Letter to the Romans

Overview

Romans is about thirty pages, which makes it the shortest thing on this shelf with the largest consequences. Paul dictated it in Corinth around 57 CE to a secretary called Tertius, who signs his own name in the last chapter, and sent it ahead of him to a church he had neither founded nor visited.

That last fact explains the letter’s character. Paul’s other letters are interventions in local rows: a congregation is quarrelling, somebody is sleeping with his stepmother, the collection has not been taken. Romans has no crisis to fix. Paul is introducing himself to a church he hopes will support an expedition further west to Spain, and to a mixed community of Jewish and Gentile believers who had been through an expulsion from the city and were evidently not getting on. So he sets out his whole case from the beginning, in order, with the objections raised and answered as he goes.

The form is a diatribe in the ancient sense: an argument conducted with an imagined opponent who interrupts. When you hit a sentence that seems to contradict the one before it, check whether Paul has just put it in the mouth of the questioner. Much of the difficulty in reading Romans is working out who is speaking.

The argument

1:1 to 1:17, the thesis. After a long greeting, Paul states it: the gospel is God’s power for salvation to everyone who trusts, Jew first and also Greek, because in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. The single phrase the righteousness of God is the most contested in the letter. Read as the standard God measures us by, it is terrifying. Read as a status God confers, it is the Reformation.

1:18 to 3:20, the case against everyone. Paul builds a prosecution in two stages. First the Gentile world: what can be known of God is evident in what has been made, and they exchanged it for images, and God gave them up to the consequences, in a passage that includes his condemnation of same-sex relations and which is argued over today more fiercely than anything else in the letter. Then, having let the reader agree, he turns: you who judge are doing the same things. Possession of the law is no defence if you break it, and he strings together quotations to reach the conclusion that there is none righteous, no, not one. The point of the whole section is to close off every exit before offering a way out.

3:21 to 5:21, the verdict. Now the righteousness of God apart from law, through trust in Christ, for all who believe, since all have sinned. Paul reaches for a courtroom word, justification, and an unexpected proof: Abraham, who was reckoned righteous on the strength of belief, before he was circumcised and centuries before Sinai, which means the promise never ran through law in the first place. Chapter 5 sets Adam against Christ, one man’s act bringing condemnation and one man’s act bringing acquittal.

6 to 8, the objections and the answer. If grace increases where sin does, why not sin more? Paul is appalled by the question and answers with baptism: you died to it, you cannot live in it. Then chapter 7, the most psychologically vivid page in the New Testament, in which a divided self describes wanting the good, knowing the good, and doing the opposite, and asks who will deliver him from this body of death. Whether Paul is describing himself, his pre-conversion state, Adam, or Israel under the law has been argued for four hundred years.

Chapter 8 is the resolution and the high point of the letter. No condemnation; life in the Spirit; creation groaning like a woman in labour and waiting to be set free; all things working together for good; and the closing list of everything that cannot separate us from the love of God, which is as close as Paul ever gets to poetry.

9 to 11, the hard question. Having said the promise is open to everyone, Paul turns to the people it was made to, and the tone changes completely. He would be cut off himself if it would help his own people. He argues that God’s choosing has never followed the obvious line, that the potter has rights over the clay, and then, in chapter 11, that the Gentiles are a wild branch grafted into a cultivated olive tree and had better not boast about it. He ends by insisting the covenant has not been revoked and that all Israel will be saved, and then gives up on explaining and breaks into a hymn about how unsearchable God’s judgements are.

12 to 16, the consequences. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice; do not be conformed to this age; the community as a body with different functions; love without pretending; bless those who persecute you. Then chapter 13, and the instruction to be subject to the governing authorities, which has been used to justify obedience to every regime since and which Paul, executed by the Roman state, does not qualify. Then a long, patient passage about the strong and the weak over food and holy days, arguing that neither should despise the other. The last chapter greets twenty-six people by name, including Phoebe, a deacon carrying the letter, and Junia, described as outstanding among the apostles.

How to read it

Read chapters 1 to 8 as one movement, in a sitting, and do not stop at a verse you dislike. The argument is cumulative and the hard passages in chapter 1 are doing structural work that only becomes visible at chapter 3.

Read 9 to 11 rather than skipping them. They are usually taught as an excursus and they are the emotional centre of the letter, and what Paul says there about Israel constrains everything Christians have been entitled to say since.

Watch for the imagined objector. Paul frequently states a position in order to demolish it, and a translation with quotation marks will help you more than one without.

Read Galatians alongside. It is the same argument made in a fury to people Paul knew, and the differences in tone show what the calm of Romans is costing him.

Know that the standard reading is contested. Since the 1970s the New Perspective on Paul has argued that works of the law means the boundary markers that separated Jew from Gentile, circumcision and food and calendar, rather than good deeds performed to earn salvation, and that Paul’s target was exclusion rather than self-righteousness. Whether that is a correction or an overcorrection is the main scholarly argument about this letter.

Questions it raises

• Is the righteousness of God a standard we are measured by or a status we are given? The letter can be read either way and Christendom split over it.
• If nobody can keep the law, what was the law for? Paul answers this several times and not identically.
• Who is the I of chapter 7? Does it change the argument if Paul is describing someone other than himself?
• Chapter 9 says God has mercy on whom he will and hardens whom he will, and answers the obvious objection by telling the clay to be quiet. Is that an argument?
• Paul insists God has not rejected Israel. Has the history of Christian reading of this letter honoured that?
• Be subject to the governing authorities, written under Nero. Is chapter 13 a general principle, local advice, or something Paul would have qualified if asked?