Over the past two chapters, Paul has laid out, step by step, his argument that everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, sins and stands in need of God’s grace. This is the first argument he deploys to support his thesis statement: that by bringing Jews and Gentiles together in one community, his gospel demonstrates rather than undermines God’s justice (1.16-17). With that argument done, he now return to his thesis statement and expands upon it. This is another one of those passages that has been the flashpoint of a lot of historical and contemporary theological wrangling. As always, we’ll have to keep all of that in mind even as we try to keep our head above the fray and focus on what Paul is trying to tell us.
Text
[3.21] But now, God’s justice has been revealed apart from the Law, though the Law and the Prophets testify to it, [22] God’s justice through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who are faithful, for there is no distinction. [23] For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, [24] but are justified as a gift of his grace, through the redemption that belongs to Jesus Christ, [25] whom God put forth as the place of atonement through faith in his blood, so as to exhibit his justice by overlooking sins previously committed, [26] in divine forbearance so as to exhibit his justice in this present time, that he is himself just and justifies a person from Jesus’ faithfulness.
[27] But where then is boasting? It is shut out. Through which law, that of works? No, but through the law of faith. [28] For we posit that a person is justified by faith, apart from works of the law. [29] Is God the God of the Jews only? No, of the Gentiles too — yes, the Gentiles too, [30] since God is one and will justify circumcision through faith and foreskin through faith. [31] So then, do we restrain the Law through faith? Perish the thought! No, we uphold the law.
Experience
As someone who has formally studied the New Testament for over two decades now, I find this passage both exhilarating and exhausting. It’s a resounding and glorious piece of theology, where Paul’s conviction that Jesus really did change everything shines through. But it’s also in places very difficult to understand, and it’s hard not to carry all of the weight of the theological debates about it with me as I read it. Everything really comes down to two big questions: 1. What does Paul believe the mechanism of salvation in Jesus is? and 2. How does this mechanism reveal God’s justice?
Encounter
The main character here is God. The passage is in a sense Paul’s closing argument defending God’s justice. That justice is operationalized in the person of Jesus, who returns to the foreground here after being largely absent for the past two chapters.
Explore
We’ve set ourselves two deceptively simple questions for this step today:
- How does Paul think salvation ‘in Jesus’ works?
- How does this demonstrate God’s justice?
The Mechanism of Salvation in Romans 3.21-26
(Note, this section reworks a longer discussion of this theme from my post “Sacrifice in Romans 3.21-26” from my 2021 series on Sin and Salvation.)
The grammar behind this passage is so strange that Biblical scholars generally assume that Paul incorporated pieces of hymns or creeds, sacrificing comprehensibility for familiarity of language. But if we break it down, we can at least see the constellation of ideas Paul was working with, even if not precisely how they fit together.
The Question of Faith(fulness) and Jesus
First, Paul states that we are justified — put in right, or just, relationship with God — by God’s grace, through what I’ve translated as “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” As with a lot of things in Paul, this simple expression, has spawned a lot of debate. The grammatical construction, known as a genitive construction, is simple but ambiguous, simply telling us there’s a relationship between the two noun phrases without telling us what that relationship is. The most obvious sense is possession, which is why I’ve translated as I have — all things being equal, it’s generally best to go with the simplest translation. But it could also be a subject (faith that Jesus lives out (which semantically amounts to much the same thing as possession in this case; see Witherington 94 for a good discussion of points in favour of this reading)), an object (faith in Jesus; see Eberhart for a good discussion in support of this reading), a source (faith from Jesus), content (faith about Jesus), or substance (faith consisting of Jesus), and more. This is ultimately unsolvable: all of these are perfectly reasonable readings. But two things should comfort us here. First, since from the beginning we’ve been working with an understanding of faith that brings our ideas of faith and faithfulness together into one idea that involves a two-way relationship, it all sort of amounts to the same thing: we are saved by the establishment of a good-faith relationship with Jesus and by definition good faith involves reciprocity.
And second, I’m not sure Paul gave much thought to what kind of genitive he was using. I’m using my linguistic training here and not my biblical studies training when I say this, but as much as language teachers don’t like to admit this, we’re talking about a grammatical rather than semantic category. There’s a very good chance that Paul didn’t think much here beyond an idea “good faith connected to Jesus.” If the nature of that connection was important, he would have spelled it out.
Justification and Redemption
When thinking through Paul’s vocabulary about sin and salvation, it’s important tor recognize he metaphors he’s using. Justification comes from a legal setting, and is at its most basic level a declaration that someone is just, that is ‘in the right’, or innocent. But as Witherington points out, this ‘justification’ is more than just a “legal fiction” (105). Yes, it refers to a legal status, and yes, this status is conferred by God’s grace, but the whole idea of faith is that it involves a right, reciprocal, relationship with God. This is not fictional!
The metaphor of redemption for its part understands salvation in terms of ransoming a hostage, or manumitting an enslaved person (SBL; Nanos 330; Eberhart). In the Ancient Mediterranean world, slaves could purchase their freedom, either by saving up money or by being redeemed by a friend or family member; here freedom is purchased by Jesus.
Sacrificial Language in Romans 3.21-26
Now we come to the trickiest part of the passage: God appointed this Jesus as a hilasterion. Thousands of pages of dense academic writing have been published about how to interpret this word. For the purposes of today’s post, I’ll narrow it down to the two most likely options:
- An ‘atoning thing,’ hence ‘sacrifice’: This interpretation is awkward, and, while it is (rarely) attested in roughly contemporary materials, it is never used in this way in the Septuagint (the Greek language Bible commonly used in Paul’s day) (Eberhart). It is the option seen in translations such as the NRSV: “a sacrifice of atonement“. Note that this translation has to supply the word ‘sacrifice’ to be sensible in English.
- ‘place of atonement’, i.e., temple, altar, or monument: This interpretation picks up on the normal meaning of Greek nouns ending in –ion, and is well-attested in literature and inscriptions from the time period. It is also how it is used in the Septuagint, where it was referred specifically to the Mercy Seat or ‘Atonement Cover’ on the Ark of the Covenant (Eberhart). The main drawbacks from it are that it’s more difficult to conceive of what Paul means by calling Jesus a place of atonement than a sacrifice.
Even as i recognize the complexities of the question, I find myself squarely in the second camp: As someone familiar with the Septuagint, when I see hilasterion, I immediately think of the Mercy Seat. And if Paul wanted to talk about a sacrifice, there were far, far better words he could have used to do so. Understanding hilasterion as the place of atonement puts us in the ritual world of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In this ritual, the high priest would enter the Most Holy Place and sprinkle the blood of a bull on the Mercy Seat in order to cleanse it from ritual defilement that had accrued over the previous year. (See my posts on Hebrews 10 and on how the Old Testament’s sacrificial system worked for more discussion of the issues at play.) Since the Mercy Seat was understood to be the place where God’s presence dwelt and from which God spoke, this purification essentially provided the proper, holy, conditions for God to be there, and by extension allowed the high priest to enter into God’s presence (Eberhart). Hebrews 10 also centres this ritual in understanding what Jesus did, but where it envisions Jesus as the high priest in this scene, here, Paul sees Jesus as the Mercy Seat itself. Eberhart rightly notes that in this way, Jesus “fills a void” since there was no Ark in the second temple and, according to Josephus, the Most Holy Place was empty.
This is a conceptually strange idea, but has some powerful implications. The eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth wrote about this:
Jesus has been appointed from eternity as the place of [atonement] above which God dwells and from which He speaks; now, however, He occupies a position in time, in history, and in the presence of men. … God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. v. 19). At this place the Kingdom of God is come nigh… (The Epistle to the Romans, 104f)
In this view, the cross and the incarnation end up saying essentially the same thing: Jesus is now the place where God is present with the faithful, in death as in life. As N.T. Wright notes, “Jesus himself is now the place where, and also the means by which, the God of Israel has met with his people and forgiven their sins” (Romans, Part 1). And Robert Jewett adds that for Paul, Jesus becomes “the new place of atonement, epiphany, and divine presence” (Jewett (2006) 287).
The focus in this interpretation, then, is less on Jesus as fulfilling the Old Covenant, than on renewing it under new terms. (It is, as 3.21 reminds us, “apart from the Law.”) As Robert Jewett notes, this aligned with a common hope in many segments of Judaism of the period (including, for example, 4 Maccabees, the Qumran community and the book of Jubilees) that God would act to renew the Temple (Jewett (2006) 285). But the renewal that Paul has in mind is quite a bit more radical: the dominant theme is no longer sacrificial atonement, but reconciliation, both with God and with one another in the new community of faith.
Salvation and God’s Justice
How does all this prove that God is just? By providing place and means — Jesus — for a renewed covenant that brings everyone, both those inside the old covenant and those outside of it, together on the same terms. As we’ve seen, Paul is very concerned with the idea that God does not show favouritism (2.11). This should come as no surprise, considering the importance of impartiality within the larger context of biblical justice (e.g., Leviticus 19.15; Deuteronomy 1.17, 10.17; Job 34.19; Psalm 82.2; Proverbs 24;23). It would be strange, and hypocritical, indeed for God to demand earthly judges not play favourites while showing partiality to a group of insiders who are, in point of fact, just as unfaithful as the outsiders (1.18-32).
But since God’s justice is inherently tied not to an unbending sense of right-and-wrong, but to the establishment of peace, of healed and whole (and yes, reciprocal) relationships, neither would God be just to let everyone, insiders and outsiders alike, suffer in judgment and divine wrath. And so God has acted in and through Jesus to reconcile everyone — whether a sinning insider or a sinning outsider — to God and each other.
Paul will have more to say about this going forward, but this is where his argument leaves us here.
Challenge
So far in Romans, Paul has talked about two divine characteristics being revealed: God’s justice (1.17 and 3.21f) and God’s wrath (1.18 and 2.5-8). Here, Paul has talked about how God’s actions in and through Jesus demonstrated justice. But it must be noted that the interpretation that emerged in this study doesn’t have much to say about wrath.
As we’ve already seen, while understandably unpopular these days, the idea of divine anger, or ‘wrath’ is a necessary implication of our belief that God is love. A God who cares for the orphan and widow and outcast, a God who is Love — this is to say, the God revealed in the Scriptures and especially in Jesus of Nazareth — must care about justice and therefore must experience anger where there is injustice in the world. The important question is not whether God is angry, but what God does about it.
For a long time, Christian culture was dominated by images of a violently angry God, eager to torture humanity for our sins. There is no doubt that such images must be tossed aside as both counterproductive, and, more importantly, plainly false: This is simply not how God is revealed to be in the Scriptures. But in rejecting this false teaching on divine wrath, we can’t ignore what a correct understanding might be.
It has to be said that the interpretation of hilasterion that I did not take here, as a sacrifice, lends itself well to the idea of propitiation, an act that removes divine wrath. Its argument goes like this: God’s justice demanded that humanity die for marring creation through our sins; but since God is loving, God sent Jesus as a sacrifice of God’s own Self to pay that penalty on our behalf, thereby satisfying God’s anger and restoring justice. While this misrepresents how the sacrificial system worked, it does work with some Greco-Roman ideas of how sacrifice worked. And it’s a tidy argument: Paul has previously introduced the problem of divine anger and now resolves it through Jesus’ atoning death. And this has been the take of traditional Protestant theology. (See the works of Black, Dunn, Kruse, and Mounce for academic commentaries that follow this interpretation.)
But, tidy as it may be, if we press the analogy too much, we run into some significant logical and theological problems. It imagines God as being governed by anger, as lacking the emotional resources to manage anger maturely, without lashing out or punishing. The New Testament commands us to forgive without payment or propitiation, and not to let the sun go down on our anger. How can God ask of us what God is apparently unable to do? Moreover, if we lean into the unity between Jesus and God, this image suggests that God essentially self-harms to restore justice. But, if we instead lean into the distinction between Jesus as God’s Son and God the Father, then it’s hard not to read this as a form of divine child abuse, with the Father taking out His anger on His innocent Son. Neither of these are good options. At the end of the day, only a petty, immature god needs his anger propitiated.
Thankfully, the ‘Mercy Seat’ interpretation of hilasterion that has emerged in this study can, in fact, incorporate the idea of wrath: For a healthy and mature personality is able to manage anger not by demanding retribution but by doing justice. Instead of God either meting out or taking the mandated punishment for human sin, here God restores justice by implementing a renewed covenant, which expands the covenant community beyond Israel’s national boundaries, and promotes true reconciliation instead of ritual atonement as its method. What does God do with God’s just wrath at the state of the world? God sends Jesus to be the divine presence in the world, to teach humanity the ways of God’s Kingdom, and to reconcile us to one another and to God.
Expand
The interpretation that has emerged in this study fits the criteria for our Expand step well. It continues the theme of the book so far in insisting that insider and outsider categories have no bearing with God, expanding the circle of those for whom we should include as ‘us’ to encompass everyone. And, it shows that even righteous anger doesn’t need to be propitiated, but can be better managed through doing justice. While the popular saying ‘No justice, no peace’ reflects the state of the world as we know it, a more healing framing of the same truth is ‘More justice, more peace’: the more justice we see in the world, the more peace we will see; and the best way to enact justice is to enact more peace.
Summary & Conclusions
After making his case that all humanity, religious insiders and outsiders alike, stand as sinners in need of God’s grace, Paul returns to the main thesis of his letter: that by sending Jesus to reconcile all humanity, God has proven God’s justice. But there are still some loose threads, the first of which is why God wouldn’t just establish the covenant of faith in the first place. And, surprise surprise, he tackles that question in the next section
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 