Sampling Romans

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 9th

MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice performing in 2009. Image by YoTuT and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

People around my age—people who grew up listening to the music of the 1980s and came of age with the hip-hop revolution of the 1990s—share what I think is a unique experience. Sometimes a song will play over the radio, and we have to take a moment to figure out which song it is. The confusion comes not because we are ignorant of music, but because we know too much. The confusion is because for some tunes, we know several different versions, and the bit of music appears in several different songs.

Is this song playing at the grocery store Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, or is it Ice Ice Baby, the Vanilla Ice song that sampled the Queen and Bowie song a decade later? Is this I’ll Be Missing You by Puff Daddy, or is it Every Breath You Take by the Police, the song that was sampled by Diddy fourteen years after it was released? Biggie’s hit song Hypnotize contains a sample of Herp Alpert’s song Rise; MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This contains parts of Rick James’ song Super Freak. I could go on. You get the idea. I grew up in the generation that knew the original songs, and then also knew the songs that sampled them, all in the same childhood. For many of us, there’s a weird half-second moment when we hear a familiar tune in public, where we’re trying to figure out which instance of a song we are hearing—the song itself, or the bit that has been lifted out and abstracted from the rest to act as a sample for something else.

Maybe it’s a tortured analogy, but I feel similarly about Paul’s letter to the Romans. Romans is a document written by Paul around the year 60 and addressed to a handful of groups of Jesus’ followers in Rome. Scholars argue vehemently about what kind of letter Romans is and why Paul wrote it, but for my money he wrote the letter as a self-introduction and a fundraising appeal for an upcoming missionary journey to Spain. (Paul likely never got to actually travel to Spain, and instead he likely died in the city of Rome itself before he had the chance, though we will probably never know for sure. For much more on this, see my academic book that came out a couple of weeks ago, or my book for general audiences that comes out in October). Romans, most likely, is Paul’s effort to explain himself to people who were mostly strangers, who had a sense of his reputation and because of that were probably a bit skeptical of Paul. But Paul understood those people to be critical to the next phase of his missionary work. In my opinion, the letter to the Romans is probably an example of Paul managing his own image from afar, and trying to cast his controversial persona in the best light before an eventual planned visit to the capital of the empire.

At the same time, Romans has this other, more modern life as the Ur-text of Protestant Christianity and especially evangelical Christianity. Beginning at least with Martin Luther, Protestants have invested Romans with a special power. Luther called it purest gospel and gave the letter pride of place in his own theology. Christians through the years have followed suit. As a young evangelical, I was trained to lead people on the so-called Romans Road, which was a series of out-of-order, out-of-context quotations from Romans that eventually were supposed to lure people to salvation. All that is needed for salvation, in the eyes of many evangelical Christians, is for someone to hear a few verses from Romans, and they would likely see the truth of Jesus’ sacrifice and accept him into their hearts.

Romans 10:9—which is part of the lectionary readings for this Sunday—was a stone in that Romans Road. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, the verse goes. For many evangelical Christians, perhaps all the way back to Martin Luther, that simple formula—believe and confess—was necessary and sufficient for salvation.

This is where Romans feels a little bit like a song sample to me. There’s the original—which Paul wrote for a specific occasion with a specific audience in mind and at a specific time and place. And then there is the remixed sample, which has a life entirely of its own. The sample—like the samples of Herp Alpert, or Queen and Bowie, or Rick James—has been repurposed for something that the first author could not have anticipated, and of which they did not even necessarily approve. The sample is out there in the world, meaning something that the first version never really meant.

That’s not to say that Paul had nothing to say about salvation. He very much did have something to say about it, and he’s saying something about it in this passage. But the version of his words that has found its way into modern evangelical tracts and street-preacher pressure tactics is a long way from what Paul was trying to say in Romans.

The letter to the Romans is notoriously convoluted and difficult to understand. Some people will object to that claim, and say that Romans is actually straightforward and simple, but I think a plain reading of the text bears my opinion out. (Just scroll up and click that link and try to figure out what Paul is trying to say in these eleven verses. It’s easy to take any one of them out of context and claim to understand it; it’s much more difficult to discern what Paul’s broader argument is across all these verses, or across this whole section of Romans, or in the entire letter. Eminent scholars build whole careers on that task). Romans is so wound tight, I think, because of the very fact of its composition. Paul was writing to people he mostly did not know, who he had reason to think were skeptical of him, trying to please them and disarm them and charm them enough to back his new ventures. His writing in Romans is twisty and slippery because he was trying to satisfy people whose reactions he couldn’t see in real time. It was a difficult writing assignment, and that shows in the letter.

Although modern Protestants and especially evangelicals often treat Romans as if it is a tract about salvation, many scholars read Romans as a complicated text in which Paul is walking several tightropes at once. He’s probably, as many scholars have pointed out, walking the tightrope of criticizing the Roman Empire while writing to people living in its capital, and at the same time trying not to have anyone notice who could hurt him or the people he was writing to. He was probably trying to win supporters for his Spain journey, as I mentioned above, while not stepping on the toes of the leaders of the Roman churches, who might not have welcomed an out-of-town know-it-all telling their flock what to think. And—this is crucial to understanding Romans but has been mostly ignored for most of the history of Protestantism—Paul was trying to mediate between factions of gentile Jesus-followers and Jewish Jesus-followers. The letter is full of references to Jewish practice, requests for gentile humility in the face of Jewish precedence, and passionate claims about Paul’s own relationship to his Jewishness. (You can see one such example in last Sunday’s epistle reading). Start to finish, Romans is infused with an anxiety about the relations between gentile and Jewish followers of Jesus, which makes sense if you remember that a) the Roman communities he was writing to likely included both groups side by side, and b) Paul had reputation as a self-styled apostle to the gentiles who seems to have alienated a lot of his fellow Jews. There’s a way to read most or all of Romans as a convoluted what-do-I-have-to-say-for-myself account of Paul’s view of God’s salvation of both Jews and gentiles.

So Romans is about salvation, but not in the simplistic way that’s implied when 10:9 is printed on a t-shirt or in an evangelizing tract. Paul was trying to talk about salvation, but in a specific Jews-and-gentiles way, which you can see clearly in 10:12, where out of nowhere he says that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. That claim doesn’t make any sense unless someone was claiming that was a distinction between Jews and Greeks—that is, between Jews and gentiles. It’s only coherent if we remember that Paul had already been arguing, for ten chapters, that God’s salvation applied to both groups, and pleading for the two factions to get along and respect each other. Paul was dipping his toes into a running dispute and trying to be politic about it, and the seemingly out-of-nowhere reference to not making a distinction between Jews and Greeks is evidence that Paul was doing his best to keep the peace. You can even see how, at the end of this little passage, Paul turned the debate to his own purposes. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, Paul wrote in a paraphrase of Joel 2:32. And people can’t call on someone they don’t know about, he continued in 10:14, and someone needs to tell them, and no one can tell them unless someone sends them to do it, he writes in 10:15. And that’s why you need to send me, Paul offered, to be the one to tell those Spanish gentiles about Jesus. It’s a nifty argument, bolstered by an appeal to the well-being of gentiles and references to Jewish scriptures, tailored to the conditions of the Roman communities to which he was writing.

That’s a complex and layered appeal that Paul is making in Romans 10:5-15, but it gets flattened out and simplified in the sampled version. I don’t recall ever seeing any of these other ten verses on a bumper sticker, but 10:9 has become a kind of motto and a shorthand for people who think that the full purpose of Christianity is convincing other people to profess Christianity.

The letter to the Romans is one of the most complicated books in the Bible, and it is also one of the most quoted. Both things are true, but the first one makes the second one more difficult. The quotes that tend to circulate from Romans—the samples, if you will—tend to be wildly out of context, because the people doing the sampling either don’t understand the source text or they don’t care to couch it in nuance. Take a few bars from here, a few notes from there, and rearrange them out of order, and you can make Romans say something it does not say; you can make it into an evangelical handbook. You might believe that the end result is a worthwhile song; you might even think that it’s better than the original, and there’s no accounting for differences in taste.

But the sample is not, in the end, the song itself.