We’re in the middle of a three-part miniseries looking at Paul’s thesis statement for his Epistle to the Romans. Last time we looked at his key vocabulary of faith and justice. Today we’ll turn to his use of Habakkuk 2.4 within the thesis statement.
(For the introductory Experience and Encounter steps of the study, please see the previous post.)
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.”
Explore: Romans 1.17 and Habakkuk 2.4
The centrepiece of Paul’s thesis statement is a direct quotation from Habakkuk: “The just one will live by faith.” There are a few things about this that are important to consider for how we interpret its use in Romans 1.17:
- What is the book of Habakkuk about?
- How does Habakkuk 2.4 fit into that book?
- What might that mean for how we interpret Romans 1.16-17?
Habakkuk
Habakkuk is a short and rarely-read book in the Prophets. Because it’s largely unfamiliar to most of us, it’s helpful to begin by looking at the book’s themes and basic argument.
After an introductory formula, Habakkuk begins as follows:
O YHWH, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice [shpt] never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous [tzdq]— therefore judgement comes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1.2-4)
It then speaks of the rise of Neo-Babylonian Empire, describing them as a “fierce and impetuous nation, who march through the breadth of the earth to seize dwellings not their own” (1.6), before diagnosing their essential problem as follows: “their justice and dignity proceed from themselves” (1.7). So we have in these opening verses the prophet asking a question about God’s justice and faithfulness within a context of the rise of a foreign empire who has made its own power the standard of ‘justice’. It would seem then that Paul’s surprising quote from Habakkuk is far from random. Habakkuk revolves around the question of God’s justice in the face of human, and specifically imperial, injustice, the very theme Paul introduces in 1.16 when he claims that the gospel reveals God’s justice.
The Proud vs. The Just: Habakkuk 2.4
In Habakkuk 2, we get God’s response to the prophet’s accusation. God urges patience and trust that God will ultimately vindicate the faithful in Israel and Judah. In this section, the Babylonian imperialists are described in the worst of terms:
Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them … Moreover, wealth is treacherous; the arrogant do not endure. They open their throats wide as Sheol; like Death they never have enough. They gather all nations for themselves, and collect all peoples as their own (2.4-5).
The portion Paul quotes in Romans 1.17 is the piece I’ve left out of the quote above. It is an aside that contrasts all this imperialistic hubris with the way of righteousness and justice: “But the just one will live by faith.” In other words, faithfulness is used here as the antithesis of the way of imperialism. It is the opposite of hubris, arrogance, wealth-seeking, insatiability, and taking over one’s neighbours for one’s own gain.
Again, Considering how rarely Paul quotes from the prophets, it seems particularly pointed that he does so here, and this prophet in particular (Eberhart). That Paul uses Habakkuk 2.4 as an intentional critique of Rome is further supported by his contemporary coreligionists in the Qumran community also using Habakkuk in their anti-Roman rhetoric (Nanos; Elliott 191; Keesmaat & Walsh).
What’s interesting about Paul’s quote, though, is that where the New Testament almost always quotes from the Greek text of the Old Testament (known as the Septuagint, or LXX), here Paul translates directly from the Hebrew text (Eberhart; Tonstad 13). To take a step back, the LXX is not a direct translation from the Hebrew Bible that we know today (a medieval source known as the Masoretic Text), but rather both of these represent distinctive witnesses (‘recensions’ in the academic language) to the ancient biblical text. When we find ancient scrolls, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, sometimes they are close to the LXX and sometimes to the Masoretic text. In this case, the two recensions differ in the insertion in the LXX of a first-person possessive pronoun:
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- The just one will live by faith(fulness) (Hebrew; cf. Romans 1.17)
- The just one will live by My faith(fulness) (LXX)
While both traditions insist that the response to injustice in the world is found in one’s relationship with God, they emphasize different sides of that relationship. In the LXX tradition, it is God’s faithfulness that allows ‘the just one’ to persist in the face of oppression; but in the recension Paul takes up here, it is the just one’s own commitment to remaining faithful to the covenant with God that vindicates him. It’s the ultimate, ‘when they go low, we go high’ attitude and it reflects Jesus’ ethical teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, in which hatred is to be repaid in love, and violence with forgiveness.
It must be said, however, that this picture of imperial wickedness is not unlike other prophets’ critiques of Israel and Judah’s own leadership. As much as Habakkuk is an indictment of conquering empires, it is also an indictment of anyone who would govern by greed and arrogance, unjustly padding the pocketbooks of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. In this way, the text complicates the basic “us vs. them” mentality often found in apocalyptic writing. It’s not “God’s covenant people versus foreign oppressors” but “those faithful to doing justice versus anyone — foreign or no — who is not.”
All this must be supplemented by a possible messianic reading of the text, which we know existed in Paul’s day in the Qumran community, and may have been in Paul’s mind here (Tonstad 14; Eberhart). This takes “the just one” not as a general description but as a specific reference to the Messiah. Keeping in mind the apocalyptic, and therefore anti-imperial origins of messianic expectation, this interpretation understands the answer to the question of God’s justice in the face of human injustice to be the Messiah’s faithfulness, which undermines evil by revealing it for what it is (Tonstad 15; cf. the nonviolent atonement movement). Even if we accept this messianic interpretation, and I think there is good reason for doing so, it doesn’t let us off the hook. For, as the ancient Christian saying goes, “we are by grace all that he is by nature.” Everything that is true of the Messiah is true of us inasmuch as we follow him and participate in his risen life (as Paul will make clear later in this letter!).
Challenge
We’ve already seen that the claims that Paul wrote Romans with an anti-imperial agenda would be harder to brush off if he didn’t keep on using words that were part of the Roman imperial rhetoric. And now, he goes further, quoting an explicitly anti-imperial text. Yet, Paul doesn’t challenge imperial propaganda outright, and at times seems harder on his own people than the Romans (Kim 17). And towards the end of the book, Paul infamously exhorts his readers to “be subject to the governing authorities,” giving them divine right to govern in the process — a text that has been weaponized for centuries by authoritarian regimes against the masses (Romans 13.1-7). So, is Paul anti-imperial or not?
While we’ll have to leave an answer to this question until the end of the book, once again we need to remember that the religious is always political and the political is always religious, whether overtly as in Paul’s day, or covertly. Both are ultimately about power and allegiance — who has it and by whose authority? By appealing to faithfulness as the response to political injustice, Paul is taking a page from the shared handbook of Apocalyptic and Jesus: When up against earthly powers much stronger than us, the response is to double down on goodness, faithfulness, and justice. As Neil Elliott notes:
Whether Paul’s letter to believers living at the heart of the empire subverts that empire or not has everything to do with what kind of gospel people will hear and what kind of Lord they will give their lives to. Spiritual salvation devoid of radical liberation from the power of empire is too safe, too comfortable. (Elliott 20f)
As we’ll see as the letter goes on, for Paul the gospel of Jesus, whom God raised from the dead in a rebuke to Roman power and authority, means that nothing other than a complete revolution in life and values will do as a response (Elliott 20; Jewett (2013) 23). Inasmuch as readers take that message to heart and allow the good news of the victory of Jesus and the Kingdom of God to transform their hearts, his message was antithetical to Rome’s ambition, policy, arrogance, and violence. Again quoting Elliott:
Paul appeals to the Christians of Rome to throw off the mental shackles of the empire’s theology, to resist conformity to the world and embrace the transformation of their minds, and come at last to share in God’s compassionate purposes toward humanity, and more particularly toward the covenant people Israel. (Elliott 19)
In other words, while Paul seems to stop short of directly criticizing Rome, his message was incredibly subversive, and remains so to this day. We still live in a world where political authorities use violence and threats of violence to impose their power and beliefs upon others. And all too often, they use religious language — frighteningly, increasingly Christian language — to justify their violence, just as the unjust rulers of Israel and Judah back in the way had abused special standing with God to justify their injustices (Elliott 21).
Sigve K. Tonstad also rightly points out that in our present world, Paul’s argument takes on an ecological dimension:
In this world [of ecological destruction and climate crisis], God’s absence is felt even more acutely than in the days of Habakkuk. Paul’s indictment of people originally called to mediate God’s blessing to the world now carry over to the way God has been represented in the Christian tradition. To a world experiencing ecological dissolution and a sense of existential abandonment, Paul still speaks in the key of which he has exquisite mastery: of the instability and unsustainability of the current order …. It is in awareness of apparent god-forsakenness that Paul in Romans broadcasts the message of God’s faithfulness. (Tonstad 17)
Expand
While we’ll have to wait until next time to look at the text as a whole, our emerging interpretation of Paul’s citation of Habakkuk is an expansive and growth-oriented reading because it infuses our understanding with the prophet Habakkuk’s anti-imperial aims. Recognizing this agenda reinforces the ideas of justice and faith from the previous study, reminding us that the ways of God’s Kingdom are always subversive and antithetical to the ways of the kingdoms of this world, no matter how ‘Christian’ they may claim to be.
Summary & Conclusions
When looking for a biblical foundation for his thesis statement in Romans, Paul turned to Habakkuk, one of the most explicitly anti-imperial texts in the Old Testament. This gives his thesis, and indeed the book as a whole, a subversive dimension. Both Paul and Habakkuk introduce their books in terms of theodicy, the question of God’s justice in the face of an evil world. The answer is faith: a way of life in which we live up to our responsibilities in our relationships with God and those around us. This many not undermine Empire through violent uprising or political revolution, but it undermines it nonetheless, through the stronger, though more elusive, means of spiritual, moral, and relational transformation.
Next time we’ll see how these ideas fit into Paul’s thesis statement as a whole.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography
Matthew Root 