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.
[1] See, e.g., James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A; Dallas, Word, 1988) 197.
[2] Paul's reading apparently reflects the LXX of Genesis 15:1: ho misthos sou polys estai sphodra, "Your reward will be very great" (cf. the Samaritan Pentateuch and, among modern English translations, the NRSV). The more ambiguous MT reading focuses on YHWH as the source of his reward. Cf. the NIV rendering: "I am your shield, your very great reward." Abram's response in Genesis 15:2 clearly implies that he understood this "reward" (misthos) in terms of the progeny and inheritance he had been promised earlier in Genesis.
[3] Hence the strength of Hays's controversial alternative translation of of the syntactically obscure Romans 4:1: "What then shall we say? Have we found Abraham (to be) our forefather according to the flesh?" Richard B. Hays, "Abraham as Father of Jews and Gentiles," in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008 [1985]), 61-84 (at 67; italics his).
[4] Cf. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 897 et passim. As Wright argues, Paul accomplishes this by redefining both the seed and, as we shall see, who the dikaios ("righteous") are and how their "righteousness" is credited to their account.
[5] Douglas Campbell helpfully describes the force of this metaphor: "A seal or stamp marked overtly on an item (or even a person) a state of ownership, possession, or identification, confirming something that was already established on other grounds … The "sign" of the covenant, then, according to Paul, has become a "stamp" signifying the presence of a prior and more fundamental state … which Paul suggests is associated with pistis on the grounds of the earlier situation of promise narrated by Genesis 15:6" (The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009] 733).
[6] E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 499 et passim.
[7] See also 1 Corinthians 15:8, where he emphasizes his unworthiness to apostleship based on his former persecution of the church by referring to himself as an ektrōma, a prematurely born, dead fetus ("an abortion"); cf. 1 Timothy 1:15.
[8] Thus, famously, Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951-55) 1:197.
[9] Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980) 120.
[10] Thus Cranfield's rendering of the meaning of the verb katērgētai (C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. [ICC: Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975-79] 1:240).
[11] Paul's argument in Galatians 3:10-14 also hinges on the nation's current experience of the covenant curse of exile based on Deuteronomy 28-32, only solved by Jesus Messiah's vicarious bearing of that curse on the cross. Cf. also Galatians 3:19; Romans 5:20; 7:7-13.
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