Living Sacrifices, Transformed not Conformed: Romans 12.1-2

So far in this series, Paul has made his case for a single, diverse community of Christ-followers reflective of the new humanity in Christ. This community does not force Gentiles to become Jewish, but also shows respect to Jews, Christian and otherwise, for being God’s chosen people. In the next section, Romans 12-15, Paul explores what this community is to look like. Today we’ll see how he beings this section with a plea for radical  personal transformation.

Text

[12.1] I exhort you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s compassion, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God as your rational worship. [2] And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind’s interpretive faculty so that you might discern the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Experience

If chapters 9-11 felt like reading someone else’s mail, since they address problems and concerns that aren’t pressing for me, chapter 12 marks a refreshing return to a message that feels very universal and evergreen. My faith, psychological interests, and orientation to the world are resonate strongly with the theme of personal transformation, so passages like this excite me.

Encounter

Here Paul addresses individual Christ-followers. While I know that Paul’s ultimate goal is for them to live well together in community, here it’s a personal and individual appeal for them to undergo the transformation required to make that community life happen.

Explore

Romans 12 and Roman Rhetoric

It’s universally recognized in the scholarship that chapter 12 marks the start of a distinct section of Romans (Tonstad 287ff; Eberhart; Witherington 280; Kruse 461). In Roman rhetorical literature, this section is called the paraenesis, which offers ethical advice grounded in what has preceded it (Eberhart; Witherington 280). Here the transition is marked explicitly with the language of exhortation (12.1) and commandment (12.2f). In today’s jargon, we’d call it the ‘call to action’, which creates a sense of urgency in the audience to follow through on the speaker’s desired next steps. With this in mind, we’d expect continuity with what has preceded it, but a difference in form, tone, and content. And that’s what we see here.

As poor of a sentence-level writer as Paul was, he did excel in rhetoric. He’s just spent eight chapters discussing God’s grace and the need to come to God in a posture of faithfulness, and three talking about God’s patience and mercy towards Israel. Chapter 11 ended with a rousing praise of God’s mercy and compassion. Now Paul turns his attention to his readers, insisting that they embody that same compassion and faithfulness within their own communities (Tonstad 287ff; Witherington 285; Nanos 320; Kruse 461). Having received grace, they are now to live in gratitude by showing similar grace to others (Witherington 283). This what I’ve previously called God’s pay-it-forward economy of grace.

Living Sacrifices

Paul introduces the kind of posture he wants the faithful to take with the metaphor of offering and sacrifice. In chapter 6, Paul had urged his readers not to offer their bodies up to sin, but to God, as instruments or weapons of justice (6.13, 19). Here he picks that language up again, exhorting them to offer themselves up as living, holy, and pleasing sacrifices to God. All four of those words deserves a bit of thought:

• Sacrifices: We have an unrealistic image of sacrifice as being essentially about killing animals to atone for sin. But that was just a small part of the Jewish sacrificial system. Most of it was about thanksgiving and dedication (Eberhart). This fits well with what Paul has in mind, the dedication of one’s life to God in gratitude of the grace received in and through Jesus (Witherington 283). With the temple still standing when Paul was writing, to say nothing of the sacrifices that were part of Roman civic religion, this was a living and very relevant metaphor (Eberhart); and as Nanos notes, it was a common one in Second Temple literature, and particularly in radical forms of Judaism such as the one at Qumran (1QS 8.5-10, 9.3-5; 4QFlor 1.2-7; cf. Odes of Solomon 20.1-5).
• Living: Old Testament sacrifices, whether of grain or livestock, involved the destruction of the offering. But the sacrifice Paul has in mind is not that of martyrdom, but what is in some ways the more challenging sacrifice of ongoing dedication and service (Kruse 462; Witherington 284)
• Holy: Holiness is about being fully dedicated to, or separated apart for, God (Eberhart). There’s a single-mindedness in orientation at play here (SBL). As Witherington puts it, God “does not want something from us; he wants us” (284).
• Pleasing: Contrary to the notion, common in some theological circles, that we can do nothing to please God, Paul makes it clear that the faithful offering of our life in response to God’s mercy is pleasing to God (Witherington 285).

Rational Worship

Paul calls this self-offering our “rational” (logikos, ‘rational, reasonable, logical’) worship. This is a strange expression that feels out of place. Many Bible translations talk around it, with translations such as “spiritual”, “true”, “thoughtful”, or “appropriate,” and lots of ink has been spent discussing what Paul could mean by it here (Tonstad 289; Eberhart; SBL). I see the possibilities as growing from minimalist to maximalist readings. It could simply mean ‘logical’, as in ‘this is the kind of worship that makes sense.’ A ‘bigger’ interpretation, which aligns with similar usage in the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (a near-contemporary of Paul), is that this is worship that honours God with knowledge and the intellect (Witherington 285; Nanos 320; Kruse 462). But if we take one step further into philosophical language, it could be something like ‘this is the kind of worship that is consistent with the argument I’ve made so far’ (Witherington 285). And finally, if we want to assume Paul is using the word in its purest philosophical sense (originating in Middle Platonism (where we see it in the aforementioned Philo), but becoming part of the general language of popular philosophy of the day), it could be something like ‘this is the kind of worship that aligns with the reason or ‘grammar’ that is the blueprint of the universe.’ While I’m happy to take the more conservative approaches, I think the more extreme option is very much in play. We’ve already seen that Paul was happy to make use of the language of pop philosophy, and logikos would be a natural way to describe the kind of alignment between one’s lifestyle and fundamental truths that Paul is getting at here (Witherington 284; Eberhart). The options exist in a kind of nesting doll: It is ‘reasonable’ worship, but reasonable means using the intellect, and in the thought of the day, the intellect when working properly aligns with the fundamental truths and mysteries of the universe.

At any rate, this kind of life is described as worship. As Witherington helpfully puts it:

Worship is where the creature recognizes that he or she is a creature and God is the Creator. It is an act of submission or ordering oneself under the Divine. It is also by implication a denial of one’s own divinity, a denial that one is lord of one’s own life. (Witherington 284)

Renewal of the Nous

Paul describes this rational worship in terms that are both apocalyptic and psychological:

And do not be conformed to this age, but transformed by the renewal of your mind’s interpretive faculty so that you might discern the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. (12.2)

It is apocalyptic in its rejection of “this age” and its ways, in favour of living in God’s ways (Kruse 463; SBL; Tonstad 289; Witherington 285). But this apocalyptic reality is described in terms of a psychological process, the transformation of the nous, a word commonly translated as ‘mind’, but which I’ve chosen to paraphrase here to avoid misinterpretation. As I’ve commented regularly here over the years (see here, here, and here), the nous did not refer to the ‘mind’ as we think of it in English, in terms of cognition and reasoning, but as the organ of understanding. The nous is what makes sense of the stimuli taken in by our senses. In the pop psychology of the day, which, again, Paul commonly uses in his writing, bad behaviour comes from the nous being misaligned: This misalignment leads us to misunderstand our sensations and emotions, confusing need and want, and causing us to get carried away by ‘the passions,’ our body’s natural instincts and impulses. In this framework, repentance (metanoia ‘a change of nous’) is not about feeling badly or saying sorry, but about a fundamental change in the nous that allows us to see the world and ourselves clearly. Here Paul spells that process out, exhorting his readers to stop the status quo of conformity to ‘this world’ and its ways of seeing and being, and be transformed in the nous (Tonstad 290; Kruse 468 (though his interpretation of the passage is far more cognition-heavy than mine); Witherington 285f; cf. Ephesians 4.21-24).

This sense of the nous as an organ of understanding rather than cognition is reinforced by the purpose Paul provides for the transformation: the ability to discern God’s will, which is nothing less than goodness, God-pleasing, and, ultimately, perfection (cf. Matthew 5.48; 2 Corinthians 7.1; Hebrews 6.1; 1 John 2.5). This focus on moral discernment flows naturally from Paul’s earlier argument on following the law written on the heart rather than obedience to the letter of the law. As Witherington helpfully puts it:

For many, perhaps most, situations in life, there is not a specific biblical rule to tell one precisely what to do. Therefore, one must have a renewed mind, gain a moral vision, and develop a competency in moral discernment to determine what is indeed good and pleasing and perfect in God’s sight. One will be able to do this only if one’s mind is being renewed and one is also consciously disengaging from the world’s orientation and prevailing assumptions. (Witherington 287; cf. Kruse 465)

Challenge

Jesus, riffing off of John the Baptist, famously taught that a tree will be judged by its fruit: that is, the success of a life, an idea, or a teaching must be judged on what it produces in the world. With this in mind, we would do well to pay attention to the feminist interpreters who have questioned the quality of the fruit the sacrificial imagery Paul uses here has produced. As Eberhart concludes (quoting Beverly Roberts Gaventa):

In parenetic contexts, [sacrificial metaphors] appear to promote nothing but self-denial and submission. Therefore, “many women have seen themselves as ‘living sacrifices’ and have experienced that as profoundly destructive.” (Eberhart)

There are two sides to the problem here: a legitimate social problem and a problem of theological framing. The social reality is that when sacrifices need to be made within families or society — especially surrounding the difficult intersection of career goals and caregiving needs — it is often women who bear the the brunt of the sacrifices.

But, as Eberhart points out, the association of such sacrifices of energy, time, and opportunity with drudgery and suffering are made worse by the common misunderstandings about what sacrifice entailed:

[S]acrificial metaphors not only in Romans 12:1 but elsewhere in the New Testament have often been misinterpreted. Some of these problems have to do with the characteristic misconception that sacrificial rituals exclusively involve animals and are in essence mainly about slaughter, connected with ideas that blood rites and suffering are intrinsic to sacrifice. Related metaphors, therefore, are habitually interpreted in negative ways.

But as we’ve seen, far more commonly, the Old Testament associates sacrifice with joy, thanksgiving, and gift. This doesn’t make the burdens of caregiving any less difficult or one-sided, but a more theologically accurate understanding of sacrifice could help to provide a more psychologically fruitful framing for the sacrifices caregivers need to make.

And of course we also need to ensure that the calling to offer one’s life as a living sacrifice is directed equally to everyone in a community, including within the family.

Expand

Does the interpretation of the passage presented here help us to grow in faithfulness? Absolutely. Here Paul offers a call to a rejection of the status quo of ‘how the world works’ and a radical transformation of heart and mind towards God’s ways. There is no vision more expansive than this!

Summary & Conclusions

Romans 8.1-2 marks the transition into the paraenesis of the letter, the section dedicated to moral and ethical exhortation. Here Paul exhorts his readers to a radical rejection of the ways of this world and be just as radically transformed in their understanding, towards God’s ways.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.