God’s plan & Paul’s Vision In Romans

God’s plan & Paul’s Vision In Romans

By: Tom Wright

Never mind the old and the new: how do we keep Romans in any kind of perspective? It bestrides the narrow worlds of scholarship and church like a colossus, and we petty exegetes walk under its huge legs and peep about... no, let's not go there. That was, after all, said of Caesar, and part of the point of Romans is that it is written to Caesar's city but with a message very different from that of Caesar himself and, if I am right (though this is a different topic), part of its aim is to challenge, at several levels, the ideological foundations of Caesar's empire. The only possible strategy is to head for the absolutely vital passages, to do my best once more to expound them, and to deal with such objections as I can. And there is only one place to begin.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God's power for salvation to all who believe, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God's righteousness is unveiled in it, from faith to faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith." (Romans 1:16-17)

There is, of course, a sense in which we only know what Paul’s a dense introductory sentence means when we have read the fuller statements into which they grow as the argument proceeds. The Western church a long tradition of (a) reading "God's righteousness" asiustitia Dei, then (b) trying to interpret that phrase with the various meanings of iusti­tia available at the time, and (c) interpreting that in turn within the categories of theological investigation of the time (especially the de­ termination to make "justification" cover the entire sweep of soteriol­ogy from grace to glory)—unless all this had happened, nobody would ever have supposed that the "righteousness" in question in Romans 1:17 was anything other than God's own "righteousness," unveiled, as in a great apocalypse, before the watching world.

John Piper really does seem to think that to stress "covenant faithfulness" is to shrink the notion to quite a small compass, whereas in the Psalms and Isaiah, in Daniel 9 and a good deal of second-temple literature (not least 4 Ezra), the belief that God is, and will be, faithful to his covenant is absolutely foundational both for Israel's hope of rescue and, out beyond that, for the hope of a restored creation. But—still remembering Piper's own statement about how Paul's terms must ultimately be understood with reference to the actual contexts in which he uses them—the best argument for taking dikaiosyne theou in Romans 1:17, 3:21 and 10:3 as "God's faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham, to the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world," is the mas­sive sense it makes of passage after passage, the way in which bits of Romans often omitted from discussion, or even explicitly left on one side as being irrelevant to the main drift of the discourse, suddenly come back into focus with a bang.

To mention only the obvious exegetical casualties of the old perspective:

1.      The tight little paragraph 3:27-31 regularly comes unglued at its crucial joint, the fat the start of Romans 3:29.

2.      Abraham in chapter 4 is treated as an "example" or "illustration," and the point of the chapter is thereby completely missed, resulting in the oddity of placing within parentheses phrases in Romans 4:16-17 which are actually the main point of the whole discussion.

3.      Within Romans 9-11 itself, even when Paul structures his argument by questions about the word of God having failed, about God being unjust, about CJod's rights as judge, about his revelation of wrath and power, and then about his mercy (Romans 9:6, 14, 19, 22, 23)—all of which, to the eye trained in Scripture and Jewish tradition, should say, "This is all about God's own righteousness"—the point is simply not seen, let alone grasped. Such is the effect of the late-medieval blinkers still worn within the post-Reformation traditions.

4.      Then, of course, Romans 10:6-13 falls as well. If one is not thinking about God's faithfulness to the covenant, one might well miss—and the vast majority of exegetes have missed!—the crucial significance of Deuteronomy 30 within its own biblical context and within the re-readings of Scripture in Paul's day, and the way in which that passage, and the various second-temple re-readings of it, including Paul's, all point to the foundational belief that God is faithful to the covenant and will, therefore, bring about its renewal at last.

5.      Finally, the climactic statements about God in Romans 11 (see Ro­ mans 11:22, 32 and of course 33-36) still fail to alert those whose minds are steeped in the theology of a different age to the fact, which even the bare verbal statistics will tell you, that Romans is a book about God, and that the primary thing it is saying about God is that he is the God of faithful, just, covenantal love, that this has been unveiled in the gospel message about Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen Messiah, and that through this gospel message, and the radical unveiling of God's covenant justice and faithfulness, God's saving power is going out into the world, and will not rest until creation itself is set free from its slavery to corruption and decay and shares the liberty of the glory of God's children. Does the letter fit together well on this account, or does it not?

The best argument for the "righteousness" in Romans 1:17 being God's own, and referring to his (albeit strange and unexpected) faithfulness to the covenant, is the argument of Romans itself. How then does the rest of the opening summary play out?

1.      First, we note once more that Romans 1:16 and 17 are not a statement of "the gospel." I am aware that some of the things I have some­ times said at this point have been too truncated, and I am sorry for giving wrong impressions. Paul has various ways of summarizing his "gospel." In Romans itself, he does it in 1:3-5, where it is the proclamation that Jesus, the Messiah, is the risen Lord of the world, summoning the whole world to believe allegiance. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 he does it in terms of the Messiah dying for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and being raised again also in accordance with the Scriptures. But the important point to note is that "the gospel" is a message primarily about Jesus, and about what the one true God has done and is doing through him. By contrast, Romans 1:16-17 is a claim about the effect of the gospel: when it is preached, God's power goes to work and people are saved. "I am not ashamed of the gospel," followed by an explanation of what the gospel does, is not the same thing as "here is the gospel itself."

2.      Second, the gospel is God's power for salvation to those who have faith, which amounts to very much the same thing.) Notice how the two come so close together: (a) "to all who believe," (b) Jew first and also Greek. Old perspective and new; except that the "all" in the first phrase is itself a pointer to the second. The two are not divided for Paul, but only in our presentations of him.

3.      Third, "from faith to faith" is even denser than the rest of the statement, and can only be interpreted in the light of data from elsewhere. But, anticipating my discussion of Romans 3:22, I will just say that 1 think Paul intends to hint that when God's covenant faithfulness/ justice is unveiled, this is done on the basis of the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, on the one hand, and for the benefit of those who believe, on the other.

4.      Finally, Paul quotes Habakkuk 2:4: "The righteous shall live by faith" (all translations of the clause are tendentious, and depend on what you think he means by it).

This Brings Us Directly To Romans 1:18-3:20.

By Paul's references to "God's righteousness" in Romans 1:17 and Romans 3:21, setting out the ground for the fuller treatment of the stated theme the passage simply as a single section carries considerable risks, notably that of short-circuiting the exegesis of the particular parts in order to make the point which Paul is undoubtedly making overall (that all people are sinful) while ignoring the many other things he says on the way. In particular, three of the subsections are extremely important for the topic of justification. To begin with, Romans 2:1-16 sets out, clearly and dramatically, a picture of the last judgment. This picture is rooted in Jewish thinking about the final assize. It is angled rhetorically to springing the trap (following the sobering indictments of Romans 1:18- 32) on the superior-minded pagan moralist, and perhaps also (this is controversial, but irrelevant for our purposes) on the equally superior- minded on looking Jew. The main reason, of course, for embarrassment on this topic is that here Paul, in the first mention of "justification" in the letter, states openly and cheerfully that it is "the doers of the law who will be justified" (Romans 2:13).

The idea that Paul would insist on such a judgment at which the criterion will be, in some sense, "works," "deeds" or even "works of the law," has naturally been anathema to those who have been taught that his sole word about judgment and justification is that, since justification is by faith, there simply cannot be a final "judgment according to works."

Nor did I write Romans 14:10-12: The problem with the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world was that Israel had failed to deliver. There was nothing wrong with the plan, or with the Torah on which it was based. The problem was in Israel itself. As we shall see later, the problem was that Israel, too, was "in Adam." This lies deep at the heart of Paul's theological insight, and it is the reason why so much of his theology appears so intractably complex to those who have not even grasped its first principles. God's single plan was a plan through-Israel-(even-though-Israel-too-was-part- of-the-problem)-for-the-world. Miss this point, and (like C. H. Dodd, famously, and a thousand other commentators, less famously) you will wish Paul had never written 3:1-8. Or, for that matter, chapters 9-11.

But Paul, unlike many of his interpreters, answers his own question with a resounding me genoito, "certainly not" (Romans 3:4). God will be vindicated, as Psalm 51 declares in the face of massive human sin (specifically, David's sin, to which Paul will return in Romans 4:7-8). Somehow—Paul does not yet say how; he only, but strongly, affirms that—God will be true to his single plan. Israel's "unrighteousness" (her covenant failure, no less: her failure to be the middle term in the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world) will only make God's righteousness (his covenant faithfulness, no less: his determination to put that selfsame plan into effect) shine out all the more brightly.

This is the point—before we even get to Romans 3:21-4:25—where we begin to realize at last how the emphases of the old and new perspectives belong so intimately together.

1.      The overarching problem has always been human sin and its effects—idolatry, pride, human corruption and ultimately death.

2.      God launched a rescue operation, the single plan, through Israel, to save the world.

3.      But Israel, too, is part of the original problem, which has a double effect:

a.       Israel itself needs the same rescue-from-sin-and-death that every­ one else needs;

b.      Israel, as it stands, cannot be the means of the rescue operation that God's plan intended.

4.      Therefore the problem with which God is faced, if he is to be faithful to his own character and plan in both creation and covenant, is

a.       he must nevertheless put his single plan into operation, somehow accomplishing what Israel was called to do but, through faithless-- ness to his commission, failed to do;

b.      he must thereby rescue the human race and the whole world from sin, idolatry, pride, corruption and death;

c.       He must do this in a way which makes it clear that Israel, though still, of course, the object of his saving love is now on all fours with the rest of the world.

In other words, God must find a way of enabling "Israel" to be faithful after all, as the middle term of the single plan; God must thereby deal with sin, and God must do so in such as way as to leave no room for boasting. We are ready, at last, to read Romans 3:21-4:25.

Why then does human faith play the part it does within this scheme of thought?

Three possible options initially present themselves. The first is decidedly substandard (though it points, ultimately, in the right direction), and the second and third, though much better, still do not get to the root of the matter.

Three better answers are available.

1.      First, Paul has anchored his view of faith to the two biblical texts al­ ready mentioned, Habakkuk 2:4 and Genesis 15:6. These are not, as we have seen, merely decontextualized proof texts. Habakkuk speaks of a time when the cosmos seems to be shaking, and God's people are called to be faithful while they await the revelation of God's cove­nant justice and faithfulness.

2.      A second answer, further away in some senses and nearer at hand in others, may be found in the Gospels. Throughout all four Gospels, Jesus calls for faith, for belief and declares repeatedly that when God acts in and through him he does so in the context of people's faith. "Go home; your faith has saved you." "Your faith has made you well."

3.      "Let it be for you in accordance with your faith." Faith is a major theme in John: "As many as received him, as believed in his name, to them he gave the right to become God's children." We cannot prove that Paul knew any of this tradition, or that it formed part of the cli­ mate in early Christianity because of which "faith" came to play the role it did in his theology. But the link is striking, and all the more so for not being made as often as perhaps it should be.

4.      The third answer, which goes to the roots of it all, is found eventually (if only, we sometimes think, Paul had followed our rhetorical needs rather than the needs of his own argument!) toward the end of chapter 4. The faith of Abraham’s kind is the sign of a genuine humanity, responding out of total human weakness and helplessness to the grace and power of God, and thus giving God the glory. That is the point of Ro­ mans 4:19-21, where Paul demonstrates how in the case of Abraham we may witness the reversal of the catastrophic sequence of idolatry, the denial of God's power and glory, and the consequent dehumanization that he had cataloged in Romans 1:18-25. This is the point at which the grain of truth in the first view I mentioned a moment ago at last emerges. But that view, as often expressed, makes it sound extremely arbitrary, or as though God is really an existentialist who simply wants an "authentic" response rather than an "external" one. Putting it this way brings out the full flavor: the faith of Abraham, which Paul sees as the exact model for the faith of the Christian (Ro­ mans 4:23-25), is the faith which indicates the presence of genuine, humble, trusting and indeed we might say image-bearing humanity (compare Colossians 3:10). And, within that, "faithfulness" has all along (so it seems) been the thing that God requires from his people, the "Israel" who arc the middle term in his single plan. If the plan has been fulfilled by the Messiah's faithfulness (pistis), the badge of the covenant people from then on will be the same: pistis, faith, con­ fessing that Jesus is Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). The faith of this sort is the true-Israel, true-human sign, the badge of God's redeemed people.

WE CANNOT SAY IT TOO OFTEN

Abraham is not simply an "example" of someone who is justified by faith. Romans 4 is not just an "illustration," or even a "biblical proof," of the theological point Paul has just made. And it is God's faithfulness to his promises to Abraham that, as in many passages of the Old Testament, is the key central meaning of "God's righteousness." Romans 3:21 did not finish at Romans 3:31; it merely sets up the fuller exposition of the same point, the dikaiosyne theou. The tragedy of much Reformation reading of Paul is that, by using up the language of "God's righteous­ ness" on the unnecessary project of "finding someone's righteousness to impute to the believer" as though "righteousness" was that sort of thing in the first place, and as though the theological point were not already taken care of "in Christ," this entire point was not just sidelined but binned. And with that, the entire single narrative, the entire Jewish narrative, was lost from view.

The point of Romans 4 is, in any case, not simply about "how people get justified." The flow of thought from Romans 4:9 onward indicates that the question toward which Paul is working in the opening verses is rather the question—much as in Galatians 3!—who are the family of Abraham? Who are his "seed" (Romans 4:16)? Is this a family of Jews only, so that Gentiles have to come in either as second-class citizens or as actual proselytes? In a fairly literal translation, these key verses read:

Therefore it is by faith, so that it might be in accordance with grace, so that the promise might be confirmed for all the seed, not only that which is from the law but also that which is from the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, "Father of many nations have I ap­ pointed you," before the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls non-existent things into existence. (Romans 4:16-17)

The following translation, which works extremely well with the Greek, brings this out:

What then shall we say? Have we found Abraham to be our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has a boast—but not in the presence of God. (Romans 4:1-2).

These sets up exactly that question to which Romans 4:16-17 are the answer, toward which the rest of the chapter is building and from which the conclusion flows. Abraham was "ungodly," a "sinner," God did not count this against him. The covenant of Genesis 15, in other words, was a matter of sheer grace from its very first moments (as stressed in Romans 4:16: "by faith, so that it might be by grace").Reading the passage this way means that Romans 4:3-8 does not constitute, as Simon Gathercole and others have argued, a "smoking gun" indicating that Paul is after all working with an old perspective framework rather than a new perspective one.'

The question then presses as to why Paul has introduced this new topic. The answer he himself suggests is that the next stage of the let­ter's argument (Romans 5-8) is framed by the strong doctrine of God's love. With this, we realize, of course, that we have not in fact left behind one key element of justification, namely the covenant. the language of justification, not so much of reconcilia­tion, that dominates the summary (in Romans 5:12-21) of where the argument has got to so far. The force of the Adam-Christ contrast grows directly out of the long argument concerning Abraham, since God's purpose in calling Abraham, as we have seen, was to deal with the problem created through Adam. If God has now been true to the promises to Abraham, it must mean that the long entail of sin and death has been overcome, so that the way is clear to the rescue of human beings and, through them, the rescue of the whole of creation. After the opening setting of the scene (Romans 5:12-14), Paul develops the point in two moves.

1.      First, he shows that there is, in fact, a gross imbalance between (a) sin and its effects and (b) grace and its effects (Romans 5:15-17). Then he shows that, granted this imbalance, one can at last view, as though from a great height, the victory of God over all the forces of evil through Jesus the Messiah (Romans 5:18-21), taking in at a single glance the map of all that territory which the Chris­ tian now inhabits and in which, through the Spirit, God's people move from justification to glorification.

Thus, throughout 5:15-21, Paul summarizes the achievement of God in Christ in terms of "righteousness" and "justification" (remembering still that these share the same Greek root):

1.      5:16b: The gift following many trespasses led to "the verdict 'righteous'" (dikaidma);

2.      5:17b: How much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness (dikaiosyne) reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ;

3.      5:18b: Even so, through a single "righteous act" (dikaidma), to all people, to "justification of life" (dikaiosis zoes);

4.      5:19b: Even so through the obedience of the one man the many will be established as "righteous" (dikaioi);

5.      5:21b: [So that] . . . even so, grace might reign through righteousness (dikaiosyne) to "the life of the age |to come]" through Jesus Christ our Lord.

That Paul has in mind a consistent frame of thought in which (a) a judicial event takes place, consisting of (b) the righteous act of Jesus, also designated as his "obedience," and referring to the same event as his "faithfulness," in other words, his death (Romans 3:24-26; 5:6-10), as a result of which (c) human beings are declared to he "in the right," now enjoying the status of "righteousness" as a result of the verdict which God has announced (dikaidma) and as God's free gift, so that (d) they might inherit "the age to come," and not only inherit it but also share Christ's reign within it.

And Paul's doctrine of final justification is based solidly on the fact that this great rescue operation, this great renewal of all things, has already been launched in Jesus Christ, and is already being put into operation through the Spirit. This is Paul's framework for what we have come to think of as "Christian ethics." Let me put it like this: if we begin simply with "justification by faith," as traditionally conceived within much Protestantism, we will have the obvious problem that "what we now do" appears to get in the way of the "faith from first to last" by which alone we are justified. But if we follow Paul and see justifica­tion by faith (as in Romans 3:21-4:25) within the larger framework of his biblical theology of God's covenant with and through Abraham for the world, now fulfilled in Christ, we will discover that from within that larger, and utterly Pauline, framework there is a straight and easy path to understanding (what is sometimes referred to as) the place of "works" in the Christian life, without in any way, shape or form compromising the solidity of "justification by faith" itself.

Why then does Paul not discuss faith between 5:2 and 8:39, even though the whole passage is "about" justification in the sense of the final verdict which remains founded on God's love in the death and resurrection of Jesus? It's hard to prove a negative. But it could just be for two reasons. First, at no point throughout this long argument does he need to stress that the people of God consist equally of Jews and Gentiles. He has already made that point in 3:21-4:25, and will return to it shortly in 9:30-10:13. And this is closely cognate with the second point: throughout this passage, he has his eye on the future day when God will put the whole world right and raise his people to new life. "Justification by faith" is about the present; about how you can already tell who the people are who will be vindicated on the last day. He celebrates that in chapter 8, not by providing a further discussion of it as though to supplement 3:21-4:25, but by looking on from it to the final moment of resurrection, ultimate vindication and new creation.

Romans 5-8 (the absence of pistis) thus points to an underlying theological point of enormous significance for our whole topic. Loose talk about "salvation by faith" (a phrase Paul never uses; the closest he gets, as we have seen, is Ephesians 2:8, "By grace you have been saved through faith") can seriously mislead people into supposing that you can construct an entire Pauline soteriology out of the sole elements of "faith" and "works," with "works" of any sort al­ ways being ruled out as damaging or compromising the purity of faith. For Paul, a stress on "justification by faith" is always a stress on the present status of all God's people in anticipation of the final judgment. But when he puts this into its larger, covenantal context, alongside and integrated with "being in Christ" and all the other elements of his complex thought, it is always filled out with talk of the Spirit.

The result is that the long-awaited covenant renewal spoken of in Deuteronomy has, at last, come about. Yes, Moses docs indeed say that the one who "does these things" shall live in them (Romans 10:5, quoting Leviticus 18:5). But what does "doing these things" now mean? Paul is not thinking in terms of a detached profit-and-loss account system of soteriology in which one either "does" good works to earn God's favor or decides to trust God's forgiveness instead. He is thinking in terms of the promised covenant renewal which, when it arrives, will enable a "doing of the law" of quite a different sort of anything previously imagined—exactly as he had hinted in Romans 2:25-29 and such other apparently odd passages as 1 Corinthians 7:19 ("Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but obeying the commandments of God is everything").

There remains one final note. Paul does of course highlight the saving death of Jesus when he is giving his thumbnail sketch of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. But it is interesting that in the two crucial passages where he speaks of the faith of the Christian as embodying the faith spoken of in the Old Testament—Romans 4:23-25 and Romans 10:6-11—it is the resurrection that takes center stage. This is not, of course, an either-or. The resurrection remains the resurrection of the crucified one, and its significance is not least that it signals that the cross was a victory, not a defeat (1 Corinthians 15:17). And in 4:23-25 Paul quickly adds that Jesus "was handed over to death for our trespasses." But the second half of that stanza is that he was "raised for our justification." Justification is more than simply the remitting and forgiving of sins, vital and wonderful though that is. It is the declaration that those who believe in Jesus are part of the resurrection-based single family of the one Creator God. Any preaching of justification which focuses solely or even mainly on Jesus' death and its results is only doing half the job. Justification is not just about "how I get my sins forgiven." It is about how God creates, in the Messiah Jesus and in the power of his Spirit, a single family, celebrating their once-for-all forgiveness and their assured "no condemnation" in Christ, through whom his purposes can now be extended into the wider world.

Discussion:

An exposition of Wright’s reading of Romans, we need to prepare the way by noting how Wright understands the theme of Romans and the place of this passage in the flow of the narrative. In his consideration of this passage, Wright insists that it must be interpreted, not in isolation from what precedes and follows it, but in terms of its contribution to the overall argument of the epistle. The main theme and narrative structure of Romans that differs considerably from the traditional Reformation view. In the Reformation reading of Romans, the theme of the believer’s justification by grace alone is typically thought to be its main emphasis. Shaped by Luther’s discovery that the “righteousness of God” is not the demand of the law but the free gift of being received into God’s favor for the sake of Christ, this reading of the epistle often treats it as a kind of general theological treatise of this and related themes.

In Wright’s analysis of the theme and structure of the book of Romans, a very different picture emerges. Though Wright grants that the “righteousness of God” is the theme of the book (1:17), he argues that the Reformers misunderstood this language. When Paul speaks of the “righteousness of God,” he is speaking the language of a first-century Jew who would understand it to refer to God’s faithfulness to his covenant promise to his people Israel. Rather than referring abstractly to God’s granting individual sinners a status of acceptance, this language announces the theme of Romans to be the way in which God has in Christ fulfilled his promises to Abraham.

The summary of Wright’s view of the theme and structure of the epistle to the Romans illustrates an important feature of his approach. Unlike the traditional reading of Romans, which tends to abstract its teaching from its setting within the context of Judaism and the history of redemption, Wright’s reading proceeds from the conviction that Paul writes as a first-century Jew. The gospel, which is to be preached first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles (1:17), tells the story of how the God of Israel has demonstrated his covenant faithfulness and set the world to right by means of the obedience and cross of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. The Jewish background of Paul’s articulation of the gospel is especially significant with respect to Romans 5:12-21 and its sustained comparison between the first Adam and Christ. If we are to understand Paul’s view of the role of Adam in the history of redemption, the only relevant background must be found in the literature of Judaism.

In his assessment of this literature, Wright argues that it tends to cluster around one principal theme:

God’s purposes for the human race, in general, have devolved on to and will be fulfilled in, Israel in particular. Israel is, or will become God’s true humanity. What God intended for Adam will be given to the seed of Abraham? They will inherit the second Eden, the restored primeval glory. If there is a “last Adam” in the relevant Jewish literature, he is not an individual, whether Messianic or otherwise. He is the whole eschatological people of God. If we take “Adam” language out of this context we do not merely distort it; we empty it of its basic content.

According to Tom Wright has played an important role in the formulation of traditional Reformed theology and its understanding of the doctrine of justification. In Reformed theology, this passage provides a comprehensive statement of the comparison/contrast between the first Adam, whose one act of disobedience resulted in the condemnation and death of all men, and the second Adam, Christ, whose act of obedience resulted in righteousness and life for all believers. Disobedience of the first Adam as its covenant head or representative; and redeemed humanity, which has been constituted righteous and heir of eternal life on account of the obedience of Christ, the second Adam, and the covenant head or representative of all who shares in him through faith.

"Wright argues that the obedience of Christ is his “faithfulness” in fulfilling the calling of Israel in the history of redemption, namely, to secure the blessing of salvation for the new humanity and obtaining its inheritance of a renewed cosmos."