Apocalyptic Paul

Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5-8

Beverly Roberts Gaventa

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781602589704, 9781602589698
• eBook ISBN: 9781481301022
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Romans 5-8 revolve around God's dramatic cosmic activity and its implications for humanity and all of creation. Apocalyptic Paul measures the power of Paul's rhetoric about the relationship of cosmic power to the Law, interpretations of righteousness and the self, and the link between grace and obedience. A revealing study of Paul's understanding of humanity in light of God's apocalyptic action through Jesus Christ, Apocalyptic Paul illuminates Romans 5-8 and shows how critical this neglected part of Romans was to Paul's literary project.

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Paul’s Mythologizing Program in Romans 5–8

Martinus C. de Boer

My title contains an obvious allusion to Rudolf Bultmann’s well-known program of demythologization.¹ I want to argue in this paper that Paul’s concern in Romans 5–8 is not demythologization but mythologization, if the word can be allowed. One of the main reasons Paul programmatically mythologizes in these chapters is to explain why the Law is not, or no longer, a viable option for those who have come to believe in Christ.

Paul’s concern with the Law is evident throughout the first eight chapters, indeed the first ten chapters (e.g., esp. 2:12-17; 3:19-31; 4:125; 5:13, 20; 6:14-15; 7:1–8:4; 9:31–10:5; 13:8-10). This focus on the Law in Romans reflects its unique occasion. Briefly, the letter appears to have a triple occasion: (1) Paul has received information about differences, even conflicts, among believers in Rome (evident especially in chapters 14–15); (2) as Christ’s apostle to the Gentiles, Paul has made plans to go on to new missionary territory in Spain by way of Rome (15:20, 24-25, 28); and (3) before going to Rome, he plans to go to Jerusalem with a collection of funds from the Gentile churches he had founded (15:23-33). Paul hopes that this collection will be accepted by “the saints” (15:31) in Jerusalem, and he fears that he will receive a hostile reception there from those he calls “the unbelievers in Judea” (15:31). At issue for Paul on all three fronts are the status and the role of the Law now that Christ has come on the human scene. Closely related to the issue of the Law is the question of “the righteousness of God” and justification. Again, this theme pervades much of Romans (cf. 1:17; 2:12; 3:4-30; 4:1-25; 5:1-21; 6:7, 13-20; 8:10, 30, 33; 9:30–10:10; 14:17), especially the first four chapters, but also chapter 5 (and chapters 9–10).

In my view, one of Paul’s major aims in this letter is to remind the believers in Rome that they are not “under the Law” (ὑπὸ νόμον)² but “under grace” (ὑπὸ χάριν), as he puts it in 6:14 (cf. 6:15). “The Law” and “grace” constitute the overarching polarity in Romans 5–8. The other major polarities in these chapters—sin and righteousness, death and life, flesh and spirit—are largely brought into the service of explaining the fundamental polarity of the Law and grace. Paul wants to bring out the implications and advantages of being under grace rather than being under the Law. One of these implications is to see the world as it really is now that Christ has appeared on the human scene, and another is to redefine the status and the role of the Law in the light of this event.

It will also be relevant to take note here of the broader context of chapters 5–8. In chapters 9–11, Paul’s concern is explicitly with unbelieving Israel—put otherwise, with a form of Judaism in which Christ has no place, whether that be in Jerusalem or in Rome. In these chapters Paul returns to the issues of justification and the Law (especially in chapters 9 and 10) that were prominent in the first four chapters, using similar terminology and formulations. In that light, it seems to me probable that in chapters 1–4 Paul also has unbelieving Israel in view. That is to say, Paul is here in dialogue with a form of contemporary Judaism embracing a certain understanding of sin and justification and the Law, one in which Christ has no place. It will be my working assumption that the apocalypses of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch are representative of the views with which Paul is in dialogue in the opening chapters of Romans, including chapter 5.³ Both works stem from the late first or early second century, it is true, but scholars also maintain that they mediate traditions that go back to the early and middle of the first century, when Paul was active.⁴ Paul is in dialogue with these views in his Letter to the Romans evidently because, so Paul assumes, the believers in Rome will hear and read his letter with these views in the backs of their minds.⁵

Bultmann’s Proposal and Käsemann’s Reaction

Bultmann argued that one must attempt to understand “the mythical world picture” of the NT⁶ “in terms of its real intention,” and that is to give expression to “how we human beings understand ourselves in our world. Thus,” he claimed, “myth does not want to be understood in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms.”⁷ The point is to get “to the understanding of [human] existence” contained in the mythological or cosmological language.⁸

In his demythologizing program, Bultmann saw himself as following in the footsteps of John and Paul. For our purposes what Bultmann says about Jewish apocalyptic eschatology with respect to Paul is particularly pertinent. Jewish apocalyptic eschatology is defined by Bultmann as a “basic dualistic view according to which the present world and the people living in it are under the dominion of demonic, satanic powers and in need of redemption, a redemption that they themselves cannot provide and that can be given them only through divine intervention.”⁹ For Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, that divine intervention is an imminently future event whereby God “puts an end to this old age and ushers in the new one through God’s sending of the Messiah.”¹⁰ Paul has demythologized this Jewish apocalyptic eschatology in at least two ways according to Bultmann:

1.Jewish apocalyptic eschatology is “demythologized insofar as the day of salvation has already dawned for believers and the life of the future has already become present.”¹¹ In other words: present eschatology.

2.Paul emphasizes individual responsibility and “decision” (Entscheidung). Talk of cosmic powers lording it over human beings serves to indicate that “we can in no way free ourselves from our factual fallenness in the world, but are freed from it only by an act of God.”¹² That point is crucial for Bultmann because it distinguishes faith from philosophy, which can pose the problem of inauthentic existence but cannot provide the needed solution.¹³ Nevertheless, for Bultmann, there is “never any doubt about our responsibility and guilt” or that “God is also the Judge before whom we are responsible.”¹⁴

With respect to Paul, then, Bultmann’s demythologization of Paul came down to a deapocalypticized Paul, a Paul with no future eschatology and no cosmological powers.¹⁵ In response to Bultmann, his former student, Ernst Käsemann, argued for the following two points:

1.Despite the new emphasis on the present reality of salvation in Paul’s thought, “Paul remained an apocalyptist” in that a “future eschatology” remained a crucial element of his thinking.¹⁶

2.Bultmann’s interpretation of Paul’s cosmology in terms of an individualistic anthropology is untenable. Paul’s use of the Greek term σῶμα (“body”) belies Bultmann’s claims. Bultmann rightly saw that Paul used this term to designate the whole person,¹⁷ but he failed to see that the body signifies for Paul the creaturely solidarity of human beings with one another and with the rest of creation. The Pauline understanding of σῶμα, Käsemann argued, signifies that the individual cannot isolate herself from the world to which she belongs and that the human being is subject to “the rule of outside forces” that determine his existence, identity, and destiny.¹⁸ So for Käsemann, “The world is not neutral ground; it is a battlefield, and everyone is a combatant. Anthropology must then eo ipso be cosmology.”¹⁹ Or, as he puts it elsewhere: since a human being’s life is “from the beginning a stake in the confrontation between God and the principalities and the world,” it “can only be understood apocalyptically.”²⁰

Käsemann thus offered what we may call a “cosmological-apocalyptic” reading of Paul.²¹

The difference between Bultmann and Käsemann was also evident in their different interpretations of Paul’s theology of justification. For Bultmann, “the righteousness of God,” ἡ δικαιοσύνη τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 1:17; 3:5, 21, 22; cf. 2 Cor 5:21), is a gift for the individual, the “favorable standing” a believer has in God’s court.²² The righteousness of God is “God-given, God-adjudicated righteousness.”²³ For Käsemann, the formulation “the righteousness of God” actually refers to God’s own righteousness and concerns God’s reestablishing his sovereignty over the world. Thus, “the righteousness of God does not, in Paul’s understanding, refer primarily to the individual and is not to be understood exclusively” as anthropology.²⁴ Because “the righteousness of God” refers first and foremost to God’s own saving action, effective in the lordship of the crucified Christ, the justifying action on behalf of the ungodly not only “declares righteous” (is not simply a forensic-eschatological pronouncement, as it is for Bultmann) but also actually “makes righteous.”²⁵ It does so by coming on the human scene to liberate human beings from cosmological forces and powers that have enslaved them.

Now, it is interesting to observe that Bultmann predicated his forensic-eschatological understanding of justification and God’s righteousness largely on Romans 1–4, whereas Käsemann based his cosmological-apocalyptic reading of Paul largely on Romans 6–8.²⁶ Romans 5 is contested territory in that the views of both Bultmann and Käsemann can find support in this passage (see below). The Bultmann-Käsemann exchange allows us to see, or at least to suspect, that Romans 5 marks a shift from predominantly forensic-eschatological categories (focused on the individual) to predominantly cosmological-apocalyptic ones in Paul’s argument in Romans. The question this phenomenon of course raises is: why is this the case and what does it signify?

The Cosmic Context of the Gospel

Paul begins chapter 5 with the following words: “Since, then, we have been justified on the basis of faith [rather than on the basis of the Law—a summary of the preceding argument] we [now] have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access into this grace in which we [now] stand” (5:1-2a). This emphasis on the present (cf. Bultmann), on what has been attained, is certainly retained throughout the first eleven verses. The opening paragraph concludes in verse 11 with the words, “We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation.” The result of justification is peace or reconciliation with God.

At the same time, another note may be heard—one that points to the future (cf. Käsemann): because “we” have been justified and thereby obtained peace with God and access to the grace in which “we” now stand, “we” can also “boast in the hope of the glory of God” (5:1-2). Or as Paul expresses it later in the passage: “having been justified, how much more shall we be saved through him from wrath” (5:9), and “having been reconciled how much more shall we be saved in his life” (5:10). Hope indeed “does not disappoint, since the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the holy spirit that has been given to us” (5:5). God’s love becomes manifest in the justifying and reconciling death of Christ (5:8-10), and this fact of faith provides the basis for hope—hope for the future, not only for the long term (the Parousia) but also for the lives of believers from now on.

These new accents are continued in the second paragraph of chapter 5, verses 12-21, but Paul now also places Christ’s work within an explicitly cosmic framework. By “cosmic” I mean simply “pertaining to the whole human world”; Paul uses the term κόσμος in verse 12 to refer to “the whole human world”—not the universe or the earth, two possible other meanings of the term (cf. 1:8 [“the whole world”]; 3:19 [“the whole world”]; 4:13; 2 Cor 5:19). If in verses 1-11 he repeatedly uses the first person plural “we” (“we have peace with God,” “we boast,” and so forth), limiting his discussion to beli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1  Paul’s Mythologizing Program in Romans 5–8
• 2  Righteousness, Cosmic and Microcosmic
• 3  A Tale of Two Gardens: Augustine’s Narrative Interpretation of Romans 5
• 4  Under Grace: The Christ-Gift and the Construction of a Christian Habitus
• 5  The Shape of the “I”: The Psalter, the Gospel, and the Speaker in Romans 7
• 6  Double Participation and the Responsible Self in Romans 5–8
• 7  The Love of God Is a Sovereign Thing: The Witness of Romans 8:31-39 and the Royal Office of Jesus Christ
• 8  Creation, Cosmos, and Conflict in Romans 8–9
• Afterword: The Human Moral Drama
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Authors
• Subject Index