True to our native land, p.53
True to Our Native Land, page 53
Outward Signs
In challenging the dependence on circumcision as an outward sign, Paul effectively discredits such external symbols as the sole markers of identity, relationship with God, and thus worth. God’s relationship with humans is established through grace, not through any exterior accomplishments or markings that might designate one human as more acceptable to God and therefore acceptable within human community. Likewise, external markings of color, ethnicity, and/or gender, though important, do not indicate anything about relationship with God and therefore standing within a human community. Peter Paris speaks about this divine and its consequent human relationship through the metaphor of divine parentage that has been so eloquently expressed within the African American church. This means that God is not the parent of some elements of the human race. Instead, God is parent to all human beings, regardless of racial identity. As Peter Paris argues, “The Black churches have always discerned this doctrine to be the bedrock of the biblical perspective on humanity, and they have given prominence to biblical passages that make it unequivocally clear” (Peter J. Paris, “The Bible and the Black Churches,” in The Bible and Social Reform, ed. Ernest Sandeen [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982], 135). They have also given prominence to the key implication that develops out of this primary principle. If, indeed, God is the divine parent of all, then all races must be of the same family. This kinship denies the basic premise of racism, that the different races are of different origin, and, that, therefore, some are inferior. The linkage to the same divine parent gives all races an equal standing before God that demands an equal standing before each other. It is not external marking, be it the natural marking of ethnicity or the accomplished marking of circumcision, that determines human standing before God and before other humans. It is relationship with God alone that matters, and that relationship is brokered by faith through grace.
4:13–25, God’s Promise Realized through Faith
Paul’s second major point is that Abraham received the promise by faith, not by works (vv. 13–25). Paul could refer to the “promise” (vv. 13, 14, 16, 20, 21) without explanation, because his Jewish Christian readers would have been quite familiar with the promises of God as seen in Genesis 12:2–3; 17:4–8; 18:18; 22:17–18. Abraham believed the promises even when those promises went against logic, experience, or hope.
When Abraham was ninety-nine years old and Sarah eighty, God promised that Abraham would become the father of multitudes. Abraham trusted God, and Isaac was born. Those who believe “are blessed with Abraham who had faith.” God’s intent for Abraham was achieved not in the history of Israel but in the existence of a community of Jews and Gentiles whose trust in God is Abrahamic. Abraham is, therefore, the spiritual father of both the Jew and the Gentile (Ps 32:1–2; Gen 17:5; 15:6).
Romans 4:1–25: The Faith of the Fathers and Mothers Still Lives
The African American family has always had ancestors who trusted and obeyed the Word of God. This faith of ancestors through the African American experience has been grounded in the value system of proverbs that have been passed on through the years: “A hard head makes a soft bottom.” “If you make your bed hard, you have to lie in it.” “If you are big enough to lie, you are big enough to seek your soul salvation.” “Just do what I tell you to do. I ain’t going to tell you nothing wrong.” “Next time I have to get on you about something, I’m going to pay you for old and new.” We praise the folk wisdom of valiant and courageous men and women, our ancestors, who have shown us how to connect with the past and how to live in the present, and have established footprints for us to follow in our quest for the future. The faith of our mothers and fathers still lives.
In order to get the full implication of the connection with Abraham, one must understand the meaning of righteousness. Righteousness/justification means right relationship. Although I have argued above that justification could mean pardon or acquittal in a legal or business sense, it could very well also represent how people relate to each other. “Relationship” is also a covenant word that specifies an attachment between persons for a common purpose. Justification means being bound to God and one another in mutual commitment. The righteousness of God is, therefore, the inner character of God that relates to people and creation by binding them together in right relationship to one another.
God manifests righteousness by blessing. The word “bless” means to share one’s power, one’s strength, one’s life with another, to be with the other. God blesses Abraham by “accompanying” him with divine power, enabling Abraham to live and find his pilgrim way, filled with the promise of God. We too say, “Bless you,” to one another. It is an instinctive way of affirming our solidarity with the other and wishing the other well.
To receive blessing, though, one must be reckoned righteous, put in the way of right relationship. To be in that way is to have faith. This faith is the gift of God, a work of grace, and also the act by which we respond and relate to the righteous, faithful God who has come and comes to us. This God calls us to believe, trust, and rely on the divine promises. We are called to live in faithfulness to God. This was what Abraham did. He had faith in God, and this faith was manifested in his being reckoned righteous and blessed. We who have faith participate in the life of righteousness and in the blessing of God.
Chapter 5
5:1–11, The Results of Justification
Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the happy fruits of justification by faith: peace, grace, hope, and love. When the righteous decision of God becomes known to us and effective for us through our acknowledgment and grasp of it in faith, we have peace with God (v. 1). The sovereignty of sin over us is broken. This same theme is expressed throughout the chapter: “we are now reconciled with God” (v. 10); “we have now received reconciliation” (v. 11); “every alien lordship has now become for us a thing of the past” (v. 21). Because we are made right before God by God’s grace through faith, we have real peace.
Redemptive Suffering
Martin Luther King Jr. understood both the tragedy and the transformative potential of unmerited suffering. In the midst of persecution and suffering imposed on him and other civil rights activists because of their endeavors for justice, King observed: “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. . . . Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Suffering and Faith,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 41. For two different interpretations of this King quote, see Anthony Pinn, Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995), 76, and Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 84.
The work of Christ provides “access” (a word used to describe admittance into the presence of royalty) to the present blessing of grace and, through grace, to the renewed hope of glory. Humans were created to share in the glory of God; the “fall” eclipsed that hope (3:23). But now the joy of sharing in that glory is available, even in the midst of trials and tribulations.
When Christians refused to engage in immoral or idolatrous practices, such countercultural resistance made them seem socially and politically disloyal. Believers suffered as a result. Such suffering is a time of testing. (See sidebar above.) Paul calls for endurance: an active overcoming of misfortune rather than a passive acceptance of it. Such endurance produces character. “Character” is a word used of metal that has been so heated by fire that all the impurities are refined out. The hope born of suffering is the confidence that God is transforming one’s character and will continue to do so until believers share in God’s glory.
God’s love, poured into human hearts, sustains this hope. It is the presupposition of this hope that sinners who have completely and finally fallen short can partake of God’s glory (3:23). For God’s love commends itself in this (v. 8), that Christ died for us while we were still weak (v. 6), still sinners (v. 8), still godless (v. 6), and still enemies (v. 10). God’s love has, therefore, not waited for us to get right but has come to meet us just as we are. No one would want to die for a wicked person—no one but Christ (v. 6).
The important words “reconciled” and “reconciliation” appear in vv. 10–11 for the first time in Romans. The Greek word katallasso, translated “reconciliation,” describes what God did in salvation. It indicates a thorough change in relationship. Enmity was given over to friendship. God opened the way for this change in relationship, bringing harmony and peace between human beings and God. God justified us through the sacrificial blood of Christ. In the death of God’s Son, God intervened on our behalf with the “nevertheless” of God’s free grace in the face of the apparently insurmountable power of human revolt and resistance (vv. 9–10). God has made peace. God has reconciled. God has saved. When humans put their trust in God’s righteous decision as carried out in Christ Jesus, they immediately become sharers in Christ’s triumph.
Romans 5:1–11 points out that in Christ the one justified by faith has peace with God. This faith is a source of hope for the future and a source of power for the present. The atoning act of Christ is cause for rejoicing because those who were “enemies” of God and had every right to fear the consequences of the wrath of God are now at peace because they are saved by that atoning work. Through Christ, humans have been reconciled to God (vv. 6–11).
5:12–21, Adam and Christ
Paul stresses the deliberate offense of the first man, his “breaking of God’s command” (v. 14), his fall (vv. 15, 17–18) and above all his “disobedience” (v. 19). It is integral to Paul’s thought that the sin of Adam introduces not a defective physical nature, but an existence that is blighted by a defective relationship with God. Adam does not “fall” into matter; he is matter that has sinfully asserted itself against the Creator and therefore stands under God’s judgment. He stands under condemnation (vv. 16, 18) and needs grace (vv. 15ff.); his defect is remedied not by a new creation or liberation of the old nature, but by the obedience of Christ (v. 19). The new life is bestowed not by some natural process, but by justification (v. 18). It is only on the basis of a prior justification that God brings about a physical change of nature in God’s creatures (8:30).
In Romans 5:17, 21, the life that Christ brings is set against the death that Adam brought and also against the death that he himself endured. His death for sinners is undoubtedly a physical fact; it is, therefore, hard to argue that the death imposed on humankind because of sin is not similarly physical. And yet death is much more than a physical reality. For Paul, it is an accursed thing (Gal 3:13). Yet it is transformed by the fact that God’s own Son endured it (Rom 5:10). Now even death is the most perfect assurance of God’s love and will to be reconciled with humankind (5:8, 10–11).
So also the death that Adam brought was more than just a physical fact; it was a sign of God’s judgment upon human sin. The continued existence of death as a physical fact reminds us constantly of God’s “giving up” of his creation because of sin (Rom 1:18–32); it is a present judgment, part of the revealed wrath of God in this present world. Paul’s view of death is thus intelligible within the categories of apocalyptic Judaism, with its stress both on the penal nature of physical death and on a final judgment. Christ’s coming, death, and resurrection meant that what for apocalyptic Judaism was a secret to be revealed in the future was to a large extent already experienced in the present.
Chapter 6
6:1–14, Dying and Rising with Christ
In this chapter, Paul the pastor interprets the nature of the Christian life. What difference does the incarnation of Jesus make in the life of common folk? Some evidently argued that one should sin in order to receive more grace. Since there is nothing one can do to obtain salvation, and because a believer is already assured of acquittal on the Day of Judgment, why not sin without restraint? In emphatically rejecting this logic, Paul stresses that justification has moral implications. Right standing before God carries with it right living.
Because You Are, I Am
The African family operates on a communal basis: “Because you are, I am.” The Western mind-set is so geared to individual development as self-assertion that it is sometimes difficult to understand the corporate personality attitude of contemporary Africans or ancient Jews. The Jews thought in terms of tribe, nation, and community. It is on the basis of this communitarian perspective that Paul argues that the death of Jesus saved all, all of those in his time and in our own. The African perspective stresses ancestor reverence because of the analogous belief that its members share in the “communion of saints.” This connectedness with the other extends not only in time but also into eternity. Perhaps nowhere is this connectedness of all to Jesus across even the boundary of time more explicit than in the words and meaning of the enslaved spiritual, “Were You There?” When the enslaved asked whether a contemporary was “there” at the cross with Jesus, not only did they recognize that relationship is broader than individual connectedness—the “you” is surely as much a plural as a singular pronoun—but they also realized that time itself can through faith be transcended. The nineteenth-century enslaved community was, in spirit and in truth, through their own oppression and suffering, with Jesus as he agonized on the cross. Though they were of different times, they were of the same community.
In making his case, Paul drops the terminology of faith and justification and shifts to a baptismal imagery of death, burial, and resurrection with Christ. Baptism meant union with Christ, in both his death and his resurrection. Those in Christ are therefore dead to sin. In Christ, one is freed from the power of sin and need no longer yield her body to unrighteousness. One is free to stand against sin, fight it, and offer one’s body as servant of righteousness. Sin has no place at all in the life of faith.
There are various meanings of Paul’s image of dying to sin. Christians have died to sin (1) in the judicial sense—in Christ’s death the debt of sin is paid; (2) in the baptismal sense—a believer thereby publicly accepts Christ’s death on their behalf; (3) in the moral sense—a believer daily resists specific sinful impulses; and (4) in the eschatological sense—when one dies physically, sin no longer has any sway over the person who enters completely into resurrection life.
To live in Christ means to have died to sin; it is impossible to live in something to which one has died. In vv. 3–14, Paul discusses what it means to have died to sin. Paul uses the figures of dying and rising to illustrate the difference between the old life and the new life in Christ. Verses 3–4 contain the only references to baptism in Romans. Paul’s comparison of baptism to death and resurrection is based on immersion imagery—being buried in the water and coming up out of it. The illustration may be clearer if we remember that baptism at the time was connected with adults making decisive moves from paganism to Christianity, from one way of life to another. For these adults, baptism was more than a symbolic act. It was not entering into church membership; it was actual induction into a new relationship, a personal identification with the redeemer Messiah. The one who becomes a believer breaks with sin as sharply as one who dies breaks with physical life.
Baptism signifies a union with Christ. The old preconversion life has been crucified with Christ. The “body of sin” is not destroyed, but it is deprived of its power; its domination is broken. The liberation occurs in salvific stages. First, one’s former self is crucified with Christ, in order that, second, the lower part of one’s nature is deprived of its power, with the result that, third, one lives no longer in bondage to sin.
God once again uses death as a tool of reconciliation (see the comments on 1:1–7). Physically, death wipes out all old accounts and frees sinners from all obligations to former masters. Metaphorically, the old self in its unredeemed state with evil thoughts, words, and actions dies. The believer is a new person, completely changed, living in a new dimension.
Verse 11 introduces the idea of being “in Christ,” one of the most important themes in Paul’s writings. To be “in Christ” means that a person has entered into a union with Christ, “the second Adam.” The believer becomes a member of a new race of beings whose head is Christ. Christianity, though, is not only a spiritual experience of mystical union with Christ; it is a way of living. Paul therefore exhorts his readers to live the kind of sinless lives he thinks should be the believers’ normal existence (vv. 2, 7, 11).
6:15–23, The Enslaved of Righteousness
As in v. 1, Paul begins this section with a question from an imaginary opponent in characteristic diatribe style: “Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (v. 15). Many concluded that there can be no morality without law. Paul seeks to show that there is a definite change in conduct for the Christian, which is the product rather than the antithesis of grace, a true moral righteousness without being a law-centered righteousness.
