Salvation

Then he draws a conclusion in verses 19 and 20, sort of wrapping up what he’s been saying all the way from 1:18 to this point, namely that because of the failure of humans, because of the power of God’s reign in Christ, here is the situation. Human beings are under sin, unable to obey God, and thus the law and the works that it demands cannot break through that. “No one,” Paul says, “will be declared right before God by works of the law.” That little phrase “works of the law,” however, is going to occupy us for a little bit more time. It’s one of the most debated phrases in contemporary discussions of Romans and the theology of Paul. So we’re going to have to wait to look at that in a little more detail over the next couple of lessons.

SEGMENT 16

The Works of the Law

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Recognize the balance between traditional interpretations and new ideas

• Explain the main benefit the New Perspective has offered for understanding Paul

Two Approaches

I mentioned that there’s a lot of controversy over this little phrase “works of the law.” We find it here in verse 20. Paul uses it again in verse 28 and then six other times in the Letter to the Galatians. In some ways, a lot of the debate about Paul’s theology crystallizes around how we understand this phrase. Many of you have heard about the New Perspective—a significant movement in understanding Paul that arose in the last 30 years. I want to talk a little bit about the New Perspective, how it differs from some of the traditional views. But first, let me make a general point. Students of the Bible need to steer a very careful path between two extremes.

On the one hand, we have to have respect for tradition. There are a lot of very, very fine Christians, very, very fine scholars who have gone before us over the centuries, who have sought to understand Scripture and teach it accurately. We should be very careful not too quickly to abandon the teaching that they have accumulated over the centuries. On the other hand, there are new things that we can discover about God’s Word. The reformers themselves (as convinced as they were of their theology) said that a true reformation approach would be one that is always reforming. So we have to pay attention to some of the latest developments in scholarship. See if we could learn from them, but always test those developments against both the tradition we’ve inherited and the text itself.

Emphasis on Works

So, back to the New Perspective. Let’s begin with this phrase, “works of the law.” If you look at the Reformers who significantly talked about this phrase, and justification, and such issues, they saw “works of the law” to be a way of referring to Jewish doing of the law, but having ultimately a reference to any human doing. That is, in the phrase “works of the law,” they emphasize the word “works,” and saw in a text like Rom 3:20, therefore, a basis for the very fundamental claim that human beings cannot be justified by anything they do. They can only be justified by faith in Christ, as Paul will talk about it in verse 21.

Emphasis on Law

New Perspective advocates, on the other hand, emphasize the word “law” in the phrase. They think Paul is talking not so much about general human works of any kind, but specific doing of the Jewish Torah in order to maintain covenant status by the Jews. Let’s broaden out a bit and talk about the New Perspective so we have a better understanding of it.

The New Perspective

Covenantal Nomism

The New Perspective is rooted in a new view of Judaism associated with a well-known book of E. P. Sanders published in 1977: Paul and Palestinian Judaism. E. P. Sanders, in that book, argues basically that the traditional viewpoint that he found all too widespread was wrong, a traditional viewpoint that emphasizes the idea of legalism that Paul was combating. Sanders argues, “No, first-century Judaism was not legalistic in that sense.” Rather, first-century Judaism was characterized by what he called “covenant nomism.” Jews believed that by virtue of God’s covenant, God by His grace had brought them into the sphere of salvation and that doing the law then was not a means to get in. Doing the law was a means of staying in. Jews did the law out of grateful thanksgiving to God for His grace in the covenant, and did it to maintain their status in the covenant. Now, if Sanders was right about first-century Judaism (and a lot of people thought he might be right), the question then is: “What was Paul teaching in a verse like Rom 3:20?” If Jews were not teaching that they could do the law to be justified, who was Paul talking about? How to understand him?

Some scholars initially gave a very, very strong, radical answer to that question. They said, “Well, either Paul simply was wrong. He misunderstood Judaism”—hard to believe since Paul was raised in it—“or that he deliberately misrepresented Judaism to make Christianity look better.” Against that background, one of the things we have to appreciate is that the so-called New Perspective was in one way a very conservative movement.

Explaining Paul against His First-Century Background

Two of the key people in the New Perspective—James Dunn and N. T. Wright—were concerned to explain Paul in his own terms and against that first-century background. They wanted to do justice, in other words, both to Sanders’ view of Judaism (which they thought was right) and to Paul as a faithful and careful interpreter of the Jewish faith of his day. And so the answer that they came up with was that, in fact, “works of the law” is again a way of talking about Jewish covenant. It’s a way of talking about getting right with God by doing things (legalism), but a way of maintaining Jewish status particularly vis-à-vis the Gentiles.

New Perspective advocates stress that this is a great concern for Jews in the first century. How could they maintain their own special status and keep Gentiles out, in a sense, away from them and outside the barrier of salvation? So, what Paul thought was wrong with “works of the law” then was not that Jews were doing them to get right with God. Rather, the problem with “works of the law” is that Jews were doing them to keep the Gentiles out, maintaining their exclusive claim on salvation and not allowing the gospel of God’s grace to be shared equally among Jews and Gentiles. So that the issue that Paul is combating is not legalism, but ethnocentrism: the attempt, again, to use God’s law to maintain the special status of Jews and to prevent Gentiles from entering into that situation.

What are we to think of the New Perspective? I want to comment on that in a moment, but let me say first of all, again, how important it is for us to respect those like N. T. Wright, and James Dunn, and others who have sought to understand Paul authentically against his first-century Jewish background.

Surely, that’s a point we can all agree with. Paul was not a 16th-century reformer or 21st-century pastor. He was a first-century Jew who became a Christian and was trying to understand his heritage of the faith he had grown up in, in the context of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to do it faithfully so that he would be able to honor both God’s commitment in the ot and his new act of grace in Christ.

SEGMENT 18

Justification and the Righteousness of God

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Recognize the transition from the human predicament to the gospel in Rom 3

The Problem

We’ve heard enough of the bad news. In 1:18–3:20 Paul has talked about the dark backdrop of the gospel in terms of human sin and helplessness. Now he’s ready to turn to the good news again, beginning in 3:21, picking up the phrase “God’s righteousness” from 1:17. But before we look at what Paul says about the righteousness of God in 3:21 and following, let’s quickly review what Paul has been saying about the human predicament. We can summarize his points under three basic ideas. First, in Romans 2, Paul has said there is a principle—the principle on which God looks at human beings. Outside of Christ and without the gospel, He looks at what we do so and assesses us on that basis. But that creates the problem. The problem as He said in 3:9, is that all human beings are under sin’s power, incapable of doing the law that God has given us. Therefore, the prospect is bleak. No one can be put right before God by doing the law, by the works of the law, by any of our works, by any of our actions. So Paul has effectively closed the door here to any attempt on the part of human beings to reach God on their own. If we are ever to reach God, it will be because He reaches down to us, and that’s the great good news that Paul begins preaching beginning in 3:21.

The Solution

Verses 21–26 is the center of the next section of Romans. Indeed, many would say it’s the center of the Bible. Martin Luther famously claimed that this is the most important paragraph in all of Scripture. Now, there are a lot of candidates for that honor, and I’m not sure I want to choose one over another, but I would certainly agree with Luther that few paragraphs from the Bible bring together so many key theological ideas as the paragraph before us. The idea of righteousness or justification is central to the paragraph, as the accompanying display reveals. But Paul also is going to talk about God’s grace, about faith, about the idea of redemption, about Christ’s death as a sacrifice for us, and about God’s own righteousness that is demonstrated through the entire process. That’s a breathtaking vision of the gospel that we need to appreciate and own in our day that we might be more effective livers and proclaimers of that gospel of Jesus Christ.

SEGMENT 19

God’s Righteousness and Christ’s Faithfulness

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Recognize the debate over the phrase “faith of Jesus Christ”

• Discuss the two main options for understanding the “faith of Jesus Christ”

The Righteousness of God

Romans 3:21–26 is so important that we’re going to take some time to look at several specific issues this text raises. First, briefly, I think verse 21 beautifully shows the balance that Paul is trying to achieve in Romans as he talks about the canon. “The righteousness of God,” Paul says, “is revealed apart from the law.” God has done something new, distinct, that can’t be fit within the confines of God’s law as He had given it to Israel. “New wine has to go in new wine skins,” Paul is, in fact, saying. But on the other hand, he also wants to add very quickly, “This righteousness of God is testified to by the law of the prophets.” The ot clearly points forward and anticipates what God has now done in this new work in Jesus Christ. So the balance here of continuity and discontinuity, a balance that Paul is careful to try to maintain throughout his argument in Romans.

Faith of Jesus Christ

A second issue we want to look at comes in verse 22—this issue of what it means when Paul talks about the Greek word pistis and follows it with a genitive of Jesus, or Christ, or Jesus Christ. This has become a very significant debate in recent interpretation of Paul. Paul uses this kind of expression about seven times, once here in Rom 3:22.

Objective Genitive or Subjective Genitive?

On the one hand, the traditional view that you see in most English translations is that this genitive is a so-called “objective genitive.” That is, Christ is the object of believing. So Paul would be talking here about our faith in Christ.

On the other hand, there are many arguing—particularly more recently—that this genitive should be construed as a “subjective genitive”; that is, that the genitive of Jesus or Christ is the subject of the verb, the verbal idea in this Greek noun pistis, or “faith.” What Paul is talking about here is the faithfulness exhibited by Jesus or even the faith of Jesus. It should be pointed out that this is not a matter on which what we might call the “old perspective” and the “new perspective” neatly divides. You’ll note, for instance, that two key new perspective advocates (James Dunn and N. T. Wright) are on different sides of this issue, and the same is true for many who hold a more traditional view.

Understanding the Ambiguity

So the question is: Which does Paul have in view here? Is he emphasizing our human believing in Christ? Or is he talking about Christ’s faith or faithfulness? Let me say that the second view is certainly theologically appropriate. Paul has a lot to say about the fact that God’s work on our behalf comes through Christ’s faithfulness and going to the cross for us. So there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. But I do want to clarify matters by backing up to look at the Greek genitive a moment, because I hear a lot of nonsense spoken about genitive.

First of all, I hear some people saying, “Well, a literal rendering of the Greek genitive uses the preposition ‘of,’ so that here, for instance, a literal rendering would be ‘the faith of Christ.’ ” But, in fact, Greek doesn’t use a preposition here equivalent to our “of” in English. A closer equivalent in English to the Greek genitive construction in its ambiguous nature is an English double noun construction, to which I am indebted to Moisés Silva pointing out via somebody else before him. So phrases like “fire sale,” “storm chaser,” “head case” would be good examples of double noun constructions in English. So take the phrase “fire sale.” Does that mean that fire is being sold? Does that mean it’s a fire characterized by a sale or a sale characterized by a fire? The phrase by itself doesn’t tell us that. What we know a “fire sale” means is based on our expectations of how those words generally function in English.

A great illustration of this is an anecdote that I can tell in my own experience. I am a keen photographer, and I was with one of the students in my office one day and talked to him about the famous photograph of Ansel Adams. The minute I uttered that phrase I realized that my student was immediately going to assume that what I meant by that was a photograph taken by Ansel Adams. Why would he think that? Because Ansel Adams is a famous photographer, and so you would naturally think that in a phrase “photograph of Ansel Adams,” Adams is the photographer.

In fact, however, I was referring to a famous photograph of Ansel Adams in which he is pictured standing on top of a station wagon with his big eight-by-ten-inch view camera on a tripod in Yosemite Valley. In other words, I intended to use an objective genitive (Ansel Adams, the object of the photograph), whereas I realized my student was assuming that I would be using a subjective genitive (a photograph taken by Ansel Adams). The point I’m making here is that it’s our expectations that are critical in unpacking these ambiguous phrases.

The Case for the Objective Genitive

So, to return to “faith of Christ” for a moment. When we look at the evidence that we have in Paul elsewhere, there are several points that, to me, point decisively to the traditional interpretation here: faith in Christ. First, when Paul uses the verb “believe” (the Greek pisteuo) Jesus is never the subject of that verb. He is often its object. So, in other words, when Paul uses an unambiguously clear grammatical construction, Christ tends to be the object, never the subject. Second, throughout the context of Rom 3, Paul is regularly talking about human beings as the subject of the verb. In Rom 4, for instance, Paul will talk a lot about Abraham believing. In other words, the idea here is of someone believing, not being believed or having faithfulness.

Now, to be sure in Rom 3:22 there’s a particular problem in this verse we need to look at. If we render faith in Christ, doesn’t it seem that Paul is simply repeating himself then by going on to the verse and talking about “to all those who believe”? The argument on the other side, however, is that redundancy sometimes has powerful rhetorical effects. Paul might want to be emphasizing the idea of faith and saying, “On the one hand, our righteousness is attained by our believing in Jesus and, second, emphasizing that point [that] our righteousness is attained by everybody who believes in Jesus—Jew and Gentile alike”—a really key point Paul has been making in Romans.

Don’t get me wrong. Not a lot of theology hinges on the decision we make here, but there are those in studying Paul these days who are, I’m afraid, tending to eliminate the significance of human faith in the appropriation of God’s grace in Christ. And then I think we do need to resist and to continue to emphasize that Paul is deeply concerned to contrast human believing with human doing as a way of accessing all that God gives us in the gospel.

SEGMENT 20

Righteousness and Redemption

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Identify two key theological terms or themes for Paul

• Explain the different nuances for the meaning of Greek hilasterion

Righteousness Revealed

As we continue to look at this great paragraph, Rom 3:21–26, let us just follow Paul’s argument a little bit. [In] 21–22 he makes the point that God’s righteousness is now available for those who have faith in Christ. This reminds you what an important point that is in this context. We’ve seen that the ot prophets predict the day when God’s righteousness would be manifested for His people. But for the prophets, they were assuming in their day that God’s people would be defined on a national basis; God’s righteousness would be available for Israel. So a key point Paul is making here is that God now has actually revealed His righteousness in a way that makes it available for everybody who has Christ-faith, everybody who believes, including Gentiles along with Jews. In verse 23 we have a little bit of a parenthesis as Paul reminds us of what he’s argued earlier—that all human beings are alike in being under sin’s power. Then in verse 24 Paul returns the theme of God’s righteousness, now talking about God’s justifying work. Remember (I hope) we talked about words like “righteousness” and “justify” as English words that reflect the same Greek root? So Paul is continuing in verse 24 the same subject he began in verses 21 and 22.

Redemption

God’s righteousness and His justification comes to us by means of a redemption. Here is another key theological word in Paul, which like many other words Paul uses, has a double background. On the one hand, the word “redemption” was widely used in the ot to talk about God’s act in delivering the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. On the other hand, this word was also being widely used in Paul’s day in terms of slaves who could purchase their freedom by paying a price that was their redemption price. So Paul combines these backgrounds as a way of picturing the work of God in Jesus Christ for us. God sent Christ as a price to be paid in His death that He might liberate us from our servitude to sin and bring us into His own kingdom.

Paul goes on to say that God did this act of redemption by presenting Christ as a hilastērion. Here is the Greek word Paul uses in verse 25 around which there has been much debate. The rsv translates, for instance, “expiation,” referring to the wiping away of sin. The esv and other versions translate the idea of “propitiation” here, which has the idea of shielding sinners from the wrath of God. The niv, on the other hand, translates “sacrifice of atonement,” and the reason the niv does that is to create a connection with an important ot background.

It seems to me this is the most likely direction we should go in thinking of this word. The Greek word hilastērion Paul uses here is used once else in the nt, [in] Heb 9:5, clearly referring to the mercy seat in the tabernacle. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven occurrences of the word in the Greek ot, the Septuagint (or lxx), also use the word that way. So when someone reading or hearing Paul’s letter to the Romans would come to this word, if they had any ot background at all, that’s naturally what they would think Paul was referring to. And it makes great theological sense. In the ot, God established the mercy seat as the place where He dealt with the sins of the people of Israel. Now Paul is saying, “In the new era of salvation, Christ is that place where God decisively deals with the sin of all human beings.”

SEGMENT 21

Righteousness and Holiness

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Identify Paul’s shift in what he means by “righteousness”

Reconciling God’s Holiness and God’s Love

As we come to the end of this great theological text, Rom 3:21–26, we come to the word “righteousness” again in both verse 25 and 26. In verses 21–22 the word “God’s righteousness” clearly has the sense it had in 1:17: God’s intervention acting to put people right before Him. Many people think the word has a meaning something like that also in verses 25 and 26. I think, however, it’s more likely here that Paul has shifted to a slightly different nuance of that phrase. He’s referring here more to God’s attributes of holiness or justice. God sent Christ to the cross on our behalf in order that He might remain just or righteous in doing what He has done. God cannot simply ignore sin. In His nature He must react against sin with wrath because of His holiness, and so God can’t simply accept sinners into His presence without doing something to maintain His holiness in the process.

Fundamentally, what happens at the cross is God’s way of reconciling His holiness and His love that He might accept sinful humans without tarnishing His own holiness in doing so. Christ is our substitute, the one who takes God’s wrath on Himself that we might stand in God’s presence. And that this interpretation is on the right lines, I think, is strongly suggested by the very end of the paragraph where Paul beautifully summarizes one of the key points that he’s been making. He says, “God is the one who is both just and the one who justifies. God remains fully holy, fully Himself in all of His attributes, even as He is able to intervene on behalf of sinful human beings and justify them.”

So God is just—and assumed here is the background of the holiness of God—Jesus’ sacrifice is a satisfaction of that holiness. And as we’ve seen that the righteousness of God in 25 and 26 also suggests the same idea. God is also, of course, very importantly the one who justifies. He redeems us or liberates us from sin’s power. He does it by grace—a very significant theological point we will talk about in Rom 4 also. He does it by means of human faith and for all who have faith. We can see in retrospect why Martin Luther talked about this paragraph the way he did. Indeed, it combines so many fundamental theological ideas, particularly focusing on the cross and what was accomplished there that few paragraphs in the Bible can rival it for power, and effectiveness, and significance. We need to be appropriately thankful that God has found a way to justify us and accept us into His presence as sinful humans even as He remains the just, and powerful, and holy God that He is.

SEGMENT 22

By Faith Alone

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Describe how Paul uses Abraham as an example for faith

• Define the theological idea of grace

The Importance of Faith

As we are following Paul’s argument in Romans, we recognize that Rom 3:21 to the end of chapter 4 is a particular segment of the argument. Here Paul hones in on the good news of God’s righteousness manifested in Christ on His cross. We’ve seen how Paul does that in 3:21–26 in a very basic way. [Romans] 3:27 to the end of chapter 4 is a place where Paul elaborates one particular matter of that gospel—its emphasis on faith. At the end of chapter 3, verses 27–31, Paul sort of looks at faith from a principial standpoint—talks about its importance, its difference from works, the way it unifies Jew and Gentile together.

Abraham’s Faith

Paul elaborates that whole thing in Rom 4 as he looks at Abraham. Many people call Rom 4 a “midrash” on Gen 15:6. “Midrash” needs to be put in quotation marks, however. There’s a lot debate about what this Jewish method of exegesis actually was. If we use it in a very loose sense, that Paul here is taking an ot verse and elaborating its meaning in various ways, then it’s fair enough to call Rom 4 a “midrash.”

This text, which asserts Abraham’s faith and how God rewarded that faith with righteousness, is quoted in verse three, and Paul then comes back to it and elaborates that phrase in a number of ways throughout the rest of the chapter. He explains how Abraham had righteousness credited to him apart from works, apart from his circumcision, apart from the law, and, if we may put it that way, apart from sight. Paul emphasizes that Abraham was one who believed even though all the evidence was not there as a basis for his faith. At the end of the chapter Paul makes clear that all of this is significant for us as believers. Abraham’s faith, in a sense, sets the pattern for our faith, emphasizing how critical and central faith is in the life of the believer.

One People of God

In terms of a larger issue of what’s going on in Romans—horizontal emphasis, vertical emphasis, some of the New Perspective insights—let me say, again, that while I think the major theme that Paul was developing there has to do with the gospel and the nature of God’s justified work, clearly in Rom 4 there is also the significant minor theme of the way faith (as exhibited by Abraham) makes it possible for Jew and Gentile to come together in one people of God. Abraham believed, and God justified him because of that belief, but Abraham’s faith also enables him to be the father of both Jew and Gentile—everybody who believes.

God’s Grace

One of the most interesting and intriguing passages of Rom 4 comes in verses 4–5. Here Paul is talking about works and faith and introduces the critical term “grace.” We saw that word earlier in Rom 3:24, and it is a central idea in Paul’s theology. I think we get a sense of God’s grace from this passage in Rom 4:4–5. Paul here compares a person who works, who is, in a sense, under contract, and who therefore has to be paid for the work done. If you’re an employee, and you do “x” amount of work in accordance with the contract, your employer is obliged to pay you. Paul’s point is that God is not like that. He is a God of grace who can never be constrained by any of His creatures, who always gives by His own free will. That’s why Paul suggests our justification before God has to come by means of faith rather than works. If it were works, we would be putting God under obligation to us, but in God’s grace He delights to give us the gift of justification to which we respond with faith. Calvin talked about faith and used the analogy of open hands to describe faith—a great image because it reminds us that faith is a matter of simply opening ourselves to receive the gift God is seeking to give us. Faith is not something we can take credit for. It’s not something, in a sense, that we even do. But it is, again, a willingness, the receptiveness to open ourselves to allow God to do the work that He is seeking to do in and for us.