Into the heart of romans, p.10
Into the Heart of Romans, page 10
Notice how Paul puts it in verse 10. If the Messiah is in you – well, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of dikaiosynē. I have translated this dense term here as ‘covenant justice’, partly because (to be frank) the normal translation ‘righteousness’ means anything and nothing these days. But this theme of life because of dikaiosynē goes back to 5.1–11, and behind that to 1.17: ho dikaios ek pisteōs zēsetai, ‘the righteous shall live by faith.’ Life and righteousness. If we were to stand back from the present passage and quickly read through the whole of Romans (a great thing to do, by the way), it would become clear that ‘justification by faith’ depends for its own inner logic on the work of the spirit through the gospel. That should have been clear from Galatians, where Paul weaves the work of the spirit into his whole discussion of justification; but the rhetorical demands of his larger argument in Romans mean that he has delayed bringing the spirit on stage (so to speak) until 5.1–5, 7.4–6 and now chapter 8 itself, to which those earlier passages look forward.7
This, then, is what Paul means in Philippians 1 when he speaks of the ‘good work’ that God has begun, with the converts’ initial coming to faith, and then of the certain fact that God will bring this ‘good work’ to completion at the Day of the Messiah. The point is that the present body is heading for death because it has been the locus of idolatry and injustice, missing the mark of genuine humanness, the word for this being hamartia, sin. We have all taken part in that, colluding with the anti-creational forces of death. But the spirit – and at this point, with further potential confusion, Paul seems to be referring to the human spirit, as he will again in verse 16 – the spirit is already ‘life’ because of God’s verdict of ‘in the right’, the verdict of covenant justice. God has justified this person, declared them to be ‘in the right’; so those who are righteous by faith will have life. (I will say more about the interplay between the human spirit and God’s spirit when we get to verse 16.) There is thus a sense in which Romans 8.9–11 provides a kind of QED to the opening statement of Romans 1.16–17.
Just in case we might have thought that the passage was getting too straightforward (if Paul can on occasion use irony, perhaps we can as well?), we have in addition here a remarkable small window on Paul’s view of what we often call ‘life after death’. Once we abandon Platonism, with its view of an immortal soul – something never mentioned in the New Testament – we are left with the question, where are we, who are we, what are we in between our bodily death and our bodily resurrection? How can we talk wisely and humbly about this intermediate state, this apparent reality which, again, is hardly ever mentioned in scripture? Part of the answer seems to be that, as God’s spirit has come to dwell within us, enlivening our own spirits, so God’s own spirit will hold on to us hereafter until the time of resurrection. I note that, at key points, from Jesus himself and elsewhere, it is the human spirit that is commended to God upon the death of the person.8 Thus, insofar as God’s spirit has as it were become us, taking on our identity to live and work in and through us, so after death we remain in the multi-track life-giving memory of God’s own spirit, until the time of resurrection. I think we need to reflect more on the place and work of the holy spirit in grounding what has been called the ‘intermediate state’. That is again a topic for another time; but that is where verse 10 seems to be pointing.
So to verse 11, the climax of the chapter so far and the ultimate answer to the questions of Romans 7. Notice how Paul oscillates deliberately between ‘Jesus’ at the start of the verse and ‘Messiah’, Christos, in the second half. The name ‘Jesus’ refers specifically to the human Jesus, the man from Nazareth; the word Christos refers to the same person, but seen as the representative of God’s people, the anointed one who sums up his people in himself. Paul, as usual, is writing with great precision. Think of how, at the end of Romans 4, he speaks of Christian faith as ‘faith in the-God-who-raised-Jesus-from-the-dead’. Well, he now says, if the spirit-of-the-God-who-raised-Jesus-from-the-dead indwells you – the phrasing is very close to 4.24 – then the one who raised the representative Messiah, the Christos, from the dead will give life to the mortal bodies of the Messiah’s people, too, through that spirit, his own spirit, who dwells in you.
We may well find ourselves marvelling at the way Paul has woven all the threads together to reach this dramatic conclusion. This is where God’s purpose for Torah has ended up. Through the Messiah and the spirit, God has given the life that Torah promised, the resurrection life which, beginning already through the spirit, is to be anticipated (as in verses 5–8) in the moral mindset and actions of God’s people.
We might also, to be frank, marvel at the fact that these first eleven verses of chapter 8, complex and dense though they are, are simply the first part of the larger argument of the chapter as a whole. But above all, we ought to marvel at the reality of which Paul is speaking: the reality of the living God coming to dwell not just among us but within us. The ancient promises of YHWH’s return to Zion, and the rebuilding of the Temple, are coming true not ‘in heaven’, as the older allegorical exegesis would have it, but in the new creation. And the new creation, which will involve as we shall presently see the renewal of the entire creation, and also the personal bodily resurrection which we are promised, includes also the anticipation of that resurrection in the present moral life, the mindset of the spirit. This paves the way for 8.12–16, which, again using exodus-language, focuses on the bracing challenge of learning to think and live in the spirit rather than in the flesh.
Coming back in conclusion to one of the vital – and often ignored – elements of this passage, we think again of verse 8, where Paul declares that those in the flesh ‘can’t please God’. As I noted earlier, the idea of ‘pleasing God’ has almost been banned from some circles. We have been long schooled to recognize, and reject, any sense of works-righteousness, of the pride which imagines that we are, as we stand, morally capable of doing what God wants, perhaps even of putting him in our debt. The earlier chapters of Romans should have made it clear how foolish and impossible such an idea would be. But the traditions that have rightly rejected any pride in our own achievements have sometimes failed to complete the narrative, Paul’s larger story in which God’s spirit does what the Torah could not do, enabling the Messiah’s people, even in the present time, to become already part of his ultimate new creation, and therefore to give God real delight. But here, and in the other passages we referred to before, Paul really does indicate that those who are living by the spirit will actually please God. Not to recognize this would be to fall into the trap of Jesus’ critics in Luke 15, to whom the answer was that the angels were having a celebration in heaven because of sinners being rescued and that therefore a similar celebration on earth was thoroughly appropriate.
We shouldn’t be shy about this. Some of our trouble, I sometimes suspect, comes from an upbringing where parents or teachers were hard to please. We have then transposed that, tragically, on to God himself. Perhaps that’s why certain Christian sub-cultures are so anxious about the whole idea. But think of Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire. ‘God made me fast,’ he said, ‘and when I run, I feel his pleasure.’ It is worth pausing to ask, what has God made you? What is it which, when you do it in the power and joy of the spirit, enables you to feel God’s pleasure? Might that perhaps be part of God’s ultimate new creation, breaking in to the present?
Notes
1 On Tertullian and the other early Fathers on the meaning of resurrection, see RSG, ch. 11.
2 Deut. 30.15–20; Josh. 24.15.
3 See too the ‘covenant of peace’ in Num. 25.12; Isa. 54.10; Ezek. 34.25; 37.26.
4 E.g. Rom. 12.1–2; 1 Cor. 7.32; Col. 1.10; 1 Thess. 4.1.
5 The LXX regularly uses the root katoikein (e.g. Ps. 132[LXX 131].14, hōde katoikēsō, ‘here will I dwell’; 135[LXX 134].21 (YHWH katoikōn Ierousalem, ‘dwells in Jerusalem’). Paul echoes this root in e.g. Eph. 2.22 (katoikētērion, cf. e.g. Ps. 76[LXX 75].2; cf. Matt. 23.21). By Paul’s day, the difference between katoikein, enoikein and simply oikein seems to have been flattened out; but the more precise meaning of the kata- prefix, that of someone coming to dwell in a place as perhaps for the first time, was less suitable for his meaning.
6 Ascribed to R. Hudson Pope (1879–1967).
7 Another anticipation of this argument is found in 2.25–9.
8 See Luke 23.46 (quoting Ps. 31.5); Acts 7.59; John 19.30; compare (for various nuances) Num. 16.22; Eccles. 3.21; 12.7; Job 34.14.
4
Romans 8.12–17: Led by the Spirit
12So then, my dear family, we are in debt – but not to human flesh, to live our life in that way.
12ara oun, adelphoi, opheiletai esmen ou tē sarki tou kata sarka zēn.
13If you live in accordance with the flesh, you will die; but if, by the spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
13ei gar kata sarka zēte, mellete apothnēskein. ei de pneumati tas praxeis tou sōmatos thanatoute, zēsesthe.
14All who are led by the spirit of God, you see, are God’s children.
14hosoi gar pneumati theou agontai, houtoi hyioi theou eisin.
15You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery, did you, to go back again into a state of fear? But you received the spirit of sonship, in whom we call out ‘Abba, father!’
15ou gar elabete pneuma douleias palin eis phobon alla elabete pneuma hyiothesias, en hō krazomen Abba ho patēr,
16When that happens, it is the spirit itself giving supporting witness to what our own spirit is saying, that we are God’s children.
16auto to pneuma symmarturei tō pneumati hēmōn hoti esmen tekna theou.
17And if we’re children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
17ei de tekna, kai klēronomoi: klēronomoi men theou, synklēronomoi de Christou, eiper sympaschomen hina kai syndoxasthōmen.
With the first eleven verses of Romans 8, Paul has simultaneously finished his long argument about the Torah, which began in chapter 7, and launched his exposition of the spirit’s work, which continues through most of chapter 8. And with this, we arrive at the great central section, verses 12 to 30.
We recall how the chapter is shaped. Verses 1–11 and 31–9 form obvious sections in their own right, leaving verses 12–30 as the substantial central section. This looks like a characteristically Pauline outline; another example would be 1 Corinthians 15, which also has an eleven-verse opening and a nine-verse conclusion, with a long middle section. I have the sense (over against any idea that Paul was just ‘making it up as he went along’ in dictating this letter) that he had long planned and shaped all this, through many a lecture or informal discussion, and with much prayerful consideration of how to say what had to be said within the practical limits of a letter.
Here in verse 12, Paul seems to take a deep breath: ‘So then, my dear family . . .’ We have now arrived at the heart of what he wants to say, from this point all the way through to the great conclusion in 8.29–30 in which, rooted in Christology, justification leads directly to glorification.
All that is well known. But we now run into a problem that is becoming familiar. The meaning Paul himself gives to these themes, justification, glorification and, indeed, the work of the spirit and the call to holiness, is subtly different from the meanings that the western church has often read into them. We have assumed that we knew what questions Paul was addressing, and what he meant by the themes and categories he develops. But as so often, we have to proceed carefully to see what Paul himself actually says, as opposed to what our traditions have wanted him to say. Thus, this chapter is all about the ultimate Christian hope, the Christian inheritance. But if you speak of ‘hope’ and ‘inheritance’ to most western Christians they will think of heaven, or of ‘waiting to be called home’, or of ‘going to be with Jesus, way beyond the blue’. But Romans 8 never mentions heaven, or going up to the sky as opposed to living on earth, or waiting to be called home, or anything like that. Nor is there any mention of a ‘soul’ waiting to be saved. This chapter is about new creation, not about escaping the present creation and going somewhere else. I have said this already, but it needs to be repeated, because our minds can easily flick back into ‘ordinary’ mode, particularly when many songs used today in worship express Platonic versions of the faith. As we in our generation face the groaning of all creation rather obviously, whether in climate change or the increasingly unstable world of wars and rumours of wars, let alone in our personal lives and those of people for whom we share a pastoral concern, we urgently need to recover the genuine biblical message.
Within the long section of verses 12 to 30, the first sub-section, which we’re looking at in our present chapter, is verses 12 to 17. Actually verse 17 itself is a kind of bridge, a transition, between verses 12 to 16 and verses 18 to the end, so we will include it both in the present paragraph (starting with verse 12) and also within the paragraph that continues with verses 18 onwards.
So, taking verses 12 to 17, we need to ask our basic question, the question you can put to virtually any passage in Paul: look at the start and the finish, and see what he himself thinks he’s talking about. In what way does verse 17 round off at least the first part of the train of thought begun in verse 12?
Asking that question is tricky in this case, because Paul appears to skip over what he might have said at the end of verse 12. (He does this fairly frequently, not least in Romans, with his thought racing ahead to the next main point and omitting to fill in the gaps in the first one.) ‘We are in debt,’ he says – ‘but not to human flesh, to live our life in that way . . .’ But if that’s the negative, telling us what we are not in debt to, we expect him to go on to the positive, to tell us who or what we are then in debt to. He appears to leave the thought hanging in the air.
Some have thought Paul means that we are indebted to the spirit. Since he regularly pairs spirit and flesh, as indeed in verse 13, that’s quite sensible. But as the paragraph develops and reaches its goal, it becomes clear that he is thinking of our debt to God himself, to God the father. From verse 14, this theme builds up: we are God’s sons; we’ve received the spirit of sonship; we cry out to God as Abba, father; the spirit testifies that we are indeed God’s children and – here in verse 17 is the conclusion to this specific argument, linking back to verse 12 – we are indebted to God in quite a strict sense because we are his heirs, ‘fellow heirs with the Messiah’. God has made a wonderful creation, and he is bequeathing it to his children. The promise of resurrection within God’s new creation, as set out in verses 9 to 11, brings Paul to this point: we have been left a glorious legacy, namely to be God’s heirs and also co-workers in his new world, sharing his wise and healing rule.
Normally, you only receive an inheritance after the giver has died. Though you may be, in that sense, in debt to the person who has left you the bequest, they are by definition no longer around to receive your thanks. But when it’s a matter of inheriting, from God himself, our stewardship of the whole new creation, we are (Paul strongly implies) in a perpetual state of happy indebtedness to him. As the chapter goes on this turns out to be, as my teacher George B. Caird used to say, a debt of love that only love can repay.
At this point, we face rather directly the challenge to think with Paul over against the whole of the western Christian tradition, both Roman Catholic and protestant. You see, the shape of western theology for many centuries, dominated by the prospect of ‘going to heaven’ and/or the ‘beatific vision’ where the ‘soul’ is finally allowed to see God himself, has pulled us towards dividing our theological topics into ‘salvation’ on the one hand and ‘ethics’ on the other. That, I think, is the inevitable result of thinking of salvation in terms of ‘going to heaven’, leaving us with the question not only of how we are supposed to behave in our present earthly life but of what the relationship is between that behaviour and the ultimate destiny.
Thus, as I argued in my book The Day the Revolution Began, we have Platonized our eschatology, thinking in terms of a disembodied ‘heaven’, and that has resulted in our moralizing our anthropology, thinking that the only thing that matters is whether we’ve kept some moral code or not, and that, when we discover that God has saved us despite our moral failures, we then simply have to learn how to live properly in the interim. But once we think in Pauline terms about the new creation, and about the way in which the spirit has made us already new-creation people, standing on the threshold between the present age and the age to come, we discover a quite different category: the category of vocation. And that is what this whole passage is about. Who are we called to be, standing perhaps uncomfortably at the overlap of the ages? This passage gives the start of Paul’s answer: we are already part of the new creation which, having come to birth with Jesus’ resurrection, is on the way to the final rescue of the present creation from its slavery to corruption. By the spirit, we find ourselves part of the active pilot project for that ultimate new creation, both new-creation people in ourselves and called to be agents of new creation in the present. We are therefore already called to live gladly and gratefully as God’s free children, God’s new-exodus people, and to be caught up in the present work of God’s spirit who enables us to pray ‘Abba, father’, even when – particularly when! – the world is dark all around us. That then points on to the great climax of the chapter a dozen verses later.
