One way to study an author is to read the works straight through in the order in which they were written, so as to obtain a sense of his development. Reading the New Testament straight through, that's not how you get to know Paul, whose letters, or epistles, are presented pretty much in descending order of length. This means you come first to Romans, which, besides being the longest, is pretty widely regarded as the crowning achievement of extant Pauline theological writings. It was composed in about A.D. 57, relatively late in Paul's career, possibly before Phillipians but after Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence. Martin Luther's preface to Romans begins:
This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian's while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well. The more one deals with it, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.
More than a thousand years before Luther, St. Augustine had reported, in his Confessions, that his conversion to Christianity had been consummated when, outside in a garden, he had heard a child's voice singing, "Take up and read." He therefore opened a Bible and by chance his eye fell upon a passage from Romans 13 that spoke directly to his own wavering reflections. (There are no known instances of anyone performing a similar exercise and opening, say, to a passage about the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant.) I have a book, The New Testament: An Introduction, by the 20th-century scholar Norman Perrin: it's very sober and learned but I see now, scanning the "exegetical survey of Paul's letter to the Romans," that he is evidently struck mute by the profundity of Romans 8:
In what is probably the greatest sustained passage from his letters, perhaps the greatest sustained passage from Christian literature altogether, Paul now depicts the details of the possibilities of the new life in Christ as he understands it in his maturity as a Christian missionary. It is a passage to be read and reflected on by the individual reader rather than commented on by the scholar, and the present writer does not propose to make any remarks whatsoever.
To mimic Paul, "What then am I to say?" Well, the general reader, handicapped by twenty centuries of intervening time, not to mention the elastic meanings of such terms as "sin" and "law" and "justification," is going to want some explanation for the grounds of the letter's reputation. I'm not sure that the following would satisfy Karl Barth, but I think it's in the right direction, and anyway who can ever tell what someone like Barth is talking about?
Suppose you think of yourself as an enlightened, forward-thinking kind of person whose closest colleague in Cubicleland happens to be an observant Jew. He has several habits that you view with disdain, none more perhaps than his way of noisily putting away his work things before the official quitting time on winter Fridays. You know he does this so that he can make it home before the sun sets, thereby satisfying a Jewish law about Sabbath observance. There's at least a couple of things about this that annoy you. One, you strongly suspect that all the noise is meant to call attention to his departure, which everyone knows is connected with religious observance. It pleases him that he's observant. Worse, it pleases him even more that you will have to notice that he is observant, a "good Jew." Second, assuming for the moment that there is a God, it's ridiculous to think that He should concern Himself with when people get home from the office on Friday. You suspect the purpose of such "laws" is to set before people a series of trivial hurdles that, when overcome in an endless sequence of mildly taxing acts of piety, has the desired effect of infusing every detail of life with fake religious significance. Thus religion is enthroned.
Now, you might think of this as a thoroughly secular critique, but it is in line with the general outlook advanced by Paul in the letter to the Romans. Following the religious law is a mirage, a futile dead end. Obey all the teachings, observe the Sabbath, love your neighbor as yourself, all of that--useless. This is because sin represents not ethically dubious acts but rather an inescapable state of being. You can perhaps grasp something of what Paul means if you are brutally honest about the motivations of all the dear devout people: the self-seeking, the desire to be esteemed, the quest to acquire a reason for flattering oneself about one's goodness. That Paul calls himself in this letter a "wretched man" does not mean he thinks the rest of us are any better.
Yet, while there is plenty to say against our kind, "if God is for us, who is against us?"--from chapter 8, revered by Dr Perrin. Oddly, though, it seems to me that Paul in Romans is a little hazy on the details concerning redemption. Yes, it's accomplished, but how? At least one commentator, Wayne Meeks, seems to agree, for he remarks that in Romans we do not have "a systematic summary of Pauline theology--his Christology, for example, is presupposed, not described." As we shall see when we come to our consideration of the randy Corinthians, Paul's evident preoccupations in a particular letter are generally attributed to the controversies besetting the original recipients. But, having founded and visited many of the Christian churches to which he wrote letters, Paul knew firsthand what troubles they faced. He'd never been to Rome. Why did they get the letter they did?
No one really knows, but the Roman church of the first century was probably representative of other Christian communities that occupied some not easily defined place on a spectrum--something arguably more than an apocalyptic sect within Judaism but not yet anything like an identifiable world religion. One characteristic of these early Christian communities, including the one at Rome, would have been a mix of Jewish and Gentile communicants, and it is reasonable to suppose that the place of the Jewish law might be a source of confusion to them. Paul's solution to the problem signals a decisive break with Judaism. A leading feature of this new faith would be its insistence on quite a severe anthropology. Humanity has fallen too far to be able to help itself. Its estrangement from God can be ameliorated only by God. Everyone, friend and foe, recognizes this as Christian orthodoxy, but it wouldn't have had to turn out that way. It's because of Paul that it did turn out that way. The gospel narratives came later and don't require it. As Luther indicates, the letter to the Romans has the strongest claim to being the urtext of the Christian religion.
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