Romans Epistle Lesson Common Time Year A

Romans Common Time (Year A May 29-September 17)

 

            Paul wrote the letter to the Romans from Ephesus, Macedonia, or Corinth, between the winter of 57 and the spring of 58 AD.  Phoebe, deaconess, is the bearer of the letter.  Tertius is the one who is writing the letter as Paul dictates.  Other people with Paul are Timothy, Lucius, Jason, Sosipater, Gaius, Erastus, and Quartus. 

This letter is not polemical, but ambassadorial, seeking common ground with the readers so that they can support his mission to Spain. Paul explains the basic gospel that he preaches for that purpose.  He wants to bind Jew and Gentile together, and he does this in his explanation of the gospel. His plan is to go on to Spain and continue his apostolic ministry there. He has the hope of traveling to Rome and receiving support from the church there. Paul is on his way to Jerusalem to deliver the collection of the Gentile churches that Paul planned to alleviate the suffering of the church in Jerusalem.  However, authorities in Jerusalem will arrest him in Jerusalem in 58 AD. He will be in prison in Caesarea until 60 AD.  He would then go to Rome under arrest and be under house arrest until 62 AD. Paul writes to them not as their founder, but as one seeking to establish a new base of operation (after Ephesus) in the expansion of his mission westward to Spain. Paul never did establish this relationship, for the Romans martyred him before the development of this new mission. Nonetheless, the letter offers important insight into some of Paul's central beliefs and his understanding of how it is that God has acted for the salvation of the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This letter has had more influence on the development of biblical theology and the growth of the church than any other New Testament document. I mention only Augustine's encounter with Romans in the garden at Milan, Luther's reading of Romans in an Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, Wesley listening to a reading of Luther's preface to Romans in Aldersgate Street and the first edition of Karl Barth's Romerbrief rocking the theological world early in this century. One quickly realizes that this theological tractate is something special. 

Romans 5:1-5 is the transitional point between the two foci of Paul's letter. Paul's first four chapters discuss the miraculous justification we have received by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ. However, Paul next moves into an extended consideration of the spiritual life, of what it means to be one who receives God's gift. Thus, Paul himself sets up the tension between grace and good works as he discusses how a Spirit-filled Christian life should be lived. Whether Paul is seen as underscoring the nature of personal salvation (Romans 5-8), or God's salvation historical plan to unite Jews and Gentiles in Jesus Christ (Romans 9-11), the church has historically claimed Romans as Paul's quintessential statement of God's saving purposes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The letter grounds individual and corporate Christian life in the saving action of God in Jesus Christ.

In this regard, we need to note the apocalyptic worldview that provides the intellectual setting for the presentation of the gospel we read here. The understanding Paul had of the cosmic battle between good and evil that plays out in the life of the church and in every believer is just as important as, and indeed provides support for, his doctrine of justification by faith. The problem for modern readers, of course, is that the apocalyptic worldview feels strange. It will take some intellectual effort to bridge the gap the modern reader senses between oneself and Paul.

Another important development has been in new interpretations of the Law in Judaism. The point that Saunders makes concerning covenantal nomism seems self-evident considering the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law at Sinai. Obedience to this Law is the response to divine grace, not an attempt to gain divine favor. The Law was a basic expression of the distinctiveness of Israel as the people of God. In sociological terms, the Law was an identity marker and boundary. It served to distinguish Israel from surrounding nations. One can see this view of the Law in several ancient texts.

 

Leviticus 20:24-26

 But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples. 25 You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. 26 You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine.

 

Ezra 10:11 

Now make confession to the LORD the God of your ancestors, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives."

 

 Nehemiah 13:3 

When the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.

 

Psalms of Solomon 17:28

28 (26) And he shall gather together a holy people, whom he shall lead in righteousness, And he shall judge the tribes of the people that has been sanctified by the Lord his God.

 

III Maccabees 3:4

but because they worshiped God and conducted themselves by his law, they kept their separateness with respect to foods. For this reason they appeared hateful to some;

 

Book of Jubilees 22:16

16 And do thou, my son Jacob, remember my words, 

And observe the commandments of Abraham, thy father: 

Separate thyself from the nations, 

And eat not with them: 

And do not according to their works, 

And become not their associate; 

For their works are unclean, 

And all their ways are a Pollution and an abomination and uncleanness.

 

Epistle of Aristeas 139, 142 

In his wisdom the legislator … surrounded us with unbroken palisades and iron walls to prevent our mixing with any of the other peoples in any matter. … So, to prevent our being perverted by contact with others or by mixing with bad influences, he hedged us in on all sides with strict observances connected with meat and drink and touch and hearing and sight, after the manner of the Law.

 

Further, Philo, in Moses 1.278 said that a people “which shall dwell alone, not reckoned among other nations … because in virtue of the distinction of their peculiar customs they do not mix with others to depart from the ways of their fathers.” A funerary inscription from Italy praises a woman “who lived a gracious life inside Judaism.” 

Consistent with the above is that these writings refer to Gentiles as those who do not have the Law, and thus are sinners. They are “without the Law.” The desire to live within the Law is what distinguishes the sinner from the righteous. 

The nation also had a sense of privilege due to the Law. 

The laws that gained in prominence as the Jews lived among Gentiles were Sabbath, circumcision, and dietary laws. 

It seems likely that readers of this letter would recognize that when Paul refers to Law, his concern is for the identification of the promise of the covenant with Law, and thus with an ethnic restriction. Paul wanted to free the promise and Law for a wider number of recipients, and thus broaden the saving purpose of God.

Again, the challenge for the modern reader is that our immediate cultural and intellectual context is not that of covenant, and certainly not as understood by Judaism. It will take some intellectual effort to bridge this gap as well. Paul will point to the universal plight of humanity by pointing to two things. One is the universal awareness of the divine, even while human beings turn away from the divine, creating images they can manage. Two is the universal awareness of right and wrong, even while human beings justify their moral failure, and convince themselves that what is wrong is right.

Paul is writing at a time of religious eclecticism with which many of us today identity. He is trying to break through the noise by explaining to the Christians in Rome, people whom he had not met, the nature of his gospel. This was one of the areas in which opponents within the church had attacked him. The other area of attack was ad hominem, in that they said he was not a true apostle, a charge to which he responds in Galatians 1-2, II Corinthians 10-13, and Philippians 3. However, his gospel also came under attack. He responds in Galatians 3-6 to this attack, and Romans is a continuation and expansion of that argument.

The difficulties to which I am pointing us, however, do not need to blind us as modern readers to the common ground we share with Paul. Spiritually, many people are finding their own way, privately, to a friendly god that is like a close friend who is always there, listens, and gives advice. The advice offered happens to agree with that which we already want to do or believe. Paul will make a quite different argument, of course. He will argue that we need to take the way God addressed Israel seriously as a word from God. We also need to take seriously the shift that has taken place through Christ. By implication, I think, we can readily imagine what Paul would say to the new religions that have arisen since his time. 

Here is a summary of the argument in Romans. In 1:1-15, we find a brief introduction, and in 1:16-17 we find a statement of the theme. Paul will begin Part I of his argument in 1:18-3:20 by pointing us to the universal need humanity has demonstrated it has due to following constructing and pursuing its own image of God, following the dictates of the law of conscience, or following the Jewish Law. The need is universal because it all fails. Humanity needed God to say something to make it clear who God was, which Paul describes in 3:21-5:21, pointing to the universal answer to the universal dilemma by pointing to the saving action of God in Jesus Christ that opens the way of faith, and therefore apart from the Law. His point is that faith has really been the way of the people of God from the beginning, with Abraham. He will apply this re-definition to the people of God as individuals in Chapters 6-8. The people of God now live apart from the Law, but instead live united to Christ symbolized in baptism.  The people of God now live in the power of the Spirit, allowing them to live in the intimacy of being children of God. He will also argue for one people of God, an issue that has been in the background but brought to explicit attention in Chapters 9-11 as he argues for Jew and Gentile forming one people of God. As already noted, the focus of his argument has been on faith, looking at it from various viewpoints. He concludes his argument by offering his wisdom or insight into how this redefinition of the people of God applies to how the people of God will live their lives in 12:1-15:13. As I have come to expect from Paul, it does not surprise me that he will have an emphasis on love in Chapters 12-14 and an emphasis on hope in the first part of Chapter 15. 

Romans 1:16-17, 3:22b-31 (Year A May 29 – June 4) Romans 1:16-17 is a statement of the theme of the letter. Paul had never visited Rome, and thus he was writing to a church with which he had no personal history (although chapter 16 certainly indicates that he was acquainted with many of the people in the church at Rome). After an especially lengthy salutation (1:1-15), Paul succinctly articulates the theological convictions that he intends to explore more fully in the body of the letter.

Paul writes this letter because he wants to explain the gospel. The letter is so important to an understanding of Pauline thought for this reason.  No other letter captures the center of his teaching quite like this one.

 ¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel (εὐαγγέλιον); it is the power of God for salvation (σωτηρίαν), health, well-being, and deliverance; “Salvation” in the everyday sense in the Greco-Roman world connoted health or well-being. However, in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Scriptures of Israel, this noun was used to translate Hebrew words that conveyed God’s acts of deliverance or rescue, and this is a better analog for the way that Paul uses the word to characterize the concrete effects of the cross. The theme of Paul’s gospel is that God offers salvation to both Jew and Gentile based on faith. Such salvation is to everyone who has faith, trust in God in a way that excludes any thought of deserving this salvation or good news. Faith is trust in God’s grace, not in one’s own merit.  It is the act of receiving into ourselves the love of God, and this in all humility, gratitude, and joy.  It has both a negative and a positive aspect.  Positive in the sense of a trust in God’s limitless goodness, negative in the sense that one becomes aware of one’s own lack of righteousness and indeed despair at ever being able to achieve righteousness by one’s own effort.  Faith is an attitude toward God that involves an attitude toward the self. It shuts out all trust in one’s own deserving.  This attitude of faith, Paul is going to insist in this letter, is the sole condition of salvation.^[1] Such salvation is to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Paul makes it clear the good news has universal impact. The emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from Rome in 49 AD, and thus, Gentiles gained influence in the structure of the church. In 1:18-3:20, Paul will stress the universality of the gospel by showing the universal need for its message. He will want us to see clearly the truth of the human condition as one of alienation from each other, ourselves, nature, and God. He will want to show in this letter that God has not abandoned humanity in this lost condition. Rather, the event of Christ opens the way to peace with God and life in the Spirit.  ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God is revealed (ἀποκαλύπτεται). It becomes clear that Paul gives a new interpretation to “righteousness.”  The Old Testament seems to imply that God treats as righteous those who were already righteous.  For Paul, however, God treats as righteous (justifies) the one who is still a sinner.  In other words, justification does not refer to anything positive or negative about the person who is justified.^[2] It would at least appear that justification is a purely objective act of God. God attributes righteousness to the believer because God is righteous. The emphasis is on the justifying act or the attributing of righteousness to the believer. The righteous quality of the character of God is the source of treating the one who has faith as righteous. The gospel reveals this righteousness. Such righteousness does not have its foundation in the ability of a person to obey the Law but arises out of the event of faith within the believer. This event acknowledges the truth of what has happened in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The event character of the gospel is clear. An event in history in the person of Jesus Christ transforms our view of God, humanity, and the nature of the dealings God has with the world and the world has with God. 

As the covenant righteousness of the Creator this righteousness of God is the dawning of the new creation, even though for Paul the eschatological manifestation or epiphany to all the world is still to come. ^[3]The creaturely reality itself is a process oriented to a future consummation. True, the righteousness of God will be revealed in the end time, but the gospel of Jesus Christ already demonstrates it. The implication is that the righteousness of God is ambiguously present in the world. It means that the praise of the creatures toward God is an anticipation of the eschatological praising of God that will occur at the end. In substance, what the apostle says about the righteousness of God being revealed through the gospel is close to what Jesus said about the breaking in of the reign of God and its salvation. The gospel is not just making known the once-for-all act of salvation in Jesus Christ, but that the act of proclamation is itself an act of salvation on the part of God.^[4]

Such righteousness is through faith for faith, expressing in rhetorical way that faith is the beginning and the end of the gospel he preaches. Even as it is written in Habakkuk 2:4, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Paul is showing the unity that exists between the Old Testament and himself in his understanding of righteousness. He accomplishes this unity through the fresh revelation of the gospel that brings the Old Testament to its fulfillment. Obviously, God has done something new in Jesus Christ that allows Paul to look upon the ways of God in the Old Testament in a new way. While Paul will use some of the traditional rabbinic method, he will not rely upon their approach in terms of content. What Paul will need to show is that this gospel meets the universal need of humanity. He will need to show that the human situation as disclosed in the gospel is universal, and that therefore the offer of faith in Christ meets a universal need. Now, although Paul used the terminology and thought patterns of the first century AD, I would suggest that preachers and theologians have the same important task today, even if some of the terminology must change.

The letter explains the kerygma, the fundamental beliefs as Paul expressed them in his preaching and teaching.  What follows, therefore, becomes extremely important in understanding the primitive Christian faith.  This letter is an explanation of the gospel Paul preached, the news that this gospel can free people from the bondage of sin and death, for it is an expression of God’s power.  This gospel is an expression of God’s righteousness, which is by grace.  It is only by faith one is justified, only by faith is one righteous.  No works of the law or racial decent can justify anyone. The gospel proclaims the action of God for the salvation of everyone, based on the righteousness that comes through faith.  Romans 1:18-11:36 seek to explain, amplify, and add to, the theme.  Paul does this by discussing the unity of all person’s in sin (1:18-3:20), the significance for salvation of Jesus Christ (3:21-4:25), the new life available to the person in Christ (5:1-8:39), and the place of the Jewing people in the history of salvation (9:1-11:36).

This gospel is a message of hope.  This gospel is a message of God actively realizing that hope in people.  This gospel is a message of faith.  This gospel is a message of universal hope for deliverance.  There can be no doubt where Paul stands on these issues.  People do not have to wonder if the world is “thin,” disclosing its reality only by means of math and science, for God has offered a revelation in the unique event of Jesus Christ. People do not have to wonder if their lives are empty and meaningless, for God filled the course of the life of Jesus with meaning. People do not have to wonder if the universe and therefore their lives are without purpose, for the destiny of all things is to reflect the glory or beauty of God. People are not left hopeless, for there is a gospel of deliverance.  People do not have to wonder if God cares, for God has used divine power to accomplish salvation, liberation, and healing.  People do not have to “earn” salvation, for deliverance comes through a personal trust in the event of salvation, Jesus Christ.  People do not have to wonder if any gender, economic class, or race of people is exempt from the alienated plight of humanity, for sin and evil cut through the heart of everyone. Therefore, people also know that no one is excluded from this gospel, for its call is to everyone.

Martin Luther recounts his understanding of this passage and the significance it had in his life.

 

I greatly longed to understand Paul’s epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the justice of God,” because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that “the just shall live by his faith.” Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “justice of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.^[5]

 

In 3:21-31, Paul wants to define justification. He begins by describing the faith fellowship with Christ that is the source and goal of the Christian life. The only way out of the human dilemma described in 1:18-3:20, that the law cannot make one right with God, self, or each other, Paul wants to discuss the gift of rightness with God through faith fellowship with Christ.

Paul does not tire of reminding us of the transforming significance of the event of Jesus Christ. ²¹ Nevertheless, now, due to the new and transforming act of God that is apart from law, as an alternative to the Law, the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God has been disclosed (πεφανέρωται), and is attested (μαρτυρουμένη, given witness to) by the law and the prophets. God has manifested divine justice — divine righteousness — apart from the Law. Manifest in the atoning death of Christ is the righteousness of God that was attested by the Law and the prophets as revealed in the future, as he says in 1:2. Paul makes the point that the message about Christ has as its content the event that as such is the revelation of the righteousness of God to which the Law and the prophets bore witness. We find the combination of “apart from the Law” and “witnessed to by the Law.” Here is an important sign that Paul is not offering a diatribe against the Law, but rather, the wrong use of the Law. The Old Testament is a record of the inability of the people to or the kings to abide by the Law. The Law also clearly set a boundary between the people of God and the rest of the world. The saving concern of God is far beyond one ethnic group, and the Law and the prophets testify to this truth. We also find here an intertwining of the two aspects of the apocalyptic view of revelation, the eschatological and the provisional. The witness of the law and the prophets has the final fulfillment in view. To decipher the meaning is beyond human capacity. More generally, this means that the plan of God for history is communicated in hidden form in the words of the prophets. The provisional disclosure of end-time events can take place, not only in the form of visions but also in instruction on the hidden eschatological meaning of the words of the prophet. The content of these mysteries has been actualized as a historical fact by the cross of Christ. This content is the righteousness of God, the historical fulfillment of which the law and the prophets proclaim to be a divine necessity. The revelation the gospel imparts is still provisional. The decisive and definitive revelation remains in the future.^[6] 22 The righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God through faith in (διὰ πίστεως or of or even from)^[7] Jesus Christ. Given the difficulty of how we translate this phrase into English, we can put the matter as a question: Is Paul declaring that Jesus is the object of our faith? Or is Jesus' faith (or faithfulness) Paul's subject in his enigmatic assertion? Whatever conclusion one makes regarding this scholarly debate seems in the end immaterial since both Jesus' faith (or faithfulness) and our own faith form a mystical nexus that defines our identity as believers (cf. Mark 9:14-29, especially v. 24). Either faith in or the faithfulness of Jesus is the righteousness of God for all who believe. The mission of Paul was not to erect barriers, but to tear them down. Yet, this strange union of humanity points us to the saving separation between God and humanity. The illusion that some people have an advantage over others is one we must discard.^[8]The historical fulfillment of that which Paul writes in verse 21 is only for believers in verse 22. Both Jew and Gentile need a righteousness that is not their own. Paul has made his point that the law cannot make anyone righteous.  He now goes on to show precisely how God has made this a possibility.  All humanity has sinned and has not been able to do what God required.  Those requirements were known in the law of the heart for the Gentiles and in the written code for the Jew.  However, apart from the Law as a written code, God has made righteousness available to humanity.  The new way to righteousness, though promised in the Old Testament, was made available through faith in Jesus Christ.  At this point Paul relies on an analogy from the Jewish sacrificial system.  God presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement for a humanity that could not redeem itself through law.  In this way opening the possibility of righteousness through faith fulfills the justice of God.

            Barth^[9] says that in Jesus, God becomes a secret. God is made known as the unknown, speaking in eternal silence. God protects divinity from all intimate companionships and from all the impertinence of religion. God becomes a scandal to the Jews and the Greeks foolishness. In Jesus the communication of God begins with a rebuff, with the exposure of a vast chasm, with the clear revelation of a great stumbling-block. One needs no preliminaries to faith, no required standard of education or intelligence, no peculiar temper of mind or heart, and no economic status. One needs no human avenues of approach, no “way of salvation.’ One needs no ladder to faith that one must scale. Faith is its own initiation, its own presupposition. Upon whatever rung of the ladder of human life people may happen to be standing, they are capable of faith. The demand of faith passes diagonally across every type of religious or moral temperament, across every experience of life, through every department of intellectual activity, and through every social class. For faith is both simple and difficult, scandal and hazard, and a “Nevertheless.” Faith presents the same embarrassment and the same promise. Faith is a leap into the void. Faith is possible for all, only because for all faith is equally impossible. As he sees it, the illusion of supposed religious, moral, or intellectual experience as a sure ground of salvation is something that faith removes. 

^22bFor there is no distinction. This way is universal, to Jew and Gentile, showing that an important element of the mission of Paul is to remove barriers rather than erect them. Then, in a memorable statement, ²³ since all have sinned (ἥμαρτον) and fall short of the glory (δόξης) of God. Jews, like the Greeks, are "under the power of sin," which is one of, if not the fundamental human problem Paul addresses in Romans; it is this matter that Paul takes up in verses 21-28. Falling short of the glory of God suggests the beauty of pre-fall harmony that humanity had with nature. Sin interrupted the peaceful relations God intended with humanity, that human beings would have with each other, and that nature itself would possess. The harmony intended between the finite and Infinite, between the temporal and the eternal, will be again in the future unveiling of Jesus Christ. Ironically, the very Law through which many Jews erroneously believed they could achieve righteousness gives testimony to God's righteousness. 

Romans 3:24-26 may be part of a pre-Pauline formula. It consists of one long sentence.

Given that humanity now falls short of the glory God intended for it in creation, ²⁴ they are now, in a transforming event, justified (δικαιούμενοι). The language of justification is forensic in nature; it draws on the language of the courtroom to refer to the re-establishment of a right relationship between the believers. The event of justification is the decisive demonstration of the righteousness of God, shown specifically in the death of Christ. Yet, even this demonstration is provisional in that its decisive and definitive fulfillment still awaits the future act of God. 

Paul himself seems to distinguish three stages in the Christian life: justification, by which one enters into by faith; sanctification, by which one enters the Christian community through new life; and finally, salvation, which is the future life in which we hope to share.  Paul separates each of these stages in thought.  Time does not separate justification and sanctification since sanctification begins at the moment of justification.  Indeed, many of the differences as expressed above are the result of the confusion of these ideas.^[10]

Justification occurs by his grace (χάριτι) as a gift, unmerited, spontaneous kindness toward us, through the redemption (ἀπολυτρώσεως) that is in Christ Jesus. “Redemption” is a financial image in which the self-offering of Jesus Christ for us speaks of an event that will take place only with the appearance of Christ. Yet, this strand of thinking is slender. ^[11] God sets us free from the guilt, power, and consequences of sin in and through Christ. However, this setting free does not occur by God paying a ransom to Satan. For Paul, the work of Christ involves defeating Satan rather than buying him off. Redemption suggests the image of humanity as hopelessly bound to sin and death, when one came who, out of pure love and great cost to himself, has come to set us free. The emphasis in the image of redemption is the cost God paid for human redemption. The wrath of God on sin and death is just, but so is the offer of rectification for humanity by the event of Christ as the gift of grace. The gospel Paul preached was the setting right of human relationships with God by an act of generosity that depends on no payment any human being can make.^[12] Thus, Paul puts forward the divine solution: despite our entrenched individual and corporate failings, everyone -- both Jew and Greek, receive the gift of justification and redemption. Although this sacrifice is in continuity with the divine promises to Israel, its saving effect is as a ransom and expiatory sacrifice for humanity, participation in which is through faith. Paul thinks of the death of Christ in terms of the sin offering on the Day of Atonement. In brief, Christ’s death was effective in dealing with human sins because he represented the sinners and by his death destroyed their sins. That is, Christ ended the condition of human beings as under the alienating power of sin. In the history of Jesus Christ, God has shown us grace. Divine grace is mercy and love. 

Barth^[13] says the creation of this situation is a new creation, not a mere new eruption, extension, or unfolding, of that old “creative evolution” of which we form a part, and shall remain a part, until the end of our lives. Between the old and the new creation is the end of this human being and of this world. The “Something” that the Word of God creates is of an eternal order. It does not emerge from what we know. It does not develop out of what we knew. Compared with our “something” the new creation remains nothing. The righteousness of God in us and in the world is not a form of human righteousness competing with other forms. When we think of the mercy of God as an element in history or as a factor in human spiritual experience, one emphasizes its untruth. As Barth^[14] reflects on the redemption offered in Christ, he says that Jesus of Nazareth is one amongst other possibilities of history, but the possibility that possesses all the marks of impossibility. His life is a history within the framework of history, a concrete event amid other concrete events, an occasion limited by the boundaries of time, and belonging to the texture of human life. However, his history is pregnant with meaning. In the history of Jesus humanity is filled with the voice of God. One who gazes upon this earthly fragment of the world, and perceives in the life of Jesus, and beyond it, the redemption that shall come. One who hears the creative voice of God, and looks for no other, but awaits this redemption from this voice of God. 

Christ is the one ²⁵ whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement (ἱλαστήριον, propitiation) by his blood. By means of an unfathomable sacrifice -- the sacrifice of Jesus -- God demonstrated "his righteousness." This sacrifice required the offering of blood, specifically, Jesus' blood. The redemption effected by Jesus comes about through his being offered as a “sacrifice of atonement” by God that demonstrates God’s faithfulness and results in the justification of the one who has faith in Jesus. Further, expiation suggests that the death of Christ is sacrificial in that it pays the penalty of sin before a God who is righteous and cannot accept an unholy people. If we look close at the image in the passage, we will avoid some fruitless paths. God is active in the offering of this sacrifice, not the recipient of it. God put forward the sacrifice. God and Christ are one in the cross. The acceptable quality of the death of Christ arises because of his life, in which he offered himself willingly. The sacrifice involving blood in the Old Testament was to be ritually pure and precious. Yet, people could offer such sacrifice without any desire to obey the rest of the covenant with the Lord. We find prophets saying that God has grown tired of sacrifices that did not represent the transformed course of their lives. Thus, the people can get to the point that anything they offer to the Lord becomes unclean, for a sacrifice can become unclean and thus not acceptable if the one who offers it is not truly repentant (Haggai 2:13-14). The point is, we must not abstract the death of Christ from the course of his life. His death does not have expiatory power just because it is the shedding of blood. Christ’s death was acceptable because of the righteous and faithful quality of life, that is, he did so willingly. We find this notion of the atoning and sacrificial character of the death of Jesus becoming the basis for the traditional theological designation of the priestly office of Jesus.^[15] Jew and Gentile need a righteousness not their own. Paul could call the death of Christ an expiation here. This is a specialized, more metaphorical form of the expiatory concept by the understanding of Jesus as the expiatory sacrifice, as here. This idea takes its point of departure from the language about the blood of Christ poured out for us, which probably has its root in the tradition of the Lord’s Supper.^[16] We need to stress that God put forward this sacrifice.^[17]  Expiation ties in with the idea of a natural link between acts and their consequences. In expiation, the doers are released from the damaging consequences of their acts. The sacrifice of Christ turns away the eschatological judgment and wrath of God mentioned in 1:18, which is itself the consequence of the human situation as sinner and therefore source of the alienation with God, each other, and even inner alienation. Yet, expiation is possible only in certain cases and presupposes divine permission. The word describes the death of Christ as the place of expiation that God had prepared. Thus, the death of Christ is the new event in the history of the relationship between God and humanity that sets aside the act of human sinfulness and the consequence of eschatological judgment, which humanity richly deserves. When we link our lives through faith to his death, we receive the peace and freedom of no longer living under the act-consequence prison. Thus, the death of Christ has expiatory efficacy for individuals as they for their part link their own deaths to the death of Christ. Clearly, God and Christ are one in the cross, the cross being totally the action of God in Christ.^[18] God has a plan of reconciliation. The restraining of eschatological wrath aims at the demonstration of the covenant faithfulness of God in the atoning death of Christ by which God sets aside the destructive effects of divine wrath and is thus an attribute of divine love. The picture is that God, in holiness, cannot stand sin in the divine presence and thus has “anger” toward humanity.  Nevertheless, God also, in divine love for people, gave Christ as the one sacrifice that would make our sacrifices acceptable.

I have had many difficulties with this notion of the expiatory death of Christ for us. I do not think I have resolved them. I can share what I am thinking at this point in my life. I keep turning around the significance of the death of Christ in my mind and heart. I think my main difficulty is that my self-evaluation is that I have done a decent job at heeding the encouragement of mom to be a good boy. Thus, I have not lived with the notion that I justly stand under the threat of the eschatological judgment of God. That raises another issue. I am mostly concerned with what I do with my life here, in the brief time and limited space that in inhabit and influence. It is hard for me to take seriously what my life will look like after death. Maybe we “fade to black” as some would say. Maybe there is reward or punishment. Paul seems sure of all this because of the resurrection of Jesus, and I know I should be, but I must say that such matters do not influence the course of my life. However, I understand I lie. I put forward an image of myself that I want others to see in hopes that they will see me as a good man. Yet, that public image I present is far better than my inner world of thought as well as my actions done in secret. When I consider the expiatory character of the death of Christ with the broken character of my personal life that needs mending, of a life sick enough to need healing, and a life imprisoned by unfulfilled desires of the heart, then I know I need a path that lifts me out of the act-consequence prison. In this sense, the grace and love of God toward humanity is an event embodied in Jesus Christ. The death of Christ for us is the assurance of forgiveness. Divine forgiveness has become event in this death. Forgiveness of fault, of my falling short of what God intended my life to be, and of how I have inflicted my brokenness upon others, is the only way out of the act-consequence system that can become a violent and repetitive cycle. Here is a reason forgiveness is so important in Christian teaching. In human relationships, act-consequence is usually a good thing. Yet, it can also imprison people in an endless cycle of violence, inflicting human judgment for sins committed generations ago. The way out of the violent cycle is the difficult journey of forgiveness, in which the offended party surrenders what may be justice in order to restore peace and right relationship. Thus, I keep circling around that event. Some days I find it harder than others, but I live with the hope that my life lived in fellowship with the risen Lord through the Spirit of God at work in my will also mean a life with God in eternity. 

Sadly, the early Reformation saw this passage as the basis for holding that human sin obliterated the image of God in humanity. The good news is that as powerful and as pervasive as is human misery and alienation, it has not obliterated the fact that God made us in the divine image. It would be granting to human action far too much power to suggest otherwise. In another sad development in Christian theology, this passage became the basis for saying that the death of Christ is a ransom paid to the devil and that the anger of God needed to be appeased. 

The sacrifice of Jesus in accord with the Law is of such a nature that it extends the righteousness of God to all who believe, including those outside the Law. The sacrifice is effective through faith (διὰ [τῆς] πίστεως). Note here again the indeterminate genitive case, but this time with the addition of the definite article τῆς found in some ancient manuscripts, which lends additional support to the alternative reading. Allowing then for this textual ambiguity, God achieves atonement for sin via faith -- Jesus' faith (or faithfulness) along with the faith that believers place in God's plan of "redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Yet, as Barth tirelessly points out, humanity keeps trying to develop its own path. The way of Law in Romans is the way of religion, morality, mysticism, self-righteousness, pharisaic humility, and piety in our time. Yet, it remains an illusion.^[19]God declares righteous those who are ungodly in the sense of the Jewish Law. The “ungodly” are those who do not belong to the ancient covenant people and are not righteous before God by works of the law. God declares the ungodly in this sense as righteous because of faith. By faith, those who are ungodly in terms of the law are righteous before God. Given all of this, humanity has no right to boast, for God has provided everything needed for salvation. For Paul, the Law has its limit in its Jewishness, while faith is open to Jew and Gentile alike. Yet, in all of this, Paul believes that faith will establish the Law rather than abolish it.^[20] God did this to show his righteousness (τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ) because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed. We are not to construe this overlooking of past sins as some sort of casual indifference by God. Rather, the abiding patience of God toward sin and sinners displays divine grace. Expiation suggests a natural link between acts and their consequences. In this case, those who commit themselves to the way of misery and alienation are released for this endless succession of act and consequence. This brings about forgiveness and puts the believer in the proper condition for being in the Divine presence. 

This divine forbearance had a purpose. ²⁶ It was to prove at the present time that God is righteous (δίκαιον, just) and that God justifies (δικαιοῦντα, which can mean to set right, to pronounce just, to vindicate, and to treat as righteous) the one who has faith in Jesus (τὸν ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ or, alternatively, 'who has the faith of Jesus).  

Here is a place where we need to pause to consider a translation difficulty from the Greek to the English. Regarding the faith of which Paul writes, a debate has proceeded for nearly 2,000 years over how one should translate Paul’s reference to the salvific effect of the “pistis christou.” It might be “faith in Christ,” a translation many think of as the more traditional, which emphasizes the action of the believer. Nevertheless, the grammar can also support a translation as “faith of Christ,” which refers to Christ’s own faithfulness to God. In starkest terms, the difference in the two translations is whether it is the faith, or perhaps better, the faithfulness Christ exhibited toward God that brings salvation to the world or it is the faith of individual faithful persons in Jesus’ faithfulness toward them that brings salvation.^[21] The former interpretation is a more inclusive reading that ultimately may permit the understanding that Christ’s action has power over Christian and non-Christian alike. Linguistic arguments on both sides are weighty and persuasive. They are not, however, new. In fact, the Alexandrian scholar Origen, working early in the third century, recognized the issue and concluded that he would be open to both senses of the term. In the contemporary context, this “both/and” reading strategy may well be the best.^[22] If one adopts that strategy, the simple phrase “from faith” would be full of meaning, for it would convey that Paul and the Romans are now one family because of the faithfulness of Christ to God which enables all who are faithful to Christ to come into relationship with God. 

There is an element of human response to God’s in-breaking power in this dominion of sin, but Paul’s reference to faith has more than a human dimension. God is the one doing the justifying or rectifying the human condition. Only God can pronounce anyone righteous. Paul has made it perfectly clear in 1:18-3:20 that humanity is vulnerable in its state of enslavement to sin. If we focus on the sequence of Paul in this passage, the righteousness of faith precedes the declaration of righteousness. That justification has the forensic sense of pronouncing righteous is a lasting Reformation insight. One can rightly cling to the basic Reformation insight that only faith fellowship with Jesus Christ, with no secondary aims, is the object of the divine sentence of justification respecting believers. The implications of faith for life are certainly included here, yet our righteousness before God does not consist primarily of these, but of faith.^[23]

The language of verses 3:25-26 is very dense, abstract, and difficult to pin down precisely. Using the terms “ransom” and “expiation” suggests that Paul was thinking of Christ’s death as a sin offering, probably in terms of the sin offering on the Day of Atonement. Barth^[24] says this analogy with Jesus is especially appropriate because the mercy seat is no more than a particular, though very significant, place. At this place the Kingdom of God is come near, so dear that here the coming and redeeming power of God are recognized, here God dwells with people and the divine communion with humanity is unmistakable. According to Pannenberg, “Ransom” has its origin in the Palestinian community and its notion of expiatory sacrifice, and this passage reflects that connection. In brief, Christ’s death was effective in dealing with human sins because he represented the sinners and by his death destroyed their sins, that is, brought to an end human beings as under the power of sin. For those in Christ, God need take no further action against their sin. Being “in Christ,” they share in his death and thus can have firm hope of sharing fully in his resurrection.^[25] While all this may well have been in the mind of Paul, to oversimplify a bit, Paul’s point seems to be that the redemption effected by Jesus comes about through his being offered as a “sacrifice of atonement” by God that demonstrates God’s faithfulness and also results in the justification of the one who has faith in Jesus. God provided a solution through the redemption of Christ Jesus, and this act serves as a proof of his righteousness in the present time. As an attribute of God, Paul makes grace the central expression of divine goodness.^[26] Although God has passed over former sins, he did so in order to show his own righteousness and to demonstrate that he justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Paul’s argument indicates that God previously overlooked sins. The law was present to reveal Sin, but until Jesus, there was not a solution to Sin’s death-grip on humanity.

To summarize verses 21-26, Paul says that the decisive demonstration of the righteousness of God is the death of Christ. The active event of the revelation of the righteousness of God in the atoning death of Christ results in the justification of believers. Note the sequence in these verses of fact of the righteousness of faith precedes the declaration of righteousness. The point is participation by faith in the atoning efficacy of the death of Jesus. God declares righteous those who are so based on faith. Faith is itself righteousness that counts before God. The point here is that the Law could ended because of the vicarious death of Christ for sin, God demonstrating covenant righteousness in this act, and we can respond only by faith, not by works of the Law, which makes us now righteous before God (verse 28).^[27]

²⁷ Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. The passage ends with a short and punchy set of rhetorical questions and retorts whereby Paul refutes some possible objections to the case he has made. There is no boasting in faith because to do so denies that faith exists.  Faith is the human response to the event of Jesus Christ, even human despair regarding the truth of the human condition.  Humanity has no right to boast. By what law (νόμου, better may be “principle”)? By that of works? No, but by the law (νόμου) of faith. ²⁸ For we hold that a person is justified (δικαιοῦσθαι) by faith apart from works prescribed by the law (νόμου). Humanity is the passive object of the justifying act of God. Paul makes a clear distinction between faith and Law.  The way of the Law is limited to the Jews and to those who could observe every part of the Law, both of which leave room for the individual to boast in his Jewishness and in his accomplishments.  The way of faith, however, is available to both Jew and Gentile and does not rest on obedience to any form of law, and therefore removes any foundation for boasting. ²⁹ Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, ³⁰ since God is one; and he will justify (δικαιώσει) the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. The ground for salvation must be universal if God is to be one.  However, salvation by Law and circumcision is not universal.  Only justification by faith fulfills that requirement. ³¹ Do we then overthrow the law (Νόμον) by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law (νόμον). His theological case does not nullify the Law but rather supports it. The Law can do this by being part of the history of salvation in that the Law reaches its goal in the death of Jesus.^[28] Law here refers to the whole covenant between God and Israel. Here we see that there was no conflict between God’s love and justice.  God is righteous, but God is also the one who declares the believer righteous.  The Jew looked at the Old Testament and saw law, obedience to Law, works, circumcision, and descent from Abraham.  Paul wants them to look deeper, and they will see not law, but promise; not works, but faith, of which circumcision is only a seal, and descent from Abraham is spiritual rather than physical. Despite this contrast, faith does not destroy the Law.  Rather, it is upheld by faith.  Paul will deal with this point in Chapter 5-8.  Now Paul takes the example of Abraham to show how even he was justified by faith. In the context of chapter 3, this verse has layers of meaning. First, as this chapter explicitly states in verses 19-20, the law does not have the power to justify. Thus, one cannot be rectified before God by doing the works of the law. Second, only God can justify humanity. 

Emphasizing the event of the revelation of God’s righteousness in this passage does not negate, however, the needed event of a human response. God reveals divine righteousness to humanity, and faith is crucial — both the faithfulness of Jesus to serve as an expiation and the faith exhibited by humanity to trust in the event of God’s saving act. Faith is double-sided. The transforming event that occurs at a moment in the past through Jesus Christ becomes a call for the transforming event of faith. There could be no human response without the work of God to offer an escape from the dominion of sin. God has provided a gift by grace, and this gift invites a response. Just as Abraham is reckoned righteous for believing in God in Romans 4 so also Paul claims that God will reckon righteous those who believe in the One who raised Jesus from the dead. In this cosmic drama, where sin reigns in the old age, God’s power has broken in and offered freedom to all. There is good news. The dominion of sin is over. For those who have faith, God has offered a way out — a move from the sphere of sin and Death to the sphere of Christ. While Romans 3 certainly reveals the depravity of humanity under the power of sin, it also bears witness to this offer from God who has the power to make things right.

Throughout this chapter, the focus has been on God. Is God unjust to inflict his wrath? By no means! Everyone is worthy of God’s wrath, because all — both Jew and Gentile — are under the power of sin. The good news of the gospel is that God has revealed divine righteousness through the faithfulness of Jesus to serve as an expiation by his blood. Those who have faith in Jesus can be justified by God only because they have accepted the witness to the event of the revelation of God’s power. God is faithful throughout this passage. Indeed, Romans 9-11 will more explicitly take up the defense of God’s continued faithfulness.

Romans 4:13-25 (through verse 17, Year A, Second Sunday in Lent and Year B, Second Sunday in Lent, Year A June 5-11) Paul begins a discussion of promise (ἐπαγγελία), faith, and hope. Paul is continuing his argument concerning the centrality of faith by pointing to the example of Abraham. He is showing that his teaching is a fulfillment of the Old Testament at its basic level, going behind the Torah from Moses to Abraham. Paul is implicitly assailing the Jewish view that all blessings came to Abraham because of his merit in keeping the Law, which he was supposed to have known in advance. The promise comes only to the people of faith. He now shifts to the part in Genesis 15 where it refers to the belief in God. The emphasis of Paul on humble trust is in line with the best elements of Judaism. The point of the passage before us is that Abraham was right with God because of his faith, not the Law or circumcision. Most of his Jewish contemporaries would prefer to say, “The law brings about righteousness,” Paul has argued resolutely that righteousness comes about through faith. The role of the Law shifts to the production of wrath. Thus, it is faith that justifies, and therefore, when God promises that he will be a father in Genesis 17:5, it means his descendants are through faith not circumcision or Law.  This promise could reach fulfillment only if God gives like to the dead, since Sarah has been childless and is too old for childbearing, and this God calls into existence the things that do not exist, connecting creation with the birth of this child. In the second of the Eighteen Benedictions, Paul would have prayed something like “Remember us unto life, O king, who delights in life. Who resembles You, O King, who orders death and restores life, and causes salvation (Yeshua) to spring forth? You are faithful to revive the dead. Blessed art thou, O L-rd, who revives the dead.” Contrary to human expectation, he had hope when it was not rational to do so, believing in the promise of God to him. He became a model for human believing. He believed in something impossible. Hope always leaves room for the gracious activity of God in our lives, families, communities, and nations. Paul is encouraging us to have the hope that Abraham had. An important reminder here is that the divine promise to Abraham for progeny was in line with his desire. The desire of his heart was to bear a child through his beloved Sarah. Human desire and divine promise coincide. An appeal to the promises of God would deprive them of any meaning if they did not respond to our deepest wants and needs. Finally, he shows that Christ is the revelation of this plan, or shall we say the clear setting forth of the plan, and it is through him that we are justified. Such considerations might lead us toward a practical application. Whenever people suppose themselves conscious of the emotion of nearness to God, whenever they speak and write of divine things, whenever sermon making and temple-building are thought of as an ultimate human occupation, whenever people are aware of divine appointment and of being entrusted with a divine mission, sin abounds. Being an heir of the promise, then, must depend on faith, so that the promise rests on grace (χάριν) toward those who share the faith of Abraham, who is father of us all, even as the promise finds its fulfillment.^[29] The essence of God is not available to us apart from this revelation, that God raised Jesus from the dead. We again see the significance of the moment or event in Christian teaching. Here is an area in which neither individuals nor communities can co-operate. Giving life to the dead is an act of God alone.^[30] Paul puts the resurrection of the dead alongside creation out of nothing. Paul is suggesting that the Easter event and the resurrection on which sets Christian hope is limitless as creation. Only the Creator can awaken the dead, and resurrection from the dead shows what it means to be Creator. The act of creation finds consummation in the resurrection. Resurrection is the supreme enactment of the will of the Creator that wills the existence of creatures. Indeed, by using this imagery, Paul makes a connection between God overcoming the childlessness of Abraham and Sarah (“gives life to the dead”) with creation (“calls into existence the things that do not exist”).^[31] As stated in Genesis 15:6, God considered the faith of Abraham to be righteousness (δικαιοσύνην), a righteousness has before the Law and before circumcision. Paul unites himself and his readers to Abraham by applying it to the new situation. God will also consider our faith today in God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead as righteousness. This Jesus was handed over to death for our trespasses, which suggests expiation, releasing us from the damaging consequences of our actions. In the death of Jesus, the Father has acted to reconcile the world. Confession of Jesus as Lord gives hope of deliverance in connection with belief in the apostolic proclamation that God has raised him from the dead, and by this faith, we are righteous before God. This implies on a personal relation of individuals to Jesus Christ, as well as membership in the church founded by the apostolic missionary proclamation and adherence to its common confession of the apostolic faith.^[32] The Father was at work in this event according to divine providential directing of the course of history. The sending of the Son by the Father aims at the vicarious expiatory death on the cross.^[33] The love and grace of God show themselves in the event of the righteous and faithful course of the life of Jesus, but especially in his death and resurrection. The Father raised him from the dead for our justification (δικαίωσιν), bringing us into right relation to God. Humanity is broken. We live out the course of life journey by mending the brokenness. Grace is the glue to that holds it together.^[34] Humanity needs healing. Paul shows that the resurrection reminds him of our forgiveness. The Greek Fathers understood the resurrection of Christ as the cause of justification.  Many Latin Fathers attempted to integrate the two ideas, death and resurrection, but this attempt unfortunately minimized the causality of the resurrection, for they actually started looking upon the resurrection only as an appendage or even as an exemplary confirmation of the death of Jesus, which they considered to be the real cause of the forgiveness of sins and justification. For Paul, the resurrection is confirmation of the identity of Jesus as the Son and therefore our Lord (Romans 1:4, I Corinthians 15:14-15), it is the basis for the atoning value of his death (I Corinthians 15:17), expresses the acceptance by the Father of the faithfulness of Jesus that led him to the cross and affirms the efficacy of his death (Romans 3:25-26, 6:7-10), it results in the promise and hope of the Christian for life with God (I Corinthians 15:20-23, II Corinthians 4:14, Romans 8:11, Colossians 1:18), and thus calls believers to a moral and spiritual awakening (Romans 6:1-11). Faith involves accepting as applied to oneself the promise of God. The promise addresses us and reaches us. Such faith gives rise to hope, showing that hope rests upon faith. While the promise connects positively with human desire, we cannot accomplish on our own and by our own action our salvation, the wholeness and fulfillment of our existence, its identity with its destiny to be truly itself. No more can we rationally expect the changes and chances of life to do this for us. The hope of fulfillment, of salvation, transcends all that is possible by what we do or in the ordinary course of things. To that extent, we have here a hope against all hope that normal who gives to life to the dead and being to what is not. Paul found this promise expressed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, for the significance of this event puts the situation the situation of all of us in a new light.^[35] Living with faith and hope recognizes that we live in a world with plenty of darkness to go around, but they also recognize that we live with the responsibility to bring light.

Romans 5:1-8 (Year A June 12-18, also adding 9-11 in Year A, Third Sunday in Lent), Paul draws out the consequences of this new perspective of faith he has described in Chapter 4 for the individual believer in the present and the future. As he often does in his writings, Paul lifts before his readers the qualities of faith, hope, and love as unique gifts. Verses 1-5 offer a summary of the character and qualities of the new life in Christ. Paul shifts to legal terminology. “Justified” (Δικαιωθέντες) in Roman law refers to a judge who knows the accused person is guilty but pronounces the defendant free anyway. We might think of it as a pardon. Human beings receive this pardon through the event or act of faith (πίστεως). Chapter 4 has explained that Abraham received his pardon by his faith and obviously apart from the law of Moses. This event or act of faith that opens the door to our pardon and gives us peace (εἰρήνην), reconciliation, creative harmony, inner security, and serenity with God. The first effect of such pardon is peace, in contrast to the wrath or judgment of God of which human sin is a reasonable consequence. The human acts of rebellion Paul describes in 1:18ff, the fact that Jew and Gentile alike are under the power of sin, have a consequence in judgment. This divine judgment shows itself in allowing human beings to reap the consequences of their actions. Humanity reaps what it sows. Yet, the human situation is not hopeless. The death of Christ has the expiatory effect of removing the reasonable consequences of human sin in eschatological judgment from God. Human beings can experience the effects of the event of expiation through the response of faith that brings the person into a new covenant. The death of Christ breaks the vicious circle of act-consequence that would have meant the destruction of humanity. To clarify, we are the ones who need this peace and reconciliation with God, which has occurred in Jesus Christ. God is already well-disposed toward humanity, as the Father unites with the Son in the cross. Such peace with God gives us access in the sense of a social introduction to the God who give us grace. Since God gives us this grace, it represents the divine self-giving. We can stand or abide in this grace (χάριν). Christ brings us close God, so close that we share in the hope (ἐλπίδι) of the glory (δόξης) of God. The glory of God is human destiny, created as we are in the divine likeness. This destiny is part of the restoration that will come in the new age to come. Such hope has the orientation toward the eschatological gifts of resurrection and life. Obviously, this destiny is not our present. Such is the nature of hope. Our present includes suffering, even as the Lord Jesus suffered. Our hope helps us to rejoice in suffering for Christ. Our hope helps us to allow suffering to produce the virtue of endurance, perseverance, or courage. It suggests living faithfully even as one suffers for Christ. Such courage in the face of suffering will produce one who can withstand the tests of a Christian life, which is character (δοκιμήν). Living faithfully through the tests of life is a matter of our integrity. Yet, such endurance and withstanding of tests derives from the hope we have for our destiny. We are standing or abiding in this grace, which invites us to live faithfully and persevere among the tests of life. Thus, the virtues of which Paul writes do not derive from our efforts, but from the turn away from ourselves and toward the hope and grace with experience through Christ. Withstanding such tests, coming full circle, produces hope. Yet, this hope is not just dreaming or a nice idea. It has its basis the love (ἀγάπη) or grace of God seen in Jesus Christ and poured like life-giving water into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is the personal divine presence that the pardoned believer enjoys. We have here the assurance of fellowship with God in the link between love and Spirit. Christian love is participation in the love God has for the world. ^[36] The love of neighbor participates in the love God has for the world. The love of God is the destiny of humanity, but the present gift of the Holy Spirit is an anticipation of that destiny. Pardon, then, is one element that opens us to deeper dimensions of our relationship with God. The human situation is one that participates in rebellion from God. In Christ, we receive pardon for that rebellion. However, God did not stop at pardoning us for our rebellion. We have a filial relationship to the Father. Being in this relation is the true content of the new relation to God due to our regeneration through the gift of the Spirit. This new relation is primarily a fellowship with Christ on his destined way to crucifixion and resurrection. The new relation is participation in the filial relation of Jesus to the Father and therefore in the intra-Trinitarian life of God. Yes, this passage is an important source for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Would it be possible for the great, true, real God to look like Jesus?  That is what the church has always claimed: Not simply that Jesus was God, but that God was Jesus.  From the beginning, this is what all the fuss was about.  The doctrine of the Trinity, the belief that God has met us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was not an invention of the early church to make Jesus God but was an attempt on the part of the early church, using the language and philosophy at hand, to try to describe the God whom they met in Jesus.  It is our claim that when we look at Jesus, we see as much of God as we ever hope to see. The new relation rests upon the hope of the inheritance of eternal life by the resurrection from the dead.

In Romans 5:6-8, through justification and reconciliation, we also possess the Holy Spirit, whom the grace of God gives to us. While we were rebelling against God, God was still reaching out to us in a demonstration of divine love (ἀγάπην). God pours out the Holy Spirit upon the very people who were under the judgment of the wrath of God, thereby embracing godless people. While only the eschatological future of God will consummate this revelation of divine love, the gift of the Holy Spirit makes believers already certain of it. Those justified before God live now in a state of peace with God. God has poured out the love of God into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Spirit refers to the grace in which we have achieved a firm standing. Paul intricately connects the love and grace of God so closely that they are the same thing. Paul causes us to consider the death of a man so long ago can still be significant to us today. Moments are significant in nature, as natural events can have significant and long-term effects, mass extinctions and planetary collisions that bring the conditions for the creation of life among the most obvious. Events are significant in the development of human thought, the emergence of philosophy in Greece, the Bhagavat Gita and Buddha in Indian, Confucius in China, fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Reformation and the Enlightenment were noteworthy events that marked either advances or declines in human progress toward freedom. While the notion of the scandal of particularity related to Jesus has been noted for a long time, the scandal is not so much particularity, which have their parallels in nature and philosophy, but the scandal of revelation. What Paul points us toward is an event that is not natural, and it does not emerge out of human experience. Rather, this event is a divine disclosure that reveals the true and the good. This event calls us to turn toward it and orient our lives around it. This event becomes an encounter with the truth rather than a calm discovery of it. The encounter with this event involves the significance of an event of long ago, but is reality involves the subjective encounter with the Holy Spirit. We reveal our weakness and ungodliness in that we needed this revelation to have this encounter. Our personal response orients us to the divine event of the death of Christ. Human beings are weak in that they could not accomplish for themselves what God has done in Christ. Their weakness is a sign of their ungodliness in their turn from relying upon the creator to relying upon self. However, “at the right time,” in a moment, in an event within human history, Christ died for these persons too weak to save themselves. The event is a purposeful act of God. The event has a vicarious character. The death of Christ and his obedience through suffering is how the love and grace of God shows itself to the world. We may have here a form of martyr theology, suggesting that Christ is the willing self-sacrifice of one on behalf of many, further defined as those who are ungodly and who do not deserve such an act on the part of God. He is our example and shows us the way. Christ is for us, independently of our response. God shows divine love and demonstrates divine grace in the event of the death of Christ. This death has a vicarious character in that it benefits others. In that sense, all weak humanity was present in this event.

Romans 6:1b-11 (Year A June 19-25) discusses baptism, sin, death, life, and being in Christ.

Paul wanted his readers to face the reality and power of sin and death. "Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away," sings the old hymn, O God our help in Ages Past, by Isaac Watts (1719). All life is a march toward death with the constant ticking of time. Or as the great Bard put it: 

 

     'Tis but an hour since it was nine, 

     And after one hour more 'twill be eleven, 

     And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, 

     And from hour to hour we rot and rot, 

     And thereby hangs a tale. (Shakespeare, "As You Like It" )

 

A person asked Socrates why it was that Alcibiades, who was so rich, so brilliant and so able a public official and general, who had traveled so much, and seen so much of the world, was nevertheless such an unhappy man. Socrates replied, “Because wherever he goes Alcibiades takes himself with him.” Such is the plight of each of us. We carry the prison of our the patterns of our self-destructive behavior with us wherever we go. If we are incapable of looking into the mirror of our souls and shudder at what we see there, we have not seen who we are. We can turn our fight against evil and for good into an evil, as Nel Noddings in Women and Evil points out, “We do evil in the name of some overriding good, usually, paradoxically, the conquest of evil.” W. H. Auden said it well in his poem, Epilogue to The Age of Anxiety:

 

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.^[37]

 

We need to recognize the power of the self-destructive forces in our lives. A song written by Nicholas Orain Lowe and sung by Johnny Cash sums up the problem we face. The title is, "The Beast In Me."

 

The beast in me

 Is caged by frail and fragile bars

 Restless by day

 And by night rants and rages at the stars

 God help the beast in me

 

 The beast in me

 Has had to learn to live with pain

 And how to shelter from the rain

 And in the twinkling of an eye

 Might have to be restrained

 God help the beast in me

 

 Sometimes it tries to kid me

 That it's just a teddy bear

 And even somehow manage to vanish in the air

 And that is when I must beware

 Of the beast in me that everybody knows

 They've seen him out dressed in my clothes

 Patently unclear

 If it's New York or New Year

 God help the beast in me

 

 The beast in me  

 

Shall we name the beast? We might call it sin or the old self. Our fatal fixations that lead toward self-destruction do not have to determine our future. Can we name the event or moment needed for change to begin? We might call it conversion, or the new person Christ has destined us to be.

Paul begins his discussion of the difference Christ can make in our lives. It will take an event, a moment, in which we separate ourselves from what we are now to what our destiny is in Christ. The “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster of the American West is part of American lore, but Paul is inviting us to consider that the proclamation of the church invites us to be “dead and alive” Christians. The context of Chapters 5-8 offers a variety of insights into that which followers of Jesus need to consider themselves dead to and that to which they need to become alive. This moment is like deciding that we are already dead, in our baptism uniting ourselves with Christ in his death, but also, in passing through this death, considering that moment as a transforming union with Christ in his resurrection. Obviously, the coming of Christ as the promise of the eschatological destiny of humanity is not fully a reality in the present. Humanity still wrestles with the reality of Adam (5:12ff). Sin and death are realities in Adam. Humanity continues to make the decision Adam did in turning away from God and therefore the source of its life. Adam has become our prison. Humanity is in bondage to sin. The sin of Adam finds a reflection in the sin of each human being. However, participation in eschatological life is a reality for those in Christ. God takes our sin seriously, which we can see in the bloody, expiatory event of the cross that averts the eschatological wrath and judgment of God. God remains committed to humanity in divine love, which the cross also shows. Christ offers humanity a new possibility.  Christ holds before us the possibility of reconstituting humanity toward eschatological life. Baptism into Christ is a sign of the moment or event in our lives that signals our needed transformation. This statement may indicate that baptism in the name of Jesus may well have preceded the use of the Trinitarian formula. Faith and grace that we find together in baptism unites the believer with Christ. Humanity naturally unites to Adam but must make a choice to unite with Christ. The believer participates in the fate and destiny of Christ. Participating in the death of Christ releases one from the destiny of humanity in Adam, while participating in the resurrection of Christ unites one with the redeemed and reconciled life of the risen Christ. Paul already saw in baptism a picture and likeness of the death of Christ, in which the believer is incorporated into fellowship with Christ in his destiny of death and resurrection, meaning that baptism is a sign that anticipates the future death of the candidates as they are linked to the death of Jesus in order that they may receive the assurance that in the future they will also share in the resurrection life of Christ. This statement places the basis of the Christian hope concerning human destiny on fellowship with Christ. Baptism identifies a person not only with Christ’s act of dying, but also with his rising.  Though future, it describes a share in the risen life of Christ that the justified Christian already enjoys, as result of the Christ-event. The resurrection of Jesus serves as an eschatological guarantor of the resurrection of the believer.^[38] The death of Christ is an expiatory offering, transferring our sin to the innocent Jesus. We have no way to make amends with God for our rebellion. The death of Christ is the offering provided by God that set aside the Old Testament sacrificial system.^[39] This fact reminds us of the deep connection between Christian theology and its Jewish context. Humanity cannot liberate itself from sin and death, but union with Christ shifts the focus from our efforts to the power of the risen Christ at work in us. Yet, our today is a life of tension between the pattern set by Adam of turning from God and the pattern set by Christ of turning toward God. Truly, the more graphically we see the depths of human sin, we see the heights to which grace lifts us. Of course, the point of this grace is to liberate us from sin and death. Faith and grace do not lead us to indifference regarding the plight of humanity or the battle each of us face. Far from surrendering to Adam, sin, and death, we look forward with faith to our hoped for transformation because of our participation in Christ. The humility of faith will lead to a life devoted to love and virtue. Will and rationality continue to orient us toward Adam, but faith and grace orient us toward Christ and life. Death and life become metaphors for the human struggle. In the cross of Christ, humanity died to sin. Our corporate identity in Adam leads to sin, but our corporate identity in the cross of Christ liberates us from it. Humanity is now the tension between Adam and Christ. Paul can become quite literal here, as baptism into the death of Christ is burial with him, while we unite with the risen Christ so that the course of our lives is now in the context of the newness of resurrected and eschatological life. Christ is a sign of the end or destiny of humanity, while humanity is still on the way. The heart of the ethical reflection of Paul is that the future glory of resurrection life impels one to live in the present in a way that is consistent with and worthy of that future reality. The power of resurrection pressures itself into my existence of sin and death and moves me toward newness of life. Baptism reminds us of who we are. We naturally orient our lives toward Adam, but baptism focuses us upon what we can be through union with Christ. While our present is so little conformed to Christ, we live with the hope of resurrection.^[40] Jesus represents humanity in the possibility contained in their death. The Father already links our death to the death of the Son. Yes, his death has an expiatory character. Paul is also discussing the universal vicarious significance of the death of Christ. His death was truly for others. Theologically, this means his death stretches beyond the immediate circle of the friends of Jesus and extends to humanity past, present, and future. His death is for all. Yet, this also means humanity already links to the resurrected life in the resurrection of the Son.^[41] We can see the anthropological position of humanity as closed in upon itself in sin and death, while humanity is also open to the world in a way that points toward its fulfillment beyond death.^[42] The Christian life becomes a process of dying with Christ and experiencing resurrected life with Christ. Baptism anticipates the whole course of human life. Baptism is a sign that the believer no longer belongs to self, but rather belongs to God. This passage is an important witness to the idea that baptism occurs once in our lives. Baptism is present throughout our lives. The moment or event lasts a lifetime. The destiny of our lives is that our new identity in Christ will transform us throughout the course of our lives. As important as the moment or event is for us, it must be a moment that has a continuing transforming influence throughout our lives.  Such change of human life is not easy, and thus the metaphors of death, crucifixion, and resurrection are significant. The well-known tension we find in Paul between Already and Not Yet is present in this passage. Freedom from sin and reconciliation with God are present already, even though sin and physical death are still present.^[43] Even crucifixion takes time. The death of Adam in us takes time. United with the death and resurrection of Christ, the transition remains incomplete. We await the fullness of faith, hope, and love in the promise of resurrection. 

In some cases, what one becomes dead to is subtle and nuanced, and that to which one is alive becomes a subtle shift in direction. 

In Dostoyevsky’s book, Crime and Punishment, there are two characters. There is Sonya who is a harlot, not because she is a bad girl at heart, but because of circumstances. Raskolnikov is a murderer, not because he is bad but because he, himself, was caught up in a slimy situation. Dostoyevsky studies these two people and the transformation of their lives and hearts. Raskolnikov, noticing Sonya has a Bible, asks her to read the story of the resurrection of Jesus. She had a racking cough, her body was thin and emaciated, her face was flushed and there was the light of fever in her eyes. Sonya read the beautiful words of this story until she came to the point where Jesus stood by the tomb. Then, her voice became stronger, with a new force, as it rang out in the silent room: “Lazarus, come forth!” Slowly, deliberately, she continued, “And he who was dead, came forth.” And the candle burned low as a harlot and an assassin sat under the spell of immortal words, words that said that if a person is dead, the person can live again — words that said to a harlot and an assassin, “You can be changed. You can be cleansed. You can once again be strong and beautiful. You can be reborn in your souls.” No matter how bad we become, no matter how we defame our lives, no matter how we destroy our bodies, no matter how we stain our souls, no matter how we cheat and lie and become infamous in our own sight and in the sight of God, Christ can bring the change our lives desperately need.

Romans 6:12-23 (Year A June 26-July 2) has the theme of the Christian life as putting into effect our baptism. He has been considering the Christian life as walking in a newness of life that Christ initiated and that the Holy Spirit sustains. In doing so, Paul continues to wrestle with the significance of the coming of Christ. He will raise the question of what freedom is. He would agree with the many thinkers who suggest that freedom is not simply a matter of the freedom to do whatever you want. As a political matter, one could make a strong libertarian case that the best society is the one in which people have the freedom to pursue happiness as they conceive it. Yet, that is a minor freedom when it comes to morality, human flourishing, and becoming the person God wants us to be. Doing what we want can be its form of slavery. We discover true freedom in learning how we ought to live so that we can reach our fullest potential. This suggests to Paul the idea that we will serve somebody. N. T. Wright calls this a new kind of “liberated slavery.” Freedom is coming to a place in our lives where we want to live in obedience to God. God loves and seeks our true freedom and happiness. 

Paul is also going to suggest that the transition from serving one master to serving another is not an easy one. The pattern established by Adam is one we keep repeating. His turn from God and toward himself leads to death. We need to face our mortality. Those who do so because circumstances force them often have regrets. It will take courage to live life true to ourselves rather than focus too much on what others expect of us. We want to work hard, but not to the point of obsession. We need the courage to take the time it takes to identify our feelings and share them. Friends are precious, so we need to stay in touch with the old and have an open heart for new friends. We need not be afraid of what makes us genuinely happy.^[44] Facing our mortality before we must do so will help us move toward what God wants, which we can broadly say is righteousness and life. 

Paul has compared Adam, who represents the pattern of sin and death, with Christ, who represents the pattern of righteousness and life. He continues to draw out the implication of this analysis of the human situation to the life of the believer. Paul says to the baptized that they have identified with Christ in his death and resurrection; now become the person so united with him that you can become what God intends you to be.  Manifest in your lives the lordship of Christ who has justified you and freed you from the power of sin. He draws a contrast between slavery and freedom, an image drawn from the Greco-Roman world, in which freedom denoted the privileged condition or social status of citizens in a city government.  By referring to sin, death, body, and Law, Paul will clarify their continuing roles as they threaten the lives of believers. For example, sin and death continue in human life as we do what Adam did and turn away from God as the source of our lives. Sin is bondage. It shows itself in self-asserting rejection of God. The Law comes from God and is therefore good, but it reveals the sinful state of humanity. His account of sin and death makes it clear that we bear responsibility for the prison or slavery in which we find ourselves. We even use the good intent of the Law in such a way that its effect is to increase the power of sin and death at work in us. At the same time, the Law is weak, something against which Judaism would argue. For Paul, the Law does not provide a remedy to the predicament humanity faces. Through his death and resurrection, Christ offers humanity a new possibility of living with God.  Such a new possibility will lead to righteousness and life. The promised redemption that is the future of humanity finds anticipatory presence in the baptized as faith and sanctifying grace begin their work of healing and liberating from sin and death. Fellowship or union with Christ will mean such liberation and healing. This redemption includes the body, to the point that the body participates now in resurrection life. This body is already experiencing the transformation that will come in the final redemption of creation. We see the already/not yet feature of Christian life in that the transition from death to life is incomplete. The historical event of the death and resurrection of Christ finds its answer in us, who respond in the event of baptism, faith, justification, and sanctification. In our eschatological moment we present ourselves to the God who brings us from death to life, from sin to righteousness. Such a moment in our lives puts us under the leadership of grace rather than sin. Such grace will lead us to righteousness, which we find in the “form of teaching” we have received, which today we might think of as the teaching of the apostles. He is thinking of the basic kerygma of apostolic teaching. I suspect he is also thinking of the basic virtues and vices we find in his writings. Christian life in every culture and in every historical age is not a matter of making it up as we go along. The “form of teaching” is there, in the Bible. We turn from what we think is right to what we have learned from the apostles. 

The process of which Paul writes is sanctification. Justification and sanctification do not follow each other in temporal sequence. They occur together in the event of our faith response. However, they address two separate aspects of Christian life. Justification focuses upon the pardon of our sin that we received in the death of Christ. We need that pardon every day. Sanctification focuses upon the separation of the people of God from the ways of this world that Adam signifies. Baptism consecrates the person of faith to Christ. Union with Christ in his death and resurrection is the source of our sanctification. The pressure of the eschatological moment for us keeps placing this world of sin and death into question. Sanctification is an implication of belonging to Christ. It suggests the separation of the people of God from this world.^[45] The baptized await the fullness of resurrection and eternal life. The concept is eschatological in that God will make all this reality in the future, but that there is also a present realization in the life of the believer.  The self we once were is the self that belongs to the old age, the self dominated by sin and exposed to wrath. We can see here the eschatological tension that exists for the believer. Believers are still persons under the influence of Adam. The inner logic of the link between sin and death arises on the presupposition that all life comes from God. Since sin is turning from God, sinners separate themselves not only from the commanding will of God, but also from the source of their lives. Death is not just a penalty that an external authority imposes on them but lies in the nature of sin as its consequence. We receive such “wages” due to our choice to serve sin. In contrast to the wages of sin that are due, making death the consequence of sin, God graciously bestows eternal life on people who respond with faith.  Paul insists that the gift of eternal life is something that comes to Christians through the mediating death and resurrection of Christ Jesus; it is a gift tied up with the work of Christ.^[46]

In a sense, the message of 6:12-23 is something like “that was then” when you were slaves of sin, but “this is now” when you are enslaved to God. To put it another way, Christian life is a matter of living the Christian life out of what baptism signifies. Paul wants believers to look seriously at their baptism. The indicative fact of baptism stands over against their lives as they work out its implications during their Christian lives. The new identity of the baptized is an anticipation of the death that awaits us all, but also finds itself absorbed in the new life found in Christ. This struggle will not end until the last day.^[47] The imperative of the call to new obedience is a summons to demonstrate the indicative of the new being in Christ, but it also has its eschatological presupposition in the future that God has promised and that one can expect. Yes, become what you are, but even more, become what you shall be.^[48] He does not want the baptized to go back to their old way of life.

Paul is suggesting that we are going to become a slave to something or to someone. Paul reminds me of the Bob Dylan (1979) song

 

  You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,

  You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side,

  You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair,

  You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir

  But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,

    yes indeed

  You’re gonna have to serve somebody,

  Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

  But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

 

John Lennon responded with a song not released until 1998, where he ridicules people who follow Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, or anyone else, because all you can do is “serve yourself.” This profanity laced song has some irony in that serving yourself is still serving. When he ridiculed Dylan by saying wondering if he wanted to be a waiter, which could have been said with the Lennon humor, but if said seriously, shows lack of understanding what Dylan was saying in the song. At another level, and I am sure John did not mean it this way, is that focusing upon serving yourself will lead to a shallow life and a lonely life. One might gain much wealth with this approach to life but dine alone. 

We will serve someone. The imagery Paul uses is interesting, for he says we choose our master. Although one could sell oneself into slavery in his time, the norm was that the master chooses the slave. God has chosen us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We can choose whether to live within that realm or to live within the realm of sin and death. Living within the domain of righteousness is sanctification, beginning the process of growing into the life God has prepared for us.

Among the difficult matters in this passage is that bodily desire becomes a master from which we need liberation so that we can fulfill God’s desire for us. Paul is thinking of the body in a theological way. His concern is that if we follow bodily desire, we are behaving no differently than higher order animals. Bodily desire includes hunger, comfort, rest, the exhilaration of victory in battle, and the socialization involved in community. If all we do is fulfill such desire to the point of pleasure in the way other animals may do, then we are not fulfilling the higher purpose to which God has appointed us as bearers of the image of God. While bodily desire can take many forms, Paul will focus upon one such desire. Paul uses sexual desire to show its power and influence over our behavior. Bodily passion, the giving over of our “members,” a possible sexual reference to such desire, shows that we have a choice to make. In many animal species, the male impregnates as many females as possible. Some men approach their relationships with women in the same way. Paul has the concern that those baptized into union with Christ in his baptism and resurrection must exhibit in their lives a vastly different way of channeling their desire so that the body and its desires serve righteousness and become enslaved to God. We will either allow such desire to direct itself in the way God intends or in the way our natural sinful self would direct us. As Paul makes clear in his writings, God cares about what we do with our sexual desire. God cares about how many sexual partners we have, whether we are faithful in a commitment to a spouse, and even the gender of that partner. Paul is marking himself off from the pure hedonist. Yet, he is not an ascetic who might simply deny a person any bodily pleasure. Rather, Paul is urging his readers, and us, to allow God to sanctify our bodily desire so that our desire for bodily pleasure takes a form that is pleasing to God. He wants us to see that bodily desire can become a harsh master. It can lead us down a path of self-destruction, sin, and death. It will certainly not lead us toward right living and anticipate eschatological life. Paul envisions an embodied process of sanctification that orients us toward eternal life.

Paul is also suggesting that changing from the slavery of sin to slavery to God and righteousness is not easy. Paul invites us to envision a new humanity, a movement from the old humanity dominated by Adam and his turning away from God, a form of life that keeps tugging away at us. The new humanity has a pattern of likeness to Christ that turns toward God, seeks righteousness, and enjoys life. Paul envisions a form of liberated slavery, of obedience to God in which we experience the freedom of the true self. We start seeing that which formerly attracted us and led us away from God is leading to death. We start seeing that the new pattern shown in Christ becomes increasingly attractive to us and leads to life. We expel one attraction for a new attraction.^[49]

Romans 7:15-25a (Year A July 3-9) is part of the second defense of the Law that Paul offers. There are several important theological issues raised in this passage on which I am still working. One is the use of the term “flesh,” by which I understand Paul to focus upon the weakness of humanity. This weakness affects the ability of human beings to perform the “law.” Another issue is what Paul means by law or principle here. I take him to refer to the Jewish Law as an example of the universality of law in human life that has the intent of pointing adherents to what is good. Their combination here suggests the universal weakness of humanity confronts the intent of the Law toward the good in our personal experience as a tension in which the law always loses. The reason is that the sin of Adam is replicated in us all as we turn from God, the source of life, and thus reap the consequences of sin, which is death. 

Paul is still wrestling with the significance of the coming of Christ for those now baptized in Christ. To do so, he paints a picture of life apart from the grace and faith we find in Christ. We need to be careful, for he is not offering a phenomenological description of the human situation. He is offering his understanding of the plight of humanity apart from the faith and grace one has in Christ. His argument is that considering the destiny of humanity revealed in Christ, we learn of the plight of the present situation of humanity. We would not know our plight were it not for this event of revelation. As he describes the plight of humanity, the sin of Adam keeps repeating in every human life. The Law becomes a universal human experience of elevating what is good before individuals, but it introduces the plight of our failure to find ourselves truly reflected in what we do. ^[50]The recurring decision of each of us to identify with Adam makes sure that we remain enslaved in sin. Turning from God, we turn toward self and death.

Most people will read this passage as reflecting human life, and most Christians will read it as expressing a dimension of Christian life. It resonates because the struggle with our weakness as human beings, the struggle with relying upon a code of behavior (law) for liberation, and the enigma presented by our failure to be in our actions whom we desire to be, is a struggle that seems relevant at every stage of life. Most of my reflections will keep this latter point in mind. In context, Paul continues to juxtapose the old life under the power of sin with the new life in the Spirit he will describe in Chapter 8. Throughout the first seven chapters, Paul is emphasizing that the way out of the old life is beyond human achievement. The way out involves turning from our participation in Adam through our recurring pattern of turning from God and instead turning toward the grace of God shown in Christ. God intends to reconcile us with God through the new pattern for humanity revealed in Christ. His thesis statement is that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (1:16), a gospel that culminates in the life of the Spirit (Chapter 8). He has demonstrated the universal need for salvation (1:18-3:20), making it clear that Jew and Gentile alike exist under the power of sin. He has shown that the gracious gift of redemption is effective through faith and offers a right relationship with God (3:21-4:25). He has shown that the prime hero of the Jewish faith, Abraham, lived by faith in the promise of God, making him the ancestor of Jew and Gentile alike. Paul stresses that while the only pattern it had was Adam and his turn from God and thus toward sin and death, God has given humanity a new pattern in Christ involving a turn toward God in faith and therefore toward sanctification, righteousness, and life. He has stressed that the issue is the way in which bodily desire conflicts with righteousness and life. Salvation is in our recognition of this problem, not through denial of bodily desire, but through presenting our bodily desires as instruments of righteousness (6:13). 

Paul will now crystallize the matter of law, sin, flesh, and body. Paul has just shown that law is a spiritual waring system by which sin becomes recognizable for what it is (7:7, 12-13). Further, all too often, the law leads us into further sin rather than away from it (7:8-11, 13-14). The law "compels sin to show its true face," the law "detects sin and makes me aware of my desperate plight," and, sadly, "this knowledge is not therapeutic or preventive but a knowledge-unto-death, which seals my doom."^[51] The result is that humanity is ill equipped to make effective use of the law just because it alerts us to sin (7:11). The divinely given warning system of law is in fleshly hands, which results in the irony that our observation of the law leads us into an existential dilemma instead of eternal life. He will use a standard theme of the Greek and Roman world, the conflict between knowing the right thing to do and being incapable of finding the moral capacity to do it." Here, the apostle highlights "the gulf between willing and [non] achievement" as well as "the grip of sin as indwelling power."^[52] "Paul has in view here the religious person, the responsible member of the human community, the one who wants to be a contributing member of society. Despite every attempt to accomplish good for other and for self, the efforts of the religious person come to nothing."^[53]  In that sense, Paul reflects on the experience of any morally sensitive person.^[54]

Paul never clarified his doctrine of law as a universal human condition. The expression of law we find in Israel must end with the coming of the provision God has made in Christ. Yet, if the coming of Christ is to have universal influence, then the law must be a universal human experience as well. Paul never explicitly makes this connection. Clearly, the will of God for justice that underlies the universal human experience of law does not end.^[55] Yet, Paul has given us the elements necessary to discuss the universal human experience of law in his view of conscience, the universal experience of the human sense of right and wrong, the desire for truth and goodness, and the universality of religious experience. In that sense, the Jewish law is one expression of a universal human condition. Inner desire may well delight in the law of God, but the body is at war with that desire. All of this coincide metaphorically with the outward mobility, inner motivation and stature associated with human action. As Paul pointed out in Chapter 6, bodily desire, especially manifested in sexual desire, can enslave us. If we are ensouled bodies (Barth), we can understand better the battle Paul is describing. It may well be that the delight his inmost self has in the Torah reflects the image of God that remains with him. Yet, his bodily desire follows the pattern of Adam in finding delight in moving against the command of God. The conflict between good and evil cuts through the hearts of each human being. Neither good nor evil reside in an economic class, ethnic group, or the pigmentation of skin. Each human being confronts this battle between what we desire in our inmost self and bodily desire. Paul adds to the contrast, referring to the law of the mind and to the law of sin that dwells in his body. The conscience is alert to the moral dilemma generated by our encounters with others. How ought we to treat them? The recognition of an ought in human encounter is a recognition of the claim the other has upon my behavior. Sin takes advantage of bodily desire to divert one from the dictates of the mind. The inmost self, the law or principle of mind, is the true and authentic self God intends us to be. Bodily desire is against this true self because of the dictates of sin. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are,^[56] for the inner battle is a fight worth having. Most of us have a great deal of unmapped country within us that one would have to take into account in explaining the gusts and storms of our lives.^[57] “Know yourself,” said the Delphic oracle, a statement Socrates used to say that he is still trying to do that, and thus does not have time for irrelevant things like myths and other speculations.^[58] We will find genuine freedom in the discovery of who we are.^[59]

 

And, above all, to thine own self be true

And it must follow as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.[60]

 

The general point is that any form the law takes enslaves and withholds life because sin will overtake it. Observing the law will not break the hold of sin. Any attempt to make oneself righteous by adhering to a code inevitably fails to produce the righteousness and purity to which the code aspires. Thus, the attempt to dictate proper behavior by politically correct codes of speech will fail. The reason is that those who form the code will inevitably become victims of their failure to abide by the code. The politically correct quickly devour their own because of some real or imagined infraction of the code. Paul offers an account of his experience of the Torah in Philippians 3:4b-6 that demonstrates the difficulty, which is why this passage has such personal overtones. People can distinguish between good and evil.  The problem is the difference between knowing and doing.  In that sense, Paul is describing the existential experience of all people of good will and conscience. As observed by Hannah Arednt, he is not describing anything new.[61] Ovid (Metaphorses, Book VII, 11, 20-21) said, "I will to do good, but do evil,” or “I see what is better and approve of it; I follow what is worse.” This is a translation of the famous passage in Euripides’ Medea (lines 1078–60): “I know indeed what evil I intend to do; but stronger than my deliberations [bouleumata] is my thymos [what makes me move], which is the cause of the greatest evils among mortals.” This disparity is not just among non-Christians but is there with those who genuinely try to live out their lives in a Christian way. Paul's actions while under the law were, in fact, lawlessness.  Paul is himself the supreme example of a how adherence to a code designed to make one a good person in line with the will of God can make one violent. He is a supreme example of one who united himself to a code that clearly defined purity and righteousness in one group and evil in another (Jesus and his followers). He could justify his violence, his role as persecutor, because the victims of his violence embodied evil. He is the supreme example that since human beings are the ones who are trying to put the law into practice, sin is there to interfere with their efforts. His contrast of flesh and mind here points to the weakness of the flesh, for the law of God is only present in flesh and blood human beings. It simply corrupts the necessarily interdependent relationship with the human spirit. The result is that the divine origin of the law makes it good, it directs me to do good, all of which points to my weakness as human being to fulfill the good intent of God. To belong to the body of death, described in verses 7-23, is to belong to the fellowship of all people under the law of sin. The body of death is without a future, hopeless, and non-redemptive. It is the body from whose context and association humanity must be torn and delivered if it is to live. The whole situation depicted in verses 14-23 has this character of death. Since this self-contradiction is a fact and one cannot resolve it, it can bring humanity only to corruption and non-redemptive death. The dignity of human destiny becomes a judgment on our unworthy conduct. Only then do we reach the deepest plight of our human situation. It is neither want and oppression, nor the frailty and corruptibility of life, but human conduct that contradicts our human destiny that causes the apostle Paul to utter this cry. Mortality characterizes the misery to which all human life is subject, no matter how different human situations may be. The root of this misery lies in the opposition of death to our human destiny of fellowship with God. Whether we know it or not, we all want a life that death does not end. The reason for our misery is the sin of turning from God.^[62] His conclusion to the argument reaffirms the divided self and the divided law. With his mind he is a slave to the law of God, while with his flesh he is a slave to the law of sin. What “is happening in my house,” referring to the body. Sin acts, sin performs, sin is successful. Yet, I am still responsible. It means that I stand self-condemned. Paul cannot recognize himself in his actual doing or non-doing, in his achievements, that he cannot identify himself as the one who wills with the one who achieves. Paul is a stranger to himself in what he attains and accomplishes.^[63]

            Paul concludes by offering the hope that is through Jesus Christ our Lord. He is suggesting a dialectical tension within us. We can see a hint of a spirituality of patience in the sense that one keeps reaching out in faith for the strength to keep waging the battle. We work to overcome what pulls us down in a way that healing comes over time. Martin Luther famously said, "Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly," thereby urging us to believe and rejoice despite our sin. We can also see a spirituality of power at work in the intense hope for a healing of the struggle. Christ is the one who heals in a way that begins freedom now that reaches its fulfillment eschatologically. The bewildering dialectical tensions are not the ultimate truth about us, so we can find within the tension the effects of this new life.^[64] Paul has argued that the old and new epoch created a divided “I” and a divided law. Under the old epoch, the “I” is the flesh, while under the new epoch the “I” is mind or inner person. Under the old epoch, sin uses the law to bring death. Under the new epoch, the law in its clearest expression is the gift of God. 

            Religion, symbolized in law, spells disruption, discord, and the absence of peace. This notion universalizes the human experience of law. A person at one with oneself does yet perceive the human plight. Our behavior proves us to be in no way at one with ourselves. Therefore, our relation to God is a disturbed relation. Religion discloses the questionable quality of my ego. In fact, one should not delude oneself into recommending religion for peace, enrichment of life, or a valuable addition to civilization. Religion is the human possibility of remembering that we must die. Religion is the place where, in the world of time, things, and people, one formulates the intolerable question – who, then, are you? Religion breaks people into two halves, in inward spirit and outer person of the natural world. 

The law is good because it expresses the created goodness of humanity, which humanity must face because humanity also experiences estrangement from it. Paul wants to deal with the problem of moral motivation and the motivating power of the law. The attitude toward the law of the greatest religious people in the world finds a reflection in the Jewish people. As Paul puts it, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, just, and good. The law is spiritual. He delights in the law and recognizes he is subject to the law of God as a rational being. The law gives acquaintance with sin. The law is the expression of what humanity essentially is and therefore ought to be, but what humanity is not in its history or individual lives, as the law shows. The law commands, but we do not do, and under a power that contradicts our true being. The law shows our essential nature and our estrangement from it. It also awakens the sleeping sin in us. Therefore, the law is not a power of moral motivation. The commanding law produces all kinds of wrong desires but does not motivate the conquest of these desires and the reunion of the “actual” will with the “essential” will. All of this suggests we can separate his argument from the historically conditioned religious framework. A humanist with insight into the spiritual predicament of humanity would agree with Paul.^[65] As such, Paul unites himself with many morally sensitive people; If sin is a universal condition of humanity, then law as Paul explains it must also be a universal human experience. For Paul, existence under the law has its embodiment in the person who knows the law, wants to keep it, assents to it, but who also falls under its judgment because of the failure to observe it. One cannot balance virtuous deeds against bad deeds, and thus humanity cannot absolve itself from the part of the Law it could not obey. The true effect of the Law is to nail humanity to its sin. The law holds humanity within the prison of sin. The law prevents any attempt to secure righteousness before God. This is what Paul means when he writes of the weakness of the law. The Law cannot overcome sin and it cannot give life. Law expresses the will and purpose of God toward life and wholeness but discloses the sin that dominates human life in the divided self and the divided law. Paul could not abide the judgment that any human experience of law could lead to its salvation. Judaism knew no other way of salvation than that of Torah. In doing so, it becomes the supreme example, given the setting of Paul, for a general human tendency to construct the law as a means of salvation. The light that has arisen in the death and resurrection of Christ reveals the inadequacy of the Law as a means of salvation. The Torah, and every other experience of the law, is now in the shadow of Christ and has become superfluous. Humanity faces a new situation with the death and resurrection of Christ. One can no longer boast in the works of Torah, or of any other law, whether Hindu yoga, Buddhist eight-fold path, Islam, or any secular version (dialectical materialism). God saves both Jew and Gentile. Since this calling to the gentile is central for Paul, the Torah fails specifically because of its demand for everyone to become Jewish. Gentiles cannot live by Torah, since Torah is the possession of Israel and an ethnic group within the Roman Empire. His Gentile mission and his recognition that one God has one foundation for salvation dethroned Torah in the thinking of Paul. Yet, any form of law cannot become a means of salvation. Therefore, God gave Torah to show that humanity could not keep it. Humanity will always experience its inadequacy in the presence of Law. Instead of orienting humanity toward God, Torah (and every other law) stirs up sin. This weakness of Torah, and therefore every form of law, can lead one to recognize the insufficiency of human work and prepare one for the way of faith. 

Paul is clearly pointing to the Jewish experience of the Torah here. Yet, his argument seems to assume in a tacit way that every human being has the struggle of the divided self. If so, the law must refer to a universal principle, something like we would call religion, for his argument to make sense. Religion introduces the principle of trying to redeem the self through our effort. Our inability to satisfy the requirements of religion disrupts our relationship with God in a profound way, for we now know only slavery. Religion might even reveal what could be true of humanity, but instead reveals the actuality of our estrangement from self, others, and God. We hear the command, but do not perform it. We experience estrangement from our true self.^[66] In some sense, then, if sin is a universal human experience, then the experience of Law is as well. I might suggest that Torah is a specific instance of a universal principle of law that God has given humanity. Once the Law arrives in our lives, it places us in a prison, working with our sin to accomplish this. The weakness of Law, and therefore of religion, is that it cannot overcome sin and thus cannot give life. Law or religion reveals the divine purpose to move us toward life and wholeness, but it only has the power to disclose the divided self and the divided law. He experiences this battle as a form of slavery to the repetition of the decision of Adam to turn from God, life, and righteousness and toward self, sin, and death. He cannot free himself from this enslavement. His actions condemn him to slavery.

Paul describes the plight of humanity as that of the divided self. He shows the conflict that many in the ancient world noted, that of knowing the right thing to do and being incapable of finding the moral capacity to do it. Socrates proposed that we do not do what is good because of our ignorance of what is good. Paul is suggesting that the problem humanity faces is deeper than that. When we know what the good, we are not able to do it. Aristotle said that if Socrates were right, then no one would be responsible for his or her actions. His point is that people do evil because they choose it, even when they know what is good. He sees a war within between the person we want to be, but are not, and the person we are but do not want to be. Many people "who appear never to overcome the recurrent insurgence of their own underworld," but who are nonetheless "deeply Christian."^[67]

This divided self is reflected in the significant discussion of the will that emerges in this passage.[68]

The notion of the will deals with experiences people with themselves and inside themselves. Paul relates his discovery of two within him who struggle against each other. Precisely when he “wants to do right,” he finds that “evil lies close at hand” (7:21), for “if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet,’” he “should not have known what it is to covet.” Hence, it is the command of the law that occasioned “all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead” (7:7,8). The function of the law is ambivalent: it is “good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin” (7:13), but since it speaks in the voice of command, it “arouses the passions” and “revives sin.” “The very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me” (7:9–10). The result is that “I do not understand my own actions.” Thus, “I have become a question to myself,” as philosophers put it. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:15). This inner conflict can never be settled in favor of either obedience to the law or submission to sin; this inner “wretchedness,” according to Paul, can be healed only through grace. The fulfillment of the law is beyond human power, leading to an “I-will-but-cannot.” Jesus stressed the inner life of the will when he referred to the only one of the Ten Commandments that refers to the inner life: Thou shall not covet. Yet, if one looks upon lustfully, one is already committing adultery in the heart. Jesus stresses that even those who are doing good may do so hypocritically (Luke 6:41, 20:26). Paul shifts his attention from the realm of doing, for the outward person living in world of appearance, to believing and an inwardness that does not manifest itself in action, and is thus scrutinized by God, who appears indistinctly. The law cannot be fulfilled. The will to fulfill the law activates another will, the will to sin. The one will is never without the other. This discussion of two wills occurs in the context of two laws. One is the law of the mind that lets him delight in the law of God “in his inmost self’ and the other law is the one of his “members” that tells him to do what in his inmost self he hates. Law itself is the voice of a master demanding obedience; the Thou-shalt of the law demands and expects a voluntary act of submission, an I-will of agreement. The Old Law said: thou shalt do; the New Law says: thou shalt will. It was the experience of an imperative demanding voluntary submission that led to the discovery of the will, and inherent in this experience was the wondrous fact of a freedom that none of the ancient peoples—Greek, Roman, or Hebrew-had been aware of, namely, that there is a faculty in humanity by virtue of which, regardless of necessity and compulsion, they can say “Yes” or “No,” agree or disagree with what is factually given, including their own self and their existence, and that this faculty may determine what they are going to do. But this faculty is of a curiously paradoxical nature. It is actualized by an imperative that says “Thou shalt will,” and this already implies that, whatever I may in fact eventually do, I can answer: I will, or I will not. The very commandment puts me before a choice between an I-will and an I-will-not, that is, theologically speaking, between obedience and disobedience. If the will did not have the choice of saying “No,” it would no longer be a will; and if there were not a counter-will within me that is aroused by the very commandment of the Thou-shalt, if, to speak in Paul’s terms, “sin” did not dwell “within me” (Romans 7:20), I would not need a will at all. the reflexivity of mental activities is nowhere stronger than in the willing ego; the point is that every I-will arises out of a natural inclination toward freedom, that is, out of the natural revulsion of free people toward being at someone’s bidding. The will always addresses itself to itself; when the command says, Thou shalt, the will replies, Thou shalt will as the command says—and not mindlessly execute orders. That is the moment when the internal contest begins, for the aroused counter-will has a like power of command. Thus, even if the law is obeyed and fulfilled, there remains this inner resistance. The will, split and automatically producing its own counter-will, is in need of being healed, of becoming one again. Willing has split the one into a two-in-one. The will hinders itself. The explanation is simple. The conflict is between flesh and spirit, and the trouble is that people are both, carnal and spiritual. The flesh will die, and therefore to live according to the flesh means certain death. Paul has an hostility to the body that focuses upon the flesh, but also arises out of the essence of the will. The origin of the will is mental activity, but the will grows aware of itself only by overcoming resistance, and “flesh” in Paul’s reasoning (as in the later disguise of “inclination”) becomes the metaphor for an internal resistance. Thus, even in this simplistic scheme, the discovery of the will has already opened a veritable Pandora’s box of unanswerable questions.

Torah (and every other law) stirs up sin. This weakness of Torah, and therefore every form of law, can lead one to recognize the insufficiency of human work and prepare one for the way of faith. If Christ is the end of the Law, then Christ is the end of religion. We are prisoners, even though it seemed to us as pure, upright, and unbroken. Our acts of piety suggest as much. People cling to religion to bring life, but religion must die.^[69] The coming of Christ throws light on the actual plight of the human situation. The only freedom humanity will find is in the grace it will find in Jesus Christ. The only deliverance for humanity will come in fellowship with Jesus Christ, who has come to release humanity from sin and death, reconstituting the destiny of humanity as participating in the eschatological life of Christ.

Romans 8:1-11 (Year A July 10-16) deals with the theme of the Spirit of life. Paul will make it clear during his argument that love is the source of lasting fellowship and the basis of what is right, thus alone perfecting the law.^[70] One “in Christ” is the new person who has passed from death to life.^[71] This union with Christ brings liberation from the law or principle of sin and death. The Spirit at work in the one “in Christ” lifts one into the law or principle of the Spirit of life. One can embody this new law or principle through the Spirit. The point is that the weakness of our flesh reveals itself in that the law could not deal with sin, while God has condemned sin through the Incarnation. The bond of love between Father and Son is in the background of the Incarnation and therefore of our justification and redemption. 

One might ask the question, is there only the belief of our having received pardon (justification) and the hope of our future salvation and redemption in Christ? We are right with God through what God has done rather than our observance of any law. Here is the problem. A positive answer would leave the present moment empty of the presence of God. The past would be full because of the cross, and the future would be full because of resurrection. The past act becomes full because of the theological notion of representation. The Father has condemned our sin in the flesh of the Son, doing for us what our weakness showed we could not do for ourselves. The one (the Son) has represented the whole (humanity). The vicarious expiatory death of the Son is the purpose of the sending of the Son by the Father. The Son has taken the place of sinners in order to suffer their fate. The Incarnation becomes an act of representation.^[72] The innocent Jesus suffers death in the place of sinners, and therefore takes within the divine life the judgment on their sin.  An exchange of place took place between the innocent and the guilty. In this sense, we have vicarious penal suffering on behalf of others. Such a notion rests upon the fellowship of the Son with humanity. His death becomes expiation for us.^[73]

All of this is powerful, strengthening the awareness of the significance of that moment in history. Yet, for Paul, the significance of that moment leads him to reflect upon the transforming possibility in our moment. Thus, Paul would offer a negative answer, because the believer in the present has the advance installment of the Spirit. Walking in the Spirit will transplant the one “in Christ” into the freedom of a child of God through the power of the Spirit.^[74]  One “in Christ” is open to the promptings of the Spirit. The Spirit makes it possible for us to have our independent and spontaneous entry into participating in the movement of the reconciling love of God toward the world.^[75] Faith draws us outside of self and therefore we can say that Christ dwells in us.^[76]All law, no matter how noble its goal, will result in the condemnation of death now and in the future because of sin. We will not adhere perfectly to the code, we will elevate ourselves about outsiders to the code, and the code itself will not be flexible enough to deal with the inevitable changes our historical nature will bring. If the law, whether the Jewish Law or the code of any culture that reflects the desire to achieve the best for humanity, could not heal the human estrangement we see in sin and death, then we are open to seeing that God has healed the estrangement in Christ and through a life in the Spirit. To be “in Christ” means to live as someone freed from the condemnation that sin and adherence to a code bring into our lives. The liberated person may live as one who is not condemned, and therefore ought to live with such freedom.^[77] The gracious gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ is the means of being right with God. Those “in Christ” live today by the Spirit of God.  Based on his discussion of baptism in chapter 6, it is reasonable to assume that when Paul speaks of being "in Christ" here, he is thinking of those who have received baptism in the name of Jesus. However, as we will see, for Paul, being in Christ involves a reality that transforms human beings from the inside out. The dissolution of the person of this world, which is revealed in Jesus as the Christ, means the establishing a new person who passes from death to life, which is the meaning of the words, “In Christ Jesus.” In saying that we speak concerning the Spirit, we have the Spirit, and we reckon with the Spirit, we must not emphasize either “we” or our own “having,” or else we enter the sphere of religion.^[78] For the liberated person, the decisive consequence of this liberation consists in the fact that there is for the believer no condemnation. One may live as one who is not condemned, which then sums up what one ought to be.^[79]The Spirit is the culminating theme of the argument that began in 6:1. The Spirit is the seal of the resurrection and the sign of the new age. To belong to the Spirit is to admit the believer into the community of believers, which is in the Spirit, and thus gives partial freedom from sin and death.  The authority of the Spirit operating in the believer brings union with Christ, and thus freedom. Part of that transformation involves a new ability to embody the law of the Spirit in one's life.  This part of Romans introduces the formal treatment of the influence of the Spirit of God in Christian life.

The language of Paul opens a discussion of what we might think of as our mindset or set of assumptions or methods that creates a powerful incentive to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools. We develop such paradigms because of what we have learned in life, but the problem is that in learning them they can create a form of mental inertia when faced with new possibilities or experiences that should put such assumptions into question. The mode of contrast Paul makes now concerns the result of aspirations.  All the strivings and orientation of the flesh focus on death.  Paul brings the relation between sin and death closer than ever before. Not only does death follow sin, but also to live in the weakness of the flesh is a form of death already. To live after the flesh is to contain the seeds of death. Paul refers to the general thought and motive.  Flesh is that side of human nature is morally weak, the physical organism leading people to sin.  The death is present and future. The strivings and orientation of the Spirit is life and peace, which is life and friendship with God.  If the Spirit dominates the strivings, orientation, and life of a person, one has more than a hope of life and peace.  The person experiences life and peace in the present. In that sense, the leading of the Spirit is not a blind force of nature, but rather, is of a personal sort. The Spirit is a personal reality by not extinguishing the personal character of human action through the activity of the Spirit, but by letting personal life come to consummation through willing dedication. It is to possess those qualities now, although partially.^[80] The life of which Paul writes is at the same time present and future.  Thus, peace is not simply forensic here, but applies to the whole person. Peace is reconciliation with God and a feeling of harmony and tranquility over the whole person.  Those who receive baptism, live “in Christ Jesus” (v. 1) and are therefore open to the promptings of the Spirit, receive life and peace now.  Their aspirations receive their inspiration and take the side of the Spirit.  The direction of the interests of the spiritual person are toward the Spirit. This includes the affections and will as well as reason.  Because Christ lives in Christians, the things of the flesh no longer dominate them, even if they must daily decide to allow the Spirit to control their aspirations and orientation.  The tension between death and life is a war carried out in the believer between living a life oriented to the self and living a life oriented by the Spirit. To live by the self (the flesh), to live out of our weakness, is death. While one can “crucify” this type of life with Christ, crucifixion of it lasts a lifetime. At times, it will be painful. The center of your life is outside you and therefore in relation with others and with God. Such a life is “in the Spirit.” Such a transformation is life and friendship with God. Such a realization and transformation is not an easy process. Such leading by the Spirit has a personal character by bringing our personal lives to their fulfillment. Living by the Spirit is to possess such qualities in a partial way today.^[81]Thus, the Spirit makes this moment full of possibility. True, the past moment of our justification in the cross through faith and the future moment of our redemption that we hold in hope contain their fullness. Yet, the present is not empty. Rather, the present is full because of the eschatological gift of the Spirit, who provisionally imparts life and peace now. The past act and the hoped-for future have a middle term in the advance installment of the Spirit. A thoroughgoing change has taken place in the Christian’s whole existence because of faith and baptism.  Sin may still try to dominate the flesh, but it does not dominate the self, thanks to the indwelling Spirit.  God’s Spirit now personally directs such a person toward individual fulfillment. The Spirit is the pleasure that God has in people and goodwill people have toward God.  The Spirit is existential meaning and sense.  Spirit admits no other possibility.  However, flesh is also a decision in time by God against people and by people against God.  We cannot decide between the two.  Nor are these two classes of people, those in the Spirit and those in the flesh.  We are in death and in life, rejection and election, condemnation and justification.  Christ in us helps us apprehend our existential freedom.^[82] The Spirit comes into us and makes possible our independent and spontaneous entry into the action of God in reconciling the world and our participation in the movement of the reconciling love of God toward the world.^[83] Christ dwells in Christians, as the Spirit becomes the source of the new experience, empowering them in a new way and with a new vitality. Even here, Barth concludes that “Christ in you” does not refer to a subjective status inaugurated and someday fulfilled, but an objective status already fulfilled and already established.^[84] I think Barth is simply not wanting to read with clear eyes what Paul is saying here. Paul is taking up a theme in this letter of the role of the Spirit as abiding, residing, staying, inhabiting within the believer. This indwelling Spirit is thus the driving force and the source of new vitality for Christian life.  The life-giving Spirit has an OT background.  The believers receive the eschatological earnest of the Spirit who has Christ from the dead and will quicken our mortal bodies, for the word that leads the believer into the truth is promise of eternal life, but not yet that life itself.^[85]

The tension introduced by the Spirit in the life of the believer is a tension that arises because the Infinite embraces the finite, that transcendence embraces our immanent experience of the world. if we close ourselves off from transcendence, if we do not feel its pull, then we will not have the type of tension of which Paul writes. Some people can rest with an objective description of the world. They are content with that. Yet, human language itself pushes us beyond such mere description, seeking to express thoughts and feelings that are beyond words. Life is more than what a collection of atoms and cells concoct. For Paul, Christ is the answer to that which we find so difficult to name and for which we have difficulty to hope for humanity and for our world. the Infinitude and transcendence that embraces us is the presence of the Spirit, who will dwell within us and walk with us if by faith open our lives to this power. Paul could write this way because he was one of whom God blessed with a powerful experience of the grace of forgiveness and the vision of the peace and reconciliation God intends in Christ. Most believers may have a far more ordinary account of the indwelling and guiding work of the Spirit in their lives that will suit the uniqueness of their lives. 

Romans 8:12-25 (Year A July 17-23) Paul focuses upon the Spirit making people children of God. He will complete his discussion of walking by the flesh or the Spirit (verses 12-17) and open his discussion to reinterpreting the sufferings of our finite and temporal lives (verses 18-25). This formation occurs through the pain, struggle, and suffering of a human life. 

The struggle or tension in the Christian life derives from the tension between the weakness of our flesh and the energy of the Spirit. He will speak of human weakness, while sin becomes something like an external force that takes advantage of that weakness. ^[86]  Life lived out of that weakness by taking such a life seriously, within the possibilities of this world. It relies upon finitude, temporality, and self. Such life might live passionately, devoted to the lowest or highest possibilities, or committing oneself to conservative or revolutionary political ideology. Yet, such a passionate life is also living under the shadow of death. Thus, the only path to life, a genuine, eternal, and eschatological life, is through the death of living within the possibilities of human weakness. United to Christ and empowered by the Spirit, Christians aspire to the new possibilities the Spirit offers. Such possibilities result from the freedom one has from the bondage to human weakness through participation in the life of the Spirit. It was through the Spirit that the Father “breathed” life into a lump of clay and gave humanity life. The Spirit provides personalized leadership, thereby respecting the unique personality of everyone. The Spirit will lead them to a life that finds fulfillment and completion that involves freedom, faith, and love.^[87] Therefore, the Spirit is not a blind force, for the Spirit adopts us into a family. The authentic freedom we find in the Spirit is by the one who grants this freedom by liberating us from fixation on our own ego, lifting us above our own finitude, and by becoming lastingly ours as the Spirit gives us a share in the sonship of Jesus Christ. “Spirit of adoption” refers to the Spirit as the seal and guarantee as well as a partial realization of the new status.  Animated by the Spirit, Christians cannot have an attitude of slavery, for the Spirit sets one free.  Christians have thereby won out over the anxiety of death and the fear of slavery. Adoption is the special status of Christians before God.^[88] Such adoption is consistent with the idea of a chosen people of God but focuses upon the Spirit as the active agent who brings this special place in the heart of God into effect.^[89] The significance of this such adoption is not through another means, such as the circumcision of males or adherence to Torah. A sign of this adoption is that we can refer to God in the same way Jesus did. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” Jesus called the God of Israel Abba,^[90] Father, and we can do so as well. It is the designation that Jesus used, when in agony in Gethsemane, he prayed, “Abba, Father, with you all things are possible; remove this cup from me” (Mk 14:36). The cry “Abba, Father!” is probably that liturgical form that the early Christian community used in its prayers when it gathered. The community prays “Our Father in Heaven” (Mt 6:9b) in the Lord’s Prayer. We are not slaves to the possibilities of this life but living in the freedom of children of the heavenly Father. In this family, we as individuals have many siblings, children, and parents. One has a personal experience of the Spirit that gives inward assurance to our conscience that we are children of God. Such experience has an emotional quality, a form of ecstasy, illumination, inspiration, or intuition. ^[91] The Spirit integrates emotion, reason, and will. The Spirit transplants the Christian into a sphere of behavior and power one characterizes as freedom of the children of God. In that sense, the Spirit becomes a personal center of action residing outside the individual. The Christian lives outside the self as weakened by the flesh and thus lives in the power of the resurrected Jesus and in the Spirit. Those in Christ re-center their lives away from self outside themselves to the power the Spirit gives them. What we are seeing is that the Spirit is both a person distinguished from the Christian and a power that they possess internally. The leadership of Spirit is not a blind force of nature but is of a personal sort. Thus, the Spirit claims our service. The Spirit living within believers has its basis in believers having the ground or foundation of their lives outside the weakness of self and flesh and therefore in the Spirit.^[92] Of course, as I John 4:1 reminds us, this personal experience of the Spirit does not absolve us from testing the spirits. The Spirit is in strange company when the Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God. Distinguishing between the Spirit and our spirit is not so easy, given our capacity for self-deception. ^[93]

We must not pass too quickly over the Trinitarian dimension of this argument. Paul refers to Christ as the Son (verse 3). Christians live their lives by and through the Spirit (of Christ, God, Holy Spirit). Abba, Father, has adopted us into the family of God as children. Paul is opening a discussion of the Christian experience of God. The Quran argues repeatedly that God does not have a Son, charging Christians with polytheism, a charge that shows no attempt to understand the language of the New Testament or of Christian theology. Christian baptism is in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The creeds have a Trinitarian structure. The prayer of thanksgiving before communion is Trinitarian. Trinitarian reflection begins the revelation of the Son in the work of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, giving us a moment in history when the Trinitarian nature of God disclosed itself as the loving fellowship of the one God experienced as Father, Son, and Spirit. The definitive moment of Christian knowledge of God is not Torah, it is not a book in Arabic that is the language of God, but the paradoxical claim that such knowledge appeared at a point in history, in a Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth. The resurrection of this man confirms he is whom the New Testament claims him to be, the Son in relation to the Father, and the one through whom comes the life-giving power of the Spirit to the community of believers and to individuals. Like all experiences that give life its meaning, the Trinitarian relation is not definable. This teaching of the church is precious. God (as Father) reveals who God is (in Jesus Christ) and becomes the life-giving presence of God in the world and in our lives (the Spirit).

Paul is focusing upon a struggle in the Christian life, in the process showing how that struggle finds a reflection in the struggle we see in creation. Through the revelation in the Son, we know that the redeeming work of the Father involves undoing the work of Adam, restoring humanity and all creation to the purpose of God in creation. Given the revelation from the Father we have in the Son through Jesus of Nazareth, and through the present working of the Spirit among us and in us, this struggle has meaning and significance. The reason is our present as part of the family of God means the death and resurrection of Christ define our destiny. We suffer with Christ as we reflect upon his death for us, the weak and guilty, and by faithful following of Christ in the world. The life-journey of every human being involves pain. We may wonder why. We may rebel against it. However, the harsh reality is that living things struggle and suffer to maintain life. Often, such pain deepens the experience and appreciation of life. In fact, if we knew the secret history of our enemies, we might see in him or her a sorrow, pain, or hurt that would disarm us of our hostility toward them.^[94] Life has hurt everyone. Everyone is broken. No one receives an exemption from the pain that comes in living a human life. Paul is not going to offer what philosophy and theology would later call theodicy. He will not explain suffering. Suffering and pain in life is part of the training we experience that will reveal who we are. If the person remains oriented toward God while life pierces the person with the nail of affliction, the nail pierces a hole through creation, through the thickness of the veil that separates the person and God.^[95] Could pain deepen our character, help us appreciate life, and even enable us to go deeper with God? If we love God, aware only of the roughness of the divine hand, we have indeed gone deeper in our walk with God. Such personal pain and affliction is a reminder of the sufferings of the present time. While this life may bear a hint of eternity, it always remains debatable and ambiguous.^[96] The analysis of the human condition as in Adam that began in 1:18 has its culmination in the restoration of humanity as children of God. Redemption is the completion of creation, and humanity is part of that creation. We see our present suffering in the shadow of the Day of Jesus Christ. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time. The future will reveal the glory or beauty of the end of humanity. In this sense, Christianity is “thoroughgoing eschatology,” as redemption remains a hope. The believer will live by this hope. We must desire nothing higher or better than hope.^[97]

Thus, the personal struggle and the cosmic struggle are part of the present redeeming work of God that moves toward the completion and fulfillment of creation. If we place personal and cosmic experience of struggle within the context of the Infinite and Eternal, we will expand our conceptual horizons. Science provides us with some clues as to the nature of the travail of nature. Life began 3.5-4.5 million years ago on earth, but asteroids snuffed it out, some describing early earth as “an interrupted Eden,” a planet where life repeatedly evolved and diversified, only to be snuffed out. [98] Evolution describes the depth of suffering in nature, as life requires the consumption of other life to survive, as the strong devour the weak. The whole creation is crying for release. Those who are in the Spirit experience, in their own being, the labor pains of the birth of the new age within. Something new is being born in the world. The new age of God is not just a redesign of the old age but is the birth of something fresh and unexpected. God's new creation will come out of the old creation and will quickly grow up to replace it. At the center of this transformation is the Holy Spirit, a current of divine power that comes directly from God. The metaphor of a mother delivering a child is rich and passionate. He conceives of the transformation of all creation in terms of giving birth. All creation is in the process of hard labor; the contractions are coming faster and harder, although the experience of the passage of time seems cruelly slow. Verse 15 refers to reception now of the Spirit of adoption, but we also await the manifestation of our adoption as children of the heavenly Father. We groan because of the frustration that the life in the Spirit cannot find complete embodiment in the life of the believer, referring to human weakness that causes so many human endeavors to end in futility. The two entities of personal and cosmic suffering converge on a path of redemption. What is happening within is also happening without; the entire creation is experiencing labor pains, too. There is complete synchronicity between the microcosm of the inner life and the macrocosm of the universe. Through the immanent work of the Spirit in us and in creation, God is liberating and redeeming creation. The goal of creation is to share in the life of God. The sighing of creation is an expression of the presence of the life-giving Spirit of God in all creatures. The immanent work of the Spirit both gives life to all and suffers with all creation. Paul is not explaining why suffering exists. He is offering the insight that the Spirit suffers with all creation, and therefore with you and I amid our suffering. In this work of the Spirit, all creation participates in the destiny of the children of God, which we see by way of anticipation in the resurrection of Jesus. Creation will share in the eternal fellowship of the Trinity. Each part of creation has divinely given independence. God has granted to human beings the unique responsibility of respecting this independence of all creatures.^[99] In the present time of suffering and pain, the believer lives by hope. Such hope waits silently for the Lord. It restrains faith from expecting too much. It refreshes faith when it becomes tired. For believers, such hope has its basis in the One for whom the Christian hopes. Christ defines that future.^[100] Such hope reaches beyond the present to something not yet visible. Caught up in the process of delivery, powerless to resist the urge to push, the believer and all created order must remain focused on that which is unseen but certainly and painfully felt. One must envision the end and know that it is surely coming. This is Paul's definition of hope. One believes the certainty of the Unseen One's promised end in the midst and of the muddle of the present chaos. One cannot see the crowning. However, one feels the contraction and knows that new life is on the way! Christians who are justified by faith and baptized into Christ live in hope of the eternal redemption already achieved for them by Christ Jesus.  This hope gives vitality to endure the sufferings that lead to glory.  Christian groaning and waiting has its root in hope.  We have dissatisfaction with the frail and perishable quality of this life. Christians believe they are on the way to a future fulfillment that transcends the weakness and suffering of the present. We vacillate between hope and despair for that reason. The basis of such hope could be the natural processes of life and its anticipation. For Jews and Christians, its basis is in the promise of God.^[101] Hope understood in this way involves waiting, which means we do not have, see, know, or grasp that for which we wait. Our existence in relation to God is one of waiting. We can wait anxiously. Paul encourages us to wait patiently. If we are no longer waiting, we have created an idol out of our belief system with which we have grown comfortable. Much of the resistance to preaching and to Christian witness may have in the background resistance that anyone can have so much certainty about truth or God. Those who witness may well need to consider that the witness needs to include communicating that we are still waiting patiently and humbly.

Romans 8:26-39 (Year A July 24-30) offers assurance that along with the present life-giving work of the Spirit that enlivens us to live with the anticipation/waiting for redemption, the Spirit will also make the pain of this life easier to bear by bringing comfort and support to those experiencing tribulation. The Spirit who helps us is the Spirit whom the Father has poured into us the love of God. [102]  The presence of the Spirit lifts the believer to a life beyond the potential confined by human weakness and enables creation to live beyond its aspect of groaning and suffering. Hope enlivens humanity and creation to move toward redemption. We can see the help of the Spirit in that even if we become inarticulate before the Father and the Son, the Spirit connects our experience of human weakness through our inward struggle with the life of the Father and the Son. When we cannot articulate our greatest needs to God in our prayers, the Spirit calls out to God for us.[103]  The Spirit is emotionally involved and eternally invested in our yearnings toward the Divine. The Spirit groans for us, yes, and the Spirit gives us hope by helping us in our weakness. Since the Spirit is the promise of the Father and is the Spirit of Christ, the Father and Son know the depth of human longing through the aspirations of the Spirit at work within us. The Spirit translates the stuttering and stammering human soul into a language of praise and love. We can be thankful for this work of the Spirit, for in our weakness even our prayers become twisted and stand in need of repentance and forgiveness. Paul will write like this in other places. Human egoism, human anxiety, cupidity, desire and passion, human short-sightedness, unreasonableness, and stupidity, might flow into prayer.^[104] In I Corinthians 2:6-16, God has revealed to “us” through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. Only the Spirit of God can comprehend the thoughts of God. Paul contrasts the spirit of the world and the spirit from God. The Spirit from God helps us understand the gifts God bestows on us. “We” impart this wisdom in words taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual person does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for such a person would them as folly. The gifts of a God require spiritual discernment. I Corinthians 4:1-5 refers to receiving judgment from others, and even from himself, but such judgment does not matter, for the Lord judges. II Corinthians 3:4-6 discusses the confidence that “we” have through Christ toward God. In this context, just as we groan in concert with creation, the Spirit also groans for us or, alternatively, just as the Spirit gives us hope, the Spirit also gives us help in our weakness. God is immanent among us and in us through the Spirit. The Spirit enables us to pray, even when prayer is difficult. 

Paul becomes a theologian of the Spirit. His Christology and eschatology depend on his doctrine of the Spirit. Paul strongly emphasizes the ecstatic element in the experience of the Spiritual Presence. These experiences he claims for himself. He knows that every successful prayer has an ecstatic character. The Spirit prays through the person, even should it be “unspeakable sighs.” The formula, being in Christ, which Paul often uses, involves an ecstatic participation in the Christ who is the Spirit, whereby one lives in the sphere of this Spiritual power. Yet, Paul resists any tendency that would permit ecstasy to disrupt structure. To refer to Romans 12-15 at this point, note that Paul can write of the gifts of the Spirit, which is does extensively in I Corinthians 12-14 in dealing with ecstatic experiences. He writes of the structure of the moral imperative of love. His focus on love or morality and knowledge are the forms in which ecstasy and structure unite. The struggle for churches in every generation and culture involves bringing structure and spiritual movement together. Spiritual movement is not the same as chaos. However, one can also secularize the Spirit by the institutionalization that accompanies places the structure provided by doctrine or moral rules in priority. All churches must face the duty and the risk of such choices. Paul is careful to provide moral and institutional guidance in a way that provides some structure, but we must always be aware that he also expected the power of the Spirit to provide leadership in new ways. ^[105]  

God sees to it that the aspirations and sufferings of those in Christ contribute to their good. How can this happen? Suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope, all of which finds confirmation in the love of God shown us in the personal presence and power of the Spirit (Romans 5:1-5). Those who love God are also those whom God has called to live in accord with the purpose of God. The sustaining ground of the hope by which communities and individuals live is their love for God and thus their calling in accord with the divine purpose. The existence of the community rests on the primal decision of God in which the will of God will bring to eschatological glory coincides with the will of God to affirm that the community in love. Paul directs us to the basis of the event that discloses the purpose of God, that is, Christ, rather than the contingent quality of an historical community of the people of God.^[106] Paul expresses how this can happen in Romans 5:1-5, in which “we” rejoice in “our” sufferings, as suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope, which has confirmation in the love of God poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The providence of God governs everything that happens to Christians in earthly life. Nothing in this life can harm Christians, whether it is suffering or the attack of hostile evil powers, for all these things can contribute to the destiny to which God has called Christians, whom Paul now refers to as “those who love God.” One of the ways the providence and sovereignty of God works itself in our lives is that God takes the suffering and weakness of our lives and brings good out of it. In this sense, nothing can harm those who love God in an ultimate way. The sovereignty of God over our lives means that everything will contribute to our destiny as determined by Christ. Evil is that which attempts to thwart the plan or purpose of God. Our weakness, combined with our propensity toward serving self, is a large part of the harm we inflict upon self, others, and creation. Of course, even if human beings did not exist, plenty of suffering and pain would exist in creation. Yet, God has not left creation without assistance. The Spirit is with creation and with human beings in their suffering and weakness. Human beings make a hundred small decisions every day that contributes to the evil and suffering in the world. Yet, in response, we have seen human beings offer acts of kindness and goodness. Some will misuse their freedom to perpetrate evil. Millions will respond with using their freedom to re-dress wrong and contribute to what is good in this world. 

Romans 8:29-30 have the theme of the Christian called and destined for glory. Properly read, Paul characterizes the plan of God for history in one sentence. Paul is stretching human language here to express the providential care of God for us. Thus, the Father knows beforehand (see 11:2) and decides beforehand (I Corinthians 2:7, Ephesians 1:5, 11) those whom the Father will conform to the image of the Son. Thus, Paul gives further definition of what it means for God to work everything for the good of those in Christ. Everything that happens has the possibility of conforming us to the image of the Son. The movement toward “good” is a process of forming Christlikeness in the lives of those who love God. The risen Christ is the beginning of a large family of people who will be with God in eternity. Paul refers to those whom God decided beforehand. Such a decision occurs within the context of the ongoing work of God since the beginning of creation and ends in the redemption of creation. In that sense, this decision beforehand we understand best in the context of Romans 8 and the thought of 9-11. Thus, we can also understand this decision beforehand as having a close connection to the formation of those who love God into the image of the Son. Amid human suffering and weakness, God has decided beforehand what the outcome will be. Those who love God will gradually conform to the image of the Son. In II Thessalonians 2:13-15, God chose them from the beginning for sanctification through the Spirit. For these reasons, I must disagree with John Calvin, who thought of this decision beforehand to relate to individuals who would experience eternal life or eternal judgment.^[107] Such a view, rooted in Augustine, is an abstract view of election because it separates the electing activity of God from the historicity of the divine acts of election to which the Bible gives witness. We can see the abstraction of this view as it focuses on individuals and separates them from the corporate nature of the people of God. Christ is the first among many whom the Father will bring into filial relationship with the Father through the Son.^[108]  God decided beforehand a plan that those who love God have the destiny, through their weakness and suffering, to reproduce themselves in the image of Christ by a progressive share in the risen life of Christ. Paul is bringing the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of believers into close parallel.^[109]  Therefore, God also called them. If God calls them, God also pardons them their offences. God will also glorify such persons in the fashion of the risen Lord. Those who love God and those whom God has called bear the form of the Son. God incorporates people in the rule of the Son by binding people to Jesus through the proclamation that awakens faith and sets them on the course of formation into the image of the Son. Although Paul will not directly connect this idea to the mission of the church, the responsibility of the church is to develop this likeness in its fellowship and teaching.^[110] Paul has just said that creation awaits the revelation of the children of God. Yet, that revelation has already appeared in the Son.^[111] The goal of election and the government of the world by God is that the elect should find themselves formed into the image of the Son. This decision beforehand by God has the design of offering assurance to those who love God that through the weakness and suffering of human life and creation the purpose of God will reach its desired end. The mission of the people of God is to include all humanity in this relation of the risen Christ to the Father. The aim of election is the fellowship of a renewed humanity in the rule of God.^[112]

Romans 8:31-39 focuses on the decision of God to be “for us.” Yes, God loves us and is ready to help us in our weakness. However, the focus here shifts to Jesus. We know God is for us because the Father did not spare the Son but gave him for us so that we might find life.^[113] The Father gave up, abandoned, cast out, and delivered the Son to an accursed death, in an act that was for humanity. Since the Father did not Spare the Son, humanity is spared its fate. This act shows that while humanity may be godless, humanity is not godforsaken. This act is the basis for the justification of the godless. The Father suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love. The Son suffers death as one abandoned by the Father, but the Father is never without the Son, suffering the grief of that loss. [114] This passage points to a reality we all face. This world has an alien character, for it is chaotic, destructive, and dangerous.^[115] Yet, above the weakness and suffering of this life is a divine Yes. This Yes does not arise within us. It comes from beyond us and confronts us. This Yes summons us to seek and find ourselves. We hear this Yes in Jesus Christ.^[116] We hear the pardon for our sins coming from God through the cross. No one can accuse those who love God and respond to the call of God.  No one has the right or power to condemn such persons. The reason is Jesus Christ, who died for us and who the Father raised to new and resurrected life within the Trinity. The Son prays for us and with us. In this way, the Son unites with the ministry of the Spirit within us. His point is that nothing in the world can feel so alien to us because of its dangerous character that it will separate us from the love Christ. 

Paul will list some ways in which this world is dangerous. Scholars refer to these portions of the letters of Paul as his “hardship” lists. In I Corinthians 4:8-13, Paul admits “we” have become a spectacle to the world and to angels. “We” are fools for the sake of Christ. He describes his team as weak, hungry, thirsty, ill-clad, buffeted, homeless, reviled, persecuted, and slandered. They seek reconciliation. He admits that they have become like refuse in the world. In II Corinthians 4:7-12, “we” have this treasure in earthen vessels, afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, and carrying in their bodies the death of Jesus. Death is at work in them. In II Corinthians 6:1-10, “we” develop great endurance, in affliction, hardship, calamity, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, and hunger. He refers to how people treat them as impostors, unknown, dying, punished, sorrowful, and as having nothing. In II Corinthians 11:21b-29, he refers to five times receiving from the Jews 39 lashes, three times beaten with rods, stoned once, shipwrecked three times, in danger from rivers, robbers, and the Jews, danger from Gentiles and the city, danger in the wilderness. In II Corinthians 1:9, he says he felt he had received the sentence of death. In II Corinthians 12:1-10, he refers to his thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, that harasses him. Considering all of this, Philippians 4:10-13 says that he has learned contentment in all things and that he can do all things through Christ who strengthens him. In this passage, Paul notes that Psalm 44:22 sums up his experience in this world, and the experience of many early followers of Jesus. For the sake of the Lord, people are killing them all day long like sheep led to the slaughter. His point is that regardless of the ways in which we experience our weakness and suffering in this world, it will not separate us from the love God has shown us in Jesus Christ. Life in this world is not Camelot. A well lived life is one that does not allow hardship to defeat the basic reason we are here. Hardship defeats us if we turn to addiction, crime, or suicide. Defeat can also take less aggressive forms that allow our fears and anxieties to make us shy away from life. He even identifies the forces that may try to separate us from that love, such as death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, powers, height or depth, and anything else in creation. Paul is getting poetic as he builds to this conclusion. Nothing will separate those who love God and have responded to the call of God from the love of God shown in Christ. In the process, he stresses the love of Christ for us cooperates with the love of the Father for us.^[117]  He said in 5:5-11, in union with what he says here, that the essential content of the history of Jesus in the fact of the love God has for the world.^[118]

As we shift our attention to the difficult argument Paul makes in Romans 9-11, I have grown in my appreciation for what Paul is doing. Paul explains the result of the saving act of God in communal life as it redefines the people of God. He has written regularly that the message of the gospel went “to the Jew first, and then to the Greek.” He has said that God has acted now in Christ to bring salvation to humanity as a fulfillment of the promise contained in the Old Testament, especially to Abraham. Yet, the people to whom God made these promises, the Jewish people, have mostly rejected this message. The puzzle for Paul is not so much where Israel fits into the plan of God, but how the church fits to the plan of God for the newly envisioned people of God. He does this by showing the relationship between God and Israel, explaining that the church is a subset of Israel in the plan of God for saving humanity. This passage is an explanation of the plan of God that Paul offers from the standpoint of his eschatology. He can have a principal place for Christ in the plan of God because of his eschatological vision. Paul feels the need to explain in more detail the question of the relationship between Jew and Gentile.  He has hit the issue at various points, but now wants to make himself clear.  He has expounded upon the eschatological tension in the life of the individual believer in Chapters 6-8, and now, he devotes himself to the eschatological tension between Israel and Church.^[119]

The church is not the church when it resists the joining of Israel and church into one community of God. Where the church apprehends in the crucified Messiah of Israel its own election, knowing itself to be one with Israel, there we find revealed the unity of the whole elected community. The church is, then, the second form of this one community of God. The church will comfort Israel with its message. The church will reveal to Israel the evil it intended in the crucifixion of Jesus. The church will make clear that the promises delivered to Israel it will proclaim to the world. The church will save Israel from annihilation. The church understands that the Son of God is Incarnate as part of this Jewish people.

Given the presence, again, of the state of Israel, this argument means more today in terms of Jewish and Christian relationships than it did prior to that event. Christians in America and Europe continue to struggle with the place of Judaism in the on-going plan of salvation. Anti-Semitism, hidden or overt, is obvious. In addition, another religion, Islam, has arisen that is quite explicit in its rejection of the covenant God established with Israel and the church, making it clear that the only hope for Jews or Christians is to convert to Islam. 

  Romans 9-11 is not a denunciation of the Israelites, whom Paul describes as his own people (9:3). Indeed, it is important to remember that throughout the entirety of the Pauline letters, it is not Jews or Israelites who receive any of Paul’s condemnation, but rather Jewish-Christians whenever they try to make Gentile-Christians follow Jewish religious practices as a condition for becoming Christian (cf. Galatians 2:1-16). Second, while Paul does not shy away from offering criticism of his people (10:2-3), he still contends that God has not rejected the Israelites — they remain God’s people (11:1, 28-29). Third, no matter how things appear now, eventually “all Israel will be saved” (11:26) because of the mercy of God (11:31-32). 

Paul quotes so much from the Old Testament that one can call this section a Midrash Old Testament texts. Each claim regards the saving purpose of God as revealed in the word of God as having a two-sided character. The theme of the Midrash is around the question of 9:6a: Has the word of God failed? The point is that God has chosen the above means of salvation through faith in Christ, and that Jews have no right to argue with God about that.  Yet, he maintains that Israel continues to have a special place in God’s plans. This statement means that the older assumption that these chapters deal with the doctrine of predestination does not hold, a common conclusion among interpreters today. Part of his point is that the church is a subset of Israel, a branch from that Jewish root. 

Given that Paul is applying the basic themes of Israel to Gentiles, one might justly wonder what Paul feels toward Israel or toward the Jewish people. This section of Romans begins with sorrow. We can understand that. Most of Paul’s fellow Jews rejected the gospel.  The recipients of the divine promises in the Old Testament have remained outside the stream of salvation.  If what Paul teaches is consistent with the Law and the Prophets, then why have the Jews rejected it?  That is what Paul deals with in Chapters 9-11.  The failure of the mission to the Jews raised the question of the faithfulness of God to the promises we find in the Old Testament; Paul then sees the need to justify the activity of God in Christ Jesus. Surprisingly, the problem most Jews would have with the preaching of Paul is that his message was so like their message. The message of free grace and election, of the faithfulness of God to that election, would be in common to both. However, Paul has had the insight or revelation that the basic Jewish message has an application to Gentiles through faith in Christ. Paul offers an apologetic for his message in the sense that he will defend both his application of the promises God made to Israel to Gentiles and the continuing role Israel has in the plan of God. Paul maintains that Israel continues to have a special place in God’s plans. The church is a subset of Israel, a branch from that root. Clearly, Paul feels the need to explain in more detail the question of the relationship between Jew and Gentile.  He has expounded upon the eschatological tension in the life of the individual believer in Chapters 6-8, and now, he devotes himself to the eschatological tension between Israel and Church. This section of Paul's letter to the Romans concerns the relation of his central theological tenet - justification by faith - to the historical fact of Israel's self-perception as God's chosen people. Paul seems to suggest that the form the people of God take is provisional, in the sense that it points the world beyond itself to the God who is active on behalf of the world. The community is a witness and herald. Israel formed the original and special environment of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. This community mediates its missional purpose in the plan of God. The man Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of Israel and therefore the Messiah of humanity. Christ is witness to the mercy of God toward humanity. The people of God, the elect of God, are Jew and Gentile. When the church resists joining itself to Israel, the church is not truly church. The church can reveal to Israel its participation in sin as it collaborated with Rome to crucify Jesus. Yet, the church will also take the promises of God to Israel and apply them to humanity because of what God has done in Christ. If the church is the church, it will save Israel from annihilation. The Son is incarnate Jewish flesh, and thus, the church will not forget its special bond with the Jewish people. The church lives by the covenant made between God and Israel. The church lives by the existence of Christ according to the flesh, and thus a descendant of Abraham and David, and called Jesus of Nazareth. This reality is significant. He is this man, within this community, as well as the Son of God. He was not a Greek, Roman, or German, but Israelite. As we find in John 4:22, “Salvation is of the Jews.” The church recognizes itself in the prophets of Israel that reminded Israel of its disobedience. Yet, in defiance of all Gentile arrogance, the church asserts and teaches the eternal election of Israel.^[120]

Romans 9:1-5 (Year A July 31-August 6) expresses the appreciation Paul has for Israel. Paul refers to his conscience, a moral consciousness available to all human beings. Given what Paul has said about circumcision and the Law to this point in the letter, Paul is imagining a dialogue partner accusing him of some hostility toward those with whom he formerly identified. He assures his readers this is not the case. He has a deep concern for the Jewish people. He is willing to be cursed and cut off from Christ if it meant the salvation of the Jewish people, adopting the position of Moses (Exodus 32:32). Paul enumerates the blessings that remain with the Jewish people. The adoption as children of God that applied to the church in 8:15, 23 belongs to them, as does the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, Temple worship, the promises, as well as the patriarchs (Chapter 4 and in 9-11), concluding with the reminder that the Messiah of all humanity is and always will be of Jewish flesh. This last fact verifies the continuing significance of Israel, the Old Testament, and the Jewish people. Paul discusses Israel and the church. Israel is the human fellowship that provisionally forms the natural and historical environment of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. The church is the environment out of which witness to Christ emerges. It summons the entire world to faith in Christ. The church has this office and commission, pointing beyond itself to the fellowship of all people, to which it is witness and herald. Israel forms the inner circle of the election of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, while the election of the church becomes a mediating witness between Israel and the world. ^[121] We learn in these verses that Paul can exercise the apostolic office committed to him by Christ only in the name of and on behalf of the church and Israel. His work as an apostle, and necessary to him personally for his salvation, is to approach his mission as to the Jews first. They are his brothers and sisters according to the flesh. The community of the church has its basis in the unbelieving Israel. The church is Israel reaching its divinely appointed goal. The church lives on what Israel has received as a wrestler with God. The church lives by the glory of God that goes before Israel and dwells in its midst, by God’s own manifestation of the divine presence graciously occurring, but also graciously concealed, in the providences of its history. Israel experiences the concealing of this gracious presence, while the church lives by that divine presence. Yet, it is one divine presence.

Given that Paul is applying the basic themes of Israel to Gentiles, one might justly wonder what Paul feels toward Israel or toward the Jewish people. This section of Romans begins with sorrow. We can understand that. Most of Paul’s fellow Jews rejected the gospel.  The recipients of the divine promises in the Old Testament have remained outside the stream of salvation.  If what Paul teaches is consistent with the Law and the Prophets, then why have the Jews rejected it?  That is what Paul deals with in Chapters 9-11.  The failure of the mission to the Jews raised the question of the faithfulness of God to the promises we find in the Old Testament; Paul then sees the need to justify the activity of God in Christ Jesus. Surprisingly, the problem most Jews would have with the preaching of Paul is that his message was so like their message. The message of free grace and election, of the faithfulness of God to that election, would be in common to both. However, Paul has had the insight or revelation that the basic Jewish message has an application to Gentiles through faith in Christ. Paul offers an apologetic for his message in the sense that he will defend both his application of the promises God made to Israel to Gentiles and the continuing role Israel has in the plan of God. Paul maintains that Israel continues to have a special place in God’s plans. The church is a subset of Israel, a branch from that root. Clearly, Paul feels the need to explain in more detail the question of the relationship between Jew and Gentile.  He has expounded upon the eschatological tension in the life of the individual believer in Chapters 6-8, and now, he devotes himself to the eschatological tension between Israel and Church. This section of Paul's letter to the Romans concerns the relation of his central theological tenet - justification by faith - to the historical fact of Israel's self-perception as God's chosen people. Paul seems to suggest that the form the people of God take is provisional, in the sense that it points the world beyond itself to the God who is active on behalf of the world. The community is a witness and herald. Israel formed the original and special environment of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. This community mediates its missional purpose in the plan of God. The man Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of Israel and therefore the Messiah of humanity. Christ is witness to the mercy of God toward humanity. The people of God, the elect of God, are Jew and Gentile. When the church resists joining itself to Israel, the church is not truly church. The church can reveal to Israel its participation in sin as it collaborated with Rome to crucify Jesus. Yet, the church will also take the promises of God to Israel and apply them to humanity because of what God has done in Christ. If the church is the church, it will save Israel from annihilation. The Son is incarnate Jewish flesh, and thus, the church will not forget its special bond with the Jewish people. The church lives by the covenant made between God and Israel. The church lives by the existence of Christ according to the flesh, and thus a descendant of Abraham and David, and called Jesus of Nazareth. This reality is significant. He is this man, within this community, as well as the Son of God. He was not a Greek, Roman, or German, but Israelite. As we find in John 4:22, “Salvation is of the Jews.” The church recognizes itself in the prophets of Israel that reminded Israel of its disobedience. Yet, in defiance of all Gentile arrogance, the church asserts and teaches the eternal election of Israel.^[122]

Romans 10:5-15 (Year A August 7-13) is a discussion of the righteousness from the Law and the righteousness from faith. The point Paul will make is that the new way of rightness with God is not through Law. Rather, the path is open to all, easy and near at hand, as Scripture shows.  Paul discusses the meaning of faith, as he explains this new mode of acquiring peace with God. An event has occurred that has ended the salvific importance of the Torah. Christ is the content of that event. At this point in the argument, Paul is pondering how so many of the Jewish people have rejected the way of faith. We find that even though the Torah had its time in the plan of God, the way of faith makes the Lord God of Moses available to all. While law and faith represent differing events in the history of salvation, the character of God has remained the same.^[123] Paul explains the futile character of the pursuit of an upright status before God based on works. In Galatians 3:10-14, Paul will also assert that a curse rests upon those who seek to find life in this way. The reason is that one must obey everything taught in the Torah or else one lives under a curse. Even the Jewish people could not accomplish this, so God opened a new way through the cross. Christ received the curse of our failure to live by the Law, whether the Torah or the principle embedded in humanity to live by Law. His death frees us from the curse of not following the Law. 

 

Free from the law -- oh, happy condition!

Jesus hath bled, and there is remission;

Cursed by the law and bruised by the fall,

Christ hath redeemed us once for all.^[124]

 

The Torah showed its ineffectiveness by the fact that no one could obey it fully. Its ineffectiveness has led to the opening of the way of faith in Christ, which means that Jew and Gentile could be together as the people of God. The way of faith opens when we have our encounter with Christ. The event that Christ is in the history of salvation must have a corresponding event of faith in our lives. Such an event binds Jew and Gentile together and has the potential to erase all other boundaries of human construction. Paul will then offer a midrash on Leviticus 18:5 and Deuteronomy 30:11-14, one that does not reflect what we would consider careful exegesis of these texts, to say that the word of faith is not the goal of some impossible far-off quest, but as close as our hearts and mouths, through which we remember and make known the righteousness that comes from faith. He then identifies the word of faith with the word that we proclaim. In making this appeal, Paul is affirming that God has not changed. The gospel which “we proclaim” now makes clear that the “word” said to be so near to everyone in Deuteronomy, was always, in Paul’s view, “the word of faith” and not some law demanding perfect obedience. The Lord God of Moses is the same God who is the Father of Jesus Christ and the one Christians call upon as “Abba, Father.” His claim is that Gentiles have access to rightly relating to God through faith rather than a law no one can obey fully. Paul is trying to move the people of God from the burden of a religious life based upon Law to the joy of the life of offering personal assent to what God has done in Christ. In what way has Christ become the end of the Law?^[125] The people of God can no longer look upon this Torah as the expression of the eternal will and purpose of God. The way of Torah must give way to faith in the new saving event of God in Jesus Christ. This act of God opens the door for good news to the world.^[126] The reason for this is ⁹ that if you confess  (ὁμολογήσῃς, to commit an act of honest-to-God speech, publicly coming clean about what the truth is) with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe (πιστεύσῃς) in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (σωθήσῃ). The fundamental divine act, in Paul's theology, was God's elevation of Jesus to divine sovereignty and God's raising Jesus from the dead. Paul acknowledges that this belief is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23), but Paul is not ashamed to proclaim it (Romans 1:16). For one believes with the heart and so is justified (δικαιοσύνην). Paul's doctrine of justification through faith, of which Luther and the Reformed tradition have made much, is expounded most fully in Romans. The word for "justified" occurs a dozen times, far more than in any other book in the New Testament (see, for example, 2:13; 3:4, 20, 24, 28; 4:2; 5:1, 9; 8:30; 10:10; and two-thirds of the occurrences of "justification" also appear in Romans). Although the term has a complex theological history, the basic meaning in the Pauline writings is "to be made righteous," as the recipient of God's transforming grace. And one confesses with the mouth and so is saved (σωτηρίαν). The first basic confession or profession of faith in the early church was simple: Jesus is Lord. It was an affirmation developed before Paul began his public ministry. The confession of Jesus as Lord was a fundamental article of belief in the early church.^[127] The Holy Spirit causes people to say that Jesus is Lord (I Corinthians 12:3). Paul and his team proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord (II Corinthians 4:5). A day is coming when every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father (Philippians 2:11). Since they have received Christ Jesus the Lord, they are to continue to live their lives in Christ (Colossians 2:6). It was one of the earliest and most widespread Christian confessions of faith in most Greek-speaking areas of Christianity.^[128] The confession of Jesus as Lord in creedal formulation was required for admission to baptism, membership in the church and access to the Eucharist. Today, Christology must provide the basis for this confession.^[129] The cause of this public profession is the prior internal event of believing that God raised Jesus from the dead. Such conviction resides authentically in the heart and issues faithfully from the mouth. Inner faith forthrightly receives voice. We see this pattern in Romans 1:1, 3-4 as well, which affirms the resurrection of Jesus from the dead first, and then affirms that Jesus is Lord. Philippians 2 stresses that Jesus humbled himself to the point of death before God exalted him. Hebrews 2:9 has a similar emphasis. I Corinthians 15 reveals the basis of the gospel he preached in Corinth, including the death and resurrection of Jesus that he finds especially affirmed in the appearances to the disciples and to a larger group soon after the death of Jesus. He admits that the event of faith is empty if God did not raise Jesus from the dead. Yet, this internal belief was more than intellectual assent. It was the sign of sharing in the life of the new community of the people of God.  The logic of this pattern of spiritual awakening is that one first believes in the heart, thereby receiving a right relationship with God through the pardon we have received in the event of the death of Jesus for our failure to live in a way that honors God. One can understand the joy many have found in recognizing that their standing with God did not rest upon their ability to do everything some perceived law might require.^[130] The mouth affirms what the heart confirms. The result is that God saves a person who believes in the heart and publicly testifies to the truth discerned in the heart. Such salvation primarily refers to the eschatological fulfillment of the plan of God for the redemption of humanity. We can see this emphasis in Romans 5:9-10, where salvation involves freedom from receiving the anger and judgment of God upon sin. In I Thessalonians 2:16, those who resist bringing this saving message to Gentiles will be at the receiving end of the anger of God. In I Thessalonians 5:8-9, to receive salvation is to avoid the anger of God. In I Corinthians 3:15, everyone will be at the receiving end of the fire of judgment, but the fire is a cleansing fire. What remains will receive the benefit of the saving action of God. In I Corinthians 5:5, he even hopes that as a matter of church discipline handing someone over to Satan now will lead to his or her salvation on the Day of the Lord. This notion of salvation shows the theological indebtedness of early Christian teaching to Israel and to Jewish apocalyptic writings. For scriptural support he appeals to Isaiah 28:16, that one who believes will not experience shame. The one who believes in the heart and confesses with the lips will have nothing about which to worry in the final judgment. Such a person will receive honor rather than shame. Romans 1:16 stresses says that Paul has no shame now, in this life, in preaching the gospel, because he has seen the effect of the saving message of the gospel spreading among the Gentile world. ¹² For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. In Romans 3:26-29, there is neither Jew nor Greek, a point he makes in I Corinthians 12:12-13 and Colossians 3:11 as well, and if they belong to Christ, they are the offspring of Abraham and heirs according to the promise. there are not two ways of salvation, one for the Jew and one for the Gentile. Paul introduces the second characteristic of obtaining righteousness by faith, that it is universal. Paul’s concern here the inclusion of Jews within the new covenant that God establishes with all humanity in Christ. God is now relating to “Jews” and all others in the light of what has been done in Christ. He appeals to Joel 2:32, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall receive salvation. He has stressed that the same Lord of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus is Lord of all and is generous to all who call upon the Lord. The Lord is so generous that the Lord will save such persons. Paul stresses that this path of rightly relating to God through faith fulfills the universalist thrust of the message of the Israelite prophets. The purpose of God through the covenant with Israel finds its fulfillment in the divine saving purpose revealed in the event of Christ. What Paul has done is explain how Israel is accountable for its rejection of the word of faith. It already had the word of faith contained in the Law! It already had the universalizing thrust of the prophets! He uses the words of Joel and Isaiah to say that Israel has heard the call of God and failed to respond with faith. Paul seems to argue that the election of Israel by God finds its confirmation in the election of the church. The reason for this is that the mission of Israel finds its fulfillment in the church. The honor of God dwells among the people of God. The community serves the divine promise that awaits a humanity that will hear and respond with faith. The community lives as a witness to the saving action of God in Christ. It hears the call of God and serves that call. A church that would cut itself off from this connection to Israel will lose its mission. Israel will always have a special place of service within the people of God and the church must do all it can to make sure nothing interrupts that service. Israel reminds us all that God chooses to make humanity hear the word, follow the leadership God provides, subject itself to God, and listen to God. This will always be the privilege of humanity. As we find revealed in the Jewish Messiah, the people of God are servants. Israel reaches its goal in its church form! All of this would be clearer if Israel had received the word of faith. It fails to hear properly its destiny in Jesus Christ. It jeopardizes its existence by rejecting the one community in the world that cannot do without this relation to Israel and Judaism. Its rigid rejection does not remove it from the people of God. It continues to serve its purpose within the people of God.^[131]

            The confidence of Paul rests in the purpose of God to show mercy through election and rejection and to extend the call of God to Gentiles, both of which the Old Testament has prophesied. He has explained it as a failure to understand the Law as the word of faith pointing to the eschatological significance of Christ and has refused to excuse Israel on grounds that they had never heard the word of faith or had insufficiently clear indication of how God would achieve the divine purpose in the final days. In these verses, Paul deals directly with the failure of Israel to believe the gospel, a theme that has been in the background. The interlocking of these two elements in his thought, the way his understanding of the Law in terms of faith meshed into these prophecies of Jewish unbelief and Gentile belief, provided Paul the Jew with one of the central supports for his faith in the Christ. He could use Isaiah 52:7, 53:1, 65:1-2 as support.

            Paul will conclude in Romans 10:14-15 by discussing the failure of Israel to respond to the gospel. If the event of faith has occurred in our hearts and we have professed it with our words, then we will want to become active participants in sharing that word with the others. We will want others to call upon the Lord that will arise out of their believing in the Lord. Such belief will come because they have heard, recognizing that If faith comes through hearing, then it comes with some understanding.^[132] Communicating faith is integral to proclaiming the good news of salvation to others. More than a matter of efficacious personal piety, receiving good news becomes our faithful responsibility to publicly share good news with, and for the edification of, all humankind. Once received, good news remains neither good nor news unless shared with others. Referring to Isaiah 52:7, beauty is a gentle way to gain attention and to attract people. The way we “clothe” ourselves in our witness matters. It needs to have a gentle quality of beauty. Good news is not so much an object upon which we act as it is an activity that calls and gathers us to participate in it. By quoting from Isaiah, Paul connects this good news activity with the tradition of the prophets calling attention to God’s manifest and emerging purposes. Thought (heart) and word (mouth) in 10:8-10 set the stage for deed (feet) in 10:15. Whether Paul had this in mind, the dynamics of this imagery are consistent with the apostle’s view of faith in relation to action. Faith does not result from our action or works. Even when action on our part leads others to faith, such action is grounded in God’s gracious initiatives to which we faithfully respond. Our actions may map our spiritual journeys, but such mapping cannot be developed or serviceably guide us unless we first have the reliable compass of the faith we communicate by calling on God and calling others to God. Paul is providing inspiration for a view of spiritual growth as well. Living things grow. The same must be true of spiritual life. As we work through this passage, we need to remember that the life of Paul backed up these words. He had an extraordinary personal involvement in announcing the gospel. The event of faith in his heart led to courageous profession in the world. He dedicated his life to Christ, despite problems and persecutions. His life is a lesson for us. One wonders what would happen if the action of the church backed up its words in the way Paul backed up his words. The credibility and effectiveness of the church would undoubtedly expand. He was willing to pay personally for his faith in Christ in every situation. The appeal of the gospel is weaker when this is not the case.

            Romans 11:1-21, 29-32 (Year A August 14-20) stresses that Jewish apostasy is not final. The faithfulness of God is among the profound mysteries of who God is. 

Paul is wrestling with his version of the saving plan of God. We might even call it a philosophy of history from the perspective of the significance of the coming of Christ. The issue is that the Jewish people have received the promises and calling of God. How can Paul now say that Gentiles can now claim such promises and calling? He will respond by sketching out the historical dealings of God with humanity. If we go back to the argument in Romans 1-8, Paul says that Christ is the “end of the Law.” He is saying that the Law had its place in the saving plan of God for humanity, but that Christ has now fulfilled that purpose. The saving plan of God continues in calling people to faith in Christ rather than obedience to the Law. Yet, this occurs in a way that fulfills the purpose of the Law. In Romans 9-11, Paul is working on the role of Israel in the formation of the people of God. The political organization of Israel, whether as a tribal federation or as sacral kingship, was the form the covenant people of God took as the focus of the saving plan of God for humanity. Yet, the prophetic notion of the remnant within Israel (I Kings 19:10-14, Deuteronomy 29:4, Isaiah 29:10, Psalm 69:22-23) is a reminder that Israel has always contained the faithful and the faithless. The same is true today. Paul and the disciples are prominent examples of a remnant from the Jewish faith that has embraced Christ as fulfilling the saving purpose of God. However, this means the historical form of the people of God needs to shift from the political organization of the nation of Israel to the formation of the church as the Body of Christ. Bringing people into this community is now the center of the formation of the people of God who are to be a light to the nations. The church fulfills the saving purpose of God in such a way that it does not replace Israel but fulfills the purpose of Israel in the world as the people of God. This means the church must always humbly acknowledge its indebtedness to Israel and therefore its Jewish roots. The rejection of the gospel by the Jewish people means that the people of God presently divide along the lines of Judaism and Christianity. Even though Israel has rejected the saving purpose of God in Christ, God has not rejected Israel. For God to do so would mean that Christians, newly incorporated into Israel and the people of God, should have some anxiety about whether God will abandon them for some new people! Thus, God remains faithful to the people of the old covenant. Sadly, the history of the church is that it has claimed as an exclusive quality the election of God only for itself.^[133] In the process, the church needs to admit its complicity in the spread of anti-Semitism. However, the way people of God will find their destiny is to find their unity in Christ. The faith and hope of the church includes the preservation and redemption of Israel. The hope of Israel in this world is the intimate concern the church has for it.^[134] It ought to pain us that when Jews see the cross or think of the church, they do so with fear. The church needs to admit that while it must have a respectful relation with all religions, it must have a special relationship with Judaism. We will never understand Jesus or the early church if we reject the Jewishness of its origin. In the process, the faithfulness of the love of God to Israel will become visible to all. Thus, the providence of God is such that God incorporates the faithlessness and stubbornness of Israel into the saving plan of God for humanity. God is in fact at work in all things, even in most of the Jewish people rejecting the gospel, for the good of those who love God. God has considered human sin in the saving plan for the redemption of humanity.^[135] Since the way God created resulted in the formation of independent creatures, human sin became the cost.^[136] Such a view of saving history ought at least to raise the issue of whether Judaism and the church are the remnant God has for a people from within the human race that God intends to save in the end. Such a philosophy keeps in tension the purpose (choice, election, predestination) of God and respect for the freedom and dignity of those whom God created. The action of God is prior to all human action since God is the source of our being. If God is to exercise providential care for humanity and its destiny, then obviously, God is at work in all things, bringing good out of evil, and moving humanity toward its destiny in Christ. Another way to say this is that God is present everywhere at the same time. Yet, God is at work in all things in a way that shows respect for the freedom and dignity of those whom God has created. God chooses to respect the freedom and dignity of those whom God has made within the limits determined by God so that the saving purpose of God for humanity will reach its divinely appointed end. We know that end because of Christ, in whom God is acting to reconcile and redeem humanity. 

Paul raises the question whether the rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ by most of the Jewish people means that God has rejected his people in 11:1. The answer is an emphatic negative. How could Christians be certain of their own comparatively new membership in the circle of the elect of God if God did not remain faithful to such election despite the unbelief of Israel? This is the point the apostle makes when he advocates the inviolability of the election of the Jewish people in 11:29 and 9:6. He has in mind Christian assurance of election. God has not annulled the covenant with the Jewish people. Yet, how could Paul cling to this conviction in view of what was for him particularly the painful experience of the overwhelming rejection of the gospel by his own people? The primary solution lies in the remnant concept of Old Testament prophecy. He could point to Elijah and the Jewish-Christian community. As the people of God, Israel is for the time being confined to this remnant, but at the same time the people of God is expanding as the mission of the apostle to the Gentiles is bringing in believers from the nations in 9:24-26. Paul sees an abiding link between the church and the Jewish people, a link he describes in terms of the root of the olive tree that carries the wild branches that contrary to normal rules have been grafted into it in 11:17-18. The hardening of Israel by God serves the purpose of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles, so that the hardening does not finally exclude from God or from sharing in divine salvation. At the same time, the history of the church has shown that it has not heeded the warning by Paul that we find in verses 17-24 of claiming an exclusive election for itself.[137]

The election of the one man, Jesus of Nazareth, demonstrates God as merciful in judgment. The purpose of God for humanity is a gracious end that already has a gracious beginning. Paul has shown us that one aspect of the Incarnation is that God takes the place of humanity in bearing the bitterness of the natural human end. Christ died for us. God has interrupted the natural act-consequence of divine judgment. God has shown humanity supreme favor by doing so. Israel as the chosen, elect human community was the environment out of which Jesus of Nazareth arose and through which the saving purpose of God is revealed to humanity. The honor of God dwells in this historical community. The people of God exist in two historical forms, one that is passing in Israel and one that is coming in the church. In a sense, Israel represents the passing of the old humanity so that the new humanity can come. Those who resist God are passing away. The church needs this contribution of Israel. One cannot hear the witness of the church to the past event of Jesus of Nazareth or to the living future promised in Christ to humanity without the background and undertone of the Jewish people, which spiritually nourished Jesus yet also, surprisingly, crucified him. The election of Israel discloses that God elects a community for fellowship with God through grace and for fellowship with humanity. As Paul has shown, God chooses to have fellowship with the frailty of the flesh, those who suffer and die, to clothe humanity with glory. Israel reveals the depth of human need as well as the depths God will go for the sake of establishing the covenant with humanity. In a sense, the promise of the election of a historical community is now through Israel and the church. Israel is the smitten servant of God prophesied in Isaiah. Yet, the purposes of God do not depend upon that historical community to be the faithful servant who suffers. Israel depends upon the attitude of God toward it. We could imagine a different scenario for Israel. Suppose Israel had fulfilled its election as the people of God by responding positively to the proclamation of Jesus. In that case, it would witness to the passing of the old humanity as taken up in the confession of the whole community of God of the coming rule of God. It would supplement and harmonize with the witness of the hope and promise founded in the resurrection of Jesus. As the promised Messiah of Israel, Israel would already become new as God translates Israel from death to life. In its refusal to accept that the old is passing away and the new is coming, it shows the depth of the human need for grace. It refuses to see that Christ died for the sins of the Jewish people as well as for the Gentile. Israel keeps looking backward when it needs to look forward. Old things have passed away and the new has already come. Divine mercy is the lens through which we need to see Jewish unbelief. It might have served the purpose of God by responding with faith, but it also serves the divine purpose by its resistance. Israel has united with much of humanity in its resistance to the gospel. It disrupts the historical community of the people of God by doing so. The church form of the people of God shows God has elected humanity, not just a nation, for fellowship with God. God elects them for salvation. In that sense, life surrounds death and the rule of God through Christ surrounds hell. We learn all this through the event of revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot penetrate behind it or ignore it. The task of the church is to witness to its truth. In the presence of death, the church witnesses to life. In the presence of the old humanity, the church witnesses to the coming of the new humanity. The church that witnesses to the gospel in this way discloses the direction and purpose of Israel. Israel shares this mission. The church confirms the election of Israel by its witness to the event of revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. The church discloses the meaning of the history of Israel. The church is no more than Israel fulfilling its fulfilling its purpose in living by nothing else but the grace of God. The church confesses its unity with the Jewish people and with the rest of humanity in its witness to the hope of humanity in Christ. 

We can see the record in the Old Testament that God continually held out a gracious hand to a disobedient people of God. We see the same in the New Testament. God does not abandon the attempt to address Israel. Thus, the crucifixion of Jesus does not allow Christians to treat Jews as accursed by God. The crucifixion is no basis for anti-Semitism. The Jewish origin of the church is relevant to how the church treats the Jewish people. Even the original resistance to Jesus (crucifixion) and to the message of Paul by the Jewish people has meant the good news brought to all people. Such is the providential care of God for humanity that God can take what human beings intend for evil and turn it into good. The hardened heart of the Jewish people became an integral part of the salvation-history that leads to gentiles hearing and responding to the gospel. The growth of the church among the gentiles has the partial intent of showing to the Jewish people what God intended for the mission of Israel. Yet, even in its resistance to this insight, Israel remains the possession of God. ^[138] The permission of sin is the cost of the creaturely independence at which the creative action of God aims.^[139]

Paul has expressed a certain view of history that revolves around the revelation of God in Christ. Adam represents a time of ignorance and thus no guilt. The Torah given through Moses has had the purpose of showing people their guilt. This experience of the people of God reveals that all forms of law or living by a code will fail because of the inability of the code to make a tribe or community pure, the arrogance it engenders toward other people, and the inevitable violence to which it will bring people. Christ has come to end all such views of the people of God. Within that context, God has selected Israel to show forth the divine purpose in revealing the failure of the law and opening the door to the salvation of all through Christ. Paul further believed in the eschatological nearness of the rule of God through the event of Christ and through the presence of the Spirit, a rule that bring reconciliation and peace for Jew and Gentile who find in Jesus of Nazareth their Messiah. Paul saw evidence for this view of the providence of God in what he was witnessing in his ministry. While his own Jewish people rejected the gospel, gentiles accepted it. God shows sovereignty over all things by taking the bad, the rejection of the gospel by most Jewish people, and working through that to bring salvation to the world. God demonstrates a form of wisdom that is deeper than that of human wisdom by exercising such providential care for the people of God and for humanity.^[140]

The tension in Paul between the working out of the purpose of God in history and in individual lives on the one hand and the responsibility individuals have for their choices on the other, is quite real. Paul has thus far emphasized the action of God in Christ and through the present operation of the Spirit to accomplish the purpose of forming the people of God apart from Torah or any adherence to a code. The exhortations by Paul for the people of God to look a certain way in their life together, governed by love that has the effect of reconciliation and peace, suggests his readers have some responsibility to embrace the exhortation. God has a purpose that God intends to become real among the people of God, while at the same time, God does not intend this purpose to become real without the cooperation of human beings. In that way, God makes room for human beings in a way that respects their will and choice. God can bring good out of any choice human beings make, demonstrating the sovereignty of God. The supreme example of the hope Paul has is that while his own Jewish people have surprisingly rejected the offer of salvation through faith in Christ, gentiles have surprisingly embraced the good news, thereby giving him the confidence that God will also save Israel. Paul does not resolve the tension. Rather, given the context, he will focus upon the accomplishment of the purpose of God in one context, and on the responsibility of his hearers to embrace his message on the other.^[141]

Christians have been adopted into the people of God and are thus honorary receivers of the promises to Israel and therefore to the Jewish people. Repentance of the historic sins the church has committed against the Jewish people will be appropriate in every generation, accompanied by the excellent work of working for the peace and preservation of the Jewish people as part of the people of God. Such persecution was especially acute in the Hellenistic and Roman domination of Israel. When the church gained influence in the power structure with Constantine, instead of guiding political leaders away from anti-Semitism, and it could have done through a faithful reading of Romans 9-11, it bowed to the political and cultural policies of anti-Semitism. It did so on what most of us would now view as twisted theological reasoning. Christians are related to Judaism in a way that differs from our relationship to any other faith. There is no way to understand Jesus without understanding the faith of Israel. Christians must not get to the New Testament too soon or too directly, for the Old Testament nourished the faith and life of Jesus and the early church, for whom it was scripture. It is painful when Jews, for good reason, look upon the church with bitterness and the cross as a sign of the torture of Jews. Their response is a witness to the tragic infidelity of the church. If the Jews are going to believe that Jesus is their redeemer, then it will have to be from people other than those of us who have so betrayed our redeemer through 2,000 years of persecution, indifference, and complicity in violence against the Jews. If we want to do anything for our sisters and brothers in Christ, the Jews, then we might urge them to be faithful to the religion of Israel, rather than attempt to convert them out of that faith. The great miracle, as Paul understood it, was that we have been adopted into a family not originally ours, and thus the promises of God to Israel have been extended to gentiles. God has not rejected the Jewish people, and God has not rejected the church, despite its sins against the Jewish people. God remains faithful to the people of God, for which Jew and Gentile alike may be thankful.

As modern readers, we have far more history of the church and its mission from which to learn than did Paul. Much of the world has rejected the gospel. We see this rejection even more in recent decades. We also see the obscurity of the life of the people of God that makes acceptance of the gospel harder. If we applied the reasoning of Paul to our situation, it could be that God will show sovereignty over humanity by taking even the perversions of the fellowship of the Body of Christ in the life of the church as a means God will use in the divine government of the world to hold open an opportunity of sharing in this salvation the rule of God will bring for those who now take offense at the church. ^[142]

As we move to a new section of this letter in Chapter 12, considering this letter from a philosophical perspective, Paul has given his exposition of the true in the first eleven chapters. He will now connect this truth regarding the merciful and gracious action of God in Christ and through the life-giving Spirit in the life of the people of God to his vision of the good and beautiful life. In terms of the theological virtues, he is moving from his reflection on the faith of the people of God in Chapters 1-11 to an exposition of how that faith leads to the transforming of the people of God through love. Considering his argument from the perspective of the two great commandments as stated by Jesus, he directs us to love God for what the mercy shown in in Jesus Christ (1-11), thereby by fulfilling the first four of the Ten Commandments, and to love the neighbor as oneself (12:1-15:13), thereby fulfilling the last six of the commandments.

Romans 12:1-15:13 is a sketch that Paul offers of redefining the daily life of the people of God in the light of salvation through faith. He is particularly concerned with Christian community in this section. Anyone who believes that God has a people will also need to show how this fact affects the daily life of the people of God. Paul now wants to clarify the look of this new life in Christ. It has roots in the doctrinal section of the letter. This section is an ethical treatise. He has made clear that the Mosaic Law is not the norm of Christian life. He will now show that love flows from the faith of which he has written in Chapters 1-11. This section of Paul's letter to the Romans exhorts this community to display proper Christian behaviors and attitudes. Paul would oppose any move toward a purely private religion. 

The way Paul binds his doctrinal reflections in Chapters 1-11 to his exposition of the loving and unifying nature of Christian life in Chapter 12-15 has important implications. Christianity is not simply about intellectual assent to the right things. It involves embodying the life of the risen Lord as we participate in a humble and harmonious way with the people of God. We have the unity and diversity that a body has. In particular, the risen Christ is visible, is bodily, in the historical presence of the Christian community. Paul has made the point that the mercies of God come to us apart from Torah. They have come to us in Christ, and we open ourselves to such mercy through faith. Paul is not imposing a new Torah, which is why referring to this section as the ethical section is so dangerous. He is not proposing the exchange of one code for another. He also wants to be clear that baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ (Chapter 6), that walking in the power of the eschatological gift of the Spirit (Chapter 8), and uniting ourselves to the historical work of God in Israel that finds its fulfillment in Christ (Chapter 9-11), will show themselves in the way we live. The language of the section is simpler and more accessible to most of us as readers than is the discussion of doctrine in Chapters 1-11. Beneath the simpler language we discover the ambiguity of all life as well as the ambiguity of Christian life. Paul will disclose the ambiguity contained in all ethical and moral reflection. He will also show how such reflections must lead to compassion and understanding of others. The basis for his reflections upon the Christian life are the mercies of God (12:1), which he has explored in Chapters 1-11. The Christian life is to embody that mercy. Paul is reminding us that when we fall short of the humility, harmony, peace, and love he will discuss, our bad conscience still relies upon that mercy. Paul acknowledges that much of the Christian life overlaps with what most of us would consider as “good,” “acceptable,” and wholesome behavior. Yet, the Christian life is discerning of the critical nature of this moment, in which a tension is present between the dominant forces of evil in this age and the eschatological transformation for which Christian faith hopes in the future and strains toward in the present. The temptation will be to read this section as we might an ethical or moral tract as modern, secular persons, with a heavy emphasis upon the individualism that is simply part of our intellectual environment. Paul has before him the specific concerns of Christian communal life, even though such concerns will overlap with good people everywhere. The perspective of this discussion involves our participation in the risen life of Christ as members of his body, embodying the resurrected life of Christ in Christian communities. Such a perspective keeps Paul from simply exchanging one code for another.[143]

Romans 12:1-8 (Year A August 21-27) is the beginning of his moral appeal to the Christian family in Rome. 

Romans 12:1-2 assert that finding and doing the will of God, which is our reasonable worship of God, is the heart of the reconstituted people of God. His appeal or encouragement to them is a typical form of address in constructing a moral discourse (parenesis), in which he will advise his readers to pursue or abstain from certain ways of life. His use of “therefore” connects this appeal to the argument of Chapter 1-11, which he summaries as explaining the mercies of God, and directs the appeal to the Christian family. The action his appeal encourages is the presentation of their bodies. This suggests a purposive action, a moment. This moment is decisive because it involves bodies, which is anthropological language for the whole person, physical, emotional, and intellectual. In Chapters 7-8, the body is the place where the battle between sin, Law, and flesh takes place and in 8:10-11, where the Spirit who dwells in is life and will therefore give life to bodies destined to death. This presentation of ourselves becomes a holy and acceptable sacrifice offered to God that does not die in the offering. To make such an offering involves a decisive act of one's own will, a positive involvement in becoming part of God's plan toward holiness. He further identifies this act as our spiritual or reasonable worship practice. He is drawing upon the language of Leviticus and the sacrificial system as practiced in the Temple. Such an offering is the appropriate response to what God has offered the world in Christ. Such an offering is the appropriate response to what God has offered the world in Christ. Using the language of apocalyptic that forms the background of the thinking of Paul, this decision has the effect of introducing a tension between this response to what God has done in Christ and this present age, the spirit of this time, which is decaying, thereby refusing to allow this dying moment of history to conform or shape one’s life. As Paul has shown, Christ is the appearance of the coming glorious age within this present decaying age, and the Spirit is the agent of that coming glorious age who is at work now to move this age toward its redemption. The glorious age that has already begun will find its maturity in the return of Christ. Thus, the spiritual battle is the ongoing battle between the present evil age and the coming glorious age that is already present through Christ and the Spirit. In the moment of decision, we become part of the eschatological battle that takes place in this age.^[144] Considering the argument in Chapters 5-8 and 9-11, the eschatological battle plays out in our lives and in the constitution of the people of God (church and Israel). He is now showing how that eschatological battle will play itself out in our moral decisions, which will involve what we pursue and what we avoid. He will give some content to our moral decisions in the rest of the letter. Our transformation is through the renewal of the mind, a form of mindfulness or paying attention to one’s mindset. Such a transformation is a re-centering of the self, a renewal of our mindset so that we can discern the good, acceptable/well-pleasing, and perfect will of God. 

Romans 12:3-8 draws out the lesson of humility within the church. Paul has expressed his concern that his fellow Jews have had overconfidence in the Law, he has shown that the prophets warned of the danger of such overconfidence, and that faith in the saving work of God in Christ gives no one reason to boast. Paul wants us to avoid thinking highly of the self. The Christian family is to pursue a sober or prudent judgment of self rather than giving into the normal human pattern of this present corrupt age to think highly of the self. He invites the Christian family to consider the basic equality of each member. This will require modesty. He wants his readers to avoid arrogance and excess. Such a view of the self is unfitting and overly ambitious in the context of Christian family life. The underlying point is that if the family is to have unity, it must begin here, in a proper estimation of the self. Paul will then invite us to consider the metaphor of the human body. The image is vivid enough that it remains powerful all these centuries later. The body is a unity that has diversity of parts. Each part relates to the other part and the sum as one body. Such an attitude is part of our reasonable act of worship. Here is a specific way we can pursue the transformation of the mind and do battle with the present evil age. He calls upon the family to recognize that variety can exist within unity. Such diversity is part of the continued health of the whole. Each part of the body must make full use of what God has given to that member. Grace unites the variety of gifts, temperaments, and passions of individual members.^[145] He is stressing that the fellowship of Christians with God and each other rests on their participation in the Christ to whom each of them has a relationship by faith and baptism. If we take what Paul says about the church as the Body of Christ just as it stands, we must understand the new resurrected life, the life of the risen Christ, as a removal of the individual autonomy and separation that are still part of earthly life while still involving respect for individuality.^[146] Grace and faith determine the position one has in the body rather than our ambition or merit.

Although the Church of Jesus Christ is many denominations today, we can still acknowledge the unity we already have in Christ. In other words, we need to see that just as our individual lives have significance and giftedness in order to benefit the larger network (which we call the church), we also need to have enough of the grace of God working through us to acknowledge the various ways God may work through other denominations in order to benefit a still larger network (which we call the rule of God). Denominational histories contain within them unique gifts that can feed other denominations.

Paul will then enumerate the variety of gifts that constitute the body. Such gifts are not from a distant place. Part of the transformation of our minds involves seeing the gifts as already at hand in our lives. All gifts are equally important for the health of the body. We often do not appreciate our own uniqueness.  Two cells, each containing 23 chromosomes and within each chromosome hundreds of genes that would govern our essential characteristics.  Each one of us is indeed special.  The individual member of the body has a responsibility to discover the gift that he or she can use to glorify God through the mission and ministry of the Body of Christ in this world. Proper worship involves everyday life and the communal life of humility and love. One offers unselfishly the gifts and talents one has. A proper understanding of the spiritual gifts one has would lead motivate one to greater commitment and service and bring a new excitement to being part of the body of Christ. Every Christian has at least one. We find our joy in discovering and using our gift. Personal fulfillment flows from maturing the gift or gifts we may have. The point of each gift is to strengthen the body. Our focus needs to be our motivation and the opportunities for service, leaving any manifestation of the gift to the Spirit. These opportunities for service involve declaring truth, serving, teaching, exhorting, giving, ruling, and mercy. Each of us may exercise any of these gifts. Yet, we may well discern that our basic motivation is one such gift. If we can learn our basic motivation, we will have a minimum of weariness in serving and maximum effectiveness in serving. Thus, one who has the gift of teaching will still practice the gift of mercy or empathy but will express this mercy as a teacher.

 

I offer a brief reflection on the gifts mentioned here that I have gathered over the years.

 prophecy (προφητείαν, a function of certain persons within the early church, referring to both speaking forth the word of God into a situation and an insight into the future), in proportion to faith; something like Old Testament prophets who spoke as messengers of God. God inspired them to utter the deep things of God for the conviction of sin, edification, comfort, and sometimes predicting the future. If we reflect upon the gift of prophecy further, we will find a need to express the message verbally, to discern the character and motives of people, the capacity to identify, define, and hate evil, the willingness to experience and prompt brokenness, a desire for outward evidences to demonstrate inward conviction, directness and persuasiveness in speaking, a concern for the reputation and program of God, an inward weeping for the sins of others, and an eagerness to have others point their blind spot. The prophet will be misunderstood in seeming harsh, disinterested in individuals, gain results by gimmicks, intolerance of grey areas, neglect for the process of growth, hinder intimate relationships, and little interest in listening to others.

 ⁷ ministry (διακονίαν, often in Acts as a description of a group within the early church, as in waiting on tables, giving aid, service), in ministering; such serving has the ability to recall specific likes and dislikes of people, alertness to practical needs, to meet needs as quickly as possible, the stamina to fulfill needs, the willingness to use personal funds, complete a job with evidence of unexpected extra service, an inability to say no, greater enjoyment with short-range goals, and frustration when limitations of time are attached to a job. Misunderstanding arises in that they can be pushy, exclusion of others from a job, disregard for personal and family needs, suspicion of self-advancement, negative reactions when others do not detect needs that seem obvious, rejection of allowing others to serve them, easily hurt, interfere with lessons that the need they sense might teach others, lack of interest in spiritual matters, impatience with others who are helping, frustration with long-range objectives, and sidetracking directives from leadership to meet needs.

the teacher (διδάσκων Jesus taught in the synagogue, he taught the disciples, and he taught the crowds that followed him), in teaching; they believe their gift is foundational to other gifts, an emphasis on the accuracy of words, testing of the knowledge of those who teach them, delight in research in order to validate truth, validating of new information by established systems of truth, presentation of truth in a systematic sequences, avoidance and resistance of illustrations of scripture out of context, and a greater joy in researching truth than presenting it.

⁸ the exhorter (παρακαλῶν, as in to call near, to admonish, to exhort), in exhortation; such a person visualizes specific achievements and prescribes precise steps of action, avoids systems of information that lack practical application, sees how tribulation can produce new levels of maturity, depends on visible acceptance when speaking to individual groups, discover insights from human experience that can be validated and amplified in scripture, enjoys those eager to follow steps of action, does not teaching unaccompanied by practical steps of actions, and delights in personal conferences that result in new insights. Misunderstanding arises as they can oversimplify the problem, overconfidence in the steps of action, lack of interest in personal evangelism, taking scripture out of context, and disregard for the feelings of those counseled because of the emphasis upon action steps.

the giver (μεταδιδοὺς, sharing what one has with others), in generosity; such a one has an ability to make wise purchases and investments, gives quietly to effective projects of ministries, attempts to use giving to motivates to give, alert to valid needs that might be overlooked, enjoy meeting needs without the pressure of appeals, joy when gifts are an answer to specific prayer, depends on counsel of partner to confirm the amount of a gift, has concern that the gift be of high quality, and desires to feel a part of the work or person to whom the person gives. Misunderstanding arises when such a person can appear to focus upon temporal values, can appear to desire to control the work or person, giving unnecessary pressure to others, not responding to appeals can seem like lack of generosity, and personal frugality can appear to be selfishness. 

the leader (προϊστάμενος, preside over or direct), in diligence; Has an ability to see the overall picture and clarify long-range goals, organizational skills, completes tasks, knows the resources needed, know what can be delegated, stands on the sidelines until those in charge give responsibility to the person, assumes responsibility if no leadership exists, endures reactions from workers to accomplish the task, finds fulfillment in seeing all the pieces coming together and move toward the finished project, and moves on to a new challenge when a previous task is fully completed. Misunderstanding occurs when delegations appear as laziness, willingness to endure appears as callousness, misuse of workers, views people as resources or tools, and the desire to complete tasks swiftly appears insensitivity to the schedule, weariness, or priorities of workers. 

The compassionate (ἐλεῶν, showing mercy or pity upon the afflicted, Jesus pronouncing that those who show it shall receive it), in cheerfulness. Showing compassion is the ability to feel an atmosphere of joy or distress in a person or group, attracted to understanding people, remove hurts and bring healing, more concern for mental than physical distress, avoids firmness, sensitivity to words and actions that hurt others, discerns sincere motives, enjoys unity with others, and closed to those who are insincere or insensitive. Misunderstanding occurs when the person appears weak and indecisive, guided by feeling rather than logic, misinterpreted by the opposite sex, appear to be taking up the offense of another, and hard to get to know.

 

            Romans 12:9-21 (Year A August 28-September 3) in the context of the argument Paul has made in Romans, receiving the gift of grace and reconciliation in Christ and they are to reflect this peace with God (Romans 5:1) in their relationships with each other and with the world.^[147] In the immediate context, Paul provides tangible instructions for how to be a unified body in the present age, moving from a discussion of spiritual gifts to a discussion of Christian character inspired by the principle stated in verse 9 of genuine love, hating evil while holding fast to the good, both within the church and toward those outside the church. Such love is the necessary component if the fullness of the spiritual gifts that activates and exercises the Christian community is to become reality. They are reminders of who the Christian community is in the form that expresses the qualities, attitudes, and actions that are to distinguish the community from other social gatherings. The form is that of wisdom sentences like we find in the Book of Proverbs. They become counsels for Christian living. The people of God are to have certain distinguishing features in their life in the world. It will not derive its identity from adherence to a political ideology, to an economic system, to a pattern of worship, to a building, to a set of ritual or purity laws, to a form of dress, and so on. Such approaches would be the approach of a people devoted to law and adherence to a code. In contrast, these words, phrases, and sentences are matters for our meditation and prayer. Here is the type of community we seek to be and therefore the type of people we seek to be. Such statements ought to give us pause. Are we becoming the type of person Paul is describing here? Are we becoming this type of community? Such a community is seeking to do the will of God (Lord’s Prayer and Romans 12:2). One cannot legislate this type of attitude and behavior that extends forgiveness and resists the temptation of repaying evil or evil. One can hardly legislate loving God fully or extending genuine love to the neighbor. Such matters lift one beyond a code and to the life-giving realm of life in the Spirit and becoming children of God (Romans 8). We will never become such communities or persons, but we can be on the way. We can keep engaging in self-examination to see if we truly on this path. Presenting yourself as a living sacrifice, allowing the transformation of your mind, and aligning your life with the good, and therefore right, friendly, and wholesome, will of God, will lead Paul to reflect upon interpersonal relationships within and outside the body of Christ. The same “body” that is at war in Romans 7-8 is now at peace in relationships, not because one focuses on individuality, but because one focuses on their connection to community. In fact, returning to Romans 7 is helpful because the struggle there focuses on the ego, that is, the struggle “I” have. In this passage, one gets far more of a sense of individuals at peace because they have connected as part of the body of Christ, and therefore has genuine love as a guide. As part of the body, they have put the conflict described earlier behind them. One can now experience the peace that passes understanding and allow this peace to maintain, guard, and protect their lives. The concern in this passage is that the law of the Spirit of life governs the behavior of the community. This section takes the individual so seriously because it places the individual in the context of community. Thus, we will need to avoid an individualistic interpretation of this segment.^[148] If we properly grasp love, the other behaviors that Paul considers a matter of wisdom will naturally follow. We need discernment here, for love may not be true. Since most people have experienced the pain of live, it can lead to cynicism. Life can be dry, waterless, and unfruitful. Life is full of regret, disillusionment, and weariness with the world. Yet, love keeps appearing in our lives in surprising times and places.^[149] Such love springs from a desire to contribute human flourishing (goodness). Mutual love and showing honor/respect, zeal/passion for the Lord, hope that expresses itself in rejoicing, patience through suffering, perseverance in prayer, generosity, and hospitality, are ways Paul gives content to what it means to have genuine love while hating evil and clinging to the good. Shifting to those outside the community of the people of God, he urges them speak well of and pray for those who persecute them, differing with the Old Testament and the synagogue practice of cursing enemies. Paul stands with Jesus on this point. He taught that his followers were to meet hostility with prayer and meet violence with blessing (Matthew 5:44). Rejoicing and weeping together suggests a community so in touch with all other members that sharing emotions and compassion is a natural part of its life. Such a love will lead to living in harmony with each other. Rejecting the path of arrogance and self-importance, they are to associate with the lowly, recognizing that how one treats those of lesser social and cultural standing reflects who we are, refusing to abide by artificial divisions created by the culture and resisting the impulse of the culture to diminish the value of certain groups or to admire one group above another. An important aspect of wisdom is realizing that one is not as wise as one thinks. Rather than repaying evil done to you with doing evil to the other, do what is noble in the sight of all, and so, love instead of hate and bless instead of curse. Live peaceably with all. Thus, confident that divine judgment is near, an eschatological mindset suggests, as in Proverbs 25:21-22, that vengeance belongs to the Lord and the Lord will repay in the timing of the Lord. As for the people of God, if an enemy is hungry, feed them, and if thirsty, given them something to drink, opening the possibility of the person having the kind of shame that will lead to repentance and healing of the relationship. They are to overcome evil with good, even as God exercises the art of divine governance in the world by bringing good out of evil (Romans 8:28). To reverse much of the Old Testament on this point, but consistent with the teaching of Jesus, the people of God seek the destruction of the enemy by turning them into friends. In the end, God will hold them accountable for their actions. The time before divine judgment is a sign of divine patience and the love of God.^[150] Such counsel is appropriate for the cultural and political setting Paul faced. It will be appropriate for most situations Christians face today. It testifies to the promise and hope of an age to come in which peace will reign. Interpreting this passage as suggesting the absolute value of pacifism avoids the reality of an ambiguous world in which one may need to engage in strife, but only with the goal of the kind of peace we can have in this world.^[151]

Romans 13:8-14 (Year A September 4-10) Paul calls for a life within the community rooted in love. Love is the ethical outcome of the life made new by faith in Christ (1-11). Love is what we do graciously in the lives of others. We act toward others as God has already acted toward us in Jesus Christ, as he stated in 5:1-8. Grace overflows with the faith and love we find in Christ Jesus ( I Timothy 1:14). As good stewards of the grace of God, maintain constant love for each other, be hospital to each other, and serve each other, for love covers a multitude of sins (I Peter 4:8-10). God first loved us, so we cannot claim to love God and hate each other, so the commandment we have from Jesus is not a burdensome one, but the simple and difficult one to love each other (I John 4:17-5:3). Love sums up what we owe each other. Love says that some things matter to you. They are important. Life matters when the desire of your heart is love and the way you seek to live. Love is the answer to the question of what we owe to each other, the question of a meaningful life, and the question of what leads to human flourishing. Here is a place where the concern of the Christian community intersects with expressions of human desire in popular culture.

 

"All you need is love,

dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,

all you need is love,

dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,

all you need is love, love,

love is all you need."

 

Love is all we need. On this Paul, the apostle and Paul the McCartney agree. For another generation, "Love Makes the World Go Round."  It is a nice thought.  A romantic thought. To think of love as a debt we owe to each other may seem strange, although ethical questions may well begin with considering what we owe to others. The motivation of human behavior is to be love and the goal of our actions is to reflect that love. To go back to 12:1-2, love is another aspect of the presentation of ourselves as living sacrifices to God and the transformation of our mindset is to have love become operative in our lives, a view at which he hinted in 12:14, 17-21. Such love is to guide all our relationships. The reason is that love is a characteristic of God and is to find a reflection in those who worship and serve God. Paul and John (13:34, 14:12, 17) intersect at this point. Such love will do what the moral and ethical life of every culture entails, including the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:13-17, Deuteronomy 5:17-21 regarding adultery, murder, stealing, and coveting). Yet, the commands have their summation in the word from Leviticus 12:19 to love the neighbor as oneself, to which he refers in Galatians 5:14 as well. Paul assumes the value of the codes of various cultures but wants to move beyond the requirements and limits of a code to the love that fulfills them. Living by a code unites you to others who share the code and gives you moral superiority over those who do not share the code. It leads, at minimum, to arrogance and separation. It can also lead to the justification of violence against those who do not share the code. Abiding by a code is always a dangerous path. Relationships would suffer if the only thing that mattered was adherence to a code. Love will bring the entire law to its proper conclusion. Paul re-considers the meaning and role of the law as he considers the love of the Father demonstrated in the sending of the Son. The fellowship we have with God calls us to the difficult path of love for human beings.^[152] Christians must conduct themselves in Christ and in love. Jesus started this line of argument (Mark 12:28-31). Love fulfills the law because it does no wrong to the neighbor, universally understood. The neighbor might be the enemy, which he has covered in 12:14-21, or the governing authority, which he has covered in 13:1-7 (Dunn, 780-81). Love is the supreme gift in I Corinthians 13. Love is the freedom to be a servant to each other in Galatians 5:13-15. He complements the congregation for the love it has already shown and encourages this love with increasing depth and breadth to the point where he does not even to write them reminders to do so in I Thessalonians 4:9-12. Truly, our conversations about God (Romans 1-11) are always interrupted conversations when we consider the supremacy of love toward human beings. If we do not hear the voice of God in the other person, we may not hear the voice of God anywhere.^[153] We must be clear. A love for God that omits such love for the neighbor is not love for God. Law demands action, but for Paul, the action the Law requires is love. In the giving of oneself that love suggests the believer fulfills the Torah. They do what God requires and what is right in the sight of God.^[154] Such love, properly understood, takes us beyond the legal question we often have in mind with moralistic thinking. The love to which Paul invites us is harder because it is a humble path, in contrast to the arrogance and self-righteousness inherent in the way of the code. The way of love is harder because it is a peaceful and reconciling path, in contrast to the tendency toward binding oneself to a tribe of “us” against any other tribe of “them” generated by the code. We will never fulfill the moral obligation of love! Therefore, we are constantly growing in our understanding and practice of the breadth and depth of love. To conclude, yet another song:

 

And when you feel afraid (Love one another)

 When you've lost your way (Love one another)

 And when you're all alone (Love one another)

 And when you're far from home (Love one another)

 And when you're down and out (Love one another) 

 And when your hopes run out (Love one another)

 And when you need a friend (Love one another) 

And when you're near the end (Love)

(We've got to love)

(We've got to love one another) 

 

Light of the world, shine on me

Love is the answer

Shine on us all

Set us free

Love is the answer.^[155]

 

Romans 13:11-14 has the theme of the special need of ethical consecration because of the approaching eschatological crisis. He has just referred to the command to love as the primary preparation for the “end.” Paul brings Christian hope and Christian life together. Our hope for the future means we are to live a certain way today. Paul consistently held together two horizons, one on the decaying of the old age through sin and death and the in-breaking of the rule of God into this world through Jesus Christ. This apocalyptic vision means the present age is passing as God is in ushering in a new age. He is quite aware of the human plight of sin and darkness. Most Christians in apostolic times believed the Parousia was at hand and would happen in their lifetime.  Paul has statements that imply he expected Christ’s coming in his lifetime.  However, he also gives the impression that he looked for the attainment of a full life in Christ by his own death. While they expected Christ’s coming imminently, the delay did not shatter the foundations of their faith. Rather, through the risen Lord and the Spirit, eschatological salvation had already become a certainty for believers, so that the length of the remaining span of time was a secondary matter. The “delay” of the coming did not seem to create a crisis. A Christian sense of time is not just clocks and calendars.  It is the tension between the ways of God and our ways, good and evil, light and darkness.  It translates into a way of life. The trial on earth is a night of gloom that precedes the arrival of morning.^[156] Paul says that the return of Christ is even more reason for his hearers to contour their lives after the pattern of Christ. He bases his appeal on the fact that they “know what time it is.” There is no time to squabble with the state or their neighbors. He urges them to respect the state and to love their neighbors because their time is short. He is also quite aware of the hope for a new creation in Christ. Hope is more important that we know. St. Augustine says that hope has two beautiful daughters: anger at the way things are and courage to see to it they do not remain the way they are. Our dissatisfaction with the present arises out of our hope the future. As Reinhold Niebuhr said: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime." Hope always looks ahead to something greater and better than we have now. The incomplete character of human life is the basis for a hope that suggests its possible fulfillment. Christian hope has its basis in the promise of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and extends to the created order. We can move toward the future with confidence, patience, and cheerful expectation of the revelation of the will of God for humanity. We hope for the one in whom we believe and love. While the specifics of that future elude us, of course, we know what is most important. The content of the future is Jesus Christ in his final form, as he completes the work begun in his life, death and resurrection and in the sending of the Spirit. The content of our hope is Jesus Christ coming in glory. This hope means pardon for humanity. It means a movement out of darkness and into light. It means transformation and eternal life. The hope is for the completion of the reconciling act of God in Christ. Such redemption means peace between Creator and creation. Christians offer their witness and service today considering that hope. We move toward the goal. We live with the hope for the dawn of the great light, but we also have joy over the little lights we experience today. The Holy Spirit is the one who awakens us to this hope.

Paul will point out that much of humanity is asleep both to the plight and to the hope. Slumbering humanity needs to awaken to the significance of the coming of Christ as providing the basis for this hope. Even we in the church can slumber. We need to wake up to the needs of those closest to us, to the demands of this moment, to the many ways God appears in the simplest moments of our day. We need to awaken. Conversion is a form of awakening, appropriate given that the term has proximity to the resurrection of Jesus. In this moment, one awakens. Paul expresses this concern in other letters. In I Thessalonians 5:2, he reminds them that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. In 5:4-8, they are not in darkness, but children of light. They are not to sleep, but rather, are to keep awake and be sober. They are to put on the armor of faith, hope, and love. In Colossians 4:2, Paul encourages his readers to be watchful in prayer with thanksgiving. Every moment contains the possibility of being our time for God. The time is the eschatological era or last days, begun by Christ's death and resurrection and is co-extensive with the age of the church, the age of salvation.  Paul evokes the notion of time not with the basic reference to the Greek term chronos, but to kairos. Here he signals that this is a special sense of time, namely God's time and God's activity in history. The "time" is technically before the second coming.  Paul refers to the time that does not occur in time; a moment that is not moment in time.^[157] Time reveals its secret. Every moment bears within it the unborn secret of revelation. Here is a true end of the present age, but without reference to a temporal event or a legendary destruction of the world. ^[158] Since Paul is writing to a Christian community, we can assume that his concern is that Christians can be asleep just as much as others can. There is continual need for awakening. Christians can enjoy sleeping with the rest of the world. Christians may awaken at one point, but to their shame need the admonition to awaken at another point. Christians constantly stand in need of awakening and depend upon the community to keep them awake. The sleep from which they awaken is the relentless downward movement caused by their sloth.^[159]  Jesus himself warned against spiritual snoozing lest he return and find his feckless followers asleep instead of awake and at work (Matthew 24:43; Mark 13:36). We are in the night but waiting for the full light of day to come. This assertion of the imminence of the day of Jesus’ return is quite like what Paul wrote in I Thessalonians (4:15; 5:4-5) and I Corinthians (7:29). In other words, the salvation of the Roman Christians has not completely arrived. It is emerging. This eschatological expectation places the horizon of God's activity in Jesus Christ far beyond any individual's situation, compliance, or non-compliance with the law. Paul signals here that God is at work and that in Jesus Christ, God's saving purposes continue to emerge. While early Christians expected Christ’s coming imminently, the delay did not shatter the foundations of their faith. Rather, through the risen Lord and the Spirit, eschatological salvation had already become a certainty for believers, so that the length of the remaining span of time was a secondary matter.^[160] Put another way, the turning-point of history occurred, even if the “end” has not. the vanishing of the night and the breaking of the day have begun, and nothing can stop it. The same Lord stands at the beginning and the end, he is also Lord of the time between. ^[161] If we are really waiting for the day, then we need to live in the light of the daylight we see coming in Christ. It will be a battle. The darkness is not yet gone. The light is not yet fully come. The use of the light/darkness dichotomy to symbolize good and evil was widespread in ancient Judaism and Christianity.

 

Proverbs 4:16-19

16 For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong; they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble. 17 For they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence. 18 But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. 19 The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what they stumble over.

John 12:35-36

35 Jesus said to them, "The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. 36 While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light."

 

One could also find many other texts. It is particularly prominent in apocalyptic texts. For instance, the tension between good and evil in some of the most important texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls is presented as a struggle between the “sons of light,” who are gathered under the banner of the “angel of light,” and the “sons of darkness,” who rally around the “angel of darkness (e.g., 1QS 3.13-4.26). Just as the night was associated with certain behaviors, so, too, was the approach of dawn. As Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century British writer, once noted, “He who has a secret should not only hide it but hide that he has to hide.” St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, says that temptations are like secret lovers. He uses the image of a young woman who has a good father. The secret lover wants to stay secret, in the dark, trying to get you to do things you know the father, who loves you and wants the best for you, would not approve. St. Ignatius says sin is like that. Keep everything in the dark, hidden, and secret. So we need to put on the armor. We find the image in I Thessalonians 5:8, “But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.” In addition, in II Corinthians 6:7, we read, “... the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left ...” Warfare and the equipment of war were common sources for ethical metaphors among many writers in Greco-Roman antiquity. For example, the first-century Stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus compared the challenge of living a virtuous life to a soldier out on campaign. “Each person’s life is a kind of campaign, and a long and complicated one at that. You have to maintain the character of a soldier, and do each separate act at the bidding of the general, if possible divining what he wishes.”^[162]  The most famous example of military imagery to describe the Christian life can be found in Ephesians 6:10-17, where the various pieces of the “armor of God” are discussed. In Ephesians 6:12, he reminds his readers that “we” are not contending against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, and the rulers of this present darkness, and against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. We need to have the mentality of a soldier when it comes to spiritual life. Paul wants the people of God to act honorably. He contrasts this with several acts. Christians need to exercise some care in reading such a list by pondering them and engaging in self-examination. Are any of these behaviors showing themselves in our lives? Reveling (κώμοις, carousing, orgies, wild parties) and drunkenness, not in debauchery (κοίταις, literally “beds” or “couch,” thus metaphorically improper/promiscuous sexual relations) and licentiousness (ἀσελγείαις, defined in the BDAG Greek lexicon as “lack of self-constraint which involves one in conduct that violates all bounds of what is socially acceptable expression of sexual desire), not in quarreling (ἔριδι, variously translated as strife, dissension, wrangling and rivalry) and jealousy (ζήλῳ, perhaps better translated more narrowly as envy BDAG understands it to mean “intense negative feelings over another’s achievements or success,” and thus disobedience of the tenth commandment, “You shall not covet.”) He is offering a small version of his vice list. Some other lists of such behaviors are in Romans 1:29; 9:10; I Corinthians 1:11; 3:3; 2 Corinthians 12:20; Galatians 5:21; Philippians 1:15. These activities all threaten the life of the community. They are the inverse of the commandments of the law and hence are the inverse of love. They provide opportunities for self-interest, social divisions, and broken relationships. Given the contrast between living in the light of day or the darkness of night, if Christians are honest, enough darkness of the night remains with us to bring us to repentance. Paul expands the notion of salvation from personal transformation to the cosmological and historical saving purposes of God for all creation. The battle is between light and darkness. Paul reminds his readers again of the eschatological tension that exists due to the saving act of God in Christ, and thus, time itself is no longer just a matter of chronology, but of the action of God. The final word is also the first word, to put on Jesus Christ, a reflection of our baptism, clothing ourselves with Christ (Galatians 3:27), an allusion to the practice of the newly baptized receiving a white robe, which lead to the honorable life he wants the people of God to lead. Clothing ourselves with Christ will keep us from submitting to the weakness of our finite and temporal life which has its lists and inordinate desire (I Thessalonians 4:5 and Ephesians 4:22). Putting on Christ manifests the fulfillment of the law in love. 

Romans 14:1-12 (Year A September 11-17), a portion of the moral instruction in 14:1-15:13. It deals further with the life of the people of God. In Romans 14:1-23, Paul urges the people of God to show love and respect for differences in conscience, even if some are “weak” in this area. It has a modern feel in that it fits nicely into the notion that passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance. Our fear of making judgments may lead us to consider that we need more judgment rather than less judgment. Paul is urging us to carefully choose the battles worth fighting. He is engaging some issues that endanger the unity of the Body of Christ. Paul is ready to remind his readers that some subjects ought to remain matters of indifference. We may treat certain opinions with seriousness, but they are not of the status that ought to bring division or even unhealthiness into the Body of Christ. Such matters ought to encourage us to listen to how a brother or sister in Christ wrestles with certain matters and respect them for their position. Such respect does not mean less respect for oneself, who may hold a differing position. Such respect does not mean looking down upon the other from the standpoint of your superiority. It simply means mutuality of respect so that each of you finds honor and respect in the presence of the other. People quarrel over differing opinions regarding what foods to eat and what days to honor. In terms of broad emphasis within this chapter, the freedom Paul emphasizes in verses 1-12 will give way to the responsibility to each other in verses 13-23. Living one’s life in Christ means living with freedom and with responsibility. Paul continues to amplify what it means to be a living sacrifice to have openness to the ongoing transformation of life and thought. Here, he refers to one’s convictions. One’s convictions, then, are the outworking of one’s faith and relationship with God.  To those who are strong and realize more the implications of this faith, Paul cautions them not to have pride in looking at this weaker brother or sister.  The strong have realized that scrupulousness over externals has nothing to do with what it means to be “in Christ.”  The weak, however, have scrupulous convictions and look down on those who do not. They have lifted their opinion above Christ. Thus, whether eats meat or only vegetables are indifferent regarding salvation. The rationale is that the earth belongs to the Lord. If a neighbor in invites them to dinner and you want to go, eat what is set before them without raising a question relating to conscience. If one partakes with thankfulness, one should not receive judgment when motivated by that thankfulness. The issue is lifting a code to an improper place of importance. Their code provides unity for their group and a place to stand that justifies judging the opposing group. They have elevated their code above Christ. Christians need to practice the attitude of acceptance and compassion for other members of their faith community. The purpose of Christian community is not to achieve homogeneity in its moral, spiritual, or political agenda, but to accommodate all into the household of faith on equal ground. Since each Christian is like a household servant for the Lord, we have no right to pass judgment, for the other, who differs from us, is not our servant. They belong to the Lord. Paul wants to move his readers toward peace even if they disagree on which code by which one ought to live. One does not have to demean those with whom one disagrees. One does not need to build oneself up by demeaning the other. One can at least try to understand those with whom one disagrees. 

Paul also expresses concern for those who elevate one day above another. In Galatians 4:8-11, Paul puzzles how they can return to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, observing days, months, seasons, and years. Colossians 2:16-17 urges that no one pass judgment on them in questions of food and drink, or even regarding festival, new moon, or Sabbath. These are a shadow of what was to come, with the substance belong to Christ. Paul is not so much concerned with the rightness of the group as in each group recognizing that Christ is greater than either group. Paul even urges thoughtful reflection and passionate embracing such broad principles by which one chooses to live. Yet, when we think eschatologically of such matters, we may loosen the hold of opinion in terms of relations with others. We do not want our passionately held opinion to disrupt the Body of Christ. We have no desire to be the reformer who may have good intentions, but who does little more than whip up moral indignation to the point where we seek the imposition of our convictions upon others.^[163] Such a path leads to arrogance, elevating oneself and one’s code above others and potentially leads to harmful and even violent acts toward those who do not accept the code. I would hope we could agree that the church should not be the religious arm of any political agenda! Paul is making light of the seriousness with which each group holds to its opinions. Both groups can live by their code in a way that honors Christ and gives thanks to the Father. In Ephesians 5:20, Christians are to give thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ for everything. Colossians 3:17 says that everything they do is to be in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. The reason Paul can write this way is because of the Christ-centered approach he has to the matters causing quarrelling among them.

The final verses (7-12) have a hymn-like quality. Only Christ is in the role of judge, which makes each of us accountable to Christ. The death and resurrection of Christ makes Christ the Lord of both the dead and the living. Even in death we stand in the presence of the loving, redeeming, and resurrected Christ. . We are witnesses to the saving work of God in Christ rather than judges of the opinions of others. The resurrection of Jesus did not happen for Jesus alone, but in his capacity as Mediator and Redeemer of humanity. Participation in the reality of the new life that broke in him is even now possible for those who are linked to Christ by baptism and faith. Nor is this participation, which is part of the divine mystery of salvation in Christ and thus sacramental, destroyed through the death of believers. Hence, in their death as well as their life believers belong to Christ. ^[164] In I Corinthians 4:1-5 Paul stresses that they ought not to pronounce judgment before the Lord comes, for the Lord will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness. The Lord will disclose the purposes of the heart. Every individual receive commendation from God. Considering the role of the risen Lord, there is no place for uncharitable human judgments. Paul interprets Isaiah 45:23 in a Christ-centered way that says every knee shall bow and every tongue give praise to Christ. humanity is under the authority and judgment of Christ. People stand or fall based upon their openness to the will of God in their lives. Paul, convinced that those who are related to Jesus Christ by faith and baptism already have assurance of participation in the new life that has broken in with the resurrection of Christ, still expected that we must appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive what is due for things done in this life, whether good or bad.^[165]This suggests that Christians need to learn a lesson in humility and allow Christ to be the judge. This means that diversity regarding the various codes, perspectives, and practices by which we live is a good thing if our priority is to bring honor to Christ. This means that we need to reflect upon how we hold our opinions will look on the day when Christ judges each of us. As Jesus put it, do not judge, and God will not judge you, do not condemn and God will not condemn you. Rather, forgive, and God will forgive you (Luke 6:37). The way to prepare for the Day of Judgment is to treat others exactly as you would like to be treated on the day of divine judgment, replacing condemnation with forgiveness.

The overarching narrative of the Bible is a story of ever-increasing inclusiveness, beginning with the marriage of Boaz of Bethlehem to a Moabite woman named Ruth -- a foreigner who ends up being the great-grandmother of King David (Ruth 1-4). It continues with God's call for cultural barriers to fall and for people of all nationalities to be part of "a house of prayer for all peoples," as we read in Isaiah 56. This movement only accelerates when Jesus begins his loving and gracious ministry to tax collectors and sinners, and when Paul takes the gospel to the Gentiles. In the end, our goal is to build a community that fits the vision of the book of Revelation, in which there is 

"a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages, standing before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands" (Revelation 7:9). 

 

All tribes. All people. All languages. We will simply be thankful that we belong to Jesus, the Lamb of God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] John Knox, IB.

[2] Sanday & Headlam.

[3] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 457-58.

[4] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 646.

[5] —Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 49-50.

[6] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume I, 210.

[7] Although the NRSV adopts an orthodox translation of in its main text (i.e., "through faith in Jesus Christ"), the editors acknowledge the problematic nature of this expression when they note an alternative reading in a footnote ("through the faith of Jesus Christ," The HarperCollins Study Bible, Revised Edition [New York: HarperCollins, 2006], 1914; cf. vv. 25-26). The Common English Bible, which is a relatively recent translation (circa 2010), also favors the alternative reading and highlights its own editorial decision with the following rendering: "through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ." While the NRSV translation found in its main text is more straightforward, the reading offered in the footnote is defensible due to the equivocality of the genitive case.

[8] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 100.

[9] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 98-100.

[10] Sanday and Headlam, in their ICC commentary on Romans.

[11] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)IV.1 [59.2, 274.

[12] John Knox, IB.

[13] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 102.

[14] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 103-04.

[15] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 219-20.

[16] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 248-49.

[17] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 277.

[18] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 411.

[19] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume I, 440.

[20] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 224.

[21] In Pauline Theology IV (eds. Richard Hays and E. Elizabeth Johnson [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997]), Professors James D. G. Dunn and Hays argue forcefully, Dunn for the former, and Hays for the latter.

[22] (see Mark Reasoner, Romans in Full Circle: A History of Interpretation [Knoxville: Westminster John Knox, 2005], 41; see also Paul Achtmeier, “Apropos the faith of/in Christ” in Pauline Theology IV referenced above)

[23] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 229-31.

[24] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 105.

[25] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 275.

[26] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume I, 433.

[27] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 62-63, 224.

[28] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 255-56.

[29] Barth, Romans, 136.

[30] Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, 130.

[31] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume I, 417.

[32] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume III, 232.

[33] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume II, 418, 438.

[34] Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.  --Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown.

[35] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume III, 173-74, 176-77.

[36] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume III, 183-187, 193-94.

[37]  --W.H. Auden, "Epilogue" to The Age  of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclog (Princeton University Press, 2011), 105.

 

[38] Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 158.3.

[39] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume II, 412.

[40] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 196-97.

[41] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume II, 350, 427.

[42] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 262.

[43] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 604.

[44] Bronnie Ware, "Top 5 regrets of dying," The Huffington Post Website, huffingtonpost.com, March 2, 2013. Retrieved February 10, 2017.

[45] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume III, 492.

[46] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume II, 266.

[47] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume III, 253-257.

[48] (Moltmann, Theology of Hope 1965, 1967), 162.

[49]–Thomas Chalmers

[50] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 256.

[51] J. Christiaan Beker (Paul the Apostle [Philadephia Fortress, 1980] 238-9).

[52] (Byrne, Romans. Sacra Pagina 6. [Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1996] 226).

[53] Beverly Gaventa (Text for Preaching: [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995] 393).

[54] Knox, Sanday and Headlam, and to a certain extent Greathouse, believe this passage to be a part of Paul’s present experience.  The point here is that Paul speaks so deeply and movingly, and then uses the cry of despair and hope so effectively, that he must necessarily be speaking from personal experience as a Christian.  One should also note that this passage might not express the normal experience of the believer.  Paul here is relating an aspect of his life that has covered some twenty years of preaching and persecution.  This is simply a focusing on one aspect of experience, but clearly not the normal experience, as expressed in verse 25a and Chapter 8.  One might find rather appealing Knox’s point that the passage reflects the experience of any morally sensitive person.  

[55] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 256.

[56] --e.e. cummings.

[57] George Eliot

[58] Phaedrus

[59] When I discover who I am, I'll be free.--Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

[60] --William Shakespeare, "Polonius to Laertes," in Hamlet, III.1.

[61] Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (p. 324). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

[62] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 178.

[63] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 266.

[64] Ivens, Michael. "Healing the divided self." The Way, July 1976, 163-75, theway.org.

[65] (Tillich, Morality and Beyond 1963)(1963), 52-53.

[66] (Tillich, Morality and Beyond 1963)(1963), 52-53.

[67] Michael Ivens

[68] Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (pp. 317-326). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

 

[69] Barth, Romans, 235-39.

[70] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 58-96.

[71] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 272-74.

[72] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 419, 420-21, 427.

[73] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 33.

[74] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 177.

[75] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 12.

[76] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 200.

[77] Barth Church Dogmatics, II.2 [37.3], 592.

[78] Barth, Romans, 272-74.

[79] Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2 [37.3], 592.

[80] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 176-77.

[81] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 176-77.

[82] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933).

[83] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 12.

[84] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 285.

[85] (Moltmann, Theology of Hope 1965, 1967), 162.

[86] (Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976], 40-52).

[87] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 176-77, (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 316.

[88] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume III, 130.

[89] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 298.

[90] The Aramaic cry abba as used by Jesus in the moment of his supreme earthly confidence in God, was a cry cherished in prayer by early Christians in memory of Jesus himself.  Many NT interpreters regard the Aramaic abba as an instance of ipsissima vox Iesu.  Such a mode of address for God, abba, is unattested in the OT.  The cry "Abba! Father" -- which newly adopted sons and daughters may now legitimately call out -- itself demonstrates the closeness of a believer's relationship to God. The Aramaic "Abba" was, of course, Jesus' own favorite divine address. Paul's letter reveals that early Christians had quickly taken to using this address as well.

[91] Despite the comment by (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 298.

[92] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 177.

[93] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV.2 [64.4], 320.

[94] If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. - Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

[95] Weil, Simone. "The love of God and affliction." Waiting for God. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1951.

[96] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 301.

[97] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 302-314.

[98] Benson, Etienne. "Geophysicist studies life in the early solar system." Stanford Report, December 14, 2001, news-service.stanford.edu/news. 

[99] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 136-37, 138-39, 231.

[100] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV.3 [73.1], 913-4.

[101] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume III, 175.

[102] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV.2 [64.4], 330.

[103] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 176.

[104] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), III. 4 [53.3], 100. 

[105] (Tillich, Systematic Theology 1951), Volume III, 116-17. 

[106] Maurer, TDNT, Volume VIII, 166-7.

[107] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 21.5

[108] Pannenberg, Human Nature, Election and History, 47-61

[109] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 77.

[110] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume II, 208, 304.

[111] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 380.

[112] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 522-26.

[113] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), III.2 [45.1], 213.

[114] (Moltmann, The Crucified God 1973, 1974) 242-3.

[115] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV.2 [64.4] 278-30.

[116] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV.2 [64.4] 285.

[117] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 423.

[118] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume I, 422.

[119] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 380.

[120] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)II.2 [34].

[121] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)section 34.1

[122] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)II.2 [34].

[123] (Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans [Yale University Press, 1994], 310).

[124] --Old gospel hymn, music and lyrics by Philip Paul Bliss (1838-1876).

[125] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 64.

[126] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 58-96. 

[127] I Corinthians 12:3

no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit.

II Corinthians 4:5

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake.

Philippians 2:11

every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Colossians 2:6

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him …

[128] see Wayne A. Meeks, ed., The Writings of St. Paul [New York: Norton, 1972], 85 n. 7.

[129] Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, 29; Systematic Theology, Volume III, 111-12, 232.

[130] Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 49-50.

[131] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)34.3.

[132] (Bultmann 1951), I, 318.

[133] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 462, 470-72.

[134] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)34.4

[135] Augustine, City of God, 14.27; 14.11.1.

[136] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 76.

[137] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 462, 470-72.

[138] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)34.4

[139] (Pannenberg, Jesus -- God and Man 1964, 1968), 76.

[140] Based on Sanday and Headlam.

[141] Sanday and Headlam.

[142] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 525.

[143] Inspired in part by (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933)424-32.

[144] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)IV.1 [60.3] 497.

[145] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)II.2 [38.3].

[146] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 15, 628.

[147] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67)II.2 [38.3].

[148] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), II.2 [38.3].

[149] Deserdata puts it this way: do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

[150] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume I, 440.

[151] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 451, 460-75.

[152] Pannenberg, (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 68-69)

[153] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 494.

[154] Barth (Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.1] 732-3)

[155]  --From England Dan and John Ford Coley, "Love Is the Answer." YouTube has several versions of them singing this song.

[156] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 366.

[157] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV.3 71.2)

[158] Barth Romans, 497-500.

[159] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), IV. 2, 66.4)

[160] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 366.

[161] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.4, 56.1)

[162] Discourse 3.24.34

[163] (Barth, Epistle to the Romans 1918, 1921, 1933), 509, 514, 517.

[164] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 579.

[165] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume III, 567-68.