Saturday I was having lunch with an old seminary friend, and as soon as we sat down he asked me how Paul was doing. “Paul…the apostle?,” I asked after a moment. Yes, he said—how was all the Paul research going?
I told my friend that I had not thought very much about Paul lately, and that I had written about him even less. It’s true that I wrote a book about Paul, but that was six years ago now, and the writing that I’ve done about Paul since then has tended to be shorter pieces that are more narrowly focused. I’m not a Paul scholar, really, and I feel like I’ve said most of what I would like to say about him already. In the Acts book that I’ve finished that’s still in editorial process, I talk about Paul quite a bit of course, since Paul is one of the main characters in Acts. But that’s not the same thing as Paul’s letters (the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts are quite different from each other), and for the most part, for now, I’m glad to leave Paul in the past.
But passages like the ones from this week’s lectionary remind me why I find him so interesting in the first place. The lectionary for the second Sunday of Lent includes Romans 4:13-25 and also Genesis 17:1-7 and 15-16, which Paul is citing in the Romans passage. If you know Paul at all, you know that when you get a passage from Romans you’re in for a wild ride, and this one does not disappoint. It has everything: discussions about law, faith, Abraham and Sarah, descent and ancestry, righteousness, and resurrection.
If you zoom way out from Romans and try to read it not as Christian scripture but as a first-century letter, you might start to see different themes than you might have expected. Those of us who are Christians in the 21st century, especially those of us in the Protestant tradition, have been conditioned to read Romans as a tract about salvation. But I’m not sure that does the letter justice. I think that if we could somehow read it with an open mind, not knowing anything about Christianity or Christology or theories of salvation, we might find that Paul’s letter to the Romans is best understood as an extended meditation on inheritance. He’s asking, throughout the letter, how we should understand our ancestors and what might that understanding mean for the way we live our lives? Paul is preoccupied with Abraham in the letter, especially in chapter 4, and more broadly he’s thinking a lot about the God of Israel and God’s covenantal promises, and the ways those promises extend into Paul’s own day. One of my favorite books in New Testament studies, though it’s quite old at this point, is Krister Stendahl’s book Final Account—a thin and lyrical volume that’s a close reading of Romans. Stehdahl tracks Paul’s discussion of Abraham, and his exegesis of Genesis, as a kind of window into the apostle’s mind. Paul, Stendahl is arguing, is wrestling with Abraham, because Abraham wrestled with God, and because when Abraham “believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” in Genesis 15:6, Paul thought something important had happened not only for Abraham, and not only for Abraham’s descendants, but for the world.
Because of the polemics and arguments of the Protestant Reformation and the rest of Christian history, our knee-jerk reading of a passage like Romans 4:13-25 is usually that Paul is arguing for the triumph of faith over works. We think that when Paul talks about “law,” which he does a lot in these verses, he must be talking about a defunct Jewish legalism that cannot save us. And we think that when Paul talks about “faith,” and “hope,” and “righteousness,” he must be talking about a new and improved pathway to salvation. But neither case is as clear as it looks on paper, and there are some translation choices going on behind the scenes that make the Protestant reading of this passage seem easier than it ought to be. For starters, the word “law” is ambiguous enough in this passage that it doesn’t really refer to anything identifiable, and Christians have turned it into an all-encompassing bogeyman of an idea. The word Paul is using is nomos, which can have a lot of different meanings. It can mean “law” in the civil or secular sense, but that doesn’t make much sense in this context (though many people think similar words referring to authority have to refer to civil authorities in Romans 13, erroneously in my opinion). Nomos can also mean Torah in a technical sense—the Jewish Law, as passed from God to Moses and ratified as part of the covenant. Many people have read this passage in that sense—that it is Paul discussing, and dismissing, the Torah and law observance in general. Ironic, then, that Paul would cite Torah in the service of denigrating Torah.
But another option for reading nomos in this passage is to understand it neither in a technical secular legal sense nor in a specific religious sense, but in one of its common meanings in koine Greek, as custom or tradition or convention, the kinds of things passed down and received from ancestors. This actually makes a lot of sense in this passage, and it makes a lot of sense in light of the argument Paul is making about Abraham. That’s because this passage comes on the heels of a discussion of circumcision; in verses 9-12, which are not in the lectionary reading, Paul is explicitly asking about the role of circumcision. (Circumcision passages tend to get left out of the lectionary for obvious reasons). He’s kicking around the idea of circumcision as a sign of belonging and relationship with God earlier in his argument, and then, in verse 13 where this passage picks up, Paul mentions nomos. He’s very much not talking about the entirety of the Torah here; he’s talking about the act of circumcision as a stand-in for belonging and relationship. And—here’s the kicker—Paul notices that in Genesis, Abraham gets all of this praise from God and connection with God before he is circumcised. So, Paul realizes, we can uncouple circumcision from God’s favor, and—viola—gentiles too can be a part of God’s family.
Now, does this mean that God no longer honors Abraham’s descendants or has a special relationship with them? Of course not. This whole section of Romans begins with an emphatic statement and a rhetorical question from Paul, in 3:31 and 4:1: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?” Paul goes on to answer his own question: Abraham gained a great deal, and his circumcision was a sign of that gain.
You can begin to see what’s at stake in Christian readings of passages like this one, especially Protestant Christian readings of them. It is very, very easy to read something like Romans 4 as a supersessionist tract against Jews and Jewish identity; it’s very easy to read it erroneously as a prediction of Christian triumph over and replacement of Judaism. Five centuries of Protestant theology and fifteen more before that of Christian anti-Jewish theologies make that very easy to do, because they show up in our presuppositions about the text, our translations of the text, and our frameworks for interpreting it. It feels obvious to the average Christian reader of this passage that Paul is denigrating Jewish law and practice, but that obviousness comes from tradition, and from the easy but wrong readings it affords, not from the passage itself.
It helps to pay attention to audience. Every biblical text presupposes an audience, and rarely, probably never, is that audience anyone like us. None of the ancient authors who wrote the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had you or me in mind. Certainly, they might have had posterity in mind, and they might have been self-consciously committing their words to the future. But they could not have fathomed us, or the world we live in, or the myriad Christianities we know and participate in. We are not who they had in mind as they wrote. This is true of all biblical books, but especially true of Paul’s letters, because they are letters. They are mail. They were written by Paul (and companions sometimes) to specific people. Those people were not us. We are reading someone else’s mail.
So, to whom did Paul write Romans? He wrote it to the Romans, obviously (though there are some who think that this was a general letter, meant for many communities, and that we just have the Roman version of it). But he couldn’t have written it to all Romans, because “Romans” is a very broad category. Late in the letter, Paul specifies at least five small groups—churches, we could call them—to whom the letter is directed. For example, in 16:3-4, Paul writes “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Greet also the church in their house.” Other references to churches are more oblique, but scholars have found traces in the text. And, by reading the whole of Romans, we can detect that Paul expected that his letter would arrive among people who had big questions about Jews and gentiles and how they should get along. So, I am of the opinion that the churches Paul wrote to in Rome were mixed Jewish and gentile, though that is not a universal opinion among scholars by any means. I think there were Jews and gentiles trying to figure out how to get along, how to make their theology work across difference, and Paul knew that, and crafted arguments like the one in Romans 4 to appeal specifically to that audience.
In that sense, Romans is a letter addressing the question of how to belong together even across difference. That was a very specific problem for the Roman churches Paul was writing to, but it’s still quite relevant to us today, because we too struggle with the question of belonging across difference. We don’t always know how to reconcile the past with the present, and like the Romans seem to have done, we can get stuck at the place where our inherited customs and ideas are more exclusionary than inclusive. What I like about Paul’s argument in this part of Romans is that he’s starting from a place of wanting unity, and he’s working backward from there. The plainest reading of Genesis 17 is that Abraham and God have a special relationship, and everyone else is outside of it. But Paul is bending over backwards in Romans 4 to read the Genesis passage in a way that includes gentiles, even where there were ample scriptural resources to exclude them. Paul is prioritizing belonging across difference, and going out of his way to do it, and I think that’s a pretty good model for us today, even if Paul never had anyone like us in mind when he was writing it.