At this point it may be good to take a deep breath and remember: we must interpret what Paul has to say in his book-length essay we know as Romans in accordance with Jesus' teaching. Baptists, of which I am one, have too long tended to interpret Jesus' teaching by Paul's letters. I suppose the reasoning goes that Paul is more western in his thinking and his thoughts are difficult to follow. It must be, then, that his contribution to the New Testament is more complete and meaningful or deep. However that is a false bit of reasoning. If Jesus is God come to earth, then he must be the criterion for interpreting all other scripture.
Accordingly, you may want to spend a few days in the study of one of the Gospels: Mark if you want something fast-moving, Luke if you appreciate scholarly thoroughness and all the parables and stories only he recorded, or John for his intuitive and loving grasp of who Jesus is.
Returning to Paul, what he has to say in what we call chapter 6 can be summarized in verse 11: "So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (NRSV). The entire chapter says the same thing over and over: under the law we slaves to sin, but the eternal redemptive purpose of God means that under his grace we are slaves of a new master. Being a slave to sin brings condemnation, but being a slave of God brings acquittal and life.
Jesus said it clearer: "If anyone wishes to be my disciple, deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me." Once we give ourselves to God we must live a life of obedience. It is all well and good to stress that God's salvation is once for all, but we have too long failed to take seriously Jesus' call to discipleship. Paul says "Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!" (v. 15 NRSV). We are all the same before God. Disobedience brings death but God came in person to buy us back, metaphorically speaking, but a metaphor causing Jesus' execution and resurrection. The law cannot save anyone. God saves us by his grace and we respond in trust that leads us to do what God commands, to live "in newness of life," to love God and live an ethical life of faithfulness by loving our fellow creatures.
To say it another way: Paul says no, you cannot live as you please because you are under grace, and no, continuing to live under the Torah and Talmud will not do either. The Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit in us means to transform us and make us fit for the Eternal Kingdom. Because Christ is risen, he leads the way.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Monday, September 17, 2018
Romans 5
Since writing the last post, I received some feedback questioning what I meant by saying that, according to Paul, the Jewish law (Torah) brings condemnation. In 4:15 Paul says the law brings wrath. He doesn't go into explanation at this point, but, judging from what he has been saying, it can be taken to mean that the law cannot save us from our sinful nature. If it is the case, as Paul argues, that if there is no law, there is no guilt, then it follows that the Torah gives some guidance as to what to do, and some prohibitions, which we would not have known are wrong without the Torah having told us. The "wrath" Paul refers to is not "the wrath of God" but just "wrath." To us that doesn't sound very satisfactory, but consider the following: we bring condemnation on ourselves. This is not something God wants, but it is inherent in the freedom God gives us to obey or not. God's purpose is redemption, not condemnation.
Paul starts his essay by establishing that God has no favorites and that from the beginning, humans have been acquitted and made right with God by his grace, which we accept through trust that leads to repentance. So some of the Greek Christians say "Great! Now we can live as we like, since God gives us grace, right?" Paul says "No, that's not it." The Jewish Christians said "To know what God wants of us we all have to know and follow the Torah law." Paul says "No, that's not it either." However, Paul's problem is to explain to the Jews what to do with the law.
So Paul embarks on an alternative that applies to all, Greek and Jewish Christians, in chapter 5. God acquits us when we respond in faith and puts us at peace through God the Son, Jesus Christ. We are therefore entitled to boast of our hope of the eternal Kingdom and even in any suffering we encounter because it sets off a process of growth from endurance all the way to a hope based on God's promise, which is therefore secure. That's the first five verses.
Jesus gave his life for all of us while we were still sinners and because of his resurrection, saves us from death (verses 6 to 12). Under the Torah and the sacrificial temple worship, people had to purify themselves and provide the applicable sacrifice before they could come to God. It follows that the Jewish system had it backward: God provides the sacrifice and the life. We come as we are to him in trust, and he is faithful to acquit us. We then respond with faithfulness to God, following Jesus in complete obedience.
In the remainder of the chapter, Paul apparently deals with a question he has been asked or is anticipating may be asked: How can just one man do the full sacrifice for all people for all time? The Jews needed to sacrifice over and over. At the time the essay was written, the temple sacrificial worship was still in operation. The answer is not the kind that would probably convince us post-modern people, but it would make sense to those to whom the essay was read: sin came into the world through one human being. Now God provides the one human being (Jesus) who can undo what Adam did. Now you may be thinking: wasn't it Eve who took the forbidden fruit first? But you see, what Paul's readers and listeners would know is that Adam in Hebrew means "mankind." God's provision more than suffices for all who trust God with their lives.
Paul's teaching is not that we are obliged to believe that Adam (Mankind) and Eve (Life) were individual humans in the creation story. His point is that Jesus and Jesus alone gives life in the eternal kingdom to all who trust fully in him. We need no other.
Paul starts his essay by establishing that God has no favorites and that from the beginning, humans have been acquitted and made right with God by his grace, which we accept through trust that leads to repentance. So some of the Greek Christians say "Great! Now we can live as we like, since God gives us grace, right?" Paul says "No, that's not it." The Jewish Christians said "To know what God wants of us we all have to know and follow the Torah law." Paul says "No, that's not it either." However, Paul's problem is to explain to the Jews what to do with the law.
So Paul embarks on an alternative that applies to all, Greek and Jewish Christians, in chapter 5. God acquits us when we respond in faith and puts us at peace through God the Son, Jesus Christ. We are therefore entitled to boast of our hope of the eternal Kingdom and even in any suffering we encounter because it sets off a process of growth from endurance all the way to a hope based on God's promise, which is therefore secure. That's the first five verses.
Jesus gave his life for all of us while we were still sinners and because of his resurrection, saves us from death (verses 6 to 12). Under the Torah and the sacrificial temple worship, people had to purify themselves and provide the applicable sacrifice before they could come to God. It follows that the Jewish system had it backward: God provides the sacrifice and the life. We come as we are to him in trust, and he is faithful to acquit us. We then respond with faithfulness to God, following Jesus in complete obedience.
In the remainder of the chapter, Paul apparently deals with a question he has been asked or is anticipating may be asked: How can just one man do the full sacrifice for all people for all time? The Jews needed to sacrifice over and over. At the time the essay was written, the temple sacrificial worship was still in operation. The answer is not the kind that would probably convince us post-modern people, but it would make sense to those to whom the essay was read: sin came into the world through one human being. Now God provides the one human being (Jesus) who can undo what Adam did. Now you may be thinking: wasn't it Eve who took the forbidden fruit first? But you see, what Paul's readers and listeners would know is that Adam in Hebrew means "mankind." God's provision more than suffices for all who trust God with their lives.
Paul's teaching is not that we are obliged to believe that Adam (Mankind) and Eve (Life) were individual humans in the creation story. His point is that Jesus and Jesus alone gives life in the eternal kingdom to all who trust fully in him. We need no other.
Monday, September 3, 2018
Romans 4
In Romans 4 Paul argues that people are made right with God solely through faith. Much has been misunderstood owing to the large gulf between the meaning of pistis in Koiné Greek and "faith" in English. We are the victims of centuries of practice of using the word "faith" to mean intellectual assent to propositions about God developed by the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist, and so on. Faith so defined misses Paul's point.
Pistis means "trust." In New Testament terms, as we will see, it means "trust that leads to following Jesus in loving obedience" or "trusting Jesus to be always who he said he was when on earth and behaving accordingly." Yet another way to define pistis is "faithfulness." It is used of God to describe his faithfulness in dealing with us.
In what we know as chapter 4, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham believed in God, that is, that God would keep the promise to make Abraham's descendants a great nation. This trust in the faithfulness of God justified Abraham (accounted to him as righteousness). Justification is a legal term meaning to acquit an accused person. In Paul it means that a person is put into right relationship with God, whose purpose has always been redemption, and whose message is personal and ethical. That is what righteousness means.
After quoting from the Torah, Paul goes on to say that works did not justify Abraham, otherwise we would have something to boast about. Keep that idea in mind, as later on in the book Paul talks about what it is proper to boast about as a believer. When we work at a job and are paid, we are given what is owed to us. It is not a gift. Similarly, we cannot make God owe us, but rather justification, or being accounted as right with God, is a free gift.
Even the psalmist says "Blessed are those whose iniquities (acts of disobedience to God) are forgiven and whose sins are blotted out; blessed is the one against whom the Lord (יהוה) will not reckon sin." (Psalm 32:1-2).
Then Paul points out that Abraham was accepted as righteous by God before he or anyone of his family was circumcised and long before the Torah was given. At this point in the reading of the book in Rome, the Greek Christians were probably nodding with satisfaction, while the Jewish Christians were squirming. God set Abraham as the father of many nations before there was law (Torah) or even circumcision. Abraham continued to believe after he was very old and Sarah was, to all human knowledge even today, beyond child-bearing possibility. That is what faith (trusting) is. All the hearers of the letter knew that, in her old age, Sarah bore a son to Abraham and named him Yitschak ("he laughs").
If becoming right with God were a matter of obeying the Torah, then faith would be meaningless, and the promise to Abraham would be empty. If you can by obedience to rules make yourself righteous and attain your hope, then there is no place for faith or promise. So what is God about, then, and what was the purpose of the Torah? Paul's position is that what the Torah does is to bring wrath (condemnation) and to make faith and promise empty, while God is working out his promise to Abraham in those who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, he who died because of our rebellious living and was raised from the dead to make us right with God.
That is strong enough, however, something of major importance is lost in translation into English. When Jesus is given the title Lord, that is the word in Greek kurios, which all of Paul's hearers knew was the word used by Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) every time the covenant name of God (יהוה) appeared. This is the Trinitarian teaching that Jesus was none other than the One God come to earth as a first-century human.
If that is the case, then the nature of God is not that of an ancient Middle Eastern vengeful and angry God who needs to be appeased, but rather the loving God, attested to throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, whose purpose is redemption, whose nature is love, and who promises, as he did to Moses, to be with us to the end of the age.
Pistis means "trust." In New Testament terms, as we will see, it means "trust that leads to following Jesus in loving obedience" or "trusting Jesus to be always who he said he was when on earth and behaving accordingly." Yet another way to define pistis is "faithfulness." It is used of God to describe his faithfulness in dealing with us.
In what we know as chapter 4, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham believed in God, that is, that God would keep the promise to make Abraham's descendants a great nation. This trust in the faithfulness of God justified Abraham (accounted to him as righteousness). Justification is a legal term meaning to acquit an accused person. In Paul it means that a person is put into right relationship with God, whose purpose has always been redemption, and whose message is personal and ethical. That is what righteousness means.
After quoting from the Torah, Paul goes on to say that works did not justify Abraham, otherwise we would have something to boast about. Keep that idea in mind, as later on in the book Paul talks about what it is proper to boast about as a believer. When we work at a job and are paid, we are given what is owed to us. It is not a gift. Similarly, we cannot make God owe us, but rather justification, or being accounted as right with God, is a free gift.
Even the psalmist says "Blessed are those whose iniquities (acts of disobedience to God) are forgiven and whose sins are blotted out; blessed is the one against whom the Lord (יהוה) will not reckon sin." (Psalm 32:1-2).
Then Paul points out that Abraham was accepted as righteous by God before he or anyone of his family was circumcised and long before the Torah was given. At this point in the reading of the book in Rome, the Greek Christians were probably nodding with satisfaction, while the Jewish Christians were squirming. God set Abraham as the father of many nations before there was law (Torah) or even circumcision. Abraham continued to believe after he was very old and Sarah was, to all human knowledge even today, beyond child-bearing possibility. That is what faith (trusting) is. All the hearers of the letter knew that, in her old age, Sarah bore a son to Abraham and named him Yitschak ("he laughs").
If becoming right with God were a matter of obeying the Torah, then faith would be meaningless, and the promise to Abraham would be empty. If you can by obedience to rules make yourself righteous and attain your hope, then there is no place for faith or promise. So what is God about, then, and what was the purpose of the Torah? Paul's position is that what the Torah does is to bring wrath (condemnation) and to make faith and promise empty, while God is working out his promise to Abraham in those who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, he who died because of our rebellious living and was raised from the dead to make us right with God.
That is strong enough, however, something of major importance is lost in translation into English. When Jesus is given the title Lord, that is the word in Greek kurios, which all of Paul's hearers knew was the word used by Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) every time the covenant name of God (יהוה) appeared. This is the Trinitarian teaching that Jesus was none other than the One God come to earth as a first-century human.
If that is the case, then the nature of God is not that of an ancient Middle Eastern vengeful and angry God who needs to be appeased, but rather the loving God, attested to throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, whose purpose is redemption, whose nature is love, and who promises, as he did to Moses, to be with us to the end of the age.
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