Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter

by Tom Wright

One of the fascinating things about Paul’s letter to the Romans is that it is not only a vital part of scripture in its own right. It offers guidance on reading all the rest as well, Old and New Testaments alike. It doesn’t cover everything, but it covers a lot. And, within Romans, chapter 8, by common consent, is one of the most spectacular pieces of early Christian writing. It is the very heart of Romans – and, with that, it has a claim to be near the heart of what the Bible, and Christianity itself, is all about.

Salvation is not just God’s gift to his people, it is God’s gift through his people.

People do indeed sometimes imagine that if the New Testament were focused on the Jewish people and their hopes, its message would become irrelevant for gentiles from that day to this (including, of course, most Christians). Whole schemes of thought, of interpretation of Paul in particular, have been built up on that supposition. But if we want to understand Paul we can’t be content with such an idea. The way Paul saw things (as we shall see more fully in a moment), God’s purpose for Israel always was the focal point, and the intended means, of God’s purpose for the whole world. God’s plan to put the world right began with the call of Abraham, and focused on the covenant which God made with him. And when Abraham’s people sinned, as God knew they would (since they were themselves children of Adam and Eve), God did not scrap the plan. He didn’t change his mind. The covenant required a faithful Israelite, and that is what God provided in the person of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah.

We have got our story of salvation upside down. Ever since the early Middle Ages at least, most Christians have supposed that the point of the Christian gospel was to enable saved human ‘souls’ to go up to ‘heaven’.1 We’ve read Romans, not least Romans 8, in that way: when Paul says, at the climax of the chapter (verse 30), ‘those he justified, them he also glorified’, we have assumed that this means ‘Justified sinners will go to heaven’. But that isn’t what ‘glorified’ meant for Paul. He never once mentions ‘going to heaven’, here or elsewhere.

The story the Bible tells – Old and New Testaments alike – is about God creating a world in which he intends to come and live with his human creatures. The Bible ends, after all, not with saved souls going up to heaven but with the new Jerusalem coming down to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans’ (Revelation 21.3).

God’s ‘glory’ comes to dwell in the Tabernacle in Exodus 40, in the Temple in 1 Kings 8, and now in Jesus himself and, by the spirit, in Jesus’ followers. This gives them the ‘glory’ spoken of in Psalm 8, which is the restored human authority over the world.

The reason why God rescues humans from sin and death is so that they can take their proper place in the renewal of creation, the new world in which he will himself come to live, to be at home.

The irony, for us, is that many people now assume that God’s ‘justice’ and God’s ‘love’ are radically different (supposing, for instance, that God’s justice would make him punish us but that his love would find a way not to do so after all); whereas in the Old Testament the two go closely together. When the Bible speaks of God’s justice, it is talking about the creator’s utter determination, faced with his creation in a mess, to put it all right. When it speaks of God’s love, it is talking about the creator entering into a ‘covenant’, a close personal relationship, with his people – as the means by which he will put the world right.

It isn’t just about sinners discovering that they can be personally ‘put right with God’ and thus go to heaven. Personal reconciliation with God remains central, but it is itself part of the larger project which Romans 8 brings gloriously into focus in its picture of the renewal of all creation.

The powerful theme of God’s saving and transforming grace, which sweeps through Romans like a rushing mighty wind, has sometimes led readers to suppose that we humans remain passive throughout the story of salvation. Romans 8 has often been read in that way: we are assured of salvation, the spirit enables us to live in God’s way, and God will see us through any intermediate suffering. But that misses out the vital middle stage – that those who are declared to be in the right, to be God’s people, are the renewed humans, the people God had in mind when creating his image-bearing creatures in the first place, the people who now, in the present age, have a decisive role to play in the coming to birth of the new creation. As we saw, God always intended to work in the world through human beings: that’s part of the point of the ‘image’ in Genesis 1.26. That purpose, gloriously fulfilled in the ultimate Image, the man Jesus himself, is now shared with his people by the spirit.

Humans were made to be God’s agents within his world; that is part of what it means to be made in God’s image. Until humans can take up this role, the world will remain unredeemed. Thus, the resurrection of God’s people is what the whole world is waiting for (8.19–21). We are saved, not from the world but for the world.

the new exodus is under way as the means by which the new genesis is to be achieved.

To recapitulate what we said earlier about justification, God has promised to put the whole world right, and through the gospel he puts men and women right so that they can be, here and now and also hereafter, part of his putting-right project for the world. Justification and justice go closely together.

The father sends the son and the spirit to do ‘what the law could not do’, and to lead Jesus’ followers to their inheritance. In the present time, the spirit groans within the inarticulate prayer of the church and of all creation – and God the father listens and knows the mind of the spirit. The church is thereby conformed to the image of the son. This is all about God’s love, the Messiah’s love, and – by the spirit – our love for God in return. That’s what ‘covenant’ is all about.

The first rule for understanding any Pauline text – whether it’s a verse, a paragraph, a chapter or a whole letter! – is this: Take care to discover the main overall thrust. Don’t be distracted by important but secondary elements, however significant they appear in relation to all kinds of interesting theological discussions. Paul is well aware of what we might call the inner workings of his arguments, but he regularly draws together the threads of a paragraph or chapter in his opening and closing statements. That is where we should look first, to get our bearings.

This is the main affirmation of these first four verses, anticipating that fuller statement: the spirit fulfils the law’s life-giving intention and therefore there is no condemnation.

The second rule for careful exegesis is more mechanical, but it works time and again. Pay close attention to Paul’s connecting words – words such as kai (‘and’), de (‘but’), gar (‘for’), hina (‘in order that’), ara (‘so then’), oun (‘therefore’) and so on. As with all translation, the Greek and English may not always match exactly. A word in one language – even a small conjunction! – may well not carry all the implications of its nearest equivalent in another language. But we have to do the best we can. Paul doesn’t throw these little words around at random.

The third rule is to think into the first-century perspective. People often say, ‘Well, Paul may have written X, but what he really meant was Y’, producing an anachronistic paraphrase – as though we have to help poor old Paul to articulate, a bit more clearly, what he really intended.

the aim of all exegesis ought to be to get to the point where we can say, stand here (in the first-century world of a well-taught Jewish thinker); look at things like this; and then you’ll see that he has in fact said exactly what he meant. We don’t have to help Paul to get it right. We have to allow him to go on teasing us until we see his point, allowing the bits of the jigsaw to fall finally into place.

The key passage (7.7–25) is framed by two questions: ‘Is the law sin?’ (7.7) and ‘Was the good [law] responsible for my death?’ (7.13). The answer to the first is: no, but ‘Sin’ used the good law to bring death. To the second the answer is: no, but Torah brought ‘Sin’ out in its full colours through the moral confusion of those who were wanting to follow it.

7.7–25 is telling the story of Israel in relation to the law. The character Paul refers to as ‘I’ is the whole people of Israel, from before the giving of the law, through that moment and on to Paul’s own day. This rhetorical device of the ‘I’ enables Paul to tell this large, complex story as his own – which indeed it is, albeit seen now in retrospect – rather than distancing himself from the problem, and from the people of Israel, by saying ‘they’ or ‘them’. One important result of this is that we would be mistaken to probe the chapter for elements of ‘Paul’s spiritual autobiography’. That’s not the point. Paul is not describing ‘his own experience’ as such. It is his present analysis – from his position ‘in the Messiah’ – of his previous historical and theological position.

The problem of chapter 7, in fact, was that Israel was itself composed of Adamic humans; and all that Torah could do with Adamic humanity was to produce more sin and death. Thus it had been when Torah first arrived in Israel, with Moses coming down the mountain to behold Aaron and the people cavorting around the golden calf. Torah’s only proper response to such pagan idolatry was to condemn it. But in this passage, we begin to see the point. God’s plan to rescue the human race (and thereby the whole creation) was focused on Israel; Israel found itself in the same plight as all other people; but, as Paul says in verse 13, all this happened in the divine purposes in order to draw ‘sin’ on to one place, and to show it up in its true colours. The repeated hina (‘in order that’) in verse 13 expresses the strange divine purpose in giving Torah: in other words, even the point about Torah appearing to make sin ‘very sinful indeed’ had the positive purpose of preparing for the climactic and decisive moment when God would condemn it once and for all (8.3).

Paul uses ‘Sin’ (hamartia) here to denote, not merely specific acts, but the dark power that lies behind all human idolatry, injustice and immorality.

The ‘therefore’ in verse 1 anticipates the ‘because’ in verse 2, which will explain what might otherwise have seemed illogical. It is as though I might say, ‘My car has a flat battery, its tyres are ruined and its licence has run out; there is therefore no problem getting to my destination, because here is the mechanic who can fix the battery and tyres, and here is the government officer to issue me with a new licence.’ Or, to use another illustration, it’s as though someone might say, ‘I am heavily in debt to the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker – I am therefore free of all financial obligations, because the bank has agreed to write off all my debts to local tradespeople.’

The start of verse 3, literally translated, reads: ‘For the impossible thing of the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God [has done] . . .’ Most English translations, like my own, have turned this round, starting the sentence with ‘God’. But Paul’s wording should force us to ask, what was it that Torah could not do? Many have supposed that the answer has something to do with the ‘condemnation’ of sin at the end of verse 3. But that ignores Paul’s overall argument – not to mention the fact that Torah had no problem condemning sin! The answer, following once more from 7.10 and now from 8.2 as well, and looking ahead to 8.10–11, is that Torah couldn’t give life.

As will become clear in the rest of Romans 8, the spirit constitutes the new mode in which the living presence of God himself will dwell in and with his people, constituting them as the new ‘Temple’. But for God to dwell in the Temple, the Temple must be cleansed of everything that pollutes it, everything that smells of death. How is that to be done? With the Torah itself, it is impossible – not because there is anything wrong with Torah, but because Torah was given to the Adamic, ‘fleshly’ people of Israel. As Moses already warned (in Deuteronomy 32 and elsewhere), and as one prophet after another insisted, the people seemed incapable of keeping the holy, just and good law. The law was thus ‘weak because of human flesh’, unable to give the life it promised (7.10). And the problem with ‘flesh’, as Paul has analysed it in 7.7–25, is ‘Sin’, hamartia, which as we said is here more than just the sum total of human wrongdoing. It is the dark, quasi-demonic power that used even the holy law as a base of operations to whisper its seductions (7.8–11). What had to happen, therefore, is that hamartia itself needed to be ‘condemned’ – not just receiving the judicial verdict of condemnation, but having that sentence duly carried out. And that, declares Paul, is what God has done – in the death of his son. ‘Right there in the flesh, [God] condemned sin.’

Every time Paul writes about the cross, he says something different, because in each passage he is expounding a particular line of thought, not constructing an abstract system. But what he says here sends a signal to all those who do want to construct such systems of theology. ‘There is now no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus’ (verse 1), because on the Messiah’s cross God ‘condemned sin’. In the terms of much later debate, that is obviously ‘penal’. The punishment deserved by ‘Sin’ has been meted out – on ‘Sin’ itself. It is likewise obviously ‘substitutionary’. The death of the Messiah, as the means of sin’s condemnation, results in there being ‘no condemnation’ for those ‘in the Messiah’. He dies under the weight of sin; his people do not. Here, at the heart of Paul’s vital argument, driving the larger analysis he will offer in the rest of the chapter, we have a clear and definite statement of what many later theologians will describe (in language which is actually vaguer than many of them realize) as ‘atonement’. But Paul is not constructing such an abstract scheme. What he says here is in the service of his actual argument, which is about the law’s intention being fulfilled – the intention which had been thwarted by ‘Sin’ dwelling in the ‘flesh’ of the humans to whom the law had been given. So it is vital to observe, against the run of a great deal of popular preaching, that Paul does not say that God ‘condemned Jesus’, or even ‘condemned the Messiah’. God ...

Imagine Sin as a small transparent photograph; Torah puts a bright light behind it and a large screen in front of it. Torah brings Adamic Sin to larger-than-life size, precisely and paradoxically in Israel, so that it could be dealt with there. The key link, as we mentioned before, is 7.13, and the key word is hina, ‘in order that’, picking up from the hina in 5.20. In 7.13, Paul declares that God’s purpose in giving Torah – indicated with this repeated hina – was so that ‘Sin might become very sinful indeed, through the commandment’. The purpose of Torah, Paul is saying, was to lure Sin into one place, namely Israel, and there to let it do its worst, to become its full, horrid self – so that in the person of Israel’s representative, the Messiah, it might then be dealt with once and for all.

Paul, to repeat, is thinking historically. This is not an allegory for some otherworldly truth. God’s plan of salvation has been worked out through Abraham’s people, fulfilled in the Messiah, and now extended to the worldwide, Jesus-believing, spirit-filled family.

Paul elsewhere declares that the Messiah ‘died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures’. This doesn’t just mean a few proof-texts taken out of their larger contexts. It means the whole narrative of God’s purposes with Israel, following through the Deuteronomic covenantal scheme of blessing then curse and thus requiring the apocalyptic fulfilment, the unveiling of God’s covenant faithfulness, in Israel’s representative Messiah.

Here, then, we are at the heart of all Christian theology. God made humans to be his stewards, reflecting his wise image in the world, so that he might himself come into his world as the ultimate steward of creation. Following sin, God called Abraham and his family to be the means of rescuing humans and thereby the whole creation – so that he might himself come, as the anointed representative of Abraham’s family, to rescue Israel and the whole world from sin. Humans were made as appropriate vehicles for God’s self-expression in his world. Israel was called as the vessel for the self-expression of God’s rescuing love. Davidic Messiahship was called into being to bring Israel’s task and destiny into focus on one figure, royal, rejected, resurrected, reigning. All this is here in Romans 8.1–4, dense and compact as only Paul could make it.

The second thing to say about the ‘sin-offering’ is that, in Leviticus and Numbers, this sacrifice relates specifically to sins of ignorance (when a person performed an action without knowing that it was forbidden) or to unintentional sins (they did know, but did not intend to commit the sin). It is fascinating to observe that in 7.13–20 Paul has analysed the ongoing sin of Israel in terms of just those two things: 7.15, ‘I don’t understand what I do; I don’t do what I want’; 7.19, ‘I don’t do the good thing I want to do, but I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do.’

We should be quite clear, once again, that to say ‘no condemnation’ doesn’t mean ‘escaping this world, and hell, and going to heaven’. We hear the word ‘condemnation’ and we think ‘hell’, and because we are used to thinking of ‘heaven and hell’ as equal and opposite, as in much mediaeval and later theology, we assume that ‘no condemnation’ means ‘going to heaven’. But it doesn’t. Heaven is not mentioned in Romans 8. (Actually, the word only occurs twice in the whole letter, and on neither occasion is Paul referring to the destiny of God’s people after their death.) Paul’s focus, as we begin to see after verse 12, is on the inheritance of God’s people, which, as with Abraham in chapter 4 verse 13, means the world, God’s creation. God will renew his creation from top to bottom, will rescue it from its slavery to corruption, and will give us new bodily life, resurrection life, within that new world, and to assist in looking after it. That is the promise and the hope.

Sin with a capital S has received its death-blow – and Sin in this sense, as we saw, is not just the accumulation of our own private sins, but the dark power that, luring us into idolatry, is bent on the distortion of our genuine humanness and the consequent dissolution of God’s good creation, which we were supposed to be looking after. All of that – the dark power and its effects – was condemned in the death of Jesus the Messiah.

So, to bring out these connections (in bold here), we could translate verses 5, 6 and 7 rather woodenly like this: 4b. . . we who behave not in accordance with the flesh but in accordance with the spirit. 5Let me explain [gar]. People of the flesh-determined sort set their minds on flesh-matters, but people of the spirit-determined sort set their minds on spirit-matters. 6You see [gar], the mindset of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the spirit is life and peace. 7Because [dioti] the mindset of the flesh is hostile to God; for [gar] it does not submit to God’s law; for [gar] indeed it cannot do so. 8What’s more [de], flesh-determined people cannot please God.

But after verse 8 we hear no more of the law. As we might have guessed from verses 2, 3 and 4, its positive role has now been fully taken up by the spirit, and it is the spirit that will dominate the discussion from now on.

for Paul, the resurrection body is not sarx but soma. Soma, which we normally render ‘body’, is for Paul the bridge term. Paul’s anthropological terms are best approached as ways of referring to the whole human being but from one particular angle or with one particular aspect, rather than supposing they refer to different parts of the same human. Thus the Greek word soma denotes our whole public personal reality – the whole self, the body, in fact almost what we mean by the ‘person’. This soma can still give in to sin. That is why, perhaps surprisingly, Paul can speak in verse 13 of the need to ‘put to death the deeds of the body’. But it can also be the locus of our ‘living sacrifice’ as in Romans 12.1–2. The ‘body’, the whole self, is what we are to give in service to God and to our neighbour. And, decisively, the body, not the ‘flesh’, is what will finally be raised from the dead, as in verse 11.

Paul is making a sharp contrast between those ‘in the flesh’ and those ‘in the spirit’. He is talking about the basic orientation of someone’s life. In particular, he’s talking about the basic mindset, the focus of the mind and its habitual patterns. He clearly doesn’t imagine that Christians are now sinless, or that they never suffer from wandering thoughts or wayward actions. Had they been sinless, he wouldn’t have had to give such frequent moral exhortation. Paul is obviously very concerned, in this letter and elsewhere, about outward bodily behaviour. But here he is thinking particularly of the mind, the thoughts. Verse 5: those in the flesh – I’ve cashed it out in my translation as ‘people whose lives are determined by human flesh’ – think about, focus their minds on, matters to do with the flesh. They focus attention, in other words, on the things he lists in Galatians 5 as ‘works of the flesh’, things such as factionalism and party spirit, jealousy and envy, as well as drunkenness, sexual immorality and so on.

Part of Paul’s point, here as constantly in the letter to the Philippians, is that Christian living doesn’t just happen. It takes what we call a mental effort, a concentrated exercise of the mind to focus on God’s way of being human.

The negative result of this (verse 8) is that those who are, in this sense, en sarki cannot please God. That is a remarkable statement, implying as it does its converse: that those who are in the spirit can and do please God, as Paul says in various other places.4 There is a strand of post-Reformation spirituality that is so anxious to avoid any appearance of ‘works-righteousness’ that it shies away from any suggestion that anything we can do might actually please God. The best we can hope for on that score is to avoid getting into trouble. But if God’s spirit is at work within us, then of course we ought to please God!

Ethics isn’t just a matter of learning how to behave, though it is that too. It is primarily a matter of inaugurated eschatology. The spirit comes to us from God’s future, enabling us to live as already-renewed humans even in the midst of a world of sin and death.

Think how the original exodus worked. God rescued his people from Egypt so that they could leave the land full of idols and worship him in the desert. The idea was that, after coming through the Red Sea and being given Torah on Mount Sinai, God could establish his Tabernacle in their midst and then come to dwell there in person, living alongside his people, leading them to their inheritance. Exodus–Torah–Tabernacle–inheritance. To repeat what I said before, Romans 6 speaks of the exodus: the slaves come through the water to freedom. Romans 7 brings them to Sinai, with all its puzzles and problems but with its continuing promise of life for those who actually keep Torah. But how (granted that, as in 7.17, ‘Sin’ dwells within them)? Paul’s answer is the spirit – and now the spirit coming to dwell actually within humans themselves, not just in a tent outside the gate of the camp. This is the new Tabernacle. And then, as we will discover in the subsequent passage, the spirit leads God’s redeemed people to their inheritance – which is not ‘heaven’ but the entire renewed creation.

As with the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians, so with the Temple of our bodies. God had promised that the Temple would be rebuilt. Well, if God has dwelled already in our present bodies, he will certainly rebuild that Temple. Verse 11: he will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his spirit who indwells you. The promise of our final resurrection, within the eventual new creation, is rooted in the ancient Passover-story, and in the Temple-shaped hopes of the second-Temple Jews. It’s all there in the closing chapters of Ezekiel, which – unsurprisingly – follow the dramatic ‘resurrection’ prophecy in chapter 37.

Part of the point of the Temple in Jerusalem was that it was an advance signpost to the eventual new creation. It was a heaven- and-earth structure, pointing forward to the promise of new heavens and new earth. In the same way, we human ‘temples’, individually and together, are meant to be signposts pointing forwards to the final new creation of which Paul speaks in verse 18 and onwards. Thus Romans 8.1–11 establishes the base of operations – the promise of bodily resurrection – so that Paul can then move on from verse 12 onwards and explain that what God promises to do in and for his people he will do in and for the whole creation in the end.

But we are not just mute signposts to that coming fulfilment. We are given an active role in working towards it. In fact, as he will shortly explain, we are caught up, often painfully, in the middle of the process, as active, prayerful, suffering agents.

Once we abandon Platonism, with its view of an immortal soul – something never mentioned in the New Testament – we are left with the question, where are we, who are we, what are we in between our bodily death and our bodily resurrection? How can we talk wisely and humbly about this intermediate state, this apparent reality which, again, is hardly ever mentioned in scripture?

But above all, we ought to marvel at the reality of which Paul is speaking: the reality of the living God coming to dwell not just among us but within us. The ancient promises of YHWH’s return to Zion, and the rebuilding of the Temple, are coming true not ‘in heaven’, as the older allegorical exegesis would have it, but in the new creation. And the new creation, which will involve as we shall presently see the renewal of the entire creation, and also the personal bodily resurrection which we are promised, includes also the anticipation of that resurrection in the present moral life, the mindset of the spirit.

But think of Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire. ‘God made me fast,’ he said, ‘and when I run, I feel his pleasure.’ It is worth pausing to ask, what has God made you? What is it which, when you do it in the power and joy of the spirit, enables you to feel God’s pleasure? Might that perhaps be part of God’s ultimate new creation, breaking in to the present?

Normally, you only receive an inheritance after the giver has died. Though you may be, in that sense, in debt to the person who has left you the bequest, they are by definition no longer around to receive your thanks. But when it’s a matter of inheriting, from God himself, our stewardship of the whole new creation, we are (Paul strongly implies) in a perpetual state of happy indebtedness to him. As the chapter goes on this turns out to be, as my teacher George B. Caird used to say, a debt of love that only love can repay.

(As an aside: this highlights the dilemma of all translation. Strict word-for-word accuracy is great, but sometimes it results in the new text feeling very stilted and awkward, which means it is not accurate because Paul is seldom, if ever, stilted or awkward. The translator is always compromising between words and moods, trying to get both right but realizing it’s often impossible.)