Encountering the Book of Romans (Encountering Biblical Studies)

A Theological Survey

Moo, Douglas J., Elwell, Walter A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441245922
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

In this updated edition of his successful textbook, a leading evangelical New Testament scholar offers a guide to the book of Romans that is informed by current scholarship and written at an accessible level. The new edition has been updated throughout and features a new interior design. After addressing introductory matters and laying the groundwork for reading Romans, Douglas Moo leads readers through the weighty argument of this significant book, highlighting key themes, clarifying difficult passages, and exploring the continuing relevance of Romans. As with other volumes in the well-received Encountering Biblical Studies series, this book is designed for the undergraduate classroom and includes pedagogical aids such as photos and sidebars. A test bank for professors is available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

PART
1
Encountering an Ancient Letter

Romans 1:1–17

1
Getting Oriented

What Is Romans Really About?

Outline

• Ancient Letters and Modern Readers
• The Current Debate about Romans
• Getting Situated: How, Then, Should We Read?
• “Take Up and Read!”

Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to

1. Appreciate why we have to get our bearings before we plunge into an ancient letter like Romans.
2. Understand the most important alternatives for reading and understanding Romans today.
3. Decide how you are going to read Romans.

Christians have always believed that God speaks to his people in the pages of the Bible. And that belief is quite justified. The Bible is a collection of books that God inspired to inform, challenge, and edify us. But how do we understand what it is that God is trying to communicate to us through the pages of the Bible? For God himself did not directly write the words of Scripture. The Bible is no book dropped from heaven. Rather, it is a collection of many different books, written by human beings over the course of two millennia. And to understand the Bible rightly, we must learn something about this human dimension of Scripture. We especially need to remind ourselves of what we might call the “contextualized nature” of the Bible when we turn to Romans. Many Christians think of Romans as a kind of theological summary and tend to pay little attention to its actual origins. But Romans, though thoroughly theological, is no textbook on doctrine. It is a letter—written by a particular person to particular people in a particular time and place. We will be able to understand better what God wants to teach us in Romans if we keep these circumstances in mind. In chapters 2 and 3 we will explore some of the specifics, looking in turn at the author, the readers, and the theme of the letter. But we need to begin, in this chapter, by laying a broader foundation. Specifically, we want to ask, and suggest an answer to, this question: what is Romans really about?

Ancient Letters and Modern Readers

The question we have just posed might seem to be the product of overheated academic imaginations. Doesn’t the book tell us clearly enough what it is about? Why create needless controversy over what is so obvious? But wait. Is it obvious? That’s the question. The problem is that we bring our own agendas to the reading of a letter like Romans. We come to it—inevitably—from our own culture. We interpret its words and sentences as if they were written by a twenty-first-century Christian. But, of course, they were not. Romans was written by a first-century Jew, Saul of Tarsus. The words of Romans have to be understood in his context before we can translate them accurately into ours. The famous philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced the notion of “language games” to explain this problem with understanding words. Basically, he argued, we have to know what “game” we are playing if we are going to understand language accurately. Take a simple example: the phrase “Hail Mary” uttered in the context of the “game” of a Roman Catholic religious service means something quite different from the very same phrase spoken in the “game” of a football broadcast.

And so we might rephrase our central question: what “game” was Paul playing when he wrote his letter to the Romans? The Reformer Martin Luther gave voice to a classic answer to this question in the sixteenth century. Paul was writing about the way a sinful human being can get into right relationship with a perfect and just God. Why did Luther think that this is what Romans is about? “Because it is the plain meaning of the text!” Luther undoubtedly would have responded. And he may well be right. But we also must acknowledge that Luther’s reading was influenced by his circumstances. He was reading Romans from a very specific and personal vantage point. As a dedicated Roman Catholic monk, Luther used every available religious discipline to try to make himself presentable to God, but he simply could not convince himself that he was succeeding. As he looked deeply into his own heart, he saw so much selfishness and pride and rebellion there that he could not imagine what he could ever do to bridge the gap between himself and God. Then came the great realization. What Luther could never do, God had already done. God, by allowing his Son to be executed on a Roman cross, had provided a way for the sins of all human beings to be forgiven. And it was in Romans, especially, that Luther discovered this liberating message of grace. As a result of his previous training, Luther had taken the expression “the righteousness of God” (Rom. 1:17) to refer to God’s own righteousness—God’s impartial justice. But how, then, could the revelation of that righteousness be “good news” (see Rom. 1:16)? Surely it was bad news, not good news, to learn that God was just and impartial, that he would punish every sin and judge every sinner. But then Luther came to understand that the “righteousness of God” that Paul was talking about was not God’s justice but God’s gift. The good news that Paul preached was that God had brought into the world the possibility of a righteousness from God—the gift of acceptance and right standing offered to every sinner—and that the gift was given simply in response to faith. Works of religious devotion or good deeds were not needed to earn acceptance with God. All God asked was that people turn away from their sins and turn to him in heartfelt faith.

Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) (Wikimedia Commons)

What a sense of liberation and joy Luther felt when he first came to understand “the righteousness of God” in these terms! Indeed, so overwhelming was the experience that Luther read the entire Bible in light of this truth for the rest of his life. “Justification by faith” was the heart of the gospel, the heart of Romans, the heart of the Bible. It was precisely for this reason that Luther had his famous problem with the Epistle of James, for he did not think that this letter adequately teaches the truth of justification by faith. The Protestant Reformers who followed Luther did not make justification by faith quite as central as Luther did, but they all followed him in reading Romans as a book about the individual human being and how that individual could be turned from a rebellious sinner into an obedient saint. Attention was focused above all on the early chapters of Romans 1–4, where the great issues of sin and God’s remedy in Christ are spelled out. Eventually, as the heat of the Reformation battles died down, many Roman Catholic scholars came to interpret Romans in a very similar way. By the middle of the twentieth century, therefore, one could almost speak of a consensus about the basic message of Romans. We can summarize this consensus in two basic points:

1. Romans focuses on the individual human being.
2. Romans emphasizes justification by faith because Jews were teaching justification by works.

Preachers, Sunday school teachers, and evangelists have taught most of us to read Romans from this perspective. We might call this the “language game” of individual salvation.

The Current Debate about Romans

Scholars view a consensus as a challenge. It is the very nature of the academic approach to question what most assume to be true—to take a hard, critical look at the ruling paradigms. And that is no bad thing. We can too easily get locked into certain ways of looking at the Bible and never stop to ask whether our approach is the right one or not. If the Bible is truly to be our authority for all of life, then we must constantly be reassessing our reading of its message. Very often, in fact, our failure to appreciate the real message of Scripture lies in certain assumptions about how we read the text—assumptions that we might not even be aware that we hold.

And so it is that in the last fifty years scholars have been asking some serious questions about the ruling consensus among interpreters of Romans. Two questions in particular are at the forefront and set the agenda for the current debate about the nature of Romans. These questions match the two key points in the “individual salvation” reading of Romans mentioned above.

Thus, the first question is whether Romans indeed focuses on the individual. Scholars such as Krister Stendahl argue that our individualistic reading of Romans (and of Paul generally) arose in the modern era, especially under the influence of Luther. Luther’s problem was how he, as an individual human being, could find rest for his troubled conscience. But that was not the issue with which Paul was grappling. Indeed, Stendahl suggests, concern about what he called the “introspective conscience” arose in the modern Western world. People in ancient times simply didn’t think that way. We have made the mistake of reading into Romans our own concerns.

What, then, was Paul’s real concern in Romans? The “people” question: what does God’s gracious work in Christ mean for the two great people groups of Paul’s world, Jews and gentiles? Romans is not basically about how an individual human being can get right with God; it is about how gentiles can be added into God’s people without disenfranchising God’s original people, the Jews.1 This was the great question that confronted the Jewish apostle Paul in the first century as he sought to explain and defend the gospel. Generations of Jews, reading the Old Testament promises of God about the Messiah and the salvation he would bring, naturally thought that those promises would bring great blessing for the Jewish people. But by the time Paul wrote Romans, something strange and unexpected had happened. Comparatively few Jews had responded to the gospel, while gentiles had turned to Christ in significant numbers. The church was taking on an overwhelmingly gentile profile. But if the preaching of the gospel was bringing salvation to the gentiles while leaving most Jews hardened in their sins, how could the gospel truly be “the gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1)? Did not the same God who sent his Son to the cross and raised him from the dead to usher in the age of fulfillment promise that he would bless Israel? We find Paul tackling this thorny question in chapters 9–11 of Romans. And for Stendahl and many others, these chapters, not Romans 1–4, are the heart of Romans. The people question is what Romans is really about. Romans is not so much about the history of the individual as about the history of salvation.

A second question has attacked the second plank in the Reformation platform. Luther’s conviction that God offers the grace of salvation unconditionally to anyone who believes was forged in the fires of controversy. As a monk, he struggled to understand how his acts of religious devotion, however many, could ever enable him to appear before a perfect and holy God. And as a reformer, he fought for his vision of the gospel with a Roman Catholic church that insisted on works as a necessary condition for true righteousness before God. We should not be surprised, then, that Luther tended to read Romans as an ancient parallel to his own experience. Paul was cast in the role of the reforming Luther, and the Jews took the place of a legalistic Roman Catholicism. For Luther, then, and for those who have followed in his interpretive footsteps, Paul emphasizes justification by faith in order to counter the Jewish view of justification by works. Jews, in the traditional consensus, tended to base a right standing with God on the quantity of good works that a person was able to accomplish. Paul, in contrast, proclaims that a person can gain right standing with God only...