A Gospel for Today

If the Christian gospel it to mean anything at all, it must offer realistic hope and direction for the time in which we live. Often the gospel is thought to be outside of time, describing what happened long ago and what will happen in the future—or in eternity—but having little to say to our present time. But this gospel of heaven and hell, remote from our earth, is not the gospel of the New Testament. The New Testament writers believed that the gospel brought hope and a new way of life to the age in which they lived. In our exposition of the gospel, we should do no less.

In my previous post, I addressed the stories of the Maccabean martyrs.  It was the remembered events of the Maccabean age that galvanized in Jewish culture the hope of resurrection. The earlier Old Testament contains little about life after death, but with the Maccabean age there arose the motif of moral heroes—people whose faith extended to martyrdom and for whom there surely must be a reward beyond death.

It’s of this that the rich young ruler inquires of Jesus in the gospels. In Mark’s account (10:17-22) the man asks, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit life everlasting?” He’s asking about what would make him a moral hero of the sort that we meet in 2 Maccabees 6-7. In this way of thinking, it’s moral heroes who inherit life everlasting.

That this concern was very much on the minds of the writers of the New Testament appears vividly in Hebrews 11, especially 32-39. Those verses, drawing on stories of moral heroes from the Old Testament and beyond, rush to a conclusion:

Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. (NRSV)

The language of this passage resonates with the language of 4 Maccabees:

The tyrant himself [Antiochus IV] and all his council marveled at their [the young martyrs] endurance, because of which they now stand before the divine throne and live the life of eternal blessedness . . . they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated. (17:17-18, 21-22; NRSV)

Reading Paul with New Eyes

It’s of this faith that the Apostle Paul writes in his letters. For too long, we have read Paul and especially Paul’s letter to the Romans through the eyes of Martin Luther and those who came soon after Luther. We’ve read Paul as contrasting believing and doing. The old religion, in this way of reading Paul, was about doing, keeping Torah; the new religion is about believing, trusting the truth about Jesus. It’s for this reason that the faith that comes out of the Reformation puts so much emphasis on getting belief right. In the denomination in which I grew up, pastors and other officers of the church are required to subscribe to three Reformation era confessions: the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort. Nothing is said in the subscription document about following Jesus. It’s what you do with your head that counts in this kind of theology, not what you do with your hand and feet.

Underlying this way of approaching faith is penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), the subject I have been addressing in this “Harsh Justice” series. For PSA, faith is centrally about what Jesus did for us on the cross. It’s more Good Friday than Easter. By dying Jesus paid the price that God requires for sin—the “penal” part of PSA. Jesus suffers and dies instead of me—the “substitutionary” part of PSA. 

The role of faith in this theology is controverted. For most evangelicals, faith operationalizes the sacrifice of Jesus for me. I choose Jesus and therefore God. I’m saved by believing (which, contrary to what I said above about Luther’s concerns, would seem to make faith something I do). For Reformed people, among whom I grew up, faith is secondary. We are first chosen as recipients of grace, and then through the agency of the Spirit of God we come to believe. God chooses us; faith comes with the choosing. What’s not entirely clear in either of these formulations is what faith does. Why does God require faith? 

But all this gets us away from what Paul is doing in his letters. Paul talks about all these things—the death of Jesus, the cross, salvation, and, of course, faith—but he approaches theme in a way different than the way that post-Reformation Protestant theology approached them. And the way Paul approaches these things seems to me (and many others) to make better sense of the gospel and—this is no small thing—to have more to say to our present time.

Romans: a Precis of Paul’s Theology

So how to get at what Paul is actually talking about in his letters? I could try to do a summary of Paul’s theology, except that Paul doesn’t write a “theology” in any systematic way. He writes letters. His letters are full of contemporary concerns in the churches to whom he writes—pastoral concerns. He raises his theological points in direct reference to these concerns. We put them together into a “theology of Paul” at our peril. So rather than trying to lay out such a theology, I thought it best to stay close to the text of one letter, his letter to the Romans, which is often thought to be the most comprehensive example of Paul’s thinking.

And even with that focused approach in mind, I’ll only be able to take a small part of the letter, and within the part of the letter that I cover, I’ll have to leave much out. What I hope to give you is a sketch, a sketch that offers a different reading of Paul (and much of the New Testament) from the one that you and I learned under the guise of PSA.

So, on to Romans. There are many ways to approach this difficult and evocative epistle, but it’s best for our purposes to consider two themes: faith and righteousness—and their interrelationship. This is in fact what Paul announces in a statement of his thesis:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to all who have faith, Jew first and also Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17) 

Divine Wrath and Paul’s Account of Evil

There you have it: righteousness and faith. But as soon as Paul has announced these twin themes, he moves to wrath: “For the divine wrath is revealed from heaven on all human irreligion and unrighteousness of those who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (1:18). I translated the key phrase as “divine wrath” rather than “wrath of God” because it better catches the ambiguity of what Paul is saying. “Of God” in Hebrew does not always denote something God directly does. “Of God” can mean merely “powerful.” Or “divine” in the sense of “not human.” In this case, “divine wrath” represents the consequences of evil.

It’s important to start here, with evil. In PSA, actual evil tends to get short shrift despite claims to the contrary. Evil in PSA is offending God. And in this way of thinking, evil tends to be reduced to individual sins. For Romans, the focus usually falls on the way Paul illustrates sin with reference to the sexual practices of the culture in which he lived. It was an easy target; tends still to be. But in focusing on the illustration (about which I’ve written in other places), we lose the point of the passage. 

Or points: in this section Paul makes two points, both of which are relevant for our own time. The first is that the human race is a mess. We need little convincing of this. We are reminded daily of the way that humans harm each other, our fellow creatures, the earth itself. Lately the headlines have been filled with intentional cruelty. If pain can be inflicted on others, our government with the support of many Americans seems intent on doing so. Meanwhile we ignore the existential threat of climate change. We seem at times destined not to survive as a species. 

But it’s Paul’s second, related, point that perhaps we need most to hear: we are in this mess together. Most religion tends to be some kind of sorting project. We sort out the good from the bad. We convince ourselves that some of us, though we may have occasional lapses, are good; and that others, though they may occasionally do good things, are lost. For Paul, these two groups, the good and the bad, were once thought to be Jews—the good—and Greeks—the bad. For many today the good are whatever brand of Christian they claim to be and the bad those who belong to other faiths or no faith at all. But for Paul, faith should not a sorting project. We are in this together. 

I do not want to rush on before this point has settled into our consciousness. If faith is a sorting project, then salvation becomes a rescue operation for which only some people are rescued. And if this is your view, that God saves some here and there, then you are not likely to be interested in the fate of humanity. Nor in the fate of other creatures. Nor in the fate of the earth. 

But, as I read Paul, Paul is interested in those things. At the end of this section of the letter, he says something that caught my attention. Speaking of the Torah, he says, “We know that what the Torah says it says to those who are “in” the Torah” (3:19). What he seems to be saying is that the Torah only speaks to those who are included in Israel, but we need something bigger, something that speaks beyond our religious traditions to the whole human race. If we are in this mess together, we need together to find a way out of the mess. And this is precisely what Paul believes has been revealed to him in Christ: a way that works for all humankind.

But Now . . . Righteousness

Having established that the human race is a mess and that we are in this mess together, Paul comes back near the end of chapter 3 to the language of revelation: “But now, apart from the Torah, divine righteousness has been manifested . . . , divine righteousness manifested in the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ that extends to all who have faith [are faithful]” (3:21-22). There you have it again: righteousness and faith.

The two words are related. Faith has the twin senses of being faithful to and trusting the faithfulness of another, as we shall see momentarily. Righteousness is the quality of being faithful. Righteousness in the Bible is first and foremost keeping faith—keeping faith with God (and God keeping faith with us) and keeping faith with others. In the passage I just quoted, the divine righteousness is God’s grace—God keeping faith with humanity even when humanity has not kept faith with God. 

What PSA has done is impose on the biblical divine righteousness its own idea of justice—an idea of justice that is punitive and harsh. But this idea of justice does not arise from this text or, for the most part, from other biblical texts. Whenever the theology of PSA sees “righteousness” in the text, it reads in its own harsh justice. This runs contrary to what Paul is arguing in this text.

In the verses that follow, Paul makes this point about God’s righteousness by using a cascade of images. I’ll not pause on them, except to mention one: the hilastērion of verse 25. He says of Christ that God “has presented him as a hilastērion through his faithfulness with his blood. . .” (3:25). The hilastērion was the cover of the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies in the temple where God was enthroned between the golden cherubim. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest splashes blood on the cover of the ark to purge the sanctuary of the sins of the people (Leviticus 16:15-16). 

I mention this image because PSA hangs much of its theology on this verse. And it’s here that our English translations tend intentionally or unintentionally to steer us in the direction of PSA. For hilasterion they have “sacrifice of atonement.” God presented Christ as a “sacrifice of atonement.” But this gets it wrong. A hilastērion is not a sacrifice. It’s a place, a setting where God and humanity meet—a place of reconciliation. Recently archaeologists have discovered altars installed at Metropolis, north of Ephesus, set up to mark the end of the Roman civil war between Mark Anthony and Octavian. One of these altars seems to proclaim Octavian as a hilastērion, one who brings reconciliation to the world. Mark Wilson concludes:

The altars of Metropolis functioned . . . as social and psychological expressions of the belief among the elite in Metropolis that Octavian was the divine gift of God sent to re-establish order and peace in the world through his reconciling power. Thus, it was inevitable that the imperial ideology that Octavian/Augustus was the reconciler of the world would collide with Paul’s theology that Jesus Christ was in fact that reconciler. For Paul the reconciliation introduced by Jesus was not just temporal for an empire but eternal for the world (Rom 11:15). (Mark Wilson, “Hilasterion and Imperial Theology: A New Reading of Romans 3:25.” HTS Theological Studies 73.3 (2017), accessed here. On this see Andrew Rillera, Lamb of the Free, 410-15)

No one would confuse Octavian with an “atoning sacrifice.”

Paul seems to have claims like those of Octavian in mind when he says that, on the contrary, God presents Christ as the hilastērion “for the purpose of demonstrating his righteousness through the passing over of foregone sins, in his divine clemency, to demonstrate his righteousness in the present age, so that God may be proved righteous and be the one who offers righteousness for anyone who keeps faith with Jesus” (3:25-26). The righteousness of God is not, as PSA has it, God’s wrath but, as Paul has it, God’s reconciliation.

What Faith Looks Like

It’s here that Paul introduces the second of the twin themes: faith. If righteousness looks like grace, then what does faith look like? Paul’s answer is clear: faith looks like Abraham. And for Abraham, faith is tied to a promise. In Genesis 15, God in a vision shows Abraham the stars and says of them, “So shall your descendants be.” And we are told, “Abraham trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 

For Paul, but even more so, for the author of Hebrews, Abraham’s faith is open-ended. It leans into this promise, not knowing exactly what the promise will mean. As Hebrews has it, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (11:8). Faith is hearing the voice of God and trusting it, setting off toward a land we do not yet know.

But Paul is not done. Faith is not just Abraham. Faith is also and pre-eminently Jesus. This is easily missed, both because our translations are often misleading and because, truth be told, Paul does not mark the transition from Abraham to Jesus as clearly as he might have done. The transition comes at the end of chapter 4. Paul gives a final statement about the faith of Abraham: 

No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:20-22. NRSV)

And Paul then adds:

Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. (Romans 4:23-25; NRSV)

Like Abraham, the Jesus faith involves a journey to a far country, but in this case the far country is death—death in all its biblical senses, including biological death but also all the spiritual senses of death. And like Abraham, the Jesus faith involves a promise: that the journey will not end in death but in life—again in all its biblical senses.

Participation in the Journey of Faith

Out of this Paul—and not just Paul but the New Testament generally—builds an account of faith at odds with PSA and with much of evangelical theology. In Paul’s theology, the journey we take through death to new life we take with and in the journey of Jesus, so that Jesus’s journey through cross and resurrection becomes our journey, and our journey through our own cross and resurrection becomes Jesus’s.

The name for this is “participation.” In the verses I quoted above from the end of Romans 4, I let stand in the NRSV translation the last word, “justification”: “He was raised for our justification.” But this is misleading because “justification” has for many of us taken on PSA meanings. PSA theology explains justification as God demanding justice and Jesus satisfying God’s demand by his death on the cross. This makes no sense in this context even if we retain “justification” in the translation because in this instance Paul does not say Jesus diedfor our “justification”; he says that Jesus was raised for our ‘justification.’” But we could get at the meaning of what Paul is saying better if we avoided justification language altogether. Better to translate that “Jesus was raised for our righteousness” in the sense that our righteousness is in Jesus—participation, not justification.

As Paul works this out, we die with Jesus (in baptism, among other ways; see Romans 6:1-4) and we rise with him (see Romans 6:5-11). Or better, we are raised by having in us the same Spirit that raised up Jesus:

If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. (Romans 8:10-11)

“Mortal bodies” in this passage refers not just to biological life but to how we act in the world—our moral selves.

Once Again the Maccabean Martyrs

Having opened this rich vein of New Testament spirituality, I will leave it there except to wrap back one more time to the Maccabean martyrs and the rich man’s question to Jesus, “What must I do to inherit life everlasting?” The man is asking about moral heroism: do I need to suffer heroically to receive an everlasting reward? Will God require more of me than I am able to give?

The New Testament answer is that the moral heroism is not ours in the first place but Jesus’s. The journey of faith is first the journey of Jesus. As Paul has it in the passage we looked at earlier, Romans 3:22, “The divine righteousness is manifested through the faith[fulness] of Jesus.” It’s Jesus who is the true heir of Abraham (in Galatians 3:16, Paul insists that Jesus is the only heir), who journeys to the far country and who receives the promise of new life. He is first.

But faith is following Jesus, as Jesus tells the rich man. It’s a journey that involves dying and rising.

This spiritual way requires not just acquiescence but participation. It is a spiritual journey. It’s demanding. It requires us—together, I might add—to take the Jesus journey, to die to ourselves and rise to a new kind of life. Just saying you are a Christian doesn’t get at it. We are now not just those who acknowledge Jesus but those who embody Jesus. The challenge of this is both daunting and exhilarating. One has not read Paul correctly if one does not see in his words both of these at every point: both difficulty and the sheer joy of the journey.

I’ll have more to say about this in the next post.

Clay