This commentary is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. It is meant to serve as an emendation and corrective to what others have written. I am a great admirer of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s six-volume commentary on Romans 3:20 to 8:39, the portion of the letter he felt was paramount. He left chapter 9 untouched, however, which is a shame. Martin Luther made extensive reference to Romans, saying in his preface to his German translation, “This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian’s while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well.”[1] He traces his theological conversion to contemplating verse 1:17, and John Wesley came to personal faith while listening to a sermon that quoted Luther’s preface.
Romans is Paul’s most self-consciously theological letter. Typically, his letters focused on pastoral issues generated by the struggle of living a Christian life in a pagan world. Romans has its share of pastoral admonitions, but from the outset, Paul is looking for opportunities to depart from the immediate to focus instead on the eternal, to use the pastoral as a springboard to address the theological. Once the theological foundation has been laid, he can return to the pastoral. For him, doctrine leads to understanding, understanding leads to hope, and hope leads to godliness.
Paul’s theological concerns revolved around what he calls the mystery of God, namely, how a humanity divided into Jew and Gentile could be reconciled to God and each other that they all might become one. His audience in Rome is predominately Gentile but nevertheless includes prominent Jewish members. Paul is therefore faced with the challenge of introducing concepts that may be novel to one group or the other, without losing touch with either one. Even though Paul was eminently successful in achieving balance in his presentation, we in the West have been relatively unsophisticated in our interpretation of the text.
I maintain that all our theological conundrums are caused by reading a Jewish or Eastern document, the Bible, with a Western or Greek mindset. While this is a problem when reading the rest of the Bible, it becomes critical when reading Romans. It’s not that Paul showed his own cultural limitations by thinking and writing like a Jew, but that as a Jew he was in possession of concepts and insights that cannot be translated into an Aristotelian idiom without alteration and loss. As will become clear in my exposition, there is a reason God chose one people as his medium of specific revelation: a long history of interaction with God has given the Jews a unique spiritual and intellectual heritage. We have to read and think like them if we want to understand that revelation. We in the West have let our cultural and intellectual prejudices obscure the fine balance Paul worked so hard to achieve.
Let me be specific. To really understand Paul, you have to remember that as a Pharisee, he used the rhetorical tools most favored by rabbis in their scholarship and disputations. Chief among these tools is that of symmetrical parallelism, or chiastic structure. Instead of a linear sequence of syllogistic deduction, as Greeks tended to favor, the Hebrew rabbis, Jesus included, would construct an argument that makes a series of points, each following from that which precedes it. They reach a conclusion, and then the argument is repeated in reverse order until they return to the starting point. Thus, the points in a seven-step chiasmus could be viewed as ABCDCBA. Each intermediate step shares a similar thought with its corresponding step. Sometimes these thoughts are simple repetition, sometimes the second is a corollary to the first. This device can be found in a single sentence, a paragraph, or even the whole document. It was used to show the inherent logic of the statements being made; to provide clarity in a written medium that lacked spaces, sentences, paragraphs, capitalization, punctuation, or other delimiters; and to aid in memorization where written documents were the exception rather than the rule. As we will see, to read a chiasmus as linear thought can lead to confusion and genuine suffering.
Another tendency is for Paul to express himself in the form of a diatribe—that is, an informal rhetorical dialogue with imaginary opponents. Sometimes he labels his antagonists, “Now you, if you call yourself a Jew,” but he’s usually content to refer to his audience in abstract terms that render his attacks less threatening. The translation introduces labels that help clarify this back and forth repartee: Paul, Jewish Teacher, or Teacher of Law. Further, Paul employs litotes, where he uses double negatives to assert a positive.
Finally, in addition to what Paul did, we should pay attention to what he did not do. He avoids terms that would tend to defeat his intention of bringing reconciliation to a mixed congregation of both Jew and Gentile. For instance, he avoids the term church in the opening address. Nor does he speak of Christians, for he doesn’t want to act as though Judaism is totally bankrupt and being replaced. Further, he avoids speaking of synagogues because they have historically been the province of Jews alone. He knows God is making a new humanity in Christ, and he avoids using terms that hearken back to old distinctions. Instead, he speaks of family and the unity implied by that concept. His overarching theme is that we can all join God’s family, where he’s a benevolent father who has met all our needs in the person of his son. He speaks variously to Gentiles, then Jews, then back again repeatedly. He’s always mindful of the criticisms his ideas will arouse, and he’s careful to deal with each in its turn. Every once in a while, he’s able to drop his defenses and sing a hymn of praise to God without reservation.
In order to display the rhetorical structure of this epistle, I’ve used Robert Bailey’s translation of the Greek text,[2] the Novum Testamentum Graece.[3] The Scripture is laid out in cascading format to illustrate the chiastic form as perceived by its modern translator, in an attempt to reconstruct what Paul originally intended. Words in italics indicate text not found in the Greek source. The Bailey translation precedes my comments. Robert Bailey and I both provide footnotes for further clarification and commentary—his are primarily concerned with rhetorical structure, mine with exegetical interpretation. His notes appear immediately following the scripture excerpts, while mine follow normal footnote patterns. My footnotes are intended to complement his. The New International Version of the Bible is by necessity a paraphrase, edited in order to read better and offer more clarity. When it provides something the Bailey text misses, I have added it with notation. In addition to using italics for emphasis, words in my comments that are italicized are keywords pulled from the scripture passage. Words that are capitalized in the body of a sentence should be understood as referring to cardinal concepts or typologies.
The overall structure of the letter forms a chiasmus along the lines of ABCBA:
[EXT]A) 1:1–7
- B) 1:8–17
- C) 1:18—15:13
- B) 15:14—16:23
- A) 16:25–27[/EXT]
Thus, A and B consist of greetings, housekeeping preliminaries, and buttoning up. The main body of the text, C, consists of insights into God’s plan of redemption that has revolutionized the standing of all humanity, Jew and Gentile, in his eyes. This main body, which is extensive, can be further subdivided as a chiasmus along the lines of ABCCBA:
[EXT]A) 1:18—3:20: Jews and Gentiles have both dishonored God.
- B) 3:21—4:25: Jews and Gentiles alike can receive righteousness from God.*
- C) 5:1—8:39: All are justified, those who live by the Spirit are also saved.*
- C) 9:1—11:36: God’s plan of redemption as experienced by Jew and Gentile.*
- B) 12:1—13:14: Life in the Spirit within the church and society.*
- A) 14:1—15:13: Potential cultural conflicts between Jew and Gentile.*[/EXT]
* I have renamed all sections except the first and have included these titles in the chapter introductions. Bailey’s original titles are included with the text of the scripture.
It is interesting to note that the major exegetical blunders that have been committed by interpreters of this epistle have occurred in the two sections of conclusion labeled C above. In the case of Romans 5, we have no commentators to my knowledge who make a distinction between justification and salvation, as Paul does. Like Calvin, they assume this is simple parallelism or repetition, not a profound distinction that clarifies the rest of Christian soteriology.[4] In 8:29–30, my exposition shows that a linear interpretation leads to misunderstanding, while a chiastic interpretation leads to clarity and logic. In this way I’m able to offer a reconstituted Ordo Salutis, a genuine first. In the case of Romans 9, most commentators, including Calvin and Luther, adopt a literalistic approach as opposed to metaphorical. The result, especially for Calvin, is an atrocious image of God who hates his creation.[5] Time and again in these critical sections, chiastic structures play an important part in conveying the sense of Paul’s argument. These and other themes are repeated whenever warranted by the text.
Chapter designations in the Bible are arbitrary at best, but they serve to divide the text and commentary into manageable portions. For ease, my chapters correspond with the text of Romans. Because theologians do not always use words in the same way, I’ve appended a Glossary of Soteriological Terms at the end of the commentary to document how I understand these words. I believe I am using them in the sense Paul was. Let us keep Paul’s goals and methods in mind as we read the text and confront those passages that have led to the doctrinal and denominational confusion that characterizes the Christian church today. We should read Paul according to his methods and intentions, not our own.
[1] Luther, Preface, lines 1–2.
[2] Bailey, “God’s Good News to the Romans.”
[3] Nestle et al., Novum Testamentum Graece.
[4] Will Durant says of Calvin, “ . . . we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” Durant, The Reformation, 490.
[5] Frederick Calder writes of Calvin’s view of God: “ . . . as a being of whom, in point of malignity, the prince of the lower regions is but a faint image and expression. . . . far more odious than anything ever dictated by the prophet of Mecca.” Calder, Memoirs of Simon Episcopius, 267–68.
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