God’S Impartiality
GOD’S IMPARTIALITY
ROMANS 2:11-16
Which is more important: listening or doing?
Verse 11 forms a text which is expanded in the remainder of the passage. It is a theme which we could wish had been more fully developed, but Paul was content to make his main point, and that was that the mere possession of the Law conveyed no special privilege. In fact it sharpened responsibility.
2:13 contains echoes of a rabbinical debate of the sort beloved by the scribes. Some quoted: “If you will diligently listen …” (Exodus 15:26) as a proof that doing was less important than hearing. Paul generally was reflecting the nobler view of the school to which he belonged, the Pharisees. “Not learning, but doing is the Leader,” runs one Pharisaic commentary. The interest which emerges from marking Paul’s words is his intimacy with the forms and language of current theological debate.
There is also apparent to anyone familiar with Greek thought another clear indication of the same versatile scholar’s complete familiarity with Greek thought. This is a phenomenon which is notable in 1 Corinthians 1–4, a passage of sustained irony which could not have been written by anyone unfamiliar with Plato and the Stoics.
Paul’s knowledge of the Stoics, the noblest school of philosophy active in the world at the time, was clear in his address to the Athenian court. It is as obvious here. The Stoics had much to say on a law naturally written in the heart, and were the first Greeks to use the term “conscience” in Paul’s sense. And it was four centuries since Aristotle had written in his Ethics: “The truly educated man will behave as if he had a law within himself.”
Paul was aware of such ideas and the passage is further evidence of his familiarity with the patterns of thinking in the world to which he brought the gospel. An example lies therein. Paul’s famous word to the Corinthians, written six or seven years before (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), implied no abandonment of all available means of communication with his contemporaries.