READING ROMANS

Curious how a word or a phrase can jump out at you in a passage you’ve read countless times before. Preparing for my last post, Thinking Salvation, reading Romans 5 for, I don’t know, the thousandth time, what jumped out at me was verse 17, where Paul suggests that if we are to live the Jesus life, we must accept our righteousness.

Well, not that exactly. Paul doesn’t actually say, “Accept your righteousness.” I supplied the imperative. What he has in verse 17 is a participial phrase, “those who accept . . . righteousness.” The fuller phrase is “those who accept the surpassing grace and gift of righteousness.” Those who do, he says, “will reign in life through Jesus Christ.”

Paul has Abraham in mind. The faith(fulness) of Abraham hangs over this entire section of Romans. In the previous chapter Paul has reminded us that Abraham, in the words of Genesis 15:3, “trusted God, and it was counted to him for righteousness” (Romans 4:3). What this comes to is that Abraham accepted his righteousness. He trusted the promise of God that he would be the ancestor of a new kind of nation, trusting without knowing exactly where it would lead (see Hebrews 11:8). His trust was counted to him as righteousness (Hebrew ṣədāqâ). We’ll come back to this.

At stake in Romans are two, seemingly opposed, perspectives on the life of faith, the one outgoing and open, boundary-breaking; the other inward-focused and exclusive, boundary-creating. It’s important to see that both are biblical; both necessary. It’s the relationship between the two perspectives that is the issue in Romans, as indeed in much of religious life. 

In Romans, the first perspective is represented by Abraham; the second by Moses. Let me be clear: this contrast is not between Christianity and Judaism; neither Christianity nor Judaism in the form they now take existed at the writing of Romans. Nor is the question which of these is right and which is wrong. You need both. But you need them in the right order. Paul insists in Romans that you should begin with Abraham. Before the Torah, there was Abraham’s faith. If the Moses faith was particular, all the good and rich practices and traditions of Israel, the Abraham faith was universal, the call of God to someone who knew nothing of Israel, who had only a call, a promise, and his trust in that call and promise, and this was counted to him as righteousness.

By way of illustration of what Paul is getting at in Romans, a recent intra-Jewish discussion about Sabbath comes to mind. The discussion was occasioned by the publication in 2024 of Jon Levenson’s Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath. The title tips us off. For Levenson, Sabbath is intrinsically Jewish. What makes Sabbath Sabbath are the many rules and observances of the Jewish Sabbath. Without these rules, without the long history of the Jewish Sabbath, you do not have Sabbath. You might have Sunday, but that in Levenson’s view is a very different thing.

The shadow presence behind Levenson’s book is another, quite different, book on Sabbath by an older Jewish scholar, the eminent Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel’s book, published in 1951, is called The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. Again, the title tips us off. For Heschel, Sabbath is a distinctive Jewish contribution to human culture. He offers Sabbath as way to save the world. Under all the particular customs and regulations of Sabbath is the creation of holiness in time, a temple in time.

Levenson is wary of Heschel’s universality. He says of Heschel:

Heschel’s unqualifiedly universalistic language about the Sabbath as “the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of men,” and the like, collides head-on with the intense particularism of the holiday itself. It suffers from the inevitable shortcomings of any universalistic rationale for a particularistic practice. (215-16)

“The inevitable shortcomings of any universalistic rationale for a particularistic practice.” For Levenson, the particular, the glory and joy of Jewish Sabbath is prior to all else. Others, Christians perhaps, can learn from Sabbath but their days off, their religious celebrations, cannot be called “Sabbath.” For Heschel, the idea of Sabbath—its underlying reality—is available to all. Sabbath can be celebrated in other ways.

In this argument, Paul is firmly on the side of Heschel: Abraham before Moses. This is not to say that Moses is wrong or obsolete. The particularity of Torah is to be celebrated. But there are other ways. Before Torah comes the faith of Abraham.

It’s this thought we find in Romans 5:17 in the idea of accepting one’s righteousness. Perhaps we need another word for “righteousness.” Underlying the Greek word here (dikaiosunē) is the Hebrew ṣədāqâ, a word that means “doing right by.” It’s not “righteousness” in the sense that the word has acquired in contemporary English. It has none of the sense of priggery that our word often carries with it. When we think of righteous folk, we often think of people we would rather avoid. ṣədāqâ is not like that. It’s relationship based, not rule based. Around it in Hebrew texts are other relational words, words like mišpaṭ, “justice,” receiving one’s due; ḥesed, “love” in the sense of loyalty; and ʾemet, “being true to another.” These are community words. To accept one’s righteousness is to accept one’s proper role community. It’s to do right by others—by God.

In the Abraham story in Paul’s reading, Abraham’s way of “doing right by” God was trusting God’s promise, a promise that framed an identity, a role, and a course of action. To accept his righteousness was to accept all of this: his identity as one called by this strange God, Yhwh; his role as the progenitor of a new people whose very existence testified to the grace and love of this God; and the act of leaving his home and beginning a journey toward, as Hebrews has it, a new city—a new way of life. A new kind of relationship.

Romans seems to be written to a Jewish Christian community on behalf of gentiles and Paul’s mission to the gentiles. Theirs was not the righteousness of the Torah. Nor was it the keeping of the traditions. Nor eating kosher or celebrating the feast days. Their righteousness was in the promise, the promise that came to them through the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s a promise—Paul’s language in Romans 5:17 is a “surpassing grace and gift”—that came with reconciliation and inclusion—key concepts in Romans. But all that is for another time. 

My concern, belated gentile that I am, is with accepting my own righteousness. In the conventional Christian theology with which most of us grew up, we were asked to accept our sinfulness and guilt. Paul does a bit of that earlier in Romans, where he writes about the mess we find ourselves in. We are all part of the mess, he says, legitimate heirs of the coming wrath. In that part of the letter, he wants to quash the notion that the world divides between good people (people who have the right religion) and bad people (all the rest). This idea still much too easily slips into our churches. This is one of the problems with religious rules. They are too easy. We think that if we keep the rules that we have set for ourselves, we are righteous. We lose sight of our deep participation in the evil of the world. So for truth’s sake we do need to accept our role in the evil around us and our powerlessness in the face of it. But accepting our sinfulness is not the same as accepting our righteousness.

As for Abraham, our acceptance of our righteousness is the acceptance of identity, a role, and a course of action. Perhaps, at this point, we should have the whole verse in front of us.

If then in the failure of one, Death reigned through that one, much more will those who accept the surpassing grace and gift of righteousness reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:17)

Notice that in Paul’s sentence, the clauses are not quite parallel. In the first clause, Death reigns. Death here is a power. It’s not simply that we die. Biological life depends on death. Has always depended on death. Without death, we are unable to live. When cells no longer dying, we call it cancer, and cancer brings death. Death in this verse (note my capitalization) is not biological; it’s the way that Death has become a destructive power in our lives and in the world. We come to believe in Death. We serve Death. Death makes us think that life is a zero-sum game. Fearing death, we grab the bit of life we are given and hold on as hard and long as we can. Through the failure (Greek paraptōma, literally a “fall”) of one human (Paul has in mind Adam in the Garden of Eden story in a common 2^nd Temple interpretation), “Death [came to] reign.” As we well know.

Then the surprise: one expects the next clause to read: But now in (or by) the righteousness of one human, Life reigns. But that’s not what we have. It’s not Life that reigns but those who accept righteousness—”the surpassing grace and gift of righteousness.” They “reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” 

This requires us, requires me, to step into Jesus: into an identity, a role, and a way of life. All of this is amply illustrated in the rest of Romans, but for the moment focus on identity. To accept our righteousness, in the manner of Abraham, is to accept an identity-defining relationship. For Abraham, this is his relationship with Yhwh; for us, it’s our relationship with Christ. Our trinitarian theology tells us that it comes to the same thing.

It’s harder, I would add, to accept righteousness than to accept sinfulness. Accepting sinfulness asks little of us; accepting righteousness asks everything. I am reminded by way of a small illustration of my own struggles with ordination. When I first took ordination vows, I wanted to run away from them. I disliked being called a “minister” or, worse, a “pastor.” I especially disliked the honorific, “Reverend.” Who was I to be revered? But these were simply names and titles for my righteousness. I had to learn to accept my righteousness—the role to which God and the community of faith had called me. I did so grudgingly and gradually until I learned to own what I had already been declared to be. 

Our righteousness in Christ is deeper and more difficult than that. But it offers a freedom. Those who accept righteousness “will reign in life.” In accepting our righteousness, we learn daily what that means.

Clay