5. Romans and the Pauline gospel
5. Romans and the Pauline gospel
Romans was Paul’s last letter written before his prolonged period of detention, first in Caesarea and then in Rome. It is thus later than his letters to the Thessalonians, Corinthians and Galatians, and earlier than those to Philemon, the Colossians, Ephesians and Philippians (not to speak of the Pastorals). This is a conclusion which can be reached not only by external evidence and incidental chronological indications in the letters, but also by a study of their subject-matter.
Some of the themes of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence recur in Romans. We may compare what is said about the food question in 1 Corinthians 8:1–13; 10:14–11:1 with what is said in Romans 14:1–15:6; we may compare what is said about the members of the body and their respective functions in 1 Corinthians 12:12–31 with what is said in Romans 12:3–8; we may compare the antithesis between Adam and Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:21–22, 45–50 with that in Romans 5:12–19; we may compare the references to the collection for Jerusalem in 1 Corinthians 16:1–4 and 2 Corinthians 8:1–9:15 with Paul’s account of it in Romans 15:25–32. In some of these instances the Romans passage is self-evidently later than the parallel in 1 or 2 Corinthians. More particularly, Romans 8:2–25 reproduces much of the argument of 2 Corinthians 3:17–5:10 (combined with part of the argument of Galatians 4–5) in a manner which has been described as ‘the free creation, on two separate occasions, of verbal clothing for familiar logical outlines’.38
Of all the Pauline letters, however, the one which has the closest affinity with Romans is Galatians. In both of these letters Paul’s gospel of justification by faith is most clearly expounded. A comparison of the two leaves no doubt that Galatians is the earlier; the arguments which are pressed on the churches of Galatia in an urgent and ad hoc manner are set forth more systematically in Romans. Galatians, according to J. B. Lightfoot, is related to Romans ‘as the rough model to the finished statue’.39
There is indeed a marked difference in tone between Galatians and Romans. Galatians is, in the main, a polemical document, addressed to Paul’s Gentile converts who were in danger of abandoning the message of salvation by grace which he had taught them and slipping into legalism. Romans is not polemical: Paul writes to gain the good-will and co-operation of a flourishing church not personally known to him. The Roman church comprised a variety of groups, some more liberal and some more conservative, and Paul deals with both tendencies in conciliatory and understanding terms. The liberal Christian must not despise his conservative fellow-believer; the conservative must not sit in judgment on his liberal brother. If Paul expostulates with the Galatian Christians for observing ‘days, and months, and seasons, and years’ (Gal. 4:10), he contemplates with equanimity the situation in which some Roman Christians observe certain days religiously, while others set apart no special days: ‘Let every one’, he says, ‘be fully convinced in his own mind’ (14:5). His teaching about the role of the law is essentially the same in both letters, but he treats it more dismissively in Galatians than in Romans.
The letter to the Galatians was sent to churches in the Roman province of Galatia (most probably to churches in South Galatia) to warn them against relapsing from the gospel of free grace under the persuasion of teachers who insisted that their salvation depended on their submitting to circumcision and certain other requirements of the law of Moses, over and above their faith in Christ. Those teachers believed and taught that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel, but the Messiah was for Israel. The true Israel, the ‘Israel of God’, comprised those Israelites who acknowledged him as Messiah and Lord, but the only way in which non-Israelites could share the saving blessings which he brought was by incorporation into the true Israel, and this involved circumcision (for men) and the fulfilment of some other legal requirements. In Paul’s eyes those other requirements were not so much an addition to the pure gospel as a perversion of it. The teaching to which his Galatian converts were being exposed nullified the principle that God’s salvation is bestowed by his sheer grace and received by faith alone; it gave human beings a contributory share in that saving glory which, according to the gospel, belongs to God alone. It implied, moreover, that the age of law was still running its course; if so, then the age of the Messiah had not yet arrived, and Jesus, accordingly, was not the Messiah. The ‘agitators’ (as Paul calls them) who pressed their teaching on the Galatian churches were far from drawing this conclusion from it, but Paul drew it for them, and pronounced an anathema on them.40 Their whole scheme was a different gospel from that which Paul and the other apostles preached;41 it was, in fact, no gospel at all.
In his endeavour to show his Galatian friends where the truth of the matter lies, Paul raises the fundamental question of men and women’s justification in the sight of God. That God was the supreme judge of the world was common Jewish doctrine, as was also the belief that a day would come when he would pronounce final judgment on all mankind. Paul, however, taught that, thanks to the work of Christ, the verdict of the great day could by anticipation be known and accepted in this present life—that those whose hearts were right with God could have the assurance of acquittal in his court here and now. But how in fact could human beings know themselves to be ‘in the right’ so far as God’s assessment of them was concerned? If it was possible to be justified before God by observing the requirements of the Jewish law, as the Galatian Christians were now being taught, then what was the point of the death of Christ, which was central to the gospel? According to the gospel, his death procured his people’s redemption and set them right with God; but there was no need for his death if this end could have been attained by the law. But we know, says Paul, that one ‘is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ’—and his converts had proved this to be true in their own experience. So, he continues, ‘we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified’ (Gal. 2:16).42
Faith in Christ, not legal works: that is one antithesis which Paul emphasizes to the Galatians. A companion antithesis in his argument is Spirit, not flesh. The new life which they had received when they believed the gospel was a life imparted and maintained by the Holy Spirit; it was unthinkable that the work of the Spirit, which belongs to a new order, should require to be supplemented by ordinances which were so completely bound as were circumcision and all that went with it to the old order of the ‘flesh’.43 The attempt to live partly ‘according to the Spirit’ and partly ‘according to the flesh’ was foredoomed to failure, because the two orders were in sharp opposition the one to the other: ‘the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh’ (Gal. 5:17).
Both these antitheses—‘faith in Christ versus legal works’ and ‘Spirit versus flesh’—recur in Romans in their logical sequence, the former antithesis in chapters 3 and 4 where the way of righteousness is under discussion, and the latter in chapters 6–8, where the subject is the way of holiness.
Another motif of Galatians which appears also in Romans is the appeal to the precedent of Abraham. Since the Jewish ordinance of circumcision was based on the covenant made by God with Abraham (Gen. 15:10–14), those who insisted that Gentile converts to Christianity ought to be circumcised argued that otherwise they could claim no share in the blessings promised to Abraham and his descendants. To this Paul replies that the basis of Abraham’s acceptance by God was not his circumcision, or any comparable ‘work’, but his faith: ‘Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” ’ (Gal. 3:6).44 So the children of Abraham, who inherit the blessings promised to Abraham, are those who, like him, have faith in God and are accordingly justified by his grace. The gospel, in short, is the fulfilment of the promises made by God to Abraham and his posterity—promises which have not been annulled or modified by anything, such as the Mosaic law, which was instituted since they were made.
Moreover, Paul assures the Galatian Christians, those who submit to circumcision as a legal obligation put themselves under an obligation to observe the whole law of Moses, and become liable to the curse which the law pronounces on those who fail to keep it in its entirety.45 But the liberating message of the gospel tells how ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, … that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith’ (Gal. 3:13–14).
The principle of righteousness by law-keeping belongs to a stage of spiritual immaturity. But now that the gospel has come, those who obey it and believe in Jesus attain their spiritual majority as full-grown sons and daughters of God. The Spirit of God who has taken up his abode in the hearts of believers is also the Spirit of his Son, and at his prompting they address God spontaneously as Father in the same way as Jesus himself did.46
Again, the gospel is a message of liberty in place of the yoke of bondage carried by those who rely on the law to secure their acceptance by God. Why should those who have been emancipated by Christ give up their freedom and submit to servitude afresh? On the other hand, the freedom brought by the gospel has no affinity with anarchic licence. The faith of which the gospel speaks is a faith which manifests itself in a life of love, and thus fulfils ‘the law of Christ’ (Gal. 5:6; 6:2).47
So Paul reasons with the churches of Galatia, arguing ad hominem as well as ad hoc. He recalls them to faith in the gospel which first brought them salvation. It has been said, indeed, that ‘justification by faith, while not necessarily incompatible with Paul’s earlier doctrine, was actually formulated and expressed by him for the first time when he found it necessary to answer the arguments of the Judaizers in Galatia. It seems not at all unlikely that the term justification, which takes on its familiar Pauline meaning and importance only in Galatians and Romans, derived this importance and at least a part of this meaning not from Paul’s regular theological vocabulary but from that of his opponents.’48
But the gospel which Paul sets forth in the letter to the Galatians is not only the gospel which he preached to its readers when he presented the message of the cross so vividly that it was as if ‘Jesus Christ crucified’ were publicly placarded before their very eyes (Gal. 3:1); it was the gospel which had revolutionized Paul’s own life.49 Justification by faith was implicit in his Damascus-road experience. Paul, as we know, was suddenly converted to the service of Christ from a life in which the law had been the centre around which everything else was organized. In his previous system of thought and practice there was no room to entertain even the possibility that the disciples’ claim about Jesus might be true. His teacher Gamaliel might concede the possibility, if only for the sake of argument, but not so Paul. The disciples’ claim that Jesus was the Messiah undermined the law, and could not be tolerated. If one thing more than another disproved that claim, it was the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion. Whether he merited such a death or not was of secondary importance; what was of primary importance was the affirmation of the law: ‘a hanged man is accursed by God’ (Deut. 21:23). The idea that one who died under the curse of God could be the Messiah was blasphemous and scandalous.
When Paul, in mid-career as a persecutor of the church, was compelled to recognize that the crucified Jesus was alive, risen from the dead, and that he was all that his disciples claimed him to be—Messiah, Lord, Son of God—his whole system of thought and life, previously organized around the law, must have been shaken to pieces. The confident judgment which he had formed about Jesus in accordance with that system was shown to be utterly wrong. But the fragments of the broken system quickly began to reorganize themselves in a completely different pattern, around a new centre, the crucified and exalted Jesus. Henceforth, for Paul, to live was—Christ.
But what of the old argument—that the crucified one died under the curse of the law? Was it no longer valid? It was still valid, but received a new significance. By raising Jesus from the dead, God had reversed that curse. But why should Jesus have undergone the curse in the first place? Sooner rather than later, Paul must have reached the conclusion set out in Galatians 3:10–13, that Jesus submitted to the death of the cross in order to take on himself the curse which the law pronounced on all who failed to keep it completely (Deut. 27:26). The form of this argument—interpreting two texts in the light of a common term which they shared (here, the term ‘cursed’ or ‘accursed’ in Deut. 21:23 and 27:26, LXX)—was such as Paul was quite familiar with in the rabbinical schools, but no rabbi had ever formulated the substance of this bold argument: that, by voluntarily undergoing the curse of the law in one form, the Messiah should neutralize that curse on behalf of those who had incurred it in another form. But in this way the doctrine of a crucified Messiah, which had once been such a stone of stumbling to Paul, became the corner-stone of his faith and preaching.50
We cannot say how soon this reinterpretation took shape in Paul’s mind, but it must have been sooner rather than later. It could perhaps have been assisted at an early stage by consideration of the portrayal of the Suffering Servant who, in Isaiah 53:10–12, gives his life as a guilt-offering for others and, by bearing the sin of many, procures righteousness for them.51 But it cannot be too strongly emphasized that Paul’s theology was not based primarily on study or speculation. It was based primarily on the Damascus-road revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12, 16)52 and the flooding of his inner being with divine love through the impartation of the Spirit (Rom. 5:5). All that Paul had sought so long by painstaking observance of the law was now his by God’s gift—all that and much more. For now he could do the will of God with a glad spontaneity such as he had never known under the law; he knew himself accepted by God, justified by his grace, blessed with a new power within, and called to a service which for ever thereafter gave purpose and zest to life.
‘The just shall live by faith’—or, as Paul expounds it, ‘it is the one who is righteous by faith that will live’53—is not only the kernel of Galatians and the text of Romans, but it was a foundation-principle in Paul’s own life. Time and again he reverts to it, and not only in these two letters. When he reminds the Corinthians how Christ was ‘made … sin’ for us ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21), or tells the Philippians of his ambition to ‘gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith’ (Phil. 3:8–9), he shows quite plainly what was the ground of his hope and the motive-power of his apostolic ministry. The very contrast between his former activity as a persecutor and his new life as a bond-slave of Jesus Christ magnified the grace of God which had been lavished so abundantly on him, wiping the slate clean and making him what he now was.
The way of righteousness, then, which he sets forth to the Romans was a way which was well-known to him, ever since his feet were planted on it outside the walls of Damascus. A doctrine inherent in his conversion experience cannot be adequately explained as a polemical response to the arguments of judaizers. Whatever may be said about Galatians, there was no need to introduce a polemical note into the argument of Romans. There is more autobiography in this letter than meets the eye—the autobiography of a man who has been justified by faith.54
The gospel of justification by faith sets human beings by themselves as individuals before God. If it humbles them to the dust before God, it is that God may raise them up and set them on their feet. One who has had such personal dealings with God, and been made to stand erect in his presence by almighty power and grace, can never be enslaved in spirit to any other man or woman. Justification by faith is a bastion of true freedom. Luther was charged with ‘inciting revolution by putting little people in mind of their prodigious dignity before God’. How could he deny the charge? The gospel, as he had learnt it from Paul, does precisely that.
Yet, crucial as the justification of sinners by faith alone is to the Pauline gospel, it does not exhaust that gospel. It is not, as Albert Schweitzer called it, ‘a subsidiary crater’,55 but in itself it is not the centre of Paul’s teaching. Various attempts have been made to say what the centre is, and some writers on Paul have been criticized for failing to define it. But it is probably a mistake to think in terms of one centre for his theology. Reconciliation, union with Christ, the indwelling Spirit, instatement as sons and daughters of God, joint-membership of the one body, sanctification, the hope of glory—these are all interrelated in Paul’s thought; none occupies a position of centrality in relation to the others.
Paul himself speaks of the gospel as ‘the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith’ (Rom. 1:16), and in so speaking he provides us with a term which, if not central to his message, certainly comprehends everything that it contained. The term ‘salvation’ includes, as Anderson Scott has pointed out, ‘all the chief factors in Christianity, whether in theory or in practice’. Not only so, but in the term ‘salvation’ Paul’s message ‘found a point of attachment to the religious needs both of the Jewish and of the pagan world’.56 Jews and Gentiles alike were conscious of their deep need for salvation, even if they did not mean the same thing by that word. Certainly in Paul’s preaching of salvation God’s act of grace in justifying the sinner played a basic part.
Paul’s doctrine of justification, together with his other doctrines, is set in the context of the new creation that has come into being with and in Christ. That the acquittal of the day of judgment is pronounced in advance here and now on those who believe in Jesus is part and parcel of the truth that for them ‘the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun’ (2 Cor. 5:17, NEB)—a truth made real in their present experience by the advent and activity of the Spirit.