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Center for Theology
Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory, NC
The Festival of the Reformation
Pericope Study, October 21, 2003
Gospel Lesson: John 8:31-36
1. "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples" -- A big "if" these days. A big "if" across time. Luther's stand at Worms, his conscience captive to the Word of God, was to continue in that Word, as a disciple, no matter what. Though signal in the church, Luther's position was hardly unique. The same Jeremiah of new covenant articulation voiced a similar position, rather as a lament: "If I say, 'I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,' then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.'" (20:9) And Paul can hardly be challenged as to his claim that "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." (II Timothy 4:7)
But those who continue in His Word are ever challenged by those whose claims to faithfulness do not ring true to the Source. Already in Paul's Corinth there were those who challenged the notion of resurrection (c. 15). It is always difficult to discern motives, but the history of the church is mottled by those who sought to continue in the Word but whose efforts are either patently or suspiciously heretical or apostate: Basilides and Valentinus, Sabellius and Arius, Joseph Smith and John Shelby Spong. Ancient presbyters and theologians, rustic autodidacts and avant garde bishops, they form a long syllabus of errors that demonstrate, sometimes only long after the fact, the difficulty of the Lord's conditional clause: "if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples."
Even among those who name the name of Luther there are now those unwilling to accept the Word of God as norming norm for faith and life. Among the many sad contests in the Lutheran church (ELCA) there stands out the question of the status of the Word of God to norm either faith or life. At the first level is "theocentric christology," which challenges the claim of the Savior that "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one cometh to the Father but by me." Jesus the Christ becomes one among several, if not many, possible avenues to God.
Thus in the name of tolerance-amid-diversity, the claim to continue in His Word is eroded if not evaporated. Respect for the integrity of other religions of the world is a necessity, over against prejudice and controversy, to say nothing of violence. Dialogue is desired, even mandatory. But who sacrifices on the altar of tolerance the centrality of the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection as the Way to the Father, does not continue in the Word and is at best a specious disciple, if not an apostate, however well-meaning.
But the flaccid are no less a problem than the rigid. Hoarding the Word and making it exclusive to one's own communion - or turning the Word into a weapon of orthodoxy - violates the spirit of Jesus' words: it does not so continue in His Word. Just as bad, confidence in one's orthodoxy, however properly informed, is no insurance that faithfulness will consistently prevail. Such confidence may well allow at the fringes, and then at the heart, practices newly popular but clearly marginal to the faith. A Missouri brother (LCMS) remarked to me that "Schmucker has won." That is, the unconfessional eagerness of Samuel Simon Schmucker to construct a "general protestant" frontier church, with Lutherans blended in, a Schmuckerism that came out of Gettysburg in the 1830s, has finally prevailed.
I thought he meant ELCA, referencing the uncritical embrace in Philadelphia, 1997, an agreement that embraces diverse eucharistic theologies and welcomes to pulpit and altar pastors of traditions not uniformly committed to trinitarian orthodoxy - and, in some cases, welcoming moral heterodoxy, lifting up as blessed to the church behavior universally scorned in the scriptures.
Sadly, he responded, however much that may be true of the ELCA, it is also the case with Missouri. I was astonished. He explained that Schmucker had not only infiltrated but was threatening to dominate the LCMS, in the form of the triumph of "church growth" practices over the theology and worship according to the tradition. Especially the worship. Incipient in user-friendly, nonconfessional worship is a theology flaccid as to Law and Gospel, as to simul justus et peccator, semper penitens, as to Who and what are being confessed and believed. Lex orandi, lex credendi.
The "Lutheran construal," to borrow a phrase from James Nuechterlein, is yet at a phase of proposition. That is, following the analysis of Robert Jenson and Eric Gritsch, the Lutheran dogmatic proposal (i.e., that "justification is by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ" be a dogma of the church) remains just that: a proposal. On Sunday, October 31, 1999, at Augsburg, Roman Catholic Cardinal Cassidy and heads of church in the Lutheran World Federation signed a "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification," which addresses mutual understandings on justification. Though the statement "does not claim to have resolved all points related to the Lutheran and Roman Catholic understandings of justification, " it does declare that "the remaining differences on justification are not church dividing." Different reads on the Joint Declaration still remain, in both communions.
"If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples..." The effort continues, to continue in His word, and to overcome radical discontinuities of the past. God give us strength and wisdom, first to discern the word, and then to continue in it.
2. "You will know the truth and the truth shall make you free." - There have been two significant "sunderings" of this quotation from the Lord in St. John 's eighth chapter. The first was the secular disengagement of the conditional clause from the main clause: that is, the separation of "if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples" from "you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Modern education follows the Enlightenment premise that indeed knowing the truth is a necessary precondition for freedom, but that both knowing the truth and being made free are enterprises that can be carried on quite apart from any discipleship to the Lord. Indeed, from the secular point of view, can only be carried on quite apart from any prior commitments to transcendent authority, other than to the ascendancy of reason and an often unspoken adherence to material causality only.
One does not want to suspect that the founders of this college had any such separation in mind when they used only the phrase from the main clause as the college motto: ("the Truth shall make you free"). Certainly from those who insisted, in the college's charter filed with the state of North Carolina, that "the college shall teach the scriptures and the (Lutheran) confessions, even if the synod does not!" there is no sign of abandoning the conditional clause! Nevertheless, for generations that often do not know Jesus, much less Joseph, the phrase stands naked of its condition: "if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples."
I do not want to quibble over the assertion that in Christ all truth coheres. In the cosmic (that is, universal) sense, all truth finds its genesis and its telos in Christ the Word Incarnate. That we believe and that we confess. But the search for the truths of art and science and philosophy are everywhere being conducted apart from any overt assertion of the cosmic Christ, in whom all things hold together. Is it enough (satis est!) that it is the church which knows this, and not the present age? Perhaps. But, however one argues it, one cannot deny that the sundering of "my word" and "disciples" from "you will know the truth" and "the truth shall make you free" has both accompanied and facilitated not only the relativization of truth and but also the enhancement of a freedom that knows no bounds.
That's the first sundering: of the conditional clause from the main clause. But there is another divorce, more recent and more serious, yea, more virulent. That is the sundering of "truth" from "freedom," not only in the culture but especially in the church. I cannot improve on the work of John Paul II in this regard. His Veritatis Splendor, 1993, stands as a monument at the end of the 20th century, a brilliant attempt to correct errors in moral theology in the church. A major contention, if not error, is noted by Russell Hittinger's designation of "uncommanded man" as accurately illustrative of men and women inside and outside the church who will not be commanded by God but who have usurped with their freedom the prerogative of defining the content of the good. That is, in our freedom we wrest from God the truth of what is good and what is evil. Adam and Eve began the enterprise and humanity has continued it across time, sometimes surreptitiously. But in the present day now openly and often with great pride: "the Bible is culturally conditioned. All truth is culturally conditioned. Truth is radically subjective. I will spin as I will. I will decide what is good. Your definition is not the same as mine. Words are what individuals make them."
The currency of deconstruction is the yield of the radical and joyful separation of truth from freedom. Sadly, also in the church. More commonly in the ELCA than in Rome. Here and there, among pastors and bishops even, behavior and relationships condemned by the scripture are declared intrinsic to God's good creation. The Episcopalian Church U.S. has embraced and is, unless constrained by the recent Lambeth summit, prepared formally to ordain and install, a "practicing" gay bishop, in New Hampshire. Ratzinger's letter to Plano and John Paul's words to the Archbishop of Canterbury notwithstanding.
Writes the Bishop of Rome, in 1993: "A new situation has come about within the Christian community itself, which has experienced the spread of numerous doubts and objections of a human and psychological, social and cultural, religious and even properly theological nature, with regard to the Church's moral teachings. It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of anthropological and ethical presuppositions. At the root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth. Thus the traditional doctrine regarding the natural law, and the universality and the permanent validity of its precepts, is rejected; certain of the Church's moral teachings are found simply unacceptable; and the Magisterium itself is considered capable of intervening in matters of morality only in order to 'exhort consciences' and to 'propose values,' in light of which each individual will independently make his or her decisions and life choices. (VS, # 4, emphasis added)
This in the church of Rome. Absent a Magisterium since the sixteenth century, now awash in dissent from the authority of the scriptures, Protestants are often reduced to trying to make lemonade. Or, worse, overtly to celebrate the lemons as the gospel, newly understood. In the imagery of the church as hospital, for sinners repentant and forgiven, what is now being advocated in some quarters is to take disease and call it health.
The sundering of freedom from the truth is a logical, even inevitable, consequence of the sundering of the conditional clause from the primary one. If we do not continue in the Word, we are no longer His disciples. And if we are no longer His disciples, whether we intend so or not, we shall sooner or later--and now is the later--separate freedom from truth. We do it by absolutizing freedom and relativizing truth: if my freedom is absolute then I can define my own truth.
The theological problem with this is primary; primary that is, as to the first commandment: Who is God here? The ethical problem is immediately following: Who will determine what is Good, much less mandate one to do it? What is the Good becomes a matter of personal judgment or preference and, finally, a matter of power--whether of force or of votes. The political problem with this is the social yield: absent truth, freedom becomes chaos--first theological and philosophical, then very quickly moral. Eventually, social. It is not too great a stretch to suggest that we are already into the "eventually."
Faithfulness and integrity require that we do not make the sundering moves. God give us strength and wisdom, first to discern the Word, and then to continue in it. "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
JLY - submitted 10.23.01 rev. 10.21.03
First Lesson: Jeremiah 31:31-34
1. Jeremiah writes of a new covenant (kainh diaqhkh) that the LORD will make with His people. The old covenant - and the one in which the people of God live during Jeremiah's time - is the one made at Sinai, is one that they broke, "though I was their husband," says the LORD. Husband recalls the language of Hosea and others of the eighth century, an understanding that Judah and Israel were as unfaithful wives, whoring after other gods, even as the pathetic Gomer.
2. Notice that this kainh diaqhkh will be made with both the house of Judah and the house of Israel. Israel has been defunct for a hundred years, victim of bad leadership, bad faith, and an equally bad Sennecherib. The new covenant will not be made with an Israel who can stand on her hind legs among the peoples of the earth, but a conquered cipher. Here is, implicitly, hope for the future: the kainh diaqhkh respects and elevates those non-entities who are conquered , vanquished, and exiled.
3. Judah is, of course, little better off, with Nebuchadnezzar only a few years away. But, more than any single act of prophetic symbolism, this prophecy of Jeremiah makes him infinitely more a prophet of hope than one of doom. As a prophet of doom he is simply announcing the consequences of apostasy, faithlessness, and sin--including injustice, but not reducible to injustice! As a prophet making his point, Jeremiah donned an iron yoke to symbolize the unbreakable bondage coming, then sent Baruch beyond the Jordan with a change of breechcloth to advise the people to "pack your extra underwear, boys, you're going on a long trip (into exile)."
4. But in announcing the new covenant, Jeremiah invokes a tradition as old as mankind and deeper than the alienation of apostasy and sin: God establishing relationship with His people. Irenæus understood four covenants: Adam, Noah, and Moses before Christ, with Christ as the "new Adam," in his theology of recapitulation--a new head and new start for humanity. [Why Irenæus omitted Abraham would be interesting to research. Surely Paul's invocation of the "child of flesh" and "child of promise" is reflective of the pivotal relationship between the LORD and the man through whom all peoples would "get themselves a blessing."]
4. The new covenant will be unlike the old in that it will be written upon their hearts, instead of upon tablets of stone. Here is an instrument of knowing (gnosis!) that is intimate if not intrinsic--they will not need to teach each other saying "know the LORD," for all shall know Him, from the least to the greatest of them.
5. But what precisely is the law that is written upon their hearts? Is it the decalogue? Is it the sum of the requirements? Is the "law" here the content of the marriage of Divine Husband and people of God? Surely Jeremiah means to contrast the law written upon the hearts with that which impacts the people from the outside, from the mountain and from the stone--instruments and media external to the self and soul but impacting self and soul with consequences of requirement and judgment. In the new covenant there is an immediacy of intimacy, God invading the heart with His own inscription, "written" within them.
6. The apostle Paul knows of those outside the Law (gentiles) who do the law nonetheless. Paul knows of a "natural law" intuited by some who are not children of the Sinai covenant. (Romans 1 & 2) He at least implies that these people outside the Sinai covenant have "within them" what the Law requires. But that is not the same as what Jeremiah anticipates. The "new covenant within the heart" is not something that people intuit or that is otherwise intrinsic to their own efforts and consciousness, or accessible to their native reason. It is, rather, a content placed there by God Himself--the Law revealed in the coming covenant, not upon stone or that shared in creation, but a relationship overtly begun and nurtured by the LORD.
7. Jeremiah's words, coming at a time of crisis for the people of the covenant, portend not only good but also salvation. He doe not know the content of what would come at Calvary, only its coming. Whatever the content of "the law written within the hearts," God reckons the new covenant as constitutive of His forgiveness: "for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
Second Lesson: Romans 3:19-28
1. Here is the heart of the gospel:
- "the whole world (is) held accountable to God
- "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law"
- "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"
- "they are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus"
- "we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law."
Paul knows that under the law, the whole world is accountable to God. There is no exception for Jew or Greek, slave or free. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No human being will be justified--made righteous, make himself worthy, make himself acceptable to God--by works of the law. But the Good News is that the righteousness of God has been manifested--declared, evidenced, invoked, broadcast for all to see--apart from law. It is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. The new covenant, first announced by Jeremiah, is a covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ, "whom God put forward as an expiation ... to be received by faith." The content of Jeremiah's new covenant turns out to be the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
2. The nascent church at Rome needed to hear Paul's message of God's new order of things. "No human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law." It could hardly have been put more clearly. For those who have any concern to be "right with God" (made righteous, justified, in good standing), the answer to the quest does not reside in proper self-understanding, not even of the Socratic sort. The answer does not reside in aspiring to or achieving Plato's understanding of the Idea of the Good, however virtuous such a good man may be, however upright and pure such a woman. The answer does not reside in Aristotle's arhth, excellence of the rational essence of humanity properly applied to things of reason, including proper control of the appetites. Nor does the answer reside in those whose first move is obedience to God's law, understanding both cosmic reality and ethical behavior in the proper acknowledgement of the God who is God and that what He requires is not proper self-knowledge or conception of the Good or arhth but obedience. It just isn't there for humanity to deliver, either as to thought or deed or will. The problem is that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." The works are inadequate. Obedience is finally inadequate. Even the law is inadequate.
3. "Through the law comes knowledge of sin." The frame of reference for Paul's audience was a paradigm of obedience to the law. Paul himself had come through what seems in retrospect a conservative vein of Jewish thought, the Pharisee Puritanism rigorously pursued. Few in Paul's time understood the radicality of sin--as rebellion and separation from God, as being essentially flawed, as being by nature sinful and unclean.
4. Few in Luther's time understood either the nature of sin or the nature of grace. The paradigm for humanity in Luther's time was essentially medieval. The position of a man or woman was, in relation to God, that of serf to vassal, subject to sovereign. The grace of God was tamed and dispensed by the church. Humanity's tendency to codify and calibrate had domesticated the radical wildness of God's grace. More than domesticated. More accurately, ossified. Everything was tame and proscribed. Sin is the Pelagian notion of actions or thoughts done. Forgiveness is proper enumeration and penance, works done to atone. Humanity reduced to the protocols of medieval court and manor, with God as sovereign whose dignity is offended by their very presence, surely by their vile peasant stupidity. Something to atone, some satisfaction to be made. Christ and the saints are full of merits, plenty from the saints, inexhaustible from Christ. The church is the chancellor of the treasury of merits, dispensing to peasants ( of whatever station and order in life) what they need to receive in order to get it right. These people needed to hear about the "grace as a gift," about humanity "justified by faith apart from works of law." And Luther said it clearly. Unmistakably. The church of that time blinked at the clarity, balked at the implications. Raised the question of authority. Recoiled from the plain truth of the gospel.
5. We live among a people who understand estrangement from each other as much as--or more than--they understand estrangement from God. Many of them live in uncomfortable tension between the ashes of a relationship they hoped for and the reality of what they've got. Others bear the pain of having to walk away, hounded by sin on both sides, their own and his or hers--"My covenant which they broke, though I was their husband," says the LORD.
Perhaps the analogy of broken relationships can catch the attention of a people who seem to be little acquainted with God's wrath and judgment, who are antinomian (against the law, above the law) in an ignorant, if not arrogant, sort of way. Christian antinomianism is of the arrogant sort if one can say, "because of the gospel, I have no more need of the law." Or, "because of the gospel, the law does not apply." Or even worse, "because of my new understandings, the law does not apply."
But I say ignorant because the last thirty years have marked a dramatic shift in both the understanding of piety and the breaches of piety among American Lutherans. The large theological dragon to be slain by young pastors coming out of seminary in the late 60s was "legalism," a kind of notion of salvation by works of law, especially virulent here in the buckle of the Bible Belt. The several cultural revolutions of the last third of the 20th century have obliterated self-conscious legalism in the popular mind. Denigrating God's law as a mere cultural convention, or perhaps, less self-consciously, focusing on God's love as "acceptance of me on my own terms of self-worth," many understand life in the gospel as a life free from guilt--a liberation from both the consequences of sin and from the requirements of the law.
Luther was obliged to recall the church to the proclamation of the gospel. What he saw in Wittenberg was a system and structure that had largely reduced faith to quantifiable observance and empty rituals, distorting the gospel not so much to a vigorous legalism but to a piety that concerned itself with purchased indulgences, funded masses, perfunctory prayers.
6. I would argue that the proclamation of the Gospel in our time presupposes a vigorous preaching of the Law. The Law is not obliterated in the new covenant. Adultery is still sin. Honoring one's parents is required. Keeping God's name holy is not perfunctory but mandatory. The Good News is not that the Law is crushed and obliterated. The Good News is not that the requirements of the Law no longer apply. The Good News is that God does not judge us by our achievements within the Law. We are, instead, declared righteous by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.
We will not begin to understand either the power or the beauty of the Gospel until we understand the requirements, the severity, and the judgment of the Law. We will not understand the requirements and severity of the law until we come to terms with its Author. The Author of the law is the author of the universe, the Father of all, the Judge of all. "You shall have no other gods," the commandments begin. Commandments! The practical atheism of our time makes God remote, even impotent, to the oi poloi, even to ostensible Christians. Luther's appreciation of his predicament so far surpasses the selbsverstandnis of most of us so as not even to be in the same universe of humanity. Luther understood that his situation before the wrath of God was absolutely untenable. Luther understood that the requirements are there, articulated and enforced. Luther knew what he was up against.
So many of us skip to the grace part--which is the Word part, the Gospel part--without paying attention to our predicament. We address our predicament with moments of affirmation, seek self-esteem from sources congenial, "compadres" kind. We seem unwilling to tend our soul in any sense other than its aspect as self, a modern distortion of soul unknown to Greeks and Hebrews, unaddressed by Jesus--except in terms of what must be denied, that is, rejected, along with taking up the Cross, in order to follow Him.
It is now fashionable to ignore the power of God. Various proponents of natural theology are re-invoking one or another form of the teleological argument, which in turn invokes causality, the Uncaused First Cause. Much of liberal theology, including not a few in the ELCA, have reduced God to metaphor by reducing talk about God to metaphor. The antipathy to putative patriarchy dismisses not only God as Father but also God as power God as person, even God as God.
7. The modern paradigm is hardly the subservient medieval peasant, whether of the common or royal variety. Restricting our view to the United States, although as many as 98% acknowledge God as "existing," significantly fewer acknowledge Him as Lord. In a culture of plenty, seduction by Mammon takes many forms. In a culture of freedom, the notion of obedience is consigned to primitive enclaves. In a state where just authority is constitutionally declared to be first and only by the consent of the governed, many have made the political paradigm also the moral paradigm: God's authority in religion has its origin and its limits, like the state's authority in political affairs, by the consent of the governed. The law is, in the main, regarded as positive, rather than natural or divine, in origin: a human construct.
In the church as in the culture, the paradigm is not obedience but freedom--the freedom, in principle, of the human person from any constraint except what is self-acknowledged and self-consented. Freedom not only to decide what and when to act and say, but also to define what is sin. Theologians, consigning scriptures to cultural construct, attempt to enlighten holy writ. Reformers seek to enlighten by now making noble relationships and acts declared by scripture to be vile and sinful. Reformation, understood uncritically as "change," is blessed as the proper avenue to enlighten in the direction of new cultural understandings.
There is no short answer to a culture with the bit between its teeth, to a church so acculturated as to presume to redefine as loving, caring, committed, and just what God in scripture declares to be sin. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" is invoked to silence voices of prophetic concern. The fallen condition of humanity is understood as warrant to preclude anyone's making legitimate judgment of what someone has consented to as just and loving.
8. Only the power of God in the Law makes the power of God in the Gospel meaningful. Only the realization of how we are trapped in sin and failure before God can make our understanding of grace any more than "Ho hum. Of course God forgives us. We deserve it. God don't make no junk." Such a view is the apotheosis sin, because it amounts to saying that we have no sin.
"Change" is not Reformation. Consent is not grace. Man is not god. The law is not, in the first instance, a human construct. God is not mocked.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we continue in His Word we are truly His disciples. And we shall know the Truth. And the Truth shall make us free.
JLY 10.26..99
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9. All this is in advance of, and written prior to, the events of September 11, 2001. How the tragedy and trauma affect the spiritual life of this nation remains to be seen. What we have at this point is increased attendance in worship services, along with increased intensity and renewed interest in patriotism. What we also see, according to the Charlotte Observer, of October 22nd, is a decrease in the divorce traffic (as reported by divorce lawyers), an increased interest and intensity among singles to seek a mate--that is, to marry instead of simply to "make it on one's own," to commit instead of merely to connect--to pay attention to family relationships and joys, to attempt to work things out and live in mutual respect instead of breaking off. The reaction may well trigger still more thinking about what is really important, embracing fundamentals instead of what is exotic as lifestyle. If the "joy ride" of freewheeling economy and international isolation is indeed eclipsed by the new situation, then perhaps a more sober and meaning-seeking life is ahead. Too early to tell.
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JLY 10.22.01
Sunday, October 29, 2003
Reformation Sunday
Romans
3:19-28
The Rev. C. Pierson Shaw,
Jr
Romans 3:19-28
SECOND READING: Romans 3:19-28
Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reformation believed the heart of the gospel was found in these words of Paul written to the Romans. All people have sinned, but God offers forgiveness through Christ Jesus. We are justified, or put right with God, by grace through faith in Jesus.
Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks
to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and
the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20For "no human
being will be justified in his sight" by deeds prescribed by the law, for
through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
21But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
27Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. 1
Sitz im Leben
Based on the remarks Paul makes in 1:10-15 it is clear that Paul is preparing for a journey to Rome. He has done all he can do in the eastern Mediterranean and now he wants to extend his missionary efforts to Spain, and he seeks the support of the Roman congregation in this endeavor. (15:24). From Romans 16:23 we learn that Paul's host is Gaius. Gaius is mentioned as the only one that Paul remembers having baptized in Corinth. This would suggest the writing of this letter to the Romans may well have come from Corinth. If one uses the Acts timeline (Which must be used with some caution) the writing of the letter to the Romans would have likely preceded Paul's last trip to Jerusalem to deliver the "contribution to the saints" there. This would place the dating of the letter to the Romans around the winter of 55 or 56 AD. This would mean that Paul has written his canonical letters: the letters to the Thessalonians, Philippians, and the letters to the Corinthians and Galatians. The letter to the Romans is one that seems to want to engender trust and put forth a convincing argument of ideas. One can only imagine that some of the Judaizers of Galatia and Corinth may well have worked they way to Rome. In Romans 3:7-8 Paul seems to suggest that certain slanderous charges have been leveled against him. The fact that Paul seems to address a Roman Congregation, which in some places is Gentile in origin and in other places, seems Jewish in origin, would suggest a mixed congregation.
The fact that Paul is addressing Jewish Christians at all seems to violate a "principle of noninterference." It is a principle stated in Romans 15:20-21 and in II Corinthians 10:15-16 and which was reached at the Jerusalem Council. Under this principle or agreement Paul served as an Apostle to the Gentiles and further he was only to pursue missionary activity where others had not begun it. So why then does Paul write to this Church at all? It seems to violate the "principle of noninterference" on two counts. First it seems that there is a Synagogue community there. Secondly he did not found this Christian congregation. There are two hypotheses, which have been put forward to explain Paul's violation of the "principle of noninterference." The first is what Paul W. Meyer calls the "Roman Exile Hypothesis." Under this hypothesis a disturbance is created within the Church in Rome between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians around 54 AD when the Emperor Claudius died. Claudius had issued a degree banning Jews from Rome in 49 AD. Presumably the Church would have begun prior to this date and under this hypothesis would have been made up of both a Jewish and a Gentile contingent. What is a matter of history is that Claudius' ban was issued to quell the disturbances over the Messiahship of Jesus. For Claudius this was a Jewish question. Remove the Jews from Rome, so he thought, and you rid the problem. In Corinth upon his arrival around 50 AD Paul meets Aquila and Prisca whom he acknowledges as head of a house church in Asia (I Corinthians 16:19 and Acts 18:2-3 "Aquila and his wife Priscilla"). Prisca and Aquila are themselves exiles who are affected by the "Edict of Claudius." Presumably the edict only affected Jews and not Gentile members of the Church in Rome. If in fact the Gentile Christians were left behind and were reunited with their Jewish convert brothers and sisters in 54AD there would have been enormous problems in reconciling the two groups after as resented five years of Jewish exile. If such were the case it was not a matter of the Jewish converts accepting their new Gentile brothers into the faith but rather the reverse. Gentile Christians might see their status as one of having subverted the choseness of the Jewish people descended from Abraham. This hypothesis seems to be supported by the arguments laid out in Romans chapters 9-11.
One problem with this hypothesis however, is that Paul does not take sides in the argument. He does not appeal to his Jewish heritage as he did in the letter to the Galatians. Rather than using himself as a model, as a Benjamite, he appeals instead to see Christ as the model. The major flaw with this hypothesis is that nowhere does the Apostle directly appeal to the Gentile Christians to welcome their Jewish brothers and sisters back. If this were Paul's intent, would not he in some way come directly to the point? This is not to suggest that there may not be some concern for the unity of both Jews and Gentiles, only that there may well be a broader intent. Paul Meyer favors a second more plausible hypothesis which he calls the "Jerusalem Crisis Hypothesis." Under this view the time and the place of the writing of the Letter to the Romans is as before, it is postmarked from Corinth in the winter of 55 AD. What would support this view is Romans 15:30-33 where Paul expressing anxiety over his pending visit to Jerusalem. What remains a central truth for Paul for both Jews and Gentiles is the unity in the Gospel, which he preaches. He prepares to go to Jerusalem as he carries an offering that comes from both Jews and Greeks in Churches in Asia. For Paul the relevancy of his entire missionary work is at stake. Not only does he need the Roman Church's support as he goes to Jerusalem but he needs their understanding and support as he leaves Jerusalem and comes to them in Rome. He must not appear to come to the capitol of the empire as a apparent "freelancer" in the Gospel. Rather he must be seen in Jerusalem and in Rome as a legitimate unifier of both Jews and Gentiles in the Gospel of Christ.
As he prepares to go to Jerusalem Paul wants to put forth the conviction in Chapters 1 and 2 that through the faithfulness and impartiality of God, both Jew and Gentile have been equally rightwised for the sake of Jesus Christ. In Chapters 3 and 4 he points to Abraham "who is father of us all." In Chapters 5-8 we see the terms of true obedience in and through Christ. In 9-11 Paul puts forth the meaning of Israel for the life of the Church. Then in 12-15, he further expounds on Israel's role by revealing how Israel and the Church share equal freedom for the life of the world. In the end what is at stake for Paul is not so much Gentiles receiving the Jewish exiles home as under the "Roman Exile Hypothesis." Rather it is that Rome might not see Jerusalem and all that it represents as a threat to gospel to the Gentiles. But perhaps equally and if not more important for Paul was that the Jerusalem Church might not see the Roman church and what it represents as a threat to their mission. In the end what makes Paul's letter, which Luther would later call "his Katie," so powerful as his magnum opus is that it does not come with all of the pleas and exhortations for unity as with the letters to the Thessalonians, the Corinthians, or the Galatians. Instead Paul's thesis "that a gracious God who has rightwised both Jew and Gentile in and through faith apart from works of the law," comes most clearly through in this his final Will and Testament to the whole Church. Ironically, it was this thesis that may well have been the core of what led to his own martyrdom. For Jewish officials who saw in Paul an attempt to bring about the unity of both Jews and Gentiles in the Gospel, such unity would jeopardize the special status awarded to Judaism alone within the David's ancient capitol and throughout the Roman Empire. 2
Exegesis of Romans 3:19-28
As our pericope begins Paul has just paraphrased quotes from the Septuagint specifically Psalms: 14, 53, 5, 140, 10, 36, and Isaiah 59. Then he continues: Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. He is using these rather contextually unconnected references to say in this context here that all are guilty before God. But in verse 20 he puts a new twist on the Torah (law). For "no human being will be justified in his sight" by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. While the law enables us to see that we are accountable we can only see our sin. We can not be justified or reconciled to God through the law. Self-reconciliation in other words is impossible. Here Paul is almost restating in a sentence what he had said to the Church in Galatia in Chapter 3 of that letter. Only by understanding that the law (Torah) is a gift to both the entire Gentile and Jew is Paul's argument possible here. Yet while this Torah is gift it exposes the harsh reality that "we are all, both Gentile and Greek, guilty before God. Given the harshness of this reality we cannot be reconciled to God by merely living and following the prescriptions of the Torah. Indeed what is revealed is that we are sinful since we are unable to sufficiently keep Torah. Less we become Marcionites however, and abolish the Torah for the sake of the rules and prescriptions Paul reminds us: But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets. Here Paul stands with the Evangelists and proclaims that the salvivic act of the Christ event stands in continuity with the law and the prophets. In other words God's work of reconciling us in Christ Jesus comes as the pinnacle of the Heilsgeschicte. Now comes the means of God's rightwising activity. It is "The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." Christ becomes the vehicle of God's rightwising activity. That is to say that Christ does what the law with it demands could not do. We can not come to God, rather it is Christ who has brought God to us. Does Christ do this in the incarnation? Here once again in his writing, Paul points not to the incarnation but to the crucifixion. Paul begins to expound upon his thesis by revealing the universality of the Gospel: "For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Now comes the beginning of Paul's expanded thesis: "they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." The justifying faith is a gift that that comes by Christ's action. This redemption is not like the redemption described by sports commentators of Sunday afternoon describing how the extraordinary actions of athletes allow for self-redemption. Instead what Paul is describing is rooted in the Hebrew concept of the "Goel" in which the nearest male was to marry the widow of his kinsman in order to support her and if necessary avenge for any blood guilt against the slayer. Therefore the one who has faith has been goeled and brought back to God by the work of Christ. In fact through this "grace as a gift" we have been brought to faith in God. Then in the next verse Paul continues. "Whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. It is the word hilostarion that has been translated in one of thee ways: "a sacrifice of atonement" (NRSV) "expiation" (RSV) "Propitiation" (KJV). The distinction in these words is slight yet, they contain slightly different nuances. Propitiate is closer to Jerome's translation in the Latin Vulgate and refers to satisfaction to satisfy an angry god or deity. This use Luther rejected. Instead he favored "expiate" which refers to the mercy seat in which a price was paid for the crime or sin. Thus were one to translate the verb hilostarion as "expiation" it would suggest a sacrifice on the "mercy seat" whose blood has satisfied the law that blood must be spilled in order to make satisfaction. This is certainly supported by the ancient usage of the goel or redeemer who avenges for a bloodguilt, only in the case of Christ as our redeemer he becomes the sacrifice on the mercy seat of the cross. The NRSV translation uses the term that makes use of a word for which there is no direct cognate or even equivalent in Greek.3 Atonement refers to reconciling one estranged party from another. Yet, when pressed on the matter as to which rendering of the word hilostarion was closest to Paul's intent given the context, Ernst Kässemann suggested that all three renderings were bound up in the sense of the word hilostarion. For the sake of Jesus, God sees our sins as propitiated and by the blood of Christ's sacrifice. The death sentence against us is nullified and by the cross we are reconciled to the God whom we could not be reconciled to by works of the law. Christ Jesus has become our Goel not just taking us back in a way that we could not come on our own but he has become the blood sacrifice satisfying the laws demands that the bloodguilt must be assuaged. The avenger / redeemer has become for us the victim. And how may we know that this is so: It is "effective through faith." He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. Paul reminds us here that we have our sins forgiven and as a result are rightwised, that is declared righteous before God as judge through this Christ's work. And so, do we show that we have been rightwised be talking about our works, "A theology of the glory? Or do we boast in the work of what Christ has done? Or as Paul's put it: "Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law." Works of the law prove nothing. The fact that we have faith in the one who has rightwised us with God, who is alone righteous, is proof that we have been declared righteous. The image in Romans of the Judge who declares us righteous is not so much a criminal court judge as a magistrate. We need not even face trial for our sins, we have been declared righteous before God by God's gracious gift of faith in Christ. This is something that trying to live by the expectations of Torah can not get us. In as much as God is revealed as a God of compassion and grace in the promises of the Torah, so now have we been forgiven and brought to faith as our great inheritance, through the one who has been put forth as our hilostarion and is our Goel.
Preaching on Romans 3:19-28
So often when this text is used at Reformation services it is used as an opportunity to discuss how Luther discovered this truth of the gospel and how Rome failed to see it. What sometimes comes across is that Luther founded a new church full of the pure Gospel and how wrong Rome was. Wow aren't we great! This over simplistic view not only is bad history but bad exegesis. Luther's rediscovery was nothing new. As loathe, as we are sometimes to admit it, it was Paul that informed Augustine Huss, Luther, and Wesley, and continues to inform and reform. Through all of them the Holy Spirit is at work. One of Luther's openings to "the very gates of paradise" in this letter was through none other than the Torah, specifically the Psalmist. In the end as the Holy Spirit led Luther to discover a "Righteous God who loves" in the 16th Century the same Spirit worked through this same Epistle leading the Second Vatican Council to such reforms within Catholicism in the 20th.
In so far as the text itself it may be helpful to remember the point that amid the legal language of the Letter to the Romans, God functions as a magistrate not as a criminal court judge. Another matter that should be remembered is that under the Aristilian rules of law one is either to plead guilty or not guilty. Modern press accounts often render court verdicts and pleas as guilty or innocent. The difference in the terms not guilty and innocent may seem subtle, but there is in fact quite a bit of difference. Not guilty means that by a preponderance of the evidence the charged person could not be determined to be "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." Innocent suggests the charged person in no way perpetrated the crime. For our purposes it may be helpful to think of us appearing before God who is our magistrate judge. We must confess that we are guilty sinners as charged and enter a "plea of guilty as charged." Under the "law" we should be bound over for sentencing. But God takes a radical step. For our sake his Son takes the penalty instead and thereby relieves us of the sentence of the trial judge and of the law itself. He has paid the debt in our stead. God takes the radical step for the sake of his Son and declares us "Innocent." By his actions we believe in the love he has for us a see our live in the law in a whole new way.
1Words for Worship 2003
2Harpers Bible Commentary: "Romans" Paul W. Meyer pp. 1130-1132.
3Mercer Dictionary of the Bible, p. 74.
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