ROMANS, EPISTLE TO THE. The longest of the thirteen NT letters bearing the name of Paul and the first letter in the long-established order of the corpus Paulinum.

I. Authorship

If one disregards those erratic schools of thought (e.g. the Dutch school of W. C. van Manen at the beginning of the 20th cent.) which have denied apostolic authorship to any of the documents in the corpus Paulinum, the Pauline authorship of Romans is uncontested. With Galatians and the two letters to the Corinthians, Romans belongs to the four “capital” epistles which are basic material for determining the main lines of Paul’s teaching. In one sense it is otiose to speak of the Pauline authorship of Romans and its three companion letters, since for most theological purposes “Paul” and “the author of Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians” are synonymous terms.

II. Destination

In the opening salutation the addressees are denoted as “all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints” (Rom 1:7)—for the textual problem of the phrase “in Rome” see # VII below. The fact that Paul did not speak of the “church” in Rome may be significant; perhaps at this time there was no city-wide church in Rome with a community consciousness of its own, as there was, for example, in Corinth, where Paul himself had planted and tended the church. On the other hand, the fact that Paul can address a letter to all the Christians in Rome implies some assurance on his part that they would all have access to it. Even if the only church life in Rome was found in decentralized groups or household churches, the fact of their common faith in Christ would tend to give them a sense of fellowship one with another.

III. Christianity in Rome

There is no record of the planting of Christianity in Rome. The position of the city as the center of communications throughout the Rom. empire would insure that Christianity, once it was securely established in the eastern provinces, would reach the capital sooner rather than later. The mention of “visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes” (Acts 2:10) as the only European contingent in the list of those present in Jerusalem at the first Christian Pentecost may suggest that some of these, impressed by what they heard, carried the message back to Rome. In the 4th cent. the Lat. writer conventionally called “Ambrosiaster,” in the preamble to his commentary on Romans, says that the Romans “had embraced the faith of Christ, albeit according to the Jewish rite, without seeing any sign of mighty works or any of the apostles.” These words prob. preserve a sound tradition. What he wrote about the “Jewish rite” reflects the probable truth of the matter, that it was Jewish Christians who first carried the Gospel to Rome. As late as the time of Hippolytus, early in the 3rd cent., Christian worship at Rome retained some elements derived from Judaism, and from “nonconformist” rather than normative Judaism (e.g. the preliminary bath of purification which converts were required to undergo on the Thursday preceding Easter, by way of preparation for their baptism on Easter Day itself, according to the Hippolytan Apostolic Tradition). That the base of Rom. Christianity was Jewish, although when Paul wrote, it comprised more Gentile than Jewish believers, is a natural inference from Romans 11:13-24.

The Jewish colony which existed in Rome as early as the 2nd cent. b.c., was greatly augmented from 63 b.c. onward, after Judea was incorporated into the Rom. empire; Cicero in 59 b.c. represented it as large, clannish, powerful, and influential. The city authorities from time to time tried to evict masses of undesirable immigrants, and occasionally the Jewish colony attracted their unfriendly attention in this regard. In a.d. 19, when Tiberius was emperor, there was a large-scale expulsion of Jews from Rome because of a financial scandal (Jos. Antiq. XVIII. iii. 5ff.); but in a decade or two they were back in larger numbers than ever. Claudius, at the beginning of his principate (a.d. 41), took some steps to restrict them (Dio Cassius, Hist. lx.6), but about eight years later he resorted to the more drastic course of expulsion. This expulsion, mentioned in Acts 18:2, is ascribed by Suetonius (Claudius, 25) to the Rom. Jews’ “constant indulgence in riots at the instigation of Chrestus.” These last words are enigmatic; it is conceivable that at this time there was in Rome a Jewish agitator named Chrestus of whom nothing else is known. It is more likely that Suetonius reproduced a garbled version of the rioting which repeatedly broke out within the Jewish colony as a result of the introduction of Christianity. That on this occasion the expelled Jews included some who acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah is evident from the fact that Aquila and his wife Priscilla were among them; they appear to have been Christians before they met Paul in Corinth, for Paul never refers to them as though they were converts of his.

The expulsion under Claudius was no more durable than that under Tiberius. The edict may have been allowed to lapse with Claudius’ death (a.d. 54), if not earlier; a few years later the Jewish colony in Rome was as flourishing as ever, and as before it included Jewish believers in Jesus. By the time Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, not more than eight years after the edict of expulsion, the Christian community in the capital comprised a considerable Gentile element which prob. by that time outnumbered the Jewish membership. At any rate, Paul could assure his readers that their faith was “proclaimed in all the world” (Rom 1:8). Some idea of the composition of the Rom. church at this time may be gathered from the greetings in ch. 16, if one regards this chapter as destined for Rome (on this see # VII below). Many people whom Paul had met at various places in the eastern provinces from time to time were then resident in Rome, so that he had many friends there, although thus far he had never visited the city. They included members of the households of certain scions of the Herod family, and also two of Paul’s kinsmen and fellow prisoners who, he says, are “of note among the apostles” and were Christians before he himself was, with one or two others like Rufus (prob.), whose association with the Christian movement went back to the earliest days. The presence of such men and women in the Rom. church, even if they were a handful in proportion to the total membership, must have contributed greatly to its strength.

It may be that by the time this letter was written Christianity was beginning to make its way into the upper strata of Rom. society. In a.d. 57 the wife of Aulus Plautius (who had added Britain to the Rom. empire fourteen years before) was accused before a domestic court of having embraced a “foreign superstition” which, from the description of her way of life, might have been Christianity (Tac. Ann. xiii. 32). She was acquitted, and continued for the rest of her life to enjoy the esteem of her friends in spite of her retiring ways, which presented a sharp contrast to the social frivolity of many of her contemporaries. Some color is given to the view that her “foreign superstition” was Christianity by archeological evidence for the prevalence of Christianity in her family in the following cent.

By the time of the first great persecution of Rom. Christians, which broke out as the sequel to the fire of a.d. 64, they were so numerous that a pagan historian (Tac. Ann. xv. 44) and a Christian father (Clement of Rome, Ep. 6:1) both described the martyrs on that occasion as “a huge multitude.” The Rom. church survived the ordeal and continued to increase and enjoy the esteem of Christians throughout the world as a church “worthy of God, worthy of honour, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, pre-eminent in love, walking in the law of Christ and bearing the Father’s name” (Ignatius, To the Romans, preface).

IV. Occasion, purpose and date

The writing of this letter is a milestone in the course of Paul’s ministry as apostle to the Gentiles. In Acts 19:21 Luke says that toward the close of his three years’ evangelization of Ephesus and the province of Asia, Paul planned to visit Macedonia and Achaia, the theater of an earlier phase of his ministry, and then go to Jerusalem, adding, “After I have been there, I must also see Rome.” Luke put the matter from his own perspective; Rome is the goal of his narrative, and when he has brought Paul there some years later and portrayed him preaching the Gospel unhindered at the heart of the empire, under the eyes of the highest authorities, he has achieved his purpose. Paul’s perspective was different; to him, Rome was not a goal but a place which he must visit in transit, or at best a base from which he could set out on a further phase of his ministry, with a view to repeating in the western Mediterranean the program which (at the time indicated in Acts 19:21) he had almost completed in the E. That Paul’s plan for this westward advance was conceived around the time indicated by Luke may be gathered from this letter.

With the evangelization of the province of Asia, Paul had completed his program of missionary pioneering in Asia Minor and the Aegean world. The Gospel had been preached and churches had been planted in the principal cities and along the principal roads of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, and Achaia. During the brief visit to the Balkan peninsula which followed his Ephesian ministry, Paul carried the Gospel farther W than he had previously done, at least as far as the border of Illyricum (Rom 15:19), the province on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. In his own words, he had no longer “any room for work in these regions” (Rom 15:23). His missionary zeal had not weakened through the arduous experiences of the past years; there were other Gentile lands to be won for the Gospel, and the responsibility of evangelizing them rested peculiarly on Paul as the Gentiles’ apostle par excellence. Some Gentile lands along the Mediterranean seaboard had, however, been evangelized already by others than Paul; he looked for virgin soil, for territory where the name of Christ had never been heard. Spain, the oldest Rom. province in the W and an important bastion of Rom. civilization, was such a place; to Spain, then, Paul decided to go and continue his apostolic service there.

First, however, he determined to go to Jerusalem and give an account of his stewardship thus far—not to the church of Jerusalem or its leaders, for he denied that he had in any sense been commissioned by them, but to the risen Christ. One may ask why he should have thought it necessary to go to Jerusalem for this purpose; could he not have accomplished it in Ephesus or Corinth? Perhaps he could have done so; but a consideration of his reason may help to understand the place which Jerusalem held in Paul’s thinking. Although it was in Damascus that he first began to preach the Gospel, he describes the first stage of his mission as having been fulfilled “from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum” (Rom 15:19), as though Jerusalem were his point of departure. It was in Jerusalem many years before (Acts 22:17-21) that Paul had a vision of the Lord in the Temple and heard His command: “Depart; for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” To that same spot he would return and present to his Master as a spiritual sacrifice the fruit of his “priestly service of the gospel of God” (Rom 15:16). He planned also to take with him to Jerusalem delegates of the Gentile churches he had founded in the Aegean provinces, bearing gifts from their churches as a contribution to relieve the poverty of the mother church in Jerusalem; thus, he hoped, the bonds of fellowship would be more securely forged between those churches and the headquarters of Jewish Christianity, where the Gentile mission in general, and Paul’s activity in particular, tended to be viewed with misgivings and suspicion. When this service had been completed, and not before, he would be free to turn his steps in the direction of Spain. On the route to Spain he would have an opportunity of realizing an ambition cherished for many years—the ambition of seeing Rome. Roman citizen though he was from birth, he had never visited the city. It was, therefore, in large measure to prepare the Christians of Rome for his projected visit that he sent them this letter.

The date of the letter is prob. to be fixed at some point in the winter of a.d. 56-57. The chronology of this phase of Paul’s career can be determined to some degree by the inscriptional evidence from Delphi dating Gallio’s entry on the proconsulship of Achaia (cf. Acts 18:12) in the summer of a.d. 51 (or, less prob., a.d. 52), and by the numismatic evidence pointing to a.d. 59 as the year of Felix’s supersession by Festus in the procuratorship of Judaea (cf. Acts 24:27). In terms of the narrative of Acts, the writing of the letter may be placed during Paul’s three months in Greece (20:3). The reference to his host Gaius (Rom 16:23), which is valid evidence whatever the destination of ch. 16 may have been, points to Corinth as the city where Paul was resident at the time (cf. 1 Cor 1:14); so does the reference to “Erastus, the city treasurer”—if, as seems likely, this Erastus is to be identified with the man of that name mentioned as curator of public buildings in a Corinthian inscr. uncovered in 1929.

In addition to paving the way for his visit to Rome Paul hoped to secure the good will of the Rom. Christians to such an extent that they would provide him with a forward base for his Spanish mission—in the way, for example, that Syrian Antioch had served as a base for Barnabas and himself when they evangelized Cyprus and the cities of S Galatia. He knew that outside his own mission field (and even to some degree inside it) his reputation suffered from the criticisms of his opponents. Therefore he availed himself of the opportunity to place before the Rom. Christians a systematic statement of the Gospel as he understood and proclaimed it, and of his policy as apostle to the Gentiles. He does not impose his authority on these readers as he does when he writes to his own converts; yet he makes it plain that the authority by which he carries on his ministry is imparted to him by the risen Christ who called him to be His apostle. The Gospel expounded in this letter is recognizably “the Gospel according to Paul” as known from his other letters, and esp. from Galatians. Whereas Galatians was an urgent response to a critical situation in Paul’s mission field, Romans is a more dispassionate and orderly unfolding of the same theme to which Galatians is related “as the rough model to the finished statue” (J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians [1890], p. 49). A great deal of the present letter was therefore of general interest, and it is probable that from the first, at Paul’s own instance, copies of it were circulated to other churches as well as to that in Rome (see # VII below).

How well the letter accomplished its immediate purpose is uncertain; not for three years was Paul able to visit Rome, and when he came it was not as a free agent but as a prisoner under armed guard, to stand trial before Caesar to whose supreme court he had appealed from the jurisdiction of the procurator of Judaea. The reception of the letter may have had something to do with the welcome he received from some Rom. Christians as he approached their city along the Appian Way, when he was still some forty m. distant. “The brethren there,” says his companion Luke, “when they heard of us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us. On seeing them Paul thanked God and took courage” (Acts 28:15).

V. Outline

VI. Contents

A. Prologue. Paul expands the opening salutation (Rom 1:1-7) to emphasize his special calling and the nature of the Gospel which he has been commissioned to proclaim. The Gospel has God as its Author and His Son Jesus Christ as its subject matter; it is no innovation, but was promised of old by the prophets. Jesus Christ traced His human lineage from King David (this is part of the early Jewish kerygma, calculated to show that Jesus possessed the genealogical credentials for the Davidic Messiahship); but His resurrection, accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit set Him forth as “Son of God in power.” To bring the nations under His obedience Paul, His servant, had been chosen by Him and endowed with apostolic grace. Since Rome belongs to the Gentile world it falls within the sphere of Paul’s apostleship, and to the Christians of Rome he addressed himself with his customary greeting of “grace and peace.”

1. The introduction to his argument (1:8-15) assures his readers that he regularly prays for them and thanks God for them, since he is well acquainted with their good reputation, and explains that his reason for not having visited them was lack of opportunity, since he has often planned to see them, in order to preach the Gospel at Rome as elsewhere in the Gentile world and enjoy mutual fellowship and refreshment in their company. The preaching of the Gospel is for him an obligation which he will never have fully discharged as long as he lives.

2. The foundation of Christian doctrine (1:16-8:39). The main section of the letter begins with a brief statement of the nature and theme of the Gospel: it is God’s mighty means for the salvation of all believers, Jew and Gentile alike, and it displays the righteousness of God—not merely God’s righteous character but His gracious bestowal of a righteous status on believers, in accordance with Habakkuk 2:4 which Paul construes to mean “He who through faith is righteous shall live” (1:16, 17).

The necessity for men to receive God’s righteousness by faith if they are to receive it at all is unfolded (1:18-3:20). Stage by stage the moral bankruptcy of humanity is demonstrated. A somber backdrop to the grace of God in the Gospel is the wrath of God manifesting itself in human history: wrong ideas of God lead to wrong ways of life. The indictment of the pagan world (1:18-32) was not only common form in Jewish lit. of the time; it could be corroborated in the judgment of many Gentile writers. The repeated “God gave them up” (vv. 24, 26, 28) bespeaks the working of divine retribution in history. The statement that men had the knowledge of God at their disposal in His works of creation (vv. 19ff.) is paralleled by Paul’s speech to the Athenian Areopagus (Acts 17:24ff.); the differences of perspective between the two passages are due to the different audiences addressed. The moral argument of these vv. had already been summarized (Wisd Sol 14:12): “For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life.”

Paul then envisages a bystander applauding this denunciation of pagan immorality and turns on him to assure him that he is in no better case (Rom 2:1-16). Such denunciations can be paralleled among pagan moralists as well as among Jews of that period, and although Paul had a Jewish critic in mind from the outset of ch. 2, his language through v. 16 would be largely applicable to such a pagan as Seneca. It is not enough to avoid the grosser forms of immorality if one is involved in the society which fosters them or practices essentially the same vices in a more refined way. The judgment of God is completely impartial; it is proportioned to each man’s works, whether he be Jew or Gentile, moralizer or libertine. If a man presumes that since divine retribution has not manifested itself in his life in the manner detailed in ch. 1, he is exempt from that judgment, let him thank God for His goodness, and reflect that this goodness is a sign of God’s patience with him, giving him opportunity to repent. If Jews break the law of Moses, they must repent of their transgression, but the fact that Gentiles have not received that law does not exempt them from the necessity of repentance; they have a divine law written in the conscience; when they break it they know that they are doing wrong, and will be judged in the light of it at the last judgment.

Turning more directly to the Jew (2:17-29), Paul writes that he has no cause to suppose that he enjoys a position of special favor before God because of the privileges God has lavished on his nation. It is not the knowledge but the doing of the law that is important. The Jew who knows the will of God by revelation is more guilty if he disobeys it than the Gentile who has no such knowledge. There are many ways of breaking the divine commandments, and when Paul, applying to the reputation of Jews in the Rom. empire the words of Isaiah 52:5, said, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Rom 2:24), he said something which found corroboration in both Jewish and Gentile writers of the period. What is of primary importance is that a man’s heart must be right with God; apart from that, the knowledge of the law and the covenant of circumcision are valueless. God will accept an uncircumcised Gentile who does His will rather than a circumcised Jew who does not. It is the circumcision of the heart that matters (cf. Deut 10:16); by etymology the true Jew is the man whose life wins “praise” from God (Rom 2:28, 29; cf. Gen 29:35; 49:8) and such praise is not confined to men of any one race.

If this is so, someone may ask, is there any advantage in being a Jew? This quotation of a question or objection by someone breaking into his argument is a feature of the diatribe style of Gr. rhetoric, repeatedly used by Paul in this letter. Paul’s reply is that there is great advantage in belonging to the people to whom the oracles of God were committed, in order that they might be the instrument for the accomplishment of His purpose in the world. It is true that some of them proved unfaithful to their trust, but since God is God, no imperfection in the instrument can thwart His purpose. Nor can He be blamed for not foreseeing such imperfection: no lawsuit against God can ever succeed. Nor can those who have been unfaithful to their trust claim indulgence because their unfaithfulness has been overruled by God for His glory: the doing of evil that good may come is always to be condemned (Rom 3:1-8).

Despite the advantages inherited by Jews, their failure to treat these advantages responsibly means that before God they have no claim to favor over Gentiles. A catena of OT passages, establishing the sinfulness of all mankind, applies to Gentiles but in the first instance to Jews, since they were the people with whom the sacred writers were primarily concerned. The whole world is bound to plead guilty at God’s tribunal; no one can expect to be justified there on the ground of his works or his obedience to God’s law; the law which sets forth God’s will reveals in the event man’s inability to do that will (3:9-20).

Every attempt of man to establish his own righteousness before God being ruled out of court, the way is open for the introduction of God’s way of righteousness, and to this Paul devotes the crucially important passage which follows (3:21-23). The first part may be paraphrased thus: “But now a way to get right with God has been revealed, apart from the righteousness prescribed in the law. This way, which is attested by the law and the prophets, is provided by God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe in Him. There is no difference: Jew and Gentile alike have sinned, and all fall short of God’s glory; but Jew and Gentile alike can be brought into a right relationship with God and secure His pardon. This they receive freely, by His pure grace, because of the redemptive work accomplished by Christ Jesus. He has been set before mankind by God as the One whose sacrificial death has made atonement for sin, and what He has procured becomes effective in a person through faith. God’s righteousness has been demonstrated; in His forbearance He passed over sins committed before Christ came, instead of exacting their proper penalty, and He did so in prospect of the demonstration of His righteousness in this present epoch. While remaining perfectly righteous, He pardons those who believe in Jesus and brings them into a right relationship with Himself.” The “expiation” (v. 25, RSV) which is provided in Christ averts the wrath of Romans 1:18 and wipes out the sinner’s guilt. It is not an act by which the sinner attempts to placate God (as if such a thing were possible) but an act in which God graciously takes the initiative. The Gr. word (hilastērion) is used elsewhere in the Gr. Bible for the “mercy seat” where God assured His people when they confessed their sin through their sacerdotal representative, of His forgiveness and acceptance. What was done by a rit ual object lesson has now been accomplished effectively in Christ “by his blood”; and all may share in its benefits by resting their faith in Him.

If this is God’s way of justifying men and women, it affords them no opportunity of taking any credit to themselves; it springs from His grace, not their merit. It is a way which is open on equal terms to Jew and Gentile, since God is the God of both; therefore neither has now any advantage over the other. Moreover, far from setting the law aside, it vindicates the law (3:27-31).

To show how the principle of justification by faith vindicates the law, Paul returned to the account of Abraham in Genesis (4:1-25). If obedience to God’s will were the ground of justification, Abraham could make a good case (cf. Gen 26:5). According to the record, the ground of Abraham’s justification was his simply taking God at His word: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Rom 4:3, quoting Gen 15:6). The place which this OT text already occupied in Paul’s thinking may be seen from his use of it in Galatians 3:6. When he proceeds (Rom 4:5) to speak of God as He “who justifies the ungodly,” he boldly declares that God in the Gospel does the very thing which in the law He says He will not do (cf. Exod 23:7: “I will not acquit the wicked,” where LXX has the same verb and noun as Paul uses).

Before developing the argument about Abraham, Paul looks at another OT use of the verb “reckon”: “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not reckon his sin” (Ps 32:2; cf. Rom 4:6-8). The non-reckoning of sin to the sinner is equivalent to his being reckoned righteous. Abraham’s case was not isolated; David’s testimony was similar.

Reverting to Abraham (vv. 9ff.), Paul asks whether his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness before or after he was circumcised, and had no need to labor the point: Abraham was justified by faith while he was uncircumcised, years before he received the covenant of circumcision (Gen 17:24). In this fact Paul finds a charter admitting Gentile believers, equally with Jewish believers, to the status of Abraham’s heirs. It is faith, not circumcision, that is relevant. Abraham’s spiritual fatherhood of Gentile as well as Jewish believers was adumbrated when God gave him a new name and said, “I have made you the father of many nations” (Rom 4:17, quoting Gen 17:5). His faith was no easy faith: it was faith exercised in the face of an overwhelming weight of circumstances that for most people would have made such faith seem ridiculous. But in Abraham’s eyes the promise of God absolutely outweighed all those circumstances, making them of no account; he believed the bare promise before there was any external sign or likelihood of its coming to pass, and this was counted to him for righteousness. In the same way, God confers a righteous status on all who believe the Word He has spoken through the crucified and risen Jesus.

Having thus demonstrated the Biblical foundation of the good news of justification by faith, Paul proceeds to describe the blessings which accompany it in the believer’s life (5:1-11). A textual problem arises in v. 1 because of the common confusion between short and long “o” in Gr. MS copying; RSV “we have peace with God” suits the context better than the somewhat more strongly attested “let us have peace....” Peace, joy, and hope are the boons which the justified enjoy, no matter what afflictions they have to endure. Their endurance produces strength of character, but best of all, the Holy Spirit whom they have received, and who conveys these boons to them, has poured the love of God into their hearts. The saving work which has been so effectually inaugurated in their lives will continue until its consummation at the end time; when the eschatological wrath is poured out, they will be delivered from it by the Savior who has already procured their justification by the shedding of His blood. This is their hope, both sure and joyful; meanwhile they “rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation” (v. 11).

Paul’s account of God’s way of righteousness concludes with a parallel drawn between the old humanity and the new (5:12-21). Adam, head of the old creation, who involved his posterity in sin and death through his disobedience, is set over against Christ, Head of the new creation, who brings His people into righteousness and life through His obedience. This is one of the two classic passages where Paul develops the concept of Christ as the second Adam (the other is 1 Cor 15:21ff.). This concept can be traced elsewhere in his letters, and may be linked with teaching associated in other parts of the Bible with the figure of the “Son of man.” By the redemptive work which the Gospel proclaims the old “Adam-solidarity” of guilt and despair is shattered, to be replaced by the new “Christ-solidarity” of pardon and hope. For the saving effects of Christ’s obedience (His lifelong obedience culminating in the crowning obedience of His submission to death) are much more comprehensive and far-reaching than the ruinous effects of Adam’s disobedience.

If it be asked what place the law has in this concept, the answer is that it does not affect the great issue of death in Adam versus life in Christ; the law was introduced to bring to light the sin that was already latent. This it did, and at the same time it stimulated an increase in acts of sin; “but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom 5:20).

From his exposition of the way of righteousness (3:21-5:21) Paul continues (chs. 6-8) to speak of the way of holiness, and he introduces this subject by supposing a questioner who, having heard him say that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,” asks why one should not go on sinning in order that grace may continue to abound (6:1). The question was prob. not an imaginary one; Paul knew some members of the Gentile churches whose conduct seemed to be based on just such an argument. He replies that there can be no peaceful coexistence between death to sin and life in sin and shows what he means by two arguments: (1) he brings out the practical implication of baptism (vv. 3-14), and (2) he draws an analogy from the institution of slavery (vv. 15-23).

Baptism “into Christ Jesus” betokens incorporation into Him, so that henceforth the baptized person is “in Christ Jesus”; sharing Christ’s death he has died to the old way, and sharing His resurrection he lives in the new way. To live in sin would be, for such a person, a contradiction of his life in Christ; it would be repudiating his baptism, severing himself from Christ. As it is, the man he once was (the “old self” of v. 6) is no more; the life he now lives is the life which the risen Christ lives out in him. Christ died once in relation to sin (as the sin-bearer) but death has no more power over Him; the man in Christ is “dead to sin and alive to God” (v. 11) and is no more compelled, as he once was, to let his limbs and faculties be used for sin; he should dedicate them to God as instruments to do His will, and he will find himself liberated from the dominion of sin. The phrase “not under law but under grace” (v. 14) in this context underscores the close association in Paul’s mind between law and sin (cf. 7:4ff.).

Sin, in other words, can be personified as a slave owner. The slave is forced to do his master’s bidding. If the slave dies, his master has no further power over him. The man in Christ has died as far as his relation to sin, his former slave-owner, is concerned. Or, to change the figure somewhat, if the slave becomes the property of another master, he is henceforth bound to obey his new master, not his old one. So the believer, formerly a slave of sin, has now been liberated into the free service of God. His former master paid him the wages of death; his new Master gives him life in Christ—not as a reward for service rendered, but as a free gift.

Law, which is good, nevertheless stimulates sin, which is bad. Law reveals and denounces sin but cannot bring deliverance from it. To be liberated from sin to righteousness is one side of a coin, the other is liberation from law to grace. From the subject of freedom from sin (ch. 6) Paul turns to its cognate: freedom from law (ch. 7). To illustrate this aspect of Christian freedom he has recourse to another legal relation: that between husband and wife. By law a wife is bound to her husband so long as he lives; only if he dies is she free to marry another man. (Whether Paul is thinking of Rom. or Jewish law makes little difference.) In the application of the analogy the husband is the law and the wife is the believer, but it is not the law that dies, but the believer who has died with Christ. The point, however, is that, as death breaks the marriage bond, so the believer’s death with Christ breaks the bond that bound him to the law and sets him free to be united “to him who has been raised from the dead” (v. 4). Union with the law stimulated sinful passions and produced fruit for death; union with Christ enables one to deny those passions and bring forth fruit for God. One may surmise that Paul’s Jewish-Christian readers understood his argument better than the Gentile Christians, whether they approved of it or not. Admittedly, Paul’s language about the law runs counter to the traditional testimony of Jewish piety, but he spoke out of the experience of one who had exchanged the bondage of “the old written code” for “the new life of the Spirit” (v. 6).

In 7:7-25 there is a passage written in the first person sing. and the past tense giving way in v. 14 to one also written in the first person sing. but in the present tense. Ostensibly both passages are autobiographical, and although the view that they are truly autobiographical has been “now relegated to the museum of exegetical absurdities” (P. Demann, apud F. J. Leenhardt, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 181), the poignancy of much of the language still compels some readers to discern no “abstract argument but the echo of the personal experience of an anguished soul” (M. Goguel, The Birth of Christianity [London, 1953], pp. 213f.). Perhaps one can say that “here Paul’s autobiography is the biography of Everyman” (T. W. Manson in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, ed. M. Black [London, 1962], p. 945). At one level Paul describes his innocent boyhood and the growing sense of bondage after he assumed personal responsibility to keep the law, finding that it tempted him to do the very thing it forbade. At another level he prob. was describing Adam before and after the prohibition to eat of the forbidden tree; at still another he recapitulates the history of the human family—before the giving of the law (“from Adam to Moses”, 5:14), after the giving of the law (cf. 5:20), and then (7:25a) freed from the law in Christ (cf. 5:21).

After this portrayal of the dawn of conscience, Paul continues in the present tense to describe the inner conflict experienced by one who approves the divine law and desires to keep it, but is prevented from doing so by “another law” which forces him against his will to do the evil that he loathes. “I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (7:25b); a man’s own resources, for all the excellence of his intentions, are inadequate for doing the will of God and defying the power of evil. Only “through Jesus Christ our Lord” (v. 25a) comes the strength for this.

Such strength is available for all “who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1); there is no reason why they should go on in a state of penal servitude (which may be the meaning of “condemnation” in 8:1). A new principle has begun to live within them, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (8:2), and liberates them not only from the thraldom of sin and the bondage of the law, but from death itself. This is the theme of ch. 8, where the mainspring of the way of holiness—the presence of the life giving Spirit in the believer—is fully unfolded.

Life in the Spirit (8:1-17) enables the believer to fulfill “the just requirements of the law” (v. 4) as life under the law could not, because of the unsatisfactory human material with which the law had to operate. The Son of God, bearing our humanity, presented Himself as a sin offering (this is the meaning of “for sin” in v. 3), and carried that humanity into death and out of it into resurrection: now “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead” dwells in His people (v. 11) and imparts new life and resurrection power to them. Christian holiness is not a matter of painstaking conformity to an external code; it is rather a matter of the Spirit’s producing in the believer’s life those graces which were seen in perfection in the life of his Lord. The possession of the Spirit of Christ is the Christian’s indispensable hallmark (v. 9). It is the Spirit who enables him to realize his heritage as a son of God and to acknowledge this by calling God “Abba” (the family word for “father”) as Jesus Himself did: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (vv. 15, 16). The Spirit, moreover, conveys the assurance of the future quickening of this mortal body and of the glory to be shared with Christ by those who suffer for Him now (vv. 11, 17).

This coming glory (vv. 18-30) will not only compensate the believer for the trials endured in the present age; it is something to which all creation eagerly looks forward, for when the sons of God are revealed in glory, all creation will be released from the frustration under which it has labored since the fall (vv. 19-22). This investiture with glory will coincide with the day of resurrection, “the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23), when the saving effect of the passion of Christ will be consummated and believers will be manifested as sons of God. Till that day dawns, the Spirit helps them in their weakness, intercedes on their behalf, and co-operates with them in everything for good (vv. 26-28). When it dawns, it will be recognized as the fulfillment of God’s eternal purpose, conceived when He foreknew and foreordained His people in Christ before the world’s foundation (vv. 29-30). The verb “glorified” in v. 30 is in the past tense because, although it refers to a future experience, its accomplishment is settled already in the counsel of God.

With such a hope, the believer may well exult in God (vv. 31-39). Though all things seem to be against him, God is for him; though men condemn him, Christ at God’s right hand is his all-prevailing advocate and intercessor. Neither earth’s privations nor hell’s hostility can separate him from the love of God, manifest and active in Christ.

3. The righteousness of God in history (9:1-11:36). Chapters 9-11 may seem to be a parenthesis in the argument of the letter, but in Paul’s mind they were crucially necessary. The fact that the people who had been specially prepared for the Gospel declined for the most part to believe it, although it was from their midst that the Christ Himself came “according to the flesh” (9:5), presented Paul and no doubt many of his contemporaries with a problem in theodicy. Had God’s purpose gone awry? Was He lacking in foresight? Surely, if Paul’s claims were valid, his own kith and kin would have been the first to acknowledge them. Paul appreciated the problem all the more because in his earlier days he himself had been involved in Israel’s unbelief. As he faces the problem, he begins with the particular issue of Jewish resistance to the Gospel and ends with an exposition of the divine purpose in history.

The first two answers he gives to the problem are these: 1. The Jewish resistance to the Gospel has come about in the unchallengeable ordering of God’s electing purpose (9:6-29). 2. In resisting the Gospel Israel is following a precedent repeatedly shown throughout her history (9:30-10:21).

To these Paul adds two more, much more hopeful in tone: 3. The fact that a “remnant” of Israel has believed the Gospel is the token that Israel as a whole will yet do so (11:1-16). 4. If Israel’s present rejection of the Gospel has meant so much blessing for Gentiles, Israel’s future acceptance of the Gospel will mean even greater blessing for the world (11:17-32).

1. God’s sovereign choice (9:6-29). Throughout sacred history God has chosen one and set aside another. Of the sons of Abraham, God chose Isaac and not Ishmael; in the next generation, of the two sons of Isaac, He chose Jacob and not Esau, giving notice of His choice before either Jacob or Esau was born, in order to establish His sovereignty in election (9:6-13). Even those who have been set aside promote His purpose, whether willingly or not: Pharaoh, so stubborn of heart, was a signal instrument in God’s hand for the display of His power and the exaltation of His name: “he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills” (9:14-18).

To the complaint that God is unjust in acting thus, since no one can resist His decree, the uncompromising answer is given, following the precedent of OT prophets (cf. Isa 29:16; 45:9), that the pot has no right to complain of the potter’s workmanship. What if God chose to make some “vessels,” from Gentiles as well as from Jews, to be recipients of His mercy, and others to be destroyed, object lessons of His judgment? Paul did not say that God has in fact done this latter thing, but argued that, if He chose to do so, no one is competent to call Him to account (9:19-24).

What God in fact has done, says Paul, is to display His mercy in uncovenanted fashion, by calling as His people those who had no claim to be so designated (in accordance with a principle revealed in Hosea) and preserving only a remnant of His former people Israel (in accordance with a principle emphasized in Isaiah). So he concluded his first exposition of God’s way of election (9:6-29), but he will revert to this subject before the end of his present argument.

2. Israel’s responsibility (9:30-10:21). If on the one hand Israel’s unbelief exemplifies divine election, it has to be seen on the other hand in terms of human responsibility. The stone of stumbling described in Isaiah 28:16, realized in Christ and the Gospel, had tripped them up, because they did not entrust themselves to it and so avoid being put to shame (9:30-33).

With a further confession of his heartfelt longing and prayer for his kinsmen’s salvation, Paul ascribes their present unbelief and unenlightened zeal to their ignorance of God’s way of righteousness. They pursued the righteousness based on the law, in terms of Leviticus 18:5 (living by doing), not knowing that with the coming of Christ an end has been put to the age of law, so that now it is every believer who is justified. This way of righteousness by faith was foreshadowed in Deuteronomy 30:11-14, here interpreted as teaching that righteousness and salvation come to those who confess Jesus aloud as Lord and believe in Him inwardly as the risen One. To the same effect is the assurance of the passage about the stone of stumbling already quoted: “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” This assurance applies equally to Jew and Gentile: “there is no distinction” between them because all have sinned (Rom 3:22, 23), but also “there is no distinction” (10:12) because all receive God’s abundant mercy on an equal footing: “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (10:1-13).

They had to hear His saving name proclaimed before they could believe in Him; but there was ample opportunity for this: the preachers had sped far and wide with the joyful news, and in every part of the world where there were Jewish communities it had now been made known (cf. Ps 19:4). If Israel did not believe, it was not for lack of hearing; their refusal to pay heed to what they heard gave substance to the prophet’s complaint: “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” (Isa 53:1, quoted in 10:16). In the Gospel God’s hand had been stretched out to “a disobedient and contrary people” (Isa 65:2; Rom 10:21), whereas the Gentiles, who previously had had no relationship with the God of Israel, seized eagerly on the Gospel blessings when they first heard of them, thus for their part fulfilling other OT prophecies. Among these is the passage in the Song of Moses where God tried to make Israel jealous by means of “those who are not a nation” (Deut 32:21, interpreted of the Gentiles in Rom 10:19). The nature and effect of this jealousy will appear in ch. 11; meanwhile, Paul has made his point that Israel refused the Gospel in spite of every opportunity to accept it (10:14-21).

3. Israel’s alienation not final (Rom 11:1-16). It must not, however, be thought that Israel’s present unbelief and setting aside are permanent. As in OT days the preservation of a remnant carried with it hope for the future, so now the existence of “a remnant, chosen by grace” (to which Paul himself belongs) contains promise of the ultimate salvation of all Israel. For the present, Israel has stumbled, but has not fallen irrevocably. Their temporary “trespass” has meant blessing for the world; their restoration will mean far greater blessing (11:1-16).

4. The parable of the olive tree (Rom 11:17-24). Paul, as apostle to the Gentiles, thinks highly of his ministry, not only because of the blessing it brings to Gentile believers but also because, in the purpose of God, the conversion of the Gentiles will, in fulfillment of Deuteronomy 32:21 (quoted in Rom 10:19), provoke Israel to jealousy and stimulate them to demand a share in those blessings which are their natural heritage. The history of the people of God is portrayed in terms of an olive tree from which some of the original branches have been lopped off to make way for the grafting in of branches from a wild olive (a process which in 11:24 Paul rightly says is “contrary to nature”). The lopped-off branches are Jews, separated from the stock of the people of God because of unbelief; the ingrafted branches are Gentiles, incorporated into the people of God through faith. But—and here one may detect a warning to the Gentile Christians in Rome and elsewhere—the ingrafted branches may in their turn be lopped off through unbelief and the severed branches may through faith be reunited with the parent stock. By faith Jew and Gentile alike stand; by unbelief they fall (11:13-24).

God’s purpose for blessing mankind far exceeds anything that men could have hoped. If He has found all men, Jew and Gentile alike, guilty of disobedience and has pronounced this verdict on them, it is not that He may sentence them to the appropriate penalty, but “that he may have mercy upon all” (11:32). When the Deliverer comes from Zion (cf. Ps. 14:7) and banishes ungodliness from Jacob, mankind will enjoy undreamed-of bliss. Who could have supposed that Israel’s unbelief was to become God’s instrument for good to such an overwhelming degree? God’s wisdom cannot be compared with man’s; He is the source, guide and goal of all (11:25-36).

4. The Christian way of life (12:1-15:13). The proper response to the Gospel of grace which has been unfolded in the foregoing chapters is the yielding of the believer’s life to God as “a living sacrifice,” presented in the course of his “spiritual worship,” so that his mind henceforth may be transfigured to conform with the will of God (12:1, 2).

This will manifest itself, among other things, in the common life of the Christian fellowship. The figure of the body and its limbs, already used in this way (1 Cor 12:12ff.) and destined to be developed further in Colossians and Ephesians, is introduced here to illustrate the interdependence and cooperation of all for the good of the whole; and whatever service each one does should be done with a ready heart (12:3-8).

The life of the Spirit will manifest itself outwardly in acts of love to fellow members of the Christian brotherhood and to all men. The Sermon on the Mount may not have been written down at this early date in the form in which we know it, but its contents were familiar in the Church, and formed the basis of the “law of Christ” (cf. Gal 6:2) which Paul here applied. Revenge must never occur to a believer’s mind. Paul quoted in this regard the passage from Proverbs 25:21, 22, beginning, “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread...”; but he omitted the clause “and the Lord will reward you” and added the injunction, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (12:9-21).

The passage about the Christian and the state (13:1-7) has given rise to long debate. Its spirit and tone can no doubt be linked with Paul’s happy experience of Rom. law and order, as reflected in the narrative of Acts; but the permanent teaching is plain. So long as the civil authorities remain within their divinely-given commission, they can command the believer’s obedience and cooperation; only when Caesar demands the things that are God’s must the believer say “No” (cf. Acts 4:19; 5:29). Such a demand on the part of the state is not contemplated here; there is a great difference between Romans 13 and Revelation 13, although the Rom. empire is the supreme worldly authority in both places. It is very unlikely that the “governing authorities” (Rom 13:1) are angelic principalities and powers; the latter do not receive taxes, and far from counseling believers to submit to them, the Bible portrays them as servants to the people of God.

Apart from his special duty to the powers that be, the Christian has the general duty of love to all men. He may be dead to the law in the sense of Romans 7:4, but the whole OT law is summed up in the commandment of love (as Jesus had affirmed in Mark 12:29-31); from this law the Christian is never set free (Rom 13:8-10).

The days are critical; Christians must be vigilant. Already coming events were casting their shadows before; with hindsight one can think of the persecution of a.d. 64 and the revolt of a.d. 66. However, Paul looked beyond intervening woes to the fullness of salvation which would attend the advent of Christ. In language reminiscent of the idiom of Qumran, he enjoins his readers to put on the “armour of light” in readiness for spiritual conflict and to live lives worthy of Christ. It is striking that, when he commends the cultivation of those virtues that grace the character of Christ in the gospels, he does so in the words, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” One recalls how Augustine’s conversion followed immediately upon his reading Romans 13:13, 14.

In 14:1-15:6 Paul deals with the apparently conflicting demands of Christian liberty and Christian charity. He had to deal with this issue in the churches he had founded, e.g. Corinth (cf. 1 Cor 8:1-13; 10:23-33); he expounds the general principles for the benefit of the Rom. Christians. In most Christian communities there would be some people whose consciences, like the apostle’s, were completely emancipated in neutral matters such as food and sacred seasons, but they had to live alongside others who religiously avoided eating certain things and doing ordinary work on special days. “Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind,” says Paul. The emancipated Christian must not despise his brother who is more scrupulous than he in such matters; the scrupulous Christian must not condemn his brother who cheerfully does things of which his own conscience disapproves. Each believer is the Lord’s servant, whether in life or in death; it is to the Lord that he must render account at the last.

So far so good; but Paul knew from his experience elsewhere that Christians with tender consciences were easily upset and likely to be tripped up in their spiritual progress. Those who had robust consciences like himself had a duty to consider their weaker fellow Christians. Paul would have refused to listen to any attempt to place limitations on his freedom, and warned his converts, as in Galatia and at Colosse, against listening to any such attempts directed toward themselves. But it was possible, while refusing legal restrictions, to accept voluntary limitations on one’s freedom of action in the inte