When in Romans (Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic)

An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493405787
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

2020 Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies When reading the book of Romans, we often focus on the quotable passages, making brief stopovers and not staying long enough to grasp some of the big ideas it contains. Instead of raiding Paul's most famous letter for a passage here or a theme there, leading New Testament scholar Beverly Roberts Gaventa invites us to linger in Romans. She asks that we stay with the letter long enough to see how Romans reframes our tidy categories and dramatically enlarges our sense of the gospel. Containing profound insights written in accessible prose and illuminating references to contemporary culture, this engaging book explores the cosmic dimensions of the gospel that we read about in Paul's letter. Gaventa focuses on four key issues in Romans--salvation, identity, ethics, and community--that are crucial both for the first century and for our own. As she helps us navigate the book of Romans, she shows that the gospel is far larger, wilder, and more unsettling than we generally imagine it to be.

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When in Romans . . .
Watch the Horizon

On a Saturday afternoon, I was waiting in the lobby before a matinee at the local movie theater. I no longer remember what film I saw, as the little drama that unfolded in the lobby more than eclipsed my memory of the one for which I had paid admission. Two people exited another of the small theaters and instigated an argument with the teenager who had been left in charge for the afternoon. They were demanding to have their admission fee returned because they hated the movie and therefore did not think that they should have to pay for it. After all, they reported, they had watched only the first ten minutes before deciding to leave. The hapless teenager could not find a way to persuade them that only the manager, who was not in the building, possessed such authority.

On the next Saturday afternoon, I was of course drawn back to watch the offending film, which was Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. I do not know whether there were more confrontations that afternoon between annoyed patrons and staff members, but I do know that not everyone loved the movie. Periodically throughout the course of the showing, someone would simply rise and walk out of the theater.

Something about the movie gives offense, but that offense has nothing to do with the usual provocations. There is no explicit sexual encounter. There is little violence. There is no overt ideological leaning that would scandalize one group or another. My evidence is entirely anecdotal, but it seems that the scandal of The Tree of Life has to do with the fact that it is not linear. We expect movies to have a story: there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Flashbacks and flash forwards (more technically: analepses and prolepses) can enhance a film, but only if eventually we can track how they are incorporated into the story line.

With The Tree of Life, however, the narrative itself threatens to disappear. There is a story line, of sorts, about the love and loss of a single small family living in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. Yet the heart of this film is found less in that nuclear family than in the relationship between these people and creation, or better, between them and the creator. We see miniatures of family life—playing outside, working in the kitchen garden, learning to catch a ball—and we watch as those miniatures transform into brilliant, even stunning, depictions of creation. The delights of the ordinary and the magnificence of all creation are juxtaposed with one another.1

For me, The Tree of Life was far from offensive. I experienced it as an extended doxology as it narrates the joys and trials of one family within the larger story of the creation and its creator.2 By “doxology” I do not mean an unreflective singing of “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Sometimes the singing of the doxology is the liturgical equivalent of the seventh-inning stretch, the difference being that we bring more enthusiasm to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” And by “doxology” I certainly do not refer to the tepid praise music that sometimes passes for doxology, in which the focus is all on “our”—or even “my”—love for Jesus or how “my” God is better than that of my neighbor’s. What I have in mind is the doxology reflected in Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” or the Widor Toccata, vast sound that crashes over us and unsettles us with its sheer majesty.

Especially when it comes to thinking about Paul’s understanding of salvation, the Letter to the Romans is a little like Malick’s The Tree of Life. Paul too locates human life in an almost unimaginably large context. The difficulty is that most of us miss those transformations. We miss the sheer size of the letter, because we have learned to notice only certain moments in the letter. It isn’t that the letter has offended us; we don’t walk out and demand our money back. Yet we are missing a large part of the story, and the part we are missing is crucial. It’s as if we were using some odd, distorting lenses: instead of 3-D, we are using 1-D lenses that produce a flattened-out Romans, in which only a very limited story is being told.

I suspect that most of us are quite comfortable with our nice, small, domesticated version of Romans, the one that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. For years now I have taught courses on Romans. As a way of finding out what understandings students bring to the subject, I often begin the course by asking them to tell me how they would describe the letter to someone who has never read it. One regular response is that the letter is about “sin, salvation, and sanctification,” divided up into chapters 1–4 (sin), chapters 5–11 (salvation), and chapters 12–16 (sanctification).3 Later on, I will have a lot to say about the limitations of that view, but at the moment I am more concerned with the breeziness of it. At least sometimes when I hear that phrase, “sin, salvation, and sanctification,” or “justification by grace through faith,” or even “the righteousness of God,” I wonder whether it reflects a genuine struggle to read and understand the text.

Perhaps I am being unfair, since my question falls at the very beginning of a semester-long course, and students can respond only briefly in class. Yet I confess I am sometimes more encouraged by students whose response is, “I don’t know even how to think about that question,” than by those who immediately lay out trim slogans that barely skim the surface. So much of Christian encounter with Scripture in general consists of skimming the surface, looking for easy answers or slogans, settling for something that can be controlled or manipulated for our own ends.4 What such readings seem to need is a text that will not hurt anyone, will not challenge or correct or enlarge.5 Careful reading of Scripture, however, will mean, in the words of Karl Barth, “much sweat and many groans.”6 And when it comes to the question of salvation in particular, a prolonged and careful study of Romans means finding that salvation is far more complex, more cosmic,7 more challenging than we have usually imagined.

Although I may quibble with my students’ slogans, I agree when they identify salvation as central to Romans. But what does Paul mean by salvation? The answer to that question may be larger than we have understood.

Salvation in Romans: Conventional Assumptions

When we think about salvation in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, two texts come to mind immediately. The first is from what is widely regarded as the thesis of the entire letter:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God’s own power bringing about salvation for everyone who believes, the Jew first and also the Greek. (1:16)

The second text occurs within Paul’s extended discussion of God’s dealings with Israel:

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (10:9)

Others may come to mind as well, especially 13:11 (“Salvation is nearer than when we began to believe”). Relying on these texts and influenced by a large dose of American individualism, it is easy to think of salvation as a transaction between God and humanity, perhaps even between God and an individual. God sends Jesus as a kind of “offer” made to humanity, in response to its sins. Those who repent and believe in Jesus are saved, and those who do not repent and believe are not saved. Each individual human is confronted with this opportunity to be saved.8

A number of scholarly treatments of Romans presuppose this understanding. Douglas Moo, for example, identifies salvation as “spiritual deliverance,” which includes restoring the sinner to a share of God’s own glory.9 Joseph Fitzmyer comments that salvation involves the whole person,10 presumably meaning each individual person. Concerned with articulating the eschatological character of salvation, Ben Witherington and Darlene Hyatt insist that “one is not eternally secure until one is securely in eternity,”11 again suggesting that salvation pertains to the individual human being. (Ironically, just as I wrote that sentence, an email blast arrived announcing a seminar on retirement with the words, “I promise to make you feel secure, today, tomorrow and in the future.” On some interpretations of the New Testament, the gospel of God’s salvation is understood to be interchangeable with and equivalent to a healthy retirement fund.)

In all these instances and many others that could be cited, the assumption is that salvation has primarily to do with the individual human being, who is forgiven, restored to right relationship with God, and thereby saved from eschatological wrath and for the Christian life (hence the slogan of “sin, salvation, and sanctification”).

Corporate Understandings of Salvation

In the past several decades in Pauline studies, this controlling assumption about individual salvation has come under sharp criticism for being entrenched in Western, especially American, individualism. Swimming in the cultural soup of Western education, technology, and economy, and especially in the last century of psychology, we invariably read Paul’s letters (along with other ancient texts) as concerned with individuals. What we fail to understand is that the ancient world was far more collective in its thinking, filtering the world through the needs of the group rather than the individual. As a result of this important criticism, scholars have argued that Paul’s letters concern people groups rather than individuals.12

Alternatives to these individualistic readings of Romans have emerged in several different, even conflicting forms. One approach argues that Paul’s letter is concerned entirely with Christian gentiles as a people, a group.13 Pamela Eisenbaum is among those who contend that in Romans the gospel, the good news, is entirely addressed to the gentiles. In Paul’s view, Jews already are in covenant with God on the basis of divine grace; Jews are already justified. Paul’s gospel about Jesus Christ is that “God has now extended grace to Gentiles.”14 It is gentiles as a people who stand in need of the gospel, rather than Jews.

In N. T. Wright’s view, by contrast, salvation concerns the very Jewish notion of delivering Israel as a people from oppression, specifically oppression by Rome.15 By virtue of its disobedience, Israel has not lived up to its vocation of dealing with the problem of sin in the world. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus takes on this role and thereby fulfills Israel’s vocation and inaugurates the time of gentile inclusion in Israel.16

Yet another alternative to the individualistic reading of salvation figures prominently in recent discussions of Romans (and of Paul in general) and the Roman Empire. Robert Jewett is among those who contend that Paul’s assertions about God’s salvation are to be contrasted with that on offer by the empire. “Salvation must not be present in the accoutrements of Roman rule that filled the city to which this letter was addressed.” Instead, Romans insists “that salvation exists in the seemingly powerless communities of faith established by the gospel.”17

These differing views of Romans share the conviction that salvation is to be viewed in terms that are corporate or social rather than personal or individual.

The Cosmic Horizon of Salvation

Whether we use the more traditional individual readings of Romans or the more recent corporate readings, all these views (however distinctive each may be) produce a linear story of problem and solution. There is a problem for humanity, and God addresses it. Whether the problem is for individuals or for the community as a whole, it is nonetheless a problem that is solved by God’s intervention. Or at least God makes an offer about repairing it, an offer that human beings may freely either accept or decline. This way of thinking about salvat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. When in Romans . . . Watch the Horizon
• 2. When in Romans . . . Consider Abraham
• 3. When in Romans . . . Give Glory to God
• 4. When in Romans . . . Welcome One Another
• Conclusion
• For Further Reading
• Ancient Sources Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover