The Unimaginable Glory of the Gospel: Romans 4:5 (Part 3)

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.

The Unimaginable Glory of the Gospel: Romans 4:5 (Part 2)

 

Romans 4 has, not without justification, been deemed a "midrash" or commentary on Genesis 15:6, [1] which Paul quotes in verse 3:

Abraham trusted in God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness (Romans 4:3, trans. JRM)

Indeed, the apostle proceeds to elaborate, first, on the meaning of "credited … as righteousness" (elogisthē … eis dikaiosynēn) in verses 4-12, and second, on the meaning of "believed/trusted" (episteusen) in verses 13-21. In doing so, as we saw in our previous post, he he takes up the two major threads introduced in Romans 3:27-31: first, that "justification"―the acquittal or pronouncement that one is "in the right" or "innocent" (dikaios) at the bar of God's eschatological tribunal―comes through faith rather than through Jewish "works of the Law" (3:27-28); and second, that these "works of the Law" are excluded because the "oneness" of God, confessed in the Shema, necessitates that justification be on the same basis, that of faith, for Gentiles as well as Jews (3:29-30). The Abraham story, explicated in chapter 4, is brought forward as demonstration that "faith" "upholds" (histanomen) rather than "invalidates" (katargoumen) the Torah, properly understood (3:31).

This analysis readily shows that Paul adduces the example of Abraham, not simply to point to him as an Old Testament exemplar to "prove" that people have always been "justified by faith," but―as he had previously done in Galatians 3:6-9―to ground his law-free mission to the Gentiles, which he believed was the eschatological fulfillment of God's covenant promises to the patriarch. Most important, to Paul, was the fact that God promised Abraham a "seed" (Genesis 15:5) as numerous as the stars visible in a nocturnal Middle Eastern sky. This promised "seed" was to be his "inheritance," his "very great reward" (Genesis 15:1). [2] The issue, though developed somewhat differently here in Romans 4, is the same as that in (the earlier) Galatians chapter 3: Who belongs to this seed of Abraham promised in Genesis 15? Is Abraham to be understood entirely, or at least necessarily, as "our forefather according to the flesh" (Romans 4:1), with all the covenantal implications found in, for example, Genesis 17? [3] No, Paul argues here in Romans 4. The scope of God's promises to Abraham must not be limited to those who are "of the Law" (ek nomou), that is, Jews (Romans 4:14, 16), those whose circumcision marked them as the bearers of the Abrahamic promise. Rather, since God has, in the words of the promise, "made [Abraham] a father of many nations" (Gen 17:5), he is instead to be viewed as the "father of us all" who "believe" like he did (Rom 4:16-17). What often goes unacknowledged at this point is that here in Romans 4 Paul, as N. T. Wright forcefully argues, is redefining the classic Second Temple Jewish doctrine of election for the eschaton. [4] What ultimately matters is not belonging to the physical seed demarcated by circumcision and Torah-keeping as the bearers of the promise, but rather the worldwide "seed" who would be the actual fulfillment of God's covenant promises to Abraham in and through the work of the physical seed's Messiah, Jesus.

To do this, Paul must, as he did when confronting his Jewish-Christian adversaries in Galatia, deal with the apparent problem that Genesis 17 itself speaks of the covenant as being both "in [Abraham's] flesh" and "everlasting" in duration (Genesis 17:10-11, 13-14). So, in verses 9-12, the apostle appears to attempt an end run around this not insignificant difficulty by pointing to the simple matter of chronology: Abraham was credited with "righteousness" while still in an uncircumcised state. In other words, since Genesis 15 occurred before Genesis 17, the "faith" through which this righteousness was credited to his account in the earlier text must be the mark of the Abrahamic family instead of the sign of circumcision, which he then demotes to the lesser status of being the "seal" (sphragis) of the "righteousness of faith" with which he had been credited (4:11). [5] 

What goes unsaid, and what likewise lies behind his earlier, concentrated scriptural argumentation in Galatians 3, is the fact that Paul has―rather shockingly for a trained rabbinic scholar―driven a proverbial wedge between the Abrahamic Covenant and the (later) Mosaic Covenant, thereby categorically denying the latter any positive, let alone definitive, role in salvation-history (cf. Galatians 3:15-25). Whereas the Torah was given, at least in theory, to be the badge of the covenant people as the bearers of the promise and means whereby they would live within the covenant and thus fulfill their priestly role vis-à-vis the nations, in Paul's view it fills that role no longer. Abrahamic heirship, in the sense in which Paul has redefined the concept, cannot come "through the Law" (Rom 4:13).

Why is this so? And how had Paul come to this (shocking) conclusion? Here it is helpful to note E. P. Sanders's distinction between arguments used to justify a position, and the real reasons that lay behind those arguments. [6] Surely the catalysts for Paul's mature theological thoughts in this matter were, first, his own conversion experience, when a flash of blinding light on the Damascus Road showed him that his "faultless" (amemptos) "righteousness in the Law" was all so much skybala fit for the dung heap (Philippians 3:6) [7]; and second, to his experience in the Gentile mission, when uncircumcised Gentiles, upon placing faith in Christ, received the gift of the eschatological Spirit. The Spirit was, for Paul, proof positive that these Gentile believers had been "justified" by faith and had thereby received the promised "blessing of Abraham" (Galatians 3:1-5, 8, 14). He also understood the Spirit as the fulfillment of the promised circumcised heart (Romans 2:25-29) expected for the Jews when the covenant would ultimately be renewed after exile (Deuteronomy 30:1-6). These experiences necessarily caused the apostle to re-examine the Scriptures and thus reinterpret them in keeping with the "facts on the ground," as it were.

Paul indeed does provide a partial rationale for rejecting "works of the Law" as the path to heirship in verses 14-15. In contrast to so much theologizing from certain corners of the "Old Perspective," it is not the fear that law-keeping would lead people to the sinful attempt to secure their position before God and thus boast in their achievements. [8] Nor, contrary to unguarded rhetoric from correspondent corners of the "New Perspective," and even though Paul is at pains to show that Gentiles must gain admittance to the family the same way as Jews, is it the distinctly postmodern concern of cultural imperialism rearing its ugly head to the detriment of the uncircumcised. No. In Paul's own words: "For if (it is only) those 'of the Law' (who) are heirs, faith has been rendered invalid [kekenōtai] and the promise nullified [katērgētai]. For the Law brings about [katergazetai] wrath" (Rom 4:14-15a, trans. JRM). Here the apostle makes two primary assertions. First, he makes the point, in the words of Ernst Käsemann, that "[t]he promise and faith would be pointless if the law could produce the heirs of Genesis 22." [9] Second, he finds the reason (gar) for this "pointlessness," the reason the promise would be reduced to "a mere dead letter" [10], in a controversial theological deduction based on the incontrovertible facts of Jewish history: The Law had its day in the sun, and it failed. As Paul had argued earlier in the letter, all the Law is capable of doing is providing the knowledge of sin when one inevitably fails to keep its demands (Rom 3:19-20). The "Jew's" boast in Torah and of being a light to the Gentiles is, and has consistently been, invalidated by their perpetual Law-breaking (Rom 2:17-24), and the Gentiles' consequent "blasphemy" of God's name on their account (Isaiah 52:5) shows the nation as a whole still to be in the throes of exile as covenant-breakers (Rom 2:24). [11] 

Yet Paul's gospel declared that in the Christ event God had, in his "righteousness," already fulfilled his promise to Abraham for the whole world (Rom 3:21-26). Consequently, what now mattered was being a part of Abraham's promised, eschatological multinational family promised to the patriarch in Genesis 15, 17, and 22. Since all people, both Gentiles and Jews, have shown themselves to be "under sin," the means of entrance in this family (via the lawcourt metaphor of "justification") must be the same in both cases; and the badge of covenant membership must be the characteristic trait manifested from the beginning by Abraham himself, namely, faith, so as to ensure that the promise operated on the principle of (a redefined) "grace": "For this reason (the promise) is by faith, in order that it might be according to grace, in order that the promise might be valid for all the seed, not to the one who is 'of the Law' only, but also to the one 'of the faith of Abraham,' who is the father of us all" (Romans 4:16a, trans. JRM [more on this subject in installment 4 in this series]).

This leads us back to Romans 4:2-8, which argues strongly for "faith" as the sole defining family trait and means of entry into this eschatological family. It is to those verses that we will return in our next entry in this series.

Frederick Douglass: "What, to the American Slave, is your 4th of July?"

 

Frederick Douglass, circa 1879
(National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain)

Here's Frederick Douglass, 169 years ago today, on 5 July 1852, speaking to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society : 

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? …

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.  

In his address, Douglass takes special aim at the Fugitive Slave Act, enacted on 18 September 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850, which required slaves to be returned to their owners even if they had escaped to free states. In particular, he derides those "Divines" or theologians who defended, not only the law, but the institution of slavery as well:*

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cumin” — abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! — And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.”

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! 

(Read the entire speech here.)

Years ago I wrote a piece, based on the Apostle Paul's paraenesis in Romans 13, entitled "Why I Don't Celebrate the Fourth of July". I still stand by what I wrote then (where the rubber hits the road: working within the system to rectify wrongs and, if necessary, nonviolent civil disobedience, yes; armed revolution, no). Nevertheless, one would be perverse to deny the power of Thomas Jefferson's exalted rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence, adopted in Philadelphia on 4 July 1776, to the effect that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." I am proud to be an American because of this very ideological commitment, which has benefitted the world more than any words of mine could adequately convey. Nevertheless …

The problem then, as now, is that these great words were not applied to people across the board. African slaves and the millions of indigenous Americans living on the Continent were not afforded these rights. What pangs of conscience many of the founders felt about this hypocrisy were conveniently suppressed, only to be alleviated more than 80 years later by the horrors and bloodshed of the Civil War. Even then, it wasn't until 1964―during my own lifetime!―that racial, religious, and sexual discrimination were finally proscribed legally in my country. And yet, as anybody with eyes to see recognizes, systemic injustice continues to exist, denied only by those for whom such denial is politically, socially, and/or economically convenient.** Matters have not been helped by the so-called "conservative" majority of the Supreme Court, who eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act with their unconscionable, and legally dubious, Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, and did even more damage to the Law by upholding Arizona's freshly-minted voter restrictions in last week's party-line Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision. All people's votes are equal according to the law, but it is more than apparent that some people's votes are more equal than others.

I write this, not (entirely) to be contrary, but rather to hammer home the illegitimacy of a certain right-wing view of what "patriotism" entails. Patriotism is not to be confused with "Nationalism," which, in its blind adherence to a mythical narrative of American righteousness and faith in some hazily defined and unhistorical notion of American "exceptionalism," amounts to little more than a form of low-rent idolatry. By contrast, "Patriotism," rightly understood, entails both pride in the nation's ostensible values as well as criticism of it when it fails to live up to those ideals, in hope of goading it to repentance and faithfulness to those ideals.

Of course, not all see it that way. I am 64 years old, and I well remember the outcry over John Carlos' and Tommie Smith's black power salutes on the Olympic Medal platform at Mexico City in 1968 (with the approval of Australia's silver medal-winning Peter Norman). I remember the criticism Vietnam protesters received from Nixon supporters over their opposition to a war America should never have prosecuted ("America: Love it or Leave it;" alas, Mike Stivic's lectures to Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's All in the Family should have nipped this hollow criticism in the bud). More recently, I am flabbergasted with the abuse and blacklisting of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his kneeling during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner before games to highlight the continued racism in American society (i.e., America's not living up to its stated ideals; the question left unanswered, of course, is this: Why is the anthem even played before games? How is it even remotely relevant?). Most recently, the same faux "outrage" and criticism was leveled against American hammer thrower Gwen Berry for turning away from the flag after her 3rd place finish in the recent 2021 Olympic trials (For her "sin," Texas―where else?―congressman Dan Crenshaw wants her kicked off the team).

More insidiously, manufactured "conservative" outrage over "Critical Race Theory" and the New York Times's "1619 Project"―not to mention hilariously wrong-headed reactions such as Donald Trump's "1776 Commission" and Texas's "1836 Project"―manifest a willingness to double down on whitewashed mythology when genuine American history proves too uncomfortable. Such "conservative" snowflakes, in the words of Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men, "can't handle the truth."

But here's the point: Both verbal and symbolic criticism of America's shortcomings do not evince a dearth of patriotism. Criticism of American hypocrisy and failures does not equal "hatred" of America. What such criticism demonstrates is that the critic believes in American ideals and is calling the nation to faithfulness to their stated ideological commitments.*** In other words, such criticism is, in point of fact, evidence of the presence, rather than the lack, of patriotism. And it is, at the very least, bad form for men and women, who are the beneficiaries of both the acknowledged and unacknowledged privilege our country affords to white people, to condemn minority populations for their criticism of the country for reneging on its promise of "liberty and justice for all." After all, such "liberty and justice" are what they are entitled to. Moreover, the very constitution such "conservatives" claim to love guarantees the right of these people to air these criticisms. And that's nothing more than the great Frederick Douglass, on explicitly Christian grounds, did in his speech 169 years ago. "Liberty and justice for all." That's what America stands for. Here's to hoping that it will make strides in this direction in this, its 246th year.

The Unimaginable Glory of the Gospel: Romans 4:5 (Part 1)

 

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.