For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about―but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? "Abraham trusted in God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness" [Genesis 15:6]. Now to the one who works, wages are not paid as a gift, but rather as what is owed. But to the person who doesn't work, but places trust in the One who justifies the ungodly, his or her faith is "credited for righteousness." (Romans 4:2-5, trans. JRM)
In Romans 4, the Apostle Paul turns to the example of Abraham, the patriarch to whom God made the Bible's fundamental covenantal promises (Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22), promises of a "seed" and, ultimately, of a multi-national family whose "blessing" would mark the reversal of the vertical (Genesis 3) and horizontal (Genesis 11) effects of primeval human sin―promises the apostle claims were fulfilled through the eschatological manifestation of God's saving justice and faithfulness in the Christ event. For Paul, what now matters is belonging to the family of Abraham who receives blessing through Christ. It is here that complications arise, and hence controversies arose. What "seed" or family is he referring to? Is it the "seed" "according to the flesh" (Rom 4:1), the (Jewish) bearers of the promise who bear the mark of the covenant, i.e., circumcision? No, says Paul. What matters instead is belonging to his promised worldwide family (Rom 4:17), consisting of both the circumcised and the uncircumcised (Rom 4:11-12), who alike bear the fundamental Abrahamic family trait, namely the "faith" or "trust" the patriarch exhibited in response to the promise (Genesis 15) before he received the sign of circumcision (Genesis 17) (Rom 4:9-12).
For those of us raised in evangelical or Confessionalist Protestant circles, this all may seem like Theology 101. But problems arise once one assumes that Paul, in Romans 4 (especially in the verses quoted above), is arguing at a principial, trans-temporal, soteriological level against "Jews"―or any other would-be Pelagian moralist, for that matter―who argued the opposite, namely, that "justification," and consequently "salvation," is earned by "good works" that can serve as a basis for "boasting" and staking a claim for oneself before God. [1] Paul is much more subtle in his argumentation than that.
Paul's project in Romans 4 is fundamentally one of redefinition. To be precise, he is redefining the classic Jewish concept of election as a consequence of what he believed to be the eschatological fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham in Christ's death and resurrection. [2] As we have already seen, the first aspect of this redefinition is that of Abraham's "seed" (sperma), the progeny who would be the beneficiaries of God's unconditioned (as we shall see) promises to the patriarch (e.g., Genesis 15:5, 13; 17:7-10; 22:17-18). For Second Temple Jews, nothing was more fundamental than their adherence to circumcision as the mark of their physical and hereditary covenantal identity, based on the clear teaching found in Genesis 17:
God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. (Genesis 17:9-13, NRSV)
Paul, however, as we have seen, drives a proverbial wedge between the physical seed of Abraham (kata sarka) and what we may describe as his "spiritual" seed (i.e., the eschatological seed of promise, kata epangelian). And he does so through what was, at the time, a revolutionary reinterpretation of Genesis 15:6. Traditionally, Jewish interpreters read Genesis 15:6 through the hermeneutical lens provided by the covenantal passages of Genesis 17 (circumcision) and Genesis 22 (the Akedah/binding of Isaac). Hence Abraham's "faith" in Genesis 15 was generally interpreted, prospectively, as his "faithfulness" under trial. [3] Thus 1 Maccabees 2:52:
Was not Abraham found faithful when tested, and "it was credited to his account for righteousness?" (1 Maccabees 2:52, trans. JRM) [4]
And, lest we forget, in our haste to cast aspersions on Jews for their "legalistic" misinterpretation of the Genesis text, here is the Lord's brother, James:
Was not our father Abraham justified by works (ex ergōn edikaiōthē) when he offered up Isaac, his son, on the altar? You see that faith was working together (synergei) with his works, and that faith was brought to perfection by these works. And thus was fulfilled the Scripture which said, "And Abraham trusted God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness;" and he was called the friend of God (James 2:21-23, trans. JRM) [5]
Paul, however, reads Genesis 15:6 through a different lens. In what is perhaps his earliest extant letter (49 CE?), he illuminates the text, not through the lens of Abraham's subsequent faithfulness, but rather by looking backwards to the earlier and foundational Genesis 12:3 (Galatians 3:6-9). [6] By doing so he thereby discovers Abraham's trust in God's promise to be the defining trait of those people who constitute the eschatological fulfillment of that promise, those who "by faith (in Christ)" are blessed like and in Abraham. Though he doesn't cite Genesis 12 here in Romans 4, Paul's quotation of Genesis 17:5 ("I have made you the father of many nations") indicates that it indeed provides the grid for his appropriation of Genesis 15:6 in verse 3. [7]
This redefinition of the seed of Abraham also leads necessarily to a redefinition of how "the righteous ones " (hoi dikaioi) are to be identified as well. In the Hebrew Bible, the term "righteousness," when applied to humans, most often takes on the ethical connotation of behavior which is faithful to the obligations established by God's covenant with Israel (e.g., Isaiah 5:7; 56:1) [8] A righteous person is thus one who faithfully observes the Torah and thereby is contrasted with those deemed to be "sinners" and "the wicked" (e.g., Psalm 1:5-6). Instructive in this regard is Ezekiel 18:5-9:
If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right—if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel … [if he] follows my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances, acting faithfully—such a one is righteous; he shall surely live, says the LORD GOD. (NRSV) [9]
Importantly, it is these very "righteous ones" who, throughout Isaiah 40-55 and 56-66, are promised vindication ("justification") in the eschaton through the action of God's saving righteousness. Indeed, the prophet says that those who "pursue righteousness" can await the future manifestation of God's "righteousness" and "salvation" with confidence, in the certain hope that this saving deliverance will last "forever," "through all generations" (Isaiah 51:1-8).
It is in this light that we must understand Paul's somewhat strange conditional sentence in Romans 4:2. The issue in verses 1-8, as was also the case in the earlier Galatians 2:15-16, is this: Who are the "righteous?" And on what basis are they thus considered or pronounced to be "in the right" with God? Abraham, as the father of the Jews and the one to whom the foundational salvific promises were made, was rightly considered to be the paradigm of "righteousness" by both Paul and his implied interlocutors. Indeed, Second Temple Jews portrayed Abraham as the prototypical proselyte, a Gentile who turned away from idolatry to believe in, and worship, the one true God. [10] In every strand of Jewish literature from this period, Abraham's defining characteristic is considered to be his faithfulness in keeping the Torah. For example, the 2nd century BCE writing, Jubilees, says that "Abraham was perfect in all his deeds with the Lord, and well-pleasing in righteousness all the days of his life" (Jub. 23:10). Also in the 2nd century BCE, ben Sira speaks of Abraham's prodigious Law-keeping and attainment of "glory" (doxa):
Abraham was the great father of a multitude of nations,
and no one has been found like him in glory.
He kept the law of the Most High,
and entered into a covenant with him;
he certified the covenant in his flesh,
and when he was tested he proved faithful. (Sirach 44:19-20, NRSV)
Lest anyone consider this attribution of Torah-fidelity to be the product of ben Sira's fanciful, anachronistic imagination, consider the Book of Genesis itself, in which YHWH says to Isaac:
"Reside in this land as an alien, and I will be with you, and will bless you; for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfill the oath that I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws." (Genesis 26:3-5, NRSV) [11]
Thus, when Paul, in verse 2, says that Abraham had something to "boast" about (kauchēma) if he had been "justified by works" (ex ergōn edikaiōthē), he expresses the seeming plausibility of that proposition in his religious milieu by using a so-called "first class condition," in which the condition (ei followed by an indicative verb) is presented as true for the sake of argument. It is likewise clear that the language of boasting, justification, and works reflects that found a few verses earlier in Romans 3:27-28. This fact suggests rather strongly that the "works" in question here in Romans 4:2 are, at the most basic level, works of the Torah, Jewish works arising from God's covenant with Israel, and not moral works per se, as if Paul were arguing at the level of abstract theological principle. [12] Abraham, by this reckoning, would have been adjudged to be "righteous" (i.e., "justified") on the grounds of his observance of the (yet to be promulgated!) Torah, his faithfulness to his covenantal obligations. Understood theologically, in terms of Abraham's exemplary/paternal role, "justification," on this reading, would be a pronouncement made by means of a descriptive or analytic judgment: people are considered "righteous" if and only if their conduct, in contrast to that of the "ungodly" (asebēs) and "sinners" (hamartoloi), shows themselves to be so by their "delight in" (to thelēma), and hence performance of, the Law (e.g., Psalm 1).
Despite the seeming plausibility of Abraham's envisaged boast, Paul will have none of it. He abruptly, indeed shockingly, shoots such a proposition down: "But not before God" (all' ou pros theon). [13] He is at pains, in other words, to deny the very possibility that Abraham or, a fortiori, anybody else for that matter, could have been pronounced "righteous" based on the performance of the works prescribed in the Torah. These "works," though correctly understood as incumbent upon Abraham's physical seed as the means of their living within the (old) covenant, had been definitively ruled out by the saving righteousness of God, manifested apart from the Law (chōris nomou, Romans 3:21) in the Christ event, which alone brought the Abrahamic promises to fruition. In retrospect, Paul discovered these "works of the Law" to be what John Barclay has described as "dead currency," a "measure of value" no longer relevant, rendered redundant by the cross. [14]
But if this is so, it will require a non-traditional interpretation of Genesis 15:6 like the one provided by Paul both here and in Galatians 3. More significantly, it will require yet another redefinition, namely, that of the nature of "grace" or "the gift" (charis) that underlies the "good news" of the "now time" (Romans 3:21) revelation of God's righteousness. It is to this radical "perfection" of grace, as Barclay puts it, [15] in terms of incongruity, that we will turn in our next, and fourth, installment in this series. And it is there that we will see the unimaginable glory of the gospel.
[1] The nadir of this perspective may be found in the writings of the preeminent Lutheran New Testament scholar of the latter half of the 20th century, Ernst Käsemann, who described Paul's assumed polemic against human "achievements" (Leistungen) in Romans 4 to be directed against "the hidden Jew in all of us" ("Paul and Israel," in New Testament Questions of Today [trans. W. J. Montague; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969] 183-87 [at 186]). [As an aside, I suggest that a proper reading of, e.g., Romans 7 would rather suggest the problem to have been "the hidden Adam in the Jews."] Among commentators who have written post-"New Perspective," Douglas Moo is representative of those who fall into this trap. For example, when commenting on Romans 4:5, he interprets "the person who doesn't work" in terms of "the person who does not depend on her works for her standing before God" (Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans [NICNT; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996) 264). Somewhat more nuanced, but still critical of Jewish "synergism," is Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul's Response in Romans 1-5 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002) 232-48. On the contrary, as John Barclay argues, "There is no reason to think that here, or anywhere else in Romans, Paul targets a Jewish (or any other) presumption that one could 'earn' salvation by good works. He neither charges nor assumes that Law-keepers boast in their achievements, in the sense of looking to themselves, rather than to God, as the ground of their salvation" (John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015] 484 and nn. 93-94 [italics his]).
[2] See especially N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 996.
[3] References in Jewish literature are available in all the standard commentaries. Cf. especially the full discussion in G. Walter Hansen, Abraham in Galatians: Epistolary and Rhetorical Contexts (JSNTSup 29; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989) 175-99.
[4] Gk. 'Abraam ouchi en peirasmōi heurethē pistos, kai elogisthē autōi eis dikaiosynēn.
[5] Moo attempts to harmonize James and Paul by maintaining that the two apostles use the term "justify" differently: "For Paul, 'justification' is the initial acceptance of the 'ungodly' by God … James, however, uses [dikaioō] in a more traditional sense, of the ultimate judgment of God over the life of a person. Paul, then, is insisting that Abraham could not have achieved a right standing with God through works; James, that Abraham could not have maintained that status, or gone free in the final judgment, without works" (The Epistle to the Romans, 261 n.28). I have no criticism with Moo's harmonization per se. I only wish he would have also given the same consideration to Second Temple Jewish interpreters, who likewise were not thinking of a definitive "justification" already effective in the midst of the present age. Paul's notion of a proleptic declaration of eschatological righteousness was, after all (despite partial parallels at Qumran), a theological novum.
[6] Actually, Galatians 3:8 uses a conflated citation of Genesis 12:3 and 18:18 as the text to qualify the meaning of Genesis 15:6. Also lurking in the background, through its mention of Abraham's "seed," is Genesis 22:18. Textual details in James R. McGahey, "'No One Is Justified by 'Works of the Law' (Galatians 2:16A): The Nature and Rationale of Paul's Polemic Against "Works of the Law" in the Epistle to the Galatians," Ph.D. diss. Dallas Theological Seminary, 1996, 212 n.63.
[7] Recognized by Gathercole, 243.
[8] For further texts, cf. BDB, 841-42; John Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (SNTSMS 20; Cambridge: CUP, 1972) 26.
[9] This usage is particularly common in the Psalms. For texts, see McGahey, 143 n.55. It then is a commonplace in every strand of post-biblical literature. For texts, cf. McGahey, 144 n.56.
[10] E.g., Jub. 11:15-17; Josephus, Ant. 1.155; Philo, Virt. 20.102-104. Later rabbinic writings emphasize this point. Cf. Tanḥuma 32a: "The father of all proselytes was Abraham." Cf. also m. Ned 3:11.
[11] Cf. also the Damascus Document at Qumran: "Abraham … was accounted a friend of God because he kept the commandments of God" (CD 3:2-3).
[12] Thus, e.g., James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A; Dallas: Word, 1988) 200; N. T. Wright, "Paul and the Patriarch: The Role(s) of Abraham in Galatians and Romans," in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978-2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 554-91 (at 584-85); J. R. Daniel Kirk, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008) 62.
[13] That Paul's categorical denial is meant to negate the entire condition, protasis and apodosis alike, instead of the protasis alone (in which case Paul would acknowledge the legitimacy of a boast before humans), has been persuasively argued by C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975-79) 1:228.
[14] Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 383. Indeed, writing on Galatians 2, he adds: "in fact, as Scripture shows, it was never the currency some have taken it to be (cf. Gal 3:10-12, 21)." Paul uses the same argument, as we have seen, in Romans 4:15, when he (again retrospectively) argues that "the Law works wrath."
[15] Ibid., 70-75, 331-574.
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