So far in our study of Romans, we’ve looked at Paul’s extended, fifteen-verse introduction, in which he introduced himself and his ministry, summarized the message to which he’s dedicated his life, and tried to bring his Roman audience on board. Over the next three posts, we’ll be looking at the next two verses, which form the letter’s propositio, or thesis statement. While only two verses long, this passage — like so many in Romans — has inspired both faith in generations of believers and countless pages of theological wrangling. And because they represent the thesis statement for the book as a whole, they deserve this expansive treatment.
Text
[1.16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who is faithful, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. [17] For in it God’s justice is revealed through faith for faith, just as it is written: “The just one will live by faith.”
Experience
Putting a pin in all the academic and theological wrangling attached to these verses, they are powerful words of Scripture. The idea that the gospel—the story of God’s victory in and through the resurrection of Jesus—reveals God’s justice is very compelling. But, at some point, I have to take the pin out. For there are big issues at play at almost every point. Translation is always an interpretive, and in the case of the Bible, theological, act, and I was very aware of the translation choices I had to make and the consequences they might have for how one might casually read the text.
The comment “as it is written” always triggers me to wonder about the text being cited. In this case, it’s Habakkuk 2.4, which at first glance seems kind of random, and I’m curious to learn more about it.
Encounter
Here we encounter Paul, who says he is not ashamed by the message which he had summarized in the preceding verses. This naturally prompts us to wonder what about the gospel might prompt shame in someone. We also meet God, whose character the gospel reveals in the world, and the two groups who will loom large in the letter’s rhetoric and arguments: Jews and Gentiles.
Explore
The first two steps have raised questions to explore further in this study: the translation and related interpretive issues surrounding key terms, and what exactly the gospel reveals about God. Today we’ll look at the translation issues facing the two main concepts of the text. Next time, we’ll look at Paul’s citation of Habakkuk, before putting the pieces together to look at the thesis statement as a whole in the third post on these verses.
Text and Translation
These verses are pretty much unanimously understood to be the thesis statement for the letter, and some go even further, calling them “a summary of Paul’s theology as a whole” (Barrett 27). The difficulty comes in understanding what the verses mean, a task rendered even more difficult for English readers since Paul’s key terminology doesn’t fit nicely into the categories of English vocabulary. The debates — truly the biggest in Pauline studies — revolve around two Greek word families, coming from the pist- and dik– roots respectively.
Faith & Faithfulness (Redux)
Words deriving from pist- occur four times in these two verses. As we saw last week, the pist- root basically means ‘faith’, a reciprocal relationship in which two parties fulfill their responsibilities towards the other. The idea as it comes to the New Testament has roots in both Judaism, where the relationship between God and Israel-Judah was set up like a vassal treaty, and Roman society, which was entirely based on patronage relationships. The problem for us as English speakers is that over the past few centuries, ’faith’ has come to take on the meaning of ‘belief’, or ‘intellectual assent’. We ‘believe in’ aliens or Santa Claus or God. And so, when Paul says his gospel is “the power of God for salvation for everyone who is pistos,” Protestant translators have unhelpfully tended to translate it as “everyone who believes” instead of the more literal and accurate “everyone who is faithful.” Likewise, when Paul says that God’s justice (more on this below), “is revealed through faith for faith,” and “The just one will live by faith.” we can easily read into this an idea that it’s all about what we believe. But such an interpretation has nothing to do with how the word was used in Greek or Hebrew langauges, or in Jewish or Greco-Roman cultures. Because of this, it has become trendy among scholars to replace ‘faith’ with ‘faithfulness’. I’m fine with that, awkward as it may sound, but it’s really not ‘faith’’s fault it has been so reduced in our imagination!
Again, ‘belief’ is absolutely a part of faith — you don’t live into responsibilities towards someone or something you don’t ‘believe in’ and trust — but it’s only a small sliver of it. Reducing faith to belief is like seeing a rainbow and calling it ‘red’; it’s there certainly, but only one piece of a richer whole. This is no small point considering words from the pist– root occur roughly sixty times in Romans! It is a central concept, so we have to get it right. And all of the ancient evidence requires us to insist that it is about faithfully living into one’s responsibilities in relationship with others.
Of course, how those responsibilities are defined, and who gets to define them are critical questions here (Keesmaat & Walsh 20). As we’ve seen, ‘faith’ was just as central a concept for the rhetoric of Roman imperial propaganda as it was for Paul. And herein lies the point: the question at the heart of Romans is not whether to live by faith or by works, but what it means to live by faith.
I would argue that this understanding of faith is only controversial because it renders the Lutheran and Reformed reading of Romans as establishing a ‘faith’-based Christianity against a ‘works’-based Judaism — and therefore their basis for establishing a ‘faith’-based Protestantism against a ‘works’-based Roman Catholicism — irrelevant. It really has nothing to do with Paul or the concept at play. (For more on this debate ‘as it happened’, see Wright; for a helpful summary, see Tonstad 8-16).
Justice & Righteousness
Words deriving from the dik– root in Greek represent an even more difficult translation issue. For it covers ideas that feel very different to English minds, ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice.’ If we consistently choose one of these or the other for our translation, it often doesn’t feel quite right; but if we flip back and forth between them, we introduce a distinction the original text doesn’t make. There really isn’t a good solution to this, so it’s genuinely important that we at least understand what’s happening in the background of our translations.
The concept of ‘righteousness’ in English puts us in a decidedly religious realm. To be righteous is to be in a ‘right’ relationship with God, or in alignment with one’s fundamental beliefs about the universe. But to speak of ‘justice’ puts us in a social and political realm. And we, especially those of us who have grown up in the English-speaking world that has been so shaped by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation, don’t like to mix the religious and political like this. (Or for those who do like to mix them, ideas of righteousness tend to inappropriately swallow up justice completely so that very unjust acts can be justified as being nonetheless righteous.) But as awkward as it may be for us, in Greek, these were not conceived of as different ideas. We need to carry both senses with us when we read the New Testament. Righteousness = justice and justice = righteousness. Right relationship with God entails being in right relationship with those around us.
Some may argue that this conceptual unity in Greek hides a legitimate distinction between them in Hebrew. It’s true that Hebrew does have two different words that we often translate as righteousness (tzdk) and justice (shpt). But, I’ve been surprised to find that Jewish scholars generally treat the terms as synonymous. And even in the Old Testament they are often used to complement rather than oppose each other. For example, Proverbs 21.15 reads “When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous, but dismay to evildoers.” Beyond any linguistic differences, conceptually, the Bible is unanimous in uniting justice and righteousness. As Micah 6.8 famously puts it, what God requires of us is “to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Similarly, the traditional Jewish summary of the Law unites Deuteronomy 6.5, “You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” with Leviticus 19.18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (This tradition is of course famously taken on by Jesus (Matthew 22.38-40).)
So, there is no real distinction between righteousness and justice. The two are united, coming from God but extending outwards throughout all of our relationships. We cannot treat our neighbour unjustly and claim to be right with God; nor can we truly do right by our neighbour unless we are aligned with God. Again, this is really only controversial because of the fear among more partisan Protestant commentators that bringing ethical behaviour into the theological equation inevitably turns Christianity into a religion of ‘works’. (Douglas Moo, for example, whose 1996 commentary was the magisterial Evangelical work on Romans when I was in seminary in the early ‘00s, acknowledges that the early Church universally equated God’s justice and righteousness even as he rejected that assumption himself (Moo 70).) (For a solid discussion of the theological issues showing both sides of the question, see Schreiner 64-67.)
But even accepting the unity of righteousness and justice, we still need to make a translation decision. I’ve chosen to lean towards the justice side of the question, since it is far too common for Christians today to think that questions of justice are theologically irrelevant. It’s too easy for us to let ourselves off the hook through a spiritual, sanitized, and private idea of righteousness, and this translation choice helps to mitigate that risk.
Either way, Paul’s point is that the gospel reveals, rather than hides or complicates, God’s justice/righteousness.
Challenge
The interpretation of these important pieces of vocabulary that has emerged here has not been kind to traditional Protestant theology. So it seems fair to give it a hearing here in this ‘challenge’ section. The two main claims Protestant theology makes are that:
- Salvation is by grace alone, through faith in Jesus; and
- Righteousness is a legal status given to the believer, graciously granted by God in light of Jesus’ atoning death.
These claims were developed out of a desire to purify Christianity of any strains of ‘works religion’, the idea that we can earn salvation by the good works (whether ritual or moral) that we do.
Claim 1 stands just fine by our emerging interpretation, though it tweaks what we understand by ‘faith’: belief and trust in, yes, but also living up to the responsibilities that that relationship entails. I honestly think this reading benefits traditional Protestant theology since it eliminates the tension the tradition has always had between its discomfort with ‘works’ and its recognition that the New Testament clearly teaches that there are behavioural expectations that come with the Christian life.
Claim 2 fares less well. We’ll look more at this when we get to chapter 3, but our reading insists that righteousness or justice is not merely a legal status — an ‘innocent’ verdict by the divine judge — but is something in which we actively participate and live out ‘in Christ.’ I believe this is a needful corrective since so many Christians have become convinced their right relationship with God has nothing to do with how they treat their neighbour.
The Protestant desire to protect Christianity from ‘works’ has less to do with Romans, and far less with Judaism, than it does with the context in which it arose: as a protest against developments in medieval Western theology which introduced merit into the equation of salvation. But in rightly calling out these abuses, the Reformers relied on what has turned out through scholarly investigation to be specious interpretations of ancient Judaism, and what Paul wrote to the Romans.
Expand
The interpretation of Paul’s language of justice and faith that has emerged here absolutely meets the criteria of the ‘Expand’ step, the step that insists that we leave a given text with an interpretation that suits our ultimate aims of increased faithfulness. It is an expansive and growth-oriented reading because it draws our attention away from a myopic and navel-gazing focus on ‘my personal relationship with Jesus Christ’, toward the practical ways that relationship must transform me and my relationships with everyone and everything in the world around me.
Summary & Conclusions
Paul’s thesis statement in Romans is dependent on two big ideas: justice, which as we’ve seen must encompass both our ideas of social justice and personal righteousness, and faith, a characteristic describing a relationship in which both parties are living up to their responsibilities to the other.
Next time, we’ll see how Paul’s use of these concepts in his thesis statement was dependent on the proto-apocalyptic text of the prophet Habakkuk.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography
Matthew Root 