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We theologians serve the [lay reader] best when we refuse to have [them] especially in mind, and when we simply live of our own, as every honest laborer must do—Karl Barth, The Epistle To the Romans
Paul’s letter to the Romans is unique in that it was the only letter he wrote to a community he had neither visited nor founded. In the other letters we have from Paul (the Corinthians correspondence, Galatians, etc.) there is a clear sense Paul is writing to communities he knows personally. He makes personal references, jumps topics, hyper-focuses on presenting issues unique to his relationship with specific communities. Many of these sound like “family” letters.
Romans is different. In it he attempts to summarize the gospel he proclaims, and to do so in a far more total fashion. This isn’t to say that it is as systematic as much later Christian theology; it’s still a letter, and a letter from Paul, after all. But it is longer and more intentionally structured than many of the other letters.
It’s also a very difficult letter to read. If you sit down and read it in its entirety, you may find comfort in knowing the Bible itself states that Paul is difficult to read. “Some things Paul writes are difficult to understand” (2 Peter 3:16).1
However, too much at times has been made of the issue of things being difficult. Many if not most good things in life are similarly difficult. One does not learn to play a piano in a day, or master woodworking the first time handling wood. Why would we assume the work of theology, of proclaiming, of “thinking faith,” would be any different?
This is why I appreciate Karl Barth’s statement in his commentary on Romans, quoted as an epigraph above. He defends the work of the theologian who simply “lives of their own,” without an audience necessarily in mind, just as every honest laborer may do their work while not (at least not immediately) worrying whether others will understand how they perform their labor.
Barth, famously2, wrote his dense and lengthy commentary on Romans while having no formal higher academic degree and while serving in a blue collar parish in Safenfil, Switzerland. The commentary was so incredibly popular it went through six separate printings in a few short years. It’s also so opaque at times that there have been commentaries published about it… and it itself is a commentary!
A book about a book that is about a letter (that is about Scripture). Layers upon layers.
It’s difficult to imagine in 2023 that any commentary on Romans could gain that level of attention, but then it’s likely Barth didn’t imagine his would get the attention it did… so you never know. But a peer of Barth’s, Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, early in Barth’s career published a book about Barth’s theology and had this to say about the first edition of the commentary:
"What a startling book it is! Barth's opening chords reverberate throughout. It chants of a radical, philosophical mysticism, of a radical historical outlook on the world, and of a powerful universalism deeply tinged with liberalism and socialism.”
Barth spent almost the entire next year significantly editing the first edition, so much so that it is the second edition that stands as the official version of the book. But I find it inspiring, if challenging, to realize that a pastor and theologian of the caliber of Barth not only wrote a whole commentary on Romans, but also re-wrote that commentary over the course of an entire additional year. That’s devotion.
Many, many commentaries have been written on Romans. Another famous one is by Martin Luther. Romans was transformational in Luther’s theological outlook (in it he reports he finally came to a realization of or a focus on God’s righteousness rather than his own), so it is no surprise he gave considerable attention to publishing a commentary on the letter.
Many readers of Paul’s letter to the Romans argue that the central thesis of the letter is summed up in chapter 3. Paul writes, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Luther again: “Note that here is the very center and kernel of the Epistle and of all Scripture.”
Paul keeps circling back around to this motif, and drives it home much later in the letter (chapter 11) when he writes, “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all.”
Quite a lot is packed into such a sweeping claim, and much comes from unpacking it. For one, it is one of the clearer articulations of the kind of universalism Barth espoused in his own theology—God will be merciful to all.
But also it bears a deep sense that such universal mercy is embedded in a dynamic of forgiveness. As Barth says rather startlingly midway through his commentary, “All human activity is a cry for forgiveness.”
This of course is core Protestant doctrine—that which makes us human, what marks us in our relationship to God, is a dynamic of justification. Forgiven sinners, community of reconciliation, justified (made right with God) as gift, this or something like it is the sense Protestantism picked up and carried, and did so through a close reading of Romans.3
This is the thing about Romans (something also true of all the best parts of Scripture): sometimes we must agonize our way through repeated re-readings of a text and wait, often interminably, for a break-through. Paul himself says in chapter five that suffering produces character, and character hope; one might say that Romans is a text we “suffer.”
But a patient reading of the text does help, and I call out in outline fashion some key take-aways that I hope might inspire you, dear reader, prior to Sunday worship, to read Romans for yourself, as it will serve as one of our lectionary texts and possibly the basis for preaching in some congregations.
First, Romans really does struggle with the reality of “sin.” It’s helpful if we try to join Paul in his way of thinking about sin rather than the moralistic ways sin is discussed in much of contemporary Protestant theology. For Paul, sin is simply a description of how the world is: he discovers himself bound up in it, he sees how it influences systems and powers, and he sees how sin even impacts creation itself.
Chapter 8, for example, mentions how creation itself groans in pain as a result of the way sin extends in and through humans to creation. Climate change, anyone?
After a set of eight chapters that in careful fashion invite the readers in Rome to consider how the law functions in relationship to God’s righteousness as embodied in the faithfulness of Christ, Paul then offers a three chapter meditation that is narrow and focused and utterly radical.
Remember that for eight chapters he has kind of put pressure on “law” as it plays out in the thought-world of his the Jewish community (of which he is part). However, Paul is not interested in presenting something that can then result in anti-Jewish sentiment, and so in chapters 9-11 he is at great pains to point out that God’s righteousness was extended first to the Jews, and that God’s faithfulness in and through it remains, AND it has now also been extended to the Gentiles.
It’s a paradoxical and at times utterly baffling presentation, while at the same time offering resolution for some problems in Christian theology we have wrestled with ever since, inasmuch as Christians have tried to be faithful to the gospel being extended to the Gentiles while also seeking not to be super-sessionist in their theology.
Then, Paul circles back around with the part of chapter 11 I already quoted, making the condemnation universal so the mercy might be universal as well—and this all because God is God.
The final portion of the letter is a how-to guide. It’s a set of descriptions and lists for how individuals and communities might live in light of the gospel as Paul has presented it.
Along the way, Romans offers some of the most powerfully consoling texts in all of Scripture. I’ve already mentioned the sense of all creation groaning as part of the way sin impacts the world; there’s a later passage in that same chapter frequently read at funerals promising that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Romans contains all of this, and much more. One last thing: Paul in Romans keeps asking a rhetorical question: What then shall we say? I love this rhetorical liveliness. It’s like in the middle of writing the letter, Paul wakes up the part of his brain that might ask itself, “How will we all be thinking of speaking when we read this?” He believes there may be questions, doubts, challenges, wrong moves. So then he answers the question before continuing.
What then shall we say? Shall we sin all the more because grace abounds? By no means!
Cut through the whole of the letter is an abiding integrity, a sense that Paul is committed, as difficult as it might be written into a letter to a community he has never met, that he might say who this God is he knows in Christ that is LIFE. Proclaiming this God to the Romans is worth complicated passages almost algebraic in their force, digressions into inter-faith relations, a certain vulnerability trusting the receiving community will even be able to comprehend what he is getting at, and put in sufficient work to struggle through it with him.
All of that… is Romans.
Try this experiment. Just read chapter 5 slowly, then chapter 6. These chapters become more difficult the more SLOWLY you read them.
As in, became a global sensation famous.
Although there is currently a debate among some that this Protestant direction is a misreading of Paul and Romans. See the New Perspective on Paul, which (roughly speaking) claims the Protestant understanding of justification is mistaken; that Paul is actually opposing Jewish boundary markers in the New Testament people of God.