Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. R. Daniel Kirk holds a PhD in New Testament from Duke University and has taught at North Carolina State University, St. Joseph's University, Eastern College, and Fuller Theological Seminary. His previous books include Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? and Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God.

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UNLOCKING ROMANS

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

PREFACE............................................................................................ixABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................xi1. Romans under Lock and Key?......................................................................12. Functions of Resurrection in Early Judaism......................................................143. Resurrection, Messiah, and the Justification of God Romans 1:1-7 and 15:12.....................334. Resurrection and the Promise of Abraham Romans 4:13-25.........................................565. Resurrection and Final Salvation Romans 5:9-10.................................................846. Resurrection and Mosaic Law (I) Romans 5:12–8:11.........................................987. Resurrection and New Creation Romans 8:12-39...................................................1328. Resurrection and Mosaic Law (II)................................................................1619. Resurrection and the Future of Israel Romans 11:15.............................................18110. Resurrection and the Lord of the Church Romans 13:8-14 and 14:1-9.............................19411. Reading with the Apostle.......................................................................206INDEX OF NAMES.....................................................................................235INDEX OF ANCIENT SOURCES...........................................................................237

Chapter One

Paul the Jew and the God of Israel

"It's about God, stupid." Such a reminder is always pertinent as we embark on a study of Scripture, especially a text as much mooted as the apostle Paul's letter to Rome. For all the sundry rabbit trails and byways that New Testament scholars travel, the subject matter itself continually points the journey back to God. But even to agree to this much is to beg a host of questions about the topic of Scripture. Influenced as it has been by the Greek philosophical tradition, the church throughout the centuries has often articulated an understanding of God under heavy influence from Plato's god of ideal form and perfect moral goodness and from Aristotle's unmoved mover. We thus find Augustine asking, "What, then, are you, O my God?" and giving a list of attributes that includes "Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent ... unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old." In the medieval period, Anselm's Proslogion seeks to prove the existence of a God whose definition is of the same ilk: "that being greater than which cannot be conceived." Centuries later, we find the British Reformed tradition giving this definition of God: "What is God? God is a spirit; infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth" (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q/A 4). Not only do these Christian definitions, like their Greek philosophical counterparts, all focus on a g/God who is wholly other, they also define God in universal terms without reference to the story of Israel.

In the Scriptures of Israel, however, God's identity is inseparable from a particular people and from certain actions performed on behalf of that people. God is not known in universal abstract qualities but in limiting and particular actions. The question in the Scriptures seems to be less What is God? but rather Who is God? or perhaps Which God? The God of Israel is known through that God's commitment to and actions among a particular people. This is the God of the covenants with the fathers: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob whose name is YHWH (e.g., Gen 32:9; Exod 3:6, 15, 16; 4:5; Deut 1:11, 21; 4:1; 6:3). The God of Israel is the one who has acted to redeem a people for himself; their God is YHWH who brought a people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exod 20:2). Because of these identifications with Israel in covenant and redemption, God is named as the God of a particular people — the God of the Hebrews (e.g., Exod 5:3; 7:16; 9:1; 1 Sam 4:6-7), the God of Israel (e.g., Exod 5:1; Num 16:9; Josh 7:19-20). Unlike the Greek counterparts, Jewish definitions of God look to the sphere of the particular and enmesh the identity of God within the scandalously singular notion of election. The God of Israel's Scriptures is the God who, though Lord over all things, has chosen to disclose himself and make his name known to the world through one particular people. In this choosing he bound himself in covenant and promised that this people would be the epicenter both of YHWH's self-disclosure and of this God's blessings to humanity.

No question is more central for the study of Paul than to determine at the outset which God we expect to find as the topic of his letters. As our representatives above demonstrate from ancient, medieval, and post-Reformation church history, it is not only the seed of Marcion which has struggled with the earthy, this-worldly identity of God as depicted in the OT. The dehistoricizing of the identity of God in the Christian tradition makes it a smaller step than might otherwise seem to be the case from the God of catholic Christianity to the God of nineteenth-century liberalism — the latter being the universal Father presiding over a universal fraternity of humanity.

And at the birth of Protestantism itself, an ethically abstract conception of God, insufficiently grounded in the identity of God as the God of Israel, sparked a reading of Romans which kindled the flame of the Protestant Reformation. It also blazed a trail for reading Romans which was followed for hundreds of years. Martin Luther's "tower experience" grew, in part, from the decontextualization of two related themes in Romans. The first is the notion of "law" as ethical standard. While Luther does well, in his preface to Romans, to comment on the need for heart disposition and external action to be combined, he never questions the identification of "law" as a reference to transhistorical norms required by God and law as a reference to the historically instantiated code that Paul says comes only at a particular point in the story of Israel. Related to this is the connotation of God as righteous. The revelation of the righteousness of God, declared in Rom 1:17 to be the result of the gospel, was loathsome to Luther because it depicted God as the judge who condemned or pardoned on the basis of adherence to that transhistorical law. Loathing turned to love when, in that tower, Luther found in Rom 1:17 a new exposition of the phrase "righteousness of God," one in which righteousness comes not from a principle of doing (with the heart), but from the altogether passive act of faith. Righteousness is an ethical quality of God (the echoes of Plato are important here), transferred ("imputed") to the believer. Calvin would follow suit and read Rom 1:17 as indicating the bestowal of God's own righteousness on the believer. Without a doubt, Luther's conception of God was deeply formed by his extensive knowledge of Scripture. But it was insufficiently informed by the particularity of the God who works in the story of Israel, who has committed himself to the salvation of that people, and whose law and righteousness find their definition within that story. Luther was therefore...