Romans 13

Once again we encounter a passage of Paul's writing that has been misunderstood and misused. Paul argues that all should be subject to the existing authorities and not resist them. He gives two reasons: the first is that all rulers have been instituted by God and it follows that if you resist the rulers you are setting yourself against the will of God and will be judged accordingly; the second is that one has no reason to fear the rulers if what one does is just and right--only the disobedient and criminals have reason to fear.

This passage has been used by dictators, kings, and presidents to mean that no one should oppose them. The people who support the rulers politically put pressure on those who disagree with their policies. In one of my classes many years ago, before the class hour began, one of the students said that, if the US went to war with Iraq, there would be all kinds of problems created and we would regret it. Another student said: "But he is our president and we have to do what he says." I stayed out of the issue, as required of university professors and instructors, but I was very taken aback by the attitude of the second student. We know now that the first student was absolutely correct in her assessment.

The reading I have just described of this passage is an interpretation which takes no account of context, either in the essay itself, in the Biblical teaching as a whole, or in the culture and time in which the essay was written. It is important to note that in ancient Hebrew thought, and to a great extent in the thought of all cultures who believed in one supreme God, this God was the first cause of everything that happened. This being the case, it is not surprising that Paul argues that if a certain emperor is in power, it can only mean that God put him (always a him in the Roman Empire) there.

Another matter is that the idea of the great chain of being, in which God is the first cause and all events, through chain of causes which create effects, and in which the effects in turn become the cause of a next effect and so on ad inifinitum, did not exist in the first century or for many centuries thereafter. The idea is the creation of philosopher/theologians of the Middle Ages.

Finally, it must be noted from history that, at the time Paul wrote this essay, the Roman government was protecting the Jewish religion and with it Christianity, viewed as one expression of Judaism. When Paul later was caught up in a legal accusation and it seemed that he would never get justice at the Palestine province capital Caesarea, he appealed to the Emperor. At the time Roman justice had an enviously positive reputation.

Jesus exploded the idea that all events are directly ordered by God. He famously asked his followers if they really thought that the people who had been crushed and killed by the collapse of a tower (referring to an event in his hearers' memory) were really any more culpable than everyone else? The obvious answer had to be no.

We don't know what anti-government attitudes people in the church in Rome may have had, but Paul is arguing that, things being as they are, they should obey the authorities and be good citizens, thus showing a witness of their love for God. Jesus had said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." This is what Paul is arguing. He does not say that Christians should do the yearly declaration, required at times and in some places of Roman citizens, to declare that Caesar is Lord. The confession of the Christian is Xristos Kurios: Christ is Lord, that is, the most High God. Implicit in Jesus's saying is that our loyalty to God must come before any other loyalty. We must interpret what Paul is saying in accordance with what Jesus taught.

In the latter half of Chapter 13, Paul reminds his hearers that, as far as human relationships are concerned, the principle to live by is "Love your neighbor as yourself," quoting Jesus, who in turn quoted Leviticus 19:18.

In the final section, Paul urges the church at Rome to put off the works of "darkness" (when the revelation of God was not full--before the coming of Jesus, metaphorically the "light") and to live righteously (according to the will of God) given that the light has come and that each day, the eternal kingdom (described by the word salvation) is one day nearer.

Romans 12

The section we know as Chapter 12 of Romans begins with one of Paul's most quoted and approved lines: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect" (verses 1 and 2, NRSV).

"Therefore" (in Greek just one syllable: oun) indicates that, given all the previous matters discussed in the essay, Paul is going to lay out how the Christian should live. That one little word means a great deal, but it is normally passed over or not assigned much importance. However it is crucial: given that God's purpose is redemption and that God offers salvation (God's love and protection) to all people on the same basis, here is how you should live. So then, how should we live? To the ancient Gentiles: stop giving your bodies over to licentious living. Instead, live an ethical life loving God and your fellow humans. That is, seek the good of others over your own desires and your own good. This message also applies to societies in post-modern times. To the ancient Jews: God does not want your sacrifices or your righteousness, he wants you to live in relationship with him and in obedience, relying on God's righteousness. Living for God and for the good of other people is the sacrifice God demands. This message addresses the self-satisfied people in churches that believe that God's nature requires retribution, but following the rules laid out by the community pleases God. Paul's message, based on that of Jesus, could not have been more counter cultural, then or now. Human wisdom only leads to trouble.

Paul goes on to point out that we must not see ourselves as alone and separate from others. The church is a community, metaphorically the body of Christ. Each of us has a part to play and none of us is the all-in-all, and none is unimportant, either. Christ, none of us, is the head.

Verses 9 to the end of the chapter explain how love (agape, not romantic love) is to be practiced. Never fall prey to schadenfreude, accompany with your emotions those who are in difficulties and those who are happy, persevere when you suffer, meet the needs of fellow Christians and give hospitality to strangers. The latter was a sacred duty in ancient times. As for your enemies, let God deal with them. Meanwhile, feed them if they are hungry, do not treat them as they treat you, give them water if they are thirsty.

All this is clear and easy to understand. It is extremely difficult to practice, because it goes completely against our human nature and what our culture says we should do.

Romans 11

We come now to a passage in this essay that is among the most misused by interpreters who do not pay attention to context, but rather interpret every verse as if it stood alone.

Paul continues in what we now call Chapter 11 of Romans to insist that God's redemptive purpose is offered to all people, of all races and ethnicities, on the same basis. That being the case, God has not set aside the people of Israel nor excluded them from the offer of grace (vv. 1-2). As it has always been, it is up to people to accept the salvation offered by God, but again as it has always been, most people will say "no, thanks, I'm good." That is the very definition of sin, and it is the message of the story of temptation in the Garden of Eden.

Then look carefully at verses 3 and 4. Paul references the story of Elijah in 1 Samuel, in which the prophet cries to God that all the other prophets had been killed and the altars demolished and now he alone was left and they were out to kill him too. God replies that there were seven thousand men (sic) who remained faithful to God. We can safely assume that we can add that many women and at least that many children, probably more. So, although the majority of Israel rejected God, there remained a large contingent of faithful people.

Paul goes on to say that this is the working of God's grace, and is nothing these people could have earned by their own efforts. That is, he is reminding his readers of what he has been emphasizing all along: God offers to all God's grace through faith (not works) but not everyone accepts it.

The import of verses 7 through 10 is that God never did obligate the people of Israel to obey him. The expression "God gave them eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear" should not be read as we would now. This essay was written well before the concept of cause and effect and the great chain of being, with God as the first cause. That belongs to the Middle Ages and still tends to affect our post-modern thinking. If anything, in ancient times people thought of God as the first cause of everything. That was one reason people were convinced they had to appease their gods. At same time the Jews held what we would consider a contradictory position: that individuals were responsible for their own decisions and actions. Accordingly the passage cannot be read as saying that God made the Israelites disobedient so that the Gentiles could also participate in the Kingdom of God, but rather, that one advantage or result of the situation is that God used it to move the good news of Christ's kingdom out to the Gentile world.

After laying out the disobedience of the Jews, Paul tells the Gentiles of the church not to be proud or feel they have it made. He compares the church to a plant, originally Jewish, that the Gentiles were grafted onto. God's sovereignty means that Israel can be grafted back on, so watch out.

Verses 25 and 26 have been sorely misinterpreted because they have been taken as a blanket statement requiring no interpretation. Given all that Paul has to say, and that he often used the metaphor of the church as the new Israel, the statement that "all Israel will be saved" is best understood as referring to the total sum of Jews and Gentiles who recognize Jesus as their God.

At the end of the chapter Paul quotes Isaiah 40:13 and Job 15:8 and 41:3, verses that assert that no one can know the mind of God, whose purposes exhaust and go beyond our understanding. He concludes with a doxolgy: "For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen." That is the future God is making and that is our hope.

Romans 10

I'm back from the winter break and gearing up for the new semester, glad to be able to resume the blog on Paul's letter to the Romans.

Chapter 10 is a reprise of the main point Paul has to make in his book-length essay: God offers salvation to all, Jews and all other ethnicities, on the same basis. The Jews, says Paul, were strongly committed to God, but insist on relating to him on their own terms. What they refused to accept is that "The perfection of the law (Torah) is Christ so that all who trust fully in him will be accounted as righteous" (v. 4). That is, it is trust that places your life on the line for God, who came as Jesus, that makes you right with God.

Paul continues by expanding on the concept. In verses 9 and 10 he argues that "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. You see, with your heart you trust and become righteous and with your mouth you confess and are saved." In other words, when you trust in your inmost being that Jesus will always be who he said he is, you stake your very life on it, and you verbalize it, you come into relationship with God, who brings you into the eternal kingdom of God. Submit in humility and set to serving others. That is what "salvation" means.

In the remainder of what was designated much later than the writing as Chapter 10, Paul makes very clear that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (v. 13)." He is quoting the prophet Joel at 2:32, again insisting that this has been God's purpose all along. He ends the section by quoting from the Torah and the prophets sections that declare that those who did not seek God (the non-Jews) found him, while of the Jews he says "all day long I (God) have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people (NRSV)," implying that they missed his coming as a result.

I have commented before to the effect that context is everything. That is, we always must take the entire context of a book into account when we interpret. That said, please keep in mind what Paul has just laid out clearly as we deal with Chapter 11, where Paul talks of the restoration of Israel and which we will take up in the next blog post.

Romans 9

The section of Paul's book-length essay known as Chapter 9 of Romans has been subject to a great deal of misinterpretation arising from two errors. The first is reading into the text and the second is failing to interpret in context (i.e. the entire essay) while overlooking important statements of principle.

Reading into the text has the fancy name of eisegesis, defined by Merriam-Webster as interpreting a text by imposing on it one's own ideas. It is the opposite of exegesis, which denotes the practice of reading a text on its own terms and allowing it to challenge the reader. A typical case of eisegesis is that of people who see the Bible story as a series of different plans God had for saving people. The first was Eden, but the humans disobeyed. The second was up to the great flood, the one Noah built the ark for. The next was Israel, followed by the coming of Jesus and the establishment of the Christian church. These people look to a future plan in which Israel is restored and Jesus reigns for 1000 years. Then there will be a great battle after which the elect (there is a certain amount of predestination built in to this way of interpreting the Bible) are taken into the Eternal New Jerusalem. Each one of these plans (and mind you, we are at Plan F by this time) is called a dispensation of grace, a different way of saving people. It depicts God as failing in his first intents and shuffling the cards each time things just do not work out. My description of the dispensationalist interpretation is not meant to be critical of people who hold this view, but rather to point out that it imposes a system onto the biblical texts rather than let the Bible speak on its own.

Let us try out an exegetical approach instead: What does Chapter 9 have to say. What is the context? At the beginning of the essay Paul establishes that all of us have sinned and that God makes no distinction between Jews and Gentiles. In Chapter 15 he insists that God has commissioned him to take the good news of Jesus to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, the peoples (ethnoi in Greek). If God sent Paul to the non-Jewish people and if God holds all people with the same regard, and if Paul makes a big deal of the fact that Abraham was put right with God through trust (faith), then Paul cannot be saying in Chapter 9 that merely being a good Jew will turn out to be enough in the end.

What Paul does say in Chapter 9 is that he recognizes his Jewishness and that he feels sorrow for his own people. After all, the salvation history up to the time of Jesus was first and foremost a Jewish story. They were given the adoption (as children of God), the glory (a vision of God's presence), the covenants, the law, the (temple) worship, and the promises (v. 4). God's word and purpose did not fail, but rather the problem was that not all Israelites truly belong to Israel (v. 6). Paul sees the church as the New Israel. Jeremiah foresaw that God would make a new pact, one written on people's hearts rather than on stone and parchment (32:40). Jesus said his death (and resurrection) established a new pact (Luke 22:20).

In the remainder of Chapter 9 Paul insists on God's sovereign right to have mercy on who he will have mercy, to put all humans on an equal footing, to use Israel's disobedience to allow multiple millions of Gentiles to come to faith. The discussion of Chapter 9 really ends in 10:4: "Christ is the fulfillment of the law to make righteous all those who believe." It could not be clearer. He will go on to cover the matter of how Israel will fit in God's future purposes in Chapters 10 and 11. Keep in mind where Paul ends up in this part of the essay: "I do not wish you to be ignorant, my brothers and sisters, of this mystery, so that you will not think too highly of your own wisdom: the hardening of a portion of Israel has come about until the fullness of the Gentiles enters (the kingdom of God) and that is how all Israel shall be saved (11: 25). This is the new pact, all who put their full trust in Jesus, whether Gentile or Jew, will be made right with God.

Romans 8

I ask your permission to indulge in a brief digression, the purpose of which will become apparent below. Perhaps my favorite novel is Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman) by Pierre Loti, set in the 1890's. The main character, who lives in Brittany, spends his summers on a fishing boat that circles Iceland. There are poetic descriptions of a large sun which circles the horizon constantly, looking like a large balloon. Meanwhile, his brother is fighting with the French army in Vietnam, where he is hit by a bullet. As he travels back toward France on a hospital boat, he dies at the precise moment the boat crosses the equator as the evening sun dips into the horizon and darkness comes swiftly in that latitude. This happens at the exact middle of the novel. I later discovered that the best written novels usually have a centrally important turning point in the exact middle, give or take one or two pages either direction.

Now Paul, in his book-length essay divided much later into 16 chapters, begins chapter eight, the very middle of his book, with the resounding affirmation that summarizes all he wrote before and announces what comes in the remainder of the essay: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death" (NRSV) What can be more clear than that? The remainder of the chapter explores what that means and how it works. Several sections in this chapter are among the most quoted in books and from the pulpits, not always paying sufficient attention to the context.

As you read the remainder of the chapter, keep in mind what Paul has argued in the preceding portions of the letter: God takes the initiative to offer his grace, leaving us free to trust in such confidence that we respond in obedience. or to refuse to accept the offer of grace in order to live as we like. Those who respond in trust have their faith accounted as right relationship with God, as was the case with Abraham. If you read his story, you will see that God forgave him much.

Up through verse 17 Paul contrasts the flesh with the Spirit. The flesh is Paul's metaphor for our desire to disobey God, leading to all sorts of evil results. The Spirit is Christ, God himself, living alongside us and transforming us. He gives us the right to call God Father. Paul uses the Hebrew word, Abba. Preachers often declare that it means "Daddy," but we must be careful. Abba is the only word Hebrew uses for "father." Overinterpretation can be dangerous. The point is that we are God's children, if the Spirit is in us, and if so heirs of God, that is, joint heirs with Christ. God adopts the believers as God's own.

In verses 18 through 30 we see that the presence of the Spirit and the rightness with God that is thereby worked in us gives us faith in the future, a future which makes anything we suffer in the present worthwhile. The Spirit prays on our behalf when we do not know how or what to pray. The Spirit, that is God in us, knows us, loves us, helps us withstand the bad things that happen to us, and in God's time turns them into something good for us, something that makes us mature and experience joy in spite of what happens.

At the very end of that section, Paul affirms that God knew all along who would respond in faith and therefore prepared a purpose for them, calling them to be conformed to the image of Jesus, that is to be made more and more how we were meant to be and to fit us for glory (that is, living in the presence of God). Taken in the full context of the essay, this cannot mean that God decided beforehand who would be saved and who would not. That is overinterpretation taking a verse or two out of context.

Verses 31 to the end of chapter eight tell us what that means: that nothing the world can throw at us can separate us from God. Because God has already triumphed, we will triumph, if we respond to God in a total trust that issues in obedience.

Romans 7

In the section of the essay we know as chapter 7, Paul makes two final efforts to drive home what he has been saying: That everyone in the world is in the same condition before God. Obeying the Torah and the extensions of the law developed in the era following the exile of the Jews in Babylon cannot make God owe you anything. Conversely, being acquitted by the grace of God does not entitle non-Jews to live as they please.

In the first six verses Paul makes an analogy with marriage. An analogy is not an argument and seems strange in post-modern times but the intent of the writer is clear. It goes like this: A married woman was bound by the law to her husband. As a result she was not free to marry another. If her husband died, however, she was no longer bound by the law and could marry freely. In the first century C.E. the men were allowed to divorce their wives at will, but the wives could not divorce their husbands. Jesus pointed to a higher moral standard: keep to your marriage vows. Paul's point is that the death of Jesus freed all Jews from the condemnation outlined in the law (as the death of a husband frees his widow from the law) and the resurrection of Jesus allows to live a new life of freedom and of following Jesus (as though bound to a new husband).

The remainder of the chapter has puzzled interpreters for ages, with people staking out a position and verbally fighting those who assail it. But if we are right in reading Romans as a book-length essay, it becomes clear that at this point Paul is describing the common condition of all people: we cannot under our own power create the will to do what is right (if we can even know what the right thing is) and make it stick. In other words, we cannot justify ourselves, we cannot make ourselves right with God, we cannot make God owe us, and we cannot appease God. The mind may want to please God, but our human nature (what Paul means by "flesh") keeps asserting itself.

The first part of verse 25 gives thanks to God "through Jesus Christ our Lord." In a previous post I mentioned that the name God gave to Moses was "I will be who I will be" and that it is closely connected to "I will be with you." The word "Lord" is the Greek word Kyrios which is always used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for "Yaweh". Jesus' last words to his disciples were "I will be with you to the end of the age." It is the God who is with us who acquits and brings us into the holy Presence.