Paul, page 9
Paul was not under direct attack when he wrote Romans, and the letter is much less polemical than is Galatians. He had also listened to criticism of his position and had thought some more about the issues. The church at Rome was not of his founding, and this too affected the tone of the letter. He could berate the Galatians and threaten them, or appeal to their initial response to him and play on past sympathy and warmth (for example, Gal. 4: 14f.). These persuasive devices were not appropriate when writing to a church that was not his own, but others were. He was not too proud to use compliments when urging the Romans to hear him out:
I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you, that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. (Rom. 1: 11f.)
Late in the letter, looking back on his admonitions, he softened them by a flattering disclaimer: the Roman Christians were already full of both goodness and knowledge, but . . . (15: 14). He certainly thought that he had the right to instruct them, but he was conscious that he must not claim authority over them.
The criticism which Paul takes into account in Romans was that his attack on the Jewish law might lead to immorality, since the law, among other things, served as a guide to human behaviour. After writing that the law has the function of increasing trespass, or making it worse, and assuring the readers that ‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’, he must now caution against immorality: ‘Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!’ (5: 20–6: 1). A few verses later he asks, ‘Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?’, and makes the same denial: ‘By no means!’ (6: 15). That he himself had been accused of undermining morality is explicit in 3: 8: ‘And why not do evil that good may come? – as some people slanderously charge us with saying.’ This accusation helped push him to some very strong statements in favour of the law: ‘Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law’ (3: 35; cf. 7: 7, 12f.). This has no counterpart in Galatians.
5. A medieval representation of Saint Paul preaching, illuminating a manuscript of the Epistle to the Romans.
Despite such differences between Romans and Galatians, the discussion of ‘being righteoused by faith’ is substantially the same. The problem is, again, that of Gentile inclusion in the people of God. The single most important theme of Romans is equality of Jew and Gentile.
the gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation of every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (Rom. 5: 16)
There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honour and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality. (2: 9–11)
Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all; for I have already charged that all people, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin. (3: 9)
For there is no distinction . . . (3: 22)
Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? (3: 29)
[God makes known] the riches of his glory . . . [for] us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles. (9: 23 f.)
For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. (10: 12)
For God has consigned all people to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all. (15: 32)
As the climax to the first part of this argument (Rom. 1–3), Paul asserts that all, whether Jew or Gentile, are equally righteoused by faith (3: 30), and again, in chapter 4, he turns to the story of Abraham to prove the point. This time he implicitly acknowledges Genesis 17, according to which God said to Abraham that he and his offspring must be circumcised. Paul now points out that God pronounced Abraham to be righteoused before he required him to be circumcised. Thus Abraham stands as both ‘the father of all who faith without being circumcised’ and also ‘the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but also follow the example of the faith which our father Abraham had before he was circumcised’ (4: 11–12).
In the discussion in Romans 3–4 the verb ‘reckon’ (logizomai), derived from Genesis 15: 6, comes into prominence (3: 28, and eleven times in chapter 4). This does not mean, however, that Paul thinks of righteousness as being fictitiously imputed to those who have faith, while they remain sinners in fact. In sharing Christ’s death Christians have died to the old order. They no longer live in sin (6: 2), but are ‘slaves’ of righteousness, who have become obedient to God (6: 15–18). Paul picked up ‘reckon’ from Genesis, and then he repeated it, with no thought of a fictional, ‘merely imputed’ righteousness.
As the argument about the equal status of Jew and Gentile in the people of God rolls on, it is combined with Paul’s concern about ethics and the law. In Romans 6, as we saw above, he wishes to refute the idea that Christians, being free from the law, sin so that grace may abound (6: 1 f.), and he tries to explain how, without the law, ethics are maintained. He argues that Christians, being ‘in the Spirit’, are able to put to death evil deeds and to fulfil what the law requires (8: 1–14). In chapters 1–3 Paul had argued that Jews and Gentiles alike sinned, and in chapters 3–4 that membership in the people of God had been made available to Jew and Gentile equally. Now he argues that Gentiles are on the same footing as Jews with regard to doing what is right: those who die with Christ (6: 5–11) and live in the Spirit do what is pleasing to God (8: 8).
In this argument (chapters 6–8) the phrase ‘righteoused by faith’ recedes in favour of other sets of terms. That God ‘righteouses’ is repeated in Romans 8: 30, 33, where the discussion is judicial: God righteouses rather than condemns (8: 33). That the person who dies with Christ is ‘righteoused’ from sin – that is, freed from it – is stated in 6: 7. Nevertheless the thrust of the argument in chapters 6–8 is conveyed by other terms: dying with Christ (6: 5–11), being set free from sin (6: 18), dying to the law or the Flesh (7: 1–6), being in Christ Jesus (8: 1), and being in the Spirit rather than in the Flesh (8: 9). As we saw in Galatians, these are not different from ‘being righteoused’; rather, they say the same thing in other words. But when Paul leaves behind his scriptural arguments, which are based on the Abraham story, he also, for the most part, leaves behind the terminology which is connected with it.
We have now surveyed most of the passages which make the interpretation of Paul difficult and contentious. Those about the law have been quickly passed over, and we shall return to them in Chapter 9. Now we should concentrate on the interpretation of ‘being righteoused by faith’, ‘being in Christ Jesus’, ‘dying with Christ’ and related phrases.
The main lines of what Paul thought about the two major issues which are in view in Galatians and much of Romans can be stated quite simply: Membership: Paul held that faith in Christ was the sole requirement for membership in the group of those who would be saved. Negatively, this meant that accepting the Jewish law was not necessary. This is the meaning of ‘righteoused by faith in Christ, not by works of law’ and similar phrases.
Behaviour: Christians should live morally blameless lives. The idea of fictional, imputed righteousness had not occurred to him, but had it done so he would have raged against it. We shall consider his moral perfectionism in Chapter 10.
Since Paul is sometimes thought to be hopelessly difficult to understand, we should emphasize that his views about two of the major concerns of any religion are straightforward and simple. ‘Who counts as a member of the in-group?’ and ‘How should members act?’ are the two practical questions with which religion must deal. (Most other major questions are speculative: Whence do we come? What happens after death?) To the two practical questions Paul replies: All who have faith in Christ, with no further distinctions of any kind, are members. They should act perfectly.
Despite the basic simplicity of these two answers, there are difficulties within each point. To see the complications with regard to membership, we may ask two questions: What terminology best expresses Paul’s real thought? When a person becomes a member, what changes – the person or God’s opinion about that person? These questions overlap, and answering one helps us answer the other. We begin with the second.
A change at work in the world
One of Paul’s most striking views is that those in Christ had already begun the process of transformation which would culminate at the return of the Lord. Sometimes, in fact, he wrote as if the change had already taken place: ‘If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5: 17).
This is, however, overstatement by Paul’s usual standard. In Romans, although he puts ‘death with Christ’ in the past tense, he stops short of putting resurrection with Christ into the past: ‘We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6: 4).
One would have expected, ‘As Christ was raised . . . we too have been raised’. ‘Walk in newness of life’ implies that the full transformation comes at the return of the Lord or the resurrection. In Romans 8: 19–25 Paul makes clear the relationship between what Christians already have and what is to come. In the present age, the whole creation awaits liberation from bondage. Christians have the ‘first fruits’ of the Spirit, but we still await full adoption as ‘sons’, which means ‘the redemption of our bodies’. On the basis of such passages one might think that the only changes, in Paul’s view, were in God’s attitude towards the individual, and in the individual’s outlook and mental orientation. He held, however, an intermediate position between ‘the new creation has already arrived’ and ‘only attitudinal changes have taken place’.
And we all, with unveiled face, reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3: 18)
Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Cor. 4: 16)
Here the verbs are in the present passive: the Christian is being changed. In the first passage, the change ‘from one glory to another’ (the word ‘degree’ does not appear in Greek) recalls 1 Cor. 15: 40. There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; ‘the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another’. According to 2 Corinthians 3: 18, then, Christians are in the process of being changed from one to the other. They will end up with a body like Christ’s after the resurrection, a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15: 44, 48 f.).
How realistically did Paul think of a transformation in the present? This sort of question is one of the hardest to face the modern student of an ancient thinker. Today most people draw a sharp line between ‘physical’ and ‘mental, emotional, or spiritual’, a line which our view of ‘laws of nature’ makes almost absolute. Either the body is being changed, in which case we should be able to observe and measure the change, or the only change is that of mental outlook and orientation – either physical or psychological. Paul too could distinguish between inner–spiritual and outer–physical, and he does so in the passages we have cited. Yet his view was not just the same as ours. ‘There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory’ (1 Cor. 15: 41). To us, these are all physical entities, and we know that they are composed of the same basic elements. To Paul there was a continuum, from one glory to another, and he used these different glories as an analogy for the change of individuals from earthly glory to heavenly glory. One was not less ‘real’ than another, just as the sun is not less real than the moon or the earth. He himself had seen the risen Christ, ‘the man of heaven’, to whose image Christians were in the process of being transformed (5 Cor. 9: 1; 15: 46f.). He knew that the risen Lord did not have a ‘natural’ body, but a ‘spiritual’ one (1 Cor. 15: 44); nevertheless it could be seen.
Could the transformation of Christians be seen? Paul realized that it could not. The bodies of the believers, whether living or dead, would be transformed only at the return of the Lord (1 Cor. 15: 51; Rom. 8: 23; 2 Cor. 5: 1 f.). The only sign of change perceptible to the five senses of the observer was the ‘wasting away’ of the ‘outer nature’ (2 Cor. 4: 16). This may be connected to Paul’s view that Christians had to suffer to be like Christ and to be transformed into his image (Rom. 8: 17). Whether suffering is the meaning of ‘wasting away’ or not, we may take it that Paul could not point to progressive signs of glorification which were visible to the observer. This does not, however, mean that his statement that Christians were ‘being changed’ is only a figure of speech for moral redirection.
We can best see this by focusing directly on ethics and noting the degree to which Paul thought that correct behaviour was the inevitable consequence of becoming one person with Christ: a member of Christ’s body lived accordingly, naturally producing the ‘fruit of the Spirit’. Paul seems not to have spent his time in each city teaching ethics. We find him having to give elementary ethical admonition by letter, and he seldom appeals to the readers to remember what he had told them when present. The apparent explanation of this strange fact is that he thought that correct behaviour was the consequence of baptism and that deeds related to people as fruit to trees.
The converts seem to have thought so too. One of them, probably inspired by the proclamation, ‘You are a new creation’, thought that he could therefore take up sexual relations with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5: 1–5); the relationships of the old world had passed away, the new had come, as Paul himself maintained (2 Cor. 5: 17; and see further pp. 124 f. below). Paul was horrified and shocked. He and the Corinthian agreed that those who were members of a new order had been transformed; they disagreed on what this meant. The Corinthian correspondence shows how realistically some or all of Paul’s converts understood the change which he proclaimed; they really were new people (cf. 1 Cor. 4: 8). When we add this realism to the fact that in his correspondence Paul often gives very basic ethical instruction on major issues, with no indication that he had given it before, we must conclude that he and his converts thought that their membership in the body of Christ really changed them, so that they would live accordingly. He thought that his converts were dead to sin, alive to God, that conduct flowed naturally from people, and that it varied according to who they really were. Those who were under sin naturally committed sins: ‘those who are in the Flesh cannot please God’ (Rom. 8: 8); those who were in Christ produced ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ (Gal. 5: 22).
This ‘realistic’ view of human transformation and of behaviour as the natural product of each sort of person may be contrasted with the psychological explanation of how Paul’s ethics related to his basic proclamation of salvation. According to this model, Paul preached ‘righteousness by faith’ as imputed. Converts accepted their own ineradicable sinfulness, but they were psychologically freed by the proclamation that God nevertheless considered them innocent or righteous. Since the gospel made them feel that they were loved, they were then able to love one another, on the perfectly sound principle that love begets love. Those who are emotionally secure are able to deal more generously with others than can those who are emotionally deprived.
What is wrong with this is that Paul wrote nothing of the sort. As we shall see more fully in Chapter 10, Paul’s ethical admonitions are not connected to the ‘doctrine’ of righteousness by faith, but principally to two other conceptions: being a member of the body of Christ and being in the Spirit. Both of these relate to who a person is and in what higher power he or she participates, not to self-perception or mental or emotional outlook. For people today, the psychological explanation works quite well, while the realistic one is hard to grasp. It was otherwise for Paul and his readers.
If it be granted that, in Paul’s view, membership in the body of Christ changed believers in some real sense, rather than just changing their perception of God and the world, we may still ask whether God’s opinion of them also changed. The answer is yes. Paul did not, to our knowledge, discuss ledgers on which God recorded the names of the righteous and the wicked, but he did think that God kept track of who was who. At the return of the Lord, some would be transformed to be like him, but others would be destroyed (Phil. 3: 18–20).
It is more important, however, to note that Paul thought that God did something other than keep track of people and alter his opinion about them. God ‘righteoused’ the person of faith as well as ‘reckoned’ the person to be righteous. The active verb, with God as subject, occurs in Romans 3: 26, 30; 4: 5; 8: 30, 33; Galatians 3: 8. The usual formulation is the passive verb; a person ‘is righteoused’. This passive, however, implies God as the understood subject: ‘a person is righteoused by God’. This means not just that the person’s name was moved from one side of God’s ledger to another, as ‘reckon’ might imply, but that the person was transferred to another sphere, called variously ‘the body of Christ’, the Spirit, and the like. In this transfer a real change was effected, the first step towards the glorified body which would be attained at the return of the Lord. As a result of this change the new person found that good deeds flowed out naturally and that everything which the law had required was ‘fulfilled’ in his or her life (Rom. 8: 4).
These last sentences, on their own, give too mechanistic a view. Paul did not think that Christians or others were automatons. He knew full well that his followers could make decisions and act according to them, and he exhorted them to do the deeds of the Spirit: exhortation implies the ability of those exhorted to make their own decisions (for example, Gal. 5: 16). Paul did not explain how he could maintain both that one person cannot obey God, while another does so naturally (Rom. 7: 15–23; 8: 7 f.), and that at each individual point people could choose. The Corinthian church member did not have to live with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5: 1–5), Christians could choose whether or not to employ prostitutes (1 Cor. 6: 15–20), and so on, through the whole range of behaviour. Just as Paul, in common with other first-century Jews, did not see that there is a logical problem in holding together God’s providence and human choice (Ch. 5), he also did not see that the theory of natural ‘fruit’ does not harmonize well with the idea of free choice. Each statement – the law is fulfilled in Christians, non-Christians cannot please God, people can choose whether to obey God’s will or not – reflects something which was deeply meaningful to Paul and which he held without secondary rationalization of how it fitted in with everything else he thought.
