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

 (For previous installments in this series, see here, here, here, and here.)

We come at last, as it were, to Rome (Acts 28:16). As we have seen, Romans 4:4-5 expresses, in succinct fashion, the indescribable and well nigh unimaginable glory of St. Paul's gospel insofar as it relates to the individual's standing before God: God justifies the ungodly as a gift. The expression says it all. This is a gift given without consideration of any human determinants of value. Symbolic capital of every kind, be it moral attainment or ethnic privilege, is thereby excluded. This favor―"grace," in Christian theological parlance―is entirely unconditioned or, in the terms recently made famous by Professor John Barclay, "incongruous." 

The fact that, for those of us raised in evangelical or confessionalist Protestant circles, this notion is so unshocking shouldn't blind us to how truly shocking this affirmation would have been to Paul and his Jewish contemporaries in the first century CE. Indeed, as I have been at pains to emphasize, Paul's project in Romans 4 is one of redefinition, not least with regard to the identity of the "righteous." The Hebrew Bible is quite clear on the matter: the "righteous" (LXX dikaios) are contrasted with the "wicked" or "ungodly" (LXX asebēs) precisely in terms of their obedience to the Torah (e.g., Ezekiel 18:5-9). And it is precisely the "ungodly" who will not be acquitted at the bar of God's justice:

Therefore the wicked (asebeis) will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous (dikaioi);

for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1:5-6, NRSV)

Indeed, as Jimmy Dunn notes, the notion of "acquitting the ungodly" "offended against the whole basis of the covenant" [1] because Israel's entire system of justice encoded in the Torah was posited on God's fundamental declaration, "I will not acquit the guilty" (Exodus 23:7). [2] More than that―and Paul could not have been unaware of this―the LXX of Exodus 23:7 transforms this into an express prohibition:

You shall not justify the ungodly.

(ou dikaiōseis ton asebē)

Here, once again, is Paul's description of God in Romans 4:5: He is the one who "justifies the ungodly" (ton dikaiounta ton asebē). Charles Kingsley Barrett succinctly points to the surface difficulty, one which shocked me into attention when I first read his commentary in my days as a fledgling seminarian: these words "describe God as doing what the Old Testament forbids." [3] Barrett's Durham colleague, C. E. B. Cranfield, may have objected that his was a "misleading over-simplification," and that "the justification of the ungodly to which Paul's words refer differs toto caelo from the sort of thing against which the OT warns human judges is obvious enough." [4] But, I would ask, is it really such an over-simplification, any more than what I would deem to be Paul's own intentionally reversing echo of the Exodus text in his description of God here in Romans 4?

What lies behind this shocking reversal? As I have often argued, the key lies in the course of Israel's history and the progress of biblical salvation-history.  In Romans 1-4, Paul is at pains to argue that God had, in this "now" time (Rom 3:21), at long last fulfilled his foundational promises to Abraham―the very promises that would together provide the twin solution to the primeval human problems portrayed in Genesis 11 and, behind that, in Genesis 3―in the Christ event. Paul's imaginary Jewish interlocutors may have boasted in their possession of the Torah and their presumption to be "guides" to the ungodly Gentiles who weren't so blessed to have the Law "by nature" (Rom 2:17-20). [5] But the Apostle reminds them that what matters for acquittal at the bar of God's justice ("justification") is not possession of the Law alone, but performance of it (Romans 2:13), and Jewish non-performance demonstrated they were still in the throes of the exile promised for their dereliction of covenantal responsibilities (Romans 2:24; Deuteronomy 30:1-6). Their own Law showed that they, no less than the Gentiles to whom they presumed to be superior, were unrighteous (Romans 3:10) and sinners (Romans 3:20); and, since God is a God who, by definition, shows no partiality (prosōpolēmpsia) (Romans 2:11), [6] they stood in the dock together with them, liable to divine judgment (Romans 3:19).

God, however, is a faithful God, and the story of the gospel is the story of God's initiative, in the face of his people's unfaithfulness (Romans 3:1-8), to bring his saving promises to fruition ("the righteousness of God") by, first, setting forth Messiah Jesus publicly as an atoning sacrifice (hilastērion), as a result of which his present justification of Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus is demonstrated to be both gracious and just (Romans 3:21-26), [7] and, second, by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead "for our justification" (Romans 4:25). [8] 

Thus the difference between Paul and the Mosaic ordinance, and hence the apostle's intended rhetorical contrast, is easily seen. In the Torah, "justification" or "acquittal" is an analytical judgment, a judicial decision based on the facts of a given case. In Paul, the "justification" of an ungodly sinner is nothing of the sort; it is rather, as Moo puts it, "a creative act," a declaration of God the just judge whereby the believer is freely granted a new status as a forgiven sinner and member of God's new covenant people―a status conferred solely in union with Christ on the basis of what he has done, once for all, on his or her behalf. [9] For Paul, justification by faith is not the cheap forgiveness of a lenient judge who dispenses with justice in the interests of mercy. On the contrary, it came at a cost (cf. "redemption," Romans 3:24), the very life of God's own Son.

Yet niggling questions remain. Foundational to Paul's theology is the axiomatic belief that God is an impartial adjudicator who will render a just verdict (dikaiokrisia) at the last judgment (Romans 2:5). How this works itself out has caused no little consternation among many of his readers. In Paul's words: 

For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality. (Romans 2:6-11, NRSV)

Many, of course, simply choose to skip over this pothole on the "Romans Road," but such is hardly responsible, let alone wise; the rains will come, filling up the holes and inevitably tripping up the unwary or irresponsible. Others argue, based on Paul's catena of scriptural citations in 3:9-20, that these words are merely hypothetical: if Christ had not come (but he has) and the Law could be fulfilled (but it can't), this is how judgment would take place. [10] Still others, mostly writing from a Reformed vantage point, argue somewhat similarly that Paul is simply laying out the conditions for eternal life apart from Christ, which remain valid if one wants to "merit" salvation on one's own. [11]  Still others, despairing of any solution that make it cohere with Paul's own (assumed Lutheranesque) theology, attribute it to others, such as  non-Christian Jews in the form of a hypothetical synagogue sermon. [12]

These are, however, counsels of despair. More importantly, they ignore indications in the immediate context itself that Paul intends what he says to be taken seriously. First, immediately after stating that "the doers of the Law will be justified" (i.e., eschatologically, at the Final Judgment; Romans 2:13), Paul provides examples of such "doers" in verses 14-15 when he speaks of Gentiles who, though not by nature having the Law, "do the things the Law requires" (ta tou nomou poiōsin), thereby demonstrating that "the work required by the Law is written on their hearts (to ergon tou nomou grapton en tais kardiais autōn), a transparent allusion to the New Covenant promise of the Law written on the hearts of the people in Jeremiah 31 (LXX 38):33. [13]

Second, even more clear is Romans 2:25-29, where Paul brazenly redefines Jewish identity in terms of the circumcised heart (cf. Deuteronomy 30:6), "by the Spirit, not the letter" (en pneumatu ou grammati, v. 29); according to the Apostle, it is those who, regardless of whether or not they bear the marks of circumcision on their foreskin, "keep the righteous requirements of the Law" (ta dikaiōmata tou nomou phylassēi; cf. Rom 8:4!) who will be "reckoned as circumcised" (ouch hē akrobystia autou eis peritomēn logisthēsetai) (v. 26; cf. Rom 4:4-5!). As if this were not clear enough, the parallels between Paul's Spirit/letter contrast here and in both Romans 7:6 and the classic New Covenant text of 2 Corinthians 3:6 make a Christian identification all but certain, as is almost universally recognized by New Testament scholars today. [14]

What this means is that the old "problem" of the seemingly uneasy relationship between "justification by faith" and "judgment according to works" has an elegant solution within Paul's thought on grace. To put it simply: The incongruous grace that justifies also transforms. The grace that justifies is unconditioned but not unconditional … if by the latter one means "no strings attached." John Barclay, a re-reading of whose recent work on Paul's teaching on grace provided the impetus for this series, writes:

Romans 2, with its affirmation of the ultimate [dikaiokrisia] of God (2:5), indicates that Paul is concerned to maintain the justice of the cosmos: when it comes to the final judgment, God will neither condone sin nor ignore its effects. Like 4 Ezra, he insists that there will be a distinction between good and evil, a fit between the praise of God and the "good work" that it acknowledges (2:6-11). But ― and this is the crucial Pauline point ― the basis for that fit, the foundation and frame of the patient good work that leads to eternal life, is an act of divine power, an incongruous gift to sinful humanity whose transformative effects will be evident at the judgment. This incongruity (God's faithfulness to the faithless) is the ground for Paul's hope, in a world he considers corrupted by the universal effects of sin; it is also what gives him confidence, backed by experience, that God pays no regard to ethnic background, moral upbringing, or access to the Law. But the purpose of the unfitting gift is to create a fit, to turn lawless Gentiles into those who do the Law (2:12-15), and trespassing Jews into Spirit-circumcised servants who bear fruit for God (2:29; 7:6). God's dramatic act of righteousness in the face of human unrighteousness is designed to create not moral chaos but justified and purified creatures. As the letter proceeds, it will become clear that these persons are not old selves morally improved, but new creatures forged ex nihilo from the resurrection life of Christ, by an act of "calling into being" basic to the story of Abraham and of Israel as a whole. But it is clear already that this creation is an incongruous gift given without regard to prior worth, that founds an existence whose lived practice is congruous with the righteous judgment of God. [15]

Such a radical understanding of grace was unknown to Saul the Pharisee who, as E. P. Sanders was right to remind us, knew a lot about grace.  It was forged by Paul the Apostle's experience of its power in his incongruous call on the road to Damascus and in his long and deep reflections on Israel's Scriptures. And it remains unimaginably glorious to all who experience it today through the Spirit-empowered word of Paul's gospel. Soli Deo Gloria!

Who's Next, 50 Years On

 

I had just finished 9th grade at Haverford Junior High a week or so earlier in June of 1971. My Phillies, despite the promise of surprising rookie centerfielder Willie Montanez, were headed for yet another last place finish in the NL East. But one sultry afternoon, out of my tinny transistor radio on Philadelphia's WIBG AM came the strains of a new song by the Who called "Won't Get Fooled Again" that immediately caught my attention. I had just studied the Who's rock opera "Tommy" in music class at school―along with Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar," to which I believed then, as I believe now, "Tommy" is in every way superior―and bought the album as a result. But this was something else entirely: more immediate, more visceral. In a word, better. By a large margin. And this was just the 3:35 single edit! When, two months later, the album on which it serves as the closer hit the stores, I immediately went out and bought it. They were some of the best 4 dollars I ever spent in my life.

That album, Who's Next, turns 50 years old today. To this day, I consider that record to be Pete Townshend's masterpiece, one of the absolute greatest albums ever recorded in the rock era. On some days, I even rank it second behind only Bruce Springsteen's unmatchable Born to Run. As I reflect on the music of my youth from this autumnal stage of my life, I am struck by the lightning-quick evolution of a music that began, in the mid-1950's, at the intersection of (black) blues/R&B and (white/hillbilly) country, perhaps exemplified best by the hybrid music of its two greatest early artists, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. This was music, and an ethos, diametrically opposite to the insipid popular music of the white middle America of the day. And, as has been rehearsed ad nauseum over the decades, while the "fad" seemed to fade here in America, the banner was taken up and championed across the pond in the British Isles, whose artists, most notably the Beatles and Rolling Stones, subsequently "invaded" America to win over America's youth with American sounds Americans had ignored and, in many cases, were unaware even existed.

In the years following the British Invasion of 1963-64, there were lots of bands who tried imitating the Beatles' Merseyside sound or the Stones' blues stylings. And it was more of the same when the Beatles experimented with psychedelia in 1966-67. But. to me, the really significant bands were the ones who didn't seem to care about making hits, the ones for whom commercial concerns were decidedly secondary. For example, there were plenty of blues bands in that era, but Cream was sui generis because of the jazz sensibilities of drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, which made their lengthy improvisational passages with Eric Clapton more than tiresome noodling, show-off exercises. Likewise, there were plenty of hard blues-rock bands with great guitar players, but only one Led Zeppelin, not simply because of the band's instrumental virtuosity and Robert Plant's preternatural vocal abilities, but because of Jimmy Page's subtle use of, as he puts it, "light and shade," and deft incorporation of English folk and world music into his blues and rock foundation. 

The evolution of the Who fits here as well. They hit the scene in 1964 as a decidedly "Mod" English band with the garage rock/power pop single "I Can't Explain" in December of 1964. The following November they released one of their most famous songs, the minimalist, almost proto-punk "My Generation," with Roger Daltrey stuttering his lines and famously singing Townshend's lyric, "Hope I die before I get old" (Thankfully, both Roger and Pete didn't didn't get their wish; would that the same could be said for Keith and the Ox.) Over the next few years, the band put out a number of great singles ("Substitute," "Pictures of Lily," "I'm a Boy, " "Magic Bus") and albums (especially The Who Sell Out, which includes the excellent "I Can See for Miles"), that display both exquisite British humor and a growing pop sensibility. But then, in 1969, the band released the aforementioned Tommy, the first rock opera. In the hindsight of more than a half century, the artistic pretensions and ludicrous, puerile story line are blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, there are more than a few musical moments of lasting value (The Overture, where the Ox gets to show off his chops on the horn, "Pinball Wizard," "I'm Free," "We're Not Gonna Take It"). But the best was yet to come.

As is well known, Townshend wanted to follow up his Tommy triumph with yet another, more ambitious project. Entitled Lifehouse, it was to be a multi-media, audience-interactive rock opera based on the teachings of his spiritual leader, Meher Baba. Ultimately, however, after none of his mates "got" the Lifehouse concept and he subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, Townshend aborted the project, hired Glyn Johns as a new associate producer, and decided to put together a "regular" long player, incorporating what elements of the abandoned project as he could, none more significant than his (then) cutting edge use of synthesizers. The results, to put it mildly, were stunning.

Tommy, for all its historical significance, sounds terribly dated today. Who's Next, by contrast, remains as fresh today as it did when it first hit the shelves 50 years ago. Each and every song is a winner. There is no filler. All of Townshend and the Who's trademarks are here in spades: intelligent lyrics, instrumental prowess, humor, introspection, hard rockers and beautiful ballads, crushing power chords, heartbreakingly beautiful melodies, rhythmic foundation laid down by Townshend's guitar, letting the Ox and Keith Moon roam where they may. But the biggest revelation: Roger Daltrey's voice. Daltrey was always a fine vocalist, but here he discovers a depth and power matched by few others in the history of rock and roll. I almost fell off my chair the first time I heard him wail, "Out here in the fields," at the beginning of the classic opener, "Baba O'Riley" (known to viewers of CSI:NY). Rock and roll doesn't get any better than that … until you hear the next song, "Bargain," which proves a love song doesn't have to be pathetically sappy (of course, Townshend claims the song was written about God, via his late spiritual mentor Meher Baba, but that wouldn't make it much different, lyrically, from many CCM songs): 

But, of course, Townshend saves the best for last, the aforementioned "Won't Get Fooled Again," in my view not only the Who's best song but one of the 10 or so greatest rock songs ever recorded. This song's power and, yes, majesty, is matched by a wisdom―attributed by Townshend to his being a "cynical English a**ehole"―rarely found in the work of a 26 year old musician, taking on the naïve, revolutionary, youthful idealism of the time: 

We'll be fighting in the streets

With our children at our feet

And the morals that they worship will be gone

And the men who spurred us on

Sit in judgement of all wrong

They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again

The change, it had to come

We knew it all along

We were liberated from the fold, that's all

And the world looks just the same

And history ain't changed

'Cause the banners, they are flown in the next war

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again, no, no

I'll move myself and my family aside

If we happen to be left half alive

I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky

Though I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?

Yeah

There's nothing in the streets

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye

And the parting on the left

Is now parting on the right

And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again

Don't get fooled again, no, no

Yeah

Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss

Musically, what always struck me were the power chords, the extended synthesizer passage near the end (signifying the change of regimes), and Daltrey's sublime scream prior to the triumphant final lines. But last night, listening to the song for the thousandth (?) time, I picked up on a hint that Pete understood the significance of the song he was recording. The staccato power chords that close the song are strikingly reminiscent of the endings of many of Beethoven's odd-numbered symphonies (obviously not the same, but the family resemblance is there despite being stripped down, as it were). This is not mere "pop" music written for your "entertainment," he seems to be telling us. Indeed, it is not. And I pity those whose musical exposure only extends to such ephemera.

Simone Biles' Yips, the "Conservative" Fetish of Toughness, and Authentic Christianity

Of all the thrills and compelling stories of this year's Tokyo Olympic Games―the exploits of Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel in the pool, British diver Tom Daley finally winning an Olympic gold medal, Karsten Warholm of Norway's spectacular destruction of the world record in the 400 meter hurdles, the sportsmanship of high jumpers Mutaz-Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy, willing to share the gold medal―no doubt the most compelling has concerned the travails of American gymnast Simone Biles, the most decorated and surely the greatest female athlete in the sport's history, dropping out of the team and individual overall competitions, and three of the individual competitions for which she had qualified, because of what she described as the "twisties," the gymnastic equivalent of the "yips" commonly associated with athletes of other sports like golf (Tommy Armour) and baseball (Steve Blass, Steve Sax, Chuck Knoblauch).

Thankfully, Biles received support from many top-tier athletes (Michael Phelps, Rory McElroy, Ledecky) and a large percentage of the public, who instinctively understand the physical dangers involved at the intersection of mental health issues and the spectacular athletic feats her discipline demands, and are unwilling to pry into private matters that are, to be frank, none of their business. Not surprisingly, however, one segment of the population demurs, and has been more than ready to throw Biles under the bus. I am speaking, of course, of a certain kind of "conservative" found, more and more commonly, it seems, in both America and Britain. For example, British windbag Piers Morgan―who himself stormed off the set of "Good Morning Britain" in a snit, never to return, over an argument about Meghan Markle (!) with a co-host―slammed Biles for "quitting" and "letting down" her teammates, fans, and country. 

More important, for my present purposes, have been the responses from many self-proclaimed "Christians" to Biles' decision to withdraw from many of her scheduled competitions. For example, college dropout Charlie Kirk accused her of "softness," "shattering into a million pieces" once "the going gets tough," and of being a "sociopath." Jenna Ellis concurred, accusing her of "selfishly abandoning her teammates" and lack of commitment and integrity. Blogger Matt Walsh said much the same, spicing it up with a bit of implicit misogyny (or, at least, anti-feminist animus): "Simone Biles quit on her team because she wasn't having fun. This is called being a quitter. It's completely disgraceful and selfish. I guarantee that most of the people defending it wouldn't be defending it if she was a man."

When reading such unkind moral pronouncements from people who know nothing of Biles' circumstances, the first thing that immediately strikes me is the blatantly unchristian nature of their self-righteous attitudes (more on this presently). But what strikes me, and what makes me even more sad and, if I'm to be honest, mad, is how such attitudes in much of so-called white "evangelicalism" increasingly coalesce with those found in what conservative journalist Charlie Sykes refers to as the "MAGAverse." In Sykes' words:

[T]his is what makes the attacks on Biles so odd. 

At least on the surface, there was no tangible flashpoint in the culture war here. The assault on the gymnast wasn’t sparked by any act of protest on her part; and there is no discernible “conservative” principle involved in her concerns for her mental health. 

But if the attacks lack a coherent idea, they share an increasingly familiar posture. Despite all the rhetoric about individual freedom, the real fetish on the right is toughness. 

Men who show emotion, especially those who cry, are weak. Young women who fail to perform are “quitters.” All that matters is strength, winning and a weird obsession with machismo. Just look at Trump’s rebuke on Wednesday of the “RINOs” he accused of helping Democrats get the infrastructure deal passed: “It is a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb.” Not responsive to constituents or committed to bipartisanship but weak.

This might sound familiar.

“What is good?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”  

What is evil? “Whatever springs from weakness.” (If the German philosopher were alive, he’d almost certainly have a show on Fox News.) … 

In this brave new world of faux-toughness, Biles as an individual simply does not matter—she is merely an instrument of national greatness, with her actual humanity regarded as an inconvenient afterthought.

That’s why her critics spend so little time dealing with the role that stress, pressure and a history of sexual abuse likely played in Biles’ decision, because that would mean having to think of her as a person, and for critics like Charlie Kirk and the others, that is utterly irrelevant.

This is also the new ethos on the right. Adam Serwer has famously noted that in Trump’s America, ‘the cruelty is the point.”

But in late-stage Trumpism, it is not just the cruelty: The lack of empathy is also the point. Insensitivity is cultivated; compassion is derided as weakness.

So, we are left with this moment of high absurdity, in which a symbol of human excellence and American greatness is being mocked by bloated white man-children for being “weak.”

They have decided that Simone Biles represents everything they oppose.

How revealing is that? 

(Read the whole piece here). 

This analysis strikes me as unusually perceptive … and damning. Over the past decade or so I have gotten tired of pointing out to lay evangelicals the blatant incompatibility of the ideas of Ayn Rand and those of Christianity, Paul Ryan's futile attempted synthesis notwithstanding. Now, however, what we clearly have is an unwitting, de facto synthesis of Nietzsche and Christianity which, considering the inherent incompatibility of the two, necessarily produces a bastard form of the latter. In the passage cited above, Sykes quotes Nietzsche, from his famous The Antichrist. [1] Subsequent to the words found above, Nietzsche wrote, "The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity." 

Make no mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche, for all his impiety and atheism, understood something about the fundamental nature of the Christian faith that is lost to the vast multitudes of American white evangelicals for whom Kristen Kobes DuMez wrote her provocative and compelling Jesus and John Wayne [2] ―those, like John Piper, who tout the "masculine feel" of Christianity and lament its supposed "feminization" and increasing "softness" in recent decades. Indeed, the New Testament talks a lot about power. It speaks of authority. It speaks of strength. But it turns conventional wisdom and thinking about these matters on its head. God's wisdom and God's power, according to Paul the Apostle, find their climactic expression in the cross of Messiah Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), so much so that he can summarize his message by means of the ultimate oxymoron, "Christ crucified" (christon estaurōmenon, 1 Cor 1:23). The Messiah, by definition, was to be a "winner." Crucified men, on the other hand, by definition, were "losers," vanquished by the reigning imperial power and exposed publicly for the masses to see with their own eyes what happened to those who resisted its will. But God's "foolishness," manifested in the cross, proved wiser than human wisdom (1 Cor 1:25); he chose the "weak things" of the world to "put to shame" (kataischynēi) the strong (1 Cor 1:27); the Messiah's apparent "defeat" on the cross proved in fact to be his public disarming of, indeed his triumph (thriambeusas) over, the dark spiritual powers that had held the world in their grip, working through those worldly authorities that put him to death (Colossians 2:15). Indeed, in the primitive Christian hymn embedded in Philippians 2, Christ's ultimate exaltation to Lordship occurred only after he had refused to use his divine equality (to einai isa theōi, Phil 2:6) for his own advantage (ouch harpargmon hēgēsato), but "emptied himself" by "taking the form of a slave," becoming human and dying a slave's death on a Roman cross (Phil 2:6-11). [3] And it was precisely because he existed "in the form of God" (en morphēi theou, Phil 2:6) that he exhibited such transcendent vulnerability for the sake of those who one day would confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord," to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:11). [4] 

This is important because it is not simply a matter of Christians worshipping the Jesus who humbled himself and secured their salvation via the path of weakness. [5] More to the point, Christ's example of weakness and self-sacrifice overturns the values of the world and thus must be the pattern for the lives of those who aim to be his followers. [6] Nowhere is this more clear than in 2 Corinthians 10-13, where Paul takes on self-aggrandizing, boastful Jewish Christian opponents he deems "super-apostles" (hoi hyperlian apostolōn, 2 Cor 11:5). In the middle of his rhetorical response he asks the Corinthians to indulge him in a bit of folly as he proceeds to "boast" to keep up, as it were, with these false apostles. The problem, however, is that the things he boasts in are all the wrong things, whether looked at from the perspective of the Greco-Roman honor-shame culture or that of today's western world: imprisonment, beatings, shipwrecks, sleeplessness, hunger (2 Cor 11:16-29). Capping it off he mentions the time he fled from Aretas IV of Damascus, escaping with, and no doubt afraid for, his life in a basket lowered from the city walls (2 Cor 11:33-36). When the going got tough, he ran!

Fundamental for Paul was the lesson he learned when he prayed for the removal of the unidentified "thorn in (his) flesh" that plagued him throughout his career (2 Cor 12:7). The Lord's answer to this prayer is one all his followers must learn: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:8). For that reason, Paul's only boast was in his weaknesses, for it was only in them and through them that Christ's power could rest upon him and work through him (2 Cor 12:9). C. K. Barrett notes:

[A] scene of human weakness is the best possible stage for the display of divine power. So far from coming to perfection, divine power is scarcely perceptible in the impressive activities of the ecclesiastical potentates with whom Paul has to contend. It is when he is weak, really weak—poor, sick, humiliated, despised, unloved by his own spiritual children as well as scorned by the world—that God's power comes into view. For 'God's foolishness is wiser than men, and God's weakness is stronger than men' (I Cor. i. 25). [7]

Let us never forget that.

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

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)

At last we come to Romans 4:4-5, where what I have dubbed the "unimaginable glory" of Paul's eschatological gospel of God's saving righteousness comes to its most shocking, radical expression. These verses, with their memorable characterization of God as the One who "justifies the ungodly," are often viewed as being theologically programmatic, not only in popular evangelicalism, but in scholarly circles as well. [1] This is largely due to the widespread opinion that Paul, in verse 4, is simply laying down a "general principle" or "generally applicable rule" [2] ―in other words, one with trans-temporal or timeless theological implications directly detrimental to his (implied) Jewish interlocutors and anybody else who, supposedly like them, desired then or desires now to secure his or her position before God by means of moral effort. However, though Paul certainly is at pains in this chapter to present Abraham's example as the paradigm for those Jews and Gentiles who, through faith in Christ, are to become his children "according to the promise" (cf. esp. 4:23), closer inspection makes it abundantly clear that the Apostle is being, as usual, more subtle than this. Indeed, verses 4-5 operate on two levels: at ground level, as it were, he is simply interpreting his text, Genesis 15:6, in the context of Genesis 15 as a whole; yet he presents this interpretation in such a way that at a second level, ongoing implications for his readers are drawn out for the matter at hand.

The clearest pointer to this multi-level strategy is the usually neglected (unobserved?), yet surely not coincidental, fact that the term generally translated "wages" in Romans 4:4, misthos, occurs in Genesis 15:1 LXX [3] with reference to the reward promised to Abram, the inheritance he would receive consisting in countless descendants (Genesis 15:5) from many nations (Genesis 17:5; Romans 4:17). At ground level, the issue Paul is dealing with concerns what, if anything, could have motivated God to reward Abram with this promise. As far as the second level significance for Paul's readers is concerned, what is at stake, if the originating scriptural context is taken seriously, is being identified as one of these promised eschatological descendants of Abraham, children of the promise of Genesis 12:3; 18:18; 22:18 (cf. Galatians 3:8). [4] To make his case, Paul walks a tightrope, making his contemporary point by means of a close reading of the Genesis text itself. [5]

When Paul speaks of Abraham's "reward," one is tempted to look for something that would have prompted such a response from God. What Paul noticed in Genesis, as significantly as surprisingly, was the absence of such a precipitating act or "work" on the Patriarch's part. Nothing he had done warranted such an initiative of divine beneficence. And it is this very asymmetry or lack of correspondence that the Apostle highlights in verses 4-5. Instead, what we find in the Genesis story is this: God promised Abraham an innumerable progeny (Gen 15:5); Abraham "believed God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness" (Gen 15:6); and God concretized that "crediting" by cutting a covenant with Abraham (Gen 15:7-21). From the shape of this narrative Paul then makes a fundamental theological deduction about how human beings now can and must relate to God if they are to be counted as Abraham's children "according to the promise."

Utilizing the common accounting term logizōmai ("I reckon, calculate, charge to one's account"), derived from Genesis 15:6, Paul applies both what the text says and what it does not say to the matter at hand. He does so by making a contrast between two potential ways of "calculating" pay or favor to a person. This rhetorical contrast, summed up in the prepositional phrases kata charin ("as a gift") and kata opheilēma ("as [one's] due"), could not be more stark. On the one hand, those who work are not remunerated voluntarily, as a gift; instead, they are paid as a matter of obligation. [6] On the other―and here the Apostle explicitly makes theological application to his readers' situation―the one who does not work, but (only) believes in the One who justifies the ungodly, his or her faith is counted for "righteousness." It is the second scenario which fit the narrated experience of Abraham, and thus it is also, by definition, the one which must fit the experience of his children of promise.

[[Once again, as an aside, as was mentioned above, one must be careful not to over-mirror-read the participial constructions tōi … ergazomenōi and tōi … mē ergazomenōi pisteuonti de ("to the one who works"/"to the one who does not work, but believes") so as to attribute to Paul's Jewish contemporaries the pretension that they could earn or establish their position before God by the performance of works apart from grace. [7] Of course, this text may legitimately be used to refute such a pipe dream should anybody have it, but Paul's point, stripped of such illegitimate polemics, is far more simple: Abraham―and by extension anybody else on this side of the Christ event who wants to be counted among his children―did nothing to render him deserving of the "gift" he received from God, namely, being given the promise of a worldwide family and being "put in the right" as God's covenant partner. [8] ]]

Paul's description of God as the "One who justifies the ungodly" (ton dikaiounta ton asebē) has direct relevance to the foundational Abraham narrative, and not merely because the Patriarch, the prototypical proselyte of Jewish tradition, was an erstwhile pagan from Ur, and hence by definition "ungodly," before being chosen by God (narratively speaking) to be his covenant partner. Indeed, God's promise to Abraham, from the very start in Genesis 12, involved the eschatological "blessing" of all peoples of the earth―which the Apostle equates with "justification" in Galatians 3―"in" the Patriarch. Here in Romans 4, Paul interprets God's promise of a countless progeny (Gen 15:5) in light of the (later) divine claim to have made Abraham "a father of many nations" (Gen 17:5; Rom 4:17). "Ungodliness" (asebeia) was, to the Jewish mind, characteristic of the Gentile world, without the Law and thus unable to meet God's moral demands (Rom 1:18!). Yet Paul's master stroke in this letter was to paint his fellow Jews into a corner from which they could not escape and put them into the dock along with the Gentiles (Rom 2:1-3:20). God, however, is a God who is faithful to his covenant promises. And so, in manifestation of his saving "righteousness," Christ "died for the ungodly" (hyper hēmōn apethanen, Rom 5:6), Jew and Gentile alike. Only on that basis could they be "justified" and become members of the family promised to Abraham in Genesis 15.

Paul's language of "justifying the ungodly" in verse 5 corresponds in function to the formulation "credited as a gift" (logizesthai kata charin) in verse 4, and thus recalls Romans 3:24, where "all" (i.e., Jews and Gentiles) who believe, being sinners, are "justified freely by (God's) grace" (dikaioumenoi dōrean tēi autou chariti) through the redemption in Christ Jesus." And it is here, with the language of "grace," that what we have described as Paul's redefinition project in Romans 4 is seen to involve a third element. As we have emphasized, in light of the eschatological manifestation of God's saving righteousness in Christ, the Apostle believed he had no choice but, for want of a better term, to redefine the classic Second Temple Jewish doctrine of election: he has redefined, first, who the "seed" of Abraham are who inherit the covenant promises; second, he has correspondingly redefined who the "righteous" are; and now, third, in doing these first two he has thereby radically redefined what God's "grace" entails. 

At this point one should note that Paul, in using the language of "grace" (charis) [9], was not, as is sometimes imagined in popular Christian circles, utilizing a technical term with the sense of "undeserved favor." Indeed, when used in the sense of a favor or gift given, the term had no necessary connotations of being undeserved. But for Paul, God's gift of Christ most certainly was undeserved: rather than it being the vindication of the godly, it was the justification of the ungodly. Along these lines, Paul, by excluding "works (of the Law)" as the path to "justification" (Rom 3:28) or the inheritance of the promise (Rom 4:16), thereby excludes all potential human determinants of value ("symbolic capital") in the sight of God, be they moral achievement ("Old Perspective") or tokens of ethnic, covenantal privilege ("New Perspective"). And thus, because God gives his Gift to the ungodly, his grace is entirely unconditioned. To put it differently, because there is no "fit" between the person and God's gift to her, God's grace, in Barclay's terms, is utterly "incongruous." "God acts," he writes, "in the absence of human worth." [10]

But is faith to be seen, in some sense, to be a token of worth accepted by God in the place of works? For instance, Joseph Fitzmyer interprets Romans 4:3 thus: "Abraham's faith was counted by God as uprightness, because God sees things as they are." [11] Such a reading, however, misses Paul's point entirely. Indeed, his point in adducing the example of Abraham is that God's pronouncement of justification is not the result of his "seeing things as they are." Justification of the ungodly means acquittal on the basis of no human presupposition. For Paul, the "crediting of faith for righteousness" (Rom 4:3) means for God to credit "righteousness" (=the [forensic] status of "being in the right") to a person's account (Rom 4:6); it means not to have one's sins counted against him (Psalm 32:2; Rom 4:8). Hence faith, far from being a potential token of value, is instead, in the words of Barclay, 

not an alternative human achievement nor a refined human spirituality, but a declaration of bankruptcy, a radical and shattering recognition that the only capital in God's economy is the gift of Christ crucified and risen. [12]

Indeed, in the case of Abraham, the faith which God calculated in his favor was simple, unadorned trust in the promise he had been given, no matter how outrageous, on the face of it, that promise appeared to be. Abraham's faith merely consisted, as Käsemann put it, in his "Yes to the message of … God." [13] And what was this promise? It was the promise of a son, which was, in the normal course of things, impossible for people of his and Sarai's age (Rom 4:19; cf. Gen 17:1, 17). Yet he took God at his word, and his faith, his "unconditional trust" and "utter dependence" on the truth of God's promise, [14] is the paradigm for his heirs today.

That Abraham is the paradigm of faith for those who would "walk in his footsteps" (tois stoichousin tois ichnesin, Rom 4:12) and be counted his eschatological children is made clear in the peroration to his midrash in verses 23-24: "It was not written for his [i.e., Abraham's] sake alone that 'It was reckoned,' but for our sakes as well, to whom it [i.e., our faith] is to be reckoned …" What is more, it is not simply "faith" as a dispositional quality that the Patriarch and his spiritual children have in common. Paul insists, rather, that the faith exercised by Abraham is the very same faith that Christians exercise when they confess, "Jesus is Lord," and believe God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). [15]

Paul develops the nature of Abraham's faith by means of a two-fold description of the God in whom he placed his trust: He is "the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that do not exist into being" (theou tou zōiopoiountas tous nekrous kai kalountas ta mē onta hōs onta, Rom 4:17). [16] From Genesis 15 the Apostle learned that the Patriarch's faith consisted in his unswerving faith [17] that God, despite the "deadness" of his and Sarai's reproductive organs (Rom 4:19), had the power to do what he had promised [18] and provide him with the son he previously had been unable to bear. By doing so God thus called into being the "seed" which were to become the bearers of the initial promise to Abraham to be the conduit of blessing for all peoples on earth (Gen 12:3).

As one can readily see, Abraham's faith that God would "raise" his and his wife's procreative capacities from the dead has a certain parallel with the earliest, most basic Christian confession, to which Paul alludes in verse 24, when he refers to those who "believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead" (tois pisteuousin epi ton egeiranta 'Iēsoun ton kyrion hēmōn ek nekrōn; cf. Rom 10:9). But the linkage is closer than one based on analogy alone. For Paul's entire argument in Romans 3:21-4:25 is concerned to show how God's covenant promises to Abraham have been fulfilled in Christ, who is the "seed" of Abraham "according to the flesh" (kata sarka) [19] and who thus, through his death and resurrection, brought the covenant benefits to Jews and Gentiles alike who believe (Rom 4:25). God, in raising Jesus our Lord back to life, shows himself to be the God who gives life to the dead. God, in creating a worldwide family of Jews and Gentiles who mirror his faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, shows himself to be the God who acts by the principle of creatio ex nihilo. And so we see how the faith of Abraham is the very same faith exercised by believers in Christ today.

One more thing. I would like to suggest that one further aspect of God's gracious operation by the principle of creatio ex nihilo consists in the very faith through which a believer is accounted "righteous" before God. As was mentioned above, this "faith" is not to be understood as a sort of dispositional achievement on the part of the believer that conceivably could be viewed as a token of worth or symbolic capital that might prompt God's favor. Indeed, in the programmatic Romans 1:16-17, Paul declares that the gospel―defined in Romans 1:3-4 as the Scripture-fulfilling messianic career and resurrection of Jesus, God's "Son" [20]―is not a bare recitation of gospel "events" and an "invitation" to believe, but a royal announcement whose very proclamation unleashes God’s power to “call” people effectively to salvation through faith. [21] God's grace carries no antecedent conditions. Human inadequacies are met by created divine adequacy. The ungodly are thereby justified. But, one wonders, is this just? And is this the end of the matter? These questions await the next, and final, installment, of the series.