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

by Tom Wright

Of course, we can’t simply look back at ancient parodies of the truth and feel smug that we are not subject to similar distortions ourselves. We ought to ponder carefully the ways in which the vast and socially powerful narratives of both modernity and postmodernity have offered the world things that look a bit like the Christian gospel but are in fact deadly parodies. Thus modernity has tried to steal Christianity’s clothes with its talk of progress and enlightenment, offering an eschatology without God and a would-be wisdom without God. Postmodernity, in reaction, has given us a harsh doctrine of original sin – the hermeneutic of suspicion is the secular version of that dogma – but without any hope of redemption or forgiveness. There are not, after all, that many great truths in the world. The Christian gospel has them all, and in proper balance. But powerful sub-Christian movements regularly snatch bits and pieces of them and try to put them together in new ways which never actually do what they promise. Modernism already showed its true colours with the guillotine, and followed that up with the Holocaust.