The Law of Faith: A Reflection on Romans 4:13-25

My main series in the blog right now is about understanding the Nicene Creed, not just its history and theology, but also its spirituality. And so, my thoughts have returned quite a bit lately to the relationship among the connected but different concepts of faith, ‘the faith’, and faithfulness. In light of this, today’s Epistle reading, Romans 4.13-25, struck me as particularly relevant and worth some reflection here.

Romans was written to help the nascent church in Rome, which was divided along ethnic lines, come together and find common cause. The thesis statement of the letter can be found in 1.16-17, where Paul claims that the Gospel “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it God’s righteousness is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’” Because of the different ways English and Greek conceive of things, ‘faith’ here can equally be considered ‘faithfulness’, and ‘righteous(ness)’ can be translated equally by ‘just(ice)’. This is less a matter of one sense being right and the other wrong than it is that they are always two sides of the same coin in the Greek thought-world, so when we see one we should always bring the other side to mind. After the thesis statement, Paul spends 1.18-3.20 explaining how both groups, first Gentiles (1.18-2.16) and then Jews (2.17-3.20) have messed up and are both, equally, in need of salvation, which is always and for both groups about faith(fulness).

This brings us to the chapter today’s lesson is from. Here, Paul tries to explain this through the example of the story of Abraham, who did not receive God’s promises because he was particularly good or worthy of them, but rather received them as a gift and responded to that gift with faith (that is faithfully). Now we get to today’s passage, which begins:

The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

The main sticking point between the Jewish and Gentile Christians at the time was the question of the Law of Moses: Were Christians expected to adhere to to the Law? That is to say, was conversion to Christianity also a conversion to Judaism? Paul’s answer to this tricky question was ‘no’. Here he explains his reasoning: The Jewish people are God’s people not because they follow the Law but because they are the inheritors of God’s promises through their descent from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. The Law came much later, so it cannot be considered the grounds of their relationship with God. This is say that law adherence was an expression of their faithful response to God, not the grounds of that relationship. The Law is an effect, not a cause, so to speak. Moreover, according to Paul, if we mix that up, then we actually nullify the relationship.

Paul then makes the rather strange claim that “the law brings wrath” and so “where there is no law, neither is there violation.” What he seems to be trying to say here is that Gentiles can’t be judged negatively based on their lack of adherence to the Law since they were never given the Law. (As Romans 1 has it, they are to be judged instead because of their confusion of creation and Creator.) You can’t break a law that doesn’t exist for you — that would be like me, as a Canadian living in Canada, being judged according to Korean law. He continues by describing the kind of faith that was the grounds for Abraham’s relationship with God:

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) — in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness. Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Abraham was promised that he would become the “father of many nations.” This applies not only biologically (not only for Jews, but also groups like the Edomites, Amelakites, Midianites, and Arabs), but also, according to Paul, spiritually, to those Gentiles who, like Abraham come to their relationship with God by trusting God’s promises. Abraham’s trust was not an easy one, for he was already well into old age when he received the promise. And it was also greatly tested — it was decades before his son Isaac was finally conceived. Yet, despite wobbling from time to time, he remained faithful to God’s promises. And this was the basis of his ‘righteousness’ before God.

Crucially, according to Paul, this is the basis of Christians’ righteousness too, whether we come from a Jewish or Gentile background. But the promises made to us are not those made specifically to Abraham — we are not promised innumerable descendants — but those made in and through Jesus of Nazareth, namely a new and right relationship with God by trusting that, in vindicating Jesus’ way over against the ways of this world which put him to death, by raising him from the dead, God has opened up the possibility of that life for us too. The promise to Abraham that all that nations of the world would be blessed through him and his offspring are thus fulfilled in Jesus, and also in us as we too live lives that bless others.

There are many things we might say about how all this should apply to us two thousand years later. First and foremost, it is a reminder that no matter our ethnic or theological background or religious heritage, all of us who call ourselves Christians are saved by God’s grace, through that coin that has faith on one side — radical trust that God is for us and has acted decisively through the man Jesus — and faithfulness on the other — living our lives in light that trust relationship. But it is also a reminder that God’s ways are not our ways and that two different paths, stories, and sets of identities, can have far more in common that we think, and may in fact, be ultimately the same path. That is God’s grace revealed for us. Thanks be to God!