8. The influence of Romans
8. The influence of Romans
In the summer of AD 386 Aurelius Augustinus, native of Tagaste in North Africa, and now for two years Professor of Rhetoric at Milan, sat weeping in the garden of his friend Alypius, almost persuaded to begin a new life, yet lacking the final resolution to break with the old. As he sat, he heard a child singing in a neighbouring house, Tolle, lege! tolle, lege! (Take up and read! take up and read!’).86 Picking up a scroll which lay at his friend’s side, he let his eyes rest on the words: ‘not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires’ (Rom. 13:13b–14). ‘No further would I read’, he tells us, ‘nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.’87 What the church and the world owe to this influx of light which illuminated Augustine’s mind as he read these words of Paul is something beyond our power to compute.
In August 1513, Martin Luther, Augustinian monk and Professor of Biblical Theology in the University of Wittenberg, began to deliver a course of lectures on the Psalms. His mind at the time was preoccupied with the agonizing endeavour to ‘find a gracious God’. He was struck by the prayer of Psalm 31:1, ‘in thy righteousness deliver me!’ But how could God’s righteousness deliver him? Was it not calculated to condemn the sinner and not to save him? As he pondered this question, his attention was more and more attracted to Paul’s statement in Romans 1:17, that in the gospel ‘the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live” ’ (Hab. 2:4b). The outcome of his study is best told in his own words:
I had greatly longed to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, ‘the righteousness of God’, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and acts righteously in punishing the unrighteous.… Night and day I pondered until … I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith.88 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 righteousness 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 gateway into heaven.89
The consequences of Luther’s new insight into the liberating gospel according to Paul are writ large in history.90
In the evening of 24 May 1738 John Wesley ‘went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street [London], where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine’, as he records in his journal, ‘while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken my sins away, even mine; and saved me from the law of sin and death.’91 That critical moment in John Wesley’s life provided the spark which kindled the ‘inextinguishable blaze’ of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival.
In August 1918 Karl Barth, pastor of Safenwil in Canton Aargau, Switzerland, published an exposition of the letter to the Romans. ‘The reader’, he said in his preface, ‘will detect for himself that is has been written with a joyful sense of discovery. The mighty voice of Paul was new to me, and if to me, no doubt to many others also. And yet, now that my work is finished, I perceive that much remains which I have not yet heard …’92 But what he had heard he wrote down, and others heard it too. He compared himself to a man who, clutching in the dark at a rope for guidance, finds that he has pulled on a bell-rope and made a sound fit to wake the dead.93 That first edition of his Römerbrief fell‚ it was said, ‘like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground’.94 The repercussions of the explosion are with us still.
There is no saying what may happen when people begin to study the letter to the Romans. What happened to Augustine, Luther, Wesley and Barth launched great spiritual movements which have left their mark in world history. But similar things have happened, much more frequently, to very ordinary men and women as the words of this letter came home to them with power. So, let those who have read thus far be prepared for the consequences of reading farther: you have been warned!