Every week for a month or two I will be writing a post on the New Testament book of Romans. After that I will continue with other books from the Scriptures.
Introduction to Romans
The book titled To the Romans (Prous Romaious in Greek) is a letter and a book-length essay.
Romans is clearly a letter because it begins with the elements of classical Greek and Roman letters though, as we shall see, greatly expanded. A typical letter two thousand years ago would begin as follows:
Romulus Quintus (the writer)
to Augustus Tertius (the recipient)
Xairen (grace: the normal greeting in Greek, the language of the eastern Roman Empire)
Romans begins "Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ," followed by a sentence of praise to God the Father and the Son who gave him, Paul, the job of apostle, that is, one sent to the peoples of the world to proclaim the good news of the story of Jesus. The opening ends with grace, as customary, but not just grace in general or grace as a formula, but the grace of God. Grace becomes the theme of the letter, as Paul insists that we are put right with God, not by our beliefs, nor by our rites or ethics, but by God's grace which anyone may receive through faith, meaning to trust Jesus to be always who he said he was when he was on earth, and therefore follow him in obedience because we love him.
Romans also ends with a leave-taking that is normal for ancient letters. It includes greetings from people the recipients would know and a benediction. Letters usually are relatively short (see the letters of John or Paul's letter to Philemon. Romans is the first letter in the New Testament because they are mostly arranged from the longest to the shortest by author.
Romans is, for all practical purposes, a book-length work, specifically a book-length essay because it essentially deals with one or two ideas: (1) no one is righteous enough to make God owe him or her God's favor and (2) it is trusting God that makes us right with him, which is the definition of faith. The person who lives by faith of this kind will find life.
The French produce many book-length essays. Jacques Derrida's On Grammatology, a largely misunderstood book in America academia, is a good example. He spends the first half of his work urging the reader to give up ontological logocentrism (big words that mean simply considering books as scriptures coming from an unquestionable authority, and he was not talking about Bible, but rather about people's attitude towards literature in general). Once he had made the point in as different ways and with as many examples as possible, he proceeded to investigate which book by Rousseau, Emile or another one, was written first, because the order of writing determined what the author meant to say. This examination makes up the remainder of the book. American literary academics, not being used to book-length essays, misunderstood what Derrida had to say and gave us deconstructionism. To go further into this matter exceeds the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that you can look up deconstructionism if you really want to and that we can be glad the movement has run its course.
One more example: Marshall McLuhan was also given to writing book-length essays. He was an Anglo-Canadian, but Canada has more tolerance of the French way of thinking than does the US. In The Mechanical Bride his one point is that all advertising is totalitarian and destructive of traditional cultures. And he was basing his observations on print advertising before television became big. In The Gutenberg Galaxy his one major point is that print made people of the modern period think linearly and come up with outlines, programs, and technology. He remarked that Romans thought of themselves as ancient Greeks, Medieval people thought of themselves as ancient Romans, Modern people thought of themselves as Medieval, and the we post-moderns think of ourselves as Modern. Finally, in Understanding Media he defines radio as a hot (high definition) medium and television as a a cold (low definition) medium and he says that the medium is the message. This saying means simply that the effect the medium (whether print, radio, or television) has on the user is greater than any content that it conveys. If we read book-length essays as such, we don't expect every single paragraph to say something different and we do not become frustrated with the text.
Armed with the understanding of what a book-length essay is, we can now go back to Romans. Paul has one major idea to make in his book-length letter: Jews and non-Jews are on the same footing before God, who approves of those who live by trust in Jesus. Neither belonging to an ethnicity nor holding certain tenets nor obeying a list of rules deriving from the Torah will suffice. He makes these points repeatedly, coming at them from various angles and using many different stories, arguments, and quotes from scripture.
Next week I will deal with the first chapter of the essay we call Romans.
