While
following along with the Westar Institute’s challenge to read all seven
undisputed letters of Paul went along quite well for most of July, I admit to
some serious procrastination when it came time to read Romans. In the spirit of completing what I started,
though, I will offer some comments here.
First, a
word on Philippians. Brilliant. Bright.
A ray of sunshine, frankly, and the most poetic of Paul’s writings. He seems finally to glimpse the possibility
of unity centered on the joy and love of Christ. His ego is still a bit in the way, but it’s
starting to recede, and good on him for it.
Now on to
Romans: his most intellectual, and therefore most convoluted, attempt to work
out the significance of the revelation of Christ, both for the Jewish
community, and for the Gentiles. There
are some harsh words on human sexuality in here, but it helps to read before
and after the ‘hot’ verses. Paul
is concerned about sin, not for its own sake, but because in his mind it is a
sign of idolatry. Those whose lives are
given over to sins of all sorts are expressing in their outward conditions
(which Paul calls ‘the body’) the state of their inward spirit. This letter, then, is Paul’s attempt to
account for the presence of sin among people who have received either the
revelation of the Law, or the revelation of Christ.
Paul
rightly understands that the consequence of Adam’s sin is the universal
condition of suffering and death. I say
rightly because what Paul is pointing to here is, in fact, the human condition –
all sin, all suffer, all die. And Paul
rightly claims that Jesus Christ is the witness and example that sin, suffering
and death are not God’s last word for humanity – that forgiveness and
restoration (he calls it ‘salvation,’ [soteria: rescue, safety]) are. His words at the end of chapter 8 ring out:
neither life not death, nor angels nor principalities, nor anything already in
existence nor anything still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the
depths, nor any created thing whatever will be able to come between us and the
love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-9, NJB) God intends all humanity to live in a state
of perfect freedom, and the path to that goal is life ‘in Christ.’
He then
goes on to make the convert’s universal error – if coming to this understanding
has made it all crystal clear to me, then this must be the understanding (i.e.,
belief in and acceptance of Jesus Christ as personal savior) that will work for
everyone else as well. And so he tries
to create a new 'universal' community, one that transcends the former divisions
of Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free, but creates his own division
in doing so: his ‘us’ and ‘them’ is ‘believers’ and ‘idolaters’. This may, perhaps, be a response to two
concerns: 1, as noted above, Paul is well aware that sin persists, both within
and beyond both Jewish and Christian communities. And 2, God’s perfect freedom to both forgive
and condemn appears to need defending, as the references to Moses and Isaiah in
chapter 10 would suggest. If God’s love
is completely universal, not dependent upon human actions or statements of
belief or any other criterion, then God’s supreme freedom to judge among human
persons is compromised. It is a
conundrum which plagues theologians in the form of theodicy: if God is all-good, how can evil exist? But it does.
And moral evil, as indication of the rejection of God’s grace, is where
Paul draws the line.
I'm going to go out an a limb, though, as the title of this post indicates. I’d like to
think of Paul here as a proto-universalist.
Perhaps I’m being optimistic, but here’s my evidence: Paul felt himself
compelled to preach the crucified Christ as God’s message of forgiving love to
the entire non-Jewish world – precisely the people least likely to understand
what he was talking about. The barrier
between Jew and Gentile was the first to come down. After that come the dividing walls, at least
in theory if not yet in practice, between slaves and freemen, and between males
and females. If in Adam all die, even so in Christ all will be made alive. It’s there, just below the surface of the
text, and Paul himself may not even have realized it. But we must see it, and embrace it, if
Christianity is to live up to its own promises.
