content

128

Moo, 28–29. Italics in Moo’s text. Exemplified by Wilckens, 82; Fitzmyer, 255; Stuhlmacher, 28; Dunn, 38. 130 Exemplified by Moo, 65–66; Barrett, 28. 131 Exemplified by Michel, 86, Leenhardt, 46. 132 Fitzmyer, 256. 133 Fitzmyer, 116–24. 129

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is Jesus Christ ‘appointed Son-of-God-in-power’ (v. 4), mediates ‘the power of God leading to salvation’.”134 By contrast, for Leenhardt,135 it is because of its preaching that the gospel is the power of God. It is as preached that the gospel is salvific and reveals the righteousness of God, and as such it powerfully manifests salvation (in the present of the preaching of the gospel). Similarly, for Barrett the effect of the preached gospel is to provide the “proleptic enjoyment of salvation” that it “announces and anticipates”.136 Therefore the question is: Is the power of God located in the content of the gospel? Or is it in the effects that the gospel as preached has upon people? This distinction is related to divergences among forensic understandings regarding salvation, the righteousness of God, and faith. 1:16c: (The gospel is) the power of God for salvation.137 In what sense? For Moo, it is because the gospel is “about salvation.”138 For Paul, salvation is the content of the gospel as message. It has most frequently “a negative meaning” of “deliverance from eschatological judgment,” where human sinners are before God, the righteous Judge;139 a deliverance from the wrath of God “finalized only at the last day” (cf. 13:11).140 But salvation also has positive nuances; for Moo and others, it is receiving “life” (the “righteous will live” 1:17c)—eternal life (2:7, etc.) and life in the “already” of the present of the believer, and involves “the restoration of the sinner to a share of the ‘glory (δόξα) of God’” (cf. 3:23, 8:18–24).141 Salvation is the positive, transformative effect for believers of the Christ event, that is, of the content of the gospel as the message about the Christ event.142 Leenhardt agrees with this forensic interpretation, but he insists on the positive, transformative effect for believers and that this effect is that of the gospel as preached (see 1:1 and 15)—that is, the gospel as logos.143 This is what Paul expresses by using the present tense when speaking about the gospel (“it is the power of God for salvation” and later “in it the righteousness of God is revealed” 1:17). As Dodd emphasized, “The present tense of the verb is all important.”144 What has a powerful effect is not what happened in the past (in the time of Jesus Christ, the time of the content of the message), but what happens in the present of the gospel, that is, the gospel as preached— and also the faith response which makes this Word operative,145 as expressed in the

134

Moo, 66; see also Stuhlmacher, 28; Fitzmyer, 256. Leenhardt, 49–50, and also Cranfield, 86–87; 110; Dunn, 39. 136 Barrett, 28. Cf. Fitzmyer, 256. 137 Although the words εἰς σωτηρίαν, “for salvation,” are missing in manuscript G, it should be retained in view of the evidence of the other manuscripts and because it expresses the purpose of the gospel as God’s power (with Fitzmyer, 256). 138 Moo, 66–67. 139 Cranfield, 89. 140 Barrett, 28, on the basis of 5:9. 141 Moo, 67; Cranfield, 89; Dunn, 39. 142 A point emphasized by Fitzmyer, 256, cf. 116–24. 143 Leenhardt, 49; following Lagrange, 17. Once again Leenhardt’s emphasis on the “present” dimension of salvation comes close to the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation, even as his interpretation resolutely remains forensic. 144 C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Moffatt New Testament commentary (New York: Long & Smith, 1932). 145 Murray, 27–28. 135

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next phrase (“salvation to everyone who has faith”) discussed below. Leenhardt makes this point very clear. In preaching the gospel the apostle is aware of revealing the righteousness of God with the efficacy inherent in such a revelation. The power of his word as a preacher flows from the fact that God, by his agency, discloses the divine righteousness.146 Preaching is everywhere effectual in mediating salvation .  .  . the gospel [as preached] is a power for salvation, and an instrument of the merciful righteousness of God, because it is the power of God.147

Before dealing with the rest of 1:16 concerning who is affected by the power of the gospel, let us consider the rest of Paul’s explanation of the sense in which the gospel is “power for salvation”—including how its negative meaning (salvation from eschatological condemnation) and its positive meaning (its present effect upon believers) are understood in light of the revelation of the “righteousness of God” (1:17a). 1:17a: Divergent Forensic Understandings of the Revealed “Righteousness of God.” Forensic commentators agree that the phrase 1:17a, “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed,” refers to the way in which the gospel reveals how salvation occurs through the gospel, namely by God giving “righteousness,” that is, the status of being acquitted, to sinners who therefore have no longer to fear the eschatological judgment. But forensic commentators differ in their interpretations according to where they find the interpretive key: either (1) in one or another of the possible grammatical understandings of the genitive in the phrase “righteousness of God” or (2) in a philological assessment of the word δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynê) that can be translated righteousness or justice. These two options remain in the forensic interpretive line of reasoning, even though they lead to different understandings of “righteousness of God,” as well as of “justification” (by faith) and of “justified” (a person who is “righteous,” 1:17c). The first option is to understand “righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ— dikaiosynê theou) by putting the emphasis on the righteousness as a gift from God (genitive of source or origin) following Luther and the traditional Protestant forensic interpretation of 1:17a, as Moo does.148 First this involves agreeing that “the formal meaning of dikaiosynê . . . is a forensic-eschatological term” even as righteousness is also a present reality.149 This also involves strongly emphasizing that “righteousness of God” is a genitive of source—the righteousness of God is a status given by God to human beings: God as a righteous merciful judge gives the status of righteousness to sinners—all this without denying that this phrase has a secondary connotation due to its subjective genitive (God acts as subject/agent who reveals his righteousness). But, this first option followed by Moo excludes the possibility that “righteousness of 146

Leenhardt, 49. Leenhardt, 56. 148 Together with Nygren, 74–77; Ridderbos, 163–66; Cranfield, 92–99; Bultmann, 270–87; and Conzelmann, 214–20. 149 Bultmann, 273, 276. 147

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God” be a possessive genitive, according to which “righteousness” would be simply an attribute possessed by God.150 In this latter case, as Moo points out, “righteousness of God” is best understood in the framework of “the imagery of the law court. . . . We can picture God’s righteousness as the act or decision by which the judge declares innocent a defendant.”151 Therefore by giving them the status of acquitted “God brings people into right relationship with himself.”152 Yet, it is important to note with Bultmann that “the righteousness which God adjudicates to [a person] of faith is not a ‘sinlessness’ in the sense of ethical perfection, but a ‘sinlessness’ in the sense that God does not ‘count’ human sin against that person.”153 Or in Cranfield’s words, “We regard the interpretation which takes θεοῦ [theou] as a genitive of origin and δικαιοσύνη [dikaiosynê] as referring to the righteous status which is given by God as being much the more probable.”154 God’s act of justification—the act of giving the righteous status, of acquitting—remains in the forensic sphere. Yet, this acquittal is far from being a “legal fiction.” In Moo’s words, God’s act of justification “is no more fiction than is the release from imprisonment experienced by the pardoned criminal.”155 In this traditional Protestant forensic interpretation, justification and being justified have similar connotations rooted in the concept of the righteousness of God (given by God). Indeed, the verbal root of righteousness, δικαιόω, dikaioõ (see 2:13; 3:4, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30; 4:2, 5; 5:1, 9; 6:7; 8:30, 33) is appropriately translated “to justify”: thus, for Moo, “dikaioõ in Paul means not ‘make righteous’ but ‘declare righteous,’ or ‘acquit,’ on the analogy of the verdict pronounced by a judge.”156 Someone “justified” or “righteous” (1:17c) is someone who has the status “acquitted.” Similarly, as Moo notes, “to justify signifies, according to forensic usage, to acquit a guilty one and declare him or her righteous.”157 In sum, this first type of forensic interpretation emphasizes “righteousness of God” as the end-result of the process of justification; it is what is revealed in/through the gospel to the believer, namely that he/she has the status of “acquitted.” Righteousness is “imputed” (or credited) to the sinner—and thus the believer is “righteous” and does not need to fear the final judgment. A second option does not deny that believers receive the gift of righteousness, acquittal, from God but nevertheless emphasizes “righteousness” as an attribute of God (possessive or attributive genitive). In such a case, for Fitzmier “righteousness of God”

150

See Moo, 70. Moo, 75. 152 Moo, 74. 153 Bultmann, 276. 154 Cranfield, 98. 155 Moo, 87. 156 Moo, 86, emphasis added. 157 Moo, 86, emphasis added. These quotations from Moo represent well the traditional understanding of justification by faith in “Forensic Theological interpretations.” The forensic character of these interpretations is made much more explicit when forensic interpreters underscore their disagreement with “inclusive community interpretations” (that we call covenantal community interpretations, see Chapter 4), as Moo does here. Stuhlmacher, despite a different forensic interpretation, does the same in Peter Stuhlmacher, Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001). 151

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(δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ) is best translated “God’s uprightness.”158 And since God is righteous/ upright, his activity also is; therefore the “righteousness of God” also refers, through a secondary connotation, to the righteous interventions of this upright God (subjective genitive) who acquits sinners. Schlatter, followed by Wilckens and Fitzmyer,159 reach the conclusion that “righteousness” is an attribute of God and thus of God’s actions (rather than God's gift in itself) by noting that Paul sets the phrase “righteousness of God” (1:17) in parallel with the phrases “power of God” (1:16) and “wrath of God” (1:18) (as well as with the phrases “faithfulness of God” [3:3], “truthfulness of God” [3:7], which are virtual synonyms of “righteousness of God”).160 This is marked by Paul’s contrast of “the righteousness of God” (1:17) with “the wrath of God” (1:18); the latter is clearly an attribute, property, or quality of God. Then one can conclude with Fitzmyer that “because that sense [of righteousness of God or God’s righteousness] is also found in 3:5 and best suits the other verses in ch. 3, that sense is used for all passages in Romans in which that phrase occurs.”161 Such interpretations remain forensic, as Fitzmyer makes explicit, by emphasizing that understanding “righteousness” as an attribute of both God and God’s activity means that this righteousness is not static. So, after stating that the genitive, “of God,” describes “God’s upright being and his upright activity,” Fitzmyer clarifies: When dikaiosynê is called an attribute or quality, nothing static is implied; it is an aspect of God’s power, whence proceeds his acquitting and salvific activity in a forensic mode. Paul uses dikaiosynê theou in the sense in which God’s uprightness is spoken of in postexilic writings of the OT . . . It is the quality whereby God actively acquits his sinful people, manifesting towards them his power and gracious activity in a just judgment (see Isa 46:13; 51:5, 6, 8; 56:1; 61:10; Ps 40:9-10). It is now manifested toward humanity because of what Christ Jesus has done for them.162

This second type of forensic interpretation emphasizes the ongoing process of righteousness as justification, and within this process the central role of God: the powerful and gracious activity of God; the “righteousness/uprightness of God.” In sum, what is revealed in/through the gospel to the believer is God’s righteous intervention—an effective righteousness—through which God as the righteous/ upright Judge not only acquits the sinner, but also transforms his/her being. Thus Stuhlmacher wrote, “To justify,” dikaioõ, means “make righteous/upright,” and being justified is being graciously acquitted (and thus no longer fearing the last judgment) and transformed into an upright person. “Justification means the establishment of a new being before God.”163 158

With Fitzmyer, 262. Wilckens, 202–33 and Fitzmyer, 257. 160 Schlatter, Romans: The Righteousness of God, 20–21.The only use of “righteousness of God” as a gift from God would be in 10:3, where it is paired with a use of “righteousness of God” in the attributive sense. 161 Fitzmyer, 257. 162 Fitzmyer, 257–58, emphases added. 163 Stuhlmacher, Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification, 61–62. He adds, “Therefore, the controversial and—between Protestants and Catholics since the 16th century—much discussed distinction 159

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A third option of forensic interpretation of “righteousness of God” is proposed by Leenhardt who takes into account the fact that the terms “righteousness/justice” (dikaiosynê), “to justify” (dikaioõ), and therefore “justification” (dikaiôsis) refer to a specific kind of “relation” or better of “interrelation”—rather than to a person’s quality, status, or act. After underscoring that the gospel as “power of God for salvation” is the “preached gospel” (as discussed above) Leenhardt notes that this gospel is an “efficacious word of God the sovereign Judge,” making it clear that he espouses a forensic interpretation—usually in line with the second option above. But Leenhardt continues by noting that a person (divine or human) cannot be righteous by her/himself; he/ she is righteous when he/she is in a right relation (a just relation) with another or with others.164 Far from distracting Leenhardt from a forensic interpretation, this stress upon the relationality of righteousness, justice, and justification underscores that 1:16– 17 are best interpreted in a forensic way, because “juridical ideas are preeminently ideas describing the right relations between persons.”165 Thus he concludes, The ideas of righteousness and justification do no express what human or God are in themselves, but a certain status of their relations, and the situation arising out of the latter. The righteous God is he who justifies the human; the righteous human is the person who is justified by the righteous God. When God proclaims a human righteous he creates a new situation; he brings the human into a new relation with himself; he bestows on the human his favour; he gives the human access to himself; he allows the human to call him Father; he owns the human as his son. God does not speak in vain and when he speaks he acts. Justification is an efficacious word of God . . . . For Paul, the inheritor of Hebrew thought, justification is an efficacious word of God the sovereign Judge, who thus draws the believer into new conditions of existence and thus confer on him/her newness of life.166

In sum, in this third type of forensic interpretation, the righteousness of God is manifested in the upright and loving relationship of God, the Judge, with human beings:

between ‘imputed’ righteousness (which is only credited to the sinner) and ‘effective’ righteousness (which transforms the sinner in his or her being) cannot be maintained from the Pauline text. Both belong together for the apostle.” 164 Conceptualizing δικαιοσύνη (and other related terms) as referring to a quality, a value, the worth of a person is facilitated by the English translation “righteousness,” rather than “justice”—as is demanded in the Latin (iustitia) and the Romance languages when a single word (justice”) translates the single word δικαιοσύνη. Leenhardt, writing and thinking in French, can readily understand all this discussion in terms of “justice” and thus in terms of “right relations.” 165 Leenhardt, 53. He reaches this conclusion despite the fact that he takes note and emphasizes (50–54) that for Paul diakosyne, righteousness/justice, is a covenantal term. Leenhardt insists that in Hebrew thought δικαιοσύνη (diakosyne, righteousness/justice) is to be understood (as is the case in the LXX) as equivalent of ‫( צְדָ קָה‬tsedakah) and refers to relationships (among persons in a community; between God and human beings) and not to a quality, value or worth of the persons in themselves. Here Leenhardt’s emphasis on “relationships” at the core of Paul’s teaching comes close to covenantal community interpretations (see Chapter 4). 166 Leenhardt, 56–57. Here and elsewhere I provide a sex-inclusive translation of Leenhardt from the French; yet, for the convenience of English language readers I refer to the pages of the English translation of his commentary.

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it is “the mercy of God operating to make salvation available to human.”167 Justification is the process through which God graciously establishes this new relationship, which “emerges independently of all human causality. It is an event which is rooted beyond all human possibilities. It reflects the sole power of God active in the service of his love, the sovereign intervention promised for the end of the age.”168 Being justified is for believers (re)entering and embodying this upright/righteous relationship with God and with others. “To justify,” dikaioõ, means interacting justly/uprightly with others— on the part of God with humans, and on the part of humans with other humans and God. Which of these three options for interpreting “the righteousness of God” is legitimate and plausible? Obviously it makes a difference for one’s forensic interpretation of 1:16– 17 if one understands “the righteousness of God” primarily as the end-result of the process of justification, or primarily as this process itself (how sinners are justified), or again as an end-result and a process that are necessarily relational, characterized by God’s relationship with humans, and humans’ relationship with God and each other. Yet, it is no less obvious that these three types of interpretative options are not mutually exclusive. So which of these three options is legitimate and plausible? In a perspective framed by his study of the varied receptions of Romans, for Fitzmier, the answer is obvious: these three options are equally legitimate and plausible choices, and each should be respected.169 In other words, with Fitzmyer, we have to be content (a) to demand consistency—keeping up with the same (forensic) interpretation of “the righteousness of God” throughout one’s reading of Romans (rather than implying that Paul used the same phrase with different meanings in different places)—and also (b) to call for a respect of the differences in interpretation, rather than co-opting the diverse interpretations and forcing them into a single one. 1:16d, 17b: Forensic Understandings of “Everyone who Believes” and “From/through Faith to/for Faith” (ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν); as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” For forensic interpretations, these passages emphasize the role of faith in justification, building upon what Paul said about faith in 1:5. Thus, reading “(The gospel is the power of God for) salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and then to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is being revealed, from faith for faith,” Moo first explains that this salvation is “the deliverance from eschatological judgment.” This blessing for believers is “enjoyed, to some extent, by anyone the moment he or she trusts Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord,” whether this believer is of Jewish origin or Gentile origin.170 For forensic commentators, faith is therefore “trusting Jesus Christ,” because one believes as true the content of the Gospel (see above the discussion of 1:5). But here (and elsewhere) Paul uses “believing” and “faith” in an absolute form, 167

Leenhardt, 54. Leenhardt. 169 Fitzmyer, 259–263. 170 Moo, 67, italics added. This view of the atonement according to which “Christ died instead of us” and we are saved when each of us as an individual puts oneself to the benefit of the cross through “faith” can be grounded in Paul’s letters, as demonstrated in a very clear way in the short book (128 pages) by Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). 168

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without mention of “what is believed” or the “content of faith.” So in order to justify this forensic interpretation, Moo (with many other commentators) explains that Paul does not need to say “everyone who believes in Christ” or the like, because “the language of faith has become so tied to what God has done in Christ that further specification is not needed.”171 When any given sinner believes, she has the assurance not only that she will enjoy salvation at the final judgment, but also that, in the present, she can already enjoy salvation as “the restoration of the sinner to a share of the ‘glory of God’” (alluding to Rom 5:2).172 Yet, as in the forensic interpretation of 1:5, faith (believing that the gospel-message is true) also includes a willful response, “obedience” (1:5; as emphasized by Barrett),173 and trusting Christ as Lord. Since this verse underscores the gospel as power of salvation, Moo can now say that faith involves not only trusting “Jesus Christ as Lord,” but also as “Savior.” Yet, he adds, “Though intellectual assent cannot be excluded from faith, the Pauline emphasis is on surrender to God as an act of the will (cf., e.g., 4:18; 10:9) . . . . For Paul makes clear that people are responsible to believe—[yet] we must also insist that ‘believing’ is not something we do (in the sense of ‘works’) but is always a response, an accepting of the gift God holds out to us in his grace.”174 Even though faith is believing/trusting in the gifts from God and is itself a gift from God, “we must never go to the extreme of making the person a totally passive instrument through whom believing occurs.”175 The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who responds in faith—“to all who believe” (a phrase emphasizing universalism also found in 3:22; 4:11; 10:4, 11). Everyone is in a position to respond to this gift from God, both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews). But Jews were first in a position to do so because this gospel was “promised beforehand through [the] prophets and holy Scriptures” (1:2). Such is Moo’s interpretation of “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16c).176 The phrase ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν (from/by/through faith for/to faith) is interpreted in many different ways as the composite translation above suggests (see Moo, 76). For Moo “the combination is rhetorical and is intended to emphasize that faith and ‘nothing but faith’ can put us in the right relationship with God” (76). Or as Barrett puts it, “God’s righteousness, then, is revealed on the basis of nothing but faith” (31; similarly Dodd).177 Thus for Cranfield,178 the doublet of this phrase can be rendered by an emphatic “altogether by faith,” that is, “by faith alone,” sola fide. “As it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith,’” (1:17b; quoting Hab 2:4) is then read in this forensic interpretation as confirming “that righteousness is to be attained only on the basis of faith.”179 Thus Moo concludes that this passage also states “how it is that one can attain a right standing with God and so live eternally”;

171

Moo, 67. Moo, 67. 173 Barrett, 29. 174 Moo, 67. 175 Moo, 67. 176 Cf. Moo, 68–69. 177 Dodd, 14. 178 Cranfield, 100. 179 Moo, 76. 172

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namely, through “faith,” that is, through believing as true the content of the gospel.180 Or with Fitzmyer, “the phrase stresses the way a person comes to share in life in Christ or salvation,” namely “by faith” (265).181 Obviously, theologians have much to contribute to this discussion of justification by faith concerning how God’s righteousness makes the ungodly righteous (Rom 4:5). This is well summarized by Oswald Bayer who writes: The person who is justified solely through faith is reconstituted as a responsible, ek-centric, eschatological agent .  .  . one lives in faith outside oneself (extra se), only in God and in love directed toward one’s neighbors and their sorrows and joys (conclusion of [Luther’s] Treatise on Christian Freedom, 1520). This ek-centric being consists in a vertical relation to the Creator and a horizontal relation to fellow creatures; one becomes what one already is, the image of God. Looking only on oneself, one sees oneself only as a sinner; looking on Christ, one sees oneself as fully righteous (simul iustus et peccator, “both righteous and sinner”).182

This paragraph captures well Moo’s and Leenhardt’s comment regarding the present effects of justification. One can understand also the importance of Leenhardt’s insistence that for Paul “justification does not express what human or God are in themselves, but a certain status of their relations, and the situation arising out of the latter.” It is because justification is a matter of relations (and not of being), that one can be set in the right relationship with God and others, even though one remains a sinner. Rom 1:18: The Wrath of God. “For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of human beings who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Moo). The phrase “the wrath of God” (“as a reaction to human wickedness and unrighteousness,”in Fitzmier’s understanding183) alludes to the eschatological judgment and punishment—including deprivation of eternal life (as in 2:5–12)—although, as Moo notes, it is already manifested in present sufferings as prelude of this future punishment (see also 3:5, 4:15, 5:9, 9:22, 12:19, 13:4, 5).184 The revelation of “the wrath of God” (1:18) and of “the righteousness of God” are grammatically interrelated by γὰρ, “for” or “because”—a conjunction that should not be ignored as if it were meaningless.

180

Moo, 77. This is understanding “by/through faith” as modifying the verb “will live,” as, for example, in the NRSV and NIV translations: “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Alternatively, one can understand that “through faith” modifies “is righteous,” as does—the RSV translation: the person “who through faith is righteous shall live.” In both cases, “faith” remains defined as “believing that” certain affirmations are true because they are revealed by God. This forensic view of “faith” is consistently presupposed by the extremely well-documented interpretation of 1:17 and the quotation of Hab 2:4 by Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 33–163. 182 Oswald Bayer, “Justification, a Central Doctrine for Western Christianity,” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. 183 Fitzmyer, 270. 184 Moo, 100. In a traditional view of forensic atonement, one could say that the wrath of God and the judgment are needed to reestablish God’s honor and to correct God’s humiliation resulting from the sins of individuals; such sinners are/will be found guilty before God, the judge. 181

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching

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The question is, how are “the wrath of God” and “the righteousness of God” related to the gospel? Two answers are given to this question by forensic interpreters. For a first group (including Barrett, Nygren, Cranfield, Leenhardt, Moo, and Dunn), both righteousness and wrath are parts of the gospel; both are revealed in the gospel. “From heaven” simply expresses that this revelation is from God, in the same way that Paul speaks of the revelation of the righteousness of God (i.e., in this interpretation, the righteousness as a gift from God). So Barrett paraphrases 1:18a as follows: “A clear signal of the revealing of God’s righteousness is the fact that his wrath is being revealed from heaven” (32–35). God’s righteousness is revealed in the present, because God’s wrath is also revealed in the present. Both belong to the gospel.185 Or as Nygren puts it, “As long as God is God, God cannot behold with indifference that his creation is destroyed and his holy will trodden underfoot. Therefore he meets sin with his mighty and annihilating reaction.”186 So, in Cranfield’s words, God’s wrath is an integral part of the gospel in that “it is not an indiscriminate, uncontrolled, irrational fury, but the wrath of the holy and merciful God.” “In the gospel the divine mercy and the divine judgment are inseparable from each other.”187 In sum, this means that preaching the gospel involves both proclaiming the news of the gracious gift of God’s righteousness for those who believe and proclaiming the “or else!”—that is, the news of the wrath of God against all sinners. Thus Leenhardt concludes: “The ‘good news’ itself implies as a prerequisite the proclamation of the ‘wrath of God,’”188 because it is only by being aware of the tragic condition of life in sinfulness that one might want to turn and receive the good news. For other forensic interpreters (including Lagrange, Schlatter, Michel, Murray, Wilckens, and Fitzmyer), God’s wrath is not a part of the content of the gospel. The wrath of God is revealed “from heaven” rather than from the (preached) gospel about the righteousness of God; “from heaven” in 1:18a is contrasted with “in it” [the gospel] in 1:17a. For Stuhlmacher, “from heaven” can be understood as “from God’s judgment seat,” that is, as carrying forensic connotations (36). More broadly, for Fitzmyer, “Paul sees these attributes [wrath and righteousness] as parallel but distinct and contrary, even though they are both attributes of the one God . . . Paul is deliberately contrasting the situation of pagan humanity [described in 1:18–32], subject to such wrath revealed, with humanity exposed to the revealing gospel. . . The status of uprightness before God is offered to humanity only by that which comes ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν.”189 In sum, this means that preaching the gospel involves proclaiming exclusively the news of the gracious gift of God’s righteousness for those who believe; the mention of the wrath of God is part of the description of the situation of humanity without the gospel (1:18–3:20).

185

Moo, 99–100. Nygren, 98. Although Nygren (116) makes a distinction between the revelation in Christ (the gospel in itself) and the revelation outside of Christ, as that of the wrath of God (“from heaven”) and the Law. 187 Cranfield, 110–11; see also Dunn, 70. 188 Leenhardt, 60. 189 Fitzmyer, 277; see also Lagrange, 21–22; Schlatter, 28–29; Michel, 97; Murray, 35; and Wilckens, 103. 186

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Whether “righteousness of God” and “wrath of God” are viewed as complementary parts of the gospel or as contrasting descriptions of God’s relationship to humanity with the gospel and without the gospel, the two phrases remain parallel. Thus, in the same way that “the righteousness of God” in 1:17 has been interpreted in forensic commentaries in three different ways, so it is of the “wrath of God.” It can be understood either as the wrath “given” (inflicted) by God (ultimately including the punishment to eternal damnation) to people as the end-result of the condemnation by God the Judge (see 2:5–6); or as the wrath which is the ongoing process of God’s punishing intervention until the eschatological judgment; or again, the wrathful relationship (or interaction) of God the Judge with sinners—sinners are separated from God. God’s wrath is God’s appropriate response to the fact that human beings “suppress the truth” (1:18b). “Ungodliness and unrighteousness” (ἀσέβεια καὶ ἀδικία), in short “sinfulness,” is characterized by the “suppress[ion of] the truth.” From a forensic perspective, this is an appropriate definition of “sin” (see above the discussion of 1:16– 17 and the table below), since “sin” is intentionally failing to do God’s will or ignoring it (and thus lacking the knowledge of this truth), that is, in both cases suppressing God’s will and revelation. In sum, from a forensic perspective, the root of sin is either a wrong/lack of will or wrong/lack of knowledge, or a combination of both. For a summary of the forensic theological interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Thesis of the Letter (1:16-17); Righteousness of God (1:17a); Righteous (1:17b, Hab 2:4); Salvation (1:16-17); Wrath of God (1:18)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the first column of the “APPENDIX: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their forensic theological interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the inclusive covenantal community and realized-apocalyptic/messianic readings.

(D) Rom 1:18–32: Sin, natural revelation, idolatry, homosexuality, wickedness of all kinds, and related themes From a forensic perspective, for the Jewish Christ-followers who are the primary addressees of this letter “the indictment of Gentiles in 1:18-32 is an ‘assumed’ point,” as Moo emphasizes.190 Therefore, in this first part of the body of the letter, there is no need to use flourishes of diatribe style to convince the intended addressees (as Paul does beginning in the next verses, 2:1ff ). For the readers/hearers (Jewish Christ-followers), it is clear that 1:18–32 is an indictment of Gentiles, despite the fact that most of the passage—including the long list of sinful behaviors—concerns all human beings and thus applies to all human beings through the centuries and today, as Moo carefully notes. But allusions to prophetic texts about idolatry such as Jer 2:5, 10:14, Isa 44:20 (in Rom 1:21–25) and the use of many phrases that echo the extended descriptions of pagans and their vices in Wis 12–15 (in Rom 1:19–32) conspicuously show that

190

Moo, 93, note 7.

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching

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1:19–32 is primarily a presentation of Gentile sinful conducts as viewed from a Jewish perspective.191 Rom 1:18–32 fleshes out what is the “suppressed truth” (as τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν κατεχόντων in 1:18d is interpreted here):192 it is the “truth” revealed to human beings in creation (1:19–21a) and in “God’s righteous decree” (1:32, NIV). In the rest of the passage, Paul maps out how this suppression of the truth about God and God’s will brings about retribution. More specifically.193 ●

●

●

●

Because they “exchanged” the truth about God for idols, God handed them over to their passions (1:21–24); Because they “exchanged” the truth of God for a lie, God handed them over to dishonorable passions (1:25–26a); Because they “exchanged” natural sexual practices for the unnatural, God handed them over to dishonorable passions (1:26b–27); and Because “they did not see fit to retain God in knowledge, God handed them over to a worthless mind, so that they do what is not right” (1:28, Moo’s translation), namely the sins described in 1:29–31.

The present tense in 1:19 (“what can be known about God is manifested among them”) and in 1:32 (“those who do such things” and “commend those who do them”) prolongs the present tense in 1:16–18 and simply means that, in the present, one can recognize the sins which deserve God’s judgment and condemnation. In Moo’s words, these present tenses suggest that “the revealing of God’s wrath, the suppression of the knowledge of God available in creation, and the recognition that certain sins deserve God’s judgment are constant aspects of human experience.”194 What Paul says about sin is exemplified by the idolatry of pagans. For Moo, this description of idolatry in 1:19–23 applies to first-century pagans as well as, mutatis mutandis, to twenty-first-century materialists who suppress the truth about God: Every person is without excuse because every person .  .  . has been given a knowledge of God and has spurned that knowledge in favor of idolatry, in all its varied manifestations. All therefore stand under the awful reality of the wrath of God, and all are in desperate need of the justifying power of the gospel of Christ.195

These conclusions provide the frame of Moo’s interpretation. First, he posits that the primary problem is idolatry “in all its varied manifestations.” Idolatry is the source of all sins. Second, while it can take many different forms, idolatry is always some kind of suppression of the truth about God, with the presupposition that everyone has access

191

Moo, 97. Though it seems self-evident, keep in mind that this is an interpretation, which is legitimate and plausible, yet very different from the no-less legitimate and plausible interpretation of the realizedapocalyptic/messianic reading (focused on thematic and figurative textual features; see Chapter 5). 193 See Moo, 96–98. 194 Moo, 98. 195 Moo, 98. 192

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to such a truth—thus, one can say that idolatry is a sin characterized by suppressing true knowledge (spurning it) and either replacing it by a wrong knowledge (an idol) or functioning without this true knowledge (being senseless). Third, he emphasizes that each individual (“every person”) is responsible for this suppression of the truth (“without excuse”). In other words, this suppression of the truth (whether it is a truth to which one must give mental assent or something to be done and to be obeyed196) is a voluntary, willful act, for which each idolater is responsible, and therefore deserves to be punished by God—unless this person is justified, that is, acquitted. In sum, once again, from a forensic theological perspective sin is rooted either in a wrong/lack of knowledge or in a wrong/lack of will, or a combination of both. What is this truth that “every person” has and then suppresses according to 1:19– 20? This question is much debated by forensic commentators. In a forensic interpretive line of reasoning, faith is primarily believing that a revealed message is true (fides quae creditur) as we have seen. Therefore, faith involves believing the gospel-message (as summarized in the propositional truths of 1:2–4). All forensic interpreters agree; faith is believing in a revealed knowledge, and then willingly responding and acting accordingly (so the “obedience of faith,” 1:5)—by contrast with sin viewed as rooted in a wrong/ lack of knowledge (“suppression of the truth”) and a wrong/lack of will (a voluntary, willful act). Thus, the question is whether or not the revealed knowledge in 1:19–20 and 1:32—a revealed knowledge about God and about God’s will, not grounded in the gospel—can be viewed as a content of faith with the same status as the gospel-message (1:2–4). Is the faith which is the condition for salvation (1:16–17) exclusively a “faith in Jesus Christ” (i.e., a faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ) or can it be a “faith in God” (i.e., a faith in “the gospel of God,” 1:1), a faith whose content could be a natural theology? This question seeks to summarize the debate among forensic interpreters regarding the significance of 1:19–20, and whether it should be understood as a natural theology. It is clear that these verses express that there is a knowledge of God available to all people in God’s creation of the world, through which God reveals (1:19) “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature” (1:20 NIV). The phrase ὁ θεὸς γὰρ αὐτοῖς ἐφανέρωσεν (1:19)—“because God has shown it to them” (NRSV) or “for God has made it manifest to them” (Moo)—expresses that “only by an act of revelation from above—God ‘making it known’—can people understand God as he is.”197 All forensic commentators agree. But beyond this they diverge in their understanding of this revelation in nature and its relationship to the revelation in the gospel. For a first group of forensic commentators—including Cranfield, Stuhlmacher, and Moo198—the natural revelation to all humans is indeed an actual revelation by God, but it is strictly limited to “what is knowable about God” (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ 1:19a) in creation (Cranfield, 113). Thus people should believe that the natural revelation is true, rather than suppressing it as they do. But such a belief is not salvific faith. Actual faith requires that one believes in the gospel of Jesus Christ that reveals the righteousness

196

Moo, 103. Moo, 104. 198 Cranfield, 113–16; Stuhlmacher, 34–36; Moo, 103–06. 197

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching

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of God (the righteousness/acquittal given by God, 1:17) and the wrath of God (against those who deliberately suppress the truth, 1:16–18). By contrast, other forensic interpreters—including Lagrange, Leenhardt, Fitzmyer, and Dunn—underscore that “some sort of natural theology is involved.”199 What sort? For Greek philosophy in Paul’s time and before, human beings were capable of attaining a knowledge of God; thus the Greek and Latin patristic commentators do not hesitate to call upon such a natural theology. It is possible to have actual faith—a (salvific) “faith in God”—on the basis of such a natural theology. The natural revelation to all humans is not limited to “what is knowable about God”—in which case the sentence would be a tautology—because τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ (1:19a) should be translated “the knowability of God.”200 What God has shown to all humans through the creation is that God is knowable; God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (1:20 NRSV). This is a definite divine revelation.201 Thus “faith in God”—an actual (salvific) faith—on the basis of this natural theology is possible. But humans fail to avail themselves of this actual opportunity, by suppressing this truth through the making of idols. This is why they are without excuse (1:20). Rom 1:21–23 “For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him . . . they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” Why did the Gentiles who, in the created world, have access to a knowledge of God, become idolaters instead of honoring God? The forensic interpretations of Lagrange, Cranfield, Moo, and Fitzmyer202 posit that, for Paul, the Gentiles made idols for themselves and worshiped them, because they had an incomplete (limited, thus wrong) knowledge of God—in line with Thomas Aquinas who wrote: “The first fault of the Gentiles is already a fault of ignorance.”203 Alternatively, other forensic commentaries—including Leenhardt, Barrett, Stuhlmacher, and Dunn204—posit that, for Paul, the Gentiles’ idolatry resulted from a deliberate, willful rejection of God, whom “they knew” (1:21).205 Gentiles refused to honor God, whom they knew through what they could see in creation (1:19–20). Again, following the forensic understanding of sin, idolatry—the archetypal sin—is rooted either in a faulty knowledge or in a wrong will.206 In either case they are

199

Dunn, 56. Lagrange, 23; Leenhardt, 62. 201 And not “a knowledge of God to which men have by their reasoning attained” as is emphasized by Morna D. Hooker, “Adam in Romans 1,” NTS 6 (1959–60), 299. Interpretations that reject that Paul is speaking of an actual revelation by God (that could be the basis of an actual faith in God) “subconsciously react” to the Enlightenment that envisioned a natural religion or a religion of reason and thus “the capability of the human mind to attain some knowledge of God” (Fitzmyer, 274). 202 Lagrange, 25; Cranfield, 116–17; Moo, 106–07; Fitzmyer, 281–82. 203 As quoted by Leenhardt, 65. 204 Leenhardt, 65–66; Barrett, 36; Stuhlmacher, 36; Dunn, 59. 205 Dunn helpfully contrasts the Greek understanding of knowledge as cognitive (to perceive God as he really is) with the Hebrew understanding of knowledge (that Paul uses) as a motivational recognition, and thus a matter of the will. 206 Forensic commentators have, therefore, the tendency to waver among the two, at times emphasizing issues related to wrong/lack of knowledge and at other times issues of wrong/lack of will—as Moo has the tendency to do in his choice of vocabulary. 200

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responsible for their sin; that is, their idolatry: “So they are without excuse” (1:20), and thus deserve the wrath of God, the divine Judge. In 1:23, echoing the indictment of idolatry in Psalm 106:20; 115:4–6; 135:15; Deut 4:16; Jer 2:11, 10:14; Isa 44:20; 46:6 as well as Wisdom 13:13–15, in Moo’s words, Paul “describes the terrible proclivity of all people to corrupt the knowledge of God they possess by making gods of their own,” worshipping the idols they have carved “out of wood and stone.”207 In other words, in this forensic interpretation (by contrast with the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation; see Chapter 5), idolatry involves abandoning, rejecting the knowledge of God that one possesses in order to make other gods and worship them. Such idolatry—“claiming to be wise” but “becoming fools” (1:22)—characterizes the various religions that people invent for themselves (1:23). All the allusions to biblical texts about idolatry show that for Paul one should mock idolatry and the idolaters, as the OT writers did. Such mockery is well illustrated by Ps 115:4–6: “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.” Practicing idolatry—a consequence of “suppressing the truth”—is being “futile” in thinking, having “senseless minds,” being “fools.” This shows that Paul’s estimation of other religions is quite negative. Thus Moo concludes, “Far from being a preparatory stage in the human quest for God,208 these religions represent a descent from the truth and are ‘evidence of man’s deepest corruption’.”209 Rom 1:24–25 “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” These verses underscore (“therefore”) “that God’s ‘handing over’ of human beings is his response to their culpable rejection of the knowledge of himself that he has made generally available.  . . . Like a judge who hands over a prisoner to the punishment his crime has earned, God hands over the sinner to the terrible cycle of ever increasing sin.”210 These verses are Paul’s “indictment of the pagans without the gospel.”211 Thus, Stuhlmacher concludes: “Those who transgress God’s will must bear the consequences of their sin, and the judgment takes place precisely in these consequences: God ‘gave them up’.”212 These are clearly forensic interpretations that Dunn expresses in more general but no less forensic terms: “The control of God once removed left them like a faulty rocket plunging out of control. For what this vaunted

207

Moo, 109–10; see also Leenhardt, 66–69; Cranfield, 119–20; Fitzmyer, 272–75, 283–84. This is a statement against covenantal community and realized-apocalyptic interpretations (as well as Latin and Greek patristic commentators followed by Catholic and Eastern Orthodox interpretations) that affirm that “some knowledge of God was within the ken of pagans without the gospel” (Fitzmyer, 273). See Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 for the covenantal community and realizedapocalyptic interpretations on this issue. 209 Moo, 108, quoting Nygren, 109. See also Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 42–54, for whom the making and worship of idols, of “No-God,” is a key for understanding the theme of Romans. Interestingly enough, none of the “Pauline Theologies” discuss in any detail what Paul says about idolatry. 210 Moo, 110–11, emphasis added. 211 Fitzmyer, 274. 212 Stuhlmacher, 36. 208

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Forensic Theological Teaching

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liberty consisted in was nothing other than freedom to indulge in immorality which insulted themselves and their bodies”,213 or as Leenhardt writes: [God] has established an order which cannot be broken without causing that order to react against the one who violates it  . . . The will of a person alone comes into play when this person refuses God; but it is God who determines sanctions and he alone can lift them. Verses 1:22, 23, 24 expound the consequences of the person’s refusal of God insofar as a person’s relations with God on the cultic level are concerned, and they describe the corresponding sanctions.214

And, as becomes apparent in the following verses, the terrible cycle of ever-increasing sin to which idolaters are condemned amounts to a continuation of the process of idolatry. Rom 1:26–27: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and 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” (emphasis added). Why does Paul take homosexual conduct as a first case of sin? Granted that homosexual conduct was prevalent in the Greco-Roman society,215 for the forensic commentators who posit that Paul addresses a Jewish Christfollower audience, the answer is quite simple: this is a typical Jewish way of looking at the sins of idolaters and Gentiles. Thus Barrett underscores: “No feature of pagan society filled the Jew with greater loathing than the toleration, or rather admiration, of homosexual practices.”216 For instance, we read in Wisdom of Solomon, “For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life” (14:12). The only difference is that Paul attributes the cycle of ever-increasing sin to God’s retributive “handing over” of the idolaters to their sins. By singling out homosexuality and underscoring its unnatural character (as emphasized in the translation above), Paul does not allude to Greek philosophy; he followed Jewish authors, such as Philo, for whom sexual morality was part of “natural law.” Saying that homosexual acts are “against nature” and thus against God’s created order is another way of saying that they are an “abomination” [‫( ]תּוֹ ֵעבָה‬Lev 18:22, 20:13). Therefore, Paul presents homosexuality as another suppression of true knowledge of God—the process of idolatry continues, as is further expressed in 1:28.217 From this perspective, 1:26–27 is a paraenetic (moral, ethical) saying conveying the teaching: “You shall not commit ‘homoerotic’ acts” (as described in these verses). Sinners commit homoerotic acts because they suppress their knowledge of God’s will that they do not want to follow. The question is, what exactly is the behavior which is condemned? Any homoerotic act by lesbians and gays, as most forensic interpretations conclude? This is, for instance, the interpretation of Moo (see above), Hays, and Brooten, 213

Dunn, 73. Leenhardt, 66–67. 215 See bibliography in Fitzmyer, 275. 216 Barrett, 39; see also, e.g., Wilckens, 109–10; Moo, 113–17; Fitzmyer, 285–88. 217 Moo, 117–18. 214

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who emphasize Paul’s reference to “natural” and “unnatural” intercourses.218 Or is it pederasty (such as homoerotic acts with young slaves, common in the Roman Empire), as Scroggs and Smith argue?219 Or cultic homosexuality (in view of the mention of idolatry in the preceding verses), as Leenhardt argued, followed by Ridderbos and Wengst?220 Whatever the conclusion regarding which homoerotic acts are involved (most commonly understood as any homoerotic acts by lesbians and gays), these verses condemn them as sins that suppress the “natural” knowledge that one should have in one’s conscience (2:15) regarding the sinfulness of homoerotic acts.221 Rom 1:28–31. And even as they did not see fit to retain God in knowledge, God handed them over to a worthless mind, so that they do what is not right,29 being filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, greed, wickedness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; gossips,30 maligners, haters of God, insolent (ὑβριστὰς), arrogant (ὑπερηφάνους), braggarts (ἀλαζόνας), devisers of evil, disobedient to parents,31 without understanding, without faithfulness, without affection, without mercy.222 The preceding comments apply to this long list of immoral activities—social sins, rather than sins directly against God. This list of sins (commonly found in the New Testament, following Jewish and Hellenistic models) shows the scope of social evils resulting from the “depraved mind” to which God gave sinners up (1:28). It is to be noted that prominence is given to sins of pride and presumption in 1:30 (ὑβριστὰς, ὑπερηφάνους, ἀλαζόνας)—as also alluded to in 2:1–5. Rom 1:32, “They 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” is, once again, referring to a natural theology (see again the above discussion of 1:19–20). For Moo, while Paul acknowledges that Gentiles have a (limited) knowledge of God and of God’s decree (that they received from God, 1:19), he affirms with the Jewish tradition that Gentiles are “without excuse” because, despite this knowledge, they fail to recognize God and to respond appropriately (Wis 13:8). In short, as Schlatter says: “Knowledge does not liberate [the individual] from practicing sin. Knowledge alone does not save him; on the contrary, it renders him guilty, for his knowledge does not prevent him from practicing that which he condemns.”223 Thus, Stuhlmacher can add: “according to the Old Testament and Jewish thought . . .  the Gentiles who intentionally sin have irretrievably fallen under God’s judgments of wrath.”224 Paul’s 218

Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 387, and “Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell’s Exegesis of Romans 1,” JRE 14 (1986): 184–215, especially 185. Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 240–41; 281–302, and her annotated bibliography, 363–72, where she mentions the many other scholars following this interpretation. 219 Leenhardt, 68. Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 29–65; Abraham Smith, “The New Testament and Homosexuality,” QR 11 (1991): 18–32. 220 Simon Jan Ridderbos, “Bibel und Homosexualität,” in Der homosexuelle Nächste: Ein Symposion (ed. H. Bianchi; Hamburg: Furche, 1963), 50–73; Klaus Wengst, “Paulus und die Homosexualität,” ZEE 31 (1987): 72–81. 221 This “natural” knowledge that people have in their conscience that “homoerotic acts are against God’s will” could be described, from another perspective, as a homophobic revulsion. 222 Moo’s translation, with some modifications from Dunn’s. 223 Schlatter, 47. 224 Stuhlmacher, 38; see also Fitzmyer, 289.

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targeted audience, Jews and Jewish Christ-followers (in this interpretation), can then fully agree with his negative verdict regarding the sins of the Gentiles. But it is a verdict regarding the sins of everybody! Therefore, they are primed to fall into the dialogical/ rhetorical trap of the next chapter. The same verdict applies to Jews, because they are also without excuse for failing to recognize God as God should be recognized and to respond appropriately to the knowledge of God they have received. For a summary of the forensic theological interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Sin (1:18-32); Natural Revelation = Natural Theology (1:19-20); Glorifying/Honoring God as God (1:21); Idolatry (1:19-25); Homosexuality (1:26-27); Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:28-32)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the first column of the “APPENDIX: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their forensic theological interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the inclusive covenantal community and realizedapocalyptic/messianic readings.

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Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its Call to Mission of an Inclusive Covenantal Community

Do you wish to know Him who spoke and by whose word the world came into being? Study Haggadah: for through such study you can get to understand the Holy One blessed be He and to follow in his ways. Sifré, 85a.1 Stories Because all things write their own stories No matter how humble The world is a great big book Open to a different page, Depending on the hour of the day. ~ Charles Simic2

I A quest for Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic The letter to the Romans displays, from beginning to end, most powerful and significant rhetorical and ideological textual features, through which Paul ultimately seeks to convince the Roman churches to support him and his mission to Spain, as becomes explicit in Rom 15:14–22. Everybody agrees. For many critical exegetes, deciding to pay particular attention to the rhetorical and ideological features of the letter is easy. How can one read Romans without recognizing the way in which Paul calls the communities he addresses to engage in mission so as to fulfill their collective vocation of bringing glory to God, as Christ did (15:8–9)? How can one read Romans without taking note of the way Paul interacts with the churches in Rome,

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Sifré, 85a to Numbers 11, as quoted by Henry Slonimsky, Essays (Cincinnati, and Chicago: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), 15, in the essay entitled “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash.” In this essay, Slonimsky underscores that, for Jews (including early rabbis who wrote this early Midrash), understanding the Holy One and following in his ways is essential, because God and humans are heroes in the same drama, needing each other, growing together, but also suffering together. As we shall see, this is a view that Paul the Jew would have shared. For a recent translation of this early Midrash see Joseph Neusner, A Theological Commentary to the Midrash. Volume 8: Sifré to Numbers and Sifré to Deuteronomy (Lanham, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, 2001), 23. Charles Simic, The Lunatic: Poems (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015), 13.

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calling them to his side (12:1a)3 by thoughtfully alluding to the cultural and ideological lenses through which they envision their community life? It remains that focusing on such rhetorical and ideological community-centered features as most significant is a choice, an analytical textual choice made explicit by the critical methods that one uses. This first observation is to make clear that as interpreters we have other choices regarding the textual features that can be viewed as most significant. As we have seen in the previous chapter, one could consider as most significant the theological teaching and argument that this letter offers. Furthermore, as we will see in the next chapter, one could consider as most significant in this letter its thematic and figurative features through which Paul shares his religious experience and his vision. The very existence of these other types of critical exegesis demonstrates that focusing on the rhetorical and ideological features of Paul’s text is indeed an analytical textual choice. Biblical exegetes who choose to see as most significant the rhetorical and ideological features of the letter (their analytical textual choice) commonly acknowledge that they chose this kind of critical exegetical readings for two other reasons: (a) because of correlated hermeneutical theological choices—as we shall see, the center of attention of these exegetes is on community-centered theological teachings concerning the relations between Jews and Gentiles (by contrast with the individual-centered theological teaching of forensic interpretations); and b) because of correlated contextual ethical choices—they chose this type of interpretation to respond to one or another kind of ethical imperative rooted in urgent concerns related to their own life-contexts. As discussed in Chapter 1, having hermeneutical and ethical reasons besides one’s methodological choice (here the choice of rhetorical and ideological exegetical methods) does not diminish the legitimacy of a scholar’s critical exegesis. By nature, all interpretations of scriptural texts are necessarily framed by hermeneutical theological choices and by contextual ethical choices, in addition to the analytical textual choices they also involve. What is different with rhetorical and ideological exegeses focused on community-centered hermeneutical features of Romans—practiced by exegetes often identified as belonging to exegetical schools called the “New Perspective” on Paul and “Beyond the New Perspective”—is that they have self-consciously abandoned individual-centered forensic interpretations for community-centered interpretations and that they most often make explicit the role of their contextual ethical choices (while other critical exegeses strive to hide these).4 Obviously, the possibilities offered by the other types of critical exegeses (those that privilege either the theological teaching and argument of Romans, or its thematic and figurative features) are quite appealing for many readers and exegetes. Actually, in Western cultures, most readers of Romans (including my students) cannot imagine reading Romans except for its theological argument. Thus, the forensic theological interpretation presented in Chapter 3 seems “natural.” Is it not demanded by Paul’s

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“I call you to my side” is one of the legitimate translations of 12:1a, Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς, and as we shall see, the most plausible one in this interpretive line of reasoning. See Kathy Ehrensperger, “The New Perspective and Beyond,” Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013), 191–219. In what follows, I avoid using the phrase “New Perspective” because, as Chapter 7 shows, such interpretations are not “new”: they have existed at least since the second century, as illustrated in our discussion of the interpretation by Clement of Alexandria. Indeed, beyond the interpretations of Romans, Luke’s interpretation of Paul in Acts can be said to belong to such “new” (!) perspective on Paul.

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text? This attraction appears to be confirmed by the fact that, in our libraries, the large majority of critical commentaries and of the English translations of Romans (including NRSV, NIV, NJB, NAB, and BBE) are theological interpretations. As we repeatedly noted in Chapter 3, focusing one’s interpretation on the theological argument of the letter is making an analytical textual choice, which leads to legitimate interpretations. Furthermore, by emphasizing the forensic theological semantic features of Romans, these interpretations signal that they made a hermeneutical choice, which leads to a coherent and plausible conclusion that Romans offers a forensic individual-centered theological teaching. But note the above qualifier, “In Western cultures.” It is meant to signal that forensic theological interpretations are framed not only by textual analytical and hermeneutical theological interpretive choices, but also by contextual interpretive choices. Interpreters choose a specific type of interpretation because it addresses particular needs in their (sociocultural) contexts—and this does not make their interpretations less legitimate or plausible! So, saying that certain interpretations— in this case, forensic theological interpretations—reflect contextual choices related to “Western cultures” (that tend to emphasize individuals and their needs) is not making a negative comment about these interpretations. This is simply acknowledging that these legitimate and plausible interpretations are also framed by particular contextual choices. These issues will be the central topic of Part III (Chapters 6 and 7), which, following the history of reception (including present-day receptions), discusses the roles of contextual choices in interpretations of Romans. Here it is enough to say, following Krister Stendahl, that what we call “forensic theological interpretations” are framed by “the introspective conscience of the West”—that is, by hermeneutical choices related to the conscience of individuals and also by contextual concerns for individuals that are characteristic of Western cultures since Augustine, through the Middle Ages and Luther to today.5 By contrast, exegetes who emphasize rhetorical as well as ideological and cultural features of Paul’s text are community-centered as they elucidate everything in Romans concerning the relationship between the gospel and Judaism and the Greco-Roman world in which Paul was.6 This chapter introduces the distinctive interpretation of those exegetes who emphasize the Jewishness of Paul who, far from rejecting his Jewish heritage, reinterprets it as he affirms Jesus as Messiah/Christ (a Jewish claim) and as he strives to make it inclusive enough to incorporate the Gentiles who lived with Paul in the GrecoRoman world. In the process Paul also challenges those Gentile Christ-followers who advocate a separation from Judaism.7 As we shall see, such conclusions are legitimate, even though they directly contradict the no-less legitimate conclusions (see Chapter 3)

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Krister Stendhal’s 1961 lecture, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” republished in Paul among Jews and Gentiles, and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 78–96—see especially 78–79. My analysis is once again guided by semiotic theories. In semiotic terms, the rhetorical and ideological features of a text are parts of the discoursive syntax and semantics dimension (rhetorical features belong to discursive syntax and ideological features belong to discursive semantics). See Patte, Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts, 129–72. See William S. Campbell, Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context: Jew and Gentile in the Letter to the Romans (Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 1991). The entire book provides an excellent review of the “new perspective” on Paul and Judaism; see especially, 132–207.

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reached by the forensic interpretations that understand Paul’s gospel as implicitly or explicitly involving a rejection of Judaism, and even an open separation from it. After this introductory section, I will be in a position to present an inclusive covenantal community commentary on Rom 1:1-32, following Paul’s text verse by verse. Of course, this commentary is “Daniel Patte’s Inclusive Covenantal Community Commentary on Romans 1:1-32.” I proceed very much as any critical commentator proceeds. I use existing rhetorical/sociocultural community-centered interpretations of Paul and of Romans. Yet, I do so with the awareness that these interpretations are hybrid (as the literary genre critical commentary requires) and therefore that, beyond their common characteristics, they are different from each other on specific points. The proposed commentary is also different from other commentaries in that I am fully aware that this inclusive covenantal community commentary is one of the three equally legitimate and plausible and yet divergent commentaries that I am presenting. Consequently, in order to construct what is, in my view, a typical inclusive covenantal community interpretation of Romans, I consult only those commentaries of Romans and Pauline Theologies that I personally identify as inclusive covenantal community interpretations. To recognize studies that follow a covenantal community interpretive line, I use two kinds of criteria: ●

●

Covenantal community critical interpretations are first recognizable because of their particular contextual choices that they often make explicit, even as they remain strictly critical. As can be expected, these interpretations are framed by contextual concerns regarding community life (rather than individual life), ranging from concerns about inner-community issues (e.g., concerning the interactions of individuals and groups within the larger community) to concerns about intercommunity issues (e.g., concerning the interaction of the communities of Christ-followers and the Jewish communities; concerning the interaction of communities of Christ-followers and the state). Covenantal community critical interpretations are also recognizable because of their hermeneutical choices, namely by their emphasis on the role that Jewish perspectives and conceptualizations play in Paul’s views of the gospel and of the churches’ mission.

A community-centered interpretation necessarily posits community-centered views of sin, of the human predicament, and of its resolution-salvation (as listed at the end of Chapter 2) as well as views of gospel, Christ, faith, and grace (found in 1:1–7)—as presented below. Therefore, when I find in an interpretation such distinctive community-centered conceptions of key theological and ethical themes, I can anticipate that its views of the other theological and ethical themes found in Romans will also be understood from the same perspective. Then, in the next step, I pay attention to the textual choices involved; that is, how this covenantal community interpretation can be grounded into the text and its historical setting, especially through rhetorical, ideological, and cultural analysis of the text. By following such criteria (further explained below), I was led to privilege the so-called “New Perspective and Beyond” interpretations, and among them the commentary by Robert Jewett.

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But my inclusive covenantal commentary remains my commentary, as I critically use Jewett’s commentary by complementing it by many other studies, as listed below.

(A) The contextual grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans The mention in the preceding paragraphs of the distinctive contextual choices of inclusive covenantal community critical interpretations should have been expected following the discussions in Chapter 1. But it might still be surprising, because contextual choices are usually hidden or denied by critical exegetes.8 Does not the standard of critical biblical scholarship, as enshrined in Krister Stendahl’s 1962 article “Biblical Theology,” demand that contextual concerns be relegated to a second—and secondary—interpretive step? This article became the norm for critical biblical studies for decades because of its distinction between “the descriptive task”—elucidating “what the text meant” (“exegesis”)—and the discernment of “what the text means” for today by theologians and preachers, that relegated contextual concerns to the second and secondary step of the interpretative process, discerning “what the text means” (for today).9 Since then, contextual biblical studies have shown the essential role of contextual choices in all interpretive processes. Therefore, without losing their critical character, biblical studies could emphasize their contextual choices in situations which were so dire that they could not be ignored. For instance, the origin of contextual biblical studies in Latin America can be traced to biblical studies in Base Communities.10 Yet, as the publication of El Evangelio en Solentiname by Ernesto Cardenal11 shows, while the contextual interpretation of biblical texts by community members of Solentiname (Nicaragua) were emphasized, Cardenal found necessary to provide first an explanation of “what the text meant.” Thus, the traditional pattern of critical biblical studies (from “what the text meant” to “what the text means”) remained. But this model broke down when, both through practice and through the development of hermeneutical theories,12 it became clear that all interpretations, including the most rigorously critical exegesis, are simultaneously framed by contextual choices, and by textual/analytical and hermeneutical theological choices. As discussed in Chapter 1, provided they are acknowledged, contextual concerns for present-day issues and situations do not lead to biased interpretations; rather they function as lenses that allow readers to recognize features of the text that are actually in the text but were ignored or neglected in other interpretations—themselves framed by other contextual choices.13 8

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Or is it more specifically, by forensic theological critical exegetes in Western cultures since the Enlightenment? Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 1 (ed. George A. Buttrick; Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 418–32. Popularized as an outcome of the 1968 Medellín (Colombia) Latin American Council of Bishops. Ernesto Cardenal, El Evangelio en Solentiname—Love in Practice: The Gospel in Solentiname (trans. Donald D. Walsh; London: Search Press, 1976). Let us not forget that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method was first published in 1960. It is not by chance that forensic theological interpretations of Romans follow critical exegetical approaches that choose to emphasize the textual features that lead to an understanding of the

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At least on Romans, following liberation theologians, Latin American biblical scholars were first to bring together exegetical, theological, and contextual approaches in an open and explicit way. I refer to the superb critical exegete, Elsa Tamez, who brought together contextual concerns and critical exegesis in The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective.14 Obviously, her critical reading of Romans (and other Pauline letters) is framed by her concerns for the poor, the oppressed, and all those excluded by systemic sin and injustice prevalent in Latin America. She is a liberation theologian who is an exegete. Therefore, she rereads Paul’s letters in quest for the teaching which would be “good news to the excluded”— including her students, their (future) parishioners, their families, and those to whom she preaches the “good news” in Costa Rica, and now in Colombia. Consequently, in her critical exegesis she accounts for the allusions in Romans to the historical economic, cultural, and political context of those to whom Paul addressed his letter in Rome, the capital of the empire. By contrast with the individual-centered exegetical interpretations found in European and North American commentaries (which she discusses throughout), her exegesis emphasizes the role that socioeconomic features play in Paul’s text, often by allowing liberation theologians to formulate the questions. Consequently, as we shall see below, she recognizes that what Paul says about “justice” (δικαιοσύνη, justicia, both justice and righteousness in Spanish and also in Greek!) and about “justification by faith” is a call to a practice of justice for the excluded (whoever they might be). Romans is a call to become a truly inclusive community. Thus, below, in my formulation of the inclusive covenantal community commentary, I often come back implicitly or explicitly to Tamez’s book. But for the majority of Western critical exegetes of Romans, Tamez’s book was and is largely ignored. For instance, in their magisterial works on Romans, neither Jewett, nor Stowers, nor Elliott, nor Gager refer to her book.15 It is as if such a contextual exegetical interpretation cannot be truly critical; to paraphrase John’s gospel, “can anything good come out of Costa Rica?” And yet, all of them indirectly or directly acknowledge the contextual character of their own interpretations. Robert Jewett’s strict rhetorical and ideological/cultural analysis of Paul’s letter, Romans: A Commentary, is appropriately acknowledged as the epitome of critical scholarship on Romans by being published in Hermeneia, a series providing “critical and historical commentaries on the Bible” at Fortress Press.16 As a trustworthy guide, Jewett follows the rigorous norms of critical commentaries. He accounts for all the critical studies on Romans; his bibliography is indeed extensive. But as a result, on

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teaching of this letter as individual-centered! Were not these critical exegetical interpretations developed in Western cultures since the Enlightenment—which, just by chance, emphasizes the centrality of the individual’s reason, will, and rights? Elsa Tamez. The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective (trans. Sharon Ringe; Nashville: Abingdon, 1991). Neil Elliott, The Rhetoric of Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy, and Paul’s Dialogue with Judaism. Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Supplement series, 45 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990). John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Stanley Kent Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary. Hermeneia: A Critical & Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).

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many points his commentary becomes hybrid—hiding his own interpretive line of reasoning by discussing too many other types of interpretations.17 Although at times he abandons or forgets for a brief while that his interpretation is framed by Paul’s inclusive covenantal community vision and call to mission of the churches in Rome, Jewett’s rhetorical and ideological/cultural analysis quickly brings him back on track. Other question remains: Was his interpretation partly framed by contextual choices? Following the norms of critical biblical commentaries, Jewett does not mention in his commentary such contextual choices; apparently, this would invite other exegetes to accuse him of being biased! And yet, contextual concerns did frame his commentary (as his textual/analytical and hermeneutical theological choices also did). Actually, Jewett does not leave us in the dark. He makes abundantly clear the contextual concerns that drive his scholarship, although he does so in other books, published during the time he was preparing his commentary or shortly thereafter. His contextual concerns are clearly recognizable in the titles of these other books (I emphasize some key words): The Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (1973); Christian Tolerance: Paul’s Message to the Modern Church (1982); Saint Paul at the Movies: The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture (1993); Paul the Apostle to America: Cultural Trends and Pauline Scholarship (1994); Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph over Shame (1999); Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (2003); Mission and Menace: Four Centuries of American Religious Zeal (2008).18 It cannot be clearer that Jewett’s contextual concerns for social injustices are framed by issues concerning cultural ideologies! Actually, he has the same contextual concerns as Tamez. But they look at the same dire situations from two different perspectives: Tamez, from the perspective of the excluded and oppressed; Jewett, from that of the oppressors. Latin American exegetes are not the only ones to make explicit their contextual choices in their exegetical work on Romans. Neil Elliott does it in his critical exegetical works. His solid critical scholarship was established by his publication of The Rhetoric of Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy, and Paul’s Dialogue with Judaism (1990), as well as by the exegetical work presented in Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (1995), and The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire.19 These titles already betray Elliott’s contextual concerns for present-day Jewish-Christian relationships, political justice, and neo-imperialism. But unlike Jewett and like Tamez, he emphasizes the essential role of his contextual choices as he developed his critical interpretation of Paul. Thus, he begins the Preface of Liberating Paul as follows:

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Actually, the short version of his commentary is most helpful for acquiring a clearer picture of the unfolding of his interpretive line of reasoning. See Romans: A Short Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). See the listing of all these works by Robert Jewett in the bibliography. Neil Elliott, The Rhetoric of Romans (1990); Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995); The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2010).

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In August 1991, George Bush was basking in the glow of the highest approval ratings of his presidency in the wake of the Persian Gulf war. (ix) This book is written, first of all, for those who have found Paul a stumbling block in their attempt to follow Jesus on the way of justice and peace. (x)

Then in Chapter 1, “Paul in the Service of Death,” he reviews (mis)interpretations of Paul’s letters as read in specific historical contexts—South Carolina, 1709; The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1637; Chelmo, Poland, 1941–45; Guatemala, 1982—in support of an ideology of death, before developing a critical interpretation of the letters with the goal of presenting “Paul in the Service of Liberation” (3–24). In brief, the contextual concerns for earlier, very problematic uses of Paul in concrete life-contexts is what focuses and frames Elliot’s critical exegetical study. Similarly, he opens The Arrogance of Nations with descriptions of the situation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (which he visited in August 1995), and of the response (or lack thereof) of people in Hannibal, Missouri (March 2003) to the bombing and military invasion of Iraq. Reading Romans through these contextual lenses he cannot but recognize that from its very first lines, Paul’s letter burns with the incendiary proclamation of God’s justice, and with a searing critique of the injustice of those who smother and suppress the truth (1:17-18). The themes that dominate Romans are political topics.20

The question is not: How should one avoid framing one’s interpretation by presentday contextual concerns? All interpretations are framed by some kind of contextual concerns, and these are necessarily parts of the process of interpretation (as Gadamer has shown). So, the legitimacy and plausibility of an interpretation is not compromised by one’s contextual concerns. Provided that they are acknowledged, such concerns do not introduce biases in the interpretation. Therefore (as discussed in Chapter 7) the question is: How can we be sure that appropriate present-day contextual concerns frame our interpretation? Tamez, Jewett, and Elliott emphasize present-day socio-cultural, economic, political issues (including poverty and neo-colonialism and imperialism). But exegetes who are identified as promoting a “New Perspective on Paul”—and now “Beyond the New Perspective” interpretations—make more and more explicit other types of interpretive contextual choices. For many the tragic and very concrete contextual consequences of anti-Semitism during World War II frame their readings of Paul’s letters. Such is the case of Lloyd Gaston’s and Peter Tomson’s studies of Paul and the Law, and many similar studies discussed below.21 It is enough here to mention the book by John Gager, Reinventing Paul, that refers to these earlier studies.22 In this book Gager presents—or

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Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations, 6. Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 15; Peter Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also, for a history of Pauline studies which makes clear the place of anti-Judaism in it, Magnus Zetterholm,

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better, advocates—a New Perspective on Paul (focused on Galatians and Romans) by underscoring that one of the basic reasons for rejecting the traditional interpretations (i.e., forensic theological interpretations) is that they construct and promote a Paul who is “the origins of Christian anti-Judaism.”23 Then Gager proceeds to make explicit the contextual character of his interpretation: “I would not claim that Paul, or even Christianity as a whole, is responsible for modern anti-Semitism. But Paul in the traditional reading has been an important part of that story.”24 And the story of modern anti-Semitism includes the Shoah, the Holocaust. Therefore, he concludes (quoting Gaston): “From a Christian perspective, ‘a Christian church with an anti-Semitic New Testament is abominable’.”25 In short, the development of the “New Perspective” critical interpretations was driven by an ethical imperative, imposed upon them by the post–World War II and post-Holocaust context, in which one could no longer ignore the devastating effects of anti-Judaism. Kathy Ehrensperger traces back the “New Perspective” critical scholarship on Paul to James Dunn’s 1982 Manson Memorial lecture.26 This is appropriate since this lecture was actually entitled “The New Perspective on Paul.”27 But it is noteworthy that N. T. Wright already advocated this “New Perspective” in his 1978 Tyndale lecture, even though his essay was entitled “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith.”28 In both cases, the recent book by E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism—or more exactly its first part on Palestinian Judaism—played a central role, but more so for Dunn.29 We will come back to both Sanders and Dunn throughout this chapter. But Wright’s 1978 lecture/article is a better starting point, because it makes explicit the contextual character of this shift in interpretive line of reasoning. Wright’s proposal for a New Perspective is based upon the debate between Stendahl and Käsemann, when Käsemann responded in 1969 to Stendhal’s 1963 article, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” mentioned in footnote 5.30 Neither Stendahl nor Käsemann (in his commentary) makes explicit the role of contextual choices in their critical interpretations. Ironically, Stendahl

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Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2009) especially 1–93, and then the development of the New Perspective after World War II in response to the disaster of the Holocaust, 95–163. Gager, 15. Gager, 18; see 17–19. Gager. I added “critical scholarship” to qualify “New Perspective on Paul” because, as we will see in Part III, this so-called new interpretation can actually be found much earlier in the history of reception of Romans. James Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” first published in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122; reprinted in Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (London: SPCK 1990), 183–214 and in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 89–110. Dunn does not show any sign of being aware of Wright’s lecture/article. N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith” (first published in the Tyndale Bulletin 29 [1978], 61–88). I refer to its reprint in N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 19782013 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 3–20. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul (trans. Margaret Kohl; Philadelphia: SCM and Fortress, 1971; German, 1969), especially “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” 60–78, where he objects to Stendhal’s article.

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had just published in 1962 his article on “Biblical Theology” (see p. 124, note 9) that distinguished “what the text meant” from “what the text means,” relegating contextual concerns to a second and secondary step of interpretation. Yet, Stendahl and Käsemann cannot help but to reveal that their critical interpretations are also based upon contextual ethical choices. Here it is enough to say (in Wright’s words)31 that Stendahl insisted that, far from rejecting Judaism, “Paul had asked the question: Granted that the gospel is for the Gentiles, what is now the place of the Jews and of the Torah? Romans 9-11 is, [Stendahl] claimed, the real center of the epistle: salvation history is the basic content of Paul’s theology, and justification by faith is part of Paul’s apologetic for the Gentile mission and the place of Gentiles in the church.” To this Käsemann responded that (in Wright’s words)32 “salvation history was opposed to the true Protestant doctrine of justification and its basis, the theologia crucis.” Astutely, Wright points out that—beyond the confessional dispute regarding what is for Käsemann a puzzling interpretation of a Protestant doctrine by Stendahl (and thus beyond issues concerning hermeneutical theological choices)—what is at stake is the contextual character of their interpretations. Why is Käsemann so opposed to framing Paul’s teaching in “salvation history”? Käsemann answers by referring to contextual concerns: because it is “a conception of salvation history which broke in on us in secularized and political form with the Third Reich and its ideology.”33 Or as Wright34 puts it, Käsemann warned that “salvation history had been used to back up Nazism.” In his response to Käsemann, Stendahl emphasizes the contextual character of both of their interpretations: [Käsemann’s] article proceeds to deal with all the evils in the church and the world that can and have come from “theologies of history,” including naïve cultural optimism and abhorrent Nazism (p. 64). Similarly, I could list how pogroms and the Holocaust found fuel and comfort in an understanding of Judaism as the eternally condemned and evil way to serve God, in the notion that the Jews (including Qumran) suppose the “justification of the godly” to be the aim of the divine plan.35

Yes, both Stendahl and Käsemann are critical exegetes. They carefully ground their interpretations in Paul’s text and thus ensure the legitimacy of their conclusions (as we shall see below). Their respective choices of what is most significant in the letter—1:1–4:25 and justification by faith (Käsemann) or 9:1–11:36 and the place of the Jews in salvation history (Stendahl)—are legitimate textual analytical choices that can be grounded in Paul’s text. But Stendahl and Käsemann cannot help but show that their interpretations are also based upon contextual ethical choices. Both develop their interpretations in the wake of World War II and of the Shoah, when millions of Jews were murdered by people driven by an anti-Semitism that appeared to be condoned by, and possibly rooted in, anti-Jewish 31 32 33 34 35

Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” 4. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” 4. Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 64, emphasis added. Wright, op. cit. 5. Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 131.

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interpretations of the Bible—including Paul’s letter to the Romans. But they see the root of this anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism in very different ways. Leaving aside Käsemann’s interpretation (discussed in Chapter 5), we can note that Stendahl sees his critical essays in Paul among Jews and Gentiles as “an attempt to get at some of the roots of Christian anti-Semitism . . . .When the first two essays assert that Paul’s argument about justification by faith neither goes out of his ‘dissatisfaction’ with Judaism, nor is intended as a frontal attack on ‘legalism,’ I believe that I am striking at the most vicious root of theological antiJudaism” (126–27).36 In sum, for Stendahl, the horrendous contextual tragedy of Christian anti-Semitism and its awful consequences—a contextual issue that interpreters of Paul cannot ignore after the Shoah—is rooted in a problematic understanding of what Paul says about the relationships between Paul and Judaism, the gospel and Judaism, Jews and Gentiles, and the Jewish community and the church. This problematic understanding is hidden in interpretations of Romans focused on “justification by faith,” a fundamentally supersessionist doctrine: the gospel supersedes Judaism, in that there is no salvation for Jews as long as they do not believe in Christ and abandon their Judaism.37 Such is Stendahl’s thesis. Of course, one can claim against Stendahl (as Käsemann did, to a certain extent) that we have no choice and that the center of Paul’s teaching is indeed justification by faith; one can claim that denying this traditional interpretation—the forensic theological interpretation—is an illegitimate and implausible exegetical interpretation that betrays Paul’s text—“what the text meant.” Yet, if it were the case, believers who read Romans as Scripture would face an ethical dilemma. Since an interpretation centered on justification by faith would, accordingly, be the only legitimate one (accurately presenting “what the text meant”), believers who read this text as Scripture (as a Word-to-live-by) would have to either (a) deny that there is an anti-Judaism latent in it (but it is difficult to do so, when one recognizes that supersessionism is a root of Christian anti-Judaism) or (b) act as if it were not the case, closing their eyes to the implications of the Word by which they live. Most forensic interpreters adopt one of these two options. Another possibility is to renounce the epistle to the Romans as authoritative Scripture. This would be a responsible ethical option (to avoid promoting anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism). But for believers the ethical choice would come at a high cost. And for what? In order to protect the view that there is one and only one true interpretation, the forensic interpretation?

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Note that Stendahl’s essays were exegetical ones, that challenge other exegeses, and thus that do not infringe in the study of “what the text means” for today and its contextual considerations—following the model presented in the article “Biblical Theology.” As Jewett does, Stendahl keeps separate the descriptive study of “what the text meant” from the study of “what the text means” (including contextual choices). “Supersessionism” is the “view according to which Christianity supersedes or replaces Judaism, since Christ is the complete and final revelation that not only fulfilled but ended the purpose of the Law” (“Supersessionism,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity). See also Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Anti-Semitism” (The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity) and Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974); Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978); and N. T. Wright Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 806–10 (proposing a distinction among three types of supersessionism).

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Stendahl and “New Perspective” exegetes reverse the argument and claim that it is not necessarily the text of Romans which is flawed and anti-Jewish. Rather the problem is with the forensic interpretations centered on justification by faith. So, independently from the contextual concerns arising from the Shoah that deeply disturb them, these exegetes develop a different kind of critical interpretation of Romans that shows, in Stendahl’s words, (a) that “Paul’s idea of justification does not permeate his writing” and (b) that in Romans (including 9–11) “Paul is not carrying out a polemic against the Jews, but is rather giving an apology for his mission in which he reflects on the mystery of God’s dealing with Israel.”38 Or as Wright39 emphasizes, for Stendahl, it is because interpretations are framed by “the traditional, and false, picture of Judaism” (based upon inappropriate exegetical and historical studies) that they promote anti-Judaism with tragic contextual consequences. So, what is the solution? How can these problematic interpretations be corrected? By correcting the false picture of Judaism that frames them. How? By reading Paul from the perspective of the Judaism of his time—a perspective patiently acquired by reading early Jewish literature on its own terms (in dialogue with Jewish scholars and rabbis)—rather than reading early Jewish literature from the perspective of the traditional (forensic) understanding of Paul.40 Note: It should be clear that in this book (and against many [if not all] New Perspective exegetes) I do not want to, and will not, engage in a quest for “THE” only true interpretation of Romans, as all the participants in the debate under discussion do. As Chapter III has demonstrated, forensic theological interpretations (focused on justification by faith of individuals) are legitimate and plausible. The present chapter will similarly show the legitimacy and plausibility of inclusive covenantal community interpretations. What about the anti-Judaism promoted by the forensic theological interpretations? PART III will argue that (1) the forensic theological interpretations must continue to be affirmed because they have benefits which are most important in contexts involving individuals’ crises, that no other interpretation can address; and (2) that they have the disastrous contextual effect of promoting anti-Judaism if, and only if, they are absolutized and claim to be the only true interpretations.

(B) The hermeneutical theological grounding of inclusive covenantal community readings of Romans Parallel to the contextual choices discussed above, New Perspective exegetes make a distinctive hermeneutical theological choice regarding Judaism and thus regarding

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Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 131–32. Wright, “Paul of History,” 16. Stendahl had initiated this approach (although on very different texts, Matthew and the Dead Sea Scrolls) with his 1954 Uppsala dissertation: The School of St. Matthew, and Its Use of the Old Testament (reprinted, Lund: Gleerup and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968). He also constantly participated in Jewish Christian dialogue, including as one of the directors of a think-tank with rabbis at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

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Paul’s understanding of the Law/Torah: instead of understanding Judaism as a legalistic, works-righteousness religion, they understand Judaism as characterized by “covenantal nomism” (Sanders’s phrase). A critical historical study of Palestinian Judaism (with far-reaching hermeneutical theological consequences) helps to address the contextual problems related to anti-Judaism mentioned above. Thus, following his discussion of the Käsemann/Stendahl debate, in his 1978 article Wright turns to the recently published work of E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), who strove to correct the false picture of Judaism embedded in traditional interpretations of Paul by systematically studying early Jewish literature. Before even thinking of comparing Judaism and Paul, Sanders strove to understand Judaism on its own terms and to elucidate “the structure and functioning of that religion.”41 Sanders’s approach was therefore very different from that of W. D. Davies who, in his Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, started with the Jewish motifs found in Paul, and convincingly established the Jewish background of many of Paul’s points and elaborations, while still striving to understand them in the structure and functioning of Paul’s theological thinking.42 By contrast, in order to identify the structure and functioning of Palestinian Judaism as a religion, Sanders immersed himself for many years in the systematic study of Palestinian Judaism. While Sanders failed—from the perspective of Wright, Dunn, and New Perspective exegetes—to recognize the actual implications of his research for understanding Paul (in studying the letters, he could not get free from the framework of a forensic theological interpretation), Sanders was immensely successful in demonstrating in the first part (and the bulk) of his book that, far from being characterized by a legalistic works-righteousness performed in order to be saved, Judaism in Paul’s time was actually characterized by what Sanders called “covenantal nomism.” To my knowledge Sanders does not make explicit whether or not he was driven to invest himself in long and intensive studies of Palestinian Judaism because of contextual concerns for the effects of Christian anti-Judaism. But I know that I was driven by such contextual concerns when I conducted my own study of Palestinian Judaism, resulting in my dissertation, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine—in which independently I reach very similar conclusions to those of Sanders (our manuscripts were written concurrently).43 It was because I was confronted since my youth (when our home was a stop on the underground railroad leading Jewish 41 42

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Sanders, Palestinian Judaism, xi. W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (London: SPCK, 1955). Davies’s approach remains in line with Hermann L. Strack and Paul Billerbeck (and others), Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 6 vol (Munich: Beck, 1922–61), and of Joseph Bonsirven, Exégèse rabbinique et exéxèse paulinienne (Paris : Beauchesne et ses fils, 1939) and especially Textes rabbiniques des deux premiers siècles chrétiens, pour servir à l’intelligence du Nouveau Testament (Rome: Pontificio Istituto biblico, 1955). While all these studies are immensely helpful, they miss both the “structure and functioning of Palestinian Judaism as a religion” (studied by Sanders) and the similar “hermeneutical framework” (that I studied; see below). Daniel Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine (SBL Dissertation Series 22. Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975. 5th printing, 1981). I defended this dissertation in 1971. By the time it was finally published in 1975, Sanders’s manuscript was in final form. The most important difference is that, in his description of the structure and functioning of Palestinian Judaism as a religion, Sanders includes as a single “religion” pharisaic/early rabbinic Judaism AND apocalyptic Judaism, while in my description of early Jewish hermeneutic I carefully distinguish and even contrast pharisaic/ early rabbinic (the covenantal hermeneutic discussed in this chapter) from apocalyptic Judaism

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refugees to Switzerland) with the paradox (a) of having a firsthand experience of seeing the disastrous effects of Christian anti-Judaism that our Huguenot/Protestant communities were fully committed to confront by helping its victims despite the great risks and (b) of hearing supersessionism (a disguised, but recognizable, anti-Judaism) preached in these same Huguenot/Protestant communities. For me, the problem was rooted in our (mis)understanding of New Testament texts about the Jews’ use of Torah (or the Law). Should not one acknowledge that “hypocritical legalistic worksrighteousness”—the forensic interpretation—cannot but be a caricature demonizing the Jews’ use of their Scripture? In Ricoeur’s definition, is this not a caricature of their “hermeneutic”? Thus, I studied many different expressions of early Rabbinic and Pharisaic hermeneutic, that is, the ways in which Palestinian Jews related biblical texts to various aspects of their lives, seeking to discern the “hermeneutic pattern” they followed (comparable to Sanders’s “structure and functioning of Palestinian Judaism as a religion”).44 I concluded that their hermeneutic pattern could best be named a covenantal hermeneutical framework. Torah (and Tanakh [the entire Hebrew Scripture]) was consistently “understood in the framework of the covenant.” In very brief, the covenant was understood by Tannaitic rabbis not as a relation with God to be earned, but as a gift (election) and call (vocation) from God to be the Chosen People of God in the world (as expressed in Haggadah), accomplished by “walking” in life accordingly (as spelled out in Halakah). Obviously, I might have called this covenantal hermeneutical framework “covenantal nomism,” if I had access to Sanders’s work! We basically reached the same conclusions. Consequently, when reading Romans (and Paul’s other letters) from this “New Perspective,” one could recognize that Paul, the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles, continued to envision his ministry and the communities of Christ-followers in terms of a covenantal hermeneutical framework. This covenantal focus is also pointed out by Dunn in his essay, “The New Perspective on Paul,” when he discusses and appropriates Sanders’s work. Similarly, after emphasizing that Paul’s charge against the Jews is about boasting (not legalism) and sin (the breaking or abuse of the law) and not a charge against the law itself, Wright concludes his proclamation of a New Perspective on Paul by emphasizing: “In language rich with ‘new covenant’ significance, Paul outlines here [Rom 3:27-31] his theology of the church as the true Israel, the People of God.”45 I add (as Wright does in later works) that this People of God is an inclusive covenantal community, a phrase that I use as a

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(discussed in Chapter 5). In this dissertation, I did not discuss Paul’s letters (and any other New Testament text). Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 64 and « Problèmes actuels de l’interprétation » Centre Protestant d’Études et de Documentations (CPED), March 1970, 51–70. So, in Early Jewish Hermeneutic I was not studying how the early Rabbis understood specific texts—what can be called their “exegesis” (as many of my readers presupposed I was doing, despite my claims to the contrary). I was studying the ways in which they relate biblical texts to various aspects of their lives. This hermeneutical pattern is expressed not only in their explicit doctrine of Scripture and rules of interpretations (middot), but also in their uses of Torah in the Synagogue (reading cycles, homilies, Targum, liturgy) and the Schools (in halakhic midrash, in Mishnah, and later on Talmud). See Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 11–127. Wright, “Paul of History,” 16–17.

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shorthand designation instead of other designations, such as the “New Perspective and Beyond.” As will be shown throughout this chapter, inclusive covenantal community interpretations are (a) appropriately grounded in the rhetorical and ideological features of the text of Romans through the use of suitable methodologies (they make legitimate textual/analytical choices), (b) plausibly framed by community-centered, covenantal hermeneutical categories that hold together the rhetorical and ideological features of Romans (they make plausible hermeneutical choices), and (c) driven by the ethical imperative to address urgent contextual issues, namely those rooted in anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, as well as those resulting from exclusionary attitudes and injustices of any kind (they make contextual choices that have the potential to be valid in particular contexts, as discussed in Chapter 7). Yet, I have an important reservation—as I have with most interpretations! New Perspective exegetes advocating inclusive covenantal community interpretations often claim (as Stendahl, Käsemann, Wright, and Dunn do in their respective works) that they are proposing an interpretation that has a greater degree of probability than any other interpretation. Even though they humbly follow the principle of criticism (simply claiming that their “inclusive covenantal” interpretation has a higher degree of probability), they exclude all other interpretations as having a lower degree of probability. The problem is that this attitude contradicts the teaching found in Romans according to their own interpretive line of reasoning! Indeed, in New Perspective interpretations, Romans calls the “weak” and the “strong” (Rom 14–15) to participate together in an inclusive covenantal community and more generally (throughout the letter) Romans calls the very diverse church members with Jewish and Greek/Gentile backgrounds to respect each other’s different points of view and practices in order to participate together in a joint mission. Of course, these Jews and these Greeks/Gentiles had very different views—equivalent to the very different interpretations of Romans. In this inclusive community, one cannot promote one’s interpretation as the only legitimate and plausible one – and exclusivist attitude. It is in order to avoid this trap that Chapters 3 and 5 present two other interpretations as equally legitimate and plausible, even as the present chapter carefully establishes the legitimacy and plausibility of the quest for Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic. And of course, it is expected that conversely those who give priority to another textual dimension should not absolutize their interpretation to the point of denying the legitimacy and plausibility of the covenantal community interpretation. Therefore, they should have the openness and the patience to “discern . . . what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2) in this different interpretation.

(C) Critical studies of Paul’s rhetoric and ideological/cultural logic in Romans The legitimacy and plausibility of inclusive covenantal community interpretations are established by critical exegetical studies focused on the rhetorical and ideological features of Paul’s letter. Although inclusive covenantal community interpretations of Romans can be traced throughout the history of reception, in critical biblical scholarship they

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are relatively new (post-World War II). Indeed, these “New” Perspective, “Beyond the New” Perspective studies, or “Re-readings” of Romans are often defined negatively: by what they are not, namely forensic theological interpretations grounded in philological epistolary exegeses. I avoid doing so and therefore designate them positively: by the fact that they reflect hermeneutical theological choices that are community-centered showing that Paul advocates an inclusive community envisioned from a covenantal perspective (by contrast with the forensic individual-centered interpretations) and that they are grounded in Paul’s text by exegetical studies of the rhetorical and ideological features of the letter. Such critical exegetical studies reflect textual analytical choices focused upon the elucidation of Paul’s rhetorical logic in Romans, an approach that demands that we also pay close attention to the ideological, cultural, as well as social and political features of the letter. The first notable rhetorical analysis of Romans is found in Wilhelm Wuellner’s 1976 CBQ article, “Paul’s Rhetoric of Argumentation in Romans.”46 As its title indicates, Wuellner’s article posits that Paul framed his letter by means of a rhetorical model comparable to that of classical Greco-Roman rhetoric.47 So the question is: What is the rhetorical genre of Romans? For Wuellner, addressing this question demands the establishment of “the relationship between speaker and speech content, the relationship between speaker and audience, and the relationship between speech content and audience” (342). Wuellner does this by comparing the Exordium (introduction), 1:1–15, and the Peroratio (conclusion), 15:14–16:23. Then he can ask: Is the genre of Romans a “deliberative” genre (as in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians) that features advice offered by Paul as an authoritative figure in response to the needs of an audience with which he is well acquainted, and even in response to specific questions posed by the addressees (as is the case in 1 Corinthians)? Or, is it a “judicial” or “apologetic” genre (as in Galatians) that features a defense offered by an authoritative figure (Paul) whose status has been threatened or challenged? Following his negative answer to these two questions, Wuellner concludes that the genre of Romans is “epideictic” or “demonstrative,” because Romans “tries to establish a sense of communion centered on particular values recognized by the audience (in Romans it is the faith stance and faith commitment of speaker and audience), and to this end [Paul] uses a whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement” (343). On this basis Wuellner can present the overall “arrangement” (Lat. dispositio) of the rhetorical discourse.48 Wuellner is followed, each time with some modifications and variations, by Folker Siegert, and many others including Ben Witherington, and ultimately Robert Jewett.49 In his Hermeneia commentary, Jewett argues, as we shall

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Wilhelm Wuellner, “Paul’s Rhetoric of Argumentation in Romans. An Alternative to the DonfriedKarris Debate over Romans,” CBQ 38 (1976), 330–51. See Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) and George A. Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman world, 300 B.C.-A.D. 300 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Progressing from the exordium (1:115) to the peroratio (15:14–16:23) by means of the transitus (or propositio, i.e., thesis, 1:16–17) and the confirmatio (the “proof,” 12:1–15:13, including a paraenetic part). Folker Siegert, Argumentation bei Paulus, gezeigt an Röm 9-11 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1985); Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids,

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see, that the more specific genre of the epideictic discourse of Romans is that of an “ambassadorial rhetorical letter” that seeks to find common ground among different community groups in Rome (and elsewhere) with characteristics of other subgenres of epideictic discourse—such as paraenetic (also emphasized by Stowers). Below, our presentation of the rhetorical analysis of Romans follows Jewett’s version, because he carefully took into account previous studies and, elaborating on them, carefully justified his proposals. i. 1:1–12 The Exordium (“introduction” & “causa” (issue): Paul’s forthcoming visit) ii. 1:13–15 The Narratio (“opening statement of facts”: Paul’s missionary project) iii. 1:16–17(18)50 The Propositio (“Thesis”: the Gospel as powerful embodiment of the righteousness/justice of God) iv. 1:18(19)–15:13 The Probatio (“Proof ”: Four proofs of the Thesis and its implications for the Romans) 1:18–4:25 First Proof: The Gospel expresses the impartial righteousness/justice of God against claims of cultural superiority 5:1–8:39 Second Proof: Life in Christ as the new system of honor that replaces the quest for status through conformity to the Law 9:1–11:36 Third Proof: The triumph of Divine Righteousness/Justice in the Gospel’s Mission to Israel and the Gentiles 12:1–15:13 Fourth Proof: Living together according to the Gospel v. 15:14–16:2451 The Peroratio (“Conclusion”) An appeal for cooperation in Missionary activities in Jerusalem, Rome, and Spain By itself this identification of the genre of Romans and of its “arrangement” (dispositio) is far from showing the rhetoric logic of Romans. As Jean-Noël Aletti wisely notes, if a rhetorical study remains formal by identifying in Romans the ideal or customary order of the parts of ancient rhetorical discourses and its traditional rhetoric genre, this study sounds artificial.52 Indeed, while it needs to take into account the overall “arrangement” of the discourse, a critical rhetorical study of Romans must account for the entire range of the means of persuasion identified in ancient rhetoric. Jewett explains at length that these means of persuasion include stylistic features to facilitate “memory and delivery,” the “rhetorical situation” and its narrative formulations, and “invention” (23–42).

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Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 21–22. I will include 1:18 in the Propositio for rhetorical reasons, together with Neil Elliott. The Arrogance of Nation, 17, and others. This arrangement is also helpful to facilitate the comparison with the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation, whose figurative analysis demands a break after 1:18. As will be discussed, while Chapter 16 is part of the original letter, one needs to exclude the interpolations of 16:17–20a (against heretics) and of 16:25–27 (a supersessionist doxology, which displaced the benediction, kept in 16:20b, and which was in 16:24). Jean-Noël Aletti, God’s Justice in Romans: Keys for Interpreting the Epistle to the Romans (trans. Peggy Manning Meyer; Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2010), 34–36. Elliott (The Arrogance of Nations, 17) makes the same points when he says that such rhetorical studies do little more than provide a new technical vocabulary, gleaned from Greek and Roman rhetorical handbooks, to present the outline of the letter, often still conceived as presenting a theological argument.

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Stylistic features which help “memory and delivery” are means of persuasion, because Paul as the author needed to anticipate that his letter would be committed to memory before being delivered orally to the Roman congregations. Indeed, since the text produced by the secretary (who identifies himself as Tertius in 16:22) was written without spaces between words and without punctuation (and thus without paragraphs or chapter divisions), before being delivered orally it needed to be rehearsed.53 Many stylistic features were needed to help in this process. Thus, as Jewett54 shows, to help both the person delivering orally the letter and the hearers, rather than making a single point, Paul frequently included in his text “series” of similar points.55 These and other types of stylistic features are most helpful for the person who is orally delivering the letter. But they are also persuasive by focusing the attention of the hearers (it is not expected that the letter will be read with the eyes) on important points, not by presupposing that the hearers already have an interest in their theological content, but by calling the hearers’ attention to these points through a striking style in the hope of generating interest in their theological content. Taking into account all the stylistic rhetorical features of Romans—and not simply the diatribe and theological teaching, as in forensic interpretations—totally transforms the understanding of the letter and its purposes. The interpretations of 14:1–15:13 illustrate this point. Much has been done in forensic interpretations with the references to divisions among the house-churches (or between factions in the church) in Rome: some being “weak in faith,” because they eat only leafy vegetables (lettuce, 14:2) and observe certain holy days (14:5); while others are “strong in faith” because they eat everything, and judge all days alike. In short, for forensic interpretations, these passages are commonly read as referring to confrontations among specific groups in the churches in Rome—confrontations regarding the theological perspectives of the individual members which make up the groups—which Paul is trying to resolve. But it is quite another matter to read 14:1–15:13 by focusing on stylistic rhetorical features of the passage, that is, as Wilhelm Wuellner already suggested in his 1976 article,56 as an illustration (exemplum, as 13:1–7 also is) of the general principles posited in Romans 12. In his more detailed study and in his Short Commentary, Jewett points out that, when one reads 14:1–15:13 as a rhetorical illustration (exemplum), one must take into account the humorous character of these descriptions of matters of kosher regulations

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A point demonstrated by the earliest manuscripts, as is underscored by Stowers, 9 and Jewett, 39, who refers to specialists of textual criticism such as Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarenton, 1964), 22–24. Jewett, 32–41. The text includes “series of tens,” “series of fives,” “series of sevens” (seven representing completeness and perfection in Jewish thought), “series of threes” (e.g., 1:23 “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles”) as well as “series of fours”(favorite in the Greco-Roman world), the most striking being 1:29—31, that presents a catalog of evils in five series of fours. “They were filled with every kind of (I) wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of (II) envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are (III) gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, and (IV) haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, (V) foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” Wilhelm Wuellner, “Paul’s Rhetoric of Argumentation in Romans.” CBQ 38 (1976), 344–48.

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(14:14).57 Indeed, since there is no evidence that any group in that time was so extremely ascetic as to eat only lettuce, “the exaggeration is humorous and rhetorically effective in supporting an argument that pertains to a wide range of controversial positions on diet and liturgy that divided the Roman congregations.”58 Jewett continues by noting that, by not specifying which holy days are in dispute (Sunday? Sabbath? Roman feast day?), “the appropriate conclusion is that Paul intentionally formulated the matter so that a number of controversies would be covered.”59 Therefore one should not seek to draw any conclusion regarding specific situations in the churches in Rome (as most forensic interpretations do). But these humorous descriptions are rhetorically quite effective, in the process of “seek[ing] to persuade the Roman congregations to support his mission to the barbarians in Spain.”60 The many rhetorical features (presented below in the detailed rhetorical reading of Romans) require that the letter be read as a presentation of the gospel, which is framed by its call to participate in an inclusive community (including both Jews and Gentiles) and a call to mission of this community. This gospel has a theological content—that Jewett summarizes by saying that it is a “gospel of impartial, divine righteousness/justice revealed in Christ.”61 But this theological discourse is primarily a rhetorical discourse. Broadly speaking, one can say that the rhetorical aim, which frames all its teaching, is to overcome the prejudices that divide the house-churches in Rome and that have their roots in the Greco-Roman and Jewish cultural and ideological worlds, which included honor systems that engendered discrimination, exploitation, and rivalry among groups. From this rhetorical perspective, the purpose of the letter is “to bring together believing Jews and non-Jews in one community,” as Moxnes already emphasized in 1988.62 Therefore, this rhetorical kind of interpretation focuses upon the community-centered teaching of this letter. Another means of persuasion is the “rhetorical situation,” a literary construct of the relationship between author and audience. Such a rhetorical situation can be conceived as inscribed in the narratives that the letter posits.63 Such narratives are to be expected in Romans, because life is full of stories: “All things write their own stories.”64 Obviously, in Paul’s letter we can readily recognize narratives of the interactions of Paul and the Roman congregations, and a series of sub-narratives (stories) among which are: those regarding the development of these congregations, including stories of the conflicts that currently divide these congregations; those regarding Paul’s previous ministry among the Gentiles “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum” (15:19); those regarding his future ministry, including delivering the offering of the Gentile churches 57

58 59 60 61 62

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Jewett, 829–99. Jewett uses this example in the introduction of his Short Commentary to show the difference a rhetoric reading makes. See Robert Jewett, Romans: A Short Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1–9; designated from now on as “Jewett, Short Commentary”; the Hermeneia commentary continues to be simply designated by Jewett’s name and page numbers). Jewett, Short Commentary, 3. Jewett, Short Commentary. Jewett, Short Commentary, 6. Jewett, Short Commentary, 1. Halvor Moxnes, “Honour and Righteousness in Romans,” JSNT 32 (1988), 61–77. Moxnes builds upon Stendahl’s groundbreaking proposals mentioned above. Jewett, 41–42, following the model of the pioneering book by Norman R. Petersen, Rediscovering Paul: Philemon and the Sociology of Paul’s Narrative World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). As Charles Simic writes in his poem “Stories,” cited in epigraph to this chapter.

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for the “poor among the saints at Jerusalem” (15:26) and the preparation of the mission to Spain (15:24); and the anticipated sub-narrative of the reading of this letter to the Roman congregations. This rhetorical situation and its narratives are literary constructs—and therefore should not be construed as a means of accessing historical reality as, among others, Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza has argued.65 Therefore, a study of the rhetorical situation helps to discern not so much the author’s intent and how it is transmitted through the text to an audience66 but rather the narrative world of the rhetorical discourse and therefore the ideological, cultural, social, and political constructs that compose the narrative world and its characters (including the author as character!).67 A final and essential means of persuasion is what is designated by the rhetorical term “invention,”68 which designates the discovery of the resources for discoursive persuasion that are appropriate in particular rhetorical situations, and finding the best ways to use these resources.69 There are inartificial and artificial types of invention. Inartificial inventions include the appeal to sources that the audience will recognize as authoritative. Such inventions include the citations of early creeds (e.g., the Hellenistic creed cited in 1:3–4) and of hymns (e.g., the many uses of doxology; as well as fragments of hymns; e.g., in 3:25–26, 11:33–36) well known in the communities of Christfollowers, as well as, of course, the ongoing references to Scripture. Artificial inventions include making use of modes of discourse that the audience is expected to recognize— such as the diatribe (including speech in character), the midrashic style (interpreting Scripture by Scripture), syllogisms, and other forms of arguments. All these inventions are used to produce ideological constructs that would be readily recognizable by the audience and, as such, would play an essential role in the rhetorical discourse. Many of these inventions and their powers of persuasion are either not recognized or misrecognized by modern readers who are unaware of the cultural specificity of the letter to the Romans. This is why a rhetorical reading of this letter needs to pay close attention to the ideological, cultural, social, and political features of the letter— that is, to those textual features that point to the ways in which people spontaneously (ideologically) conceive of their relationship with others in a community, of the relationship of their community with other communities, and of their relationship with all other “real conditions of [their] existence.”70 An example of the misrecognition of an invention by not recognizing the cultural specificity of the letter to the Romans is its multiple allusions to the theme of selfmastery. These allusions are misleading as long as one does not recognize that they 65

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Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, “Rhetorical Situation and Historical Reconstruction in 1 Corinthians,” NTS 33 (1987), 390–400. Against Jewett, 41, who unduly follows Kennedy on this point. George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1984), 12. Jewett, 24–29. Stanley E. Porter, ed., Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic: 330 B.C.-A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). I allude to Althusser’s definition of ideology: “Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), 36. On this neutral definition of ideology, see also J. Harold Ellens, “Ideology,” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity).

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point to the ideological pattern of self-mastery predominant in Greco-Roman culture, and thus that, in rhetorical terms, these allusions contribute to a central invention that Paul uses as means of persuasion. From a modern Western ideological perspective (framed by what Stendahl’s “the introspective conscience of the West”) these references to self-mastery are obviously (i.e., ideologically!) individual-centered. But as Stowers shows in A Rereading of Romans, in the Greco-Roman culture self-mastery would have been a community-centered or social-centered ideological pattern.71 Paul’s use of this theme can thus be viewed as an invention, indeed a powerful invention because, as Stowers shows, “the theme [of self-mastery] allows a coherent understanding of Paul’s discourse about the law, his opponents, and his audience.”72 Self-mastery is the “social psychology” of an ethic73 and therefore is an aspect of moral politics: “The philosopher’s message said that the same training that made one most able to control oneself and others also made oneself free from the control of others.”74 In its Jewish version (in Philo and Josephus), this ideological view of self-mastery—with its sociohistorical understanding of all kinds of issues—yields a logic that tightly binds together for Paul “the law, works of the law, gentiles becoming righteous, Christ’s faithfulness, and the Spirit’s virtues.”75 Self-mastery as a community-centered or social-centered ideological mode of life is, as we shall see, foregrounded in Romans in the presentation of sin and salvation as a story of the loss and recovery of self-control and of Christ as enabler of the disciplined self. But rather than understanding these issues as personal, individual problems, for the Greco-Roman culture an ethic of self-mastery, moderation, and restraint was primarily an issue concerning the “social life characterized by steeply hierarchical social stratification and intense competition for goods,” as well as by “social standing (honor).”76 Consequently, a rhetorical and ideological reading of Romans shows that, through this theme, Romans tries to clarify for gentile followers of Christ their relation to the law, Jews, and Judaism and the current place of both Jews and gentiles in God’s plan through Jesus Christ. . . . and that the acceptance and self-mastery they seek is to be found not in following Jewish teachers who advocate works from the law but in what God has done and is even now doing through Jesus Christ.77

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In A Rereading of Romans, Stowers builds upon his study of the diatribe in Romans (The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1981), in which he showed that the diatribe features of Romans should be understood as parts of the rhetoric of the letter—and not merely as an aspect of the preaching style through which Paul communicated a theological teaching. Stowers, 66. Stowers, 82. Stowers, 56, and 45, where he takes 1 Cor 9:25 as an example of Paul’s use of the terms of the family of ἐγκράτεια to speak of the attitudes of athletes who “exercise self-control in all things” (using the verb ἐγκρατεύεται) in order to adapt themselves to the skills of the other athletes with whom they compete. Contrary to the Western perspective on self-control as primarily focused upon the individual (the self), in the Greco-Roman world self-control is always conceived in terms of one’s relationship with others, including when it is in matters related to sex as in 1 Cor 7:9. Stowers, 74. Stowers, 47. Stowers, 36.

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As we progress in our reading of Romans, we will therefore need to pay close attention to those ideological features of the letter (such as self-mastery) that are easily misread when seen from the perspective of another culture and its ideology. An example of a lack of awareness of the presence of an invention in Romans is when modern Western readers completely ignore the many allusions to “honor and shame,” because these categories do not play any significant ideological role in our own culture. But, as Jewett shows, honor (and shame) is at the center of an invention that Paul uses as means of persuasion for the Romans. The honor-and-shame system was an essential ideological pattern that, in the Greco-Roman world, as in many present-day cultures outside of the West, pervaded the entire cultural, social, and political world, including the relationships among religious communities and within each religious community. In order to reveal the allusions to this honor ideological pattern, Jewett78 carefully reviews (a) the cultural situation in Rome and its pyramid of honor, (b) the relationship between the Roman congregations and the mission in Spain, and (c) the cultural situation in Spain, a society made up of subjugated (shameful) barbarians.79 As we progress in our reading of Romans, we will see how fruitful this attention to the role of honor and shame in Paul’s discourse is. For instance, when 14:1–15:13 is read from an honor/shame perspective, Paul’s criticism of believers for “despising” and “judging” each other can be, and indeed should be, understood as references to contrary strategies of mutual shaming in community settings (rather than to the ill-will of individuals, as is usually done in forensic theological interpretations). Similarly, from an honor/ shame perspective, “boasting” (2:17, 23; 3:27; 4:2; 11:18) as undue claim of superiority is to be understood as the problematic attitude of a group or community that seeks to maintain its honor as a community by disparaging others. Then one needs to conclude with Jewett that the gospel presented in Romans proclaims that Christ transformed the honor systems that dominated the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds, resulting in discrimination and exploitation of barbarians . . . . [By contrast] the gospel offered grace to every group in equal measure, shattering the imperial premise of exceptionalism in virtue and honor.80

We will find many other kinds of ideologically framed allusions to social relations in Romans that commonly escape the notice of modern Western readers as long as cultural and social historians have not unpacked what would have been self-evident for the hearers of Paul’s letter. There are many allusions to the way of life in households (including slavery, see 1:1a!), to structures of authority, to interrelationships among churches and other communities, and most importantly throughout the letter, to the interrelationships of Jews and Gentiles, as well as what we will call the interrelationships of “Jewish Christ-followers” and “Gentile Christ-followers.” I will use this terminology following “New Perspective and Beyond” exegetes because designating them as Christians would hide the socio-cultural dimensions of their interactions, let alone

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Jewett, 46–74. Jewett, 74–80. Jewett, 1.

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it being anachronistic, since the members of the communities that followed Jesus as Christ did not view themselves as Christians. For instance, as we shall see, Paul continued to view himself as a Jew (he did not convert, as Stendahl underscored), and therefore is more appropriately called a “Jewish Christ-follower.”81 Our detailed presentation of these issues will carefully point out the rhetorical significance of these readily recognizable sociopolitical and cultural textual features (that have been studied with appropriate socio-critical methods). We will need to be particularly attentive to unpack the ideological, sociopolitical, and cultural dimensions of what appears to us as exclusively theological concepts.82 For instance: Paul’s statements about death and its reign in relation to sin in 5:14, 17, 21 and Rom 6, seem to be simply theological. After all, death is death is death, isn’t it? And sin is a theological concept. But such a reading is totally missing the rhetorical point of this invention, which one can recognize only when one reads these passages with the awareness that life and death are fundamentally tied to “the imperial propaganda that the prosperity of Rome and the Julio-Claudian house were providentially ordained. In consigning humanity to the rule of sin and death, Paul dethroned the ‘great man’ in antiquity and denied him the perpetuity of his house over against the eternal house of David (Rom 1:3-4; 11:26; 15:12),” as James Harrison shows in this interpretation of all these passages to be discussed below.83 But this interpretation makes sense only insofar as one reviews how the Romans (including emperors and philosophers) of Paul’s time envisioned death in their social relations, as Harrison does. Similarly, to keep up with the same exegete, the concept of grace seems to be totally a theological concept, until one becomes aware that it alludes to the Hellenistic reciprocity system and to the social conventions of giving and receiving. By deliberately using this language—a rhetorical invention—Paul redefines the rationale of the reciprocity system of the Hellenistic world in the light of the gospel of grace and transforms its social expression in the house-churches.84 Similarly, we can recognize, following Dieter Georgi and Neil Elliott, that many features of Romans are framed by political ideology.85 An obvious example is the significance of calling Jesus Christ “our Lord.” In a letter to the Romans this is far from being a politically innocent statement, since the same title was used for the Emperor! We shall continue finding examples in the comments below, by being attentive to the ideological and cultural investment of the textual features of the letter, so as to discern their rhetorical weight.

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Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 7–23. Including by constantly consulting for direction Thomas R. Blanton IV and Raymond Picketts, eds., Paul and Economics: A Handbook (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017)—a book that will be invaluable for Volumes II and III. James R. Harrison, “Paul and the ‘Social Relations’ of Death at Rome,” in Paul and His Social Relations (eds. Stanley Porter and Christopher Land; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 114. James R. Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). See again Neil Elliott’s The Arrogance of Nations, as well as his preceding books: The Rhetoric of Romans and Liberating Paul.

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(D) Why designate this interpretive line of reasoning as a “reading Romans for its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community”? When exegetes choose as most significant the rhetoric, ideological, social, and cultural textual features of the letter to the Romans—in short, when their textual/analytical choice is to seek to elucidate “Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic”—they end up reading Romans for “its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community”; this interpretive line of reasoning is their hermeneutical theological choice. The legitimacy and plausibility of these choices have been suggested above and will be demonstrated through the systematic reading of Romans below. But why such a designation? Why focus on Paul’s rhetoric and ideological logic? Acknowledging such ideological (cultural, socioeconomic, political) features of Romans is not suggesting that Paul intentionally developed an ideological discourse, instead of a theological one. Rather, as Elliott writes, it “allows us to recognize at once both the pressure of ideological forces in Paul’s environment  .  .  .  and the countervailing impulses to transcend that pressure that emerge from the collective imagination” on both Paul and his intended audience.86 Paul’s discourse was driven by an ideological logic (expressed through its rhetoric), because Paul recognized powerful community-centered problems in his world and in the world of the churches in Rome and was convinced that the gospel as the power of God could address and needed to address them. This is what made his own mission most urgent; and this mission could not be his alone. It was imperative— and as urgent—that the Roman churches participate in it. So the letter was a call to mission addressed to these churches. Therefore, as exegetes seek to identify the means of persuasion Paul used—that is, how his discourse is framed by its rhetorical goal of affecting its readers/hearers—two central points became apparent: 1. This letter is rhetorically framed by its call to mission of the Roman housechurches: Paul hopes that they will support his mission to Spain (15:23–24) and, through their prayers, his “ministry” in Jerusalem (15:30–31), and that they will be fully engaged in the same kind of mission as he is. Actually, Paul presupposes that, at least to some extent, the Romans are already engaged in missionary activities, as is apparent throughout the letter, beginning in 1:8 (where Paul gives thanks to God “because [their] faith is proclaimed throughout the world”). 2. The letter does not address its readers/hearers as individuals, but as a community. It calls a plurality of house-churches to become an inclusive covenantal community (14:1–15:13) and to be fully engaged in the same kind of mission as he is—a call that Paul formulates with all the rhetorical tact necessary to convince his addressees. These general observations begin to explain the distinctive features of the inclusive covenantal community interpretive lines briefly sketched at the end of Chapter 2. It 86

Elliott, Arrogance of Nations, 23.

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is now readily understandable why these interpretive lines are community-centered. When one pays attention to the rhetorical features of the letter (especially its “inventions” and its “rhetorical situation” with its embedded sub-narratives about the relations between Jewish and Gentile communities) and to the ways in which these rhetorical features constantly bring forward the ideological, the social, the cultural, and even the political, one cannot but read the rest of the letter any other way than as community-centered. And then, one is surprised that the letter could be read from an individual-centered perspective—as is done in the forensic interpretations that pervade the readings (including Bible translations) of Romans in Western cultures. Is not the community-centered focus of Paul’s discourse made explicit by the grammatical style of the letter where plural pronouns—“we,” “you” in the plural form (ὑμεῖς not σὺ)— heavily predominate? But many resist this community-centered reading of the letter, by pointing to Paul’s vocabulary. They object: Is it not clear that Paul’s teaching is individual-centered when he speaks of “sin,” “justification,” “faith,” and dozens of other theological concepts? Of course, Paul’s teaching is individual-centered in its formulations as presented by forensic theological interpretations which have read all of Paul’s concepts following an individual-centered interpretive line of reasoning! But when one reads Romans for its rhetoric and ideological logic, all Paul’s theological concepts need to be, and are, reread following a community-centered interpretive line of reasoning! Paul’s vocabulary remains. The words remain the same in Greek (and even in English, although at times they need to be re-translated). But as they are read from a community-centered perspective, they do not have the same connotations. This becomes clear as soon as one compares the lists of key themes in the individual-centered forensic theological interpretations—Chapter 3—and in the community-centered inclusive covenantal community interpretations, presented below in this chapter (see Appendix). Suffice it here to illustrate this point by alluding to major differences in understandings of “sin,” “justification,” and “faith.” As summarized at the end of Chapter 2, from the individual-centered perspective that characterizes forensic interpretations, “sin” is a behavior or attitude about which an individual sinner feels guilty by her/himself before God (as a result of an introspective examination). Thus “justification by faith” is understood as God’s forgiveness of individual sins (removing this guilt and the threat of the judgment), when each individual has “faith,” that is, believes that Christ died instead of him/her (believes in the gospel as teaching). By contrast, in a communitycentered interpretive line of reasoning, “sin” is a matter of honor and shame. Rhetorical analyses show that honor/shame systems are parts of the ideological framework of the ancient Mediterranean cultures, of Judaism in Palestine and the Greco-Roman world, as well as of the countervailing impulse of Paul’s teaching. Thus “sin” is a shameful behavior, attitude, or situation. Shame is necessarily community-centered since, unlike an individual-centered guilty feeling, being ashamed for a sinful behavior is a consequence of being (or fearing to be) observed by others in a community. Individual sins always have a community dimension, because sin brings shame to the community. In the case of Paul’s teaching (as we shall see below, in this reading of Romans), sin is what prevents the community from properly functioning as the people of God; sin prevents the people of God to manifest the righteousness/justice of God in the world

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by carrying out (as it should) its covenantal vocation/mission. And this is shameful. Therefore, the solution to the problem of sin, justification through faith, is itself communal. As a close reading of Romans following this interpretive line of reasoning shows, “justification” is the right-wising of the community with God—making it once again a faithful covenantal community. In this community-centered perspective, all theological and ethical concepts concern relations with others (including with God). Thus, for instance, faith is faithfulness. The phrase having faith should be understood as being faithful in one’s relationship with God and others (rather than as believing in a doctrine or believing in God). Consequently, as we shall see, the right-wising of the community is brought about through the “faithfulness” of Christ (3:22) that reestablishes the possibility of faithfulness for the community (and its individual members as representing the community). The distinctiveness of the community-centered interpretive line of reasoning frames the way in which all the terminology Paul uses is understood—as becomes clear as we reread each verse of the letter. This is not a projection upon Paul’s text of a foreign perspective, as certain exegetes presuppose when they view the forensic understanding of Paul’s terminology as the actual meaning of this vocabulary, rather than as an interpretation.87 Actually, the “New Perspective and Beyond” exegetes often claim that this type of reading of Paul’s terminology is the only legitimate one, since it takes seriously into account the cultural context of Paul’s letter. But in our study framed by the history of interpretation of Romans, our claim must be more modest: the individual-centered and the community-centered interpretations of Paul’s terminology are equally legitimate and plausible. They reflect different textual/ analytical and hermeneutical choices that result in different interpretations that are equally legitimate and plausible, provided that they are consistent. Why is it appropriate to say that Paul is concerned by a “covenantal community”? One feature of the designation of this interpretive line of reasoning, “Call to Mission of an Inclusive Covenantal Community,” remains to be explained: why does it concern a “covenantal community”? As noted in Romans Paul constantly refers or alludes to the interactions of Jews and Greeks/Gentiles—often understood too quickly as exclusively referring to Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers. In forensic theological interpretations, these mentions are commonly read as references to individual Jews or Greeks/Gentiles and their respective attitudes; indeed, they are members of communities, but each community is understood as a group of individuals who share specific beliefs and attitudes. Once again, forensic theological interpretations

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This is often the point made in recent exegetical studies that “defend” the forensic interpretation against the community-centered interpretations of “new perspective and beyond” interpretations. See, for instance, Peter Stuhlmacher, Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001); see also Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul, 163–93, where he reviews the exegetes who propose what he calls a “defense of Protestantism”; Frank Thielman, From Flight to Solution: A Jewish Framework for Understanding Paul’s View of the Law in Galatians and Romans (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1989); A. Andrew Das, Paul, the Law, and the Covenant (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2001); Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1-5 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002); Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004).

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presuppose individual-centered ideologies. By contrast community-centered interpretations through their rhetorical and ideological approaches take note of the ways in which Paul envisioned these communities, including the church communities. As the “New Perspective” and especially the “Beyond the New Perspective” scholarship on Paul have emphasized, Judaism was (and remains) community-centered. Israel is the people of God. Righteousness/justice and sin are to be understood in a communitycentered way, namely, in terms of the covenant between God and the people of God. Thus Pharisaic and early Rabbinic Judaism—Paul’s Judaism88—was characterized by what Sanders appropriately called “covenantal nomism.”89 Against Sanders, “New Perspective” and “Beyond the New Perspective” interpreters have emphasized, following Stendahl, that far from rejecting Judaism, Paul remained a Jew: his experience on the road to Damascus was not a conversion but a call to a prophet-like mission to the Gentiles. Speaking about Gal 1:11–17, Stendahl emphatically writes, “Here is not that change of ‘religion’ that we commonly associate with the word conversion. Serving the one and the same God, Paul receives a new and special calling in God’s service. God’s Messiah asks him as a Jew to bring God’s message to the Gentiles.”90 Paul remained a Jew—that is, kept his Jewish Pharisaic perspective—even as he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, as is clear from the fact that he envisioned his own call as a prophetic call for a mission to the Gentiles (Gal 1:15–16) comparable to that of Isaiah (49:1, 6) and Jeremiah (1:5).91 Through this road-to-Damascus experience, Paul the Jew became a follower of Christ: “A Jewish Christ-follower.” Thus, it is as a Jew that Paul envisioned the people of God (including the church) as a community in a covenantal relationship with God: a covenantal community.92 The question is then: How can we understand the covenant in a Jewish way (that is, in Paul’s way)? As I argued in my study of Early Jewish Hermeneutics and summarized in Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel, for the Pharisees and early rabbis the covenant had three components and, though he rarely uses the term “covenant” (only in Rom 9:4 and 11:27), Paul still thought in a covenantal way when he envisioned the communities of the followers of Christ Jesus. The covenant included 1. The election of Israel by God; it is a blessing or [unmerited] gift from God (God bringing Israel out of Egypt, Exod 19:3–5; 20:2) and a call that are irrevocable (“the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” Rom 11:29); similarly, without abolishing the irrevocable election of Israel, Gentiles are now elected into the people of God—a part of the Chosen People that Paul called elsewhere the “new covenant” (1 Cor 11:25: 2 Cor 3:6).

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“Pharisaic Judaism” in this interpretation—“Apocalyptic Judaism” for the realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretation. See again Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 84–107 (“The election and the covenant”). Stendahl, 7. Stendahl, 8. Since Stendahl, the Jewishness of Paul has been affirmed by many exegetes of the “New Perspective” and “Beyond the New Perspective.” For a well-balanced review of how the Jewishness of Paul has been interpreted up to 1979, see Markus Barth, “St. Paul—A Good Jew,” Horizons in Biblical Theology, 1979, vol. 1, 17–45, who underscores that there are many different ways of being “a good Jew” in different Greco-Roman cultural settings.

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2. The vocation (or mission) of the people of God—what the Chosen People should do: “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6)—was to bring about the “sanctification of the Name,” that is, to bring people, including Gentiles, to glorify God; thus, following the model of Christ’s own mission, the church (in Rome and elsewhere, including Paul) should carry out its mission “in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for God’s mercy” (Rom 15:9).93 3. The law, the commandments given as guidelines to fulfill this vocation/mission as the people of God (Exod 20:3–17, etc.); for Paul the law is fulfilled by loving neighbors, “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom 13:8). Being chosen to be the people of God—the election of the Jews first, then of the Gentiles (1:16)—is the supreme blessing. Being (part of) the Chosen People—the covenantal people—is being saved from what separates us from God. So, it is not in order to be saved that the Chosen People carries out its vocation by following the law; it had already been saved by the very fact that God has chosen them. This is what Sanders appropriately emphasizes so as to dismantle the misunderstanding of Judaism in terms of “works-righteousness” and “works-salvation.”94 For me, this shift took place when studying Midrash with Rabbi Sholom Singer and Rabbi Judah Rosenthal.95 Note the difference. For Sanders the question of salvation frames his study of Palestinian Judaism: after pointing out the centrality of election in the covenant and its gratuity he continues with a chapter on “Salvation by membership in the covenant and atonement” (147–82). Consequently, Sanders never truly asks: What is the purpose of the election? Neither has he asked the similar question: What is the purpose of following the law? He assumes that the answer to these questions is: the election is for the sake of Israel, or more generally for the sake of humanity. Israel, and human beings in general, need to be saved by God—who happily is a gracious God; salvation is gratis. For Rabbi Singer all this emphasis on salvation is not quite right. So, he led us to read Midrash, closely following the teaching of the midrashic scholar Henry Slonimsky in his remarkable essay: “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash.”96 In very brief, the

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Unfortunately, “New Perspective” interpreters have the tendency to ignore or minimize the central place of “vocation” in the covenant. See Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 84–107. For the two Goyim (Christians, forensic minded) members of the 1966 History of Judaism class taught at Spertus College of Jewish Studies, similar affirmations about the election by our teacher, Rabbi Dr. Sholom Singer, were totally nonsensical. But Rabbi Singer pricked us even more by responding to our puzzled looks by forcefully asserting: “We Jews do not need to be saved! In your vocabulary: We are saved! We have been saved long ago. What a strange wording for us! We rarely speak about salvation. But in effect that’s what we mean when we say that we are the chosen people, the people of the covenant. But do not take my word for it: let us read Midrash.” See Sholom Singer, The Hasid in Qumran and in the Talmud (Wheeling, Ill.: Whitehall, 1974). Rabbi Singer’s teaching was reinforced by reading Midrash (including Sifra and Sifre) for a full year with Rabbi professor Judah Rosenthal (who shortly afterward moved to Jerusalem and published exclusively in Hebrew), by my study of the Dead Sea Scrolls (especially the pesharim) with Professor Otto Betz (see his Offenbarung und Schriftforschung in der Qumransekte . [Tübingen: Mohr, 1960]), and of Exodus in light of its Midrashic interpretations with Professor André LaCocque (see his Le devenir de Dieu [Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1967]). Henry Slonimsky, “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,” Essays (Cincinnati and Chicago: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), 11–84. Sanders does not refer to the work of Slonimsky.

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covenant is for the benefit of both God and the people of God. The election benefits Israel: they graciously become the Chosen People—as Sanders has appropriately emphasized. But the covenant is also for the benefit of God, a point that Sanders leaves out.97 We should not envision God as without needs. As Slonimsky underscores following the rabbis, “to regard God as perfect in power, as he is in vision, at the very beginning, is the most disastrous of superstitions.”98 God suffers. God is a “becoming God,” as André Lacocque puts it.99 Slonimsky continues: “God’s power is at present still pitifully small, and that fact entails the drama. The power must be increased, the ideal must be translated into the real; and the active agent in this crucial event is man [Israel, the Chosen People] . . . God, in the full meaning of the term, is seen to stand at the end, not at the beginning.”100 The role of the Chosen People, its vocation for the benefit of God is what the rabbis called “the Sanctification of the Name,” literally “making God holy,” or “making God God.” God has put the destiny of God (and consequently of the creation) in the hands of the Chosen People. What a responsibility! What a vocation! Of course all this is expressed in Midrash with a great deal of humor and in imaginative flights. This is what Midrash as Haggadah is: Stories—imaginative stories. If one must use the language of salvation: yes indeed, humans need salvation—a salvation graciously provided by God through the election. But God also needs to be saved, to be recognized as holy when people fail to do so and therefore when they fail to glorify God. Therefore, the vocation or mission of the people of God is to bring all people (the “nations,” the Gentiles) to glorify God, as Paul says regarding Christ’s vocation: “Christ has become a servant of the circumcised . . . in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for God’s mercy” (Rom 15:8–9). Keeping in mind the Pharisaic and early rabbinic view of the covenant, one is not surprised to find that the letter to the Romans calls the house-churches in Rome to carry out their mission (= vocation) as an inclusive community (encompassing Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish [e.g., Rom 1:14], and also Jews and Greeks [e.g., 1:16]); and this community is a covenantal community. Thus, together with N. T. Wright, “New Perspective” interpretations of Romans take most seriously Paul’s Jewishness rooted in Pharisaic and early Rabbinic (Tannaitic) Judaism.101 Similarly, Nanos underscores, “Paul’s concerns are those of a Jewish missionary, and his message and framework of thinking are those of one who considers himself working within the historical expectations of Israel.”102 Therefore, as Wright notes, “covenant” can be viewed as the larger category that frames all other themes for Paul (even though Paul 97

For instance, the section “God’s side of the covenant: commandments and blessings” (Sanders: 104–07) notes that God’s side of the covenant was to give commandments, which Israel was to obey, along with promises to love Israel. Thus even in this section everything is for the benefit of Israel and the commandments appear to be more or less arbitrary. 98 Slonimsky, 15. 99 See again Lacocque, Le devenir de Dieu. Cf., also the process theological commentary by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Lull, Romans. Chalice Commentaries for Today (St. Louis: Chalice, 2005). 100 Slonimsky, 15. 101 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Although I consulted his other publications (listed in the bibliography), to present Wright’s interpretation I will exclusively refer to this massive two-volume compendium, unless otherwise noted. 102 Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 26.

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rarely uses the term).103 Paul’s understanding of the gospel is necessarily communitycentered, because (as Wright continues) it is “the redefinition, in and around Jesus the Messiah, of the Jewish doctrine of election, rooted in the covenantal theology of Genesis and Deuteronomy and worked out through Jesus’ saving death and resurrection.”104 For Wright, this is the linchpin of his interpretation of Paul. Alternatively, instead of emphasizing “election,” with Jewett105 one can focus one’s covenantal interpretation on the “vocation” that the people of God is called to carry out, namely its “mission”—a key feature of Paul’s rhetoric that, for Jewett, should be viewed as framing Paul’s theology.106 For Paul (the Jewish follower of the Christ Jesus), this covenantal perspective was primarily framed by a covenantal hermeneutic involving a particular conception of the “holy scriptures” (1:2). For him, as well as for the Pharisees and early rabbis, Scriptures included two covenant-related components that demanded two interrelated but distinct types of hermeneutic. The Haggadah (Heb “narrative, story”)—sermonlike and liturgical interpretations of narrative biblical texts (as well as other nonlegal texts, including prophetic texts, Psalms, etc.) practiced in the synagogues—has been preserved especially in Midrash and Targum, as well as in Talmud. By considering scriptural texts as stories, haggadic interpretations called readers-believers to enter the story, to see themselves in the story. Prototypical haggadic interpretations are those taking place during the Passover meal (Seder), when the participants reread/ recite stories about the Exodus (using a book called “Haggadah”) by saying “we went out of Egypt” (identifying themselves with the people of Israel of old). This process of narrative or haggadic interpretation established for the community a sense of identity as the Chosen People (a people blessed, set apart by God; the election) with a specific vocation (a mission, calling the elect to fulfill general moral obligations toward God and others, with the ultimate goal that all “might glorify God,” as Paul says in 15:9). Yet, beyond understanding what this vocation is all about, a most important question remained: How should one carry out this vocation in ever-changing situations? This was a matter of discerning the “way to walk”—in Hebrew, the Halakha. The purpose of halakhic interpretations of Scripture (and of tradition)—especially legal texts—was to provide a guide for the Jewish community striving to fulfill its vocation as the Chosen People in all aspects of life. Halakhic interpretations were practiced in the (rabbinic) schools; halakhic teachings were compiled in Mishnah, Talmud, and later in response literature as well as in a few halakhic Midrashim. As we shall see, throughout Romans Paul interprets the Hebrew Scriptures (actually quoting the Greek translation, the LXX) following both a haggadic hermeneutic and a halakhic hermeneutic. Paul’s halakhic hermeneutic is the focus of studies of “Paul and the Law,” including the important study by Peter Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Though this book is primarily focused on “1 Corinthians 1,” it provides guidelines for recognizing the halakhic

103

Wright, 781–82. Wright, 846; emphasis added. 105 Jewett, 83–91. 106 A point first made in a systematic way by Nils A. Dahl, “The Missionary Theology in the Epistle to the Romans,” Studies in Paul: Theology for the Early Christian Mission (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), 70–87. 104

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features in Romans, including the constant reminder that “the basic coherence of Paul’s thought is not any particular theological theme but in the organic structure of practical life.”107 We will come back later to Paul’s halakhic hermeneutic and its organic structure, when dealing with texts of Romans about the Law and about “halakha” (“formulated rules of behavior”) following Tomson.108 But it is also important to recognize—and this is often overlooked (including by Tomson)—that Paul also follows a haggadic hermeneutic throughout Romans. This should not be a surprise. Paul the Jew writes in a preaching style (as is clear, for instance, from his use of diatribe), and Jewish homilies are most often framed by a haggadic hermeneutic and by the stories that characterize it. This means that in his covenantal hermeneutic Paul retells biblical stories in such a way as to invite his readers to envision themselves as characters participating in these stories and thus to recognize themselves as belonging to the Chosen People (election), and also as having a vocation/mission. The clearest example is Roman 4, where Paul retells the story of Abraham—actually the story of God, Abraham, and Sarah—inviting his readers to identify themselves as members of the family of Abraham (“the father of all of us,” 4:16) and even to identify themselves with Abraham, since what is said about Abraham also applies to us: “Now the words ‘it was reckoned to him,’ [Gen 15:6] were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also” (Rom 4:23–24). Thus, Paul’s readers are invited to recognize themselves as belonging to the Chosen People, receiving the same blessing from God as Abraham did (a blessing which is an election that involves a vocation/mission, although this is not underscored in the verses mentioned here). But this is true of all kinds of passages: Paul’s ongoing telling of stories starts with his self-presentation in 1:1 and the presentation of the gospel-story in 1:2–4 as prolongations of biblical stories. Consequently, and more generally, reading Romans involves identifying the roles that the scriptural stories—including the grand narrative going from God’s creation of the world to the end of time—play in this letter. It follows that this inclusive covenantal community interpretation involves not only a rhetorical and an ideological analysis of Paul’s letter, but also a narrative analysis. But what kind? Such studies could go in many different directions, as is illustrated by Richard Hays’s study of the narrative substructure of Gal 3:1–4:11 and by the collective book edited by Bruce Longenecker, Narrative Dynamics in Paul.109 Many stories and substories can be identified in Romans including the grand story of God and humanity (Edward Adams), the story of God and Israel stories (Longenecker), the story of Jesus (Douglas Campbell), the story of Paul (John Barclay), and the story of Paul’s predecessors and inheritors (Andrew Lincoln).110 107

Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 265 (emphases added), see also 264–74. Similarly, Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter, focuses almost exclusively on halakhic features of Romans—leaving out the haggadic ones. 108 Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 62. 109 Richard Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11. SBL Dissertation series, 56 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983); Bruce W. Longenecker, ed., Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 110 See their articles in Narrative Dynamics. Exegetes who envision that there is only one legitimate and plausible interpretation—the forensic theological interpretation—offer quite negative assessments of these studies. Of course, narrative studies do not help forensic theological interpreters, who can declare that Paul’s gospel is “essentially nonnarratable” because the gospel does not tell a horizontal story but is the vertical construal of God’s intervention (as Watson says, in his essay “Is

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Each of these stories is significant in itself, but in a rhetorical and ideological analysis of Paul’s letter, the narrative analysis is needed to clarify the ideological pattern that holds these stories together, that is, the covenantal hermeneutical pattern, designated by Wright111 as “the storied worldview” that believers are called to enter.112 Yet, Paul’s storied worldview is not the ground to establish a theology.113 What is at stake is not a better understanding of Paul’s theological teaching, but rather a recognition that Paul invites his readers to enter these stories and to envision their lives as participants in these stories, following and prolonging their ideological pattern. This is inviting his readers to envision their lives from within the ideology that frames a particular set of stories. The far-ranging implications of these comments about the covenantal hermeneutical pattern of Paul’s letter appear as soon as we open Romans and read 1:1–2. What is “the gospel of God” that Paul is commissioned to proclaim? In this reading, far from being characterized by a theological content (a series of propositional truths, as in the forensic theological interpretations), it is a story—the gospel-story—that invites its hearers to engage in a haggadic interpretation by entering the story so as to recognize themselves as belonging to this story, as blessed because their story is also that of Christ, as members of the body of Christ, as members of an inclusive covenantal community called to carry out a mission (vocation) through which others are called to participate in this inclusive covenantal community. Christ-followers envision their lives from within the community-centered ideology that frames the gospel-story. And since, as we shall see, the gospel-story is countercultural, this means that Christ-followers no longer envisioned their lives from within the ideology that frames life in the Roman Empire, and indeed in the Greco-Roman world. This preceding section was needed to suggest the ways in which a reading of Romans for its call to mission of an inclusive covenantal community (a plausible hermeneutical choice) can be solidly grounded in Paul’s text, even as it privileges its rhetorical, ideological, and thus narrative features (a legitimate textual/analytical choice). The differences of this reading as compared with a forensic theological reading will become even more apparent as we proceed to read the letter from beginning to end following this legitimate and plausible interpretive line of reasoning.

There a Story in These Texts?” in Narrative Dynamics, 231–39 [quote, 239]). Below, for the sociorhetorical analysis that ground the proposed inclusive covenantal community commentary, I use these narrative analyses with caution, because they have often been developed in order to elicit the (forensic) “theological”—or theological-ethical—teaching of Paul’s letters. 111 Wright, 456–537. 112 Below, I readily follow Wright’s appeal to narrative studies. But I use Witherington’s studies with caution, even though he makes similar points in Ben Witherington III, with Darlene Hyatt. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 30. See also Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Narrative Thought World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1994). While they use innovative narrative perspectives, they still do so in order to refine a forensic theological interpretation, not seeing the haggadic vista that these approaches also elucidate. 113 For many years, this has been the fundamental error of Christian scholars reading Midrash and other haggadic Jewish texts so as to discern “the Jewish theology”! So Slonimsky (in the essay mentioned above) carefully presents the “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,”—one could also say “its hermeneutic”—not its theology.

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II An inclusive covenantal community commentary of Rom 1:1–32 (A) Rom 1:1–12: The Exordium (Introduction) Since letters are also rhetoric discourses, and can be read as such, epistolary features are also rhetorical features.114 Thus a typical Greek letter opening can be read as an exordium, a rhetorical introduction. As in the forensic commentary (Chapter 3), here one observes that this introduction is obviously much longer than the traditional opening of common letters in the ancient world, which would have been: “Paul, to those in Rome. Greetings.” In all his letters, Paul expanded this epistolary formula, but never to this extent. The very length of this introduction shows that Paul’s letter to the Romans is not an ordinary letter. But note that rhetorical criteria lead to delimiting the exordium, the rhetorical introduction, 1:1–12, in a different way than the epistolary introduction. A first reason is the recognition that the rhetorical genre of this discourse is epideictic or demonstrative. As Jewett notes, this is the genre of a discourse that seeks to establish a sense of communion centered on particular values recognized by the audience (see 1:12, which mentions the faith stance and commitment of Paul and the Romans: “That we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith”). Because it is epideictic, this epistolary discourse can be compared with the official governmental correspondence in the Roman Empire, in which the officeholder is announced in a formal way. This is particularly true of diplomatic or ambassadorial letters and their rhetoric disposition. In the exordium the credentials of the ambassador—or of the religious official—are laid down.115 Similarly, the rhetorical style of the “introduction” (1:1–12) shows that Paul introduces himself as an ambassador of Christ, who has the proper credentials to preach to Gentiles, and who seeks to establish a relationship between himself and the recipients of the letter, house-churches in Rome. Thus 1:1–12 can be subdivided into two rhetorical dispositions: A. The inauguration of Paul’s communication with believers in Rome (1:1–7), where Paul respectfully presents his credentials as “ambassador” of Christ to housechurches in Rome; B. Thanksgiving for the impact of Roman Christ-followers in the whole world and the purpose of writing the letter (1:8–12). A closer study of the exordium and its many themes confirms these initial observations regarding the rhetorical features of the letter and its ambassadorial genre—a genre that would be recognized by inhabitants of the capital of the Roman Empire.

114

See Jeffrey Reed, “The Epistle,” in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic (ed. Stanley E. Porter; Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), 171–93. 115 Jewett, 97, provides several examples of diplomatic letters in Roman imperial correspondence and similar formulas cited by Philo and Josephus. Jewett refers to the more detailed works by Samuel Bryskog, “Epistolography, Rhetoric and Letter Prescript: Romans 1:1–7 as a Test Case,” JSNT 65 (1997), 27–46.

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Rom 1:1–7. The Covenantal Story of the Gospel of God in which Christ Jesus, Paul, and the Romans are Called to Participate Faithfully Rom 1:1a. Paul, slave of Christ Jesus (Jewett).116 For people living in Rome, the term “slave” (δοῦλος) in Paul’s self-presentation is readily perceived as a metaphor built upon the social institution of slavery (as 6:16–17, 20 also do).117 In this metaphorical phrase, δοῦλος could have been used as a degrading word evoking someone who is the acquired property of somebody else (this is actually the realized-apocalyptic interpretation); conversely, this self-designation could have been understood as an echo of the designation “servant of Yahweh” used about prophets who voluntarily devoted themselves to God in the Hebrew Bible; in such a case Paul would have presented himself as a devoted and authoritative prophet-like “servant of Christ,” without reference to the social institution of slavery since it would involve a voluntary devotion to Christ (this is the forensic theological interpretation).118 But a rhetorical reading points to a third interpretation. In a letter addressed to the Romans—that is, to inhabitants of the capital of the Roman Empire—this designation evoked the many influential slaves in imperial service in Rome who proudly bore the title “slaves of Caesar,” as they had the honor and authority of acting as agents of Caesar, as Michael Brown documented.119 Therefore, by presenting himself as “slave of Christ Jesus,” Paul already introduces himself as having the proper official credentials of an agent with the authority to act and speak in the name of Christ Jesus.120 By replacing “Caesar” with “Christ Jesus” in his self-designation as “slave of . . . ”— and by using in 1:4 the title Lord (Kyrios; κύριος), given to the Emperor (beginning with Claudius and Nero, in the time of Romans) in order to designate Jesus Christ as “our Lord”—Paul already announces that, at least in one of its aspects, this letter will be a subversive, countercultural discourse challenging the ideology and the structure of power that frame life in the society and culture of the Roman Empire.121 But, as we shall see, this countercultural discourse will not involve replacing one authority (Caesar) 116

The shorthand notation “(Jewett)” after the translation means that the translation is provided by Jewett in his commentary. (Contrast with, “a servant of Jesus Christ” found in RSV, NRSV, BBE, and “a servant of Christ Jesus” in NIV, NJB.) Translations without notations are from NRSV. 117 Rom 16:10–11 include actual reference to the social institution of slavery—the institution of household where slaves were located—in the mention of those who are “out of ” [τοὺς ἐκ τῶν, appropriately translated “who belong to”] “Aristobulus” (16:10) and “Narkissos” (16:11), their respective masters or patriarchs—as noted by Jewett (100). 118 Paul’s self-identification as a prophet-like servant of Christ could be appropriate in an interpretation that emphasizes the Judaism of Paul, such as inclusive covenantal community interpretation. But this would be missing the rhetorical strength of this self-designation addressed to “Romans.” An actual slave does not choose to be a slave; the designation “voluntarily slave” is a contradiction in terms. 119 Michael Joseph Brown, “Paul’s use of δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ in Romans 1:1,” JBL 120: 4 (2001), 723–37. 120 This interpretation of “slave” (δοῦλος) in 1:1 applies also to the same word in 6:16, 17, and 20. 121 In this reading, the letter is, among other things, a counter-political discourse, as emphasized in Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology, 85–87; and Horsley, “Paul’s Counter Imperial Gospel: Introduction,” in Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (ed. Richard A. Horsley; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2004), 140–47; Elliott, Liberating Paul, 184–89 and The Arrogance of Nation, 14–15. But this discourse does not directly challenge the political figures in Rome; rather it challenges the ways in which the imperial ideology frames the interactions among different groups of people society—interactions which will be rejected as unjust and distinctive.

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with another authority (Christ), while keeping the same (imperialistic and oppressive) structure of power. The letter to the Romans is not a political treatise. This discourse is countercultural in that it affirms not only that the true power is that of Christ, but also that his power is not imperialistic: it is a shared, reciprocal, and not hierarchical power, or, in other words (not found in Romans) it is the power of the powerless crucified Christ (as emphasized by Jewett on the basis of 1 Cor 1–2).122 In sum, by this metaphorical self-designation, “Paul, slave of Christ” (1:1a), Paul claims the authoritative position of being one of the agents of Christ who carries out Christ’s mission in the communities of Christ-followers (including in Rome) and in society. Rom 1:11–12 (“that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith”) make explicit that Paul views himself as sharing Christ’s paradoxical authority, a shared, reciprocal (rather than hierarchical) authority.123 So Paul’s mention of “sharing with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you” refers to communal sharing and is reinforced (not contradicted) by 1:12, because συμπαρακληθῆναι ἐν ὑμῖν is understood as referring to a mutual, communal call (συμ) to join each other in the collective mission of God. This communal call is reinforced in 12:1: “I call you to our side”; “I call you to join us,” Παρακαλῶ ὑμᾶς.124 Thus, from the outset, the Romans (and other believers hearing/reading this letter after them) should see themselves as sharing with Paul Christ’s countercultural mission in society. This mission (which is also the mission of the cohorts of agents of Christ that the communities of Christ-followers are) involves challenging the ideologies of the Roman Empire and of most societies, because these ideologies are framed by hierarchical authority that engenders injustice and exclusion. Positively this mission involves envisioning and embodying in their communal life an ideology framed by the shared and reciprocal authority exemplified by their powerless, crucified Lord (see 6:1–23, where Paul uses again the metaphor of slavery and describes Christ-followers as “baptized into his death” and “crucified with him”). Rom 1:1b: an apostle called (Jewett). These words specify the nature of Paul’s service as an agent of Christ. “Called” (κλητὸς) has the sense of a divine passive, implying that his office rests upon a divine election or appointment.125 As Jewett emphasizes, this office is that of an “apostle,” that is (as often expressed in verbal forms) someone “sent in behalf of someone else,” namely in the political realm as an ambassador who represents a monarch and his authority, or in the religious sphere as a Cynic philosopher with the authority to speak in the name of the gods, or in Isa 6:8 (LXX, using “ἀποστέλλω” twice) as someone sent by God. In sum, as slave of Christ Jesus, Paul is appointed by God as an ambassador of Christ—with all the authority of an official representative of Christ.126 But again, as Ehrensperger shows, authority and power in prophetic or 122

A point repeatedly documented in Kathy Ehrensperger, Paul and the Dynamics of Power: Communication and Interaction in the Early Christ-Movement (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2009). See especially 35–62. 123 See also 1:5, where Paul conveys solidarity with other apostles: “We have received grace and apostleship.” 124 This interpretation is an option supported by Greek dictionaries (e.g., Louw-Nida), although not as the first option. 125 Thus, it does not rest upon a conversion, as argued by Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 7–23. 126 Jewett, 101–02.

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apostolic sending have a very distinctive character.127 Since they are marked by “grace” (1:5), they are not simply an inversion of the authority and power in the Roman Empire. The ideological structure of power set by these introductory phrases will need to be carefully examined throughout this rhetorical and ideological reading of Romans. Rom 1:1c: set apart for the gospel of God. In the next phrase, the verb “set apart” alludes to Gal 1:15, “God, who had set me apart before I was born,” where Paul refers to Jeremiah’s appointment as prophet from his mother’s womb (Jer 1:5; see also Isa 49:5). As noted earlier, by saying that he has been “set apart” by God for his apostolic task (an allusion to his road-to-Damascus experience), far from saying that he “converted” from Judaism, Paul affirms that he has been appointed to a prophetic task comparable to that of the Hebrew prophets. Neither Paul’s apostleship nor the gospel involves a rejection of Judaism—a view which is a cornerstone of the “new perspective on Paul and beyond” interpretations (including the rhetorical and ideological interpretations of Romans).128 Beyond this negative statement, this means that Paul remained a Jew and continued to think and believe as a Jew—in this interpretation, as “a Pharisee”(Phil 3:5).129 It is as a (Pharisaic) Jew that he conceived of his encounter with Christ Jesus and that he understood the gospel. It is as a Jew that he envisioned his life, his ministry, his prayer life (1:8–10). Therefore, it is as a Jew that he understood his relationship to the Christ-followers in Rome as well as his mission. By saying that he was “set apart for God’s gospel” (Jewett), Paul described the goal of his commission as a service (a ministry, which is a priestly service understood in a Jewish framework), directly related to the gospel, as described in the following verses. “Set apart for the gospel of God.” It is surprising that Paul emphasizes that God is both the commissioner and the source of Paul’s gospel (as also in 15:16) by using the phrase “gospel of God” (rather than “of Jesus Christ” as in his other letters). Why this emphasis? As Moxnes argues and Jewett underscores, this is Paul’s way to emphasize the continuity between Judaism and the gospel; it was the same God who acted in the history of Israel and in Jesus. “This emphasis has its primary bearing not in theoretical and theological issues but in ‘the conflict between Jews and Greeks, high and low, insiders and outsiders. Most of Paul’s statements about God in Romans were related to the situation in which he attempted to achieve unity through conflict.’”130 Furthermore, from a rhetorical and ideological perspective, for the readers/hearers in Rome who have been alerted to the countercultural character of Paul’s message by his self-designation as “slave of Christ” (which evokes for them the “slaves of Caesar”), the mention that his apostleship is a cultic service “for the gospel of God” cannot but 127

Ehrensperger, Paul and the Dynamics of Power, 86–87; see also, 81–97. See also Kathy Ehrensperger, That We May Be Mutually Encouraged: Feminism and the New Perspective in Pauline Studies (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 154–59. 128 This interpretation was first laid out in modern critical exegetical studies by Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 7–23. See also William S. Campbell, Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context: Jew and Gentile in the Letter to the Romans (New York: P. Lang, 1991). For this interpretation during the history of reception, see Part III. 129 We need to keep in mind the diversity of “Judaisms” in Paul’s time. From the perspective of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation (Chapter 5), Paul was (or became, by encountering the Messiah) an Apocalyptic Jew. 130 Jewett (102) quotes from Halvor Moxnes, Theology in Conflict: Studies in Paul’s Understanding of God in Romans (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 288.

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evoke the celebration of the “gospel of Caesar”—including the good news that universal peace had been achieved by the victory of Augustus at Actium (31 BCE) as well as all the “good news” concerning other Caesars, celebrated in Rome and in others cities of the empire as part of the cults of the Roman Emperor.131 As Georgi summarizes, “If the term chosen by Paul for his Roman readers has associations with the slogan of Caesar religion, then Paul’s gospel must be understood as competing with the gospel of the Caesars.”132 In sum, the reference to “the gospel of God” has a complex rhetorical effect. First, by using vocabulary associated with Caesar religion, Paul signals the counter-imperial character of the gospel: instead of celebrating in a cult the good news of a Roman Emperor, Paul’s cultic ministry celebrates the good news of God, which, similarly, will include the recitation of the events that constitute the good news, and will invite people to enter this celebration. This will become even more apparent when the gospel is associated with salvation in 1:16–17. Second, for Paul the Jew and for the Christ-followers in Rome, this reference to “the gospel of God” is also a first signal that, in writing his letter, Paul wanted to address the conflict between Jews and Gentiles as well as between the house-churches in Rome predominantly composed of Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers. The forensic theological interpretation—that Paul’s insistence that he was set apart for “the gospel of God” suggests that the problem his letter seeks to address is that he fears that (many in) the churches in Rome have theological misunderstandings about the gospel as the theological content of a message—does not make sense for this rhetorical and ideological reading of Romans. For Paul the Jew, “the gospel of God” is, of course, envisioned from a covenantal perspective. The “gospel of God” is the story of God’s interactions with humans—including God’s interactions with Israel and through Christ with Gentiles. God’s gospel is a God-centered ideology embedded in a story—a gospelstory—through which all believers, indeed all humans, are invited to recognize that they are related to each other and to God. The gospel is the story of “the same God acting both in the history of Israel and in Jesus.”133 As Witherington says, It is important to bear in mind from the outset that Paul is drawing on and alluding to a storied world. He begins this work with the reference to his own story (called and set apart for the specific call by God) and the story of Jesus (born in the Davidic line requisite of the messianic figure and marked out as Son of God in power after his resurrection).134

Paul’s rhetorical and ideological concern is to formulate a gospel-story that all the house-churches in Rome are called to enter. This is an understanding of the gospel from a covenantal perspective. The gospel of God is the story that both Jewish Christ-

131

See S. R. F. Price, “Rituals and Power,” 47–71 (especially 48–49); Horsley “Paul’s Counter-Imperial Gospel: Introduction,” 140–47; and Georgi, “God Turned Upside Down,” 148–57 (especially 148– 52) in Horsley, ed. Paul and the Roman Imperial Order. 132 Georgi, “God Turned Upside Down,” 152 in Horsley, ed. Paul and the Roman Imperial Order. 133 Moxnes, Theology in Conflict, 288. 134 Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 30.

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followers and Gentile Christ-followers can enter and share, recognizing it as their story (as Jews do when saying “we went out of Egypt” as they share the Passover Haggadah). The problem that Paul seeks to address is a problem of relations, a community-centered problem—an ideological problem that divides communities, because they do not recognize that they owe their identities to the same God. Therefore, the solution will be an inclusive community sharing an inclusive story; then all the house-churches acknowledge that despite possible differences in theological formulation, the gospel that gathers them together, as they participate into it, is the gospel of (the same) God. Saying that, for Paul the Jew, the gospel is a gospel-story, that is, a covenantal story (Haggadah), is underscoring that the gospel is the story, indeed the drama, in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together.”135 All (“the Jew first and also the Greek,” 1:16d) are invited to enter it. As such, this covenantal story that prolongs the story of God and Israel in the Exodus is further prolonged by the story of all those who participate in it (and can therefore be called “saints,” 1:7, as the Chosen People of old were). The rhetorical effect of saying that God (rather than Christ) is both the commissioner and the source of Paul’s gospel is not in order to address theological misunderstandings, but in order to address the community-centered ideological problem of divided communities in Rome. Paul invites all parties to participate in the gospel-story—this is what his service of the gospel-story (for which he has been commissioned, “set apart”) involves—since it is the Gospel of God, to whom all the house-churches owe their identity. This is reinforced in 1:2–4, that intermingles formulations of the gospel by Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers. Rom 1:2–4. All interpretations acknowledge that Paul quoted ancient creeds in order to define the gospel of God. Beyond this agreement, on the basis of a detailed form critical analysis, Jewett emphasizes three points:136 1. Paul carefully affirmed the total narrative continuity between the Jewish Scriptures (God’s “prophets in the holy scriptures,” 1:2) and God’s gospel (“the prophets articulated the gospel of God in the period before Christ”), a point that Jewish Christ-followers in house-churches in Rome (the “weak” of Rom 14:1– 15:13) would appreciate; 2. Paul used (primarily in 1:3) parts of a creed originating in communities of Jewish Christ-followers affirming that “God’s Son, who was descended from David”; and 3. Paul intermingled, in this material, parts of a creed originating in communities of Gentile Christ-followers—“Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,” 1:4— characterized by its emphasis on the resurrection of Christ, his Lordship, and the role of the Spirit, although without denying the continuity with Judaism (affirmed in 1:2 and 3).

135 136

Slonimsky, “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,” in Essays, 15 (11–84). Jewett, 103–08.

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Following Jewett’s rhetorical analysis, it becomes clear that what is significant in 1:2–4 is very different from what is debated among the theological interpretations (namely the theological content of these verses). For this rhetorical interpretation, in 1:2–4 Paul’s formulation of the gospel is shaped as a story by the rhetorical goal of “find[ing] common ground with conservative Jewish believers, who are being discriminated against in Rome” by Gentile Christ-followers.137 Paul brings the two sides together by incorporating both the views of Jewish Christ-followers and those of Gentile Christ-followers into a single balanced formulation of the gospel-story. Therefore, this formulation is ambiguous enough to be open to the different house-churches in Rome. What matters is not an agreement regarding theological views, but a unity in praxis; namely, as we shall see, the pragmatic goal of sharing the same vocation and mission as an inclusive community—the people of God, the inclusive body of Christ, the ἐκκλησία, the community of those who are called (to a vocation, a mission),138 “the called of Jesus Christ,” “the called saints” (1:6–7).139 To become involved in this praxis, it is a matter of envisioning oneself as part of the story of the gospel—the story of Christ, or more precisely, the complex story which extends (a) from God’s promises through the prophets of Holy Scriptures, (b) to David, (c) to Jesus Christ, “appointed God’s son by power according to a spirit of holiness, by resurrecting from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:4, Jewett), (d) to Paul (and collaborators) and his mission to the Gentiles (“through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name,” 1:5), and (e) ultimately to the Romans themselves (“including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,” 1:6). Paul is inviting the Romans to enter this story, and thus to recognize themselves as participants in the gospel. To enter this story it is simply a matter of acknowledging “Jesus Christ” is “our Lord” (1:4d). Paul, the Romans, and indeed all readers of the letter are invited to enter the gospel-story as Haggadah by acknowledging Jesus Christ as “our Lord”—saying “we” as they retell the gospel-story (as the Jewish people around the Passover table say “we went out of Egypt”). Rom 1:5a “[Jesus Christ our Lord] through whom we have received grace and apostleship.” Paul prolongs the gospel-story by tying to it the call of the apostles— note the plural “we”140—by Christ. In the process he introduces what will be a major rhetorical theme of the letter: “Grace” (χάρις, charis). In this covenantal interpretive line of reasoning, “grace”—an underserved favor, a gracious gift, a blessing from God (or

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Jewett, 103. The designation of the Romans as “the called of Jesus Christ” (1:6) grounds this interpretation—and neither Paul’s use the word ἐκκλησία (exclusively in Rom 16) nor its etymology as “the community of those who are called” (which, in itself, is weak, as Louw and Nida Lexicon warns). 139 A “social function” emphasized by Watson. I will frequently come back to Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 192– 343. Although his study remains a hybrid study (frequently coming back to forensic theological interpretations), Watson underscores the significance of the “pragmatic goal” (or “social function”) of each textual unit and thus systematically presents the social functions of each of the units in Romans—a rhetorical concern. 140 In this inclusive covenantal community interpretation, this “we” should be understood in a haggadic fashion, as above, even as it is viewed, more specifically, as conveying Paul’s solidarity with the other apostles, including the founders of the churches in Rome, as Jewett (109) and Ehrensperger (Paul and the Dynamics of Power, 86) do. 138

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Christ), as unmerited access to God—is relational (rather than being a self-contained personal favor); a community-centered blessing.141 Grace (charis) as a blessing is also a call—an election—to carry out a vocation for the sake of God and others, as Paul makes clear by interrelating it with apostleship.142 “In explicitly linking this χάρις [charis] with his commissioning . . . he also makes it evident that he did not receive this χάρις as a personal favour which he could enjoy for himself. It is rather something which is inherently relational in that only in responding to the call by acting upon it and doing what this χάρις encompassed is Paul true to his ἀποστολή [apostleship].”143 And this “grace” is not only for Paul but also for the Romans (see 1:7). As the rest of a rhetorical analysis of Romans shows, “grace” is an underserved gift from God also in the sense of unmerited access to God for those who do not deserve it, demonstrating that those whom the world despises as shameful actually are worthy of honor—they are marked by this gracious gift from God. Rom 1:5b “to bring about the obedience of faithfulness/faith (pistis) among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name.” A significant rhetorical observation is that Paul presents his apostleship as directed toward Gentiles (and this only in Romans). This is a first signal that, throughout the letter, as Stowers convincingly argued, Paul envisions his primary readers/hearers as Gentiles—that is, as Gentile Christ-followers, rather than Jewish Christfollowers—in the house-churches in Rome,144 although he is also aware that his letter will also be read/heard by Jewish Christ-followers.145 Indeed, Paul makes sure to address also Jewish Christ-followers (as Jewett notes, e.g., by using parts of one of their creeds). But the observation that Paul primarily addresses Gentile Christ-followers has profound influence on how one reads the letter. Unlike the forensic theological interpretation that posits that through this letter Paul addresses Jewish Christians so as to correct their misunderstandings of Paul’s teaching (that they presume is pro-Gentile at the expense of the Jewish Christian views), the inclusive covenantal community interpretation and the rhetorical studies that support it posit that the letter is aimed at changing the views of Gentile Christ-followers—especially, their disparagement of Jewish Christ-followers whom they judge as “weak in faith” (14:1–15:13). The fact that Paul makes sure that 141

“Relational” does NOT simply mean—as some understood it to mean—that charis concerns the relation of an individual to God, but that it concerns relations with God and within a community. These are the relations between God and a community which is best designated as covenantal. To avoid the ambiguity of the term “relational,” I will use a phrase such as community-centered. 142 Charis is both a blessing and a call as, for Israel, the blessing (underserved gift) of being delivered from slavery in Egypt was also a call to be the people of God, demanding from them to carry out this vocation (Exod 19:4–6; 20:2ff ). 143 Ehrensperger, Paul and the Dynamics of Power, 88, see 86–90. Charis also alludes to the Hellenistic reciprocity systems and to the social conventions of giving and receiving to which the covenantal Jewish perspective was readily related (Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 348–49), even as Paul altered and thus challenged both views. 144 Stowers, 43. 145 That Gentiles are the primary addressees is emphasized by Stowers, 43 and most “New Perspective” exegetes, including Daniel Fraikin, “Rhetorical Function of the Jews in Romans,” in Anti—Judaism in Early Christianity. Vol. 1. Paul and the Gospels (ed. Peter Richardson; Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986); Campbell, Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context, 21–22;Dunn, Romans, xlv; Tomson. Paul and the Jewish Law, 55–62; Nanos, The Mystery of Romans, 83. Witherington (Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, 8) writes in summary: “It is Gentile Christians in Rome that he feels mainly need exhorting, and it is Gentile Christians in Rome he feels he has some claim on, since he is the apostle to the Gentiles.”

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the perspectives of both Jewish (Christ-followers) and Gentile (Christ-followers) are integrated in his presentation of his ministry and of the gospel can be understood as Paul offering a model for interactions in an inclusive covenantal community. Paul makes another rhetorical point by saying that the goal of his apostleship among Gentiles is “to bring about the obedience of faithfulness/faith (ὑπακοή πίστεως).” We can affirm that Paul coined this phrase for his rhetorical purpose, since it is exclusively found here and in 16:26 (with a partial rhetorical echo in 15:18), and nowhere else in all of ancient literature.146 First, beyond all the discussion of the grammatical construction of this phrase provided by Nanos,147 we note that this phrase shows the covenantal character of Paul’s teaching. As Garlington demonstrates in his detailed study entitled The Obedience of Faith, the combination of faith and obedience fits well the covenantal perspective: in early Judaism, “faith’s obedience was one’s commitment to the whole of the Mosaic covenant and its laws.”148 Second, from a rhetorical perspective one needs to ask with Jewett the essential question: What was Paul’s rhetorical purpose in combining the concepts of “obedience” and “faithfulness/faith” in the same phrase? Jewett concludes that “the coordination of these two terms [obedience and faithfulness/faith] conveyed . . . an interest in finding common ground” between the house-churches of Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers, for whom the phrase “obedience of faithfulness/faith” would have very different rhetorical effects.149 To understand Jewett’s conclusion, we need to pay attention to the place that “obedience” had in the very different Jewish and GrecoRoman ideological systems. In the Jewish religious ideological system, “obedience” to God’s will and to God’s law has a very positive connotation; it has an even more positive connotation when it is a matter of bringing Gentiles to this obedience. Obedience is Israel’s proper response to God’s covenantal grace/call, a response that involves carrying out its vocation as God’s people, namely bringing the nations/Gentiles to glorify God (15:9), or in other words, bringing the Gentiles to the obedience of faith.150 As Dunn says, “The point would then be that Paul intends his readers to understand the faith response of the Gentiles to the gospel as the fulfillment of God’s covenant purpose through Israel, the eschatological equivalent of Israel’s obligation under the covenant.”151 Or as Garlington puts it more forcefully, “Paul’s declaration is tantamount to a manifesto that faith’s obedience (i.e., faithfulness) and, therefore, Israel’s identity, privileges, and responsibilities were a possibility apart from the assumption of Jewish ethnico-theological distinctives” (255). For Jewish Christ-followers, it would have been reassuring to hear from the apostle to the Gentiles that “faith”—understood as

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Acts 6:7 is the closest approximation, but it uses a verbal form: “Many . . . became obedient to the faith” (πολύς . . . ὑπήκουον τῇ πίστει). And that is all in the entirety of ancient Greek literature! (Jewett, 110). 147 Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 223–25. 148 Don B. Garlington. The Obedience of Faith: A Pauline Phrase in Historical Context (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1991), 255 (emphasis original). The entire volume is relevant for this covenantal reading of Romans. 149 Jewett, 110. 150 See Patte, Paul’s Faith, 96–117. 151 Dunn, 18.

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“faithfulness to” the Lord Jesus Christ (1:4)—involves “obedience”; after all, faithfulness/ faith and obedience are necessarily associated in the Hebrew Bible definition of emunah, that is, faithfulness.152 In sum, in this interpretive line it might be best to translate πίστις [pistis] by “faithfulness”—emunah. But this might be confusing for those who read “faith” in Bible translations and commentaries. Thus I chose to use the compound “faithfulness/ faith” both to avoid this confusion and to convey the primary connotation of the word. In addition to the rhetorical effect of “obedience of faithfulness/faith” for Jewish Christ-followers in Rome, it is important to recognize with Jewett that, for Gentile Christ-followers in Rome, this phrase has a very different rhetorical effect due to its emphasis on “faithfulness/faith” as the basis for proper actions (as is also the case in 14:1, 22, and 23). Indeed, for Gentile Christ-followers in Rome, a statement merely saying that the gospel demands “obedience” to the Lord Jesus Christ would have been quite problematic. Why? Because in the Greco-Roman world “obedience” had negative, indeed shameful, connotations, so much so that the Emperor himself preferred to give “suggestions” and “advice,” rather than to demand “obedience.” Those who “obeyed” were without honor, and therefore their service did not honor the one who was helped or served. When one served the Lord (Kyrios, the Emperor or Christ), one did not “obey” him (a shameful attitude toward the Lord); rather, one “honored” him, by submitting to him; that is, acknowledging his faithful authority and power. For Greco-Roman readers (for whom fides was the Latin counterpart of pistis), fides was understood in terms of the political model of submission of the vanquished to the victorious Romans “in fidem populi Romani,” according to which the vanquished submitted to the Romans while trusting in the Romans’ fides (i.e., in their “trustworthiness,” “faithfulness,” “sincerity”) even as the vanquished committed themselves (with trustworthiness of their own) to unconditionally surrender to the Romans.153 For members of the Roman Empire, including the addressees of this letter,

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“Faithfulness” is a good rendering of emunah, because it combines the connotations of trust and obedience (Nanos, 223). See also Garlington, The Obedience of Faith, 209–10. In agreement with Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 113–15) the distinction that Martin Buber (Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk; London: Routledge & Paul, 1951) draws between a Hebrew Bible definition of faith as emunah and πίστις in Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament is not appropriate, because Buber presupposes that “Paul’s teaching” is the “Forensic Theological” interpretation of Paul. Thus he fails to recognize that Paul was still viewing himself as a Jew, thinking as a Jew, and therefore thinking πίστις as emunah. See also Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (ed. Aleida Assmann, trans. Dana Hollander; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 6–11. 153 See A. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 75–79 (Italian 1955), and also Salvatore Calderone, Pistis-Fides: Ricerche di storia e diritto internazionale nell’antichità (Messina: Università degli studi, 1964) and Wolfgang Flurl, Deditio in Fide. Untersuchungen zu Livius und Polybios (dissertation, Munich, 1969). See also Agamben, The Time That Remains, 115–19.This discussion is further grounded in the work of the linguist Émile Benvéniste, Le vocabulaire des institution indo-européennes, vol. 1:Économie, société, parenté (Paris: Minuit, 1969). Don B. Garlington, Faith, Obedience and Perseverance. Aspects of Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994), 14, and 10–31. Beyond the understanding of faith/fides and in line with its link with deditio (submission to Roman legions), we would need a systematic reading of Romans “with the eyes of the vanquished,” comparable to Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

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fides/pistis is therefore a relational term.154 Thus, for Greco-Roman readers of Paul’s letter, such a submission (obedience) to the “Lord” was a submission in pistis/fides— unconditionally committing themselves to surrender faithfully to the Lord, as they count on the faithfulness of the Lord. Thus for Paul and the Roman Christ-followers faithfulness/faith designates the good relation with God, with Christ, and with others whom they can trust as faithful. And the verbal form, “believing” (πιστεύω, pisteuô) should be understood as entering into such a relationship. An additional observation: In Romans all the instances of pistis are in the “absolute”; that is, pistis is used without mention of an object of faith (by contrast with phrases such as “faith in” someone or something as posited by forensic theological interpretations that understand faith as “propositional belief ”). This is, of course, to be expected for a relational term. In 1:5, Paul does not say, for instance, “obedience of faith in Christ.” And the same is true when Paul uses pistis in many other instances throughout the letter.155 Similarly the corresponding verb, πιστεύω, believing, either is in the absolute (without mention of who is believed or what is believed)156 or is a reference to the trust one can have in God’s faithfulness (a mirror image of what the believers’ faithfulness should be).157 The above interpretation does not deny that the forensic interpretation (for which “faith” is “believing in a revealed truth”) is legitimate and plausible. Such denial would be inappropriate from a history of reception perspective. But it is essential to affirm that the relational view of faith as faithfulness is at least as legitimate and as plausible. Far from betraying what the text of Paul’s letter says (as some forensic theological interpreters claim), an understanding of pistis as faithfulness is arguably closer to the textual evidence than “traditional” (forensic theological) understandings. It follows that the inclusive covenantal community interpretive line has a problem with all the English translations because they systematically translate pistis by the word “faith.” In so doing, they are necessarily misleading because, as Cobb and Lull158 underscored, these translations totally hide the appropriate, legitimate, and plausible understanding of pistis as “faithfulness”—a relational term. So I use “faithfulness/faith,” to show that faith is qualified as meaning faithfulness.159

154

See the remarkable and detailed new study, Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)— published after I finished writing most of this book. As I do throughout this book for all themes, Morgan aims at describing not so much the content of each concept, but its shape in each context— adopting what historians of religions would call a phenomenological perspective. When dealing with Romans (282–306) she emphasizes the relational character of pistis (by contrast with the understanding of faith as “propositional belief ”—what I call the forensic theological understanding of faith—see her Introduction, 1–35). 155 The only possible exception would be 3:22, where διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ is commonly translated “through faith in Jesus Christ.” See below the comments on 3:22 that emphasizes that the alternate translation, “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ,” is at least as grammatically legitimate, and is consistent with all the other use of pistis in Romans. 156 See Rom 1:16, 3:22, 4:11; 10:4; 10:10; 13:11; 15:13. 157 See Rom 4:3, 5; 4:17; 9:33; 10:11 where believing in God is trusting in God’s faithful fulfillment of God’s promises, as is directly expressed in 4:18, 24; 6:8; 10:14; 14:2. 158 John B. Cobb Jr. and David Lull, Romans (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2005), 29–30. 159 See again the multiple definitions in the article “Faith” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.

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It follows that the rhetorical effect of the phrase “obedience of faith” on the housechurches in Rome (divided among Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christfollowers) would be both diversified and very effective. (1) It created a common ground for Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers, as we just noted. (2) The phrase “obedience of faith” challenged the Greco-Roman honor/shame ideology in Rome, because it affirms (with the Jews) the positive value of obedience (to God, to the covenant). Obedience cannot be and should not be dismissed as shameful. Actually when it is associated with pistis as submission and faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ—a submission and faithfulness that amounts to honoring him as the Lord—obedience becomes honorable (it brings honor to Christ) contradicting the Greco-Roman honor/shame ideology.160 (3) Conversely, and in a more subtle way, this phrase also challenges the Jewish ideology (and that of Jewish Christ-followers): instead of being associated with the “law” (as expression of God’s will), true obedience is associated with pistis, that is, with submission to the Lord Jesus Christ as a fulfillment of the vocation/mission of the covenantal community. In sum, the very phrase “‘obedience of faith’ articulated Paul’s uncompromising commitment to the deeper intentions of the Shema, embracing both the election of Israel and the inclusion of Gentiles equally—for God is one!”161 Faithfulness/faith as a relational term designates a good relation with God, with the Lord Jesus Christ, and also good relations with other members of the community and the world at large (up to Spain, the “end of the world”). These good faith/faithful relations—a particular type of ideological relations—are embedded in the gospelstory, a covenantal story. Consequently, those who trust the gospel-story enough to enter it and to participate into it—those who believe-in/are-faithful-to the gospel (as summarized in 1:1–5)—have faith and are faithful. Thus, following Cobb and Lull (see their excellent discussion of pistis as “faithfulness” from an inclusive covenantal community perspective, 28–30), we will often designate those who have pistis (commonly designated as “believers”) as “faithfuls” (those who are “faithful”) and continue to translate pistis by “faithfulness/faith.” Rom 1:6–7 [all the Gentiles] among whom you also are called of Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome, called to be saints: Grace to you [plural] and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This blessing appropriately concludes the opening of the letter. Once again Paul prolongs the gospel-story by including in it the Romans: as he was called (1:1) and received grace (together with the other apostles) (1:5), so the Romans have been called and received grace. They have therefore a similar vocation. As Jewett underscores, Paul shows here the same concern to address in an inclusive way both Gentile Christ-followers (who would recognize themselves as “the called of Jesus Christ”) and Jewish Christ-followers (who would feel included among “all God’s beloved, called saints”).162 In the same way that Paul spoke of himself as having received “grace and apostleship” (election and vocation) (1:5), he affirms that “all God’s beloved in Rome” have been “called” (elected, chosen) for a certain vocation: κλητοῖς ἁγίοις, “called to be saints” 160

See Jewett, 110, who refers to J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 161 Nanos, 238. 162 Jewett, 111–16.

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(NRSV), or “called to be God’s holy people” (cf. NIV, NJB). Here again this is covenantal language. As Jewett notes, Paul designates the Romans not only  as  “God’s  beloved” (as the patriarchs, Jerusalem, and the entire people of Israel were in the prophets and Pseudepigrapha),163 but also as “saints”; that is, as God’s “holy people,” which was a traditional title for the Chosen People that the Essenes in Qumran used for themselves.164 Thus, “called saints” is a title, comparable to “called apostle” (1:1) or “Chosen People.” But in this covenantal perspective, this is not simply an honorific title; it is also spelling out a vocation. In the same way that one who has been elected senator is both commonly called by the title senator and also is expected to assume the duties of a senator, so here this title, “saints,” was an expression of a vocation of the Chosen People. So the translations “called to be saints” or “called to be his holy people” (NIV, NJB) are appropriate. To be “saints” or a “holy people” is a proper formulation of the vocation that God’s Chosen People should carry out. Indeed, in the Tannaitic literature (early rabbinic literature), the vocation of the Chosen People is to “sanctify the Name,” (as in “hallowed be thy name”), that is, to bring people to glorify God and God’s holiness by being “holy” for God’s sake.165 How? For the rabbis, “being ‘holy’ as God is ‘holy’” demanded that the people carry out the commandments (so that “see[ing] their good works people would give glory to their Father in heaven,” as Matt. 5:16 says) and that they be separated from the profane.166 Thus being the Chosen People demands that the people be holy.167 So also the vocation of “God’s beloved” in Rome is “to be holy”—so as to bring people to glorify God (as Christ did, Rom 15:9). Yet, as Wright emphasizes, they are not “called to be saints eventually but have a long way to go before that word can be truly used of them, but rather that, having being ‘called,’ they are saints, set-apartfor-God.”168 Whether or not they carry out their vocation, it remains that they have this vocation (somewhat in the same way that a senator keeps his/her title and vocation whether or not he/she carries her/his duties). We will need to pay attention as we read the rest of Romans how Paul continues to explain this vocation of “God’s beloved.” Receiving this vocation involves a transformation of their identity, comparable to a “grafting,” as Dunning suggests.169 By being called, the Gentiles are grafted upon God’s chosen tree, the people of Israel, and in this way they are given a new status and a new mode of life as “saints,” as members of the “holy people,” and this without effacing Israel’s ethnic identity (11:17–24)—as is affirmed by inclusive covenantal community

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Jewett, 113. Jewett, 114; Cranfield, 69; Wilckens, 68. 165 Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutics, 105–07. Preserving and making visible the holiness of God, or even “making God holy” as Slonimsky would say; see “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,” 11–84. 166 Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutics, 105–07 (about sanctifying the name by carrying out the commandments) and 107–09 (about “making a fence around Torah”)—all this as expressed in the early Midrash on Leviticus, esp. Sifra on Lev 20:26. 167 Yes, it is something that the Chosen People must do, but not for their salvation or for some moral agenda—as Jewett, 114 suggests, when rejecting the notion that κλητοῖς ἁγίοις needs to be translated “called to be saints” (NRSV) or “called to be his holy people” (NJB), and then speculating that this title refers to a particular group in Rome (the “weak” of 14:1–15:13). 168 Wright, 1027. 169 See Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 2. 164

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interpretations. Reversing the analogy, one could also say that sainthood was grafted upon the Gentiles, without modifying their Gentile ethnic identity. Similarly, by being called apostle, Paul is “grafted” upon the inclusive covenantal community, put in a position of leadership (as apostle), but without effacing his Jewish identity. Paul remains a (Pharisaic) Jew, thinks and acts like one, even as he welcomes Gentiles in the Chosen People made inclusive by Christ. Yes, the “calls” involve changes, transformations; but these are minimal. As Dunn puts it, “The grace of Christ (toward Gentiles) and the peace of God (upon Jews) are not two separate, far less opposed factors. Each is bound with the other. The gospel is about the grace-and-peace of the God whom the Jews have proclaimed and their Jesus whom God exalted to God’s right hand—old promise and new gospel are one” (25–26). This rhetorical/covenantal type of interpretation carefully acknowledges this new expression of the continuity between gospel and Judaism (already found in 1:2), and therefore the covenantal character of the gospel. Since “grace” is the same blessing as the “peace” upon Israel/Jews (Dunn), “grace” and “peace” mark the same covenantal relationship with God for both Gentiles and Jews. From this covenantal perspective, the dual blessing of grace and peace is an affirmation of election.170 For a summary of the inclusive covenantal community interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Slave [δοῦλος] of Christ Jesus (Paul a); Called (apostle, saints); Apostle (1:1); God; Gospel of God (1:1); Spirit (of holiness) (1:4); Scriptures; Faithfulness/Faith (1:5); Obedience (to the Lord) (1:5); Christ Jesus; Grace (1:5, 7); God’s Beloved in Rome (1:7): Saints, called to be (1:7)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the second column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their inclusive covenantal community interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and realized-apocalyptic/messianic readings.

Rom 1:8–12. Thanksgiving for the Impact of Roman Christ-Followers in the Whole World; Purpose of the Letter 1:8: “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the world.” Paul’s “thanksgivings” found at the beginning of each of his letters, except Galatians, is often discounted as a formulaic address without 170

Of course, the covenantal view of grace presented above does not make sense when one presupposes an individual-centered view of “sin,” that requires an understanding of “grace” as the underserved favor of God’s forgiveness (of individual sins). Rather this covenantal understanding of “grace” presupposes a community-centered view of “sin” (found later in Romans, particularly in 1:18–3:20 and Rom 7), namely, being in competition with others, wanting to be better than others, oppressing others, making use of power plays, having wrong sense of honor and shame, holding prejudices and biases vis-à-vis others; in sum, having a wrong ideology, including an anti-Jewish and/or anti-Gentile ideology; patriarchal, sexist, racist, colonialist, imperialist ideologies. As we shall see, the root of these communal sins is sin as rebellion against God and against God’s people, because we are enemies of God (5:10), angry against God and jealous of God’s people, of those who are blessed by God.

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much meaning. But it should not be overlooked. Thanksgiving to God is a central part of the covenantal praxis of the Chosen People. While fulfilling its vocation by bringing others to glorify God (the “sanctification of the Name”), the Chosen People should itself constantly give thanks to God, as Berakoth (Thanksgivings), the tractate of Mishnah, exemplifies. Giving thanks to God is a basic covenantal practice that, of course, Paul the Jew follows. In Wright’s words: “Paul fits into this pattern like a foot into a well-made shoe.”171 Indeed, his vocation and mission (comparable to Christ’s mission, 15:9, 16–19) is to bring people (Gentiles) to thank God—to glorify God; and he cannot but practice what he preaches. It is a matter of covenantal praxis.172 This thanksgiving for the Roman Christ-followers seems at first to be highly hyperbolic (as other types of interpretations conclude). First, the statement “your faith is proclaimed” is strange. Ordinarily, for Paul, it is “the gospel” or “Christ” that are proclaimed! Furthermore, he adds that their “faith is proclaimed through the whole world” (as Jewett emphasizes). Is this another overstatement? Another hyperbole? Not necessarily! Saying that the Romans’ “faith is proclaimed through the whole world” is actually plausible when one keeps in mind the communication network of the empire, with constant interaction between the capital and the provinces. Thus, the news that there are communities of faith in Rome—communities recognizable because of their faithfulness—would readily spread “through the whole world,” that is, from the perspective of readers, through the whole known world of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, saying that their “faithfulness/faith is proclaimed” is not a flattery. It is actually affirming that, willingly or unwillingly, they are already actively part of a missionary movement. The news of their faithfulness/faith would entice others to participate in it. Therefore, this thanksgiving is a prelude to Paul’s request that, as all Christ-followers, the Roman house-churches be involved in the collective mission of the body of Christ (12:4) and more specifically that they support Paul in his missionary activity, now directed toward Spain (15:24, 28). One needs to keep in mind with Jewett that, for Paul, the overall rhetorical purpose of the letter—a missionary letter—is to invite the Romans to participate in mission with him (to Spain). Paul first stated it in 1:10–15 and made it more explicit in the concluding part of the letter, especially 15:14–33.173 1:9–10a “For God is my witness, whom I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son, how I ceaselessly make mention of you, always pleading in my prayers” (Jewett). The mention that Paul ceaselessly prayed for the Roman Christ-followers expresses another rhetorical theme of the letter: Christ-followers praying for each other. He returns to it in the Peroratio/conclusion (15:30–32) by requesting that the Romans pray to God on his behalf with regard to the dangers involved in his trip to Jerusalem. As they should pray for him, he prays for them. Prayer for others is what we can call a covenantal/

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Wright, 411–13. Here, Romans 1 is read as presenting a praxis (not a theology). Elliott, Liberating Paul, 74–75; see also Rhetoric of Romans, 69–104, esp. 77–82. These haggadic dimensions of Paul’s thought will be complemented by a halakhic hermeneutic focused on “the Law” in Rom 2–3. See Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 264–74, passim. 173 A rhetorical analysis must keep in mind the relationship between the introduction (exordium) and concluding part (peroratio) of the discourse (15:14–16:24). 172

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community prayer that invokes one’s connection with others (here, the connection of Paul with the Romans) within the framework of their God-given community call and vocation.174 This is a liturgical view of Paul’s missionary activity that he describes by saying: “Whom I serve [in a cultic sense, as λατρεύω is used in the LXX] in my spirit in the gospel of his Son” (confirmed by Paul’s self-description as “a minister [λειτουργός] of Christ Jesus” in 15:16), as Fitzmyer and Nanos note.175 Or in Jewett’s words, “it places Paul’s missionary prayer within the context ‘religious service’ performed as ‘worship’ of God.”176 This is an appropriate covenantal view of one’s ministry, as is the case for Israel carrying out its vocation as “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6); daily life is a “religious service” marked by thanksgiving and prayer for others in the covenantal community (as Wright notes, 1517). Note also the covenantal understanding of this service as serving “in (ἐν) the gospel of his Son” (Jewett). This translation (also in RSV and BBE) does not make any sense from a forensic perspective; thus most English translations add “by announcing” (NRSV) or “in preaching” (NIV, NJB, NAS) or “in proclaiming” (NAB) in front of “the gospel of his Son.” But from a covenantal perspective, for which the gospel is a haggadic story which believers are called to enter, it is indeed from within the gospel that one carries out one’s ministry. “I ceaselessly make mention of you” (or “without ceasing I remember you” NRSV)177 “in my prayers” means, as Jewett says, that “Paul has long been connected with the Roman believers even though he has not seen their faces.”178 Prayer rehearses the spiritual bond that links Paul with the Romans, as well as the Romans with Paul (15:30–32), and more generally believers with other believers in their collective missionary endeavors. 1:10b–12. Paul also prays that he might succeed in coming to them in Rome “by the will of God.” The rhetorical significance of this latter phrase is twofold: (a) it makes clear that Paul understand all his activities, including his mission, as matters of obedience to God’s will and of fulfillment of his call or vocation; and (b) that his visit to Rome is within the divine context.179 By objecting to Paul’s visit the Romans would be objecting to God’s will!

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A covenantal/community prayer is what Samuel Wells, vicar at St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), calls “incarnation prayer.” It is a communal prayer in the first person plural—“we,” “our.” Wells illustrates this incarnation/covenantal prayer in the concrete case of a man near-death living with a family member: “God, in Jesus you shared our pain, our foolishness, and our sheer bad luck. Visit my friend and her father: give them patience to endure what lies ahead, hope for every trying day, and companions to show them your love.” Such a prayer presupposes the covenantal view of faith as “trust” (in the covenant offered by God), and, especially, faith as “faithfulness” that calls for involvement with the community and sharing God’s love and justice with those in need. Wells contrasts “incarnation prayer” (“covenantal/community prayer”) with what he calls “resurrection prayer” (“prayer of petition,” the forensic theological understanding) and “transfiguration prayer” (“contemplative prayer,” the realized-apocalyptic/messianic understanding). Samuel Wells, “A Different Way to Pray,” Christian Century (April 30, 2014), 51. 175 Fitzmyer, 242–45; Nanos, 112. 176 Jewett, 120. 177 NRSV “remember you” is a more literal translation that fits Jewett’s interpretation better than his own translation, “make mention of you.” 178 Jewett, 122. 179 Jewett, 123.

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1:11a. “I long to see you” (ἐπιποθῶ γὰρ ἰδεῖν ὑμᾶς) softens the preceding “ironfist-in-a-velvet-glove” statement by an inclusive statement through which Paul sets his relationship with the Romans in family terminology. With Jewett we note that this phrase (and the similar one in15:23) is a typical reference to close relations with family members (here a family of brothers and sisters) and with very close friends; it expresses a desire for solidarity in Christ, an inclusive motive.180 1:11b–12. “So that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” This twofold statement reinforces the preceding point. In these verses, as Jewett says, “Paul obviously felt the need to communicate as a charismatic with charismatics, emphasizing the spiritual bond that linked all believers together.”181 Paul avoids giving offense to the Romans. Indeed. But this is not a rhetorical trick. He is not “buttering them up,” by flattering them in order to make them more receptive (as many interpretations posit)! He is truly expecting that his spiritual charisma will strengthen them (“that you may be strengthened,” 1:11), but avoids any arrogance by making clear that they will be strengthened by God (and not by him), through his use of a divine passive. Similarly, he is truly expecting that he will receive from them as much encouragement as he provides: “so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (1:12). Gone is the hierarchy one could have anticipated when reading his credentials (1:1) as establishing Paul’s hierarchical authority over lesser believers (who are not worthy of the title “apostle”). Kathy Ehrensperger brilliantly shows this in her book That We May Be Mutually Encouraged, in a discussion of 1:12 prolonged by an insightful presentation of the way Paul implements this dictum in 14:1–15:13 demonstrating that “In this passage Paul clearly demands mutuality in relationships of equals.”182 Similarly, Jewett comments. “Faith involves a mutually supportive reciprocity by which Paul’s faith will act on theirs and theirs on him.”183 This reciprocity is an integral feature of mission as Paul views it: mission is not the task of an independent missionary; it is the task of a community, whose members encourage each other in a mutually supportive reciprocity. Jewett concludes: “It is this revolutionary starting point of a world-unifying mission that gives Paul’s argument in the subsequent chapters its innovative, logical creativity.”184

(B) Rom 1:13–15: The background of Paul’s missionary project (Narratio) 1:13. “I do not wish you to be ignorant, brothers [and sisters], that many times I made plans to come to you, and have been hindered until now, so that I might reap some fruit 180

Jewett, 123–24. Jewett, 124. 182 Ehrensperger, That We May Be Mutually Encouraged, 187. This conclusion applies even in situations where some are considered “weak” and other “strong” (as in 14:1–15:13), when one keeps in mind the “ethics of mutuality” and the protection of the rights of weaker partners (rather than denying that they are weaker). 183 Jewett, 125, keeping in mind that, in this interpretive line of reasoning, “faith” should be understood as “faithfulness”; see also Wright, 1498. 184 Jewett, 126. 181

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even among you as also among the rest of the Gentiles” (Jewett).In line with the reciprocity expressed in the preceding verses (1:11b–12), Paul expects to receive something from the Romans. He wants to come to the Romans, so that “I might reap some fruit among you” (1:13). Obviously, this does not mean that Paul expects to convert the Romans; they are already believers. But, as he more directly expresses in 15:24 and 28, the “fruit” he hopes to receive from them is their support for, indeed participation in, his mission to Spain.185 Consequently, in this interpretive line of reasoning exemplified by Jewett, the rest of the verse (“as also among the rest of the Gentiles,” 1:13c) should be understood in the same way: in all cases, one of the goals of Paul’s mission is to “reap” this type of “fruit”; namely to establish missionary communities (missionary outposts) that participate in and contribute to the collective and ongoing task of mission.186 1:14: “To both Greeks and barbarians, to both wise and foolish, I am under obligation” (Jewett). This verse is one of the keys to understanding Romans. As Jewett perceptively shows through his rhetorical and ideological analysis, this verse makes explicit that Paul conceives of his mission as countercultural; that is, as a mission that “reverses the profoundest stereotypes of the ancient world” and its “system of honor and shame.”187 In 1:14 “Paul’s calling as an apostle to the Gentiles is clarified in a remarkable formulation describing his ‘obligations’ to the hostile poles of ethnicity, class, and education.”188 In agreement with all interpretations, we note that Paul describes the four categories of the Gentile world—“Greeks” (i.e., Greco-Romans, bilingual), “barbarians” (alien tribes who cannot speak Greek or Latin and are “uncivilized”), “wise” (in the general sense of educated in the Greco-Roman culture), and “foolish” (uneducated, rustic). But what is most significant is that, regarding all of these, Paul says, in Jewett’s translation of ὀφειλέτης εἰμί, “I am under obligation.” This phrase is important because it directly refers to the honor/shame system that distinguishes between “people with honor” and “people without honor” (the nobodies). Thus, it refers to the Greco-Roman ethic of reciprocity that requires to see oneself as “under obligation” to honor “people with honor” (if one wants to be also a person with honor)—and “without any obligation” toward the nobodies without honor. But Paul directly challenges the Greco-Roman honor/shame system, as Jewett explains: Thus, while the Greco-Roman ethic of reciprocity would require obligation to the Greeks and the educated who were perceived to have provided benefits for others, it was a complete reversal of the system of honor and shame to feel indebted to the barbarians and the uneducated.189 185

Jewett, 128–30. See Patte, “Thinking Mission with Paul and the Romans: Romans 15:1-33,” Mission Studies, Brill 23: 1 (2006), 81–104. In this inclusive covenantal community interpretation, the goal of Paul’s missionary activity is to establish missionary communities as missionary outpost. As soon as a few communities of Christ-followers are established in a region his particular missionary ministry is finished. This is why he can truly say, speaking of all the eastern Mediterranean regions (from Jerusalem to Illyricum [Albania], 15:19), that there is “no further place for me in these regions” (15:23). 187 Jewett, 132–33. 188 Jewett, 130, 132. 189 It is significant that, in this interpretation, Jewett understands the honor-and-shame Greco-Roman system as characterized by an ethics of reciprocity, and therefore primarily characterized by a sense of obligation—following J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman 186

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Paul claims that, because of the gospel, he feels that he has an obligation toward— and thus that he must honor—those who, for the Greco-Roman culture, are “nobodies without honor” whom he should ignore, namely, the barbarians and the uneducated (everywhere outside of Rome, including Spain). Now, these “nobodies without honor” are affirmed as valuable targets of his apostolic mission, and therefore as people that should be welcomed in the inclusive covenantal community. In short, Paul’s ministry, as well as the mission of all Christ-followers and the gospel itself, (1) aim at establishing inclusive communities (i.e., communities where differences are actually honored, as he explains later on in the letter) and (2) aim at challenging the basic ideology and the ethic of reciprocity that characterize the Greco-Roman world, because such an ideology excludes all kinds of people (as nobodies unworthy of honor). With these comments it becomes clear why, for Jewett, this verse is the key for understanding Romans (from a rhetorical, ideological perspective).190 1:15 “So my eagerness to manifest the gospel (εὐαγγελίσασθαι) together with you in Rome” (DP). In Jewett’s reading, Paul’s “eagerness” is aimed at enlisting the Romans in his mission project encompassing the uneducated and the barbarians—and not to convert the (already converted) Romans. Indeed. But what does εὐαγγελίσασθαι (euangelizethai, “gospelize”) mean? Commentaries and translations that follow forensic theological interpretations translate “preach the gospel.” Actually, following a rhetorical and ideological critical approach, it is most appropriate to recognize that Paul simply writes about his desire to “gospelize,” to “manifest the gospel,” to “share the gospel.” First, this verb does not specify the way in which the gospel is to be manifested or shared. Yes, manifesting the gospel includes using words—preaching. But as Paul expresses in 15:18–19, this transmission process involves much more than words: For I shall not make bold to say anything except what Christ as performed through me, towards the obedience of the Gentiles, by word and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the spirit, so that from Jerusalem also as far round as Illyricum, I have fulfilled the gospel of Christ.” (Jewett)191

Second, and as significantly, Paul uses a middle voice verbal form (euangelizethai)192 that emphasizes the subject’s participation in the action—which the word “sharing” seeks to convey.193 From this perspective, the gospel is not an object—the content of a

World (Oxford, Clarendon, and New York: Oxford University Press. 1997), especially 96, as well as Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Frankfort, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1993). Yet, see Chapter 5 for a very different understanding of the honorand-shame system by scholars who lived in honor-and-shame societies—they emphasize the sense of indebtedness rather than the sense of obligation, as in Meng Hun Goh, The Middle Voice of Love in 1 Corinthians: Reading Singularity and Plurality from Different Cultures (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, 2014), especially Introduction and Chapter 1. 190 On this point, Jewett expands original analyses by Sigfred Perdersen, “Theologische Überlegungen zur Isagogik des Römerbriefes,” ZNW 76 (1985), 47–67. 191 Here Jewett stays free from a forensic interpretation. 192 It is notable that in all his letters Paul uses εὐαγγελίζω exclusively in the middle voice (the only exception is in Gal 1:11, when he uses the passive, and insists his gospel is not of human origin). 193 Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1996), 414–30, defines the middle voice as follows: “In the middle voice the subject performs or experiences

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message—that a subject (a preacher) can pass on to someone else. Rather, the gospel is something in which Paul (or any other believer) participates; it is a gospel-story which is transmitted by participating in it, together with other people with whom one shares the gospel as a collective story. One cannot ignore the middle voice of this verb—reading as if it were an active voice—as is commonly done. This flattens out our understanding of Paul’s letters, as Meng Hun Goh shows regarding Paul’s use of euangelizethai in 1 Cor 9:16–18: For Paul, “to gospelize” does not mean to give the gospel to someone as if one possesses it. Rather, to gospelize means to manifest the gospel so that one may become its participant.(9:23, [“share in its blessings”])194

This is why I suggest the translation “my eagerness to manifest the gospel.” In light of Paul’s description of his ministry in 15:18–19 as a manifestation of the gospel that involves not only words (preaching) but also deeds (such as deeds of love, mercy, and justice) and signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God (related to the spiritual gifts and faith that believers exchange, according to 1:11–12) and in light of the charismatic reciprocity that he presents in the preceding verses (1:11–13), Paul’s eagerness (in 1:15) can be understood as an eagerness to manifest the gospel “together with you who are in Rome” (Patte; καὶ ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐν Ῥώμῃ). Such a “manifestation” or “sharing” of the gospel involves “restoring to memory”—a recollection of the gospel (as gospel-story) to which “they had already made participants, they had been made part of the divine work of which the kerygma was a proclamation” and indeed “more recollection than proclamation” as Nils Dahl astutely recognized.195 Such a “manifestation” or “sharing” of the gospel is therefore an invitation to participate with God in the gospel-story as covenantal story—as we shall see in the following verses. Paul’s eagerness is therefore to convince the Romans to participate with him in the mission he plans to carry out in Rome (among the Gentiles there, beyond the established churches) and in Spain, because by definition it is the collective mission Paul and the Romans share. All of them have spiritual gifts (1:11–12) that are needed in this mission in which they are invited to participate. For a summary of the inclusive covenantal community interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Thanksgiving (1:8); Ministry (1:9); Prayer (1:9-10); Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14); Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14); Gospel, Transmission of the; Gospelize (εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the second column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their covenantal community interpretations can be compared/ contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and realizedapocalyptic/messianic readings.

the action expressed by the verb in such a way that emphasizes the subject’s participation” (414, emphasis added). 194 Goh, The Middle Voice of Love in 1 Corinthians, ix. 195 Nils Dahl, “Anamnesis: Memory and Commemoration in the Early Church,” Jesus in the Memory of the Early Church: Essays (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976), 19.

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(C) Rom 1:16–17/18.196 The thesis: The gospel-story as the powerful embodiment of the justice of the covenant God in inclusive covenantal communities and their mission (Propositio) 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel-story, for it is the power of the covenant God for salvation to the faithful, both to the Jew first and then to the Greek, 17 for in it the justice of God is revealed through faithfulness for faithfulness; as it is written, “The one who is just shall live by faithfulness.” 18 Because the anger of the covenant God is being revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of humans who are suppressing the truth by injustice. (Patte) 16 For 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. 17 For 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.” 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. (NRSV)

The translation I propose makes explicit the covenantal and community-centered character of Paul’s thesis by using a vocabulary that, on the basis of inclusive covenantal community interpretation of 1:1–15, makes clear the fact that in this perspective the “gospel” is a haggadic “gospel-story”; that God is “the covenant God” (Wright’s phrase); that pistis is emunah, and thus primarily “faithfulness,” “a lived faith” together with the people of the covenantal God; that the covenantal God is characterized by “justice,” “just relations” with humans, but also by God’s “anger” against “impiety and injustice” that result in the present, deplorable state of human affairs. This surprising vocabulary—which will be justified as we progress in our rhetorical and ideological reading of 1:16–18—is aimed at jolting us out of the straightjacket of the forensic theological vocabulary of English translations that prevents us from embracing the covenantal and community-centered pattern of Paul’s thesis and much of the grounding of his vocabulary in the Hebrew Bible. The multifaceted thesis is that 1:16–17(18) advances the rhetorical thrust of the letter by emphasizing three features that require explanation in terms of their rhetorical and ideological weight: (a) the phrase “I am not ashamed of the gospel-story”; (b) the gospel as “the power of God for salvation to all the faithful”; (c) the justice of God and the anger of God. If these three verses were standing by themselves, it would be difficult to make sense of them, because they include many technical terms: “Ashamed,” “gospel/ gospel-story,” “power of the covenantal God,” “salvation,” “faithfulness/faith,” “justice/ righteousness,” “anger/wrath of God,” and “injustice/unrighteousness.” Happily, 196

I take the thesis to include 1:18, because Rom 1:17 and 1:18 should not be separated, as I (Paul’s Faith, 257–58) and Elliott (Arrogance, 6–7) argue. It is because these two verses are parallel statements about the revelation of God’s righteousness/justice and of God’s wrath against injustice that we insist they should not be separated. Another reason is that realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations need to have a break after 1:18. The break at this point makes also sense in the forensic interpretation. In this way the “Triple Commentary” is more consistent for parallel comparisons.

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the inclusive covenantal community interpretation of 1:1–15 clearly defined two of these—“gospel/gospel-story” and “faithfulness/faith”—and alluded to two others, “power of God” and “shame.” These four established terms can serve as a starting point for our interpretation. The Gospel (of which Paul is not ashamed) is a covenantal story (Haggadah). So the translation: “Gospel-story.” As “the gospel of God” (1:1) it is the story of the covenant God who is One and acts both in the [hi]story of Israel and of Jesus, and also now in the story of Paul and of Gentiles (all the way to the end of the world, Spain [15:24, 28]). ALL are invited to enter this gospel-story by participating in the people of God that now encompasses “the Jew first and also the Greek” (1:16d). As such this covenantal story prolongs the story of God and Israel in the Hebrew Bible with the story of all those who participate into it (and can be called “saints,” 1:7, as the Chosen People of old was) among Gentiles. As a covenantal story, the gospelstory is a drama in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together.” (Slonimsky, about Midrash) Faithfulness/faith (1:5) (as emunah and fides) is the submission/obedience to God and to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the good relations that believers have with God, Christ, and other members of the community. Faithfulness/faith is trustfully entering the gospel-story (Haggadah) as the drama in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together,” and participating into it (faithfully “walking” according to its patterns—Halakah). The Power of God (we can anticipate) follows a similar pattern to that of the power of the Apostle as manifested in the “Authority of the Apostle” (1:11-14). Rather than being oppressive and authoritarian, this power brings encouragement and empowerment to the faithful. Honor and Shame, as ideological system prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, has been rejected in 1:14 as “exclusive” and thus it is denounced by the gospelstory as an unjust and oppressive cultural and social system.

Exegetes who follow a community-centered, rhetorical, and ideological critical approach and the corresponding interpretive line of reasoning can progress by keeping in mind what Paul said about these four themes as they read 1:16–18 and, in the process, sharpen these concepts. Then they have less difficulty understanding and explaining the new concepts this passage introduces: “Salvation,” “righteousness/justice of God,” “unrighteousness/injustice,” and “wrath of God.” Yet, it is a challenge to understand all this vocabulary from an inclusive covenantal community perspective because, as soon as they are uttered, the traditional forensic theological meanings of these words are often viewed as self-evident—as is the case in the North Atlantic cultures and in the circles of other cultures influenced by the missionary teaching derived from them. To prevent such automatic forensic individual-centered readings, I use compound terms until the community-centered meaning is well established.

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Note on the use of compounds: As I did in the above translation, I could abruptly begin using the community-centered terms “justice,” “just,” “injustice” for δικαιοσύνη, δίκαιος and ἀδικία, as for instance the New Jerusalem Bible, Georgi, Horsley, Elliott, and all the commentaries using Romance Languages do. But I discovered that by themselves these community-centered terms were often confusing for my students. They found this vocabulary confusing because most of the English translations of Romans and even community-centered commentaries (such as Jewett) that they had in front of them used individual-centered terms such as “righteousness,” “the righteous,” and “unrighteous.” Furthermore, my students found that interpretations that systematically used “justice,” “just,” and “injustice” appeared to say that Paul’s teaching was merely a “political” teaching, that is, a teaching that is not “religious.” So, in my seminars, I avoided these confusions by using compounds to translate δικαιοσύνη (righteousness/justice), δίκαιος (righteous/just) and ἀδικία (unrighteousness/injustice)—and thus “righteousness/ justice of God” (as I did for the term “faithfulness/faith”). I will do so here as well, including when referring to exegetes who are using individual-centered terms to present their community-centered interpretation—as, for instance, Jewett does.197 But compounds are cumbersome. Therefore, after having sufficiently established the community-centered covenantal meanings of these compounds, I will use the community-centered form by itself, as I did in the above translation of 1:16-18.

In the formulation of this “thesis”—both a formal rhetorical thesis and also a covenantal thesis, as we shall see—Paul affirmed that the gospel involves a triple challenge: 1. It challenges the Greco-Roman honor-and-shame cultural ideology; 2. It challenges the political and religious ideology of the Roman Empire, its power structure, and its practice of justice; and 3. It challenges the religious ideology of particular communities of Christ-followers, including Gentile Christ-followers with misconceptions of the covenant and of the people of God. Before commenting on each verse, it is helpful to quote how Jewett summarizes his comments on 1:16–17, which partially explains why these verses involve this threefold challenge. The stunning feature of Paul’s thesis . . . is its contention that preaching [manifesting] the gospel to establish faith communities, rather than force of arms or apocalyptic 197

At first it was puzzling for me that community-centered interpretations, such as Jewett’s and William Campbell’s (in Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context, 200–04, and passim), both emphasize the corporate/community (not individualistic) character of δικαιοσύνη and continue to use the individual-centered forensic translation “righteousness” or even introduce forensic concepts such as “judgment” in the discussion of these verses. My suspicion is that they were afraid that their interpretation would no longer be viewed as “religious”—and be exclusively viewed as offering a political and ideological teaching, as my students frequently commented. But this problem disappears when one uses compounds and when covenantal features of this teaching are also emphasized.

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miracle, is the means by which righteousness [/divine justice] is restored. In the establishment of faith communities as far as the end of the known world, God will be restoring arenas where righteousness [/justice] is accomplished, thus creating salvation. In place of the salvation of the Pax Romana, based on military power and imperial administration, there is a salvation of small groups who believe in [/are faithful to] the gospel of Christ crucified. Paul’s goal in this letter is to encourage their cooperation with each other to extend this new form of salvation to the end of the world. The global offensive in behalf of divine righteousness [/justice] envisioned by Romans is missional and persuasive rather than martial and coercive. The implications of this audacious thesis are developed in the rest of the letter.198

My only point of disagreement with Jewett is in the phrase when he speaks of those “who believe in the gospel of Christ crucified.” First, Jewett still speaks of faith as “believing in”; this “forensic formulation” is potentially misleading. In the proposed covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning, it is better to speak of those “who are faithful to the gospel” (keeping closer to the text, in which Paul chose not to refer to the cross—although from 1 Corinthians we know that he could have). Second and most significantly, it is essential to note, together with Bernadette Brooten, that in all this passage and until 3:22, the general focus is on God—as Paul spoke of the “gospel of God” in 1:1. It is for good reasons that Paul is not speaking here of the “gospel of Christ”—and even less of the “gospel of Christ crucified” (see below). As Brooten summarizes, “the general focus on God, rather than Christ, enables Paul to achieve his goal for the first three chapters, namely, to demonstrate divine impartiality and universal human sinfulness, before and outside of Christ.”199 1:16a “I am not ashamed of the gospel” foregrounds the honor-and-shame ideological focus of the gospel already found in 1:5 and 1:14. As Jewett says, this phrase sets the tone of the entire letter.200 Paul anticipates that the gospel-story was viewed— or could be viewed—as shameful. At first, this phrase seems to imply that one could think that the gospel is shameful because of its “proclamation” of the “gospel message” about the “crucified Christ” (as Jewett does201). This is an essential point in 1 Cor 1–2. But regarding Romans and in this inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning, such an interpretation of “I am not ashamed of the gospel” is not appropriate. First, it presupposes that “the gospel” is a message with a theological teaching that is being proclaimed; this is a forensic theological understanding of 1:15, which is not warranted in a rhetorical and ideological perspective—according to which the “gospel” is to be viewed as a gospel-story. Second, saying that Paul anticipates in Romans that one could be ashamed of the gospel-story because it is about “the crucified Christ” simply stretches the evidence found in Romans. In this letter, Paul never uses the word cross and uses the verb “crucified” only once (in 6:6). Adopting this interpretation 198

Jewett, 146–47, terms between brackets added. Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 220, see also 219–66. 200 Jewett, 136. 201 Jewett, 137. 199

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would also distract us and prevent us from recognizing that Paul might have another reason for anticipating that the gospel-story might be viewed as shameful. After the ideological analysis of 1:14, one can readily recognize that the gospel-story is potentially shameful, because its narrative pattern fundamentally challenges the Greco-Roman honor-and-shame system. From the perspective of the gospel-story, those without honor according to the Greco-Roman world (the barbarians and the uneducated) are viewed and treated as having as much honor as the honorable Greeks and the educated. Therefore the gospel appears to be shameful in that it rejects, and indeed overturns, the honor-and-shame system of the Greco-Roman world. Thus for believers such as Paul, the gospel-story is countercultural, and as such makes it impossible to be ashamed, since the honor-and-shame system does not apply any longer! Christ-followers have stepped out of the prevalent honor-and-shame system. Thus with Jewett we conclude: “His [Paul’s] claim not to be ashamed signals that a social and ideological revolution has been inaugurated by the gospel.”202 But this shameless countercultural proclamation challenges the status quo in a society—and corresponds to the dangerous virtue and practice of parrhesia by Socrates and Plato.203 1:16b–d “It [the gospel-story] is the power of God for salvation to all who have faith/ are faithful.” At the center of the thesis of the letter (1:16–18) is the “paradox of power” (Jewett), or, as Ehrensperger emphasizes, a “dynamics of power” as an “empowering power”—rather than a “power of domination.”204 In order to understand these claims, we first need to grasp in which sense “the gospel-story is the power of God . . . to all what have faith/are faithful” (1:16b & d) before discussing what type of “salvation” (1:16c) is involved. The covenantal and ideological perspectives on this phrase complement each other. A—From a covenantal perspective, those who have faith/are faithful (1:16d) are those who (having heard it, 10:17) enter and participate in the gospel-story. As discussed regarding 1:5, pistis (πίστις, three times in 1:17) is the term used in the LXX to translate the Hebrew emunah [‫—] ֱאמוּנָה‬actually in the quotation of Hab 2:4 in Rom 1:17b, pistis is used as a translation of emunah—that has a similar meaning to the Latin fides, and is thus best translated as faithfulness. And the same applies regarding the verbal form of pistis (πιστεύοντι, 1:16d) that I translated above “the faithful,” that is, those who “faithfully” enter the “gospel of God” (1:1). As noted, this “gospel of God” is the gospel-story of the covenant God with the now-inclusive Chosen People. It is necessary to make explicit for readers who belong to individual-centered cultures, that since “faithfulness” involves participating in this collective gospel-story, one cannot have faithfulness/faith by oneself; faithfulness (pistis) is necessarily communal (although one can of course speak of individual persons who are faithful, as Paul does speaking of “both to the Jew first and then to the Greek,” 1:16e). It is also essential to recognize, 202

The above presentation rehearses Jewett’s interpretation of 1:14–15 and his conclusion about 1:16a, while avoiding Jewett’s appeal to 1 Cor 1–2—this is not needed, although one can do so as shorthand, because of the mention of being crucified with Christ in 6:6 (the only allusion to the crucifixion in Romans). Jewett, 137. 203 See Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 28, who refers to Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the College the France 1983-1984 (trans. G. Burchell; New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 78–79. 204 Ehrensperger, Paul in the Dynamics of Power, 196–200.

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as Nanos205 appropriately emphasizes, that this story encompasses both God’s interactions with the Chosen People until Christ (until the Messiah), including, among those named by Paul in Romans, Adam (5:14), the patriarchs (9:5; 15:8), Abraham (4:1–16; 11:1), Sarah (4:19; 9:9), Rebecca (9:10), Isaac (9:7, 10), Moses (5:15; 9:15; 10:5, 19), David (1:3; 4:6;11:9) and, of course, Israel (9–11), the prophets (1:2, 3:21, 11:3), and more specifically Isaiah (9–10; 15:12) and Hosea (9:25), and of course the Messiah Jesus (Christ Jesus), and God’s interactions with the Chosen People since Christ (the Messiah)—that is, the Chosen People that now comprises Jewish and Gentile Christfollowers, among whom are “the saints at Jerusalem” (15:25–26), churches in Macedonia and Achaia (15:26), the churches established by Paul “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum” (15:19), and of course the churches in Rome. Thus, the Jewish covenant story is now an inclusive covenantal gospel-story that includes both Jews and Greeks/Gentiles. But Paul repeats three times (1:16, 2:9, 2:10), “the Jew first (πρῶτον) and also the Greek.” This gospel-story will first have an effect (either salvation in 1:16 and 2:10, or punishment, 2:9) for the Jews. In which sense? Is it because they were the first ones to hear the gospel-message, first “preached” or “proclaimed” to Jews, then to Greeks? This is the forensic view (which is possible and plausible). But when this phrase is read from the perspective of Paul the Jew, we need to remember that the gospel is a story—a covenantal story, a gospel-story. Who first participated with God in this story? Of course, all the biblical personages and the Jews. Of course, also Gentile proselytes. But it is only now, after the coming of the Messiah/ Christ Jesus, that Gentiles/Greeks are systematically invited to enter and faithfully participate with God in this covenantal gospel-story. But it remains first a Jewish covenantal story. Allow me to emphasize this point that Nanos has very insightfully made: The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a message that Jews would now need to receive, because it would be a radically new message for them, that would threaten their Jewish identity. The gospel of God is the Jewish covenantal story in which Gentiles/Greeks are now (since Christ) also invited to participate.206 For Paul the Jew, faithfully entering the gospel-story of the covenant God is entering a covenantal story which includes the story of God and Israel (as found throughout the Hebrew Bible and beyond, in Judaism, as already mentioned in 1:2) that is prolonged (without being superseded) by the story of God and the Messiah/Christ Jesus interacting with Paul and all the other Christ-followers. By entering the gospelstory, (a) the faithful recognize themselves as belonging to those powerless people adrift in the world (like the wandering Arameans, the slaves in Egypt, the tribes in the wilderness) that God transformed into the Chosen People, and then (b) the faithful “walk” accordingly. The gospel-story—the “gospel of God” in which they enter with faithfulness—has a transformative power; it transforms them into the Chosen People. It is in this way that “the gospel is the power of God” that transforms the faithful.

205 206

Nanos, 21–40. Nanos consequently argues that this “New Perspective” interpretation of Romans is not dissimilar to the presentation of Paul’s relationship with Judaism in the book of Acts. Thus Nanos constantly refers to Acts in The Mystery of Romans. This is not a criticism. A review of the history of the receptions of Romans shows that the inclusive covenantal community interpretive line begins with the book of Acts.

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But there is more. From an ideological perspective, the vocabulary of the phrase, “the gospel-story is the power of the covenant God for salvation to all the faithful,” resonates with another set of connotations. Since Paul presented himself as the ambassador of Christ (1:1), with Jewett we can note that, by manifesting the gospel-story through his mission (1:15), Paul is extending the “cosmic foreign-policy” of God as a challenge to the Roman Empire’s universal foreign-policy.207 Indeed, since “slave of Christ” (1:1a) alludes to “slave of Caesar” and since calling Christ “Lord” (Kyrios, 1:4) is assigning to him the imperial title “Lord,” the phrase, “the gospel is the power of God for salvation,” connotes that the “gospel of God” with its paradoxical power, plays the role that the Roman emperors claimed for themselves. In the same way that the emperors brought “salvation” by establishing the Pax Romana to supplant the chaos of barbarian disorder, so the gospel of God and its Christ bring “salvation.” The vocabulary that Paul uses to formulate this thesis amounts to presenting the gospel as a direct competitor to the “gospel” of Caesar, and thus, as Jewett underscores, to challenging—indeed, turning upside down—the political religious ideology of Rome, as the gospel also turned upside down the honor-and-shame ideology in 1:14.208 So Georgi notes, “By using such loaded terms as εὐαγγέλιον [gospel], πίστις [faithfulness], δικαιοσύνη [righteousness/justice], εἰρήνη [peace, in1:7] as central concepts in Romans, [Paul] evokes their associations to Roman political theology” and ideology.209 Georgi and his followers, including Jewett, Horsley, and Elliott, show that each of these terms—to which I add σωτηρία, salvation—evoked for Roman readers of this letter a complete reversal of the imperial political theology and ideology.210 The gospel, εὐαγγέλιον, has a dynamic meaning that evokes the “gospel” of the imperial Savior (Caesar). It follows, as Jewett explains, that “when Paul states that he is ‘not ashamed of the gospel’ because it ‘is God’s power,’ it seems most natural to take this in the context of weighing whether the sovereign an ambassador represents is capable of achieving

207 208

Jewett, 138. Since, at first, this political reading seems outlandish, it is worth quoting Jewett, 138, at length:

The imperial cult celebrated the “gospel” of the allegedly divine power of the emperor, viewing him in the words of an official document from the province of Asia, as “a savior (σωτήρ) who put an end to war and will restore order everywhere: Caesar, by his appearing has realized the hopes of our ancestors; not only has he surpassed earlier benefactors of humanity, but he leaves no hope to those of the future that they might surpass him. The god’s birthday was for the world the beginning of the gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) that he brought.” [From the letter of the Proconsul of Asia, Paulus Fabius Maximux, honoring Augustus] The elaborate triumphs staged by emperors at the conclusion of military campaigns celebrated their allegedly divine power. This slant on the thesis of Romans not only enables one to explain the claim that “the gospel is God’s power,” but also allows access to the explanatory connection between 1:16a and b. The major point in the thesis statement, that the gospel is God’s means of restoring righteousness/[justice] over a disobedient creation, dovetails with Paul’s understanding of his mission to extend that reign. [I slightly abbreviated the reference to the letter of the Proconsul. See Jewett 138, note 35.] 209 Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology, 83; see 79–96. Georgi uses alternatively “political theology” and “political ideology,” because of his argument about “theocracy” and because this ideology is religious in character. While agreeing with this point, with Jewett and others I believe it is more accurate to speak of “political ideology.” 210 Richard A. Horsley, ed., Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, especially “Part III. Paul’s Counter Imperial Gospel: Introduction,” 140–47, in which Horsley provides an excellent summary. Elliott, The Arrogance of Nation, 72–83.

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the purposes of an embassy.”211 And of course Paul’s statement in 1:16a–b is a definite positive answer: “The gospel is God’s means of restoring righteousness[/justice] over a disobedient creation . . . . In effect, Paul presents himself in Romans as the ambassador of the ‘power of God,’ extending the sovereign’s [God’s] cosmic foreign policy through [manifesting] the gospel.”212 “For Salvation.” Such a gospel (as the covenantal gospel-story which is, for believers, the transformative power of God) “is for salvation” (ἐστιν εἰς σωτηρίαν). There is no difficulty understanding that “for salvation” designates (in Jewett’s words) “the effect of divine power acting through the gospel”213 in the present of believers, as the present tense, ἐστιν “is,” indicates (as in Ps 98:2). In other words (and against forensic interpretations), at this point Paul does not speak about eschatological salvation at the future judgment of the end of time. This theme is significant for Paul—he speaks about eschatological salvation in Rom 5:9–10 and 13:11, and more covertly elsewhere, as we discuss when dealing with these texts.214 But unlike forensic commentators that understand 1:16b as referring to eschatological salvation, covenantal ideological interpretations simply respect the text and its grammar. Thus, Jewett and other commentators who follow this interpretive line of reasoning emphasize that one cannot ignore that fact that in 1:16 Paul speaks of salvation in the present tense, in the same way that he speaks of the revelation of the righteousness/justice of God in the present tense in 1:17, and of the revelation of the anger/wrath of God in the present tense in 1:18. As noted above, the phrase εἰς σωτηρίαν, “for salvation,” designates “the effect of divine power acting through the gospel,”215 and this in the present. But what is this salvation? Let us clarify it by keeping in mind the key questions that need to be asked to clarify any given understanding of “salvation”: (1) Who needs to be saved? (2) From what predicament? (3) What is the state of “being saved”? (4) By whom/what are they saved and how? Let us address these questions. 1. “Salvation”: Who need to be saved? From the perspective of the rhetorical and ideological reading of 1:1–15, “salvation” is a community-centered affair: salvation is experienced together with and within a community that includes “all [παντὶ] faithful.” I emphasize “all” (παντὶ) to signal that Paul does insist on this point. This is the fourth of sixty-one times (yes, 61 times!) that Paul uses πᾶς, “all, everyone,” in Romans! This repeated usage marks again and again the community-centered and inclusive character of Paul’s teaching. This “salvation” is experienced, together with and within a community, by individuals as members of a community (a point on which forensic interpreters might agree). But this “salvation” is primarily community-centered in the sense that it is needed at the community

211

Jewett, 137. Jewett, 138. 213 Jewett, 138. 214 Future eschatological salvation is also explicitly presented in 1 Cor 3:15; 5:5; 1 Thess 5:8–9. Many other passages (including Phil 1:28; 2:12) have been interpreted as referring to future salvation, even though they might also support a present salvation interpretation. 215 Jewett, 138. 212

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level. Thus: Who needs to be saved? “Community/ies,” the people of the covenant (the Chosen People) and through it all the families of the earth—all communities.216 2. “Salvation”: From what predicament do communities need to be saved? Since the phrase εἰς σωτηρίαν, “for salvation,” designates, as Jewett points out, “the effect of divine power acting through the gospel”217 for present communities, “Paul contends that salvation is manifest now in the seemingly powerless communities of faith established by the gospel.”218 The question is what was the problematic state from which these communities needed to be saved? In brief, from a wrong ideology that separates people from each other in a community, that separates communities from communities in society, and that separates all people from God. Explanations are needed. We can recognize allusions to the communal state of affairs as we reread 1:11–18 for clues regarding the community issues that Paul seeks to address. From 1:11–12, we can conclude that these communities include members (and apostles?) who, following an accepted ideology, see themselves as having authority over other members, because they have received special gifts from God that the other members do not have— envisioning that the communities of Christ-followers are governed by the same structures of authority as those in the rest of society. In 1:14a it becomes apparent that in these communities there are Greeks who, following an accepted ideology, approve excluding and looking down on barbarians, because these are people without honor, second-rate citizens whom one can deride, exploit, and abuse. Similarly, we can conclude from 1:14b that these communities include people who are wise and educated, and who, as such, see fit (following an accepted ideology) to despise and thus exclude the uneducated as foolish people who can be ignored. Finally, from 1:16c (although we saw hints of these issues in 1:1–7), in these communities there are Jews and Gentiles/Greeks who, following an accepted ideology, seem to be divided and to exclude each other, affirming themselves as superior (stronger) in faithfulness/faith and thus viewing others as inferior (weaker), second-rate members of the communities (as becomes explicit in 14:1–15:13, and many other passages as we shall discover). In sum, from these hints, it appears that the predicament from which these communities of Christ-followers need to be “saved” is that their community life mirrors the hierarchical, exclusive, abusive, oppressive characteristics of life in the Roman Empire, a life fraught with injustice—they need a community life freed from the “injustice of humans who are suppressing the truth by injustice” (1:18). 3. “Salvation”: What Is Supposed to Be the State of “Being Saved” for such Communities?

216

Thus, as Wright (754–55) underscores, salvation is not “a Platonic soteriology of saved souls.” “Salvation is part of a much bigger picture . . . in Israel’s scriptures [it] has to do with the faithfulness of the creator to [the] whole world, the faithfulness of the covenant God to the promises [God] has made not only to [God’s] people but also through [this] people . . . to all the families of the earth” (755). 217 Jewett, 138. 218 Jewett, 139.

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In sum, as a result of the effect of divine power at work through the gospel in them, such communities should become inclusive communities that live by a countercultural gospel. In response to the above-mentioned situation, Paul presents his authority as paradoxical and reciprocal—not as an “authority over” others; not as a hierarchical authority. From the start (1:1), as we noted, Paul presents the gospel-story for which he is set apart as a countercultural gospel (1:1). Then Roman readers, after recognizing countercultural features of the gospel in 1:1–15, cannot but be struck by the powerful rhetorical effect of the terminology in 1:16–18. Since they reside in the imperial capital, Paul’s use of “salvation” would evoke in an ironic way the celebration of the emperors (from Augustus to Nero in Paul’s time) as “saviors”—bringers of salvation.219 The “salvation” brought by Roman emperors and the Roman Empire was the worldwide establishment of the Pax Romana that was understood to rightwise the chaos of barbarian disorder that Romans citizens feared. But in the process of constructing this worldwide Pax Romana through the use of force (the legions), the Romans established an authoritative, hierarchical, stratified, exclusive, and unjust society. Yes, the “salvation” brought about by Jesus Christ our Lord is like the Pax Romana, but only through its universal scope: it is the worldwide establishment of a new kind of community/ society. This aspiration to be a worldwide network of communities of Christ-followers is recognizable in the worldwide scope of the mission that Paul envisions to conduct with the help of the Romans (1:11–15)—to the end of the known world, Spain (15:24, 28). But beyond this potential worldwide character, the “salvation” brought about by the countercultural gospel is necessarily very different from the Pax Romana. Actually, one could view the community life envisioned by the gospel-story as an upside down Roman Empire, as Georgi suggests. But, as we shall see, ultimately this is misleading, because their respective frames are so different: the covenantal frame of the community life of Christ-followers (centered on the faithfulness of the covenantal God, a.k.a. the “righteousness/justice of God”) is radically different from the imperial cult and “the gospel of imperial salvation” that frame the Roman Empire.220 From the perspective of 1:17, the communities of Christ-followers need to be freed from a praxis that mirrors the hierarchical and exclusive praxis of the Roman Empire, a way of community life fraught with injustice. Instead it is the righteousness/ justice of God that needs to frame the communities of Christ-followers. Paul envisions inclusive communities that would be “righteous/just” communities, because (through the gospel-story in which they faithfully participate) they would be framed by the “righteousness/justice of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ)—rather than being framed by the “justice” [injustice] of the Roman Empire. From the perspective of a rhetorical and ideological reading, the righteousness/ justice of God is associated with the paradoxical countercultural salvation of the gospelstory, which is needed by all those who suffer from injustice in the Roman world. This 219 220

See Jewett, 139, who quotes the evidence in ancient sources. The gospel-story as upside down empire (keeping a similar but upside down hierarchical structure) remains a “temptation” even if this outlook is very helpful, as Dieter Georgi shows in “God Turned Upside Down,” in Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire, 148–57. On “the gospel of imperial salvation,” see the same volume, 9–86.

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injustice was (and is still) shaped by exclusions and exclusionary practices of all kinds: exclusions of all kinds of people from the main stream of society, reinforced when the social life of the Roman Empire is ideologically framed by the Greco-Roman honor/ shame system (giving unjust precedence to the Greeks and Romans over the barbarians, to the well-educated over the ill-educated, 1:14) or reinforced by other ideological and political hierarchical and discrimination systems (such as the household headed by the pater familias or the patronage system).221 Thus, salvation from all these oppressive systems is what is brought about by the gospel-story as “power of God,” because it establishes inclusive and thus just communities. This is what Paul meant according to this interpretive line of reasoning. Jewett expresses it in his own words: The goal of divine righteousness[/justice] is to establish salvation, which in the context of the expression “to all who have faith” implies the establishment of faith communities where righteous[/just] relationships are maintained. It is essential at this point to recapture the social context of Paul’s mission, rather than to allow our definition of salvation to be dominated by the later theological tradition.  .  .  .  Salvation implies the restoration of wholeness on a corporate as well as an individual level; its primary scope in biblical theology and in Roman civil religion is the group, that is, the nation and the world, rather than the individual.  .  .  .  In the establishment of faith communities as far as the ends of the known world, God will be restoring arenas where righteousness[/justice] is accomplished, thus creating salvation.222

In saying so, Jewett is in line with Georgi’s broader interpretation of Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology and Elliott’s “political reading” (in The Arrogance of Nations), and follows the interpretive tradition of those scholars who, with Hermann Cremer and Dunn (40–42), emphasize that the word δικαιοσύνη (in the phrase “righteousness/ justice of God”) translates the Hebrew ‫ ְצ ָד ָקה‬, which is a relational term—and is therefore more appropriately translated “justice.”223 One cannot be “just” as an individual; one is “just” when one’s relationship with others is “just” and thus characterized by “justice.” Although Jewett mentions that the phrase “justice of God” “was primarily relational, associated with covenantal loyalty” (141, emphasis added), he does not develop this point. He conceives of the teaching of Paul as an inclusive community teaching characterized by justice, ignoring its covenantal dimension.224 This is an 221

See Richard A. Horsley, ed. Paul and Empire, 88–137. Jewett, 146–47. 223 Hermann Cremer, Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhange ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen, 2nd ed. (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1900), 34–38. This is another instance in which Dunn’s interpretation (42–44) is hybrid—insisting on the “the covenantal framework of God’s righteousness” and adding that “it has to be understood afresh in terms of faith” (with “faith” defined as “believing that”), showing once again that his commentary remains framed by a forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning. 224 As a consequence, for my students, such a teaching sounded like the teaching of the Social Gospel Movement (first developed in the United States during the early twentieth century) that emphasized, following Walter Rauschenbusch, that the Kingdom of God embraces all of human life and that the church’s duty is to be the conscience and guide for “the Christian transfiguration of the social order.” See Donald K. Gorrell, “Social Gospel Movement,” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. 222

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essential part of the “inclusive covenantal community” interpretation of Romans. Yet, its Jewish covenantal framework—marked by “to the Jew first”—is essential and needs to be accounted for by considering the process of salvation, an important aspect of the concept of “salvation.” 4. “Salvation”: By What Are the Communities Saved and How? “For I am not ashamed of the gospel-story, for it is the power of God for salvation to all the faithful, both to the Jew first and then to the Greek, for in it the justice of God is revealed through faithfulness for faithfulness, as it is written, ‘The one who is just shall live by faithfulness.’” (1:16–17)

After the preceding comments, it is easy to answer the question “By what are the communities saved and how?” It is just a matter of rereading the text (including 1:17) while taking into account the inclusive covenantal community interpretation of each of the terms that are by now known (and that I have bolded in the above translation of 1:16–17). “All the faithful” are those who, as the translation of pistis as faithfulness expresses, have entered into and participate in the gospel-story as a covenantal story. Since they are part of this story, they recognize themselves as part of an inclusive community of Christ-followers with diverse members and subcommunities—including Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers. In other words, they recognize themselves as part of an inclusive community that lives according to and embodies the “justice of God.” This is, in this inclusive covenantal community interpretation, the meaning of the phrase “the justice of God is revealed through faithfulness for faithfulness.” By the very fact that believers enter into, and participate in, the gospelstory, the justice of God is revealed to them (the passive verb is an indication of divine agency).225 “In it” (in the gospel-story) what was hidden or covered is uncovered and become visible and recognizable to those who faithfully participate in the gospel-story with God.226 The justice of God is nothing less than this inclusive way of life that God shares with the people of God. And this revelation of the justice of God is an ongoing process (“through faithfulness for faithfulness”), because it occurs when the faithful enter the gospel-story and see other believers already participating in it by “walking” according to it—as Jews enter the Haggadah/story of the covenant in Exodus, find themselves with a new identity (“Chosen People”) and a vocation (the “sanctification of the Name; bringing glory to God), and therefore with duties to carry out following “a way to walk” (Halakah). As Nanos summarized it, “Paul’s concerns are those of a Jewish missionary, and his message and framework of thinking are those of one who considers himself working within the historical expectations of Israel.”227 When compared with forensic theological interpretations, this reading is surprising; allow me to clarify it. The revelation of the justice of God is not a revelation from heaven, 225

As also noted by Jewett, 146. Here the root-meaning of ἀποκαλύπτω, “to uncover” (“to reveal by removing the cover that hides something) is better than its metaphorical understanding as a cognitive term (“to cause something to be fully known” “to make known,” a theological understanding; see Chapter 3). 227 Nanos, The Mystery of Romans, 26. 226

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directly from God, as it were. Rather, this revelation of the justice of God occurs in the gospel-story (“in it,” 1:17a) and through the interactions of believers, “ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν” (1:17b)—“through (ἐκ) faithfulness” (through those who are already faithful [in the gospel-story]) “for (εἰς) faithfulness” (i.e., for the sake of new believers). From this perspective, the phrase “from faithfulness to faithfulness” is readily understood: the divine justice is revealed in the gospel-story in a progressive manner, “from faithfulness to faithfulness,” through the missionary expansion, which relies on the contagion of faithfulness, as Jewett shows.228 The manifestation of the justice of the “covenant God” takes place in countercultural communities of the faithful that are spreading triumphantly (15:15–28). Therefore, in this interpretive line, the quotation from Hab 2:4 “The one who is just shall live through faithfulness,” can simply be understood, with Jewett, as emphasizing “‘faith’[/faithfulness] as a theological formula for participation in the Christ movement. As we have seen, the word pistis appears no less than six times in this short pericope prior to the citation of Hab 2:4, each time with a connotation of acceptance of the gospel[-story] and subsequent participation in the community of believers.”229 Therefore “through faithfulness” is best understood as connected with the verb “shall live” (the normal grammatical construction). In this verse, Hab 2:4 defines someone who is “just” as someone who lives “through faithfulness,” and therefore (in the context of 1:16–17), someone who accepts the gospel-story and participates in it with the community of believers. Wright’s (801) phrase “the righteousness[/justice] of the covenant God” (that I began using above) is an excellent way to express what Paul the Jew conveyed by δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ and is an appropriate summary of the above comments. This designation of God as “the covenant God” brings out the covenantal character of the concept of justice, Hebrew ‫( ְצ ָד ָקה‬ṣĕdāqâ)—since in the Hebrew Bible “the concept of righteousness[/ justice] is a relational term [that] emphasizes the relational aspect of God and humanity in the context of a covenant.”230 Actually the phrase “the justice of God” should be understood (in Wright’s words) as “the faithfulness of the covenant God”231 or “the divine covenant faithfulness.”232 It is “God’s covenant faithfulness” which is revealed in the gospel-story to the faithful.233 This revelation is also a call—an election—to join this covenantal relationship between God and the community.234 Thus, elsewhere, Paul can call this community “God’s beloved” and “saints” (1:7), using traditional designation of

228

Jewett, 143–44. Jewett, 145, emphases and words between brackets added. 230 Karen L. Onesti and Manfred T. Brauch, “Righteousness, Righteousness of God,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (eds. G. F. Hawthorne, R. P. Martin, and D. G. Reid; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1993), 827-837 (828). Unfortunately after emphasizing the covenantal character of “the righteousness of God” in the Hebrew Bible, all the covenantal connotations have disappeared in their comments on Paul’s use of the phrase to emphasize the individual-centered view of it, in the context of the forensic understanding of “righteousness declared” (acquittal). 231 Wright, 801. 232 Wright, 804. 233 Nanos, The Mystery of Romans, 129, makes the same point. 234 See Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: “the central point of the present book [is]: the redefinition, in and around Jesus the Messiah, of the Jewish doctrine of election, rooted in the covenant theology of Genesis and Deuteronomy and worked out through Jesus’ saving death and resurrection” (846). We shall come back to it when dealing with 3:27–4:25. 229

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God’s “Chosen People.” And this revelation through the gospel-story is transformative (“rightwising”) for the faithful community. For this community it is “the power of God for salvation” that transforms them into an inclusive covenantal community that embodies the justice of the covenant God. 1:18. Because the anger of the covenant God is being revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of humans who are suppressing the truth by injustice (Patte). This translation is once again clashing with the traditional (forensic) translation of NRSV “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.” Here, the words in bold signal the issues that an inclusive covenantal community interpretation understands differently. Because versus For. The conjunction γὰρ (usually rendered by “for”) expresses how 1:18 is related to 1:16–17. I translated it as “because,” to make explicit that this conjunction should not be overlooked. As all the lexicons emphasize, it most significantly introduces the reason or cause for the preceding statement.235 Rom 1:18 explains the reason for what is said in 1:16–17. Why is “the justice of God revealed” through the gospel as “the power of God for salvation” for “all” the faithful (1:16–17)? “Because the anger/wrath of God is being revealed,” currently, to address the present, deplorable state of human affairs (1:18–3:20). In short: by writing 1:18 following 1:16–17 Paul does not posit an alternative—either salvation or wrath/punishment, as if it were a matter of choice (as forensic interpretations imply). Rather, it is “because” humans are presently in a deplorable situation which angers God (1:18). “Because” humans are in a dire situation from which they need to be rescued—and “because” humans themselves make God angry—salvation is offered by the gospel to all the faithful (1:16–17). In sum, the conjunction γὰρ—“for” in the sense of “because”—ties 1:18 with 1:16–17 to make clear that “wrath is not the final word” (as Jewett says).236 The good news of the gospel-story is inclusive and universal in scope. Salvation is intended for all those against whom God is angry. Why not say “for all those who are under God’s wrath” (together with most translations)? Let us clarify this point. Anger versus Wrath. What is this “anger/wrath” of God? Two observations clarify it in a preliminary way. First, the anger/wrath of God is mentioned throughout the Hebrew Bible, but in the large majority of cases it designates a present (or even past) expression of God’s anger/wrath directed against manifestations of various kinds of evil; it is only in some prophetic texts that God’s wrath is associated with “the day of the Lord” and the final judgment.237 Thus this vocabulary can be used for retribution by God at the last judgment—especially in apocalyptic texts. But here Paul uses the present tense (“is being revealed”), which signals that we should not rush to understand this verse (1:18) in this retributive mode (it will be a different matter in 2:1–16). Second, 235

BAGD, Loow-Nida, Friberg, Liddell-Scott are unanimous in saying that it is a conjunction introducing an explanation. Since it expresses cause or reason, translating it as “because” (Friberg) clarifies its point. Compare Wright, 764–67. 236 Jewett, 151. 237 See the article ὀργὴ by Kleinknecht, Grether, Procksch, Fichtner, Sjoeberg, Stählin, in G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (trans. G. Bromiley; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968), Volume V, 382–446, that shows that the LXX Greek term ὀργὴ translates a range of Hebrew terms or phrases with a range of connotations.

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we need to take note that the Greek term, orgê in the phrase orgê theou (ὀργὴ θεοῦ), is used throughout the LXX to speak of “anger”—human and divine anger, without a connotation of retribution—as well as in phrases that refer to “the wrath of God,” with the connotation of retribution. We have a choice. “Orgê” by itself is used by Paul in highly diatribal/rhetorical passages such as 2:5, 8; 3:5; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22;12:19; and 13:5 in order to refer to retribution (mostly future retribution by “God,” but with a rhetorical character!). The phrase “orgê theou” (found only in 1:18 within the undisputed letters) is in the present (ἀποκαλύπτεται, “is revealed,” present tense, and not located in the time of the future judgment). Consequently, it does not necessarily involve the connotation of “retribution.” This phrase can then, at least as plausibly, be translated as “God’s anger,” so as to mark that it refers to the emotion of anger, which does not necessarily connote retribution. This anger can be understood as directed against all the manifestations of evil, including all kinds of “impiety” and “injustice.” The understanding of God as “the covenant God” in the covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning further clarifies the possibility that the phrase orgê theou does not primarily refer to retribution. The Anger of (the Covenant) God versus the Wrath of (the Retributive) God (against impiety/ungodliness, injustice/wickedness/unrighteousness, suppression of the truth). The choice of “anger” or “wrath” as the translation of “orgê” is also governed by the way we understand “God.”238 “God” is not presented as a God bringing retribution against evil and sin (impiety and unrighteousness/injustice of humans who are suppressing the truth). Interestingly enough, God is presented as reacting against what constitutes the predicament from which communities need to be saved (according to the above interpretation of 1:16–17). Remember, “the justice of God” is revealed in the present, “because” (γὰρ) “the anger/wrath of God is being revealed,” and therefore “because” (γὰρ) the gospel needs to address the present, deplorable state of human affairs (1:18–3:20). Then speaking of “the centrality of God’s wrath in Paul’s account of the human condition” (as many Western, Forensic, readers do) is not warranted, as Cobb and Lull note.239 One needs to take into account the rhetoric unfolding of Paul’s argument. Then one can recognize that the statement about the revelation of the “anger/wrath of God” (1:18) is strongly tied together with and therefore framed by (γὰρ, “because”) the statement about the revelation of the “justice of God” and the gospel as the power of God for salvation (1:16–17). When one reads the text in this way, one can easily recognize that in these verses “Paul was engaged in shifting the reader’s understanding of God”—shifting away from an understanding of God as a God of retribution (punishing in order to restore the divine honor that has been stained by sins).240 All interpreters agree that the ultimate goal of God’s response is the eradication of human sin and of the evil it generates. In one word, this ultimate goal of God’s reaction against sin/impiety and evil/injustice is “atonement,” that is, “the reestablishment of the proper relationship of sinners with God” (according to the broader definition of

238

A “new understanding of the wrath of God” is involved here, as Cranfield, 110 and Wilckens, 102 have already recognized, without moving to an inclusive covenantal community interpretation. 239 Cobb and Lull, 40–41. 240 Cobb and Lull, 40.

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atonement).241 But, as is well known, atonement has been understood in very different ways throughout the history of the church and therefore throughout the history of the receptions of Romans. These different conceptions of atonement (most often implicitly) are due to different conceptions of God and of God’s response to sin and evil—and therefore to different understandings of orgê theou (ὀργὴ θεοῦ) and its object (impiety/ungodliness, injustice/wickedness/unrighteousness, suppression of the truth). This is why I avoid translating this phrase “wrath of God” (which echoes views of atonement linked with either a forensic or a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation). Instead I proposed “anger of God,” because this phrase reflects a view of atonement compatible with an inclusive covenantal community interpretation. For a forensic interpretation, the translation of orgê theou is, for Bultmann, “the wrath of God,” because “God is the Judge who demands good deeds of [humans]” and “we may speak of God’s ‘grace’ only when we also speak of his wrath.”242 This interpretation posits that (1) “sin” is intentionally “suppressing the truth” (1:18d) about God’s will and revelation and therefore that individual sinners are responsible for their sins, which are the source of all evil in society and take the form of ungodly and wicked attitudes; (2) God is offended by human sin like a feudal overlord whose honor is offended; and that justice requires either punishment (especially at the last judgment, see 2:1–16) or satisfaction (by Christ’s sacrifice of atonement, 3:21–26). In this view the atonement God is right/just by being wrathful—God is being offended; retribution is required, unless a merciful solution is found. The problem with human sin and evil is how they affect God. Sin dishonors and mocks God; the honor of God must be restored. I explain in Chapter 3 why and how this forensic interpretation is legitimate and plausible.243 By contrast, for an inclusive covenantal community interpretation, ὀργὴ θεοῦ needs to be understood as “the anger of God,” because God remains the same God as in 1:16–17, namely “the covenant God”! The problem with human sin and evil is how they affect the covenant relationship between God and humans and the covenant relationship among humans. Sin and evil are community-centered issues. Human sin and evil affect both God and humans—damaging or even destroying their covenantal relationship (rather than dishonoring God, as in the forensic interpretation). Sin and evil are the opposite of the covenantal relationships among humans and God. They destroy these relationships. According to inclusive covenantal community interpretations, three characteristics of the “problem” that sin and evil are and its “solution” need to be noted. 1. “Sin” and “evil” are relational and community matters, as Paul’s terminology shows. The first object of God’s anger is “impiety” (ἀσέβεια), that is, an ungodly mode of life “contrary to proper religious beliefs and practice” (Louw and Nida). Impiety impedes, destroys, or prevents εὐσέβεια, a way of life in good relation

241

The quote is from the entry “Atonement” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, which outlines the three traditional views of atonement. 242 Bultmann, 262. 243 We will find in realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations a case for understanding Romans following the third view of atonement as redemption from bondage or healing (see Chapter 5) also prevalent among the Greek Fathers and in Eastern Orthodox churches.

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with God; that is, a (good) covenantal relationship with God. The second object of God’s anger is another relational problem that becomes visible when ἀδικία is translated by “injustice” (as the lexicons suggest).244 In the form of injustice, sin and evil impede, destroy, or prevent (good) covenantal interhuman relationships (as is already exemplified in 1:1–17, and further illustrated in 1:18–3:20). In sum, the covenantal God is angry about the deplorable human situation which breaks down the relationship “of humans” (plural, ἀνθρώπων) with God and with other humans, because it is the opposite of what the relationships in a covenantal community should be. In fact, this situation is the exact opposite of what faithfulness is, namely the trustful participation in the gospel-story as the drama in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together,” as Slonimsky says.245 2. This breakdown of covenantal relationships (impiety and injustice) is not resolved by God’s anger! Rather, as 1:16–17 expresses, this breakdown of covenantal relationships is resolved by “the power of God for salvation,” which is the gospelstory and the faithfulness/faith of those who enter it. Rom 1:16–17 presents the solution to the “problems” resulting from sin and evil as described in 1:18 (γὰρ, “because”) and in 1:19–3:20. The gospel-story and its call to faithfulness is what “saves” humans from the appalling reality of the “injustice of humans” (ἀδικίαν ἀνθρώπων). Sharing the gospel-story (1:15), mission, is therefore essential to bring this salvation all the way to the end of the world, because it is the means through which good relations with God (εὐσέβεια) and just interhuman relations (justice, δικαιοσύνη) are established or restored. 3. “Atonement” from a covenantal perspective is neither a forensic view (requiring retribution, unless a merciful solution is found) nor a realized-apocalyptic view (redemption from the powers of evil and sin) but the third view of atonement found throughout the history of the church—the view commonly known as the Moral Transformation model.246 This model emphasizes the way atonement changes humans when they are exposed to, and invited to share in, the gospelstory (including about Christ’s death) as the ultimate expression of God’s love for sinful humanity. Participating in the “gospel of God” (as a covenantal story) transform humans, change their attitudes, their way of relating to God and to others, and indeed transforms them into (or restore them as) the beloved Chosen People. This view of atonement is appropriately called covenantal in order to emphasize its community-centered character (by contrast with modern moral liberal theology that understands this Moral Transformation view of atonement as individual-centered).

244

The lexicons propose for ἀδικία: “Injustice” (BAGD; Liddell-Scott); “disregard for what is right; disregard for human rights, injustice” (Friberg); “activity which is unjust” (Louw and Nida). 245 Slonimsky, Essays, 15, his summary of the Haggadah as a covenantal story. 246 By contrast with the Honor and Juridical Satisfaction model (followed by forensic interpretations) and with the Ransom and Redemption from Bondage or Healing model (followed by the realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretations). Once again see the article “Atonement” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (and the many cross-references to others articles).

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The gospel-story necessarily includes God’s anger, because of the presence of impiety and injustice. Yes, the covenant God is angry! And for good reason! “Injustice” (ἀδικία) in all its forms always is a tragedy that quickly degenerates in unacceptable sufferings for the weak and the innocents and results in the horrors of history due to oppressions and abuses, including genocidal and collective suicidal practices, because those who are supposed to promote justice have “suppressed the truth” and now ignore—or even do not recognize—unjust situations.247 Yes, “the anger of the covenant God is being revealed” against such situations. Yes, God is so angry, that God’s anger blasts “from heaven” against all these forms of injustice. Yes, “God’s anger”—the anger of the covenant God—can take punishing and destructive forms against unjust people (even though this is not “salvation,” not the solution to the problem of injustice). Yes, for Paul and the Hebrew Bible, God responds angrily against impiety and injustice, as God did in the time of the Flood and of the Exile, for instance. But we should not confuse the covenant God with the apocalyptic God, who actively destroys evil powers through manifestations of God’s wrath (see Chapter 5). The anger of the covenant God against impiety and injustice calls for repentance—as is especially made clear during the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur). Indeed! But the covenant God’s anger against injustice is first of all characterized by empathy. God is suffering with those who are excluded, despised, oppressed, abused, exploited and who tragically suffer in all such marginalized situations in which they have been unjustly relegated—they need to be reintegrated and embraced in the inclusive covenantal community. Of course, this way of conceiving of God as the covenant God can be traced back through the Hebrew Bible (as LaCocque did) and in earlier Jewish traditions.248 But the covenantal framework of this view of God is most strikingly visible in Midrash. As Slonimsky249 emphasizes, in Midrash and the haggadic tradition God’s response to impiety and injustice is “God’s own special suffering as the Rabbis conceive it: his weeping, his helplessness, his need of comfort. . . . The weeping stricken God, who says of Israel ‘I am with him in his distress’ ‫( ִע ֽמּוֹ־אָנ ִֹכ֥י ְבצ ָָרה‬Ps 91:15), can be supremely distressed in his own person.”250 This is not the wrath of a God who is omnipotent with the power of destroying evil powers which keeps humans in bondage251—as is the case when atonement is understood as redemption from bondage, following a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation. This is not the wrath of a God who feels personally offended and demands punishment of the wicked because God’s honor or holiness has been damaged—as is the case when atonement is understood as requiring either punishment or satisfaction, following a forensic interpretation. This is the anger 247

This is what a leader of the “Black Lives Matter” movement exclaimed in 2015 (after the killing by police of many unarmed African American young men): “It became apparent early in the movement that ‘justice’ was not part of the spiritual vocabulary for many U.S. Christians” (Ryan Herring, “Now Is a Time for Theology to Strive: The Black Lives Matter movement offers a challenge to the church— and an opportunity,” 16–18, Sojourners, September–October 2015). 248 See again, André LaCocque, Le devenir de Dieu. This framework (or mythical structure) remains the same even if the Midrash belongs to later dates—as established in structural anthropology and structural semiotics. 249 Slonimsky, Essays, 41–56. 250 Slonimsky, 41–42. 251 Remember that from a covenantal perspective, “To regard God as perfect in power, as he is in vision, at the very beginning, is the most disastrous of superstitions.” Slonimsky, Essays, 15.

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of a covenant God whose righteousness/justice consists in faithfully participating in the gospel-story with the inclusive Chosen People. In this haggadic gospel-story, God and humans “are both heroes in the same drama. They need each other, they grow together, but they also suffer together.” The covenant God is angry against the impiety and injustice that separate humans from God and humans from humans, precisely because they separate them, and because this separation is disastrous. The introductions (Proems) to Lamentations Rabba (the Midrash on Lamentations) express this most powerfully in regard to the destruction of the Temple (70 CE).252 Yes, the Temple has been destroyed as a consequence of God’s anger against impiety and injustice (when “God determined to destroy the Temple”). But what was the role of God’s anger? The Midrash explains that God moved away from the Temple (“I will close my eyes so as not to see it and swear that I will not attach myself to it until the time of the End.”)253. In effect, God takes stock of the fact that the Chosen People in their unfaithfulness had separated themselves from God, and God withdrew. Then, as the rabbis underscore (as Slonimsky points out), the catastrophic reality of this separation became visible: enemies destroyed the Temple and the Shekinah (divine presence) was no longer in it. “In that hour God wept.”254 In this covenantal community interpretive line, “the anger of the covenant God is being revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of humans who are suppressing the truth by injustice”; meaning that the catastrophic reality resulting from humans’ separation from God became fully visible. God is angry because humans break down their relations with God and with other humans and because this relational breakdown engenders disasters. And the anger of God becomes visible (“is being revealed from heaven”) in the disastrous consequences of this relational breakdown (presented in 1:18b–3:20). The covenant God does not do anything—and does not need to do anything—to bring about this disaster! By their impiety and injustice humans have brought this disaster upon themselves. God is angry. And God weeps! As Nanos underscores (I paraphrase in my own words Nanos’s long development), just as the covenant God is faithful when God reveals in the gospel “the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16), in the same way the covenant God is faithful when God’s anger is revealed against impiety and injustice (129). The justice of God as expression of the covenant God’s faithfulness involves denouncing, and thus “revealing” in a most radical way (“from heaven”), all the evil that contradicts the covenant: denouncing the impiety or godlessness (ἀσεβείᾳ) that prevents the covenantal just relationship with God, as well as the injustice that disrupts the covenantal just relationships among humans. The covenantal God’s anger is in process; it “is being revealed” (Jewett). The ongoing expression of God’s anger “relentlessly exposes the awful truth that the human race constantly attempts to suppress about the true nature of its relationships.”255 This is not a warning about future punishments for sinners but a manifestation and revelation of the faithfulness of the covenant God (as Nanos noted). Rather, as Jewett notes, 252

Cited at length in Slonimsky, 42–43. Slonimsky, 42. 254 Slonimsky. 255 Jewett, 151. 253

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beyond the revelation of the faithfulness to God in the gospel-story (1:16–17) and in the inclusive covenantal community of Jews and Greeks, God’s faithfulness is also revealed in God’s angry rejection of anything that impinges upon all the good and just covenantal relationships that the gospel, as “power of salvation,” brings.256 Humans who are suppressing the truth by injustice (1:18d). These concluding words are quite significant because they define the root of sin. As people who are “suppressing the truth,” “unjust people,” that is, sinners, are doing the opposite of what God is doing through the gospel (1:17). When God reveals, God uncovers what was covered (as the Greek verb ἀποκαλύπτω expresses). When sinners suppress the truth, they cover up the truth (as the Greek verb κατέχω expresses; Liddell-Scott). This play on words (“uncovering” vs. “covering”—suggested by Jewett, 153)257 simply takes note that for this inclusive covenantal community interpretation, sin is a rebellion against God and against God’s people. It is a rebellion against God’s revelation of a truth that sinners suppress. And since this truth which is revealed by God is the truth revealed through the gospel-story, this rebellion against God is also a rebellion against the covenantal people. This preliminary observation will be important for understanding why Paul speaks of the way in which sinners are saved; since they are in rebellion against God, they are brought in a right relationship with God through a “reconciliation” with God (“while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of God’s Son,” 5:10—more on this verse and all these issues below). For a summary of the inclusive covenantal community interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Thesis of the Letter (1:1617); Salvation (1:16-17); Righteousness/Justice of God (1:17a); Righteous (1:17b, Hab 2:4); Wrath/Anger of God (1:18)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the second column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their inclusive covenantal community interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and realized-apocalyptic/ messianic readings.

(D) Interlude prior to reading the Probatio (“Proofs”): Looking toward the Peroratio (“Conclusion”), 15:14–16:24 After our presentation of the inclusive covenantal community interpretation of the opening rhetorical features of the letter—the Exordium/Introduction (1:1–12), the Narratio/Opening Statement: Paul’s missionary project (1:13–15), and Propositio/Thesis (1:16–18)—and before proceeding to a rhetorical reading of the central part of the letter, the Probatio/Proof (1:18b–15:13), we need to take note of the overall rhetorical trajectory of Paul’s discourse by considering the Peroratio (conclusion), 15:14–

256 257

Jewett. Jewett, 153.

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16:24.258 Wuellner and Jewett concluded that the genre of Romans is “epideictic” or “demonstrative.” It is worth repeating here why this is the case according to Wuellner: [The letter to the Romans] tries to establish a sense of communion centered on particular values recognized by the audience (in Romans it is the faith stance and faith commitment of speaker and audience), and to this end he [Paul] uses a whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement.” (343)

Beyond Wuellner, with Jewett we have begun to recognize that this “sense of communion centered on particular values” is related to the missionary project (that became apparent in 1:13–15) in which Paul hopes to convince the Romans to participate. For this purpose, Paul and the Romans need to share a common vision of what this missionary project is about, as well as of what it entails for all those involved. Everybody agrees that through this letter Paul ultimately seeks to convince the Roman churches to support the mission to Spain, as becomes explicit in Rom 15:14– 22. But it is only by paying close attention to the details of the Peroratio/conclusion that it becomes clear that through and through this letter is a rhetorical challenge to its readers to engage in mission. For Paul, it is not simply a matter of convincing the Romans to provide him with financial and other assistance for “his” mission to Spain (15:24, 28). Participating in mission is part of the “sense of communion centered on particular values” that Paul, through the rhetorical discourse that this letter is, seeks to convey to his readers. In the same way that Christ’s entire ministry was “for the glory of God” by bringing Jews and Gentiles to “glorify God” (15:6–9), so Christ-followers (including Paul, 15:15–24) have a collective vocation, or mission, to bring other people (Jews and Greeks/Gentiles) to glorify God. Throughout his letter, Paul seeks to establish a “sense of communion” with the Romans centered on this collective vocation/mission. Then, the general questions are: What is the group in Rome that particularly needs to be convinced to embrace this sense of vocation/mission? And, what is this vocation/ mission? These two questions are intermingled. The overall rhetorical trajectory of the letter is fundamentally shaped by the fact that it is primarily addressed to Gentile Christ-followers—with the expectation that Jewish Christ-followers overhear this conversation and are secondary addressees. This point will be confirmed and demonstrated throughout the rhetorical reading of 1:18b–15:13, but it should not come as a surprise. There are five reasons to claim that the letter is primarily addressed to Gentile Christ-followers. 1. First, Gentile Christ-followers were the majority in the Roman house-churches. As Jewett argues, this is a plausible conjecture presupposing that after 49 (when the Edict of Claudius banished Jewish and Jewish Christian leaders from Rome and when the eleven synagogues were viewed as suspect) “a dramatic development of house and tenement churches ensued. This explains why the majority of

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I use 16:24 as shorthand for “16:1-16, 21-24.” As discussed below, the interpolations (16:17–20a and 25–27) need to be excluded and 16:20b (the benediction) need to be added to 16:24.

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2.

3.

4.

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converts were Gentiles by the time of Paul’s letter.”259 When the letter was written (56/57, after Claudius’s death) the returning banished Jewish Christians “were no longer welcome as leaders in the congregations that had found new meeting places.”260 Thus it is to the majority of Gentile Christ-followers that this letter is addressed, even as Paul can greet in Romans 16 a relatively large number of mostly Jewish Christ-followers whom he met while they were in exile. Second, Paul’s own apostleship,—that is, his own mission—was to bring about “the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (1:5). He is the apostle to the Gentiles! Therefore, it is appropriate for him to address primarily Gentile Christfollowers, as will become apparent throughout the central part of the letter (including 14:1–15:13). Third, and most importantly, Paul the Jew needs to address Gentile Christfollowers because they lack “a sense of communion” (Wuellner) with Jewish Christ-followers, because they fail to recognize that the gospel-story is a covenantal story that prolongs, and thus is part of, the Jewish covenantal story. Thus, here contrary to other letters (e.g., Galatians) Paul does not seek to address misunderstandings that Jewish Christ-followers had regarding his “gospel free from the law.”261 There is no hint that in this letter Paul is trying to convince Judaizers to allow Gentile Christ-followers to follow a gospel free from the law (as he did in Galatians). Rather in Romans (14:1–15:13), Paul asks Gentile Christfollowers (the strong) to allow Jewish Christ-followers (the weak) to follow their ritual practices. But more fundamentally they need to recognize the Jewishness of their mission. As noted in the introduction to this Chapter, saying that the goal of their mission is to bring Jews and Gentiles to “glorify God” (15:6–9) is actually defining this mission as the Pharisees and rabbis defined their covenantal vocation in Midrash, namely as “sanctifying the Name” by bringing others (the Gentiles) to glorify God. Consequently, the overall goal of Paul’s rhetorical discourse is to bring the Gentile Christ-followers to acknowledge that the gospel is “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16, 2:9, 10). It is the Jewish covenantal story in which, now (since Christ), Gentiles/Greeks are also invited to participate. Fourth, the rhetorical markers of the letter designate Gentile Christ- followers as primary addressees. The fact that Paul speaks about many “Jewish topics,” such as the Law and the salvation of Israel does not mean that he primarily addresses Jewish Christ-followers. Indeed, at times Paul seems to directly address Jewish interlocutors, for instance in 2:1–3:20. But as soon as one pays attention to the diatribe style of such passages and others rhetorical devices it becomes clear that Paul is setting up a rhetorical trap for Gentile Christ-followers—his actual addressees. Fifth, the “covenantal” character of the gospel-story concerning the role of God in a broadened covenant that now (after Christ/the Messiah) also includes Gentiles is framed by basic Jewish convictions. Gentile Christ-believers are those who need to

Jewett, 59. Jewett, 59. 261 By contrast with forensic interpretations, which usually presuppose that this is one of the problems Paul is trying to address. 260

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be instructed in the Jewishness of the gospel-story! While the extent to which the covenant is broadened in the gospel-story might be open to debate among Jewish Christ-followers (including Judaizers, as in Galatia), except for the description of the meeting in Jerusalem (15:30–31) there is no hint that Paul is concerned with the possibility of Judaizers trying to impose a Jewish way of life framed by the Law upon Gentile Christ-believers. Actually, in 14:1–15:13 Paul is concerned with the opposite problem—Gentile Christ-followers seeking to impose their Gentile way of life upon Jewish Christ-followers. Of course, the plausibility of the claim that the letter is primarily addressed to Gentile Christ-followers will be fully confirmed only as we go through the next chapters following their rhetorical markers. But it is a most important guideline for our rhetorical and ideological reading of Romans. It makes a huge difference to presuppose with most “New Perspective” interpreters262 that, as Witherington writes: “It is Gentile Christians in Rome that he [Paul] feels mainly need exhorting, and it is Gentile Christians in Rome he feels he has some claim on, since he is the apostle to the Gentiles.”263 Other important guiding principles for our rhetorical and ideological reading of Romans are found in the Peroratio/conclusion (15:14–16:24). We need to take carefully into account the description of Paul’s own missionary calling and strategy (15:14–21) which, obviously, is saying a lot about his conception of “mission.” Its ultimate goal is “the offering of the Gentiles” to God in a way that it will “be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (15:16)—a mission/vocation with the same goal as that of the Chosen People. Furthermore its description in 15:18–20 shows that while it involves using words, this mission is far from being limited to the “proclamation” of a message (as can be seen when one avoids introducing the verb “proclaim” where it is not in the text, as discussed about 1:15) but rather an invitation to participate in the gospel-story in which Christ and the Spirit of God are also at work. As Paul says: For 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, by 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 fulfilled the gospel (πεπληρωκέναι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον) of Christ. Thus I make it my ambition to manifest the gospel (εὐαγγελίζεσθαι), not where Christ has already been named, so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation. (Rom 15:19–20)

Similarly, in the presentation of his travel plans and his appeal to the Romans to participate in missionary activities (15:22–33), two points need to be emphasized. Regarding Paul’s journey to Jerusalem (15:25–28a, 30–31). It is clear, as Jewett notes, that by bringing gifts from Gentile churches from Macedonia and Achaia Paul hopes to unify “the Gentile

262

See again Stowers, Rereading Romans, 43; Fraikin, “Rhetorical Function of the Jews in Romans,” 91–106; W. Campbell, Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context, 21–22, passim; Dunn, Romans, xlv; Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 55–62; Nanos, The Mystery of Romans, 83, passim. 263 Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. 8.

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and Jewish Christian wings of the church.”264 But Paul expresses strong anxiety about his visit to Jerusalem. He is fearing people in Jerusalem whom he calls “unbeliever” or “disobedient” (15:31). There are two possibilities. If they are people outside the churches (such as Jewish Zealots), as Jewett265 suggests, obviously they cannot in any way be identified with the addressees of the letter. Some identify these “unbeliever” or “disobedient” people that he fears as Judaizers among “the saints” in Jerusalem who object to his mission based on a gospel without the law for Gentiles. Then one can wonder: Is the letter addressed to Jewish Christ-followers who are Judaizers (or have inclinations to be Judaizers) and thus who need to have their Judaizing views of the gospel corrected? This is what many forensic interpretations think, reading Romans as a letter addressed to Jewish Christ-followers with Judaizing tendencies—Jervell has even argued that this letter should be called a “letter to Jerusalem.”266 But from a rhetorical perspective even if Paul feared Judaizers, he did not expect that they were in Rome among his addressees, since he is asking the Romans to pray to God on his behalf (15:30–31). This is another reason to affirm that Paul was addressing Gentile Christfollowers (not Jewish Christ-followers with Judaizing tendencies). In this section, 15:22–33, Paul also mentions twice (15:24, 28) that he plans to pursue a mission in Spain with the help and participation of the Romans—a plan to which he alluded in 1:9–15. From a rhetorical and ideological perspective this information plays an important role in the reading of Romans. The basic question is, why does he need the help of Roman churches to pursue a mission in Spain? As soon as one digs in the situation in Spain in that time, as Jewett267 did, it appears that there was no Jewish population in Spain in that time (therefore, there was no possibility of a mission starting from synagogues as was the case elsewhere); that culturally and linguistically people in Spain were “uneducated barbarians” (cf. 1:14) who were neither Greek-speakers nor Latin-speakers; and even the Roman administration was very limited. Thus in Spain Paul’s mission would necessarily need help from Romans with access to Spain and its linguistic, social, and cultural situation. We can expect to find throughout the letter expressions of Paul’s concern for such a situation. Finally, the greetings and commendations to congregational leaders in Rome (16:1–16, 21–24)268 are significant for the concrete information they give us about the churches in Rome and their social makeup, and about the crucial role of Phoebe, who not only brings and delivers the letter but also appears to be the “patron” who will financially support the mission to Spain. As such these concluding verses provide other pointers asking us to pay attention to social and cultural allusions throughout the letter. As we read the Probatio/Proof (1:18b–15:13) we need therefore to keep in mind both that this Proof expands and demonstrates the Propositio/Thesis (1:16–18) and that it seeks to convince Gentile Christ-followers to participate with Jewish Christfollowers to the mission to Spain. Following Jewett’s rhetorical analysis I subdivide the

264

Jewett, 937. Jewett, 937–38. 266 See Jacob Jervell, “The Letter to Jerusalem,” in Donfried, The Romans Debate, 56 (see 53–64). 267 Jewett, 18–74. 268 Excluding the interpolations. 265

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Probatio/Proof (1:18b–15:13) into four “Proofs”: The First Proof, 1:18b–4:25;269 The Second Proof, 5:1–8:39; The Third Proof, 9:1–11:36; The Fourth Proof, 12:1–15:13. The First Proof—1:18b–4:25, about the Impartial Justice of God—successively presents the “Revelation of Divine Anger as Setting a First Rhetorical Trap” (1:18b–32 [2:1]), “The Just Judgment of Greeks and Jews as Springing the First Rhetorical Trap and Setting a Second One” (2:1–29), “The Evidence of Universal Sin as Springing the Second Rhetorical Trap ” (3:1–20), “The Triumph of Justice in Christ” (3:21–31), and “Midrash on Abraham and Justice that Comes from Faithfulness” (4:1–25). In this book (on Rom 1:1–32) we limit ourselves to the first part of the First Proof; the rest of it (2:1–4:1–25) will be found in Volume II. This subdivision is demanded to facilitate the comparison with the forensic theological and realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations.

(E) Rom 1:18b–32: Revelation of divine anger as rhetorical trap to convince Gentile Christ-followers not to exclude people they instinctively view as sinners Before reading 1:18b–32 following a community-centered, rhetorical, and ideological critical approach, we need to address two essential general questions: 1. What does Paul seek to achieve by presenting to Gentile Christ-followers (his primary addressees) this detailed description of sinners committing all range of sins? And 2. How is “sinning” to be understood from the community-centered perspective of an inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning? (1) What does Paul seek to achieve by means of 1:18b-32? From a rhetorical perspective, we must remember that this pericope is the first part of a multifold “rhetorical trap” for readers who are Gentile Christ-followers. As they read/hear 1:18b–32, the first response of Gentile Christ-followers is a self-righteous condemnation of the “sinners” described in this pericope. By doing so they fall in a first rhetorical trap, which snaps on them as they read 2:1f: “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.” By condemning the sinners described in 1:18b– 32, these Gentile Christ-followers condemn themselves! But soon, blindly, they trigger another rhetorical trap. Surely, it is appropriate to condemn Jews, and by extension Jewish Christ-followers, who depend on the Law. Is not Paul doing so, for instance, in 2:12–3:20? Therefore, Gentile Christ-followers feel justified in condemning Jews and Jewish Christ-followers for their dependence on the Law. This is falling into a second rhetorical trap (very similar to the first one), followed by all a series of such traps, which ultimately snap on them as they read 14:4: “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” (See also 14:3, 5, 10, 13, 22). In these verses the “you” who pass 269

The second part of 1:18 (about the suppression of the truth, 1:18b) actually belongs with the First Proof, because 1:19–22 develops the same topic.

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judgment on others are Gentile Christ-followers—as is self-evident in this reading. And we will discover more subtle rhetorical traps throughout the body of the letter. For readers who pay attention to the rhetorical effects of the letter and therefore to its rhetorical traps, this means that all the descriptions of sinners and their sinful conduct in 1:18b–32 are NOT designed to teach Gentile Christ-followers how to identify “sinners” in order to put the readers in the self-righteous position of condemning, rejecting, and excluding such sinners (unless they repent) even as they avoid such sins themselves. Furthermore, 1:23–32 are NOT designed to teach the readers what is the “sinful conduct” that each of them as individuals should avoid.270 But then, what is the teaching that this pericope has for its intended addressees—Gentile Christfollowers—and by extension for any other readers/believers? The rhetorical traps make it abundantly clear: the teaching of this pericope is simply to help Gentile Christfollowers and subsequent readers to identify people whom they should neither condemn nor exclude! “In passing judgment on another you condemn yourself.” Yes, 1:18b–32 presents sinners; the fact that they suffer from God’s anger confirms it. But as readers, whoever we might be, we should recognize ourselves as sinners just as these persons are (2:1)! Thus, we who are included in the community of Christ-followers—and who we want to remain in it—should welcome those “other sinners” into it. In sum, what does 1:18b–32 teach Gentile Christ-followers and us? This pericope is designed to help us identify other people whom we should welcome in the inclusive covenantal community of Christ-followers. Indeed, they are sinners, but just like us! Of course, sin needs to be rejected, but not the sinners. Hate the sin, but love the sinner!271 (2) How is “sinning” described in 1:18b-32 to be understood from the communitycentered perspective of an inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning? To begin with, it is essential to remember that our reading is to be communitycentered. This means that a “sinful behavior” should NOT be viewed as primarily resulting from the wrong “will” of an individual (who does not want to do God’s will or on the contrary who wants to do something against God’s will) or as primarily resulting from the wrong “knowledge” of an individual (who does not know God’s will or who is misinformed about God’s will). Rather “sinful behaviors” should be viewed as primarily resulting from wrong “ideologies” (understood in a neutral way with Althusser as “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”),272 and thus from a wrong perception that sinners have of their relationships to others in a community (or in society at large) and of their relationships to God. Such wrong perceptions are collective delusions (and thus, by definition, they are not the choice of an individual).

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Contrary to the way forensic theological interpretations commonly interpret these verses. In sum, the teaching could be expressed by the phrase “hate the sin, but love the sinner!”—at the condition of viewing the sinner as “sinner just like me.” But I hesitate to use this phrase, because it has been used “against” gays and lesbians by good Christians who viewed gays and lesbians as sinners unlike them. This phrase can be roughly traced to Augustine’s “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum” (“with love for the human and hatred of sins” or “with love for the persons and a hatred for their vices”). Augustine, Letters 211-270. Vol. II/4 The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (trans. Roland Teske, S.J.; New York: New York City Press, 2005), 26 (19–28)—a letter written in 424 to call back in harmony nuns in the monastery of Hippo. 272 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, 36. 271

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To illustrate this point, let us take the example of racism, a type of sinful behavior that has been closely studied. Of course, individuals can display racist attitudes in deliberate, willful behaviors against people from another race, after intentionally deciding to do so—an individual-centered sin. This unfortunately happens, and such persons can sometimes be legally held responsible for having perpetrated a hate crime. Of course, and happily, most people do not perpetrate such hate crimes. Similarly, many individual white people readily claim: “I am not a racist.” It might be correct that they are not racist, in the sense of being a voluntarily racist (voluntarily mistreating people from another race). But this does not prevent them from being racist, in the most insidious sense of participating with good conscience in the life of a community characterized by “prejudice, bias, discrimination, violence, and terror directed at persons or groups solely on the basis of what are perceived to be inferior traits, characteristics, manners, customs, or other cultural markers such as language, dress, or skin color” or religion (as Victor Anderson defines racism).273 Such sinful behaviors in community life are not promoted by individual choices. They can be understood as generated by a collective-delusion, a wrong ideology, that governs the way in which sinners envision their relations with others in society—following a racist vision. And this delusion or wrong vision cannot be held by an individual by him/herself; it needs to be reinforced by other members of the community who share this wrong ideological vision of what constitutes “normal” relationships with others. These comments on racism apply, unfortunately, to all kinds of sinfulness. While individual sins remain possible, for an inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning, sinful behaviors are more likely than not to be rooted in a wrong ideology, a wrong perception, a collective-delusion. The fact that throughout this passage Paul uses plural forms (“they”) is a clear marker that he is speaking of community-centered sinfulness.274 These two points—(a) that 1:18b–32 presents sinners that Gentile Christ-followers should welcome in the inclusive community, and (b) that 1:18b–32 emphasizes the community-centered dimensions of sinning related to collective delusions—must carefully be kept in mind as we read this pericope (and the rest of the letter), so as to avoid being misled by our individual-centered Western cultures. Since, in most instances, sinfulness is generated by collective delusions, the question is: How can people be freed from such collective delusions? A solution is suggested by 1:18b–2:1ff itself. By this rhetorical exercise,275 Paul invites the readers (all of us!) to welcome in the inclusive covenantal community those whom we perceive as sinners and are tempted to exclude. Is this not requiring us, readers, to envision our relations with others in a

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See Victor Anderson, “Racism and Christianity: Ethnocentrism,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. 274 It is also noteworthy that throughout this passage Paul is presenting people (they) behaving in a sinful way, rather than presenting a list of sins. The only near-exception is 1:29, where Paul presents people who are “filled with” all kinds of sinfulness (“they were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness”). We shall come back to it. 275 To show the rhetorical role of 1:18b–32 and its powerful rhetorical effect one does not need to claim (as Douglas Campbell, Delivrance, 519–600, does) that 1:18–32 is the voice of a “speech-incharacter” (προσωποποιία, prosopopeia) by “the Teacher”—as will be the case in 2:1–3:20.

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different way? Is this not inviting us to enter and participate in a covenantal gospelstory in which relations with others and God are envisioned in a totally different way?

Rom 1:18b–22. Universal Sin: Suppression of the Truth as Failure to “Glorify God as God or Give God Thanks” From a covenantal community perspective, the primary addressees of this letter, Gentile Christ-followers, can readily recognize that 1:18b–22 describes the sins of the entire “human race” (and not merely the sins of Gentiles!)—see above and Jewett, 150160 on 1:18b. Following this section in 1:23–32 Paul offers a long list of sinful conducts perpetrated by all human beings—providing a detailed description of the impiety and injustice of “humans” (ἄνθρωποι) mentioned in the thesis (the designation used in 1:18b, and also in 1:23 and 2:1). But why do humans have this propensity to have such sinful conduct? In brief, because they “suppressed the truth” (1:18b). Paul fleshes out what this “suppressed truth” is: it is the “truth” revealed to humans in creation (1:19–22)—and also in “the righteous/just decree of God” (1:32, Jewett). The rest of the passage (1:23–32) maps out “the anger of God” against this suppression of the truth and its devastating effects upon all human relations. The rhetorical thrust of 1:18b–22 is to bring Gentile Christ-followers to understand these issues from the perspective of the covenantal gospel-story, and indeed, from the perspective of the inclusive covenantal gospel-story. This inclusivity is marked in a general way by the fact that, throughout this discussion of sin, sinning, and its consequences, Paul uses plural forms. In some way sinning in all its forms is always a community affair. Throughout 1:18b–32 there are many allusions to Jewish views concerning what is too quickly understood (despite the references to “humans,” ἄνθρωποι) as “sins of the Gentiles”—because of references to prophetic texts about idolatry (such as Jer 2:5, 10:14, Isa 44:20 in Rom 1:21–25) and because of many phrases that echo the extended descriptions of pagans and their vices in Wisdom of Sol. 12–15. These intertextual references to biblical traditions would be most significant for Jewish Christ-followers who read/hear the letter. But the primary addressees, Gentile Christ-followers, would more immediately resonate with the Greco-Roman themes that also frame this section. For them, the biblical allusions and Jewish connotations of this passage play a different role; they help them to become aware of the covenantal character of the gospel-story. In 1:19–22, the first verses of this pericope, Paul explains how humans suppress the truth (1:18b) by using a Greco-Roman vocabulary that will help the Gentile Christfollowers to understand all these issues from a covenantal perspective (a perspective which would be nothing new for Jewish Christ-followers). 1:19. How do humans suppress the truth? Paul’s answer is amazingly bold and broad ranging: “Because (διότι) what can be known (τὸ γνωστὸν) about God is manifest [among (ἐν)] them. For God has manifested it to them” (1:19, Jewett, with my additions between brackets). Rom 1:19a alludes to the Stoic philosophers’ refutation of the skeptics who claim that “nothing is knowable” (as Jewett,276 points out, referring to Epictetus). Thus, in this verse, together with the Stoics, Paul affirms that God can

276

Jewett, 153.

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be known. This divine self-revelation, though always partial and elusive, is knowable. By whom? Paul explains it by saying that what is knowable about God is manifest ἐν αὐτοῖς. How does one translate ἐν αὐτοῖς? Jewett proposed “within them.” “What can be known about God is manifest within them.” Indeed, the preposition ἐν can be understood as “within.” This translation is plausible, if one presupposes that this phrase refers to the conscience of individuals. It is “within” the conscience of each of them that what can be known about God is manifest. This is a spontaneous reading in individualcentered cultures. But this individual-centered reading ignores the communitycentered perspective that frames everything in Paul’s letter, as inclusive covenant community interpretations (including Jewett’s!) underscore. Actually, all lexicons point out that ἐν with the plural (αὐτοῖς) is more appropriately translated “among.” “What can be known about God is manifest among them,” that is, in their community or communities. Here Paul refers to all kinds of situations “since the creation of the world” (1:20) up to the present (2:1). Therefore “among them” might allude to Jewish and Gentile/Greek communities (cf. 1:16) or even to the diverse house-churches and tenement-churches in Rome. But Paul makes a more general point: he is speaking about all humans (ἄνθρωποι), Jews and Greeks/Gentiles, educated and barbarians (in Spain and elsewhere). This divine self-revelation is not limited to any particular group. But one thing is clear: it is as a community or as a group of communities that we have access to what is knowable about God! For Gentile Christ-followers—the addressees—this is a welcome point, since they were confronted with the Jews’ claim that they alone had received a true knowledge of God. Now Paul affirms that Gentiles in and of themselves have a true knowledge of God. Conversely, Gentile Christ-followers would also be aware of the anti-Judaism found in parts of the Greco-Roman culture that denied that Jews had a true knowledge of God.277 Paul’s statement also undermines such an anti-Judaism stance: “It is striking to observe how bluntly and unequivocally Paul speaks of divine manifestation to everyone” (Jewett, 154, emphasis added). This is an important aspect of the inclusive character of the gospel-story recognized by inclusive covenantal community interpreters who pay close attention to the rhetorical features of the letter. Everyone has access to God’s self-revelation; all are on the same footing—Jews, as well as Gentiles and barbarians (in Spain). By adding, “for God has manifested it to them” (1:19b), Paul underscores the divine intentionality of God’s self-revelation to all. The rhetorical effect upon the addressees needs to be noted. Paul is anticipating a competition between Gentile and Jewish Christ-followers in Rome. So, referring to this competition, Jewett concludes, “While certain members of Paul’s audience may have been inclined to dispute the innate capabilities of their competitors to ‘know God,’ they would hardly doubt God’s power of self-manifestation.”278 The phrase “for God has manifested it to them”—to all of them—is an amazingly powerful claim. It means that any denial that “others”—whoever they might be, including “barbarians”—have innate capabilities to know God is the most basic form of “suppressing the truth” (1:18). Any

277 278

See Jewett, 154, and his references to Apion (debated by Josephus), Apuleius, and Cicero. Jewett, 154.

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such denial is the basic reason for God’s anger. In present-day vocabulary, this is saying that members of other religious traditions—such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, African Religion, and so-called “Native Religions”—have the same innate capabilities to know God as Jews and Christians have. “What can be known about God is manifest among them. For God has manifested it to them.” What an amazingly inclusive claim! Thus, 1:19 underscores that suppressing the truth “by injustice” (1:18b) is primarily denying the truth that “others” have received. 1:20a–c. For [God’s] invisible attributes are seen, becoming discerned from the creation of the world in the things made, namely [God’s] eternal power and divinity (Jewett). Far from the Protestant versus Catholic debate regarding “natural revelation” (also found in forensic interpretations), this verse fuses Jewish and Greco-Roman perspectives. The phrase “creation of the world” refers to a biblical and Jewish doctrine regarding God the Creator of the world—an evocation that will open the way for a covenantal understanding of the gospel-story. But the rest of the verse gives the impression of technical Greco-Roman philosophical language. In sum, Paul is speaking to Gentile/ Greek Christ-followers using the terminology of Hellenistic philosophy of religion, to explain God’s “invisible attributes” which are God’s “eternal power and divinity.”279 1:20d. So, they are without excuse is a phrase derived from Greek legal and rhetorical usage. Paul continues to address Gentiles. Why are they without excuse? That is, why are all humans without excuse? Because they suppress the truth (1:18). How? Paul has already implied in 1:19 that they suppress the truth by denying the truth that “others” have received. 1:21–22. “Because although they knew God, they did not glorify [God] as God or give [God] thanks, but they were made futile in their thinking, and their senseless heart was darkened. While claiming to be wise, they were made witless” (Jewett). Here Paul shifts from the present tense to an aorist/past tense in order to refer, as Jewett observes, to an archaic human past that “imposed a grim future on their descendants.”280 Again, without any restriction, Paul affirms that humans—all humans—had in the past (1:21a) as they have in the present (1:19–20a) an authentic knowledge of God: “They knew God.” Paul’s rhetorical concern is not to develop a “natural theology”—having such a theological doctrine is beside the point. Paul’s concern is about the ways humans responded, or failed to respond, to this divine revelation (here in 1:21, but also 1:28, 32). In 1:21, Paul underscores their failure to respond appropriately to their knowledge of God by apparently repeating the same point in two parallel phrases: they failed (1) to “glorify God as God,” (2) “or” (ἢ)—and this amounts to the same thing— to “give God thanks” (1:21b–c). Why this duplication? To understand its significant rhetorical effect, we need to remember that Paul’s primary addressees are Gentile Christ-followers and his secondary addressees are Jewish Christ-followers. To the former he seeks

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As Jewett notes, “The idea of τὰ ἀόρατα (‘the invisible attributes’) of God’s being ‘made visible’ (καθορᾶται) in the natural world is found in Stoicism and adapted by Hellenistic Judaism. The concept of attributes ‘discerned in the things that are made’ (τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα) appears to be a Pauline adaptation of Platonic usage” (Jewett, 155–56). Similarly, Paul combines a reference to divine power (already in 1:16) with the Greek concept of eternity (ἀΐδιος) as is found in Hellenistic philosophy of religion. 280 Jewett, 156.

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to present a covenantal community teaching, which the latter will readily recognize and appreciate. Speaking of the failure to “glorify God” is using a Jewish covenantal vocabulary—what Paul wants to teach Gentile Christ-followers. Speaking of the failure to “give God thanks” is translating the same point in a Gentile vocabulary. They did not glorify God as God (Jewett) is a translation of οὐχ ἐδόξασαν. The common English translation “they did not honor” (RSV, NRSV, NAS, NJB) obscures the covenantal connotations of these words. Indeed, glorifying God is equivalent to “sanctifying the Name” (in Midrash) or “bringing others to glorify God.” It is a biblical and Jewish formulation of what was/is the vocation of the Chosen People, before Christ and also after Christ for Paul the Jew. Thus Abraham is a model for the faithful because “he gave glory to God” (4:20). For Paul this was also the vocation of the Messiah/ Christ (Christ came “in order that the Gentiles might glorify God” 15:9; see 15:8–11). Paul’s own vocation (bringing about the obedience of faith of the Gentiles, 1:5; 15:18) is, from the perspective of 1:21, another way of speaking of bringing Gentiles to glorify God. In short, bringing people to glorify God is the ultimate purpose of Paul’s and the churches’ mission, as envisioned from a covenantal perspective. For Paul’s secondary addressees, Jewish Christ-followers, those people who have received a revelation from God (“what can be known about God was manifest among them,” 1:19) have by this very fact received the vocation to “glorify God.” “Not glorifying God” is therefore a fundamental betrayal of this vocation. By not glorifying God as God, such people brazenly betrayed their entire covenantal relationship with God. But for the Gentile Christ-followers, the primary addressees, this way of speaking would sound archaic and would not carry much weight. So Paul expresses the same thing in their own vocabulary by adding “or give God thanks.” In an honor-and-shame culture, such as the Greco-Roman culture, one of the primary duties of the members of the family, of a group, of a community is to acknowledge those to whom they are “under obligation” that is, those from whom they have received gifts. When speaking to somebody else, this acknowledgment is simply expressed as Paul did in 1:14 by declaring: ὀφειλέτης εἰμί, “I am under obligation to” so and so. When addressing or dealing with those to whom one is under obligation, this acknowledgment of indebtedness is expressed, as Jewett noted, by “giving thanks” (εὐχαριστέω), as Greek (especially Stoic) philosophers emphasized.281 In sum, “giving God thanks” is a hellenized formulation of the Chosen People’s covenantal vocation that “glorifying God” expresses in Jewish terminology. Fulfilling their vocation is what humans who were given the true knowledge of God were supposed to do and failed to do: “They did not glorify [God] as God or give [God] thanks.” They failed to carry out the vocation that God’s self-revelation involved— and that any self-revelation by God involves. This failure to glorify or thank God is what makes “suppressing the truth” so problematic. In response “the anger of God” is manifested: they were made futile in their thinking, and their senseless heart was darkened. While claiming to be wise, they were made witless (1:21d–22, Jewett). Once again, Paul first uses Jewish formulations then continues with a more Hellenistic vocabulary. The verbs are in a divine passive, a Jewish way of expressing what God is doing without 281

Jewett, 157–58.

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using God’s name. The vocabulary of 1:21d is derived from Ps 94:11 (cf. “futile in their thinking”) and LXX Ps 75/76:5–6 (cf. “their senseless heart was darkened”—although by substituting “mind” for “heart” most of the English translations, rooted in a Greek way of thinking, obscure this connection with the Psalms). Then Paul summarizes all this by what Jewett calls “a witty and succinct formulation”—“while claiming to be wise, they were made witless.”282 For Hellenistic people this phrase is particularly ironical, because “claiming to be wise” is something that wise persons should not, and actually, would not do! Note that all this passage is in the plural form. This is not a “distorted self-image” (as Jewett,283 says), but a distorted communal image, a distorted ideology (ideologies are necessarily shared with a community), a collective-delusion.

Interlude on “Glorifying God” as Covenantal Vocation Framing Paul’s Rhetorical Discourse Rom 1:21a, “although they knew God, they did not glorify God as God or give God thanks,” has most important implications for our understanding of the unfolding of Paul’s rhetorical discourse. Of course, Paul “knows God” who was revealed to him not only through his call to be an apostle set apart for the gospel of God (1:1), but also through the prophets and the holy Scriptures (1:2), through the spiritual gifts received from others (1:12), and through whatever gifts he received from Greeks and barbarians, wise, and foolish, so much so that he is under obligation to them (1:14). And of course, through the creation, together with the rest of humanity, Paul is sharing in the revelation of God’s eternal power and divine nature (1:20). It follows that in writing 1:21a Paul implies that, unlike those who suppress the truth, he, Paul, intends to “glorify God,” that is, to bring glory to God through his entire ministry, including through writing this letter. As he puts it in 15:8–16, the goal of his ministry—his covenantal vocation—is to glorify God by bringing Gentiles to praise the Lord (as Christ did), and thus to bring to God an “offering of the Gentiles . . . acceptable and sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (15:16). Therefore, as he develops his discourse—the letter as a rhetorical discourse—Paul pursues the same goal, an ongoing and unfolding process. His rhetoric aims at glorifying God, by bringing his readers to glorify God; and these readers will do so, in turn, by bringing others to glorify God, and so on. In the present section of the letter, how is the description of sinners in 1:18b–32 supposed to help in bringing about the glorification of God’s name? If this description of sinners was in order to point out that these sinners are condemned and rejected by God—when the “anger of God” is understood as God punishing sinners, rather than God weeping upon sinners even as God abandons them to themselves—of course, these rejected sinners would not glorify God! And if this description of sinners was in order to point out that the readers of the letter should reject these sinners, of course these rejected sinners would not glorify God! Indeed, the readers themselves, by rejecting these sinners, would fail to bring glory to God. And Paul, the author of this letter, would have failed to bring glory to God. Rom 2:1, “Therefore you have no

282 283

Jewett, 159. Jewett.

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excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself,” is introduced to avoid this cascade of failures to glorify God. Rom 2:1, the so-called rhetorical trap, explains why 1:18b–32 was written. Negatively, 2:1 means that the readers should NOT judge and condemn these sinners. Often the interpretations stop here. But 2:1 also has a positive meaning, which is most significant in an inclusive covenantal community interpretation. Rom 2:1 demands from the readers—both Gentile Christ-followers and also Jewish Christ-followers— to “glorify God” by bringing these sinners to glorify God themselves. How? It is actually quite simple. If it seems difficult, it is only as long as the readers have not truly renounced judging and condemning! Indeed, if the readers actually avoid disparaging or demeaning these “sinners,” or even avoid being condescending toward them, they will readily welcome them in the inclusive community, rather than excluding them. It is simply a matter of acknowledging that these sinners are like us, since after all we are doing the same things (2:1b, “because you, the judge, are doing the very same things”), and therefore are sinners accepted as they are, that is, without asking them to change (as Paul emphasizes in 14:1–15:12), with one exception: they need to glorify God and to give God thanks, instead of failing to do so. Of course, this is not so simple a step, as we shall discuss in commenting on Rom 2:1–3:20. How can such people—they are sinners after all!—be accepted “as they are” in the inclusive covenantal community? In brief, by following the instruction involved in the rhetorical trap, “Therefore 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” (Rom 2:1).Obviously, if we look at the list of sins in 1:26–31, it is clear that for Paul and his readers these are real sins that should not be condoned. Yet, we should not forget that, in this community-centered perspective, sins are social sins—that affect community relationships and also have their origin in the (distorted) ideologies of communities. While we might want to discuss the exact nature of each sin (see below the comments on 1:24–32), it remains that, from this perspective, sinners have committed sins (e.g., murder, 1:29) that mark them as sinners (e.g., a murderer remains a murderer even if he/she does not continue to commit murders) who disrupted the community/social order. To take a modern example, divorce can be viewed as a social sin that deeply disrupts family and society life; thus divorce is rejected as a sin by churches (including the Catholic Church) and the divorcees are marked as sinners.284 While hating the sin (divorce as a social—and not individual—sin) and seeking to prevent it (through community-centered church programs for couples), many churches love such sinners; they welcome divorcees “as they are” (including if they remarry and divorce again) as full members of the church participating in all the mission activities of the church, and (as I could observe) this “welcome” in inclusive communities is commonly felt as deeply transformative by these divorcees, who then glorify God, being thankful to God and then participating in the ministry/mission of the church, bringing other people to glorify God.

284

Note the emphasis on divorce as a social sin. Of course, this illustration does not make sense if divorce is viewed as an individual-centered sin, for which the divorcee should feel guilty.

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Of course, it is never simple to acknowledge that people whom we are ready to condemn as “sinners” are “like us” (acknowledging that we “are doing the very same things,” 2:1b) and to welcome them “as they are” (without asking them to change). We will discuss this at length as this inclusive covenantal community commentary unfolds. But assuming this step is taken, the (Gentile and Jewish) Christ-followers would welcome these “sinners” in the inclusive covenantal community as they are, that is, without asking them to change (as Paul emphasizes in 14:1–15:12) except regarding one issue: they should glorify God. And how should this change take place? Simply by the fact that they are welcomed as they are, without being condemned, they will hopefully want to “give thanks.” They would hopefully be thankful to the inclusive community that welcomes them. But they would also be thankful to God and glorify God, because this inclusive community is a covenantal community, which is inclusive because its members share in the gospel-story with God, and “walk” with God as they carry out their communal vocation. A final point regarding the teaching about sins that 1:18b–32 and 2:1ff have for modern readers. This passage did not teach anything regarding what sinful behaviors are to the addressees in Rome, primarily the Gentile Christ-followers and secondarily for the Jewish Christ-followers. They knew that everything Paul listed was sinful and evil. As we shall see, Paul simply used the Greek, Latin, and Jewish catalogues of evils and sins, that is, the cultural views of evils and sins that he could expect his readers in his time to hold already. His intended teaching was the rhetorical trap of recognizing that in condemning such sinners they condemned themselves. Modern readers will receive a similar teaching, if and if only they replace these ancient cultural views by presentday cultural views of sins and evils. Yes, certain sins and evils remain the same (for instance, killing someone remains murder whether it is with a knife or with a gun). But in most instances we in our modern cultures have very different views of sins and evils. What are “natural and unnatural” sexual activities are radically different when one is aware of the plurality of “natural” sexual orientations. The most debated “sins and evils” in our time—for example, abortion, racism, patriarchalism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, colonialism, massive poverty, climate change and its devastating effects on the poor and weak, genocides—would need to be introduced into or substituted for those found in Paul’s Greco-Roman list, so that we, modern readers, might find ourselves condemning those who practice such evils. Then we would receive for ourselves the teaching Paul’s rhetorical discourse actually aimed at conveying.

Rom 1:23–32. Idolatry and Human Distortion as a Consequence of Suppression of the Truth and a Current Indication of Divine Anger 1:23. “And they changed the glory of the imperishable God into a likeness of an image of a perishable human and birds and four-legged animals and reptiles.” Idolatry is a typical example of what happens—collective-delusion—when humans suppress the truth and fail to glorify God. It is important to note that, in this covenantal community interpretation, idolatry is not the source or cause of suppressing the truth. Rather, idolatry is a consequence of suppressing the truth; a manifestation of the anger of God. Note also that the opening phrase evokes Ps 106:20, “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” and therefore evokes the idolatry of Israelites

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(not of pagans). Paul reworks this allusion to Ps 106 by replacing the “ox” (the golden calf) by idols resembling “a human, birds, four-legged animals, and reptiles.” As Jewett notes, whether or not this list refers to Egyptian or other types of pagan idols, through it Paul accentuates the ludicrous level of collective-delusion,285 and expands Israelite/ Jewish idolatry to all kinds of pagan idolatry. But Israelite/Jewish idolatry remains included, as Jewish Christ-followers will have readily recognized due to the allusion to Ps 106:20. All forms of idolatry are targeted. Those who claimed to be wise proved incapable of making the most elementary kind of distinction between the imperishable God and perishable humans and animals. And the same is true in every situation or culture when suppressing the truth occurs. Jewett concludes that the perverse ideological drive “to change the glory of the imperishable God is a universal problem; the gospel elaborated in this letter has an inclusive bearing.”286. In the broad-stroke presentation in 1:21–22 of the manifestation of the anger of God as inflicting a collective-delusion that distorts human thought process and human self-image, Paul already has idolatry in sight, as discussed in 1:23. But as Jewett notes (159) Paul does not begin by attacking idolatry. Idolatry is neither the beginning nor the source of the suppression of the truth about God. Rom 1:21–22 is not a description of pagan idolaters—as forensic interpretations presuppose following certain Jewish traditions (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon 14). In such a case the non-idolaters, the nonpagans (the good Jews and good Christ-followers) could conceive of themselves as superior to these pagan idolaters, and could disparage all those who are linked with idolaters—including Gentile Christ-followers (who would have needed to be freed from the anger of God, while Jews or Jewish Christ-followers would not need to be freed from it). Rom 1:21–22 is a description of all humans who failed—and continue to fail—to “glorify God as God or give God thanks.” Indeed, all humans “are without excuse,” because “they know God” since, in one way or another, “what can be known about God is manifest among them. For God has manifested it to them” (1:19). The suppression of the truth, the failure to “glorify God as God or to give God thanks,” is universal sinfulness—the root of sin. Idolatry is a typical illustration of what happens when humans suppress the truth and fail to glorify God as God. But idolatry is not the only consequence of suppressing the truth, as the following verses show. The outline of the rhetorical analysis of 1:24-32 can be summarized with Jewett as follows: [1:24-32] provides an elaboration of the thematic statement in 1:18, with rhetorical finesse  .  .  .  .The failure to honor [glorify] God in 1:21-23 corresponds to the deliverance to dishonorable relationships in 1:24. The “exchanging” of truth for a lie in 1:25 corresponds to the “exchanging” of natural relations for unnatural in 1:26. Not seeing “fit” to acknowledge God in 1:28a corresponds to the deliverance to the “unfitting mind” of 1:28b. This link is solidified by the wordplay between ἐδοκίμασαν (“acknowledge, approve”) and ἀδόκιμον (“not approved, unfitting”). The threefold reduplication of παρέδωκεν (“he delivered”) serves as a forceful

285 286

Jewett, 160. Jewett, 162.

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refrain of deliverance to human distortion, first on the mental and religious level in the worship of the creature rather than the Creator (1:24-25), then on the sexual level in the form of perverted relationships (1:26-27), and finally on the public level in the form of criminal and sociopathic behavior (1:28-32).287

1:24–25. Therefore God delivered them to the desires of their hearts for impurity of their bodies’ being dishonored among themselves, [25] the very ones who exchanged the truth of God for their lie, and venerated and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed into the ages! Amen. (Jewett) Paul expresses that God delivered/abandoned them to their distorted desires, and lacking self-control they worshiped the creature rather than the Creator. These two verses belong together as Jewett demonstrates.288 Rom 1:24 concerns all those who are without excuse (1:20d) and who are described as idolaters both in 1:21–23 and in 1:25: “The very ones who exchanged the truth of God for their lie, and venerated and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator.” It is as a consequence (διό, “therefore”) of their suppression of the truth and of their failure to bring glory to God that “God delivered them (παρέδωκεν) to the desires of their hearts.” Here, as Jewett notes, Paul is “using a typical formulation of consigning enemies to their victors or prisoners to their jailers.”289 Such is the manifestation of God’s anger. As, according to the Midrash discussed above, God abandoned the Temple and the People who failed to truly glorify God in the hands of their enemies, so here God simply abandoned to their “enemies” those who failed to glorify God and consequently those who had abandoned God. Who were these enemies in the hands of which they have been abandoned (or delivered)? “The desires (ἐπιθυμίαι) of their hearts.” God is not actively punishing sinners; they punish themselves; the desires of their hearts punish them. In Jewett’s words, “they are released from God’s control and handed over to the control of their own desires.”290 Their “hearts” (i.e., as noted, what we would call their “minds” or their “reasons”) should be under self-control or self-mastery, but they are totally unable to keep their desires under control. So, their hearts are totally disoriented. Instead of bringing about “honor,” as they should, they bring about “dishonor.” In other words, community relations (governed by honor and shame) are totally disrupted. Sinners have lost self-control. Sinners have lost self-mastery. Their “hearts” are governed by passions, desires (ἐπιθυμίαι). “Self-control.” “Self-mastery.” “Passions.” “Desires.” All these seem to point to individual-centered understanding of sinfulness (as the forensic interpretations do). But this would be twisting all these themes to understand them from the perspective of modern individual-centered cultures. As Stowers points out in Rereading Romans (42–82), for ancient readers—and especially for the Gentile Christ-followers who are the primary addressees (as Stowers also emphasizes)—the themes of self-mastery and self-control would have loomed very large. These themes were powerfully loaded with

287

Jewett, 165. Jewett, 169. 289 Jewett, 167. 290 Jewett, 168. 288

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social and cultural meanings in Greco-Roman culture and were community-centered concepts. As Stowers summarizes, The rhetoric of Romans pushes the theme of self-mastery, or the lack of it, into the foreground in three ways. First, Romans [especially, 1:18-4:25] tells the story of sin and salvation, problem and solution, punishment and reward at its most basic level as a story of the loss and recovery of self-control. Second, the letter represents the readers as characters in these basic stories that concern self-mastery. Third, Romans relates this story of loss to the story of God’s righteous action through Jesus Christ so that Christ becomes an enabler of the restored and disciplined self [especially Rom 5-8].291

In modern Western cultures, we have great difficulty understanding what Paul is saying in 1:24a, God delivered them to the desires of their hearts for impurity. The first problem for us concerns the understanding of “desires” and the second the understanding of “impurity.” For us, desiring—that is, wanting—is good: “The modern attitude toward desire is, ‘You have the right and the potential to aspire to anything you want as long as you do not directly harm someone else . . . . Desires are good.”292 For us, modern Western readers, it is only excessive desires—for example, passions, lusts—that are problematic. Therefore, English translations have to qualify “desires” in some negative ways: “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts” (NRSV, see also RSV, NAB, and NAS), “in the sinful desires of their hearts” (NIV, see also BBE). But, Stowers continues, “the dominant view in Greco-Roman culture held that desires in themselves were not bad but dangerous, powerful, and prone to act independently of rational control.”293 This is exactly what Paul was speaking about. In the Greco-Roman culture (and therefore presumably for the Gentile Christ-followers that Paul addresses), self-control or selfmastery would mean that “their hearts” have control over their “desires”; or, in the Greek way of thinking, self-control is when reason controls desires. So, by the phrase “desires of their hearts” Paul expresses that they have lost self-mastery. For sinners, their desires have taken control of their hearts and thus of their life; they have lost self-control. And this is disastrous for their communities. Indeed, this “self-control” in the Greco-Roman culture is not individual-centered (as it is in modern Western cultures). Self-control is what gives someone the exercise of control over families, dependents, and others in society, and what gives someone the ability to avoid being under the undue control of others. Thus Stowers can affirm: “readers in Paul’s time could be expected to understand that a key to almost any aspiration or ambition [in society] was the cultivation of self-mastery.”294 Thus for Gentile readers and for Paul himself, being abandoned to the desires (ἐπιθυμίαι) of their hearts (note the plural) is a loss of self-control that has disastrous effects not so much for “oneself,” but primarily for the entire community (for “themselves”). And, as a next phrase signals, this loss of self-control also destroys any possibility of covenantal relationship with God; because 291

Stowers, Rereading, 42. Stowers, Rereading, 46–47. 293 Stowers, Rereading, 47, emphasis added. 294 Stowers, Rereading, 55. 292

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it makes the sinners “impure”; they become incapable of honoring God, and thus of bringing glory to God. This loss of self-control results in “impurity (ἀκαθαρσία) of their bodies’ being dishonored among themselves.” Jewetts comments: “when humans live within the twisted prison of their desires, their inevitable direction is ‘toward/for impurity’.”295 For Jewish Christ-followers, the term ἀκαθαρσία, impurity, evokes central parts of Jewish traditions. In the LXX and Hellenistic Judaism the term ἀκαθαρσία refers to the themes of early rabbinic Judaism based upon biblical texts, such as Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Mary Douglas masterfully analyzed these by focusing on Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 from her anthropological perspective.296 As she showed, “impurity” has primarily a ritual connotation, but not in a narrow, cultic sense. The system of purity and impurity (or cleanness and uncleanness) regulations framed the entire life and universe for ancient Israelites, and therefore their worship in all aspects of their daily lives. Purity and impurity are not moral or ethical categories. They concern proper or improper relationships; that is, whether or not two objects or two beings which are interrelated belong to the same class, as they should. The association of the “imperishable God” with “perishable” beings (1:23) is impure and generates further impurity. For Douglas, regarding impurity in animals in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, “the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of the class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world.”297 Thus, impurity is not a matter of the morality of the partners in a relationship. Impurity results from the joining together of two things/beings which do not belong together, and this is what happens when twisted desires are in control (as Jewett pointed out). Then such inappropriate relations engender dysfunction, and eventually immorality. But the fundamental effect of impurity is that it separates people from the holy; that is, from the covenant God. In 1:24 ἀκαθαρσία, impurity causes the dishonoring of the idolaters’ bodies “among themselves”; it is through the wrong interactions with others that one is impure and dishonored. In this Jewish perspective, this “dishonoring” makes human bodies unable to honor God as they should; indeed, it makes them unable to honor God in all aspects of their lives. And as we noted above, honoring God, glorifying God is what humans should do with all aspects of their lives. Thus “the dishonoring of their bodies” to which God abandoned humans does not merely result in perverse sexual relations as is the case in 1:26–27, but also in all the other forms of antisocial behaviors listed in 1:28–31 (as discussed by Jewett).298 Thus, contrary to many modern Western cultural perspectives, impurity (ἀκαθαρσία) is not primarily or exclusively associated with issues concerning sexual relations. Impurity is present wherever something or someone makes people unable to honor God the Creator. The problem with impurity

295

Jewett, 168. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 297 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 57. 298 Jewett, 169. 296

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is that it makes it impossible to venerate and worship the Creator; it is a fundamental feature of idolatry (1:25). What is Paul’s rhetorical point? Once again let us remember that Paul was not providing a list of wrong behaviors that his readers should abandon or avoid (a list of sins which is universal and atemporal). Rather, Paul was setting up a rhetorical trap, both for his primary addressees, Gentile Christ-followers, and his secondary addressees, Jewish Christ-followers. The trap (2:1) was to entice his readers to condemn the “sinners” described in these verses. Paul has begun to set the trap: Gentile Christfollowers will condemn those who lose self-control; Jewish Christ-followers will condemn those who become impure. But this is just the beginning. 1:26-27. For this reason, God delivered them [to the desires of their hearts] for passions of dishonor, for their females exchanged the natural use for the unnatural, [27] and likewise also the males, after they abandoned the natural use with females, were inflamed with their lust for one another, males who work up their shameful member in [other] males, and receive back for their deception the recompense that is tightness in themselves.(Jewett)

God delivered/abandoned them to their distorted desires, and lacking self-control and following dishonorable passions, they engaged in perverted sexual relationships. This second refrain-like “God delivered/abandoned them” is given in an abbreviated form here; “to the desires of their hearts” is not repeated, but presupposed (as Jewett points out). So the parallel with 1:24 is clear. For those who are abandoned by God, in this second instance the result of their lack of self-control (the desires of their hearts) is “dishonorable passions” (instead of “impurity”). Here Paul turns to his primary addressees, Gentile Christ-followers, using their language. For Greek philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics) and Hellenistic Judaism, passions are manifestations of a lack of self-control or of self-mastery.299 And these passions are “dishonorable.” Like “impurity,” they make people unable to honor God (as the people of God and indeed all creatures should do). To justify his claim Paul gives two “examples,” as is expected in epideictic (demonstrative) rhetoric that praises or blames behaviors. What is the significance of these examples? Is it to teach to the readers that, as Christ-followers, they should not commit these homoerotic acts? Such is the forensic interpretation. With such an interpretation, it is essential to define exactly what are the homoerotic acts that must be avoided (although, as is shown in Chapter 3, quite a diversity of interpretations are proposed, how homoerotic acts were envisioned was quite different in Paul’s time and today). But in this inclusive covenantal community reading and its rhetorical textual focus one asks a very different question: What is the rhetorical effect that in Paul’s expectation this description of female and male homoerotic behaviors will have upon his primary addressees, Gentile Christ-followers, and his secondary addressees, Jewish Christ-followers? We need to keep in mind that this pericope is setting up a rhetorical trap, which snaps on the addressees as they read 2:1: “You have no excuse, whoever you 299

Jewett, 172; Stowers, Rereading, 94.

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are, when you judge others . . . ” So Paul’s point is not to describe particular behaviors that his readers should avoid because they are sinful. Rather he describes behaviors that will set up the rhetorical trap most effectively for his addressees. Cunningly, Paul wants to entice his readers to condemn “sinners.” For this purpose, Paul needs to present behaviors that his addressees will readily want to condemn! So the more shocking and egregious the instances of sexual perversity, the better! But how is Paul, the rhetor, actually doing this? “Their females exchanged the natural (φυσικὴν) use for the unnatural (παρὰ φύσιν), and likewise also the males, after they abandoned the natural (φυσικὴν) use with females” (1:26b). What is “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality? Actually, there was a wide range of understandings of it in the ancient world, as Brooten shows in her book, Love Between Women. This book, exclusively devoted to what is “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality, reviews all kinds of Greco-Roman literature, including Egyptian, astrological, and medical texts as well as biblical and postbiblical Jewish texts (see 73–185 and on Romans, 239–58). The Hebrew Bible does not say anything about sexual relations between women, although it prohibits sexual relations between males in Leviticus.300 By calling them an “abomination,” the Hebrew Bible (and early Judaism) suggests that it is a matter of “impurity” (in the sense discussed above) but not of “natural/unnatural” character. For Jews of Paul’s time, such as Philo, procreation is the touchstone for distinguishing between natural and unnatural sexuality. But Paul does not distinguish “natural/unnatural” sexuality in this Jewish understanding, since when speaking about sexuality here or anywhere else, he does not even allude to procreation (1 Cor 7:2–5, 9, 36 presents sexual activity as a way of satisfying sexual needs). Consequently, when Paul evokes “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality he uses a vocabulary attuned to the Greco-Roman world of his Gentile addressees. “Sexual relations between women confounded societal categories of gender that classified all females as passive, subordinate recipients of penetration. In this framework, all femalefemale sexual relations were inherently unnatural,” as Brooten observes, referring to numerous Greco-Roman texts.301 “In the same way” (1:27) the men “inflamed with their lust for one another” practice “unnatural sexuality” because “the passive male has allowed himself to play the part of a woman, while the active male has taught his partner effeminacy and participated in his becoming effeminate” (as Brooten comments).302 Committing unnatural sexuality was committing shameful acts and indeed becoming shameful. Such homoerotic behaviors would engender “wide revulsion” in the Greco-Roman world of the Gentiles. So once again Paul is primarily addressing Gentile Christ-followers for whom this vocabulary about “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality, passion, and shameful acts would readily resonate and engender revulsion—a homophobic revulsion. These homophobic Gentile Christ-followers will want to condemn such sinners; but in doing so they condemn themselves (2:1).

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination (‫( ”)הָבֵעוֹתּ‬Lev 18:22) and “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination (‫ ;)הָבֵעוֹתּ‬they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them” (Lev 20:13). 301 Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 241. 302 Brooten, Love Between Women, 256. 300

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More broadly speaking we need to recognize that, in the Greco-Roman world, speaking of “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality—or of any other kinds of “natural” and “unnatural” activity—is evoking “natural law.” And so it should also be for Gentile Christ-followers reading this letter. We noted that (by contrast with the forensic interpretation) in this inclusive covenantal community/rhetorical interpretation it is not appropriate to speak about “natural theology” on the basis of 1:19–20. But a rhetorical reading requires also paying attention to the ideological connotations of the vocabulary in order to assess its effects on readers. Thus the use of the technical language of “natural law” in 1:26–27 (φυσικὴν, παρὰ φύσιν), which is reinforced in 2:14–15 by a reference to Gentiles who “by nature do what the law requires,” makes clear, as Brooten explains, that Paul’s use of the terms natural and unnatural “corresponds to the philosophical model inherent in natural law theory: human beings can determine proper ethical behavior (which theologians define as God’s will) by observing nature.”303 This is in line with the Stoics who “held that divine rationality permeates nature and that all human beings can live in accordance with nature by learning its laws.”304 From this perspective all good behaviors are “natural” and all problematic behaviors are “unnatural.” Therefore, the following list of “things that should not be done” (1:28–31) would be “unnatural” behaviors, against the natural law revealed to all human beings (see 1:32). 1:28–32 And as they did not see fit to hold God in knowledge, God delivered them to an unfitting mind to do the things that are improper, [29] having been filled with all manner of wrongdoing, evil, greed, badness, persons full of envy, murder, strife, treachery, malice, whisperers, [30] slanderers, haters of God, bullies, egotists, braggarts, inventors of evil designs, disobeyers of parents, [31] without understanding, without dutifulness, without affection, without mercy. [32] Though they know the righteous/just decree of God that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do such things but also applaud those who practice such things. (Jewett) God delivered/abandoned them to their distorted desires, and lacking self-control they engaged in criminal and sociopathic behaviors. Paul opens this final paragraph of this section (1:28) by repeating the refrain of the suppression of the truth about God (using the phrase “they did not see fit [did not approve, οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν] to hold God in knowledge” as a wordplay with “unfitting mind” [ἀδόκιμον νοῦν]). This phrasing emphasizes that what is at stake is the fact that these people deliberately refuse to respond to God’s revelation; they refused “to hold God in knowledge,” reinforcing the point that they refused to glorify and honor God (1:21). So “God delivered/abandoned them,” the third use of this phrase, this time pointing to “an unfitting mind,” that is (as Jewett notes), a mind bent “to do the things that are improper,” a phrase adapted from Stoic ethics.305 Therefore, 1:29, they “have been filled with all manner of wrongdoing,” implying that the divine deliverance is, this time, to a social orientation incapable of doing the right thing. As Jewett documents, the list which follows is from GrecoRoman ethics, especially Stoic, even though similar catalogs are also found in Judaism

303

Brooten, Love Between Women, 268. Brooten, Love Between Women, 269. 305 Jewett, 182. 304

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of that time.306 In sum, this catalog is primarily addressed to Gentile Christ-followers as readers, although it will also make sense for Jewish Christ-followers. Plural forms and past (aorist) tenses continue; the sins that are listed are communitycentered and continue to refer to the sins of humanity since an archaic human past. As Jewett shows, for the primary readers, Gentile Christ-followers, this list evokes the teaching of the Stoic philosopher, through the emphasis on the failure to “acknowledge” (δοκιμάζω) natural law “known” from the beginning, although for Jewish Christfollowers the lack of acknowledgment of God might evoke the story of Adam’s fall.307 Without going into the details it is enough to conclude with Jewett that the following list of twenty-one “evils” is unique to Paul, who borrows from Greek, Latin, and Jewish catalogues of evils. As such it presents (in Jewett’s words) “a social pathology that is oriented not to the character flaws of individuals or groups but to the collective experience of the human race  .  .  .  . This catalogue undercuts in the most sweeping manner any potential claims of individual, group, or national exceptionalism.”308 Rom 1:32 is a fitting conclusion. Jewett’s concluding comment is appropriate: “This final verse in the pericope is the last plank in the rhetorical bridge called ‘suppression of the truth.’ It is rhetorically effective in large part because of the stunning list of social offenses and offenders that evoked many of the readiest stereotypes of the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds. Paul would have no doubt after these twenty-one characterizations that his audience would nod in agreement with the sentiment that such persons ‘deserve’ to die, even though not all of the evils were actually adjudicable in the courts.”309 Yes, for Gentile Christ-followers (and also, secondarily for Jewish Christ-followers), these “sinners” deserve to die, as 1:32 claims. Yes, the readers are ready to condemn them. And in the process, they are triggering the rhetorical trap of 2:1: “Therefore 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.” For a summary of the inclusive covenantal community interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Sin (1:18-32); Natural Revelation = Natural Theology (1:19-20); Glorifying/Honoring God as God (1:21); Idolatry (1:19-25); Homosexuality (1:26-27); Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:28-32)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the second column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their inclusive covenantal community interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and realized-apocalyptic/messianic readings.

306

see Jewett, 183–90. Jewett, 182. 308 Jewett, 184. 309 Jewett, 191. 307

5

Reading Rom 1:1–32 for Its RealizedApocalyptic/Messianic Vision

[Dedicated to] all who love and serve the city, bearing its daily stress, and are grounded in the conviction that the risen Lord is there, summoning us to join in at the cruciform places where God is already at work, bringing life out of death. Roger J. Gench1

I A quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic The letter to the Romans includes many thematic and figurative features that reflect Paul’s religious experience and faith/vision. Therefore, an interpretation of Romans focused on these themes and figures and a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic is warranted. This is especially so since other interpretations, due to their concerns for theological or rhetorical and ideological teachings (Chapters 3 and 4), sidestep these thematic and figurative dimensions of Paul’s discourse as if they did not exist.

(A) Identifying thematic and figurative features of Romans In order to recognize the thematic and figurative features of Paul’s text, we need to adopt a different approach. Unexpectedly, we need to read Paul’s text with the surprising expectation that it includes puzzling features that we should not bypass. We need to allow the text to surprise us. When our response to what we are reading is, “Okay, this makes sense,” we need to stop and backtrack. Consider the four words that open the letter: Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” (1:1a).2 Before saying that we understand these words and how we understand them, we have to stop and ask ourselves: what is surprising here? 1

2

Roger J. Gench, Theology from the Trenches: Reflections on Urban Ministry (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014). The quote is from the dedication by the author in the epilogue (143). This Presbyterian minister is invested in the Ignatian spirituality, also practiced by the Jesuit Brendan Byrne, whose commentary—Romans. Sacra Pagina series; v. 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007)—is one of the recent representative readings of Romans for its realized apocalyptic/messianic vision. Reproduced with permission of Westminster John Knox Press. In this chapter, translations from Paul’s letters are from me, unless otherwise signaled.

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A few preliminary comments on these four words are enough to illustrate what happens when one views as most significant their thematic and figurative features. As soon as we ponder them, it quickly appears that these words should be quite surprising for readers. They are highly figurative: Paul, a slave. Of course, Paul is not saying that he is literally a slave. This is a metaphor, a live metaphor, through which Paul expresses simultaneously that he is slave-like, but also that he is unlike an actual slave bought and owned by a master, a slave who has no choice but to do what his master demands. In what sense is Paul a slave of Christ? As we shall see, comparison with other slavery metaphors that Paul uses in 6:16–20 shows that “Paul, a slave of Christ/Messiah Jesus” as a live metaphor expresses that he is under the power of Christ as a slave is under the power of his/her master. For the author of a letter to churches that he does not know, this is an unexpected self-presentation. What?! Is Paul merely a puppet of Christ?! This is disparaging himself and his authority as apostle, isn’t it? But let us continue. Christ Jesus is the next surprising formulation. One would expect Jesus Christ, in which Christ becomes a kind of proper name. Therefore, scribes often put these words in the “right order” in their manuscripts (to the satisfaction of some modern translators including RSV, NRSV, BBE), although the formulation “Christ Jesus” is certainly the original manuscript form.3 This phrase calls attention to the word Christ as the designation of a religious figure, the Messiah. When one takes this into account, one can readily recognize that Paul’s self-designation as a slave of the Messiah is a compelling metaphorical expression of the way in which Paul envisions himself and his ministry. His ministry belongs to and takes place during the messianic time—the time opened by the coming of the Messiah. This means that now is the “time of the end” or “end-time”; now is the eschatological time. The coming of the Messiah shows that this special time has already begun. Therefore, these opening words already suggest that Paul’s teaching offers a realized eschatological vision. As one continues to read, paying close attention to the “surprising” features of the text, one readily recognizes that Romans includes many thematic and figurative features. This is what the interpretations presented throughout this chapter do. Of course, focusing on the themes and figures as the most significant features of the letter is a legitimate textual choice—such themes and figures are actual features of Paul’s text. This textual choice is concomitant with seeking to elucidate the religious teaching of this letter, which includes a vision that I provisionally called a realized-eschatological vision. This is a plausible hermeneutical choice—one cannot deny that Paul’s letter is a religious discourse! But what does it mean to proceed with a reading of Paul’s letter to discern its thematic and figurative logic and the religious vision this logic conveys? In order to grasp this, the best is to begin with negative definitions. A reading aimed at elucidating the religious teaching that Romans offers through its themes and figures differs from an interpretation focused on the theological teaching it

3

The majority of ancient manuscripts do have “Jesus Christ.” But another group of excellent manuscripts have “Christ Jesus.” See the notes on Rom 1:1 in Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece 27th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993): “‘Christ Jesus’ has to be preferred because it is the more difficult reading. Scribes would have readily changed [corrected!] ‘Christ Jesus’ into ‘Jesus Christ’ (actually found in 1:4, 6, 7, 8). But no scribe would have any reason to do the opposite.”

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offers through its theological argument (as in Chapter 3). In that case Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ is translated “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ” (1:1a, using the Greek manuscripts that more readily “make theological sense”). This phrase is understood as Paul’s affirmation that he is like the Old Testament prophets. As the prophets willingly accepted God’s call to be “servants of YAHWEH,” so he voluntarily devoted himself to the Lord Jesus Christ (1:4). Consequently, as such he has an authority comparable to that of the prophets: he has the authority to proclaim the Word of God (the theological message that the gospel is). This theological reading of 1:1a (and of Romans as a whole) is, of course, an alternate legitimate and plausible choice, as Chapter 3 demonstrates. Of course, it takes into account that this statement is a metaphor. But in this interpretation, it is a dead metaphor, because what is surprising in it has been eliminated.4 It is quite appropriate and expected that Paul would present himself as having an authority comparable to that of the prophets. This is what one can assume since the author of this letter designates himself with the title “apostle.” What is different in a thematic and figurative interpretation focused upon the religious teaching of Romans is that metaphors and figures are read as live metaphors and live figures. A reading aimed at elucidating the religious teaching that Romans offers through its themes and figures also differs from an interpretation focused on the ideological teaching it offers through its rhetorical features, which we saw in Chapter 4. In such a case Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, translated “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” (1:1a), is understood as the self-presentation of someone who has the honor and authority of acting as an agent of Christ, in the same way as the powerful slaves of Caesar who acted as agents of Caesar throughout the Roman Empire, and specially in Rome. From this perspective, these opening words already announce that the letter is a countercultural rhetorical discourse. The imperial Roman authority of Caesar is being replaced by the paradoxical authority of Christ—the powerless crucified Lord. Those who act as agents (ambassadors) of Christ (here Paul, but also the saints in Rome; see 1:7– 12) have a similar paradoxical authority to live out the Word/gospel as leaders of a countercultural community that challenges the way of life in the Roman Empire (or any other societies). In this interpretation, “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” is also read as a metaphor. Yet it becomes a tamed metaphor (if not quite a dead metaphor). For Roman readers, it expresses something which is somewhat surprising—a countercultural view. But it still provides an expected view of Paul and his authority. The surprise is gone: it is quite appropriate and expected that Paul would present himself as having an authority comparable to that of the slaves of Caesar, acting and speaking in the name of Christ. By contrast, in a thematic and figurative interpretation focused upon the religious teaching of Romans, metaphors and figures are fully read as live metaphors and live figures. Both the theological and the rhetorical/ideological interpretations are legitimate and plausible. But so is an interpretation focused upon the thematic and figurative textual features of Romans and its religious teaching. Since there is a real choice among

4

As a dead metaphor, it does not jolt the reader, even for a moment, with the image of Paul as genuinely a slave. Instead, the term doulos is distanced from its literal meaning and becomes merely a convention.

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these three alternatives, for various reasons—textual sensibility for the thematic and figurative aspects of Paul’s discourse; hermeneutical inclination toward the religious; and also, as we shall see, contextual reasons—many readers, including exegetes, readily focus upon the thematic and figurative religious dimensions of Paul’s letter. For such readers this choice is an easy decision. For them, what is surprising is that people might want to read this letter without acknowledging that it is a religious discourse. How can one read Romans without acknowledging that this religious discourse was generated by Paul’s religious experience and that it conveys his figurative world, the product of his transformative faith/vision!? But these readers and exegetes commonly are the target of objections such as “This is a poetic reading of Romans!” “Anything goes when one reads a text figuratively!” “Such a religious (pietistic, mystical) reading cannot be taken seriously.” In order to show the critical character of their thematic and figurative readings of Romans as a religious discourse, scholarly exegetes such as Käsemann and Byrne wrote critical commentaries. But soon they struggled with the trap posed by a literary genre that demands taking into account all previous interpretations. They struggled to distinguish their approaches from the philologically based elucidation of theological propositions of the forensic theological interpretations. To a lesser extent, such exegetes also struggled to distinguish their approaches from the inclusive covenantal community interpretations of the New Perspective on Paul—as is exemplified by the debate between Krister Stendahl and Ernst Käsemann.5 The literary genre critical commentary readily leads to hybrid comments, because it demands constant comparison between different interpretations instead of following the flow of a single reading of the text. So thematic and figurative interpreters often avoid this pitfall by choosing to write quasi-methodological books and essays that allowed them to immerse themselves in Paul’s thematic and figurative vision. Some of these—such as the “commentaries” on Romans by contemporary philosophers (Taubes, Agamben, Badiou, and also Žižek)—may sound like uncritical musings or meditations on Paul’s text. But their insights into Paul’s vision are no less solidly grounded into Paul’s text through its themes and figures. Dismissing such interpretations is impossible without disparaging the scholarly authority of these renowned philosophers who are also great linguists. Indeed, a reading focused upon the thematic and figurative dimensions of Romans is slippery. How can one corral live themes, live figures, live religious visions into a critical presentation that will not kill them? And yet this is necessary so that we might be in a position to pursue our critical task of comparing these thematic and figurative interpretations with the theological-individual-centered and communitycentered interpretations discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. The first step is to recognize that, as any other interpretation, a reading of Romans aimed at elucidating its thematic and figurative logic and its religious vision makes three kinds of correlated choices: textual analytical choices, hermeneutical theological choices, and contextual ethical interpretive choices. Before coming back to the textual analytical choices so as to clarify the procedures for a quest for Paul’s thematic

5

See Ernst Käsemann, “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” 60–78 in Perspectives on Paul, and his response to Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles.

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and figurative logic, let us make explicit in a preliminary way what are the main hermeneutical and contextual choices involved in this kind of interpretation. 1. The hermeneutical theological choices. Interpreters who focus their reading of Romans upon its thematic and figurative features are convinced that a religious text—such as Romans—is somehow grounded in religious experience and seeks to share with its readers the faith/vision embedded in its thematic and figurative features. Such interpreters expect to find in Romans a teaching that has been and is to be experienced—a teaching shared in a spiritual experience (and therefore a teaching which is neither a series of theological propositions to be understood nor a praxis to be implemented in community life). Readers of Romans are invited to enter this discourse so as to share its figurative world, which conveys Paul’s faith/ vision. That vision is grounded, in turn, in ongoing religious experiences of the New Age that, for him, involved recognizing the active presence of the resurrected Christ and of the Spirit in his and their lives. 2. The contextual ethical interpretive choices. Interpreters who long for such religious experiences are not satisfied with the status quo. They have pessimistic views of their life-contexts (which need to be counterbalanced by religious experiences that would give them hope).6 For them interventions by God, or by the resurrected Christ, or by the Spirit are urgently needed to overcome problems that deeply affect their private lives as well as their lives in communities and in the world. These believers as individuals and even as communities feel that on their own they are totally unable to deal with such problems. Transformative divine interventions are needed to overcome them. To have true hope, believers need to have a religious vision so that they can recognize, see, and discern such divine interventions. Believers in other times and contexts have shared in Paul’s vision by reading Romans somewhat as one reads a poem: by meditating over this text in contemplation (as monks and mystics did and still do). The critical exegetes’ role is different; it is to analyze Paul’s text for its themes and figures that convey this figurative world so as to elucidate its characteristics. For this they need to develop a critical (legitimate and plausible) interpretation focused on the thematic and figurative features that reflect Paul’s religious experience and faith/vision in the form of a figurative world. Strange as it may sound for Westerners, reading Romans for its religious, messianic faith/vision has a long history that includes most (if not all) of the interpretations by the Greek Fathers and the Greek Orthodox exegetes through the centuries and today, as well as many readings of Romans by Pentecostal and Charismatic believers, as we will see in Chapter 7. Among Western exegetes, this kind of interpretation found its roots in the work of Käsemann—especially his commentary on Romans—soon followed by (in chronological order) Leander Keck, J. Christiaan Beker, Daniel Patte, Douglas A. Campbell, Beverly Gaventa (all of us avoiding the literary genre commentary and its

6

J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 135 (from now on “Beker, Paul”).

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constraints), and the commentaries (with the hybrid constraints demanded by this genre) by Keck, Brendan Byrne, and numerous shorter studies.7 In addition, a group of postmodern philosophers—including Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek,—and postmodern exegetes such as Theodore W. Jennings and Larry L. Welborn—recently offered very insightful readings of Romans by investigating with philosophical acuity thematic and figurative features of the letter.8 All of these studies provide essential entries in Paul’s messianic vision and its hermeneutical/ideological features (e.g., eschatology, messianic time). The bulk of this chapter, “II—A Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary on Romans,” follows the figures in Rom 1:1–32. For this, contrary to other exegetical commentaries, we will not follow the text verse by verse, but figure by figure. As will 7

8

Käsemann, An die Römer (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973). See also his early essay (a lecture delivered in 1962) largely devoted to Paul: “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” New Testament Questions for Today (trans. W. J. Montague; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 108–37; Leander Keck, Paul and His Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle as well as Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel: The Coming Times of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982 [identified as Beker, Apocalyptic Gospel]); The Triumph of God: The Essence of Paul’s Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990 [identified as Beker, Essence of Paul’s Thought]); Daniel Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel: A Structural Introduction to the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009) and also The Rhetoric of Righteousness in Romans 3.21-26. JSNTSS: 65 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); Beverly Gaventa, When in Romans. An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2016) with, 23–46, an excellent and brief overview of the differences between the individual-centered (forensic theological) and communitycentered (inclusive covenantal community) and the cosmic horizon (realized apocalyptic/messianic) interpretations of Paul that she advocate; Leander Keck, Romans, Abingdon New Testament commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005); Brendan Byrne, Romans, Sacra Pagina series; v. 6 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007); Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, eds., Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016); they discuss thematically a variety of understandings of the “apocalyptic Paul” that will be especially important in Volumes II and III as we progress beyond Rom 1. In this list of resources for a realized apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of Romans, I deliberately do not include J. P. Davies, Paul among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), because this “evaluation” is done from the perspective of a forensic theological interpretation, and therefore would demand from me to refute each of his arguments against the “presupposed” uses of apocalyptic categories in Paul’s letters. David W. Odell-Scott, ed., Reading Romans with Contemporary Philosophers and Theologians. RTCH vol. 5 (2007); John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff, eds., Saint Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (trans. Dana Hollander; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004; German lectures 1987; pub. 1993) and Occidental Eschatology (trans. David Ratmoko; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009; German original: 1947). Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003; French original, 1997); Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005; Italian, 2000); Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (trans. Adam Kotsko; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013; Italian original, 2012). Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999); The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); and On Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013); Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Transforming Atonement: A Political Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009). L. L. Welborn, “‘Extraction from the Mortal Site’: Badiou on the Resurrection in Paul.” New Testament Studies 55/03 (July 2009), 295–314, and Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

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be explained, a figurative critical reading analyzes the figures by comparing them with each other as demanded by the thematic organization of the text. But otherwise, I proceed very much like any critical commentator, by taking advantage of the abovementioned existing interpretations to construct a commentary that represents my understanding of Romans when it is read for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic. Therefore, despite the fact that I am learning a great deal from these other works (to which I give credit), this study is “Daniel Patte’s Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary on Romans.” The primary difference between this commentary and other realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations—which are quite different from each other on many points—is that unlike them I do not seek to establish the only true interpretation of Romans. I am fully aware that my Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary is one of the three equally legitimate and plausible and yet divergent kinds of commentaries that I am presenting. Consequently, in order to construct what is, in my view, a typical realized apocalyptic/messianic commentary on Romans, I consult only the studies and commentaries of Romans (and Paul’s other letters) that I personally identify as realized apocalyptic/messianic interpretations, with the awareness that all of these studies are hybrid, because each of them seeks to establish the only true interpretation. To identify studies that follow what I just called a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretive line I use two kinds of criteria that I need to explain at the outset. First, in order to establish in a general way the plausibility of a reading of Romans for its realized-apocalyptic/messianic faith/vision, I present the hermeneutical theological choices involved in such an interpretation. This involves explaining why I decided to call this interpretive line realized-apocalyptic/messianic. Second, in order to establish in a general way the legitimacy of such readings of Romans, I need to clarify how such studies seek to elucidate Paul’s thematic and figurative logic, giving priority to the corresponding textual features of the letter. In order to show why and how a study of Romans focused upon its thematic and figurative features is legitimate, I explain the procedures for a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic.

(B) The plausibility of a realized-apocalyptic/messianic understanding of Paul’s teaching in Romans It is not without qualms that I entitled this third kind of interpretation “Reading Romans for its Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Vision.” I hesitated, trying to formulate different alternative titles, because the term “apocalyptic” has so many problematic connotations, which have absolutely no connection with Paul’s teaching! For English dictionaries, such as Merriam-Webster, apocalyptic conveys cataclysmic end-time destruction through the clash of good and evil powers; momentous or catastrophic events of the end of the world; ominous, portentous doomsday. In addition, it is associated with present-day terrorist movements. This is not what I want to convey by qualifying Paul’s teaching as apocalyptic! Thus, I contemplated dropping this term. The only problem—a major problem—is that avoiding the term “apocalyptic” would be disconnecting Paul from his roots and

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sources in “Apocalyptic Judaism” and “early Christian Apocalypticism.”9 The qualifier apocalyptic is used here to mark the connections of Paul with these movements to which he belonged. Indeed, when speaking of “Paul and Judaism,” it is essential to keep in mind that Paul might have been related to two very different forms of Judaism. With the scholars of the “New Perspective and Beyond”—beginning with E. P. Sanders—and earlier studies of Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (to use W. D. Davies’s title), one can read Romans with the expectation that Paul was immersed in Pharisaic/ early rabbinic Judaism, and therefore describe his teaching as covenantal. Yet it is as legitimate and plausible to read Romans with the expectation that Paul was immersed in Apocalyptic Judaism, and therefore that he proclaimed an apocalyptic gospel about the Messiah Jesus. This observation has many implications. As we shall see below, his use of Scripture and his hermeneutical perspective should be understood through comparisons with the diverse forms of Apocalyptic Judaism, including the Qumran community and its Dead Sea Scrolls. In this trajectory, one can then recognize that Paul is constantly emphasizing the ongoing empowering divine interventions in the believers’ life.10 In order to avoid the facile identification with modern unwarranted understandings of apocalyptic and promote comparisons with Apocalyptic Judaism, I always use the term “apocalyptic” with qualifiers. I always refer to “realized-apocalyptic” to signal that the present manifestations of apocalyptic are Paul’s primarily focus: as in Jewish Apocalypticism Paul emphasizes the ongoing empowering divine interventions in the present of the believers’ life. In addition, I always refer to “realized-apocalyptic/messianic” interpretations, so as to clarify that for Paul we are in the apocalyptic time, because the Messiah Jesus (Christ Jesus) has come. Far from being the “supernatural Avenger” who brings cataclysmic end-time destruction (as modern views of apocalypticism would have it), this Messiah was shown to be “Son of God with power” by his resurrection from the dead (1:4), and this after having been crucified (3:25; 6:3–8). Contrary to modern views, for Apocalyptic Judaism and for Paul, primary connotations of the term “apocalyptic” come from the fact that it is derived from the 9

10

These have been carefully studied by Johannes Weiss and his successors, despite the resistance the majority of the guild which saw “Apocalypticism” as degrading the teaching of Jesus and early Christianity. Johannes Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period A.D. 30-150 (trans. Frederick C. Grant, 2 vols; New York: Harper, 1959; German, 1914); summarized in Paul and Jesus (trans. H. J. Chaytor; London and New York: Harper, 1909). See also Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (trans. Richard Hyde Hiers and David Larrimore Holland; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971; German, 1900). For a good analysis of Weiss’s work see Berthold Lannert, Die Wiederentdeckung der neutestamentlichen Eschatologie durch Johannes Weiss (Tübingen: Francke, 1989). The most recent authoritative study of Jewish Apocalypticism is John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998). Without making any claim regarding how much Paul knew about the teaching of the historical Jesus, one can note that failing to acknowledge Paul’s Apocalypticism has the effect of divorcing his teaching from Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom (an apocalyptic proclamation). Thus, for instance, Rom 8:1–11 emphasizes that “God is the enabler and compeller of obedience” as in the interpretation of Ezek 36–37 in 1 QH 12:30–37. See Preston M. Sprinkle, Paul and Judaism Revisited: A Study of Divine and Human Agency in Salvation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2013), 202–03. As we shall see in Volume II, this work is especially helpful for an interpretation of the role of the Spirit in 7:6–8:13 and also of 2:1–3:31 (Sprinkle’s emphasis on soteriology) through a comparison with Qumran.

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Greek apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις), “revelation”—understood as the action or process of uncovering, disclosing, revealing, including through visions. Consequently, when speaking about “Apocalypticism,” one refers to a revealed and revealing vision, which is a worldview exemplified in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Therefore, speaking of Apocalypticism in Paul’s letter is speaking of the matrix of Paul’s gospel, of a worldview, of the “Apocalyptic imagination” that frames Paul’s discourse in Romans, as was the case in Jewish Apocalypticism—an essential point underscored by John Collins.11 From the perspective of the apocalyptic worldview, during the end-time (the last period of history; the last generation) the world is the arena of supernatural forces, including evil powers that can only be overcome by divine intervention (eventually working with and through humans) that culminates in the eschatological judgment. In various apocalyptic books, this matrix of the apocalyptic imagination was filled with all kinds of apocalyptic contents—such as visions explained by angels, cosmic catastrophe, and vivid eschatological judgment, otherworldly journeys by seers, as diversely depicted in apocalyptic books such as Daniel, Enoch, Fourth Ezra, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Dead Sea Scrolls and, in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, and gospel passages such as Mark 13. It is because of this diversity in contents, that together with John Collins, we must define “apocalyptic” as the designation of a faith/vision (imagination) grounded in a figurative world characterized by an apocalyptic matrix, pattern, or structure. Consequently, when, together with a sizable group of Western scholars,12 we designate Paul’s teaching as “apocalyptic,” we do not do so because Paul’s teaching would have the same “apocalyptic content” as Jewish apocalyptic books, but rather because Paul’s teaching is infused by an “apocalyptic faith/vision” (or imagination) and is framed by an apocalyptic matrix. Therefore, to the disappointment of many of their colleagues, the proponents of apocalyptic interpretations of Paul do not give a definition of Apocalypticism in terms of its apocalyptic contents. The response to Ernst Käsemann’s pioneering 1962 lecture in Oslo (translated as “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic”) is typical. This lecture was followed by a fierce debate, in which renowned scholars such as Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs accused Käsemann of failing to provide a “proper” (content-based!) definition of Apocalypticism and eschatology.13 But, how could Käsemann do so? Although he was not using Collins’s vocabulary (published much later), Käsemann was striving to elucidate the apocalyptic matrix of primitive Christianity! Similar beside-the-point criticisms of apocalyptic 11

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I follow closely John Collins’ article “Apocalypticism: Beginnings in Judaism and Christianity,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, a précis of his authoritative The Apocalyptic Imagination. It is to be noted that the first edition of his book had the more precise subtitle “An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity,” from which I borrow the term “matrix” above. As we shall see (primarily in Chapter 7) Russian and Greek Orthodox scholars have developed similar interpretations without using the designation “apocalyptic.” Ernst Käsemann, “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” New Testaments Questions of Today (trans. W. J. Montague; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 108–37. This translation has the advantage of including additional footnotes by Käsemann referring to the objections of G. Ebeling and E. Fuchs and responding to these objections. See the translation of this debate in Robert W. Funk, Apocalypticism. Journal for Theology and the Church, vol. 6 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969) including contributions by Gerhard Ebeling, Frank M. Cross, David Freedman, Robert w. Funk, Ernst Fuchs, Ernst Kasemann, and Hans Dieter Betz.

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interpretations of Paul continue. Most recently, in sarcastic comments, N. T. Wright (as a way of defending his covenantal community-centered interpretation as “the only true” interpretation) basically dismissed Douglas Campbell’s apocalyptic rereading of Paul because, Wright says, Campbell fails to define (in terms of contents!) what he means by “apocalyptic.”14 We will come back to all the issues in this debate as we progressively elucidate the characteristics of the matrix of Paul’s apocalyptic faith/vision (imagination). Be it enough to flesh out this matrix by saying with J. Christiaan Beker that “Dualism, the cosmic rule of God, and the hope of its imminent coming form the crux of [Jewish] apocalyptic thought.”15 Such a matrix—or apocalyptic faith/vision—should not be understood in terms of fixed contents. For instance, “dualism” is not to be understood as a fixed content, but as always reflecting the contextual situations of the apocalyptists. Thus, Beker explains apocalyptic dualism by saying that “the apocalyptist has a profound awareness of the discrepancy between what is and what should be.”16 Dualism as a part of the apocalyptic matrix can be filled with many different contents. Consequently, when speaking of Paul’s Apocalypticism with Käsemann, Beker, and D. Campbell, I am not suggesting that he adopted specific apocalyptic theological content. Rather, I want to say that Paul adopted an apocalyptic matrix and filled it in his own particular way with theological contents. For instance, in terms of an apocalyptic matrix, Paul envisions the human predicament as a bondage to evil powers. But he filled this matrix by speaking not only of a bondage to “rulers” (ἀρχαὶ) and to “[evil] powers” of all kinds (δυνάμεις; ἐξουσίαι; Rom 8:38–39, 1 Cor 15:24)— referring to tropes found in Jewish apocalyptic literature—but also and primarily of “slavery to sin” (Rom 6:12–18) which becomes a major theme in the letter (at least in Rom 3–8), while “death” is envisioned as one of these evil powers (8:38) and also as the ultimate consequence of slavery to sin and these powers (6:16). Following the apocalyptic matrix, Paul envisions humans, including believers, as helpless under such powers. But he also envisions the hope of redemption in his own way! As we shall see, for him believers through their faith (“faith/vision”) can recognize (can “see”) the resurrected Christ or the Spirit as intervening in transformative divine interventions that free (“redeem”) believers and others around them from many of the powers that keep them in bondage—even though “death,” “the last enemy to be destroyed” still has power upon believers and everybody else (1 Cor 15:26). Then it becomes clear that, far from envisioning that catastrophic destruction is coming in the imminent future (the definitions of “apocalyptic” in the English dictionaries), although he is still speaking about God’s wrath and about the coming judgment, Paul recasts these apocalyptic contents in his particular way of filling the apocalyptic matrix. Paul’s apocalyptic teaching envisions that such catastrophic destruction by evil powers is taking place 14

15 16

Wright sarcastically writes about Campbell’s use of the term “apocalyptic”: “The blessed word ‘apocalyptic’ has become so exhausted that it seems to be wandering around in a daze, unsure of its own identity, landing accidental support to this or that theory, forgetting the way back to its own front door, indeed appearing to forget that it ever had a real front door, or a home, in the first place,” Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 189. See pp. 187–218 for his complete comments on Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Beker, Paul, 138. Beker, Paul, 136.

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now, in the present, and that in the present apocalyptic time God intervenes, though the resurrected Christ (Messiah) and the Spirit, to free (to redeem) humans from bondage to such evil powers. These preliminary suggestions begin to show some of the particular ways in which Paul adopted (Jewish) Apocalypticism as a matrix and a faith/vision that could accommodate what Beker calls “his primordial experience of the Christ-event [that] nourishes, intensifies, and modifies Paul’s traditional apocalyptic language.”17 As a matrix and a faith/vision, this Apocalypticism of Paul pervades all of his discourse in Romans. Of course, when this discourse is understood as forming a theological argument (as forensic theological interpretations do) or a rhetorical and ideological discourse (as inclusive covenantal community interpretations do), the apocalyptic character of this discourse disappears. It is only when we take note how Paul’s discourse is framed by themes and figures by studying the thematic and figurative logic of the letter that we can hope to discern Paul’s apocalyptic figurative world in all its particularity and to share in Paul’s faith/vision.

(C) Procedures for a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic Beker’s 1980 book, Paul the Apostle, played a crucial role in explaining why a study of Paul’s letters as religious discourses demands a different exegetical approach: it demands what is called in Chapter 1 within-the-text exegetical methodologies—including a combination of literary, narrative, history of religion, and structural critical methods. In order to elucidate Paul’s figurative world and faith/vision one needs to use a methodology that is drastically different from those used in the two other interpretive lines of reasoning.

Contingency and coherence: Paul’s hermeneutic Beker opened the possibility of this new kind of critical interpretation by introducing a most insightful distinction between contingency and coherence. Beker begins his methodological comments by stating that, to discuss in a preliminary way the character of Paul’s thought, I propose that its specificity is marked by two components—contingency and coherence—and their interaction. . . . His hermeneutic consists in the constant interaction between the coherent center of the gospel and its contingent interpretation.18

This “simple” proposal is groundbreaking! Beker’s proposal to read Romans (and other letters) to elucidate Paul’s hermeneutic is simply brilliant. It is a methodological breakthrough that opens totally new vistas on Paul and his letters for critical exegetes.19 One might wonder if my statement is hyperbolic. Did I not discuss hermeneutical

17 18 19

Beker, Paul, 15–16. Beker, Paul, 11. Of course, simple believers through the centuries (especially mystics and Greek Orthodox) have intuitively embraced these features of Paul’s letters through contemplative readings (see Part III).

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issues from the beginning of this book (including in Chapters 1 and 2)? Of course, I did. But I “merely” discussed our hermeneutic—that is, the way in which we readers make sense of Romans, whenever (from Paul’s time to today) we read or hear the words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs of this letter as we follow the flow of its entire discourse. I discussed many aspects of our hermeneutic. By contrast, for Beker, we need to focus our attention on elucidating “Paul’s hermeneutic.” In order to understand more clearly the importance of Beker’s proposal, it is helpful to keep in mind that Chapters 1 and 2 emphasized that our hermeneutic always involves three dimensions—three kinds of interpretive choices. Reading for all of us involves making (1) “analytical textual choices” among the wealth of textual features as we identify what is most significant for us in the text of Paul’s letter; we, critical interpreters, strive to make explicit our analytical textual choices; (2) “hermeneutical theological choices” that establish among plausible alternatives what is for us in our particular situations the most meaningful understanding of each theological theme, because it addresses theological concerns that we and people around us (consciously or not) have; (3) “contextual choices” that establish among potentially valuable teachings what is for us and our particular situations the most valuable or helpful teaching to address contextual problems that (consciously or not) are of particular concerns for us. Although I did not use Beker’s vocabulary, it is clear that the “contextual choices” are what Beker calls contingent: they are related to the concrete concerns that interpreters have in a particular context, namely, a contingent situation. This is also true for “hermeneutical theological choices” which are related to existential concerns that interpreters have in their particular life situations— also in their contingent situations. By contrast the “analytical textual choices” deal with the stable core of the interpretation, namely the coherence of the text. Beker complicates our threefold model through his great insight that Paul himself was also interpreting, and therefore that he followed his own hermeneutic. Interpreting what? Actually, two things: Scripture and the gospel. As is clear from all of Paul’s quotations or allusions, he was interpreting what he calls the “Holy Scriptures” (1:2), and he used for this purpose a specific scriptural hermeneutic (understood differently by the forensic, covenantal community, and realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations, as we shall see). Beker recognizes this aspect of Paul’s hermeneutic (for instance, in his discussion of Paul and the Law, which includes the Law as found in the Hebrew Bible). But he is going much farther. Indeed, Beker recognized that Paul was interpreting and reinterpreting in various contingent situations a stable and coherent set of basic convictions, his figurative world and faith/vision that at times he calls “my gospel” (2:16). Beker’s point is that, as he wrote his letters, Paul was interpreting and reinterpreting this stable and coherent gospel—“the core” of his teaching—each time for a specific contingent situation. Each letter represents Paul’s contingent teaching aimed at addressing specific contextual issues, be it in Thessalonica, Galatia, Corinth, or Rome. But each of these contingent teachings is always and necessarily framed by Paul’s figurative world—what Beker called “the coherent core” of Paul’s teaching. When formulating a contingent teaching, for instance, for the Romans in the capital of the empire, Paul was interpreting in a specific way “the core” of the gospel, and applying its stable/core teaching to the Romans’ particular needs by coherently following the

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same hermeneutic—the same particular ways [or particular patterns or structures] of relating the core of the gospel to contingent situations, whatever they might be. Thus this hermeneutic is framed by the coherent core of the gospel. Since this core is apocalyptic, Paul’s hermeneutic is appropriately designated as a realized-apocalyptic/ messianic hermeneutic. For Beker, it is unfortunate that most critical biblical exegetes do not make a distinction between the contingent and coherent dimensions of Paul’s letters, and therefore end up ignoring the coherent core of the gospel that structures Paul’s hermeneutic and ultimately end up ignoring this hermeneutic itself. Let us clarify the different ways in which, for Beker, the contingent and coherent dimensions of Paul’s letters are studied. First let us take note that what Beker calls “contingent” dimensions of the meaning of Romans are those studied by what we called in Chapter 1 behind-the-text and in-front-of-the-text exegetical methodologies. Behind-the-text features include Paul’s theological argument—that is, his theological teaching on issues that he felt needed to be addressed for the churches in Rome, and especially for Jewish Christ-followers who might have looked with suspicion at the teaching of the apostle to the Gentiles. Therefore behind-the-text methods—including the so-called historical methods—aim at discerning Paul’s specific (contingent) intention: Why did Paul write Romans? What did he hope to achieve for the Romans through this theological teaching? What kind of theological instruction did Paul seek to convey through his letter to help the Roman congregations address issues in their particular contingent situation around 56/57 CE in Rome? In brief, Paul’s goal was to correct misunderstandings of the gospel that the Romans—and especially the Jewish Christ-followers in Rome—might have had. Similarly, as we saw in Chapter 4, in-front-of-the-text features include all the rhetorical and ideological aspects of the text aimed at affecting Paul’s readers in their contingent situations in Rome—in particular the Gentile Christ-followers, and in different ways readers from subsequent generations. In-front-of-the-text methods—including rhetoric, ideological, cultural anthropology, sociopolitical, feminist, postcolonial critical methods—aim at discerning how, through the rhetorical and ideological features of the letter, Paul sought to affect in certain ways the Roman congregations in their particular (contingent) contexts by helping them perceive in a different way (a countercultural covenantal way) their community life and its mission. Thus, behindthe-text and in-front-of-the-text exegetical studies make important contributions to the study of the contingent features of Romans. But all these exegetical studies leave aside another meaning-producing dimension of Paul’s text: its coherent core. Beker’s insightful contribution was to point out that these two kinds of contingent approaches (the theological teaching of Romans and its rhetoric) would not hold together—would not have any coherence—if it were not for the coherent core of Paul’s teaching. What gives coherence to Paul’s teaching? For Beker there is no doubt: it is his religious experience. Paul’s teaching owes its coherence to his faith/vision—rooted in, but not limited to, his transformative experience of seeing Christ on the Road to Damascus. This faith/vision and figurative world as a set of convictions engendered by his religious experiences frames all his discourses and actually all his life and ministry. Thus this faith/vision would have been “futile” and “senseless” (cf. 1:21) if he had not

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integrated it in the contingency of his own life and of his addressees’ lives. To do so, he needed to reflect theologically on his convictions and enter in conversation with his addressees by formulating for them and their contingent situations what Beker calls “doctrinal systems”20 and theological arguments and teachings (studied in Chapter 3), which they could appropriate and integrate into their lives as believers. Similarly, for the sake of the Roman congregations and their contingent situations, Paul also needed to envision how to live out these convictions in communities and for the sake of others through mission (as studied in Chapter 4). Thus, as Beker argues in a well-balanced presentation, coherence and contingency are necessarily interrelated in Paul’s overall hermeneutic, because his hermeneutic is the interface of coherence (the realizedapocalyptic/messianic figurative world and faith/vision) and contingency (theological formulations of the gospel for particular situations and the rhetorical effective words based on this figurative world and faith/vision). Yet we have to resist Beker’s efforts to develop an interpretation that would be “the only true interpretation,” because it alone would take into account what gives coherence to Paul’s discourse, namely his faith/vision. This is the hermeneutical trap in which all critical scholars fall when thinking that being critical is striving to formulate an interpretation that has a greater degree of probability than other interpretations— and therefore would be the truest interpretation, commonly assumed to be “the only true interpretation”! As the study of the history of the receptions of Romans has shown, all interpreters (including critical exegetes) always make interpretive choices as they develop interpretations that are all the more legitimate and plausible when they acknowledge having done so. Therefore choosing as most significant the textual features that provide coherence to Paul’s teaching is not denying the legitimacy and plausibility of the interpretations focused on the various textual features that express the contingency of Paul’s teaching. A reading of Romans for its coherent core, that is, for Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/messianic figurative world and faith/vision, is legitimate and plausible in and of itself. It does not need to be complemented by readings focused on contingent features! Far from being helpful, such considerations would prevent a consistent focus on the textual features that express the coherent core of Paul’s teaching.

The coherent core of Paul’s teaching: His religious experience How does one identify the coherent core of Paul’s teaching? In other words, how does Paul’s religious experience give coherence to his discourse in Romans? What kind of theoretical and methodological grounding can we find for such a study? To address these questions, Beker appeals (often in footnotes) to structural anthropology as well as to semiotic and semantic research. The first step is to recognize that an experience is truly a religious experience when it generates for believers a set of basic convictions. Religious convictions are, by definition, views that are self-evident for the believers who hold them; they cannot be denied without also denying the religious experience which generated them. In my own study, I add that such convictions—self-evident truths, gut feelings, or proprioceptive perceptions

20

Beker, Paul, 14.

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(what is felt to be true with one’s entire being)—never stand alone; they are always part of a system.21 Consequently, elucidating the “coherent core” of Paul’s teaching involves identifying his system of convictions—also called “semantic universe” by the semiotician A. J. Greimas, or “mythical structure” by the anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss.22 Both Greimas and Lévi-Strauss make explicit that the most characteristic and the most significant feature of a system of convictions is its structure (or matrix, as John Collins would say), which governs the way in which these convictions define each other through their interrelations. Beker’s definitions are helpful at this point: Paul’s coherent center must be viewed as a symbolic structure in which a primordial experience (Paul’s call) is brought into language in a particular way. . . . The symbolic structure . . . is a result of the translation of Paul’s primordial experience into his basal language and constitutes for him the necessary interpretation of the Christ-event. The primordial experience of the Christ-event then nourishes, intensifies, and modifies Paul’s traditional apocalyptic language.23

Let us ponder Beker’s essential programmatic statement. Note that “Paul’s coherent center” comes out of—is engendered by—a “primordial experience” that includes the religious experience of Paul’s initial encounter with the resurrected Christ (the “Christevent” described in Gal 1:12–16; 1 Cor 9:1; 15:8 and alluded to in Rom 1:1b). But this primordial experience is not limited to the Road to Damascus event. As we shall see, for Paul there are other primordial religious experiences—other Christ-events—which confirm the first one. Beker continues by underscoring that these religious experiences are shared with others only insofar as they are “brought into language in a particular way”: namely, in a symbolic structure and in basal language. Note that this symbolic structure and this basal language are not created ex nihilo: Paul rooted them, on the one hand, in his primordial experience and, on the other hand, in the traditional Jewish apocalyptic language that he modified to account for his experience of the Christ-event. Beker continues, I called Paul’s coherent center a symbolic structure that contains a “deep” structure of Christian apocalyptic and a “surface” structure of a variety of symbols. The “surface” structure . . . operates as an interpretive field that mediates between the coherent center and its relevance to contingent situations, that is, the authentic truth of the coherent center aims at relevance according to the demands of the dialogical [contingent] situation.24

21 22

23 24

Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel, 9–27. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 272–77, 361–62, and Daniel Patte, The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts: Greimas’s Structural Semiotics, Semeia Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 105–28. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology (Garden City and New York: Basic Books, 1963), 202–31. See Beker, Paul, 16. Beker, Paul, 15–16. Beker, Paul, 17.

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Here Beker becomes more specific regarding the way in which Paul’s coherent center is expressed in Paul’s letters. Beker takes note that the symbolic structure involves several layers. It has a “deep” structure—and therefore a structure which is hidden under the surface of the discourse. This is what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss calls the mythical structure of a religious discourse, or what the semiotician A. J. Greimas calls the “fundamental and narrative semantics structures,” and what Beker calls more generally basal language. Identifying these “deep” (hidden) structures, while not impossible, is at best quite difficult to do in an intelligible way (as both Lévi-Strauss and Greimas end up conceding). But “Paul’s coherent center” is also necessarily expressed in “surface” structures. These are more directly accessible, because they are expressed in the form of what Beker calls “a variety of symbols,” which (following structural semiotics) I propose to subdivide into thematic and figurative symbols. In sum, elucidating the coherent core of Paul’s teaching is a matter of reading Romans for its thematic symbols and figurative symbols, so as to discern how together they form a coherent vision—Paul’s faith/vision, which gives shape to his realizedapocalyptic/messianic figurative world in an in-between age and time, the “messianic age/time.”25 What gives coherence to this figurative world can also be understood as a thematic and figurative logic. Thus, a critical study of Paul’s figurative world can be envisioned as a quest for the thematic and figurative logic of Romans.26

Procedures for a thematic and figurative reading of Romans To understand how to proceed with a critical study of Paul’s figurative world in Romans, we need a clear understanding of what a figurative world is and of the ways it finds expression in a text or discourse. Let us start with two negative definitions of “figurative world”: it is not something that we can talk about (as we talk about theological concepts of the forensic interpretation); and it is not something that we can act out (as we are expected to act out the vocation and mission to which the rhetorical/ ideological features of the letter call the readers/believers). We cannot talk about or act out a figurative world, because it is something that can only be contemplated and entered. No wonder then that many of those who read Romans for its figurative world are mystics and contemplatives who meditate upon Paul’s text until they share in his religious experience. Such believers read Romans with the hope that through contemplation Paul’s figurative world might become their own. By contrast, critical biblical studies investigate such mystic readings of Romans and describe the features of the text in which such readings are grounded. Thus, the goal of our quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic is neither to promote such religious experience nor to challenge its value. Critical biblical studies simply seek to bring to light these religious dimensions of Romans. One does not need to be a contemplative to become aware of Paul’s figurative world and to describe its characteristics, so that it might be compared

25

26

See Agamben, 62; see also 62–78 where he clarifies the relationship between chronos and kairos (as messianic time). As the critical study of the theological argument of Romans was a quest for its “theological logic” in Chapter 3, or as the rhetorical and ideological study of Romans was a quest for its “rhetoric and ideological logic” in Chapter 4.

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with other figurative worlds. Such comparisons leave us with a choice. On the basis of interpretive ethical considerations, we will be in a position to choose whether to share in Paul’s figurative world or to reject it (eventually in favor of another one). Following Beker, our quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic involves a critical study of Paul’s figurative world as conveyed by his letter through its symbols— including thematic symbols and figurative symbols—and the logic that holds these symbols together to form a coherent vision. To what can we compare Paul’s figurative world? In view of its abstract character, an analogy might be helpful. The presentation of a figurative world in a text is like a pictorial representation. In his letter Paul’s vision is like something drawn or painted or projected on a surface. As any pictorial representation, Paul’s vision has, in his text, two kinds of coordinates called in visual arts a “picture plane” and a “pictorial space.”27 1. The “picture plane” is framed, in lay terminology, by surface coordinates (2-D coordinates) that one can measure by applying a ruler to the picture (height, width, diagonal, distances among surface features). In Paul’s letter, the interrelation of the thematic symbols establishes the picture plane—or thematic plane—that frames Paul’s figurative world by representing on the flat surface of the text (a string of words, phrases, sentences) the interrelations of personages (including God), locations, and events in time. Pointing out in Paul’s letter the textual features that belong to its thematic plane will be the first step in the thematic interpretive process presented below. But, as two dimensional, themes are flat (flat figures). A third dimension is necessary. 2. The “pictorial space” is the figurative space that seems to recede backward from the picture plane, giving a sense of depth and distance. In lay terminology, the pictorial space is shaped by depth coordinates showing volume and mass, distinguishing foreground from background, through the use of perspective. This three-dimensional space in paintings is never “real” (real in the sense that depths and distances in the world are real), yet a pictorial space can convincingly convey a model of the way the real world looks, and therefore a world that one can imagine entering.28 Similarly, in Paul’s letter, the interrelated figures (figurative symbols) construct a “figurative space” (a textual pictorial space)—which in hermeneutics and biblical studies is more spontaneously designated as “figurative world”—that conveys the depth, rich texture, and thickness of Paul’s figurative world. Indeed, as we shall see, each given figure makes sense (produces meaning) and contributes to the construction of the figurative world only through its interrelations with other figures as well as through interrelations with other texts. Consequently, by definition the figurative world has depth and rich texture. It is made up of thick figure—the flat figures (themes) have become thick.

27 28

An analogy suggested by the artist Elizabeth McNaron Patte. I paraphrase some of the lecture, “Pictorial Space,” given by the painter Sheila Butler at the University of Arizona, October 12, 2012. See kobus.ca/teaching/ista352/fall12/lectures/Pictorial-Space-talk. pdf (accessed Jan 2017)

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In the case of Paul’s letter to the Romans, the flat thematic plane (picture plane) that frames Paul’s figurative world is formed by the surface organization through which thematic features are interrelated on the plane of the text, including contrasts between the beginning and end of thematic units. For instance, as we will see below, in 1:1–7 (the first thematic unit) Paul’s self-description (1:1) is contrasted with the description of the Romans (1:6–7); in 1:8–18a (the second thematic unit), the God to whom Paul gives thanks (1:8) is contrasted with the wrathful God (1:18a); and so on and so forth. Such “intratextual” features of the flat thematic plane provide a first glimpse at the overall shape of Paul’s figurative world (as the picture plane does for a painting) and at the way the thick figures of the text are framed. The depth and texture of this figurative world appears when one focuses upon the figurative world (pictorial space) of the letter (a) by paying attention to the way in which each individual figure (e.g., “Christ”) becomes a thick figure; it acquires a depth dimension by evoking intertexts (as “Christ” as a figure evokes the biblical story of David and prophetic texts, as well as Jewish apocalyptic traditions; 1:1–3); (b) by recognizing that most textual features (words and phrases) have the potential to be figurative, and thus of evoking other intertexts, further constructing a depth dimension; and (c) by acknowledging that this multidimensional figurative world makes sense for readers only insofar as they enter it, each of them bringing into it their own particular figurative world. Consequently, the outcome of a figurative reading is necessarily a “fusion of [figurative] horizons” (Gadamer).29 As art-connoisseurs lose themselves in the painting as they contemplate it—and often say they enter it—so it is with believers who enter Paul’s figurative world by contemplating his text with its thematic plane and figurative world. A critical study such as ours does not involve contemplating or entering Paul’s figurative world as mystics and contemplatives do by immersing themselves in Paul’s discourse. It simply describes the thematic and figurative symbols and their interrelations. Instead of entering Paul’s figurative world, a critical study involves deconstructing this world,30 symbol by symbol, by extracting from Paul’s discourse the themes (flat figures) and the thick figures that make up this figurative world, and then reconstructing this figurative world (this picture) into a figurative discourse which makes sense for us as readers. Consequently, such a quest for Paul’s thematic and figurative logic demands an acknowledgment of the contextual character of our own interpretations (as any interpretation). It is only if we locate Paul’s figurative world in our present cultural and religious context that, as critical interpreters, we can (a) reconstruct it in our own discourse, (b) see Paul’s figurative world, and (c) critically enter it. And for me and most of us today (because of global communication), the present context of our discourse happens to be multicultural and multireligious. Thus my interpretation of Paul’s figurative world will necessarily reflect the fact that I was raised during World War II and studied in France then in Geneva, taught in Congo-Brazzaville, studied and taught in different cities in the United States, as

29 30

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 397–448. It is not by chance that interpreters who focus upon the thematic and figurative logic of Paul’s letters appeal to postmodern, deconstructionist philosophers.

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well as for shorter periods in southern Africa (South Africa and Botswana) and the Philippines, and spent time all over Western and Eastern (Orthodox) Europe.31

(D) Thematic symbols framing Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vision Themes (flat figures), which form the picture plane that frame the pictorial space of Paul’s figurative world and its thick figures, are often overlooked because they seem self-evident. Beker lists a few examples of such “thematic symbols” (that I call “themes” or “flat figures”): “righteousness, justification, reconciliation, freedom, adoption, being in Christ, being with Christ, glory, and so on.”32 Are these truly themes (flat figures)? Indeed, they are. But this list can be misleading. These examples can easily be confused with “theological themes” (or theological concepts and doctrinal points) designated by the same terminology (as can be expected, it is Paul’s vocabulary!) and discussed in the forensic theological interpretation (presented in summary form in the first column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for 31 Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,”). Yet the same vocabulary also designates themes that are flat figures and (thick) figures. Then, what is the difference between “theological themes” and “themes” of the figurative world? In brief: they do not produce meaning in the same way. Thus, to avoid confusion I designate themes of the figurative world as either “flat figures” or “theme (flat figure).” From the readers’ perspective, a theological theme has, by itself, a particular meaning or definition; by itself, it refers to something: a particular theological concept or doctrine. For instance, the theological theme righteousness of God in the forensic theological interpretation of 1:17 refers to “the righteousness/acquittal given by God the Judge to believers.” This point is established through grammatical and philological studies of the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ, with the pre-understanding that such a phrase had a similar (and thus stable) meaning in other ancient texts (and especially in biblical LXX texts). Theological themes have a particular and stable meaning and refer to it. By contrast, and still from the readers’ perspective, themes (flat figures)—such as “righteousness [of God], justification, reconciliation, freedom, adoption, being in Christ, and so on” (Beker’s list)—produce meaning on the thematic plane (flat picture plane) of Paul’s figurative world through their interrelationships with each other in Paul’s texts: in short, through intratextual relations.33 Thus the question is: how is “righteousness” related to other themes (flat figures) found on the thematic plane of the figurative world in this particular text? To recognize it, one needs to deconstruct the text so as to show how righteousness is related to other themes (flat figures) in Paul’s text. From the readers’ perspective, themes (flat figures) make sense by the way the text contrasts them or posits similarities with other themes (flat figures).

31

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This complex context was broadened for me by my constant work during 9 years with 828 scholars from around the world who contributed to The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (2010) of which I was the editor. By making explicit the contextual character of my interpretation, I invite the readers of my proposed realized apocalyptic/messianic commentary to set the picture of Paul’s figurative world in their own context, and then to decide whether or not to enter it. Beker, Paul, 16. As we shall see, the list of themes (flat figures) is significantly longer than the above list.

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The themes (flat figures) are readily recognizable, because they are interrelated on the surface of the text—its flat thematic or picture plane. It is simply a matter of paying attention to the thematic organization—that is, how Paul sets up contrasts and similarities among themes (flat figures) in what we can call “thematic units”—the major building blocks of the letter as thematic and figurative discourse. Each such unit is identifiable by the inverted parallelisms between its opening and closing: their themes (flat figures) have parallel (similar) features as well as inverted (different) features. A couple of examples clarify this point. Rom 1:1–7 is the first thematic unit. Since it is fully analyzed below, a few general observations will suffice. The beginning of this thematic unit is readily identifiable, since 1:1 is the beginning of Paul’s discourse! Its end is 1:6–7. Why? Because Paul contrasts himself (1:1) with his addressees (1:6–7). This is the first set of inverted parallelisms on the thematic plane of the letter. There is no true contrast except between two comparable items. In this case, in a general way, we can say these verses set in parallelism two kinds of humans—Paul and the Romans—although as we shall see they have much more in common. This parallelism is inverted by the fact that the text posits differences between Paul and the Romans. The inversions are marked by the way Paul and the Romans are contrasted. Paul as author of the letter takes the initiative and presents himself as an apostle. This selfpresentation is set in contrast (in inversion) with the Romans as intended receivers of the letter, “to all those in Rome” (πᾶσιν τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν Ῥώμῃ, 1:7) who are passive (by contrast with Paul) and apparently simple members of the communities of Christfollowers in Rome (rather than being an “apostle” as Paul is). The parallelisms are marked by the use of similar qualifiers for Paul and the Romans. These parallelisms are actually surprising. In the same way that Paul is “called” (1:1) so the Romans are “called” (1:6 and 1:7): both have received a vocation. Paul was “called apostle” (presumably called by God); the Romans were “called saints” (called by Jesus Christ, 1:6, or God). There is certainly a difference between these two kinds of calls (apostle vs. saints). Yet Paul posits that his own religious experience (the Christ-event of being called on the Road to Damascus) is not unique: he posits that the Romans have received calls similar to his, and we can already begin to wonder whether their experience was also marked by similar Christ-events. Furthermore, Paul posits that his vocation as apostle is similar to their vocation as saints—while we were expecting that the vocation of apostle would be vastly superior. Yet in Paul’s figurative world, as we shall see as we progress in our reading, the vocation of apostle and the vocation of saints are indeed similar—for example, they have received a similar “charisma” (“spiritual gift”) that they are expected to interchange (1:11–12). Furthermore, both Paul and the Romans are marked by obedience—Paul as a “slave” (of Christ, obedient to him); the Romans as having “obedience of faith” (1:5). This first set of inverted parallelisms begins to draw a picture of the way Paul envisions his relationship with the Romans, as well as their respective relationship with God and Jesus Christ—intratextual relations. This first sketch is surprising, especially for all of us who, following theological interpretations, are so accustomed to conceive of these relationships in a very hierarchical way. But this is just a very first step in our deconstruction (and reconstruction) of the thematic organization of

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Paul’s discourse. This very incomplete sketch of thematic features of the first set of inverted parallelisms (see below the Commentary) has merely considered a single set of inverted parallelisms—and this very briefly. The analysis of the thematic plane will need to flesh out these observations and continue with the study of the second set of inverted parallelisms (1:8 vs. 1:17–18a). This second thematic unit is recognizable by the way it contrasts different views of God: 1:8 exclusively presents God as a God toward whom one can be thankful; while 1:17–18a presents God as both righteous (a righteousness—a righteous intervention—for which one can be thankful) and wrathful (an anger—a wrathful intervention—that one should fear). A whole series of similar thematic units follows until the end of the letter. In other words, the flat thematic plane of Paul’s figurative world is framed by dozens of inverted parallelisms. Consequently the Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary presented below and in the next volumes will be subdivided into thematic units marked by such inverted parallelisms. As will be explained as we progress, because of large-scale inverted parallelisms, Romans is subdivided on a larger thematic scale into the following large parts: Introduction: 1:1-7 Part 1: 1:8–4:25:34 Faith/vision and the Inclusive Saving Power of the Gospel. Part 2: 5:1–8:39: God’s power overcoming the power of sin. Part 3: 9:1–11:36: The mystery of unbelief and the mystery of God’s salvation and wisdom. Part 4: 12:1–15:21: Christian life as a liturgical life in the world Conclusion: 15:22–16:24

This analysis of the thematic units and their themes (flat figures)—the thematic plane that frames Paul’s figurative world—is fascinating, but also somewhat frustrating because of its limitations. What do these relations mean? The picture plane drawn by the themes (flat figures) will fully make sense only when we take into account how it is finished— given depth and thickness, transformed into thick figures of a pictorial space. Indeed, it is only through its apocalyptic/messianic figures that the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation will truly make sense. In fact, figures are much more visible and attractive. But by themselves these figures are rather amorphous, open to a variety of interpretations that need to be filtered out by carefully taking into account how they are framed by the themes (flat figures) and their network of inverted parallelisms. So our study of each section of the letter needs to begin by identifying the thematic framework of inverted parallelisms.

(E) Thick figures giving life through intertexts to Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision Paul’s letter to the Romans is a highly figurative discourse. For interpreters used to reading this letter for its theological argument or for its rhetorical discourse—both concerned with 2-D picture plane features—this might be a surprising statement. But 34

As already suggested, 1:8-4:25 is subdivided in several thematic subunits, the first being 1:8-1:18a.

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figures are found throughout the letter. Not a single verse is without figures, although we easily overlook them. So the question is not: where can we find figures in this text? But: how does one proceed to recognize all these figurative features and then to interpret them? Of course, it is a matter of paying attention to the depth and thickness of the 3-D figurative space. Considering the first few verses of Romans will clarify how to proceed. Earlier in this chapter we noted that the letter opens with a live metaphor: Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ, “Paul, a slave of Christ” (1:1a). Paul is not saying that he is literally a “slave” of Christ, but that his relationship to Christ is slave-like. Discussing a live metaphor is an excellent starting point for understanding how to read Paul’s letter as a figurative discourse. First, it is important to note (a) that a metaphor is the most explicit of figures and (b) that in a figurative reading all figures must be understood as live metaphors. As Mary Gerhart appropriately defines it: “A ‘live metaphor’ preserves the tension in the claim that something ‘is’ and ‘is not’ at the same time.”35 Interpreting a live metaphor involves recognizing and emphasizing the tension it includes between an “is” and an “is not.”36 A contemplative reading (i.e., a figurative reading by believers) sees the tension (Paul is and is not a slave) by taking the time to meditate upon this phrase and thus to acknowledge its figurative character. A critical figurative reading (by scholars) does the same thing by analyzing each figure as a live metaphor so as to appreciate its tension. As briefly mentioned above, in the present case one takes note of the ways in which Paul is not a slave. To do so in a critical way, one needs to identify the intertext that Paul might have used in constructing this thick figure out of his description of his relationship to Christ (in itself a flat figure). In the case of each figure, there is always a series of intertexts that are possible. Since a thick figure involves a is not tension, we need to ask: what is the view of slave (in Paul’s culture and religious milieu) that appears to be in contradiction with what one can expect from the author of this letter, and therefore that appears to be something that Paul should not have meant to say? The intertext formed by the Greco-Roman culture and economic situation provides the best answer. Of course, Paul does not view himself as an abject human being, without honor and value, who had been captured and enslaved by triumphant Roman legions, then bought and sold as chattel—the situation of most slaves in Paul’s time. Such slaves were totally under the power and at the mercy of their master; thus, slaves were abused, neglected, but also maintained as a valued property. Of course, Paul does not want to claim that all these connotations of slavery apply to him: he is not a slave in all these senses. But by saying that he is a slave of Christ Paul surprisingly conveys that, in his view, some of these connotations apply to his relationship with Christ. Somehow he

35 36

Mary Gerhart, “Metaphor,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. By contrast, reading this phrase as an illustration on a theological or rhetorical plane—that is, as a dead metaphor—erases and minimizes the tension: this is what happens when one translates δοῦλος as “servant.” In such cases, there is no tension: Paul “is” (literally) a servant of Christ. Thus, according to the theological interpretation, it is neither surprising nor puzzling that Paul calls himself δοῦλος; the designation “servant” (of Christ or of God)—which was also the self-designation of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible—is an appropriate title for Paul the apostle (see Chapter 3). In such a reading, Paul’s text is not figurative. The same point can be made about the rhetorical/ideological translation of δοῦλος by “slave” in the sense of “slave of Caesar” (see Chapter 4); there is no tension, since this is an honorific title, pointing to his authority as ambassador of Christ (and God).

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sees his relationship to Christ as that of a slave to his master. But which connotations apply? On the basis of the phrase “Paul, a slave of Christ” by itself, we cannot say. A live metaphor is live precisely insofar as it is part of an ongoing interpretive process. A live metaphor is making sense both through its intertextual relations and its intratextual relations with other figures. As our critical figurative reading will progressively show, through this metaphor Paul expressed that he saw himself as totally under the power of Christ (in part because he viewed his experience of the Christ-event on the Road to Damascus as deeply transformative). A figurative reading carefully takes into account the interpretive process represented by each figure in intratextual and intertextual relations with other figures. As is explicit in the case of a metaphor—the simplest and most powerful of figures—any given figure brings together elements of two semantic domains. The metaphor “Paul, a slave of Christ” brings together slavery from the socioeconomic domain and “Christ” from the religious domain. In the process Paul interprets both of these semantic domains in terms of each other: he chooses to see as most significant (and thus he emphasizes) certain features of each domain. Which ones? When examining the metaphor by itself one cannot truly say. But this becomes apparent when one considers this particular metaphor as a part of the figurative world that Paul paints. Each metaphor and each figure reflect how Paul interprets these two semantic domains in terms of each other— so the thickness of the figure. In our example, Paul interprets his relationship with Christ by envisioning it in terms of certain features of his culture—here the institution of slavery; and simultaneously, he interprets these features of his culture—slavery—in terms of his relationship with Christ. Each time one uses metaphors (and any other kind of figures), one finds this ongoing process; a particular figurative hermeneutic is at work. Considering a second figure in these opening words, “Christ,” reveals additional characteristics of Paul’s figurative hermeneutic and, therefore, how to proceed with interpreting figures. “Christ” is a live figure. It connotes “one who has been anointed.” This live figure is open ended: Anointed with what? Anointed by whom? When? How? By definition a live figure does not make sense (produce meaning) by itself. It is through its relationships with other live figures in Paul’s text (intratextual relations) but also and especially in other texts (intertextual relations) that this live figure is fleshed out. Therefore, the analytical interpretation of any live figure involves taking note of the network of intratextual and intertextual relations in which it is located. When we will consider the network of intratextual relations in 1:1–4, we shall see that the figure Christ is fleshed out by its association with the figures (a) the gospel of God, (b) God’s Son our Lord, (c) the prophets in Holy Scriptures, (d) David, (e) the Spirit of holiness, (f) power, and (g) resurrection from the dead. This network of intratextual relations already makes clear that Paul’s figurative hermeneutic is messianic. It is centered on the figure of Christ/Messiah. It envisions the present time of Paul and his readers as belonging to the messianic or apocalyptic time—the “endtime,” a time period comparable to the “biblical time” (also called the “prophets’ time”), an earlier period that encompassed the time going from the creation to the prophets,

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when God acted in the world and interacted in history with Israel.37 The fact that, for Paul, now is the messianic or apocalyptic time is glaringly expressed by his mention of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. What time is it? A time when the resurrection from the dead has already begun! Paul and his readers—including us—are living in the apocalyptic time (so the designation “realized-apocalyptic”). We cannot turn back the clock! We live in a time after Christ’s resurrection. The figure Christ is fleshed out and works as a figure also because of the network of intertextual relations in which it is set. As is shown by the heavily Jewish vocabulary— Christ/Messiah, prophets in Holy Scriptures, David, Son of God (a title of Davidic kings, Ps 2:7), spirit of holiness, resurrection from the dead—Paul is thinking and writing as a Jew. More precisely, he thinks as an apocalyptic Jew (rather than a Pharisaic Jew or an early rabbinic Jew). Yes, he is writing in Greek, but he does so even as he is thinking in Hebrew or Aramaic, so much so that each of his words is in “Judeo-Greek” and involves a double entendre: its meaning in Greek and its meaning in Hebrew/ Aramaic.38 This is what Jacob Taubes beautifully expressed at the beginning of his book on Romans through an anecdote. As he was walking in Zurich with his professor, Emil Staiger, an excellent Hellenist, Staiger said to him that he was reading Paul’s letters, and exclaimed with disappointment: “But that isn’t Greek, it’s Yiddish!” To this, Taubes responded: “Yes, Professor, and that’s why I understand it!”39 After quoting Taubes, Agamben explains: “Paul belongs to a Jewish diaspora community that thinks and speaks in Greek (Judeo-Greek) in precisely the same manner that Sephardim would speak Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and the Ashkenazi Yiddish. It is a community that reads and cites the Bible in the Septuagint, which Paul does whenever necessary.”40 This Judeo-Greek, like Yiddish, is a language of exile. There is no need to complain that Paul’s Greek is not an elegant Hellenistic Greek, as Staiger did. Rather one needs to take into account that Paul’s words, phrases, and discursive strategies always involve a double entendre, because it is Judeo-Greek. Agamben continues: “There is nothing more genuinely Jewish than to inhabit the language of exile and to labor it from within, up to the point of confounding its very identity and turning it into more than just a grammatical language: making it a minor language, a jargon (as Kafka called Yiddish), or a poetic language.”41 In sum, through and through Paul’s language is figurative or poetic, since it constantly conveys that something expressed in Greek is and is not what Paul means, because it always conveys a surplus of meaning, namely a meaning from a Jewish apocalyptic perspective. Before systematically proceeding with our figurative reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans, it is helpful to identify main features of Paul’s Jewish apocalyptic figurative logic. 37

38

39 40 41

In Paul’s perspective as well as in the perspective of most of Apocalyptic Judaism, eschatology is not a point in time but a period. See Richard Hiers, “Day of Judgment,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 2, 79–82. Ironically, I also do so by using English words and thinking in French—and even using French phrases! Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 4. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 4. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 4–5 (emphasis added).

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1. From his opening phrase, “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” (1:1a), Paul invokes Jewish Apocalypticism by claiming that Jesus is the Messiah (Christ). But this phrase does not convey an actual Jewish apocalyptic content. It is true that the expectation of a Messiah is found in the Jewish apocalyptic literature (although it was not prevalent in Pharisaic and early rabbinic Judaism). But there is no single pre-understanding of who/what this Messiah is to be. Jewish apocalyptic texts hold in common the expectation that in the end-time (coming soon, if not yet present) there will be one or several anointed ones, one or several Messiahs: a Davidic Messiah; both a Priestly Messiah and a Davidic Messiah (for the Community of Qumran); and for still other apocalyptic texts, a Son of Man.42 Therefore the claim “Jesus is the Messiah” is not Jewish apocalyptic because of a specific content or belief. In Jewish apocalyptic literature such identification varies. This claim is Jewish apocalyptic only in the sense that it follows a particular pattern of expectation: as in other Jewish apocalyptic texts, some kind of anointed one is expected in the end-time. 2. A second marker of the Jewish apocalyptic character of Paul’s teaching is the claim that Jesus Christ/Messiah was raised from the dead: he was shown to be Son of God “by resurrection from the dead” (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν, 1:4). In both apocalyptic and Pharisaic/early rabbinic Judaism, one finds various kinds of belief regarding life after death and resurrection.43 By affirming (together with all earlier and later Christian traditions) that Christ was “raised from the dead,” Paul conveys that now is the apocalyptic time—the end-time. For Beker this is the definite proof that Paul’s teaching is apocalyptic.44 Again, it is not the specific content of Paul’s claim about the resurrection of Jesus Christ which is comparable to Jewish apocalyptic beliefs—these beliefs vary. Rather Paul’s statement follows the pattern of expectation that there will be some form of life after death—and thus a time after death, and that this time has begun. 3. A third marker of the Jewish apocalyptic character of Paul’s teaching is his repeated concerns for evil powers that attempt to separate us from God—including death. For instance, he lists a whole series of such powers in Rom 8:38–39: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor 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. To this list we can add sin, which Paul often describes as a power that enslaves humans (e.g., 6:12–18). The claim that humans are being freed (an ongoing process in the present) from all these manifestations of evil powers through God’s interventions in Christ (in the past) and also through Christ (in the present of the believers) is an apocalyptic claim.

42

43

44

See Marinus de Jonge, “Messiah,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 4, 777–88. See also Richard A. Horsley, “Messianic Movements in Judaism,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 4, 791–97. See George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Resurrection (Early Judaism and Christianity),” Anchor Bible Dictionary 5, 684–91 (on early Judaism, 684–88). Beker, Paul, 135–81.

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Evil in its many forms is so powerful that it can only be overcome by direct divine intervention. This is by contrast with the presuppositions of forensic theological interpretations (for which individuals are called to resist and overcome evil with divine help) and with those of inclusive covenantal community interpretations (for which communities are called to resist and overcome evil with divine help). Here we take note that Paul’s view of evil and its powers has an apocalyptic character. It is comparable to the expectation of the Community of Qumran and other apocalyptic Jews, who believed that they lived in the end-time, a time when God intervenes to destroy all these evil powers. It is noteworthy that in 2 Cor 6:15—“What agreement does Christ have with Beliar?”—Paul is using the name used by the apocalyptic Community of Qumran to personify the powers of evil, a particular Aramaic form of Belial.45 Yet once again it is not the specific identification of these evil powers which marks Paul’s teaching as having a Jewish apocalyptic character, but rather the pattern: there are powers that oppress humans and divine interventions alone can free humans from these powers. And this is what God is doing now, because we are in the messianic time, the last generation, the end-time, when God intervenes according to all God’s promises. 4. A fourth and most significant marker of the Jewish apocalyptic character of Paul’s teaching is the way in which Paul uses Scripture: again, it is a matter of pattern, this time a hermeneutical pattern. In the opening words of Romans Paul mentions that the promises of Scriptures are being fulfilled: “the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets (προεπηγγείλατο διὰ τῶν προφητῶν αὐτοῦ) in the Holy Scriptures (ἐν γραφαῖς ἁγίαις)” (1:1d–2). Paul’s scriptural hermeneutic is comparable to the scriptural hermeneutic found in Apocalyptic Judaism. As the Community of Qumran did, Paul reads “the Holy Scriptures” with the expectation that, in the messianic time (the present time, the time of “the last generation” for the Community of Qumran), scriptural promises are in the process of being fulfilled through divine interventions of the same “type” than those that took place in Scriptures. For Paul, the promises found in the prophets about the Messiah, son of David, have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ (1:2–4)— although in what sense they are fulfilled needs to be carefully assessed. This statement in 1:1d–2 is interpreted very differently in forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community interpretations, as compared with realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretations. Everybody agrees that 1:1d–2 means that prophetic promises have been “fulfilled” in some sense in/by the gospel of God about God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Forensic theological interpretations read these words as a warrant that establishes or verifies the truth of the gospel; the gospel “fulfills”—in the sense of supersedes—the Old Testament, the prophets, and also Judaism (see Chapter 3, on 1:2). Inclusive covenantal community interpretations underscore—against any form of supersessionism—that this statement marks the continuity of the gospel 45

In “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” one of the Dead Sea scrolls, Belial is the leader of the Sons of Darkness (see 1QM, Col. XIII, 10–12). Belial is also mentioned in others of the Dead Sea scrolls: the Rules of the Community, the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns), and many fragments; as well as the Damascus Document (CD) and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, documents from the wider Jewish apocalyptic movement of the time.

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with the Hebrew Scriptures and Judaism (see Chapter 4, on 1:2). In both cases, it is posited that Paul emphasizes that the prophecies have been fulfilled, in the past, in Jesus Christ. This is of course true. But there is more for an apocalyptic scriptural hermeneutic: the “fulfillments” of the prophecies in Jesus Christ are one step in the “ongoing fulfillments” of scriptural prophecies in the messianic time (end-time) due to ongoing divine interventions. Thus God is envisioned as a God who intervenes in human affairs—in the past (both in the history of the chosen people and in Jesus Christ), in the present (of Paul, of the Romans, and of other Christ-followers), as well as in the future. This begins to explain why this kind of interpretation is appropriately called realized-apocalyptic/messianic. In addition, “fulfillment” is understood in a figurative sense: Scriptures and their promises are seen as prefiguring their multiple realizations in the messianic time—realizations in Jesus Christ, in Paul, in the Romans, and in other Christ-followers, as well as in the situations in which all of them are involved. This is a typological understanding of the fulfillments of Scriptures. As we read Romans from this perspective, it is striking that Paul constantly alludes to the prefigurations in Scriptures of divine interventions in the present of believers, as well as in the past and in the future. Rom 4:1–25 is a conspicuous example that illustrates well one of Paul’s ongoing uses of Scripture. A few general observations on a few verses (4:17–25)—a preview of the full figurative interpretation in Volume II—is enough to clarify other characteristics of apocalyptic hermeneutic. As is well known in 4:1–25, Paul is interpreting the story of Abraham—and in particular Genesis 15 and 17 (along with Psalms 32 and other passages such as the creation story in Genesis 1-2). Be it enough to say here that, following a good Jewish apocalyptic hermeneutic tradition, Paul reads the stories of Abraham as “types” (i.e., as biblical stories that prefigure what happens later in the unfolding of sacred history). But in this case, he reads these “types” in terms of the story of Jesus (a re-figuration of what is prefigured in the biblical types), as well as in terms of the stories of believers (that are also a re-figuration of what is prefigured in the types of both Abraham and Jesus). In Romans 4 Paul’s apocalyptic hermeneutic is typological and therefore highly figurative: believers, Abraham, and Jesus are figures of each other. Believers are Abraham-like and Jesus-like; Jesus is Abraham-like and believers-like; Abraham is Jesus-like and believers-like. And, we could add, all of them are prefigurations of what happens later on, and ultimately on the Day of the Lord. What happens in this interpretation can be sketched as follows. In the footsteps of an apocalyptic typological hermeneutic, Paul contemplates the story of Jesus and envisions it by looking at it through the story of Abraham (viewed as a prefiguration of the story of Jesus). Scriptures are like corrective glasses which allow believers to see something that the naked eye cannot see in the life situations found in other lifestories (such as the story of Jesus) as well as in their own life situations. Since God was at work in Abraham’s story, this Scripture as corrective glasses allows believers to see God similarly at work in the life-situation of Jesus, as well as similarly in their own life situations and to recognize the predicaments that require divine interventions in each case. This is an ongoing process. In Romans 4 there is a threefold figurative comparison, as Paul makes explicit through his figurative vocabulary (and other textual signals). The three—Abraham/Sarah, Christ, and believers—have been or are

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in desperate situations from which there is no escape without divine intervention. Abraham and Sarah were without a child—and thus without a descendent—in their old age; there was no escape from this desperate situation, because they were held under the power of their old bodies and bareness. Yet note the strange way—actually the figurative way—in which Paul presents their situation: Paul describes the body of Abraham as “dead” (νενεκρωμένον, 4:19), even though as a matter of fact he was not dead, simply old; and the womb of Sarah as “dead” (he speaks of the νέκρωσις, deadness, of her womb, 4:19), even though her womb was not dead, simply barren and old. What a strange vocabulary! Paul also emphasizes that Abraham “hoping against hope, believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’” and that he “did not weaken in faith” (4:18–19). Who is Paul speaking about? About Abraham? About Abraham not weakening in faith following God’s covenantal promises in Genesis 15? It is true that the text of Genesis says that, when God promised Abraham offspring as numerous as the stars, “he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:5–6). But, when Paul says that Abraham “did not weaken in faith” he seems to be ignoring—or forgetting—that in Genesis 16, without “faithfully” waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promises to give him offspring, Abraham had a child with Hagar; and that in Gen 17:17 “Abraham fell on his face and laughed” when told he would have a child with Sarah! Anticipating the detailed discussion of Rom 4 in the Realized-Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary on Romans in Volume II, it is enough to say here that in Rom 4:18–19 Paul is simultaneously speaking about Abraham in terms of Christ and about Christ in terms of Abraham. Who was in a desperate situation? Who was “dead” and had a “dead” body? Of course, Christ on the cross! Paul is thinking about the bodies of Abraham and Sarah in terms of Christ’s dead body on the cross—so the English translators who presuppose (along with forensic interpretations) that Paul is exclusively speaking about Abraham and Sarah have a hard time translating these verses, trying to avoid saying that their bodies were “dead” (certain that Paul did not mean to say this!). Similarly, quoting Gen 15:5–6 Paul speaks about Abraham’s faith reckoned as righteousness, but then Paul describes “Abraham” as not wavering in his faith—a strange statement as we noted; of course, Paul is simultaneously (and primarily) speaking about Christ, whose faithfulness he describes in preceding verses (Rom 3:25–26). And of course the fulfillment of the promise through divine interventions—Isaac for Abraham and Sarah—is for Christ his resurrection from the dead, to which Paul refers figuratively by describing the God who intervenes in Abraham’s and Sarah’s desperate situation as the God “who gives life to the dead,” and also as the God of the creation who “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17). As we shall see, in this intertwined story—that interprets the stories of the Creation, of Abraham, and of Christ in terms of each other—Paul also intertwined the story of the believers. It is enough here to point out that Paul makes this explicit when he concludes by saying: “Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his [Abraham’s] sake alone, but for ours also” (Rom 4:23–24). With this concluding statement Paul asks his readers to reread the entire chapter about the intermingled stories of Abraham/Sarah and Christ, in order to recognize that Paul is also presenting their own stories as believers.

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This highly figurative interpretation of one story, in terms of another, in terms of still another one—through the interplay of intertexts—is at first confusing, until one recognizes that, in Paul’s apocalyptic perspective, since the present time is the messianic time, it is a time when all the promises by God in the past are being fulfilled by God. Or more specifically: Paul views the entirety of the Hebrew Scripture as a series of prophecies, promises, and “types” (from τύπος, the word Paul uses to speak of Adam in 5:14), that prefigure similar interventions by God in the gospel story. Then it follows that, in turn, the gospel story should also be viewed as a series of prophecies, promises, and “types” that prefigure similar interventions by God in the present of the believers’ stories, as well as similar interventions by God in the future eschatological time. “The gospel of God” is on par with “Holy Scriptures.” This typological apocalyptic hermeneutics is found throughout Romans.46 At first, for us this typological apocalyptic hermeneutic is confusing. But with his apocalyptic convictions that Jesus is the Christ/Messiah, that Jesus was raised from the dead, and consequently that he, Paul, lives in the messianic time,” Paul cannot but expect that all that was prefigured in the prophecies, promises, and types of Scriptures is in the process of being accomplished by God. The messianic time is a time when the biblical types which prefigure it as intertexts are re-figured (recognizable in new figures including, as we shall see, Jesus as Messiah/Christ, Paul as apostle, the Romans as saints, for example). And this process will be ongoing until the end-day (the Day of Judgment, 2:5, 16; a day which “is near” 13:12). Therefore, the traditional Jewish apocalyptic scriptural hermeneutic, also characterized by typology and its appeal to intertexts, is very instructive as a guide for our reading of Romans.47 Such a Jewish apocalyptic scriptural hermeneutic is found, for instance, in the Book of Jubilees (and also large passages of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Book of Enoch).48 At first it seems that these apocalyptic books are simply retelling

46

47

48

In Paul’s letters, “typology” should not be understood as a “linear typology,” as is commonly done in Western culture, according to which typology is understood as following a line going from Hebrew Bible types to their fulfillments, for example, in Christ; then these fulfillments supersede the types/ promises of Scripture, and therefore supersede Judaism. The authoritative book on this linear view of typology is Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (Donald H. Madvig; foreword E. Earle Ellis; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982; German, 1939). Rather Paul’s use of “typology” is to be understood as a “circular typology,” as the Greek Fathers did. See in Patte and Mihoc, eds., Greek Patristic and Orthodox Readings of Romans (RTHC 2013), George Kalantzis, “‘The Voice So Dear to Me’: Themes from Romans in Theodore, Chrysostom, and Theodoret,” 83–102 and Patte, “A Western Biblical Scholar Reading Romans with Greek Fathers and Eastern Orthodox Biblical Scholars,” 203–22 (on typology, 216–18). The biblical types are not so much “fulfilled” than “re-figured” in Christ and in the experience of believers. These “re-figurations,” far from superseding the biblical types, make figuratively present for believers/readers the mystery of the biblical types. Simultaneously these “re-figurations” “prefigure” and point to the mystery of further re-figurations up to the coming Day of the Lord. It is in this sense that typology involves a “contracting” time, a “shrinking” time, or what I call a “realized apocalyptic time.” See Agamben, 73–75. See also Sprinkle, Paul and Judaism Revisited, who also emphasizes important correlations between Paul’s letters and the Dead Sea Scrolls, paying close attention in most helpful ways to the interpretations of Ezek 36–37 and other prophetic texts. Although in their final form these books are composite and include much Christian interpolations, large segments of them are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These sections are well representative of Jewish apocalyptic interpretation.

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stories of the Pentateuch—in the same way that Romans 4 seems, at first, to be simply retelling the story of Abraham and Sarah given as examples of faithfulness. But as one reads the Book of Jubilees and other Jewish apocalyptic rewritings of Scripture one is soon struck by the fact that the biblical stories are retold in such a way as to allude to similar eschatological events—at times future events but most often events contemporary with the apocalyptic writers. In the Book of Jubilees and other Jewish apocalyptic books, the Creation, the Flood, the Patriarchs, and Matriarchs were considered as types that prefigured the eschatological events and personages belonging to the apocalyptic writers’ time or to their near future—since these apocalyptic writers viewed themselves as living in the last generation, when God intervenes in events that re-figure what was prefigured in the biblical types, the prophecies, and the promises— in short, in biblical intertexts. This kind of scriptural hermeneutic is characteristic of the apocalyptic Community of Qumran and is most explicitly represented in the literary genre pesher found among their writings. A pesher is a special kind of running commentary on entire biblical books with comments commonly introduced by the Hebrew word “pesher” that can be translated as “the explanation of ” [this part of the text] and is better understood as “the unriddling of ” [this typological vision]. As Lou H. Silberman has shown, these apocalyptic interpreters followed the model of Daniel’s interpretation of king Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams/visions (Dan 2:18–47).49 In this scriptural hermeneutic, biblical texts are viewed as riddles, typological visions, prophetic dreams that, like Daniel’s visions, somehow refer to what God is doing in the present and what God will be doing in the near future. As riddles, typological visions, or prophetic dreams they need to be “unriddled,” decoded. Or, in terms of our comments above, the prophetic texts are figurative: they are intertexts that provide a typological vision through which the readers/believers can see a mystery (as the members of the Community of Qumran liked to say). Such typological mysteries are things that are hidden to nonbelievers; they cannot see them. These mysteries are “hidden in plain sight” in the biblical texts, yet one needs to have the proper eyes to see them. These typological mysteries are about what God is doing in their present, the time of the last generation. Thus these typological mysteries are also hidden in plain sight in the life of the interpreters. Although there are other aspects to the apocalyptic Jewish hermeneutic found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,50 the pesher is typical of this hermeneutic, as is shown by the fact that we know they wrote pesharim on many prophetic books—at least Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah—as well as on a number of Psalms.51 The members of the Community of Qumran interpreted in similar ways all kinds of biblical texts, and not simply texts ascribed to prophets—as Paul also does.

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Lou H. Silberman, “Unriddling the Riddle: A Study in the Structure and Language of the Habakkuk Pesher,” Revue de Qumran III (1961), 323–64. Especially regarding the interpretation of the “law”—as becomes important for the study of Rom 2–3 in Volume II. See for example Alex P. Jassen, Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Unfortunately, most of these pesharim are only fragmentary among the 2000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. For bibliography see Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 299.

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Quoting a few lines from the Pesher Habakkuk clarifies this point. Hab 2:1–2 reads: “Write down the vision and make it plain upon the tablets so that he may read it easily that reads it.” The Pesher Habakkuk (7:1–5) interprets as follows: And God told Habakkuk to write down the things which will come to pass in the last generation, but the consummation of time he made not known to him. And as for that which is said, that he may read it easily that reads it, the explanation of this [pesher] concerns the Teacher of Righteousness to whom God made known all these mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets.52

Note how the commentator proceeds. (1) First the writer emphasizes that the true significance of this prophetic text—and indeed of any prophetic text (and even of any scriptural text)—is that it contains mysteries (i.e., typological mysteries), which for the members of the Community of Qumran refer to the divine interventions that will take place in the last generation and that these mysteries will be revealed in the last generation. (2) Second, note that the Pesher interpretation presupposes that now is the time when these mysteries are revealed to the interpreter; now is the time of the last generation. (3) Third, note that the cryptic mention in Habakkuk of a reader who reads easily is interpreted in the Pesher as referring to a specific person in the time of the interpreter: the Teacher of Righteousness (the leader of the Community of Qumran). In other words, in the present of the Community (the time of the last generation), God’s interventions make manifest what the prophecy of Habakkuk envisioned. In this case God’s intervention is that “God made known all these mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets.” This pesher interpretation of a verse as referring to the leader of one’s community is in itself of limited interest for our understanding of Paul’s use of Scripture. But it is a different matter when the Pesher commentator interprets the entire book of Habakkuk, verse by verse, and often word by word by saying: “the explanation of [such or such word/phrase] (pesher) is . . .” It becomes an entire pattern of apocalyptic hermeneutic, which is comparable to that of Paul. What is revealed through this unriddling of the biblical text (as a typological vision of what God is doing in the midst of present situations)? First of all, it is revealed to the interpreter that, following the pattern of the vision inscribed in promises and prophecies, God intervenes in this time of the last generation by overcoming the predicaments in which the believers are—a time when the role of evil powers is acute. Indeed, in Habakkuk the interpreter finds many mentions of manifestations of evil powers, such as (one of many possible examples): “because of human bloodshed, and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them” (Hab 2:8). The pesher is quick to identify in the time of the interpreter the evil people about whom Habakkuk had prophesied: “The explanation of this (pesher) concerns the Wicked Priest whom, because of the iniquity committed against the Teacher of Righteousness and the men of his council, God delivered into the hands of his enemies to humble him with a destiny below in bitterness of soul because he had

52

André Dupont-Sommer, The Essene Writings from Qumran (trans. G. Vermès; Cleveland: World, 1962), 262.

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done wickedly to his elect.”53 Indeed this concern for evil powers and evil people as puppets of these powers is another mark of Jewish apocalyptic. *

*

*

Keeping in mind these four markers of the Jewish apocalyptic character of Paul’s teaching, we will progress in our reading of Romans from theme to theme and from figure to figure so as to discern Paul’s thematic and figurative logic. As we do so we need to keep in mind Beker’s essential point that Paul brings to language his primordial experience of the Christ-event through the use of a “traditional apocalyptic language.”54 Since Paul was using a traditional language, he presupposed that his addressees knew it. Since by definition any figure—be it a metaphor, simile, analogy, hyperbole, personification, metonym, synecdoche, and so on—brings together intertexts from two unlike semantic worlds which are envisioned as somehow alike, when Paul uses figurative language he brings together the semantic world framed by the religious experience of apocalyptic Jews and his own semantic world framed by his own primordial religious experience. He views the apocalyptic religious experience and his own religious experience as alike. Thus by the very fact that Paul is using Jewish apocalyptic figures, he is constantly signaling that his primordial experience of the Christ-event is at the center of his figurative world, even when there is no direct references to it.55 As I develop below a Realized Apocalyptic/Messianic Commentary, of course I closely follow those studies of Paul that acknowledge the apocalyptic and/or messianic character of Paul’s teaching: exegetical commentaries (including those by Käsemann, Byrne, and Keck); broader methodological and topical studies (including those by Keck, Beker, Douglas Campbell, and myself); as well as commentary-like and essaylike studies (including those by the postmodern philosophers Taubes, Badiou, Žižek, and especially Agamben, and those by postmodern exegetes such as Jennings and Welborn). Obviously, these realized-apocalyptic interpretations are very diverse both in style and content. Consequently, I strive to bring them together in a more systemic presentation by framing them through two analytical steps: (1) First, the identification of each thematic unit of Paul’s text, within which I isolate the themes that frame this thematic unit through a series of inverted parallelisms—this is the elucidation of the thematic logic that frames the figures of this unit. This thematic analysis is kept formal and short through a close analysis of Paul’s text, usually without appealing to the studies mentioned above. Its goal is simply to provide a frame for the figurative study by describing the intratextual relations of its thematic plane (picture plane). (2) Second, the elucidation of the more significant figurative logic of this unit proceeds by analyzing each figure in constant dialogue with all the studies mentioned above. Then a close analysis of the intertexts to which Paul’s text points can show the thickness of Paul’s figurative world as expressed in each given unit appears. 53 54 55

Dupont-Sommer, The Essene Writings from Qumran, 265. Beker, Paul, 15–16. And, as we shall see, for Paul the Christ-event is associated with the resurrection (1:4), as Badiou appropriately notes: “Ultimately, for Paul, the Christ-event is nothing but resurrection” (Badiou, Saint Paul, 73).

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II A realized-apocalyptic/messianic commentary on Romans (A) Rom 1:1–7: Messianic transformations (1) Rom 1:1–7: A thematic unit framed by inverted parallelisms: Paul vs. Roman Christ-followers A critical figurative exegesis does not proceed verse by verse, but theme by theme and figure by figure. Its ultimate goal is still to show how Paul understood each of the key terms he used in his letter—such results for Rom 1:1–32 are summarized in the third column of the Appendix. But the figurative understandings of these key terms must be established by a careful figurative exegesis, which shows how each theme or each figure is defined through its relationships with other themes and/or other figures in the thematic (intratextual) organization and the figurative (intertextual) organization of Paul’s text—rather than through its place in a theological argument (as in forensic theological interpretations) or through its place in a rhetoric and cultural/ideological textual unfolding (as in inclusive covenantal community interpretations). Thus, the first task of our figurative exegesis is to identify each thematic unit and its thematic organization that will ground the study of the figures of this unit. The above methodological introduction used this first thematic unit as an example. Thus the present comments can be briefer. The inverted parallelisms that delimit this unit and set its thematic frame are between 1:1 and 1:4b–7: Paul, slave of Christ Jesus, called apostle set apart for the gospel of God (1:1) vs. [Christ our Lord through whom we have received charis/spiritual gift/grace and apostleship for] the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles/nations for the sake of his name (1:5b) including yourselves, called by Jesus Christ. (1:6) To all those in Rome, beloved of God, called saints. (1:7a) Charis/spiritual gift/[grace] to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (1:7b)56

Thus we can affirm that Rom 1:1–7 is the first thematic unit of the letter. In order to elucidate what characterizes its themes, we need to identify and take note of intratextual organization: the inversions and the parallelisms that frame this thematic unit. The inversions or contrasts between the beginning and the end of this discursive thematic unit (the intratextual relations) are clear: 1:1 is about Paul (the sender of the letter, an apostle) by contrast with 1:6–7 about the Romans (the addressees, simple Christ-followers). Since the Romans are identified as Gentiles (they are “among all the Gentiles,” 1:5b, “including yourselves,” 1:6a), the inversions underscore Paul’s “Jewishness,” made explicit in 1:2–3 (the description of the gospel for which he is set apart)—this point will become significant. In sum, 1:1–7 sets in inversions: Paul as a Jew, now Apostle vs. Romans as Gentiles, now Christ-followers.

56

My literal translation, with emphases to mark the themes. Käsemann, Paul, 5.

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The parallelisms or similarities in the descriptions of Paul and the Romans are striking. Similar qualifiers are ascribed to them. 1. “Paul” (Παῦλος, 1:1a) and “beloved by God” (ἀγαπητοῖς θεοῦ, 1:7)—this parallelism becomes clear as soon as the meaning of Paulos is unpacked. 2. Both Paul and the Romans are called. Paul is “called apostle” (κλητὸς ἀπόστολος) (1:1); the Romans are twice said to have been “called”—“called of Jesus Christ” (κλητοὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, 1:6) and “called saints” (κλητοῖς ἁγίοις) (1:7). 3. Both Paul and the Romans are qualified as obedient. This is explicit in the case of the Romans who, as Gentile Christ-followers, have been brought to the “obedience [ὑπακοή] of faith” (1:5). Therefore Paul’s self-identification as δοῦλος Χριστοῦ must be translated “slave of Christ” (1:1b); it expresses his own “obedience” to Christ. Conversely the metaphor “slave of Christ” should be viewed as the key for understanding the phrase “obedience of faith” (ὑπακοή πίστεως). It is enough to add here that the inverted parallelisms of the thematic structure which frames this unit show that both Paul and the Romans have entered what Käsemann calls the “sphere of power” of Christ, or “the eschatological world dominion of Christ, which is present already and already witnessed to” (Käsemann, Romans, 9, see also 12). Being Christ-followers (as Paul and the Romans are) means being in the sphere of power of Christ, and thus being slave of Christ or having obedience of faith.

(2) Rom 1:1–7: The figures in the frame of this thematic unit Elucidating how Paul understood—or rather envisioned—the figures in Rom 1:1–7 involves clarifying how the figures are defined through their relationships with each other, and to begin with through the relationships set by the thematic inversions and parallelisms in the thematic unit. This means that, rather than following the text verse by verse, we proceed by comparing the beginning and the end of the thematic unit— the intratextual relations between 1:1 and 1:5b–7—and by considering how each figure is further constructed through intertextual relations. This first thematic unit of the letter to the Romans is highly figurative. Its opening words, Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, “Paul, slave of Christ Jesus,” include no less than three figures: Παῦλος, Paul as a self-identification; “slave of Christ Jesus,” a metaphor; and “Christ” as a qualifier of “Jesus.” These figures are to be interpreted in terms of the corresponding parallel figures concerning the Romans (in 1:5b–7).

Paul (1:1a) and Beloved by God (1:7a) “Paul” (Παῦλος, Paulos, 1:1a) is a live figure. Its parallelism with beloved by God (ἀγαπητοῖς θεοῦ) another live figure soon becomes clear. Intratextual and intertextual connections buildup the figurative space of these live figures—Paul’s figurative world. A first and simple observation is enough to explain why Paul is a live figure. Paulos is a Greek name, or more exactly, the Greek form of the Latin name Paulus. This means that Paulos/Paulus is not the Hebrew/Aramaic name that the Jewish author of this letter had. Thus, it involves a figurative tension (is/is-not): as a live figure Paul

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is Paulos (someone using a Greek/Latin name) and simultaneously he is not Paulos (Paulos is not his original Jewish name). This recognition that Paulos is a live figure is a first and necessary step. It is also helpful, as a second step, to point out the origin of this live figure: its figurative tension is due to Paul’s Judeo-Greek linguistic practice— he was not writing in Greek but in Judeo-Greek (which was his Yiddish as Taubes said.57 By using the word Paulos, or in Latin Paulus (Greek and Latin languages were intermingled in the Greco-Roman world) the author created a live figure with double entendre that evokes both a Greek/Latin identity and a Jewish identity. But such observations, pertinent as they are, do not say anything about the significance of this live figure. Beyond identifying the presence of figures, a figurative reading involves entering the figurative tension involved in each figure and thus entering the vision it opens before our eyes as readers/hearers through its interrelations with other figures in the text—intratextual relations—and with figures of other texts (especially biblical texts)—intertextual relations—that contribute to construct a thick figure. In order to grasp these essential characteristics of a figurative reading—always a thick reading—it is helpful to make explicit the many ways in which we commonly avoid reading Paulos as a figure. (A) When Paulos is not read as a Figure. 1. A first (most common) way of not reading Paulos as a figure is merely to view this word as a “name.” Paulos (Paul) is read as a signifier pointing to a particular person. Of course, Paulos is a name; but one should not stop with this observation. 2. A second way of not reading Paulos as a figure is to ask: what did this name mean for Paul? This is taking into account that proper names in Paul’s time and culture had connotations—had meanings. Of course, this name meant something for Paul. But by looking for the specific idea or pragmatic purpose that Paul had in mind when he used Paulos instead of his Hebrew name, one still avoids its figurative tension (is/is-not) and the figurative vision (conveyed by its inter/ intratexts). This is what one does by simply saying that Paul followed “the practice of the Diaspora Jew accommodating himself to the world around him. Thus, a name sounding like the Hebrew one was chosen.”58 This amounts to say that using Paul as his name was a pragmatic move on the apostle’s part; his use of Paul did not have additional significance. In this pragmatic line, one can also wonder whether or not Paul is using Paulos to allude to his Roman citizenship (as suggested by Acts 16:37–38; 22:25–29; 23:27; 25:16),59 since Paulos is the

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Taubes, 4 and Agamben, 4–5. Yet this statement by Käsemann (Paul, 5) should not be taken (as many are tempted to do) as representing his entire interpretation; for example, he carefully avoids saying that Paul himself has chosen this name, opening the door for a truly figurative reading, as we shall see. See for example Daniel Marguerat, Les Actes des Apôtres (13-28) (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2015), 138–39. This repeated mention of Paul’s Roman citizenship in Acts is quite credible, as is shown by the fact that what empowered the Roman Empire was its practice of giving citizenship too many people from conquered nations who never went to Rome and did not speak Latin. See Mary Beard, S.P.Q.R. A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2015), 520–25. Beard’s volume has the great advantage of spending at least half of its space to reconstruct cultural history, including that of all kinds of people from senators to Roman citizen to slaves.

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Greek form of the Latin name, Paulus. Such pragmatic interpretation flattens Paulos/Paulus—effectively denying its figurative character—by understanding it exclusively in its new context. This is understanding Paulos exclusively in its Greek/Latin semantic universe—a meaning that ignores its twofold semantic investment both in the Greek/Latin semantic universe and in the Hebrew/Jewish semantic universe. 3. A third and more subtle way of not reading Paulos as a figure is exemplified by Acts. In this book Luke seems to take into account the twofold semantic investment of Paulos. He makes explicit that the apostle has both a Hebrew/ Aramaic name, “Saul,” Σαῦλος (Saulos, used in Acts up to 13:9), and also a Greek/Latin name, Paulos (systematically used after 13:9).60 Yet note that Luke introduces this Greek/Latin name by simply saying: “Saul also known as Paul,” Σαῦλος δέ, ὁ καὶ Παῦλος (13:9), and this, interestingly enough, in the midst of Saul/Paul’s interaction with a proconsul himself named Sergius Paulus, 13:7 (as most translations have it, although the Greek is Paulos). In so doing, Luke seems to open the possibility of reading Paulos as a figure. But he ends up denying this possibility by using both Saulos and Paulos as simple names. To begin with, as noted, Acts 13:9 merely affirms that the apostle had two names: Saul/Saulos to introduce the apostle as a “good Jew” (having the name of King Saul) used up to Acts 13:9; subsequently Paulos is used to introduce him as a “good Roman,” as he increasingly interacts with Greeks and Romans, including the proconsul whom he converts.61 Consequently, very much as Käsemann suggested, Luke seems to posit that the change of name was a mere pragmatic accommodation to life in the Roman Empire. This is confirmed when one notes that Acts 13:9 presents the shift from one name to another as a minimal change that merely entails switching a single letter (sigma into pi; Saulos into Paulos). It remains that Luke was very much aware that it was a more complicated matter; he revealed it by failing to be consistent. Beyond the change of name as a mere accommodation to life in the Roman Empire and as a simple play on words—turning Saulos into Paulos (as in Acts 13:9)—Acts also uses “Saoul” (Σαοὺλ, the name of King Saul) rather than “Saulos.” Indeed, throughout the LXX (the Bible the author of Romans quotes and thus reads)—and in particular in 1 Sam 9–31—the name of King Saul is consistently written in Greek as Σαουλ (“Saoul”), and not as Σαῦλος (“Saulos”). Thus, the change of Saoul into Paulos/Paulus was necessarily more deliberate and meaningful than a simple play on words. But in Acts 9, Luke simply presents this spelling of the

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Actually we cannot rely on Acts, written long after Paul’s death, to conclude that “Saul” was Paul’s actual Hebrew/Aramaic name. But it is not implausible since Paul claimed to be from “the tribe of Benjamin” (Phlm 3:5), which was also the tribe of King Saul. For an excellent succinct review of the different explanations of “Saul also known as Paul” in 13:9 see Marguerat, Les Actes des Apôtres (1328), 31. Richard I. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary (ed. Harold W. Attridge, Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 326. Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 100 (he links the literary shift in name to the mention of Sergius Paulus). For a detailed discussion of uses of name in the Greco-Roman world, see Ernst Haenchen, Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 399–400.

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future apostle name as an archaic name, exclusively used by a voice from heaven (Acts 9:4, 22:7, 26:14) and then by Ananias (9:17, 22:13).62 (B) Reading Paulos as a Figure. Luke’s wavering in Acts opens the possibility that when the author of Romans used Paulos as a self-designation it was to signal a meaningful change of name. Then is it appropriate to ask: Could it be that Paul would have deliberately given up his royal name—“Saul” (Σαῦλος) linking him to King “Saoul” of the tribe of Benjamin (a tribe membership he now viewed as a loss, as he claimed in Phil 3:5)—so as to become Paulos, which in Latin (Paulus) means “little, insignificant”? Does this mean that Paul would have deliberately chosen the name “Paul” as a demonstration of humility—a move from being “regal” to being “insignificant”—comparable to his claim to be “the least, ἐλάχιστος, of the apostles” (1 Cor 15:9)? 63 This would make for a very powerful interpretation! But it would still miss the figurative character of this name, by reading Paulos as a mere noun that refers to a particular meaning, “humility.” The figurative tension (is/is-not) is not accounted for, because this interpretation fails to account for the intertexts and intratexts that frame this figure. Agamben presents an actual figurative interpretation. After mentioning the possibility that Paulos is a deliberately changed name, Agamben (9) completely recasts this name in a figurative mold. First, he treats Acts as gossips that invite us to ponder the significance of this change of name through a proper figurative interpretation. We noted that intertexts and intratexts are necessary components of a figure. Thus the question is: what are the intertexts (in this case, Hebrew Bible or LXX texts) which contribute to make out of Paulos a figure? And how do the intratexts set up by the thematic frame (in this case the description of the Romans as “beloved of/by God”) further contribute to the figurativization of Paulos? Following Agamben (9-11), we first note the significance of the process of “changing name” and of the pattern of this process—rather than the specific alteration of the name. The change of name represented by Paulos evokes similar changes of name in the Hebrew Bible. The archetypes for such a change of name are Gen 17:5, 15–16, and Gen 32:28. God said: “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham” (17:5) and “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name” (17:15). God said: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel” (32:28). Neither Abraham or Sarah nor Jacob changes his or her own name. It is God who changed their names as a signal that God intervened to give them a new status/ vocation: to be “a father of many nations,” “a mother of nations,” or “Israel” the people of God. Similarly, as a live figure, Paulos reflects that (1) Paul’s Hebrew/Aramaic-nameas-a-Jew has been transformed (whatever this name was does not matter; in his letters, Paul never tells us what it was); (2) this name-transformation was performed by God— through a divine intervention—as was the case for Abram/Abraham, Sarai/Sarah, and Jacob/Israel; (3) and that, as in their cases, this name change was also the gift of a specific vocation. The promises embedded in the biblical “types” are accomplished: 62

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And of course when referring to King Saul, 13:21, in telling the story of Israel (13:16–23) as prolonged by the story of Jesus, a savior brought to Israel (13:23–41). Jennings, Outlaw Justice (14–17), repeatedly emphasizes that Paul deliberately chose the name “Paul” as a claim of humility.

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Paul is Abraham-like, Sarah-like, as well as Israel-like (something that becomes explicit in Rom 4 and 9, as we shall see). As their new names did, his new name signals that he has received a vocation from God. And by using Paulos as a self-designation, Paul shows that he assumes this vocation. Yet, it is important to note that, by using this name, Paul does not humble himself— he does not make himself humble. Whatever was his status—as Saul/Saoul, a kingly status, or simply as a member of “the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom 11:1; Phil 3:5)—it was an honorific status that has become a loss for him (ζημία, Phil 3:7–8). But he has not lost it deliberately; he has not abandoned it deliberately. As this change of name marks, he no longer has this status; this is true. But it is because he has been transformed into paulos, that is, into someone “small, of little significance” (paulus in Latin). He did not humble himself. It is God who humbled him (as God transformed Abram, Sarai, and Jacob). Let me repeat it: Paul’s change of name means that he has been transformed by God. Paul is like the biblical types that Abraham, Sarah, and Israel are. All of them were transformed by God. The change of names of the biblical types (the intertextual figures) does not mean that their former identity has been erased; on the contrary, their full potential is manifested. By becoming Abraham, Abram did not cease to exist; his full potential became manifest—he had a child. And the same could be said about Sarah/Sarai and also Israel/Jacob. Similarly, by becoming Paulos with the Greek/Latin (Paulus) identity of “Little” or “Insignificant,” Paul did not lose his Jewish identity (whatever his Hebrew/Aramaic name may have been). As becomes explicit in the following verse, he remained a Jew, fulfilling his vocation as a Jew. The figurative reading of Paul’s text brings us back again and again to this important point. “To all those in Rome beloved by God” (πᾶσιν τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν Ῥώμῃ ἀγαπητοῖς θεοῦ, 1:7a): the intratextual figure in relation with Paulos. “Beloved by God” is another live figure. Paul’s identity/name was changed by God. So it is for his addressees. In Paul’s case, a Gentile identity/name (Paulos) was added to a Jewish one (possibly, Saoul); now, and by contrast, in the Romans’ case a Jewish identity is added to their Gentile identity. They, who are Romans (“in Rome”) and thus Gentiles, are now called “beloved by God.” This is a loaded name! What are the intertexts (in this case, in the LXX as a translation of the Hebrew Bible) which contribute to making a figure out of “beloved of God”? Texts such as Isaiah (44:2 lxx): “Thus says the Lord: . . . my beloved Israel.” Or Ps 108:6 (lxx 107:7) where Israel is described as “those whom God loves.” “Beloved of God” is a traditional designation of Israel, repeatedly found in the LXX, through the use of similar phrases in text such as Deut 32:15, 33:26; Ps 60:5; Hos 3:1; Wis 16:26; Bar 3:36; 3 Macc 6:11.64 The same thing is expressed in different wording (and even in narrative forms) throughout the LXX: Israel is loved by God in a unique way (ἀγαπητός, translated “beloved,” means not only “greatly loved,” but also “loved in a unique way”). In Rom 1:7 the circle of those beloved by God—Israel—has been widened to include the Romans (and other Gentiles as well): they are part of the Messianic Israel, an expanded Israel. And of course, this is not their doing! God is the one who loves them, and in the process it is God who includes them in the Messianic Israel. Finally, we can presume that, as in 64

see Brendan Byrne, Romans. Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996), 46.

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Paul’s case, when the Romans became beloved by God—became parts of the Messianic Israel—their identity as Gentile Romans was not erased. We shall see the implications of this point as we continue our figurative reading of the letter. In sum, by envisioning himself as like the biblical types (Abram/Abraham, Sarai/ Sarah, Jacob/Israel) and envisioning the Romans as like the people of Israel, Paul also envisions his and their present time as part of the last generation when God intervenes according to the promises: both Paul and the Romans live in the realized-apocalyptic time, the messianic time when the promises of Scriptures are fulfilled. Their change of name already announces that Paul and the Romans are being transformed by divine interventions. It also points out that Paul’s and the Romans’ new vocations are “messianic vocations” (as Agamben,65 says about Paul)—although it is only in the next figures that these messianic qualifiers become explicit.

Slave of Christ Jesus (1:1b) and Obedience of faith among Gentiles (1:5b) Slave of Christ Jesus (δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, 1:1b) continues the elaboration of Paul’s figurative world. First Paul amplifies the picture of himself as Paulos (Paulus), “Little” or “Insignificant,” by presenting himself as a slave. As noted above, from a figurative perspective δοῦλος (doulos) is understood as slave (not as servant). Since the figure Paulos represents someone who has been transformed by God, we have to expect that the primary intertext that generates doulos as a figure is the Roman economic world, in which doulos is the designation of someone who is the acquired property of a master, and therefore under the power of this master.66 In the Roman world and especially in Rome, slavery was an integral part of the economy. Therefore, it was a fact of life for a significant part of the population (estimated at 10 percent in the provinces, 20 percent in the Italian peninsula, and 35 percent in Rome).67 Of course, Paul is not an actual slave. But, as Keck notes, by designating himself as a “slave of Christ” Paul shows that he is in the same position as actual slaves vis-à-vis their masters: he understands himself as under the power of Christ “the Lord” (1:4, 7).68 Furthermore, since Paulos is a figure of someone whose name has been changed by God as a signal of a divine transformation, and since slaves were often prisoners of war—that is, persons who were made into slaves by their Roman masters—the live metaphor “slave of Christ” paints a picture of Paul as someone who has been enslaved by Christ. This is consistent with the live figure of Paul’s change of name. As Agamben69 writes, “At the very moment when the call transformed him who is a free man into the ‘slave of the Messiah,’ the apostle must, like a slave, lose his name, whether it be Roman or Jewish. From this point on, he must call himself by a simple surname,” namely Paulos—Little.70

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Agamben, 9. A secondary intertext might have been the slavery of Israel in Egypt. But the economic situation of the Roman Empire is more likely predominant in a letter to people in Rome. Beard, S.P.Q.R. A History of Ancient Rome, 328–33. Keck, 40. Agamben, 11. Agamben (11) points out that this connotation did not escape Augustine: “Paulum . . . minimum est” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 72:4) [Ps 72:4 is about the poor and the needy].

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This new name and this self-description as a “slave of Christ Jesus”—or, in Käsemann’s words, “slave of the Messiah”71—express that Paul envisions himself as having received a “new messianic condition” that resulted from a change in status following “the principle of a particular transformation of all juridical conditions,” which as Agamben and Taubes argue, characterizes the messianic/apocalyptic age.72 Let us underscore it: this new condition, “slave of Christ Jesus,” is not something that Paul has chosen for himself. He did not commit himself to Christ; he did not voluntarily accept to be his servant (as both the forensic theological and the rhetorical and ideological interpretations posit). Christ acquired him. As Keck says, “in slavery the master acquires the person, not just the person’s labor.”73 Christ transformed him into his slave.74 He sees himself as in bondage to Christ—in Käsemann’s words, “in the sphere of power of Christ”75—in the same way that, by contrast, “sinners” are in bondage to “sin” and in the “sphere of power of sin” (6:16–20).76 “Obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (ὑπακοή πίστεως ἐν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, 1:5b), the intratextual figurative parallel to “slave of Christ” (δοῦλος Χριστοῦ, 1:1b), broadens this aspect of Paul’s figurative world to encompass the Romans. Gentile Christ-followers (including Roman Christ-followers) should view their relationship to Christ as characterized by obedience (an obedience of faith), in the same way that Paul envisioned his relationship to Christ as one of obedience as a slave. Gentiles who “have faith” (to be defined below) should be obedient to the “Lord Jesus Christ” (1:4d). In both cases it is a matter of being under power—under the power of Christ Jesus. The thematic parallelism suggests that in the same way that Paul did not (voluntarily) choose to become a slave of Christ (he was acquired), “obedience of faith” is certainly not primarily a matter of “will” (as in “deciding to obey”).77 This is confirmed when we note that in this thematic and figurative interpretation the phrase “obedience of faith” needs to be understood as “‘obedience that is faith’ (taking ‘of faith’ as explanatory),” as Keck underscores.78 Yet faith still needs to be defined. Of course, faith is a figure that makes sense through its relations with intertexts (as suggested by the Greek and Latin designations of faith, pistis and fides)—and also intratexts. In agreement with the inclusive covenantal

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Käsemann, 5. Agamben, 12–13; following Taubes, 5–11. Keck, 40. I deliberately repeatedly use the terms “transform” and “transformation” as an allusion to John Chrysostom’s interpretation of Romans, which is figurative. Chrysostom’s insightful emphasis that “transformation” is the figurative conception that frames the entire letter remains a characteristic of present-day Eastern Orthodox interpretations of Romans. See Demetrios Trakatellis, “Being Transformed: Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans. An Action within the Boundaries,” The Greek Fathers’ and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans (RTHC, 2013), 41–62. Käsemann, 172–85; followed by Keck, 156–73. Throughout I privilege the metaphoric phrase “in the sphere of power” (introduced by Käsemann), although realized apocalyptic/messianic interpreters often use alternate phrases (e.g., “the structure of power,” being “in the dominion,” “in the field of force” of Christ or sin). Obedience as a matter of “will” is the interpretation privileged in cultures and contexts where individuals have a sense of control (such as in Western cultures molded by the Enlightenment and reflected in forensic theological interpretations). Keck, 46, in agreement with Cobb and Lull, 30, who list the four alternative translations of ὑπακοή πίστεως: (1) “faithful obedience,” (2) “the faith that produces obedience,” (3) “the obedience that produces faith,” and (4) “obedience defined as faith.”

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community interpretations, we first note that pistis and its Latin counterpart, fides, were common political terms designating the submission of the vanquished to the victorious Romans—an intertextual relation. But contrary to inclusive covenantal community interpretations, the figurative interpretation takes into account that a figure is also constructed by its intratextual relationships with other figures, and especially “slave/doulos.” It is noteworthy that both slave/doulos and fides/pistis evoke being captured by and submitting to victorious Romans. For Greco-Roman readers, fides/pistis was to be understood in terms of the political model for the submission of the vanquished to the victorious Romans “in fidem populi Romani.” In brief: the vanquished (the people defeated by the Roman legions, and by analogy, believers under the Lordship of Christ) submitted to the Roman legions (to Christ as Lord), all the while emphasizing that they trusted in the Romans legionnaires’ fides (or in Christ’s fides). Submission to the Roman legionnaires made sense only if the vanquished could be confident that the legionnaires would be trustworthy, faithful to their word, in fidem, by treating them well, rather than murdering them or abusing them; and in turn the vanquished surrendered by committing themselves (with trustworthiness of their own) to unconditionally surrender to the Roman legionnaires. In sum, before entrusting themselves to the Romans legionnaires and the Roman people, the vanquished needed to see (to envision) them as trustworthy, as people who will be faithful; thus they could surrender in fidem populi Romani. The same is true in the case of Gentile believers: in order to submit in obedience to Christ the Lord, they need to see (to envision, to believe) him to be a trustworthy and faithful Lord. Thus, the thematic/figurative approach of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation underscores that pistis/fides necessarily includes a vision. The relational dimensions of faith (pistis/fides) are built upon a recognition (a vision or “faith/vision”) that the one (Christ) to whom one obediently commits oneself is trustworthy.79 Such is the case of Paul, the slave of Christ, and also the cases of all the Christ-followers characterized by “obedience of faith.” In other words, for this thematic/figurative interpretation “faith” (pistis) is a verbal noun: it involves the attitude of “believing,” of “seeing” (πιστεύω, pisteuô; a verb used twenty times in Romans, including 1:16; 3:2, 22; and especially in Rom 4 and 10, where it is a key term). (1) The first step in the process of “believing” (and “faith”) involves “seeing,” “recognizing” the faithfulness of God as manifested (a) in the past manifestation of Christ (as son of David who was raised from the dead, 1:3–4, as Byrne [40 and 52] emphasizes), but also (b) in the present manifestations of Christ, the risen Christ; and thus (c) in the present manifestations of God’s faithfulness—for example, in Paul’s “call” (as an encounter with the risen Christ) and in the present of the Christ-followers in Rome and elsewhere as “called” (at whatever time in history). Faith is a faith/vision emerging out of the contemplation of one’s experience (a contemplation of whatever is in front of and around oneself in life) aimed at recognizing, acknowledging, and surrendering to what God is doing through the risen Christ in it—a divine intervention which is also a call. Therefore, from now on, in order to avoid any confusion with

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This relational view of pistis/fides as centrally built upon a vision or “faith/vision” of divine interventions explains the surprising fact (repeatedly noted by Morgan) that for Paul pistis does not include human-human relationship (e.g., Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith, 306).

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the other understandings of “faith” as either “believing that certain affirmations are true because they are revealed by God” (forensic theological interpretation) or as “faithfulness” emunah (inclusive covenantal community interpretation), pistis will be systematically translated “faith/vision.” (2) A second and necessary step in the process of believing is a response to this faith/vision, including “obedience” (1:5), which is a movement toward God (and Christ). Believers are lured into participating in the divine interventions they “see.”80 “Obedience of faith/vision” is, therefore, not the fulfillment of a duty. It is an obedience for the sake of God’s (or of Christ’s) name that involves joining in God’s (or Christ’s) action—by “going where the action is”81—that is, by joining God wherever God is in the process of intervening. In sum, the “obedience of faith/vision” of those who are “called by Jesus Christ” is, for Käsemann, the obedience of those who have been “called out of the Gentile world in order to belong to the one Kyrios” and to his world;82 or in Byrne’s words, this obedience of faith/vision is the result of being “drawn through the gospel into the sphere of the ‘obedience’ that is the mark of the eschatological people of God.”83 As we progress in our figurative reading, from now on we can presuppose (1) that Christ-followers (Paul, the Romans, and any other believers) should be viewed as people transformed through a divine (Christic) interventions, and made slaves of Christ and thus obedient to the Lord Christ and (2) that “faith” is to be understood as a faith/vision, given to them (a) to enable them to see/recognize divine/Christic manifestations both in the past (in the Scriptures and in Jesus’s time) and in their present, and (b) to demand obedience from them.

Christ/Messiah Jesus (1:1b)– From the seed of David (1:3b); Appointed Son of God with Power (1:4a) “Christ/Messiah Jesus” (Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, 1:1b) is also, of course, a live figure (rather than a name or a simple designation—i.e., rather than a dead figure). “Christ” (Χριστός, Christos) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew ‫שי ַח‬ ׁ ִ ‫( ָמ‬Māšîaḥ), the anointed, the Messiah. By definition, as a live figure Christ/Messiah produces a figurative meaning

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This understanding of “faith” as primarily a “movement toward God” or a “response to an experience of God”—rather than faith as primarily fides quae creditor or trust or faithfulness—can be associated with phrases such as “believing in God” (already in the Septuagint) or “believing in Christ.” But for Paul it is marked by a use of “faith” without qualifier, as in 1:8 (“your faith” not “your faith in Christ” or “your faith in God” or “your faith in the gospel”). Actually, all Paul’s references to “faith” in Romans are to “faith” without qualifier. “Faith” is a “movement toward God” or a “response to an experience of God.” In Augustine, faith as movement toward God is often linked with love. Faith as movement toward God can be the beginning of spiritual union with God, as suggested by Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, and Maximus the Confessor. Recent Roman Catholic theologians (including Karl Rahner) also stressed this (mystical) view of “faith.” In similar ways, for present-day Charismatics around the world, faith involves discerning the mysteries of God’s interventions in one’s present context. A slang phrase that referred to the gamblers’ major compulsion upon arising each day which is “to know where the action is” so they can run there and join a crap game. The civil right activist, Archie Hargraves (Chicago Freedom Movement, 1966), used this phrase to speak graphically about locating what God was doing among the poor and oppressed and joining God in God’s action. Käsemann, 15. Byrne, 40.

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through its intertextual relationships with figures in other texts and also through its intratextual relations in Paul’s text. Through its intertextual relations, Christ/Messiah is envisioned as prefigured in types of the Hebrew Bible/LXX, namely the anointed ones that the priests and kings were. Who the biblical types were and what happened to them prefigure who Christ/ Messiah Jesus was and what happened to him—as in the cases of other Messiah[s] presented in the Jewish apocalyptic literature. While in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ is presented in part as a manifestation of the type anointed priest, Paul makes explicit that for him the types that Christ/Messiah Jesus manifests are the kings, with David as the archetype. Thus, he states in 1:3b that Christ/Messiah Jesus “has come from the seed of David” (τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ). As an ongoing reminder that Christos (Χριστός) must be read as a live figure, in this figurative interpretation I will from time to time translate Christos by Christ/Messiah, understood as a figure that connotes that he is David-like (an apocalyptic manifestation of the type David). In addition, to make sure that Christ be perceived as a figure (and not as a name), at times I will use Christ/Messiah Jesus or Christ Jesus (rather than Jesus Christ) since Paul uses these two phrases approximately the same number of times. As a figure, Christ/Messiah Jesus is both like and unlike David. Christ/Messiah Jesus is unlike David at the very least because he is not the same person, but also because of his “resurrection from the dead” (1:4c; see also 6:5)—a statement which alludes to his death (surprisingly, without emphasizing it).84 The resurrection of Christ/Messiah Jesus also marks that unlike David he belongs to the end-time. Christ/Messiah Jesus is like David in the sense that like him he is anointed; yet we still have to understand in what sense he is anointed. A step in this direction is to note that in the same way that Jesus is said to be “appointed Son of God” (1:4a; τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ θεοῦ), so David was proclaimed God’s Son by the Lord, according to Ps 2:7 (read as about the enthronement of David): “The Lord said to me [David]: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.’” Christ/Messiah Jesus is prefigured by David, and therefore manifests in the end-time what was already manifest in King David. So, following Byrne,85 1:3–4 can be interpreted by saying that, like David, Christ/Messiah is appointed (or proclaimed) Son of God, a phrase which in this figurative interpretation strictly refers to a function (rather than to the divine nature of Christ/Messiah). As David and other kings were enthroned as “Son of God” (when they assumed their role as King of Israel so as to govern in the name of God), so Christ/Messiah Jesus was appointed or installed (ὁρισθέντος) Son of God with the messianic task of being God’s instrument in the end-time, when he is to play a key role. This messianic role was envisioned in Apocalyptic Jewish literature as the restoration of Israel in both a political and religious sense, according to the prophecies (especially Isa 40:9; 41:27; 52:7; 60:6; 61:1 concerning God’s saving intervention that liberated the people of Israel from exile in Babylon). Similarly, in 1:3–4 Jesus is presented as the messianic agent of the 84

85

Interestingly enough, in Romans Paul does not emphasize Jesus’s crucifixion (it is only indirectly mentioned in 3:25 and 6:3–10, and the cross is not mentioned at all). We have to respect this emphasis on the resurrection and resist importing Paul’s emphasis on the cross found in other letters. We are reading Romans and not 1 Corinthians and Galatians! Byrne, 39–40; 44–45.

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promised liberation that God has inaugurated. In Byrne’s words, “God has inaugurated the era of messianic liberation by taking the step of setting up the key instrument of that liberation: Jesus Christ as Son of God ‘in power’.”86 The fact that Christ/Messiah has this power in order to be the key instrument of liberation is demonstrated by his “resurrection from the dead” (1:4c). Quoting a creedal formula, Paul envisions the “messianic career” of Jesus in two stages, described by Byrne as follows:87 1. In terms of his human origins (“according to the flesh”), Jesus fulfills a key requirement for messianic “candidacy” in the understanding of early Christianity and some Jewish circles: his birth from the royal house of David. 2. As raised from the dead and as having entered thereby into the New Age marked by the Spirit (“according to the Spirit of holiness”), the messianic “candidate” has been “installed” Messiah in fact (“designated son of God in power”). With this power, he reigns as Lord. Such is the “anointment” of Christ/Messiah Jesus: it is an anointment “in power according to the Spirit of holiness” (1:4b). Christ/Messiah is empowered to carry out his messianic task of “liberation” and therefore his messianic task of bringing about “transformations” (as the next figures spell out). In Christ/Messiah Jesus, God intervenes according to the promises “in the Holy Scriptures” (1:2); therefore, now is the time when God intervenes according to all the promises made through the prophets; now is the eschatological time, the messianic time. Therefore we are in “the time that remains” (the title of Agamben’s commentary). Christ/Messiah Jesus as a messianic figure produces a figurative meaning through such intertextual relations with biblical types and prophetic promises. Yet this messianic figure is further constituted through its intratextual relations throughout the letter. In Rom 1:1–7, we need to pay attention to the relationships of Christ/Messiah Jesus with Paul, his slave, who is “called” apostle and “set apart” for the gospel of God; as well as to his relationships with the Romans who are “called by Jesus Christ” and “called” saints. In this intratextual network, the figure of Christ/Messiah is also envisioned as “our Lord” (Κύριος ἡμῶν) (1:4d). In Käsemann’s words, he “is the representative of the God who claims the world and who with the church brings the new creation into the midst of the old world that is perishing.”88 As “our Lord” Christ/Messiah includes in his messianic task all those whom he “calls”: Paul as his slave and apostle; the Romans as saints; in short, the church.89 Together with him they are agents of transformation.90

86 87 88 89

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Byrne, 39. Byrne, 39–40. Käsemann, 17, emphasis added. Because of its form in Greek (ἐκκλησία, “church”) some, including Agamben (22), have suggested a more or less etymological meaning of “called-out ones.” Louw and Nida warn that this interpretation is not warranted by any of the sources in ancient times. But it remains that the church is made out of “called saints.” Also, let us keep in mind that Paul uses the term “church” very rarely in the undisputed letters—twice in Romans (16:1, 5) and in Philippians, and only once in 2 Corinthians, Galatians and 1 Thessalonians—except for 1 Corinthians (where it is used sixteen times). See M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 172–92, passim. Litwa shows how Paul’s view of divine transformation (underscored in Greek Patristic receptions of Romans) is grounded in the Greco-Roman culture (35–85) and has also Jewish roots (86–116; including Philo).

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As we progress in our figurative reading, from now on we can presuppose that ChristMessiah should be viewed (1) as “Son of God with power” (agent of transformation) and “our Lord” through the resurrection and (2) as opening the messianic time, “the time that remains” (our time), in which he intervenes with power.

Called [apostle] set apart (1:1c) and (Romans) Called by Jesus Christ/Messiah . . . Called [to be saints] (1:6, 7b) Being called, receiving a vocation, is being transformed by God and/or Christ/Messiah— as was already connoted by Paul’s change in name and standing (Paulus/Little) and change in status (slave of Christ/Messiah Jesus). But what is the nature of this transformation? This needs to be carefully laid out because Paul’s figure of the call frames his entire vision. It is a realized-apocalyptic vision because Paul and other Christ-followers (in any time) are “called,” and therefore are “transformed,” through their experience of Christic events (or messianic events), and in the process they are “set apart” for a certain task. The figure of the “call” is found again and again in Romans (expressed with related words) and in Paul’s other letters (especially 1 Corinthians): ●

●

●

“Called” (κλητὸς, klètos) about Paul in 1:1; about the Rom in 1:6–7; and about many Christ-followers in 8:28, 30; The verb “to call” (καλέω, kaleô) in 4:17, 9:7, 12 (about the Patriarchs), 8:30, 9:24 (about Christ-followers), 9:25–26 (about Israel in a quote of Hosea); “Calling/vocation” (κλῆσις; klèsis) in 11:29;

to which we can add (with Agamben): ●

“Being called” and “vocation” in a small treatise on this topic in 1 Cor 7:20–31, with the refrain: “Remain in the calling/vocation (klèsis) in which you were called (ἐκλήθη, a passive form of kaleô)” (1 Cor 7:20 [DP], a phrase repeated in abbreviated form in 7:24).

“Called (to be an) apostle” (κλητὸς ἀπόστολος, 1:1c) and “set apart” (ἀφωρισμένος, 1:1d, for the apostolic task), Paul’s second and third figurative self-descriptions clarify how the previous transformations (Paulus/Little and slave of Christ) should be understood: namely as signals that, like Abraham and Sarah, in addition to receiving a new name, Paul received a new vocation (klèsis). “Called” and “set apart” should be understood as two divine passives: “called by God and/or Christ/Messiah” and “set apart by God and/or Christ/Messiah.” The fact that Paul is called (and “set apart,” 1:1), that the Romans are “called by Jesus Christ” (1:6, 7; as emphasized by Käsemann),91 and that many others are called (8:28, 8:30, 9:24–26) signals that the messianic time is the time when God calls people—that is, gives a (new) vocation to them. Unlike a vocation/profession that people choose for themselves, such calls are vocations that God or Christ/Messiah addresses to people. In the messianic time, as Agamben shows, this call (klèsis) transforms the status of those who receive it: “Klèsis indicates the 91

Käsemann, 15.

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particular transformation that every juridical status and worldly condition undergoes because of, and only because of, its relation to the messianic event.”92 The question is: in which sense is this call transformative? It is essential to recognize with Agamben that such a call involves a twofold transformation: a constructive transformation and a negative transformation.93 The constructive transformations include Paul being made into an apostle and set apart (1:1) for a certain task and the Romans being made into saints (1:7). How does Paul envision constructive transformations? And, regarding the negative transformations, what is revoked (Agamben’s word) from the condition of those who are transformed? When held together, these two questions, innocent as they may sound, are crucial. According to the way in which one addresses them, either one returns to a form of (forensic) theological interpretation or one sets up the canvas upon which the realized-apocalyptic/messianic vision will be painted as we progress in our figurative reading of Romans. (1) The process of being made into an “apostle” or a “saint” by being “called by God” (the constructive transformation). Obviously, in these first verses what being an “apostle” or “saints” is not yet spelled out—much will need to be specified as we progress in our figurative reading of Romans. But we can already say that, as a figure, “called” alludes to an intertext, which in this case is the story of the way in which he, Paul, was called (1:1c) and thus transformed. The figure “called” makes sense in terms of the story of Paul’s transformative encounter with the risen Christ, a “Christic-event.” Most interpreters agree94 that in 1:1c–d Paul alludes to his encounter with Christ/Messiah described in Galatians: “When God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might manifest his gospel (εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτὸν) among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:15–16, DP).95 The fact that in Rom 1:1 Paul associates being “called” and being “set apart” as he did in Gal 1:15–16 further confirms that he alludes to his encounter with Christ/Messiah. As Beker says this is a primordial religious experience that nourishes, intensifies, modifies, and transforms those who are encountered.96 The depth or power of such religious experience should not be overlooked. It is a transformative experience: Paul found himself changed into a “called apostle set apart” (for the gospel) as well as under the power of Christ/Messiah as “slave of Christ Jesus,” with a new name, Paulos. Furthermore, this call/vocation also transforms him into an apostle in the sense that he is being equipped by Christ/ Messiah to carry out this vocation. He is being empowered by receiving charis, an enabling power (spiritual gift [grace]), as is made explicit in Rom 1:5 that underscores that receiving the vocation of “apostleship” is directly associated with the reception of such a charis: “We have received spiritual gift/charis and apostleship” (ἐλάβομεν χάριν καὶ ἀποστολὴν). Similarly, in 1:11–12 Paul expresses that he has a charisma/spiritual gift that he can share with others. In sum, as Keck puts it, “Paul neither volunteered to

92 93 94 95

96

Agamben, 22. Agamben, 23. For example, Keck, 40; Byrne, 38–39. As we did in the rhetorical/ideological interpretation, the thematic/figurative interpretation will take into account that εὐαγγελίζωμαι is in a middle voice; the apostle/evangelist, Paul, participates with Christ in the manifestation of the gospel. So my proposed translation. Beker, Paul, 15–16.

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be an apostle, nor did he view himself as the church’s apostle.”97 God and/or the risen Christ intervened in his experience and transformed him into an apostle. Although in these first verses what being “saints” is not yet spelled out (the rest of Romans specifies it), we can say that the above comments about what is involved in Paul’s call and transformation apply somehow to the Romans since, because of the thematic structure of this unit, Paul’s and the Romans’ calls are set in thematic parallelisms. To begin with, the Romans have been “called by Jesus Christ/Messiah” (1:6); they are those “in Rome, called saints” (1:7, κλητοῖς ἁγίοις, thus not “called to be saints”). Therefore, Paul’s text with its thematic parallelisms requires that we see the “Paul-like Romans” as having experienced some sort of transformative Christevent, some sort of encounter with the resurrected Christ, as Paul did. As Paul was transformed by God (and Christ) into a “called apostle set apart,”98 so the Romans are transformed into “called saints” by God (and Christ)—they did not make themselves saints by special kinds of behavior! Their encounter with the risen Christ/Messiah transformed them into “saints.” This is a central point of Badiou’s interpretation of Paul. Again and again Badiou emphasizes that nothing makes sense in Paul as long as one does not recognize the centrality of Christic-events, of encounters with the risen Christ, not only in the case of Paul but also in the case of all the saints in Rome (1:7). Thus Badiou emphasizes (following Pasolini)99 that for Paul the origin of saintliness is necessarily the unexpected, thunderbolt-like, event—the Christic-event as a pure encounter with the risen Christ.100 This is what Paul expresses here by juxtaposing “called saints” (1:7) with “called by Jesus Christ/Messiah” (1:6). One cannot be “saint” (transformed into a “saint”) without being “called by Jesus Christ/Messiah.” And this call is through an encounter with Christ/Messiah who is, of course, resurrected from the dead (1:4). Thus the thematic and figurative presentation of the Romans refers to an encounter with the risen Christ—an encounter (like a thunderbolt) which is a pure transforming event, a pure manifestation of the power of God. The Romans’ experience was the experience of a “precarious truth,” which is simultaneously the experience of being “traversed by an infinite power.”101 They were transformed into “called saints”—and therefore, in a Paul-like way, not only with a new vocation but also with new names and a slave-like status (with “obedience of faith/vision” 1:5)—through an encounter with the resurrected Christ/Messiah. (2) What is “revoked” from the condition of those who are transformed (the negative transformation)? Of course, such constructive transformations necessarily involve negative transformations. Paul’s and the Romans’ earlier conditions are challenged. At the very least some features of these conditions are revoked. There are three plausible possibilities: one aligned with the forensic theological interpretations; 97

Keck, 40. Keck. 99 Pier Paolo Passolini, Saint Paul (trans. Giovanni Joppolo; Paris : Flammarion, 1980). 100 I suggest to modify the translation of the poetic (and thus difficult) sentence “le hasard foudroyant, l’évènement , la pure rencontre, sont toujours à l’origine de la sainteté” (Badiou, Saint Paul, 39) by “the unexpected, thunderbolt-like, event, the pure encounter is always at the origin of saintliness” (compare with the translation in Badiou, 37—an otherwise excellent translation—that here hides Badiou’s point). See Badiou, 36–37. 101 Badiou, 54. 98

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another aligned with the inclusive covenantal community interpretations; and a third aligned with the thematic and figurative interpretations—realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations. The first possibility (consistent with forensic theological interpretations) is to envision these negative transformations as radical subtractions that remove all the particularities of Paul and the Romans so as to give them totally new identities as Christ-followers. In such a case the identity of Christ-followers is a universal new identity and a universal new condition, a new self that replaces the old self crucified with Christ (6:6). This radically new and universal identity is recognizable in the “calls” when one reads 1:1, 6–7 (and subsequent passages) as involving a radical subtraction—Paul abandoning his Jewish identity and the Romans abandoning their Gentile identity—demanded by an interpretation of the Christic-event as universalizing (as Badiou does).102 Benjamin Dunning appropriately summarizes Badiou’s interpretation by saying that for him Paul “announces a universalizing operation whereby truth emerges by radically subtracting itself from the differences of ethnicity, culture and sex/sexuality.”103 Dunning evokes Gal 3:28 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female”) which, in this interpretive perspective, would understand its concluding statement “for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” to mean: there are now only Christ-followers, all of them with the same universal condition.104 The second possibility—following inclusive covenantal community interpretations—is to envision this negative transformation as a minimal subtraction, or better as a “grafting,” as Dunning suggests.105 By being “called,” Gentiles are grafted upon God’s chosen tree, the people of Israel, and in this way they are given a new status and a new mode of life as “saints,” as members of the “holy people,” and this without effacing Israel’s ethnic identity (11:17–24). Reversing the analogy, one can say that sainthood was grafted upon the Gentiles, without modifying their Gentile ethnic identity. Similarly, by being called “apostle” Paul is “grafted” upon the inclusive covenantal community, put in a position of leadership (as apostle), but without effacing his Jewish identity. Paul remains a (Pharisaic) Jew, thinks and acts like one, even as he welcomes Gentiles in the chosen people made inclusive by Christ. Yes, the “calls” involve changes, transformations; but these are minimal.106 A third possibility—a midrange possibility according to which the transformations brought about by “calls” are neither radical subtraction nor mere grafting (or minimal subtraction)—is more attuned to Paul’s text when it is read from a thematic and 102

As Badiou does, followed by Žižek. See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 130, and his discussion of Badiou in The Ticklish Subject. 103 Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 2. 104 This radical subtraction is demanded when the gospel is understood as a universally true message composed of a series of propositional truths to which both preachers and believers adhere. As a consequence they must abandon everything they believed before encountering the gospel. This is why this interpretation presupposes forensic theological interpretations. 105 See Dunning, Specters of Paul, 2, who suggested the analogy with the grafting on the olive tree that I further develop in reference to Rom 1:1–7. 106 This is why I say this interpretation is aligned with inclusive covenantal community interpretations (see Chapter 4) which ends up minimizing transformations in order to emphasize the inclusive character of Paul’s teaching.

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figurative perspective. To begin with, whether it is a “call” by God (of Paul, the slave of Christ/Messiah, 1:1) or a “call” by Jesus Christ/Messiah (of the Rom 1:6), such a “call” is messianic. Directly or indirectly the origin of this call is marked by the Messiah, and it is a calling/vocation to be implemented in the messianic age. Together with its positive transformation—transformation of Paul into an apostle or Romans into saints—such a messianic call necessarily involves a complementary negative transformation. The question is: what did Paul and the Romans (and by extension subsequent believers) have to abandon when receiving this call? Agamben expresses it in a succinct and elegant formula: “The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation.”107 Yet, this formula requires explanations based on Paul’s texts! Receiving new vocations affects the “old” vocations that Paul, the Romans, and other believers had.108 Of course, Paul had a “vocation” (“an old vocation”) before receiving his “messianic vocation,” that is, before being “called to be an apostle” (Rom 1:1c). As he describes it in Gal 1:13–14 and Phil 3:5–6, he had a vocation as a Jew totally devoted to Judaism and therefore totally devoted to defend zealously the traditions of his ancestors; therefore his vocation ultimately found expression in persecuting the church.109 His messianic vocation as apostle (the positive transformation), Rom 1:1c, involved a “revocation” of his zealous vocation as a Jew (the negative transformation, as expressed in Gal 1:15–16, Phil 3:7). Does this mean that this “revocation” demanded from him a total forsaking of his Judaism?110 In a figurative interpretation that pays attention to the role of intertexts, this is clearly not the case, since in the next verse, Rom 1:2, he refers to the Jewish Holy Scriptures (a central part of “the traditions of [his] ancestors” in Gal 1:14). His vocation as a Jew was modified, but not totally rejected. Therefore it is not a “radical subtraction.” Nevertheless Paul’s “messianic vocation”—his vocation as an apostle—involves a “revocation” of his “old vocation.” In other words, his “old vocation” loses its power to drive his life; it loses its power to make him excessively “zealous” for what he still views as “Holy Scriptures” and valuable Jewish traditions (Gal 1:14, see also Phil 3:6).

107

Agamben, 23, italics in original. This “old” vocation might be a religious vocation (as it was for Paul) or a secular vocation (a purpose in life). This figurative/thematic interpretation—for which “vocations” are viewed as configurations that range from the call itself (whether verbal or not) to the actions or way of life of those who received the vocations—is quite different from the philological interpretation (of the forensic theological interpretations) for which “vocation” is limited to the act of calling performed by God (since it is a divine calling). When one follows such an interpretation it becomes quite difficult to make sense of 1 Cor 7:20: “In the calling (klèsis) in which he[she] was called (ἐκλήθη, a passive form of kaleô), everyone should remain” (which we discuss below). Indeed, in this line of interpretation, it becomes impossible to make a distinction between “calling” and “called”—such a distinction leads to a very convoluted interpretation, such as in Raymond Collins, First Corinthians. Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1999), 285. 109 “You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Gal 1:13–14). “Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phlm 3:5–6). 110 As is presupposed in forensic theological interpretations (see Chapter 3). 108

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Some comments on the revocation of the “Gentiles’ vocation” by their messianic vocation confirm what we just said about Paul’s vocation. Since Rom 1:6–7 does not provide any explanation, following Agamben we need to turn to 1 Cor 7:20–31. In the midst of a discussion about marriage, Paul introduces comments that can be viewed as a small treatise on “being called” and “vocation.”111 The pericope begins with a reference to the “vocation” (secular vocation!) that believers had before “being called,” that is, before receiving their “messianic vocation”: “In the calling/vocation (klèsis) in which he[she] was called, everyone should remain” (1 Cor 7:20, DP).112 This exhortation is repeated in a somewhat abbreviated form in 1 Cor 7:24. In the messianic time (when “the time has become short,” 1 Cor 7:29), the messianic vocation does not demand a rejection of one’s earlier vocation: “remain as you are”; “remain in the vocation in which you were involved.” But it demands a drastic change of attitude toward one’s earlier vocation: it demands to behave as if not. Paul repeatedly makes this point in 1 Cor 7:29–31: The time has become short [ὁ καιρὸς συνεσταλμένος ἐστίν]; from now on, let those who have wives be as not [ὡς μὴ; hôs mè] having; and those who mourn as not [ὡς μὴ] mourning, and those who rejoice as not [ὡς μὴ] rejoicing, and those who buy as not [ὡς μὴ] possessing, and those using the world as not [ὡς μὴ] using it fully. For the present form [σχῆμα] of this world is passing away.

The significance of the “as not” [hôs mè] is apparent in the most concretes examples: “those who buy as not [hôs mè] possessing, and those using [χρώμενοι] the world as not [hôs mè] using it fully [καταχρώμενοι]” (1 Cor 7:30–31). As Agamben insightfully points out, these verses “make an explicit reference to property (dominium) under Roman law: ius utendi et abutendi,” and reverse it.113 In brief: according to Roman law when one owns a property, one has both the use of it (utendi, the right or power to use the property) and the right to abuse it (abutendi, the right to fully consume it, to exhaust it, to destroy it). Similarly regarding a property one has the right to buy it, and also to possess it fully and exclusively. A part of one’s (secular) calling/vocation (klèsis) as a Roman citizen was the right to use and abuse (exhaust, totally possess, fully use) one’s property. What does Paul say regarding the proper behavior of those who have received a messianic vocation? In this messianic age those who have been called by God can still use their property—their secular vocation and its rights remain— but they can no longer abuse their property, they can no longer absolutize their relationship to their property, they can no longer make of this property an absolute possession. This principle applies to relationships between husbands and wives (1 Cor 7:29): when called by God such relations can no longer be absolutized. It also applies to one’s emotions such as mourning and joyfulness (1 Cor 7:30): they can no longer be

111

Agamben, 20–43. 1 Cor 1:20: ἕκαστος ἐν τῇ κλήσει ᾗ ἐκλήθη, ἐν ταύτῃ μενέτω. “In the calling/vocation (klèsis) in which he[she] was called (ἐκλήθη, a passive form of kaleô), everyone should remain.” 113 Agamben, 26. 112

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absolutized.114 Each of these changes in attitude involves the willingness of the Christfollower; they should no longer want to absolutize their old vocation. But they can adopt this new attitude (being “as if not”) only because they are empowered by God/ Christ. The same principle applies to Paul’s old vocation in Judaism. Yes, he can and should remain as he is—he can and should remain a Jew, he can and should use all the traditions in Judaism (including the Holy Scriptures)—but he should do so as not [ὡς μὴ, hôs mè]. Because of the transformations brought about by the risen Lord in his life, he is not only instructed but also empowered to abandon his zealousness as a Jew; he should and can abandon the absolutization of his Jewish vocation, and its destructive consequences—his persecution of the church. Thus Paul the Jew remains a Jew and lives as a Jew; but because of his messianic vocation, he lives as not [hôs mè] being a Jew, as not living as a Jew—no longer as a zealous Jew. He is free to live his Judaism in a freer way. And the same is true of the Romans (and the Corinthians, as well as any Christfollowers in any given time): when they “are called” for their messianic vocations, even though they can keep their old vocation since they can and should “remain as they are,” it becomes impossible for them to absolutize their old vocation.115 As we shall see, absolutizing one’s old vocation—whatever it might be—amounts to being idolatrous (see below comments on 1:19–32 and on “idolatry”). As we progress in our figurative reading, from now on we can presuppose that those who are “called” have been given a messianic vocation (that transforms them into apostle or saints), which allows them to keep their old (religious or secular) vocations (thus Paul remains a Jew and the Romans remain Gentiles) but demands from them to view their old vocations as not absolute (rejecting their absolutization).

Apostle, set apart for the gospel of God (Rom 1:1d–e) and Spiritual gift/charis [grace] and apostleship (1:5); Saints (1:7b) The outcome of Paul’s transformation through being “called” (by God) is that he has become an “apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (ἀπόστολος ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ, Rom 1:1d–e). Once again Paul uses figures that directly allude to his primordial (religious) experience on the Damascus road that transformed him. He points out that (in Byrne’s words) “the risen Lord who ‘called’ him . . . also made him, from that moment on, a ‘sent’ herald of the gospel (cf. Gal 1:1, 15-16a).”116 The messianic “call,” which revokes Paul’s earlier zealous Judaism (the absolutization of his Jewishness), establishes for him a messianic “vocation”: apostleship. In this figurative reading of Romans, apostleship cannot be viewed as an honorific status reserved for a few authorities—he uses this title about Andronicus and Junia, whom he designates as prominent among the apostles in Rom 16:7. Thus Paul does not need to defend his claim to be an apostle against adversaries who contest his right to call himself 114

And also to the more complicated case of slavery 1 Cor 7:21–23, which emphasizes “using” (χρῆσαι) one’s slavery, rather than seeing oneself as under the power of one’s slavery—a social teaching in 1Corinthians which would require close examination. We will deal with similar issues when we will encounter them in Romans. 115 Paul’s refrain in 1 Cor 7:8, 11, 20, 24, 26. 116 Byrne, 39.

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in this way (as is frequently said in commentaries, including Byrne, that read these verses in terms of disputes reflected in other letters).117 What is significant in this call to apostleship is that, as 1:5 makes explicit by associating it with “spiritual gift/charis [grace]” (Christ “through whom we have received spiritual gift/charis and apostleship,” 1:5), is that, in Käsemann’s words, this call “does not confer endowment and responsibility in general. It empowers them by giving them a specific charisma.”118 Paul’s call as an apostle is a “charisma”119 endowing him with what is needed for a particular ministry, and thus empowering him for it. Similarly the Romans are “called saints” (1:7a), a phrase that should be understood (as “called apostle” was) to refer to “God’s sovereign action, God’s deliberate choice.”120 In Käsemann’s words, “Christians are holy [saints], not because of their conduct, but because they stand before the face of their Lord,”121 and this because, in a sovereign action, God approached them (not because they approached God!). As a consequence they are transformed into members of a “holy” people—the eschatological Israel dedicated to the (liturgical) service of God, as Byrne comments.122 Thus like Paul, the “called apostle,” who was transformed by the messianic call which was a revocation of his vocation as a zealous Jew123 and was empowered (receiving “spiritual gift/charis [grace]”) that he needed to carry out his new vocation, so it is for the Christ-followers in Rome: they are transformed by a messianic call that empowers them for a new vocation. This is a vocation as “saints,” as “holy” people who manifest the presence of the Holy God in the messianic time.124 Of course, throughout the letter Paul will say much more about the empowerment and vocation of the “saints.” Here it is enough to note that in the same way that Paul received charis (a spiritual gift that empowers him to carry out his vocation, 1:5), the saints in Rome also needed such a spiritual gift/charis to empower them to carry out their own vocation. Therefore, in his greetings, Paul invokes charis—an empowering spiritual gift—upon them in his blessing/greeting: “Charis [spiritual gift, spiritual empowerment] to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:7b). As Käsemann (14) says: “It [charis] almost always means the power of salvation which finds expression in specific gifts, acts, and spheres 117

Byrne, 38. Käsemann, 6 [emphases added], 14; see also Byrne, 40, Keck, 45. 119 Note that in this thematic/figurative interpretation I do not translate charis by “grace” as is commonly done by Forensic Theological interpretations. As a reminder to readers accustomed to Paul’s text in English translations, after reference to charis I sometimes add between brackets [grace], which would be an acceptable term if it were not invested with the forensic meaning “forgiveness.” Following Realized Apocalyptic/Messianic interpreters I translate it by “spiritual gift/charis,” or simply “spiritual gift,” or even “charisma” (with Käsemann) in order to insure it will not be (mis) understood as “grace” in the sense of “forgiveness” (the Forensic understanding). Here spiritual gift/ charis is an empowerment. 120 Keck, 40. 121 Käsemann, 16. 122 Byrne, 41. 123 Not a revocation of his Judaism! 124 This is what the Greek Fathers also underscored (as discussed in Part III, Contextual Settings of Receptions of Romans). Thus Chrysostom regarding the description of the Romans as klhtoi/j a`gi,oij (“called saints”) speaks of the centrality of the radical and powerful “transformation” of humans in Christ. See Archbishop Demetrios Trakatellis, “Being Transformed: Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans,” 41–62 in Daniel Patte and Vasile Mihoc, eds., Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans (RTHC, 2013). 118

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and which is even individualized in the charismata. . . . As a power, grace [charis] does not establish human qualities but service.” And Byrne125 adds: for their apocalyptic/ messianic vocation “each and every believer has a particular gift (charis) bestowed by the Spirit.”126 “Set apart for the gospel of God” (1:1d–e). Although this is not clear in English translation, as we noted the verb “set apart” is in a passive form, which expresses once again that God is the agent. This verb is also a figure in that it paraphrases what Isaiah (49:1) and Jeremiah (1:5) said about their own divine calls when they were elected by God. Paul sees himself as Isaiah-like and/or as Jeremiah-like. In the same way that they were called by God before they were born, so it is for Paul (1:1d), and also, so it is for the Romans (“called by Jesus Christ” and “called saints,” 1:6–7), and therefore so it is for subsequent believers, including today. In sum: for the prophets, for Paul, and for the Roman (and subsequent) Christ-followers—three typological layers127—the “call” (by God) is not a vocation that they chose for themselves (as Byrne and Keck insist).128 Paul’s call is, in Käsemann’s words, a “prophetic calling [that] appears now, of course, in an apocalyptic perspective.”129 The same can be said about the call of the Roman Christ-followers, even though their call will have a different specificity. Paul’s specific call as “apostle” is “to bring about the obedience of faith/vision among all the Gentiles for the sake of his [Christ’s] name” (1:5). The Roman Christ-followers’ specific call as “saints” (holy people) is to bring others to glorify God (as we shall see in 15:1–14, and also in 1:21), a priestly kind of vocation, not unlike Paul’s (as described in 15:15–19). In the apocalyptic/Messianic time what is prefigured in the types/promises of Scripture is refigured (manifested again) in this case in the calls of Paul and of the (Roman) Gentiles. As we progress in our figurative reading, from now on we can presuppose that “apostle” and “saints” were empowered (receiving “spiritual gift/charis [grace]”) to carry out their new vocation or service in the messianic time.

The Gospel of God (1:1e–5a) The “gospel of God” (1:1e) is said to have been “promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (1:2); to be “about his Son, who has come from the seed of David” (1:3) and “appointed Son of God in power through the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:4).130

125

Byrne, 40. Following Byrne (and unlike Käsemann), to avoid any confusion with forensic interpretations I avoid using the term “grace” replacing it either by “spiritual gift/charis” or by “spiritual gift.” 127 These three typological layers are formed by (1) the Prophets and their calls as types that prefigure (2) Paul and his call to apostleship and (3) the Romans (and subsequent believers) and their calls to be saints. Beyond differences, the same type of situation and of divine intervention is taking place in each typological layer. 128 Byrne, 39; Keck, 41. 129 Käsemann, 6. 130 Figurative readings (by contrast with many other exegetical studies) posit that these parallel statements should not be read as antithetical. This is ascertained by their comparison with parallelisms in the Dead Sea Scrolls (including the Pesharim). See Nathan C. Johnson, “Romans 1:3-4: Beyond Antithetical Parallelism,” JBL 136:2 (2017), 467–90. 126

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The gospel is directly related to Paul as “called apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (κλητὸς ἀπόστολος ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ (1:1e). The responsibility of the “called apostle” who, like the prophets, has been “set apart” for a mission—a prophetic mission in the messianic time—has to do with the gospel of God. The “gospel” as a figure produces meaning through the intertexts it evokes, in particular, the prophecies of Second and Third Isaiah (Isa 40:9; 41:27; 52:7 [quoted in Rom 10:15]; 60:6; and 61:1)—that include the verbal form of εὐαγγέλιον. Theological forensic interpretations (see Chapter 3) understand the allusions to these texts to mean that the prophecies of Isaiah have been “fulfilled” in Jesus Christ; “the gospel” is a message about Christ (the content of “faith”) validated by the fact that it “fulfills” the Scriptures and therefore supersedes them.131 From the perspective of the figurative reading of the realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretations, the prophecies of Second and Third Isaiah are to be read as intertexts that prefigure “the gospel of God” for which Paul is set apart. This means that “gospel” must be interpreted (1) in terms of Isa 40:9, 41:27, 52:7, 60:6, and 61:1 in their historical contexts (i.e., when these prophetic promises were fulfilled by the return from exile); it is these prophetic-texts-as-fulfilled-in-post-exilic-times that are “types”132 which prefigure what God is doing in the messianic time. As in the prophetic time, “heralds of God” (now, apostles and saints) proclaim similar promises and point to their fulfillments in Christ, in Paul, in Christ-followers, and in the rest of their worlds (Käsemann’s and Byrne’s line of interpretation) and (2), with Käsemann, in terms of 1:16 (where Paul associates “gospel” with “power”: “The gospel is the power of God for salvation”). The prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah 40:9, 41:27, 52:7 that were proclaimed by an exilic prophet before 538 BCE (before the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus) were fulfilled when the exiled people of Israel came back from Babylon to Jerusalem later in the sixth century BCE.133 These prophecies are about “heralds of good news,” who say to the devastated cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” (Isa 40:9); or say to Jerusalem in ruins “Here is my servant” “who will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 41:27–42:3); or “who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion [in ruins], ‘Your God reigns’” (Isa 52:7). These prophecies were proclaiming good news to the exiled in Babylon while Jerusalem lay in ruins and were fulfilled through the intervention of Cyrus and the Persians and the return of (some of) the exiled to Jerusalem after 538 BCE (Cyrus’s decree). These prophecies (about “heralds of good news”) that were fulfilled (by the late-sixth-century return of the people to Jerusalem) are now types that prefigure the proclamation of good news (the gospel) by “heralds of good news” about what God has done and is doing in and through the Messiah/Christ Jesus. So this good news is appropriately called “the gospel of God”—a 131

For Käsemann (9) such an interpretation “weakens the apostle’s [apocalyptic] point.” Surprisingly, it is still the interpretation proposed by Keck (41), although he usually proposes a realized apocalyptic interpretation. 132 Rather than as prophecies or promises which are “fulfilled in Christ” (as if they had not been fulfilled in the post-exilic period). Despite his consistent realized apocalyptic/messianic interpretation, Keck (41) remains ambiguous on this point. 133 See Baltzer, Deutero-Isaiah: A Commentary on Isaiah 40-55, Hermeneia. Margaret Kohl, trans., Peter Machinist, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). See also Richard Clifford, “Second Isaiah,” 490–501, vol. III, The Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. David Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992).

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subjective genitive; the gospel performed by God134 through the Messiah/Christ Jesus for the people in the messianic time. As in the time when Jerusalem was in ruins because of wars and when the people was in exile, and therefore when the unjustly oppressed people desperately needed “heralds” proclaiming good news of God’s forthcoming salvific intervention and proclaiming the coming of God’s servant who will bring salvation from captivity and justice (Isa 41:27–42:3), so in the time of Paul and of the Romans, “heralds” proclaiming good news are desperately needed. Paul is “called apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (Rom 1:1): he is a “herald of good news.” This is presupposing that, from the perspective of Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/ messianic vision framed by the above types, in his time (as in Israel’s time): 1. People are in a desperate state of affairs, under unjust powers that keep them in captivity/exile—although these evil powers remain to be identified in the rest of the letter to the Romans (and might be quite different from those that kept Israel captive); 2. People urgently need “heralds” (“apostles,” Paul, as well as others, such as Andronicus and Junia, Rom 16:7, and certainly many others, including as we shall see the “saints in Jerusalem” invited to share in Paul’s mission) who proclaim good news of God’s forthcoming salvific intervention(s); and 3. There are fulfillments of these promises not only through the coming of God’s Messiah/Christ (both in Christ’s ministry “according to the flesh” and “with power” “according to the Spirit,” Rom 1:3–4) but also through ongoing Christic interventions (encounters of the risen Christ; the “calls” of Paul, of the Romans, and of other Christ-followers).135 Somehow these fulfillments and Christic interventions brought, bring, and will bring justice and salvation from captivity (to what?), as prefigured by the type represented by Isa 61:1 and its sixth-century fulfillment shortly after the return from captivity.136 The description of his mission by the “herald of good news”—“He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isa 61:1)—is something which is also happening in the messianic time opened by the coming of Jesus Christ/Messiah our Lord, the time of Paul, of the Romans, and of all subsequent Christ-followers. In line with this typological reading, the powerful realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of Rom 1:2–5a proposed by Byrne makes full sense: For Paul and other early Christian writers the content of the “good news” was no longer freedom for the exiles in Babylon but a “preannouncement” [or “prototype” as Käsemann says] of the eschatological liberation which God has inaugurated for

134

As carefully noted by Käsemann, 8; Byrne, 39; and Keck, 41. As Käsemann (9) expresses by saying about “the gospel as power” and “Christ event”: “The Christ event both precedes the message and continues itself in the message, so that it is not the content of an idea or one doctrine among others.” 136 The date of Third Isaiah, Isa 56–66. See Christopher Seitz, “Third Isaiah,” 501–07, vol. III Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. David Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992). 135

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all peoples in Christ. Paul associates his apostolic role with that of the scriptural prophets since he is the herald who announces the [further] realization of the salvation they foretold. . . . The gospel has this Christological focus because God has inaugurated the eschatological liberation which it proclaims by setting up Jesus as messianic agent of the promised liberation. . . . The key instrument of that liberation [is] Jesus Christ as “Son of God” in power. . . . The “gospel” tells the “good news” that Jesus is risen and entered in his active reign as risen “Lord.” . . . He also reigns as messianic “Lord” with a divine mandate to bring about the “subjection” of the universe to the glory of God.137

From this perspective, one can fully understand that Paul’s vision of the gospel of God presented in Rom 1:1–5a is consistent with his affirmation in 1:16 that “the gospel is the power of God for salvation” (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν εἰς σωτηρίαν). What is proclaimed (“the gospel of God”) is that, as Käsemann says, “God intervenes in the world with power as Lord, its Creator, and Judge”138 in the form of “Christ events”—that I call “Christic events”; that is, interventions/manifestations of the risen Christ. That is, what happened in Jesus Christ/Messiah both “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit”—proclaimed as kerygma/good news—is a twofold proclamation. It is the proclamation that in Jesus Christ/Messiah God intervened with power raising him from the dead (“with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead” 1:4) as God intervened with power in the history of Israel according to the Holy Scriptures (the types). It is also the proclamation that this gospel is a promise that God is intervening and will continue to intervene in the same way— the gospel of Jesus Christ is itself a type for future divine interventions, and is therefore the “gospel of God” (1:1d). This is what Käsemann expresses: It should not be overlooked . . . that in some sense the gospel, too, retains the character of promise. . . . Paul calls the gospel a mystery. His own proclamation is oriented to the eschatological world-dominion of Christ, which is present already and already witnessed to. . . . The dialectic of promise and gospel, or of gospel and God’s apocalyptic self-declaration, is not the dialectic of a historical process of growth. Rather, it arises from the fact that in world history the promise is known only through the gospel as its prototype, and that the gospel can be maintained as God’s promise for the world only in conflict and peril and answered only by proclaiming it ever anew.139

As we progress in our figurative reading, from now on we can presuppose that the gospel of God proclaims/manifests that God intervenes in the world with power in the form of Christic events. It is the threefold proclamation/manifestation that (a) in Christ/Messiah Jesus God intervened with power (raising him from the dead), (b) as God intervened with power in the history of Israel according to the Holy Scriptures (the

137

Byrne, 39–40. Käsemann, 9. 139 Käsemann, 9–10. 138

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types), and (c) as God is intervening in the messianic time in which all believers live. In addition, God is envisioned as a God who intervenes in powerful transformative ways in human affairs—in the past, in the present, as well as in the future.

The figurative pattern of 1:1–7 We can conclude this section by a few observations regarding the figurative pattern we elucidated in 1:1–7. The vision of the gospel of God as inaugurating “the eschatological liberation . . . by setting up Jesus as messianic agent of the promised liberation” (Byrne’s words)140—the vision expressed in 1:1d–5a—is the necessary figurative foundation for Paul’s vision of the transformations that he perceives in his own experience and in that of the Romans. It is what allows him to make sense of his own transformation through divine interventions, as figurativized a) by the change of his name into “Paul”; b) by his change of status into slave of Christ/Messiah Jesus; c) by his “call” transforming him into a “called apostle” demanding from him to renounce his earlier absolute view of his former vocation (as a zealous Jew) while expecting him to remain a Jew free to carry out another vocation as apostle (living “as not,” hôs mè); d) by his being set apart for the gospel and empowered for this vocation through the reception of “apostleship” as a spiritual gift/charis, which is an empowerment. It is also this vision of the gospel of God (1:1d–5a) that allows Paul to envision that the Romans (and more generally the Gentiles) are similarly transformed through divine interventions as figurativized (a) by the change of their names (into “beloved by God”); (b) by their change in status marked by their submission in faith/vision (pistis/fides, a submission rooted in a faith/ vision that the God manifested in Christ/Messiah is trustworthy); (c) by their “call” transforming them into “called saints” demanding that they renounce their absolute view of their former vocation/life as Gentiles while expecting them to continue living as Gentiles (living “as not,” hôs me); (d) by being set apart for “sainthood” as a spiritual gift/charis, which is a spiritual empowerment imparted to them again and again, including through Paul (1:7, 1:12). These characteristic patterns of Paul’s thematic and figurative vision are complemented by the first mention of a central role of Scripture as “promise” (ἐπαγγελία—the root of the verb προεπαγγέλλω used in 1:2a) to be understood in a typological way as the prefigurations (or types) of new divine interventions not only in Jesus Christ but also in the lives of Christ-followers, including Paul.141 The keystone of Paul’s thematic and figurative vision expressed in 1:1d–5a is the resurrection from the dead through which Jesus, son of David, became manifested as Son of God with power and as our Lord. Indeed, Jesus’s resurrection is an eschatological event—a realized-apocalyptic event142 through which “God has inaugurated the era of messianic liberation.”143 The risen Christ as Lord has (present tense) power, which he uses in the present of the church (whenever the present of the church might be) to bring about the new creation—the sphere of Christic/messianic power—in the midst of the

140

Byrne, 39. A point emphasized by Beker, 252–53. 142 Beker, 167. 143 Byrne, 39; see also Käsemann, 14. 141

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old world—the sphere of oppressive powers, including sin. As Badiou underscored all these transformations can be recognized and understood only insofar as one acknowledges the centrality of Christic-events, of repeated and ongoing interventions of the risen Christ.144 For a summary of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Slave [δοῦλος] of Christ Jesus (Paul a); Called (apostle, saints); Apostle (1:1); God; Gospel of God (1:1); Spirit (of holiness) (1:4); Scriptures; Faith/Vision (1:5); Obedience of Faith/Vision (1:5); Christ Jesus; Grace (1:5, 7); God’s Beloved in Rome (1:7): Saints, called to be (1:7)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the third column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for Thirty-One Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community readings.

(B) Rom 1:8–18a: The gospel as prefiguration/promise of messianic transformative divine interventions in human experience (1) Rom 1:8-18a as thematic unit framed by inverted parallelisms: Revelation of God’s transformative goodness by itself vs. revelation of both God’s goodness/righteousness and God’s wrath. In the first thematic unit, 1:1–7, Paul painted with broad strokes his relationship with the Romans, creating the thematic plane that frames an initial and rich set of interrelated figures, a first part of his figurative world, that is, for him, a realized-apocalyptic/ messianic world. As we continue reading the letter, we can readily recognize (as we shall see, following Byrne) a thematic organization in 1:9–17.145 But what about 1:8? Is it insignificant? And what about 1:18a? The temptation to find a conclusion to the second thematic unit in 1:17 is strong, because it is the end of a section for both forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community interpretations. But for our thematic reading we must recognize that since 1:8 does not belong to the first thematic unit (marked by clear inverted parallelisms between 1:1 and 1:6–7), it must be the opening of a new one. Similarly, without 1:18a we cannot recognize clear inverted parallelisms to 1:8: 1:8 vs. 1:17–18a. Therefore, the thematic unit must be 1:8–18a. These structural observations may seem artificial, as the delimitation of thematic units always seem. What is so significant about inverted parallelisms? The same question could be asked of the painter: what is so significant about establishing the flat surface that the picture plane is? In brief it is significant because, without it, she could not create a pictorial space. So it is for Paul. By setting up inverted parallelisms between 1:8 and 1:17–18a Paul posits the thematic plane in which he can continue to construct the figurative world and present a second set of figures for his realized-apocalyptic/ messianic faith/vision.

144 145

Badiou, 36–37. Byrne, 48.

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The inverted parallelisms of this unit become clear only after we take note of the carefully crafted structure of this passage. As Byrne shows, it alternates the expression of Paul’s desire (intention) to visit the Romans with thematic statements about the reason for that desire.146 Byrne presents this structure as follows: 1:9-10 Paul’s constant prayer (= intention) to visit the Romans (“you”) 1:11-12 Reason: to share spiritual gifts and strengthening with them. 1:13a Paul’s long-standing intention to visit the Romans (“you”). 1:13b-14 Reason: to reap some harvest among Gentiles and be indebted to them. 1:15 Paul’s long-standing eagerness (= intention) to share the gospel with the Romans. 1:16-17 Reason: to share the salvific power of the gospel.

This threefold thematic repetition of his intention to visit the Romans, each time justified by strong reasons to do so, reflects Paul’s concern that his plans might be misconstrued by his readers. His visit to Rome—that is, to a church that he did not help to plant—is a delicate matter. Is he not going against his own practice of not “participating in manifesting the gospel” where Christ has already been named (15:20, DP)? Furthermore, he reveals in 15:23–33 that the purpose of his going to Rome is not truly to visit the Romans! It is merely a visit on his way to Spain, with the hope they will provide help to him in his new missionary field. Why did he not say this before 15:23–33? Is he afraid that the Romans will be offended by the revelation of the actual purpose of his trip? Whatever might be Paul’s motivations (a primary concern for forensic theological and for rhetorical interpretations), the three expressions of his “intentions” and of his “reasons” in 1:9–17 subdivide the thematic plane in subunits that will organize our figurative reading. Obviously, this “carefully crafted structure” does not account for 1:8. What is so significant in 1:8, “First, I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ concerning all of you, because your faith/vision is proclaimed all over the world”? We should not ignore this verse, even though it is a modification of the thanks to the gods conventionally found in Greco-Roman letters. To understand the significance of this thanksgiving we need to identify its thematic features and how they continue to construct the thematic plane that frames Paul’s figurative world, building upon the preceding one. In order to give thanks to God, Paul needs to have recognized something about which to be thankful to God. He needs to have recognized a manifestation of “God’s goodness”—or better of “God’s transformative goodness.” This recognition of divine interventions that transform one’s life experience is the figurative definition of “faith/vision” that emerged in our study of 1:1–7. In sum, in 1:8 Paul’s thanksgiving concerning the Romans is grounded in his recognition (through his faith/vision) that God is at work in them—therefore he can and needs to thank God. How is God at work in/among the Romans? “Because your faith/vision is made known all over the world” (1:8b). The faith/vision that the Romans have and display is itself given to them (generated) by God. The Romans’ faith/vision is a transformative

146

Byrne, 48.

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gift from God. How was this faith/vision given to them? As noted, by being “called by Jesus Christ” (1:6). Therefore, Paul does not praise the Romans for their faith/vision, but for the fact that they have been called by Christ. Thus he gives thanks to God through Jesus Christ. Furthermore, because this faith/vision is transformative (now the Gentile Romans are “called saints”), people around these Christ-followers can recognize their faith/vision and speak about it. Their faith/vision was widely “made known” (καταγγέλλεται, 1:8d); so much so that the news of their faith/vision has reached Paul in Corinth—the other side of the known-world. Consequently, Paul can say that their “faith/vision is made known all over the world,” and he can give thanks to God for this. To make explicit the inverted parallelisms between 1:8 and 1:17–18a, we can say that this thanksgiving expresses that God’s transformative goodness has been revealed to Paul when God’s goodness has been made manifest among the Romans; that is, when he heard about the Romans’ faith/vision. We can suspect that 1:17–18a is in a position of inverted parallelisms with 1:8 because these verses are at the end of the threefold thematic pattern in 1:9–17. In this thematic/figurative reading one pays close attention to the intratextual interrelations. One first observes that both 1:17 and 1:18a open by a declaration that something “is revealed” (ἀποκαλύπτεται) using the identical verb in the same form. In both cases “is revealed” (ἀποκαλύπτεται) is a divine passive—it is a revelation by God (or maybe by Christ/Messiah) through the gospel (1:16)—in the present tense. It is a revelation which is needed by certain people in their present situation (we will explore why there is a focus on the present). In 1:17, God’s righteousness is revealed (by God). To whom? This is made explicit by the qualification of this revelation as being “from faith/vision to faith/vision” (ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν; a phrase complemented by 1:16c, “to everyone who believes”): this revelation is addressed to believers (Christ-followers). Similarly, in 1:18a, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” God reveals God’s wrath. To whom? Actually, this revelation has also to be addressed to believers/Christ-followers. Of course, God’s wrath is against those whose life is characterized by “impiety and unrighteousness” (ἀσέβεια καὶ ἀδικία). But impious and unrighteous people cannot be the recipients of the revelation of God’s wrath! How could they receive a revelation from God since they do not believe in God? These impious people cannot perceive what happens to them (described in 1:19–32) as manifestations of God’s wrath! Actually, the revelation of God’s wrath against the ungodly is necessarily addressed to the same people to whom the righteousness of God is revealed (1:17): believers/Christ-followers. Through their faith/vision, they can see (recognize, have the revelation of) manifestations of the righteousness of God. Similarly, through their faith/vision, they also can see (recognize, have the revelation of) other manifestations of God, namely manifestations of the wrath of God. We shall come back to the figurative dimensions of these verses. Here it is enough to note for our thematic analysis that according to 1:17–18a Christ-followers have a twofold revelation: both a revelation of God’s righteousness and a revelation of God’s wrath. This is in inverted parallelism with 1:8, which limits itself to a single revelation; a revelation of God’s goodness/righteousness. Why is it so important for Christ-followers to receive also a revelation of God’s wrath? Actually, as we shall see, this is an essential component of Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/

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messianic figurative world: one cannot see (have a vision of) the manifestations of God’s righteousness as long as one does not see the manifestations of God’s wrath from which God’s righteous interventions free those who lack faith/vision, those who are blind, and therefore those who mishandle the truth—including the truth that there are evil powers from which humans need to be freed.147 This astonishing characteristic of Paul’s figurative world expressed in 1:17–18a in inverted parallelism with 1:8 needs to be underscored, because it will have striking implications for the figurative reading of the following verses—and indeed of the rest of the letter. Suffice it to say here, anticipating some aspects of this figurative reading, that these amazing verses express in a very compact way that through/in the gospel Christ-followers who have faith/vision can see (recognize, discern) in their present— in front of them—both manifestations of God’s righteousness and manifestations of God’s wrath. Looking at their experience in life through/in the gospel (ἐν αὐτῷ, 1:17)— that is, through/in the “types” that the gospel offers—with the conviction that this is the messianic time in which what is prefigured by the gospel-types is being fulfilled, Christ-followers can expect to recognize manifestations of both God’s righteousness and God’s wrath. Similarly, the intended readers of this letter (first “all those in Rome, beloved of God, called saints,” as well as subsequent Christ-followers) can expect that in the following verses and chapters Paul will present manifestations of both God’s righteousness and God’s wrath that they should be able to recognize and discern. This is what an analysis of the overall thematic structure of 1:8–18a already establishes and what the figurative reading will flesh out. The overall thematic structure of 1:8–18a can be summarized as follows (adding to Byrne’s): 1:8 First of all, I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ concerning all of you, because your faith/vision is proclaimed all over the world. 1:9-10 Paul’s constant prayer (= intention) to visit the Romans (“you”) 1:11-12 Reason: to share spiritual gift and strengthening with them. 1:13a Paul’s long-standing intention to visit the Romans (“you”). 1:13b-14 Reason: to reap some harvest among Gentiles and be indebted to them. 1:15 Paul’s long-standing eagerness (= intention) to share the gospel with the Romans. 1:16 Reason: to share the salvific power of the gospel. 1:17-18a For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed through faith/vision for faith/vision; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live through faith/ vision.” For God’s wrath from heaven is revealed against all impiety (ἀσέβεια) and unrighteousness on the part of humans. [who in their unrighteousness mishandle the truth, 1:18b]

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In addition, one could underscore that 1:8 emphasizes “faith” (of the Romans) while 1:18a emphasizes “impiety” (ἀσέβεια)—that most English translations render by “ungodliness” even though it directly refers to a lack of faith or a wrong faith, that is, impiety—“unrighteousness,” and “suppression of the truth.” We shall come back to this.

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(2) Rom 1:8–18a: The figures in this thematic frame The thematic analysis of the intratextual relations has shown that Christ-followers (the readers) are led through 1:8–18a to progress from recognizing manifestations of God’s goodness/righteousness—an essential but incomplete part of the faith/vision that Paul shares with them—to recognizing manifestations of both God’s goodness/righteousness and God’s wrath. Our figurative reading needs to follow this progression, moving step by step among the sections of the thematic structure of 1:8–18a presented above—and, of course, building upon our knowledge of the figures we encountered in 1:1–7 (a focus on intratextual relations) and elucidating how new figures are constructed with new intertexts.

Thanking God for the Romans’ Faith/Vision (1:8) and God’s righteousness is revealed—God’s wrath is revealed (1:17–18a) 1:8: I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith/vision is made known all over the world.

From now on, I start the reading of a new section by taking note of the figures (or themes) that we have already encountered and begun to define; they are part of the intratextual relations that contribute to the further construction (thickening) of these figures in the new section of the letter even as they contribute to the construction of new figures.148 Rom 1:8 involves two primary figures: (1) Paul giving thanks to God through Jesus Christ; (2) the Romans’ faith/vision as made known all over the world. To read these phrases as figures we need to allow them to surprise us. For this, instead of erasing the unexpected features of these phrases by positing that Paul did not really mean what he said—in effect, dismissing this verse by saying that “this is hyperbolic language aimed at praising the Romans” (as if faith/vision was some kind of achievement)—we need to take seriously that, surprisingly, Paul praises God for their faith/vision known all over the world. To elucidate these figures we need to read them in terms of their 1. intratextual relations of 1:8 with the preceding verses, 1:1–7 (and the figures identified in them) and with their inverted parallelisms in 1:17–18a that includes two complementary figures regarding “the revelation of God’s righteousness” and “the revelation of God’s wrath”; and 2. intertextual relations of 1:8 (and its thanksgiving) with intertexts found in similar thanksgivings in Greco-Roman letters, biblical texts, and Jewish apocalyptic 148

To make them recognizable I simply bold them: here “God,” “Jesus Christ,” and “faith/vision.” The Appendix provides summary-definitions of the ways in which these figures are understood in a realized apocalyptic/messianic interpretation (the Appendix also offers the possibility of quick comparison with their definitions in the forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community interpretations).It is important to consult again and again this Appendix (as I personally have to do to avoid confusing the three interpretations), in order to avoid developing a hybrid interpretation— something we often do simply by using English translations which most often follow forensic theological interpretations.

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writings; and the intertextual relations of 1:17–18a (and the figures of “God’s righteousness” and “God’s wrath” as “revealed,” ἀποκαλύπτεται, apocalyptetai), with Jewish apocalyptic writings. Let us begin by the figures in 1:8b, “Your faith/vision made known all over the world.” It expands upon and confirms our discussion of faith/vision as a figure in 1:5. As we saw, the figure “faith/vision” (pistis and fides) involves (1) the recognition—“vision”— of intervention(s) by God and/or Christ the Lord in one’s present (a primordial transformative religious experience) as well as in the lives of others in the present and/or in the past (e.g., in Jesus and the Scriptures) and (2) obedience to the Lord. Therefore, wherever one recognizes people with faith/vision, one can (and should) conclude that a divine intervention took place—otherwise these believers would have nothing “to see.” Thus Käsemann can say (about 1:16): “Where faith[/vision] is, there is the place of salvation”; that is, there is a manifestation of God’s power.149 The faith/vision figure of 1:5 becomes even thicker in 1:8 by being presented as a gift from God. The fact that Paul gives thanks to God (1:8a) for the Romans and their faith/ vision makes it explicit. Paul does not praise the Romans for their faith/vision. Paul gives thanks to God. Thus faith/vision is not some kind of achievement by the Romans, for which Paul would have praised them.150 By giving thanks to God for the Romans and for the fact that their faith/vision is proclaimed, Paul posits (1) that the Romans have seen divine interventions in front of them (and recognized these for what they are) and (2) that their faith/vision is a gift from God—as he expresses in a different way in 1 Cor 12:9 (where faith/vision is presented as one of the gifts of the Spirit). Let me insist on this point by underscoring that, as a figure, “faith/vision” is not something that believers perform by adopting a special attitude toward God (e.g., trusting God), by adopting certain beliefs as trustworthy, by voluntarily submitting to the Lordship of Christ, and/or by being faithful. Rather as a figure, “faith/vision” is a gift from God that transforms people (here the Romans), as Paul was transformed into Paulos (1:1); a gift from God that makes them trust and obey God (as Paul was enslaved to Christ/Messiah); a gift from God that empowers them to adopt the gospel and its eschatological proclamation as a trustworthy “call,” making them “called saints” (as Paul was “called apostle”) and forcing them into submission (obedience) to their Lord (as Paul also was). In sum, as Käsemann expresses, “faith/vision” is a gift of God which is also a sign that God powerfully intervened in believers and their lives, as Paul most explicitly illustrates in the case of Abraham (Rom 4).151 Therefore, wherever one recognizes someone with faith/vision, one can (and should) be thankful to God. This faith/vision is necessarily visible for those around the believers because, as noted regarding 1:6, faith/vision as pistis and fides necessarily involves an active response to this divine intervention: obedience (“obedience of faith/ vision” ὑπακοή πίστεως). Faith/vision is not merely a private experience. As Byrne 149

Käsemann, 22. It is not that Paul is reluctant to acknowledge the achievements of Christ-followers and to praise them for these; for example, he does so in 16:3–4 when writing about Prisca and Aquila, “to whom I give thanks” (οἷς . . . εὐχαριστῶ). 151 Käsemann, 23. 150

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notes, it necessarily also involves a way of life and a faithful behavior.152 And it is all the more visible that this faith/vision leads to a paradoxical way of life, because (as Taubes notes) it involves “seeing” what others “do not see” and enacting this vision in unexpected behavior—obedience.153 “The whole network of Christian groups”(Keck’s phrase),154 including in faraway Corinth (represented by the hyperbole “all over the world”), could then speak about the Romans’ faith/vision. The figure in 1:8a can be identified as Paul’s “thanksgiving to God” (I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you). As usual, this figure becomes a “thick figure” through the intertexts to which Paul’s words allude. Which intertexts? Unlike the preceding figures (e.g., slave) for which identifying such intertexts demanded to set aside several potential intertexts that would have been misleading, in the present case quite a number of texts are clearly like Paul’s thanksgiving to God. To begin with there is the “thanksgiving to the gods” conventionally found in the opening of GrecoRoman letters. As Paul Schubert has shown, in the process of writing a “letter” Paul both followed and modified such epistolary conventions, which were already adopted in Hellenistic Jewish traditions (including Philo and 2 Maccabees, as Käsemann notes).155 It is apparently from such traditions that Paul adopted the verb εὐχαριστῶ (eucharistô, “I thank”), which he uses in similar thanksgivings in all his letters (except Galatians).156 Furthermore, the fact that Paul uses the phrase “I thank my God” (also used in 1 Cor 1:4, Phil 1:3, Philemon 4) points to other intertexts: namely, the many biblical praises addressed to “my God” throughout the Hebrew Bible, including in numerous Psalms. Therefore additional important intertexts are certainly related to the ongoing covenantal praxis of the Chosen People to give thanks to God (to bless God) that, of course, Paul the Jew followed. This practice is most directly exemplified by the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns)157 of the Qumran community, which had a similar realized-apocalyptic perspective. In sum, Paul’s thanksgiving is similar to— is figuratively like—these thanksgivings in Greco-Roman letters (same vocabulary), in the Bible (similarly addressed to “my God,” e.g., in several Psalms), and in Jewish thanksgiving practice, best exemplified here by the Hodayot. But we should not forget that what gives power to a figure is the surprise created by the intertext—what is unlike our expectations. Thus regarding “slave of Christ,” the knee-jerk reaction is to say: of course, Paul does not truly mean that he is a “slave”

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Byrne, 49; also Käsemann, 17, Beker, 72. Taubes, 10. 154 Keck, 47. 155 Käsemann, 17. See Paul Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings (Berlin: Topelmann, 1939), 26, passim, who is pointing its usage by Philo (123–31), Epictetus (132–42), and other Hellenistic texts (including papyri and inscriptions), as well as 2 Macc 1:11–12. 156 He did not borrow it from the LXX that translates various thanksgiving Hebrew verbs by ἐξομολογέω rather than by εὐχαριστῶ. 157 Eileen M. Schuller and Carol A. Newsom, The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms): A Study Edition of 1QHa., Early Judaism and Its Literature (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). I quote from this new edition and translation which, with the benefits of decades of research, presents this scroll in its reconstituted original order, rather than in the other reconstituted column order published by Sukenik in 1954–55. Since most of the earlier translations and publications cite Sukenik’s order, I give both orders: first Schuller’s and Newsom’s column number and second, between parentheses, Sukenik’s column number. 153

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comparable to the many slaves the Romans encountered every day! But, as we saw, this surprising possibility is precisely what gives to the figure “slave of Christ” all its power. But in the present case Paul’s “thanksgiving to God for the Romans” seems to be simply like the thanksgivings in the Greco-Roman letters and in the Jewish practices of his time. This is what is emphasized by most exegetical studies of this verse. But a figurative reading must take note of what is unlike in the intertexts that the figure evokes, and therefore underscore what is surprising in Paul’s words. The question is: what is unlike “Paul’s thanksgiving” in all these intertexts? Or, unlike the Greco-Roman and Jewish thanksgivings in Paul’s text? I long puzzled over these questions, until I paid attention to the reasons given for giving thanks to God in all these texts and in Paul’s letters. But this was so surprising to me that I had to double and triple check it!158 What are the blessings from God for which the speakers/authors give thanks to God? In Greco-Roman letters, in the Hebrew Bible, and in all the Hodayot (in the Dead Sea Scrolls), the persons who give thanks to God do so for blessings that they have themselves received (either as individuals or as members of a group).159 The difference is that Paul consistently gives thanks for divine interventions in the lives of other people: NOT “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for what God has done for me” (or “for us”); from 1:1 we know that Paul could have provided a long list of such blessings he received from God, yet he did not! BUT “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you” and for “your faith/ vision”—a thanksgiving for divine interventions in the experience of other people.160

This is a surprising—indeed quite extraordinary—characteristic of Paul’s figurative world and faith/vision! It is one thing to recognize—true as it is—that in Paul’s letters “praise is never the first word, but always in the second place . . . never prima actio, but always reactio, reactio to God’s saving activity” (as Deichgräber concluded from

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I looked up not only the expressions of thanksgiving, but also the expressions of praise and blessing addressed to God by Paul (including his many quotations of Psalms) in Romans and all the other undisputed letters. I could not find a single instance of Paul giving thanks for blessings he had received—although of course he acknowledges that he has received many such blessings. All his thanksgivings, praises, and blessings addressed to God are always for blessings and gifts received by others. 159 This thanksgiving can be addressed to God (or a god or the gods) from which the speakers/authors have received all kinds of blessings, but also in secular situation this thanksgiving is found addressed to political authorities for favors received by the speaker. See Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, 143. This is so much the understanding of what a thanksgiving should be that in Hellenistic literature when an author/speaker gives thanks for blessings received by someone else, the authors/speakers specify that they “give thanks in place of someone else” (εὐχαριστεῖν ὑπέρ τίνος; see Schubert, Form and Function, 127). 160 In his exegetical analysis of all these passages of Paul’s letters Schubert noted that his thanksgivings are always about other people, but he simply attributes this fact to the “epistolary characteristic of the Pauline thanksgivings” (see Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, 10–39— especially the conclusion sections, 34–39—see also 39–94). But Schubert’s own review of numerous ancient letters shows that this literary genre did not demand this focus of the thanksgiving upon the addressees: they did not do it! Therefore, Paul chose to do so.

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his study of early Christian hymns).161 Such an observation is indeed important in that it makes clear that these thanksgivings and prayers are not attempts at manipulating God to obtain blessings. But it is quite another thing to go the next step and take note that Paul exclusively gives thanks to God for blessings that others have received through divine interventions in their lives. Of course, Paul expects that Christ-followers give thanks to God for blessings that they have personally received (an aspect of 1:21). But primary thanksgiving has a different orientation: Paul is thankful to God because God intervened in the Romans’ experience and gave them faith/vision. And it is possible for Paul to do so presumably because, when looking at the Romans from the perspective of his own faith/vision (a transforming gift from God which allowed him to see himself as “Paulos,” “slave of Christ/Messiah,” and “called apostle”), he can recognize that they have been blessed by transformative divine interventions similar to his own. And presumably those who proclaimed the Romans’ faith/vision throughout the world had also recognized such divine interventions in them. These observations will be corroborated by our discussion of 1:9–10 (his prayer concerning the Romans) and of 1:17 (regarding the revelation of the righteousness of God to those who have faith/vision). But the fact that in Paul’s figurative world one should give thanks to God for the blessings that others have received surprisingly implies that Christ-followers are expected to be turned outward—looking for (seeking to discern) what God is doing in and for others in their concrete lives. This involves an outward looking contemplative attitude. How does the phrase, “through Jesus Christ” (διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ; “I thank my God through Jesus Christ”) contribute to building this figure? It expresses that this thanksgiving is possible because of something that Christ, as an intermediate agent (διὰ, through), has done or does.162 One possibility is to understand that Christ is the intermediary or “prayer-conduit” between Paul and God (an understanding favored among forensic theological interpretations). But following the declarations that the Romans have been “called by Christ” (1:6), as well as “called saints” (1:7, “by Christ” is presupposed), and that Paul invoked “charis” (an empowering spiritual gift) and “peace” upon them both from God our father and from the Lord Jesus Christ (1:7), it is best to understand “through Jesus Christ” 1. either as a reference to interventions of (the risen) Christ in the Romans’ experience.163 Paul can (and should) give thanks to God, because he sees how God, through Jesus Christ, intervened in the Romans, transforming them. 2. or as a reference to interventions of (the risen) Christ in Paul’s own experience. Paul can (and should) be thankful to God, because Christ empowers him to see divine interventions in the experience of others, including that of the Romans. 161

Reinhard Deichgräber. Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit: Untersuchungen zur Form, Sprache und Stil der frühchristlichen Hymnen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 201, quoted and translated by Peter T. O’Brien, “Thanksgiving within the Structure of Pauline Theology,” in Pauline Studies for F. F. Bruce (Exeter: Paternoster, 1980), 50. See also Peter T. O’Brien, “Thanksgiving and the Gospel in Paul,” New Testament Studies 21 (197475), 144–55. 162 The meaning of διὰ (through) with the genitive. 163 With O. Kuss, “Die Formel ‘durch Christus’ in den paulinischen Hauptbriefen,” Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 65 (1956), 193–204, quoted by Käsemann, 17.

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In both cases, Paul is thankful to God for the Romans’ faith/vision because, looking at them from the perspective of his own faith/vision, he can see (this vision is in itself a divine gift manifested through an intervention of the risen Christ) that they have been blessed by an intervention of the risen Christ (another divine gift). This means that a fundamental characteristic of Paul’s figurative world—and of his faith/vision—is that it is primarily oriented toward God’s interventions in other people. Through his othercentered faith/vision, Paul looks outward for what God is doing in and among other people. And when one sees that God has blessed and positively transformed others, one cannot but express thanks to God. The fact that Paul’s thanksgiving is other-centered and that both his figurative world and his faith/vision are outward looking is surprising, but only as long as one fails to pay attention to the intratextual relations between 1:8 and 1:17–18a, which reinforce these aspects of Paul’s figurative world. As the thematic organization of this unit (1:8–18a) shows, the figure of “Paul’s thanksgiving to his God for the Romans’ faith/vision” in 1:8 is parallel with his statement about the revelation of God’s righteousness in 1:17, and is in inverted relations with his statement about the revelation of God’s wrath in 1:18a. Therefore, we can expect that 1:17 addresses the question left open by 1:8: why can Paul be thankful (i.e., why is Paul able to and in a position to give thanks) to his God through Jesus Christ for the Romans’ faith/vision? Because God reveals (makes visible) God’s interventions to those with faith/vision. Or, in Paul’s words: Because (γὰρ) the righteousness of God is revealed through/in [the gospel] through faith/vision for faith/vision, as it is written: the righteous will live through faith/ vision. (1:17)164

Rom 1:17 further explains why Paul is in a position to be thankful to his God for the Romans’ faith/vision. To understand it, we need to unpack the figurative wealth of this verse by considering how each of its figures is constructed as a result of intratextual and intertextual relations. Regarding intratextual relations, we first ask: what are the figures in 1:17 that are parallel to those in 1:8 (and more generally to those in 1:1–8)? I already pointed to the answer by bolding them in the text-quotation. We noted in 1:1–8 that God is envisioned as intervening in transformative ways in (past, present, and future) human affairs. Therefore, we can already expect that “God’s righteousness” is a figure for one kind of God’s transformative interventions— including in the lives of the Romans. “The gospel” [of God] is the news of past divine transformative interventions in and through Jesus Christ as types/prefigurations of God’s interventions in the present. But is it true that speaking of “the righteousness of God as revealed in the gospel” is another way of saying that the gospel is a prefiguration of God’s righteous interventions in our own present? This seems to be the case since Paul’s quotation of Hab 2:4 (the righteous will live through faith/vision) expresses that righteousness is exhibited in the life of a righteous person who has “faith/vision.” Since faith/vision is a gift from God (for

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Δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, καθὼς γέγραπται, Ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται.

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which one can thank God, 1:8) and not a person’s achievement (for which one should compliment the believer), similarly a person’s righteousness is also a transformative gift from God and not a person’s achievement. “[Revealed] through faith/vision for faith/vision”: the link of both roles of “faith/ vision” (ἐκ . . . εἰς; “through” . . . “for”) with “revealed” makes perfect sense when pistis is understood as a “faith/vision”: revelation is taking place “through faith/vision” as a gift from God/Christ allowing believers to recognize/see God’s or Christ’s transformative interventions in the present; and this revelation is ultimately “for faith/vision,” that is, to prompt the active response (obedience) that faith/vision also involves. Thus, as noted regarding 1:8, Paul was thankful to his God for the Romans’ faith/vision, because he recognized (by means of his own faith/vision) that their faith/vision was the result of divine interventions in their experience (including being “called by Jesus Christ,” “called saints”). Such interventions had brought them to “obedience of faith/vision”— as others in the communities of Christ-followers could recognize and proclaim. Of course, without transformative divine interventions, faith/vision could not exist, since receiving such a faith/vision is receiving an empowering and transformative spiritual gift (charis) from God. In sum, using the vocabulary of 1:17, we can say that the fact that the Romans have faith/vision reveals that the transformative goodness of God has been manifested in the lives of these Christ-followers. This formulation is appropriate because this transformative goodness of God that the Romans experienced is, as we shall see, one manifestation of the righteousness of God. When Paul claims that “the righteousness of God is revealed” (1:17a), he affirms that a transformative intervention of God—called “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ)—is taking place (note the present tense, “is revealed”) in the lives of righteous people (1:17b), but also has taken place and will take place (in the “present” of other people’s lives during other periods of history). He also states that God’s righteousness can be recognized (be seen) “through faith/vision” (ἐκ πίστεως, i.e., it is recognizable by means of [ἐκ, “out of ”] “faith/vision”) and “for faith/vision” (εἰς πίστιν, i.e., for the life of faith/vision—in “obedience of faith/vision”—of those who have faith/vision, such as the Romans). What is revealed is a manifestation of the transformative power of God in the form of God’s righteousness. We shall progressively show through our figurative reading why Paul envisioned God’s righteousness as a manifestation of the transformative power of God. A first step in this direction is to read the text and ask: how is God’s righteousness revealed? “In/through the gospel” (“in it,” ἐν αὐτῷ, 1:17a). As noted (regarding 1:1–4),165 this gospel through which God’s righteousness is revealed concerns God’s intervention in Jesus Christ—a powerful divine intervention, since the “son of David” was “raised from the dead” and made “our Lord” (1:2–4). But this gospel is also a promise: it is a typological prefiguration of God’s ongoing powerful interventions in the present of

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Let us keep in mind that above “gospel of God” (1:1) was defined in this figurative reading as the “good news” of God’s past and present saving interventions (so “gospel of God”). It is the news that now “God has inaugurated the eschatological liberation . . . by setting up Jesus as messianic agent of the promised liberation” (Byrne); the news/promise that God’s intervention in Jesus Christ (son of David raised from the dead, 1:2–4) prefigures God’s interventions in our present, through the Messiah and the Spirit.

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Christ-followers. This is why, as discussed below, Paul designates the gospel as “the power of God for salvation” (1:16). Here it is enough to say in a preliminary way that “God’s righteousness” is a manifestation of divine power which is “revealed” (made recognizable) “through faith/vision for faith/vision.” By quoting Scripture (Hab 2:4): “as it is written, ‘The righteous will live through/by faith/vision.’” (1:17c), Paul presupposes the question: where can such a manifestation of God’s righteousness be seen? Using Habakkuk’s words, Paul answers: In a righteous person who lives through/by faith/vision. Such a person has been transformed by a righteous divine intervention not only by having received the gift of faith/vision but also by being made into an actual righteous person (and not merely declared righteous in a forensic sense). Then the question is: who is this righteous person who manifests God’s righteousness? In whom can we see an embodiment—a figure—of God’s righteousness, according to this realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation? A first answer to this question is provided by Paul in 3:22–26 (see the commentary on these verses in Volume II,) and in similar passages: this righteous person is Christ/ Messiah. Or in Käsemann’s words: “Δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ [God’s righteousness] is for Paul God’s sovereignty over the world revealing itself eschatologically in Jesus.”166 Several followers of Käsemann’s apocalyptic interpretation exclusively identify Jesus Christ/Messiah as the righteous who manifests God’s righteousness. They do so by emphasizing that, in Keck’s words, Hab 2:4 is for Paul “a messianic promise, kept in the event of Jesus Christ”167—as Douglas Campbell also articulates, although in much greater and insightful details.168 A second answer to this question given by Käsemann should not be overlooked. Indeed, Käsemann continues: [God’s righteousness] is a rightful power with which God makes his cause to triumph in the world which has fallen away from him. . . . His [Paul’s] doctrine of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ [God’s righteousness] demonstrates this: God’s power reaches out for the world, and the world’s salvation lies in its being recaptured for the sovereignty of God.169

166

Ernst Käsemann, “The Righteousness of God in Paul,” New Testament Questions of Today 180 (see 168–82). 167 Keck, 53. 168 Douglas Campbell (683–704) says that his entire interpretation “ended up largely confirming the famous definition of Käsemann” (688). He argues that the “righteousness/justice of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ) can be viewed as having seven semantic characteristics. In brief (Campbell’s list, to which I add some of the vocabulary used above), one can say about the “righteousness of God” that: Its content [is] an event or act [or divine intervention]; Its singularity [for Campbell, the singularity of the Christ event; for me, the singularity of “the type,” whether found in Christ, in Scriptures, in the present of the believers, or in the future]; It is saving [a salvific divine intervention]; It is liberating [from some powers]; It is life-giving; It is eschatological or resurrecting. 169 Käsemann, “Righteousness of God,” 180, 181–82.

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In sum, the righteousness of God is manifested in any one who is “being recaptured for the sovereignty of God.” In saying so Käsemann does not deny that God’s righteousness is manifested in Christ/Messiah (as expressed in 1:3–4 and 3:22–26 and elsewhere). But Christ/Messiah is not the exclusive manifestation of God’s righteousness.170 In fact, 1:17 should not be read primarily in a Christological way. Surprising as it may be (especially for forensic theological interpreters), from 1:8 to 3:22 Paul does not mention Christ at all (except in 2:16 about Christ as the Judge at the end of time). It is appropriate to respect Paul’s emphasis, and to take note that 1:17 points to any righteous person as a manifestation of God’s righteousness. Although one can already suspect on the basis of 1:3–4 that such righteous persons are prefigured by the type Christ, this will become explicit only in 3:22–26. In sum—coming back to the affirmation that “the righteousness of God is revealed in [the gospel] through faith/vision for faith/vision” (1:17a)—each time one sees a righteous person who lives by faith/vision (1:17b) one sees (through faith/vision; with the eyes of faith) a manifestation of God’s righteousness. This applies to Christ (as Paul makes explicit in 1:3–4 and 3:22–26) but also to anyone who lives “by/through faith/ vision”—as the Romans do (1:8). Why is this so? Because no one can be righteous on one’s own. Without transformative divine intervention, righteousness cannot exist. It is because God has transformed someone into a righteous person that a person can truly be righteous. And this transformative process is a manifestation of God’s righteousness. Therefore, as Käsemann underscores, being righteous is actually being under the power of God’s righteousness—that is, in the sphere of power of God’s righteousness— as is demonstrated by the other uses of righteousness in Romans.171 Thus, for instance, Paul describes those who are not Christ-followers as people who “have not submitted to God’s righteousness” (10:3). Similarly, in 6:13–23 Paul repeatedly describes Christfollowers as under the power of righteousness: as “tools of righteousness” (6:13); as no longer slaves of sin but as “slaves of righteousness” (6:18, 19). Thus, being righteous results from a divine transformative manifestation through which one passes from the sphere of power of sin to the sphere of power of righteousness. But as 6:1–23 shows, this passing over from one sphere to the other is always in process; more divine transformative interventions are ever needed so that the righteous will not fall back into the sphere of sin (we will see how this ongoing process unfolds in 6–8, and also 12–15). Such is in brief a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of 1:17. So far the above comments have been explained exclusively on the basis of intratextual relations (especially with 1:8). The full-fledged richness of the figurative dimensions in 1:17 appears when we pay attention to the intertextual relations of this verse with Jewish apocalyptic literature. Many such Jewish apocalyptic intertexts have been identified by Käsemann,172 Byrne,173 and also to a certain extent Keck,174 as well as in more

170

This is so, because Christ is the type that prefigures other manifestations of God’s righteousness in all those who have been transformed into righteous; in Käsemann’s words, manifestations of God’s righteousness in all those who have been “recaptured for the sovereignty of God.” 171 Käsemann, 27–29. 172 Käsemann, Romans, 21–32, and “Righteousness of God,” 168–82. 173 Byrne, 51–54; 56–61. 174 Keck, 50-55.

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general studies of Paul’s Apocalypticism—including Patte,175 Beker (passim), and D. Campbell.176 These figurative intertextual observations both justify the above interpretative comments on 1:17 and complement them by setting them in Paul’s broader figurative world framed by his faith/vision. Let us begin by reading intertextually Paul’s quote of Hab 2:4: “as it is written, ‘The righteous will live by faith/vision’” (καθὼς γέγραπται, Ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται, 1:17b). The phrase “as it is written” (found sixteen times in Romans) is a verbal figure which needs to be read together with its intertexts in Jewish apocalyptic literature. It is like and unlike the verb pesher in the Dead Sea Scrolls (discussed in the introduction to this chapter). The same interpretive process is going on in 1:17 and in the pesher, even though the emphasis is reversed. The Pesher Commentaries focus on the explanation of or the unriddling of a biblical text viewed as a typological vision; the move is from the biblical text as typological vision to events or situations in the interpreter’s present. For the author of the Pesher, it is a matter of discerning (with the help of the biblical text and its types) divine interventions in events or situations related to the present of the Qumran community. In Romans 4, Paul makes a similar move (from biblical text to present situation), as we already mentioned and will study in detail in Volume II. But, here Paul says “as it is written” following a statement about a present divine manifestation (the revelation of “the righteousness of God”). The move is from a divine manifestation recognized through faith/vision to the biblical text that (Paul claims) provided the typological vision that allowed him to “see” this divine manifestation, and which is therefore given as an explanation. Hab 2:4 is offered as a type of the present event described as “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith/vision to faith/vision”—where the verb “is revealed” (ἀποκαλύπτεται) is an indicative present passive, thus a divine passive indicating a present activity of God. This divine revelation of the righteousness of God from faith/vision to faith/vision is like (is of the same type as) what the prophet says: “The righteous will live by faith/vision.” How can this be? This is most unexpected. Paul did not follow the Pesher Habakkuk on 2:4 (which he most likely did not know), which applies the prophetic text to the Qumran community. Rather, Paul developed a typological interpretation by using the understanding of the key term righteous with the meaning made explicit in the Hodayot (the Thanksgiving Hymns) of the Qumran community. First we can note with Käsemann (25) that in the Hodayot (1 QH) a righteous (a person who observes the Law) is not someone who has achieved righteousness through good deeds or through a voluntary submission to the Law. One cannot make oneself righteous! Rather God makes people righteous. Consequently, whenever one encounters a righteous person, one encounters the effect of a divine intervention. It is worth quoting an entire section of the Hodayot and commenting upon it, rather than referring to a whole series of passages without explanations. This is a thanksgiving hymn addressed to God:

175 176

Patte, Paul’s Faith, 232–96, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 131–308. D. Campbell, 601–38 and 683–704.

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And as for me, I know, by the understanding that comes from you, that it is not through the power of flesh [that] an individual [made perfect] his/her way, nor is a person able to direct his/her steps. And I know that in your hand is the inclination of every spirit, [and all] its [activi]ty you determined before you created it. How could anyone change your words? You alone created the righteous[/just], and from the womb you prepared him[her] for the time of favor, to be attentive to your covenant and to walk in all your way, and to advance [him/her] upon it in your abundant compassion, and to relieve all the distress of his[her] soul for eternal salvation and everlasting peace . . . . But the wicked [unrighteous] you created for the purpose of your wrath, and from the womb you dedicated them for the day of slaughter. For they walk in the way that is not good, and they despise your covenant, and their soul abhors your statutes. ~ Hodayot VII, 25–31 (italics added)177

This passage is typical of a Jewish apocalyptic figurative world. Human beings are unable and indeed unwilling to do the right thing (to be righteous)—the power of flesh is not enough to enable them to do the right thing; “nor is a person able to direct his/her steps.” Why? Because they cannot but act according to the inclination of their spirit which God predetermined before these persons were created. The inclination of one’s spirit—either inclination to do good or inclination to do evil178—which governs one’s way of life is “determined before God created it.” No free will in this deterministic figurative world! Humans are totally under the power of God. God created certain people as righteous from the womb and prepared them to be attentive to the covenant and to walk in all God’s way; they are therefore destined for “eternal salvation and everlasting peace.” Similarly, other persons are created as “wicked” (or better “unrighteous”) from the womb and therefore are destined for punishment (“slaughter”) by God’s wrath. Such is in brief some of the characteristics of Qumran’s Jewish apocalyptic figurative world.179 As is the case for any live figure, Paul’s figurative understanding of righteous (and righteousness) is both like and unlike that of Qumran. Paul’s view of righteousness is like that of Qumran in that the only possibility for a person to be righteous is for God to intervene in that person, transforming her/ him—as God intervened in Paul’s life, 1:1, transforming him into “Paulos,” “slave of Christ/Messiah,” “called apostle”; and as God intervened in the Romans’ life, transforming them into “called saints,” 1:6–8. Therefore, for Qumran, righteousness is a transformative gift from God that the righteous assumes and appropriates in his/her life in being attentive to God’s covenant and walking in God’s way. In Paul’s formulation of Hab 2:4 in Rom 1:17b (and also in the LXX), the actual meaning of the phrase commonly translated “the righteous will live” is best expressed in the awkward phrase, “the righteous will assume and appropriate righteousness in his/her life.” This is so because the verb “will live” (ζήσεται) is actually in the middle voice, a verbal form that conveys that the subject performs or experiences the action expressed by the 177

Schuller and Newsom’s translation (XV, 14–21 in Sukenik’s version). Italics added. [I made the translation sex inclusive and introduced the ambivalent translation “righteous/just.”] 178 Yetzer haṭov (the good inclination) and yetzer hara (the evil inclination). 179 For more details see Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine, 247–70.

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verb. Thus, although translating the middle voice (rather than ignoring it) is always awkward, it is appropriate to translate 1:17b as above. How will the righteous assume and appropriate righteousness? “Through faith/ vision” (in the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of pistis/fides) as a gift from God by means of which one sees divine interventions in one’s present and responds accordingly. Consequently, one can begin to see that righteousness is itself a transformative gift from God. Wherever one sees a righteous person, a divine intervention took place. The presence of a righteous person reveals God’s righteousness (God’s righteous intervention). Such is the scriptural type and promise (as it is written) offered by Hab 2:4 that the Qumran community found implemented in the righteous members of the community. Similarly, Paul finds the type and promise of Hab 2:4 implemented in the very presence of a righteous person who appropriates righteousness in his/her life. Therefore, Paul can affirm that such a person is each time a demonstration that “the righteousness of God is revealed” (1:17a). But as a figurative reading expects Paul’s figures of the righteous and of God’s righteousness as figures are also unlike those of Qumran on many points. The major difference is that Paul does not ground these figures in a strict predestination. For the Qumran community the righteousness or unrighteousness (or wickedness, as translations have it) of a person depends upon the good or evil inclination they received as “determined before [God] created it,” “from the womb.” By contrast for Paul the righteousness of a person is grounded in the gospel, since the manifestation/revelation of God’s righteousness is itself grounded in the gospel: “Because the righteousness of God is revealed in it [the gospel]” 1:17a). To see all this more clearly let us outline the unfolding of 1:16–18a: 1:16: I am not ashamed of the gospel. Why? Because: It [the gospel] is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes/has faith/vision. Why? How can you affirm this? The demonstration: 1:17: Because (γὰρ) the righteousness of God is revealed in it [in the gospel]. How? through faith/vision for faith/vision, as it is written: the righteous will live through faith/vision. Why is this demonstration of the power of the gospel important? 1:18a: Because (γὰρ) the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of humans

For Paul, as for the Qumran community, it is impossible to be righteous on one’s own. A divine intervention is needed! But Paul expresses it in a different way. Righteousness in a person is always a manifestation of God’s righteousness, a transformative gift from God. And this transformation is an ongoing process; the very presence of a righteous person reveals that God’s transformative righteousness is presently at work. Consequently, when a person lives this righteousness by faith/vision—in obedient

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response to the divine intervention seen through the faith/vision (“obedience of faith/vision” 1:5)—this person in turns makes visible/reveals God’s righteousness as a transformative power at work to which the righteous submits (as Paul further expresses in 10:3 and 6:13–23, as emphasized by Käsemann).180 In the process, this righteous person through her/his experience demonstrates that the gospel is indeed “the power of salvation to everyone who believes” (1:16). Then, in this figurative reading, one needs to ask: How is “salvation” (σωτηρία) to be understood? And salvation from what? To address these we first need to ask a preliminary question: what are the intertexts that would allow readers to understand the figure of “salvation”? Ps 98:2/LXX 97:2 and Isaiah 51:5 (LXX) as Richard Hays appropriately suggested.181 The LORD has made known his salvation (τὸ σωτήριον αὐτοῦ); in the presence of the nations he has revealed his righteousness (ἀπεκάλυψεν τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ). ~Ps 98:2/LXX 97:2 My righteousness [δικαιοσύνη] draws near quickly, and my salvation [σωτήριόν] will go forth as a light, and in my arm [equivalent to δύναμις in Rom 1:16] will Gentiles [ἔθνη] hope. ~Isaiah 51:5 (LXX)

These two verses are important biblical texts showing—especially in the Septuagint— the figurative interrelations of righteousness and salvation. But are they actual intertexts of Rom 1:16–17? Is it appropriate to call upon such texts for our understanding of these verses in Romans? Of course, it is! This is what Richard Hays convincingly argued, despite the fact that Paul does not quote these verses and that he merely makes vague allusions to them. But for Paul such vague allusions to biblical texts in one’s speech were significant, because for first-century Jews like him this was the biblical way of speaking and of thinking about any issue. For Jews in that time, Scripture was simply the air they breathed. As Michael Fishbane says, within the Jewish community “all significant speech is Scriptural or Scripturally-oriented speech”—in the same way that for many present-day evangelical and charismatic communities around the world, Scriptural speech is normal speech.182 Consequently early homilies in the synagogue (and following them, Midrash and Targum) adopted an anthological style. Homilies (and many other discourses) were made up of biblical words, phrases, and even verses strung together as beads on a necklace (as the rabbis liked to say) without explicit references to (and often without any concern for) the biblical texts from which they were taken. This was the biblical way of thinking about a topic. And for apocalyptic Jews (including for the apocalyptically minded Paul) this

180

Käsemann, 27–29. Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 36–41. 182 Michael Fishbane, “Inner Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” in Midrash and Literature (eds. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 34. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). In French we even have a name for such scriptural way of speaking: “patois de Canaan”! 181

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was even more the case because in their entire daily lives they “lived in Scripture.” Scripture was for them a tapestry of types that prefigured the divine interventions in their present lives. Their lives were totally envisioned through Scripture. As becomes explicit in the Community of Qumran, the entire community life of apocalyptic Jews was liturgical, in the sense that they were constantly in the presence of divine interventions—as priests were in the presence of the divine in the sanctuary. Therefore, all their discourses were scriptural, using an anthological style infused with Scripture.183 Consequently together with Hays (and with Campbell, 688–90 who follows him), it is most appropriate to expect that Paul was constantly making use of Scriptural intertexts in the form of allusions or phrases that echo particular biblical texts (here Ps 98:2/97:2 and Isa 51:5). These biblical texts infuse what he says in 1:16– 17 in such a way that, as a matter of course, salvation is necessarily associated with God’s righteousness and vice versa. To understand this conclusion it is enough to remember the importance of parallelisms in Hebrew poetry—a poetic sense is produced in a Hebrew text by expressing the very same point twice, but with a slightly different wording. Such is the case when Ps 98:2/97:2 equates the revelation of God’s salvation (“The LORD has made known his salvation”) and the revelation of God’s righteousness (“he has revealed his righteousness”): same agent (the Lord); same action expressed slightly differently (“has made known” and “has revealed”); therefore, despite different vocabularies, the same thing is revealed/made known. “God’s salvation” is equivalent to “God’s righteousness.” Similarly, in Isa 51:5, God’s righteousness, which comes quickly, is equivalent to God’s salvation, which comes like a light/lightning. From this perspective, how is “salvation” (σωτηρία) to be understood in 1:16? We can now definitely answer that in Paul’s figurative world the manifestation of God’s righteousness and the manifestation of God salvation are identical. Consequently the question we raised above—“How is ‘salvation’ (σωτηρία) to be understood?”—is clarified. Since the manifestations of God’s righteousness and of God’s salvation are identical, and since the righteous live by faith/vision (assuming and appropriating in their lives God’s righteousness that they see through faith/vision), such righteous persons are saved through manifestation(s) of God’s righteousness as a transformative power in their lives. The question “Saved from what?” remains. It will be addressed in the process of asking another question: why does the positive, constructive transformative intervention of God—the revealed manifestation of God’s goodness endowing Romans with the spiritual gift/charis of faith/vision (1:8) and believers with God’s righteousness (1:17)—needs to be complemented by a revealed manifestation of God’s wrath? But, is it a negative, destructive transformative divine intervention? This is explained in 1:18a: Because (γὰρ) the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness [of humans who hold fast to the truth in their unrighteousness.]

183

Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 169–76.

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The figure “the wrath of God is revealed” needs to be understood in the same way as the figure “the righteousness of God is revealed,” and together with it.184 ●

●

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Both are “revealed” by God (“is revealed,” ἀποκαλύπτεται, is used in both cases; it is a divine passive, reinforced by the mention that this revelation is “from heaven” in 1:18a). Both the revelation of God’s righteousness and of God’s wrath are in the present— the eschatological present of both Paul and the readers. In the messianic time, all believers are expected to have the faith/vision necessary to “see” God’s wrath. As discussed earlier, this revelation is not for the unrighteous, since they cannot see it. Both are parts of the gospel as “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (1:16), that is, the gospel as good news of God’s interventions. Although 1:18 does not specify that the wrath of God “is revealed” in/through the gospel as 1:17 does (ἐν αὐτῷ), the parallelism clearly marks it as such. While the wrath of God in itself can hardly be qualified as “good” news—it is punishment, though as we shall see, not an angry punishment—the revelation of the wrath of God is good news, because it explains the tragic role of evil powers in human lives that the righteousness of God overcomes.

It is all good and well that positive transformative divine interventions endow people with faith/vision and righteousness. But these positive transformations mirror negative transformations: manifestations of “the wrath of God” from which humans need to be freed. The repeated mention of God’s wrath throughout the letter (2:5, 8; 3:5; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19; and 13:5) shows that these negative divine interventions cannot be toned down. Conceptualizing the need for positive transformative divine interventions—the need for “the power of God for salvation” or, in other words, for manifestations of God’s righteousness—requires envisioning that impious and unrighteous humans are under God’s wrath. They are in bondage to evil powers that can only be overcome by positive divine interventions—manifestations of the righteousness of God. In a monotheistic figurative world, such evil powers have their origin in the One God: in God’s wrath. But the fact that God’s wrath is revealed together with the righteousness of God is good news: when one recognizes that evil powers and their destructive effects are manifestations of God’s wrath, one has still in one’s eyes the aura of the revelation of God’s righteousness through which such evil powers are broken. But, for this, readers need not only keep in mind all the passages in which Paul explicitly mentions God’s wrath but also that, in Paul’s figurative world, any evil from which people need to be freed is a manifestation of God’s wrath.185 Evil in all of its forms, far from being haphazard, is a manifestation of God’s wrath. And the good news is that consequently

184

Against Douglas Campbell. While he was most helpful regarding 1:16–17, I completely depart from his interpretation of 1:18–3:20 (Deliverance of God, 519–600) as a “speech-in-character,” which would be a presentation of the “Teacher’s” definition of “the problem”—rather than Paul’s definition of the problem. 185 Rather than manifestations of some “evil gods,” or other evil supernatural or natural powers.

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God is in control, as the revelation of the manifestations of God’s righteousness makes clear for Christ-followers. Paul’s presentation of the revelation of God’s wrath as a counterpoint to the revelation of God’s righteousness is related to his presentation of his own call (1:1) and the call of the Romans (1:6–7). As noted, each call involves both a constructive transformation (being empowered by God/Christ for a particular vocation or task) and, as a counterpoint, a negative transformation (being freed from one’s absolutization of a previous vocation). This absolutization of a previous vocation brings catastrophic consequences—in Paul’s case, it involved “violently persecuting the church of God and trying to destroy it” because “I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Gal 1:13–14, NRSV). Such absolutization of a previous vocation is what was revealed to him as a manifestation of God’s wrath, a bondage that was broken up through a transformative manifestation of God’s righteousness in his life. As discussed above, Paul’s transformation into Paulos, into a slave of Christ, and into a “called apostle” set apart for the gospel (1:1) is, in light of 1:17, a manifestation of God’s righteousness in Paul’s experience—Paul has been transformed into a righteous person who lives through faith/vision, a constructive transformation. But this “call” also involved for Paul a negative transformation. Although this call allowed him to remain as he was, a Jew (he “should remain in the state in which he was called,” 1Cor 7:20), it also demanded that he be as if not (ὡς μὴ, hôs mè; 1 Cor 7:29–31); it demanded that he leave behind the absolutization of his Jewish vocation and its destructive consequences (his persecution of the church). Paul’s absolutization of his Jewish vocation—making an absolute of true divine revelations that he had received together with other Jews— corresponded to “holding fast to the truth” (Rom 1:18b). His persecution of the church corresponded to his “unrighteousness.” His “zeal for the traditions of his ancestors,” his venerating these traditions rather than God, was a manifestation of the impiety, in which he was trapped. Such was for him the manifestation of the wrath of God for him. His impiety and unrighteousness were the evil power from which Paul could not free himself. Leaving behind the absolutization of his Jewish vocation was not something that Paul could do by himself. This manifestation of the wrath of God against him needed to be torn away from him by the Christic-event (Gal 1:13–16) that transformed him into Paulos and “slave of Christ.” In other words, a manifestation of God’s righteousness was necessary to free him from his “zeal for the traditions of his ancestors,” a zeal which, as a manifestation of the wrath of God, had power over him and kept him in bondage and led him to a destructive behavior—persecuting the church. This zeal or absolutization and its power—this manifestation of God’s wrath—needed to be broken, destroyed by a divine intervention: a manifestation of God’s righteousness. This intratextual figurative interpretation of the manifestation of the “wrath of God” still hangs in the air. It needs to be complemented by the intertextual figurative interpretation demanded by the fact that Paul’s reference to the wrath of God plunges readers into a Jewish apocalyptic vocabulary. Let us remember, as an example, the concluding lines of the above quotation from Hodayot VII:

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But the wicked [unrighteous] you created for the purpose of your wrath, and from the womb you dedicated them for the day of slaughter.

The figures of God’s wrath in 1:18a and in Jewish apocalyptic literature (as represented by Hodayot VII) are, of course, both like and unlike. What is like is quite clear: both Hodayot VII and 1:18a use similar apocalyptic vocabulary about the final judgment. Apocalyptic Jews and similarly minded readers would readily recognize it. But what is unlike is also quite apparent to these readers: in 1:18a and in many other places Paul focuses on a present manifestation of God’s wrath and judgment, which is obviously future for apocalyptic Jews, for many in the early church, and for many readers of the New Testament and of the letter to the Romans. This is a striking, unexpected, and surprising difference. Therefore, the temptation is to overlook or to tone down the present tense of ἀποκαλύπτεται (“the wrath of God is revealed”). But in a figurative reading this difference is most significant and cannot be ignored. Paul is deliberately using the vocabulary of the apocalyptic final judgment in order to speak about a present reality. This is in contrast with what is expressed in the passage from the Hodayot quoted above but also from what is found in the vast majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocalyptic literature of the time: God’s wrath will be manifested in the future—in the apocalyptic end of time. As mentioned, this is also a central feature of the modern understanding of apocalyptic as the coming of a cataclysmic judgment at the end of time. Paul does not deny that there will be a future apocalyptic judgment; he explicitly refers to it in several places throughout the letter (e.g., in 2:3–12). The apocalyptic judgment is both future (as expected) and present. But here, in 1:18a, Paul explicitly and emphatically expresses that the wrath of God is revealed—in the present! And he does the same thing most emphatically in 8:34–39. Thus, Paul’s presentation of the figure of God’s wrath follows the same pattern as his presentation of the figure of God’s righteousness. Both are like and unlike similar presentations in Jewish apocalyptic literature. Similar vocabulary and references to comparable interventions of God are alike. And this is quite significant. Paul’s views of the gospel and of faith/vision are apocalyptic and messianic. But his temporal frame is different. The apocalyptic climax is already now (and not simply in the future); Paul’s gospel and faith/vision are characterized by a realized-apocalyptic/messianic figurative frame. This acknowledgment challenges the pre-understanding of the manifestations of God’s wrath that readers might have (whether in Paul’s time or today). Our figurative reading of 1:1–7 already took note of the fact that Paul envisions his present time as the time of the last generation, when God intervenes according to the Scriptural promises; this is the messianic time, an ongoing realized-apocalyptic/messianic time, itself pointing to future divine interventions of the same “type.” The temporal difference between the Jewish apocalyptic future and Paul’s ongoing realized-apocalyptic time (both present and future) leads to a particular figurative construction of each feature of God’s wrath, its manifestations, and its causes, and a similar figurative construction of the righteousness that complements God’s wrath. As 1:18a stipulates, God’s wrath is directed against those who practice all kinds of “impiety” (ἀσέβεια) and all kinds of “unrighteousness” (and who blindly “hold

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fast to the truth,” 1:18b). As discussed below, in 1:18b–32 Paul continues to speak about manifestations of God’s wrath in the present (and the past), most strikingly by repeating in 1:24, 26, and 28, as a slogan: “Therefore God gave them up” to one kind or another of degrading punishments. But discussed below when interpreting it, this slogan transforms the figure of God’s wrath by putting it in tension with the figure of God’s righteousness. Unlike the presentation of God’s wrath in Jewish apocalyptic literature and other early Christian apocalyptic texts, the wrath of God is not manifested in cataclysmic events (in the future). And unlike God’s righteousness, God’s wrath is not presented as a powerful transformative intervention of God. On the contrary, the manifestation of God’s wrath is presented as God standing aside—God “has given them up” to their own desires. An unexpected and powerful use of the apocalyptic figures of the final judgment! Paul also uses vocabulary about the future judgment while speaking about presentday circumstances in many other places in the letter, but nowhere more strikingly than in 8:34–39.186 Preliminary comments on these verses are in order at this point to clarify the above observations. After alluding to the final judgment in 8:31–33 (note the future tense, “who will bring a charge against God’s chosen”), Paul asks: “Who is to condemn?” (8:34). The rest of the verse affirms that no one can condemn Christfollowers because Christ died for them. Christ-followers are freed from God’s wrath. Yet note how Paul describes what Christ-followers need to be freed from in a series of rhetorical questions: Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation (θλῖψις), or distress (στενοχωρία), or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (8:35)

Paul opens this list of different forms of oppression that Christ-followers were (potentially) suffering in Paul’s time by a reference to tribulation (θλῖψις) and distress (στενοχωρία). These technical terms refer, in texts of Hellenistic astrology, to sufferings caused by (evil) spiritual powers. All these oppressions that Christ-followers suffer are presented in the form of figures of “powers” that oppress them and that seem as though they could separate them from God (“from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” 8:39), even though they cannot do so. These “powers” are forms of God’s wrath that would separate people from God. Similarly, in 8:38–39, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth” is actually a list of evil powers (again, forms of God’s wrath), this time anchored in an evil spiritual sphere. Such powers are expected to be totally destroyed in the endtime (although now, interestingly enough, Paul included in this list “life” and “angels”). The full significance of these lists will be discussed in detail in the commentary on Rom 8 presented in Volume II, but at this point it is helpful to summarize the main conclusions of a figurative reading of these verses. First note that in 8:34–39 Paul emphasizes that in the present Christ-followers are already freed from these powers. All these evil spiritual powers which oppress in

186

Rom 8:34–39 is most important in a figurative reading, because it is at the very center of the thematic organization of Romans.

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the present Christ-followers have become powerless: they cannot “separate us from the love of Christ.” Yes, such evil spiritual powers are real. Yes, they affect humans, including Christ-followers, in very concrete ways—in persecution, famine, nakedness, killing by the sword, death. Yes, these evil powers oppress humans in the present (8:35). How? Apparently by making use, in a twisted and oppressive way, of many aspects of creation which in and of themselves are not necessarily evil. Height and depth, powers, things present and things to come, rulers, angels, life, and even death are not necessarily evil! Paul lists all these in 8:38–39 to affirm that all of these evil powers have been neutralized for Christ-followers, so that even though they still exist they can no longer “separate us from the love of God.” But it remains that Christ-followers suffer “persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword.” These are apocalyptic woes; tribulation (θλῖψις) and distress (στενοχωρία) are apocalyptic sufferings. Evil powers dominate human life and creation. Thus Käsemann concludes: “Only the apocalyptic worldview can describe reality thus, just as this outlook alone can catch in it the cry of an enslaved creation and see the messianic woes taking place therein. In Paul, apocalyptic does not lead to enthusiasm but to a somber experience of the world.”187 Yes! Evil powers dominate human life and creation. Manifestations of God’s wrath dominate human life and creation. Manifestations of God’s righteousness are urgently needed to overcome them! And actually manifestations of God’s righteousness are taking place in the present, since Paul can express his confidence (“I am convinced,” 8:38) that none of these powers is able to separate us from God and God’s love. This is what 1:17–18 already conveys. Messianic woes—manifestations of God’s wrath—are taking place now. The only way of realistically looking at the present world is through the somber acknowledgment that everyone is enslaved to evil powers by God’s wrath. So, it is essential—it is a necessary part of the gospel—that the wrath of God be revealed for Christ-followers in the present. Whatever dire situation they find themselves in, whatever evil powers oppress them, there is hope, because now, already now, God’s righteousness is also manifested against all these evil powers, ultimately making them powerless (8:38–39). As Byrne concludes in his similar line of interpretation: “The overall effect is to suggest that in whatever situation believers find themselves—whether dead or alive, whether in the present or in the days to come—no spiritual force or power from the full extent of the universe would be able to separate them from God.”188 Consequently, the apocalyptic figure, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness” (1:18a), provides the answer to the question we had raised regarding 1:16: “Salvation from what?” We need to be saved from all the manifestations of God’s wrath; namely, all these evil powers, whatever they might be, that oppress humans. In 1:18a, these evil powers are manifested in the form of “impiety and unrighteousness.” These evil powers are embodied by humans. By their lack of faith/vision (impiety) and their lack of righteousness (unrighteousness), such people show that they are enslaved to evil powers (or slaves to sin, as Paul says in 6:13–19), and therefore under God’s wrath. With Käsemann, it is appropriate to speak of the

187 188

Käsemann, 251. Byrne, 278.

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“somber experience of the world” pervaded by “the cry of an enslaved creation.” It is in this dire situation—unfortunately the situation in which Käsemann found himself in the midst of the ruins left by World War II and the situation of the present-day world, as daily reports in newspapers, radio, TV, and social networks readily confirm—that the news that the wrath of God is revealed is indeed good news, even though such a statement seems at first to be paradoxical. Indeed the gospel is first of all the good news about God’s saving interventions and it is a manifestation of the power through which such divine interventions take place (1:16–17). The gospel is the news that the righteousness of God is revealed in the form of divine interventions through which an unrighteous (ἄδικος) is being transformed into a righteous (δίκαιος) living by faith/vision (1:17c), as discussed above. In order to be “the power of salvation” that transforms those who believe (who have faith/vision), the gospel needs to reveal (make recognizable) “through faith/vision” the present positive transformative interventions of God (the manifestations of God’s righteousness) (1:17). But for this the gospel also needs (1) to reveal (make recognizable) the lack of faith/vision (impiety) and unrighteousness as well as their root in “holding fast to the truth” as attitudes and behaviors from which people need to be freed, and (2) to reveal that such impiety and unrighteousness engender God’s wrath—bring about God’s wrathful interventions— because such destructive behaviors separate humans from God (1:18a). Rom 1:9–16: Charismatic Ministry of the Gospel; contemplative prayers; looking for gifts (charismata); and signs of indebtedness Our figurative reading of 1:8 and of 1:16b–18a (the righteousness of God, salvation, and the wrath of God) has put in place key features of Paul’s realized-apocalyptic/ messianic figurative world that provide a framework for reading 1:9–16a. Following Byrne189 we also noted that 1:9–16 forms a thematic structure that includes (1) a threefold expression of Paul’s desire to visit Rome (1:9–10, 13a, and 15)—expressing what Beker calls the contingency of Paul’s discourse; and (2) a threefold statement of the reasons or grounds for this intent (1:11–12, 13b–14, and 16–17)—expressing what, for Beker, brings coherence to Paul’s discourse. This thematic structure provides a second guide for our figurative reading of these verses. The presentation of contingent issues (Beker) in 1:9–10, 13a, and 15 are, at one level, straightforward expressions of Paul’s desire to go to Rome. But it soon becomes clear that they also involve figures (related to those in 1:8 and 1:16b–18a), which frame the key features of what expresses more directly the coherence of Paul’s figurative world—and therefore that it is best to discuss all these verses in the textual order. A few preliminary observations about Paul’s presentation of contingency issues are enough to account for them. The contingent features are characterized by the threefold expression of Paul’s desire to visit Rome: “that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you” (1:10b); “I want you to know that I have often intended to come to you” (1:13a); “hence my eagerness to gospelize also among you in Rome” (1:15). For Byrnes (48), these repetitions convey a “sense of defensiveness on Paul’s part.” Paul 189

Byrne, 48.

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seeks to set up appropriate relations with the Roman congregations, and in the process speaks about the concrete historical situation regarding his relationship—or better, his lack of relationship—with the Romans. This sense of defensiveness also reflects how Paul envisions this situation from the perspective of his figurative world. Thus, he heavily insists on wanting to visit the Romans: he calls God as his witness that he remembers the Romans in his prayers (1:9a); he emphasizes that he has not come to them before because he has been prevented [by God?] (1:13b); and his desire to visit them is presented as an eagerness, a passionate desire (using the term πρόθυμος derived from θυμός, passion, 1:15a). These emphases do indicate that, contingently, Paul is anxious about what will be the Romans’ response to his proposed visit. One can understand his concern. Since his actual project is merely to stop in Rome on his way to somewhere else (Spain, as 15:23–32 makes explicit), he tries to avoid giving the Romans the impression that his visit is not truly significant and not really for their own sake. Yet Paul expresses figuratively these contingent concerns by emphasizing the religious dimensions of his ministry. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you, for I am longing to see you. (1:9–11a)

There are three important figures in this verse: envisioning God as his witness; the nature of Paul’s ministry; and prayer. Of course, the figures already identified—God, gospel, and Son (bolded in the text) give us a starting point. In his figurative world Paul envisions God as a very active God whose presence he recognizes all around him in his life and ministry in the form of transformative divine interventions: ●

●

●

In people in Rome who have been transformed into “called saints” (1:7–8) by God; In righteous people who live through faith (as the Romans do, 1:8) and as such “reveal” God’s righteousness as a divine intervention in their lives (1:17); as well as In manifestations of God’s wrath “against all impiety and unrighteousness of humans who hold fast to the truth in their unrighteousness” (1:18–32)—a wrath against “impiety and unrighteousness” manifested as evil powers that keep people in bondage (1:18b–3:20) but are in the process of being destroyed by God’s righteousness (8:34–39).

Wherever Paul turns in his life, he “sees” (by means of his faith/vision) God’s present transformative interventions. He recognizes these divine interventions as Christlike, because he sees them as prefigured by the gospel. This gospel is about God’s transformative interventions in Jesus Christ/Messiah: transforming the son of David into the Son of God in power through the resurrection (1:2–4), a transformation which was itself prefigured in the Holy Scriptures and promised by the prophets (1:2). And

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all these types prefigure God’s interventions in the lives of Christ-followers. It is from this realized-apocalyptic/messianic perspective that our figurative reading of 1:9–10 needs to proceed. For God is my witness (1:9a). Since in Paul’s figurative world God is constantly and actively present in all aspects of his life, it is natural for him to say: “God is my witness.” In saying so Paul evokes God as a figure of authority who can warrant his statement, because God is totally present in his life, embedded in his life, and therefore witnessing everything in it.190 God whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel (1:9b). This description of Paul’s ministry is highly figurative. The verb λατρεύω (latreuô, “I serve”) is used throughout the Septuagint and the New Testament to speak about worshiping, rendering religious service to God, as Paul does here, and also regarding the “worship of idols” (as in Exod 20:5; 23:24; Ezek 20:32) as Paul does in 1:25. Therefore, Paul explicitly presents his ministry as liturgical, as a worship service—performed in the presence of God and as an act of worship. Therefore, Paul envisions himself as someone who acts as a holy priest. This is what 15:16 makes explicit, when he describes himself as a “λειτουργός” (leitourgos, servant, from which we derived the term “liturgist”) and says that he is “in the priestly service (ἱερουργοῦντα) of the gospel of God.” Since Paul sees himself as a priest (an intermediary between God and the people; someone who points to and makes recognizable the Presence [of God] in the sanctuary), he does not conceive of his ministry as something he personally performs. “To bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (1:5) is not something he personally achieves. It is something that “Christ has accomplished through me” (15:18), since after all “faith” is a gift from God (and Christ, 1:8). Therefore, in this preliminary description, Paul’s ministry/priestly service involves ●

●

●

giving thanks to his God for the faith of the Romans (1:8) and thereby pointing out to them what God has done and is doing in their experience; acknowledging God as a witness to all his actions, including the most private ones (his private prayers, 1:9); and of course addressing prayers to this God who is constantly present with him and with those to whom his ministry is directed.191

The intertexts of the figure of this cultic ministry are readily found in Jewish apocalyptic literature—especially among the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran community. Since the “end-time” is the time when prophecies are in the process of being fulfilled in the experience of the community through divine interventions (prefigured in the types of Scripture), apocalyptic Jews viewed themselves as continually in the Presence of God. Therefore the Covenanters of Qumran viewed their present community life and service

190

In sum, there is no need to see here an allusion to a court, a forensic setting, as Forensic Theological interpretations do. 191 See Byrne, 49—his summary of this realized apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of Paul’s ministry as cultic.

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as comparable to—actually as replacing—the life and service of priests in the Temple.192 So it is for Paul, with the difference that this continual Presence of God is discovered in the gospel as a prefiguration of God’s ongoing righteous and wrathful interventions in the present of Christ-followers (Paul, the Romans, and subsequent Christ-followers), whatever might be their social situations. This is why Paul can conceive of his ministry as a cultic priestly ministry.193 From this perspective, the phrase “[God whom I serve] with my spirit in the gospel of his Son” is simply understood as Paul expressing that it is by means of his spirit that he can recognize the present divine interventions and thus the active Presence of God. But for this he needs to look around himself in the gospel of his Son, that is, looking through those types found in the gospel that prefigure the present divine interventions. As such the gospel functions as corrective glasses, allowing the believer to “see” what one cannot otherwise see, namely God at work in Christ-like ways in one’s present. Since the gospel is centered on God’s Son, the divine interventions which it prefigures can be expected to be in the form of Christ/Messiah; that is, as Christ-like or Christic divine interventions, which can also be viewed as interventions of the resurrected Christ (cf. Paul’s experience, 1:1d). Consequently, in the gospel Paul as well as other Christ-followers can recognize themselves as constantly in the Presence of God—a mysterious, holy, bewildering Presence—and as transformed by God’s interventions. Without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you, for I am longing to see you (1:10–11a). It is noteworthy that while other passages make it possible to understand Paul’s prayer as a “covenantal prayer” (praying for each other as a community practice, as emphasized in community covenantal interpretations), one can also note that this verse clearly presents Paul’s prayer as a personal practice (he says, “I” and not “we”). Furthermore, Paul is not saying “without ceasing I pray for you,” with an understanding of “prayer as making petitions” or supplications to God for others.194 Indeed, making petition to God is a part of Paul’s prayer: he is “asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you” (1:10b). But this petition carefully avoids manipulating God. Yes, he asks that God allow him to go to Rome, but only if it is God’s will. In addition, this petition is only a secondary step in his prayers—expressed by the general verb “asking” (δέομαι). The primary description of Paul’s prayers—involving the technical term for prayer (προσευχή)—is the phrase: “I remember you always in my prayers.” For Paul, praying always involves “remembering” (see also 1 Thess 1:2; Philem 1:4; Phil 1:3) those who are the object of the prayer. Praying primarily consists in bringing 192

Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 278–79; and 164–67, 311–14 on the “liturgical view of history” posited by the Qumran community. See also Bertil Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament: A Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism of the Qumran Texts and the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1965), 19–21, passim. 193 In later Christian apocalyptic literature, the Apocalypse of John (the New Testament book of Revelation) envisions the “end-time” as a time when there is “no Temple in the city, for its Temple is the Lord God” (Rev 21:22), as Paul does, but in this case it is in a future end-time. It is in the present of Paul and other Christ-followers that life is totally taking place in the presence of God—as if it were in the Temple. 194 The forensic theological interpretation of Prat, 340–41, and Dunn, 29. Yet Moo—who follows this interpretation—expresses his surprise that Paul does not “spell out any specific petitions for the Christians there” (Moo, 59). See Chapter 3.

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to memory those about whom one prays. This is a contemplative prayer that involves discerning how God is at work in those about whom one prays.195 Praying about the Romans (1:9–10) involves discerning God’s interventions in their experience, and therefore being thankful for their faith (1:8). Furthermore, as becomes explicit in 8:26– 27, such a contemplative prayer also involves discerning how “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8:27). This contemplative prayer needs to be “ceaselessly” practiced by Paul himself, but also by all Christ-followers, so as to discern God’s mysterious and active presence in those around them, so as to respond appropriately. Such a ceaseless contemplative prayer is an intrinsic part of Paul’s cultic ministry. Consequently, it is not surprising that a thanksgiving to God for the Godgiven faith of the Romans (1:8) be followed by a mention of Paul’s prayers about the Romans, prayers that involve acknowledging God’s work among them. (I am longing to see you) so that I may share with you some spiritual gift (charisma χάρισμα) to strengthen you—that is, so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. (1:11–12)196

In order to ground his project to visit the Romans (1:10)—the contingent point of his discourse—Paul begins by explaining and warranting the purpose of his visit (“so that,” “for,” γὰρ).197 Why his visit? It is in order to share with them “some spiritual gift” (charisma) in order “to strengthen” them. For Paul, in the messianic age, a charisma is “a concrete instance or effect of God’s charis”—best translated “gift”198 in the sense of a “spiritual gift” that empowers believers to carry out their particular ministry, as Käsemann underscores.199 Thus like charis, the more specific charismata can and should be shared among believers. In Byrne’s words, this charisma is “the sense of God’s grace [spiritual gift] and power individual believers communicate to others through the exercise of the particular gift (charis) bestowed upon each one personally by the Spirit. Paul’s distinctive ‘gift’ is that of being called to be an apostle (1:5).”200 The purpose of Paul’s visit is not “to bring about the obedience of faith among” the Romans 195

A contemplative prayer is what Wells calls transfiguration prayer, through which one “sees” the mysterious dimensions of human experience. Wells illustrates it by the following prayer: “God, in your son’s Transfiguration [or ‘in your son, the Messiah risen in power’] we see a whole reality within and beneath and beyond what we thought we understood.” The subsequent prayer presupposes the “faith/vision” (recognition) of God’s mysterious interventions in the life of others and the discernment of what should be one’s active response to these interventions. Wells contrasts “transfiguration prayer” with what I call prayer of petition and covenantal/community prayer. See Samuel Wells, “A Different Way to Pray,” Christian Century (April 30, 2014), 51. 196 With the lexicons by Friberg, Thayer, and Gingrich, in this figurative reading I translate the verb συμπαρακαλέω “mutually encourage” (or “mutually comfort”) as παρακαλέω in 12:1 is translated “encourage” (by contrast with the forensic theological and the inclusive covenantal community interpretations). 197 Paul provides “warrants” that give “coherence” to his dialogue with the Romans and thus express most important points. This is comparable to his use of warrants (that ground the “dialogic dimension” of his argument) in 1 Thessalonians: see Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel, 127–54, and more technically, Patte, Aspects of a Semiotic of Didactic Discourse: Analysis of 1 Thessalonians (Urbino, Italy: Urbino Center for Semiotics, 1980). 198 Instead of “grace,” with too many forensic connotations. 199 Käsemann, 6. 200 Byrne, 49, emphases added.

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(1:5), since the Romans are already believers. The charisma Paul will convey to them will be one that will somehow “strengthen” or “empower” them. Why do they need to be strengthened? From the preceding verses it is clear that it is in order to carry out their own ministries. As most commentators note, 1:11 is an expression of Paul’s “charismatic authority”: Paul has received charis (a spiritual gift) that empowers him for his apostleship (1:5),201 that involves sharing with the Romans (and others) “some spiritual charisma” (1:11), because they also need to be empowered to carry out their own and similar ministry as saints. And, from the perspective of a realized-apocalyptic/messianic reading of these verses, this empowerment is not a one-way street. As 1:12 explains, Paul is not the only one to have such a charismatic authority; indeed he receives empowerment from others, and to begin with from the Romans. This is a truly mutual encouragement. This “mutuality” is often hidden under a misleading translation of the opening of 1:12. For a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation, τοῦτο δέ ἐστιν must be read as introducing an explanation—“that is.”202 Grammatically, δέ can be (and, here, should be!) read as additive and explicative (and not as adversative): “that is.”203 This figurative interpretation of τοῦτο δέ ἐστιν as “that is” is demanded by the intratext, “the righteous will live through faith” (1:17), since 1:12 explicitly presents the Romans has having faith (“each other’s faith, both yours and mine”). By “living through faith” the Romans reveal “the righteousness of God” to others—in this case to Paul. Thus the sharing of charismata described in 1:11–12 is really mutual—with the implication that (in Paul’s view) the Romans have themselves a charismatic authority that involves sharing charismata with others (in this case with Paul) since, as we know (1:8), they already have a spiritual gift (a charis or charisma), namely their faith/vision, and that anyone living through faith/vision reveals God’s righteousness (1:17). Therefore the Romans and Paul are on a level playing field: they can encourage each other by sharing spiritual gifts with each other—namely “each other’s faith/vision.” And Paul emphasizes this mutuality in the sharing of encouragement (a sharing on a level playing field): “encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” In the process they empower each other for their respective ministries—either as apostle or as saints. As we reconstruct the figurative view of charismatic authority following Paul’s text, we must keep in mind that all believers have a charisma/charis and therefore have a charismatic authority comparable to Paul’s. This is in contrast with the traditional view of charismatic authority that exclusively rests with a charismatic leader. Yet we are surprised. Did Paul actually envision himself as needing to be empowered and encouraged by receiving spiritual gifts from others (including the Romans)? Yet our doubt comes from the difficulty we have to adopt a realized-apocalyptic/messianic perspective: as these verses suggest, an ongoing mutual empowerment is a characteristic 201

Thus the translation of charis by “grace” (commonly understood in a forensic way) is misleading. I systematically avoid it. 202 And not as expressing some kind of tactful rhetorical ploy to avoid appearing too authoritarian (as when the phrase is translated “or rather so that,” with δέ understood as adversative). So goes the familiar forensic theological interpretation, presupposing that Paul’s authority as an apostle is a topdown authority. 203 This is consistent with a quick survey of the 126 uses of δέ elsewhere in Romans that shows that most of them are additive (providing an explanation), with a single clear adversative uses in 4:5.

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of life in the messianic age. And this is possible because all have gifts (charismata) to share, and all need to be empowered and encouraged by receiving such gifts through others. This point is reinforced by the next verses (1:13–14) that surprisingly expand the group of those who have “gifts” to share. Paul repeats his contingent desire to come to Rome—a rhetorical ploy in which he emphasizes that he repeatedly tried to do so, but unsuccessfully (I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I have often intended to come to you but thus far have been prevented, 1:13)—as he also does in 1:15 (Hence my eagerness to manifest the gospel also among you in Rome). There is nothing really new here. But Paul’s explanations of his “reasons” to do so are most significant; they fill important gaps in his readers’ understanding of his relations with others. Why does he want to go to Rome? In order that I might have (harvest) some fruit among you, too, as among the rest of the Gentiles. Not only to Greeks but also to barbarians, not only to the educated but also to the ignorant, I am a debtor. (1:13a–14)

Let us first unpack the last sentence (1:14), by reviewing alternate legitimate and plausible interpretations of this key verse. To begin with, Paul’s description of the Gentile world in four categories is classical. But in the context of a letter to the Romans which has Spain as its mission horizon, this list might suggest (as Keck, 49, mentions) that Paul underscores that he wants to carry out his ministry not only among the civilized Romans, namely the elite with a Hellenized culture (“Greeks”) and the “educated,” in Rome, where he plans a mission (1:15) but also among “barbarians” and “uneducated” (“foolish”)—that is, from the perspective of Roman citizens, the people in Spain (where he intends to bring his mission) and in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire (where Paul was before). Second, we need to pay attention to the phrase ὀφειλέτης εἰμί—opheiletès eimi— that I translate literally with the NRSV: “I am a debtor.” As lexicons point out, this phrase refers to “one who owes another.” There are several semantic components of this rich cultural concept, which can be interpreted in different ways, and that Paul also uses in 8:12 and 15:27 as well as in a verbal form (opheilô, I am indebted) in 13:8, 15:1, 27. The first possibility is to understand that being indebted posits that one has received something from someone, and therefore one is under some obligation. Thus Paul affirms that he feels indebted. The question is: To whom does Paul feel indebted? And consequently, toward whom does Paul feel obliged? For forensic theological interpretations the answer is: of course Paul feels indebted toward God and Christ, who have graciously intervened in his life and set him apart as an apostle to preach the gospel (a doctrinal message about salvation). Because of this sense of indebtedness toward God and Christ, as a second step Paul views himself as under obligation toward God and Christ to share the gifts he received with Greeks and non-Greeks. Therefore, opheiletès eimi is commonly translated “I am obligated” (NIV) or “I am under obligation” (RSV, NAB, NJB), even though the primary connotation is that of a sense of indebtedness, “I am a debtor to.” This obligation to God and Christ is

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understood as a missionary obligation that he must fulfill by working at his apostolic ministry. The presupposition of this first interpretation is that Paul cannot literally mean what he said, namely that he is indebted to the people he lists: “not only to Greeks but also to barbarians. . . . I am a debtor.” “Of course, he has not received anything from them. It is from God and Christ that he has received blessings, and it is therefore toward them that he is indebted to carry out his ministry as apostle for the benefits of Greeks and barbarians. Such is Paul’s obligation toward God and Christ.” So goes the reasoning of this first kind of interpretation. The inclusive covenantal community interpretation differs. Rather than bypassing what the text says, namely that Paul affirms “I am debtor” (opheiletès eimi), this alternative interpretation understands Paul’s claim as “I owe something” to the people listed; it also considers this list in the cultural and ideological context of Paul’s time. Then it appears that the phrase opheiletès eimi belongs to the Greco-Roman honor/ shame system understood as a system according to which one is “under obligation” to honor people with honor—this is an “ethics of reciprocity,” as Jewett calls it. From this perspective it is clear that Greeks and educated people in this list are people with honor that Paul would have the obligation to honor. In the cultural and ideological perspective of the Greco-Roman world this makes sense. Then by adding that he views himself as also under obligation to barbarians and ignorant, Paul emphasizes that his mission is countercultural: it reverses the honor/shame stereotypes. He feels equally obligated to all: both to people with honor and to nobodies (i.e., people without honor), namely barbarians and the ignorant. Such is in brief the inclusive covenantal community interpretation reading of this verse.204 From the figurative perspective of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation presented in this chapter, such recognition that the phrase opheiletès eimi belongs to the Greco-Roman honor/shame system is most appropriate; this system is the figurative intertext for 1:14 as well as for 1:16, where Paul declares: “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Thus, it makes sense to recognize that the phrase opheiletès eimi expresses Paul’s equal sense of obligation to all, as required by his countercultural understanding of his mission.205 But one must also acknowledge that the figure of indebtedness is prevalent in the Greco-Roman honor/shame system. The sense of indebtedness is what is primarily conveyed by the phrase opheiletès eimi206: a sense of indebtedness is necessarily the basis for the sense of obligation. From these two affirmations it follows that 1:14 does indeed convey that Paul counterculturally emphasizes Paul’s sense of obligation to all (as the covenantal community interpretation appropriately emphasizes). But following the text more closely the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation acknowledges that this sense of obligation is rooted in a sense of indebtedness to all these people—“not only to Greeks but also to barbarians, not only to the educated but also to the ignorant.” As Paul affirms: to all these “I am a debtor” (NRSV). This surprising conclusion is confirmed when one recognizes the central role of the sense of indebtedness in an honor/shame system.

204

See Byrne, 50. As the covenantal community interpretation has it. 206 As the forensic theological interpretation appropriately emphasizes. 205

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Members of present-day honor/shame cultures (such as, for instance, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese cultures) readily recognize that such a deep sense of indebtedness is missing from most presentations of honor/shame systems in critical biblical studies—such as those in Malina, The New Testament World, Lendon, Empire of Honour, and Jewett’s commentary.207 Such studies exclusively emphasize the sense of obligation, leaving out the sense of indebtedness. Indeed, as Meng Hun Goh discusses at length in his detailed study of honor and shame in 1 Corinthians,208 Western sociologists and anthropologists have long underscored (at least since the 1960s) that the value of honor is felt (i.e., it involves a feeling, a sense of indebtedness, toward someone) as well as claimed and paid (i.e., it involves a sense of obligation—someone has a claim upon me—that must be fulfilled, paid). Together with these sociologists and anthropologists, Goh emphasizes that the foundational aspect of honor, the felt sense of indebtedness, should be fully accounted for. Thus the realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretation deliberately interprets opheiletès eimi—I am a debtor—as the expression of a sense of obligation which is deeply rooted in a foundational feeling: a sense of indebtedness. We shall see that beyond 1:14 Paul repeatedly uses (either as a noun, opheiletès, or as a verb, opheiletô) the figure of indebtedness and obligation. He does so at key points of the letter to the Romans: about life in the flesh or in the spirit (8:12); about love (13:8); and about life in community (15:1 and 15:27, twice). Thus, for Paul this sense of indebtedness (and obligation) drives at the deepest level all relational aspects of life—love,209 life in the community of Christ-followers as well as in the broader society, including both Greeks and barbarians. I long struggled to conceptualize the role of this sense of indebtedness, that at first I understood as a hyperbole—and thus basically I erased it. Finally, it made sense to me when I had a chance to participate in the Filipino culture, an honor and shame culture framed by what is called in Tagalog utang na 207

Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Frankfort, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993); J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press. 1997). 208 Meng Hun Goh, The Middle Voice of Love in 1 Corinthians: Reading Singularity and Plurality from Different Cultures (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, 2014). See especially 45–110 for a sharp critique of the Western understanding of honor and shame, and for an analysis of how honor functions in a honor/shame culture in three complementary modes: honor felt (= the sense of indebtedness), honor claimed, and honor paid. For our purpose, here it is enough to collapse these two modes into the “sense of obligation” which has an individual and a communal dimension. “In the middle voice, Paul gospelizes as he is gospelized (i.e., thus the gospel presses upon him). Paul is aware that he is only a medium of the gospel and as a medium he is vigilant that he is not the owner of the gospel, lest the (gift of the) gospel be emptied of its potentiality.” The phrase “Paul gospelizes as he is gospelized” shows that Goh follows a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation (as discussed in this chapter). See also pp. 4–8, and passim for Goh’s detailed explanation of the way in which he can speak of “the middle voice of love.” In which he quotes, Charles E. Scott, “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics,” The Review of Metaphysics 42:4 (June 1989). 743–64 (745), and his The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 24, where Scott writes: “The middle voice suggests something that goes beyond subjectobject formations. It is able to articulate nonreflexive enactments that are not for themselves or for something else. As a formation, it does not need to suggest intention outside of its movement or a movement toward an other. It does not oppose active and passive formations, but it is other than they are. It is the voice of something’s taking place through its own enactment.” 209 See the interpretation of 13:8 in Monya A. Stubbs, Indebted Love: Paul’s Subjection Language in Romans (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2013).

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loob: the “indebtedness of the heart.” This foundational Filipino concept is explained as follows by Revelation Velunta: Utang na loob is a unique kind of debt: however it may have been incurred, no matter how insignificant a debt, there is no way by which one is absolved of the debt except perhaps by having the “lender” him/herself incur a similar utang na loob. The debt goes beyond the legal-juridical framework; it creates an extra-legal but even more binding debt because it involves a personal debt, one that can only be paid back not only in person but with one’s person. Utang na loob as a debt of gratitude is not absolved legally but through a personal involvement which acknowledges the unmerited and unsolicited graciousness. . . . One is bound no longer to a single compensating act but binds him/herself voluntarily to be committed beyond repayment. . . . This kind of debt is not imposed per se; it binds only to the extent that one allows oneself to be thus bound. . . . [But] Filipinos do not want to be considered, even unjustifiably, as walang utang na loob (having no sense of indebtedness). That would be equivalent to implying that a person has no sense of personal honor.210

Far from being a hyperbole, “indebtedness of the heart” deeply governs all relationships in Filipino culture. Of course, one is indebted to parents, teachers, leaders in a community, as well as to anyone else from whom one has received something that, for one reason or another, one finds significant.211 Utang na loob can be viewed as the frame of the Filipino community. From my interactions with Malaysian and Chinese people and reading Meng Hun Goh, it is clear that this kind of honor and shame vision also frames their cultures – non-Western cultures, as Paul’s. We can begin recognizing that the same thing is true for Paul in 1:14. By using the technical term for indebtedness—opheiletès eimi, I am a debtor—Paul expresses his deep sense of indebtedness toward Greeks and barbarians, educated and ignorant, and that he envisions this indebtedness as framing his relations with them. Thus, Paul believes that he has received something significant from them. One can readily understand the possibility that he was indebted to Greeks and educated people. For instance, he has clearly learned much from Greek philosophers (to whose works he frequently alludes); therefore, he could view himself as indebted to them. But how can he be indebted to barbarians and the ignorant? This seems to be nonsensical or oxymoronic. But not more than 13:8, where Paul says that we are indebted to love: “Do not be indebted (ὀφείλετε) to anyone for anything, except to love one another.” As Monya Stubbs notes—in her book appropriately entitled Indebted Love: Paul’s Subjection Language in The Romans—the fact that “Paul equates debt with love and

210

Revelation Enriquez Velunta, “Ek Pisteôs Eis Pistin and the Filipinos’ Sense of Indebtedness (Utang Na Loob)” Navigating Romans through Cultures (RTHC, 2004), 243–44. 211 Utang na loob greatly facilitated the repeated colonization of the Philippines by colonizers (or neocolonizers) who brought some gifts—sometimes most helpful gifts such as medicine and hospitals, schools. Then Filipinos were “indebted” to these colonizers; then whatever “wish” the colonizers expressed (often without being aware of what they were doing) became a “demand” that Filipinos were indebted to fulfill.

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love with debt” seems oxymoronic.212 And yet in both cases this is what Paul is saying. He is indebted even to barbarians—and Christ-followers are indebted to one another in love; love involves acknowledging one’s indebtedness for each other. Of course, by now, we should not be surprised by nonsensical expressions in Paul’s discourse. This is figurative language. As we repeatedly saw, a figure is constructed by bringing together features which are in tension. Once again, we find ourselves in presence of a figure which makes sense only insofar as we take seriously into account the two features in tension. This is what we did, for instance, by working through the tension in Paul’s figurative statement “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus”: indeed, he is a slave (of Christ), even though in a sense he is not a slave (of Christ). Similarly, in the figure of indebtedness that uses vocabulary from the honor and shame system of the GrecoRoman world, we need to account for and work through the tension found in Paul’s sense of indebtedness to Greeks and barbarians, educated and ignorant. Yes, he is indebted to all of them. Yet he is not indebted to all of them in the way that one might imagine from the perspective of the Greco-Roman culture. Thus, it is not simply a matter of being instructed in Greek philosophy and of owing honor to the powerful. But from another perspective—the perspective of the gospel!—Paul views himself as having received something of great value from each of them. What exactly? Here we have to leave the question open. But it will be soon addressed when we read 1:19–32 and what Paul says about idolaters—of course, barbarians are idolaters. As we shall see, in these verses Paul shows that he (along with all of us) has something most significant to receive from barbarians, even though in very unexpected ways. Thus, after all, 1:14 is not nonsensical and not oxymoronic! It is a figure of the way Paul conceives at the deepest level of his relationships not only with Greeks and educated but also with barbarians and ignorant. He is indebted to them. He has received something from them. We begin to recognize that this is a pattern. Indeed, in the preceding verses, while saying that he will bring something (a charisma) to the Roman Christ-followers, he also expresses that he expects to receive “encouragement” from them and their faith (1:11–12). Therefore, he will be indebted to them.213 We also need to note that in 1:13b, commonly translated “that I may reap some harvest among you” (NRSV) and understood as pointing to a hoped for missionary success (converting Gentile Romans), Paul uses an awkward phrase. His hope is “that I might have some fruit among you, too, as among the rest of the Gentiles.” According to the figurative pattern found in 1:11–12 and 1:14, this might also be read as Paul expressing his hope to receive something (fruit) from the Gentile Romans. Of course, this seems nonsensical and oxymoronic, unless this is pointing to a figurative dimension of these verses that expresses Paul’s expected future indebtedness to Gentile Romans. In such a figurative reading, no single feature makes sense by itself. It is only when the figurative space (pictorial space) is progressively reconstructed that each figure finds its place in it, and

212

See more specifically Stubbs, 130–35. She quotes (131) Fitzmyer (Romans, 677) for whom it is an oxymoronic language: “Paul states it strangely, speaking of love as something owed like a debt. Love does not constitute one being under an obligation to pay another for something received.” 213 Thus, Stubbs insightfully notes: “Paul, in order to realize the agency aspect of his ministry and to offer concrete manifestations of God’s ‘generous and powerful concern’ for God’s creation, must recognize both the agency of others and his indebtedness to others,” Indebted Love, 127.

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therefore makes sense. But what we have discovered so far demands that we ask: could it be that in the messianic age believers are transformed by recognizing the gifts that others (all others) share with them (as in 1:12 and also, 12:2 and 12:3–10, read in light of Phil 2:3, “in humility regard others as better than yourselves”)? For the time being these are only questions that will progressively be answered affirmatively as we move forward in this realized-apocalyptic/messianic reading of Romans. Yet, it is noteworthy that in the next verse, 1:15, a contingent expression of his intention, Paul writes: Hence my eagerness to gospelize (εὐαγγελίσασθαι) with you also who are in Rome. (1:15)

This awkward translation makes two points. First, the verb εὐαγγελίζω (euaggelizô) means to “manifest or communicate the gospel.” This verb does not specify any particular way in which the gospel is manifested or communicated. So my awkward translation: “gospelize.”214 In this figurative realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation, “gospelizing” does involve preaching; that is, communicating the news that the eschatological liberation has been inaugurated by Jesus “as messianic agent of the promised liberation”(Byrne’s phrase).215 But this is only one of the ways among many through which the gospel is communicated/manifested. Thus in 15:18–19a Paul describes his ministry as: “what Christ has accomplished through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God.” Indeed, his ministry involves words (preaching); but it also includes deeds, as well as various kinds of divine interventions (power of signs and wonders and power of the Spirit). Gospelizing is a rich eschatological event. This suggestion is further clarified by the fact that the verb εὐαγγελίσασθαι (gospelize) is here (as well as in 10:15 and 15:20) in the middle voice. As noted earlier, by contrast to the indicative and passive voices, in the middle voice “the subject performs or experiences the action expressed by the verb in such a way that emphasizes the subject’s participation.”216 While it is ignored by forensic theological interpretations, the middle voice is also taken into account by the covenantal community interpretation, for which it expresses that this projected missionary activity would be shared with the Roman Christ-followers. Indeed, a middle voice verb conveys that the subject/agent participates in the action together with those to whom this action is directed; Paul transmits the gospel story by participating in it together with the Romans; gospelizing is a communal activity. For a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation this is true. But one needs to go one step beyond the covenantal community interpretation. As Meng Hun Goh explains, by contrast with the indicative voice217 which envisions Paul as passing to others the gospel as an object (a theological message), the middle voice expresses that the gospel is not an object possessed by Paul who could give this object 214

Paul rarely uses the verb for “preaching” (κηρύσσω) in reference to the gospel: only three times in Romans, 10:8, 14. 15 (a fourth use of the verb refers to the “preaching” of the false teacher in 2:12); four times in 1 Cor; three times in 2 Cor; twice in Gal; once in Phil; and twice in 1 Thess (a total of 15 times). By contrast in the NIV translation, the verb “preaching” is found 43 times in Paul’s letters. 215 Byrne, 39. 216 Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics, 414, emphasis added. 217 Posited by the forensic theological translations, “hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel.”

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to the Romans (and that the Romans could in turn pass on to somebody else). As Goh powerfully summarizes, “In the middle voice, Paul gospelizes as he is gospelized.”218 Manifesting the gospel, “gospelizing” is a mutual process of sharing and receiving. By gospelizing Paul will share with the Romans his own experience of eschatological liberation—the good news for him—as he proposes to share the spiritual gift (charisma) that he has with them (1:11). Yet gospelizing is also receiving, by discerning the Romans’ own experience of eschatological liberation—the good news for them that they will share with Paul—as he also expects to be encouraged by their faith (1:12). Once again it is a mutual process. I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation (1:16a)

The honor and shame opening, “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” is a standard rhetorical figure (a litotes) “in which an understatement couched as a double negative has the effect of placing even greater stress upon the corresponding positive affirmation.”219 By saying “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul forcefully affirms, “I am honored by the gospel.”220 The gospel honors him. He is indebted to the gospel. That is, he has received something from the gospel. This is not surprising when one remembers that the gospel is the “gospel of God” (1:1) that is the “good news” of God’s past and present saving interventions. Paul is indebted to the gospel because it is the manifestation of “the power of God for salvation”; that is, as noted, because the gospel is God’s transformative interventions in his experience (1:1), as well as in the experience of all those who believe. Thus, as Käsemann (22) puts it: The gospel is more than the message actualized in the church. It is God’s declaration of salvation to the world, which is outside human control, which is independent even of the church and its ministers, and which constantly becomes a reality. . . . The operation of God’s power corresponds to its eschatological nature. It creates salvation in a manner which determines the whole person in time and eternity. . . . The redemption for the new aeon, connected with σωτηρία [salvation] already has become a present reality through Christ in the midst of the world.

This gospel as ongoing redemptive and transformative manifestations of God in the present honors Paul, gives him a sense of indebtedness, and puts him under obligation, as it does for all believers who recognize the manifestations of the righteousness of God and manifest it in their lives as believers. . . . to everyone who believes [παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι], to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (1:16b) 218

Goh, The Middle Voice of Love in 1 Corinthians, ix–x. Byrne, 51. He also notes (56) that one should not over-interpret this phrase, by reading this phrase as if Paul was concerned that the gospel could be viewed as shameful, because of Jesus’s shameful death on the cross. This would be plausible in 1 Corinthians. But note again that Paul does not underscore the cross in Romans. 220 Or as Byrne, 51, suggests: “I can boast in the gospel” to use the “boasting” figurative vocabulary—an honor and shame vocabulary—that Paul uses in 2:17, 23; 3:27; 5:2, 3, 11. 219

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These words do express that the gospel went first to the Jews then to the Greeks/Gentiles (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι), as is commonly mentioned in commentaries. But we also need to note that Paul uses this coupling in order to underscore that, despite the temporal sequence, “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek” (10:12): both groups include believers for whom the gospel is the power of God for salvation (1:16); but both groups will also be under the final judgment (2:9–10) and both groups are under the power of sin (3: 9). Speaking of Jews and Greeks/Gentiles is speaking about everyone: the two parts of humanity (from a Jewish perspective). Yet the most significant part of this statement is, for a figurative reading, that the gospel is for everyone who believes. By this phrase, for the first time in the letter, Paul broadens the audience of those he invites to enter his figurative world. Of course, his primary readers/hearers are the Romans (all those who have faith and are “in Rome, beloved of God, called saints” 1:7–8). But now it becomes clear that what he says about the gospel is also addressed to “everyone who believes.” All believers are invited to be readers/hearers of this letter. All Christ-followers (including modern day believers) are invited to enter Paul’s figurative world, and to read the rest of the letter as believers. When they enter Paul’s figurative world as believers (with faith/ vision), readers discover themselves as those to whom are revealed both God’s righteousness and God’s wrath (1:17–18) throughout Paul’s presentation of the gospel—throughout the rest of the letter. As critical readers practicing a figurative reading, we need to be attentive to the ways in which Paul presents manifestations of both God’s righteousness and God’s wrath throughout his discourse. This perspective will become essential—and eye-opening—when reading the next pericopes. It is indeed tempting to label 1:18b–32 as exclusively presenting manifestations of God’s wrath against impious and unrighteous people (1:18b).221 But even in such passages, we will find that Paul expects his readers/believers (with their faith/vision) to see (recognize) manifestations of God’s righteousness in the people and situations that Paul describes in these verses. He is positing that readers/believers are beneficiaries of a twofold revelation and that they should see in any given situation entangled manifestations of both God’s righteousness and God’s wrath. As critical readers of the rest of the letter we should be attentive to the way in which Paul presents this twofold revelation with the expectation that his intended readers/believers are constantly called to distinguish and sort out how the manifestations of God’s righteousness and the manifestations of God’s wrath are interrelated, and to disentangle them, so as to respond appropriately. For a summary of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Thanksgiving to God (1:8); Ministry (1:9); Prayer (1:9-10); Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14); Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14); Gospelizing (εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15), Gospel, Transmission of the; Thesis of the Letter (1:16-17); Salvation; Righteousness of God (1:17a); Righteous (1:17b); Wrath of God (1:18a)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the third column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for Thirty-One Key Theological 221

As is commonly done in forensic and in covenantal community interpretations.

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and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations (in the third column) can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community readings.

(C) Rom 1:18b–32: The wrath of God at work: Idolatry (1) Rom 1:18b–32 as a thematic unit framed by inverted parallelisms: The condemned holding fast to their knowledge of God, although in unrighteousness vs. the condemned ignoring their knowledge of God’s will In this third thematic unit, 1:18b–32, Paul continues to paint with broad strokes the thematic plane that frames another part of his realized-apocalyptic/messianic figurative world. The thematic organization of this unit is already colored by the preceding unit (1:8–18a) and its last words: “Because the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness” (1:18a). As Byrne and Käsemann222 note, 1:18b–32 needs to be read in terms of this realized-apocalyptic/messianic figurative perspective (as I call it). Before performing this figurative interpretation, it is nevertheless helpful to consider the more formal thematic organization of this unit, which will guide it. The thematic unit, 1:18b–32, has been limited to these verses because of the inverted parallelisms between two different but complementary descriptions of the condemned impious and unrighteous found in 1:18b–20 and in 1:32: [The wrath of God is revealed against all impiety and unrighteousness] (1:18b) of humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness. (1:19) For what can be known about God is plainly visible to them, because God has made it visible to them. (1:20) Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, [God’s] eternal power and divinity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. vs. They truly know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve death—yet they not only do them but even applaud those who practice them. (1:32)

The parallelisms between the two descriptions of the impious and unrighteous are apparent (and bolded in the above translation). 1. In both cases, they “know” something “about God” or “about God’s will”: “what can be known about God (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ) is plainly visible to them” (1:19); “they truly know (ἐπιγνόντες) God’s decree” (1:32).223 For readers/believers this

222 223

Byrne, 65–66 and Käsemann, 37–38. The emphasis “truly,” which is built in the verb ἐπιγνόντες—and which is most often ignored—is significant as Alain Gignac points out (L’épître aux Romains [Paris: Cerf, 2014], 108). It is another marker of the parallelism with 1:18b–20.

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shows that in both cases such people have been beneficiaries of manifestations of God’s righteousness, whether these people recognize it or not.224 2. Because in both cases they mishandle this knowledge, they are punishable under the judgment: they are “without excuse” (1:20; they cannot be defended in court) and/or “deserve death” (1:32a). For readers/believers this reveals that in both cases such people are under God’s wrath. Another form of punishment structures the thematic unit through the repetition of the phrase “God gave them up” (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς) in 1:24, 1:26, and 1:28. These parallelisms make it clear that the primary themes of this unit concern knowledge about God (aka “the truth”) or God’s will; and punishments for mishandling this knowledge. The inversions between the beginning and the end of this discursive thematic unit concern (1) different kinds of revealed knowledge and (2) different ways in which this knowledge is mishandled. 1. A knowledge about God’s nature, power, and divinity is contrasted with a knowledge about God’s will. In 1:18a–20 the revealed knowledge is about God’s “invisible nature, eternal power and divinity,” made visible to humans “since the creation of the world” in “the things that have been made.” In sum, this revealed knowledge about God (and God’s nature, power, divinity) is what could be called a “natural theology” (although in lower case, to make clear that I am not claiming that it is either a sufficient or a total knowledge about God). By contrast, in 1:32 humans are said to truly know “God’s righteous decree” (τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ θεοῦ)—that which has been “deemed right” by God and thus has the force of law; in Byrne’s words, “a requirement or commandment with legal force.”225 The phrase “they truly know God’s decree” makes clear that what is known by humans in this case is the revealed knowledge about God’s will, commonly formulated in legal form (“the law”)—by contrast to the knowledge about God’s nature, power, divinity perceived in nature (natural theology). 2. The mishandling of the revealed knowledge is quite different in 1:18b-20 and in 1:32. The mishandling in 1:32 is clear: The impious and unrighteous simply do not act according to God’s decree, which stipulates that they should not practice certain things (“such things” in 1:32 refer in particular to those listed in 1:29–31). They disobey God’s decree, ignoring it and therefore practicing what is forbidden. In addition, they approve and even applaud226 those who are practicing them. In such cases, they act as if God’s decree does not exist; the revealed knowledge is discarded or ignored. The mishandling of revealed knowledge in 1:18b is actually the reverse. Far from ignoring or discarding the revealed knowledge, in 1:18b

224

This is reinforced by the two other references to “knowing” God (or something about God), which further structure the thematic unit around this theme, as Käsemann (51) noted: in 1:21, “though they knew God” (γνόντες τὸν θεὸν); and in 1:28, “they did not think worthwhile to acknowledge God (τὸν θεὸν ἔχειν ἐν ἐπιγνώσει, “to have God in knowledge”). 225 Byrne, 78. 226 A possible allusion to attending spectacles where people are practicing such things.

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humans “hold fast to” it (as one holds fast and is faithful to a received tradition), they “take possession” of it. This last comment seems to be contradicting “what the text says” (according to common English translations!): “those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (as one finds for instance in RSV, NRSV, NIV, NAB, NAS, and also in many commentaries, including Käsemann and Byrne). But such translations are shaped by an inappropriate view of idolatry—implied by the term “impiety” (ἀσέβεια).227 The above English translations presuppose that idolatry is grounded in a rejection of true revelation; therefore, for such translators the verb κατέχω (katechô) is surprising (as if it were obscure!) and ends up being translated “suppress”—even though nowhere else is it found to have this meaning! Far from being obscure, this verb is actually used several times by Paul in his letters, as well as found throughout the New Testament, classical Greek literature, and the Koine papyri letters. Throughout these many texts, it never has anything close to the meaning “suppress.” To refer only to the apostle’s letters, it is quite clear that Paul regularly uses this verb with a range of meaning consistent with its meanings in classical Greek as well as in many of the papyri letters—and quite different from “suppress.”228 Using the verb katechô as in Rom 1:18, Paul writes in Rom 7:6 that we are “dead to that (the law) which held us captive” (RSV, NRSV, NAB) or bound us (NIV, NJB, NAS); in 1 Cor 7:30, katechô with a negation is consistently translated “[those who buy as though] they had no possessions” (not possessing; not owning; not having goods);229 in 2 Cor 6:10, katechô is used to refer to the attitude of being “[as having nothing, and yet] possessing (owning) everything”; in Phlm 1:13 Paul uses katechô to say about Onesimus, “[I wanted] to keep him with me” or “retain him for myself.” These observations already strongly suggest that a translation of katechô as “suppressing the truth” is not appropriate. This becomes even clearer in the passages in which Paul uses the verb katechô with an object concerning some kind of knowledge (comparable to “truth,” τὴν ἀλήθειαν in 1:18b). Thus in 1 Cor 11:2, Paul uses the verb katechô when he says: “[I commend you because you . . .] hold fast (hold to; hold firmly, maintain) the traditions (τὰς παραδόσεις κατέχετε) just as I handed them to you”; or in 1 Cor 15:2, “if you hold fast (hold firmly, κατέχετε) to the message. . .”; 1 Thess 5:21, “hold fast to (hold on; retain) what is good (τὸ καλὸν κατέχετε).” As is clear, in all these other passages of Paul’s letters where the verb katechô is found, translators never render it as “suppress.” Furthermore, each time its object is some kind of knowledge—a tradition, a message, a teaching about what is good—the only plausible translation is “holding fast to” or a similar phrase (holding to; holding firmly; maintaining; retaining). And now, surprise! Surprise! In Rom 1:18b it would mean “suppressing the truth,” as most English translations have! Yet the NJB translates “holding back the truth”—which is closer to

227

Term “impiety” (ἀσέβεια)—violating certain taboos—has the same root as the verb σεβάζομαι (referring to an intense worship, since σεβάζομαι is a stronger form of σέβομαι, “worship”) used for idolatrous worship in 1:25. Thus “impiety” (ἀσέβεια) should not be understood as a lack of piety or a lack of worship—it is a misdirected religious attitude. 228 As Liddell and Scott and Moulton and Milligan confirm and amply. 229 From now on, I simply provide the different translations of katechô in italics and between parentheses.

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the uses in the other passages in Paul’s letters, although this translation might have been chosen because it can also be understood in the sense of suppressing the truth (preventing others from having the truth). But to be consistent with Rom 7:6, Luther’s translation and all the main modern French translations understand the verb katechô in Rom 1:18b as expressing something like “keep truth captive in unrighteousness” or “holding fast to the truth” (as in Paul’s other letters mentioned above).230 So, my proposed translation: “Humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness.” (1:18b)

In 1:18b the mishandling of the truth (or of the knowledge about God) does not involve ignoring this truth/knowledge or acting as if this truth/knowledge did not exist (as in 1:32). Far from it. Rather, in this case, the mishandling of the truth involves “holding fast to” it, “grabbing” it, “taking possession” of it—as the Corinthians were holding fast to the traditions they received from Paul. In itself this would be good! These people have benefited from a revelation/manifestation of God’s righteousness (1:17)—the truth—and responded accordingly: they held fast to it. The problem—what is wrong— is that they are holding fast to this truth “in unrighteousness.” By holding to the truth “in unrighteousness” they twist this truth into idolatry, which will be shown to be a manifestation of God’s wrath—as an examination of the figures will clarify. In sum, and as we shall see, in 1:18b–32 and everywhere else in Romans, the inverted parallelisms of the thematic organization of this passage already show that idolatry is “holding fast to a truth [about God] in unrighteousness” (τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων, 1:18b); it is twisting/deforming a particular revelatory divine manifestation by absolutizing it in the process of holding it fast. Far from being a lack of religious fervor, idolatry is a religious fanaticism that absolutizes a true but partial revelation—idolaters view and act as if this partial revelation was complete and final, making it impossible for them to expect and recognize other revelations. Therefore one can expect different kinds of idolatry related to different kinds of partial revelations that have been absolutized—as we shall see in the rest of the letter—and related to the extent to which the original revelation is still recognizable. In 1:18b–32 Paul presents three different forms of idolatry (Rom 1:19 GNT) that vary according to the extent to which the divine manifestations that idolaters absolutize are still recognizable as revelation in the idolatrous practice—“idolatry-as-worshiping-images” (1:22, as in the Hebrew Bible); “idolatry-as-lie” (that hides these divine manifestations, 1:25); and “idolatry-as-denying-God” (that “refuses to acknowledge” that these manifestations are from God, 1:28).

230

For Luther, in his forensic interpretation (see Chapter 7), the sinful conduct is “holding on to unrighteousness,” Luther’s Works. Vol 25. Lectures on Romans Glosses and Scholia (ed. Hilton Oswald; Saint Louis: Concordia, 1972), 9 (marginal gloss). Yet “take possession of truth” and “keep truth captive” are kept as viable alternatives. Käsemann (38), struggling with the same problem, suggests that katechô could have the meaning it has in some magical texts, “binding with a spell.” This suggestion goes in the same direction as the proposed translation, but the latter has the advantage of simply adopting a meaning present in other Pauline letters. (Unfortunately, modern German translations have abandoned Luther’s suggestions.)

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(2) Rom 1:18b–32: The figures in this thematic frame. The thematic analysis has shown that the readers/hearers of 1:18b–32—Christfollowers in Rome or elsewhere—are led to condemn and reject all that is involved in mishandling the “knowledge” that one has about God’s nature and power (1:18b–23 and 1:24–27) and about God’s well-known decree and will (1:28–32). In the thematic structure, this progression is marked by the repeated references to the “knowledge” that humans have and mishandled in one way or another (in 1:18b–20, 1:21, 1:28, 1:32) and by the repeated condemnation and punishment of such behaviors (in 1:18, 1:24, 1:26, 1:28, and 1:32). And as we just saw, the mishandling of the revealed truth/knowledge is quite different in the first and second parts. This difference is best understood here by considering the figures in the order of the textual progression. Of course, this figurative reading builds upon what we have learned about the figures we encountered in 1:1–18a.

The Central Figure in 1:18–32: Idolatry as “Holding Fast to the Truth” about God “in Unrighteousness” At the outset, we can readily recognize the overall figure that frames 1:18–32: “idolatry” and its consequences. The mishandling of the truth (1:18) is figurativized as idolatry (including the process of “making idols”). Paul’s readers readily recognize this figure because his text is like many intertexts in the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint as well as in early Jewish literature.231 The impious and unrighteous “changed the glory (ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν) of the immortal God into an imitation, the image (ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος) of a mortal human being or of birds or of animals or of reptiles” (1:23); “they changed God’s truth into a lie (μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει)232 and worshiped and served (ἐσεβάσθησαν καὶ ἐλάτρευσαν) the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25). Instead of “glorifying (δοξάζω) God as God” (1:21)—that is, instead of worshiping God—they worshiped the image of a creature. These statements echo the many texts in the Hebrew Bible about idolatry. For instance, the prohibition of graven image and of idolatry in Exod 20:4–5; 20:23, 34:17; Lev 19:4, 26:1, as well as in Deut 4:15–18, which includes in the LXX version a vocabulary close to Paul’s. Compare Rom 1:23 and Deut 4:15–18: [They] changed the glory (ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν) of the immortal God for an imitation (ἐν ὁμοιώματι), the image (εἰκόνος) of a mortal human being or of birds or of animals or of reptiles. (Rom 1:23) 15

Since you saw no form (ὁμοίωμα) when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, 16 so that you do not act corruptly by

231

As we repeatedly noted, there is “figure” when a text evokes another text—by being like it—even as this text is also unlike the other text. Recognizing what is like allows the readers to identify the figure; what is unlike (the difference) provides the new vision which characterizes the figurative world of the author. 232 Note that both in 1:23 and 25 ἤλλαξαν or μετήλλαξαν is followed by ἐν (ἐν ὁμοιώματι or ἐν τῷ ψεύδει) and, therefore, means “changed into” (something else), as is often the case in the LXX.

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making for yourselves a sculpted-idol in the form of any figure (γλυπτὸν ὁμοίωμα πᾶσαν εἰκόνα), the likeness (ὁμοίωμα) of male or female, 17 the likeness (ὁμοίωμα) of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness (ὁμοίωμα) of any winged bird that flies in the air, 18 the likeness (ὁμοίωμα) of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness (ὁμοίωμα) of any fish that is in the water under the earth. (Deut 4:15–18)

Similarly, making reference to the golden calf episode (Exod 32–34), Ps 106:19–20 reads (in the LXX version, Ps 105:19–20): (19) They made a calf at Horeb and worshiped a sculpted image. (20) They changed their glory (ἠλλάξαντο τὴν δόξαν) into the image (ἐν ὁμοιώματι) of an ox that eats grass.

Many other texts—especially prophetic texts—mock those who practice idolatry, because it involves worshiping a piece of wood or stone, even if it is gold or silver plated, as for example Hab 2:18–19 expresses (and as the Pesher Habakkuk simply paraphrases):233 What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it—a cast image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak! Woe to you who say to a piece of wood, “Wake up!” to dumb stone, “Arise!” Can it teach? See, it is gold and silver plated, and there is no spirit in it at all.

Idols are worthless (Ps 31:6); worse, they are an “abomination” (‫)ץּוּקִׁש‬: see for example Deut 29:16; 2 Kgs 23:24; Ezek 5:11, 20:7–8, 37:23; Jer 4:1, 7:30, 16:18, 32:34. In all these texts, idolatry, worshipping “abominations,” is often directly associated with the “unrighteousness” (LXX ἀδικία) of idolaters, as in Rom 1:18b. Idols are “deceptive and false” and therefore idolaters are “stupid and without knowledge,” as Jer 10:14–15 = 51:17–18 emphasizes in a way that is comparable to Rom 1:21b–22: 14

Everyone is stupid and without knowledge; goldsmiths are all put to shame by their idols; for their images are false, and there is no spirit in them. They are worthless, a work of delusion; at the time of their punishment they shall perish. (Jer 10:14–15 = 51:17–18) They were made futile in their thinking and their senseless hearts were made dark. Pretending to be wise, they became fools. (Rom 1:21b–22)

Similar mockeries of idolatry are found in Hellenistic Jewish literature. Käsemann, Byrne, and Keck234 mention the diatribes against idolatry found in the Epistle of 233

See Vermès, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Baltimore, Penguin, 1962), 240. In all the passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls I consulted, the Qumran community closely follows the understanding of idolatry found in the Hebrew Bible, simply emphasizing that “idolatry” was a problem found “in the nations”—but not accusing their Jewish adversaries of idolatry. 234 Käsemann, 69–40; Byrne, 64, and Keck, 60–62.

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Aristeas, 132–38; the Testament of Naphtali, 3:3–5; Sibylline Oracles 3:8–45, Josephus and Philo, but appropriately insist that the most relevant intertext is Wisdom of Sol. 13–14. The similarities of Wis 13–14 with 1:18–32 are so striking that Byrne even suggests that Paul used this text as a model. As in the Hebrew Bible texts mentioned above, we find mockeries of idolatry such as: 10 Miserable, with their hopes set on dead things, are those who give the name “gods” to the works of human hands, gold and silver fashioned with skill, and likenesses of animals, or a useless stone, the work of an ancient hand. . . 17 When he prays about possessions and his marriage and children, he is not ashamed to address a lifeless thing. 18 For health he appeals to a thing that is weak; for life he prays to a thing that is dead; for aid he entreats a thing that is utterly inexperienced; for a prosperous journey, a thing that cannot take a step; 19 for money-making and work and success with his hands he asks strength of a thing whose hands have no strength. (Wis 13:10–19 NRSV) The idol made with hands is accursed, and so is the one who made it. (Wis 14:8)

Most striking are the similarities of the consequences of idolatry as described in Wisdom and Paul’s text: Therefore there will be a visitation also upon the heathen idols, because, though part of what God created, they became an abomination, snares for human souls and a trap for the feet of the foolish. For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life. (Wis 14:11– 12, NRSV)

Idols were made out of what God created—a tree given by God to make useful things that serves life’s needs. But by taking a part of what God created to make “the likeness of a human being” or the likeness of “some worthless animal” and then addressing prayers to this “lifeless thing”—“a thing that is dead,” “that is utterly inexperienced,” “that cannot take a step,” that has “no strength”—is simply being wretched, stupid, ignorant as is repeatedly expressed in one way or another (Wis 13:1; 13:10; and all the descriptions of idolatry in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish literature); indeed, they are not to be excused (Wis 13:8; cf. Rom 1:20). And, strikingly, for Wisdom as for Paul, making idols is “the beginning of fornication” (so Rom 1:24, 26–27; cf Wis 14:24–27), and “the corruption of life” (so Rom 1:28–31). Thus, in many ways the description of idolatry in Rom 1:18–32 is like that in Wis 13–14 (and in the many texts against idolatry in the Hebrew Bible and LXX). But one should not overlook how unlike Rom 1:18–32 is as compared with all the biblical texts we mentioned and with Wis 13–14. In a figurative reading, it is not enough to take note of the striking parallels (the figurative likeness) and to ponder the implications of introducing a “conventional Jewish polemic against the Gentile world and its idolatry.”235 What makes 1:18–32 a powerful figurative text is that Paul was saying much more than Hellenistic Judaism on that matter (also emphasizing 235

Byrne, 65.

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the figurative unlikeness), as Käsemann and Keck emphasize.236 Keck summarizes this difference by saying: “For Paul, however, idolatry was not traceable to error but to disobedience.”237 By contrast with the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish views, for Paul idolatry is not due to a lack of knowledge (to an error or to ignorance) but is due to a misuse of this knowledge (including disobedience). This is a crucial difference. As noted, the thematic structure of the passage shows that, for Paul, all humans have a knowledge regarding God’s nature and power (1:18b–23 and 1:24–27) and regarding God’s will/decree (1:28–32). They are not ignorant or stupid. While the second case (1:28–32) involves sheer disobedience (ignoring God’s decree and acting as if it did not exist) as Keck emphasizes, in the case of idolatry (1:18b–27), far from ignoring the truth about God’s nature and power, they “hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18b). They truly have a knowledge about God’s nature and power—a true knowledge. The problem is that they twist this knowledge in an unrighteous way by making idols. By contrast, it is striking that in the Hebrew Bible idolaters are, in Jeremiah’s words, “stupid and without knowledge” (Jer 10:14/51:17), either because they never had a true knowledge about God (e.g., as Jeremiah suggests) or because they lost this knowledge by “forgetting” it—as Israel did when they worshiped the golden calf because “they forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt” according to Ps 106/105:21. Like Paul, the Hellenistic Jewish Wisdom of Solomon presupposes that true knowledge about God can be known through the creation: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5). But, unlike Paul, Wisdom defines the problem as resulting from ignorance and foolishness: All people were ignorant of God (θεοῦ ἀγνωσία), were foolish (μάταιοι) by nature and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works, but they supposed that either fire or wind, or swift air, or the circle of the stars . . . were the gods that rule the world.” (Wis 13:1–2, NRSV)

So idolaters “err about the knowledge of God” (Wis 14:22). Even though, as any humans, they have the power/ability to know the Creator by observing the creation, they fail to use this cognitive power, and therefore never have the proper knowledge about God as Creator: 7 For while they live among his works, they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. 8 Yet again, not even they are to be excused; 9 for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? (Wis 13:7–10, NRSV) 236

Käsemann, 41–52 and Keck, 60–72. Byrne’s comment that both Wisdom and Romans find the human failure to attain the knowledge of God inexcusable (64–65) is most puzzling. Before saying that “their senseless hearts were darkened” (Rom 1:21d), and more broadly that “they did not glorify God as God or give thanks but they became futile in their thinking” (1:21b–c), Paul affirms “γνόντες τὸν θεὸν” (1:21a), which can only be translated, “they knew God” (this is Byrne’s translation). So, in Paul’s text humans did not fail to attain knowledge of God. 237 Keck, 62, emphases added.

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Such views are very different from Paul’s. For him, this is not what is at stake in idolatry. Instead of saying that humans failed to find and recognize the Lord, Paul affirms: “They knew God” (1:21a) and “What can be known about God is plainly visible to them, because God has made it visible to them. Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, [God’s] eternal power and divinity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:19–20). So “they are without excuse” (1:20), not because they failed to know God while having the ability to do so (as Wis 13:8 proposes), not because they lack this knowledge through forgetfulness (as e.g., in Ps 106:21/105:21, Deut 32:18), but on the contrary because they actually know God’s nature, power, and divinity. In sum, idolatry is the dominant figure in 1:18b–27. This figure is like the description in the Hebrew Bible (in the many passages we reviewed) and in Hellenistic Judaism (including Wis 13–14), but departs from the descriptions of idolatry in the Hebrew Bible and Hellenistic Judaism in a most significant way: Paul emphasizes that idol worshipers have a true knowledge of God (1:19–21a); they have a natural theology. Though incomplete and partial, the revelation they have (by seeing the things God made, 1:19) is true. Idolatry is “holding fast in unrighteousness to the truth” (a truth about God) that one has. The fact that it is in unrighteousness that this truth is held fast expresses that this truth is deformed or twisted in some way. But it remains that impious and unrighteous have received a true revelation of God’s constructive interventions; something like God’s goodness (seen in good gifts, 1:8–9) or something like God’s righteousness (recognizable in righteous people who live by faith, 1:17, and also somehow in other people to whom one is indebted, 1:14), although in their case it is primarily a true revelation of God in creation (1:19–20). There is nothing lacking in this particular revelation; it is as valuable as other kinds of revelations. But it is merely one among several true revelations, and therefore it is “incomplete” and “partial.” Looking more closely to the text will show that making idols involves turning a revealed but partial truth into an absolute truth—and therefore into something worthy of worship instead of God.

Making Idols and Worshiping Them: 1:18-23, 25 While keeping in mind that for Paul the figure idolatry is centered upon a true knowledge of God which is “held fast in unrighteousness,” we reread 1:18–25 with the awareness that we still need to understand from this perspective the manifestation of God’s wrath in (a) the process of making idols, (b) worshiping idols rather than God, and (c) the moral and social punishments. The starting point in the process of making idols is clear: humans have a true knowledge of God’s nature, power, and divinity that they perceived in the created world: [Because the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness] of humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness. For what can be known about God is plainly visible to them, because God has made it visible to them. Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature,

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namely, [God’s] eternal power and divinity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. (1:18b–20a)

With most English translations, I translate the phrase τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ “what can be known about God” so as to clarify that this knowledge of God is partial and/or incomplete, because of human limitations. Limited as it is, such a “natural revelation” is available to all humans. All of us have the ability to see (to perceive) in creation essential aspects of “God’s invisible nature, eternal power and divinity”—in the same way that Paul, through his own faith/vision and in contemplative prayer, was able to see the Romans’ faith/vision as a gift they received from God (1:8). There is no need to debate whether this natural revelation is a faith-content sufficient to bring about salvation, as forensic theological interpretations do. Rather, in the realized-apocalyptic/ messianic perspective, one notes that Paul affirms that all humans are given the ability to see manifestations of God in front of them (in the created world and in human experience), as Paul was given the ability (through the divine interventions in his life) to see manifestations of God in front of him. As we noted in the figurative reading of 1:1–18a, Paul envisions God as a God who intervenes in powerful transformative ways in human affairs, and God’s interventions are seen through faith. In 1:19–20, Paul underscores that all humans have a similar ability to recognize God at work in their experience: in this case it is the ability to see in the created world manifestations of God’s invisible nature, eternal power, and divinity. In effect, various manifestations of God’s righteousness (God’s powerful interventions) are revealed to everyone—and not merely to believers and Christ-followers. But without the gospel, humans do not know what to do with such revelations of God’s righteousness. So they are without excuse. (21) For although they knew God, they did not glorify God as God (οὐχ ὡς θεὸν ἐδόξασαν) or give thanks (ηὐχαρίστησαν), but they were made futile in their thinking and their senseless hearts were made dark. (1:20b–21)

Why were all humans given this ability to see God at work in the world? For what purpose? Actually, for the same reason that Paul was given the ability to “see” that the Romans’ faith/vision was a gift from God, namely: so that he might give thanks to God—“I thank (εὐχαριστῶ) my God . . . for all of you, because your faith . . .” (1:8). Similarly, why are humans given the ability to recognize God’s invisible nature, eternal power, and divinity as they recognize God at work in the created world? So that they might “give thanks to God.” The problem is that barbarian Gentiles—actually, all humans (“all have sinned,” 3:23)—fail to do so. The tragedy with idolatry begins with failing to glorify God and in the process failing to give thanks to God. Why this failure? By comparing this response with Paul’s giving thanks for God’s interventions in the Romans’ experience (1:8), the difference is clear: Paul had a faith/vision engendered by the gospel (1:17), which allowed him to recognize what he saw as a manifestation of God’s righteousness. By contrast, impious and unrighteous Gentiles received this knowledge about God’s interventions in creation without the faith/vision engendered by the gospel. It is noteworthy that failing to glorify God is not simply an offense against God (dishonoring God, as vassals were viewed as offending their lords in the feudal

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system) but primarily separating oneself from God and the glory that God wants to share with humans. Indeed, glorifying God is not only an appropriate response to God’s intervention in human experience (as Paul further expresses in 4:20 and 15:6, 7, 9); it also is a reciprocal experience. When humans glorify God, they participate in and thus reflect in themselves the glory of God, as will be made explicit in 2:7, 10; 3:23; 5:2; 8:18, 21; 9:4, 23, which in one way or another speak of “the glory of the children of God” (8:21). Paul repeats it: “They knew God.” Yes, “they,” the idolaters, the barbarians (1:14), have a knowledge of God (1:21a). They knew God’s “invisible nature” (1:20a). It is a knowledge of the invisible God. As Käsemann puts it, “God remains ‘invisible’ here to the extent that we cannot get power over [God] or calculate [God] metaphysically; rather, [God] ‘has’ us.”238 Such is the limitation of human knowledge in the face of God. Yet this knowledge of God’s “invisible nature” is precisely a real knowledge of God (as Deut 4:15 emphasizes, God had no visible form when the Lord spoke at Horeb). The proper response for this knowledge of God is to glorify and thank God, something idolaters failed to do. Thus their guilt is suitably named “impiety” (ἀσέβεια, 1:18), that is (as noted above), “holding fast to the truth in unrighteousness (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ)”— they “know God,” but in a twisted way. They do not respond appropriately. Instead of glorifying and thanking God, they hold fast to this truth; they take possession of it, using it as they please. Since “they knew God,” their failure to glorify and thank God is inexcusable: “They are without excuse” (1:20b). Therefore, they are punished: the “wrath of God” is manifested against them for their failure to glorify and thank God. Let me underscore it. It is not for their subsequent idolatry and moral perversion that the wrath of God is manifested against them. Rather it is for their failure to glorify and thank God. The list of their punishments already begins in 1:21b: “They were made futile (ἐματαιώθησαν, passive) in their reasoning and their senseless hearts were made dark (ἐσκοτίσθη, passive).” Both passive verbs express that God is the agent, as Keck and Byrne note.239 Readers of the Hebrew Bible and LXX expect that “futility” (also expressed by words of the stem of ματαιόω in LXX) is associated with the worship of idols (e.g., as in Lev 17:7; Hos 5:11; Isa 44:9; Jer 8:19; Wis 13:1) and with “senseless hearts” (as in Wis 11:15). Paul’s statement about would-be idolaters is therefore like the many biblical and Jewish texts that describe idolaters as “stupid and without knowledge” (see again Jer 10:14/51:17). But Paul’s figurative view of idolaters is unlike these texts, because he portrays them as futile and senseless before practicing idolatry and before the ensuing moral perversions. For Paul, God’s wrath intervenes before actual idolatry and moral perversion (described in 1:22–31). Contrary to common expectations, as Käsemann and Keck underscore, Paul paradoxically reverses cause and consequence: idolatry and moral perversion are results of God’s wrath—manifestations of God’s wrath—not the reason for it. God’s wrath causes the futility and the senseless hearts that engender idolatry.240 Futility and senseless hearts are part of their punishment for failing to

238

Käsemann, 42. Keck, 63; see also Byrne, 67, 74. 240 Käsemann, 47 and Keck, 63. 239

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glorify and thank God. Idolatry is itself part of their punishment, caused by God’s wrath—in the same way that their moral perversions are also caused by God’s wrath when “God gave them up” (1:24, 26, 28) to such perversion. How do futility and senseless hearts engender idolatry? Paul’s figure of idolatry as “holding fast to the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18b) makes it clear. It is not by ignoring or dismissing the revelation of God’s invisible nature, eternal power and divinity in creation, but by confusing this incomplete and partial revelation for the complete and final revelation. Futility and senseless hearts are the source of this confusion, which is fueled by “desire” (epithymia, as Paul says in 1:24; 7:7), and which in turns brings about the confusing absolutization of something (any true revelation) which, although true, is not absolute. Then a confusing behavior—including failing to glorify and give thanks to God—is generated by this absolutization. This means that the fundamental sin, punished by God’s wrath, is the failure to glorify and thank God when one witnesses a manifestation of God (always some kind of transformative intervention of God). This failure is so terribly problematic because, instead of glorifying and thanking God for such an intervention—for this truth—one holds fast to it, takes possession of it, grabs it for oneself or for one’s community, instead of receiving it in order to live in relation to God, and therefore in order to glorify and thank God. Holding fast to the truth “in unrighteousness” is the effort of dealing and living with this truth (this transformative intervention of God) apart from the Righteous One. “God’s righteousness” and “God’s wrath” are divine transformative events that encounter all human beings from without (as Käsemann says).241 Of course, believers experience such divine transformative events. To them who believe (1:16) the specific nature of these divine transformative events as either manifestations of “God’s righteousness” or manifestations of “God’s wrath” is revealed through the gospel in the present; that is, in the post-resurrection, eschatological present in which believers live. All impious and unrighteous “human beings” (ἀνθρώπων, 1:18) also experience such divine transformative events. They cannot deny that these eschatological transformative events are performed by God, in the same way that they cannot deny that the world has been created by God—creation is the divine transformative event par excellence. And therefore, “they knew God.” They know all this truth about God. Therefore, they should glorify and give thanks to God. For believers (including Paul and his readers), the fact that they “were made” futile and senseless is a punishing manifestation of the wrath of God. Pretending to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the immortal God into an imitation, the image (ἐν ὁμοιώματι, εἰκόνος) of a mortal human being or of birds or of animals or of reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. They changed the truth about God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (1:22–25)

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Käsemann, 35.

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The earlier mention that futility in thinking and senseless hearts was imposed upon the impious and unrighteous by God is asserted once again, but this time from the perspective of the sinners. They “pretend to be wise,” because of the punishment that imposed “futility in thinking” on them. And the more they pretend or boast to be wise, the more “they become fools.” So, for Käsemann, “Folly can no longer diagnose its own situation. Even under ὀργὴ [wrath] it does not cease to boast about itself.”242 And thus foolishly they engage in the practice of idolatry, that Paul describes using the words of Ps 106:20 (LXX 105:20), about the golden calf.243 Exegetical Note: Beyond the discussion of the figure of idolatry, note that throughout I translated the verb ἀλλάσσω both in 1:23 and in Ps 106:20 (LXX 105:20) as “change,” rather than “exchange.” This is demanded by the grammatical construction, since ἤλλαξαν is followed by ἐν (into): “they changed the glory of the immortal God into an imitation, the image (ἐν ὁμοιώματι, εἰκόνος) of a mortal human being . . .” This is also demanded by the use of this verb in 1 Cor 15:51-52, Gal 4:20, and in Greek literature—where it refers to “making otherwise,” “changing” or “transforming” something. This adjusted translation is most significant. When one translates “exchange,” one presupposes that idolaters totally replace “the glory of the immortal God” with an imitation or an image—in the same way that one presupposes that idolaters “suppress” the truth (translating katechô by “suppress” in 1:18b, even though elsewhere in Paul’s letters this verb refers to “holding fast to” a tradition or teaching). Carefully taking into account the figurative dimensions of Paul’s text (and therefore how it is both “like” and also “unlike” its intertexts) demands that we recognize that idolatry is far from suppressing, dismissing, and exchanging this revealed reality for something else. Instead it involves both “holding fast to” this revealed reality and, because one “holds fast to the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18b), “changing” it, “transforming” it into something else—an imitation (ὁμοίωμα, a likeness, a resemblance, a counterfeit) and an image. (εἰκών, a likeness, an image, a portrait)

What is this “revealed reality” which is “changed” into an idol? “God’s eternal power and divinity” (1:20) and “the glory of the immortal God” (1:23) as “clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (1:20), that is, in all aspects of the created world. This “revealed reality” includes God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory as revealed in mortal human beings; God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory as revealed in birds; God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory as revealed in animals; God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory as revealed in reptiles. By these repetitions I make the point that idolatry involves holding fast to one or the other of these manifestations of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory: human beings, birds, animals, or reptiles. So far so good. There is nothing wrong to holding fast to the reality that each of these has been created by God as is revealed in each case. But idolaters twist this revealed reality, even as they hold fast to 242 243

Käsemann, 44. For the relation of Paul’s interpretation and early Jewish interpretation of Ps 106:20 (LXX 105:20) as prefiguring the situation of all idolaters—Israel, but also Gentiles, and indeed modern idolaters, see Käsemann, 45–47. See also the figurative interpretation of Gignac, 116–17.

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it. They change, transform, each of the manifestations of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory into an imitation, an image, an idol. Why this transformation? Is it because they want to deny that human beings, birds, animals, reptiles are manifestations of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory? Of course not! On the contrary, it is because they respect the revelation of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory in these that the idolaters make imitations and images of humans, birds, animals, reptiles so that they might worship (ἐσεβάσθησαν) and serve (ἐλάτρευσαν) them (1:25a)—as, through his ministry, Paul “serves” God in the priestly sense (1:9, same vocabulary). Yes, worshiping and serving “the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25b) is an abomination—a common qualification of idolatry. But it is essential to recognize the dynamics involved in the making of idols. Far from excluding or disregarding or dismissing as insignificant what each given creature (human, bird, animal, or reptile) manifests—namely a true revelation from God and about God—in the process of making idols, idolaters affirm, hold fast, and absolutize each of these revealed manifestations of God. Let us take as an example the making idols out of human beings—of course, the same point could be made regarding birds, animals, reptiles, or other parts of the creation. Idolaters view a human being—this amazingly complex and beautiful body endowed with a consciousness—as revealing God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory. And indeed, a human being reveals God. Actually, Paul might have in mind Gen 1:27 (as Käsemann and Gignac suggest) and its affirmation that a human being is “in God’s image” (κατ᾽ εἰκόνα θεοῦ).244 Idolaters affirm and hold fast to this truth. But, “pretending to be wise” (1:22) they amplify this truth; they absolutize it. In this example, instead of viewing the human being as one among several revelations of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory—and therefore as a partial revelation—they view the human being as the complete, total, absolute manifestation of God, and therefore as Godself, whom they can represent by an image of a human being, which can therefore be at the center of their worship of “god.” In the process “they changed the truth about God into a lie” (μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει, 1:25)—a phrase best understood, together with 1:23, as expressing that idolaters “transformed” (changed) something (God’s truth) into something else (a lie) without suppressing it. The result is of course an abomination. By transforming a partial revelation of God into a complete and absolute revelation, that is, into a “god,” the truth about God has been distorted. This absolutization transforms this partial truth—this true revelation of God’s eternal power, divinity, and glory found in one part of creation—into something which is misleading. “They changed God’s truth into a lie.” And this idolatry will be costly, as God’s wrath continues to be unleashed against idolaters, as the following verses spell out.245 Before going further and dealing with 1:24, it is essential to recognize that this idol, this absurd absolutization, still contains a true revelation about God. Despite deformations and twisting, a true (although partial) revelation is still present in the idol; in fact, this revelation remains “holy and just and good” (Rom 7:12). Therefore, an idol should in no way be dismissed, brushed aside, or ignored as if it were only a pack of lies—the usual iconoclastic attitude, with its breaking and burning of idols. One cannot

244 245

As suggested by Käsemann, 45 and Gignac, 116–17. For a graphic representation of the process of idol-making, see Patte, Paul’s Faith, 281–84.

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and should not do so, because any given idol still contains and harbors a true revelation from God and about God—a gift from God! Although wrapped into a manifestation of God’s wrath, the idol still contains a revelation of God’s righteousness! This is a true, partial revelation that idolaters have transformed into an idol by “holding fast to” it, twisting it into unrighteousness by viewing it as an absolute (complete and final) revelation. Thus, the given revelation present in a particular idol can be—and indeed should be—accepted and welcomed by believers for what it is: a call to believers to give thanks and glorify God, as any revelation is (1:21), even though idolaters failed to do it. By saying that the revelation hidden in an idol should be viewed by believers as “holy and just and good,” it is clear that I am alluding to Paul’s statement in 7:12 (ἁγία καὶ δικαία καὶ ἀγαθη) regarding the law (Torah). The realized-apocalyptic/messianic commentary on 7:5–24 (in Volume II) spells out how the absolutized law becomes deadly and an instrument of God’s wrath. As such this passage provides a detailed clarification and amplification of the way Paul envisions the hellish process through which idolaters are “made futile in their thinking and their senseless hearts were made dark. Pretending to be wise, they became fools” (1:21b–22). In brief, 7:5–24 makes explicit that absolutizing the law is another form of idolatry: it involves taking as absolute, and therefore zealously holding fast to, a revelation which is true (indeed “holy and just and good”) but partial—that is, neither complete nor final. While discussing Paul’s messianic vocation we noted that the phrase being “called to be an apostle” (Rom 1:1c) evokes as intertexts Gal 1:13–14 and Phil 3:5–6, where Paul describes his life as a Jew before encountering Christ. It was a life framed by his vocation as a Jew totally devoted to Judaism and therefore totally devoted to defend zealously the traditions of his ancestors (ultimately by persecuting the church). In other words, he zealously held fast to the partial revelation he had as a Jew (the traditions of his ancestors, including the Law), transforming it into an absolute—as the barbarian idolatrous Gentiles did with the partial revelation they had received. We could say that as a zealous Jew Paul transformed the traditions of his ancestors and the Law into an idol. This term would be appropriate, even as it would be awkward in this case, since for Jews idolatry is the primary sin of Gentiles. But I am attempting to make a more general point regarding idolatry as the absolutization of a truth, whatever it might be. I seek to underscore here that the gospel and its revelation of God’s righteousness and God’s wrath did not require that Paul abandon and totally reject the traditions of his ancestors and the law—he still views them as Holy Scriptures (1:2). The same applies to any idolatry. The gospel and its revelation of God’s righteousness and God’s wrath does not require that idolaters (all sinners) abandon and totally reject the true but partial revelation that they absolutized and transformed into an idol. “What can be known about God” which was plainly visible to them in creation—God’s invisible nature, eternal power and divinity—remains true and should be welcomed and treasured as a true revelation still present in and inappropriately wrapped into the idolatries and the idolaters—as Paul’s Jewishness and the Holy Scriptures are welcomed and treasured as true revelation by the Gentiles whom Paul, as apostle set apart for the gospel of God, seeks to bring to the obedience of faith (1:5). And Paul makes the same point in 12:2 about the present idolatrous world (τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ, to which one should not be conformed) by affirming that believers should discern in it “what is the will of

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God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ εὐάρεστον καὶ τέλειον). It follows that when Paul encountered “barbarians,” such as Gentile idolaters, he felt indebted to them (ὀφειλέτης εἰμί, 1:14). We now understand why. As a believer to whom the gospel revealed the manifestations of God’s righteousness and God’s wrath in those he encountered, Paul discerned in the very idolatry of these barbarians the true (and partial) revelation that they had absolutized and transformed into an idol. Even though in a deformed fashion, these barbarians brought to him the revelations they had received and that he did not know; thus Paul felt and truly was indebted to them. Now, what Paul said in 1:14 makes full sense and, as we shall see, needs to be viewed as a key for understanding Paul’s overall figurative world. In sum, the intended readers—“all those in Rome, beloved of God, called saints” who have faith (1:7–8) and thus who are among those to whom both “God’s righteousness” and “God’s wrath” are revealed” (1:17–18)—can “see” through their faith/vision the manifestations of God’s righteousness in barbarian idolaters who recognized “God’s invisible nature, eternal power and divinity” because these have been made known to them. The faithful Romans and subsequent Christ-followers as readers/hearers should recognize themselves as “indebted” to these barbarian idolaters as Paul did; they are beneficiary of the particular revelation of God’s righteousness (God’s invisible nature, etc.) that these barbarian idolaters have received and bring to them. But the manifestation of God’s wrath is also revealed to such readers/believers: in Paul’s description of the barbarian idolaters they also recognized how God’s wrath is unleashed upon these people. As noted, a first direct manifestation of God’s wrath—of God’s punishment—is that “they were made futile in their thinking and their senseless hearts were made dark” (1:21). And as a result—a related punishment—they make idols and worship them (1:22-23). Their idolatry is a form of punishment—a manifestation of God’s wrath. In the same line, Paul emphasizes that God’s wrath and punishment also involve God abandoning them to their futility, senseless hearts, and idolatrous ways: “Therefore God gave them up (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς) in the desires (ἐν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις) of their hearts, to impurity (εἰς ἀκαθαρσίαν), to the dishonoring (ἀτιμ άζεσθαι) of their bodies among themselves.” (1:24)

This verse is loaded with figures. The figure of “God giving them up” (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς) is striking not only because it is repeated in 1:26 and 1:28, but also because it is in tension with the figure “God” found earlier in the text. Instead of a God who intervenes in powerful transformative ways in human affairs (as is the case with God’s righteousness, God’s constructive interventions), God is presented here as standing aside—God “has given them up,” “handed them over,” to their own desires. God’s wrath is manifested in a passive way, by the very fact that God is not intervening.246 But this remains a punishment. 246

Interestingly enough Paul uses the same vocabulary to express that God “handed over” Christ for our trespasses (4:25, using a passive form, παρεδόθη, and 8:32, using an active form, παρέδωκεν, as in 1:24).

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The phrase, “God gave them up in the desires (ἐν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις) of their hearts to impurity (εἰς ἀκαθαρσίαν), to the dishonoring (ἀτιμάζεσθαι) of their bodies among themselves” (1:24a), is a most powerful figure, because of its intratextual and intertextual relationships. This figure bridges and holds together the description of humans under the wrath of God, their idol-making, and the catastrophic moral perversion, first represented by sexual moral perversion. The antipathy against “desire” (ἐπιθυμία, epithymia) was common in the Greco-Roman world, in which desire was contrasted with reason (the antidote to desire) or with “self-mastery,” “temperance” (σωφρόνημα; curbing one’s desires, σωφρονεῖν, cf. Rom 12:3).247 Such views of desire were welcome in Hellenistic Judaism, especially since the Septuagint translates the tenth commandment: “You shall not desire” (οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις) (Exod 20:17, LXX; the commandment usually rendered in English “You shall not covet”). Like these intertexts Paul emphasizes “desire,” epithymia, as the central, basic problem. But unlike these intertexts Paul sets desire as part of his description of the manifestation of God’s wrath and of idolatry. Beyond 1:24, Paul emphasizes the centrality of desire in sinful life by saying that sin “makes you obey your desires” (6:12) and that living in the flesh involves “gratifying desire” (13:14). In addition, and most significantly, Paul directly refers to Exod 20:17 in Rom 7:7, expressing that sin is rooted in and fueled by desire: Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to desire if the law had not said, “You shall not desire.” (7:7)

Leaving aside for the commentary in Volume II the importance of this verse regarding Paul’s understanding of the Law/Torah, 7:7 confirms and reinforces that epithymia should be read in 1:24a in terms of Exod 20:17. This means that, as in Exod 20:17 which refers to all kinds of desiring in addition to desiring a neighbor’s wife, epithymia connotes “desire” in a generic sense, rather than more narrowly to “sexual desire” or “lust,” even though the following verses (1:26–27) will do so.248 The fact that Paul uses the plural (“the desires of their hearts,” αἱ ἐπιθυμίαι τῶν καρδιῶν) further confirms this point. Desire is envisioned here (and in 7:7) as what fuels idolatry and sin at the most fundamental level. We noted regarding the affirmation in 1:18b that impious and unrighteous were “holding fast to the truth” “grabbing” it, “taking possession” of it (κ ατεχόντων), as one of the first steps in the process of making idols. Now it appears that what fuels this “holding fast to the truth” is desire. Why would they hold fast to the truth if they did not desire the truth? And of course, as noted, holding fast to the truth—and therefore desiring the truth—is not problematic in itself. It becomes problematic when it is fueled by “unbridled desires,” that is, by desires that engender

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According to Plato, Socrates said: “The soul secures immunity from desires by following reason” (Phaedo 83A). Philo, Wisdom of Solomon, 4 Maccabees contrast desire with self-mastery (Keck, 66–67). See also Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 36–82. 248 The tenth commandment reads in full: “You shall not desire your neighbor’s wife, You shall not desire your neighbor’s house, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exod 20:17). By reversing the order in the Hebrew Bible, the LXX reads: “You shall not desire your neighbor’s wife; You shall not desire your neighbor’s house.”

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“impurity” (ἀκαθαρσία)—moral but also cultic uncleanness (as in 1 Thess 2:3 and Matt 23:27)—and “dishonor” (deprivation of honor) of “their bodies among themselves” (now with a sexual connotation). As a consequence, the appropriate “holding fast to the truth” becomes twisted “in unrighteousness” (1:18b)—in the same way that the Law, which is holy, and the commandment, which is holy, just, and good (7:12) become twisted into a deadly deception by desire, the fuel of sin (7:7–11). But then, just as this Law, though twisted in a deadly parody of itself by desire (e.g., by Paul “zealous” for the tradition of his ancestors), remains “holy, just, and good” and can be retrieved as Holy Scriptures from this deception “through Jesus Christ” and by “walking according to the Spirit” (7:25; 8:4), so the revealed truth (1:18b, the revealed righteousness of God) that barbarian idolaters had/have received is still communicated to people who have faith/ vision (like Paul and the Romans) through their very idolatry. Therefore Paul truly feels indebted to barbarian idolaters for communicating to him the revelation/truth they have received (1:14), even though they twisted it into idolatry. And so it is for all idolatries: through their faith/vision, believers can see “the truth” as “truth” (whatever it might be) in the deadly parody that idolaters have made out of it, and nevertheless receive this truth from these idolaters and be indebted to them for it (1:14). Because of this, God gave them up (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς) to dishonorable (ἀτιμίας) passions. Their females changed (μετήλλαξαν) natural intercourse (φυσικὴν χρῆσιν) into (εἰς) unnatural (παρὰ φύσιν), and in the same way also (ὁμοίως τε καὶ) the males, abandoning (ἀφέντες) natural (φυσικὴν) intercourse with females, were inflamed with lust (ὄρεξις) for one another. Males committed shamelessness (ἀσχημοσύνην) with males, receiving in themselves the due penalty for their deceit (πλάνης αὐτῶν). (1:26–27)

The descriptions of the consequences of idolatry in 1:22–31 need to be considered together—rather than considering individually each set of verses. Following the above comments on 1:22–25, it would be tempting to deal with 1:26–27 by themselves, as numerous critical studies have done.249 Despite the fact that 1:26–27 is given preeminence (sexual behaviors are at the top of the list, with greater space devoted to them), in a figurative reading it is necessary to consider these verses as part of 1:22– 31 as a whole, so as to be in a position to recognize the patterns—the intratextual figurative relations—that characterize this entire list of punishments for idolatry. A pattern is easily recognizable because of the repetition of “God gave them up” found in 1:24, 1:26, and 1:28. What was noted about 1:24 could be repeated regarding 1:26 and 1:28. In the three cases the phrase about the manifestation of God’s wrath (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς) is identical. This observation opens the way to an intratextual figurative reading. These three presentations of the manifestation of God’s wrath are three interrelated figures which are like each other in that, in each case, the 249

To this literature I contributed a short article, the bibliography of which refers to many (but not all!) publications on these two verses until 2001. Daniel Patte, “Can One Be Critical Without Being Autobiographical? The Case of Romans 1:26-27,” in Autobiographical Biblical Criticism: Academic Border Crossings ? A Hermeneutical Challenge (ed. Ingrid Rosa Kitszberger; Leiden: Deo Publishing, 2002), 34–59).

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phrase “God gave them up” presents a passive manifestation of God’s wrath; God is simply standing aside. But, as can be expected for figures, these three presentations are also unlike each other. The differences among them reside in the reasons given for the manifestations of God’s wrath in 1:22–23, 1:25, and 1:28. For convenience, these three interrelated figures can be designated with three different names (explained below): “idolatry-as-worshiping-images,” “idolatry-as-lie,” “idolatry-as-denying-God.” a. Idolatry-as-worshiping-images Why did “God gave them up in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves” (1:24)? Because they “changed the glory of the immortal God for an imitation, the image of a mortal human being or of birds or of animals or of reptiles” (1:23). In this first case, the idols they sculpted still make clearly recognizable the revelatory manifestations through which “what can be known about God” (in this case, God’s invisible nature, eternal power, and divinity) was revealed to them. Looking at the images and imitations (the idols) that they worshiped, one can readily recognize that they absolutized the creatures (human being, birds, animals, reptiles) through which the truth about God was revealed to them. The worship of these images/idols makes it easy to recognize that idolaters take these creatures—actual divine manifestations—to be complete, absolute manifestations of God that are worthy of worship. Therefore, because it is easy to recognize the truth (the revelation) which has been absolutized, it is easy for those with faith/vision (including Paul) to benefit from this revelation that they did not have (or did not focus upon), and therefore to feel indebted to these idolaters (1:14). b. Idolatry-as-lie Why did “God [give] them up to dishonorable passions” in the second case (1:26a)? Once again, because of their idolatries: they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25b). But this time the idolatry is described in a more abstract way: “They changed the truth about God into a lie (μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει)” (1:25a). The twisting/deformation of the truth is now more radical: “the truth about God” is changed (transformed) “into a lie”; that is, into “a conscious and intentional falsehood” (“the understanding of ψεῦδος from Homer to the Septuagint”; Thayer’s Greek Lexicon). Since a lie presents something which does not exist except in the false claim, this type of idolatry hides the actual divine manifestation (or divine gift) through which “what can be known about God” was revealed to these idolaters. A lie hides what idolaters absolutized—namely, the particular divine manifestations that revealed to them a truth about God. It is therefore more difficult (although still possible) for those with faith/vision (including Paul) to recognize that an idolatry is taking place, to benefit from the revelation that has been absolutized, and therefore to feel indebted to these idolaters (1:14), because the idolaters hides the received revelation behind a lie. Yet Paul emphasizes this is no less an idolatry: “They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25b). They absolutized a partial revelation—a particular divine manifestation. The question is: what did they absolutize? It does not take long to recognize that, as in the preceding case, they absolutized a divine manifestation in a creature—namely a “human being” (1:23). But in this case the

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divine manifestation which, by being absolutized, is “worshiped and served” (1:25b, as a god/idol) is the sexualized human body. Human sexuality and engaging in sexual intercourse are good gifts from God; these are divine gifts that manifest “the truth about God” (ἀλήθεια τοῦ θεοῦ, 1:25a) in the same way that “the things that have been made” were presented as divine manifestations in 1:20. But when these good gifts from God are absolutized by “dishonorable passions” (πάθη ἀτιμίας, 1:26a), they are turned into a lie (ἐν τῷ ψεύδει, 1:25). The idol (the absolutized divine manifestation/gift) is hidden, because the blatant worship of the idol—worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator—is, so to speak, secularized. As earlier (1:21–22), the idolatry is God’s wrathful punishment. But in the present case, this idolatry is covered up: religious acts and/or prayers are replaced by “dishonorable passions” (πάθη ἀτιμίας, 1:26). That is, this idolatry takes the form of “dishonorable passions.” This is a first figurative use of “passions.” In the Greco-Roman world, “passions” (πάθη) are viewed as emotions that befall someone, leading the person to lose selfcontrol and self-mastery. As noted in Chapter 4, in Stowers’s words, “the dominant view in Greco-Roman culture held that desires in themselves were not bad but dangerous, powerful, and prone to act independently of rational control.”250 Like the Greco-Roman view of “passions,” idolatry-as-lie involves a loss of self-control and self-mastery. But unlike the Greco-Roman view, Paul presents “passions” as a divine punishment—as is reinforced by the fact that these passions are characterized as dishonorable (ἀτιμίας). Idolatry-as-lie is further illustrated by figurative descriptions of the “idolaters” as “changing” something into something else (as already in 1:25). This is explicit in 1:26b: “Their females changed (μετήλλαξαν) natural intercourse (φυσικὴν χρῆσιν) into (εἰς) unnatural (παρὰ φύσιν)” (1:26b). When this statement is read by itself, what is changed, φυσικὴν χρῆσιν “natural use,” is ambivalent. But the designation of women by their gender, as “females,” already suggests that what is changed is the “natural” “sexual use” of their bodies—“natural intercourse.” This becomes explicit in 1:27 regarding men, again designated by their gender, as “males.” This later verse opens with the phrase “and in the same way also” (ὁμοίως τε καὶ), which underscores that a similar change is taking place regarding males, although expressed in different words: “The males, abandoning (ἀφέντες) natural intercourse (φυσικὴν χρῆσιν) with females, were inflamed with desire (ὄρεξις) for one another. Males committed shameful (ἀσ χημοσύνην) acts with males, enjoying (experiencing pleasure) in themselves (ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἀπολαμβάνοντες) as a satisfaction (a recompense, ἀντιμισθία) for their deceit (πλάνης)” (1:27).251 Thus it becomes clear that Paul speaks about same-gender sexual 250 251

Stowers , 47. This translation is based upon the reading of this verse by Caragounis on the basis of his analysis of Paul’s Greek as a “living” language (and not as a dead language as became the practice, at least since Erasmus) and therefore taking into account the readings by Chrysostom and other Greek Fathers. See Chrys C. Caragounis, The Development of Greek and the New Testament: Morphology, Syntax, Phonology, and Textual Transmission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), 279–91. From this perspective—against the traditional understanding since Erasmus of τὴν ἀντιμισθίαν ἣν ἔδει τῆς πλάνης αὐτῶν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἀπολαμβάνοντες (1:27c) as “received in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (NRSV)—Caragounis emphasizes: “ἀντιμισθία is here used figuratively of the satisfaction or pleasure derived from performing the acts described . . . neither ἀντιμισθία nor ἀπολαμβάνοντες has any reference to an eventual divine judgment. That thought is not present here” (289–90).

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intercourse in both 1:26 and 1:27. It also appears that both statements are figurative: they express a view (Paul’s view) in terms of another view (the anticipated readers’ view), which is both similar and different. Another way to put it is to say with Keck: [Paul] does not argue that same-gender sex acts are wrong; he assumes they are. Nor does he explain what makes them “unnatural,” because he also assumes his readers will agree that they are. And that suffices for developing the argument; Paul is not writing an essay on sex ethics.252

Paul assumes that his readers in Rome are Greco-Romans—including Jews living in the Greco-Roman culture—and therefore that they have a Greco-Roman view of same-gender sex acts.253 The fact that Paul begins with female-female relations (1:26b) is often viewed as surprising, because such relations are rarely mentioned in Greco-Roman literature. But by broadening the scope of the investigation beyond the philosophers to include Greek erotic spells, astrological texts, medical treatises, artistic representations, and interpretations of dreams, Bernadette Brooten has demonstrated that “love between women” was indeed well known in the Greco-Roman world, and was at times classified as “unnatural love.”254 Similarly Robin Scroggs documented that “unnatural” (παρὰ φύσιν) was “the most common stereotype” used by philosophers (such as Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus) against male-male sex acts viewed as abhorrent because they “violated the natural order of creation.”255 And in early Jewish literature, as documented by Robert Gagnon, male-male sex was unanimously rejected as “contrary to nature” (on the basis of biblical texts—Leviticus, Genesis 19, Sodom—but also due to Greek influence on Hellenistic Jewish literature) and was also rejected for the “excess passion” involved (both Philo and Josephus refer to the Sodomites).256 Therefore, Paul can assume that, for his readers, same-gender sex acts are wrong or even abhorrent and that they are “unnatural.” Paul does not argue this point. As Keck appropriately notes, “He is not trying to dissuade readers from such practices.”257 Rather, Paul uses what he assumes to be the views of his readers about same-gender sexual relations and their

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Keck, 68. Following Keck, I am using the descriptive phrase “same-gender sex acts,” because the modern terms “homosexual” or “homoerotic” acts have very different (modern!) connotations. For instance, as Robin Scroggs has documented in The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Contemporary Debate (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 29–43, that male same-gender sex acts would commonly be in the Greco-Roman world “pederasty” between an older male and a (pre-pubescent) boy. He concludes his survey by noting that “most forms of pederasty had at least the potential to create concrete relations that would be destructive and dehumanizing to the participants, particularly the youths” (43). Yet, Paul’s description of the males as “inflamed with lust for one another” does not fit the imbalanced relations involved in pederasty, since in the GrecoRoman descriptions of pederasty, sexual gratification is exclusively for the older male. 254 Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 29–186; 175–86. 255 Scroggs, New Testament and Homosexuality, 60 (see 59–62). 256 See Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 159–83. See also William Schoedel, “Same-Sex Eros: Paul and the Greco-Roman Tradition,” in Homosexuality, Science and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture (ed. David Balch; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdsmans, 2000), 43–72. 257 Keck, 69. 253

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unnatural character as figurative evidence of the characteristics of idolatry. First, both idolatry and same-gender sex relations involve changing something into something else: this is on this basis that they are like each other. Same-gender sex relations can therefore be a metaphoric representation of idolatry. But of course, they are unlike each other. Idolatry involves “changing the truth about God into a lie” (1:25). Same-gender sex relations involve “changing natural relations into unnatural relations.” At the outset, same-gender sex relations seem to have nothing to do with idolatry. They seem to be only about sexual behaviors. Yet such same-gender sex relations are idolatrous, even though they hide the idolatry. Second, both idolatry and same-gender sex relations involve pleasure and satisfaction. In the same way that idolaters feel satisfaction when they “hold fast to the truth” (1:18)—it is satisfying to have the truth—so idolaters who engage in same-gender sex relations experience pleasure, satisfaction. Paul does not deny it. For people with faith/vision such relations illustrate the fact that in many cases idolatry is hidden, because idolaters “change the truth about God into a lie”—the “lie” being a satisfying behavior which hides (behind this feeling of satisfaction) that one has changed the truth about God. This is shown by the fact that Paul is not interested in describing problematic sexual behaviors in details. He generalizes: “Males committed shamelessness (ἀσχημοσύνην) with males” (1:27b). But what he wants to make clear is that this is a behavior which is visibly shameless (the worst qualification in an honor/ shame culture) and as such a manifestation of God’s wrath against turning the truth about God into a lie. “Shamelessness” ostracizes in society those associated with it. Paul is content to affirm that they are shamed. This is enough of a manifestation of God’s wrath for their idolatry that Paul designates it by saying “for their deceit (πλάνης).” By this word he clarifies the reason for their punishment/shaming: it is “deceit” an equivalent to “lie.”258 Assuming and therefore affirming the doubtful cultural and religious views of his readers—in this case about same-gender sexual relations and their unnatural character as figurative evidence of the characteristics of idolatry—might seem to be an inappropriate practice. Is this not contributing to the propagation of these doubtful cultural and religious views? But as Käsemann underscores: “In good apocalyptic fashion, however, the individual is for him [Paul] inseparable from his[/her] world.” Or as Paul puts it in 12:2, “Do 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 cultural and religious views found in the world of Paul’s readers are and remain doubtful. And thus Christ-followers are called to recognize with their realized-apocalyptic faith/vision that there are many things in these cultural and religious views to which they should “not be conformed.” But it remains that with their realized-apocalyptic faith/vision Christ-followers should also discern in these doubtful cultural and religious views “what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Whenever a truth is changed into a lie, into an idol, this truth remains a “good, acceptable and perfect” truth that believers should discern. Thus, in other cultural settings—such as present-day Western cultures where what is “natural”

258

Πλάνη, “going astray,” is best understood as a straying from the truth, and thus as “deceit,” in view of the reference to “changing the truth about God into a lie” in the preceding words.

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and “unnatural” in sexual relations is perceived in totally different ways—figurative evidence of idolatry would need to be very different. We would need to ask: what are instances of truth being changed into a lie, in our cultures? The clearest examples might be found in the socioeconomic and political realms that are often and unfortunately characterized by manipulations of the truth to the extent that it is changed into lies. Even though such social economic and political practices do not seem to have anything to do with religious practices—as is the case with same-gender sex acts—they would be good examples of idolatrous practices that change the truth, including hidden truth about God, into a lie. And since they did not think God worthwhile (οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαντὸν θεὸν) to be acknowledged (ἔχειν ἐν ἐπιγνώσει), God gave them up (παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς) to a worthless (ἀδόκιμον) mind to do what ought not to be done (τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα). They were filled with every kind of unrighteousness (πάσῃ ἀδικίᾳ), evil, covetousness, malice πονηρίᾳ πλεονεξίᾳ κακία); full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless (ἀσυνέτους ἀσυνθέτους ἀστόργους ἀνελεήμονας). (1:28–31)

(c) Idolatry-as-denying-God. Why did “God gave them up to a worthless (ἀδόκιμον) mind and to do what ought not to be done (τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα)” (1:28b)? This time it is because “they did not find God worthwhile (οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν) to be acknowledged (ἔχειν ἐν ἐπιγνώσει)” (1:28a). This translation attempts to render the play on words which contrasts “not finding God worthy” (οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν τὸν θεὸν; using the verb δοκιμάζω, proving worthy by testing) and the idolaters’ “worthless mind” (ἀδόκιμον νοῦν, a mind that did not pass the test of worthiness). As a rendering for this play on words, Byrne proposes “they tried/tested God out, and finding the experience unsatisfactory, decided to break off relations.”259 In short, these idolaters deny God, and in return (God’s wrath) God deny them. The threefold figurative pattern demands that we recognize this denial of God as another form of idolatry. Beyond the plain idolatry (idolatry-as-worshiping-images) and beyond idolatry hidden in lies (idolatry-as-lie), here idolatry is even more hidden, because God is denied any worth. This is idolatry-as-denying-God. Atheism camouflages idolatry and as such is the ultimate form of idolatry; it declares the absence of God and therefore that there is no God worthy of glorification and thanksgiving (1:21).260 Therefore in this case there is no betrayal of God by worshiping images and/ or by absolutizing a partial revelation of God! Idolatry is camouflaged by erasing God. “They did not think God worthwhile to be acknowledged” (1:28). But how do humans do that? By having the gall to institute ourselves as judge and jury in a position to test

259 260

Byrne, 71. “Atheism surfaces as soon as the devil asks (see Matt 4:1–11), Will God really be there when you need him? . . . Atheism plays the experience of God’s absence against that of God’s presence, driving a wedge between them.” Gabriel Vahanian, “Atheism,” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. For further insights on idolatry-as-denying-God see Vahanian, Wait without Idols (New York: G. Braziller, 1964) and No Other God (New York: G. Braziller, 1966).

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God so as to establish whether God is worthy or not, and then declaring that God is not worthy! We position ourselves above God. Through an ultimate practice of idolatry, we absolutize ourselves. What are we absolutizing? Once again, of course, a revelation and gift from God—ourselves as a gift from God. We are holding fast to ourselves, as God’s creature, indeed as God’s special creature in the image of God. And each case we are holding fast to special gifts that each of us has received—and now absolutizing these gifts. The following verses point out that we wield these gifts as a weapon to oppress others in various ways. The punishment (expression of God’s wrath) for their idolatry-as-denying-God is to be given up to doing what ought not to be done (τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα). And the things that ought not to be done include first of all to be “filled with every kind of unrighteousness (πάσῃ ἀδικίᾳ)” (1:29). We are back to 1:18b about “humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness.” The declaration in 1:29 shows that, while God’s wrath is revealed “against all impiety and unrighteousness” (1:18a), “unrighteousness” is also a part of the punishment brought about by God’s wrath. Because they are unrighteous, God’s wrath gave them up to their unrighteousness. Rom 1:29 confirms our earlier observations that in Paul’s figurative world idolaters—“humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness”—are idolaters as a consequence of the punishment brought about by God’s wrath. Then Paul continues with a list of twenty-three vices which is not unlike such lists in the Greco-Roman world—not organized by topics but by assonances, as was common for rhetorical effect and for mnemotechnic reasons (important in an oral/aural culture). Of course, these assonances disappear in translation—though in 1:31 the translation “senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless” creates some of these assonances.261 As long as we keep in mind the figure character of this list, produced by its oral character evoking other oral discourses of the time, there is no need to go in the details of this list. It is enough to observe that such behaviors are very destructive and oppressive, making a harmonious life in society impossible. This is a display of the idolatrous destructive powers characteristic of the world in this apocalyptic/messianic age from which people and the world are and will be freed by manifestation of God’s righteousness—as we exemplified in a preliminary discussion of 8:31–39. Thus, 1:28–31, the presentation of “idolatry-as-denying-God,” is indeed an appropriate presentation of the ultimate idolatry and its apocalyptic/messianic destructive power as manifestation of God’s wrath. This section is then a powerful conclusion to the presentation of God’s wrath which is revealed through the gospel to believers—to those with faith/vision. In all these unfortunate and destructive features of life in society (as well as in the expressions of idolatry-as-worshiping-images and of idolatry-as-lie), believers can now recognize on the one hand that something good—a true revelation, a true gift from God—has been absolutized and therefore transformed into a destructive power. But oddly enough, for those with faith/vision the true revelation, the true gift from God, is still also revealed and accessible in these destructive manifestations of idolatry. And thus, believers should feel indebted 261

As Caragounis (The Development of Greek and the New Testament, 461) pointed out, there are several examples of parechesis (assonances) in 1:19–31, including φθόνου φόνου (1:29; envy and murder) and ἀσυνέτους ἀσυνθέτους (1:31; foolish and faithless). These groupings do not make ethical points by associating behaviors, but form oral/aural figurative points expressed in a “living” language.

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(1:14) to those who wield these destructive powers for the gifts of God that in totally unexpected ways they bring with them. The concluding verse, 1:32, was discussed earlier in the thematic analysis. As noted it makes clear that the impious and unrighteous simply do not act according to God’s decree (τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ θεοῦ) which stipulates that they should not practice certain things. The reference can be to the various idolatrous practices listed in the preceding verses (including 1:29–31). But this phrase can also be heard as alluding to the Law— which becomes a topic of the next chapter. For a summary of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes discussed above—Sin (1:18-32); Natural Revelation = Natural Theology (1:19-20); Glorifying/Honoring God as God (1:21); Idolatry (1:19-25); Homosexuality (1:26-27); Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:28-32)—see these terms (organized alphabetically) in the third column of the “Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices for Thirty-One Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1-32,” in which their realized-apocalyptic/messianic can be compared/contrasted with their interpretations in the forensic theological and inclusive covenantal community interpretations readings.

Part Three

Critical Exegeses and Receptions of Rom 1:1-32

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The Contextual Character of the Three Legitimate and Plausible Exegetical Interpretations of Rom 1:1–32

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have presented three explicit interpretive choices that critical exegetes have self-consciously made when reading Rom 1:1–32 and when striving to demonstrate the legitimacy and plausibility of their own exegetical interpretations. They have shown that exegetes justify the legitimacy of their respective interpretations by purposefully choosing particular critical methods rather than others—even as they integrate the results of other methods in hybrid studies as demanded by the commentary literary genre. Similarly, they resolutely argued for the plausibility of their particular interpretations in a coherent Pauline theology. Even though, each time, exegetes might want to deny that they had any interpretive choice—by claiming that they present the only truly legitimate and plausible interpretation—the very fact that they had to argue so resolutely for their particular interpretation demonstrates that they had such choices and that they made them very purposefully.1 The surprise was not that exegetes made interpretive choices, but that these (exegetical/analytical and hermeneutical) choices were so very different from each other, even as they remained quite explicit by being vigorously argued. But beyond these explicit and self-conscious choices, implicitly and often subconsciously these exegetes’ interpretations were simultaneously driven and framed by another kind of interpretive choices. This became clear through our discussions with theologians, church historians, and exegetes in the SBL “Romans Through History and Cultures” seminar (1998–2010). In addition to the previously mentioned interpretive choices, any given interpretation—any exegesis as well as any reception—of Romans is necessarily framed by a third kind of interpretive choices: contextual interpretive choices. Even though they remain mostly hidden in critical exegeses, such contextual choices frame any interpretation of Romans. Each time, the interpreters chose a particular interpretation, because they felt that it has the greatest value for a particular context. Such ethical contextual choices are ignored in critical exegeses, where they are buried under the urgent concerns for legitimacy and plausibility. But they took place

1

The only alternative, as we repeatedly noted, amounts to say that all other exegetes—including very knowledgeable scholars—are theologically aberrant ignoramuses.

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and played a central role in framing these critical exegeses. Recovering them is a matter of learning to recognize the traces—the tracks, the fossilized remains—they left in the exegeses. For this we need to proceed to an archaeological dig in these interpretations.2 Of course, it is not a matter of reconstructing the particular contexts in which each exegesis has been developed—exegetes hid these—but of uncovering the fossilized remains of the essential role that contextual interpretive choices played for each kind of critical exegesis. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have shown that, through the explicit and self-conscious use of corresponding critical exegetical methods, biblical scholars have established the legitimacy of each of three very different interpretations—each with legitimate variants reflecting different emphases. The differences among these three kinds of critical interpretations are due to the fact that each of them has chosen to view certain textual features as most significant, while viewing other textual features as less significant. Each of these critical interpretations is framed by a legitimate interpretive choice. First, these different textual features do exist. Second, when reading Romans one cannot but be selective: one must privilege one kind of textual features or another, and therefore must treat other features as less significant (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). Thus, despite their differences, these three different kinds of critical exegesis are legitimate. This legitimacy is unduly contested by claims that a given interpretation failed to take sufficiently into account the other two kinds of textual dimensions—a contestation each time aimed at reinforcing the view that one kind of critical exegesis, and only one kind, is legitimate: one’s own. Another goal of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 was to show how, while using one or another of these critical methodologies, exegetes explicitly formulated consistent and thus plausible interpretations of Paul’s teaching about key theological and ethical themes by choosing to follow one or another of the three hermeneutical interpretive lines of reasoning. They read Romans as offering (1) either a forensic theological, (2) or an inclusive covenantal community, (3) or a realized-apocalyptic/messianic teaching. Once again, when reading Romans, it is impossible to follow at once these three interpretive lines of reasoning. They are so different (and at times contradictory) that one cannot but make a choice. This is true even if one appropriates aspects of the other interpretations—a common occurrence, especially in the critical commentaries. But doing so transforms one’s interpretation into a hybrid, even though it cannot but remain framed by a particular interpretive line of reasoning in order to be plausible (see Chapter 2). Interpreting/reading always involves hermeneutical theological choices (as discussed in Chapter 1). As a result, each of the key theological and ethical themes of 1:1–32 has been understood in three different yet plausible ways—each with plausible variants reflecting different emphases.

2

In a way similar to what Michel Foucault did by proceeding to an “archaeology of knowledge” so as to investigate how the histories of madness, of the human sciences, of the prison system, of medicine and the clinic were constructed. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1965); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Pantheon, 1973); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977).

The Contextual Character of the Three Legitimate

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In sum, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 endeavored to establish as clearly as possible both (a) the legitimacy of these three kinds of interpretations, by showing that each followed a particular set of critical exegetical methods as it read Paul’s text verse by verse, and (b) the plausibility of these interpretations, by showing that each followed a particular consistent interpretive line of reasoning. In large part, this was a matter of identifying interpretive choices that exegetes made explicit through their selections of critical methods and their formulations of theological/hermeneutical conclusions. But the cross-disciplinary “Romans Through History and Culture” seminar revealed to us that investigating the roles of exegetical/analytical and hermeneutical choices in exegetical studies of Romans was not enough. As we were doing for receptions, regarding exegeses we also needed to elucidate the roles that contextual ethical interpretive choices played in each kind of critical interpretation, even if such contextual ethical interpretive choices were not explicit in exegeses, as they usually are in receptions. Our collective study of receptions of Romans taught us three lessons that deserve emphasis here. First, the many and diverging receptions of Romans show that, far from being a postmodern invention, the acknowledgment that a diversity of interpretations of Paul’s theological and ethical teaching in Romans are legitimate and plausible—even though they stand, at times, in contradiction with each other—is also a characteristic of the receptions of Romans through the centuries. Therefore, the accusation (by my students!) that, by emphasizing a plurality of interpretations, I succumbed to the “madness of postmodern criticisms where everything goes” is stamped down by a study of the history of receptions (Wirkungsgeschichte) of Scripture in general, and more narrowly of Romans.3 Actually, it is by encountering the broad diversity of receptions of Romans through the centuries and cultures in the SBL seminar that I, personally, was progressively led to reexamine the significance of the diversity of critical exegeses of Romans. The second lesson from our studies of the receptions of Romans is that any interpretation is contextual.4 For many critical biblical scholars, this statement simply confirms what they have already argued or at least acknowledged for a long time. I allude to the many critical exegetes—prompted especially by feminist, African American, liberation, and postcolonial scholars, and by Global Bible interpreters— who not only affirm the plurality of legitimate and plausible interpretations but also underscore the contextual character of all interpretations. As feminist exegetes have long demonstrated, interpretations that pretend to be free of contextual influence are those that are the most androcentric (and most often patriarchal as well); they are a reflection of the male-centered context in which they were developed—a context that excluded/excludes any female perspective.5 Similarly, African American exegetes 3

4

5

See Robert Grant, with David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). This crucial point was suggested to me by Barry Crawford (Washburn University), who in this way clarified for me the needed focus for this chapter. The bibliography could be very long following Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983). On Romans, see Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte, eds., Gender, Tradition, and Romans. Shared Ground, Uncertain Borders (RTHC, 2005), and its bibliography in endnotes.

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have long pointed out the Eurocentric character of critical biblical studies that pretend not to be contextual, while being framed by their European (or European American) cultural context that excludes as void any cultural contexts that are different, especially the African (and thus the African American) context.6 The third lesson from our studies of receptions of Romans is that all receptions and all critical exegeses of Paul’s letter are framed in the same threefold way. As suggested in Chapter 1, all such interpretations of a scriptural text, despite having very different styles, are concurrently framed by an analytical frame, an interpretive line of reasoning (or hermeneutical frame), and a contextual frame.7 Receptions showed us why critical exegeses are themselves contextual, even if in a cryptic way. All interpretations of Romans (receptions as well as critical exegeses) are necessarily contextual, because this text—Paul’s letter to the Romans—is held by Christian believers to be Scripture. For better or for worse, Christians read Romans as Scripture in their quest for a Word-to-live-by in the concreteness of their life-contexts. Therefore, their receptions of Romans are necessarily contextual. In brief, receptions are framed by the interpreters’ need to have a scriptural teaching (a Word-to-live-by), most frequently in order to address issues, concerns, and problems that they feel must be addressed in their particular contextual situation—or more specifically in a given sector of this contextual situation—as well as a teaching that they need in order to respond in an appropriate way to euphoric, happy contextual situations. But what is true for receptions is also true for exegeses, even when exegetes strive to produce detached, objective, scientific interpretations. Exegetes cannot—and do not—ignore that the text under study, Romans, is Scripture for believers. Actually, most exegetes make explicit that they seek to correct what they consider to be misinterpretations found in believers’ simplistic religious readings. But note: in doing so, such critical exegetes seek to provide believers with a proper (historical, rhetorical, literary) understanding of the text, which presumably would allow believers to draw from the text a better Word-to-live-by! In so doing, exegetes actually and self-consciously contribute to the development of a contextual Word-to-live-by. Supposedly, neutral critical exegetes have themselves proposed interpretations that would be in their own judgment better scriptural readings for believers—better Words-to-live-by for them in their particular life-context. Even the most secular (and even atheist) exegetes are fully aware that the text they are studying functions as Scripture for believers. And they zealously study such texts (devoting their entire lives to this project), because 6

7

The bibliography could also be very long here. The state of the research is well represented by Arthur Francis Carter Jr. Diaspora Poetics & (re)Constructions of Differentness: Conceiving Acts 6.1—8.40 as Diaspora (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, 2016). See especially Carter’s analysis of Hegel’s theory of history (that he labels “Hegelian Colour-Blindness,” according to which there is no history in Africa, because of a lack of culture on this continent) and its devastating impact on critical biblical study— that it made totally Eurocentric and Colour-Blind—in the sections, “Bounded by Intellect: It’s So Dark Outside (of history)” (in the Introduction) and “Scholarly Readings of Acts with Hegelian Eyes” (in Chapter 1). What is so devastating is to recognize, following Carter’s analysis, that all of historical critical study of the Bible is totally framed by Hegel’s Colour-Blind view of history, a Eurocentric perspective. This point only applies to interpretations of Scripture. This is following the steps of the phenomenological study by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in What Is Scripture?

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they are so vehemently concerned by the problematic contextual effects that the wrong interpretations by believers have. Thus, even though they do not themselves believe that such texts are Scriptures, they devote their entire lives to correcting these wrong interpretations. It follows that, despite the exegetes’ claims to the contrary, all critical exegeses are contextually framed, even if this contextualization is hidden, buried under a multitude of technical words. Yet an archaeological dig can show the fossilized remains of the contextual moves that frame each kind of critical exegesis, even if this dig cannot be expected to reveal the concrete contextual situations that shaped particular exegetical interpretations. Consequently, as discussed in Chapter 1, the members of our SBL seminar— theologians, church historians, and exegetes—drew a first general conclusion: one cannot make a radical distinction between interpretations by critical exegetes and receptions by believers. Rather than conceiving of good critical exegesis as detached, scientific research by historians, as scientists, we recognized that we needed to envision good critical exegesis as sound homiletics. Note how responsible preachers proceed: (a) they closely read the text (in Greek if possible) while consulting a plurality of critical commentaries—of course, with the expectation that these commentaries are different from one another; (b) in the process, they discern potential theological and/or ethical teachings of the text; and (c) then on this basis, they proceed to formulate a Wordto-live-by (a sermon, a reception) for believers (their congregations) in a particular life-context. Such a “responsible preaching is the model for responsible scholarship and not its stepchild” (as Daniel Boyarin summarized).8 Thus, and most importantly, we learned from our studies of receptions of Romans that we had to conceive of each critical exegesis as a particular kind of reception. Furthermore, we were led to conclude (on the basis of our analyses of many critical exegeses—a.k.a. “modern readings of Romans”—alongside many receptions) that any interpretation of a scriptural text is necessarily framed in these three different ways, as repeatedly emphasized above regarding critical interpretations.9 In sum, any interpretation—including receptions by believers and preachers—is framed by the following: ●

An Analytical frame, resulting from choosing certain textual features as particularly significant; this frame establishes for readers the legitimacy of their interpretation. Exegetes make this analytical frame explicit in their critical methods. Believers and preachers, even when they end up with interpretations that are most unexpected (according to exegetes), have their own analytical frames. As they formulate a reception, they put their life on the line (they read for a Word-tolive-by) and therefore make sure their interpretation is grounded in the scriptural text, even if this is with rudimental analytical tools focused on unexpected textual features, such as those reflecting the “orality/aurality” of Romans (after all,

8

Daniel Boyarin, “Epilogue: Israel Reading in ‘Reading Israel,’” Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC, 2000), 246–50. The detailed argument presenting this point is in Grenholm and Patte, “Overture: Receptions, Critical Interpretations, and Scriptural Criticism,” 1–54 (especially 34–43). Most explicitly in Patte and Grenholm, eds., Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013).

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Romans was written in order to be in read aloud [orality] and heard [aurality]), a fact often ignored by critical exegetes.10 An Interpretive Line of Reasoning—or Theological Hermeneutical frame—resulting from choosing to give preeminence to certain theological and/or ideological and ethical categories. Each particular interpretive line of reasoning establishes the plausibility of certain critical exegetical interpretations of the key theological and ethical themes of Romans. Believers and preachers, of course, make sure that their interpretations of Romans in their receptions “make sense.” Thus, as they formulate a particular “teaching-for-believers” on the basis of Romans, they strive to make sure that this theological or ethical teaching is presented as a plausible teaching. A contextual frame, arising from particular contextual issues and needs in the interpreter’s contexts. These contexts call for an appropriate teaching from the scriptural text—a Word-to-live-by—aimed at addressing the contextual problems identified in these contexts. The contextual frame sets bridge categories that induce the choice of a particular interpretive line of reasoning, and thereby of a particular “teaching-for-believers,” and consequently induce the choice of a particular analytical frame. For preachers and believers, the choice of this contextual frame in their interpretations is a primary concern. But as suggested, this choice of a contextual frame also plays an essential role in the critical exegetes’ formulation of their interpretations—even if it is in the form of fossilized remains.

The fact that all interpretations—both receptions and critical exegeses—necessarily involve these three frames requires from us to acknowledge that the forensic theological, inclusive covenantal community, and realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of Romans are not merely framed by interpretive lines of reasoning (or theological hermeneutical frames), but also by contextual frames. But critical exegetical interpretations most commonly hide their contextual character. Now it is time to expose it.

I Fossilized remains of three contextual perspectives in critical exegeses of Romans At first, it may seem difficult to identify the contextual characteristics that frame critical exegeses. Exegetes are notorious for hiding the contextual character—the interested character—of their critical interpretations. Indeed, they hide it from themselves! After all—so they commonly claim—an interested interpretation (seeking to address concerns related to the interpreters’ context) is biased, and therefore illegitimate and implausible; isn’t it the case? But digging out remains of the contextual frames of the 10

See Werner H. Kelber, W. The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress. 1983; reprint with a new introduction by the author: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

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three kinds of critical interpretations of Rom 1:1–32 presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 is not a matter of trying to guess what specific life-contexts were presupposed by these interpretations. Rather, as we proceed to an archaeological dig we need to learn how to dust off exegetical interpretations so as to recognize the fossilized remains of the contextual features that frame these interpretations. Actually, earlier in this volume, we have begun acknowledging the role of contextual categories in critical interpretations of Romans. Of course, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were primarily focused on exegetical methods (analytical frames) and interpretive lines of reasoning (theological hermeneutical frames). Yet they also mentioned in passing some broad contextual features that are dusty remains of the contextual interpretive choices that contributed to frame each kind of interpretation. Thus when Moo (43, passim) and other forensic theological interpreters underscore that their interpretations are individual-centered, one can readily recognize that they affirm that their interpretations are framed by a broad contextual perspective, which they contrast with community-centered interpretations—that is, inclusive covenantal community interpretations (a.k.a. “New Perspective and Beyond” interpretations). Of course, the distinction between individual-centered and community-centered interpretations is explicitly contextual. These two types of interpretations are driven by concerns to address problems, issues, and needs in two distinct contextual domains of the interpreters’ lives: they are concerned either by problems related to individual mode of existence, or by problems related to community mode of existence. Focusing on one or the other of these contextual concerns leads to choosing one or another kind of critical methodologies and one or another kind of interpretive lines of reasoning. It follows that such broad contextual interpretive choices have framed their critical interpretations. Of course, in most instances, critical exegetes deny that such contextual interpretive choices truly exist. They do so by denying the legitimacy and plausibility of either the individual-centered or the community-centered interpretation.11 What about the third kind of interpretations—realized-apocalyptic/messianic? Is it also contextually marked? Chapter 5 mentioned that in this case, Romans is read as a religious discourse. As such they could be called religious-centered. Although this might be unexpected, religious-centered actually is the designation of another mode of human existence (by contrast with individual-centered and community-centered modes of human existence)—even though this phrase will need to be broadened into religious/heteronomy-centered, in order to make sure that this designation encompasses the full range of this contextual mode of human existence. Obviously, this point requires clarification. People in any culture readily conceive of human experience as interrelating three modes of human existence, that is, three broad life-contexts: (a) individual life, (b) 11

This is also what exegetes explicitly do when they attempt to reconcile “individual-centered” and “community-centered” perspectives, as Ben Dunson does in Individual and Community in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 179. He necessarily ends up privileging one (insisting that community-centered interpretations are “flawed perspective on the Apostle’s thought”) to preserve the centrality of “individual-centered” interpretations—denying in this way the presence and role of contextual interpretive choices. For the diversity of community-centered interpretations, see Ehrensperger, “The New Perspective and Beyond,” 191–219 in Modern Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013).

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community life, and (c) religious life—although secular cultures disparage this latter life-context. Each of these life-contexts is characterized by one of the three contextual modes of human existence, technically designated as: (a) autonomy, (b) relationality, and (c) heteronomy. Although these technical distinctions require explanations, once understood they are very helpful for our archaeological dig. Any human life necessarily involves these three contextual modes of existence, although in each case, one of them is dominant. Since the concept “individual” overlaps so much with “autonomy,” and the concept “community” with “relationality,” there is no need to complicate the designations of these broad life-contexts; individual-centered and community-centered interpretations are sufficient to label the contextual characters of the first two kinds of interpretations. But, because of their ambivalence, the terms “religious” and “heteronomous” need to be used together so as to complement each other; so “religious/heteronomy-centered” is needed as a designation of the contextual character of the third kind of interpretations. “Heteronomy,” but also “autonomy” and “relationality,” need to be explained. Cristina Grenholm does it for us.12 Heteronomy (Gk. hetero, “another”; nomos, “law”) literally refers to ethical norms and values that are externally imposed on the subject. As a contextual mode of existence, heteronomy implies a lack of control by the individual and also, eventually, by entire communities. Therefore heteronomy has negative connotations from an individualcentered perspective, and also from a community-centered perspective. As any of the contextual modes of existence, heteronomy is ambivalent: being under the control of and submitting to another can refer to situations of abuse, exposure, oppression (and even tyranny); but it can also refer to situations of empowerment and love (being in love is a heteronomous experience). Most significantly, heteronomy can also be seen as a fundamental dimension of Christian religious experience—for example, submitting to divine revelation and also kenosis, exemplified by the empowering experience of contemplative prayer (Coakley).13 Following other feminist theologians, Grenholm carefully analyzes both the assets and the downsides of each of the three modes of existence—autonomy, relationality, and heteronomy—for women in their life-contexts, and particularly in the context of motherhood that provides an excellent instance of heteronomy-centered life. In doing so, Grenholm observes and argues (a) 12

13

See Cristina Grenholm, Motherhood and Love: Beyond the Gendered Stereotypes of Theology (trans. Marie Tåqvist; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011), 185; as well as 163–65 on “Autonomy”; 185–87 on “Relationality”; and 164–81 and 187–88 on “Heteronomy.” See also Grenholm’s articles “Autonomy,” “Heteronomy,” and “Relationality,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. In what follows I paraphrase her. See Grenholm, Motherhood and Love, 186. She refers to Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of Vulnerability in Christian Feminist Writing,” in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (ed. Daphne Hampson; London: SPCK, 1996), 82–111. This article is a remarkably insightful analysis of contemplative prayer—the kind of prayer Paul uses in 1:8–12 according to the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation. Coakley shows that contemplative prayer is an heteronomy-centered prayer, which characterizes mystical experience as well as apophaticism (apophatic experiences that are beyond what one can formulate in words, and are thus unsayable, the center of “negative theology”—strongly emphasized in Greek Orthodox theologies and interpretations of Romans). See the articles on Contemplative Prayer, Mysticism, Apophaticism, and Orthodox Churches and their theologies in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.

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that heteronomy is characteristic of motherhood and (b) that in all relationships we alternate between autonomy, relationality, and heteronomy. In other words, at one time or another, one of these contextual modes of existence is dominant, for each of us human beings. Our life is either autonomy-centered, or relationality-centered, or heteronomy-centered. Yet when one of the modes of existence is privileged, the two others remain operative. Thus, as Grenholm points out, a mother (being pregnant, giving birth, and taking care of a child) is heteronomy-centered: her life is controlled by her child’s demands—her child would not survive without her. Of course, the mother remains autonomous, although her autonomy is now qualified: we could say it is a “heteronomous autonomy”—her autonomy is limited by the commanding needs of the child who frames her life as a mother. And her relationality (her interactions with other people) is similarly a “heteronomous relationality”—her interactions with other people are limited by the commanding needs of the child who frames her life as a mother. Similarly, “autonomy-centered” or “relationality-centered” persons have the other modes of existence, including the heteronomy-centered mode, even though these are not dominant.14 Obviously, these contextual categories are very broad; entire cultures can be characterized as privileging one or another of these modes of existence. Let us be a little more specific and emphasize the differences among the three life-contexts: ●

●

14

Individual life-context is often privileged in Western cultures (and thus in the English language), so much so that in the West it is self-evident that individual life (including autonomy and private life in all of its forms) should be viewed as the center of human existence. For better or for worse, an individual-centered life (autonomy-centered life) involves viewing all of human life—and thus private/ autonomous life, as well as community/relational life and religious/heteronomous life—from the perspective of the place, role, and responsibility of individuals in one’s life-context. Community life-context has a much broader scope. It potentially includes relational life in a family (a small community unit), in a religious community, but also life in a society (including its economics, politics, and other social components), in a culture (including its vision of life, its values, its ideology), in the world (including the interrelations among several communities, societies, and cultures, ultimately global in scope). For better or for worse, a communitycentered life (relationality-centered life) usually privileges one or another dimension of community life-context, and then views from this perspective all the other dimensions of community/relational life-context, as well as individual/ autonomous life and religious/heteronomous life-context.

For instance, as Grenholm notes (in her article “Relationality” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity), Elizabeth Johnson speaks of “autonomy” as “relational autonomy,” expressing that autonomy as a mode of existence is not (and should not be) excluded even if relationality is privileged (as Johnson does in her feminist theology). See Elizabeth A. Johnson, Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 1998) and She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992).

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Religious/heteronomous life-context is another broad realm of human lifecontext; it is the heteronomous aspect of human experience where one feels that one is under the power and control of someone else, or of some entity, or (in religious experiences) under the power of God, the divine, the Other. Therefore, vulnerability is a characteristic of a religious/heteronomous lifecontext. Perceiving vulnerability is sometimes at the origin of heteronomy: when one recognizes that someone else (the baby) is vulnerable, one feels under obligation to protect the vulnerable (the mother submits to the demands of the baby). And acknowledging one’s vulnerability is at the heart of any heteronomous relationship: acknowledging vulnerability as a threat, when this relationship is destructive; or on the contrary acknowledging vulnerability when one surrenders oneself to the other (or Other).15 One cannot reject the reality of heteronomous situations, and therefore of the “religious” in this broader sense, as a particular context of human experience, even if one is secular-minded and rejects any notion of a religious-centered life.16 And since the religious/heteronomous life-context includes (individually or communally) felt religious experiences in which some kind of heteronomous force is perceived (e.g., in mystical experiences, experiences of the numinous, but also in the experience of being in love and other such experiences),17 such religious/heteronomous experiences are, for better or for worse, always transformative in some ways, be it in private or communal settings. Consequently, one of the options for human beings is to have a religious-centered life, based upon one or another kind of religious experience as a perspective from which they view all aspects of their individual/private and community life.

In sum, while nobody can deny that human experience includes these three broad life-contexts (and/or three modes of human experience), our perspective as human beings is always and necessarily centered upon one of them. Thus, we might envision the human life-context from (1) an individual-centered perspective (envisioning community and religious/heteronomous life-contexts as instances of individual 15

16

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Grenholm, “Heteronomy,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (2010). Heteronomy and vulnerability involve “surrendering every claim to autonomy . . . [But] my space is not threatened, even though I choose not to mark it”—as is the case of contemplative prayer (and unlike the situation when one is silenced and overpowered). Thus, one should not be surprised by the fact that an atheist philosopher, Badiou, emphasizes that Paul’s own religious experience—his encounter with the resurrected Christ—is at the very center of Paul’s letter to the Romans, undergirding all of his statements—something missed by many Christian interpreters. See again Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, especially 36–37. On the ambivalence of “religious experience” see the key articles on “Experience,” “Religious Experience,” and “Religion,” in The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (eds. Jonathan Z. Smith, and William Scott Green; San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995), especially 891–923. It remains that this entire Dictionary presents scholarly views of different aspects of “religious experiences” as an essential “context” of human life. In semiotic terminology, the experience of “being in love” is designated as a thymic* and proprioceptive* experience. For Greimas, such experiences are based upon perceptions of reality through one’s entire body (rather than one’s mind)—as lovers do. More generally, they are gut feelings that generate convictions (i.e., self-evident truths) and eventually a semantic* universe that can only be expressed in a figurative* way. See the articles on the words followed by * in Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (trans. Larry Crist, Daniel Patte, et al; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

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life, privileging autonomy), (2) a community-centered perspective (envisioning individual and religious/heteronomous life-contexts as instances of community life, privileging relationality), or (3) a religious/ heteronomy-centered perspective (envisioning individual and community life-contexts as instances of religious life, privileging heteronomy). Following critical scholars, the previous three chapters have already begun to make contextual distinctions among individual-centered, community-centered, and religious/heteronomy-centered interpretations. In the process, we have begun our archaeological dig. It is as if, after removing debris of all kinds, we identified individual housings (in which we can hope to discover many artifacts used by individuals), public spaces and buildings (in which we can hope to discover many characteristics of community life), and religious spaces and places of worship (in which we can hope to get a sense of the religious life and practices as well as what the inhabitants viewed as primary religious experiences). Now it is a matter of dusting off the different understandings of key theological and ethical themes offered by the individualcentered forensic theological interpretations, by the community-centered inclusive covenantal community interpretations, and by the religious/heteronomy-centered interpretations—summarized in three columns in the Appendix. These different understandings are fossilized remains of interpretations framed by contextual concerns. Our task in this chapter is to elucidate the broad characteristics of the contextual motivations that in each case led to the choice of one or another interpretation. For this purpose, regarding each of the three kinds of interpretations (presented in succession), I first clarify the contextual character of their respective views of the human predicament—that is, what is viewed as the major contextual problem. Then on this basis, in each case I review the understandings of the themes that express how the human predicament is addressed; although fossilized, the understandings of these themes can be brushed to remove at least in part the dust that covers them so as to reveal how they are contextually framed. Beyond the analysis of the conceptualizations of the human predicament, the task becomes more difficult, since the other theological and ethical themes do not display clear contextual characteristics. For instance, the understandings of the theological themes (including God and Christ) seem to be exclusively framed by the demands for theological/ethical coherence in each interpretive line of reasoning. Yet by showing how these theological themes are integrally related to the contextually marked views of the human predicament, although in a cryptic way, in each kind of interpretation the views of the divine necessarily— yet maybe surprisingly—reflect the same contextual perspective as the views of the human predicament. The themes concerning the life of believers (e.g., as “apostle” and “saints”) are, as might be expected, more explicitly contextual. Therefore, for each kind of interpretation, the rest of this chapter will successively clarify and present: a. The contextual formulations of the themes concerning the human predicament: sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God. b. The derivative contextual framing of the formulations of the themes that directly or indirectly concern how the human predicament is addressed: salvation, grace/ charis, (being) righteous, faith, gospel, gospelizing, and Scriptures.

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c. How the formulations of the theological themes (God, righteousness/justice of God, Christ, and the Spirit) have themselves a contextual character, even though it usually remains implicit. d. And the more obviously contextual formulations of the themes concerning the life of believers (as apostle and saints, their prayer and thanksgiving).

II Excavating the individual-centered contextual character of forensic theological interpretations of 1:1–32 In our archaeological dig (and in the previous chapters), we have identified the remains of individual housings—the fossilized remains of interpretations framed by individual-centered contextual concerns. Some of the archaeologists are exclusively devoted to the excavation of such individual housings. The many artifacts (brushes, combs, pieces of jewelry, pots and pans, knives, seats, beds, etc.) already identified and cleaned up in such individual housings (Chapter 3) need to be presented and organized to show what they reveal about the lives of individuals in the context of this settlement (i.e., the contextual features that frame individual-centered interpretations). Most of what we will find in this dig of the individual-centered context presupposed by forensic theological interpretations will, of course, be very familiar to us, Westerners, who repeatedly might want to say: of course, this is self-evident. Thus, you might want to read this section quickly. Yet, as we shall see, this description of presupposed individual/autonomy-centered contexts will be most helpful to bring into sharp relief the characteristics of community/relational-centered and religious/heteronomycentered contexts, presupposed in their interpretations by readers from other cultures and religious milieux.

Sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God as contextual features framing individual-centered interpretations In the individual-centered forensic theological interpretations and their interpretive line of reasoning, we can expect that the definitions of each of the key ethical and theological themes—and to begin with sin, idolatry, and the wrath God—are framed by contextual concerns that interpreters have in their own contexts (a) regarding the roles of individuals in their relationships with other people and with God and (b) regarding the needs and problems that individuals face in their life-contexts. This focus on individual life is neither good nor bad (it is not necessarily narcissistic!). It simply emphasizes a particular mode of human existence. In the same way that, as humans, we cannot but be relational beings (and therefore have a community life-context) and cannot but be heteronomous beings with religious experiences of one kind or another (and therefore have a religious/heteronomous life-context), so as humans, we cannot but be individuals; each of us strives to have an identity and to affirm her/himself. Any of these three contexts can be viewed as primary and therefore provides the contextual framework for an interpretation.

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Exegetes have readily emphasized that forensic theological interpretations are individual-centered. This means that the contextual interpretive frame of these interpretations is in one way or another related to the autonomy-context of human existence. Forensic theological interpretations of the views of sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God confirm this general observation. Individual-centered views of sin are framed by concerns for the ways in which human actions are (or are not) generated and performed by individuals in particular life-contexts. The individual as subject/agent is responsible for “sin,” understood either as an individual’s action contrary to God’s will or as an individual’s failure to do God’s will (eventually under the influence of someone opposed to God). The root of sin is envisioned as located in the individual, who either lacks the will to carry out God’s will (e.g., by following his/her own will or desires that are different from God’s will—sin of commission) or, eventually, lacks true knowledge of God’s will (or does not know how to do God’s will—sin of omission). Thus, sin is primarily understood as a willful or intentional act, with a potential component of ignorance (lack of knowledge). This individual-centered contextual perspective frames the interpretation of 1:18b, “human beings who suppress the truth,” as a statement according to which “sin” is intentionally failing to do God’s will (intentionally doing the wrong thing—suppressing the knowledge of God’s will—and thus following a wrong will) or intentionally ignoring God’s will and consequently lacking the knowledge of God’s will (as 1:32 is read), or again distorting God’s revelation (and thus lacking the knowledge of it, because of a deliberate, willful attitude—as 1:22, “claiming to be wise, they became fools,” is read). Understanding sin as an individual ethical issue (e.g., Ridderbos and Prat) reflects this contextual perspective.18 Such an interpretation reflects a concern for individuals who should (or actually do) feel guilty when becoming aware of their sins: mea culpa, it is my fault, it is my responsibility. A contextual concern for people in such a situation—that is, for all individuals, since all have sinned in one way or another—is warranted. Not feeling guilty (the absence of guilt) is a danger ultimately represented by psychopaths who, without the restraint of guilt, continue to harm self and/or others. For forensic interpretations, this is the case of Jewish Christ-followers (in this interpretation, the primary addressees of the letter) who, after reading/hearing the list of sins in 1:19–32, condemn others (Gentiles) and fail to feel guilty for any of these sins, even though they should: “in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (2:1; see Moo, 128).19 Yet one should be concerned about guilt for another reason: it can quickly become very destructive as an oppressive feeling that can engender or perpetuate obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, and suicide. This is why freeing sinners from guilt is essential. As discussed below, for forensic interpretations this is what justification by faith accomplishes.

18 19

Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of his Theology, 101; Prat, Theology of Saint Paul, vol. 1: 195–96. Who can claim to have never committed at least one of the following sins: being “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (1:29–31 NRSV)?

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From this individual-centered contextual perspective, it is self-evident that all the sinful acts listed in 1:19–32 are intentional actions—a legitimate interpretation (supported by critical exegesis focused upon the philological, epistolary, and dialogical/diatribe textual features, see Chapter 3) which is plausible (it is consistent with a forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning). Thus the suppression of God’s self-revelation through creation (1:19–22) is legitimately and plausibly understood as a deliberate, willful act of arrogance, which ultimately is foolishness, since it is a deliberate suppression of truth (“supposing themselves to be wise, they became fools,” 1:22, Moo, 108). As such the sinful actions listed in 1:23–31 are squarely individual-centered, even though they also include religious acts (including idolatry) and relational acts in community life (e.g., murder, strife, slanderers, rebellious against parents, ruthless). Idolatry (1:23, 25) is a (wrong) willful act: “Given the opportunity to bask in the glory of the immortal God, people have rather chosen, in their folly, to worship the images of mortal beings and beasts” (Moo, 108, emphasis added). Idolatry is a matter of individual choice, even as it is (and remains) a religious act. So 1:23 and 1:25 are read as descriptions of idolatry, understood as contextually grounded in an individual’s wrongly oriented will (a deliberate choice) that ends up generating a wrong knowledge (a lie) and then stupid idolatrous behavior.20 Being idolatrous is individual-centered because it involves (a) making other gods (idols) by deliberately suppressing the truth about God and (b) senselessly but willingly rejecting the actual knowledge of God that one possesses. Worship (here, deluded worship) is, of course, a religious act that involves interactions with a god and therefore also comprises some kind of religious experience, even if it is a deceitful one. But in this individual-centered perspective, this idolatrous religious experience is framed by the deliberate choice of rejecting what can be known about God in creation, of refusing to give glory to God, and of (willfully) worshiping idols instead of God. The religious act of worship and the religious experience of these idolaters are grounded in their individual decisions; they are individual-centered. Similarly, all the sinful acts listed in 1:24, 26–32 are understood as the consequence of a willful idolatry and thus as intentional, willful actions by individual sinners.21 “Passions,” “uncleanness,” and “dishonoring of their bodies” are understood as deliberate, willful actions by idolaters/sinners and as the consequences of such actions. “God handed them over” means that God allowed them to act as they will—according to their wrong will. This is a punishment by God: “Like a judge who hands over a prisoner to the punishment his [sic] crime has earned, God hands over the sinner to the terrible cycle of ever-increasing sin” (Moo, 111). Consequently, for forensic interpretations, 1:26–27 describe and condemn homoerotic acts as a (willful) “violation of God’s created order,” a violation of God’s “natural law” (Philo); homoerotic acts are therefore

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The description of idolaters as “stupid” fits this contextual perspective well: being “stupid” is either lacking knowledge or having the wrong knowledge. Thus, Moo mentions that 1:24 (“Therefore, God handed them over in the passions of their hearts. . .”) should be understood in terms of “Eph 4:19, where Paul says that Gentiles ‘gave themselves up’ to licentiousness, leading to all kind of ‘uncleanness’” (Moo, 111, emphasis added), because this undergirds his interpretation of sin as willful.

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willful “transgressions of God’s will” and a willful “perversion of true knowledge of God” (Moo, 114–115). Obviously, such individual-centered forensic interpretations do not deny that homoerotic acts are relational—they involve the interactions of two persons—and therefore are parts of (minimal) community life. But they are willful actions, individual-centered actions. Similarly, each of the sins and evils listed in 1:29–31 (“all manner of unrighteousness, evil, greed, wickedness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; gossips, maligners, haters of God, proud, arrogant, overbearing, devisers of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, without faithfulness, without affection, without mercy,” Moo) are willful wrong behaviors, even though most have a relational (community) dimension. Sinners know that these actions are wrong (against “God’s decree,” 1:32a), but they nevertheless voluntarily do them (since they “commend those who do them,” 1:32b). This is how all human beings as individuals—each responsible for his/ her own actions—behave. Each individual willfully sins—according to Paul’s text, as translated in English from the perspective of forensic theological interpretations. Thus one reads 1:18 as Paul speaking about the “unrighteousness” (e.g., Moo and NAS) or “wickedness” (e.g., NRSV, NIV, NAB, RSV) of human beings (translations of ἀδικία ἀνθρώπων). The terms “unrighteousness” and “wickedness” connote an individual’s state of being, an individual’s evil moral inclination, and the behavior that follows from this inclination.22 Thus all the sins listed in the rest of the chapter are sins deliberately performed by individuals following their evil inclinations; sins are voluntary acts. Even if it is because of the influence of someone against God, sinners willfully suppress or distort the knowledge of God’s will that they have. The terrible cycle of ever-increasing sin that results is also punishment (“God handed them over,” 1:28, to all these evil actions). And indeed, the consequence of these unrighteous and wicked actions by individuals is that they hurt each other in a community/society characterized by strife of all kinds. Thus, individuals’ sinful activities have a relational, community dimension. Yet it remains that these unrighteous and wicked actions are rooted in and initiated by individuals and their will. Thus, whatever social evil is found in a society (e.g., poverty, violence of all types, oppression, racism, sexism, lack of security, injustices of all kinds), it results from the fact that there are evil and nefarious individuals in this community, such as the unrighteous, greedy, wicked, envious, murderous, deceitful, malicious individuals described in 1:29–31 (in this interpretation). And the community will not become better as long as such evil individuals remain in its midst.23 The wrath of God (ὀργὴ θεοῦ), in forensic interpretations, is God’s negative reaction to—and ultimately punishment of—the wickedness and unrighteousness of individual sinners who dishonor God. God is anthropomorphically envisioned as an individual who is offended by sins. Retribution is required, unless a merciful solution is found. Obviously, fear of the wrath of God is a (negative) contextual religious experience for

22

23

And not a behavior that requires the cooperation of several individuals, as “injustice” commonly does in community-centered interpretations. Punishment, exclusion, and/or correction of these evil individuals are the way of resolving the contextual problems in this community. See the striking archaeology of knowledge Foucault performed on the punishment system in Western (individual-centered) cultures: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

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sinners. The problem with human sin and evil—individual-centered sin and evil—is ultimately how God is affected. Individual sinners dishonor and mock God; the honor of God must be restored. Thus, the revelation of the wrath of God is a part of the message of the gospel (1:16–18, alongside the revelation of the righteousness of God). In the eschatological future, the wrath of God will be manifested in the form of the final judgment and punishment—including in the form of deprivation of eternal life, as 2:5–12 makes clear. This is the fundamental human predicament that results from the very concrete, and therefore contextual, unrighteous actions by individual sinners. Since all human beings are sinners, all are under God’s wrath and punishment, and all will be condemned at the judgment and will perish—being deprived of eternal life (if nothing else intervenes). But God’s wrath and punishment are already manifest in present punishments/sufferings to which “God gave them up” (1:24, 26, 28) and which are a prelude of this future punishment (see also 3:5, 4:15, 5:9, 9:22, 12:19, 13:4, 5). The wrath of God and the judgment are needed to reestablish God’s honor and to correct God’s humiliation resulting from the sins of individuals; such sinners are/will be found guilty before God, the Judge, and punished by God. In closing: we have shown that in forensic interpretations of Romans, sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God are understood from individual-centered contextual perspective. Each individual is a sinner—all humans are sinners. Sin results from a wrong will (refusing to do God’s will or willingly following one’s own wrongful desires and passions) related to a lack of knowledge of God’s will (because one has suppressed this knowledge). When sooner or later one is confronted by God’s will—since one knows it, even if one suppresses it (1:18–21, 32)—and the wrath of God, one feels guilty (rather than feeling guiltless, as psychopaths do). Guilt is a contextual reality, a sense of culpability, which has an important and positive role (making empathy possible). But guilt easily turns into anxiety, which readily becomes destructive. In such cases, as noted, by feeling responsible for one’s wrongdoing and by feeling that one deserves punishment for it, one is paralyzed by guilt as an emotion that can be self-destructive— even to the point of suicide. Believers who have such guilt (sinful believers) commonly live in fear of God’s wrath, God’s judgment, and eternal condemnation (deprivation of eternal life). In this perspective, by writing 1:18 following 1:16–17, Paul posits an alternative—either salvation if one chooses faith (and justification by faith)—see below—or wrath and punishment (deserved, as one’s guilt confirms), if one continues to suppress the truth and to sin. Of course, in this individual-centered perspective, sinners have a religious life and religious experiences—even though for them these are twisted religious experiences related to idolatry. And of course, in this individualcentered perspective, sinners live in communities and societies, and their sins have negative consequences for their community life-contexts. But the central contextual problems and predicaments from which each individual sinner needs to be saved are (a) the destructive guilt engendered by one’s sins and (b) the fear and anxiety engendered by the expectation of just punishments for these sins. When these are resolved along with their individual sins, the problems in their religious experiences and in their community life will also be resolved. Thus, the easily recognizable markers that signal the presence of an individualcentered contextual perspective include concerns for issues of knowledge (lacking true

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knowledge or having a wrong knowledge) and for issues of will (lacking the will to do God’s will or having a wrong will, for example, driven by passions)—and conversely the establishment of true knowledge and good will.

Salvation, grace, being righteous/justified, faith, gospel, Scripture, and the transmission of the gospel as contextual features framing an individual-centered contextual perspective The forensic theological understandings of the theological and ethical themes “salvation,” “grace/charis,” “(being) righteous,” “faith,” “gospel,” “transmission of the gospel (gospelizing),” and “Scriptures” are necessarily and clearly framed by the individual-centered contextualized understandings of the human predicament, sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God. How could they not be contextualized in this way, since these themes express what redresses the individual-centered human predicament? How is this human predicament to be redressed? In brief: through salvation (σωτηρία, 1:16). Individual sinners need to be delivered from the wrath of God against them, a wrath that separates them from God, following their own voluntary rejection of God through their sins. God is appropriately angry with (individual) sinners; they deserve punishments. Sinners need to be saved from these punishments. Beyond present punishments by God—death (5:12–6:23) and other calamities that happen in their lives (e.g., those listed in 8:35–39)—sinners ultimately need to be saved from the future punishment: the eschatological judgment and its “wrath and fury” (e.g., 2:8–9), that is, the ultimate coming manifestations of “the wrath of God” as revealed by the gospel (1:18). Such a salvation can only be effected by God through a gracious act of forgiveness. Thus, in this individual-centered perspective, grace (χάρις, 1:5, 7) as the underserved favor of God’s forgiveness is the only hope for salvation—a salvation needed by each individual, since each has sinned against God in one way or another. The understanding of grace as a gift of forgiveness from God is the only understanding that makes sense in an individual-centered contextual perspective. The choice of a forensic interpretive line of reasoning and its understanding of grace as undeserved forgiveness or acquittal (instead of condemnation) by the Divine Judge is thus also contextually framed. It follows that being righteous is understood as the status of a person who has been declared righteous—that is, who has been acquitted—by God the Judge is framed by this individual-centered contextual perspective. An individual “has ‘righteousness,’ or is ‘righteous,’ when he[/she] is acknowledged to be such, when he[/she] is ‘rightwised,’ ‘pronounced righteous,’ acquitted, acknowledged innocent” (Bultmann, 272). Faith (πίστις, 1:5, 8, 12, 17) is a characteristic of each (individual) Christ-follower. Faith, as the polar opposite to “sin,” has a similar individual-centered contextual character. As sin reflected the contextual concerns for lack of knowledge and wrong will, so faith involves having true knowledge of God’s will—as revealed in/by “Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:3–4)—and intentionally (willfully) doing God’s will. Thus, faith includes all the true knowledge that sinners do not have. Faith is “believing that” certain affirmations are true, because they are revealed by God and thus are the content of faith; faith is believing the gospel (the content of faith), understood as a series of

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interconnected theological propositions (propositional truths) which believers should hold to be true—and faith also includes, eventually, believing other divine revelations (e.g., 1:19–20, 32; 2:18–20). Faith as “believing that” is a gift from God (a grace), but it requires a willful response, “the obedience of faith” (1:5), from each believer. Thus, faith corrects the contextual problem of people lacking the will to do God’s will. The three components of faith are framed by this contextual perspective: faith involves (1) trusting and believing God (who revealed the content of faith), (2) welcoming the gift of faith (the faith by which we trust God), as well as (3) faithfulness—a faithcommitment that shows the “will” to do God’s will—that is, “the obedience of faith” (i.e., “the obedience that comes from faith” NIV). “Obedience” is a necessary part of faith as “believing that” Christ is the Lord, whom the believer must willingly obey. Consequently, justification by faith, this paramount forensic concept, is itself contextually framed by this individual-centered view of faith.24 It is individuals who need to be, and are, justified when they have faith—a gift from God through which they believe the “gospel” (have the true knowledge which the gospel is) as the content of faith and respond faithfully with obedience. In turn, gospel (1:1, 9, 16) as the content of faith has an individual-centered contextual character—derived from the individual-centered understanding of “faith.” Without going into the details of all that the gospel entails (see Chapter 3), it is enough to say here that the gospel is a message that conveys to individuals a certain knowledge—the content of faith (a series of theological propositional truths; for example, those contained in 1:3–4, 16–18)—that entices them to do God’s will (e.g., by revealing that Jesus Christ is Lord). The gospel as good news is therefore appropriately understood as the kerygma (the preached message) to be received, believed, and obeyed by each believer. The transmission of the gospel (gospelizing, εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15) is necessarily and exclusively through “preaching the gospel” (as in most English translations). It involves not only the initial transmission to individuals of a knowledge of the “gospel of God” (i.e., the theological message—good news—summarized in 1:1c–4) aimed at bringing about the obedience of faith (1:5) during an initial evangelization, but also, as 1:15 suggests, the ongoing training of believers that instructs them for their lives as disciples. The gospel fulfills the promises of Scriptures (1:2). Since in this individual-centered perspective the gospel is the knowledge-content of faith, “Scripture is prophetical” (Luther, Moo): it points to its fulfillments (in Jesus Christ, in the gospel, in the church). Scripture (the Old Testament, the prophets, and also Judaism) is superseded by the gospel. Supersessionism is not problematic in an individual-centered contextual perspective, because the primary concern is to overcome for all people a lack of knowledge (regarding one’s relation to God) and a lack of will to serve God as individual believers. The most efficient way to do so—indeed, the only way to do so— is through the gospel, which alone reveals what individuals need to hold in faith to be saved, and secondarily to address all the issues concerning life in a community and between communities.

24

The forensic concept is based on 1:17b/Hab 2:4 (“the one who is righteous will live by faith”) interpreted in terms of 3:24 (“justified freely by his grace” [NIV]) as discussed in Chapter 3.

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God (and the righteousness of God), Christ, the Spirit: Conceptions of the divine as contextual features framing an individual-centered contextual perspective. The forensic theological understandings of the key theological themes found in 1:1–32 (God, Christ, the Spirit) do not seem to be framed by any particular context. Are they not traditional theological views? Nevertheless these forensic understandings of God, Christ, and the Spirit are intrinsically tied to the forensic individual-centered views of the human predicament (sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God) and of the way in which it is redressed (salvation, grace, being justified, faith, gospel, Scripture). God is envisioned as a righteous and merciful/loving Judge. God is a righteous and eventually wrathful God of justice, who demands that humans intentionally strive to perform good deeds (1:18–3:20), and a God who is also merciful and loving, forgiving sinners. As Bultmann (262) wrote: “The preaching of faith does not introduce a new concept of God as if God were not the Judge who requires good works but were only the Merciful. No, we may speak of God’s ‘grace’ only when we also speak of his wrath.” This view of God is thoroughly framed by an individual-centered contextual perspective. Individual sinners are accountable for their sins, unless they are forgiven—declared righteous before the Judge. Righteousness of God is a polyvalent phrase, which, here, is framed by an individualcentered contextual perspective. It refers to a status intrinsic to God—God’s righteousness as a yardstick to assess humans’ behavior (used by God as the Judge)— but also to a status that God shares with humans by graciously acquitting them, making them righteous/justified. The phrase “righteousness of God” is marked by this contextual perspective, whether it is understood (1) with emphasis on the end-result of the gracious acquittal by God the Judge ([individual] sinners are forgiven, given the status of “righteous” who will not be condemned at the eschatological judgment), or (2) with emphasis on the ongoing transforming effect for the (individual) forgiven believer who does not need to fear the judgment, or again (3) with emphasis on the (re)establishment of an upright relationship of the (individual) believer with God (and neighbors) through the preached good news of the righteousness of God as forgiveness. Christ (surprisingly not mentioned in 1:10–32) is the focus of the summary of the gospel in 1:3–4. Whatever might be its interpretation, in this forensic interpretation the presentation of Christ seems to be exclusively doctrinal. The dual affirmation that Christ is son of David according to the flesh and Son of God in power according to the Spirit by/through the resurrection is quite doctrinal, whether it refers to (1) two natures (human and divine) of Christ, (2) two stages in his existence, before and after his resurrection (according to the salvation history scheme), or (3) his two roles in God’s purpose: “as Messiah (of Israel)” and as “the Son of God (for all).” Such doctrines are not intrinsically contextual. But (as noted in Chapter 3) by integrating these three dimensions of 1:3–4, forensic interpreters such as Bultmann (293) and Ridderbos (44–90) understand Christ as innovating the time of salvation as a “one salvation-process” (Bultmann)—consequently their understanding of Christ is framed by the same contextual perspective as their individual-centered view of salvation (discussed above).

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The Spirit (of holiness)—or Holy Spirit—in the phrase “declared Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness” (1:4) is understood in light of the three different forensic Christological interpretations of 1:3–4 just mentioned. Therefore, this apparently very doctrinal interpretation is itself marked by an individual-centered contextual perspective, as the understandings of “salvation” and of Christ were (e.g., see Moo, 50).

Apostle, saints, prayer and thanksgiving: Conceptions of the believers’ life in an individual-centered contextual perspective. Apostle—the designation of the vocation (“called to be an apostle,” 1:1b) that Paul has as a “servant of Christ Jesus” (δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, 1:1a)—is explicitly marked by an individual-centered contextual perspective (and its emphasis on “knowledge” and “will” that each individual needs in order to act properly) in this forensic interpretation. As the prophets did, Paul has voluntarily accepted, in total devotion to the Lord, his prophet-like vocation to proclaim truthfully—to preach (as εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15, and even ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ, 1:9, are understood)—the gospel as the revealed knowledge, which is the content of faith (a series of propositional truths that believers should know). His vocation also includes sharing with others “some spiritual gifts” (1:11) that he received to strengthen their faith—understood here (together with the mention of “reaping some harvest,” 1:13) as a complement to preaching (as conveying the revealed knowledge which is the content of faith that one needs to receive beyond the initial proclamation of the gospel). In order to carry out this vocation, Paul has a unique authority (a vertical authority that qualifies him as a special [individual] preacher), received from God and Christ (1:5), which establishes and verifies the truthfulness of the gospel message he preaches to others. Saints: the Romans are “called to be saints” (κλητοῖς ἁγίοις, 1:7), as Paul was “called to be apostle” (1:1). This means here that “God’s Beloved in Rome” have voluntarily accepted this vocation as the new chosen people of God in Rome—as Paul voluntarily accepted his vocation of apostle. The saints are qualified by “obedience of faith”—that is, they have the “knowledge” of the gospel and the “will” to act accordingly—since they have accepted the gospel. Thanksgiving (1:8) and prayer (1:9–10) are expressions of the personal relationship of an individual with God. Paul’s thanksgiving is an expression of his personal piety, made possible through the mediation of Christ (“through [διὰ] Jesus Christ”). “Prayers of petition” are part of Paul’s ministry as an offering of worship to God (ὁ θεός, ᾧ λατρεύω, 1:9)—thus a religious experience—with attention to the needs of others. Yet this religious experience is individual-centered: both thanksgiving and prayer are marked by their personal nature through the use of the first-person singular. For most Western readers of Paul, the “individual-centered” understandings of all these themes are not surprising. Generally speaking, this is the most common understanding of Romans in the West since Augustine and the Augustinian monk, Luther. But it might be somewhat unexpected that these interpretations be labeled contextual simply because they are individual-centered. Indeed, it is often presupposed that an interpretation is contextual only insofar as it is framed by special community,

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social, or cultural concerns and that such community-centered interpretations are simply superimposed upon the (only!) legitimate philological exegesis and their (only!) plausible forensic formulations. Yet it remains that human beings live in three contextual modes of existence, and not simply in community-centered lives. Therefore, the individual-centered focus consistently found in forensic interpretations signals a particular and definite concern for contextual issues and problems that belong to the individual-centered mode of existence. Such issues and problems do exist, take concrete and often alarming forms, and thus need to be addressed. Reading from this individual-centered perspective frames the interpretation in a contextual way, as much as reading from a community-centered or from a religious/heteronomous perspective does. Of course, this affirmation in no way puts into question the legitimacy and plausibility of such interpretations. Actually, this contextual interpretive choice might be the best—the one with the greatest ethical value—in particular contexts where individual-centered problems need to be urgently addressed. Yet since, as we shall see, other interpretations seek to address other contextual concerns and are framed by them, the question becomes for each particular context: which is the best? Regarding each particular context we need to ask: what are the most urgent problems? Then we are in a position to assess which kind of interpretation has the greatest ethical value, because through its contextual characteristics it can best address the problems in this given context.

III Excavating the community-centered contextual character of socio-rhetorical inclusive covenantal community interpretations of 1:1–32 In our archaeological dig (and the previous chapters), we have also identified the remains of public spaces and buildings—the fossilized remains of interpretations framed by community-centered contextual concerns. Some of the archaeologists/ exegetes are exclusively devoted to the excavation of such public spaces and buildings. The very shape of the public spaces—an agora, a marketplace, a theater—and the architectural characteristics of public building already identified (in Chapter 4) need to be studied as an organic whole with contextual features that frame communitycentered interpretations. In this way, we will understand what they reveal about the community life in the context of this “settlement.” The inclusive covenantal community interpretations and their interpretive line of reasoning are community-centered (as indicated by their name) or relational (a simpler designation). As such, these interpretations are also framed by contextual concerns that interpreters have about various aspects of community life in their own contexts. Thus, we can expect that the definitions of each of the key ethical and theological themes in this interpretive line of reasoning (see the Appendix, where the community-centered interpretations of these themes are summarized in the second of the three parallel columns) are framed by contextual concerns for all kinds of community relations, such as the following:

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Contextual concerns for intracommunity relationships—contextual problems that hopefully can be addressed by studying what Paul says about the relationships within a given society (economic, social, political [13:1–7], cultural dimensions of life), the relationships among classes (slave and free, male and female, Gal 3:28), and among groups within religious communities, for example, between Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers in each church [ἐκκλησία, 16:1, 5, 23, see 12:1–21; 14:1–15:13]; Contextual concerns for intercommunity relationships—contextual problems that hopefully can be addressed by studying what Paul says about the relations among Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish (1:14), Jews and Greeks/Gentiles (1:16; see 9:1–11:36; 13:1–7), which are some of the groups and communities in the very diverse Roman Empire.

These concerns for community relationships also frame and mold everything concerning the perception of both the individual and religious dimensions of human experience. This focus on community life is neither good nor bad. It simply emphasizes a part of human experience. In the same way that as human beings we cannot but be individuals (and therefore have an autonomous life-context) and cannot but be heteronomous beings with religious experiences of one kind or another (and therefore have a religious/heteronomous life-context), we are also social beings who necessarily live in communities as relational beings. Any of these three contexts can be viewed as primary and therefore provides the contextual framework for an interpretation. From this community-centered perspective, human beings are necessarily viewed as “relational individuals” (“community-centered persons,” “social animals”) who could not exist, survive, and properly function outside of relationships with others in some kind of community; they are therefore individuals who understand themselves and everything in their life-context in a relational way. Similarly, from this communitycentered perspective, religious experience is necessarily relational: thus, relationship with God is understood in a covenantal way—the interrelationship of God with a community of people (a covenantal relationship); prayer is relational (Paul’s prayer is in the context of a relation with the God whom he serves and of his interrelations with the Romans for whom he prays and who should pray for him; 1:9–10, 15:30–32). And of course the use of language in oral or written discourses is relational. Paul’s discourse (his letter) is framed by his concerns for the Christ-followers in Rome, and his efforts to transform (establish) a relationship with them, as well as their relationships with each other, and their relationship with God. The rhetoric features of the letter are relational. In sum, all aspects of the theological and ethical themes have relational connotations.

Sin, idolatry, and the wrath of God as contextual features framing community-centered interpretations Community-centered interpretations are contextually framed by ideologies, which also play a central role in all cultures—a role that is explicit in community-centered cultures, such as the Greco-Roman world. Therefore, the study of the communitycentered interpretations of Romans (as described in Chapter 4) is closely related to an

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elucidation of the contextual features that are of concerns to certain interpreters and therefore contextually frame their interpretations. In community-centered cultures, the good and the bad are conceptualized, acted out, and assessed by the community from the perspective of an ideology, which itself originates within the community. “Ideology” is understood here, together with Althusser, in a neutral sense as “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” as a community.25 No human can live without an ideology. It posits the way people should behave. It is established by a community (a family, a group, a society) to which one belongs. In and of itself, following an ideology is not problematic; actually, it is quite helpful. It posits what all members of the community view as a “collective will” and “collective knowledge of what to do and not to do.” From this community-centered perspective—an ideological perspective—sinning is either following wrong or problematic ideological views of good and evil (usually the ideology of another community) or failing to follow the proper ideology (accepted by the community). This is simple enough in isolated communities where a single ideology is present. But, it is another matter in a world that involves the interaction of several, very different communities—such as Paul’s and the Romans’ world, and our present globalized world. In such cases, several ideologies are in competition. In Paul’s world, the ideologies of the Romans, of the Greeks/Gentiles, of the Jews, of the barbarians, and of the church/ἐκκλησία (using some of the terminology Paul uses in Romans 1 and 16) interact with and confront each other. So critical exegetes legitimately use socio-rhetorical methods framed by an ideological, communitycentered, perspective. But this choice of methodology also signals (is the fossilized remains of) concerns for community-centered contextual issues and problems that lead interpreters to frame their readings in this way. Actually, exegetes using such methodologies readily make explicit their community-centered contextual concerns. Such is the case of Robert Jewett. Although in his commentaries he barely alludes to his community-centered concerns, leaving no doubt about the role of such concerns in framing his exegetical interpretation, he published no less than eight books (listed in the Bibliography) expressing and analyzing such concerns regarding the American situation over the last four centuries. The community-centered contextual connotations of Paul’s view of sin become apparent as soon as we consider the textual features taken into account by the sociorhetorical interpretations of 1:18–32 (see Chapter 4). A rhetorical feature of this passage is striking: 1:18b–32 is setting up a rhetorical trap that snaps on the readers in 2:1.26 As discussed, rhetorical analyses of the letter show that this rhetorical trap is aimed at Gentile Christ-followers—the primary addressees of the letter in this interpretation. This is confirmed by socio-rhetorical analyses, which show that 1:18b–22

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See Althusser, Essays on Ideology, 36. In the spirit of Althusser’s community-centered work, I added “as a community” to his definition of ideology. See also Ellens, “Ideology,” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. “Therefore you have no excuse, O man/woman, whoever you are who passes judgment. For by that which you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, for you, the one who passes judgment, practice the same things” (2:1, Jewett).

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uses Greco-Roman (especially Stoic) vocabulary, as 1:23–32 also does throughout its long description of sinful conducts. This means that in 1:18b–32 the descriptions of sinners in the Greco-Roman vocabulary repeat what was viewed as evil and condemned in the culture and ideology of Greco-Roman communities. This is why the rhetorical trap was working so well for Gentile Christ-followers (the primary readers)! They were ready to condemn those who practice the evils and vices listed here. Contextually, it is essential to repeat the same rhetorical move in the readers’ cultural setting (whatever it might be through history and today)—as we found certain interpreters doing in their receptions of Romans (see Chapter 7) and as Jewett did, for instance, in Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil (2003) and in his book, Saint Paul at the Movies (1993 and 1999). What is Paul teaching about sin in 1:18b–32? Actually, for his intended readers, there is nothing new about the sins listed in these verses. From a community-centered ideological perspective, Paul is not teaching that these evils are sins. In a culture impregnated with Stoic teaching and ideology, the condemnation of these vices is well known to Paul’s readers. Since, for Gentile Christ-followers, it is well known that all of these behaviors are sins, evils, and vices, the rhetorical effect of 1:18b–32 and 2:1 is the unexpected teaching that they should not condemn such sinners. Using these traditional views of sin, they would readily identify as sinners people around them who are such behaviors; but they should not condemn them.27 The fundamental sin is condemning, and thus excluding and marginalizing others, because they are different or because they act in a way that is not acceptable to us—because we think they are sinners, as 2:1 makes explicit. As 2:1 expresses, instead of condemning such sinners, Christ-followers should welcome them in their inclusive community. It does not take much dusting of this interpretation to recognize potential contextual concerns that entice interpreters to adopt such an interpretation. The choice of this interpretation is contextually demanded when one is faced with divided communities in which members condemn each other as sinners. The teaching (Word-to-live-by) derived from such interpretations is ultimately that the community members should welcome each other in their inclusive community, including welcome those which they view as sinners. The contextual concern is therefore for divided community and society where people judge and condemn each other—a concern which is warranted in many settings through history, including today in the American and European contexts. Similar contextual concerns for the negative role of cultural ideologies in the interpreters’ present—whatever it might be—clearly frame the socio-rhetorical elucidation of the way in which Paul dealt with such issues in his time through his letter to the Romans, and to begin with when confronting the honor and shame ideology of the Greco-Roman world. Such an analysis presupposes that a similar attitude— mutatis mutandis—might be needed regarding the problematic role of ideology in the interpreters’ present. This is such a broad (but no less urgent) contextual concern that frames critical exegeses following a socio-rhetorical perspective presented in Chapter 4.

27

This is by contrast with the forensic interpretation for which this passage teaches readers what they should not do and what is condemned by God.

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Indebtedness vs. Sin. When read from this socio-rhetorical perspective, Paul exemplifies how to avoid problematic judgmental community-centered attitudes (a model that eventually applies to many contexts, including those of the critical exegetes) by affirming in 1:14 that he views himself as indebted to barbarians as well as to Greeks and to foolish as well as to wise. Instead of following the Greco-Roman cultural/ ideological norms of marginalizing and excluding barbarians and foolish people (accordingly, because their culture is actually a lack of culture and because their way of life is shameful), he welcomes them as equal and valuable members of the inclusive community, expressing his indebtedness to them. Similarly, Gentile Christ-followers should welcome those whom they are tempted to marginalize and exclude because they spontaneously view them (following one or another kind of cultural ideology) as sinners “foolish” enough (1:22, 31) to have anyone of the “sinful” conducts listed in 1:23–31 (or the common list of sins in another cultural context). Sins are communal—by definition, since they are instances of the fundamental sin of excluding others as well as of practicing the sins listed in 1:18–32 (or another culturally marked list of sins). In Romans, sins (and the gospel, as the polar opposite of sins) are perceived from a communal perspective of the Greco-Roman ideology, that is, in terms of felt shame and felt honor. Thus Paul insists, “I am not ashamed (οὐ ἐπαισχύνομαι) of the gospel” (1:16). Sins are viewed as engendering the feeling of shame before others in the community—by contrast with guilt (a feeling that an individual has first privately, by her/himself, even if afterward this perception of one’s individual failure [guilt] becomes public). Therefore for Paul, in this communitycentered perspective, sinfulness is best illustrated (1) as a wrong sense of honor and shame (“I am not ashamed of the gospel”), (2) as lacking an appropriate sense of indebtedness (1:14), and (3) as valuing power plays (instead of mutual interrelations, 1:11–12). Sinfulness is represented by Roman-like imperialism and power-wielding, to be replaced by the gospel as the power of God (1:3–4, 16). This communal view of sin is illustrated more generally through the mention of the evil that all kinds of competition with others are—competition with others taking the form of wanting to be better than others, but also of oppressing others, of having prejudices against others, and of being biased vis-à-vis others—listed in 1:29–32.28 Such a sociocultural exegetical exegesis discloses that such interpretations is framed by the contextual concern for such competitive attitudes and divisions in all kinds of cultural, economic, social, and political situations, including in Western cultures that are far removed from honor and shame cultures. Thus, the interpretive choice driven at the exegetical level by sociorhetorical analyses is clearly framed by community-centered contextual concerns that readily make sense in many different situations—wherever there are social conflicts of any kind, including elitism, patriarchalism, racism, xenophobia, as well as class conflicts, political authoritarianism, economic oppression, colonialism, imperialism— especially whenever such situations are viewed as a normal state of affairs.

28

As we saw in Chapter 4, this is a point repeatedly made, following Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991) by Jewett, Wright, W. Campbell, Ehrensperger, and Elliott.

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Such an approach shows that the suppression of God’s truth—a root of sin—has itself a relational, community-centered character. Paul expresses it by saying that the wrath of God condemns “all impiety and injustice (ἀδικίαν) of humans (in general, ἀνθρώπων) who are suppressing the truth by injustice (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ)” (1:18, Patte). The collective (plural) suppression of God’s truth (by “humans,” ἀνθρώπων) is a sin against God—a rejection of God. But it is also a manifestation of injustice. Note that unlike the preferred forensic translations for ἀδικία, “injustice” is a relational term—a community-centered term. It involves at least two persons: someone’s violating the rights of another in a community setting. Injustice—with its social, economic, or political connotations—is the abuse or oppression of certain members of a community by others who either follow a wrong ideology (that excludes or marginalizes or exploits certain persons or groups in a society) or who betray a right ideology (that appropriately respects and promotes the rights of each person or group in a society). So the sinful collective suppression of the truth is not simply directed against God—not simply an affront of God. It is also directed against other members of the community: it promotes injustice, it diminishes others. This important contextual marker becomes clear presently. From the twofold perspective of (a) the promotion of injustice through the suppression of the truth (1:18b–22) and (b) the rhetorical trap (2:1), 1:23–32 is appropriately viewed as a sinful listing of sins. The actions listed are indeed sins. But taking the description of these sins as normative—as a legalistic listing of what should not be done—promotes injustice. People who hold this list to be normative are led to exclude, marginalize, and thus abuse those that they, in their judgment, view as performing such acts. But positively, when 1:23–32 is read as a sinful listing of sins—a list viewed as normative because of the suppression of the truth (1:18b–22), as rhetorically required by 2:1—the intended readers (Gentile Christ-followers) are led to welcome such alleged sinners into the inclusive covenantal community. The community-centered contextual concerns that frame this choice of interpretation are transparent. The choice of this socio-rhetorical exegetical approach for the study of 1:19–22 is itself highly contextualized even as it points out that the suppression of the truth (about God) is presented in these verses as a highly contextualized process. This is visible in the main conclusions of this exegetical study (see Chapter 4). To begin with, the suppressed revelations are/were not made to individuals but to a community (or to a group of communities); all humans (ἄνθρωποι, 1:18b, αὐτοί, 1:19–20) have access to what is knowable about God! Second, and consequently, the injustice of suppressing the truth (1:18b, ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων) does not merely involve denying the truth that one has personally received (an impossibility, since revelations are collective) but also and primarily denying the truth that others (all others) have received. It involves denying the truth manifested, understood, and seen by all humans, as it is/was manifested among them and to them. This sinful suppression of the revelations that others have received ultimately engenders the sinful condemnation of others (2:1), who can no longer be viewed as full-fledged persons, when in one way or another the revelations that ground their identities are suppressed. This is the injustice of excluding others by

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dismissing their knowledge of God, including the knowledge of God’s eternal power and divine nature, 1:19–21. Thus, in one way or another, all the sins listed in 1:29–31 are “injustices”: the lists begin with being “filled with every kind of injustice” (πάσῃ ἀδικίᾳ) and include “envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, . . . slanderers, . . . insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, with no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy”: all these attitudes or actions hurt other people and disrupt the life of the community. The suppression of the truth has still another community-centered dimension: it involves failing to glorify God. This is a collective failure (“they”) to “glorify God as God or give God thanks” (1:21) and therefore the failure to bring other people to glorify God. This is a community-centered failure, because glorifying God (and bringing other people to glorify God) is the covenantal vocation of God’s people—(a) as understood in formative Judaism (by the Pharisees and early rabbis), (b) as embodied by Christ, as Paul says in 15:8–9: “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, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy” (NRSV), (c) as embodied by Paul, who gives thanks to God for the Romans (1:8), and (d) as embodied by the church as body of Christ (12:1–15:13) that should “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God,” 15:7 NRSV). In sum, all this interpretation is contextually framed by the interpreters’ concerns regarding how sin is manifested at the community level. From this communitycentered perspective, (a) sin is rooted in a collective suppression of the truth that has been collectively received as revelations; (b) sin is injustice against others (excluding, marginalizing, abusing, hurting others—each of these attitudes with its social, economic, or political connotations); and (c) sin is failing to participate in fulfilling the covenantal vocation of the people of God, glorifying God. Thus the conceptualization of sin is contextually located in communities: in their wrong ideologies, that is, their collective wrong will and collective wrong knowledge of what to do and not to do, as opposed to the individual’s wrong will or wrong knowledge, as in the forensic theological interpretation. Therefore, it is clear that the choice of such an interpretation reflects, on the part of the interpreters, concerns for social, communal problems in their own social and cultural contexts—as has been illustrated by interpretations of Romans in different cultural contexts concerning the issues of gender and tradition in Gender, Tradition, and Romans. Shared Ground, Uncertain Borders (RTHC, 2005). In this socio-rhetorical interpretation framed by the interpreters’ contextual concerns, idolatry is understood as a typical example of collective-delusion resulting from suppressing the truth and failing to glorify God. This is what 1:23 is understood to express in its description of idolatry: “They changed the glory of the imperishable God into a likeness of an image of ” a mortal human or animal. Instead of glorifying God, idolaters glorify something else. In this interpretation, idolatry is a manifestation of the anger of God (as discussed below). Idolatry is not the source or cause of suppressing the truth, but its consequence, with communitywide effects. By alluding to both Israelite idolatry (Ps 106) and pagan idolatries, Paul is inclusive; he emphasizes that the perverse ideological drive associated with idolatry is a universal

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problem. As an ideological delusion—a problematic vision that people have of their relationships to everything in the world, in society, and to God—an idolatry makes it impossible for the idolaters to interact properly with others and with God. Idolatry is of course a religious practice—that belongs to the religious dimensions of life—even though it is a negative religious practice. It involves heteronomy— being totally submitted to some kind of superhuman power: “Therefore God gave them up (Διὸ παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς)” (1:24; 1:26; 1:28). Yet in this interpretation framed by community-centered contextual concerns idolatry is not religious-centered; as we noted, it is and remains a (negative) “community-centered religious practice.” The question remains: Why are we, as God’s people, not carrying out our vocation of glorifying God and bringing others to glorify God? That is, why are we suppressing the truth of God? Why are we rejecting the revelations that others have received? Why are we excluding and condemning them (2:1)? Why are we practicing idolatry (whatever its form might be)? Paul makes it clear later in Romans: it is because we are “enemies of God” (5:10), because we are against God, because we are jealous of God’s people, of those who are blessed by God, and thus because we are angry against God. Therefore, salvation “for us” as a community is to be “reconciled to God” (5:10–11—the discussion in Volume II notes that in these verses “being saved” and “being reconciled to God” are posited as equivalent; see also 2 Cor 5:18–20). The problem resulting from sin is therefore not located with God—it is not that God’s honor has been offended and must be avenged. Rather the problem resulting from sin is actually located with us, sinners: we are enemies of God; we are angry with God; we are in rebellion against God, and as a consequence we generate all kinds of evil. This is good news! Despite our inclination to believe that God is angry against us (the forensic interpretation), God is not. Indeed, we are separated and alienated from God. But the reason for this is that we are suspicious of God, we are in rebellion against God, we are angry with God, and therefore we need to be reconciled with God upon whom we are projecting all our negative dispositions and feelings. This legitimate choice of exegetical interpretation is once again clearly framed by contextual concerns for discerning the (very subtle) ways in which our communities (in whatever concrete situation) are in rebellion against God, and for seeking to discern how our idolatry functions (whatever might be the idolatries in the interpreters’ contexts). Following Paul this involves recognizing what our idolatry is (since idolatry turns us against God) and what truth that others have received we suppress (1:19), consequently feeling feel free unduly to condemn these others (2:1). This is sinning against these neighbors; this is also being angry with God. Because God had given to these others a revelation that we ourselves have not received, we are jealous of these people—this is why we suppress the true revelation they have. Simultaneously we are angry against God who favored these others. This is the root of sin as Robert Jewett brilliantly illustrated in his book, Saint Paul at the Movies, by analyzing in the movie Amadeus the sin of Salieri (jealous of the gifts God gave to Mozart).29 Thus, the

29

Jewett, Saint Paul at the Movies, 31–42.

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contextual problem that needs to be addressed is that we need to be reconciled with God, as well as with our neighbors. Anger of God vs. Wrath of God. The socio-rhetorical interpretation of the opening phrase of 1:18, Ἀποκαλύπτεται γὰρ ὀργὴ θεοῦ, is rich in contextualized meaning and connotations, because of its covenantal connotations. Exposing this contextualized meaning reflects the way in which interpreters frame their interpretation with contextual concerns. Presenting its exegetical interpretation in Chapter 4, I proposed to translate this phrase: “Because the anger of the covenant God is being revealed.” It is essential to give γὰρ its usual sense of “because.” This conjunction ties 1:18 with 1:16– 17 to make clear that “wrath is not the final word” (Jewett, 151). “Because” humans are presently in a deplorable situation which angers God (1:18)—that is, “because” human communities are in dire situations from which they need to be rescued and “because” human communities themselves make God angry—salvation is offered by the gospel to all the faithfuls (1:16–17). The good news of the gospel-story is inclusive and universal in scope—all communities are included. Salvation (1:16–17) is intended for all those communities against whom God is angry. And of course, this applies to the communities about which the interpreters (who have chosen this interpretation) are concerned—their choice is a contextual choice. The good news is that the anger of God against these disastrous community situations is the reason why the salvation of the gospel is offered! And indeed this is good news. This understanding (which forensic interpretations readily reject as “against what Paul meant”) is demanded by the grammatical construction of 1:18a, “Because (γὰρ) the anger of the covenant God is being revealed”—something that a community-oriented contextual interpretation readily emphasizes. One can easily see the contextual implications of taking note that the wrath of God, orgê theou (ὀργὴ θεοῦ), should not be understood in a retributive mode (and in terms of the judgment at the end of time) but as referring to God’s emotion of anger against the deplorable condition of all the peoples of God (as discussed in Chapter 4). Paul presents the covenantal God as reacting against what constitutes the predicament from which communities need to be saved. Such an exegetical conclusion has contextual implications for the interpreters; indeed, the choice of this interpretation shows how much it is contextually framed by community-centered concerns. The exegetically based recognition that, for Paul, sins and evil are community-centered issues that negatively affect the covenant relationships between God and humans and among humans (as Jewett, 151, does) once again reflects community-centered contextual concerns on the part of the interpreters. And these contextual concerns are addressed by the exegetical conclusion that Paul here and elsewhere in Romans emphasizes the revelation of the faithfulness of the covenant God (as Nanos noted). And this revelation of the faithfulness of God (in the gospel-story and in the inclusive covenantal community of Jews and Greeks, 1:16–17) is also a revelation that the anger of God is a good news; it is God’s angry rejection of anything that impinges upon all the good and just covenantal relationships that the gospel, as “power of salvation,” brings (Jewett, 151). Once again, it is clear that the interpreters’ contextual concerns frame the interpretation of the anger of God (18a) as the empathic anger of the covenant God. But, of course, this does not prevent this interpretation from being legitimate (grounded in

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solid exegesis), as we saw in Chapter 4. God’s “empathic anger” is an invitation to all to participate in God’s story. This is good news for the interpreters who are concerned with the deplorable situations of their own communities and of communities around them. All are invited to share in God’s anger. And this good news is also addressed to those who, together with forensic interpreters, have individual-centered contextual concerns taking the form of “fearing the wrath of God” (fearing punishments from God): God is not angry with them, God loves them, God suffers with them in the disastrous community-centered situations in which they are, and from which they need to be freed and saved.

Gospel, “gospelizing” (the transmission of the gospel), Scripture, being righteous/just, faith, grace, and salvation as contextual features framing a community-centered contextual perspective In socio-rhetorical interpretations with a community-centered contextual perspective, salvation is a communal experience. Who/what need to be saved? Communities! As a result, this interpretation of salvation is contextually framed by concerns related to the community-centered mode of existence and the human need to build and participate in communities. It is easy to recognize how the interpretations of the theological and ethical themes listed in the above subtitle are framed by contextual concerns. Gospel. To begin with, for community-centered interpretations, the polar opposite of sin is the gospel—(and not salvation, as it is for forensic individual-centered interpretations). The overcoming of sin (salvation) cannot be envisioned and cannot take place apart from the gospel. The first reason is that, in Paul’s phrase, “the gospel is the power of God for salvation” (1:16), “salvation” cannot be disassociated from gospel.  The second and more important reason is that, in community-centered interpretations, sin is a relational, communal term: it refers to a disorder in community relationships; that is, injustice (ἀδικία, 1:18, 29) manifested, for instance, in the form of abuse, oppression, domination, marginalization, exploitation, exclusion of certain members of a community by others—or of one community by other communities. As discussed in Chapter 4, injustice in all its forms is related to wrong ideologies; it is framed and energized by problematic ideologies. Therefore, the polar opposite of sin  is something that promotes justice (δικαιοσύνη, 1:17)—just communal relationships. What promotes justice? A just ideology that frames and energizes justice as the normal praxis among members of a community and just relationships among communities—for example, among communities of Jews, of Greeks/Gentiles, of Jewish Christ-followers, of Gentile Christ-followers, as well as the communities that form the Roman Empire. What has the contextual effect of promoting such a just ideology? Of course (in this reading of Romans), it is participating with others in the gospel-story. To understand why this is the case, one needs to keep in mind that by definition any ideology takes shape in a story (as discussed in Chapter 4). An ideology is empowered and promoted by being embedded in a story—a master-story (multiple narratives) about human experience in the world—that invites its hearers/readers to enter it

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and to find their place and role in the story. Thus, overcoming a sinful ideology that promotes injustice (e.g., abuse, oppression, domination, marginalization, exploitation, exclusion)—a contextual concern that frames this interpretation—is not simply a matter of denouncing it—for example, by proclaiming that it is sinful and worthy of the wrath of God. Rather one needs a new master-story framed by a just ideology that promotes justice. And for Paul this master-story is the gospel-story. The same contextual concern continues to frame this interpretation of the way the gospel functions by being shared as a story from believers to believers. As established  by the critical exegesis (see Chapter 4), this is what “gospelizing” (εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15) is. It involves participating with other people in the gospel as a collective story. When Paul was sharing the gospel (“gospelizing”), he participated in the gospel-story together with others—as, in turn, other believers do when they share the gospel with other people. The gospel-story is manifested (εὐαγγελίσασθαι) by participating into it together with other people, by sharing it with them, because it is a collective story in which all are invited to enter. (Thus the verb εὐαγγελίσασθαι, to “gospelize,” does not refer to the transmission of an object—the content of a message—as it does in forensic interpretations.) The socio-rhetorical exegetical interpretation has legitimately shown that sharing the gospel-story with others is transforming their former ideology—framed and conveyed by another master-story. But this interpretation is also clearly contextually framed. Sharing the gospel-story is transforming an exclusive and abusive ideology of injustice by replacing it with an inclusive and gracious ideology of justice, the justice of God—and being transformed by participating with them in broader community. Therefore, interpreters who read Romans with concerns for injustices in their contextual situations pay close attention to the role of the gospel-story in challenging exclusivist ideologies and in promoting an inclusive covenantal community for Christ-followers as well as for their neighbors. Scripture and gospel are closely intertwined. The content of the “gospel of God” (1:1; and not merely the “gospel of Jesus Christ”) is the covenantal story of God interacting with the people of God in the history of Israel—the gospel of God that the prophets articulated in Scripture (1:2)—as well as in the history of the Jews, of Jesus, and of the people of God among the Gentiles. This is what Paul presents by intermingling formulations regarding the gospel and Scripture both by Jewish Christ-followers and by Gentile Christ-followers (1:2–4), for the sake of addressing the contextual problems of his time; the community-centered ideological problem of divided communities in Rome as well as ideological issues related to life in the Greco-Roman culture (and its honor and shame system, 1:14) in the Roman Empire (all the Roman power-markers, from slave to Lord, recast into gospel-vocabulary) have been discussed in Chapter 4. This pointed to the contextual concern of Paul, as elucidated by socio-rhetorical exegeses. Of course, the community-centered contextual concerns in other times and places lead the interpreters to frame their interpretations in different ways, by emphasizing one or another of these community-centered textual features. Thus, for instance, through appropriate socio-rhetorical interpretation, Dieter Georgi and Neil Elliott, and Robert Jewett (his commentary and Captain America) privilege political features of Romans related to their contextual concerns. Similarly, because of

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contextual concerns for ideological issues in our times, in his commentary and other works Robert Jewett privilege cultural features of Romans.30 The interpretations of all the other themes, developed with a socio-rhetorical exegetical approach, are framed in related community-centered contextual ways. Being righteous/just is, in a socio-rhetorical exegesis, shown to be a reference to a way of life in community. Being righteous/just is interrelating in a proper or just way with other members in a community. It is having appropriate social interactions by following good norms—implementing virtues as Aristotle (and following him, the Stoics) called them—set by the ideology that governs life in this community. Virtues are not innate good inclinations that individuals would have by themselves. Virtues are learned through apprenticeship, and thus through life in a community. Good conduct arises from habits that in turn can only be acquired by repeated action and correction, through life in a community—making ethics intensely ideological. Being righteous/ just is something that one becomes by participating in the story of one’s community, and therefore learning to become a member of that community. Thus one cannot be righteous/just by oneself; one becomes righteous/just by entering and participating in the ideological story of the community. And so it is regarding the members of the covenantal community of the people of God—be it in the time of Israel, of Jesus, of Paul, or in any other times of the history of the people of God. Members of the community are righteous/just when they share in the gospel-story—when they gospelize. Conversely, in this socio-rhetorical reading framed by contextual concerns for life in community, any mention of “being righteous/just” and “righteousness/justice” is appropriately understood as a virtue (as a learned good practice in community). Therefore any interpretation which looks in Romans for teaching about “virtue” (and vices) or regarding “faithfulness” of the people of God to the covenant—as found in the history of receptions (see Chapter 7)—shows itself to be a community-centered contextual interpretation, which is framed by broad contextual concerns of the interpreters. Faithfulness/faith is an appropriate rendering of pistis (1:5) as a relational term in a socio-rhetorical reading of Romans and its inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning—an interpretation which also shows the traces of the interpreters’ contextual concerns. For the sake of Jewish Christ-followers and of Gentile (Greek and Roman) Christ-followers—Paul’s contextual concerns—Paul uses pistis to render both the Hebrew emunah and the Latin fides. Both of these terms refer to the submission to someone more powerful and to honoring that person. Thus (as we saw in Chapter 4) faithfulness/faith involves (a) the acknowledgment of God as one’s God and Christ as one’s Lord; and thus (b) good/faithful relations with God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and (c) good/faithful relations with other members of the community and the world at large (relations embedded in the gospel-story). Faithfulness/faith is trustfully entering the gospel-story as a covenantal story in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together” (as the rabbis say about the Haggadah) and participating into the gospel-story (faithfully “walking” according to 30

See again Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology, 1991; Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations, 2010, as well as his preceding books: The Rhetoric of Romans, 1990, and Liberating Paul, 1995; Jewett. The Captain America Complex, 1973; Saint Paul at the Movies, 1993; Paul the Apostle to America, 1994; Saint Paul Returns to the Movies, 1999; Captain America, 2003; and Romans (2007).

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its patterns—what rabbis call Halakah). Thus, the interpreters’ contextual concerns that such a socio-rhetorical, inclusive covenantal community interpretation posits are clear; faithfulness/faith involves discerning how the gospel-story unfolds in the story of our present-day communities/societies and faithfully walking with God in this story. Grace (charis, 1:5,7) is, in this interpretation (see Chapter 4), a relational, covenantal term designating a gracious, undeserved gift from God (and/or Christ) which also is a call to carry out a vocation—as Paul makes clear by interrelating grace with apostleship (1:5). It is a covenantal, community-centered gift/call that inscribes individuals (Paul) or groups (Jews or Gentiles as people of God, 1:7) in the covenantal/gospel-story with God, and therefore with the vocation of glorifying/honoring God as God (1:21; see also 4: 20, 15:8–11, 15:18). This is a community-centered vocation that in Midrash the rabbis called “sanctifying the Name” [of God] to speak about the vocation of the people of God. Failing to glorifying God is due to a rebellion against God (perceived as “partial,” 2:11). For Paul, the context of this understanding of charis is obviously his experience in the Jewish (Pharisaic) community; the interpreters’ broader contextual concerns are similar to those framing the interpretation of faithfulness. Salvation is then completely perceived from this community-centered perspective, which also continues to provide a contextual frame for the interpreter’s reading. Who needs to be saved? Communities, since it is a matter of being saved from a wrong ideology (whatever it might be) that leads us (members of the community) to find exclusive, hierarchical, abusive, oppressive community life normal–mirroring life in the Roman Empire, but also life in the present-day world, which is appropriately a contextual concern for many interpreters. Salvation is offered by the gospel as the covenantal story that it is. Being saved is faithfully participating in God’s story (the gospel-story which unfolds forever) with the people of God that is ruled by divine justice in inclusive covenantal communities. Then inclusive covenantal community life is what is viewed as the normal way of life—a normal way of life which is an ongoing contextual preoccupation for interpreters choosing this kind of reading.

God (and the righteousness/justice of God), Christ, the Spirit: Conceptions of the divine as contextual features framing a community-centered contextual perspective Because of their very designation as inclusive covenantal community understandings of the theological themes found in 1:1–32 (God, Christ, the Spirit), it is clear that these are framed by community-centered perspectives—and consequently by corresponding contextual concerns. As in Pharisaic and early Rabbinic Judaism, the understandings of such theological themes are framed by community-centered praxis—covenantal praxis—rather than by theological orthodoxy (as is commonly the case for their understandings in forensic interpretations). Regarding the interpretation of these theological concepts, our archaeology reveals only traces of contextual interpretation— but these traces (that we might have missed by themselves) are recognizable because they are consistent with the clear community-centered contextual framing we found earlier. It is enough to outline here what was presented in Chapter 4 to make this contextual character appear.

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God is envisioned as a covenantal God—the God of the inclusive covenant with Israel (the covenant as a gift/election, and a call/vocation to be the beloved Chosen People walking with God in life) and, as revealed by the gospel, also the God of the inclusive covenant with “God’s beloved in Rome” (1:7) and “throughout the world” (1:8) of the Gentiles. Indeed, Gentiles are now in a covenantal relationship with God through Christ. God is the God with whom they walk as the beloved Chosen People— the people that include all Christ-followers from among those who were previously excluded and are now included among God’s beloved. God intervened (in the past) in the time of Israel to establish the covenant and in the time of Jesus Christ to broaden this covenant so that it is now inclusive. In this interpretation God and the (inclusive) chosen people are in a reciprocal relationship: the chosen people obviously needs God’s gifts, righteousness/justice, and mercy; but God as a covenantal God also needs the chosen people so that God might be glorified (15:6–9). In this community-centered contextual perspective, there is necessarily a two-way relationship between God and the chosen people; both are tied together in the covenant. Christ Jesus—Christ/Messiah (1:1–5)—is similarly framed by a communitycentered perspective and contextual concerns for divisions in community and its relationship with the outside world. An orthodox theological view of Christ is suspended: it does not matter. This is expressed by the presentation of Christ as both (a) in agreement with Jewish Christ-followers, as son of David, the fulfillment of Scripture, the Christ/Messiah, in continuity with Judaism; and (b) in agreement with Gentile Christ-followers, as the resurrected one, the Lord, in relationship with the Spirit. These two different (conflicting) theological views are acceptable, because orthodoxy does not matter in an inclusive community-centered perspective. The essential is orthopraxy, which involves acknowledging the authority of Christ/Messiah (1:1, “Paul, a servant of Christ/Messiah Jesus”) and as Lord (the resurrected “Lord Jesus Christ,” 1:4, who demands “obedience of faith,” 1:5)—an authority acknowledged by both Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers, despite their distinct theological views. This acknowledgment of the authority of Christ/Messiah/Lord amounts to adopting a highly contextual countercultural attitude (in the Roman context, replacing the authority of the Lord Caesar by the paradoxical authority of Christ) uniting them as “called” (“called apostle,” 1:1, “called of Jesus Christ,” 1:5, “called saints,” 1:6) into the common vocation and mission of promoting an inclusive community (the body of Christ, 12:4–8) which turns out to be a countercultural community, where one feels indebted to everyone—including those who in the Greco-Roman culture are viewed as shameful and ignorant (1:14). The Spirit (of Holiness) is also a highly contextualized concept (by contrast with the doctrinal concept). By contrast with the Jewish Christ-followers’ view, the Spirit is associated with the Gentile Christ-followers’ view of the resurrection of Christ as the divine power that established his Lordship upon all of these outsiders—note the possible contextual concern to integrate these outsiders. The Spirit is also associated with the divine power that is transformative for believers (5:5, 7:6, 8:2–27, 9:1, 14:17, 15:13, 16, 19, 30—in most instances empowering a plurality of believers) as they carry out their vocation with obedience of faith in specific life-context.

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Apostle, saints, prayer, thanksgiving, and indebtedness: Conceptions of the believers’ life as contextual features framing a community-centered contextual perspective Apostle (Called Apostle) is, in this interpretation, explicitly marked by a communitycentered contextual perspective through the emphasis on the fact that this term designates Paul’s vocation (“called [by God] to be an apostle,” 1:1b) with a community dimensions. Furthermore, the phrase “slave of Christ” (1:1a) expresses that he was appointed by Christ in an ambassadorial role (Jewett), as the slaves of Caesar were appointed by Caesar with the authority to represent him. So Paul’s vocation as apostle is countercultural (as expressed by replacing Caesar by Christ). This vocation gives him the authority of representing and speaking in the name of God and Christ—as an ambassador. But this is also a covenantal vocation, associated with grace (charis, 1:5), an  undeserved gift related to the covenantal vocation of bringing people to glorify God (as Christ did, Rom 15:9). Thus, Paul’s vocation as apostle is to invite others to participate with him in the gospel-story (by “gospelizing,” 1:15) and to recognize themselves as called saints who also share the covenantal vocation of the apostle and of the people of  God of bringing people to glorify God. The community-centered contextual framing  of this understanding of vocation is clear: vocation necessarily involves leading the community of Christ-followers into community involvement. Why do people around them in society not glorify God? Of course, how could they when they are excluded, viewed as worthless, marginalized, and abused in one way or another—as they are in societies/communities framed by an exclusive ideology (such as that of the Greco-Roman world)? But they are in a position to glorify God by being called to share in the gospel-story and, therefore, to share in the inclusive covenantal community of Christ-followers, the people of God, they can share with them the undeserved grace/gift of participating in a community where they are honored by being recognized as worthy as anybody else—a recognition that is lacking in many contextual settings, and that might be a concern that leads interpreters to choose this interpretation. Thanksgiving (1:8), glorifying God, is community-centered, as may be expected. It is a central part of the covenantal praxis of the chosen people, who should constantly give thanks to God, as they carry out their vocation of bringing others to glorify God (the “sanctification of the Name”). And this thanksgiving should be most public, since glorifying God is a community-centered practice, calling attention to God’s blessings that one receives by interacting with other members of the covenantal community, and inviting others to join that community—the chosen people framed by the gospel-story. Prayer (1:9–10) involves praying for each other, and is therefore communitycentered. This is a “covenantal prayer” or “community prayer,” which is a major responsibility that Christ-followers have for each other (see also 15:30–32). Praying for each other reinforces one’s connection with others within the framework of their God-given common call and vocation. Therefore, such a community-centered prayer demands that we view our relations with others in terms of God’s will (1:10). For Paul’s readers in community-centered cultures (in most of the world, outside of the West)—often labeled “honor and shame” cultures—the community-centered

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understandings of all these themes are not surprising. So it is not surprising that we will find such interpretations in many of the receptions of Romans found throughout history and present-day cultures. These community-centered contextual interpretations of the key themes in Romans are clearly quite different from those of the other readings—as the Appendix makes explicit. It remains that, although they may be surprising for us in the Western world, these interpretations framed by a community-centered contextual perspective are grounded in legitimate exegeses (socio-rhetorical exegeses) and plausible interpretations (following an inclusive covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning). Yet interpretations that are religious/heteronomy-centered are themselves equally legitimate and plausible. Such systematic community-centered focus signals a particular and definite concern for issues and problems that belong to the community-centered contextual mode of existence. Such issues and problems do exist, take concrete and often alarming forms, and thus need to be addressed. Thus it is not surprising that interpreters contextually frame their interpretation in such community-centered ways. This affirmation in no way puts into question the legitimacy and plausibility of such interpretations. In certain contexts where community-centered problems need to be urgently addressed, this contextual interpretive choice might be the best—the one with the greatest ethical value. Yet—as we said earlier—since other interpretations seek to address other contextual concerns and are framed by them, the question is for each particular context: Which is the best? Which has the greatest ethical value, because it addresses the most urgent problems in this context?

IV Excavating the religious/heteronomy-centered contextual character of figurative realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretations of 1:1–32 In our archaeological dig (and the previous chapters), we have also identified the remains of religious buildings and spaces—the fossilized remains of interpretations framed by religious/heteronomy-centered contextual concerns. Some of the archaeologists/exegetes are exclusively devoted to the excavation of such religious buildings and spaces. The very shape of the religious spaces—an altar, prayer books, benches, pulpit—and the architectural characteristics of religious building which are already identified (in Chapter 5) need to be studied as an organic whole (as contextual features that frame a religious/heteronomous interpretation) so as to understand what they reveal about the religious life in the context of this “settlement.”

Sin, idolatry, and the anger/wrath of God as contextual features framing religious/heteronomy-centered interpretations As noted, realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations are religious/heteronomycentered, focused on the study of religious/heteronomy-centered features of the text (see Chapter 5). But as such features are also contextual. Thus realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations are also implicitly framed by the interpreters’ concerns for issues regarding the religious/heteronomous mode of human existence in their

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particular contexts. In this interpretive line of reasoning we can expect that the definitions of the key ethical and theological themes—here sin, idolatry, and the wrath God—are framed by contextual concerns related to heteronomous and religious experiences of one kind or another. Such experiences posit the reality that, for better or for worse, human beings (either as individuals or communities) are under the power of entities beyond their control (so they have “heteronomous” experiences). This is neither good nor bad. This is simply a dimension of human existence. In the same way that as human beings we cannot but be individuals (with autonomy) who live in communities (as relational beings), we also are finite beings under the power of “others,” and thus we are heteronomous beings with religious experiences of one kind or another. Any of these three contexts can be viewed as primary and therefore provides the contextual framework for an interpretation of Romans. Realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations are framed by contextual concerns for the heteronomous/ religious context of human experience. In order to elucidate the heteronomous contextual character of realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations and of the related critical exegetical interpretations focused on thematic and figurative textual features of Romans, it is enough to pay attention to the many ways in which Paul’s text and its interpretations express that, for better or for worse, humans are either “under powers” or, in certain cases, “freed from such powers”—and this as a result of interventions by still other powers. The “other” (Gk hetero, in “heteronomy”)—who/which enforces his/her/its rule (Gk nomos) and thus his/her/its power and/or authority upon an individual and/or a community, and this for better or for worse—has to be understood in the broadest possible way. This (powerful) “other” can be an individual (human or supernatural), a community (with its power structures; for example, that of the Roman Empire), but also entities with more diffuse negative or positive powers and authorities. Some of these powers and authorities can be labeled as being neutral or ambivalent, such as the diffuse powers of “cultural usages” and “customs” (a major meaning of nomos in classical Greek). Among negative powers and authorities, one can include the individuals, movements, and institutions that induce fearmongering (including, in modern days, through conspiracy theories and the like) and the resulting individual anxiety and collective paranoia.31 These negative powers and authorities also include the diffuse powers of passion, obsession, addiction, and anything else that would “separate us from the love of God.” These include what Paul calls “every ruler and every authority and power” (πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν, 1Co 15:24)— broad categories that might encompass many kinds of “powers”—as well as “death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, anything else in all creation” (Rom 8: 38–39). This longer list is in effect a warning that many things or entities that we might view in a positive light might be (or might become) negative powers and authorities that separate us from the love of God. Among positive powers and authorities that generate heteronomy, with Grenholm we must include one’s own 31

This paragraph was written during the 2016 US presidential campaign and while hearing many fearmongering discourses, especially from the “alt-right” movement. See again the excellent analysis of the devastating impact on cultures, societies, and individuals of conspiracy theories by Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006).

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child (who imposes her/his demands upon the mother in a loving [and reciprocal] relationship), but also one’s lover/partner (“being in love” as a two-way heteronomous relationship)—and therefore the sense of indebtedness that one has toward those one loves (13:8; 1:14), as well as, for instance, toward Jesus Christ (who enslaved Paul, 1:1), “the Spirit of holiness” (1:4) and “charismata” (spiritual gifts; 1:11), God (who transformed Romans into “God’s beloved,” ἀγαπητοί Θεοῦ,1:7)—each of them with the power to impose him/her/itself upon humans.32 Of course, individuals and communities prefer to be under benevolent powers, rather than under evil powers. So the primary contextual concern of interpreters are for the effects of evil powers, from global ones such as widespread famines, ongoing wars, and the increasing effects of climate change; to communitywide effects of evil powers, for instance, in the forms of oppressions, patriarchalism, sexism, racism, exploitation and abuse of all kinds; and to the effects of such evil powers on individuals, who make them agents of communitywide and global evil powers, because they are themselves under private evil powers in the form of all kinds of addictions, and of course constantly threatened by the imminence of their own death. Thus, with such contextual concerns, heteronomous/religious-centered interpreters readily recognize that Paul frequently emphasizes evil powers and their consequences. He writes to people whom he views as having been under the power of “the present evil age” from which they longed to be freed—as was achieved by Christ who came “to set us free from the present evil age” (ὅπως ἐξέληται ἡμᾶς ἐκ τοῦ αἰῶνος τοῦ ἐνεστῶτος πονηροῦ, Gal 1:4; cf. Rom 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world” that is, to this “evil age”: μὴ συσχηματίζεσθε τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ). Such a close attention to the heteronomous dimension of human experience readily opens the way to a dualistic perspective that posits a conflict between good and evil powers. Therefore, when heteronomy and the religious contextual dimension of human experience are viewed as primary, this dualistic perspective becomes dominant. Such is the case in Jewish and Christian apocalypticism and also in Paul’s letter to the Romans, when it is read following a realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretive line of reasoning (a legitimate and plausible reading; see Chapter 5). One readily identifies the central role of many heteronomous features in Paul’s text, provided one pays attention to them—as happens when interpreters have heteronomous/religious contextual concerns. Sin. The heteronomous/religious connotations of Paul’s view of sin are made explicit in 6:6: sin is a power that enslaves us, humans (δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ). Furthermore, “sin reigns in death” (ἐβασίλευσεν ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ, 5:21a): sin is an entity which has power (which “reigns”) over humans (see also 6:14, where the kingly power of sin is expressed by the verb κυριεύω—to be lord or master over, to rule, exercise dominion). Thus, sin as a power is closely associated with death. In 5:12, “so death spread to all because all have sinned,” death is posited as being caused by sin. Yet how should we understand “sin reigns in death.” Note how Paul speaks about 32

See the remarkable analysis of loving relationships in Grenholm, Motherhood and Love, 120–88. See also Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988). On Rom 13, see again Stubbs, Indebted Love: Paul’s Subjection Language in Romans (2013) and Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening (2015).

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death: “death reigned” (ἐβασίλευσεν) over humans from the time of Adam (5:14; 5:17); death lords over (κυριεύει, 6:9) someone. Thus, with Käsemann (158, see 140–158) we can recognize that in 5:21a (and throughout 5:12–21 and 6:1–23) Paul is speaking of a sphere of power—a sphere of negative power—to which both death and sin belong, a sphere which can be metonymically symbolized (and thus designated) by either of its dominant components: death or sin. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate 3:9b, πάντας ὑφ᾽ ἁμαρτίαν εἶναι (“all are under sin”) as “all are under the power of sin” (a common translation). With the same heteronomous/religious contextual concerns, following a realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretive line of reasoning grounded in a figurative exegesis, one readily recognizes that Paul contrasts the sphere of power of death and sin (to which, as we shall see, he also associates “the law”) with the sphere of power of grace (χάρις) and of Christ (5:17, 21), using the same vocabulary (the verb βασιλεύω, to reign, to have dominion). As Käsemann insists, Paul posits an apocalyptic perspective with a dualistic perspective that involves the confrontation of two spheres of power—the sphere of sin and death and the sphere of grace and life in Christ. These two spheres are not two successive periods, but two simultaneously present spheres of power from the time of Christ (Käsemann, 142). This is a realized-apocalyptic/messianic perspective that includes the expectation of a conflict between good and evil spheres of power. This is an interpretation framed by a heteronomous/religious contextual perspective. The concern conveyed by the emphasis on the power of death is clearly contextual. By definition, humans are mortal. Sooner or later, each of us will die; we cannot escape the power of death. Death most significantly contributes to define the context of our lives, which are often driven by concerns about death. Betraying a greater or lesser degree of anxiety, we are constantly doing everything we can in order to delay our own death (paying attention when crossing a street, eating regularly if at all possible, taking care of our health, etc.) and to prevent the death of those we love (protecting them as much as we can). Of course, it is always a losing battle. Nevertheless, in order to avoid death, we are holding on to life in all kinds of possible ways, including by attaching ourselves to whatever has (in our perception) some degree of permanence and “holding on for dear life,” as the expression goes—be it holding on to our family, a possession, a building, an institution, or a truth. Consequently, all aspects of our lives are marked by concerns—heteronomous concerns—about this power which frames our lives by the very fact that we attempt to resist it through many of our acts or attitudes that, consciously or not, are often death-defying. So death is indeed a power—a contextual heteronomous power—upon all of us, human beings. We are under the power of death, and there is nothing we can do about it. Our only hope is that someone/something more powerful might intervene on our behalf. But in which sense is sin a similar contextual heteronomous power? What does it mean to conceive of sin as a power? How is it associated with the power of death? In which sense is sin a power which keeps humans in its sphere and therefore is (or should be) of concern—of contextual concern—for all of us? Paul clarifies it in 1:18– 32, and already in 1:18: “Because the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of humans who hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness (τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων).”

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In Chapter 5, we discussed at length this translation of 1:18—a translation which is as legitimate as the common translation, “suppress the truth.” The phrase “hold fast to the truth” describes the activity of sinners—people under the wrath of God—as they slip into idolatry (1:19–23). The contextual dimension of this phrase is suggested by the above comments regarding the contextual dimension of death as a power. “Holding fast to the truth” is a death-defying attitude. It is “holding on for dear life” to the truth that one has received. People become sinners by this very attitude toward the truth; they grab it, appropriate it, seize it, hold on to it, precisely because it is a real truth and therefore they take it to be something which has permanence and which would give them permanence if they possess it. And so they hold fast to it. That interpreters should be contextually concerned by such attitude is clear: everybody around them have this “sinful” attitude, “holding on for dear life” to any real truth they have, and doing so by being driven by fear of death. And the interpreters themselves have to acknowledge that this is a problem they exemplify in their own lives. Since this truth, ἀλήθεια, is by definition what has certainty, validity, dependability, and since this truth has its origin with God (“God has shown it to them,” 1:19) and is about God (“they knew God,” 1:21), it seems that “holding fast to the truth” should be the right thing to do. Shouldn’t it? This is the view that concerns the religious/heteronomycentered interpreters, because in their contexts this is the universally accepted response: “holding fast to the truth”—especially when this truth is a divine revelation about God’s nature—is, of course, what believers should do. But Paul indicates that this “holding fast to the truth” is necessarily twisted by “unrighteousness” (it is ἐν ἀδικίᾳ, “in unrighteousness”). “Holding fast to the truth” turns this truth upside down by the death-defying quest for permanence that seeks to overcome the anxiety generated by death and its power—and in the process, unleashes the deadly (death-bringing) power of sin in the form of idolatry (1:19:23) and its destructive consequences. Idolatry is the typical sin—and is most significant for a religious/heteronomous perspective. As discussed in Chapter 5, idolatry is twisting/deforming a particular revelatory divine manifestation by absolutizing it in the process of holding fast to it. Far from being a lack of religious fervor, idolatry is religious fanaticism that absolutizes a revelation, which is true but partial. The contextual features of this choice of interpretation of idolatry is similar to those of the interpretation of sin; interpreters choose this interpretation to address the contextual dangers of religious fanaticism. This interpretation is of course grounded in Paul’s text, and here more specifically by taking note that Paul is not denying that the so-called natural revelation of God’s “eternal power and divine nature” in creation (1:20) is true revelation. He affirms it. Humans can and do recognize God’s power and divine nature by looking at God’s amazing creatures: human beings, birds, quadrupeds, and reptiles. Observing these creatures one can recognize a true revelation of the creator, namely “the known about God” (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ, 1:19)—that is, “what can be known about God,” as most English translations have it so as to clarify that, because of human limitations, this knowledge of God is “partial” and/or “incomplete.” The problem with idolatry—also a contextual problem—is fanaticism. By “holding fast” to this true revelation—and exclaiming “I’ve got it; I know who God is”—idolaters view and act as if this partial revelation were complete and final, and therefore as if it were

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absolute. Therefore, deluded humans worship what manifested the partial revelation to them—in this case, certain creatures: human beings, birds, quadrupeds, and reptiles (1:23)—instead of worshiping and giving glory to the creator, God (1:21). Sin has power upon us because it is fueled by futility in thinking, senselessness, darkened minds, and foolishness (1:21–22) which make us “hold on for dear life” to these partial revelations by viewing them as absolute, complete, and final. In so doing sinners/idolaters confine themselves to the limited sphere of this absolutized partial revelation. Choosing this interpretation is a contextual move that interpreters may hope will lead to a teaching that will allow to confront the very concrete condition of the many individuals and communities which are trapped under the power of religious fanaticism. To understand that it is enough to note that religious fanaticism becomes a sphere in which a truth—true as it is—is viewed as excluding all other possible truths, and therefore as excluding all those who hold these other truths. This is the sphere of obsession in which sinners are trapped in obsessive-compulsive behaviors related to the absolutized truth. This is the sphere of addiction (comparable to drug or behavioral addiction) in which sinners become totally dependent on this absolutized truth. It is not that this truth is not “holy, just and good” (as Paul says about the law in 7:12); it is! But when absolutized, it becomes deadly. Being entrapped in any idolatrous sphere is being entrapped into destructive behaviors—self-destructive behaviors as well as destructive behaviors toward others. And the sinner/idolater is powerless to stop this cycle. Indeed, it is appropriate for interpreters to be concerned about the power of sin/ idolatry and its destructive consequences. Unfortunately, they are omnipresent in the concreteness of our life-contexts, whatever that might be. The Wrath of God. The good news—a contextual good news for interpreters—is that, according to the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations, these evil powers—actual evil powers—are in fact manifestations of the wrath of God. This means that these negative transformative powers are under the control of God—and not manifestations of some evil gods or other evil supernatural or natural powers, which would be totally out of control. As we saw in Chapter 5, this is good news. The gospel reveals “the power of God for salvation” (1:16) to believers who through faith/vision can see not only the positive manifestations of God’s transformative power—the manifestation of God’s righteousness through which evil powers are broken (1:17)—but also they can see through faith/vision that the manifestations of evil powers are under God’s control. Indeed, sinners/idolaters cannot hope to free themselves from the powers of sin and idols. But even these evil powers are under God’s control; they are often God’s interventions: God gave them up; God bound them; God enslaved them to such powers. Because of the gospel, through faith/vision believers can recognize these evil powers for what they are: manifestations of God’s power, and therefore under God’s control. Therefore, as believers have experienced in their own lives—as Paul and the Romans did—there is hope. Before becoming believers, as sinners/idolaters they were themselves under such powers that led them to destructive behaviors—such as Paul’s destructive absolutization of the true revelation he had received as a Jew and his destructive behavior as persecutor of the church. But through manifestations of God’s righteousness as a transformative power, they have been freed from the wrath of God.

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They were freed from the power of sin/idolatry and its destructive manifestations, as they were brought in the sphere of God’s power, enslaved to Christ (1:1), enslaved to God (6:22), enslaved to righteousness (6:18). In Rom 1:1–32, Paul does not yet explain the process through which sinners/idolaters are freed from the power of idolatries/sins (this process is presented in Rom 6–8, and therefore discussed in Volume II). But we are in a position to address the contextual preoccupation of the interpreters: What does it mean to be freed from the power of sin/idolatry? It soon becomes clear that this is very much a contextual issue. Following the description of the idolatry of Gentiles in 1:18b–32 (which includes allusions to biblical condemnations of idolatry), for Jewish Christ-followers the temptation would be to reject all idols together with the idolatrous attitude of the idolaters. But as 2:1–3 warns, this is a totally wrong attitude. Actually, an idolatrous attitude! The one who condemns is actually claiming to have the truth, and holding fast to it (1:18b) by passing judgment upon others on the basis of this truth (2:1)—that one holds to be a complete and final revelation, even though it is only a partial revelation. Rejecting idolatry should not be a total rejection of the idols themselves, because (remember!) idols are the absolutization of a true, although partial, revelation. Rejecting idolatry— and being freed from idolatry—involves affirming the true though partial revelation still contained in the idol. And so when encountering idolaters—including Greeks but also barbarians (1:14), possibly close to those described in 1:19–32, and all the idolaters that concern so greatly interpreters in their contexts—one also encounters a partial revelation that one might not have received. Therefore, one is indebted to these idolaters, as Paul said he was indebted to Greeks and barbarians alike. Being freed from the power of sin/idolatry—and therefore, believing without absolutizing the revelations we have received—involves being in a position to welcome and receive from others the revelations that they have received, even if they make idols out of them. Having a life freed from the power of sin/idolatry means that we will always feel indebted to others for bringing to us new revelations and gifts from God, which enrich our lives—a most valuable contextual teaching for interpreters who chose such an interpretation.

Salvation, charis/grace, gospel, Scripture, faith/vision, thanksgiving, indebtedness, being righteous as contextual features framing a religious/heteronomy-centeredcontextual perspective Salvation—as well as all the other themes in figurative interpretations—is distinctively framed when envisioned from a religious/heteronomy-centered contextual perspective. Who needs to be saved? Of course, all humans! All of us are in bondage to evil powers as part of the fallen world. These evil powers can be named in modern vocabulary to show why interpretations framed by a heteronomous/religious contextual perspective reflect actual concerns that present-day interpreters do have (when following this interpretive line). From a realized-apocalyptic/messianic perspective, all individuals and all communities are, of course, in bondage to finitude (death), and therefore in bondage to all kinds of idolatrous attempts to escape death—whatever might be the consequences for others. But salvation from death is the last step: it is “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor 15:26). But from this realized-apocalyptic/messianic perspective, all individuals and communities are in bondage to many other powers. More often than not, individuals

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are in bondage to “sin”; that is, to some kind of idolatry, be it in the form of obsessions, addictions, or in the form of total devotion to something very good (a true gift from God) to which one commits totally oneself: such as a total devotion to a ministry/serving God (remember Paul’s total devotion to the traditions of his ancestors!), or to one’s work (including in service professions), or to one’s family, or to one’s beloved spouse. Then these good gifts from God become evil powers keeping us in bondage. Similarly, more often than not, communities are trapped under collective idolatries (that turn good gifts and concerns into cultural or political extremisms stoked by fear and anxiety; fascism, imperialism, colonialism; bigotry, sexism, patriarchalism, racism), and are trapped under political and economic realities that they perceive as inescapable powers; and the world (“the whole creation,” κτίσις, 8:19–21) is also trapped under threat of destruction— including ecological or nuclear destruction. There is no way for humans—either as individuals or as communities—to overcome or even to escape these powers of evil. This heteronomous/religious contextual reading of Romans is quite pessimistic— and among my students, those from privileged North American milieux find this view of life totally unrealistic. They readily say in substance: Of course, we can overcome evil inclinations and social problems. Otherwise there is no hope! But there is hope, isn’t it? We can do it. As individuals empowered by God through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we can overcome our evil inclinations (as forensic interpretations contend). As communities empowered to walk humbly with our God, we can prolong with God the history of Israel in the gospel story doing justice and loving kindness as the inclusive people of the covenant. (following Micah 6:8, as inclusive covenantal community interpretations contend)

But, for interpreters who choose this realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation these optimistic views (1) are contextually unrealistic (as current situations with ongoing famines, wars, oppressions, abuses of all kinds show, without even speaking of the imminence of our own death) and (2) fail to account for the many features of Paul’s text that emphasize the powerlessness of individuals and communities to overcome and escape these evil powers. Positively, such interpreters can affirm that the figurative reading of Romans and its realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretive line of reasoning framed by a heteronomous/religious contextualized perspective do not deny the (ethical) responsibility of individuals and communities. Yet they insist that this responsibility is framed by the recognition that the only possibility for salvation is through divine intervention. This conclusion is based upon a legitimate and plausible reading of Romans and can be welcomed as a realistic (thus valuable) contextual conclusion. There is hope only if salvation is the ongoing transformative process through which God is “recapturing the fallen world for the sovereignty of God” (Käsemann). How should we understand the ways interpreters relate their heteronomous/religious contextual concerns with what Paul says about salvation as transformative divine interventions in Romans 1? To answer this question, we need to dust off these fossilized remains. First, interpreters can recognize that Paul presents salvation as an ongoing process. In view of the multitude of evil powers that, in the present, keep all humans (and the

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world) in bondage, and in view of Paul’s understanding of the present as the messianic time (opened by the Messiah’s resurrection and extending until the last judgment and the giving of either eternal life or wrath and fury, 2:7–10), salvation needs to be viewed as an ongoing process. Second, interpreters need to acknowledge that in the present messianic time (also the interpreters’ time!), the power of God is manifested through the Spirit, as it was in the case of the Messiah Jesus, in Christ-like ongoing salvation events. Each manifestation of salvation is Christ-like in that it involves a decisive intervention of the power of God comparable to its intervention in Christ. As the resurrection freed Christ/Messiah from the power of death “in power through the Spirit of holiness” (ἐν δυνάμει κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης, 1:4), so we should anticipate that ultimately “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you” (8:11 NRS), but also that each of the other evil powers is defeated through a similar divine intervention—and this until the end when all evil powers will be defeated (8:35–39).33 In each case, such divine interventions mark the saved individuals (e.g., Paul or possibly the present-day interpreters) or saved communities (e.g., God’s beloved in Rome or possibly the interpreters’ community) as Christ-like. They are beneficiaries of an intervention of God’s power similar to the one that took place in the case of Christ, thus what happened to them is Christ-like, even though for these individuals or communities it is only preliminary. In other words, these saved individuals or communities are fulfillments of the type “Christ resurrected from the dead,” and thus of the type “Christ freed from a death-like power.” As Christ was resurrected when the power of God/the Spirit intervened to free him from the power of death, so an individual’s or community’s experience of being freed from a particular evil power shows that a transformative divine intervention has taken place. So “Saul” is transformed into “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” (1:1a); Romans are transformed into “beloved of God” and “saints” (1:7); and Christ-followers are transformed into a Christlike body (“one body in Christ,” not conforming to this world and being transformed by the renewal of their minds: 12:2–5). And the same is true in the present context of the interpreters when an individual is freed (for example, from an addiction), or when a community is freed (for example, from a collective idolatry). What happened to the individual or to the community is the result of a Christ-like divine intervention—in each instance, a transformative intervention. Salvation and Charis/Grace. As Paul makes clear regarding himself, he was freed from his own idolatrous situation as Saul—“zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (that he absolutized) and thus “violently persecuting the church of God” (Gal 1:13– 14)—and transformed into “Paul a slave of Christ Jesus” (Rom 1:1a). In this way, he was freed from bondage to some evil power (sin, 6:6); this is the deconstructive side of salvation. But Paul was also placed into bondage to Christ, a constructive transformation which is also a call/vocation to be “apostle.” Therefore this salvific transformation is not simply being freed from an evil power; constructively, it also involves (a) being given a new identity (“Paul” instead of “Saul”) under a new Master and Lord (Christ Jesus), (b) being appointed to a new vocation (his apocalyptic/

33

See Sprinkle, Paul and Judaism Revisited, 102–21. As Sprinkle shows, obedience in Paul’s letters is regularly connected to an ongoing empowerment by the Spirit.

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messianic vocation as apostle), and also (c) being empowered with what is needed to carry out this vocation: being endowed with charis, an empowering spiritual gift. So Paul (and his companions, “we”) “received charis/grace and apostleship” (1:5). In sum, the salvific Christ-like interventions of God are transformative in two ways: (a) in a deconstructive way, they free people from the bondage to some evil power; and (b) in a constructive way, they also include an empowerment through a spiritual gift (charis or charisma) that all Christ-followers—including those in the present context of the interpreters—receive to carry out a specific vocation. So Paul invokes charis/ grace upon the Romans (1:7). With this spiritual gift they will be empowered to carry out their vocation as beloved of God and saints. And when Christ-followers meet, they share or exchange empowering spiritual gifts (charismata), as Paul anticipates will be the case when he meets with the Romans (1:11–12). In addition, as we have seen (Chapter 5), Paul posits that all (including idolaters) have received from God revelations and/or spiritual gifts—although their gifts might need to be “freed from bondage,” namely when they have been transformed into idols. Faith/Vision and Salvation. Understanding how salvation can be viewed as a series of ongoing transformative Christ-like divine interventions—including in the time of the interpreters—is facilitated by taking into account that Paul ties salvation with the power of God, the gospel, and faith in his thesis statement: “The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν εἰς σωτηρίαν παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι, 1:16b). How does this transformative salvation occur? It occurs through the power of God, manifested in “the gospel” “to everyone who has faith.” As discussed, in this interpretive line (see Chapter 5), pistis is best rendered by faith/ vision, because it primarily involves seeing (recognizing) manifestations of salvation that involve divine transformative interventions in the believers’ present, as well as those which took place in the past to which the gospel and Scripture testify. Such a faith/vision is itself a gift from God (so Paul gives thanks to God for the faith of the Romans, 1:8). From a contextual perspective, looking around oneself without faith/vision, one would only see manifestations of evil powers: wars, murders, abuses of all kinds, oppressions, unwarranted passions, lies, and the like—that is, what dominates most headlines in newspapers, television newscasts, and digital news. But by looking around oneself through the eyes of faith (with faith/vision as “corrective glasses”) one can see something else: namely, that God is at work in the midst of all this evil. There are divine interventions through which individuals and communities are saved, provided that they have faith/vision and thus that they recognize what God (or the Spirit or the risen Christ) is in the process of doing among them and the gifts they have received from God. Faith/vision is the sine qua non for salvation. This is the crux of Paul’s thesis statement: “The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith/vision.” Without faith/vision, there is no salvation. But with faith/vision, there is salvation, both (a) in the sense that one recognizes that God is indeed intervening and (b) in the sense that one experiences salvation and is freed from the control of given evil power—freed from some form of sin/idolatry—and is empowered by some kind of charis. Let us first consider the

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contextual features of the way in which, through faith/vision, believers can recognize salvific interventions of God. Gospel and Faith/Vision. From the standpoint of faith/vision, the “gospel of God” (1:1) is not only the “good news” of God’s saving intervention in Christ Jesus (so “gospel of God”; the gospel performed by God in Christ), but also the news that now—a very contextual “now”—“God has inaugurated the eschatological liberation . . . by setting up Jesus as messianic agent of the promised liberation” (Byrne), as “the Lord Jesus Christ/Messiah” (1:4). This means that the gospel is viewed—from the standpoint of faith/vision—as a set of promises that God intervenes in the present (whenever might be the believers’ present, including the present of the interpreters’ context) in the same way that God intervened in Jesus Christ/Messiah, the son of David raised from the dead (1:2–4). What is distinctive about the gospel is that it reveals that now is the messianic time; consequently, in these last days, now is the time when God is in the process of fulfilling all promises, all “types,” all prophecies. More specifically, the gospel offers three kinds of types that prefigure God’s interventions in the believers’ present— including the interpreters’ contextual present. Thus for believers, hearing/reading the gospel amounts to putting on “corrective glasses” that give them eyes of faith allowing them to recognize in their present—since this is a “messianic present”—God’s interventions similar to God’s interventions in the gospel. These are of three kinds. 1. The primary divine intervention in the gospel is, of course, in Jesus Christ/ Messiah. In order to recognize Christ-like divine interventions in their present, believers need to ask as they hear the gospel (1:2–4): What are death-like situations in our experiences in our present context? Then, are there any signs that people are freed from these death-like situations? Are there manifestations of resurrection in our experiences? Are there people empowered by spiritual gifts (charis, charismata)? But one should not limit the gospel to its concluding part, 1:4. 2. The gospel also includes the divine intervention presented in 1:3: “The gospel concerning his Son, who has come from the seed of David (τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ) according to the flesh” (1:3). So the question also is: Who in our present can be identified as God’s child, as Jesus Christ was “from the seed of David”? Even though Paul is saying very few words about Jesus’s ministry before his resurrection, this aspect of the gospel cannot be ignored. It also involves types and promises, and therefore it is appropriate that through faith believers should ask: in our present context, who are God’s children, like Jesus Christ “from the seed of David”? 3. In addition, the gospel includes Paul’s experience as well as that of Christfollowers such as the Romans. For present-day interpreters and their context, these are also important (and often most helpful) types that most directly prefigure divine interventions in the experience of present-day believers. They can ask: In our present, who is Paul-like? Who are Romans-like? Of course, the answers to all the above questions are not obvious! It is not obvious what the transformative manifestations of salvation are in the present day. Recognizing them

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demands discernment. And this discernment only occurs when believers contemplate the dire situations around them through the eyes of faith (focused by the gospel as corrective glasses)—a contemplation that needs to be ongoing, diligent, assiduous, and sustained. And then, at times, they have a glimpse at gospel-like manifestations of God in their present. Prayer and Faith/Vision. Contemplation is what prayer is all about in this realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretive line of reasoning and its heteronomous/religious contextual perspective. Prayer (1:9, 10) involves confident submission (heteronomy) to the promise of the gospel: blindly believing that, in the gospel, God made promises; blindly believing that, as promised, God is in the process of fulfilling prophecies and “types”; and blindly believing that God is doing so, even when we cannot see it. Contemplative prayer involves seeking to discern God’s mysterious activity—by definition, not a self-evident activity—in the concrete experiences of those for whom one prays (eventually including one’s own concrete experiences). Far from being disembodied, such heteronomous contemplative prayers are highly contextual!34 It is in the concreteness of life around them that believers seek to discern what the gospellike divine interventions are—that is, the divine interventions that are like the types and promises of the gospel. Scripture and Faith/Vision. Yet for believers the promises and types of God’s salvific interventions are not merely those found in the gospel; they include all those found in the Scriptures. The gospel fulfills what God “promised beforehand through the prophets in the holy Scriptures” (1:2). Therefore, believers can recognize in the gospel how God has fulfilled promises and types of Scripture. But, the gospel does not exhaust the rich treasure of types, promises, and prophecies that Scripture is— as is demonstrated by Paul’s many references and allusions to Scripture in Romans. Similarly for believers, all the Scriptures remain a vast series of types and promises that are pointers—“corrective glasses”—that, in addition to the types and promises of the gospel, focus the eyes of faith of the believers upon what God is in the process of doing: God defeating powers of evil in their present context (as Jesus was raised from the dead); God engendering children (as Jesus Christ was engendered “from the seed of David”) and engendering a beloved people of God (as Israel was, for example, Exod 4:22, Hos 11:1; and as the Romans were, Rom 1:7); and also God empowering people by giving them a spiritual gift (charis, charisma) that they need to carry out their vocation, whatever it might be. Thanksgiving and Faith/Vision. Faith/vision allows believers to recognize in Scripture and the gospel the types, prophecies, promises that prefigure what God is in the process of doing in their present. So, through prayer/contemplation, with the eyes of faith they can eventually see in front of them new interventions of God in their present, and then give thanks to God for these interventions. As noted (Chapter 5), Paul consistently gives thanks for divine interventions in the life of other people—and surprisingly, never for interventions in his own life. Paul always and exclusively gives thanks to God for blessings received by other people: in 1:8, for the Romans’ faith as

34

One of the points that Sarah Coakley makes in “Kenosis and Subversion,” Swallowing a Fishbone? (ed. Hampson; London: SPCK, 1996), 82–111.

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a spiritual gift from God. Paul sees what God is doing in and among other people; he sees that they have been blessed by an intervention of God, the Spirit, or the risen Christ. Thus, appropriately, he thanks God for the Romans’ faith. More generally, this means that the believers’ faith/vision needs to be other-centered. Faith/vision involves not so much looking for what God is doing for oneself, but looking for what God is doing for others and through others—including by freeing them from the bondage to one or another kind of evil powers, but also by endowing them with particular spiritual gifts (through which they serve others). In 1:8 Paul recognizes that God has endowed the Romans with the gift (charis) of faith. Similarly, seeing with their faith/vision that God has blessed others with a specific gift, believers are in a position to give thanks to God for this new manifestation of God that they see; and indeed, they should do so. Idolaters fail “to glorify God as God and to give thanks” to God (1:21) for what God has done for others (in this case in creation), because in their self-centered way they hold fast for themselves to any new revelation. By contrast, Paul and other believers (people with actual faith/vision who seek to discern what God has done and is doing for others) give thanks to God and “glorify God as God” for the spiritual gifts that others received—whatever these gifts might be. Indebtedness, Faith/Vision, and Salvation. We can now discuss how faith/vision is the sine qua non for salvation, in a second sense. Faith/vision is that through which one experiences salvation in one’s context, in that it is that through which one is freed from the control of particular evil powers—freed from some form of sin/idolatry. With the guidance of the many scriptural and gospel types and promises, as noted, through the eyes of faith, believers see the spiritual gifts or revelations that others have received. But this seeing is not passive. Believers also partake of the spiritual gifts and divine revelations that they recognize others have received. For instance, when looking at idolaters (pagans!) through the eyes of faith, what do believers (and the interpreters) see? Together with Paul, they can see in their context that idolaters have received true revelations: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever 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” (1:19–20). Indeed idolaters have made a mess out of this revelation by absolutizing it (“holding fast to” it, 1:18b) and therefore by worshiping representations of the creatures in which they could see God’s “eternal power and divine nature”—instead of glorifying God. But this revelation in nature/creation is a true revelation that most city-dwellers (and Jews, like Paul, who are totally focused upon the God manifested in the history of Israel) completely miss; they are ignorant of this revelation of God in nature. But now looking at such idolaters through the eyes of faith, believers can now see and recognize and affirm that in creation one can see God’s “eternal power and divine nature.” Thus from these pagans/idolaters (even if they remain idolaters), these believers have received a revelation—a divine revelation, a spiritual gift—that they did not have and lacked. Therefore (as discussed in Chapter 5) Paul can exclaim: “I am indebted to barbarians” (1:14). These barbarians as pagan idolaters had a revelation—yes, a true revelation, a true spiritual gift! Even though they may have made a mess out of it (as idolaters usually

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do), by looking at them through the eyes of faith, Paul saw this revelation or spiritual gift that he did not have—a revelation different from all the wealth of revelations he already had. So through these barbarians, Paul is aware that he has received a gift or revelation from God. Therefore, he is indebted to them. As a Jew, a beneficiary of all of Scripture and of all the traditions of his ancestors (Gal 1:14), Paul was in a position to say together with other Israelites: “To them [to us] belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs” (9:4–5). In other words, Paul was in the privileged position to claim: “I got it”; “I have all the revelation about God that I need”; “I should therefore ‘hold fast’ (1:18) to this revelation.” And he did so: “Advancing in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Gal 1:14). As a result he persecuted the church of God that proclaimed an additional revelation in Jesus Christ—the destructive attitude of any idolater who absolutizes a true revelation. He could have continued to do so after benefiting from the revelations of the gospel; once again he could have claimed: “I got it”; “I have all the revelation about God that I need”; “I should therefore ‘hold fast’ (1:18) to this extended revelation.” But this would have meant once again absolutizing the revelation he had received, making an idol out of it, and therefore rejecting and condemning those who claim to have received another revelation, whether or not they made an idol out of it (2:1). He would have made out of the gospel an idol—a complete and final revelation, an absolute—instead of holding it as a set of promises and types that point to new revelations, new gifts from God, and therefore new religious experiences that believers should see through their faith/ vision. He would then have rejected in advance all other possible revelations and revelatory gifts from God. But, because of his faith/vision, Paul did not do so. On the contrary, he acknowledges—he confesses: “Not only to Greeks but also to barbarians, not only to the educated but also to the ignorant, I am a debtor.” I am indebted to all of these because I receive from them revelations that I did not have, spiritual gifts that I did not have. In this in the same way that he expects to receive from the Romans spiritual gifts that he does not have, even as he shares with them the spiritual gifts that he has received (1:11–12). And once again the contextual teaching that interests the interpreters is self-evident. Righteous. Righteous persons (1:17b), such as Paul, are persons in whose lives transformative interventions of God (the righteousness of God) can be seen through faith/vision (and therefore are “revealed,” 1:17) and therefore persons who are in the sphere of power of God’s righteousness. Thus, as Paul says of his own ministry— affirming that he can “only speak of the things which Christ has done through me” (15:18)—saying that someone is righteous is not saying anything about special achievements or conduct achieved by this person, but of what God (or Christ or the Spirit) have done in this person. Such righteous persons can be identified through faith/vision in Scripture (e.g., Hab 2:4 and all the biblical personages in whose lives God intervened) and the gospel (Christ), but also in all those in one’s life situation in whom through faith/vision a believer can recognize transformative interventions of God. And, as we noted, it is through this recognition and affirmation of manifestations

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of God in others that believers—including the interpreters in their context—are themselves freed from their own idolatries and thus transformed by God.

God (and God’s righteousness), Christ, the Spirit: Conceptions of the divine as contextual features framing a religious/heteronomous contextual perspective God and the Righteousness of God. We can be brief. From the above, it is clear that in this perspective God is envisioned as a God who intervenes in powerful transformative ways in human affairs—in the past (both in the history of the Chosen People and in Jesus Christ), in the present (of Paul, of the Romans, and of other Christ-followers), as well as in the future, and therefore in the context of the interpreters. As we noted, on the one hand, these transformative divine interventions are manifestations of the righteousness of God that needs to be viewed as the sphere of God’s power. Therefore, a righteous person is a person in whose life the transformative intervention of God (the righteousness of God) can be seen (recognized) through faith/vision. These are the transformative divine interventions that can be deconstructive (freeing people from bondage to sin/idolatry) but also constructive (endowing people with gifts of all kinds, including those that they transformed into idols). On the other hand, these transformative divine interventions can be punishing manifestations of the wrath of God, in the present when God stops intervening, abandoning human beings to their idolatrous desires. So interpreters with a heteronomous/religious contextual perspective expect that God is intervening in their present. Therefore, the contextual concern of such interpreters can be to help believers (eventually including themselves) to have authentic experience of God’s interventions in religious experiences grounded in contemplative prayers with a faith/vision appropriately guided by the types, promises, and prophecies of the gospel and Scripture. These transformative interventions of God can be in the form of interventions by the risen Christ and by the Spirit of Holiness— both of them manifestations of God’s power in the present of believers. Christ is indeed understood here with an emphasis on his resurrection. As the risen Christ, he is the “Son of God with Power” and “our Lord (Kyrios).” In him, “God has inaugurated the era of messianic liberation by taking the step of setting up the key instrument of that liberation” (Byrne). “The ‘Kyrios’ is a representative of the God who claims the world [in the present] and who with the church brings [in the present] the new creation in the midst of the old world that is perishing” (Käsemann). Thus, for present-day interpreters, Christ/Messiah brings salvation through his interventions in power as the risen Christ in the life of believers, the church, and the world, freeing them from bondage to sin/idolatry (following Paul’s exclusive emphasis on Christ’s resurrection in 1:3–5, with no mention of his death and cross). Thus, the eleventh-century designation “Christ Pantocrator” (Christ the Almighty) is appropriate, pointing both to Christ’s active power on earth and in heaven—the most widespread representation of Christ in Byzantine iconography and in Orthodoxy. As we suggested above regarding salvation, the divine interventions freeing people from bondage (including in the context of the interpreters) can be said to be “Christlike,” but they can also be said to be powerful interventions (iconoclastic, breaking

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idols) by the risen Christ, that believers can expect in any context. Similarly, the Spirit of holiness is a manifestation of divine power in human life (as Paul emphasizes in 8:2–27).

Apostle, called, gospelizing, saints, called: Conceptions of the believers’ life as contextual features framing a religious/heteronomous contextual perspective It follows that both Paul as “called apostle” (1:1, 5) and the Romans as “called saints” (1:7) have been transformed by a divine intervention—as interpreters and people in their context can expect to be transformed. As Paul makes explicit in his case, apostleship is the vocation that resulted from a primordial religious experience (being encountered by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, Gal 1:11–16) that transformed him, giving him the vocation apostleship and empowering him to carry it out. Apostleship is a specific charisma (1:5; Käsemann, 6), a vocation for which he (as well as others, “we”) is empowered by a spiritual gift (charis). Similarly, the Romans by being “called” (by God) have been transformed by a divine intervention into “saints” and into a people “beloved by God.” In brief (see Chapter 5), God and the risen Christ intervened in a deconstructive way in the experience of both Paul and the Romans, making them renounce their absolute idolatrous view of their former vocation (as the Jew Saul and as Gentiles). Yet they remained either Jewish or Gentile (and thus living “as not,” hôs mè), though with the freedom to carry out their new vocation as apostle or saints. In both cases their transformation was through some kind of Christic event—primordial experiences of the transformative power of God through being encountered by the risen Christ and being empowered through the receptions of the specific spiritual gift, which they need for their specific task/vocation (namely as is shown later in Romans, being Christ-like for others). As such, both Paul and the Romans are types that prefigure what interpreters can expect to experience in their own contexts—experiences of divine interventions that should also involve iconoclastic transformations (freeing them from some kind of idolatry), “calls” (or “vocations”), and endowment with spiritual gifts. Gospelizing. Sharing the Gospel (εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15) is a description of the vocation of both Paul and the Romans—and of believers in the interpreter’s context. As we saw in Chapter 5, the verb εὐαγγελίσασθαι is in the infinitive aorist middle. Since the middle voice emphasizes the subject’s/agent’s participation in the action, this verb expresses that Paul gospelizes even as he is gospelized, in this case by the Romans. As we emphasized, when taken seriously, the middle voice demands that we should avoid interpreting this verb as if it were an active voice; the middle voice means that the gospel is not an object that Paul possessed and then gave to the Romans. Sharing the gospel (gospelizing) is, for Paul, the mutual process (a) of sharing with the Romans his experience of eschatological liberation and the spiritual gifts (charismata) he had received (1:11–12), with the expectation they would welcome this good news; and (b) of welcoming from the Romans the good news of their own experiences of eschatological liberation and of the spiritual gifts they received.

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Sharing the gospel (as a mutual process) should continue with interpreters who are reading Romans with heteronomous/religious contextual concerns. The types in 1:1–32, including God’s transformative interventions in the experiences of Paul and the Romans, should be read as prefiguring what God is doing in their present contexts. These types should guide the interpreters’ eyes of faith/vision so as to allow them to see God’s transformative interventions in other people in their present contexts. Then as they give thanks to God for these interventions, and therefore as they affirm that others have received gifts from God—spiritual gifts and revelations—that they do not have, they would be freed from claiming that whatever spiritual gifts and revelations they themselves have received are absolute (a complete and final revelation). Therefore, they will be freed from the temptation to “hold fast to the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18). They would be freed from their bondage to an idolatry; they would be saved from the power of sin. *** These brief reviews of (a) individual-centered contextual interpretations, (b) community-centered contextual interpretations, and (c) religious/heteronomy-centered interpretations confront interpreters with an important interpretive choice: which kind of interpretation should they adopt in their particular contexts? This decision is fraught with ethical responsibilities. As we repeatedly noted, for Christian believers Romans is Scripture. Therefore, they read this letter so as to discern a Word-to-live-by in their particular contexts. Whether we, exegetes, like it or not, the interpretations we advocate are viewed as authoritative by believers. Thus, as exegetes we have to assume responsibility for our own choice of interpretation, not only for ourselves but also for others—including for those Christian believers around us who might (directly or indirectly through their preachers) view our scholarly work as authoritative. We have a responsibility because, as the present chapter has shown, each kind of interpretation is framed by specific contextual concerns. Therefore, by advocating one interpretation (as we often do) we are also advocating a specific contextual teaching—either individual-centered, or communitycentered, or religious/heteronomy-centered teaching—which might be appropriate, helpful, valid as a Word-to-live-by for believers in particular contexts, but which might also be inappropriate, harmful, hurtful, or invalid as a Word-to-live-by for believers in such contexts. Therefore, from the beginning of this volume, I have strongly advocated that our task as exegetes is not to choose an interpretation for others. Our role is not to read for others, proposing to them the “right reading,” as if they could not read by themselves. It is not our role to choose for them the right interpretation they should adopt in their contexts, as if we knew their contexts and as if they could not decide by themselves.35 On the contrary, our role is to point out to readers of Romans (including believers) that they have a choice to make among three kinds of equally 35

This would reduce these readers of Romans to “subalterns” unable to speak for themselves, a demeaning attitude characteristic of colonialist discourse, as forcefully shown by Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg; Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 277–313.

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legitimate and plausible interpretations (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5), and also to point out the contextual character of each of these interpretations. This is what the present chapter has striven to do. The goal was not to question the motivations of exegetes for advocating one or another interpretation. Rather the goal was to make explicit the contextual implications of each of our interpretations, and ultimately (possibly through preachers) to help those who read Romans for a Word-to-live-by in their particular lifecontexts to be aware of the implications of choosing one interpretation rather than the others. Indeed, in particular contexts, certain interpretations are helpful, appropriate, and thus valid as a Word-to-live-by for believers, while, in other contexts, the same interpretations might be most inappropriate, harmful, hurtful (indeed, promoting violence), and thus invalid. To help raise all these issues concerning present-day contexts, Chapter 7 reviews how we find throughout the history of receptions contextualized interpretations which are akin to the three kinds of equally legitimate and plausible interpretations that read Romans either (1) for its theological logic following behind-the-text exegetical methodologies (the forensic theological interpretations, Chapter 3) or (2) for its rhetoric and ideological logic (the inclusive covenantal community interpretations, Chapter 4) or (3) for its thematic and figurative logic (the realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations, Chapter 5). Since these receptions most often make explicit their contexts, they will help us discern why and how interpreters choose one interpretation rather than another.

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Receptions of Rom 1:1–32 as Guides for Choosing among Interpretations

On which ground should we choose one interpretation among the plurality of interpretations of Rom 1:1–32? Cynically we could answer: who cares? Actually, many people do. Among the more than 2 billion people who (in the twenty-first century) identify themselves as Christians and view Romans as Scripture, many read this letter in order to discern a Word-to-live-by. This is what reading a text as Scripture entails; this is what formulating a reception entails. Consequently, choosing an interpretation makes a difference in their lives. Who cares? These Christian believers care. Their life and its orientation are at stake: they live by this Word. Yet their neighbors should also care! These Christian believers necessarily interact with them—for better or worse. In sum, all of us—Christians who regularly read our Bible or those who merely listen to sermons from time to time and their close or remote neighbors—should be concerned about the way in which readers of Romans choose one interpretation rather than others. It might be—and unfortunately, too often it is—a matter of life and death. Even if it is not, we must keep in mind that our interpretive choices affect our lives together, be it in communities, in societies, and indeed in the world (including for its ecological survival; see Rom 8:19–22). Whether we like it or not, choosing an interpretation of Romans is always also an ethical choice with many ramifications—it affects the way in which we interact with others around us. And this is so especially when we pretend not to make any interpretive choice. Hopefully, the preceding chapters have shown that consciously or subconsciously we are making such choices. But the question remains: on which ground should we choose one interpretation instead of another one? At the outset, biblical scholars seem to be in a position to provide guidance. After all they devote their lives to the task of choosing the “best” interpretation among the diversity of critical studies of Romans. For this, they use two kinds of criteria. Typically, as we have mentioned earlier, the first criterion they use involves identifying the exegetical study which has the greater degree of probability to offer the most accurate (legitimate) presentation of what Paul said in his letter, because it uses what are understood to be the most sophisticated exegetical methods (according to

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the principle of criticism in historiography).1 But Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have removed this ground for choosing one interpretation rather than another: there, three kinds of critical exegetical studies are shown to be equally legitimate—they have the same “degree of probability.” The second criterion typically used to choose among the many critical studies of Romans involves identifying the study which presents in a most convincing and coherent way the theological and ethical teaching of the letter. This is choosing the most plausible presentation of Paul’s teaching (according to the principles of analogy and correlation in historiography). But Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have also removed this ground for choosing one interpretation rather than another: despite striking differences, three kinds of presentation of Paul’s teaching—a forensic theological, an inclusive covenantal community, and a realized-apocalyptic/messianic teaching (each with many variants)—are equally plausible. In sum, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have totally removed the ground upon which exegetes (their students and followers) commonly chose one interpretation rather than another: despite their incompatible differences, each of the three kinds of critical exegetical interpretations is demonstrably equally legitimate and plausible. The discussion of the contextual character of each kind of critical exegetical interpretations (Chapter 6) suggested that another ground for choosing an interpretation might itself be contextual. Even though this was not its primary purpose, our interdisciplinary SBL seminar on Romans through History and Cultures seems to confirm this suggestion. The essays in the subsequent book series show that each particular reception of Romans (through the centuries and across presentday cultures) involves a choice of interpretation that was directly or indirectly made because it was perceived as “the best” for the interpreter’s context. Now as well as in the past, at least implicitly the interpreter that formulates any given reception asks: “In my contextual situation (the interpreter’s situation), how will this given interpretation affect my neighbors and me? Is it ‘the best’ for both of us?” These are contextual interpretive questions. And since this choice concerns what is the best interpretation for people in a particular context, this is an ethical choice. One chooses an interpretation after implicitly or explicitly asking: will this interpretation be beneficial or detrimental (or even nefarious) to people in this context? Therefore, whatever might be the choice, the interpretation which is promoted is necessarily an ethical interpretive discourse: such a choice shows that the interpreter’s preferred interpretation of Romans affects his/her neighbors and his/her relations with them in a particular way—for better or worse. I explain below in which sense such “receptions” as ethical interpretive discourses can be viewed as providing guidelines for all of us readers of Romans as we assume our own ethical responsibility by choosing one interpretation rather than another. I am not suggesting that receptions provide us with models or templates that we could simply use for choosing an interpretation among the critical studies we discussed. But with 1

This is the first of three principles governing historiography as formulated by Ernst Troeltsch, “Historiography,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (ed. J. Hastings; New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 6:716–23. The other two principles are the principles of analogy and of correlation, mentioned in the next sentences.

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their help we can learn to discern in which way interpretations of Romans are always and necessarily ethical interpretive discourses: discerning whether they actually function as constructive ethical discourses (for the benefit of certain people in the interpreters’ circles) rather than negative/destructive ethical discourses (that would engender disastrous consequences for the interpreters and their neighbors). An interpretation is an event that should be assessed ethically.2 In the process, we will be in a position to recognize how the three types of critical exegetical interpretations previously discussed also function as ethical discourses, and how and why as responsible interpreters, in each context, we must carefully assess the ethical effects of choosing one interpretation rather than another one. We will proceed in four sections, considering successively: I – Receptions as ethical interpretive discourses offering guidelines for choosing among interpretations.

This first section argues that, despite our prejudices against them, we have much to learn from receptions. They can be viewed as dependable guidelines to help us in our choices of interpretations: (a) until proven otherwise, they should be taken as legitimate and plausible—therefore, we have something to learn from them when they are different from our own interpretations, and (b) they are ethical interpretive discourses. The next three sections review samples of receptions, illustrating in each case (a) the specific insights—the “mother wit” that reflects “the collective wisdom of generations” (Maya Angelou)—that we should learn from it, and (b) how, in a specific context, this reception functioned as an ethical interpretive discourse—and this for better and worse. This sampling is selected among the receptions studied in the book series Romans through History and Cultures. I do not repeat the detailed discussions found in these volumes. I build upon them by foregrounding the specificity of the interpretive insights of each given reception and by underscoring its interpretive ethical character—something that our seminar did not systematically emphasize. For this, in each case, I provide a self-sufficient vignette on each interpreter that provides enough details to show how the given reception functions as an ethical interpretive discourse in its particular context. Since our present purpose is to provide guidelines for choosing among the three kinds of interpretations discussed in the preceding chapters, the sampling of receptions is presented in three successive sections: II – Individual-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Augustine, Luther, and Pastoral care; 2

An interpretation (as performed by an interpreter) is to be viewed as an event. Therefore de Certeau’s definition of event applies: “An event is not what one can see or know about it, but what it becomes” (“un événement n’est pas ce qu’on peut voir ou savoir, mais ce qu’il devient.” See Michel de Certeau, “Pour une nouvelle culture. Prendre la parole” Études, October 1968, 383–97. Receptions as events “become,” have an effect, beyond themselves: they affect the lives of the interpreters and of their neighbors. The conclusion of this chapter comes back to this issue.

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III – Community-centered receptions and their ethical imports: Clement of Alexandria, Abelard, and Liberation theologians IV – Religious/heteronomous receptions: John Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox interpreters, and Pentecostal/Charismatic interpreters

I Receptions as ethical interpretive discourses offering guidelines for choosing among interpretations (A) Receptions as legitimate interpretations, until proven otherwise The proposed review of a sample of receptions that could serve as guidelines for choosing among interpretations makes sense only insofar as receptions can be viewed as legitimate interpretations of Romans—from which we have something to learn. But can receptions be taken seriously as dependable interpretations of Romans? Are they not biased readings? Are not believers the overwhelming majority of those who produce receptions? Are not believers reading into Paul’s text whatever they need for their lives, projecting upon the letter what they want to find in it? In our guild, exegetes traditionally have many objections. Despite all these reservations, exegetes can and should indeed take receptions seriously. This can be explained by reviewing our major objections. These reservations must be addressed and provide an ongoing guardrail: not everything goes! But these reservations should not deter us from taking seriously most receptions. As we shall see, until proven otherwise, receptions can be taken seriously. 1. Most receptions are interpretations by believers. This is a first objection against receptions, commonly leading exegetes to brush them aside. Yet, before doing so, we must remember that believers have much at stake in their interpretations. Many of them literally risk/risked their lives by committing themselves to a particular interpretation of Romans. For instance, my Huguenot ancestors were imprisoned or killed for holding to their own interpretations of Romans— rather than accepting the papist interpretation. More prosaically, believers who are reading Romans as Scripture read it for a Word-to-live-by by making the commitment to permitting this Word to affect (and to transform) their lives. When so much is at stake, one pays close attention to the text! No superficial reading is allowed! Therefore such receptions must be taken seriously, even if we are puzzled and wonder: “How in the world did these believers ground their interpretations in Paul’s text?” It is true that quite a few receptions are pure projections of the believers’ views upon Paul’s text. But many are not, even if at first they feel strange to us. Once again: when encountering such receptions we have to presume that they are legitimate, until proven otherwise. Here are a few reasons for doing so. 2. Receptions by believers often read “weak” versions of Paul’s letter—but this is not a reason to brush them aside. Believers commonly base their interpretations on

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translations, which color their understanding of the text. But this is no reason to brush them aside. Present-day examples can illustrate this point. Is it not clear that by choosing as their Scripture (for example, the KJV, NIV, NJB, NAB, or NRSV translation) believers have already opted for a certain kind of interpretation, which is biased or slanted in a particular way? Yes, it is the case. But before discounting the believers’ interpretations because of their use of the particular translation we have to acknowledge that all interpretations begin by choosing a version of Paul’s text. This is what exegetes do by performing textual criticism. And our textual critical choices among the many variants are not innocent: they already support either an individual-centered or a community-centered or a religious/heteronomous interpretation by bringing to the fore textual features that had been hidden or pushed into the background by other text critical decisions.3 Furthermore exegetes have to acknowledge that, most of the time, they bypass textual criticism: they simply use a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. By spontaneously picking up their handy Nestle-Aland and by doing so without paying close attention to the critical apparatus, exegetes have already begun to choose an interpretation.4 In so doing, exegetes proceed very much as believers do when they read the first translation at hand. In so doing these believers have begun to choose an interpretation. Rather than dismissing their receptions because they did not use the right text of Romans, we should acknowledge that the choice of a text is already a part of the interpretation. And the reason for this choice is most often contextual: because of their culture or education, interpreters read the text of Romans that is accessible in their context. Therefore, studying any reception—and indeed any interpretation—we should begin by asking: which particular version of the biblical text did the interpreters use? It often will be a translation. Even if they know Greek, believers—including theologians and church leaders—most often use or keep in mind a translation. From the fourth to the sixteenth century in Western Europe, most interpreters read Paul’s letter in the Latin Vulgate. More recently, receptions might be based on one of the hundreds of common language translations. Yet, it remains that, for believers, whatever translation they use is Scripture; thus over several centuries, for most English speakers the King James Version was Scripture, while for most German speakers Luther’s Bible was Scripture. We cannot dismiss receptions because the interpreters have used one or another version of Paul’s letter; we simply must take into account that the (subconscious and spontaneous) choice of a particular version is a first contextual marker of each reception/interpretation. 3. Receptions, as all interpretations, are framed in a threefold way.5 As earlier chapters have shown, each given interpretation is shaped by (1) an analytical frame that 3

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Note for instance how Jewett proceeds with a careful independent textual critical study and selects textual variants that other interpretations had hidden or dismissed so as to foreground textual features that convey rhetorical, cultural, and community-centered features of Paul’s text. See Robert Jewett in Romans (2007). In such a case, I venture to say that their (implicit) textual critical choices favor a Western (often forensic theological) interpretation—by contrast with a Greek Orthodox one. See below. Even when (and especially when) they present themselves as simply providing “the literal meaning” of the text!

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marks the most significant textual features, (2) a hermeneutical/ theological frame that privileges a particular interpretive line of reasoning, and (3) a contextual frame that reflects the interpreters’ particular concerns for individual-centered, community-centered, or religious/heteronomy-centered issues in their lifecontexts. In receptions these three interpretive frames are at play as much as they are in critical exegetical interpretations. But the emphases are different. Critical exegetical interpretations (see Chapters 3–6) usually (a) make explicit their analytical frames (spelling out their choice of a critical methodology), (b) readily make apparent their hermeneutical/theological frames (formulating conclusions regarding Paul’s theological views), but (c) usually ignore (or hide) their contextual frames. By contrast, receptions usually make explicit and emphasize their (a) contextual frames (in order to identify and formulate a teaching for a specific life-situation) as well as (b) hermeneutical/theological frames (they are frequently engaged in theological debates). But in most instances, receptions downplay their analytical frames: they rarely make explicit any critical methodology and therefore rarely justify their choices of certain textual features as most significant (and other textual features as less significant or even insignificant); at times they barely refer to specific passages. Receptions are almost exclusively concerned with clarifying the teaching for their context.6 For exegetes, the absence in receptions of critical methodology or even of close attention to the text is often troubling. Can such interpretations have any legitimacy? Agreed: certain receptions are quite fanciful and cannot be accepted as legitimate interpretation of Romans; they project upon the text meanings that must be dismissed as illegitimate. Not everything goes! Paul is not speaking about walking on the moon or about driverless cars! But we should not rush to dismiss receptions merely because their focus and their conclusions are different from accepted critical exegesis. To begin with, let us not forget that, whatever might be our exegesis, it is a particular choice of interpretation! In the same way that, until proven otherwise, contradictory critical exegeses must be viewed as legitimate (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5), so also, until proven otherwise, we must view any reception as legitimately grounded in Paul’s text. Adopting this attitude is not that easy. For this, we (exegetes and also church historians and theologians) have to acknowledge that particular receptions may have chosen as most significant certain textual features that we ignore—because for us they are meaningless. It is difficult—and indeed humbling—to acknowledge that we neglect significant textual features. Therefore, in a knee-jerk reaction we commonly declare such receptions as illegitimate. Rather than rushing to the conclusion that such receptions are illegitimate—improperly grounded in Paul’s text—we need to stop and ponder: how is this reception/interpretation grounded in Paul’s text? Until proven otherwise, we should presuppose that it is! Therefore, we, exegetes, should ask: what

6

It remains that the three interpretive frames can be identified in both critical exegeses and receptions—even if the contextual frame in critical exegeses and the analytical frame in receptions can only be identified by their “traces,” “fossilized remains,” “footprints,” or “shadows.” Therefore in the series Romans through History and Cultures, we have striven to identify with footnotes not only the “hermeneutical/theological” (H) and “contextual” (C) choices made by the receptions but also their “analytical” (A) choices.

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are the features of the text, which for one reason or another we ignored and which this reception recognized as particularly meaningful? A few general examples are enough to illustrate this point. A first example. We should not rush to dismiss as illegitimate the “plain receptions” of Romans (often found in catechetical teachings and sermons), which merely retell Paul’s text in simplified forms—this is frequently done because, supposedly, this letter is too complex for children or for a large congregation of “illiterate” or “barely literate” people.7 Is it not clear that such reception/interpretations betray Paul’s text? But to the surprise of most exegetes, such plain receptions often convey most directly (and quite appropriately!) fundamental aspects of the religious teaching of Romans—namely its “mythical structure,” as anthropologists would say. These simplistic retellings of Romans can be compared with simplified retellings of folktales, myths, and fables (e.g., in children’s books)—which have been shown to communicate most properly the mythical structures (i.e., fundamental religious teachings) of these myths, even across many centuries.8 So, until proven otherwise, we should assume that such simplistic retellings of Romans in ancient and modern receptions convey important religious teachings that we must consider as legitimate: even if exegetes commonly ignore it, the “mythical structure” of Romans is quite significant. Figurative readings (see Chapter 5) point in this direction, as will become clearer when dealing with Rom 2–16. The fact that most critical exegetes overlook such textual features does not make such receptions/interpretations illegitimate! A second example. Other receptions are dismissed as illegitimate because they understand the Greek text in a different way than critical exegetes. The irony is that (Western) exegetes at times quietly address this criticism to receptions of Romans by patristic interpreters who were fluent in Greek!9 These biblical scholars feel quite justified in ignoring such unwarranted interpretations/receptions: after many years of studies, they know Greek! But the question is: Which Greek? As Caragounis has demonstrated in The Development of Greek, when one reads the Greek of the New Testament as a living language, one interprets Paul’s text in ways significantly different from that of Western critical exegeses, who read Greek as a dead language, following Greek grammars built upon Erasmus’ work.10 It does not make any sense to ignore 7 8

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In the sense of the story from Maya Angelou discussed in the Introduction. See Joseph Courtès, Lévi-Strauss et les contraintes de la pensée mythique; une lecture sémiotique des “Mythologiques” (Tours: Mame, 1973) and Luc Brisson, Le mythe de Tirésias: essai d’analyse structurale (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976). Building on the work of Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958) and of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Mythologiques” (on Native American myths), Brisson follows many retellings of the myth of Tiresias in Greek mythology and beyond, and its artistic representations (including the caduceus). Retellings of the fables of Jean de La Fontaine in the abbreviated forms of children books have been analyzed with the same results in the structural semiotic seminars of A. J. Greimas (Paris, 1975–77). Following them I analyzed Galatians for its mythical structure in What Is Structural Exegesis? (1976), 53–76. For many patristic interpreters, Greek was their native language, or a close second language, following Latin and/or a local vernacular of the Roman Empire. Chrys C. Caragounis, The Development of Greek and the New Testament: Morphology, Syntax, Phonology, and Textual Transmission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006). Desiderius Erasmus, De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus (Basiliae, 1528). This book established (and thus fixed) the “correct” way (“as in antiquity”) of pronouncing Greek and Latin, thereby positing Greek as a dead language.

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or dismiss as illegitimate the Greek Fathers’ interpretations of Romans, because they are different from scholarly interpretations reading Greek as a dead language? To the dismay of Eastern Orthodox exegetes, this is nevertheless what many Western exegetes do.11 Should we not acknowledge that the Greek Fathers’ interpretations might legitimately perceive as most significant certain textual features of the Greek text that Western exegetes missed? A third example. Before criticizing as illegitimate the receptions of Romans by church authorities and theologians (such as Augustine, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer, Karl Barth—and the Greek Fathers!) because, accordingly, their interpretations were influenced by ecclesiastical concerns and therefore were not properly grounded in Paul’s Greek text, we should not forget that all of these theologians were remarkable scholars who read Romans most closely and with erudition.12 Thus, we have to presuppose that such receptions, even when they do not make explicit their analytical textual frames and emphasize theological teachings, are appropriately grounded in significant features of Paul’s text—even if these are not the features we emphasize in our own interpretations. Until proven otherwise, they are to be viewed as legitimate. A final example. Even though they may often seem outlandish, I have learned to respect aural/oral receptions. I had the opportunity of participating in churches in aural/oral cultures in Congo-Brazzaville, Zululand, Botswana, and the Philippines, where readers of the Bible often surprised me by their choices of most significant textual features.13 These readers had the temerity (!) of choosing as “most significant” aural/oral features of biblical texts! For critical exegetes, the knee-jerk reaction is “such interpretations are clearly illegitimate, are they not? Unlike our exegeses, they do not ground their interpretations in the text as written!” Yet we should humbly acknowledge that reading Paul’s letter for its aural/oral textual features is most appropriate. The letter to the Romans was to be heard (and not read with the eyes)! It was to be declaimed, probably by Phoebe (16:1), to be heard by an audience that never laid eyes on it. But most exegetes (in our writerly cultures) totally ignore such aural/oral aspects of Romans; they cannot even imagine what these features are. Yet happily sociocultural critical

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See Vasile Mihoc, “Greek Church Fathers and Orthodox Biblical Hermeneutics,” Greek Patristic and Orthodox Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2013), 1–40. Receptions of Romans throughout history (Wirkungsgeschichte) have typically their origin (1) in (preparations for) homilies delivered by preachers to congregations in particular concrete situations—even when they are called “opera exegetica” (in Calvin’s case) or “commentaries” presenting a continuous reading of the text, (2) in meditations by believers seeking direction for their lives (Word-to-live-by) in Paul’s text, and (3) in theological treatises through which theologians seek to develop normative theological perspectives for the church on the basis of Romans. Most of these are by interpreters with remarkable erudition. Yet the suspicions of exegetes are strong. Thus, the sessions we had on Karl Barth’s interpretation of Romans were crowded with theologians, but very few exegetes joined us. This reminded me of the cold shoulder I received as a first-year student after mentioning Barth’s interpretation in Leenhardt’s seminar at the University of Geneva! See my “Introduction,” in Global Bible Commentary (eds. Daniel Patte, J. Severino Croatto, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Teresa Okure, Archie Chi Chung Lee; Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), xxi–xxxvi; see also the detailed specific example in Patte, “Whither Critical New Testament Studies for a New Day? Some Reflections on Luke 17:11-19,” in Putting Body and Soul Together: Essays in Honor of Robin Scroggs (eds. , Brown, Snyder and Wiles; Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1997), 275–96.

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methods are being developed to recognize their significance.14 Far from dismissing such interpretations, we should acknowledge that they are appropriate and legitimate receptions—especially, in aural/oral cultures. We have much to learn from them! In sum, despite appearances, it is essential to acknowledge that, until proven otherwise, receptions, whatever they might be, should be viewed as legitimate. They should also be viewed as plausible—although this is less of a problem for us. And when they differ from our own interpretations, far from dismissing them we should acknowledge that they bring us a “mother wit” (Maya Angelou) that we should welcome as interpretive insights from which we should learn. Since receptions emphasize the theological teaching of the text, and commonly strive to have a coherent presentation of this teaching, when we have recognized their legitimacy, we have less difficulty acknowledging that their argument makes (some kind of) sense, and that therefore we can claim some plausibility for them.

(B) Receptions as interpretive ethical discourses After acknowledging that, until proven otherwise, receptions are to be viewed as legitimate and plausible, our SBL seminar could truly begin its work. Happily, twothirds of the ninety-three scholars who contributed to it (over a period of fifteen years) were church historians and theologians who from the outset demanded that we, exegetes, take receptions as seriously as they did. Yet we, exegetes, quickly noted to our initial dismay that, too often, when church historians and theologians spoke about “taking receptions seriously,” they primarily meant taking seriously their theological insights and their plausibility; when a reception was deemed plausible, its legitimacy (its appropriate grounding in Paul’s text) was apparently simply presupposed. Nevertheless, as explained in Chapter 1, we, exegetes, followed the lead of our colleagues. In the process, we began to understand not only why very different receptions could be viewed as legitimate but also why, despite fundamental differences (and because of them!), the various critical exegetical interpretations needed to be respected as both legitimate and plausible. Thus, as was repeatedly said, the presentations in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 (showing the legitimacy and plausibility of contradictory critical exegeses) would not have been thinkable if it were not for the church historians and theologians in our seminar. But they were not finished with us: they transformed our view of receptions in an even more radical way, by confronting us with the fact that receptions are interpretive ethical discourses. And they did so from the outset. This unexpected shift in perspective happened at the very beginning of our collective project. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Joseph Sievers came to our informal planning meeting with a complete paper: a detailed study of the receptions through the centuries of Rom 11:29, “God’s Gifts and Call Are Irrevocable.” Could he present it in our first session?15 14

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See Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Joanna Dewey, ed., Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature, Semeia 65 (Atlanta: SBL, 1994); Gerald West and Musa Dube, eds., Reading With: An Exploration of the Interface between Critical and Ordinary Readings of the Bible. Semeia 73 (Atlanta: SBL, 1997); Stephen Moore, ed., In Search of the Present: The Bible through Cultural Studies. Semeia 82 (Atlanta: SBL, 2000). Joseph Sievers, “‘God’s Gifts and Call Are Irrevocable’: The Reception of Rom 11:29 Through the Centuries and Jewish-Christian Relations,” Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC, 2000), 127–73. See Chapter 1, p. 22, where another aspect of Sievers’s presentation is discussed.

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Since the history of the receptions of this verse is also the history of the often tragic history of Jewish-Christian relations (pogroms, Shoah), it was clear that the choice of one or another reception had an ethical import. Thus, Sievers’s paper, soon amplified by similar studies by Günter Wasserberg, Mark Nanos, William Campbell, and Daniel Boyarin and gathered in Reading Israel in Romans (RTHC 2000), made it clear to all of us that dealing with receptions is dealing with interpretive ethical discourses. By formulating such receptions, interpreters affected their neighbors in very significant ways—too often as a matter of life and death. It took us a long time to grasp the full significance of this startling insight. Recognizing that all receptions were ethical discourses demanded from each of the members of our seminar nothing less than a paradigm shift. We were confronted by a new and mesmerizing vision: could it be that the decisive choice among interpretations was an ethical choice? Yet the question remained: Is it actually the case that all receptions (of Romans) are ethical discourses? Why? In which sense? We quickly understood the why? Receptions have this ethical character, because most of them involve reading Romans as Scripture. These are readings by (and for) believers who seek to discern in Paul’s letter a Word-to-live-by in the concreteness of their lives. Therefore, the interpreters’ way of life and that of their neighbors are necessarily affected by the interpretive choices involved in each of their receptions. Furthermore, we progressively discovered that we could not make clear-cut distinctions between receptions and critical biblical interpretations: whether exegetes are aware of it or not, exegeses are interpretive ethical discourses. In sum, we were led to conclude that all our interpretations of Romans—exegeses, theological interpretations, sermons, pious meditations on Romans—should be recognized for what they actually are: interpretive ethical discourses. But a crucial question remained: What does this mean? In which senses are receptions and critical exegeses ethical discourses? In which senses are receptions (and critical exegeses) ethical discourses? In which senses are they discourses that affect the interpreters’ relations with their neighbors? As can be expected following the preceding chapters, multiple answers are necessary. Receptions (and exegeses) are ethical discourses in three different ways—that can be illustrated with examples from interpretations/receptions of 1:14 (“I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish,” NRSV): 1. Receptions/interpretations are, at times, deontological ethical discourses in that, in Paul’s text, they draw attention to the ethical values (virtues and vices) that people should or should not implement in their lives. The emphasis is on what believers should or should not do for their own sake and for the sake of others. In this perspective, receptions/interpretations view as most significant in 1:14 the fact that these words are said by Paul who presented himself as a “servant of Jesus Christ,” “called” (by God) and “set apart for the gospel of God” (1:1). Thus, 1:14 expresses that Paul was under obligation to God and Christ to bring/preach the gospel to everyone (“both to Greeks and to barbarians, etc.”). This is an ethical obligation. The expectation is that the Romans and later readers who receive this verse as Word-to-live-by will follow Paul’s example. In sum, receptions of this kind

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are interpretive ethical discourses in the sense that they discern in Paul’s text what is (and is not) good to do.16 2. Other receptions/interpretations can be labeled justice ethical discourses or liberation ethical discourses. They identify in Paul’s text how his teaching refers to justice issues—including by addressing (or failing to address) injustices resulting from systemic evils generated by wrong ideologies, and other community-centered ethical issues. In the case of 1:14, such receptions/interpretations take note that when Paul says opheiletês eimi—“I am under obligation”—he uses a cultural language borrowed from the honor/shame system. This ideology, pervasive in the Greco-Roman world, made a clear distinction between “people with honor” (such as the Greeks and the wise), whom one should respect and obey, and “people without honor” (such as the barbarians, the uneducated, or the foolish), that is, shameful people whom good people were expected to despise, ignore, brush aside, and eventually exploit and abuse. Paul directly challenges this ideology and its unjust cultural norms by affirming that he feels no less “under obligation” toward people “without honor” than he does toward people “with honor”: “I am under obligation to both.” No one should be viewed as a lesser individual; all should be treated as people with honor and therefore with the respect they are due. More generally, this applies to all the receptions/interpretations of Romans paying attention to the features of the letter that show how Paul addresses—or ignores— other kinds of injustices and social and communal evils in his time and, hopefully, how he offers a way out of such systemic evils. Such receptions/interpretations are interpretive ethical discourses similar to “liberation theological ethics” that denounce and seek to overcome systemic evils and injustices of all kinds. In sum, receptions of this kind are interpretive ethical discourses in that they offer a Wordto-live-by which shows how Paul’s letter helps believers identify in their own contexts the ideological and systemic evils that hurt or threaten their neighbors and them and how such evils can be addressed.17 16

17

This is the forensic theological interpretation of 1:14 (see Chapter 3). Broadly speaking, such receptions/interpretations are ethical discourses as defined by Aristotle and/or by Kant: they identify in Paul’s text what are virtues and vices (Aristotle), fundamental positive or negative values (Kant), which believers should either implement or avoid in their lives for their own sake and for the sake of their neighbors. The difference between Aristotle and Kant is primarily the way in which one acquires virtues or values. See “Ethics” (a cluster of articles), “Aristotle,” and “Kant” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. This is the inclusive covenantal community interpretation (see Chapter 4). The Words-to-live-by of such receptions are interpretive ethical discourses that help believers to address communitycentered issues that concern the interrelations of communities (especially here, Jewish and Christian communities, already embedded in the discussion of “the law and gospel”—whether or not it involves supersessionism and thus forms of anti-Judaism), of groups (women and men, believers and unbelievers), and of individuals within a community. These receptions challenge oppressive ideologies (comparable to honor and shame and the political ideology of the Roman Empire—that Paul challenged, for example, by using the title Kyrios for Christ instead of for the Emperor); they ask whether or not Paul addressed the issues regarding other kinds of systemic evils and injustices, such as classism (e.g., Greeks, barbarians, etc. in 1:14), slavery (from 1:1 to ch. 16; and any other form of exploitation), racism (Is it embedded in the Jews vs. Gentiles distinction? In the description of idolaters?), patriarchalism and androcentrism, and/or discriminations of all kinds rooted in fear/ phobia (such as homophobia, 1:26–27). See again “Ethics” (a cluster of articles) in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.

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3. Other receptions/interpretations can be labeled theocentric and risk ethical discourses. They are ethical discourses that first identify in Romans Paul’s references, negatively, to evil powers (including most generally “the power of sin,” but also the “powers,” “rulers,” “death,” etc.; 8:38–39) and, positively, to divine interventions (through Christ, the Spirit, gifts from God [charismata], 1:11–12). Such ethical discourses seek to address religious/heteronomy-centered problems (evil powers beyond human control) and point to religious/heteronomy-centered solutions (divine interventions or gifts). Such receptions/interpretations are ethical discourses following the model of the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations (Chapter 5). Ethical discourses of this type can be labeled “theocentric and risk ethical discourses” in that they are discourses that “define responsible actions within the limits of bounded power” (ever in the presence of evil powers, as in “ethic of risk”), grounding them in God as Triune and thus incarnate (as in Eastern Orthodox ethic).18 From this perspective, one first notes in 1:14 that opheiletês eimi is a phrase borrowed from the language of the honor/ shame system (the same observation as above). But now one underscores that this phrase expresses not only a sense of obligation (“I am under obligation.”) but also and primarily the reason for this sense of obligation: “I am indebted to.” One is indebted to “people with honor” because, from such people, one has received (or expects to receive) gifts (of one kind or another). From the Greeks—that is, those who are in power in the Roman Empire—one can expect political or economic favors; from the wise and educated, one can expect pearls of wisdom or a valuable teaching. In sum: by saying opheiletês eimi Paul affirms that he views himself as indebted to the Greeks and the wise: he acknowledges that he has received (or can expect to receive) something from such “people with honor.” But even on that point he goes much further than what was expected in the Greco-Roman culture: Paul acknowledges that he has received from such people precious gifts (charismata) which are ultimately from God (as he expressed in 1:11–12). But the most surprising teaching of this verse is that Paul affirms that he is equally “indebted” to barbarians and foolish people. He acknowledges that he has received (and expects to continue receiving) something from them. Despite the GrecoRoman prejudices, Paul affirms that barbarians and foolish people brought (and continue to bring) precious gifts (charismata) from God to him. Therefore, he is indebted to them—at least as much as he is to the Greeks and the wise. This interpretation/reception is an interpretive ethical discourse in that it posits a particular relationship with all neighbors. Strangely enough—but what a powerful teaching!—from the perspective of the gospel, one can expect that any one of our neighbors brings to us gifts (charismata) from God, and therefore are in some

18

See “Ethic of Risk and Womanist Ethics” and “Ethics and Christianity in Eastern Orthodoxy” based on its theology of the “Trinity in Eastern Orthodoxy” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Womanist ethics is developed within the frame of black women’s bounded power. For Eastern Orthodoxy, responsible actions are grounded in the Trinity as a dynamic, threefold manifestation of the divine not only in the past but also in the present: for example, each human is in the image of God (who is also manifest in creation); there are Christic as well as pneumatic manifestations in the believers’ present.

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sense manifestations of God for us. This is “ethics” in the postmodern sense as formulated by Emmanuel Lévinas.19 Our neighbor is each time the Other—a mysterious, holy Other—bearer of (divine) gifts that I receive in a face-to-face encounter with this Other. Therefore, I am accountable and indebted (opheiletês eimi) to this Other, and I am ever responsible for this Other—our face-to-face encounter is always fragile. Although this is not directly expressed in 1:14 (but it will be in the rest of the letter), all of us urgently need such a gift from our neighbors. It is through them and through their interventions in our lives that God frees us from evil powers. And in turn, this is what believers are expected to do for their neighbors (according to the Greco-Roman and biblical ethics of reciprocity). Neighbors are, therefore, no longer viewed as charity cases or mere victims. Rather, in this ethical perspective, neighbors are those without whom we cannot genuinely be ourselves, because it is through them—through their faces (Lévinas)—that we encounter the Other in whom our own private and collective lives are grounded. The fact that there are numerous and very different receptions/interpretations of Romans demonstrates that any given reception is the result of a choice. Besides being an intellectual choice—it must make sense—this choice was an ethical choice, among several possible ethical interpretive discourses. For better or worse, one of them was viewed as having a greater value in a particular context in which believers/interpreters interact with their neighbors. These three kinds of interpretive choices were/are made in order to address specific contextual situations and predicaments. Implicitly or explicitly the interpreter assesses—or simply has the gut feeling in the actual or virtual presence of neighbors—that one interpretation is “better” for addressing certain contextual problems that involve these neighbors. But because situations and neighbors change, the problem to be addressed also change: it might be individual-centered, but at other times it might be community-centered, or religious/ heteronomy-centered. Therefore, the “best” reception/interpretation as ethical discourse also changes. Thus, even when in a particular context one interpretation is adopted as “the best,” in most cases the alternative interpretations were not totally excluded. It seems to be with the anticipation that in another contextual situation, another interpretation might turn to be “the best” to address a different problem. Therefore, an interpretation, which is bracketed out as useless or dangerous in a particular context, might be most useful and beneficial in another context. Of course, when one thinks in absolute terms—that there is only one universally good (interpretive) ethical discourse—this does not make any sense.20 But the

19

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See Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995) and Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Indeed, anti-Jewish interpretations of “God’s gifts and call are irrevocable” (11:29) can never be acceptable. The awful effects of such choices during World War II and before made it clear (see again Reading Israel in Romans). In all contexts that involve Jewish-Christian relations, such anti-Jewish and supersessionist interpretations are to be rejected. But as we shall see, a forensic theological interpretation is often alone in a position to address individual-centered problems. Therefore, even though it carries the germ of supersessionism, a forensic theological interpretation is often “the best” to address such individual-centered problems, at the express condition that it is not absolutized and therefore acknowledges the need, legitimacy, and plausibility of other interpretations—especially the community-centered interpretations (that deny supersessionism and thus anti-Judaism).

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review of many receptions in their respective contexts leads to the conclusion that absolutizing any given interpretive ethical discourse is most destructive, because it leads to demonizing anyone who is not abiding by it. The examples below will show this. But this apparently radical point—receptions are only “good” in a particular context (and therefore another choice might be better in another context)—is actually a commonplace for preachers, whose sermons are emblematic receptions. Preachers end up having to preach again and again on the same biblical texts. Should they repeat the same sermon? This is always a temptation, to which preachers succumb at times. But a fundamental homiletic principle is that a sermon cannot be preached twice—otherwise it becomes a dead sermon (as flat as dead metaphors). This is so because, by definition, a sermon must address the specific situation and needs of the intended congregation/audience. Therefore, as they repeatedly preach on the same biblical text, preachers end up interpreting the text differently.21 Therefore, they choose one interpretation as the most helpful and exclude other interpretations. But—and this is my point—they do so without denying that, in another time and place, they might choose the very interpretation they just excluded. This is true of any interpretation (any reception or exegesis); consciously or not it is chosen for a particular context; it is chosen because one feels that it is “the best” to address given needs or even predicaments that the interpreter and her/his neighbors face in that situation. It is in that sense that any interpretation necessarily is an ethical discourse. Each reception/sermon involves privileging one or another among the legitimate and plausible interpretations, because it is perceived as “the best” for addressing contextual concerns and predicaments in a given situation. But, once again, this is done without excluding the possibility that a bracketed-out interpretation might be “the best” in another time and place. This postmodern view of receptions and exegeses as ethical discourses might seem very far from Romans. But Paul actually practiced it himself in his letter.22 This postmodern view of ethical discourses emulates the ambivalent way in which Paul deals with the relationships of unfaithful Jews and the faithful God (3:3), of Law and faith (3:31), of faith and promise (4:14), of the body of sin and the body free from sin (6:6), of a married woman and a widow (7:2), of a person under the Law and a person in the new life of the Spirit (7:6). I refer to all these passages because in each case Paul expresses these ambivalences by using the same verb: καταργέω—katargeô. Anticipating the discussion of these passages in Volume II, it is enough to note here that in each case Paul uses this verb in the sense of “making

21

22

I owe this paragraph to my pastor, Donovan Drake, who interrupted my writing with an exegetical question. He felt that an alternate understanding of a NT text (by comparison with the understanding of this text used in his earlier sermons) would be helpful for his congregation in its present situation. But, he wondered, is this different understanding legitimately grounded in the text? Is it plausible even if it not found in the commentaries he consulted? After some research I was able to confirm it. Thus the postmodern view of receptions and exegeses ends up to be very close to what Dale Martin calls a “premodernist” interpretive practice. See Dale Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 71–110 (Chapter 3, “Scripture”). In what follows I propose a figurative and thus realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation of Paul’s use of the verb katargeô in the letter.

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inoperative” or “making idle”—as 2 Macc 5:25 uses argeô to speak about “being idle” during the Sabbath.23 2 Macc 5:25 is helpful to clarify that being inoperative (being idle) applies in certain circumstances—on Shabbat—even though it does not apply in other circumstances—the six other days of the week. Similarly, in each of the above passages, katargeô expresses that in a certain situation something is put on hold—is bracketed out—because something else is better, but without denying its value in another context. Rom 3:31 illustrates this point: “Do we then make the law inoperative (καταργοῦμεν) through faith? By no means! Rather, we hold firm the law” (Rom 3:31, Patte). Note Paul’s ambivalence. Yes, faith and the law are most different. Yet, both of them should be “held firmly.” But in the new circumstances (the time of Christ, the messianic time), one of these—namely, faith—is better than the other—the law. But the law is not abolished: it is “on hold.” John Chrysostom underscores the same point in his comments on 1 Cor 13:8, where Paul uses the verb katargeô twice to show the priority of love over prophecies, tongues, and knowledge. With this verb Paul does not dismiss prophecies, tongues, and knowledge as worthless. Rather he expresses a progression: love is “better” in particular circumstances, especially the end of time. Similarly in Rom 3:31 Paul adamantly emphasizes that he does not dismiss the Law as worthless, even though in the present circumstances (the time of Christ) faith is better, and therefore the Law needs to be bracketed out. In the same way, receptions as ethical discourses choose to bracket out certain interpretations in order to promote one of them for a particular context. But these other interpretations are not worthless. Actually, in other contexts they might need to be operative.

When confronted by the multiplicity of legitimate and plausible exegetical interpretations (as presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5), we are at a loss as long as we keep a modern exegetical outlook: the criteria we traditionally used as critical exegetes have been shown to be inoperative. Then, on which ground should I choose one interpretation rather than another? While not offering us models (often their choices are questionable), receptions of all kinds—including sermons—offer guidelines to do so. By reviewing how a sample of receptions functions as interpretive contextual ethical discourses, the rest of this chapter proposes to illustrate how critical interpretations themselves can actually function as ethical discourses. These receptions are a sample selected from those studied by the SBL interdisciplinary seminar and presented in the book series Romans through History and Cultures. The great majority of these receptions are by Christian believers who explicitly read Romans as Scripture.24 We studied them in great detail, identifying their hermeneutical/theological (H), analytical/textual (A), and contextual (C) choices. By necessity, our essays were primarily concerned with (1) analyzing the texts of the receptions, (2) presenting their historical contexts, and (3) showing how 23

24

As Agamben shows, argeô has basically the same meaning as kat-argeô. See Agamben, The Time That Remains, 90–112. The major exceptions are the receptions by present-day (atheist or Jewish) philosophers discussed in David W. Odell-Scott, ed., Reading Romans with Contemporary Philosophers and Theologians (RTHC, 2007).

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they interpreted Romans. Consequently, the essays devote very little time (if any) to assessing the ethical implications of the choice of an interpretation that a reception made; we did not systematically proceed to a study of the role of these receptions as interpretive ethical discourses that shaped the lives of not only the interpreters/ believers who read Romans for a Word-to-live-by but also their neighbors. Yet, we explicitly raised interpretive ethical issues in two cases: when dealing with the interpretations of the teaching of Romans about Jewish-Christian relations (see Reading of Israel in Romans, RTHC, 2000) and when dealing with the problematic character of exclusivist androcentric and Eurocentric interpretations (see Gender, Tradition, and Romans, RTHC, 2005). Yet, the ethical character of receptions was not systematically emphasized in the other volumes. The presentation below brings out these contextual characteristics of the receptions so as to assess the relative ethical value of the interpretive choices involved. We consider a sample of receptions (presented in vignettes) reflecting each of the three kinds of contextual interpretive choices so as to illustrate how, for better or for worse, they function as interpretive ethical discourses in different ways. The goal of the following sections is simply to clarify the kind of interpretive processes that take place when one chooses a particular interpretation in a particular context. Each reception either explicitly or implicitly seeks to address what is perceived as pressing problems in a given context. This observation already shows that each reception necessarily involves a twofold reading: of course, a reading of the text, and also a reading of the particular context in which the interpreter and her/his neighbors are. This reading of a particular concrete context might be subconscious (gut feelings), but is also often deliberate, as the case of pastors preparing sermons shows. In any case, this reading involves discerning the problems (eventually the predicaments) woven in the complexity of the particular situation, including in its sociocultural, political, economic, and religious dimensions. The parallel reading of the text of Romans seeks to discern (at times, subconsciously as well) the teaching that would hopefully address the contextual problems. With the distance created by our awareness of the three broad kinds of legitimate and plausible interpretations discussed in the preceding chapters, we are in a position to appreciate the interpretive choice that each reception has made, and then to ponder the ethical value of this choice in its particular context. The following comments strive to affirm positively the ethical value of each reception in and for its particular context— emphasizing all its beneficial aspects; yet they do not hide the problematic character of an interpretive choice. If necessary, these comments expose how and why a reception became harmful in its original context. Beyond the discussion of the appropriateness of traditional receptions by church authorities (such as Augustine, Luther, Clement of Alexandria, Abelard, and John Chrysostom), each presentation also reflects on the positive and negative effects that adopting this traditional reception would have in present-day contexts. In the process, following the receptions as guidelines, we will not only learn how to read Paul’s text but also learn how to read simultaneous our own lifecontexts. The twofold reading is what makes a reading of Romans (and any other texts from Scripture) into an interpretive contextual ethical discourse. Indeed, we cannot read Romans responsibly and ethically as long as we do not simultaneously read the

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life-context in which we are. Otherwise “reality will bite us back”—the reality of our life-context—as President Barack Obama said. I organize these vignettes thematically rather than chronologically. Focusing as much as possible on receptions of 1:1–32, I present them in the same order as in the preceding chapters so as to establish a bridge between the three types of critical exegetical studies and receptions: (1) individual-centered receptions/interpretations (most common in the West, where this book is published), (2) community-centered receptions/interpretations (which became more important in the West after World War II and in postcolonial settings), and 3) religious/heteronomy-centered receptions/ interpretations (prevalent in Eastern churches as well as in most Charismatic churches around the world).

II Individual-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Augustine, Luther, and pastoral care (A) Augustine of Hippo (354–430)25 A Vignette The essays in Engaging Augustine on Romans (RTHC, 2003) find that Augustine’s reception of Romans evolved in two major stages: (1) his early works (written in 394– 95, before being consecrated Bishop of Hippo)—Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans and Unfinished Commentary on Romans (with little to say about 1:1–32)26 and (2) his later thematic works in which Romans is the biblical text most frequently quoted; generally addressed to monks, these works include Grace and Free Will and Admonition/ Rebuke and Grace (427); Gift of Perseverance and Predestination of Saints (428–29).27 The turning point between these two stages was his Responses to Simplicianus (396), as Augustine documented in his Retractations or Reconsiderations (427) in which he reviewed the ninety-three works he had written by that time and made explicit key changes in his interpretation of Romans.28 But Augustine never wrote a systematic commentary on Romans. Despite these variations, the SBL seminar concluded that

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This section on Augustine is dedicated to Eugene TeSelle, who shortly before his death carefully and graciously checked and edited it. Paula Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans and Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, SBL Texts and Translations 23 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars, 1982). Daniel Patte and Eugene TeSelle, eds., Engaging Augustine on Romans: Self, Context, and Theology in Interpretation (RTHC, 2003). The articles relevant for a discussion of Rom 1:1–32 are the following: TeSelle, “Engaging Scripture: Patristic Interpretation of the Bible,” 1–62; Paula Fredriksen, “Augustine and Israel: Interpretatio ad litteram, Jews, and Judaism in Augustine’s Theology of History,” 91–108; Thomas Martin, O.S.A. “Modus Inveniendi Paulum: Augustine, hermeneutics, and his Reading of Romans,” 62–90; John K. Riches, “Readings of Augustine on Paul: Their Impact on Critical Studies of Paul,” 173–97; Krister Stendahl, “A Last Word,” 270–72. In the text, I refer to these essays by simply mentioning the author’s name and page numbers; in footnotes, I add “(RTHC, 2003)”—to avoid confusions about other publications by the authors. Augustine, The Retractations, Fathers of the Church Patristic Series (trans. M. Inez Bogan; Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1999; c1968), accessed online.

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Augustine’s reception/interpretation squarely belongs among the individual-centered forensic receptions. These findings confirm Krister Stendahl’s earlier influential suggestion.29 Augustine’s reception is framed by an “introspective conscience” (Stendahl’s formula) that posits a forensic interpretive line of reasoning (see Chapter 3) as John Riches (184–95) repeatedly made explicit. This kind of reception became prevalent in the West. Yet, both Engaging Augustine and the present volume refuse to follow the way in which Stendahl’s proposals and much of their extended scholarly discussion were framed. Indeed Stendahl and his followers directly or indirectly argued that Augustine’s individual-centered interpretation was misleading and inappropriate—thus, they frequently refer to Augustine’s “mis-interpretation” (or “re-interpretation”) of Paul. By contrast here, the essays in Engaging Augustine affirm or posit what Chapter 3 has established: an individual-centered interpretation of Romans is both legitimate (grounded in Paul’s text) and plausible (it follows a coherent forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning), but with the caveat: only insofar as it acknowledges the legitimacy and plausibility of other types of interpretations. Thus, Engaging Augustine treated Augustine’s interpretation of Romans as any other reception: until proven otherwise, it is to be viewed as a legitimate and plausible interpretation, among other legitimate and plausible interpretations. This is reading Augustine against the grain, since he strived to formulate the only true interpretation: what he called the “orthodox” interpretation. As his Retractations make explicit, his quest for orthodoxy involved a rejection of those he saw as heretics. It remains that the proposals by Stendahl and his followers are most helpful; they identified essential characteristics of Augustine’s individual-centered reception.

Augustine’s changing receptions of Romans The evolution of Augustine’s reception/interpretation of Romans is discussed by Thomas Martin (80–83) in his review of Predestination of Saints (428–29) and Retractations (427), in which Augustine makes explicit that he corrected himself on an essential point of his interpretation of Romans in Propositions on Romans and Unfinished Commentary (394–95). These early works were written after 386; that is after his return to North Africa (from Milan) at a time when he was confronting Manichaeism—which he had earlier espoused. Two issues were involved: the relationship of reason and faith (a central concern in individual-centered views), and the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. In Milan, prior to 386, while he was involved in a philosophical quest (reading Cicero), Augustine adhered to Manichaeism, which he viewed as an enlightened form of Christianity, because it claimed that truth can be attained by reason alone— by contrast with the authoritarian Christianity that he had encountered as a youth in North Africa. In the Confessions, Augustine emphasized that he rejected Manichaeism (his conversion; Milan, 386) (a) because he acknowledged that faith based on authority is a necessary part of reason’s quest, (b) because of his “turn inward” (viewing true 29

Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Paul among Jews and Gentiles, and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 78–79.

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reality as spiritual, following Plotinus), and (c) because of his experience of “grace speaking through Scripture.”30 In sum, for Augustine, after 386, Christian faith is individual-centered: the central issue is the relationship between faith and reason, as well as the will. Regarding the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, Augustine objected to the rejection of the Old Testament by Manichaeism, and to its anti-Judaism and dualism. As Paula Fredriksen (92–94) puts it: “Against their [the Manichees’] deterministic and dualist hermeneutic [of Paul’s letter], he seeks to show that the apostle ‘neither condemns the law nor takes away human free will’ (Propositions on Romans, 13–18, 1).”31 Thus, at that point (in 394–95), Augustine understood Paul as affirming the continuity between law and gospel and thus between Israel and Christ followers—a characteristic of inclusive covenantal community interpretations. This emphasis was demanded by what he saw as the threat posed by the Manichees (and not demanded by “religious or social encounters with real Jews”).32 Augustine’s primary concern in 394–95 was with the salvation of individuals based upon their faith. Thus, regarding Romans 9 and the election of Jacob over Esau in the womb and the divine hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, Augustine emphasized that God’s election or rejection is based on God’s foreknowledge of whether the individual will have faith. Thus, while affirming the election of believers, Augustine also affirms, in Fredriksen’s words, that salvation “must be based on some merit, and it is: the merit of faith”.33 At that point, Augustine’s interpretation/reception included a tension between (a) the affirmation of the continuity between Israel and the church (possibly a remnant of an earlier community-centered interpretation he had held) and (b) the concern for salvation of individuals (a characteristic of a forensic theological interpretation). In his Responses to Simplicianus (396; the “triumph of grace over the freedom of choice,” as he calls it in Retractations, 120), Augustine abandons his former conception of the merit of faith. When the Manichees were no longer a threat (having been condemned by the emperor), instead of his earlier clear refusal of condemning the Jewish practice of the law (his rejection of the Manichees’ anti-Judaism), Augustine simply abandoned his view of the continuity of law and gospel (and of Israel and the church). Now, as Fredriksen notes, Augustine speaks of the “continuing Jewish practice . . . [as] a mysterium . . . As children of Adam, Jews are just people . . . [but] they languish sub lege” [under the law] rather than being sub gratia [under grace].34 Thus, after affirming (against the Manichees’ anti-Judaism) that for Paul there is a continuity between law and gospel, Augustine adopts a supersessionist interpretation emphasizing the superiority of being “under grace” to the Jews’ existence “under the Law.” In his Responses to Simplicianus (396), Augustine now affirms that, under grace, the individual “does absolutely nothing to merit salvation; even the first impulse to believe, to have the faith to call out to God for help, is itself God’s gift, entirely

30

31 32 33 34

See TeSelle, “Augustine,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity and Teselle, “Exploring the Inner Conflict” (RTHC, 2003), 111–46. Fredriksen (RTHC, 2003), 92. See also Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 5–7, x. Fredriksen (RTHC, 2003), 104. Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 93. Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 102.

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undeserved (Ad Simpl. I, q.2,12).”35 This divine gift of faith is necessary because, after the Fall and original sin, “human will is compromised, broken, absolutely ineffective, because everyone is born in Adam” (94). This is the individual-centered context that he so powerfully describes in his Confessions (397). In Predestination of Saints (428–29), from a retrospective perspective, Augustine notes that he “progressed” in his understanding of Romans. This is the process he called “faith seeking understanding” through which he received “a grace”: “God revealed this to me.” Of course, even as he now frames his interpretation more consistently in a forensic individual-centered interpretive line anchored on an understanding of the will, a pivotal point in any individual-centered interpretation, Augustine does not abandon everything he affirmed in earlier interpretations—the following comments take them into account. Two other parts of the context of Augustine’s interpretation are the church (and its creeds) and the Academy. Augustine affirmed that his reading is guided by the Regula Fidei (the “rule of faith”; that is, the “faith which is believed,” fides quae creditur, possibly including creeds) as well as by the “reading rules” of the Academy of his day.36

Augustine’s interpretation of Rom 1:1-32 and Rom 7 We can now summarize Augustine’s main conclusions regarding the teaching of Rom 1:1–32. In brief, the passage for Augustine concerns salvation from the just punishment (of individual sinners) by God the righteous judge and the granting of eternal life. The letter is primarily about “justification by faith in Christ Jesus” (Unfinished Commentary, 53) and salvation (for eternal life) related to the grace given by “the justice of God the Judge” “through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ”—a “grace for the forgiveness of sinners”: “Sins have been remitted through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ”(Unfinished Commentary, 63, about 1:7). 37 As is clear, the framework of Augustine’s interpretive line of reasoning is forensic and individual-centered. For instance, in Propositions, 13–18 (and Unfinished Commentary, 5-7), Augustine lays out four stages, which at first sight seem to be merely the stages of salvation history: ● ● ● ●

before the law [ante legem], under the law [sub lege], under grace [sub gratia], and in peace [in pace] (the eschatological stage).

But as one continues reading the Propositions, one discovers that these are primarily stages through which each saved individual is expected to go. Fredriksen comments, “On micro-level, the interior workings of the individual, [Augustine’s argument] placed at the dead center the crucial moment of conversion from sub lege to sub gratia.”38 Then

35 36 37 38

As quoted by Fredriksen, 93. See in RTHC, 2003, Thomas Martin, “Modus Inveniendi Paulum,” 65–73; and TeSelle, 18–22. Unfinished Commentary, 63, about 1:7. Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 93.

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as Martin points out,39 Augustine investigates and debates all aspects of individual salvation (with central concern for the “will”)—interpreting Romans 1 and 7 together: ● ●

● ●

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The will (the bondage of the will vs. free will); How the will is related to sin (sin results from the fact that the human will is compromised after the Fall); The election of each individual; Faith (as a grace/gift—the faith by which individuals believe, fides qua creditur, and the faith which is believed, fides quae creditur—i.e., the content of faith); How faith is related to reason, understanding, comprehension, and the mysteries of Scripture,40 and The predestination of each individual to either salvation or punishment as an “explanation of divine operation of human willing.”41

Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment Augustine’s interpretive insights are not surprising for us as Western interpreters: his reading of Romans (together with Luther’s) has become the default reading often designated as “what Paul meant” or “what Paul said.” The details of Augustine’s interpretation simply confirm what we already knew or what we commonly hear from people around us. This is the interpretation with which most of my students arrived in my seminar and that they expected me to help them to confirm and refine. So there is no point in elaborating on Augustine’s interpretive insights. By contrast, it is important to acknowledge that this default reading actually is an interpretive choice which has ethical consequences that need to be discussed. As we repeatedly noted (including the first part of this chapter), interpretive choices when reading Romans have, for believers, concrete life consequences with positive or negative values, because for them Romans is Scripture—they read it for a Wordto-live-by. And of course, these interpretive choices have ethical consequences that, for better or for worse, also affect the life of the believers’ neighbors. So it was for Augustine.

1) Good fruit of Augustine’s interpretive ethical discourse The contexts of Augustine’s reception/interpretation of Romans varied: Milan and North Africa; his joining and then rejecting the Manichees (his debates with

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Martin, 65–69, 80–84. See also Eugene TeSelle, Augustine, Abingdon Pillars of Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 15, passim. This explanation went in three stages first found in Responses to Simplicianus (396): (1) God moving an individual to faith by providing motives (will); (2) conversion as a reversal of evil tendencies (wrong will) by an interior grace; (3) a combination of the two. See J. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1980), 7, passim. So Augustine envisions the “transformation” of human beings by divine interventions. This seems similar to Chrysostom’s interpretation (and realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations). But for Augustine (contrary to Chrysostom) this transformation is exclusively focused on the will (compromised after the Fall).

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Fortunatus, and Faustus);42 as Bishop of Hippo (from 412) his debates against the Pelagians (and their claim that believers have free choice) to affirm that, because of the bondage of the will due to original sin, believers need grace to have a proper exercise of their will. In all these contexts Augustine read and reread Romans. The fact that Augustine presented his reading of Romans mostly in debates and in ongoing teaching and preaching makes the contextual character of his reception more readily recognizable. His more and more consistent forensic theological, individualcentered interpretation provided the frame that he used in his theological debates: it had a contextual dimension. The central contextual issue that framed his reading was the broad concern that individuals have for their own (individual) salvation—that is, their union with God (a view influenced by Neoplatonism). Through their introspective conscience, individual believers weigh their guilt feelings and ponder whether or not their fear of divine punishment is warranted (see Confessions). Augustine’s interpretation was contextually framed by concerns for individual-centered problems. For each individual, such problems are framed by the centrality of reason; by the responsibility that each individual has in the use or misuse (bondage) of her/his will; and thus by the responsibility that each individual has for sin—his/her own sins as related to original sin. Who benefited from this interpretive choice? Who benefited from such an individualcentered forensic theological interpretation of Romans? Of course, Augustine himself, but also the many others (including monks and nuns) who, following him, adopted this interpretation. As the Confessions show, this choice of interpretation contributed to his life-changing conversion, allowing him to abandon a life marked by sexual excesses (the most individual-centered sins) for a life of sexual abstinence (as a monk)—a life controlled by his will, thanks to grace as divine interventions. The disorderly and counterproductive life of the young Augustine was turned into the amazingly rich and beneficial life of a church father—Saint Augustine. Yet life and Paul’s letter also involve religious/heteronomous and community dimensions. Augustine did not ignore them. Of course, he took into account the figurative apocalyptic dimensions of Paul’s letter—and the corresponding religious/ heteronomous experience of believers. But he incorporated these figurative apocalyptic dimensions of Paul’s text into his individual-centered forensic line of reasoning through allegorical interpretations43 and religious experience centered upon the individual experience of grace. More explicitly Augustine took into account the community dimensions of life and of Paul’s letter. Paradoxically, this was demanded by his individual-centered concerns. His focus on individual-centered life was not an occasion to withdraw from community life. In fact, we constantly find him going from group to group, from religious community (e.g., Manichees) to religious community—ultimately to monastic communities. As Peter Brown notes, “Augustine’s Confessions are constructed around the abiding paradox of the relations between the inner and the

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Fortunatus, 392; Faustus, 397–98. Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 104.

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outer world.”44 Augustine’s time, Late Antiquity, was an age of political and social disintegration, where individuals sought grounding in themselves (with the help of philosophers, including Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists) rather than in a crumbling society. Nevertheless, these individuals remained in society, in relationships with other individuals. This time of political and social disintegration was precisely a time when all kinds of institutions were created (codified Roman law, Church hierarchy, Christian empire) to promote relationships among individuals. It is therefore not surprising to find that, on the basis of his individual-centered view of faith, Augustine founded three monasteries in North Africa and wrote a monastic rule which (of course!) promoted respect for the individual personality of each monk and humility, by contrast with pride (two individual-centered issues).45 Similarly, he highly valued friendship, not so much because of what one receives from a friend but because friendship provides the possibility of sharing oneself with a friend. So Augustine wrote, “A friend is one with whom one may dare to share the counsels of one’s heart.”46 Similarly, in his theological works, Augustine dealt with community issues, but consistently from an individual-centered perspective. For instance, as TeSelle notes, in The City of God, where Augustine deals with community issues, Books 1–10 attack critics “for their political and spiritual pride” (an individual-centered issue) and Books 11–22 distinguish the two cities as “arising out of two conflicting loves, namely, love of self, so much so as to have contempt for God; and love of God, so much so as to have contempt for self” (again, a very individual-centered view—a self-centered view).47

2) Problematic fruit of Augustine’s interpretive ethical discourse While this individual-centered reception/interpretation of Romans had very beneficial effects in Augustine’s personal life and in the personal lives of his followers, including monks and nuns, this interpretive choice had other upshots, some of them with quite problematic ethical consequences. Generally speaking, by choosing this individual-centered interpretation Augustine and his followers left most political and community issues in the hands of emperors and other officials—provided that these political authorities support (or at least did not interfere with) the individual-centered gospel as orthodoxy. Thus, the Christian Emperor Theodosius (379–95 in the East, 392–95 in the West) and his successors brought the full power of the Roman Empire against pagans (abandoning Constantine’s Edict of Toleration) and against Christian heretics. These included Manichees, Pelagians, and Arians who were treated as enemies with whom the Christian Roman Empire eventually engaged in wars. Of course, Augustine and his followers had vigorous theological debates with these heretics and strong doctrinal arguments, forcefully arguing that such heretics threatened the doctrinal orthodoxy that Augustine defended. Augustine had long theological debates with Fortunatus 44

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Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (New York: Harper and Row, 1972; Reprint: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 10. See T. J. van Bavel, OSA, “Augustinian Rule,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), xi—quoted without reference; probably a free translation of De div qq (Responses to Various Questions) 83.71.6. TeSelle, “Augustine,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Emphases added.

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and Faustus so as to demonstrate why Manichaeism must be rejected as heresy. But ultimately these “heretics” were viewed as a threat to the Christian Roman Empire and became the first heretics killed by Christians.48 Similarly, Pelagians were rejected as heretics, even though, together with Augustine, they defended an individual-centered reading of Romans. They were rejected following multiple theological debates, because they affirmed that believers have free choice in the practice of their Christian life (against Augustine’s view of original sin). But beyond these theological and exegetical debates, it is interesting to note that Pelagius was embedded in and supported by the Roman aristocracy. Is it simply a coincidence that aristocrats who, in their sociopolitical context, were self-confident people who acted with free will were Pelagians? But when Pelagius and his supporters had to flee Rome (as Roman society disintegrated) and go to North Africa, Augustine and his followers could more directly challenge them. They were condemned as heretics by the imperial court, then by the Pope (418) and therefore marginalized in (when not excluded from) the (Roman Catholic) Church.49 Similarly, for the Christians who followed Augustine’s orthodox teaching, the Visigoths (who sacked Rome in 410) and the Vandals (who sacked Hippo as Augustine was dying) were mortal barbarian enemies. The paradox was that these “barbarians” (often viewed as pagans) were themselves Christians—“heretic” Arian Christians!50 Many other factors were involved in these invasions by the Goths, but viewing them as heretics or even as non-Christians fueled these destructive political, economic, and cultural conflicts. The individual-centered perspective (and the corresponding reception of Romans) engendered a reality bubble which constructed a plausible interrelation of the inner and the outer world, and thus a much needed teaching in a situation when the communitycentered world of the Roman Empire was crumbling. But by being absolutized this individual-centered perspective and its reality bubble were also ethically problematic: they led to a communal and social life framed by the exclusion of all “heretics,” pagans, and Jews (indirectly, through supersessionism)—an issue to which, from our present post-Shoah context, we cannot but be sensitive. In itself the adoption of an individual-centered forensic theological interpretation of Romans was/is not problematic, ethically speaking. In a disintegrating society this choice of an interpretation/reception had a great many benefits for Augustine and his contemporaries. In such a context and for the sake of Augustine-disoriented contemporaries, this was an ethically valid interpretive choice. Possibly today such an interpretive choice may have a great deal of benefits for Christians who are similarly disoriented in their cultural contexts. But it became ethically problematic when this interpretation/reception was viewed as the only legitimate and plausible one—the 48

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Peter Brown, “The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire,” Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine, 94–119. See Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine, 208–25. Brown makes the more general point regarding the sociopolitical contextual character of Augustine’s theology in the introduction to that volume (9–23). From 493–552, Arian Ostrogoth and Roman churches coexisted (with tensions) in Italy during the Ostrogoth rule; but during the same period in Spain and Gaul the Arians simply took over the Roman churches. See “Arianism” and “Goths” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.

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only “orthodox” one. This absolutization, its exclusive attitude, and the rejection of heretics (however defined) had quite problematic consequences in Augustine’s time, and because of his influence, during much of the Middle Ages.

(B) Martin Luther (1483–1546) A Vignette Since Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who rejected the Nominalist and Scholastic theologies in order forcefully to affirm the authority of both the Bible and Augustine’s theology, it is not surprising that his interpretation/reception of Romans will be similar to Augustine’s: an individual-centered forensic theological interpretation. Such was the conclusion of the majority of the members of our SBL seminars, as the essays presented in Reformation Readings of Romans show.51 It is true that Luther’s life and theological perspective were strongly marked by an apocalyptic perspective. Thus, for instance, Gustaf Aulén classified Luther’s view of atonement among the classic (realized-apocalyptic/messianic) understandings; Heiko Oberman’s title, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, is supported by his narrative presenting Luther as constantly feeling threatened by evil powers and therefore constantly emphasizing that we are in need of divine interventions to free us from evil powers.52 His apocalyptic preoccupations are also directly reflected in his preaching, personal piety, and pastoral interpretations of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation in the shadow of Turkish threats, the Roman Church abuses and other manifestations of the anti-Christ.53 But the question is: do these apocalyptic preoccupations frame his reception/interpretation of Romans? In our seminar, this issue was raised in the debate between Ekkehard Stegemann and Stanley Stowers.54 Stegemann, as he contrasts Erasmus’s and Luther’s interpretations, speaks about “Luther’s re-apocalyptization of Paul.” 55 Stowers56 objects by underscoring that Luther’s interpretation of Romans is not framed by his apocalyptic views: “For

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Kathy Ehrensperger and R. Ward Holder, eds., Reformation Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2008). The articles relevant for a discussion of Luther on Rom 1:1–32 are the following: R. Ward Holder, “Introduction: Romans in the Light of Reformation Receptions,” 1–9; Deanna A. Thompson, “Letting the Word Run Free: Luther, Romans, and the Call to Reform,” 25–36; Kurt Richardson, “Luther’s Reimagining of Christian Existence Through a Romans-Shaped Hermeneutic: Response to Deanna A. Thompson,” 37–40; Ekkehard W. Stegemann, “The Alienation of Humankind: Rereading Luther as Interpreter of Paul,” 41–49; Stanley Stowers, “Two Kinds of Self: A Response to Ekkehard W. Stegemann,” 50–57. See also Laurel Carrington, “Erasmus’s Reading of Romans 3, 4, and 5 as Rhetoric and Theology,” 10–20; and Cynthia Briggs Kittredge’s response, 21–24. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: A Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (trans. A. G. Hebert; London: SPCK, 1945; 1931), 117–38. Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). As noted by Thompson, “Introduction: Luther and the Apocalyptic,” 4, and Kirsi Stjerna and Deanna A. Thompson, eds., On the Apocalyptic and Human Agency: Conversations with Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014). Thompson refers to Robert O. Smith, “Prophecy, the Pope, and the Turk: Luther’s Pastoral Apocalyptic,” 7–21. From Stowers’ point of view, Stegemann fails to follow our seminar’s practice by positing that he knows what Paul’s teaching is, and then, on this basis, he assesses the legitimacy and plausibility of Luther’s view. Stegemann, 46. Stowers, 50–57.

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Luther .  .  . the site of the apocalyptic struggle has been transferred to the inner space created or at least decisively developed by Augustine.”57 Stowers’s conclusion is supported by Luther’s comments on Rom 1:1–32 (the focus of the present volume): they are clearly framed by his reading of 1:17, which was for him the key for understanding “justification by faith alone,” a clearly forensic theological concept. Of course, Luther accounts for all textual dimensions of Romans—including its apocalyptic figurative features, and also its community dimensions. But as Augustine did, Luther viewed all these features from the perspective of his individual-centered interpretive line of reasoning.

Luther’s interpretation of Rom 1:1-32 and its context It is not necessary to repeat the many points where Augustine’s and Luther’s receptions/ interpretations of Romans overlap. Therefore, the following pages emphasize how Luther grounded his interpretation in Rom 1:1–32 and how his comments on these verses are related to his context. We can do so because, unlike Augustine (whose reception/interpretation is never truly systematic), Luther provides us with a complete ongoing commentary (lectures written and taught in 1515–16).58 Luther’s Preface to Romans (1545), a retrospective look (a year before his death) at his interpretation of Paul’s letter, lists the keywords one needs to consider for understanding Romans, including “law, sin, grace, faith, righteousness, flesh, spirit”—a list of themes that anchor his forensic theological interpretation.59 The comments below follow his suggestion by emphasizing his comments on these themes (when they are found in Rom 1), but add prominent themes in 1:1–32: “God’s love,” “the power of God for salvation,” “gospel,” and “the wrath of God.” Since 1:16–17 is the prism through which he reads the rest of the chapter, it makes sense to begin with these verses before following his reading of 1:1–15 and 1:18–32.

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Stowers, 53. Stowers refers to Philip Carey, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hilton Oswald, ed., Luther’s Works. Vol 25: Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1972). I refer to “glosses” by the verse number of Romans—this is sufficient to find them easily in the volume; at times, I refer to the “Scholia” (printed after the glosses) as Lectures, with specific page numbers. [When I quote these, I make their language sex-inclusive, including for the divinity.] What are “glosses” and “scholia?” In brief, Luther’s commentary was written in preparation for teaching. The interlinear and marginal glosses—in the large margins of the special printing of the Latin Vulgate text of Romans (using the latest versions updated by his contemporaries, including Erasmus, 1466–1536)—were made available (dictated) to his students. The scholia are Luther’s extensive notes in preparation for lecturing on selected passages of Romans, that were printed separately. At times the glosses use (without identification) the traditional glossa ordinaria and glossa interlinearis, yet often this is to better criticize and refute them with the help of other sources (including Augustine and Erasmus). On Erasmus’s interpretation of Romans see Reformation Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2008) the essays by Carrington, 10–20, Kittredge, 210–24 and, compared with Luther’s, Stegemann, 41–49. See The Works of Martin Luther. Volume VI (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1943), 447–62—the translation I use. The “Preface” is fully reproduced in Martin Luther, Commentary on Romans (trans. J. T. Mueller; Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1976; c1954), xiii–xxvi. Unfortunately the rest of this translation of the commentary is unusable for our purpose, because it is presented in abbreviated form for the edification of present-day Lutherans and without any clear references to the original.

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The forensic theological and individual-centered character of Luther’s interpretation of 1:16–17 is expressed in his glosses and scholia on these verses. His comments are readily comparable to the interpretations of the key themes of these verses by forensic theological exegetes. In the Protestant West, Luther’s particular understanding of these themes is so much taken for granted that, in itself, such a presentation would be pointless. But it becomes relevant when the individual-centeredness and the forensic character of Luther’s understanding of each theme are clarified along with their contextual dimensions.

1:16. The gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes First, the “gospel” is understood as a message which is proclaimed; it is often designated as the “Word”—with the presupposition that it is addressed to individuals, who can either accept it or ignore it. Having “faith,” “believing,” is holding that this “Word” is true—having accepted it as true. “Salvation” is clearly forensic, since salvation is contrasted with “damnation.” From God the Judge, an individual receives either salvation or condemnation, according to his/her faith or lack of faith.60 1:16. Marginal gloss: “[The gospel] is a power for salvation for all who believe, or it is the Word that has power to save all who believe in it. And this is given through God and from God  .  .  . . The gospel has this ingredient from God, that he/she who believes in it is saved. In this way, therefore, the person who has the gospel is powerful and wise before, and from, God, even though from human eyes he/she may be considered foolish and weak.” [alluding to 1 Cor 1:23–24] An interlinear gloss adds: (following [The gospel] is a power for salvation for all who believe) “and on the other hand, for damnation to him/her who does not have faith.”

1:17. For in [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith As is well known, this was a central verse for Luther. In his commentary, in addition to the glosses, he discusses 1:17 in his introductory comments to the entire letter, and comes back to it in later comments (Lectures, 135–38, 151–53). At first, Luther understood “the righteousness of God” as a quality of God (“the righteousness by which God is righteous in God’s self ”); therefore, in this first interpretation, what is revealed by the gospel is the just/righteous judgment/condemnation of God. Consequently, for many years, Luther read this verse with dread. The gospel was a proclamation of condemnation—of eternal damnation. But after much struggle, Luther understood 1:17 as speaking about a gracious gift from God—“the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God”—in

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Even when, as Stegemann emphasizes (RTHC, 2008, 44–48), Luther mentions that a believer is delivered from evil powers (as realized-apocalyptic interpretations also do) it is strictly envisioned as an individual deliverance/salvation (of someone who believes the Word).

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agreement with Augustine (On the Spirit and the Letter) whom he quotes: “It is called the righteousness of God because by imparting it God makes righteous people, just as ‘deliverance belongs to the Lord’ refers to that by which God delivers” (Lectures, 151–52).61 For Luther, this was not an abstract theological point; it was an existential issue. For him, the human predicament—his own predicament—was “torment of conscience” (as he writes commenting on 1:7). It is the dread that he called Anfechtung: the spiritual terror due to the terrifying feeling of being under God’s or Christ’s judgment and condemnation—a feeling that, as late as early 1515, he had when in front of the crucifix and at mass. These were experiences of the presence of an avenging, punishing Christ as judge (see Luther’s Works, vol. 8, 188; vol. 54:19–20, 234). This “torment of conscience,” Anfechtung, is an important part of Luther’s interpretive context—an individual-centered context—as he reads and rereads Romans.62 Obviously, this torment of conscience, this fear of the avenging God/Christ as judge, was shared by many of Luther’s contemporaries, who longed for any means of forgiveness to escape his judgment. This is why there was a brisk sale of indulgences: afraid (terrified) of God’s punishment, people were buying from the Roman Catholic Church, indulgences for the remissions of punishment due to sin and the forgiveness of guilt; so many were sold by the Pope that this covered (a part of) the cost of building the basilica of St. Peter in Rome. As is well known, for Luther this was a scandal, which motivated him to write (in 1517, less than two years after his commentary on Romans) the “95 Theses,” also known as the “Disputation on the Power of Indulgences.” This demonstrates that the “torment of conscience,” Anfechtung, was not a human predicament for Luther alone, but for a large number of his contemporaries (at least in what is now Germany). This was (re)discovering Paul’s teaching—the gospel—as truly “good news,” rather than as a dreadful warning of the coming judgment, and “salvation” as based on faith, rather than on merits or works (including buying indulgences). There is no need to add comments on Luther’s own words on 1:17, a decisive verse for him. 1:17. Gloss: For the righteousness of God, by which alone there are righteous people before God, is revealed in it, because formerly it was considered hidden and to consist in a person’s own works. But now it is “revealed,” because no one is righteous unless he/she believes. Scholia (Lectures, 136–37): We must be taught a righteousness that comes completely from the outside and is foreign. . . . [The Exodus should be understood] as an exodus from virtues to the grace of Christ.  .  .  . Christ wants our whole disposition to be stripped down that we are not only unafraid of being embarrassed for our faults and also do not delight in the glory and vain joys of our virtues. . . . A true Christian must have no glory of his/her own . . . [with] the knowledge that the honor that has been bestowed on him/her has been given not to him/her but to Christ, whose righteousness and gifts are shining in him/her and that the dishonor inflicted on him/her is inflicted both on him/her and on Christ. 61

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Toward the end of his life, in a retrospective long after the fact, Luther discusses his personal struggle with the concept of the “righteousness of God” (iusticia Dei) in his preface to the 1545 edition of his works. See Luther’s Works, vol. 34, 336–37. Thompson, 25–27.

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Scholia (Lectures, 151): Only in the Gospel is the righteousness of God revealed (that is, who is and becomes righteous before God and how this takes place) by faith alone, by which the Word of God is believed [quoting Mark 16:16]. For the righteousness of God is the cause of salvation. And here again, by the righteousness of God we must not understand the righteousness by which God is righteous in God’s self but the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God. This happens through faith in the Gospel. [Followed by Augustine’s words quoted above.] The righteousness of God is so named to distinguish it from the righteousness of humans], which comes from works, as Aristotle describes very clearly in Book III of his Ethics. . . . But according to God, righteousness precedes works, and thus works are the result of righteousness. Scholia (Lectures, 153): From faith to faith. The righteousness of God is completely from faith, but in such a way that through its development it does not make its appearance but becomes a clearer faith [quoting 2 Cor 3:18, Ps 84:8, Rev 22:11, Phil 3:12, and Augustine On the Spirit and the Letter, 11:] “From the faith of those who confess with their mouth to the faith of those who are obedient.”

From the perspective of Luther’s interpretation of 1:16–17, we can briefly note how, in his comments on the rest of 1:1–32, he understood (in the glosses and the scholia) other key themes. 1:1. Luther opens his comments by a long marginal gloss that begins with these programmatic words: The whole purpose and intention of the apostle in the epistle is to break down all righteousness and wisdom of our own, to point out again those sins and foolish practices . . . ([that] we did not recognize on account of that kind of righteousness [the righteousness of our own]) . . . and thus to show that for breaking them down Christ and his righteousness are needed for us.

Thus, from the outset, Luther emphasizes that the fundamental problem is individualcentered: the “righteousness and wisdom of our own” is the human predicament that needs to be broken down by “Christ and his righteousness.” Luther expands on this point in the Scholia (Lectures, 135) by saying that “the chief purpose of this letter is to break down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and righteousness of the flesh”— defining “righteousness of the flesh” as the “sin” that someone insists does not exist, therefore pretending to be righteous—quoting Augustine at length. 1:5. To bring about the obedience of faith. Luther’s gloss provides a definition of “faith”—a clearly forensic theological definition—that confirms the above comments on 1:16–17: He (Paul) says “of faith” not “of wisdom” which can be proved by reason and testing. He has no intention of proving what he is going to say but wants to be believed simply as one who possesses divine authority. There should be no argument about faith and the things which we believe.

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So he posits that “faith” is “believing that certain affirmations are true” (Augustine’s fides quae creditur), because these propositions are revealed by God. This is the component of “faith” which is typically privileged in forensic interpretation (see Chapter 3)—by contrast with emphasis on “faith” as either “faithfulness,” or “trust,” or “movement toward, and experience of, God.”63 This understanding of faith, which Luther develops in later comments, is consistent with his Scholia on 1:3–4 (Lectures, 146) that posits that “the gospel” is a message and asserts that “the content, or object, of the gospel . . . is Jesus Christ” (who has been incarnated, quoting Phil 2:7). “The gospel” is a message about what God did in Christ, because “we have everything from God, but only through Christ” (gloss on 1:5 and Lectures, 148). This message and “faith” in it displace the “righteousness and wisdom of our own.” Luther consistently follows a forensic theological line of reasoning. 1:7a. To all God’s beloved in Rome. Luther’s gloss: “God’s love comes before the call . . . [Paul] wants them to know that they are saints not on the basis of their merits but on the basis of the love and call of God.” God’s love—as a gift of God, as grace—displaces any role of merits. 1:7b. Grace to you and peace. Luther’s gloss: “Grace, which bestows the remission of sins, to you and peace, which removes the torment of conscience.” This gloss makes explicit that, as discussed above, in Luther’s interpretation, the human predicament is twofold: sins and “torment of conscience” (the spiritual terror, Anfechtung) due to the terrifying feeling of being under God’s or Christ’s judgment and condemnation—an important part of the individual-centered interpretive context in which and for which Luther reads Romans.64 1:8. I thank my God  .  .  . because your faith. Luther’s gloss: “The faith by which you believe in Christ and also the faith which justifies” (anticipating his comments on 1:16–17). He adds: This is the nature of love: it rejoices in the good gifts of the neighbor, especially spiritual gifts  .  .  . Contrariwise it is characteristic for envy to be sad about a neighbor’s good gifts and to curse them.

Therefore, faith involves a change in relationship with neighbors. It becomes a loving relationship, instead of a relationship governed by “envy,” defined as “the love of concupiscence,” a self-centered desire—“seeking ‘my’ gain or delight” (interlinear gloss on 1:11). 1:11. That I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you. Luther’s marginal gloss reinforces this point: “The perversity of the flesh seeks its own gratification in others, but the spirit designs only what is good for others”—and this for mutual encouragement, 1:12. Therefore, believers—those with faith—have a responsibility

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In each case, the various dimensions of “faith” have a role. The question is which one is privileged to become the defining component of faith. See “Faith” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. See Thompson, 25–27.

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toward others. Consequently, 1:14 is translated “I am under obligation” followed by the gloss, “because of the office of apostleship”—even though both the Greek ὀφειλέτης εἰμί and the Vulgate debitor sum are open to other interpretations. This obligation is “to preach the gospel” (1:15)—an interpretation demanded by his understanding of the gospel as message, a legitimate interpretation although both εὐαγγελίσασθαι and evangelizare offer other possibilities. 1:18. For the wrath of God is revealed. Luther’s gloss: “namely in the same Gospel it is announced that God is angry, although until now God is postponing punishment”— the typical forensic view. [Those who suppress] the truth of God. Luther’s gloss: “The true knowledge concerning God . . . that they have had.” Luther’s comments in scholia further express the forensic character of his understanding of the gospel. Yes: having faith (in the gospel) frees us from God’s just punishment, which is a reality for all those who do not have such a faith and therefore who still are under the wrath of God (note the absence of apocalyptic connotations). The apostle directs his chief attack against the powerful and the wise of the world because if they have been humbled, their followers and the uneducated will also easily be humbled, but also because they proposed the gospel and the world and the life of the cross of Christ and have incited other against it. Therefore he imputes guilt and sin to them as if they were the only ones who are guilty and announces the wrath of God upon them. (Lectures, 154)

After emphasizing (regarding 1:19–23) that all people (especially idolaters) have “the natural knowledge of God . . . so that they are without excuse,” Luther notes in gloss that these words against idolatry are more generally against “all our strange, superstitious practices, products of utter vanity”—that he discusses at length, pointing out that they began with Lucifer who was ungrateful to his Creator so as to emphasize that idolatry and all other sins originate in “self-satisfaction”—individual-centeredness. He develops this view of sin as “self-satisfaction” in scholia: 1:19-23. (Lectures, 159) Self-satisfaction is responsible for this, for it takes pleasure in things received as though they were not received at all, and it leaves the Giver out of consideration. The second level is vanity. One feasts on oneself and on all of creation and enjoys the things that bring profit. Thus one becomes of necessity vain . . . . The third level is blindness. Bereft of truth and given over to vanity, a person becomes necessarily blind in one’s whole heart and in all one’s thoughts because one has turned completely away from God  .  .  . one is then lodged in darkness . . . . The fourth level is the error over against God. This is the worst. It leads directly to idolatry. To have arrived at this point means to have arrived at the abyss. . . . The result is that deluge of evils and bloodletting of which the apostle goes on to speak in the following passages.

1:24. Therefore God gave them up to the lust of their hearts. Beyond the view of sin as self-satisfaction, Luther underscores that sin is punishment from God in his comments (in scholia) where he strives to explain the scandalous claim that Paul

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meant that “God wills evil” (debating Nicholas of Lyra, William of Occam, Peter Lombard, and Gabriel Biel): (Lectures, 160–61) This “giving up” is not only a permission but a commission and order of God [e.g., comparable to God misleading Ahab’s prophets, 1 Kings 22:22 and God enticing Shimei to curse David, 2 Sam 16:10-11]. . . . In the same way the Lord also commands the devil and the flesh to tempt and overwhelm the person who has deserved it in the eyes of the Lord because of his/her wickedness. . . . God does not raise up evil to let it reign and triumph . . . when God acts in goodness, but when God punishes in severity, God makes those who are evil even more against God’s commandments in order to punish them all the more.  .  .  . Then the devil, who is constantly waiting for such an occasion, receives, or thinks he has received, God’s authority and command . . . God] deserts the person] so that he/she is no longer able to resist the devil. . . . It is God’s will that that person] be overwhelmed by sin. . . . Therefore God wills that sin be done not for its own sake but for the sake of penalty and punishment. . . . It hurts to be, or to have been, subjected to such vile sins. . . . Sin or rather the shame which is connected with sin, is itself the punishment of God not the withdrawal of God’s grace [as Nicholas of Lyra argued].

Luther’s long “Corollary” (Lectures, 162–65) concludes, The apostle is interested to show that all were sinners and needed the grace of Christ. . . . They were (at least in the eyes of God) his accomplices and equals of all the others . . . . Against them also the beginning of the second chapter seems to be directed, as if they had been sitting in judgment against the others and yet have done exactly the same things, though not all of them.” Paul conveys that “God wills that I and all others should be under obligation”—i.e., each individual is a sinner under the threat of punishment by God’s wrath—and that God “gives grace only to whom God wills,” giving this grace only to those to whom God chose and elect.

Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Pastoral care, peasants war, and the Shoah/Holocaust Luther’s interpretive insights are not surprising for us as Western interpreters: his reading of Romans (together with Augustine’s) has become the “default reading” often designated as “what Paul meant” or “what Paul said.” The details of Luther’s interpretation (focused on justification by faith) simply confirm what we already knew or what we commonly hear from people around us. This is the interpretation with which most of my students arrive(d) in my seminar and that they expect I will help them to confirm and refine. So there is no point in elaborating on Luther’s interpretive insights. By contrast, it is important to acknowledge that this “default reading” actually is an interpretive choice which, like Augustine’s, has ethical consequences, which need to be discussed. After the brief overview of the way Luther read 1:1–32 through the prism of 1:16–17, it is clear that Luther’s understanding of key themes of these verses in Romans closely resemble the understanding of these themes by critical exegetes (many

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of them Lutherans) who followed a forensic theological interpretive line of reasoning. This is readily confirmed by a brief glance at these key themes in the appendix of this volume.65

1) Good fruit of Luther’s interpretive ethical discourse Luther’s interpretation/reception plays an important and positive role as an interpretive ethical discourse. Its remarkable contribution to freeing individuals from very real bondage must be acknowledged. Luther’s interpretive choice met an existential need that he shared with his contemporaries: the human predicament that he called “torment of conscience” (in his comment on 1:7) and elsewhere Anfechtung. This spiritual terror due to the alarming feeling of being under God’s or Christ’s judgment and condemnation was an important part of Luther’s own interpretive context.66 But if it had been a predicament for Luther alone, Luther would have remained isolated in his monastery. This “torment of conscience” (Anfechtung) was also clearly an existential concern for many of his contemporaries. To escape it they were buying indulgences for the remissions of punishment due to sin and for the forgiveness of guilt. Indeed, they were at times buying indulgences instead of buying life-necessities;67 as mentioned, so many were sold that they significantly contributed to building the basilica of St. Peter in Rome! Many, perhaps most of Luther’s contemporaries, were seeing themselves as sinners and were suffering from “torment of conscience.” As Thompson summarizes, “Luther counsels sinners to ‘believe at least your own experience,’ for by the law you deserve God’s wrath, but by grace you have been saved through faith.”68 As Thompson continues, faith in the gospel freed Luther from his personal, dreaded “torment of conscience” and “freed him to follow his conscience rather than the external commands he believed contradicted God’s Word.”69 Luther’s forensic understanding of faith in the gospel had the same role for his followers. It freed his listeners from their own personal torment of conscience. And as it did for Luther, it freed them from the compulsion of accumulating good deeds and merits, some of which involved prohibitively large outlays of money, and from the weight of a legalistic understanding of the gospel that framed and governed the life of the church and thus of everyone in medieval society. “Justification by faith alone” freed Luther’s followers from this ecclesiastical, social, and cultural burden. This meant that Luther’s direct and indirect followers in his time and in the following centuries were free to follow their own conscience. Luther’s reception/interpretation of Romans had, therefore, broad beneficial impacts in his own culture and society. In the following centuries, for millions of people first in Western Europe, then much beyond, it brought freedom from the tyranny grounded in and empowered by fear: fear of God the Judge that engenders the fear and tyranny of

65

66 67

68 69

See “righteousness of God,” “salvation,” “the power of God,” “sin,” “grace,” “faith,” “gospel,” “righteous,” “God’s beloved,” and “wrath of God” in the Appendix. Thompson, 25–27. Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil. Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 16–18, 74–78, passim. Thompson, 29. Thompson, 30.

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guilt and also the fear and tyranny of institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope (painted as the anti-Christ). In a major step away from medieval cultures and toward modern cultures, it affirmed the centrality of “freedom of conscience”—a primary individual-centered value, at the basis of the concept of liberty. The ultimate individual-centeredness of freedom of conscience was and is fundamentally liberating for anyone trapped into subservience by guilt and other terror of conscience (and the institutions built on it). Faith in the gospel as unconditional forgiveness is literally life-giving for people who are destroyed—and/or who are destroying themselves—by their guilt. Therefore, Luther’s individual-centered forensic theological interpretation of Romans is commonly used in pastoral care by the Seelsorger, the Lutheran priest as a “carer of the soul,” to bring individuals consolation from such sufferings.70 As such, Luther’s individual-centered interpretation of Romans along with its many refinements became normative in the West—and continued to prove itself essential for addressing the believers’ personal needs—for consolation in times of suffering, for rebuilding self-esteem for the depressed, and so on.71 This individual-centered reading of Romans is indeed liberating. Freedom of conscience! My Huguenot ancestors died for it, so as to preserve their conviction— following Luther and other Reformers—that the gospel proclaims salvation by faith alone and that one’s conscience is exclusively bound to God’s Word. Walther von Löwenich comments: “For the first time, the principle of freedom of conscience was exposed publicly before the highest-ranking representative of the church and the world. One could make demands of everything else, but not of faith, for faith was a matter of conscience, and conscience [was] bound to God’s Word.”72

2) Problematic fruit of Luther’s interpretive ethical discourse The difficulty—a crucial and often disastrous ethical difficulty—is that, much beyond private (individual-centered) life, freedom of conscience has of course a communitycentered dimension. It necessarily involves rejection of any authority or power that in community life and society seeks to infringe upon my freedom of conscience. For my Huguenot ancestors, this meant resisting the authority not only of the Catholic Church and the Pope, but also of the French king—and consequently they often endured jail and death. Yet, Huguenots strove to develop communities (hidden communities in le desert—the wilderness) that could embody their freedom of conscience. But they had to wait for the full-fledged community-centered dimension for their freedom of conscience until the French Revolution and its (chaotic) institutional rejection of the authorities of both the king (resulting in democracy) and of the church (resulting in secularism as a cultural expression of freedom of conscience). This example illustrates

70 71

72

See Leonard Hummel, “Pastoral Care,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. See for instance Leonard Hummel, Clothed in Nothingness: Consolation for Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003). Hummel takes the doctrine of justification (as well as the theology of the Cross and the priesthood of believers) and shows how it applies to the “religious coping” of six individual believers who have suffered personal or social ills and how their belief in justification by faith allowed them to cope. Walther von Löwenich, Martin Luther: The Man and His Work (trans., Lawrence Denef; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1982), 195.

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that freedom of conscience cannot be restrained to individual-centered life. Actually, with an individual-centered perspective, one is totally unable to address communitycentered problems. This was tragically demonstrated by Luther’s complete inability to address the community-based situation of the peasants who were his followers. As is well known, and as Thompson discusses, it was Luther’s teaching that led to the catastrophic peasants’ war. Of course, this was totally unintentional on his part. As Thompson writes:73 For Luther, the transforming claim of the gospel—that we are saved by faith— become so deeply engraved in one’s being that conscience can and must go against any authority who threatens the gospel’s proclamation  .  .  . [Luther’s] consistent attempts to let the World run free significantly impacted many who caught wind of his call to freedom and reform. . . . Although Luther repeatedly invoked Paul’s words in Romans 12-13, preaching patience and endurance of trials inflicted by unjust rulers, his noisy disobedience in response to papal injustices fueled the imaginations and religious zeal of the peasants on ushering in the reign of God on earth. Buoyed by Luther, the peasants demanded better treatment by the rulers.74

In the subsequent broad and violent uprising, Luther, quoting Rom 13:1–2 and referring to his understanding of the two kingdoms, ended up supporting the princes.75 The result was that as many as 100,000 peasants lost their lives—a huge percentage of the population of Germany at the time! And in this context, Luther claimed that “if we are to preach God’s word, we must preach the word that declares God’s wrath, as well as that which declares mercy” (Luther’s Work 46:66; quoted by Thompson).76 This massacre was God’s will—a manifestation of God’s wrath. Thompson adds, “This, many argue, was Luther at his worst.”77 Maybe. Beyond this tragedy, the more general point is that an individual-centered teaching based on Romans is simply totally inadequate for addressing community-centered issues—in that case, the disastrous economic and social situations of the peasants in the territories that are now Germany. As was the case in Augustine’s context, an individual-centered interpretation of Romans was very helpful and necessary for addressing the disorientation that individuals experience in chaotic situations, so in Luther’s context, such an interpretation was most helpful for addressing the fear of divine judgment and guilt and the related ecclesial abuses from which individuals needed to be freed. Nevertheless, this individualcentered interpretation of Romans was and is totally unable to help believers to address community-centered problems. When it is taken as the only legitimate and plausible interpretation—as one is tempted to do in view of its many “good fruits”— 73 74 75

76 77

Thompson, 30–34. Thompson, 32. God acts through both the Word and the sword, that is, through love and persuasion in the church, through force in civil government. See the articles “Two Kingdom, Two Realms,” “Luther,” “Lutheranism,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (and cross listings). Thompson, 33. See Esther Chung-Kim, “Peasants’ War,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity and Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing Authority: The Use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011).

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that is, when it is absolutized, such an interpretation blinds interpreters to both the nature of community-centered problems and the way to address such problems. Thus, Luther was so blinded by his absolutized forensic individual-centered interpretation— everything must be viewed through the prism of justification by faith—that he could not envision any practical way to address the community-centered problems of the many peasants who were his followers. Consequently, Luther condoned their massacre by the princes—a manifestation of God’s wrath, in his view. In short, the very absolutization of the otherwise beneficial forensic theological interpretation/reception of Romans exacerbated the community-centered problems that existed in his context, to the point that they became nightmarish. “This, many argue, was Luther at his worst.” Unfortunately, Luther’s forensic theological interpretation included other dimensions, which when absolutized had—already in his time and even more so in subsequent centuries—even more nightmarish consequences. When “faith” is understood as the personal affirmation and appropriation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and when “salvation” is exclusively through “justification by faith,” Jews can be saved only insofar as they abandon their Judaism. Thus, Luther’s comments on 1:1–32 are totally framed by supersessionist presuppositions—as was already the case with Augustine’s interpretation. Certainly, Jews are not to be rejected but to be loved, which means to be converted, so that they will be saved. Such a supersessionism already marks the forensic theological interpretation/reception as anti-Jewish. The negative characterization of the Jews will become more explicit in Luther’s commentary on the following chapters of Romans (beginning with Rom 2 and 3—see our next volume), where Luther insists that the Jews are worse than the Gentiles. On many points, his commentary becomes almost a systematic disparaging of the Jews as followers of the Law. Yet, in his commentary on Romans (1515–16), Luther’s supersessionist comments remain relatively mild—the goal is to love and convert Jews. Nevertheless, for the individual-centered faith of Christian believers, this supersessionism already establishes an anti-Jewish frame, which can at any moment turn into a virulent antiSemitism. Unfortunately, this is what already happened for Luther himself: in 1543, he published On the Jews and Their Lies. This treatise has been resented as anti-Semitic by many. Whether or not this designation is justified by its content, and a posteriori by the fact that in the 1930s Nazis displayed it in some of their rallies, one must remember that anti-Judaism and supersessionism has nothing to do with Luther’s feelings toward Jews—whether he loves them or not.78 The point is that a supersessionist interpretation of Romans provides a framework for anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. And the tragedy is that a forensic theological interpretation reading Romans through the prism of justification by faith is necessarily blind to community-centered issues, including those generated by supersessionism of all kinds (“I have the only true faith”) concerning the relationship between different religious communities, and especially the relationship between Christian and Jewish communities. There is no need to rehearse here the tragic consequences of this interpretation of Romans. Many studies after World War 78

See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974); and Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Anti-Semitism,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, as well as in it the multiauthored cluster of articles (by Jewish and Christian scholars) on “Judaism and Christianity.”

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II and the Holocaust/Shoah have documented that the large majority of German Lutherans and their individual-centered views grounded in a forensic theological reception of Romans found themselves totally unable to resist fascism and its tragic consequences—prompting Dietrich Bonhoeffer to radically reject such a perspective.79 Progressively over the years, this recognition led New Testament scholars to look for ways to bypass this individual-centered interpretation of Romans (long supported by all the weight and authority of German scholarship)—a struggle documented, for instance, by John Gager in the first part of Reinventing Paul.80 The temptation is of course to reject as totally illegitimate and implausible Augustine’s and Luther’s individual-centered interpretation of Romans, so as to advocate as the only true interpretation a community-centered interpretation. The problem is that in such a case this absolutized interpretation in turn becomes deadly, because it is totally unable to deal with individual-centered problems, which remain real problems in the life of real individuals. This is the dilemma that Elsa Tamez struggles with in The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective.81 In her Latin American context, community-centered problems cannot be ignored. Therefore, an individual-centered “justification” must also be understood as a community-centered “justice.” Thus, the gospel is both the good news of justification by faith to believers—the interpretation of Romans she learned in Lausanne—and the good news of God’s justice to the excluded and oppressed, that is, the good news of God’s solidarity with the excluded, an interpretation of Romans she developed and learned in Latin America. Yet, such community-centered interpretations/receptions are not new with liberation theology; there are found throughout the history of receptions of Romans, as the next section illustrates.

III Community-centered receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: Clement of Alexandria, Abelard, and liberation theologians (A) Clement of Alexandria (c150–c215) A Vignette As the studies in the volume Early Patristic Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2005) show,82 and as this vignette argues, the reception of Romans in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis 2 (written along with Books 1–5 in Alexandria, c198–c201) belongs

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Most poignantly in Dietrich Bonhoeffer,  Letters and Papers from Prison (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2015). Gager, Reinventing Paul, 1–42. Tamez, The Amnesty of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993). Kathy L. Gaca and L. L. Welborn, eds., Early Patristic Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2005). In this volume, the pertinent essays are: Kathy L. Gaca and L. L. Welborn, “Introduction: Romans in Light of the Early Patristic Receptions,” i–vi; Michael Joseph Brown, “Jewish Salvation in Romans according to Clement of Alexandria in Stromateis 2,” 42–62; Kathy L. Gaca, “A Response. Is Clement of Alexandria a Supersessionist?” 63–65; L. L. Welborn, “The Soteriology of Romans in Clement

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among the community-centered receptions of Romans.83 A preliminary clue is that its interpretation of Romans is rejected as non-Pauline by scholars who are proponents of individual-centered forensic theological interpretations of Paul. Two additional and more substantial reasons are (a) that in his Hellenized reception of Romans Clement associates virtues with faith, and (b) that Clement’s reception of Romans is also framed by his close study and appropriation of the work of his renowned Jewish Alexandrian compatriot, Philo (25 BCE–50 CE), and thus by a covenantal Jewish perspective (that Philo had already Hellenized).84 As Welborn85 notes, “Clement’s understanding of Pauline theology is held to be superficial and distorted by the influence of Greek philosophy” by scholars who, on the one hand, follow a traditional, skeptical, and condescending attitude toward receptions and who, on the other hand, hold the forensic theological interpretation of Paul as the only “true” interpretation (what Paul truly meant). In what way did Clement misunderstand Paul and Romans according to such scholars? In brief, as Welborn notes, these scholars reject Clement’s interpretation because “Clement, it is alleged, had no understanding of the Pauline notion of sinfulness of the ‘flesh’ (Rom 7: 5, 13-20, 23-24), and thus failed to appreciate the necessity of the gift of the ‘spirit’  .  .  . [and] completely misunderstood the Pauline conception of faith as the gift of God which saves apart from the law.”86 Indeed, if it is mentioned at all (I could not find it), in Stromateis 2 Clement does not emphasize any teaching about forgiveness of sins; and his understanding of Paul’s concept of “faith” has nothing to do with “believing in Christ” or “in God” in the sense of “believing some doctrine about Christ of God.” Yes, in order to be saved one needs to have faith, but not in Augustine’s sense of fides quae creditur, as these scholars expected was the proper interpretation of Romans on the basis of an individual-centered forensic theological interpretation. Their other objection that Clement presents a Hellenized understanding of Romans points to an actual characteristic of Clement’s reception. But far from making his reception illegitimate and implausible, this hellenization of his reading of Romans is simply the mark that Clement’s interpretation/reception is contextualized—as all interpretations are—including Augustine’s and Luther’s

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of Alexandria, Stromateis 2: Faith, Fear, and Assimilation to God,” 66–83; and Kathy L. Gaca, “A Response: Elucidating Romans in Stromateis 2,” 84–86. The date c198–c201 is that of Books 1–5. Books 6–7 (and the independent Book 8) were written while in exile after 203. See Ronald Heine, “The Alexandrians,” in Early Christian Literature (eds. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117–21. See also Wayne Kannaway, “Clement of Alexandria,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. On the association of “virtues” with “faith,” see Welborn, “The Soteriology of Romans in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2,” 66–83. See also Brown on Clement’s use of Philo—“Jewish Salvation in Romans,” 42–62; and Annewies van den Hoek, Clement of Alexandria and His Use of Philo in the Stromateis: An Early Christian Reshaping of a Jewish Model (New York: Brill, 1988). Welborn, 74. Welborn refers to Hoffmann-Aleith’s detailed rejection of the “wrong” interpretation of Paul (and Romans) by Clement, in effect because his interpretation is not consistent with the “established” interpretation of Paul in German scholarship framed by Luther’s forensic theological perspective. Eva Hoffmann-Aleit, Paulusverständnis in der alten Kirche (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1937), 87–98, presupposes that Paul understands “faith” as “believing that certain affirmations are true” (the forensic theological understanding).

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individual-centered forensic theological interpretations (see above), and all critical exegetical interpretations, including the interpretation of these scholars who should—but fail to—acknowledge the Westernized character of their own reception of Romans. Clement of Alexandria’s reception of Romans takes the form of the second book of his “Miscellanies (Stromateis) of Notes of Revealed Knowledge in Accordance with the True Philosophy”—this second book being commonly designated as Stromateis 2.87 The collective title Stromateis expresses that these “notes” are “memory aids” (a “potion against forgetfulness,” Strom 1, 11:1) that the teacher (Clement) made for himself in the period (c180–c202) when he was teaching in a catechetical school in Alexandria, during the Middle Platonist period of this Hellenistic center. Book 2 of the Stromateis 2 was written a few years before riots against Christians (and Jews) in 202–03 forced Clement to leave the city. These notes include quotations from or references to various biblical, Christian, Jewish, and Hellenistic texts and are organized by topics in preparation for the instruction he gave at the catechetical school. His teaching took the form of an apology for the Christian faith addressed to Christians (participating in a catechetical school of the church!) who, by the very fact that they lived in Alexandria, were immersed in the Middle Platonist culture.88 In Stromateis 2, these notes are framed by an interpretation/reception of Romans, as “careful and attentive readers” (Clement’s common designation of his hoped-for readers) should discover.89 The notes in Stromateis 2 are not a systematic interpretation of Romans. Rather they are a reception of Romans expressed through constant references and allusions to Paul’s letter that organize the central part of Stromateis 2: 4.1–136.6. This is commonly overlooked, but demonstrated by Welborn and confirmed by Brown.90 Without repeating their detailed critical analyses, I focus upon Clement’s interpretation of “faith” as related to “salvation”—key themes related to Romans 1. But, beyond Welborn and with Brown, an overall study of Clement’s interpretation of faith and salvation as related to Romans needs to take into account that, in one section of Stromateis 2

87

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John Ferguson, trans., Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis: Books One to Three (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991). As a shorthand, I often refer to this translation despite its limitations, adjusting it on the basis of Clément d’Alexandrie, Les Stromates. II. Sources Chrétiennes 38. Ed. P. Th. Camelot and Cl. Mondésert (Paris: Cerf, 1954). Since I almost exclusively refer to Stromateis 2, to abbreviate I only refer to section and verse numbers (as in 4.1–136.6). This is my conclusion on the basis of the debate on this point that took place in our seminar. I am convinced by Gaca’s demonstration that Clement’s teaching was addressed to Christian, rather than being aimed at “converting” Middle Platonists to Christianity (after all he was teaching in a catechetical school of the church). It remains that his teaching was framed by the fact that the Christians he addressed lived in Alexandria, a city dominated by Middle Platonists (mixing Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean teachings). Thus, as Gaca argues in “A Response: Elucidating Romans in Stromateis 2” (RTHC, 2005), 84–86), the bulk of Stromateis 2 is not “protreptic”—aimed at the conversions of Greeks—although Clement’s larger project (described in Strom 2 1–3.5) might be to train Christians to convert Greeks. Clement hopes for readers who are diligent and exercise “care and inventiveness,” “if they are worthy of it” (Strom 7, 18.3; see also Strom 1, 13.3). Strom 2, 1-3.5 introduces a larger project and 137.1-147.5 deals with marriage. Welborn’s argument is convincingly based on the way Clement signals the completion of a theme by returning at the close of a section to the word or motive he has used at the beginning (κύκλος or inclusio as compositional device).

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(78.2–100.2), Clement uses and interprets Philo’s De Virtutibus, and makes references to other works by Philo.91 The context of Clement’s reception of Romans is Alexandria, one of the two largest cities in the Roman Empire92—Rome being the other. It was a very cosmopolitan Hellenistic city (with gymnasiums and athletic facilities, libraries, and temples for all kinds of Egyptian and Greek deities and syncretistic religions). Its original citizens were Greeks and Egyptians, but in Clement’s time they included Romans and people from other parts of the Roman Empire including Africa. Alexandria was a center of scholarship with (what was left of) the famous Library of Alexandria and with other libraries in all disciplines (from mathematics and science to history), but especially in literature, philology, and philosophy. Clement clearly used such a library (he quotes 300 different sources, including Philo’s works and the LXX), possibly associated with house-churches and the catechetical school where he taught.93 In Clement’s time, there was no longer any Jewish district within the inner city. As a result of the revolt of 115–17 CE, the large Jewish community of Philo’s time (that occupied one of the five districts of the inner city) had been dispersed: many emigrated to Palestine and beyond or were forced to relocate to a Jewish settlement outside the walls (to the east of the city).94 Up to the time of this revolt (a messianic revolt that was part of the Jewish–Roman wars, 66–136), the Alexandrian followers of Jesus were virtually indistinguishable (at least for outsiders such as the Romans) from the Hellenized Jewish community. After the expulsion of the Jews, the Gentile Church developed on these Hellenized Jewish roots with catechetical schools functioning as centers of learning (very much as the synagogues did).95 But the tensions between Greeks (including Romans and Egyptians) and Jews remained and soon encompassed the Christian community, so much so that the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (during his [North-]African war) promulgated an edict putting severe restrictions on both “Jewish and Christian practices,” leading to riots by the Hellenistic population against both Jews and Christians (202–03). The fact that the emperor’s edict targeted both Jewish and Christian practices shows that there was still in Alexandria a recognizable Jewish presence (even if they inhabited a settlement outside the walls) with whom Christians and Clement interacted; this Jewish presence is an important contextual feature of his reception of Romans. The fact that the edict targeted “Jewish practices” rather than institutions is consistent with the information we have about a Jewish settlement outside the walls. 91 92

93

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See also Hoek, Clement of Alexandria and His Use of Philo, 69–115; 148–208. Alexandria had an estimated population of 500,000–600,000 inhabitants for the inner city, and 1.5 million in and around the metropolis of Alexandria, according to Brown. By Clement’s time, it is not clear what was left of the 400,000 volumes of the famous Library of Alexandria—an apparently partially destroyed during Caesar’s Civil War in 48 bc. But it seems to have continued in existence in some form until the end of the third century bce. In addition, several temples, and presumably also catechetical schools, had libraries (part of the library was safeguarded for a period by being located in such a temple). Hoek, “How Alexandrian Was Clement of Alexandria? Reflections on Clement and His Alexandrian Background” (Heythrop Journal xxxi, 1990), 179–94. There was no significant Jewish community in Alexandria itself until the fourth century. Brown, “Clement of Alexandria on Jewish Salvation” (RTHC, 2005), 43–46. See Brown, 48.

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These riots forced Clement to expatriate himself (to Cappadocia) and reveal another contextual feature of Clement’s reception of Romans. Though prompted by the imperial edict, these riots signal that, during the writing of Stromateis 2 (two or three years before the riots), there were already struggles and tensions between the sizable Christian community (large enough to be the target of imperial persecutions) and the rest of the Hellenistic population in Alexandria. Thus, one can understand why Clement presents Stromateis 2 as a defense of the life of faith of the Christian community and in response to the opposition by the Hellenistic population as led by its intellectuals. In sum, the framing context of Clement’s reception of Romans is the existential conflict between the Christian community and its Hellenistic environment (unlike most receptions that are exclusively framed by theological debates among Christians), even as the Christian community interacts with Jews (although apparently not directly with institutions/synagogues of the Jewish community, by then located outside of the city). Hellenistic intellectuals contrasted “reasoned conviction” (λογισμός, logismos) to pistis, which they viewed as “blind faith,” the lowest kind of cognition.96 How does Clement respond? He undercuts their argument against the Christian faith by associating “virtues” (ἀρεταί, aretai) with “faith” (pistis), and by claiming that this understanding is in the Platonist tradition. He argues that “for Plato . . . faith is the greatest mother of virtues/aretai” (23.5). Clement begins his argument in 4.2 by asserting that “faith is the way” to perfection (so his phrase, “perfection and truth,” 5.1). Against the Hellenists who view faith as an inferior kind of cognition (believing that something is true), Clement affirms that faith is primarily a way of life, a virtuous life, faithfulness; and faith provides the foundation of such a virtuous life (78:1–126:4) Welborn97 summarizes this point by saying that Clement presents “Christian πίστις [pistis] as the foundation of a wise and virtuous life.”98 Therefore pistis/faith is the essential ingredient of the virtuous life/faithfulness. It does involve a cognition— knowing a truth—but it is a special kind of truth, namely the truth which is “the beginning of action.” Instead of pistis/faith as believing in an ontological or doctrinal truth, for Clement (as well as for Philo and much of Jewish traditions) pistis/faith is believing a deontological truth that establishes what is good to desire and to pursue through actions. This distinction is comparable to the distinction (made throughout this volume, beginning with the Foreword) between “factual truth” (e.g., in debates about “news” and “fake news”) and “ethical truth,” as the basis for action. It is in this latter sense that Clement defines pistis/faith, for example, in Stromateis 2.9: If faith is an act of choice (προαίρεσις, proairesis) desirous of some object, the desire is plainly an act of the intelligence; and since choice is the spring of action,

96

97 98

Welborn, 69. See Eric Robertson Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990; c1965), 120–21. See Welborn, 69–76. Welborn (69) follows Karl Prümm, “Glaube und Erkenntis im zweiten Buch der Stomata des Klemens von Alexandrien,” Scholastik 12 (1937): 22–23. See also Camelot, “Introduction,” 12–26, in Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates II.

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faith is found to be the spring of action, being the foundation of an act of choice based on thought, a person giving through faith, in a preliminary way, the actual demonstration. To follow freely what is best for you is the beginning of understanding. Choice, if it is solid, offers a strong impulse in the direction of knowledge. The practice of faith immediately becomes knowledge based on strong foundations. The disciples of the philosophers define knowledge as a state which reason (logos) cannot shake. But is there any where, regarding truth, a foundation as genuinely firm as in a religion which has the Logos as its sole instructor? Not in my view! Theophrastus [Aristotle’s successor] says that perception [of the desired object] is the starting point of faith. It is from perception that the first principles reach the reason and intelligence within us. So, if a person has faith in the Scriptures with a firm judgment, this person receives as an irrefutable demonstration the voice of the God who gave the Scriptures. Therefore, faith is not something grounded in a demonstration. (9.2–6)99

A few points regarding Clement’s definition of pistis/faith that frames his reception of Romans are necessary here. To begin with, for Clement, pistis/faith is an “act of choice,” which is the starting point (spring) of action. Having faith—believing—is choosing which object should be desired: “what is best for you”—and “best for your neighbors.” Pistis/faith is an ethical choice. Unlike other ethical choices, pistis/faith has strong, unshakable foundations. For philosophers, this foundation is one’s reason (one’s logos). For believers, it is the Logos; that is, the voice of God (the “word of the Lord”) embedded in Scriptures: pistis/faith as ethical choice is grounded in “the voice of the God who gave the Scriptures.” More specifically, Clement distinguishes between two kinds of pistis/faith (I follow Brown summary).100 First, there is a “common pistis/faith” that exists in all cultures and that all human beings possess; it is something so basic to existence that we make no initial (conscious) choice for it, nor do we reflect much on it (16.1–3); it is the beginning of understanding (see again 9:2–4). Second, “There is a saving faith based on common faith, along with instructions and the Word of God [or Logos]. This is the type of faith to which Clement is referring when he says, ‘But we, who have heard from the Scriptures that self-determining choice and refusal have been given by the Lord to humans, rest in the infallible criterion of faith, manifesting a willing spirit, since we have chosen life and believe God through [God’s] voice’ (12.1).”101 Pistis is faithful submission to the Logos as found in the Scriptures (as well as in Christ). And Clement continues in 12.1b: “Anyone who has faith in the Logos knows that the thing is true; for the Logos is truth. Anyone who has no faith in the one who speaks [the Logos] has no faith in God.” It is when one’s knowledge and common faith “has been properly reconstituted by means of the Logos that a human being has the opportunity to experience the process of salvation. .  .  . Through the faith offered by the Logos,

99

My translation based on both Ferguson’s English translation and Mondésert’s French translation. Brown, 52. 101 Brown, 52. 100

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human beings have the opportunity to live a righteous life, a life in conformity with the commandments of God”.102 All this is expressed by Clement in Stromateis 2.9–16. In the preceding sections, Clement did not directly define pistis/faith. Rather on the basis of Romans he began by discussing the difficulty of knowing God (5.3–8.1). As Welborn notes, following the pattern of Rom 1:18–32, Clement affirms the paradoxical character of God as both “distant” and “nearby.”103 God is an “unspeakable marvel,” because “God has drawn near. ‘I am God nearby,’ says the Lord” (5.4, quoting LXX Jer 23:23, θεὸς ἐγγίζων ἐγώ). But Clement’s primary point is that God remains hidden from those “taught by Greek laws, and by other philosophers” (7.1), who do not possess the wisdom and instruction of Scriptures (7.3).104 Thus, following Philo, Clement affirms that God does not remain hidden from those who possess the wisdom and instruction of Scriptures (including Jews). Then he quotes these “other philosophers,” even as he follows the pattern of Rom 1:17–32, and thus interprets these verses. Pistis/faith as the foundation of a virtuous life involves an “assimilation to God” that involves “obeying the commands, and living according to them, irreproachably and intelligently, through the knowledge of the divine will” (134.1).105 “‘Assimilation to God’ is thus perfection, insofar as possible, of the life of virtue” (Clement’s interpretation of Rom 8) and therefore an understanding of eschatology in an ethical sense.106 Thus, for Clement “assimilation to God” is another way of speaking of “salvation”—as is explicit in 134.3 where he quotes Rom 6:22 (“Your harvest is sanctification and your end is eternal life”). Yet, it is noteworthy, as Welborn wrote,107 that “Clement’s concept of ‘assimilation to God’ involves ‘obeying the commands, and living according to them, irreproachably and intelligently, through knowledge of the divine will’ (134:1).” In Philo’s doctrine of the Logos, all of Scriptures (including Torah and the prophets) is Word of the Lord (“voice of God”) that Philo understands as “logos spermatikos” (λόγος σπερματικός)—the Stoic designation of the generative principle immanent in human beings and the universe that mediates between humanity and God. 108 Clement co-opted this view of the Logos. Therefore, for him, “assimilation to God” involves pistis/faith in the Scriptures—faithfulness in the form of obeying the commands of Scriptures. And this remains true, even when Clement broadens Philo’s doctrine of the Logos to equate Christ with the Logos, so much so that “assimilation to God” also involves pistis/faith in Christ—that is, faithfulness understood as following Christ, which is similar to faithfulness as following the Law. This last statement, surprising as it may sound, is clarified when one notes how in his argument regarding faithfulness and righteousness in the likeness of the Logos, Clement alternates statements that emphasize that faithfulness/righteousness,

102

Brown, 52–53. Welborn, 76. 104 Welborn, 76. 105 Welborn, 80. 106 Welborn, 79. 107 Welborn, 80. 108 With the description of God as θαῦμα ἄρρητon, “unspeakable marvel,” and, with an interpretation of Exod 20:21 (where he follows Philo) in 6.1ff, Clement opens the way to a negative theology that has been developed in Christian mysticism. But Clement does not pursue this religious/heteronomous interpretive line that he opened. 103

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assimilation to God, and salvation result from following Christ, and arguments that suggest that these conditions equally result from following the Scriptures. For instance, 134.2 (“the greatest possible likeness to the true Logos, the hope of being established fully as adopted sons through the Son—this is our goal”) is followed by 134.4 (“through this love [of God] we find ourselves established in hope, which Scripture says elsewhere is given to us as rest” quoting Ps 95:11) and by 135.1–4 (about the teaching regarding faithfulness and righteousness by Ezekiel and Isaiah); all this is followed in 136.1–3 by another set of alternating references regarding faithfulness as resulting from Christ (136.1, “receiv[ing] from faith the hope of righteousness, for in Christ . . . faith work[s] in love,” quoting Gal 5:5–6) and as resulting from the Scriptures (136.3, “Wisdom, full of every virtue, uses similar words  .  .  .” quoting Prov 1:33). In sum, of course, Clement as a Christian theologian is affirming that pistis/faith in Christ as the Logos is a privileged way for assimilation to God and salvation; but he also affirms that pistis/ faith in Scriptures as the Logos has the same function and result. Thus, despite ongoing references to Hellenistic authorities, far from speaking of the God of the philosophers, Clement emphasizes the biblical God, who is a God nearby— that is, a God with whom the people of God walks, the covenantal God discussed in the inclusive covenantal community interpretation of Romans (Chapter 4). All these observations are further supported by the fact that Clement patterned a large part of Stromateis 2 (78:2–100:2) upon De Virtutibus by Philo of Alexandria—as Hoek has shown in detail.109 Giving a preeminent place to “virtues” (aretai) in the life of faith is a significant interpretive move. It is interpreting Romans in terms of a central concept in Middle Platonism, “virtue” (aretè), despite the fact that this term is not part of Paul’s vocabulary.110 In so doing, Clement is not so much Hellenizing Paul’s teaching and Scripture; rather, by following Philo, he scripturalizes this Middle Platonist teaching. This is an essential step in Clement’s refutation of the attacks by Middle Platonists against Christian preaching, but it is also a significant and consistent interpretation of Romans, which latches on to the covenantal community connotations of Paul’s vocabulary. Thus, although Clement introduces the theme of faith from the start of Stromateis 2 (“The paths of wisdom are diverse, but they lead directly to the path of truth, and this path is faith.” 4:2), he does not define it right away. He first discusses the difficulty of knowing God (5.3–8:1, following the pattern of Rom 1:18–32).111 Then he offers a long excursus on the wise as the true king (18.2–22.8, expending on Rom 4, Abraham and his faith), before returning to his discussion of faith (23.1). It is only at this point that Clement defines “faith” by emphasizing (on the basis of Plato) that “faith is the greatest mother of the virtues” (23.5) and then, following Philo, by discussing the life of faith as a life of virtues. This is latching on to the covenantal community connotations of Romans. By saying that Clement has a “preoccupation with the psychological mechanisms of commitment” with “emphasis upon the ‘voluntary’ character of faith, 109

Hoek, Clement of Alexandria and His Use of Philo, 69–115. She expends on André Méhat, Étude sur les ‘Stromates’ de Clément d’Alexandrie (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 346–94 and 395–98 (“ Les Juifs” ). 110 Paul uses this word a single time, and in the singular, in Phil 4:8. 111 “Clement understands the difficulty in apprehending God [1:18, 20] to be a function of the natural limitation of human wisdom (5.3-8.3).” Welborn (RTHC, 2005), 79.

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repentance, and virtuous actions (see esp. 60.1-77.6),” Welborn may seem to return to individual-centered issues.112 But it soon appears that all this psychology is actually community-centered. Virtuous actions and virtues are voluntary in the sense that they belong to the individuals’ will to participate in the life of the community. And, as his use of Philo shows, Clement views this community life in Alexandria as a life together with the covenantal God—as Paul the Jew and other Jews did, in various contexts.

Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: in Alexandria The above comments show that Clement’s reading of Romans follows a covenantal community interpretive line of reasoning. But what is most insightful is that he reads Romans in terms of the Hellenistic concept of virtue, and this following Philo. This confirms that this is a community-centered contextual interpretation of Romans, as we already suggested in Chapter 6 emphasizing that virtues (and vices) are related to the emphasis on the covenantal “faithfulness” of the people of God.113 This is fitting in the Greco-Roman world context of Alexandria for which virtues are acquired and assessed in a community setting—not an individual setting. Thus, Charles Pinches writes, For Greeks like Aristotle, virtue was a public matter. The person or paragon of virtue was generally determined by the judgment of those of good breeding. He behaved in a dignified, appropriate, even lofty way . . . . Additionally, the success of the community was marked by how well its people exercised and formed their fellow citizens (particularly the young) in virtue. The “know-how” to address moral issues in concrete communal situations (that moral agents learn from) emphasizes the formation of the self as moral agent.114

By definition, virtues are learned in an apprentice manner from other members of the community, they concern our relations with others, and they are commonly associated with honor-shame cultures (including by the Stoics).115 One is viewed as a virtuous

112

Welborn, 79. At times, other receptions—for example, Chrysostom—refer to “virtue” in religious/heteronomouscentered interpretations, but in such cases, instead of being semantically limited to ethics (in an Aristotelian way), “virtue” is used as a code term pointing to the new transformed life-condition brought about by divine interventions (including by Christ or the Spirit)—as in realized-apocalyptic/ messianic interpretations. 114 See Charles Pinches, “Virtue,” in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (ed. Adrian Hastings; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 741–43. 115 The Stoics (especially Epictetus) recast the Aristotelian concept of virtue into the dominant ethical frame in the Greco-Roman world of both Paul and Clement. Then virtues were associated with “nature” (as “according to nature”) understood in a community-centered frame. “Virtue” is a community-centered concept, because “according to nature” humans are relational, social animals. So while emphasizing the “reason” and volition of individuals, the entire stoic ethic is cast in a community-centered frame; individual quest for happiness demands proper relations with others. See William O. Stephens, Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom (New York: Continuum, 2007), especially Chapter 2 (Epictetus’ view of externals) and Chapter 3 (Epictetus’ view of love). In the first section, “The good of others is my concern,” Stephens quotes Epictetus arguing that it is precisely because self-interest governs the drive of individuals that they should have concerns for others (Book read in a digital form without pagination). 113

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person by the community (i.e., as having a life characterized by the virtues prized by the community), because one has the know-how to address moral issues in communal situations and to act for the benefit of the community (and thus also of oneself). Failing to act according to virtues is shameful (vis-à-vis others in the community, who ultimately might ostracize such a person), and not a matter of guilt (rooted in the privacy of one’s individual conscience). For Socrates and Plato, the virtuous person cannot be separated from the virtuous community, because a virtuous person is, by definition, committed to the common good. Thus, good teaching (as prepared by taking notes, Stromateis) is a quest for a better understanding of what virtue is, and thus of what justice is. By associating faith and virtue, Clement associates faith with concerns for justice and the common good of his community—and the broader community in Alexandria. It is in this cultural context and perspective that Clement claims that “faith is the greatest mother of virtues” (following Plato, 23.5) and then (throughout 78.1–126.4) that “faith is the way” to perfection, the foundation of a virtuous life, and even that faith is primarily a way of life, a virtuous life.116 Faith is faithfully striving for the common good and justice in society. Recognizing that a major teaching of Romans is that faith is to be understood as virtuous—mother of virtues—and therefore that, in order to be faithful, Christian believers should be deeply concerned by issues of justice and by the common good in their broader communities is an important insight that helps refine community-centered interpretations (which at times might appear too political, in a narrow sense of the term). Actually, by writing and teaching Stromateis 2, Clement was acting according to virtues, that is, for the sake of his community. His ultimate goal was to save the Christian community (and along with it, the Jewish community) in Alexandria, by equipping the community to strive for constructive interactions with their antagonists, their Hellenist fellow citizens in Alexandria. Clement shows how Christians could respond to the caricature of the Christian faith set forth by their neighbors influenced by Hellenistic intellectuals. They should argue that, far from being the lowest kind of cognition (as Hellenists believed), their “faith” (pistis) actually follows the Platonist tradition; their Christian faith is “the greatest mother of virtues” (as it was for Plato) and therefore the foundation of a wise and virtuous life that their Alexandrian neighbors should appreciate. He also shows the many things that Christians have to learn from the best of the Hellenistic tradition, even though they should, of course, reject other parts of that tradition—an attitude common in the debates among competing schools in the much diversified Hellenist culture. Unfortunately, the riots against Christians and Jews in 202–03, shortly after he wrote Stromateis 2, show that Clement was not successful in his efforts to bridge the gap between the Christian (and Jewish) community and the Hellenist community. But such an outcome doesn’t mean that his interpretation is ethically problematic. Another aspect of Clement’s interpretation could be ethically problematic. This is an issue which was debated in our SBL seminar. The question is: was Clement’s reception of Romans supersessionist (and thus involving a latent anti-Judaism) or not? It is true 116

See Welborn, 69–76.

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that Clement interpreted Romans as a Christian theologian. He did so in the name of, and on the basis of, his Christian belief that faithful life was based upon and nourished by Jesus Christ as the Logos, so much so that for him and other Christians “assimilation to God” and salvation involved pistis/faith in Christ—that is, faithfulness understood as following the Logos Christ. Does this mean that Clement was supersessionist, as Gaca asks?117 Gaca concludes that he was, since he expressed his hope that some Jews would convert. But interestingly enough, to my knowledge, Clement does so in a single statement of Stromateis 2: In facing charges leveled against us by the Greeks we use a few passages of Scripture, and it may turn out that the Jew in listening to us could experience an easy conversion, on the basis of his[her] beliefs, to the person in whom he[she] has had no belief. (2.1)

Yet note that in this statement (near the beginning of Stromateis 2), he emphasizes that his main goal is to defend the Christian community from attacks by the Greeks/ Hellenists by using the Jewish Scriptures: these are passages that Jews would recognize as Scriptures. Furthermore, as we progress in our reading of Stromateis 2, we soon discover that Clement presents a Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures that often follows Philo. In other words, yes, Clement did hope that some Jews might convert and believe in Christ and share his own faith that Christ manifests the Logos. Indeed, he quotes Rom 12:9–21 and 10:2–4 and concludes that [Jews] did not understand the intention of the Law, and so failed to practice it. They made their own version and thought that was what the Law intended. They had no faith in the prophetic power of the Law. They followed the bare letter, not the inner meaning; fear not faith. “For everyone who has faith, the end of the Law, leading to righteousness, is Christ,” the Christ who is prophesied by the Law. (42.5, quoting Rom 10:4)

But Stromateis 2 does not express that “believing in Christ” is a necessary or exclusive condition for salvation; Jews can assimilate to God, be righteous, and faithfully walk with their God by following the Logos manifested in their Scriptures. Therefore, I have to agree with Brown that, in Clement’s thought as expressed in Stromateis 2, “what is apparent is that Christianity has not displaced Judaism”; “Gentiles have inherited the covenant with Israel along with Jews.”118 The entire debate in our seminar was due to confusing two views of faith. If faith is understood as “believing that something is true” (Augustine’s fides quae creditur), and that this faith is related to Christ (“believing in Christ”) even when Clement did not specify it—because this faith is associated with salvation—then, of course, Clement’s

117 118

Gaca, “A Response [to Brown]: Is Clement of Alexandria a Supersessionist?” (RTHC, 2005), 63–66. Brown, 58; see 49–58.

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interpretation would be supersessionist. Jews would need to believe in Christ in order to be saved. But since, as we have seen, Clement is emphasizing that pistis/faith is the essential ingredient of the virtuous life/faithfulness, that it is an act of choice, choosing which object should be desired for oneself and for others, and thus since pistis/faith is an ethical choice based on the Logos, embedded both in Scriptures and in Christ, Jews can share in the salvation brought by pistis/faith by following “the voice of the God who gave the Scriptures.” Indeed this is excluding Jews who transformed Scriptures into a legalistic Law—but in the same way that Jews reject each other’s views of Scripture and in the same way that Clement objects to Christians who appropriated Christ for themselves, excluding others. “Assimilation to God” in a virtuous life amounts to “walking with God” (halakha) together with the covenantal people. Of course, neither in the Hebrew Bible/Septuagint nor in Palestinian Judaism (early Rabbinic Judaism) nor in Paul are “virtues” per se associated with pistis/emunah/faithfulness. But when one takes into account that Clement associated the terminology of virtue with faith through his use of Philo’s work, even as he is interpreting Romans in his defense of the Christian faith against Middle Platonists, we have to conclude that Clement reads Romans as the scholars discussed in Chapter 4 did: he not only took into account the Jewish connotations of many of the terms that Paul the Jew used but also viewed these Jewish connotations as most significant features of Paul’s letter. In a roundabout way—through the use of Philo—this was demanded by Clement’s contextual concerns to defend his community from the potential attacks of their Middle Platonist neighbors in Alexandria—and unfortunately their rhetorical attacks soon became actual and deadly persecutions. Another potential ethical problem with this community-centered reception of Romans is that, if it is absolutized, it becomes unable to address individual-centered and religious/heteronomy-centered problems, which certainly existed in Alexandria in Clement’s time. The data provided by Stromateis 2 do not allow us to investigate these potential problematic effects of choosing a community-centered interpretation—but unfortunately, other interpreters who follow a community-centered interpretation (including Abelard) display such problematic effects.

(B) Peter Abelard (1079–1142) A Vignette As the studies in the volume Medieval Readings of Romans show and as this vignette argues, the reception of Romans in the commentary by Peter Abelard—written in the period between 1133 and 1139, while he reestablished himself as a teacher in Paris and before the condemnation of his theological writings in 1141—belongs among the inclusive covenantal community-centered receptions of Romans.119 Christian

119

William S. Campbell, Peter S. Hawkins, and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds., Medieval Readings of Romans (RTHC, 2007). The relevant articles are the following: H. Lawrence Bond, “Another Look at Abelard’s Commentary on Romans 3:26,” 11–32; Jean Doutre, “Romans as Read in School and Cloisters in the 12th Century: The Commentaries of Peter Abelard and William of St. Thierry,”

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communities (including monasteries) are the context of his reception. His reception of Romans reflects theological debates within the medieval church, by contrast with Clement’s reception that reflected the cultural context of second-century Alexandria. Therefore, it is not surprising that the emphases of their respective interpretations of Romans be quite different; and yet both of them are clearly community-centered. In broad strokes, Gustaf Aulén excluded the possibility that Abelard embraced either of the two other views of the atonement. First, Abelard rejected the dualistic outlook of the classic idea (the realized-apocalyptic/messianic understanding) of the atonement; for him, we do not need to be saved by God from evil powers (including the devil). Second, Abelard’s “thought proves the impossibility of the idea of satisfaction” of the forensic theological view of the atonement. Rather, Abelard taught “that Christ is the great Teacher and Example, who arouses responsive love in [humans].”120 Aulén’s general characterization—in its entirety (not unduly limited to “Christ as an example,” as is often done), including the transformative role of Christ and God (who “arouse responsive love”)—is verified and specified by Abelard’s commentary on Romans, as discussed in Medieval Readings of Romans. By contrast with all the medieval theologians who could not read Romans without seeing at the center of it the forensic, vicarious death of Christ—aiming at motivating the “‘reader’ to acquire a deepened experience of grace”—for the “free-spirit” Abelard, Romans taught that Christ (and his death) accomplish a “moral transformation” for believers in their communities.121 The fact that Abelard’s reading is not individual-centered is reflected in his impersonal discoursive style: he never mentions the reader; he never addresses God.122 Unlike his medieval colleagues, Abelard did not give an undue centrality to Christ’s death—following (consciously or not) Paul who in 1:1–3:25 presents the gospel without saying a single word about Christ’s death. Rather, in Romans Abelard recognized the importance of all the passages about “love”—using the entire range of the Vulgate Latin vocabulary (amor, caritas, dilectio, and corresponding verbs)—and about interhuman relationships (speaking about the “covenant of love”; for example, about 6:14, although he consistently refers to Jews in a negative way).123 The setting of Abelard’s interpretation of Romans in the context of his career. Abelard was a preeminent philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century, 33–57; Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Female Monasticism in the Twelfth Century: Peter Abelard, Heloïse, and Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” 58–69; Ian Christopher Levy, “Medieval Readings of Old and New Law: From Sacra Pagina to Sacra Doctrina,” 70–97 (includes Abelard’s interpretation); and the responses by Charles H. Cosgrove (on Doutre’s), 135-141, by James D. G. Dunn (on Bond’s and Levy’s), 153–57, and by William Campbell, 202–12. 120 I paraphrase and quote Aulén, Christus Victor, 112–13. 121 Jean Doutre, “Romans as Read in School and Cloisters in the 12th Century: The Commentaries of Peter Abelard and William of St. Thierry,” Medieval Readings of Romans, (RTHC 2007), 52; quoting William of St Thierry whose reading Doutre contrasts with that of his contemporary, Abelard. 122 Doutre, 51—although I am not sure this style makes him the “first systematic theologian.” 123 Regarding 6:14, Abelard contrasts “the covenant of love and mercy” with the “covenant of fear and vengeance.” Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the translation by Steven R. Cartwright: Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011)—the quote is from p. 235. For the original, see Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos; Petri Abaelardi opera theologica. Corpus christianorum (continuatio mediaevalis) Vol. 11. (ed. Eligius M. Buytaert; Brepols: Turnholt, 1969).

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primarily famous as a logician—the first notable nominalist philosopher—and as a great dialectician and debater. As was the custom, he earned his living as a more or less independent lecturer (with students coming to him and paying tuition), and this in the Parisian region (Melun, Corbeil, 1110) and in Paris (at Notre Dame, 1112, before the cathedral was built!).124 In 1116–18, his love affair and marriage with Heloïse changed Abelard’s trajectory in unexpected ways. After the birth of their son, Abelard sent Heloïse to a convent, perhaps for her own protection. Heloïse’s family had Abelard forcibly castrated, after which Abelard himself entered a monastery. In such a monastic context, Abelard turned from philosophy to theology, teaching theology in priories. His early work on the Trinity—a theological topic for which he uses his sophisticated studies in logics regarding the theory of identity—was condemned at the Council of Soissons (1121).125 He became abbot of a monastery in Brittany (c1126). While retaining his rank as abbot, he returned to Paris (early 1130s) and taught on Mont Sainte Geneviève until 1140. During this time, while still teaching on the Trinity (1133–39), Abelard exchanged letters (1134–35) with Heloïse—letters that refer to their intimate loving relationship, even though by that time, she had become the abbess of a nearby monastery, the Paraclete (founded by Abelard!). It is during this period that Abelard wrote his commentary on Romans. In her letters, Heloïse offered her critical analysis of Benedict’s monastic rule in terms of her own perceptive reading of Romans, as she asked Abelard to write a special rule for women monastics.126 Her letters appear to be a (major?) source for Abelard’s interpretation of Romans, because Heloïse envisioned such a monastic Rule on the basis of Paul’s teaching about the Law—rejecting any strict monastic Rule in the same way that Paul rejects the (strict) Law in favor of love (as fulfillment of the Law)—and because, soon afterward, Abelard adopted the same interpretation while writing his commentary on Romans. This productive period (1133–39) came to an end when his ongoing work on the Trinity caught the attention of Abbot William of St Thierry and of his close friend Bernard of Clairvaux—an ascetic Cistercian abbot. Both William and Bernard favored a strict understanding of Benedict’s monastic rule. Bernard ultimately obtained the second condemnation of Abelard’s teaching on the Trinity (Council of Sens, 1140). Yet, Abelard was protected by Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, who, following the 124

See Charles H. Cosgrove’s response to Doutre, Medieval Readings of Romans (RTHC 2007), 135– 41. In his correspondence Abelard complains that at certain times “poverty forced him to resume teaching.” See also Peter King, “Peter Abelard,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Ed. Edward Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/abelard/ (accessed December 2016). 125 Of course, his explanation of the Trinity as involving the relations among the three persons with complex “identities” was too sophisticated for clerics who were content with a traditional theological definition of the Trinity. 126 We certainly do not have all the letters they exchanged (as they were clearly in constant, though discreet, contact). But in the letters we have, Heloïse shows herself as Abelard’s intellectual partner (and not as the naïve young “girl” of the legend). Written from their respective monastic settings, their letters were at first primarily about their personal relationship (complaints about emotional distance and nostalgia over their passionate relationship) but progressively turned more and more to intellectual issues related to their responsibilities as abbess and abbot. See Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Female Monasticism in the Twelfth Century: Peter Abelard, Heloïse, and Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” Medieval Readings of Romans (RTHC 2007), 58–69.

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“Cluniac Reformation,” had a less strict understanding of the monastic Rule. Together with Heloïse, Abelard had a similarly less strict understanding of the Rule. Still under Peter the Venerable’s protection, Abelard died less than two years later. These conflicts, related to the Rule of monastic communities, indirectly frame Abelard’s (and Heloïse’s) inclusive community-centered reception of Romans. While the essays found in Medieval Readings of Romans focus on Abelard’s interpretation of Rom 3:26 (on atonement), 4:1–25 (on faith), 8:1–30 (on redemption), and other passages (on the Law), Cartwright’s recent translation of his commentary (mentioned above) makes it easy to recognize that, when commenting on 1:1–32, he already interprets these key themes in the same way. Respect for and dependence upon authorities (including Augustine and Jerome/Pelagius) was imperative in medieval intellectual life, although Abelard did not hesitate to affirm his own interpretation of Romans (read in the Vulgate).127 Since Abelard offered us a systematic commentary, I focus the presentation on his comments on the first chapter of Romans. Abelard on Rom 1:1-32. Regarding “Paul” as a self-designation (1:1a), Abelard repeatedly affirms in various ways that “the Apostle himself changed his name”128—by contrast with the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations that affirm that God changed his name. Abelard continues by saying about 1:1b [Vulgate, servus Christi], “the Apostle calls himself a servant of Christ .  .  . . He submitted himself to him completely, so that he might let nothing remain by his own choice except to submit himself totally to the will of Christ.”129 This shows that he understands “conversion” as involving a change of life in which the converted adopt a new life (marked for Paul by choosing for himself a new name, as noted earlier). Yet, Abelard insists that it is not a matter of free will but of “subjection,” though with important qualifications. Regarding Paul’s self-designation as “servant” (servus), Abelard notes that by contrast with servitude/submission due to “fear of punishment,” this “subjection” involves “love [that] causes [Paul] to be obedient.”130 Abelard’s interpretation of the address, “to all who are in Rome, beloved of God” (1:7), explains further how he understands conversion: “To the beloved of God,” as if he should say: I do not say simply “to all who are at Rome,” to believers and to unbelievers, to the elect and to the reprobate, but to these only who through their conversion have now entered into friendship with God, now made subject to him in the manner of the Christians, that is, by love (amor) rather than by fear. To these indeed that saying applies: “Now I shall no

127

Modern scholars recognized that the commentary by “Jerome” that Abelard quotes (ironically, to defend his orthodoxy by appealing to such an authority) was actually by Pelagius. I quote the Vulgate when it clarifies Abelard’s interpretation. The fact that Abelard read Paul in the Vulgate often explains unexpected interpretations (that might not necessarily imply a deliberate interpretive choice by Abelard!). 128 Abelard, Commentary, 92. Here and in what follows (unless noted otherwise) I quote from Cartwright’s translation (mentioned above). 129 Abelard, Commentary, 98. 130 Abelard, Commentary, 97–98. I leave aside his comments on 1:3–4, a long discussion on the Trinity, and his controversy with William of St Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux that would require extended digressions.

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longer call you servants,” and again, “But I have called you friends.” Or, “to the beloved of God,” that is, by God who loved them first, so that he might choose them by his prevenient grace, not by their merits.131

For Abelard, “conversion” is “entering into friendship with God .  .  . by love (amor) rather than by fear.” “Love rather than fear” is a refrain throughout Abelard’s commentary. This key to the interpretation of Romans finds its origin in Heloïse’s third letter to Abelard.132 As she questions the appropriateness of the Benedict’s Rule for female monastics, Heloïse equates rigid monastic rule with the Law of the Hebrew Scriptures and distinguishes “outward works” (of the Law, practiced by “those of the devil”) from “inner works” emanating from “love”—“the sum of the Law” (quoting Rom 13:10) that she associates with faith (quoting 3:27–28 and 4:5, followed by a discussion of what nuns might eat, referring to Rom 14): “Love alone distinguishes . . . the children of God.” Fear versus love: these two opposite drives of behavior are rooted outside the person.133 In her letters Heloïse strongly emphasizes her love for Abelard, and then the centrality of love for Paul in Romans—consciously or not, her understanding of Romans is framed by the love relationship that ties them even though they are separated and live in their respective monasteries. In his epistolary response, Abelard is more cautious; he avoids overt emphasis on love.134 Yet he picks up her language by referring to Paul’s discussion of the Law as a helpful entry for questioning rigid adherence to (monastic) regulations and emphasizes that moderation rather than austerity should direct a nun’s life.135 But in his commentary this cautious attitude disappears: Abelard straightforwardly emphasizes love, by repeatedly contrasting “the law of fear” (the old Law that one obeys by fear of punishment) and “the law of [divine] love” (on Rom 8:2).136 In his comments on 1:8, Abelard notes that Paul’s thanksgiving for the Romans shows that “the conversion of the Romans took place through Christ, not through our power or that of other [humans].”137 Yet for him, this does not refer to a Christic intervention freeing us from evil powers (the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretation). Rather “through Christ” refers to a manifestation of God’s love in Christ. Conversion is a response to God’s love expressed in Christ—“whom I serve in my spirit, that is, with the inner [person], namely, with all the affection of the heart, just as a friend, not in service as a servant who fears being whipped” (on 1:9).138 This is what faith involves. Consequently, since faith comes from love, “faith is mutual, when he [Paul] binds the

131

Abelard, Commentary, 105. Abelard uses throughout the verb diligere and the noun dilectis for “loved” and “beloved” following the Vulgate, except as marked (when he uses amor). 132 See Schildgen, 58-69. 133 By contrast with forensic receptions, for both Heloïse and Abelard there is no long discussion of a person’s “will” (free will vs. bondage of the will). 134 In an essay on “Heloïse’s Critique of the Monastic Life”—quoted by Schildgen (RTHC 2007), 62— Linda Georgianna notes that Abelard has to be cautious, avoiding mention of “love,” when writing to Heloïse who remains his “tragic inconsolable lover,” even though she is now Abbess. 135 Schildgen, 62–69. 136 Abelard, Commentary, 265. See Doutre, 38. 137 Abelard, Commentary, 107. 138 Abelard, Commentary, 108-09.

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believers to each other with vicarious charity [caritas, love]. For this is the true ‘faith which works through love,’ just as he himself says” (commenting on 1:12; quoting Gal 5:6). Therefore, faith is at once (1) a response to God’s love, (2) a faithful loving relation with God, and (3) faithfulness in the form of loving relations with other people (in 1:12, with other believers). This view of faith/faithfulness is comparable to that of the inclusive covenantal community interpretation (see Chapter 4 and Appendix). Abelard interprets “the Gospel is the power of God for salvation” (1:16a) as “a power conferred on us by God to save us, through which everyone progresses” (toward perfection) through faith/faithfulness.139 Indeed, humans need to be saved from punishment meted by the “justice (iustitia) of God.” But this is not a forensic understanding. Note how Abelard explains it (commenting on 1:17): “For the justice of God,” indeed for salvation—there the teaching of the entire salvation is contained: the “justice of God,” that is, his just compensation, is plainly and perfectly contained and transmitted, either among the elect for glory or among the wicked for punishment. And this is what the Gospel reveals: the justice of God is taught in its proclamation, that is, his just compensation to everyone, both to the elect, as was said, and to the reprobate. It is revealed, I say, “from faith to faith,” that is, from faith in punishments that directs us to faith in rewards.140

If it were not for the rest of Abelard’s commentary, this passage could be understood as referring to a forensic interpretation (salvation from punishment through God’s forgiveness). Of course, all views of the atonement speak about salvation. But for him the issue is not whether or not one needs to be (or can be) saved. Rather the issue is “saved from what?” and “how is one saved from it?” For Abelard, we need to be saved from “the sin of pride”—his interpretation of the central point of 1:18–32 (123; see 115– 23). Pride involves ignoring all of natural revelation—including for him the complete revelation of the Trinity—and therefore the revelation of “the love and benevolence of God.”141 It is this prideful ignorance (lack of perception; lack of experience) of the love of God that Christ overcomes for us by pouring “divine love into our hearts.” This point is understandable when one notes that, in the preceding quote, Abelard distinguishes between two types of faith/faithfulness, in commenting on the cryptic phrase “from faith to faith” (ex fide in fidem). For him this phrase refers to two types of faith/faithfulness: “faith in punishments” and “faith in rewards”—the faith/faithfulness as a way of life that results from “fear” (generated by the old Law that one obeys by fear of punishment) and the faith/faithfulness as a way of life that results from confidence

139

Abelard, Commentary, 111. Abelard, Commentary, 111. I adapted Cartwright’s translation primarily through translating iustitia by “justice”—the translation “righteousness” makes it difficult to understand Abelard’s point! 141 For him the Trinity is a revelation of “love.” “For his [God’s] invisible things, etc.” (invisibilia; first word of 1:20 in the Vulgate) that are revealed are “the entire mystery of the Trinity”: “For the term ‘God the Father’ seems to me to express what divine power expresses, begetting the divine wisdom that is the Son; and ‘God the Son’ as the divine wisdom brought forth from God; and ‘God the Holy Spirit’ as the love or benevolence of God proceeding from God the Father and the Son” (Abelard, Commentary, 115). Note the ultimate point (the emphasized words). 140

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in God’s love (expressed in rewards). Faith/faithfulness and the obedience it involves is a way of life generated by “the law of [divine] love begetting ‘sons,’ not [the law of fear] forcing slaves”—a way of life framed by “love” and not “fear,” the constant refrain in Abelard’s commentary.142 In so doing, as is explained in his comments on Romans 8 (discussed at length by Doutre), Abelard is not rejecting “the Law” in itself, but merely the Law that generates fear (of punishments) through its commands. For him, the Law is made perfect—[perficitur], “the law is fully justified in us” (Vulgate 8:4, iustificatio legis impleretur in nobis)—by Christ who is pouring “divine love into our hearts.” And “Christ shows us how to practice the love that he poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”.143 True faith/faithfulness is the response to such love. Therefore, even though Abelard acknowledges the existence of both the “satisfaction”/forensic and the “dramatic”/realized-apocalyptic views of the atonement,144 he understands the atonement as a “moral transformation”:145 Christ pouring love in our hearts, and therefore transforming us so that we might truly love God—“God’s joining us with God” (Krey’s summary of Bond’s demonstration).146 And, it is important to add with Abelard, “God’s joining us with God” so that we might “complete all things by love,” including loving neighbors.147 Abelard’s long excursus (“questions” and “answers”) on 3:24–26 is discussed by Bond (11–32). In conclusion of this excursus, Abelard says in part: we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God; it was through this matchless grace shown to us that [God’s] Son received our nature, and in that nature, teaching us both by word and by example, persevered to the death and bound us to himself even more through love [amor], so that when we have been kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace [= expression of divine love], true charity [caritas, love] might not fear to endure anything for [God’s] sake. . . . Each one is also made more righteous/just after the Passion of Christ than before; that is, one loves [diligere] God more, because the completed benefit kindles love [amor] in us more than a hoped-for benefit. Therefore, our redemption is that supreme love [dilectio] in us through the Passion of Christ, which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but gains for us the true “liberty of the sons of God” [8:21] so that we may 142

For instance, on 8:2 he writes: “The law of the spirit of life [in Christ], that is, the law of charity [love] and divine love rather than that of fear.” Abelard, Commentary, 265. See Levy, 73-74. 143 See Doutre, 40. 144 Doutre, 39. 145 Together with H. Lawrence Bond, “Another Look at Abelard’s Commentary on Romans 3:26” (RTHC 2007), 11–32); James D. G. Dunn’s Response (RTHC 2007), 153–54, emphasizes that it is therefore inappropriate to envision Abelard’s view of atonement as “merely exemplary” (Christ providing through his death the example believers should follow). Yet without much explanation Dunn would prefer to call Abelard’s view of atonement “sanctification” (instead of “moral transformation”). Is it to preserve a forensic view of atonement? 146 Philip D. W. Krey’s Response (RTHC 2007), 160. 147 Although this does not seem relevant (but explains why Bernard of Clairvaux condemned him), one should note that Abelard’s view includes a “transformation of the will”: thus, believers as believers have “free will.” Consequently, Bernard of Clairvaux felt that he could denounce Abelard’s “Pelagianism” in the name of Augustine (and the bondage of the will). Abelard tried to defend himself against such an (anticipated) accusation by constantly quoting the commentary attributed to “Jerome,” which ironically was actually written by Pelagius (Doutre, 33–57)!

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complete all things by love [amor] rather than by fear. . . . Carefully considering this, the Apostle says later on that “the charity [caritas, love] of God is poured out in our hearts, through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” [5:5] and again, “But God commends his charity [caritas, love] in us, in that while, etc.” [“while we still were sinners Christ died for us” 5:8]148

Note the emphases on love (using various Latin terms) as a relationship with God and with other people, an emphasis that reflects the community-centered loving relationship mentioned earlier, regarding 1:7–8 and 9–12.

Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (sexual ethics and liberation theology) The above comments show that Abelard’s reading of Romans understands faith as (1) a response to God’s love, (2) a faithful loving relation with God, and (3) faithfulness in the form of loving relations with other people—and especially with other believers (as emphasized in his comments on 1:8–12). This view of faith/faithfulness is comparable to that of the inclusive covenantal community interpretation (see Chapter 4 and Appendix), even though in his reading of 1:1–32 he does not emphasize the covenantal character of this community.149 His most striking interpretive insights are encapsulated in his refrain: “Love rather than fear.” He centered his reading of Romans (including 1:1–32) upon the central role of God’s love. Of course, commentators are justified when they do not make “God’s love” as a key for their interpretation of 1:1–32. Beyond the designation of the Romans as “God’s beloved” (ἀγαπητοῖς θεοῦ, 1:7), there is no mention of “God’s love” (ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ) until this phrase appears in 5:5 and then it is only repeated twice (in 5:8 and 8:39). The mentions of the “love of Christ” (ἀγάπη τοῦ Χριστοῦ, 8:35) and of the “love of the Spirit” (ἀγάπη τοῦ πνεύματος, 15:30) are as scarce: once each. Therefore, it is quite insightful for Abelard to recognize that Paul spoke about manifestations of God’s love throughout: when speaking about his conversion and call (1:1); about the gospel (1:3–4); and about the justice of God (1:16–17). It is indeed quite insightful to do a retrospective reading of 1:1–32 from the perspective of 5:5 and 8 and 8:39. Similarly, it is quite insightful to read 1:8–15 as concerning Paul’s “loving” relationship with the Romans, with the expectation that he implemented in these relationships his own teaching in 13:8–10 (where he sums up the commandments by “love your neighbor as yourself ”), in 14:15 (his exhortations to “walk in love,” κατὰ ἀγάπην περιπατέω), as well as in 12:9–10 (his exhortations to mutual love in the community). Is this insight from Abelard? Actually, it appears to be from Heloïse! He seems to have made out of her comments on 13:8–10 (in her letters) the framing principle for his reading of Romans as a whole. The emphasis on God’s love and on loving relationships is grounded for Abbess Heloïse and Abbot Abelard on their concerns for the role of the law/rule in community life, and especially in monastic communities. 148 149

Abelard, Commentary, 164-68. The same is true for his interpretation of the rest of the letter, according to my cursory reading the rest of his commentary.

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The key for a good monastic rule that would frame the interactions of nuns and monks among themselves in each community is what Paul says in Romans about the law/rule: love is the fulfillment of the law (πλήρωμα νόμου ἡ ἀγάπη, 13:10). Then Abelard uses this insight for understanding Romans from beginning to end, including Paul’s selfdesignation as servus Christi in 1:1: by contrast with servitude/submission due to “fear of punishment,” Paul’s “subjection” involves “love [that] causes him to be obedient” to God and Christ. Then the same applies to the relations among believers in the community of Christ followers, and also to the relations with unbelievers, be they Jews or Gentiles (for Abelard, 1:18–32 apply to both)—in their case these loving relations begin with the proclamation of the gospel to them.150 The good ethical outcomes of Abelard’s choice of a community-centered interpretation are not made evident in the sources I consulted. Because Abelard was welcome and protected by Peter the Venerable who led the very successful “Cluniac Reformation,” we can expect that Abelard’s and Heloïse’s monasteries involved a way of life similar to Cluny, who similarly followed the Benedictine rule in a relaxed way (as contrasted with the strict, Cistercian practice of the monasteries at St Thierry and Clairvaux). We have much information about life in the (much larger) monastery at Cluny.151 It was characterized by a rich community life, centered not only on the common liturgy (with many hours in community singing), but also on monastic generosity (including shared spiritual goods and shared studies in their well-endowed library among monks), material generosity toward the poor, and generous hospitality to travelers. Since Peter the Venerable welcomed Peter Abelard as a friend and fellow abbot, we can presuppose that the monastic life implemented by Abelard and Heloïse on the basis of their reading of Romans involved a similar rewarding, constructive, and fruitful monastic life, although on a much smaller scale. This was a “good fruit” of their choice of interpretation of Romans, which they could eventually envision as extending beyond their monastic communities. There are two potential “bad fruit.” First, even though it is not explicit in Abelard’s commentary on 1:1–32, the tone of his comments on “the Jews” seems to suggest that his interpretation is supersessionist, as is confirmed by explicit comments regarding other parts of the letter. But his supersessionism merely seems to reflect the cultural attitudes of Christians toward Jews in the twelfth century. It is not demanded by his interpretive line, and thus could be easily avoided. For instance, Abelard could complement his view of faith (faith as response to God’s love and faith/faithfulness as loving relation with God and other people) to encompass a loving relation with Jews. He could even adopt the view of Clement of Alexandria and Philo that faith is the mother of virtues. Thus, this supersessionism is potential in the sense that it is not necessary in Abelard’s interpretive line. A second “bad fruit” is also potential in the sense that we do not have enough information to affirm that it was indeed the problem. This concerns Abelard’s 150 151

Abelard, Commentary, 110, 112-14. See “Cluny” and “Religious Orders,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. See also Joan Evans, Monastic Life at Cluny, 910-1157 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). In its early years (before becoming too wealthy and powerful), the life of this monastery was quite similar to the Taizé Community—which made a point of settling very near Cluny.

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relationship with Heloïse, which was so offensive to her family that they castrated Abelard. One problem with community-centered interpretations is that, when they are absolutized, they exclude the two other types of receptions. In Abelard’s case, the fact that his community-centered interpretation was shaped by monastic life removes the possibility that it totally excluded the religious/heteronomy-centered interpretation and the related numinous experiences; the ongoing common liturgy while being community-centered also provides the context for religious experiences. But community-centered interpretations when absolutized readily exclude any individual-centered concerns. Then what is problematic from an individual-centered perspective—as typified by sexual conducts—is no longer perceived as problematic. Therefore, if Abelard and Heloïse had in their studies together already adopted and absolutized a community-centered perspective, there was no reason for them to refrain from sexual intimacy as expression of their love for each other (perceived as a private matter). This was a scandal for her family (and certainly many others around them), who presumably had an individual-centered forensic theological perspective; therefore they punished Abelard for his sin by castrating him. But apparently it was not a scandal for Abelard’s students who continued to flock around him. Abelard’s and Heloïse’s situation seems to be comparable to that of the ethicist John Howard Yoder. He developed an important community-centered ethics—primarily a reception of the gospels, expressed in his many books including The Politics of Jesus— which is remarkable and remains much needed in order to balance the deontological ethics and ethics of risk.152 But his works are excluded in most seminary courses on ethics. Why? Because of his inappropriate relations with women, appropriately denounced as sexual abuse. This was a huge scandal; his ministerial credentials in the Mennonite church were suspended and he was ordered into church-supervised rehabilitation. This was equivalent to Abelard’s castration. From the perspective of the present book, what happened is that he absolutized this ethical perspective, and therefore disregarded any individual-centered ethics: he had no reason to avoid sexual relations with his students who were fascinated by his community-centered vision of the kingdom.153 The result was a huge scandal, and a good opportunity for many to reject any concern for his remarkable social and political ethics. But, from another perspective, it is a huge scandal to exclude concerns for the social

152

Among his many books see John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972; 2nd ed. 1994) and The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). See the assessment of the importance of his ethics in Earl Zimmerman, Practicing the Politics of Jesus: The Origin and Significance of John Howard Yoder’s Social Ethics. Foreword by John Paul Lederach (Telford, Pa.: Cascadia Pub. House; Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2007). 153 This seems confirmed by Mark Oppenheimer (October 11, 2013 New York Times OP-ED column, “A Theologian’s Influence, and Stained Past, Live On”) who quotes one of his students who reported that Yoder said to her “We are on the cutting edge. We are developing new models for the church. We are part of this grand, noble experiment. The Christian church will be indebted to us for years to come.” And she speculated that he was thinking: “You and I are developing a new Christian theology of sexuality.” And indeed, Yoder is reported having said in his defense that touching a woman could be an act of “familial” love, in which a man helped to heal a traumatized “sister,” and that a “bodily” embrace “can celebrate and reinforce familial security,” rather than “provoking guilt-producing erotic reactions.”

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and political issues that he most appropriately brought to the fore. The “sin” is the absolutization of one’s particular type of reception and therefore the exclusion of other perspectives. The sin is not simply theoretical: it results in victims—be they the traumatized victims of sexual abuse or the oppressed and no less traumatized victims of community life framed by injustice, lack of community love, reflected in unjust social and political systems. As is clear from Chapter 4, the primary contextual concerns of any communitycentered interpretation/reception are all the issues that prevent or fail to promote harmonious and just relations in the community. Such receptions are therefore urgent in situations dominated by injustice, oppression, poverty, hunger, and famine that result from corrupt socioeconomic and political systems, which need to be challenged by the proclamation of a different socioeconomic and political system— that one can call, with the exegetes discussed in Chapter 4, a covenantal community shaped by God’s justice, or with Clement of Alexandria a community shaped by and embodying faith as the mother of virtues, or with Abelard a community shaped by and embodying God’s love. Of course, this is the kind of interpretation/reception of Romans that liberation theologians, such as Elsa Tamez, readily adopt and advocate. Of course, 1:16–17 is about the justice of God: “The great news that Paul insisted on proclaiming is the arrival of the justice of God that comes to humankind as a gift,” a “good news to the excluded,” as Tamez writes in The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective.154 But as her title expresses, she is not excluding the forensic theological interpretation and its emphasis on justification of the individual sinners by God the Judge. Thus, in a book which is frustrating for both the forensic purists (who would absolutize an individual-centered forensic theological interpretation) and the liberation purists (who would absolutize a communitycentered interpretation), she is offering us a model of the way in which these two interpretations can be kept in tension with each other, by each time emphasizing the role of each interpretation in particular contexts. Thus, on the basis of Romans she advocates “solidarity between sisters and brothers”—a community framed by God’s love and the love for neighbors, as Abelard would have it—but not as a denial of the importance of the forensic justification of individual sinners by God. So she can entitle a section: “Solidarity Between Sisters and Brothers, Symbol of Justification.”155 In addition, by raising the issues of the powers of evil, she calls upon the religious/ heteronomous dimensions of Romans in her “theological reconstruction”156— which are central for John Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox interpreters, as well as Charismatic believers, as discussed below.

154

Tamez, The Amnesty of Grace, 97, 165. Tamez, 136. 156 Tamez, 119-166. She is actually also taking into account the religious/heteronomous-centered dimensions of Paul’s text as a center for reading Romans. Yet, she seeks to merge the three types of interpretations into a single, coherent interpretation—ending up giving favorite status to one, the community-centered liberation interpretation. 155

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IV Religious/heteronomous receptions/interpretations and their ethical imports: John Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox interpreters, and Pentecostals/Charismatics (A) John Chrysostom (c349–c407) A Vignette As the studies in the volume Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans (RTHC, 2013) show and as this vignette argues, the reception of Romans in John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans belongs among the “religious/heteronomy-centered” receptions.157 The first indication is that these thirtytwo homilies (preceded by an Introductory Homily) repeatedly speak of the radical transformation brought about by divine interventions experienced by anyone who enters the realm of faith in Christ and is in communion with him. This amounts to reading Romans from the perspective of Chapter 8, viewed as the key from which the rest of the letter is to be read.158 One is not surprised to find that John Chrysostom developed a “religious/ heteronomy-centered” reception of Romans when one takes note of the personal context from which he read the letter. As a young man, he studied in Antioch at the school of the renowned rhetorician Libanius—a schooling which shows that his family belonged to the upper class (or at least upper middle class). Being baptized (c367–c368) and becoming a member of the church did not mean that John had to turn his back on the social connections of his family. Members of the upper class were playing a preeminent role in the church, as a study of the church in Antioch in that time shows.159 Thus as can be expected, the people whom John addressed in his early writings were all wealthy and reputable people, belonging to powerful families. As a well-educated young man, following his baptism he undertook three years of intensive study of the Scriptures under Bishop Meletius. This led to his ordination as lector (a minor office usually leading to ordination as Deacon and Priest). But instead of assuming this role as lector, under the influence of friends who had themselves

157

I consulted online J. P. Migne, Patrologiæ Græcæ (PG) vol. 60: John Chrysostom (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1862), col. 395–680. For the English rendering, I have used (and modernized) the English translation by J. B. Morris, published under the title Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1841). As a short hand, I simply refer to the homily number (easily identifiable in PG) and the verses of Paul’s letter to the Romans (conveniently marked in the margins of Morris’s translation). This discussion of Chrysostom’s interpretations of Romans is based on Daniel Patte and Vasile Mihoc, eds., Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans (RTHC, 2013). The relevant articles for a discussion of Rom 1 are the following: Demetrios Trakatellis, “Being Transformed: Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans,” 40–62; George Kalantzis, “‘The Voice So Dear to Me’: Themes from Romans in Theodore, Chrysostom, and Theodoret,” 91–94. See also Vasile Mihoc, “Paul and the Jews according to John Chrysostom’s Commentary on Romans 9-11,” 63–82 (as well as Mihoc’s “Introduction: Greek Church Fathers and Orthodox Biblical Hermeneutics,” 1–40). 158 Instead of Rom 1–3, viewed as the key from which the rest of the letter is to be read. 159 A context carefully described in Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1–33, which I paraphrase in the following paragraphs along with other studies.

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taken up the monastic life, John decided to spend some time as a monk. But this short experiment as monk turned into at least six years of ascetic life in the desert. After his return from the desert, he continued an ascetic way of life—less rigorous due to the demands of city life (in Antioch, then Constantinople) and of his responsibilities as preacher, then as bishop. Thus, Andrea Sterk could appropriately call him “the model monk-bishop.”160 At first John’s decision to pursue “‘the blessed life of solitaries’ . . . in a covenant to Christ and to a life of celibacy, prayer, and renunciation” was difficult to implement, because it involved not only leaving the comfort of city life, but also abandoning his recently widowed mother.161 So, for a time, he began the monastic life in the city. But after she died he immediately went into the desert to spend six years with an old Syrian monk. His extreme devotion to the ascetic monastic ideal (ongoing prayer and meditation on Scriptures, little food, little sleep on the bare ground often interrupted for prayer) in mountains and caves seems to have permanently affected his health. Yet, when he came back to the city in 381, he was convinced that the ascetic ideal was the goal of the Christian life, as he envisioned it and lived it—a goal in tension with his earlier secular life, and also with the life of most people in his church audiences. Thus as we read his homilies on Romans we should not forget that he remained a monk-priest—as he explicitly said.162 This meant that his reading of Scriptures was framed by his monastic contemplative prayers, as he suggests in the beginning of his Introductory Homily on Romans by referring to “the spiritual trumpet” and “the voice so dear to me” that “roused and warmed” him as he meditated Paul’s letter. Far from being simply rhetorical artifices, these and many such flourishes bear witness to the way Chrysostom read Paul’s letter: his reading is contemplative and meditative, with the typological expectation that, as Scripture, Romans prefigures the divine interventions in the believers’ experience (Hom 1 on 1:2). Thus, we can expect that he readily latched onto the figures in Romans, as he already does with the first word of Romans: “Paul [a servant of Jesus Christ]” (1:1).163 From the outset, for him “Paul” is a figure, as he shows by asking: “Why did God change his name, and call him Paul who was Saul?” and answering, in short: his name was changed by God so that he might be transformed by God into an apostle with the same authority as Peter (referring to the same transformation of Simon into Peter in Mark 3:16, “Simon to whom he gave the name Peter”).164 Chrysostom’s reception/interpretation of Romans took place in the pulpit, that he occupied after being ordained deacon by Bishop Meletius (381) and then priest

160

Andrea Sterk, Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), Chapter 3, section 6 “John Chrysostom: The Model Monk-Bishop in Spite of Himself,” 141–45. 161 Andrea Sterk, 144, referring to his homilies. 162 John Chrysostom, Adversus oppugnatores vitae monastic. Book 1.7–8 Patrologia Graeca, vol. 47 col. 328–329 (cited by Wilken). 163 As the realized-apocalyptic/messianic interpretations of Romans do. 164 After affirming that Paul’s name was changed by God, Chrysostom continues: “It was, that he might not even in this respect come short of the Apostles, but that that preeminence which the chief of the apostle and he might also acquire . . . and have a closer union with them. ” Hom 1 on 1:1. By contrast with the other interpretations (including Abelard’s) that posit that “he” changed his own name.

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(386) by Bishop Flavian (Meletius’s successor). While at first he preached primarily in the smaller churches in Antioch, Flavian soon gave him more important preaching responsibilities. Flavian, an older man, had a social and religious background similar to that of John Chrysostom: he was from a rich family and followed an ascetic way of life. Chrysostom became Flavian’s protégé.165 Recognizing Chrysostom’s religious commitments and his homiletic gifts, Flavian immediately entrusted him with the responsibility to be one of the principal preachers in the main churches of Antioch—in effect assuming many of Flavian’s preaching responsibilities, despite his still relatively young age. It is during this period (c391) that Chrysostom preached the homilies on Romans. Chrysostom was primarily a Christian rhetor. He was more at home in the pulpit than at the desk. Thus as Goodall notes, his “main effort was directed toward preaching, not writing.”166 But even if the homilies on Romans were written in detailed preparation for preaching (as seems to be the case), I agree with Wilken that “it must be remembered that they were designed to be delivered orally and that the response of his audience was an integral part of his preaching.”167 Thus we read Chrysostom’s homilies on Romans with close attention to their context. We need to keep in mind that Chrysostom preached these homilies in Antioch, before being consecrated Bishop of Constantinople in 397/8 while continuing his monastic ascetic life.168 Far from disrupting his oversight of the churches, his rigorous ascetic practices grounded his pastoral duties and his preaching: these practices involved contemplation, prayerfully envisioning his parishioners and their lives through Romans as a scriptural figurative prism. Thus, the lifestyle of the members of the church in Antioch is helpful in understanding how Chrysostom interprets what Paul says about “sin” and the human predicament. As Trakatellis notes, in his Introductory Homily (PG 60.394) “Chrysostom speaks about a spiritual state of ‘sluggishness and sleep’ (νωθεία καὶ ὕπνος) which appears to

165

It was more than a century after his death that, because of his eloquence, John was nicknamed “Chrysostom” (“golden-mouthed”). Therefore, in his time as preacher he was known as “John.” Nevertheless, for convenience and by convention, I designate “John the preacher” as “Chrysostom,” a traditional identification readily recognized, rather than using the full designation “John Chrysostom.” 166 “The force of his personality and oratorical ability inspired such enthusiasm in his audience that they were unwilling to let his sermons go unrecorded. Stenographers therefore recorded his words,” Blake Goodall, The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on the Letters of Paul to Titus and Philemon (Berkeley, 1979), 78. On Chrysostom’s use of rhetoric see Wilken, John Chrysostom, 104–12. 167 Wilken, 105–06. In the case of the homilies on Romans there are no striking incidental remarks (about the weather, the audience, happenings in the city) that would make clear that they are stenographers’ transcriptions of his preaching. Chrysostomus Baur, John Chrysostom and His Time vol. 1 Antioch (trans. M. Gonzaga; London: Sands, 1959), 222–23. 168 Despite some claims that John preached these homilies in Constantinople, most scholars agree that he preached them in Antioch c.391: 1) because in Constantinople he would not have the time to prepare such elaborate homilies—to do so he needed the ascetic quasi-monastic setting he still had in Antioch (without all the responsibilities he had as Bishop of Constantinople); 2) because of the way he speaks of himself and of his hearers as being under one bishop (Homily 8); and 3) because he seems to address persons who have ready access to the place in which Paul taught, namely Antioch. See “Preface” of J. B. Morris, trans., Homilies of St. John Chrysostom; Baur, 297–98, and Peter Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9-11 in Origen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine (New York: E. Mellen, 1983), 107.

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characterize members of his community.”169 More specifically, he complains that “we cleave not unto his [God’s] love, but we prefer money instead of him. And people’s friendship, and comfort of body, and power, and fame we value above him [God].”170 He further complains (in Hom. IV and V, on 1:26–32) about the prevalence of falsehood, of deceit, of ruthlessness even among Christians who are cruel, savage, and arrogant, who become monsters; he describes the abysmal ugliness and utter decadence of human beings due to their “madness”—a mental illness to which he refers again and again in different ways throughout these homilies. Yes, sin and the human predicament are a matter of “free choice” (προαίρεσις, proairesis), but a free choice misled by “madness” and impaired by “sluggishness and sleep” related to life in the city. It is the “free choice” (proairesis) “to walk according to the flesh” rather than “to walk according to the Spirit” (8:5–13).171 Chrysostom anchors his central concept in “the famous chapter on the Spirit,” Romans 8, which for him is the key for understanding the entire letter (rather than Rom 1–3, as for other kinds of interpretation. What is this “sluggishness and sleep”? By the end of the fourth century in mostly Christian Antioch, social and cultural institutions (education, social life, literature, art and architecture, common discourse) remained largely framed by Hellenistic customs and legends/myths.172 Thus, by contrast with Chrysostom’s ascetic monastic Christian life (both in the desert and in the city), most members of the church in Antioch continued to have a Hellenistic lifestyle (in their daily family life and social transactions) with a thin veneer of Christianity. Such a Hellenistic lifestyle—according to customs preferring money, people’s friendship, comfort, power, and fame—was the “senseless” and “foolish” (1:21–22) choice (proairesis) that, despite its apparent innocence, ended up turning people into idolaters.173 But Paul “holds the whole of their idolatry up to ridicule” (Chrysostom on 1:23). When interpreting 1:18–25 (in Hom. III), Chrysostom takes the example of the prophet Daniel withstanding the attack of the lions: We also are attacked by lions in the form of anger and desires of passions, with fearful teeth tearing asunder those who fall among them. Become then like Daniel and let not these passions plant their teeth into your soul. But Daniel, you will object, had the whole of grace assisting him. Correct; [this happened] because proairesis preceded grace. So that if we be willing to train ourselves to a similar character, even now the grace is at hand. [Hom 3; Trakatellis’s translation]174

169

Trakatellis, 43. Trakatellis, 43–44, quoting the end of the 5th homily (PG 60.432, on Romans 2). 171 Trakatellis, 48. 172 Chrysostom does not seem to see a direct influence from traditional Hellenistic religions (still practiced in Antioch). 173 Contrary to the monks, these Christians simply had a family life (with children and grandchildren) and social transactions that followed the norms of society. See the discussion of Chrysostom’s early work, Against Those Who Oppose the Monastic Life (PG 47.319-386) in Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews, 26–29. 174 Whenever possible, I quote the modern translations either of Trakatellis (in the cited article) or of Burns, Romans Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators. 170

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“Sluggishness and sleep” (sin) is a power comparable to lions and powerful beasts planting their teeth into our souls. Sin as a power is also understood by Chrysostom as a disease that keeps people under its power, a “madness” (mental illness) as in his comments on 1:18–32, of a paralysis—sinners are paralyzed as long as there is no divine intervention, a recurring figure in his comments on the rest of the letter. For instance, regarding 3:25 (Christ as presented by God as ἱλαστήριον—sacrifice of reconciliation or of atonement) Chrysostom writes: “For there was no longer any hope of recovering health, but as a paralyzed body needed the hand from above, so does the soul which has been deadened. . . . [When] the sins were in their full, then he displayed his own power, that you might learn how great is the abundance of righteousness with him.” Sin is a disease from which God’s righteousness in Christ heals us; otherwise we remain sick and die. For Chrysostom, as for the Eastern Orthodox Church following him, the sinners’ cry Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy) is not a cry for forgiveness (“Lord forgive me, or us,” as commonly understood in Western churches) but is a cry for help by/for someone who is sick (“Lord heal us, or my daughter or my son”), as was the case when the two blind men, the Canaanite woman, and the father of the epileptic boy cried out Kyrie eleison (e.g., Matt 9:27; 20:30–31, 15:22, and 17:15). Yet, as Chrysostom underscores this healing from sin and its power occurs only insofar as, so to speak, one cries out Kyrie eleison. This is what his use of the term proairesis (προαίρεσις), “free choice,” conveys. Proairesis ends up being a technical term for him with the broader meaning of “purposeful selection, deliberate choice, free resolve (a combination of volitional, intellectual, and emotional elements).”175 As Chrysostom says concerning 1:18, sin has power upon people as long as they “hold to the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18), that is, as long as they make the wrong use of God’s gifts and revelations.176 They use their “free choice” (proairesis) in order to (unrighteously) misuse these divine gifts (see Hom. 2 on 1:18 and 19). But as soon as they have made the right “free choice” (proairesis), “grace” as divine power intervenes to free them from this “sluggishness and sleep” (the lions, sin as disease) that have power upon them; they are transformed through divine intervention, namely, through “the justice/righteousness of God” that “you do not achieve by toilings and labors, but that you receive by a gift from above, contributing only one thing, ‘believing’” (Hom II on 1:17). “What exactly is the faith Chrysostom is talking about?” asks Demetrios Trakatellis.177 His answer on the basis of the homilies on Rom 3 and 4: “For Chrysostom, faith is a unique human contribution to salvation and change.  .  .  . The essence of faith, as the highest and ultimate human contribution to the mystery of salvation and transformation, is the declaration that such a salvation and transformation is the exclusive work of the grace of God.”178 Thus for Chrysostom, far from being a belief in a doctrine, faith is the recognition (seeing) that the grace of God is at work in 175

Trakatellis (RTHC, 2013), 46. See also Kalantzis (RTHC, 2013), 91–94 who notes that Chrysostom uses προαίρεσις and its derivatives over forty times in his homilies on Romans. 176 He understands τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων (1:18c) as “holding to the truth in unrighteousness” (as in Chapter 5)—and not as “suppressing the truth in/by [their] unrighteousness” (as in Chapters 3 and 4). 177 Trakatellis, 49. 178 Trakatellis, 49, 51. Trakatellis refers to Chrysostom’s comment on 3:27, “What is the law of faith (διὰ νόμου πίστεως)? To be saved through grace.”

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one’s present and (as he expresses elsewhere) responding to it and affirming it—an expression of the believers’ “free choice” (proairesis).179 Faith is then closely associated with love: both the love of the loving God for humans—“God’s love” as an agent of transformation—and the love for God and Christ by believers. Chrysostom’s comment on Rom 1:7a (“To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints”) shows his understanding of love as a powerful agent for human transformation: [Paul] did not simply write “to all in Rome,” but with a definition added “to all God’s beloved.” Why? Because this is the best distinction which shows from where sanctification comes. Whence then is the sanctification? From love. This is why after having said “beloved,” he added “called to be saints.” (Hom I; Trakatellis’s translation)180

This is a first indication that throughout Chrysostom’s reception of Romans one finds an emphasis on God’s “consuming, vibrant, and total love” for humans. As can be expected, he grounds his understanding of God’s love as a powerful agent for human transformation in Romans 8 (the key chapter for Chrysostom). Thus commenting on 8:28 he writes “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.  .  .  . For should even tribulation, or poverty, or imprisonments, or famines, or deaths or anything else whatsoever come upon us, God has the power to change all these things into the opposite. . . . For one needs only one thing, a genuine love for God, and all things follow that” (Trakatellis’s translation, 52). God’s love as a divine intervention frees us from evil powers (that of “sluggishness and sleep” but also of all the tribulations mentioned in 8:28). Yet, God’s love “in turn becomes a central anthropological concept. A love leading to a transformation of the human being and, at the same time, becoming a sign of such a transformation.”181 Chrysostom concludes, “How powerful is the love of God! Those who had been enemies and disgraced have suddenly become saints and children! Then in saying ‘children,’ he showed them the entire treasury of blessings.”182 Regarding the love for God and Christ by believers, Chrysostom writes (toward the end of Hom V, on 1:28–2:16): “Let us then so love him [God] as we ought to love him. For this is the great reward, this is kingship and pleasure, this is enjoyment and glory and honor, this is the light, this is the myriad of bliss, which language cannot describe nor mind conceive.”183 Trakatellis continues, “What is particular in Chrysostom’s exegesis of Romans is this emphasis on a consuming, vibrant, and total love [for God and Christ] . . . leading to a transformation of the human being and, at the same time, becoming a sign of such a transformation.”184

179

As the core of the believers’ “free choice” (proairesis). “Faith” is understood here as in Chapter 5 and the realized-apocalyptic/messianic view of Faith in Appendix. 180 Trakatellis, 51. 181 Trakatellis, 53. 182 In contrast with Abelard’s understanding and emphasis on God’s love, discussed above. 183 Trakatellis’s translation, 52. 184 Trakatellis, 53.

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For Chrysostom, salvation is a radical transformation wrought by the grace of God and as a manifestation of the righteousness of God. Thus about Rom 1:16–17 (“the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith . . . For in it the righteousness of God is revealed”), he writes in Hom III: We must be attentive to the word “salvation.” With this in mind, Paul has added “righteousness/justice.” He is speaking not about your own righteousness, but about the righteousness of God. He also implies that this life is abundant and easy. For you receive this life not through toil and suffering but as a gift from above. From your side, you bring only one thing, which is “faith.”185

Trakatellis comments: “There is no doubt that here Chrysostom sees salvation in Christ as a radical transformation of ἄνθρωπος wrought by the grace of God,” as in Romans 8.186 Chrysostom frequently uses terminology related to change—about substantive changes, existential transformations—here and in subsequent homilies, especially on Romans 8 which throughout clearly appears to be the prism through which Chrysostom reads the rest of the letter. As Trakatellis says, Chrysostom speaks about “a transformation in which the old age of sin is replaced by the youth of grace. . . . The change is in conformity to the image of Christ ‘because what Christ the only-Begotten one was by nature, this the believers have also become by grace’” (quoting Hom 15 on Rom 8:28–39).187

Interpretive insights and ethical assessment: Good fruit and problematic fruit (in Antioch) The above comments show that Chrysostom’s reading of Romans follows a realizedapocalyptic/messianic interpretive line of reasoning. But what is most insightful is that in his reading of Romans Chrysostom repeatedly underscores the radical transformation brought about by divine interventions that believers experience— believers being understood as anyone who enters the realm of faith in Christ (seeing and affirming the divine intervention of Christ in one’s experience) and as anyone who is in communion with him (in a loving relationship with Christ). “What [the radical transformation of believers] Chrysostom describes is not a future eschatological condition, but a present situation. He speaks about the believers as having been already transformed, as having acquired a different status.”188 Chrysostom presents believers as constantly in the process of being transformed (by divine intervention). This strong emphasis on present transformation of believers by divine intervention is a form of what we called in Chapter 5 the “realized-apocalyptic” interpretive lines of reasoning— although Chrysostom uses a different vocabulary. The new insight that Chrysostom brings to this kind of interpretation is that, while this transformation of believers is necessarily performed by the divine, believers have

185

Based on Burns’s translation. Trakatellis, 54. 187 Trakatellis, 56. 188 Trakatellis, 56. 186

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a no less necessary role in it. In order to benefit from this divine transformation, believers must contribute to it through their “free choice,” proairesis, and the “obedience of faith”—there is no “faith” (as divine gift) without “obedience of faith”(1:5) and thus without the free resolve (proairesis) to carry out the vocation involved in the [divine] gift of faith (Chrysostom, Hom 1, on 1:5). This is what the present-day Eastern Orthodox Church calls the “principle of synergy.” Thus Trakatellis comments: Chrysostom is eager to maintain a principle of synergy. Throughout his 32 homilies, he consistently keeps a concurrent focus on both the human factor and the divine factor involved in the process of human salvation and, by extension, of human transformation. For this reason, next to the terms “grace of God,” “righteousness of God,” “gift of God,” indicative of the divine action, he uses the basic an—thropological term proairesis or one of its synonyms, which for him constitutes a tremendously important and decisive human factor operative in any transformational interactions.189

As noted above, for Chrysostom, “faith is a unique human contribution to salvation and change”—as becomes explicit in his homilies on 3:21–22 and on Abraham’s faith in Romans 4.190 The realized-apocalyptic/messianic exegeses of Romans 1 (see Chapter 5) understood “faith” as including both the anticipation of divine interventions (“hope,” as in 4:18) and a faith/vision recognizing transformative Christ-like divine interventions in the believer’s present. But these exegeses overlooked the fact that faith is also a human contribution to these divine interventions. Chrysostom avoids this imbalance by emphasizing both proairesis (the human free choice) as a component of faith and “synergy” (the participation of humans in divine interventions). As such, faith is portrayed by Chrysostom “as an expression of tremendous power . . . shining in the ‘belief that it is possible for God to do things impossible’,”191 because it is tied to all the divine interventions that are transformative in the believers’ present, including those designated by terms such as “grace of God” (1:5, 7), “gift” of God (1:11), and “righteousness of God” (1:17).192 For instance, as noted about 1:1, for Chrysostom Paul himself is the perfect type of those who through faith have been made into totally different persons by transformative divine interventions; he has been freed from his “sluggishness and sleep” even as he was transformed into an apostle and responded in faith. Because for Chrysostom “faith” is focused on the transformative interventions of the risen Christ in the life of believers (rather than on a doctrine about Christ), his understanding of “faith” was only slightly marked by the controversy generated by the Council of Nicaea (325) and its affirmation that Christ is “of one substance” (homoousios) with God the Father, even though Chrysostom was a fierce defender of the Council. Indeed, the controversy over it was still alive in Antioch when he began

189

Trakatellis, 45–46. Trakatellis, 49. 191 Trakatellis, 50. 192 Trakatellis, 45–46. 190

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preaching.193 When Chrysostom began preaching in earnest (386), Arian and Nicene parties in Antioch were still engaged in virulent disputes. Chrysostom, whose sermons were usually expository homilies on biblical texts, was challenged by Arians to devote a series of sermons on the differences between themselves and the Nicene party. To Arians, the Nicene position claiming that Christ is “of one substance” with God the Father and thus making the Son equal to God the Father seemed to compromise the primitive Christian belief that God the Father is the sole source and origin of all that exists. Chrysostom preached five homilies (On the Incomprehensibility of God, PG 48.701–812) in which he emphasized that Christian believers have transformative experience of Christ. Since Christ’s interventions are as transformative as God’s interventions (are of the same type), it is appropriate to say that Christ is “of one substance” (homoousios) with God the Father.194 Yet for Chrysostom, as an expression of “free choice” (proairesis), faith is a response to what God did in Christ (1:3–4) and does through Christ in the believers experience—again, for him faith is not so much “believing something” about Christ. Thus, commenting on 1:17 (“from faith to faith”) in Hom 3 he contrasts “faith” with preoccupations about doctrines—making explicit that faith is not believing a doctrine. And of course, following Paul, Chrysostom never uses the phrase “faith in Christ” (at least in the homilies on Romans 1, our primary concern here). Rather “faith” is focused on Christ’s transformative interventions, which believers should recognize in their present life by responding to these in obedience. In an interpretation reminiscent of what Käsemann calls the “sphere of power” of Christ, or “the eschatological world dominion of Christ, which is present already and already witnessed to,”195 as Trakatellis notes, Chrysostom described not a future eschatological condition, but a present situation: “[Paul] speaks about the believers as having been already transformed, as having acquired a different status, namely, that of righteousness . . . . [These are] the radical changes that occur to any human being entering the realm of true faith in Christ and communion with him.”196 Thus, Chrysostom comments on 8:9: “The spiritual person not only does not live anymore in sin, but not even in the flesh, having become from that very moment an angel, and ascended into heaven, henceforth, barely carrying the body about” (Hom XIII)—an interpretation that reflects his monastic ascetic experience.197 This heteronomous/religious experience of transformation that individual believers have is expected to lead to a transformed state—a life in which believers

193

Actually, the Arian and Nicene groups worshiped in different church buildings and had different bishops. Bishop Meletius (who baptized Chrysostom) and his successor Bishop Flavian were heads of one of two Nicene groups in Antioch. The Arian bishop Euzoius (consecrated in 361) was the official bishop recognized by the imperial authorities until 376. Because Meletius had been ordained by an Arian bishop, a part of the Nicene party did not recognize him. 194 These homilies presented Arians as holding a rationalistic view of God (even though they held traditional Christian doctrines) and appealed to their own experience of Christ. Regarding another group in the churches in Antioch—namely the Judaizers, who attended the synagogue and observed the Law and Jewish rites, there is no clear evidence in the Homilies on Romans 1 of Chrysostom’s denunciations of these Judaizers, although such denunciations are found in subsequent homilies. See Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews, 34–94. 195 Käsemann, Romans, 9. 196 Trakatellis, 56, 58. 197 Trakatellis’s translation, 57.

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“give [themselves] totally to virtue” (Hom XII, on Rom 6) in community life. Yet, as Trakatellis underscores “virtue in this context is not a term limited semantically to ethics, but a code term pointing to the new transformed condition in Christ” (56). Thus, Chrysostom interprets 1:8 (“I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith . . .) as an instruction “to give thanks [to God] not only for their own virtuous actions [resulting from a transformed condition in Christ] but also for those of others. Such thanksgiving frees the soul from envy and jealousy.”198 Thus, the believers’ religious experience affects their interaction with others in community. Yet, it seems that the only teaching Chrysostom the monk-preacher had for believers in his audiences was to espouse, as much as possible, a life of asceticism comparable to his—and thus ignoring community life in society. Thus, it is not surprising that, as we shall see when dealing with Rom 9-10, with his religious/heteronomous reading of Romans, Chrysostom seems to be unable to deal constructively with issues concerning the relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities. He seems to fall in the trap of supersessionism, if not anti-Judaism. Thus, the problematic aspects of Chrysostom’s reception of Romans seem to be akin to the aloofness of the life of the mystic, which for him is typified by Paul, as he expresses in his concluding homily on Romans: Paul was also a human being, partaking of the same nature with us, and having everything else in common with us. But because he showed such great love for Christ, he went up above the heavens and stood with the angels. And so if we too would rouse ourselves up a little and kindle in ourselves that fire, we shall be able to emulate that holy man. For if this was impossible, he would never have cried aloud and said, “be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). Let us not then admire him only or be amazed with him, but imitate him.199

Interpretive insights and contextual ethical assessment (today) Even though our seminar dealt with other Greek Patristic receptions of Romans (by Origen, Theodoret of Cyrus, Irenaeus, Photius/Photios of Constantinople, Arethas of Caesarea),200 that like Chrysostom’s are religious/heteronomy-centered receptions, all of these studies deal with interpretations of subsequent parts of Paul’s letter that will be discussed in the following volumes. This is not surprising. We have seen that, even though Chrysostom provided his parishioners with a systematic presentation of the teaching of Romans in thirty-two homilies from chapter 1 to chapter 16, he read the entire letter through the prism of chapter 8. This is true of all religious/heteronomycentered receptions/interpretations: the key for a proper understanding of Romans is found in chapter 8 (rather than in chapter 1 or chapters 1–4, as is the case for the two other kinds of interpretations). Of course, it is not appropriate to preempt here the discussion of these receptions of Romans 8—see the substantial discussion of important religious/heteronomy-centered receptions in Volume II (on Rom 2:1–

198

Burns’s translation. Chrysostom’s Hom XXXII; Trakatellis’s translation, 58–59. 200 See Patte and Mihoc, eds., Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans, 105–202. 199

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8:38). Therefore I directly turn to the identification of the interpretive insights that Chrysostom’s reception of Romans provides. Chrysostom’s insights are particularly important for understanding both how present-day Orthodox Christians interpret Romans as Scripture and how present-day Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians do so. This is speaking of the receptions by some 844 million Christian believers around the world today (nearly one-third of the readers of Romans).201 I mention this number, because it is usual for most Western people—whether secularized or Christians faithfully reading their Scripture—to dismiss and ignore the interpretations/receptions of Romans by this massive number of readers, supposedly because these are extravagant and nonsensical projections of the believers/readers’ “so-called religious experiences” upon Paul’s text. By now it should be clear that snubbing or flouting such interpretations/receptions is not merely showing one’s ignorance—a lack of awareness of all the figurative textual features on which the realized-apocalyptic/messianic critical exegeses are grounded—but also one’s arrogance, as together with all cultural imperialists, such a dismissive attitude shamelessly looks down on the “natives” (the vast majority of the Charismatic interpretations/receptions are strongly inculturated in their contexts in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific) and/or looks down on the otherworldly mystics. Chrysostom’s interpretive insights open for us the possibility of understanding the way in which both Orthodox and Pentecostal/Charismatic readers appropriately “receive” Romans—their interpretations/receptions are legitimate (grounded in the figurative dimensions of Paul’s text) and plausible (they make sense by carefully taking into account the religious experience that frames Paul’s text and should frame the readers’ life). We will see how closely related to Chrysostom’s insights are those of Pentecostal/ Charismatic readers as presented by Florin Cimpean (in Romania) and also by Ogbu Kalu (in Western Africa).202 Then we will be in a position to proceed with the contextual ethical assessment of such receptions.

Chrysostom’s interpretive insights for Orthodox hermeneutic The essay by Vasile Mihoc, “Greek Church Fathers and Orthodox Biblical Hermeneutics” (1-40 in Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans), about hermeneutical practices in the present-day Eastern Orthodox Church is most helpful in and of itself. But it is even more illuminating when it is correlated with Chrysostom’s reception of Romans.

201

These are the global statistics (subdivided by groups below) provided by the 2011  Pew Research Center survey—“Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 2011 in The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. According to this survey (that updates and largely confirms the estimates mentioned in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity), there were 2.18 billion Christians around the world in 2010. 202 See Florin Cimpean, “From Margin to Center: Pentecostal and Orthodox Readings of Romans 8 in Romania,” in Navigating Romans Through Cultures: Challenging Readings by Charting a New Course (RTHC 2004), 31–53. And Ogbu Kalu, The Spirit in the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009). This study (based on close direct studies of Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in Western Africa) shows how closely related Pentecostalism (or more generally the Charismatic movement) in Romania and in (Western) Africa are, despite their very different cultural contexts.

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This essay is written for a Western audience, providing the clarifications that we, Western biblical scholars, theologians, and readers of the Bible, need in order to make sense of the traditional way in which Orthodox read Scripture—their hermeneutic. It presents the main characteristics of the monastic and mystical hermeneutic that characterizes both the Eastern Orthodox Churches around the world (with a growing membership, about 215 million members in 2010) and also the no-less monastic Oriental Orthodox churches (with a membership of about 45 million members, a shrinking membership due to the upheavals in the Middle East where most are located). Because they are deliberately addressed to (Western) critical exegetes, Mihoc’s points are understandable in and of themselves; but his comments are clarified when they are put in dialogue with interpretive insights found in Chrysostom’s interpretation of Romans. As noted, while preaching on Romans Chrysostom remained a monk-priest. This meant (as expressed in his Introductory Homily) that his reading of Scriptures was framed by his monastic contemplative prayers. Mihoc clarifies what is involved in such a monastic ascetic reading and Chrysostom’s insights specify what this process entails. Of course, the Orthodox read Romans as “Holy Scripture.” For them, this is an interpretive process marked by the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit and also by the reader/believer’s recognition of this presence and activity.203 Thus reading Romans as Scripture is a contemplative process. Such contemplation is also required by the fact that “the words of Scripture and the Word of God; i.e., the divine Logos, are not identical . . . The divine is always interior and unseen.” Thus one needs prayerful contemplation to “see” the “unseen”—the essential—but also to allow the divine Logos to affect us, the readers/believers. As Mihoc emphasizes, for the Greek Fathers and for Orthodox believers “the divine Logos truly speaks in the words of sacred Scriptures and is active by them on the reader, using the words to work on the human spirit.”204 Reading Scripture is therefore a transformative experience for readers/believers—a view that framed Chrysostom’s preaching of homilies that invited the healers to read the scriptural text with the preacher. Thus throughout his essay Trakatellis underscores (including in his title) how the central teaching of Romans for Chrysostom concerns “Being Transformed.” Therefore, one is not surprised to find that Mihoc insists that “the ultimate goal of Scripture, and thus of exegesis, is soteriological.” But it is difficult to understand in his essay what this soteriology is, even though he explains: Christians participate—really, concretely, and in communion with the entire Church—in the saving events, passing with the Savior from death to life. The existential reach of Scripture is unveiled to us by the Holy Spirit acting in us, as we incorporate in ourselves the Scripture’s logoi as uncreated divine energies. Such an incorporation requires from us an ascetic effort . . . Exegesis as theoria becomes therefore an experience of the deifying grace.205

203

Mihoc, 6. Mihoc, 8–9. 205 Mihoc, 30. 204

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Yet Mihoc does not say from what we need to be saved. Happily Chrysostom specifies it. For him, as noted above, we need to be saved from the “sluggishness and sleep” induced by the common way of life in a city (Antioch), where one simply conforms to social expectations and customs, instead of allowing one’s relationship to God to shape one’s life. Furthermore, as Chrysostom stipulates in his comments on 1:18–25 (in Hom III), this “sluggishness and sleep” are due to powers which destroy us (as powerful beasts planting their teeth into our souls) and are therefore a mental illness (“madness,” as he comments on 1:26–32); sin is a power that paralyzes our free choice (proairesis). It is from this paralyzing power (sin) that we need to be saved (as Chrysostom says regarding 3:25). With this insight, one can better understand the Orthodox view of hermeneutic (as described by Mihoc) according to which “the ultimate goal of Scripture, and thus of exegesis, is soteriological.” In Trakatellis’s words, for the Orthodox Church, “salvation is defined not merely as forgiveness, but even more as liberation of the human mind from delusion and the renewal of human nature by union with the Godman Christ, whose healing presence is experienced through the Orthodox Church and its sacramental mysteries.” This is so because, Trakatellis continues, “humans are seen more as victims of the devil’s deception than as criminals to be condemned by divine justice. . . . Sin is viewed more in terms of a disease of the soul than as individual acts of lawbreaking. The human person is regarded as a psychosomatic unity that sin afflicts in its entirety, leading to all the suffering of soul and body of this present life.”206 In sum, in agreement with Aulén’s categorization both Chrysostom and the Eastern Orthodox Church embrace “the classic idea of the atonement” that characterizes what I called the “realized-apocalyptic/messianic” interpretations.207 Mihoc continues by insisting that “interpretation of Scripture is above all a contemplative, visionary endeavor, in which the Holy Spirit has a fundamental role” (31). Chrysostom’s insight clarifies this point as well by emphasizing that Romans should be read with the typological expectation that, as Scripture, it “prefigures” the divine interventions in the believers’ experience (see the above discussion of Hom 1 on 1:2). Thus for Mihoc (regarding Orthodox hermeneutic), it is “in the life and experience of the Church that the word is confirmed and actualized by the ritualized sign-act of the sacrament.”208 Reading Romans as Scripture is sacramental. “This sacramental perception of divine truth in Scripture is ‘synergetic’—i.e., it is both the gift of the Spirit and also depends on the worthiness (holiness)” of the reader (10). Chrysostom clarifies this point through his emphasis on free choice (proairesis). In order to benefit from the salvific transformation involved in faith, humans need to bring something of themselves—namely their free choice (proairesis)—which is transformed in the same way that the bread and wine are transformed in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Mihoc can thus summarize the basic hermeneutical principle of the Orthodox Church as “the interpretative vision that tries to discern the spiritual significance of God’s Word.” This basic hermeneutical principle is significantly called theoria (the 206

See Demetrios Trakatellis’s articles “Orthodox Churches, Eastern, ‘and’ Orthodox Churches, Eastern: Greek Orthodox Church and Its Theology,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. 207 Aulén, Christos Victor, 20–23, 32–76. 208 John Breck, The Power of the Word in the Worshiping Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986), 15. Quoted by Mihoc (RTHC 2013), 11.

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Greek term corresponding to the Latin contemplatio). Mihoc explains: “Theoria; i.e., contemplation. By contemplating the biblical text in the power of the Holy Spirit, the exegete discovers a spiritual sense . . . . Typology offers the key to its right interpretation . . . . The exegetes’ theoria reveals the significance of the biblical text ‘for us,’ as members of the body of Christ” (19–20). The reading of Scripture as theoria involves both contemplating the biblical text from one’s context in the body of Christ (the church) and contemplating one’s context from the perspective of the biblical text as type in order to see (recognize) the transformative interventions of God, Christ, or the Spirit in one’s experience. With this understanding of the reading of Scripture and of the nature of Scripture, as can be expected “there is a different sense for every reading, the variations expressing differences in the readers’ mystical relation to God . . . [Scripture] becomes the mirror of its reader’s or interpreter’s spirituality” (20). These variations are to be expected because each time the reading of Scripture involves a transformation of particular readers in the body of Christ and thus the transformation of their concrete life in society. Following Maximus the Confessor (whom Mihoc,209 takes as an example), this transformation can be called “an experience of deifying grace,” having a God-like life, also called in the Orthodox tradition the experience of “theosis.”210 In sum, reading Romans as Scripture—reading it as types being fulfilled by God in the believers’ experience—is salvific, because it brings about a transformation (a) from the “sluggishness and sleep” and the “madness” induced by the power of sin that destroys us as powerful beasts planting their teeth into our souls (b) to a God-like life through the experience of “theosis.” This transformation is in each case of the same type as the types found in Romans, including the transformation of “Saul” into “Paul.”

(B) Pentecostal and Orthodox readings of Romans—Florin Cimpean—and Charismatic receptions in Africa Florin Cimpean’s essay, “Pentecostal and Orthodox Readings of Romans 8 in Romania,” (together with Ogbu Kalu’s study of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement in Western Africa) complements Mihoc’s essay.211 Even though Cimpean and Mihoc wrote from the same geographical location, Romania, they did so from two very different ecclesiastical settings—respectively from the minority perspective of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and from the perspective of the predominant Orthodox Church. Yet, they complement each other by putting a similar emphasis on the religious/heteronomous dimensions of Paul’s text. This makes Cimpean’s Pentecostal (Charismatic) interpretation/reception of Romans surprisingly similar to Mihoc’s and Chrysostom’s. But Cimpean and Mihoc present receptions from two very different socio-cultural contexts in Romanian society. The Eastern Orthodox readings discussed by Mihoc are from mainline Romanian society, including its influential elite. By contrast, as Cimpean emphasizes, the Pentecostal/Charismatic readings are from marginalized groups in Romania (including the Pentecostal/Charismatic Roma [or

209

Mihoc, 25–30. See “Theosis” and the several cross-referenced articles in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. 211 See again Navigating Romans Through Cultures (RTHC, 2004), 31–53. 210

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Roms, often called Gypsies]): “The ethos of the Romanian Pentecostals is an ethos of poverty, suffering, oppression both by the government and other religious bodies, sorrow, humility, longing, eschatological tension, existential struggle” (35). During the time when the Pentecostal/Charismatic church exponentially grew in Romania (from 1947 to 1989), it suffered under oppressive governments that took the form of different kinds of Communist autocratic administrations—with which the Orthodox Church was in very uneasy tension as the other authority in the nation (more than 80 percent of the population belongs to the Orthodox Church). And the other force that oppressed (and continues to oppress) the Pentecostal/Charismatic church was/is the Orthodox Church. The Romanian Pentecostal receptions belong together with those by Charismatic churches around the world, forming together a very broad Pentecostal/Charismatic readership (despite very different cultural settings). According to the Pew Research Center survey, in 2010 there were an estimated 279 million “Pentecostals” (primarily in Western countries) and an estimated 305 million “Charismatics” (primarily located in the rest of the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America), for a total of 584 million.212 Among these Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians one can distinguish among (1) freestanding Pentecostal churches (c80 million), (2) Charismatics in groups associated with mainline churches (often counted as Pentecostals; c175 million), and (3) “Neo-Charismatics” in fast-growing “independent or indigenous” Charismatic churches, which are strongly inculturated (c330 million).213 Cimpean’s Pentecostal reading of Romans in Romania is in many ways representative of all the receptions of Paul’s letter by Charismatics and Neo-Charismatics around the world. First, he shows that, for most Pentecostals and Charismatics, Romans is functionally excluded from the canon, as he illustrates from his own experience.214 But he explains that what is actually rejected is the “Western reading” of Romans— not Romans itself. Pentecostals and Charismatics stepped away from—or deliberately distanced themselves from—Western Protestant churches for which, following a forensic theological reading, Romans functioned as “canon within the canon”: “a compendium of Christian doctrine” (Melanchthon), a theological treatise about justification through faith. Instead of faith as believing in particular theological doctrines, for Pentecostals/Charismatics faith is grounded in “Spirit encounters.” Instead of a theological discourse, “the Romanian Pentecostal discourse is made up from stories that have at their center the unending presence of the Spirit.”215

212

These are the statistics provided, once again, by the 2011  Pew Research Center  survey—“Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 2011 in The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. 213 Subdividing the same total, 584 million, using the categories proposed by The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (updating the numbers with the last Pew survey). See in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity the cluster of articles on “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements” and the remarkable introductory article by Ogbu U. Kalu, “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements: Methods for Studying” (also quoted below). 214 Cimpean, 35–36. 215 Cimpean, 35.

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Cimpean offers a sophisticated, scholarly interpretation of Romans.216 First, he explains how its figurative organization (centered on Rom 8:1–27 and 8:28–39) requires that everything in the letter be figuratively understood in terms of this twofold chiastic center. Then he proceeds with a detailed exegetical discussion of Romans 8.217 We are not surprised. Reading Romans from its center, chapter 8, is what Chrysostom was already doing. What is different in Cimpean’s interpretation/reception (and more broadly in the Pentecostals’ and Charismatics’ interpretations/receptions) is the emphasis on the Spirit and its role. Of course, Romans 8 emphasizes the role of the “Spirit”; after all, πνεῦμα is found fourteen times in this chapter (and only thirteen times in the rest of the letter). But beyond this exegetical observation, for Pentecostals and Charismatics, the role of the Spirit becomes a hermeneutical principle. Thus Cimpean writes, “The Spirit has become the great hermeneute of our experiences and of the biblical text” (35). Then he proceeds with a detailed description of this Spirit-centered hermeneutic, which characterizes the receptions of Romans (in private meditation of Scripture, in group biblical studies, and in sermons) by “Pentecostals in Romania”—the focus of Cimpean’s contextual investigation, yet his observations apply to readings of Romans by Pentecostals and Charismatics in all kinds of contexts around the world. In the following paragraphs, I summarize, paraphrase, and quote his presentation of this hermeneutical principle that characterizes Spirit-centered receptions of Romans.218 Cimpean starts with a story concretely rooted in his life as a child in an extended family in Romania. This is significant in itself: Charismatic (and Pentecostal) interpretations of Scripture are always rooted in their concrete life-contexts; they concern the ways in which the promises (types) of Scripture are fulfilled in their lives and Cimpean is no exception. “As my great-grandfather repeatedly told me,” he recalls, “the Spirit is at the center of everything, in the midst of unutterable suffering and unspeakable joy, in seasons of persecution and in seasons of liberation.” Note that, from this perspective, believers experience the Spirit—rather than having a doctrine about the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, they experience the Spirit not only in situations of liberation and joy, but also in the midst of persecution and suffering. They identify these manifestations of the Spirit through “the biblical text as their history and legacy” that they read typologically: Charismatics219 view “the biblical events, teachings and characters as their models,” as types of what the Spirit does in their experience. This typological reading takes flesh in Cimpean’s description of the Charismatics’ practice: Read aloud the biblical text was there to ignite and legitimate our experiences, to re-create the worlds of the individual believers and community and to spark imagination, vision, and action. Sermons were not aimed at systematizing grand teachings but at “re-storying” the text for today, at recapturing the passion of the

216

Cimpean, 42–47. See above Chapter 5, where I already mention Cimpean’s figurative organization of Romans (centered on chapter 8), as a preview of the discussion in Volume II. 218 Cimpean, 35–40. 219 In the rest of this discussion rather than using the phrase “Pentecostals and Charismatics,” following the practice of The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity I will simply use the more general term “Charismatics” by itself, since it encompasses Pentecostals: Pentecostals are Charismatics. 217

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text, at helping Pentecostals [and more generally, Charismatics] to cope with the passion of their existence. Pushed to the margins by both the Communists  .  .  . [and] the religious establishment, the Romanian Pentecostal community held to the biblical text and the Spirit as the necessary ingredients for subsistence and existence.220

As they enter Romans, Charismatics are aware that “this letter grew from concrete situations in the life of Paul and the communities which he interacted with” (36). For them the letter is read neither for its theological teaching (the emphasis of forensic theological interpretations) nor for its social-ethical teaching (the emphasis of inclusive covenantal community interpretations). Without denying these other possibilities, they follow an alternative by noting that Romans “is also about how one experiences the reality of life; and again and again it is brought into concrete experiences of life and death” (36); Romans is about how one can experience the active presence of God and of the Spirit in all aspects (including suffering and death) of one’s experience. “We know that all things cooperate together toward good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (8:28, Cimpean’s translation). Alluding to 8:35– 39, he comments in a note: “‘all things’ meant the whole package: freedom, suffering, persecution, resurrection, glory, Spirit, life and death.” God and the Spirit are at work in all aspects of one’s experience, including suffering, persecution, and death; these cannot be used as an excuse for not recognizing the active presence of the divine in one’s experience. But to recognize it one needs a different way of interpreting both one’s experience and the scriptural text; one needs a Spirit-centered hermeneutic. For Cimpean, Romans 8 demonstrates that “the Spirit functions as the integrating principle by means of which Paul brings together his theological categories [Romans 1-7] and the Christian praxis [Romans 9-16] . . . [and] the integrating principle through which the readers’ struggling, fractured, suppressed identities are made whole; their muted voices, their hopelessness, their alienation are overcome; and the creation itself is renewed.”221 Then, following Romans 8 verse by verse, Cimpean reviews the main characteristics of the Pentecostal/Charismatic reception/interpretation of Romans, which can be summarized as follows. Cimpean begins by making the general observation that this reception/ interpretation is a “liberationist” reading. For instance, rather than understanding κατάκριμα (katakrima, 5:16, 18, 8:1) in the forensic sense of “condemnation” (“the action of condemning someone”), it is understood as in classical Greek as “the punishment following a condemnation,” that is, in most instances, in the Greco-Roman world as “servitude” or “bondage” (i.e., the punishment of being made a slave).222 This is an appropriate translation in 5:16, 18: “for the judgment (krima) following one trespass

220

Cimpean, 35–36. Cimpean, 36–37. 222 As will be further discussed in Volume II, this “liberationist” interpretation is supported by Gustav Adolf Deissmann, Bible Studies: Contributions, Chiefly from Papyri and Inscriptions, to the History of the Language, the Literature, and the Religion of Hellenistic Judaism and Primitive Christianity (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1988; Reprint of: Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1901), 264–65, who notes that this meaning is particularly suitable for Rom 8:1. 221

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[Adam’s] brought servitude/bondage (katakrima)” (5:16); “just as one man’s trespass led to servitude/bondage (katakrima) for all” (5:18). The basic human predicament is that all of us are in bondage (the power of sin). Then in 8:1, “there is now no katakrima [for those in Christ]” needs to be understood in a liberationist way: “there is now no bondage/servitude”; that is, those in Christ are freed from bondage or oppression. This is clarified by Chrysostom’s insights regarding the human predicament from which we need to be saved. As we noted, for Chrysostom reading Romans as Scripture—reading it as types being fulfilled by God in the believers’ experience—is salvific, because it brings about a transformation from the “sluggishness and sleep” and the “madness” induced by the power of sin that destroys us as powerful beasts planting their teeth into our souls. Thus, as we shall see, Chrysostom interprets 8:1, “there is now no katakrima [for those in Christ]” by saying “now we have the power of working not after the flesh” (Hom XIII on 8:1). Cimpean continues by explaining what this liberationist transformation involves. First, this liberationist and Spirit-centered reading involves hermeneutical freedom. “All of Paul’s theological categories . . . [christology, adoption, justification, grace, sin, ethics, eschatology, mentioned in Romans 8, are discussed] are set in a pneumatic horizon where semantic boundaries are torn apart. Christology becomes pneumatic and is liberated from its rigid constraints, etc.  .  .  . Different understandings are not condemned but encouraged.”223 This hermeneutical freedom is a characteristic of figurative interpretations (as noted in Chapter 5). Paul’s Spirit-centered text is an invitation to make figurative associations (following the inspiration of the readers/ believers by the Spirit). Second, for individual believers this liberationist transformation directly affects their concrete life. This is an “immersion in this pneumatic universe,” which is an exercise in freedom as 8:2 expresses (“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death”). Each individual believer “is liberated from the constraints of sin, selfish ego, and from identity suppression. There is no condemnation, neither self-condemnation for oneself nor for the others. The individual is affirmed” (Cimpean, 37). One could be tempted to think that this liberation/salvation of individuals is limited to the liberation from self-centered sins, such as “selfish ego.” But this would be overlooking that the evil powers from which one needs to be freed (evil powers that include sin) also affect the community as a whole and the cosmos. Thus, Cimpean moves to a third point. “Third, the community as a whole enters this pneumatic liberation . . . The community is a place where the disinherited are adopted, the lame walk in the Spirit, the muted speak, the blind see, the unnamed received identity, and the excluded receive adoption. Community is not the place where identities are denied, but affirmed.” For this Cimpean notes that after 8:2 Paul uses plural forms of verbs and pronouns (“we” or the plural “you”). “In this way, adoption, for instance, becomes a community affair (8:14-17).”224

223 224

Cimpean, 37. Cimpean, 38.

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“Fourth, the whole cosmos enters this pneumatic liberation.” (as is expressed in 8:18–23).225 Yes, all kinds of powers are appropriately feared by both individuals and the community. But “the problem is not the lack of knowledge, or of ability or of will, but a lack of vision. The Spirit provides us with this vision.” Therefore Cimpean concludes, “in the pneumatic context, as a liberated community and liberated individuals we do not fall back on fear and oppression because we are given an identity of the children of God . . . Confusion and alienation is sorted out when the Spirit prompts us to identify ourselves with the divine Other and with the human others (8:15-16).”226 Cimpean continues (referring to 8:9–11, 18–21): The vision of liberation, orientation and identity provided by the Spirit is not just a utopian dream. It is actualized reality, a shared experience (8:23). Yet, this vision is not suddenly fully actualized . . . . While there is a present realization, there is also an eschatological aspiration. . . . The Spirit integrates the two ages and makes life livable.”227

And it is clear that, as for the cosmos (8:22), liberation is a long and painful process. The old evil age still resists. There is no denial of the manifestations of evil and enslaving powers: dreadful poverty, suffering, famine, persecution, oppression. But the Spiritgiven vision allows Charismatics as individuals and as communities to recognize in the mid of all these oppressions and sufferings the liberating power of God, of the living Christ (1:4), and of the Spirit (1:4, and 8:2–27) at work in their experiences.

(C) Contextual ethical assessment: Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal/Charismatic receptions in Antioch, Eastern Europe, and Western Africa Following his presentation of the reception of Romans by Romanian Pentecostals— which are comparable to receptions by Charismatics elsewhere, including in Western Africa as we shall see—Cimpean shows its similarities with the receptions by Eastern Orthodox, exemplified in Chrysostom’s homilies (40–41).228 Thus, it is appropriate to deal at once with the contextual ethical assessment of the receptions by Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox, and Pentecostals/Charismatics.

Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Chrysostom and Eastern Orthodox The “good fruit” of all these interpretations is clear. Reading Romans while focusing on its figurative dimensions enhances/enhanced the readers’ spiritual experience and has been transformative. When one feels trapped—and is actually trapped—under “the 225

Cimpean, 38. Cimpean, 38. 227 Cimpean, 38. 228 Studies of receptions of Romans in Greek Patristics were not available when Cimpean wrote. 226

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power of sin,” one is paralyzed, totally powerless. One needs to be liberated. We readily recognize that this is the case with people with mental illness, or with addictions of various kinds. But when reading Rom 1:26–32 with Chrysostom, Eastern Orthodox (as well as Oriental Orthodox) is led to recognize that this mental illness, this “madness,” affects all of us, humans. This paralysis due to mental illness might take the form of “sluggishness and sleep”— resulting in Antioch from participating in the life of this Hellenistic city. Then in the form of such “sluggishness and sleep,” this mental illness (the power of sin) becomes invisible, even though it remains a powerful reality. Therefore, a fundamental spiritual transformation is necessary. Saul, the faithful Jew, did not seem to be paralyzed in “sluggishness and sleep” under some evil power; the only sign of trouble—his violent persecution of the church—might simply be an aberration. And yet he needed to be fundamentally transformed—and was transformed—by a divine intervention from Saul into Paul. And as we saw, for Eastern Orthodox readers of Romans, this is a fundamental spiritual transformation, “theosis,” that everyone needs to experience and in which everyone needs to actively participate (in an act of “free choice,” proairesis). And this is not a transformation that remains located in the walls of the church during the liturgy (e.g., when Romans is read) or in the context of private devotions. It is a personal transformation, which is also a community experience (the liturgy). Furthermore, it is also a transformation of the ways in which the believers interact with others in society in a God-like life (“theosis”) characterized by love.229 All situations involving suffering of any kind need to be infused by God’s love, as the interventions of loving (God-like) believers do. In view of the very positive response to Chrysostom’s preaching (as expressed by the later nickname, “golden mouth”), we can presuppose that such receptions of Romans had profound effects in the life of the Christian communities in Antioch, and through them in the life of this entire Hellenistic city. These general observations can be illustrated by a personal anecdote. Once when I was a patient in an intensive care unit (ICU), I gratefully experienced the amazing empathy of John, my nurse; later on (visiting his church with my students) I discovered that he was a very faithful Eastern Orthodox, whose spiritual transformation carried on in his daily life. Then by contrast to this God-like behavior, the reality of the “sluggishness and sleep” of many others in the hospital, as well as in our society became quite visible. Similar to this transformation of the life of the individual believers (into a God-like life, theosis) and simultaneously of community life is the transformation of the attitude toward the cosmos. For instance, Elizabeth Theokritoff documents that the Eastern Orthodox Church very early sounded the alarm regarding the perils of the sins against the natural world.230 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was the first church authority

229

See Stanley Harakas, “Ethics and Christianity in Eastern Orthodoxy,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. He emphasizes in conclusion of his article that “in every moral situation, two dynamics are at work: 1) the struggle (agon) against evil and sin, sin being the denial or absence of the Godlike life (theosis) and 2) the struggle to realize (ascesis, exercise) in practice and in each situation God-like behavior and values.” 230 Elizabeth Theokritoff,  Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology  (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009).

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to do so, in 1997 (at Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church, California), by declaring: “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin.”231 While the “good fruit” of the receptions of Romans by Chrysostom and the Eastern Orthodox Church is clear, including in Romania (where I could witness it, visiting different parts of the country under the guidance of Vasile Mihoc),232 the “bad fruit” is obvious from Cimpean’s article. In very measured words, Cimpean describes the oppression and persecution of the Pentecostal/Charismatic communities by the Orthodox Church. Even though I never experienced such concrete and painful rejection, I have personally witnessed (including among students in my classes) the condescending attitudes of Orthodox believers toward other Christians, because for them there is no salvation outside the only true church; that is, the Orthodox Church.233 Such condescending attitudes easily lead to rejection and then to oppression and persecution of other Christian communities—as is the case for the Pentecostal/ Charismatic churches in Romania. Thus, tragically, once again, we find that the benefits (good fruit) from one kind of reception of Romans are negated, when this “good” reception is absolutized.

Contextual ethical assessment of the receptions of Romans by Pentecostals/Charismatics As Cimpean noted, the reception of Romans by Romanian Pentecostals is broadly similar to that by Eastern Orthodox—and I add, by Chrysostom.234 Yet, there is a difference which makes the ethical assessment more difficult. It is true that Orthodox and Charismatics are similar, because in both cases the teaching of Romans points to divine intervention (by the Spirit) through which believers are freed and will be freed from powers of evil; and in both cases, the situation of believers is expected to be radically transformed. Yet, for Charismatics, these manifestations of evil powers are more concrete, and therefore the radical transformations that free believers from evil powers are not merely spiritual. This can be illustrated regarding diseases. For both Orthodox and Charismatics, powers of evil inflict diseases upon humans. Services of healings are prevalent in Charismatic worship framed by the above reception of Romans. While such services also exist in the Orthodox Church, the spiritual character and spiritual dimension 231

The full text of the 1997 statement of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (subsequently nicknamed “the Green Patriarch”) is available at http://moralground.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/ EcumencialBartholomew.pdf (accessed April 25, 2017). By contrast it was only in 2015 that Pope Francis promulgated his climate encyclical, Laudate Si. 232 During World War II, the Orthodox Church helped most Romanian Jews escape to Palestine. I was amazed, and slightly skeptical until I read Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan, 2015), 229–34, where this historian provides the appropriate data—although, as is well known, this was unfortunately not the case in other Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe. 233 This view by Orthodox parishioners is of course inspired by archbishops, bishops, and priests. Nevertheless, on a personal level, I must note that these same Orthodox authorities were always very open, hospitable, and congenial toward us, the other members of the SBL seminar, toward me in many interactions (including in ecumenical settings) and with the students I occasionally brought with me to experience the Divine Liturgy. 234 Cimpean, 40–41.

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of the disease are carefully emphasized by the priests, so as not to deny its physical reality (although Orthodox believers often do not seem to be as careful). Charismatics often do not exercise the same caution, making it more difficult to assess the ethical character of their practice. Yet, the difference is not necessarily clear cut. As we saw, the receptions of Romans by Chrysostom and Eastern Orthodox emphasize that sin as a power keeps humans in its grip, primarily as a mental illness or madness that makes us “sluggish and sleepy” and paralyzes us. Sin is a disease from which we need to be healed. One could be tempted to think that this is merely a metaphor referring to a spiritual disease that calls for a “spiritual” transformation. Yet, from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, evil powers and their effects are “real” (and cannot be dismissed as “merely spiritual”); with disastrous concrete effects one can be possessed by evil spirits, Satan, the devil—as many Orthodox believers believe. Thus any disease is viewed as being at least in part a spiritual illness that requires spiritual healing (especially through the sacraments). In this line, exorcisms are practiced by Orthodox priests; all the Orthodox prayer books include prayers of exorcism used by priests to fight the power of evil (usually including four prayers by Chrysostom) asking in the name of God to deliver the possessed from the captivity of the devil. The church is a spiritual hospital that heals spiritual illnesses, because actual diseases (that might require hospitalization) are viewed as having a spiritual component (or source). Yet, the Orthodox Church is careful not to deny the need for physicians, medications, hospitals (including psychiatric hospitals). 235 By contrast, for Charismatics the manifestations of these evil powers take more concrete and physical forms. On the basis of the Charismatics’ reception of Romans 8, among the evils from which we need to be freed Cimpean lists poverty (basically, the inability of availing oneself and one’s family with the necessities of life); suffering (including physical, mental, or emotional pain caused by injury, illness, loss of all kinds, sorrow, grieving); oppression (being affected by an unjust or excessive exercise of power by any authority, including the government and other religious bodies); persecution (a particular kind of oppression); and the existential struggle engendered by all these dire situations. In sum, the evil powers which need to be overcome are pervasive. They are at work in all aspects of life; individual, family, community, economic, political, as well as religious aspects of life. Evil powers are at work and are very concrete realities in all aspects of daily life, as they engender poverty, suffering, oppression, and persecution of all kinds. Thus, for Charismatics who are reading Romans, evil powers are indeed spiritual powers. But for them, saying that these powers are “spiritual” does not exclude them from the concrete reality of human life. For Charismatics, such spiritual powers are parts of the “real reality,” which “has a way of catching up with you (and biting you back)” when it is ignored.236 But for Western Christians, this is nonsense. “Spiritual reality” cannot be confused with “real” (scientific, objective) reality. Therefore, the knee-jerk reaction is to reject 235

George C. Papademetriou, “Exorcism and the Greek Orthodox Church,” in Exorcism Through the Ages (ed. St. Elmo Nauman, Jr.; New York: Philosophical Library, 1974), 43–72. 236 Using the words of President Barack Obama (in his “Farewell Address” and his last “New Conference,” January 10 and 18, 2017; discussed in the Foreword) against his intended meaning—he was speaking about “scientific reality.”

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the reality of evil spiritual powers and therefore to put into question any ethical value to such Charismatic interpretation/reception of Romans. Such a view of life-reality by Charismatics is akin to the conspiracy theories analyzed by Clare Birchall.237 Is it not an unrealistic view of reality? Is it not attributing reality to “evil spiritual powers” as the way of explaining one’s fear about the dreaded “threat of the worst to come” that one sees looming on the horizon, as Derrida would say.238 Should we not, following the Enlightenment critique of religion, view Charismatics (including Pentecostals and the fast-growing Neo-Charismatics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) as disenfranchised persons who pathologically react to social and economic deprivation, and more generally to modernization and secularization (since Charismatic movements emerged in the twentieth century)? These Charismatic receptions of Romans are produced by anti-modern believers who seek to escape what they see as an “evil world,” is it not so? Are they not constructing an “alternative” world, in which “alternative facts” (evil spiritual powers and their defeat) are real? Are they not envisioning an “alternative” world constructed with “alternative facts” in which symbolic interactions are possible for disenfranchised persons through the recognition of their personal charismata? As Ogbu Kalu notes, social scientists (following Max Weber), as well as sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists of religion, view persons engaged in the Charismatic Movement as pathologically attempting “to make sense of (bring cognitive order to) a complex and often hostile world.”239 Consequently such Charismatic receptions of Romans should be dismissed as totally irresponsible, and thus as devoid of any ethical value—and indeed as ethically reprehensible for misleading their followers, as conspiracy theories do. But, consider what we are doing when adopting this attitude. We are dismissing as pathological the receptions of Romans by 584 million of its readers—the Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians. Indeed, these readers are found in disenfranchised situations. Unfortunately, these are the actual situations in which a large part of the

237

Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop (2006), discussed in the early parts of this volume. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in dialogue with Giovanna Borradori and his astute “Deconstructing Terrorism,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–136; 137–72. “Traumatism [described as the root of fear] is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with’” (97). Traumatism as the root of fear is the structure of conspiracy theory: “For conspiracy theory, it seems to me, at least attempts to articulate this ‘threat of the worst.’” The same applies to terrorism: people flood in to fill the void of the nebulous, dispersed terror or fear; in effect they are creating conspiracy theories. 239 See “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements: Methods for Studying” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, as well as his more detailed book, The Spirit in the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009). Kalu specifies (in the article “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements”) that, from this social scientific modern perspective, “Charismatic groups develop as (1) an alternative and/or corrective to modernization and secularization, (2) a response by marginalized people to a feeling of relative social and economic deprivation and of cognitive dissonance (traditional religious views are not helpful), (3) a structure in which symbolic interaction is possible for disenfranchised persons through the recognition of their personal charismata (gift of the Spirit), and (4) an effect of globalization, bringing about either an accommodation of indigenous religion to ideologies from North America (e.g., the focus on individualistic religious experience) or the inculturation of Charismatics into indigenous religious context or a combination of both.” 238

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world population struggles to survive—including all the members of the fast-growing “independent or indigenous” Charismatic churches. The fact that members of these Charismatic churches are suffering, are oppressed, are marginalized, and are persecuted is a reality that should not be overlooked. Billions of people are affected by such situations and view them as beyond their control and very much a part of the reality of their existence. For members of Charismatic churches, the source of all these evils is beyond their reach and is felt as an overwhelming “occult power” which has control over them; this evil power is for them a “factual reality” that they cannot overlook. These “evil spiritual powers” are for them an “experienced reality”—and not “fake news.” Throughout church history Christians have attributed this power to “idols,” and more generally (and appropriately for modern theologians) to “idolatry”—the power which becomes incumbent to whatever is absolutized, including today, for instance, technology (accordingly because we cannot survive and have a meaningful life without technology!) as Gabriel Vahanian points out.240 And of course this is true of all kinds of destructive powers that, for example, take the form of sexism, racism, colonialism, imperialism as powers that crush entire groups of people because one or another aspect of human experience is absolutized (transformed into an idol). Thus, for such modern theologians, the only escape from the pernicious power of the idols is an iconoclastic intervention, which has to be “transcendent”—an iconoclastic intervention that despite secularism we need to call a divine intervention or (as Charismatics do) interventions by the Holy Spirit. In the same way that we cannot and should not dismiss as conspiracy theories the reports about suffering, oppression, persecution, and exploitation of billions of people, in the same way we cannot dismiss as fake news the Charismatics’ reports about their experiences of liberation. Something happens in their experience that they appropriately identify as divine interventions or interventions by the Holy Spirit. In addition, the fact that these Charismatic churches are found especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America further puts into question the knee-jerk negative assessment of the ethical value of their receptions of Romans. This ethical assessment must take into account the context! Acknowledging the contextual character of any interpretation (as we did in Chapter 6) is especially necessary, because these Charismatic churches (and thus their receptions of Romans) are strongly inculturated. For instance, I could observe how the Kimbanguist Church in the Congo and the Church of the Eleven Apostles in Botswana are not only Charismatic but also strongly Africanized.241 Similarly, in the Philippines, I observed how much the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, known as El Shaddai, is steeped in Filipino traditions. Rejecting as unrealistic the receptions of Romans by people immersed in cultures different from ours is adopting a colonialist and imperialist attitude which is ethically unacceptable. This attitude is particularly unacceptable when reading Romans, because it contradicts Paul’s insistence that the gospel supersedes the distinctions commonly 240

See among his books, Gabriel Vahanian, God and Utopia: The Church in a Technological Civilization (New York: Seabury, 1977). See also Wait Without Idols (New York: Braziller, 1964); No Other God (New York: Braziller, 1966). 241 See my description of my experience in the Church of the Eleven Apostles in Kasane, Botswana in Daniel Patte, “Introduction,” in Global Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004).

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made in our societies among different people. Thus, in 1:16 Paul refused to oppose and even to make a distinction between Jews and Greeks, despite their different cultural/ religious perspectives; and in 1:14 he posited that people from very different cultural backgrounds and very different classes had the same status—he refused to make any distinction between Greeks and Barbarians, as well as between wise/educated and foolish/uneducated. Whatever point Paul sought to make in these verses—the three kinds of interpretations interpreted these verses in different ways—each interpretation had to acknowledge that the apostle respected the different groups in their particularity. Similarly, whatever might be our own cultural setting, following Paul we cannot brush aside as meaningless the perspectives on reality that people from other cultures have. From the perspective of Western cultures, believing that evil (spiritual) powers are concretely at work in our lives as individuals, in our societies, indeed in the entire “evil world” might seem to be unrealistic. Are these not conspiracy theories? Fake news? The pathological reaction to social and economic deprivation? Is the belief that we desperately need to be freed from these powers by God’s power, a hope grounded in “alternative facts”? Is the hope for an escape from this “evil world” the pathological construction of an “alternative” world? Are not these Charismatic receptions of Romans “a narrative construct that allows the readers to re-write or re-cognize events, and perhaps more importantly, to reconfigure contexts” as Derrida says about the conspiracy theories following 9/11?242 As Derrida notes, this is a response which is characteristic of the response to terrorism, a form of paranoia. But being paranoid is not necessarily being wrong, as Clare Birchall expresses through the title of her second chapter: “Just Because You’re Paranoid, Does Not Mean They Are Not Out To Get You.”243 For Pentecostals and Charismatics, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, being paranoid is a way of life. The reality of evil spiritual powers from which we need to be freed is not in doubt. Poverty, suffering, oppression, persecution of all kinds are concrete proofs that such evil spiritual powers are at work in the broader world, as they are in individuals in the forms of possession, illness, and death. Such views of evil spiritual powers are shaped by the particular cultural context of each Charismatic church, but not because these Christians simply adopt these cultural views. On the contrary, they struggle to avoid adopting “fake news” by developing a critique of these cultural views. They do so on the basis of their receptions of Scripture— including Romans. But it is not from the outside that they thoroughly critique the views of their particular culture. The Charismatic churches are most often shaped by their own culture precisely because they reject it as the “evil world.” Thus, on the basis of his study of African Charismatic churches, Kalu writes: “Charismatic churches [are] by definition quite inculturated, each specific Charismatic church being shaped by the very culture that it most often rejects as the ‘evil world’ and [are] often characterized as empowered by the Holy Spirit to participate in a ‘spiritual warfare’ against demonic powers that put in bondage people who live in this evil world.” Thus, rejecting the 242

Derrida continues by explaining that “conspiracy theory, it seems to me, at least attempts to articulate [the] ‘threat of the worst.’” Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 97. 243 Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 33–63.

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Western disparagement of Charismatic churches, Kalu affirms the (ethical) value of the Charismatic movements (necessarily very diverse because of its different social and cultural contexts) and in the process grounds a positive assessment of their receptions of Romans.244 Over against the Western caricatural views of Charismatics (as being exclusively concerned with individual salvation and cure of personal ailments), Kalu describes how Charismatic churches help not only individuals to have an inner vision and to reinvent themselves with a clear life journey; but also communities to reimagine their social space and the role of visible and invisible forces in it, and church communities to reconstruct a religious life and landscape that embodies clear ethical and missionary objectives that contribute to redeeming the public space of society (through political engagement).245 The positive benefits of Pentecostal/Charismatic receptions of Romans in such communities, heavily inculturated in non-Western cultures, are clear. Of course, one must continue to discern the spirits! But developing interpretations/ receptions of Romans (as other kinds of interpretations do) by dismissing as fake news Pentecostal/Charismatic spiritual experiences—that is, as fake or pathological constructions of evil spiritual powers—can only have destructive results for both individuals and communities. As Kalu shows, one important contribution of the Charismatic movements—an essential contribution for the present project—is that they reshaped the hermeneutic practice for interpreting Scripture. Because a Charismatic interpretation takes into account both the inspiration of the author of Scripture (Paul) and the inspiration of the interpreters (who are reading with the help of the charismata they received from the Spirit), the process of reading Scripture— hermeneutic—is characterized by a freedom aimed at discovering how the religious experiences described by Paul (as “type”) help the inspired-readers to recognize similar religious experiences in their own lives and situations. Thus, in Kalu’s words, the hermeneutic becomes a praxis-oriented hermeneutic where experience and Scripture are maintained in a dialectic relationship by the Holy Spirit. The immediacy of the Bible as Scripture is

244

Thus Kalu writes (in “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity):“From an African or non-Western perspective, these critical assessments are problematic because they attribute the resurgence of religion in Charismatic revivals to an African pathology. The African indigenization of Christianity is depicted as anti-modern along with fundamentalism, as if the relationship between the African past and the modern present necessarily needed to be understood in terms of a view of history framed by social Darwinism and its view of progress. Far from envisioning a rupture between present and past, one can envision our past as always in our present, a view of history found in several African cultures.” Following Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels; Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), and Waldo Cesar and Richard Shaull, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), Kalu underscore that “it is helpful to envision a critical approach that draws attention to the limits of the Enlightenment critique of religion.” 245 Kalu, “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, and in much greater detail in his book: Ogbu U. Kalu, The Spirit in the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009).

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balanced by the freedom to interpret and appropriate the multiple meanings of the biblical texts accessible to all (and not merely leaders), because of an illumination from the Spirit.246

Therefore, assessing the ethical value of a Charismatic interpretation/reception of Romans is a matter of assessing not simply how Paul’s text is interpreted but also how it affects the interpreters/readers in their particular contexts. This is necessarily a contextual, praxis-oriented ethical assessment—which in the case of the Pentecostal community in Romania as described by Cimpean can be a very positive assessment. Yet, we have to keep in mind that, especially in this case, interpretations/receptions must be constantly evaluated and reevaluated as the contextual situations constantly evolve, and as the interpreters are more or less faithful.

V Conclusions: Braiding together the almost-true, the sometimes-true, and the half-true to make a hut and bring to life the “true-true” (Patrick Chamoiseau) Which of the three kinds of interpretations is better? Of greater value? Hopefully it is clear by now that each of these interpretations is, at least potentially, equally legitimate (grounded into the text) and plausible (making theological sense)— as Chapters 3, 4, and 5 strove to establish. By reviewing in some detail in the present chapter, a few receptions of Romans (especially 1:1–32), and by showing how they were developed in very different religious, social, and cultural contexts, it became clear that each kind of interpretation offered teachings that were very beneficial and much needed in each of particular contexts where they addressed urgent needs—while another teaching/interpretation would have been totally unable to address such needs. Therefore, substituting an interpretation/reception for another kind of interpretation/ reception would have been inappropriate and indeed counterproductive in a particular context. But we have also noted that any of these interpretations/receptions becomes very destructive—and often in tragic ways—when it is absolutized, that is, when one claims that one does not have any real choice. This entire volume, as well as the ten volumes on the receptions of Romans Through History and Cultures, strove to avoid this pitfall by laying out alternative interpretive choices that any reader of Romans as Scripture has and also the benefits that each kind of interpretation has in particular contexts. Consequently, and obviously, this means that I cannot—and should not—propose, in a “Conclusion,” what is “the best” interpretation/reception of Romans (1:1–32). “The best” interpretation/reception is necessarily contextual. And therefore, it is up to you, my patient reader, to make a choice for your own context—carefully acknowledging that those interpretations/receptions of Romans, which are the most familiar to you,

246

Among the concluding words of Kalu, “Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.

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might not be “the best” in a new situation. And of course, as Pentecostal/Charismatic interpreters showed us, we have the “freedom to interpret and appropriate the multiple meanings of the biblical texts” (Kalu)—in our case, Romans. This is a much-needed freedom, as our contextual situations are constantly changing. The Martinican Creole novelist, Patrick Chamoiseau, expresses most powerfully and concisely the overall argument of this book in his remarkable novel, Texaco, where he shares the wisdom of his Creole people.247 The storyteller, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, stops many times to explain what she is doing as she tells the story of her family and her own story. Although she acknowledges that at times she is lying, in most instances, she strives to tell the truth, as she explains, “In what I tell you, there is the almosttrue, the sometimes-true, and the half-true.” This is because “telling a life is like braiding all of that together . . . to make a hut. And the true-true comes to life out of that braid.”248 In the same way that Marie-Sophie Laborieux is “telling a life,” exegetes “tell a life”—a Word-to-live-by—as soon as they interpret Romans with the awareness that it is Scripture for believers (whether or not they identify themselves as one). By interpreting they give shape to a Word-to-live-by that believers are expected to implement in their lives in concrete contexts (whatever these might be). The preceding chapters have argued and hopefully demonstrated that whenever we propose an interpretation and carefully demonstrate that it is legitimate and plausible, in fact we are also telling a life, because we ultimately propose a Word-to-live-by that hopefully addresses contextual issues, problems, joys, tragedies that believers encounter in their life in a particular contextual situation. Therefore, whatever interpretation of Romans we advocate, it is necessarily limited by a given contextual perspective—as receptions of Romans through history and present-day cultures show. It is not telling the “truetrue.” But since none of our interpretations can be viewed as absolute—as a complete and final interpretation249—we have to acknowledge that each of our interpretations is at best “the almost-true, the sometimes-true, and the half-true.” Yet this is not a disaster! As repeatedly noted in our ethical assessments, what is actually disastrous and tragic is to view an interpretation (whatever it might be) as absolute. Whenever we claim that our “almost-true, sometimes-true, and half-true” interpretation is absolute, then tragedy always follows, be it for us or for our neighbors. Of course, it is imperative that we should pursue interpretations that would bring out “the true-true.” But the true-true should not be sought after in a setting detached from life—from ivory towers. The true-true is always related to life. “The true-true comes to life.” The question is: how? Marie-Sophie Laborieux (=Patrick Chamoiseau) wisely answers that it is by 247

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Gallimard, 1992; in French, with much Creole) and the amazing English translation, Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov; New York: Vintage, 1997). 248 Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris), 139—my translation from the French. For a different translation see the English version, Chamoiseau, Texaco, 122. Rose-Myriam Réjouis’s and Val Vinokurov’s translation of these few lines hides connotations of the French original that are essential for understanding what constitutes “truth-telling” when one “tells a life,” as the protagonist Marie-Sophie Laborieux does. But overall the translation from French and Creole by Réjouis and Val Vinokurov is simply remarkable. Their “Glossary” explaining the key Creole terms and a few French abbreviations is also most helpful (and would be an excellent addition to the French edition!). 249 Or according to the principle of criticism, the “interpretation with the highest degree of probability”—a statement which has the same functional effect.

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“braiding all of that together . . . to make a hut. And the true-true comes to life out of that braid.” Far from rejecting certain interpretations (Words-to-live-by) in order to absolutize another one, even as we necessarily privilege one, we must acknowledge the constructive task in which, together with others, we are involved and the ethical imports of this task: together we are making a hut—building a dwelling and a home where individual and family life can unfold happily, harmoniously, productively, safely protected from inclement weather. Making a hut in the slums of Martinique (such as the shantytown established on the grounds of a Texaco refinery) involves braiding together whatever is at hand (as the novel articulates). Therefore, being an ethically responsible interpreter of Scripture/Romans involves acknowledging (1) that I am involved in a task performed for the sake of others (making a hut) and (2) the fact that I cannot do it by myself—I need coworkers. We have to acknowledge that each time we read Scripture/Romans—including with the most sophisticated exegetical methods—we produce one interpretation which at best merely expresses “the almosttrue, the sometimes-true, and the half-true.” No such interpretation should be and can be absolutized without disastrous consequences. But constructively, we also need to acknowledge that we are making a hut with other by braiding our chosen (almost-true, sometimes-true, half-true) interpretations together with the (almosttrue, sometimes-true, half-true) interpretations contributed by other interpreters. Therefore, we do not have the luxury of absolutizing one interpretation (our preferred one). Being ethically responsible involves participating with other interpreters in the constant to-and-fro movement from one interpretation to another of the (almost-true, sometimes-true, half-true) interpretations. Being ethically responsible involves using one of these interpretations (helpful in a particular context), while cooperating with other interpreters who use other interpretations according to the demands of other contexts. Being ethically responsible—giving birth to the true-true—involves braiding our chosen interpretation with those of colleagues, making a hut with them. Then “the true-true comes to life out of that braid.”

Appendix: Threefold Interpretive Choices about Thirty-One Key Theological and Ethical Themes in Rom 1:1–32

Even though the previous chapters (especially Chapters 3, 4, and 5) have strived to clarify the differences between the three interpretations, it is always a challenge not to confuse the three kinds of interpretations. To avoid such confusion, I prepared for myself this three-column summary table, which the readers of this volume might find helpful. This table can also be consulted as “memory aids” (Stromateis, as Clement would say; see Chapter 7) by the readers of this volume who, like me, might at times forget, regarding one or another key theme, the different understandings according to the three interpretations. The three understandings of the thirty-one key theological and ethical themes listed below can be taken as established. As such they will be the starting point for reading the rest of Romans, which will refine their understanding. Thus, the reading of Rom 2:1–8:38 in Volume 2 will proceed much more rapidly.

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FORENSIC THEOLOGICAL EXEGESES

COVENANTAL COMMUNITY EXEGESES

REALIZED-APOCALYPTIC/ MESSIANIC EXEGESES

Apostle (1:1): a messenger with the unique authority to proclaim truthfully the gospel message, a preaching vocation that Paul, as a prophet-like “servant of Christ Jesus,” has voluntarily accepted in total devotion to the Lord (God and Christ); the focus is not on role (how he preached) but on status: the apostle was commissioned—appointed and authorized—by God to preach, and thus has a unique authority to preach truthfully.

Apostle, called (1:1): an ambassador divinely elected/ appointed by God (called by God, as the “slave/servant of Christ”—appointed by Christ, as the “slaves of Caesar” were appointed by Caesar) to represent and speak in the name of and with the authority of Christ and God. This calling is associated with “grace” (charis, χάρις, 1:5)—the relational term for an undeserved gift associated with the covenantal vocation of bringing people to glorify God (as Christ did, Rom 15:9). When the apostle as ambassador of God (or other members of the community of Christ-followers, the people of God) shares with them the undeserved grace/gift of participating in a community where they are honored by the apostle (1:14 and, it is expected, by other members of the community), people who are excluded (viewed as worthless, marginalized, abused) in societies/ communities framed by an exclusive ideology (such as that of the Greco-Roman world) glorify and thank God.

Apostle, called (1:1): “Called” refers to the means by which Paul became “apostle,” namely through God’s sovereign action, God’s deliberate choice. Apostleship is the vocation that resulted from Paul’s primordial religious experience (being encountered by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus) that transformed him, giving him the vocation “apostleship” and empowering him to carry it out. Apostleship is a specific charisma (χάρις, 1:5, or χάρισμα; Käsemann, 6), a vocation for which he (as well as others) is empowered by a spiritual gift (charis, χάρις). See also SAINTS, called.

Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14): a top-down structure of authority. Because of the authority Paul has received from God and Christ by being called and set apart as apostle (1:1), he is “obligated” (to God and Christ) not only to proclaim truthfully the gospel message but also to

Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14): a horizontal, inclusive, and reciprocal structure of authority. Paul views himself as a member of an inclusive community where the differences set by the honor and shame system do not apply. By saying “I long to see you” (1:11) Paul conveys that he envisions his relationship

Authority of the Apostle (1:11-14): Paul’s authority is “charismatic”—in the sense that it has a charismatic structure. Paul is charismatic in the sense that he is empowered by spiritual gift(s) from God to carry out his ministry as apostle. But his authority is also charismatic in that it

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share the spiritual gifts he received. This authoritative ministry is first towards the Romans and ultimately towards all humanity (all Gentiles). The top-down structure of authority is clear: from God and Christ, Paul received gifts and revelations (the gospel); in turn Paul the apostle shares these gifts and revelations with others (the Roman believers, all of humanity), because they lack these gifts and revelations.

with the Romans as a close relationship with family members and close friends, expressing a desire for solidarity and reciprocity in Christ, an inclusive motive. 1:12 further expresses an inclusive reciprocity; they bring encouragement to each other—as Paul’s faith will act on theirs and theirs on him both Paul and the Romans will be strengthened by God (no pretense that Paul with his gifts could do it for the Romans). Yet, against the Greco-Roman ethic of reciprocity that requires to see oneself “under obligation” to honor only certain kind of people, namely, “people with honor” (Greek and wise, i.e., educated and sophisticated people) and to see oneself “without any obligation” toward the nobodies without honor (barbarians, uneducated foolish), Paul see himself under obligation to ALL. This horizontal, inclusive, and reciprocal structure of authority is further found in 1:13 (note that the “fruit” that Paul hopes to harvest in Rome is the Romans’ support for his mission to Spain, as a collective endeavor).

acknowledges that the Romans (and all Christfollowers) have a similar charismatic authority; they are themselves empowered by spiritual gifts from God to carry out their own ministry (as “saints”). So Paul’s charismatic authority is not putting him in a superior authoritative position above others. This charismatic authority is reciprocal, mutual.

Called (1:1b) Called by Jesus Christ (1:6), Called to be Saints (1:7). Called apostle: Paul’s affirmation that he is “called (by God)” demonstrates the legitimacy of his apostleship and his authority—an emphasis

Called Apostle; Called by Jesus Christ (1:6), Called to be Saints (1:7). Called apostle is a divine passive (“called” [by God]), implying that his office rests upon a divine election or appointment; he is “sent in behalf of God,” and therefore sent to represent God and/or

Called Apostle (1:1b) Called Saints (1:6-7) = “God’s deliberate choice” (Keck, 40) as apostle or saints; receiving a vocation; being transformed by God and/or Christ/Messiah (see Paul’s changes in name and standing [Paulus/Little; slave of Christ/Messiah]) through

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needed, because his apostleship was contested, especially by Jewish Christ-followers (also in Rome; see Rom 14–15). All believers should acknowledge Paul’s authority, heed his teaching, and imitate him by voluntarily devoting her/his life to serve Christ, i.e., giving his/her life to Christ. Called to be saints (1:7) is similarly a “call” or “vocation” by God or Christ, 1:6-7. It gives Christ-followers a universal new identity and a universal new condition, a “new self ” that replaces the “old self ” crucified with Christ (6:6). So Paul abandoned his Jewish identity and the Romans abandoned their Gentile identity (see Badiou).

Christ (a point reinforced by “set apart”). Called to be saints. Christfollowers in Rome are similarly “called” by Jesus Christ to be “saints.” By being called, the Gentiles are grafted upon God’s chosen tree, the people of Israel, and in this way they are given a new status and a new mode of life as “saints,” as members of the “holy people,” and this without effacing either Israel’s ethnic identity or their own identity as Gentiles. All of these “calls” are associated with “grace” (charis, χάρις), a covenantal relational term that signals that these “calls” (vocation) are for the sake of God and others and that, as marked by this gracious gift from God, the authority that these “calls” convey is a paradoxical authority.

their experience of Christicevents (or messianic events); in the process they are “set apart” for a certain task. A “call” involves both a constructive transformation (being empowered by God/ Christ for a particular vocation or task) and a negative transformation (being freed from one’s absolutization of a previous vocation). In Paul’s case his excessive, idolatrous, “zeal” for the Jewish tradition is abandoned, but not this previous vocation itself— Paul can remain (and remained!) a Jew continuing to follow (certain) Jewish traditions and to read the Holy Scriptures (1:2). And so it is for all Christ-followers.

Christ Jesus. The christological teaching of 1:3-4 affirms that Jesus Christ is Son of God as son of David according to the flesh and Son of God in power according to the Spirit by/through the resurrection—a doctrine understood as referring to either (a) two natures (human and divine) of Christ, or (b) two stages in his existence, before and after his resurrection (according to the salvation history scheme), or (c) his two roles in God’s purpose: “as Messiah (of Israel)” and “the Son of God [in power]

Christ Jesus—Christological Teaching (1:3-5): a voluntarily ambivalent characterization of Christ, with the expectation that it would be interpreted in different ways by Jewish Christfollowers and Gentile Christfollowers and their respective house churches. What matters is not an agreement regarding theological views (orthodoxy), but a unity in praxis (orthopraxy), faithfully serving Christ the Messiah as “our Lord.” In agreement with Jewish Christ-followers, Christ is son of David, the fulfillment of Scripture, the Christ/Messiah, in continuity with Judaism; in agreement with Gentile

Christ Jesus—Christological Teaching (1:3-5): Emphasis on the resurrection which established the son of David as “Son of God with power” and as “our Lord.” Jesus’s resurrection is an eschatological event that cannot be asserted apart from the future apocalyptic resurrection. “The central content of the ‘good news’ (‘gospel’) is that God has inaugurated the era of messianic liberation by taking the step of setting up the key instrument of that liberation: Jesus Christ as ‘Son of God’ in power”

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(for all).” These views of Christ have to be understood in terms of the “one salvation-process” that Christ’s advent, death, and resurrection form as the inauguration of the time of salvation. 1:3-4 is a condensed version of the gospel as the content of faith.

Christ-followers, Christ is the resurrected one, the Lord, in relationship with the Spirit (a high Christology); the two are acceptable because “orthodoxy” does not matter. But for Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile Christ-followers affirming together Jesus as Christ/Messiah (1:1) or as resurrected Lord (1:4) has the pragmatic goal of adopting a countercultural attitude (in the Roman context, replacing the authority of Caesar by the paradoxical authority of Christ) uniting them into the common vocation and mission of an inclusive community— the people of God, the inclusive body of Christ (12:4-8), the ἐκκλησία, the community of those who are called (to a vocation, a mission),“the called of Jesus Christ” (1:5), “the called saints” (1: 6).

(Byrne). “The ‘Kyrios’ is a representative of the God who claims the world [in the present] and who with the church brings [in the present] the new creation in the midst of the old world that is perishing” (Käsemann). Emphasis is therefore on the risen Christ who is actively present in the life of believers, the church, and the world.

Faith (1:5): Believing that certain affirmations are true (Augustine’s fides quae creditur) because they are revealed by God, thus believing the gospel (the content of faith) understood as a series of interconnected theological propositions (propositional truths) which believers should hold to be true— and eventually also believing other divine revelations (1:19-20, 32; 2:18-20); such a faith is a gift from God, but requires a willful response (“obedience”) based on trust from the believer.

Faithfulness/Faith (1:5): pistis as emunah and fides: a relational term. Emunah as in the Hebrew Bible for the sake of Jewish Christ-followers; Pisti/fides for Gentile (Greek and Roman) Christ-followers referring to the submission to someone more powerful and honoring that person. Thus faithfulness/faith involves (a) the acknowledgment of God as one’s God and Christ as one’s Lord, (b) good/ faithful relations with God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and (c) good/faithful relations with other members of the community and the world at

Faith/Vision (1:5) as pistis/ fides is a gift from God (1:8) that involves both (A) a recognition/vision of God’s (or the Spirit’s or Christ’s) transformative interventions in the present (in oneself and in others) and in the past (those told in Scriptures and those in Jesus Christ); present divine interventions are recognized as such because they are of the same “type” as past divine interventions; and (B) an active response or obedience (“obedience of faith”). Such a faith/vision is a gift from God, related to other spiritual gifts from

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Two presuppositions in this view of “faith” are (1) faith involves trusting/ believing God (credere Deo, who revealed the content of faith)—and trusting the speaker’s/writer’s [Paul’s] words—and more generally having the “faith by which we believe” (fides qua creditor) and (2) faith also involves faithfulness, faith commitment, and thus obedience.

large (relations embedded in the gospel-story). Faithfulness/ faith is trustfully entering the gospel-story (comparable to what Rabbis call the Haggadah) as the drama in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together,” and participating into it (faithfully “walking” according to its patterns—comparable to what Rabbis call the Halakah).

God—including “charis” (χάρις, empowering spiritual gift, [grace], 1:7) and “charismata” (χαρίσματα, spiritual gifts, 1:11). So Paul gives thanks to God for the Romans’ faith, 1:8 (rather than complimenting them for it). Wherever there is faith, a divine intervention took place.

Glorifying/ Honoring God as God (1:21) is what believers should want (will) to do when they have received an appropriate knowledge of God (1:19-20). The failure to do so results from either a lack of (or insufficient) knowledge about God or a lack of will to do it (having a twisted will/wrong will to suppress this knowledge or the twisted will to worship idols instead, 1:23).

Glorifying/Honoring God as God (1:21) by bringing others to glorify God is the covenantal vocation of the Chosen People—aka “sanctifying the Name” (in Midrash)— supposed to be or actually carried out by Abraham (4: 20), by the Jewish People, by Christ (15:8-11), by Paul (1:5; 15:18), by all those (everyone!) who benefited from a divine revelation (1:19-21). The failure to glorify God is due to a rebellion against God (a suppression of the truth) because God is perceived as “partial” (2:11).

Glorifying/Honoring God as God (1:21) is the appropriate response to God’s intervention in human experience. Humans are given the ability to recognize God’s invisible nature, eternal power, and divinity—to see through faith/vision God’s manifestations—so that they might “give thanks to God.” Not doing so is not simply an offense against God, but primarily separating oneself from God and the glory that God wants to share with humans. Glorifying God is a reciprocal experience. In the process humans reflect in themselves the glory of God (see 2:7, 10; 3:23; 5:2; 8:18, 21; 9:4, 23, pointing to “the glory of the children of God,” 8:21). The “wrath of God” is manifested against those who fail to glorify and thank God.

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God: a loving forensic God, i.e. a righteous and merciful/loving Judge. “God is the Judge who demands good deeds of [hu]man” (Rom 1:18-3:20). The preaching of faith does not introduce a new concept of God as if God were not the Judge who requires good works but were only the Merciful. No, we may speak of God’s ‘grace’ only when we also speak of his wrath” (Bultmann, 262). God has righteousness, which God shares with humans.

God: envisioned as a covenantal God—the God of the inclusive Covenant with Israel (the Covenant as a gift/ election, and a call/vocation to be the beloved Chosen People “walking” with God in life) and with “God’s beloved in Rome” (1:7) and everywhere else “throughout the world” (1:8) of the Gentiles (who are in a covenantal relationship with God “through Christ”). God is the God who walks in their life with the beloved Chosen People—the People that now includes all Christ-followers from among those who were previously excluded and are now also “God’s beloved.” God intervened (in the past) in the times of Israel and of Jesus Christ to establish the covenant and the new, inclusive covenant. The relation between God and the (inclusive) Chosen People is reciprocal: the Chosen People obviously need God’s gifts, righteousness/ justice and mercy; but God as a covenantal God also needs the Chosen People so that God might be glorified (15:6-9).

God: envisioned as a God who intervenes in powerful transformative ways in human affairs—in the past (both in the history of the Chosen People, and in Jesus Christ), in the present (of Paul, of the Romans, and of other Christ-followers), as well as in the future. God intervenes in salvific ways to “save” humans through manifestations of the Righteousness of God or in punishing ways— manifestations of the wrath of God—when God stops intervening, standing by and abandoning humans to their desires and to whatever evil powers keep them in bondage. (See also Salvation).

God’s Beloved in Rome (1:7): God’s new Chosen People in Rome— transferring language used of Israel in the OT to designate the Christians in Rome (commonly implying also a transfer of status from Israel to the Christians). See also Saints, Called to Be.

God’s Beloved in Rome, Called to be Saints (Rom 1:7): God’s Chosen People of the new covenant—an inclusive covenant. God’s beloved as Israel was; Israel remains God’s beloved.

God’s Beloved in Rome, Called to be Saints (Rom 1:7): those in Rome who have been transformed by God’s powerful intervention in their lives—as Paul was transformed as indicated by his new name, Paulos (1:1).

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Gospel of God (1:1): A theological message—good news—(the kerygma to be preached, received, believed, and obeyed) about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, etc. (1:3-4). Qualifying the “gospel” by “of God” marks the origin of the gospel and of its content, namely the activity of God in Christ Jesus (in the past). The “gospel” is a series of theological propositional truths, the content of faith.

Gospel of God (1:1) the story of the God (the One God) acting both in the history of Israel, of the Jews, of Jesus, and now of Gentiles. The gospelstory is a covenantal story (Haggadah). As “the gospel of God” it is the story of God with Israel, with Jesus, and also now with Paul and Gentiles (all the way to the end of the world, Spain [15:24, 28])—a drama in which God and humans “need each other, grow together, but also suffer together” (Slonimsky). All (“the Jew first and also the Greek,” 1:16d) are invited to enter it. As such this covenantal story that prolongs the story of God and Israel in the Exodus is further prolonged by the story of all those who participate into it (and can be called “saints,” 1:7, as the Chosen People of old was). The rhetorical effect of saying that God (rather than Christ) is both the Commissioner and the source of Paul’s gospel is NOT in order to address theological misunderstandings, BUT in order to address the community-centered ideological problem of divided communities in Rome. Paul invites all parties to participate in the gospel-story, since it is the “gospel of God,” to whom all the house churches owe their identity. This is reinforced in 1:2-4 that intermingles formulations of the gospel by Jewish and Gentile Christfollowers. See also 1:15 and Gospelize.

Gospel of God (1:1) the “good news” of God’s past and present saving interventions (so “gospel of God”; the gospel performed by God). The news that now “God has inaugurated the eschatological liberation … by setting up Jesus as messianic agent of the promised liberation” (Byrne); the news/promise that God’s interventions in Jesus Christ/ Messiah (son of David raised from the dead, 1:2-4) are types that prefigure God’s interventions in our present, through the risen Lord and the Spirit.

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Gospel, Transmission of the, (= gospelize, εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15) is through preaching the gospel (most English translations), i.e. both the initial preaching of the “gospel of God” (i.e., the theological message summarized in 1:1c-4) aimed at bringing about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles (1:5) and also the ongoing teaching and training of believers for discipleship that builds on initial evangelization.

Gospel, Transmission of the Gospel, Gospelize, Sharing the Gospel (εὐαγγελίσασθαι, 1:15) involves participating in the gospel as a collective story with other people. When gospelizing Paul participate in the gospel-story together with others—as other believers do when in turn they share the gospel with other people. Indeed, the gospel is a gospelstory which is manifested by participating into it together with other people, because it is a collective story. Thus the verb εὐαγγελίσασθαι, to “gospelize,” does not refer to the transmission of an object—the content of a message, as it does in forensic interpretations; rather, is best translated as to “manifest the gospel” or to “share the gospel.” It is a collective process (“together with you who are in Rome” καὶ ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐν Ῥώμῃ). The sharing of the gospel is through a collective mission which is the vocation of both Paul and the Romans. All of them have the spiritual gifts (1:11-12) needed to participate in this mission.

Gospelizing, Sharing the Gospel (1:15): εὐαγγελίσασθαι, to gospelize, is in the infinitive aorist middle, and thus an expression that sharing the gospel is a mutual process. The middle voice—that emphasizes the subject’s/ agent’s participation in the action—expresses that Paul gospelizes even as he is gospelized. (As emphasized in Chapter 5, when taken seriously, the middle voice demands that we should avoid interpreting this verb as if it were an active voice; the middle voice means that the gospel is not an object that Paul possessed and then gave to the Romans.) Sharing the gospel (“gospelizing”) is, for Paul, the mutual process (a) of sharing with the Romans his experience of eschatological liberation and the spiritual gifts (charismata, χαρίσματα) he had received (1:11-12), with the expectation they would welcome this good news, and (b) of welcoming from the Romans the good news of their own experiences of eschatological liberation and of the spiritual gifts they received.

Grace (1:5, 7), the underserved favor of God’s forgiveness, a gracious forgiveness, which is the very basis of the Christian life, and (in 1:5) the underserved favor of apostleship. Grace sums up God’s undeserved love revealed in Christ; it is

Grace (1:5, 7), a major rhetorical theme of the letter, is a relational, covenantal term. It is an underserved favor, a gracious gift, a blessing from God (or Christ), which is relational in that this blessing (charis, χάρις) is also a call to carry out a vocation, as Paul makes clear by interrelating

Grace = Spiritual Gift/Charis (1:5, 7), an “empowering spiritual gift” (cf. charisma. χάρισμα), from God and the Lord) that equips Paul and Christfollowers to carry out their vocations as apostle (1:5) or saints (1:7). [Key to understanding charis (χάρις)

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the whole gospel in a single word. The forensic connotation of “grace” as “gracious forgiveness” or acquittal appears through its association with justification in 3:24 (“justified freely by his grace,” NIV) viewed as the interpretive key for understanding all the other instances of χάρις in Romans.

it with apostleship (1:5). This “gift” is underserved also in the sense of unmerited access to God for those who do not deserve it, honor to those whom the world holds to be shameful (Jewett). This gift is covenantal (not an individual favor, e.g., forgiveness) in that it is a call to carry out a vocation (apostleship), as in 1:5: “through whom [Christ] we have received charis (χάρις) [call] and apostleship [vocation].” The parallel “Grace to you [toward Gentile] and peace from God [upon Jew]” (1:7) expresses that, since “grace” is the same blessing as the “peace” upon Israel/Jews (Dunn),“grace” and “peace” mark the same covenantal relationship with God of both Gentiles and Jews.

is 1:5: “we have received spiritual gift/charis and apostleship”: “the apostleship is the specific spiritual gift/ charis granted to Paul” (and his collaborators; 16:1-15); similarly, the saints in Rome need to receive “spiritual gift/charis” to empower them to carry out their own apocalyptic/messianic vocation, so 1:7 (Byrne).

Homosexuality, the behavior described in 1:26-27 is a sin. 1:26-27 is understood as a paraenetic (moral, ethical) teaching equivalent to “You shall not commit homoerotic acts” (as described in these verses). This teaching is addressed to individual sinners because they suppressed God’s will on this issue. What exactly is the behavior condemned in 1:26-27? Any homoerotic act by lesbians and gays, as the reference to “natural” and “unnatural” intercourses suggests? But it could also be pederasty (such as homoerotic acts with young slaves,

Homosexuality (not to be confused with the modern sense of this term). Paul expected his Roman readers (especially Gentile but also Jewish Christ-followers) to condemn the homoerotic behaviors that he purposefully described in 1:26-27 following the homophobic cultural views of these readers. Paul was not teaching his readers that homoerotic behaviors were sinful; they were already convinced of this. Rather using their cultural views as part of the rhetorical sting (2:1) he sought to convince them to welcome these “sinners” as brothers and sisters in the inclusive covenantal community that the church

Homosexuality in 1:26-27 is a figurative/metaphoric representation of idolatryas-lie, i.e., of idolaters who “change” something into something else (1:25) to hide the idolatry. Paul assumes that, for readers of the Judeo-Greco-Roman world, same-gender sex acts are wrong (abhorrent), because “unnatural.” In this cultural perspective, idolatry and same-gender sex relations are alike because both involve changing something into something else. But they are unlike each other regarding what is changed: “changing the truth about God into a lie” (1:25) for idolatry;

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common in the Roman Empire), or cultic homosexuality (in view of the mention of idolatry in the preceding verses).

is—welcoming them rather than condemning them. To make this point Paul used the Greco-Roman (and Jewish) homophobic cultural views. Homophobic Gentile Christ-followers would have wanted to condemn all types of homoerotic behavior as “unnatural” sexuality. Homophobic Jewish Christ-followers would have rejected as an abomination male homoerotic behavior (Lev 18:22, 20:13). Paul’s readers would have triggered the rhetorical trap of 2:1, by condemning those practicing homoeroticism. The rhetorical point of 1:19-32 was to demonstrate (1) that regarding the practitioners of homoeroticism (and all other sinners) what is fundamentally problematic is that they fail to glorify God and (2) that, in order to correct the situation, these “sinners” must be welcomed in the covenantal community “as they are” (rather than being excluded), so that these homoerotic “sinners” might be thankful and bring glory to God. So that this passage might have similar rhetorical effects upon modern readers, present-day cultural homophobic views would need to be substituted for the GrecoRoman (and Jewish) views.

“changing natural relations into unnatural relations” (1:26) for same-gender sex relations, hiding in this way the idolatry in a “lie”—i.e., in a behavior, which hides that one has changed the truth about God, whatever might be the form of the lie. Thus Paul is not interested in describing problematic sexual behaviors; he is not writing an essay on sex ethics (Keck, 68) but uses same-gender sex relations as a figure (a metaphor) for “idolatry-as-lie.” In other cultural settings— e.g., present-day Western cultures (where “natural” and “unnatural” in sexual relations are not perceived in the same ways) a very different figure needs to be used to convey the same point. We need to ask what are, in our cultures, instances of truth being changed into a lie? The clearest cases might be in the socioeconomic and political realms often characterized by manipulations of the truth, so much so that it is changed into lies. As in the case with same-gender sex acts, socioeconomic and political practices do not seem to have anything to do with religious practices; yet they could be good figurative illustrations of idolatrous practices that change the truth about God into a lie.

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Idolatry. Rom 1:1925 (especially 1:23-25) provides an appropriate description of idolatry practiced by pagans as a demonstration of wrongly oriented will and generates wrong knowledge, since idolatry is individually centered (resulting from wrong will, itself resulting in wrong knowledge); it involves stupidly worshiping “things” as if they were God, as expressed in Ps 115:4-6 and elsewhere. Being idolatrous involves making “other gods” (idols) by suppressing the truth about God because one deliberately (willingly) abandons, rejects the actual knowledge of God one possesses.

Idolatry is a typical example of collective-delusion resulting from suppressing the truth and failing to glorify God. It is not the source or cause of suppressing the truth, but its consequence, a manifestation of the anger of God. Speaking of both Israelite (Ps 106) and pagan idolatries (it is an inclusive presentation), Paul emphasizes the perverse ideological drive associated with idolatry as a universal problem. As an ideological delusion (a problematic vision that people have of their relationships to everything in the world, in society, and to God), an idolatry makes it impossible for the idolaters to interact properly with others and God.

Idolatry (1:18b-32) is “holding fast to a truth [about God] in unrighteousness” (τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων, 1:18b); it is twisting/deforming a particular revelatory divine manifestation by absolutizing it in the process of “holding fast” to it. Far from being a lack of religious fervor, idolatry is a religious fanaticism that absolutizes a true but partial revelation—idolaters view and act as if this revelation was complete and final, making it impossible for them to expect and recognize other revelations. There are different kinds of idolatry due to the different kinds of partial revelations that have been absolutized—as the rest of the letter shows—and due to the extent to which the original revelation is still recognizable. In 1:18b-32 Paul presents three different forms of idolatry that vary according to the extent to which the divine manifestations that idolaters absolutize are still recognizable as such in the idolatrous practice. Three forms of idolatry are presented in 1:18b-32: “idolatry-as-worshipingimages” (1:22, as in the Hebrew Bible); “idolatry-aslie” (that hide these divine manifestations, 1:25); and “idolatry-as-denying-God”

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REALIZED-APOCALYPTIC/ MESSIANIC EXEGESES (that “refuses to acknowledge” that these manifestations are from God, 1:28). Because idolatry in any of its forms is a punishment from God’s wrath as is revealed through the gospel to believers (1:18a), in each particular case through their faith/ vision believers can discern the divine manifestation/ gift which has been twisted/ deformed into an idol, and therefore they themselves can benefit from this divine manifestation/gift. Therefore they can appropriately feel indebted to these idolaters/ barbarians as Paul was (1:14).

Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14) is an obligation that Paul has toward God and Christ to share the gifts he received from God (especially the gospel) for the benefit of Greeks and non-Greeks (all Gentiles or all humanity); a missionary “obligation” that he must fulfill in his apostolic ministry.

Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14) “being under obligation” to honor certain people. The phrase, ὀφειλέτης εἰμί, “I am under obligation” from the Greco-Roman honor/ shame system refers to the obligation that one has to honor “people with honor”— here the Greeks and the wise. Paul’s countercultural mission “reverses the profoundest stereotypes of the ancient world” by demanding that he feel under obligation to ALL, and therefore to be under obligation to honor “nobodies,” “people without honor,” such as barbarians and foolish/ uneducated, as well as both “people with honor.”

Indebtedness, Sense of (1:14), as a figure of the Greco-Roman honor/shame system, is best understood as an “indebtedness of the heart” (as in Filipino culture); Paul feels indebted to (= feels he has received something significant from) not only Greeks and educated but also barbarians and the ignorant (what he received from each of them is most significant—they shared with him a divine revelation! See Idolatry); since he is indebted to all of these, he also has an obligation toward them. And all Christ-followers should have this sense of indebtedness toward others (13:8).

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Ministry (1:9) (1) as a “service” in its vertical aspect: an offering of worship to God (1:9), and therefore a prayerful service—making petitions or supplications to God for those toward whom this ministry is directed (here the Romans)—and (2) preaching/proclaiming the gospel as a theological message—the kerygma— to be preached (as εὐαγγελίσασθαι in 1:15 and 15:20 is understood).

Ministry is a missionary activity which is cast into a liturgical frame (1:9) = a covenantal view of ministry as Israel (from a Pharisaic/ Early Rabbinic perspective) carried out its vocation as “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6). Daily life (Paul’s entire life, and also that of all Christ-followers) is a “religious service” marked by thanksgiving and prayer for others in the covenantal community. This covenantal understanding of ministry/ service is marked by being “in (ἐν) the gospel of his Son” (1:9) i.e., by entering “in” the gospel as a haggadic story, as all believers are called to do.

Ministry, a cultic ministry envisioned as a worship service in which Paul functions as a priest pointing to God’s present interventions which were prefigured in previous divine interventions (“the types” told in the Holy Scriptures and the gospel). For Paul, this priestly service involves (a) giving thanks for God’s interventions in other people’s experience (1:8), (b) acknowledging that God witnesses all one’s actions, including the most private ones (1:9), (c) addressing prayers to this God who is constantly present with him and with those to whom his ministry is directed (1:10), and (d) manifesting the gospel (see Gospelizing, Sharing the Gospel) by allowing Christ “through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God” (15:18-19).

Natural Revelation = Natural Theology: the revelation in creation by God to all humans is an actual revelation, providing a knowledge about God. A) Either a revelation strictly limited to “what is knowable about God” (1:19a) in creation, which is insufficient for actual faith (faith as believing the revelation of the gospel). B) Or more generally, the revelation about God is that God is “knowable” and,

Natural Revelation = Natural Law and Ethics (not natural theology). The technical language of “natural law” (1:26-27, φυσικὴν, παρὰ φύσιν; natural, unnatural; see also 2:14-15) corresponds to the Stoics’s view that divine rationality permeates nature and that all human beings can live in accordance with nature by learning its laws; human beings can determine proper ethical behavior (i.e., “God’s will”) by observing nature. All good behaviors are “natural”

Natural Revelation = Natural Theology: What is revealed in creation about God’s nature, power, divinity (1:19-20) is an actual knowledge about God received through a divine revelation in creation—but not a complete and final revelation of God (there are other revelations of God, e.g., the knowledge about God’s will, commonly formulated in legal form [“the law”] as well as revelations of God through interventions of God in history [especially

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therefore, that one can actually know God’s eternal power and divine nature (1:20). But the suppression of this truth (whether the narrower or broader one) deserves God’s wrath (1:18b; 1:21ff ).

and all problematic behaviors are “unnatural.” The entire list of “things that should not be done” (1:28-31) are “unnatural” behaviors, against the natural law revealed to all human beings (see 1:32).

Israel’s history], through the prophets, through God’s intervention in Jesus Christ, and through divine interventions in the believers’ lives in the messianic time). Thus the revelation in nature—natural theology—is an actual divine revelation. But as any revelation, it is a partial and incomplete revelation which should not be absolutized—as happens in idolatry.

Obedience (to the Lord) (1:5): a necessary part of faith as “believing that” Christ is Lord, whom one must willingly obey.

Obedience (to the Lord) (1:5): a necessary part of the relational view of faithfulness/ faith (see Faithfulness/Faith).

Obedience (of Faith/ Vision) (1:5) understood as “the obedience that faith/ vision is” (taking “of pistis” as explanatory) as Paul also envisioned his relationship to Christ as one of obedience (as an acquired slave). In both cases one recognizes oneself as under a power—the power of Jesus Christ/Messiah our Lord whose interventions in one’s life can be “seen” through faith/vision.

Prayer (1:9-10) is making petitions to God for people who are in need or petitions for something that one needs/wants (e.g., Paul’s desire to go to Rome). “Prayer of petition” is a central part of Paul’s ministry, an offering of worship to God (ὁ θεός, ᾧ λατρεύω, 1:9), with attention to the needs of others (here Roman believers). A prayer of petition is praying for a divine intervention, for a miracle.

Prayer (1:9-10) for each other is a covenantal prayer or community prayer, a major responsibility that Christfollowers have for each other (see also 15:30-32); praying for each other reinforces one’s connection with others (here, the connection of Paul with the Romans) within the framework of their God-given common call and vocation. Therefore prayer demands viewing one’s relations with others in terms of God’s will. Thus Paul prays that he might succeed in coming to the Romans “in the will of God” (1:10).

Prayer (1:9-10) is primarily a contemplative prayer seeking to discern God’s mysterious activity in the experiences of those for whom one prays (and only secondarily a prayer of petition) “by God’s will,” as discerned in the contemplation. As such, prayer is an intrinsic part of Paul’s cultic ministry (and of the Christ-followers’ own cultic ministry as “called saints”), a genuine worship that involves continual discernment of the mysterious work of God in all the circumstances of one’s life, so as to respond appropriately.

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Righteous in “the righteous will live by faith” (1:17b, Hab 2:4) is a person who has been declared righteous (acquitted) by God the Judge. Dikaiosynê (δικαιοσύνη), “righteousness,” is a forensic term. A person “has ‘righteousness,’ or is ‘righteous,’ when that person is acknowledged to be such, i.e., is ‘rightwised,’ ‘pronounced righteous,’ acquitted, acknowledged innocent” (Bultmann, 272).

Righteous/Just in “the righteous/just will live by faith” (1:17b, Hab 2:4) the person who enters and participates in the gospel-story. In the quotation of Habakkuk 2:4 in Rom 1:17b, pistis is used as a translation of emunah [‫—] ֱאמוּנָה‬and is thus best translated as faithfulness. Righteous/just persons are therefore those who “faithfully” participate in the inclusive collective gospelstory. Righteousness/justice is therefore a communal term concerning participation in the story that encompasses both God’s interactions with the Chosen People (Jews) and with God’s beloved among Gentiles/ Greeks (Nanos, 21-40).

Righteous (1:17b): a person under the power of God’s righteousness—i.e., in the sphere of power of God’s righteousness—by contrast with those who “have not submitted to God’s righteousness” (10:3). The only way for a person to be righteous is (1) for God to intervene in that person, transforming her/him—as God transformed Paul into “Paulos,” “slave of Christ/ Messiah,” “called apostle,” and transformed the Romans into “called saints”; and (2) for that person to have “faith/vision,” i.e., to “see” God’s rightful power at work and to submit to it. Thus a righteous person is a person in whose life the transformative intervention of God (the Righteousness of God) is revealed—both in the past (of Habakkuk) and also and most emphatically in the present.

Righteousness of God (1:17a): the forensic status, righteousness (that God has and shares with humans) understood with emphasis on either (1) the end result of the gracious acquittal by God the Judge to “declare innocent” (individual) sinners at the last Judgment, giving them the status of “righteous” (believers are no longer condemned at the eschatological judgment); or (2) the ongoing process (how God’s present offering of righteousness [acquittal] at the last judgment has a transforming effect for

Righteousness/Justice of God (1:17a) is an expression of the “faithfulness of the covenantal God,” the process through which God interacts with humans in covenantal relations and establishes righteous/just (and inclusive) covenantal communities of faithfulness/ faith. The people of God manifests the righteousness/ justice of God in the world by carrying out its covenantal vocation/mission. Instead of duplicating the hierarchical and exclusive praxis of the Roman Empire (a community life fraught with “injustice”), the communities of Christfollowers need to mirror and

Righteousness of God (1:17a): the positive, constructive, right manifestation of the transformative power of God (God as subject/agent) in the present messianic time [vs. the “WRATH OF GOD”]; “the rightful power with which God makes [God’s] cause to triumph in the world” (Käsemann) by recapturing the world for the sovereignty of God. Such manifestations of God’s righteousness are recognizable (“revealed”) to faith/vision (1:17b) in/ through “the gospel” (1:17a) that points to God’s powerful

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his/her present life— no need to fear the judgment); or again (3) on the (re)establishment of an upright/righteous relationship with God and neighbors through the preached good news of acquittal at the judgment.

be framed by the inclusive “righteousness/justice of God.” God’s righteousness/ justice consists in faithfully participating in the gospelstory with the inclusive Chosen People. In this haggadic gospel-story, God and humans “are both heroes in the same drama. They need each other, they grow together, but they also suffer together” (Slonimsky, 15).

intervention in Jesus Christ (“raised from the dead” and made “our Lord”; 1:2-4), that in turn prefigures God’s interventions in any “RIGHTEOUS” person who lives through faith i.e., who lives as someone recaptured by the power of God—and therefore as someone who lives by recognizing the manifestations of the rightful power of God in her/his life, follows them, and consequently belongs to the messianic sphere of power where one is free from bondage to evil powers.

Saints, called to be (1:7) (God’s Beloved in Rome): God’s new Chosen People in Rome (transferring language used of Israel in the OT to designate the Christians in Rome); no focus on behavior here, but on status.

Saints, called (Rom 1:7) is a title comparable to “called apostle” (1:1) or “Chosen People.” In this covenantal perspective, this title spells out a vocation: to be God’s holy people, which through its holiness brings people to glorify God (as Christ did, 15:9) in the same way as the Apostle does.

Saints, called (1:7) is a title, comparable to “called apostle” (1:1). “Called” refers to the means by which Romans (Gentiles) became “beloved by God,” namely through God’s sovereign action, God’s deliberate choice. God and the risen Christ intervened in their experience and transformed them into saints; making them renounce their absolute (idolatrous) view of their former vocation (as Gentiles) while remaining Gentiles (living “as not,” hôs mè) who are free to carry out their new vocation as saints. A transformation through some kind of Christic-events (primordial experiences of being encountered by the risen Christ) enabled Romans to be saints, as empowered by a specific charisma (χάρισμα), a spiritual gift (charis, χάρις), for a specific task (namely as is shown later in Romans, being Christ-like for others).

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Salvation (1:16): (1) Who need to be saved? Individual sinners. (2) From What? Ultimately, from the wrath (wrathful punishment) of God at the eschatological judgment, an appropriate punishment for their sins; penultimately, from present manifestations of the wrath of God (to which “God gave them up”). (3) What is the state of “being saved”? Ultimately, eternal life. Penultimately, being justified; having a right standing with God. (4) By whom/what are sinners saved and how? They are saved/justified by “faith” (1:16-17) in the gospel about Christ (1:3-4) as preached; a faith that involves “obedience” to “Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:4-5).

Salvation (1:16): 1) Who needs to be saved? Communities. In the present, they need to experience salvation together with, and within, a community that includes “all faithful.” 2) From what? From a wrong ideology that leads people to separate themselves from each other and from God. The separation from each other results from hierarchical, exclusive, abusive, oppressive community life (exemplified by life in the Roman Empire and by the relationship of Jews and Gentiles) that implements this wrong ideology. The separation from God results from attributing to God the disastrous effects of this wrong ideology, which leads us to reject God—to be enemies of God (5:10). 3) The state of “being saved”? Being reconciled with God and participating in inclusive covenantal communities ruled by the “justice of God”; faithfully participating with God and other in the gospelstory and its ideology that frames their community life now and forever with God with a righteous/just ideology. 4) By What Are the Communities Saved and How? They are saved by the gospelstory, “the power of God for salvation”; by entering the gospel-story and participating in it (= by having faith and being faithful—emunah = sharing the ideology of the gospel-story) and thus by encountering the “justice of God” (revealed to them).

Salvation (1:16): 1) Who need to be saved? The “fallen world”—all humans are in bondage to evil powers—and thus, in this world, each individual and each community need to be saved. Salvation is the ongoing process through which God is “recapturing the fallen world for the sovereignty of God” (Käsemann). 2) From what? From bondage to evil powers—the “power of sin,” the power of idols as manifestations of the wrath of God. Salvation is necessarily associated with “God’s righteousness” and vice versa. 3) The state of “being saved”? It actually is an ongoing process: the process of being freed from the power of sin/idol and to be made Christ-like, and thus this is an ongoing manifestation of God’s righteousness for others. 4) By What Is the Fallen World Saved and How? It is saved by the gospel which is “the power of God for salvation” in that its “types” prefigure and therefore give to believers the possibility of “seeing” (through faith/ vision) the present divine (Christ-like) interventions that are freeing people from the powers of evil (i.e., seeing manifestations of the Righteousness of God).

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Scriptures (and their promises fulfilled in the gospel) (1:2): all Scriptures are “prophetical,” as understood in a dualistic framework of Jewish apocalyptic “salvation history,” in which the fulfillments (in Jesus Christ, in the gospel, in the church) supersede the Old Testament, the prophets, and also Judaism.

Scriptures (fulfilled in the gospel) (1:2): Paul carefully affirmed the total continuity between the Jewish Scriptures (God’s “prophets in the holy scriptures,” 1:2) and God’s gospel: the prophets articulated the gospel of God in the period before Christ (a point welcomed by Jewish Christfollowers and their house churches). The story of the Jewish Scriptures is prolonged in the story of the gospel. This is the story (gospel) of God who is One.

Scriptures (and their promises) (1:2): stories or proclamations (by prophets) about earlier divine interventions in specific situations of Israel (and humankind) that are types prefiguring the way in which God intervenes in the lives and situations of Jesus Christ/Messiah, Paul, the Romans, and subsequent generations.

Servant [δοῦλος] of Jesus Christ (Paul, a) (a.k.a. “slave of,” but actually inappropriate here) (1:1a): having an authority to teach (proclaim the gospel) comparable to that of the Old Testament prophets (who willingly accepted God’s call to be “servants of YAHWEH”), by having a total and voluntary devotion to Jesus Christ, the Lord (1:4).

Slave [δοῦλος] of Christ Jesus (Paul, a) (1:1a), someone with the honor and authority of acting as agent of Christ, as opposed to “slave of Caesar.” This is a countercultural claim that involves replacing the imperial Roman authority of Caesar by the paradoxical authority of Christ, the powerless crucified Lord; and viewing those who act as agents or ambassadors of Christ (such as Paul) as having in the community a similar paradoxical authority, namely a shared, reciprocal (rather than hierarchical) authority (as becomes explicit in 1:11-12).

Slave [δοῦλος] of Christ Jesus (Paul, a) (1:1a), “slave” is a designation of someone who is the acquired property, and therefore is under the power of a master—and often “made a slave” by a master (as the legionnaires made slaves out of those they captured) and therefore someone who, by definition, does not have agency. It expresses Paul’s self-understanding as being under the power of Christ, the Messiah, “the Lord” who transformed him; he belongs to the messianic sphere of power (rather than to the sphere of power of the “old age,” or of sin, 6:6-23).

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Sin: Generally speaking, sin is failing to do God’s will, either unintentional sin of omission—because one does not know it (a matter of wrong knowledge on the part of people with senseless and darkened minds; 1:21); or sin of commission, intentionally failing to do God’s will— because one does not want to do it (a matter of wrong will), as becomes clear in 1:18-32 where sin is shown to be rooted in a deliberate suppression (1:18) or distortion (1:21) of a revelation from God, or refusal to do God’s will (1:32). Roots of sin: wrong knowledge (or lack of knowledge) and wrong will.

Sin. Root of sin: humans (plural) suppressing God’s truth = rebellion against God (1:18d); universal sinfulness is the collective failure to “glorify God as God or give God thanks” (1:21) and to bring others to glorify God (our covenantal vocation). We are against God, we are enemies of God (Rom 5:10), jealous of God’s people, of those who are blessed by God, and thus angry against God;

Sin. Sinning is a wrong, twisted religious life, misdirected worship, wrong vision, fanaticism, in sum: idolatry (viewing what is not absolute as absolute) and its consequences: being under God’s wrath, having darkened minds, being under the “power of sin,” being enslaved by sin (6:6, 12, 16-17) and by idols (1:22-25, 26a, 28). Thus,

Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:28-32) is the indictment of Gentiles (as expected by Jewish Christfollowers, the primary addressees): these sins deserve God’s judgment and condemnation, because each of these sins is against God’s will. Every person commits such sins, and therefore is without excuse, because every

Sinning = participating in a wrong ideology (always communal), including antiJewish and/or anti-Gentile ideologies, and imperialist ideologies (and beyond this, e.g., patriarchal, sexist, racist, colonialist, ideologies). Sins are communal, illustrated by wrong sense of honor and shame (1:14), power plays (1:11-12), Roman-like imperialism, being in competition with others, wanting to be better than others, oppressing others, prejudices and biases vis-à-vis others. Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:26-32). In view of the rhetorical sting of 2:1ff, to Paul’s readers in Rome (primarily Gentile Christfollowers) this catalog did NOT teach anything regarding what are sinful behaviors, because he simply used the Greek, Latin, and Jewish catalogues of evils and sins, and therefore used the cultural views of evils and sins that he could expect his readers to hold already.

Sin is a power from which we cannot free ourselves; only a divine, Christ-like intervention can free us from the power of sin. Root of sin: “desire” (epithymia 1:24; 7:7) is both the root of sin and its ongoing fuel.

Sins and Evils, Catalogue of (1:28-31). These sins and evil behaviors are punishments (manifestations of God’s wrath) for the ultimate idolatry: “idolatryas-denying-God” (1:28), positioning ourselves above God, and thus absolutizing ourselves—absolutizing the special gift from God that we are as “God’s image.” The twenty-three vices are all

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person has been given a knowledge of God but has spurned that knowledge in favor of idolatry in all its varied manifestations, including all the sins in this catalogue.. All individual Gentiles who sin have irretrievably fallen under God’s judgments of wrath (Stuhlmacher) and are in desperate need of the justifying power of the gospel of Christ (Moo). Each of these sins is rooted in a wrong/lack of knowledge (“suppression of the truth”) and a wrong/ lack of will (a voluntary, willful act); the catalogue (similar to those found elsewhere in the New Testament, following Jewish and Hellenistic models) shows the scope of social evils resulting from the “depraved mind” (wrong knowledge and wrong will) to which God gave sinners up (1:28). The dialogical/rhetorical trap in 2:1ff is for Jews and Jewish Christ-followers (Paul’s targeted audience) who view themselves as better than Gentiles, who by definition are sinners.

He expected that they condemned such behaviors and those who practiced them. His intended teaching was conveyed through the rhetorical trap he was setting in order to lead his readers to recognize (1) that in condemning such “sinners” they condemned themselves and (2) that they should welcome such “sinners” in the inclusive covenantal community. Consequently for readers of other cultural milieux and modern readers, this passage does NOT teach anything regarding what are sins and evils to be avoided. Modern readers will receive a similar teaching, if and only if they replace this catalogue of ancient cultural views by a catalogue of present-day cultural views of sins and evils. Of course we might want to condemn most (or all) those who practice or contribute to such evils, and then be confronted by the fact that we exclude and thus fail to welcome such “sinners” in the inclusive covenantal community that the church should be.

kinds of unrighteousness (1:29; see 1:18b) commonly decried in the Greco-Roman world. Such behaviors are very destructive and oppressive, making a harmonious life in society impossible. They display the idolatrous destructive powers characteristic of the world in the apocalyptic/ messianic age—powers from which people in the world are and will be freed by manifestation of God’s righteousness (as becomes explicit in 8:31-39).

Son of God See above Christ Jesus.

Son of God See above Christ Jesus.

Son of God See above Christ Jesus.

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Spirit (of Holiness) (1:4). The reference to the divine spirit in the phrase “according to the Spirit of holiness” differentiated from “according to the flesh” either contrast Christ’s divine and human nature (Canfield) or two stages of salvation history. In the latter case, the era of the Spirit of holiness is the new era when the Spirit empowers the resurrected Jesus Christ and when “Jesus reigns as Son of God, powerfully active to bring salvation to all who believe (cf. 1:16)” (Moo, 50).

Spirit (of Holiness) (1:4) parts of a creed originating in communities of Gentile Christfollowers characterized by its emphasis on the resurrection of Christ, his Lordship, and the role of the Spirit, although without denying the continuity with Judaism.

Spirit (of Holiness) (1:4) associated with divine power (of resurrection) and therefore a mysterious manifestation of the divine power in human life. See comments on Rom 8

Thanksgiving to God (1:8): Paul gives thanks to God for the fact that the Romans “bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus” (showing “obedience of faith”). This thanksgiving compliments the Romans for their faith. It is (1) an expression of Paul’s personal piety (2) done “through [διὰ] Jesus Christ,” the risen Lord either as the mediator of Paul’s thanks (and of our prayers) before God (functioning as the High Priest) or as the one who makes access to God possible.

Thanksgiving to God (1:8) is a central part of the covenantal praxis of the Chosen People, who should constantly give thanks to God, as they carry out their vocation of bringing others to glorify God (the “sanctification of the Name”). Paul’s thanksgiving for the Romans “because [their] faith is proclaimed throughout the world” is not a flattery or a compliment; it points out that they are already carrying out their vocation by actively participating in the missionary movement—which the community of Christ-followers is. Their faithfulness/faith is readily recognizable, and thus entices others to participate in it. This is a prelude to Paul’s request that they be involved in the collective mission of the body of Christ (12:4; including to Spain, 15:24, 28).

Thanksgiving to God (1:8): Why is Paul thankful to God concerning the Romans’ faith/vision? Because their faith/vision was given to them by God (it is a gift from God! See above Faith/vision). Paul’s thanksgiving as a figure is like the thanksgivings in Greco-Roman letters (same vocabulary), in the Bible (similarly addressed to “my God,” e.g., in several Psalms), and in Jewish thanksgiving practice (including the Hodayot). And it is unlike all of these, because Paul consistently and exclusively gives thanks for blessings and divine interventions in the life of other people. Here, Paul gives thanks for the Romans’ faith as a gift from God. Paul’s figurative world (and consequently his own faith/ vision) is other-centered; Paul “sees” what God is doing in and among

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Thesis of the Letter (1:16-17) is forensic. The gospel is about “salvation” (1:16b) i.e., “the deliverance from eschatological judgment” of individual sinners; its content is Jesus Christ “appointed Son-ofGod-in-power” (v. 4) who mediates “the power of God leading to salvation” (1:16b); this blessing is enjoyed by anyone (including former Jews and Gentiles) the moment he or she has “faith” in (trusts in) Jesus Christ, i.e., believes that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. Then this individual sinner is restored to a share of the glory of God. The “righteousness of God” (1:17a) is best understood forensically as the end result of God the Judge giving righteousness (the status of righteous) by declaring innocent a defendant/sinner, a process through which individual sinners are (re)established in a right relationship with God; thus the “righteous” (1:17b, Hab 2:4) is one who has been justified— declared righteous, acquitted by God the Judge. This forensic understanding of the gospel is, therefore, centered upon justification by faith alone, sola fide.

Thesis of the Letter (1:1617) is covenantal. The gospel is “the power of God for salvation” (1:16b) that establishes inclusive faith communities that embody the “righteousness/justice of God” (as covenantal communities characterized by faithfulness, emunah are expected to do) and therefore are countercultural, challenging and replacing the inequalities and injustices of the Pax Romana (or other societies). The gospel of Christ turns upside down the gospel of Caesar, its honor/shame system and its inequalities, as well as its power structure (it involves a “paradox of power”). The gospel is God’s means of restoring righteousness/justice in the whole world, of bringing this “salvation” in the present (all the verbs in 1:16-17 are in the present tense, except in the quotation from Habakkuk). God’s righteousness/justice is the process through which God establishes righteous/ just, inclusive communities of faithfulness/faith (and thus restoring individuals and the whole creation). This divine righteousness/justice revealed in the gospel manifests itself in a progressive manner, “from faith to faith,” in the missionary expansion, which relies on the contagion of faithfulness/faith.

Thesis of the Letter (1:16-17) is realized-apocalyptic/ messianic. The gospel is “the power of God for salvation” (1:16b) 1) that reveals that God is in the process of recapturing the fallen world for the sovereignty of God—this is “salvation” as an ongoing process which began with Christ Jesus; and 2) that “energizes” salvation for believers by making them participants in their own salvation and in the salvation of others, when they recognize God or Christ at work somewhere. (Salvation is “synergy” as Greek patristic interpreters and Greek Orthodox commentators say.) This is so because the faith/ vision of believers involves discerning a) the divine interventions prefigured in (the types of) the gospel and Scriptures (Hab 2:4)— namely prefigurations of God’s defeating the forces that prevail in the sphere of the present evil age and that oppress all, including the faithful, and discerning b) the divine interventions “revealed” in the life of those living through this faith, being transformed and participating in the sphere of faith, the messianic sphere of power.

498

Romans Three Exegetical Interpretations

FORENSIC THEOLOGICAL EXEGESES

COVENANTAL COMMUNITY EXEGESES

REALIZED-APOCALYPTIC/ MESSIANIC EXEGESES

Wrath of God: God’s negative reaction to human wickedness and unrighteousness that dishonor God; it is revealed by the gospel (1:18). It will fully be manifested in the (eschatological) future Judgment and punishment—including in the form of deprivation of eternal life—(as in 2:512), although it is already manifested in present punishments/sufferings to which “God gave them up”(1:24, 26, 28) as prelude of this future punishment (see also 3:5, 4:15, 5:9, 9:22, 12:19, 13:4, 5). The wrath of God and the judgment are needed to reestablish God’s honor and to correct God’s humiliation resulting from the sins of individuals; such sinners are/will be found guilty before God, the Judge.

Wrath/Anger of God (18a) is the “empathic anger” of the covenant God against everything (impiety and injustice) that negatively affects the covenantal relationship between God and humans and among humans. With empathy, God suffers with the victims of injustice, abandons those who suppress the truth, but invites all to participate in the gospel/gospel-story.

Wrath of God revealed by the gospel (1:18) is the negative manifestation of the transformative power of God (God as subject/agent) in the present messianic time but expressed in a rather passive way: a) God makes impious and unrighteous people “futile in their thinking and their senseless hearts” and they become idolaters; and b) God stood aside, “giving them up” to their own desires (1:24, 26, 28). In the process, impious and unrighteous people are punished by the very fact that they put themselves in bondage to evil powers, from which they cannot escape by themselves. Such present manifestations of the wrath of God are a prefiguration of the future eschatological Judgment and punishment at the end of time.

Bibliography Since the present volume draws conclusions from the work of the SBL Seminar, Romans Through History and Cultures (1997–2011, interrupted two years, when no joint meeting with AAR), published in the 10 volume book series of the same name (abbreviated RTHC), it is appropriate to list them in chronological order at the outset. (In abbreviated form, each volume is designated by main title, RTHC, and year of publication [e.g. RTHC 2000]—and add the name(s) of the editor(s) if necessary.) Vol. 1. Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte, eds., Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000. Vol. 2. Daniel Patte and Eugene TeSelle, eds., Engaging Augustine on Romans: Self, Context, and Theology in Interpretation. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2003. Vol. 3. Yeo Khiok-khng, ed., Navigating Romans Through Cultures: Challenging Readings by Charting a New Course. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004. Vol. 4. Kathy Gaça and Larry L. Welborn, eds. Early Patristic Readings of Romans. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005. Vol. 5. Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte, eds., Gender, Tradition, and Romans. Shared Ground, Uncertain Borders. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005. Vol. 6. William S. Campbell, Peter S. Hawkins, and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. Medieval Readings of Romans. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2007. Vol. 7. David W. Odell-Scott, ed. Reading Romans with Contemporary Philosophers and Theologians. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2007. Vol. 8. Kathy Ehrensperger and R. Ward Holder, eds. Reformation Readings of Romans. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008. Vol. 9. Daniel Patte and Vasile Mihoc, eds. Greek Patristic and Orthodox Readings of Romans. London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Vol. 10. Daniel Patte and Cristina Grenholm, eds. Modern Readings of Romans. London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. I refer to the many articles in Daniel Patte, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) in a similar shorthand way, because in many ways it is a product of the SBL Seminar Romans Through History and Cultures: many of its members contributed to edit it and wrote many articles in the spirit of our Seminar. Thus to make short, I simply list in footnotes and in the bibliography, the author of the article, and the title Dictionary (since each article can easily located in it). *** Abelard, Peter. Petri Abaelardi opera theological: Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos. Corpus christianorum (continuatio mediaevalis) Vol. 11. Edited by Eligius M. Buytaert. Brepols: Turnholt, 1969. Abelard, Peter. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Steven R. Cartwright. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011.

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Name Index Abelard, Peter 17, 391, 395, 403, 424, 435–45, 447, 451 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 161, 217, 219, 229, 237, 242, 245, 248, 250, 252–3, 257–9, 262–3, 402 Aland, Kurt 215, 392 Alcoff, Linda Martín 219 Aletti, Jean-Noel 23, 136 Alinsky, Saul xix Althusser, Louis 24, 139, 197, 357 Anderson, Janice Capel 23 Anderson, Victor 40–1 n.63, 198 Angelou, Maya 27–8, 390, 394, 396 Apion 200 Apuleius 200 Arethas of Caesarea 455 Aristotle 210, 366, 398 n.16, 416, 429, 432 Armour, Ellen T. xvii Athenaeus 328 Augustine 2, 17, 19, 33, 93, 122, 197, 252, 255, 354, 390, 395, 403–13, 415–17, 419, 422–5, 434, 438, 441, 448, 470 Aulén, Gustaf 412, 436, 458 Austin John L. xviii Ayres, Lewis 425 Badiou, Alain 1 n.1, 97, 217, 219, 245, 260–1, 270–1, 344, 478 Balch, David 328 Baltzer, Klaus 267 Barrett, C. K. 58, 75–6, 88, 91–2, 98, 100, 102–3, 109, 111, 115, 117 Barth, Karl xvii, 15, 17, 94–5, 116, 395 Barth, Markus 146 Bartholomew, Patriarch 465–6 Baur, Chrysostomus 448 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 79 Bayer, Oswald 110 Beal, Timothy 15

Beard, Mary 248, 252 Becker, Jürgen 50 Beker, J. Christiaan 52, 62, 218–19, 223–30, 232, 238, 245, 259, 270, 277, 284, 294 Benvéniste, Émile 161 Berger, Peter 471 Bernard of Clairvaux 437–8, 441, 443 Betz, Hans Dieter 222 Betz, Otto 147 Biel, Gabriel 419 Billerbeck, Paul 132 Bion of Borysthenes 87 Birchall, Clare xx, xxi, 32, 371, 468, 470 Blackwell, Ben C. 219 Blaich, Charles 44 n.69 Blanton, Thomas R. IV 142 Blomberg, Craig L. 23 Bond, H. Lawrence 435, 441 Bonsirven, Joseph 132 Bornkamm, Günther 79, 85 Bourdieu, Pierre 51 Bracke, Evelien 84 Brauch, Manfred T. 184 Brawley, Robert L. 15, 21–2, 57 Breck, John 458 Brisson, Luc 394 Brock, Rita Nakashima 372 Brooten, Bernadette J. 117–18, 175, 211–12, 328 Brown, Michael Joseph 153, 424–7, 429–30, 434 Brown, Peter 409–412 Brown, Raymond E. 75 Bryskog, Samuel 152 Buber, Martin 161 Budick, Sanford 287 Bultmann, Rudolf 20, 51–2, 76–9, 87–8, 92–3, 97, 104–5, 187, 351, 353, 401, 490 Burns, J. Patout 33–4, 76, 408, 449, 452, 455

Name Index Byrne, Brendan 57, 214, 217, 219, 245, 251, 254–7, 259, 264–72, 274, 276–7, 281, 283, 29394, 296, 298, 301, 305–6, 308–10, 313–15, 318, 330, 380, 384, 479, 482, 484 Calderone, Salvatore 161 Calvin, John 17, 58, 395 Campbell, Douglas A. 150, 198, 218, 219, 223, 245, 282, 284, 288–9 Campbell, William S. v, xiii, 7, 15, 33, 74, 122 n.7, 155, 159, 174, 194, 359, 397, 435–6 Caputo, John D. 219 Caragounis, Chrys C. 327, 331, 394 Cardenal, Ernesto 124 Carrington, Laurel 412–13 Carter, Arthur Francis, Jr. 338 Carter, Warren 27 Cartwright. Steven R. 436, 438, 440 Cash, Johnny 27 Cesar, Waldo 471 Chamoiseau, Patrick 472–4 Chrysostom. See John Chrysostom Chung-Kim, Esther 422 Cicero 200, 405 Cimpean, Florin T. 456, 459–64, 466–7, 472 Clement of Alexandria 17, 121 n.4, 391, 403, 424–36, 443, 445, 475 Clifford, Richard 267 Coakley, Sarah 342, 381 Cobb, John B. Jr. 148, 162–3, 186, 253 Collins, John J. 221–2, 228 Collins, Raymond 262 Conway, Kellyanne xvii–xviii Conzelmann, Hans 51–2, 76, 78, 92, 104, 249 Corbett, Edward P. J. 135 Cosgrove, Charles H. 436–7 Courtès, Joseph 22, 35, 50, 228, 344, 394 Cox, Harvey 471 Cranfield, C. E. B. 15, 58, 75, 83, 86, 88, 91–8, 103–5, 109, 111, 114–16, 164, 186 Cremer, Hermann 182 Croatto, J. Severino 395 Cross, Frank M. 222 Cynics 87, 154

521

Dahl, Nils A. 149, 171 Das, A. Andrew 145 Davies, J. P. 219 Davies, W. D. 27, 60, 132, 221 de Certeau, Michel xx, 390 Deichgräber, Reinhard 278–9 Deissmann, Gustav Adolf 462 de Jonge, Marinus 238 n.42 Derrida, Jacques 219, 468, 470 Dewey, Joanna 41 n.64, 396 n.14 Dodd, C. H. 75, 88, 103, 109 Dodds, Eric Robertson 428 Donfried, Karl P. 26, 67–8, 79–83, 86, 135, 195 Douglas, Mary 209 Doutre, Jean 435–7, 439, 441 Drake, Donovan 401 Dube, Musa 396 n.14 Dunn, James D. G. 58–62, 75–6, 83, 88, 91–2, 96–9, 102–3, 111, 115–18, 128, 132–4, 159–60, 164–5, 182, 194, 297, 436, 441, 484 Dunning, Benjamin 97, 164, 261 Dunson, Ben C. 3 n.5, 341 Dupont-Sommer, André 244 Duran, Nicole Wilkinson xiv, 39, 395 Duterte, Rodrigo xvi Ebeling, Gerhard 222 Eco, Umberto 22 Ehrensperger, Kathy v, xiii, 7, 33, 36, 74, 121 n.4, 128, 154–5, 158–9, 168, 176, 341, 359, 412 Ellens, J. Harold 36, 139, 357 Elliott, Neil 125–7, 136, 142–3, 153, 166, 172, 174, 178, 182, 359, 365–6 Epictetus 87, 199, 277, 432 Erasmus, Desiderius 17, 327, 394– 5, 412–13 Evans, Joan 443 Faustus 409, 411 Ferguson, John 426, 429 Fewell, Danna Nolan xii Fishbane, Michael 287 Fitzmyer, Joseph A. 75–7, 83, 85, 88, 91–3, 98, 102–3, 106, 108, 110–11, 115–18, 167, 304 Flavian. Bishop 448, 454

522

Name Index

Flurl, Wolfgang 161 Fortunatus 409–10 Foucault, Michel 56–7, 176, 302, 336, 340 Fraikin, Daniel 159, 194 Fredriksen, Paula 404, 406–7, 409 Freedman, David 222 Freire, Paulo 40 Friberg, Timothy and Barbara 185, 187, 298 Friedrich, G. 185 Fuchs, Ernst 222 Funk, Robert W. 222 Furnish, Victor. 54–5, 79 Gaça, Kathy v, xiii, 22, 33, 424–6, 434 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 13, 15, 28, 124 n.12, 127, 231 Gager, John G. 9 n.16, 38, 74, 125, 127–8, 424 Gagnon, Robert 328 Garlington, Don B. 160–1 Gärtner, Bertil 297 Gaston, Lloyd 74, 127–8 Gathercole, Simon J. 108, 145 Gaventa, Beverly 54, 218–19 Gench, Roger J. 214 Georgi, Dieter 142, 153, 156, 174, 178, 181–2, 359, 365–6 Gerhart, Mary 235 Gignac, Alain 308, 320–1 Goh, Meng Hun 57, 170–1, 302– 3, 305–6 Goodall, Blake 448 Gooder, Paula 23 Goodrich, John K. 219 Goppelt, Leonhard 242 Gorday, Peter 448 Grant, Robert 337 Green, William Scott 344 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 22, 32–3, 35, 50–2, 55, 228–9, 344, 394 Grenholm, Cristina v, xiii, xvii, xxiv, 6 n.9, 15, 18–19, 22, 24, 36, 67, 337, 339, 342–4, 371–2 Grimme, Justin xx Grossberg, Lawrence 39, 386 n.35 Haenchen, Ernst 249 Hampson, Daphne 342, 381

Hargraves, Archie 255 Harrison, James R. 142, 159 Harrod, Howard 29 Hartman, Geoffrey H. 287 Harvey, Van A. 16, 47 Hastings, Adrian 432 Hawkins, Peter S. v, xiii, 33, 435 Hawthorne, G. F. 184 Haynes, Stephen 8 n.14, 23 Hays, Richard B. 117–18, 150, 287–8 Heine, Ronald 425 Heloïse 436–9, 442–4 Hiers, Richard 221, 237 Hodkinson, Owen 84 Hoffmann-Aleit, Eva 425 Holder, R. Ward v, xiii, 33, 412 Holland, David Larrimore 221 Hooker, Morna D. 115 Horace 87 Horsley, Richard A. 153, 156, 174, 178, 181–2, 238 n.42 Hubbard, Robert I. Jr. 23 Hummel, Leonard 421 Irenaeus 455 Iyengar, Shanto

xx

Jassen, Alex P. 243 Jauss, Hans Robert 15 Jennings, Theodore W. 176, 219, 245, 250 Jerome 438, 441 Jervell, Jacob 81, 195 Jewett, Robert 15, 36, 57, 59, 123–7, 130 n.36, 135–9, 141, 149, 152–5, 157–64, 166–70, 174–6, 178–85, 190–2, 194–5, 198–202, 205–10, 212–13, 301–2, 357–9, 362–3, 365–6, 369, 392, 484 John Chrysostom 28, 242, 253, 265, 327, 391, 402-4-3, 408, 432, 445–59, 461, 463–7 Johnson, Dale A. 29 Johnson, Elizabeth A. 343 Johnson, Nathan C. 266 Josephus 140, 152, 200, 314, 328 Kahl, Brigitte 161 Kalantzis, George 242, 446, 450 Kalu, Ogbu 456, 459–60, 468, 470–3

Name Index Kannaway, Wayne 425 Karris, Robert 81–2, 86–7, 135 Käsemann, Ernst 37, 58, 62, 128–30, 132, 134, 217–19, 222–3, 245–9, 253, 255, 257–8, 265–70, 276–7, 279, 282–4, 287, 293–4, 298, 306, 308–11, 313, 315, 318–21, 329, 373, 377, 384–5, 454, 476, 479, 490, 492 Keck, Leander E. 54–5, 218–19, 245, 252–4, 259–60, 265–8, 277, 282–3, 300, 313, 315, 318, 324, 328, 477, 485 Kelber, Werner 41 n.64, 340, 396 n.14 Kennedy, George A. 135, 139 King, Peter 437 Kitszberger, Ingrid Rosa 325 Kittel, G. 185 Kittredge, Cynthia Briggs 412–13 Klein, Charlotte 130 n.37 Klein, William W. 23 Knight, Mark 15 Kuhn, Thomas S. 57 Kümmel, Werner 76, 89 Kuss, Otto 58, 279 LaCocque, André 147–8, 189 Lagrange, M.-J. 75, 83, 85, 88, 91, 95, 103, 111, 115 Lalruatkima xxiv Lannert, Berthold 221 Lapsey, Jacqueline 5 Lee, Archie Chi Chung 395 Leenhardt, Franz J. v, xiv, 6–7, 75–6, 78, 86, 88, 91–5, 98, 100, 102–4, 107–8, 110–11, 115–18, 395 Lendon, J. E. 163, 169, 302 Lévinas, Emmanuel 400 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 52, 228–9, 394 Levy, Ian Christopher 436, 441 Liddell, Henry George 100, 185, 187, 191, 310 Litwa, M. David 257 Lombard, Peter 419 Longenecker, Bruce W. 150 Longenecker, Richard N. 75–6, 80–1, 83 Louth, Andrew 425 Louw, Johannes P. 154, 158, 187, 257 Lull, David 148, 162–3, 186, 253

523

Luther, Martin 2, 17, 94, 104, 110, 122, 311, 352, 354, 390, 392, 395, 403–4, 408, 412–24, 425 Luz, Ulrich 14–15, 27 McKenzie, Steven 8 n.14, 23 Maddow, Rachel xxi Malherbe, Abraham 83 Malina, Bruce J. 170, 302 Manichees 406, 408–10 Manson, T. W. 68, 79, 82–3, 85 Marguerat, Daniel 248–9 Martin, Dale 9 n.15, 401 Martin, R. P. 184 Martin, Thomas 404–5, 407–8 Maston, Jason 219 Meeks, Wayne A. 83 Méhat, André 431 Meletius, Bishop 446–8, 454 Messing, Solomon xx Metzger, Bruce 137 Meyer, Heinrich A. W. 75, 98–9, 136 Michel, Otto 58, 75, 79, 83, 85, 88, 98, 102, 111 Migne, J. P. 446 Mihoc, Vasile v, xiii, 33, 242, 265, 395, 446, 455–9, 466 Milligan, George 310 Minear, Paul S. 80–3, 86, 88 Momigliano, Amaldo 161 Moo, Douglas J. 57–9, 61–2, 65–7, 75–6, 82–5, 88–105, 108–18, 297, 341, 347–9, 352, 354, 495–6 Moore, Stephen D. 23, 396 n.14 Morgan, Teresa 93, 162, 254 Morris, J. B. 446, 448 Moulton, James Hope 310 Moxnes, Halvor 138, 155–6 Moyise, Steve 23 Murphy, Roland E. 75 Murray, John 58, 75, 83, 91, 93, 98, 103, 111 Nanos, Mark D. 148, 150, 159–61, 163, 167, 177, 183–4, 190, 194, 363, 397, 490 Nelson, Cary 39, 386 n.35 Nestle, Erwin 215, 392 Newsom, Carol 4 n.6, 277, 285

524

Name Index

Nicholas of Lyra 419 Nickelsburg, George W. E. 238 n.43 Nida, Eugene Albert 154, 158, 187, 257 Nygren, Anders 15, 92, 104, 111, 116 Obama, Barack H. xv, xvii, xix–xx, xxv, 404, 467 Oberman, Heiko 412, 420 O’Brien, Peter T. 279 Odell–Scott, David W. v, xiii, 219, 402 Okure, Teresa 395 Onesti, Karen L. 184 Oppenheimer, Mark 444 Origen 17, 448, 455 Orwell, George xix Oswald, Hilton 311, 413 Papademetriou, George C. 467 Pascarella, Ernest T. 44 n.69 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 1 n.1, 260 Pelagians 409–411, 441 Pelagius 411, 438, 441 Penna, Romano 76 Perdersen, Sigfred 170 Pervo, Richard I. 249 Petersen, Norman R. 138 Peter the Venerable 437–8, 443 Phillips, Gary A. xii, 39 Philo 140, 152, 211, 257, 277, 314, 324, 328, 348, 425, 427–8, 430–2, 434–5, 443 Photius/Photios of Constantinople 455 Picketts, Raymond 142 Pinches, Charles 432 Plato/Platonic 176, 179, 201, 210, 324, 328, 428, 433 Platonist (Middle) 426, 428, 431, 433, 435 Plotinus 406, 410 Plutarch 328 Porter, Stanley E. 139, 142, 152 Prat, Ferdinand 76–8, 99, 297, 347 Price, Simon R. F. 156 Propp, Vladimir Y. 394 Prümm, Karl 428 Pythagoras/Pythagorean 426 Räisänen, Heikki 48–51, 67 Ray, Stephen G. Jr. xvii Reed, Jeffrey 152

Reid, D. G. 184 Reid, Melissa Renee xxiv Richardson, Kurt 412 Richardson, Peter 159 Riches, John K. 404–5 Ricoeur, Paul xvi, 42, 133 Ridderbos, Herman 76–8, 92, 96–7, 104, 118, 347, 353 Rieger, Joerg xvii Ringe, Sharon 5 Rodriguez, Rafael 89 Roetzel, Calvin J. 84 Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. 84 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 130 n.37, 423 Rufus, Gaius Musonius 87 Sanders, E. P. 48, 59–61, 128, 132–3, 146–8, 221 Schildgen, Brenda Deen v, xiii, 33, 435–7, 439 Schlatter, Adolf 75, 86, 88, 91, 106, 111, 118 Schmeller, Thomas 87 Schmithals, Walter 68 Schneider, Laurel C. xvii Schnelle, Udo 52 Schoedel, William 328 Schubert, Paul 20, 277–8 Schuller, Eileen M. 277, 285 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth 4, 139, 337 Scott, Charles E. 302 Scott, James C. 29 Scott, Robert 100, 185, 187, 191, 310 Scroggs, Robin 118, 328, 395 Searle, John R. xviii Segovia, Fernando F. 20 Seitz, Christopher 268 Shaull, Richard 417 Sherwood, Yvonne xii Siegert, Folker 135 Sievers, Joseph 17, 22, 396–7 Silberman, Lou H. 41 n.64, 243 Simic, Charles 46, 68, 120, 138 Singer, Sholom 147 Slonimsky, Henry 120 n.1, 147–8, 151, 157, 164, 173, 188–90, 482, 491 Smart, James D. 43 Smith, Abraham 118 Smith, Jonathan Z. 344

Name Index Smith, Robert O. 412 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 9 n.15, 19, 338 Snyder, Timothy 466 Socrates 176, 324, 433 Spicer, Sean xvii–xviii Spivak, Gayatri 39, 386 n.35 Sprinkle, Preston M. 221, 242, 378 Stegemann, Ekkehard W. 412–14 Stendahl, Krister 24, 59, 61–2, 124, 128–34, 138, 140, 142, 146, 154–5, 217, 404–5 Stephens, William O. 432 Sterk, Andrea 447 Stjerna, Kirsi 412 Stoics (Stoicism) 87, 199, 201, 202, 210, 212, 358, 366, 426, 430, 432, 488 Stowers, Stanley K. 48, 74, 84, 87–9, 125, 136–7, 140, 159, 194, 207–8, 210, 324, 327, 412–13 Strack, Hermann L. 132 Strecker, Georg 26–7 Stubbs, Monya A. 23, 43 n.66, 302– 4, 372 Stuhlmacher, Peter 75, 83, 88, 91, 95, 98, 102–3, 105–6, 111, 114–16, 118, 145, 495 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 20 Tamez, Elsa 125–7, 424, 445 Taub, Amanda xx–xxii Taubes, Jacob 161, 217, 219, 237, 245, 248, 253, 277 Tayler, Irene xii Teles of Megara 87 TeSelle, Eugene v, xiii, 15, 33, 93, 404, 406–8, 410 Thayer, Joseph Henry 298, 326 Theodore 242, 446 Theodoret of Cyrus 242, 446, 455 Theokritoff, Elizabeth 465 Thielman, Frank 145 Thomas Aquinas 17, 115, 395 Thompson, Deanna A. 412, 415, 417, 420, 422 Thoreau, Henry David 46 Tilling, Chris 97 Todd, Chuck xvii–xviii Tofighi, Fatima 8

525

Tomson, Peter J. 74, 127, 149–50, 159, 166, 194 Tracy, David 337 Trakatellis, Demetrios 253, 265, 446, 448–55, 457–8 Troeltsch, Ernst 16, 47, 389 Trump, Donald J. xvi–xvii, xix–xxi, xxiv Turk/Turkish 412 Vahanian, Gabriel 65, 330, 469 van Bavel, T. J. 410 Vandals 411 van den Hoek, Annewies 425, 427, 431 Velunta, Revelation Enriquez 23, 303 Vermès, Géza 244, 313 Visigoths 411 von Löwenich, Walther 421 Wallace, Daniel B. 170, 305 Wasserberg, Günter 22, 397 Watson, Francis 50–1, 53, 110, 150, 158 Weiss, Johannes 221 Welborn, Larry L. v, xiii, 22, 33, 219, 245, 372, 424–6, 428, 430–3 Wells, Samuel 99, 167, 298 West, Gerald 396 n.14 Westerholm, Stephen 145 Westwood, Sean xx White, Hugh C. xviii Whiteley, D. E. H. 76 Wilckens, Ulrich 15, 58, 75, 83, 86, 88, 98, 106, 111, 117, 164, 186 Wilken, Robert L. 34, 446–9, 454 William of Occam 419 William of St. Thierry 435–8, 443 Wimbush, Vincent L. xxiv, 19 Witherington, Ben, III 135, 151, 156, 159, 194 Wright, N. T. 128–34, 148–9, 151, 164, 166–8, 172, 179, 184–5, 223, 359 Wuellner, Wilhelm 135, 137, 191–3 Yeo, Khiok–khng v, xiii Yoder, John Howard 444 Young, Frances 425 Zetterholm, Magnus 38, 127–8 n.22, 145 Zimmerman, Earl 444 Žižek, Slavoj 217, 219, 245, 261

Subject Index (Bolded Subjects are given threefold definitions—forensic, covenantal, and realized-apocalyptic definitions—in the Appendix) ambiguities 46, 48, 50 analytical. See interpretive choices, analytical anti-Jewish xii, xxiv, 7, 64, 130–4, 423 anti-Semitic 128, 423 apostle (called) forensic 84, 98, 354 covenantal 154–5, 158–60, 164–5, 169, 193, 203, 369–70 realized-apocalyptic 215–16, 233, 257–71, 276, 290, 322, 385 atonement 63–5, 147, 186–9, 412 Abelard’s view of 436–41 Luther’s view of 412 John Chrysostom’s view of 450, 458 sacrifice 63 authority of the apostle forensic 90–100 covenantal 153–5, 171, 173, 180–1 realized-apocalyptic 215–16, 299 author’s intention 23–4, 53 autonomy 342–7, 371

Christ Jesus forensic 91–2, 95, 98, 106, 354 covenantal 146, 149, 153–5, 167, 177, 368 realized-apocalyptic 214–16, 221, 238, 246–7, 252–3, 256, 259, 261, 267–8, 271, 292, 304, 378, 380 in Augustine’s interpretation 407 in Cimpean’s interpretation 463 commentary, critical 7–8, 25, 32, 47, 76, 81, 122, 125, 217, 339 hybrid character of 27, 56–62, 74, 123, 336 identifying line of reasoning in 63, 67, 68 community-centered 4, 34, 36, 55, 121–3, 134–5, 138, 140, 143–6, 152–204, 207, 223, 341–5, 355–70, 386, 391–3, 398, 400, 404, 406, 421–5, 432–3, 435–8, 442–4 contextual. See interpretive choices, contextual/ethical

behind-the-text. See methodology, behind-the-text

diatribe 3, 82–90, 112, 137, 139, 150, 193, 313, 348

called forensic 354 covenantal 163–5 realized-apocalyptic 267, 276, 290, 299 charisma, charis 159, 168, 171, 233, 246, 259, 264–6, 270, 279, 281, 288, 294, 298–300, 304, 306, 345, 351, 367, 369, 372, 376–82, 385, 399, 468, 471 charismatic xxiii, 168, 218, 281, 391, 404, 445, 446, 456, 459–73

election, by God 133, 146–54, 159, 163, 165, 184, 368, 406, 408 epideictic 135–6, 152, 191, 210 ethical issues 15, 81, 398, 403 exordium. See rhetorical analysis, exordium faith. See also horizon of, justification by, obedience of faith forensic (faith) 90–110, 114–15, 351–4

Subject Index covenantal (faithfulness/faith) 123, 135, 145, 152, 159–63, 166, 168, 171–80, 182, 188, 191, 366–7 realized-apocalyptic (faith/ vision) 35, 37, 214, 217–29, 234, 241, 246–7, 253–5, 270, 272–95, 299, 317, 375, 379–84 in Abelard’s interpretation 439–45 in Augustine’s interpretation 406–8 in Cimpean’s interpretation 460 in Clement’s interpretation 425–31, 433–35 in John Chrysostom’s interpretation 450–55 in Luther’s interpretation 414–23 fake news xv–xxv, 428, 469–71 figurative features 25, 27, 53, 55, 69, 73, 121, 214–15, 218–20, 235, 413 logic 55, 214–15, 217–18, 220, 224, 229–31, 237, 245, 387 forensic theological line of reasoning 71–119 contextual character of 346–55 defined 54, 74, 77–119 glorifying/honoring God as God forensic 115, 119 covenantal 202, 203–5, 208, 213, 361–2, 367, 369 realized-apocalyptic 318, 332, 382 God’s beloved in Rome forensic 80, 97, 354 covenantal 163–4, 184, 188, 368 realized-apocalyptic 246, 247, 250–2, 270, 274, 307, 323, 377–9, 385 in Abelard’s interpretation 438–9, 442 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 451 in Luther’s interpretation 417 gospel of God forensic 93–4, 114, 239, 365 covenantal 151, 153, 155–7, 165, 173, 175–6, 177–9, 188, 203 realized-apocalyptic 236, 239, 242, 246, 257, 264, 266–71, 296, 306, 322, 380 gospel, transmission of forensic 98, 100, 351–2

527

covenantal 123, 141–2, 155, 158–60, 163, 171, 364–5, 369 realized-apocalyptic (gospelizing) 305–7, 345, 385 grace forensic 64, 76–7, 92, 97–8, 100, 109, 351–3 covenantal 65, 158, 165, 187, 367, 369 realized-apocalyptic (spiritual gift/ charis) 247, 259, 264–6, 298, 373, 376, 378–9 in Abelard’s interpretation 439, 441 in Augustine’s interpretation 404, 406–9 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 449–50, 452–3, 457, 459, 463 in Luther’s interpretation 413, 417, 419–20 Haggadah 120, 133, 148–9, 157–8, 173, 183, 188, 366, 480, 482 Halakha 149–50, 435. See also law hermeneutical/theological. See interpretive choices, hermeneutical/theological heteronomy 341–6, 362, 370–2, 374, 376, 381, 386, 393, 399–400, 404, 435, 444, 446, 455 Holocaust. See Shoah homosexuality forensic 112–19 covenantal 211–13 realized-apocalyptic 328, 332 honor and shame 64, 141, 144, 169, 173, 175, 207, 302–6, 358–9, 365 horizon of faith 47, 52–3, 55 ideology. See also methodologies, rhetorical and ideological Althusser’s definition of 24, 107, 357 ideological features 53, 120–1, 134–5, 141, 219, 229–30 wrong 36–7, 64, 180, 198, 360, 367 idolatry forensic 90, 112–19, 346–51 covenantal 199, 205–6, 356, 361–2 realized-apocalyptic 65, 264, 308, 310–32, 370–1, 374–7, 379, 384–6 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 449 in Luther’s interpretation 418

528

Subject Index

imperialism 127, 359, 377, 469 inclusive covenantal community line of reasoning 120–42, 143–68 contextual character of 355–69 defined 54, 123 indebtedness, sense of forensic 84, 99 covenantal 202, 359, 369 realized-apocalyptic 295, 300–6, 372, 376, 382 individual-centered 3, 34–6, 54–5, 64, 77, 121–2, 125, 135, 140, 144–6, 173–4, 176, 188, 197–9, 207–8, 217, 341–55, 364, 386, 390, 392–3, 400, 404, 426, 432, 435–6, 444–5 in Augustine’s interpretation 405–12 in Luther’s interpretation 412–24 in-front-of-the-text. See methodologies, in-front-of-the-text interpretive choices analytical/textual xxiii, 6, 18–23, 26, 29–33, 38, 40–1, 45, 54, 63, 73, 101, 121–4, 129, 134–5, 143, 145, 151, 217, 225, 236, 335, 337–9, 341, 392–5 contextual/ethical xxiv, 18–20, 33–9, 41, 44, 63, 121–30, 131, 134, 217–18, 225, 335, 337, 402–3, 408, 419, 432, 442, 455–6, 464, 466 hermeneutical/theological 6, 18–20, 23, 30–3, 35, 38, 41, 45, 63, 73, 76, 101, 121–6, 129, 131–5, 143, 145, 151, 215, 217–20, 225, 335–41, 393, 402 Jewish Early Jewish literature 27, 59, 90, 131–2, 140, 150, 211, 277, 287, 312–15, 328, 425–6, 428, 434 Jew and Gentile 36, 81–2, 144, 156–7, 163, 177, 194, 200, 204, 307, 356, 368, 385 Jewish Apocalypticism 221–4, 228, 231, 237–45, 256, 275–6, 283–5, 290–2, 296, 372 Jewish Christ followers 81–5, 89–91, 102, 112, 117, 119, 141–2, 145–6, 156–63, 183, 192–6, 199–213, 226, 347, 364–8, 376

Jewish-Christian relations 126, 397, 403, 423, 427–8 Jewish Covenantal understanding 182, 189, 193, 201, 425 Jewish heritage of Paul, Jewishness of Paul 122–3, 132, 146, 148–9, 155, 160, 165, 177, 183, 202, 237, 246, 248, 251, 261–4, 322, 367 Jewish views of pagans, idolatry 90, 113, 117, 205, 209, 211, 314–15, 318 Jewish vocation of Paul 264, 290 justice 26, 42, 104, 107, 125–7, 136, 138, 144, 146, 171–5, 178–91, 195–6, 267–8, 346, 353, 364–8, 377, 398, 407, 424, 433, 440, 442, 445, 450, 452, 458. See also righteousness justification by faith xxiii, 4, 42, 61, 62, 86, 101–2, 110, 125, 129–31, 144, 347, 350, 352, 407, 413, 419–20, 423–4, 445 knowledge 35, 78, 112–19, 197, 200–2, 212, 308–18, 347–54, 357, 361, 374, 402, 418, 429–30, 464 Latin American 125–6, 424 law 48–9, 62–3, 66–7, 81, 89, 105, 127, 132–3, 136, 140, 147, 150, 160, 163, 193–6, 225, 284, 309–10, 322–5, 332, 342, 373, 375, 383, 401–2, 406 in Abelard’s interpretation 437–43 in Augustine’s interpretation 407, 410 in Clement’s interpretation 425, 430, 434–3 in Luther’s interpretation 413, 420, 423 natural law 117, 211–12, 348 Roman law 263, 410 works of the law 58–62, 66, 102, 140 liberation theologians, liberation theology 125, 391, 398, 424, 442, 445 love being in love 342, 344, 372 believers’ love of God, Christ 410, 436, 451, 455, 462 God’s love 108, 188, 238, 251, 292–3, 364, 371, 417, 439–43, 449, 451 love of neighbor 37–8, 42, 64, 97, 110, 147, 171, 302–4, 342, 373, 402, 423, 438, 441–2, 445 “love the sinner” 197, 204 Lutheran 30, 420–1, 424

Subject Index Matthew, Gospel of 14–15, 26–7 Messianic vision 46–47, 55, 62, 214, 219–20, 232, 234, 259, 268 methodologies. See also rhetoric behind-the-text 23–9, 53, 55, 79–80, 226, 387 in-front-of-the-text 23–9, 53, 55, 226 philological 51, 55, 58, 79, 104, 121, 217, 232, 355 philological and epistolary 3, 46, 135, 348 rhetorical and ideological 46, 54, 58–9, 67–8, 81, 103, 120–1, 125–6, 134–5, 140, 146, 151, 155–6, 169–81, 194–5, 214, 224, 230, 253 thematic and figurative 3, 46, 53, 55, 69, 73, 121, 214–20, 224, 229–33, 245, 253–54, 260–1, 270, 273, 371, 387 within-the-text 23–5, 28, 53, 55, 224 ministry 4, 49 forensic 84, 94, 98–100, 354 covenantal 133, 138, 143, 155–6, 160, 167, 170–7, 192, 203–4 realized-apocalyptic 215, 226, 265, 268, 294, 295–301, 304–5, 321, 377, 380, 383 mission 31, 85, 188, 194 as countercultural 154, 169, 301, 369 of Paul 91–2, 131, 155, 170–1, 178, 182, 193, 267 of the churches in Rome 123, 126, 171, 202 of the community 46–7, 54, 56, 59, 65, 138, 143–54, 158, 163, 168, 172, 192, 226–9, 268, 368 to Spain 55, 84, 120, 136–43, 166, 168, 192, 300 to the Gentiles 99, 129, 134, 136, 146, 158, 166, 181, 193, 195 “mother wit” 1–2, 390, 396 natural revelation forensic 112–19 covenantal 201 realized-apocalyptic 317, 374 in Abelard’s interpretation 440 New Perspective 38, 60–1, 121, 123, 127–8, 131–4, 141, 145–8, 155, 194, 217, 221, 341

529

obedience 60 forensic (to the Lord) 84, 93, 98, 109, 114, 352–4 covenantal (to the Lord) 158–63, 167, 170, 173, 193–4, 202, 369 realized-apocalyptic (of faith/ vision) 233, 246–7, 252–5, 260, 266, 276–7, 281, 287, 296–8, 305, 315, 322 Obedience of faith 84, 98, 114, 158–63, 193, 202, 233, 246–7, 253–5, 260, 266, 271, 276, 281, 287, 296, 298, 322, 352, 354, 368, 416, 453 in Luther’s interpretation 416 in Abelard’s interpretation 440 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 452–4 Orthodox Eastern 232, 384, 391, 395, 399, 445–6, 450, 453, 456–67 Greek xxiii, 30, 218 other-centered 3, 34–5, 55, 65, 280, 382 paraenetic/exhortatory 81, 117, 136 Paulos/Paul 247–52, 259, 276, 279, 285, 290 pedagogy, pedagogical 6, 10, 14, 95 implications of history of reception for 39–45 Pentecostal 218, 456, 459–73. See also Charismatic peroration. See rhetorical analysis, peroratio philological and epistolary. See methodologies, philological and epistolary power of God forensic 101–9 covenantal 143, 172–3, 176–9, 182–90, 364 realized-apocalyptic 37, 56, 66, 260, 267, 269, 281–6, 289, 306–7, 344, 378, 383–5 in Abelard’s interpretation 440 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 452 in Cimpean’s interpretation 464 in Luther’s interpretation 413–14 prayer 346 forensic 84, 98–9, 354 covenantal 143, 155, 166–7, 356, 369

530

Subject Index

realized-apocalyptic 272, 274, 279–80, 295–8, 314, 317, 327, 342, 370, 381, 384 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 447–8, 457, 467 probation. See rhetorical analysis, probatio proposition. See rhetorical analysis, propositio Protestant xxiii, 30, 104–5, 129, 133, 201, 414, 460

in Chrysostom’s interpretation 450, 452–3 in Luther’s interpretation 414–16 Roman Catholic xxiii, 30, 90, 201, 204, 411, 415, 421, 469 Romans as scripture xvi, 25, 31–3, 130, 338, 388, 391, 397, 402, 456–9, 463, 472 debate 80 theme of 100–1

realized apocalyptic line of reasoning 214–332 contextual character of 331, 370–87 defined 55, 220–1, 237 reception, history of xv, 4–10, 13, 14–30, 35, 39–43, 46–7, 62, 122, 134, 162, 337, 366, 387, 424 reconciliation 63, 191, 232, 450 Reformation 27, 33, 90, 412, 438, 443 relationality 108, 342–5 revelation, natural 112, 114–15, 201, 317, 374, 440 rhetorical analysis exordium 135–6, 152, 191 invention 136, 139–44, 314 narratio 136, 168, 191 peroratio 135–6, 166, 191–4 probatio 136, 191, 195 propositio 136, 172, 191, 195 rhetorical and ideological. See methodologies, rhetorical and ideological righteous forensic 64, 77, 101, 103–13, 351, 353 covenantal (righteous/just) 140, 172, 174, 182, 199, 208, 212, 364, 366 realized-apocalyptic 234, 274, 280–99, 309, 316, 319, 376, 383 in Abelard’s interpretation 441 in Augustine’s interpretation 407 in Clement’s interpretation 430, 434 in Luther’s interpretation 414–16 righteousness of God forensic 77–8, 85, 88, 101, 103–12, 353 covenantal (righteousness/ justice) 172–5, 182 realized-apocalyptic 232, 273–4, 279–86, 289, 294, 299, 306–7, 325, 350, 384

saints 25, 345–6 forensic 80–1, 97, 354 covenantal 139, 157–8, 163–5, 173, 177, 184, 195, 368–9 realized-apocalyptic 216, 233, 242, 246–7, 257–81, 285, 295, 298–9, 307, 323, 378–9, 385 in John Chrysostom’s interpretation 451 in Luther’s interpretation 417 salvation 37, 60–1, 63, 345 forensic 78, 86, 95–7, 101–4, 107–14, 350–4 covenantal 123, 129–30, 140, 147–8, 156, 172–91, 193, 207, 362–4, 367 realized-apocalyptic 234–5, 267–9, 276, 282, 285–9, 293–4, 300, 306–7, 317, 375–84 in Abelard’s interpretation 440 in Augustine’s interpretation 406–9 in Clement’s interpretation 426, 429–31, 434–5 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 450, 452–3, 458 in Cimpean’s interpretation 466 in Luther’s interpretation 413–16, 421, 423 Saul, Saulos 249–51, 378, 385, 447, 459, 465 scriptural criticism 14–21 hermeneutic 225, 239, 242–3 prophets 240, 269 speech 287–8 teaching 34–5 text 18, 30, 33–5, 121, 149–50, 244, 338–40, 457, 462 type, promise 286, 291, 382, 448 scriptures 63, 339, 345 forensic 91, 94–5, 109, 351–2 covenantal 149, 157–8, 165, 203

Subject Index realized-apocalyptic 225, 236–42, 252, 255, 257, 262, 264, 266–9, 276, 295, 322, 325, 381 in Abelard’s interpretation 439 in Clement’s interpretation 429–31, 434–5 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 446–7, 457 servant/slave [δοῦλος] of Christ (Paul, a) forensic 66, 91–2, 354 covenantal 148, 153–5, 178, 196, 361, 368–9, 372 realized-apocalyptic 214–16, 233–8, 244, 246–7, 252–62, 267–8, 270, 277–9, 283, 285, 290, 296, 304, 378 in Abelard’s interpretation 438–41 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 447 Shoah xii, xxiv, 9, 38, 68, 128, 130–1, 397, 411, 419, 424 sin forensic 59, 64, 66–7, 78, 89, 92, 97, 107, 111–13, 117–18, 347–51 covenantal 64, 125, 133, 140–6, 186–8, 191, 197, 207, 358–62, 364 realized-apocalyptic 65, 223, 283, 307, 322–5, 372–5 in Abelard’s interpretation 440, 444 in Augustine’s interpretation 408 in Clement’s interpretation 445 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 449–52, 458–9, 463, 467 in Luther’s interpretation 415, 418–20 sins and evils, catalogue of forensic 112–19, 349 covenantal 205–9, 212–13, 358 realized-apocalyptic 312, 330 slave, slavery 42, 65–6, 118, 141, 153–4, 177, 215, 223, 235–6, 252–3, 261, 283, 293, 356, 441, 462 Son of God forensic 95–6, 353–4 covenantal 156–7 realized-apocalyptic 221, 237–8, 255–8, 266, 269–70, 295, 384 Spirit (of Holiness) forensic 94–6, 353–4 covenantal 157–8, 171, 194, 368 realized-apocalyptic 55, 218, 223, 236–7, 257, 266, 269, 285, 295–8, 302, 305, 313, 378–9, 384

531

in Abelard’s interpretation 456 in Augustine’s interpretation 415 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 457–9, 470 in Cimpean’s interpretation 460–4 in Luther’s interpretation 417 suffering 63, 110, 188–9, 292–3, 350, 420–1, 452, 458–65, 467, 469–70 supersessionist 130, 406, 423, 433–5, 443 thanksgiving to God forensic 98, 354 covenantal 152, 165–8, 369 realized-apocalyptic 272–80, 284, 298, 330, 376, 381 in Abelard’s interpretation 439 in Chrysostom’s interpretation 455 thematic and figurative. See methodologies, thematic and figurative theology, Pauline 74, 335, 425 thick figures 230–5, 248, 277 thesis of the letter forensic 100, 112 covenantal 176, 191 realized-apocalyptic 307 transformation/transformed (into apostle, saints, chosen people) 97, 106, 177, 250–5, 258–60, 264–5, 276, 280, 282–3, 290, 294–7, 305, 329, 378, 384–5, 446–58, 465–6 vocation. See mission Western cultures 36, 121–2, 144, 198, 208, 329, 343, 359, 470 Wirkungsgeschichte 7, 14, 337. See also reception, history of within-the-text. See methodologies, within-the-text wrath of God 345 forensic 103, 106, 110–16, 346–7, 349–51, 353, covenantal (anger of God) 172–3, 179, 185–9, 356, 360, 363–5 realized-apocalyptic 273, 286, 288–94, 308, 316, 318–19, 324, 370, 373–5, 384 in Luther’s interpretation 413, 418