Zeal Gone Wrong, Zeal Gone Right: Romans 10

In Romans 9, Paul defended both his own people and God’s justice from accusations that their rejection of message is a sign that God has abandoned them. Now here in chapter 10, he connects these ideas to some of the other major themes of the letter, included the nature of justice and righteousness, and Israel’s vocation.

Text

Once again, I’m tackling a whole chapter today, so won’t do a verse-by-verse translation. Please look at your Bible of choice for the full text. Here is a quick summary:

Paul longs for his people to be saved. Unlike Gentiles, they at least show a proper zeal for God, even if he now believes that zeal is pointed in the wrong direction, defining justice and righteousness on their own terms rather than God’s. But Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law of Moses and therefore the end of its jurisdiction. Moses himself talked about the Law as a kind of checklist, but the justice that arises from faith isn’t about that, or mystical journeys into heaven or the abyss, but recognizes that God’s truth couldn’t be closer: it’s now in our hearts and on our lips. For if you confess that Jesus is Lord and trust in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. The same standard applies for both Jews and Gentiles: Everyone who calls on the Lord’s name will be saved.

But of course you don’t call on someone with whom you’re not in a good-faith relationship. And so the sequence of sending, proclaiming, hearing, and trusting is critical. Faith is a response to the message, and the message is nothing other than Jesus. Have Israel not heard the message then? Indeed they have, for the message has traveled across the whole world. So did they not understand it? Paul thinks something else is going on: that God is using Gentiles’ faith to spur Israel to jealousy, from which will come a change of heart. For God is always extending a welcome embrace to the chosen people despite their long history of doing their own thing.

Experience & Encounter

My basic experience reading this passage is that I’m not its intended audience. The problems and questions he’s addressing aren’t mine. So it makes me wonder whose questions these might be, and how it fits into his bigger argument.

That said, the image of God presented here, patiently waiting, with an olive branch permanently extended to Israel is really beautiful.

Explore

This is another passage where, whether or not we find it convincing, Paul’s argument seems pretty clear. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t details that deserve additional thought:

• What rhetorical or stylistic elements are in play here that can inform how we understand the passage and its role in the letter?
• What did “zeal” mean in the first-century context?
• What does it mean for Paul to call Jesus the “end” of the Law?
• What is Paul saying about conversion and how does that:
  • connect to his purposes in writing Romans?
  • contribute to his thoughts on his people’s rejection of the gospel?

Rhetoric and Style

With the rhetorical questions strewn throughout this chapter, we’re back in the world of diatribe (Eberhart).* This means we don’t need to look for a particular antagonist Paul is trying to win over.

It’s widely recognized that chapters 9-11 function as a whole, without strong demarcations between them. The end of chapter 9 (the stone tripping Israel up) functions as a transitional piece that could just as easily start chapter 10 as end chapter 9 (Eberhart; Witherington 258). This transitional material discusses the idea that, as Gaventa puts it, “While Israel has been running a race that it did not win, the gentiles have won a race they never entered.” As Eberhart points out, this is reminiscent of the ‘great reversal’ motif that was commonly seen in Apocalyptic literature (though not with Israel on the wrong end of it), and in Jesus’ teaching (e.g., “So the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20.16). In this framework, it’s only natural that the revelation of God’s Kingdom will upend the status quo of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.

Zeal

But, Paul points out in 10.2, even if Israel didn’t ‘win the race’, at least they were running it. They had zeal, even if it wasn’t directed towards the right things. But while we think of zeal as roughly synonymous with ‘passion’ or ‘drive’, it had a particular meaning in the Scriptures and Second Temple Judaism. As Kruse defines it, zeal “denoted passionate concern for God’s honor and his law” (Kruse 398). As the Old Testament examples of Phinehas, Elijah, Simeon, Levi, and Mattathias show, this could often include violence against those perceived to be Law-breakers or leading the faithful astray. In Philippians 3.5-6, Paul describes himself as zealous in his former life as a Pharisee, demonstrating this by his persecution of the Church (Eberhart; SBL).

From his new perspective as a follower of Jesus, Paul sees such zeal in a new light. It may have been well-intentioned in its “earnest desire to be accounted righteous by God,” but is badly misdirected (Kruse 398). As the rest of the chapter suggests, proper zeal is about living faithfully (we might say, bearing good fruit in the world), and spreading the faith positively, by proclaiming it, not negatively, through violence. Zeal that’s about one’s own achievements and focused on one’s own righteousness is not to one’s credit (Kruse 400). We might even say that zeal for God can even be “a contributing factor for the loss of justification,” if it is on human rather than God’s terms (Eberhart). As Witherington puts it:

Too often people mistake earnestness for truth. One can be zealous for the wrong cause, and it may well be that Paul puts it this way precisely because he was exhibit A of such zeal when he was wrongly persecuting the followers of Jesus as a Pharisee. (Witherington 259)

The End of the Law?

In verse 4, Paul writes “Christ is the telos of the Law.” It’s a simple sentence, and telos is a simple enough word, meaning “end, culmination, goal, execution, outcome, fulfillment, performance.” What makes this verse so commented on is the question of how to understand it in a way that neither minimizes Paul’s intention nor creates a supercessionist understanding. (For good summaries of the debate see Kruse 402ff, Witherington 260ff, and Eberhart). While some contemporary scholars have a preference (see Kruse 402; Nanos 320), there is a emerging consensus that none of these meanings is able to capture the spirit of what Paul is saying on its own, but that we need rather to carry the word’s full semantic range with us when interpreting this passage (Eberhart; SBL; Witherington 261):

• Christ is the goal of the Law in that he is what the Law had been pointing to the whole time;
• Christ is the execution or performance of the Law in that his life is what living out the Law rightly looks like;
• Christ is the culmination or fulfillment of the Law in that the Law comes together in him, his ways, and his teachings; and
• Christ is the end of the Law, “in terms of bringing to an end the era of the law’s jurisdiction” (Kruse 402)

Witherington summarizes the meaning like this:

Christ, not the Law, is now the means of righteousness for believers, whether we mean by that right standing, sanctification, moral behavior, or final righteousness. Paul will refer to the law of Christ, not Torah, when he speaks of the code or standard of righteousness for Christians. (Witherington 261)

And Eberhart:

From now on, the crucial factor for the fulfillment of the law is the power of love (8:31-39; 13:8-10; see also 15:1-6). In that specific sense, Christ is indeed the “end” of the law—because it is being fulfilled in a different way. (Eberhart)

What Does Justice Look like?

The rest of the chapter functions as a unit, returning to the discussion of justification — ‘setting things right with God’ — from chapters 3-4 using a selection of quotes from the Old Testament. It starts in 10.5 by “pitting Moses against himself” (Witherington 262), contrasting the need to keep the Law (Leviticus 18.5) with the declaration that the people need only to look within to know what the Law requires of them (Deuteronomy 30.11-14). In context, Moses’ words about travelling into heaven and across the abyss (the sea, but also a prominent image for death and chaos in Ancient Near Eastern culture) were about not having to go to great lengths to figure out the Law, but Paul spins them here, likely through a metaphor of mystical journeys (SBL; Kruse 407). (The so-called ‘Chariot Mysticism’ of the period often involved journeys up or down towards God’s throne room.) But no such “grand journey is required to find the righteousness and justice that is in Christ: No, the Word, both written and incarnate, is near at hand.” (Witherington 262). In both of these ideas — Christ as the end of the Law and justification by faith — it’s important to remember that the Law and its “just provision” (8.4) are still lived out. So justice is still done. It’s just understood to come forth from the heart rather than through keeping the letter of the Law of Moses (Nanos 320).

Confession & Proclamation

But in order to participate in this new way of righteousness and justice, you have to first hear about it and respond to it in faith. So 10.9-17 includes a chain of action, starting from the sending of apostles and their proclamation of the Gospel and ending with their audience hearing it and trusting it, confessing in the end that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” It could well be that this section is placed here to foreshadow Paul’s eventual plea for financial and logistical support for his mission to Spain in 15.22-32 (Eberhart; Tonsted). This seems a good possibility since it doesn’t contribute to his overall message in chapters 9-11 and even confuses them, since he then has to explain why his fellow Jews have actually heard the message (often from his own lips) and not responded with faith (19.18-21).

On “Jesus is Lord,” it’s been common in recent decades to see this proclamation as a direct opposition to Caesar’s lordship (Nanos 320; Kruse 410). But as Dunn correctly notes, there were a lot of different “lords” operating in Roman society, political, social, and religious. Perhaps then it’s best to think of this proclamation as throwing Jesus’ name into the ring, so to speak: of the many lords around, including the Emperor, Jesus is the one in whom Paul and his audience trust (Kruse 410).

Throwing a bit of extra spice onto this confession is Paul’s linkage of it with Joel 3.5 (2.43 in the Septuagint): “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Paul, being well-trained in the Scriptures and having already shown his familiarity with the Scriptures in both their Hebrew and Greek versions, would know full well that the Greek ‘the Lord’ is a euphemism for the divine name YHWH. in the Hebrew. While far from a smoking gun, it does seem best to see this as a “striking identification of Jesus Christ with Yahweh,” and therefore a statement of Jesus’ divinity (Kruse 412).

Israel’s Rejection of the Gospel

If it Isn’t that Israel hasn’t heard the gospel, and if indeed God has not rejected them (Romans 9), why have they largely not responded to the gospel? Or to use the language of Romans 9.30-31, why is justification by faith a stumbling stone to them? At the end of Romans 10 Paul proposes that God is using the Gentiles’ acceptance of the message and all the benefits that brings as “the catalysts” or spur that will lead Israel to faith (Eberhart; cf. Witherington 264; Kruse 417). Nanos provides an alternate reading of this: It isn’t the Gentiles coming into the fold who are to provoke jealousy among the Jews, but Paul’s success in bringing them into the fold, fulfilling their vocation to bless the world (Nanos 320).

Either way, as Eberhart notes, this is not an argument many today would find convincing, and I have to agree with him there. Nevertheless, Paul’s point is that God still loves Israel and longs for them to join the great adoption party being thrown for the Gentiles (Witherington 264; the point is reminiscent of Jesus’ parables of the lost and found, especially the elder brother).

Challenge

See the last post’s Challenge section for a discussion of why first-century Jews might really not have been on board with Paul’s message.

Expand

We’d be remiss if we were to leave this passage with understanding its rejection of “zeal not according to knowledge” as a dig at Jewish zeal but supporting Christian zeal. Zeal directed at our inward transformation, and showing the good ways of God’s Kingdom to others through proclaiming with our words and through our own lifestyle, is indeed a beautiful thing; but zeal more concerned with others’ behaviour than our own — a zeal that attacks others rather than showing others the better ways of God’s Kingdom is always misdirected and dangerous.

Summary & Conclusions

In the second phase of his defense of God’s faithfulness to Israel in light of Israel’s rejection of Jesus and the gospel, Paul revisits the idea of justification by faith. His people have heard the message, yet not believed. That does not mean God has rejected them; God remains faithful.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.