Sunday, August 12, 2012

Romans #1


This is the first summary of a new study on the Letter of Paul to the Romans - Linda

Romans #1                                                                                      07/27/12

Romans is a key book of the New Testament and considered Paul’s most important letter. Luther’s re-reading of Romans led to the Protestant reformation. Luther was an Augustinian friar, who had a crisis of faith. He was particularly sensitive to the dominant belief in Christendom of a wrathful God, and then the associated trade in indulgences put him over the edge. Indulgences arose out of the violence of the crusades – a way for knights to get out of their vow to go to Jerusalem and fight. Their vow with its associated indulgence (remission of sins) was exchanged for a monetary payment. Quickly the practice spread to all levels of the church and even to the dead. It became a system in which a wrathful God was paid off and the Church made money. Luther ran in horror from the altar at his first mass. He turned to the Greek translation of the New Testament that had just been made available by Erasmus. He was able to read for the first time the New Testament in its original language. Different words stood out with a resonance not found in the Latin text.

In Romans he read about “justification by faith”. For Luther justification meant not going to hell when you die and not having to fear a God who would send you there because now, in this life, God already counted you righteous. Justification came directly from God and was received by the individual. It offered liberation from the oppressive series of exchanges, the spiritual currency, mediated by the Catholic Church to protect you from damnation. Luther’s theology doesn’t do away with retribution or a violent, wrathful God, because Jesus pays the penalty in our stead. God’s justice has not been abandoned – but it is all loaded on Jesus. He takes the whole hellish rap for all of us. Justification by faith remains contractual thinking. The Protestant reformation replaces a contract between God and the spiritual banks of the Catholic Church with a contract between God and the individual. Any sin, however small, remains an infinite offense. The punishment that should have fallen on us is unleashed upon Christ, so that we are now in the clear. God wants this end – but the means is terrifying!

Backing up, we can understand Romans as the letter Paul wrote to address the biggest crisis of his time. It remains a paradigm of how to respond to the theological crisis of any time – the meaning of Christ in our world. Romans will always be at the center of the argument. It shows someone grappling with a problem and finding expression to work through it. Today a new major work on the theology of justification and faith found on Romans has emerged, Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God, An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.

In general terms Paul’s problem was his struggle to lift emerging Christianity out of the realm of the Jewish law, and in Romans, according to Campbell, to combat the influence of a dominant teacher in the Christian community in Rome. Christianity had emerged as a splinter group of Judaism. The Jews had had the Law for a thousand years and many influential Christians at that time seemed to want to hang on to it. When the Christian message reached the Gentile world these Jewish Christians wanted the Gentile believers to be circumcised. The Law was a guarantee of God’s faithfulness. Paul, in Galatians, says that Christians have no need to keep circumcision and, by implication, the kosher dietary laws. At times he was a lonely voice. It was only because he held out for his belief that Christianity emerged as it did.

The basic premise of Campbell’s reinterpretation of Paul is that in the book of Romans Paul is not talking about a contract – not even a choice made within our heart. It is not a decision or an entity to be bargained for. Rather it is a single apocalyptic event that breaks into human history. Something dramatically new. It is a God given event that has taken place and that we are invited to enter into and which transforms you. Christ changes all the terms – everything. Romans is all about an apocalyptic redemption. You relate to it through faith. Not “I’m saved” but instead “I’m radically different”. It is an event of grace, God’s unilateral, exclusively loving movement into the world. The teacher in Rome had not seen this radically new thing; instead he insisted on God's wrath coming upon sin. Christ's action was an additional atonement for sin but it did not change the basic equation of law, sin and punishment. In other words, nothing has fundamentally changed. Justification theory has labored under this misreading of Paul, and in consequence the later argument of Romans chapters 5 to 8 makes no sense.

There was a large Jewish community in Rome and Christianity had been established there within at least 15 years of Jesus’ death. This is backed up by external evidence. Around 49 AD Aquila and Priscilla were among Jews expelled from Rome by Claudius and met Paul in Corinth (Acts 18:2). A contemporary Roman historian, Suetonius, speaks of riots among the Jews inspired by a character called “Chrestos” and this being the reason for the expulsion. The Romans had very little previous experience of the word “Christos” which means “the anointed/oiled one,” and it is thought the controversial factor could be Christianity, which provoked the disturbance. And that would imply a sizeable community presence. Later, in 63-64 AD, the Christians had become a significant minority – large enough to catch the attention of Nero - who blamed then persecuted them.

It seems very likely that the Roman Church had links with the Jerusalem Church. They were a traditional community with Jewish roots. Paul wanted to go there. He was afraid that they were on the wrong track and he wanted to make sure his version prevailed. His opening remarks in the letter to Romans are polite. This contrasts with his earlier letter to the Galatians which is often seen as the prelude to Romans. Galatians seeks to address the same problem of the Law – but his approach there is more direct and forceful. In Gal 2:11-14 Paul describes meeting with Peter in Antioch. Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned” (v. 11). He says that until representatives from James (the brother of Jesus and the leader of the Jerusalem Church) intervened, Peter used to eat with the Gentiles. After pressure from the James group he withdrew and kept himself separate. Peter follows the crowd and Paul calls him a hypocrite. If Peter has lived like a Gentile then how can he insist that Gentiles live like Jews (that is, having to be circumcised and obey the dietary laws)?

Galatians 2: 15-21 is almost the argument of Romans in a nutshell. It is Christ, living within us, that justifies us. It is the faith of Christ that makes me faithful. For Paul, the Law is too hard for anyone to keep. If you fail in one instance, you fail completely. The very prohibition of desire in the Law (10th commandment) makes it as Law impossible – you cannot prohibit desire you can only transform it. In Chapter 3 Paul uses the example of Abraham. Abraham is a model of faithfulness. Abraham’s faithfulness heralded God’s solution to the human problem, for all the tribes of the earth.. Jesus fulfills the promise given to Abraham – blessing all of his descendants – both Jew and Gentile.

Paul stood up to the chief of the apostles and to the brother of the Lord. He had established the Church in Galatia, and therefore he had some measure of authority there. The Church in Rome was different. He had much less power – advancing his argument from a huge distance to a community unknown to him and one with an established “teacher”. This “teacher”, a leader of the Roman church, was promoting adherence to the Jewish Law.


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