In Chapter 4, Paul headed off accusations of novelty in his gospel or that it was a rejection of God’s covenant with Abraham by insisting that Abraham’s election was itself an act of divine grace that made him right with God (’justified’ him) by faith. Now in chapter five, he returns to his main argument, looking at the implications of God’s work in and through God’s messiah, Jesus.
Text
[5.1] So then, since we have been made right with God by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, [2] through whom, by faith, we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and boast in the hope of God’s glory. [3] And not only this, but we also boast in afflictions, knowing that suffering produces endurance, [4] and endurance proof of character, and proof of character hope. [5] And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who gives us life.
[6] For while we were still weak, in due season, Christ died on behalf of the ungodly. [7] Now rarely will someone die on behalf of the just (though perhaps someone might risk death on behalf of a good person); [8] But God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died on our behalf. [9] And so, now that we have been made righteous in his blood, how much more will we be saved through him from wrath! [10] For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, by how much more will we be saved in his life now that we have been reconciled! [11] Not only this, but also boasting in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Experience
The first thing I noticed about this is the shift in the story Paul uses to explain justification. Whereas the last section looked back to Israel’s origin story in the patriarch Abraham, now we’re suddenly talking about peace, access, glory, and boasting, which bring to mind previous discussions in the series about Roman culture. The idea of Romans being an anti-imperial letter has fallen aside a bit in the past few sections, so it seems worth revisiting here.
Encounter
The ‘characters’ in the story Paul is telling are a humanity that is separated from God (described in increasingly dramatic language, from ‘weak’ in verse 6, through ‘ungodly’ and ‘sinners’, to full on ‘enemies’ by verse 10); God, whose actions in and through Jesus Paul has previously claimed reveal justice (and here “love”); and Jesus (here called by the title Christ, ‘Messiah’), whose death “on our behalf” “reconciles” us to God and whose resurrected life grants us salvation. While Paul repeats language of “death” and “blood” from previous discussions, reconciliation is new. How might this shift how we understand what Paul has been telling us about the cross?
Explore
All this suggests a few questions to explore in this section:
- How does this section fit into Paul’s broader argument?
- Is the language in this section deliberately political? If so, what does that mean? And if not, where does this language come from?
- How does this section’s discussion of how our salvation works compare to what Paul has previously said about it?
Literary Matters
This section marks a transition between the previous large section (1.18-4.25), which focuses on the question of Jews and Gentiles, and Romans 5.12-8.39, which focuses more on the implications of Christian faith (SBL; Eberhart; Witherington 131). Whereas in the first section, when Paul spoke of ‘we’ as Jews, now ‘we’ refers to all Christians. As Witherington notes, it’s possible to see 5.12-8.39 as a complement to 1.18-5.11, essentially retelling the story and sharing themes of justification, hope, glory, perseverance, and Jesus’ death, but for slightly different purposes (Witherington 131f).
A Return to the Political?
Early in the series, we looked at the question of whether Paul was writing with an anti-imperial aim. We saw that it’s possible to read it either way because the language of religion in the ancient world and the language of politics overlapped significantly. Both were ultimately about power and devotion: Who is in control? and What to do we owe to whom?
With a turn here from the discussion of Jews and Gentiles to themes of peace, access, glory/boasting vs. shame, and reconciliation, these questions once again come to the fore.
Peace & Reconciliation
Peace is always a loaded term. Even in today’s political discourse there’s a divide between those who understand peace to be the maintenance of order and those who see it as the existence of justice. Unsurprisingly, similar narratives about peace also existed in Paul’s world. On the one hand, there was the propaganda of the Pax Romana, the so-called ‘Roman peace’, in which the Empire brought stability and prosperity to the Mediterranean basin. Paul wrote in the middle of this roughly two-hundred year period, when its propaganda was at its peak (Eberhart; Witherington 131; Kruse 226).
But stability and prosperity for whom? And at what cost, to whom? The Pax Romana was of course maintained by military force and violence. Its prosperity depended on slave labour and the impoverishment of conquered territories. Roman historian Tacitus quoted a British chief’s view of this so-called peace as follows:
If the enemy is rich, they are greedy; if the enemy is poor, they are power-hungry. . . . They rob, they slaughter, they plunder—and they call it ‘empire.’ Where they make a waste-land, they call it ‘peace.’ (Agric. 29-31)
Such is the peace Rome, and any ‘might equals right’, ‘law and order’, empire or kingdom of this world can offer.
The Jewish Scriptures offered a very different idea of peace: the existence of healthy, healed, and whole, reciprocal good-faith relationships with God, each other, and all of creation (Ezekiel 34.25-27; Hosea 2.18-23; Isaiah 11, 32.16-20; etc.). This is the ‘peace’ of which Paul speaks in the greetings of his letters, or more clearly, in 2 Thessalonians 3.16 (Witherington 134). And it’s a peace that no human leader can provide.
While perhaps less central, the idea of reconciliation was also used in Roman imperial propaganda, wherein the emperor was imagined to be the reconciler of the world’s peoples (Witherington 134; Eberhart). Here, Paul claims that Christ accomplishes this. Paul doesn’t have to have a political agenda for his gospel to have political consequences. God’s vision of peace always represents a challenge to the kingdoms of this world. And, if Jesus is Lord, King, and Reconciler, then Caesar is not.
Access
As Witherington notes, the idea of “access” implies “the privilege of being introduced into the presence of someone of higher station than oneself” (Witherington 134). In a Roman context, this was connected strongly to the patronage system, in which access to opportunity was entirely based on who you knew and whom you served (Witherington 134; Eberhart). Here Paul says that we have obtained access to God’s grace, which sounds strange to our ears, but makes sense again in that patronage context, in which the specific benefits granted to a faithful client by a patron were known as ‘graces’ (Eberhart).
But ‘access’ also has a religious dimension; for it was customary for religious temples (including both Greco-Roman and Jewish temples) to have sacred precincts into which only certain people had access. In the Jewish context, there were concentric courts for non-Jews, for women, for men, and for the priests, and especially the high priest alone, the Most Holy Place where God was said to dwell. Elsewhere, the New Testament explicitly ties Christ to our access to this Most Holy Place (Hebrews 10.19-22).
Because religion and politics were so deeply intertwined, it’s not helpful to ask which of these two senses Paul had in mind here: they’re really one in the same, and had been from the earliest days of recorded civilization in the region. He’s saying that because we have been made right with God, we now have access into the presence of God, the heavenly King.
Glory and Shame
Concepts of glory and shame were also pretty central in the cultures of the Mediterranean and especially that of Rome (Eberhart). It was very much a competitive society, where social standing meant everything, and most of what one did—military victory, acquisition of wealth, public service, etc.—was done with a view to building up one’s reputation. We’ve already seen in this series how ‘faith’ connected to this, since one of the primary ways a client demonstrated their faith to their patron was to boast about his generosity. So it’s not surprising that boasting is found here in a passage where Paul uses the concepts of glory and shame. Where boasting was previously excluded in passages talking about our own achievements (2.17; 3.27), here it is not only acceptable but necessary because it is boasting in what God our ‘divine patron’ has done for us (SBL; Eberhart; Witherington 134).
Conclusion for A Return to the Political?
If we put all this together, in this transitional section of his argument, Paul has used a lot of language with deep political resonance. Whether or not a critique of the empire is top of his mind, the claims he makes for what Jesus has done and the implications that has for humanity necessarily challenge imperial claims and self-image.
Atonement in Romans 5.1-11
This is the third place in as many chapters where Paul describes what Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished. In 3.25, he used the imagery of the Day of Atonement, in which blood functioned as a ‘spiritual soap’ to cleans the Most Holy Place, making it an acceptable place for God to dwell. And in 4.24-25, he wrote in more general terms about Christ’s death ‘for our sins’ and resurrection ‘for our justification’ (i.e., being made right with God). Here he speaks in similarly general terms, again stating that Christ’s death was “on our behalf,” that we have been justified or made right with God ‘in his blood’, and that we have been reconciled to God through his death (5.9-10). Absent from this is any discussion of how this works, though the reference to blood does suggest again the purification rite of the Day of Atonement. But it’s helpful to keep what he’s said so far in mind since it will be a strong theme in the next part of Romans 5.
Challenge
If what Paul is saying here challenges imperial authority, it brings up important questions of the nature of power. One could simply read such challenges as a claim to the throne, the new challenger stepping up to fight the reigning champion, some high-stakes version of ‘My dad can beat up your dad.’ And all too often, when Christians have been in power, they have simply recreated the same power dynamics at play in the old regime. But this is not what Paul is talking about here, nor is it the vision the New Testament more broadly has. It’s not a matter of simply putting a cross on the status quo, but a complete transformation of what power looks like, of how business as usual is done.
The challenges Paul’s language makes to the established order of the Roman Empire are not like-meets-like, but a meeting of opposites. If Paul is talking about peace, it’s not the brittle peace of oppression, order, and stability for the comfortable, but the transforming peace of God’s kingdom, marked by healthy, healed, and whole relationships between humanity and God, within humanity, and between humanity and the rest of the created order.
If humanity is reconciled to God, the image is not one of authorities dragging home a runaway child, but the joyous welcome of the prodigal son. If different human parties (think Jews and Gentiles, ‘Barbarians’ and Greeks, the wise and the foolish, enslaved persons and citizens, men and women) are reconciled in Christ, it is not an image of enemies forced to cooperate at gunpoint, but of rivals putting away their enmity for the joy of our shared status of children of God.
If we boast in our Lord’s glory, this is not honour won through military victory, but of one vindicated after being killed by oppressive military (and religious) authority. We boast not in victory, but in suffering, in endurance, in our hard-won hope and conviction that a different way of life is possible. In other words, we boast in the very things that Roman society saw as shameful. (Remember, Paul prefaced his thesis statement by insisting that he is not ashamed of it!)
As Dieter Georgi put it:
For Paul, Jesus is what the princeps [emperor] claimed to be: representative of humanity, reconciler and ruler of the world. Jesus is all this because he demonstrates the association and identification of God with those in rebellion against God. He represents the weakness of God and thus the dominion of grace, the sole form of dominion befitting both humanity and God. (quoted by Witherington 134)
Expand
The interpretation of the passage that has emerged in this study helps us to grow in faith by reminding us that the gospel always confronts ‘the way things work’. It shakes us from our complacent acceptance of the world’s brutality and insists another way is possible, a way grounded in love, grace, and compassion.
Summary & Conclusions
In this transitional section, Paul brings together the arguments he’s made so far: We are all made right with God in the same way, reconciled to God (and as we’ll see in later in the book, each other) through the work of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In discussing this, he’s shifted to language which would have resonated with aspects of Roman culture and political propaganda, reminding his readers, ancient and modern, that the way of Jesus is nothing short of a revolutionary alternative to the ways the kingdoms of this world work.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 