The Thesis Restated (3:21–26) Recognizing the role it plays in the diatribal argument is the most important key to interpreting this passage. As the restatement of the thesis, it serves both to respond to the condition elaborated by the antithesis (that “all have fallen short of the glory of God”) and to explicate the dimensions of the good news that were expressed so compactly in 1:16–17. In its present form, the passage is clearly and completely the result of Paul’s fashioning. Whether some portion of it may have had some antecedent form is of less importance. It has been suggested, for example, that the basic lines of the passage, dealing with the death of Christ, represent a pre-Pauline tradition into which Paul has inserted his distinctive teaching on the significance of faith (see B. F. Meyer, “The Pre-Pauline Formula in Rom 3:25–26a,” New Testament Studies 29 [1983]: 198–208). This theory is similar to the one holding that Paul made alterations to traditional hymns in passages such as Phil 2:5–11 (see G. Bornkamm, “On Understanding the Christ Hymn, Phil 2:6–11,” in Early Christian Experience [New York: Harper & Row, 1969] 112–22) and Col 1:15–20 (see B. Vawter, “The Colossians Hymn and the Principle of Redaction,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 [1971]:62–81). But language like that in 3:25 is scarcely foreign to Paul or outside his range. Despite being fuller than 1:16–17, the passage is still dauntingly dense, demanding of the reader approaches from several angles. We can begin by noting the overall points Paul wants to establish, before turning to a more detailed discussion of the role assigned to Jesus and to Jesus’ faith. 1. Paul emphasizes that this is something God is doing, in sharp contrast to the “doings of humans” that he has enumerated in 1:18–3:20. God is the subject of this action, this good news. It is God’s righteousness that is being manifested (3:21), God who is the giver of grace as a gift (3:23), God who puts forward Jesus as an expiation (3:25), God’s righteousness that is shown by his forbearance of past sins (3:25) and the making of people righteous in the present (3:26). The good news, once more, is not simply a message from God but a message about God’s work in the world. 2. God’s action reveals who God is. When Paul declares in 3:22 that “there is no distinction,” he echoes the principle enunciated in 2:11, “with God there is no partiality.” The same holds true both for judging and for gifting. God is fair to all creatures. Likewise, God’s action not only “makes them righteous” but “shows that he is righteous” (3:26). Here is the basis for doing theology: just as from the shape of creation one can “know God,” so from human experiences in time one can hope to trace the lines of God’s very nature. 3. Paul stresses the contemporary character of God’s revelation. He begins with “but now” (3:21) and ends with “in the now time” (en tọ̄ nym kairọ̄, 3:26). The word “now” will be used repeatedly in Romans, with the same sense of contrast between a former state of affairs and a present reality. The most forceful of all is the solemn summary statement in 16:25–26, which picks up on the same revelatory language Paul uses here: “the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed” (see also 5:9, 11; 6:19, 21, 22; 7:6, 17; 8:1, 18, 22; 11:5, 30, 31; 13:11). Precisely this emphasis on the “now time” marks Paul’s message as truly “news” and provides Romans with its tremendous energy and sense of urgency: “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (13:11). In Paul’s other letters, 2 Cor 6:2 comes closest to the same sense of immediacy: “Behold now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.” I have deliberately cited these two passages in order to make clear that, although Paul does not explicitly use the word “salvation” in 3:21–26, that is very much what he sees God doing. As the thesis stated, the good news is the “power for salvation” (1:16). 4. God’s revelation in the “now time” is through human experience. We shall see soon how Paul locates the action of God in the obedient death of Jesus. But already in 3:21 he stresses that God’s way of making humans right is being revealed “apart from the law and the prophets.” What this means first of all is that God’s action is really action. That is, God’s revelation is not simply ideational, or verbal, or textual; it is, rather, anthropological. It is action that happens in and through human freedom. It happened in the real human person Jesus, and it continues to happen in the lives of Paul’s readers (3:26), into whose hearts the love of God has been poured through the Holy Spirit (5:5). Here is one of Christianity’s most dramatic claims, setting it apart from both Judaism and Islam, namely, that God has entered fully into human experience in order to rectify relations with humans. Christianity is in this sense not a “religion of the book” in the same way as the other Western monotheistic traditions. There is another sense in which God’s revelation in the now time is “apart from the law and prophets,” and that is the way in which this specific human experience—the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus—appears to contradict the scriptural antecedents provided by Torah. This aspect of things is not emphasized in Romans, although we find the essence of it in 9:30–33, where Paul suggests that his fellow Jews’ zeal for Torah makes them trip over the stumbling block that was the messiah. The scandalous character of the gospel about a crucified messiah is more explicitly displayed by 1 Cor 1:18–26: the death of Jesus on the cross confounded the messianic hopes of Jews who “looked for signs” of a messiah and did not find them in him whose manner of death was, according to Torah itself, cursed by God: “Cursed be everyone who hangs upon a tree” (Deut 21:23; see Gal 3:13). It is this shocking and paradoxical experience of God’s work through the death and resurrection of a failed messiah that demands the “obedience of faith,” a response equivalently radical and unreserved. There was simply no obvious way in which Jesus fit into the precedents of how God had revealed Godself in the past. 5. Yet Paul also asserts that this revelation of God’s righteousness through Jesus is “witnessed to by the law and prophets” (3:21). Here is the dialectical tension established by the experience of God in the crucified messiah. If Torah is read one way, then the experience must be negated: Jesus cannot be messiah if Torah declares him cursed. Yet one can also approach the matter another way: beginning with the experience of Jesus, Torah can be reread in such fashion as to confirm God’s activity in the “now time.” It is precisely this new way of reading that will enable Paul to declare in 10:4, “Christ is the telos of the law,” and to state in 1:2 that the good news was “promised ahead of time through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,” and to affirm here that it is “witnessed to by law and prophets.” In Paul’s rereading of the Abraham story in chapter 4, in his interpretation of the story of the fall of Adam in chapter 5, and above all in his rereading of the story of Israel in chapters 9–11, we shall discover precisely what Paul himself understands this “witnessing” to be. 6. Paul asserts that God’s action is both gratuitous in the strict sense of that term—that is, unearned by humans—and is effective for those for whom it was performed. The gift character of God’s action is found particularly in three phrases. First, Paul affirms that all “have fallen short of the glory of God” (3:23)—not just Gentiles but also Jews have distorted their relationship with God and thus not “given him glory” (see 1:21; 2:24). Second, Paul states that they have been made righteous “freely by his gift” (3:24) God was not constrained to act this way but chose to do so. In commenting on 1:5, I noted how thematic the term “grace” (charis) is in Romans; this aspect of God’s action will be elaborated especially in 5:12–21. Third, God’s graciousness is demonstrated by the “forbearance (anochē) of God” by which he “passed over the sins of the past” (3:26). Here Paul echoes 2:4, where he spoke of God’s forbearance (anochē) and long-suffering (makrothymia) in extending to humans the chance of repentance. The gift of God is also effective: Paul speaks not of a “hope of righteousness” but of “those who are being made righteous” (3:24). 7. God’s gift extends universally to both Jew and Gentile. This is the clear inference to be drawn from Paul’s statement in 3:22, “for all have fallen short of the glory of God, being made righteous freely by his gift,” which, in the light of the antithesis, must include both Jew and Greek. The thesis statement also had included “the Jew first and then the Greek” (1:16). Precisely such inclusiveness is what prompts the question in 3:29, “Is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Greeks?” 8. Finally, we need to note the mode of receiving the gift by which God makes humans righteous. And with this we come to one of the most ticklish and important points in the interpretation of Romans. Our approach will be correspondingly careful and deliberate. There can be no question that God’s righteousness involves faith (pistis). The critical question is, “Whose faith?” The most undisputed point is that, from the human side, God’s gift is received by faith. Thus, in 3:22: “for all who are believing [having faith/responding in faith].” The Greek eis pantas tous pisteuontas echoes the last part of the thesis statement that declared salvation to be “for every one who has faith” (1:16), as well as the difficult statement “out of faith to faith” (eis pistin), about which more will be said shortly. For now, however, we can see that the establishment of a “right relationship” between God and humans involves a transaction consisting of the giving of a gift by God and a receiving of the gift “with faith” by humans. Since the word group is so central to the argument of Romans, and since Paul nowhere defines what he means by “faith” or “having faith,” a short pause here is necessary for present-day readers who may not even be aware that the same Greek roots underlie the English words for “faith” and “belief.” Both translate the Greek noun pistis and capture different dimensions of the Greek. For some unknown reason, however, English never developed a second verb form to match the Greek verb pisteuein, “believing.” And since the English “belief/believing” has taken on largely a cognitive, creedal sense (“to believe in something”), it is tempting to read that dimension back into Paul. In fact, however, both the noun pistis and the verb pisteuein have a rich range of meanings. English could use a word such as “faithing” to capture some of these dimensions. For Paul, “faithing” (pisteuein) certainly includes what we think of as belief, that is, a confession that something is so. Thus, in Rom 10:9, Paul speaks of “believing in the heart that God raised Jesus from the dead.” But “faithing” in Paul’s usage includes a much broader range of response than simple cognitive assent. It points above all to the innermost response of the “heart” in a fully personal engagement with another, and in this case, the Other. Paul therefore will touch on the nuance of faith/faithing as “hearing and responding” (Rom 10:14), as “trust” (Rom 4:3), and as “hope” (Rom 4:18). The special connotation of faith that Paul seeks to develop in this letter, however, is that of “obedience” (see 1:5; 16:26), that is, a deeply responsive hearing in which the claim of God is acknowledged by human freedom. When Paul speaks in 3:22, then, of “all those who are faithing,” he means those who respond to God’s gift with hearing, belief, trust, hope, and obedience. Johnson, L. T. (2001). Reading Romans: a literary and theological commentary (pp. 51–55). Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 07:41:50 +0000
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