Now to a worker, wages are not credited as a gift, but as what is due. But to the person who does not work, yet places trust in the One who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited with righteousness (Romans 4:4-5, trans. JRM)
As one raised in an evangelical household by a theologian father, and as one who attended a Lutheran elementary school for grades 1-4, the thought expressed here by Paul the Apostle is ingrained in my theological DNA. "Justification," and hence "salvation," does not come by "works," but only through faith in Christ. All human pretensions to moral achievement must, in the words of the great Lutheran New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann, be "reduced to dust" in the face of the creatio ex nihilo of God's action in the gospel. [1] Indeed, the notion that God (only!) "justifies the ungodly" is itself unimaginable good news to one confronted each and every day by his constitutional ungodliness. More than that, this text may be understood as a precis of the apostle's famous theology of "grace." To understand it more fully, one must place it in the flow of Paul's argument in this, his most profound letter.
"Justification by Faith," the hallmark of the Protestant Reformation, is often understood in terms of what systematic theologians refer to as the ordo salutis, the "order" in which the benefits of Christ's salvific achievement are applied to the believer. Hence, for example, the "effectual call" of the Spirit engenders "faith," which then results in God's declaration of the believer as "righteous" (i.e., justification). That's all well and good, so far as it goes. But the Apostle Paul, both in Romans 3-4 and, earlier, in Galatians 2-3, develops his notion of justification by faith in the context of the historia salutis, how God has worked out his saving purposes in history. To be precise, in these two letters Paul consistently portrays "justification" as the entail of the eschatological fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant.
Traditional Protestant exegesis has tended to portray Romans 1:18-3:20 in terms of an indictment of both Gentiles and Jews as individual sinners who are under sin's dominion and, hence, in need of the message of justification by grace proclaimed in the gospel. Of course, these chapters may, not wrongly, be used to convey this message. But the text, as Paul wrote and intended it, goes far deeper than this. Indeed, rhetorical analysis shows that the true target of his argument in this passage are his fellow "Jews" (Rom 2:17), existentially secure in their possession of, and performance of, the Torah as the charter of the covenant ("works of the Law," Rom 3:20), and hence confident of their superiority to the Gentiles, characterized by their "godlessness" (asebeia) and "unrighteousness" (adikia) (Rom 1:18), to whom they presume themselves to be "teachers" and "guides" (Rom 2:18-20). Whereas, in point of fact, their failure to perform the Torah in which they boast causes these benighted Gentiles to "blaspheme" God's name on their account (Isaiah 52:5, quoted in Rom 2:24), implying they were still under the covenant curse of exile. [2] Indeed, their very "faithlessness" to their covenant obligations (Rom 3:3) provided all the evidence needed to show, as the Scriptures attest, that "all"―they no less than the Gentiles to whom they felt superior―were under the dominion of "Sin" and, hence, in need of rescue (Rom 3:9-18). [3] God, one might suppose, was on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, his "righteousness" demands that he show no favoritism and must, therefore, judge sin on the facts of the case (Rom 2:1-16). On the other, he has made promises to the Jews, and his righteousness likewise demands that he remain faithful to those promises (Rom 3:3-4). The "solution" to this dilemma, the means by which God's moral integrity [4] is maintained, is found in the "now-time" (nyni de) "manifestation" (pephanerōtai) or enactment of God's saving covenant "righteousness" in the atoning death of Christ, as a consequence of which he justly "justifies" Jew and Gentile sinners alike by his grace through their faith in Christ (Rom 3:21-26). [5]
This argument would have shocked most Second Temple Jews, no doubt like it would surely have confused the erstwhile Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. Had not God chosen the people of Israel and made covenant with them? How, then, could he demolish the "distinction" (diastolē, Rom 3:22) between Jew and Gentile simply on the basis that all, as everyone acknowledges, "have sinned" (hēmarton, Rom 3:23)? Wouldn't the "biblical" solution be the one put forward in Deuteronomy 30:1-6, where God would rescue the people from exile and "circumcise their hearts" if and when they themselves turned back in repentance to follow the Law? [6] Indeed, such a worldview lay behind the zeal of so many of the Jews of Paul's day to perform what he terms "the works of the Law" (erga nomou). So Paul heads off this potential objection right away by asking, "Where, then, is boasting?" and immediately and categorically excluding such "boasting" from consideration (Rom 3:27). This, contrary to long-pedigreed Protestant assumptions, is not the classic boast of the Pelagian moralist who seeks to establish his or her standing before God on the basis of moral achievements. [7] It is, rather, the Jewish boast of covenantal privilege over against the Gentiles (cf. Rom 2:17). [8] Indeed, the little word "or" (ē) that introduces Romans 3:29 ("Or is God the God of the Jews only?") suggests quite clearly that "justification by works of the Law" would, by definition, limit justification to the Jews, who alone possessed the Law so as to be able to perform these distinctively Jewish practices. [9] For Paul, this potential Jewish boast is precluded by what he ironically terms "the law of faith" (nomos pisteōs)―the Torah, in other words, understood through the narratival hermeneutical grid laid bare in the apostle's recounting of the Abraham story which he provides in Romans 4. [10] Indeed, this "law of faith" expresses the manner in which Paul's gospel of "justification by faith" for Jew and Gentile alike "upholds" (histanō) the Torah (Romans 3:31). [11]
To validate this assertion, Paul turns, as he had done a few years earlier in Galatians 2, to the story of Abram/Abraham in Genesis 15, in particular the so-called "prooftext" of Genesis 15:6:
Abraham trusted in God, and it was credited to his account as righteousness (Romans 4:3, trans. JRM)
Traditional Protestant exegesis has, of course, looked at this as a "scriptural proof" or biblical "illustration" of the doctrine of justification by faith [12] On this reading, the Jews were mistaken in presuming that they could establish their position before God by performing the Law; on the contrary, as per this reading, Paul argues that "justification" has always been by faith (even if the content of that faith had changed over the course of salvation-history), and he goes to the story in Genesis about Abraham's faith and justification to "prove" this.
Such an understanding, however, runs into insurmountable difficulties, not least of which is the fact that the very clause used by Paul with reference to Abraham's prototypical justification ("it was credited to his account as righteousness;" LXX elogisthē autōi eis dikaiosynēn) is used also of Phinehas in Psalm 106 (LXX 105):31―the very Phinehas whose "zeal" for the Law led him to run a spear through Zimri and his Midianite lover, Cozbi, thereby propitiating YHWH's wrath against the people for their worship of Baal of Peor and stemming the plague he had sent in response to their idolatry (Numbers 25). Just as Abraham's "crediting with righteousness" [13] was concretized, as it were, by God's entering into a covenant with him (Genesis 15:18), so God made a "covenant of peace" with Phinehas, according to which his descendants would constitute a lasting priesthood (Numbers 25:12-13).
No. The reason Paul cites the example of Abraham in Genesis 15:6 is not because he sees the patriarch as a prime early example of a timeless or trans-temporal doctrine of justification by faith. Rather, it is because Abraham is not only the father of Israel; he is, more fundamentally, the one who, via the unconditional covenant promises given to him in Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 22, was chosen by God to to rescue the world from its primeval apostasy―"sin," both in its vertical (Genesis 3) and horizontal (Genesis 11) dimensions. It is these promises to which Paul sees God being faithful in the powerful manifestation of his saving "righteousness" in the Christ event (Rom 1:16-17; 3:21-26).
In this light, Paul understood the "reckoning with righteousness" in response to Abram's faith as an adumbration of his own Law-free gospel to the Gentiles, in which Jews and Gentiles alike―and together!―would experience the worldwide blessing promised him in Genesis 12:1-3. [14] What mattered then, as it matters now, is belonging to the family of Abraham, the family that experiences the blessings of God's covenant with the patriarch. The questions that demand answers, of course, are, first, Who belongs to this family of Abraham? and second, How does one come to belong in it? The Jews, at least those in the scope of Paul's argument here in Romans, were comfortable in, and confident because of, their election, their covenanted identity as children of Abraham "according to the flesh" (kata sarka, Rom 4:1). [15] Because of their physical descent from Abraham and, more importantly, their covenantal identity marked by circumcision (Genesis 17:11-14; note verse 13b: "So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant"), they saw their performance of "works of the Law," not as the means whereby they might establish their position before God, but rather as the means of living within the covenant and marking them as the ones who would be vindicated when God finally acted in his righteousness to establish the kingdom. [16] Paul, however, detected another familial identity, one that took primacy, in God's later covenant promise that Abraham would be "a father of many nations" (Genesis 17:5). [17] This family would be a family of faith, a worldwide and multi-ethnic family of people, both uncircumcised and circumcised, who walk in Abraham's footsteps and wear the emblem of faith (Rom 4:11-12, 16-18).
The key to understanding Romans 4 is to recognize that the chapter is meant to be a scriptural validation of Paul's two major assertions found in Romans 3:27-31. [18] First, justification is by faith, not the Jewish "works of the Torah" (vv. 27-28). Second, the monotheism of the Shema demands that Jews and Gentiles be justified on the same basis and in the same way (vv. 29-30). Paul deals with the first in 4:2-8 and the second in 4:9-18 [19]. What unites these two emphases, as we will ultimately see, is their foundation in God's sovereign, unconditioned, and unspeakably glorious grace. In our next installment, we will turn to verses 9-18 and discuss why it is that faith, and not "works of the Law," is the badge of Abraham's family.
[1] Ernst Käsemann, "The Faith of Abraham in Romans 4," in Pauline Perspectives, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971) 79-101 (90). This perspective is elaborated brilliantly and in detail in Käsemann's Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980) 105-29.
[2] "The problem for Paul is that what they take pride in turns out to produce not glory but shame (shame on God, 2:23-24)." (John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015] 469).
[3] For fuller discussion along these lines, see my previous post from 2012 at http://jamesmcgahey.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-gospel-part-7-romans-321-26.html.
[4] Cf. Leander Keck, Paul and His Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979) 117-20; Richard B. Hays, “Psalm 143 and the Logic of Romans 3,” JBL 99 (1980) 107-15 (reprinted as "Psalm 143 as Testimony to the Righteousness of God," in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1980] 50-60); cf. also Anthony C. Thiselton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007) 344.
[5] For a full discussion of these verses, see my post from 2012 at http://jamesmcgahey.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-gospel-part-8-romans-321-26.html.
[6] Not to mention the fact that this call for repentance in view of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God was constitutive of the teaching of both John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1) and Jesus himself (Mark 1:15).
[7] At least, this is not the sense intended in the course of the argument Paul is making in Romans 3:27. Of course, such could reasonably be considered a corollary or implication of the text by means of an a fortiori logic.
[8] Similarly N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 847, 1000, though he perhaps narrows it too specifically in terms of "the Jewish claim to be the means through which God would rescue the world from its plight." Certainly this would be included, at least with respect to those Second Temple Jews who thought in terms of the ultimate streaming of the nations to Zion. But as Paul's argument unfolds through the end of Romans 4, it is apparent that the issue primarily involves Jewish privilege to be considered the genuine children of Abraham, and what that entailed for their benefit.
[9] Cf. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 567. One need not delimit these "works" to those distinctly Jewish practices that served as "boundary markers" distinguishing Jews from Gentiles, as James D. G. Dunn famously argued; cf. Dunn, "The New Perspective on Paul," BJRL 65 (1983) 95-122 (reprinted in Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, rev. ed. [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008] 99-120). Yet it is essential to view them as "works" that only the Jews, the possessors of the Torah as the revealed will of God, could perform; Gentiles, who did not possess the Law, were thereby rendered, by definition, "sinners" (cf. Galatians 2:15). These are not simply "good works" simpliciter, as many, reading Romans and Galatians anachronistically through the lens provided by (the later) Ephesians 2:8-9, simply assume.
[10] The term nomos ("law") is not, despite a long and distinguished pedigree that includes Joseph A. Fitzmyer (Romans [AB 33; New York: Doubleday, 1994] 263) and Douglas J. Moo (The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT; Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 1996) 249, to be understood in the weak sense of "principle." What Paul means by this expression may be discerned by reading Romans 9:30-10:13. Cf., inter alia, C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975-79) 1:219-20; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC; Dallas: Word, 1988) 185-87; N. T. Wright, "The Letter to the Romans," in The New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 10 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002) 480-81.
[11] Cf. Richard B. Hays, "Three Dramatic Roles: The Law in Romans 3-4," in Paul and the Mosaic Law (ed. James D. G. Dunn; WUNT 89; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996) 151-64 (158-63: "The Law Is an Oracular Witness") (reprinted in The Conversion of the Imagination, 85-100 [93-99]).
[12] Cf., e.g., Käsemann's heading for 4:1-25: "Scriptural Proof from the Story of Abraham" (Commentary on Romans, 105).
[13] Cf. Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009) 732, who translates Genesis 15:6 as "Abraham trusted in God, and it [i.e., his trust] was credited to his advantage with righteousness" (italics removed).
[14] Cf. Galatians 3:8, where Paul makes this point explicitly: "And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, announced the gospel beforehand to Abraham: 'All the nations will be blessed in you'."
[15] The NIV translates Romans 4:1 thus: "What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, discovered in this matter?" In this, it agrees with other standard translations and most commentators that Abraham's "discovery" related to "justification" and consisted of the Genesis narrator's editorial comment that his faith led to "righteousness" being credited to him. The verse, however, is both textually uncertain and ambiguous. The best attested reading, without punctuation, is as follows: Ti oun eroumen heurēkenai 'Abraam ton propatora hēmōn kata sarka (cf. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament [New York and London: United Bible Societies, 1971] 509). Years ago Richard Hays, following the almost-forgotten lead of Theodor Zahn (Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer [Leipzig: Deichert, 1910] 212-19, proposed an alternative punctuation in order to bring the question in line formally with other Pauline examples of ti oun eroumen (Rom 3:5; 6:1; 7:7; 8:31; 9:30). By thus punctuating the sentence, the subject of the indirect discourse infinitive heurisenai is no longer 'Abraam, but rather the implied "we" of the introductory verb eroumen. Hence, "What then shall we say? Have we found Abraham (to be) our forefather according to the flesh?' (cf. Hays, "'Have We Found Abraham to Be Our Forefather According to the Flesh?' A Reconsideration of Rom 4:1," NovT 27 [1985] 76-98 [reprinted as "Abraham as Father of Jews and Gentiles," in The Conversion of the Imagination, 61-84]; followed and modified by N. T. Wright, "Romans and the Theology of Paul," in Pauline Theology, vol. 3: Romans, ed. D. M. Hay and E. E. Johnson [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995] 30-67 [at 39-42]; Wright has continued to champion this exegesis in his many subsequent publications; cf., inter alia, "The Letter to the Romans," 487-507; most recently, "Paul and the Patriarch: The Role(s) of Abraham in Galatians and Romans," JSNT 35 [2013] 207-41 [at 225-29] [reprinted in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978-2013 {Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013} 554-91 {at 579-82}]). This alternative reading is not without its difficulties, but it does solve the problems, first, of Paul's supposed reference to Abraham as his (predominantly) Gentile readers' "forefather according to the flesh," and second, of the curious use of the perfect tense infinitive heurēkenai rather than, as one would expect, the aorist heurein. Most importantly, it points to what Paul is actually doing in Romans 4, to wit, arguing that there are different kinds of Abrahamic descent, one based on physical descent alone (with its attendant covenantal prerogatives), and the other based on possessing the defining family trait of faith, irrespective of ethnic background (so also Galatians 3:6-9).
[16] Herein lies the truth in E. P. Sanders's famous definition of Second Temple Judaism as a religion of "covenantal nomism" (Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977]). Sanders has received considerable pushback from certain circles, to an extent rightly so. Not only did Sanders's analysis bring in foreign categories derived from sociological analysis ("Getting in"/"staying in"), he also failed to nuance the different ways the term charis ("gift" or "grace") could be, and was, conceived or, in Barclay's terms, "perfected" in Second Temple Judaism (Paul and the Gift, 194-328). Jews certainly did not imagine they could "earn" their "salvation" by performing the "works of the Law." "Grace" was always prior. But, as we shall see, this does not mean they conceived of "grace" in the same radical way that Paul did.
[17] Note that in Romans 4:13 Paul says Abraham was promised that he would be "heir of the world" (to klēronomon … kosmou). As we have seen, Abraham was promised that he would be the "father of many nations" (Gen 17:5), and he and his ancestors were promised the land of Canaan (Gen 12:7; 13:14-15; 15:7, 18-21; 17:8). Paul is not alone among Second Temple Jews in extending the land promises globally, not least in the (2nd century BCE?) Book of Jubilees (cf. Jub. 17.3; 22.14; 32.19; other texts in Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1005 n.661). See now Esau McCaulley, Sharing in the Son's Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul's Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians (LNTS 608; London: T. & T. Clark, 2021).
[18] Contra Käsemann, who not surprisingly considers Romans 4 to be the "biblical proof" of 3:21-26 (Commentary on Romans, 125). Cf. Cranfield, who rightly connects chapter 4 to 3:27-31, but who curiously ignores the controlling significance of verses 29-20: "The function of this section is to confirm the truth of what was said in the first part of 3.27" (Commentary on Romans, 224).
[19] Cf. Campbell, The Deliverance of God, 725. Campbell sees 3:27-28 as corresponding to 4:2-8, and 3:29-30 corresponding to 4:9-12. Less convincingly, Campbell suggests Paul expands on 3:31 in 4:13-16a.
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