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

by Tom Wright

That’s the heart of this little passage: our present vocation as God’s children and heirs is to be the people in whom God’s spirit, bearing witness with our own spirit, prays the prayer that Jesus prayed in Gethsemane.

Let’s imagine we are in one of the Roman house-churches, listening to Phoebe, who has been entrusted by Paul with taking this letter from Greece to Rome, reading out what he’s written. What would his hearers be thinking? The great theme of sonship – being sons of God – would undoubtedly resonate with some of the listeners. Inheriting a great empire was a well-known theme. A hundred years before, Julius Caesar had adopted Octavian, subsequently known as Augustus; when Julius was deified after his death, Augustus styled himself ‘son of the deified Julius’. He was the adopted son, inheriting the empire and being loyal to the memory of Julius Caesar himself. So it continued with Tiberius and the others. In fact, the first five emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero) weren’t related as father to son; they were chosen and adopted, groomed for the job. Then, when the old emperor died and was divinized, the new one would be ‘son of the deified one’, inheriting the empire. So now Paul is claiming here, as he did right at the start of this letter, that Jesus is the true son of the true God – and that all Jesus’ people share that sonship. Jesus’ people are God’s adopted royal family. The sons are what they are, not simply so that they can feel good about their relationship with the father, but in order to carry out the father’s project. To rule wisely over God’s empire, which is the whole world – the inheritance he promised to Abraham, as we saw before in a backward g...

What often happens in the New Testament is that we notice a theme growing out of Israel’s scriptures; the theme then gets reworked around Jesus and the spirit; and then, in line with the intention of Israel’s scriptures themselves, it turns out to confront rather sharply the claims and pretensions of the pagan world, not least of pagan empire.

It should by now be clear that this vocation, to be the royal priesthood, is itself actually the fleshing out of the vocation to be God’s image-bearers. Humans were designed, created and called to reflect the praises of creation back to God, and to reflect God’s wise rule into the world.

God is not simply able to bring them into the promised land; that is only the first stage of what he intends. The land is itself a signpost to the far greater reality, the entire creation which will in the end be flooded with God’s knowledge and glory.4 The journey that follows, with the people being led by the presence of God himself, is pointing on to God’s intention to fill the whole creation, not just one small tent, with his glorious presence.

And, of course, this theme comes to a particular focus in the Gethsemane scene in Matthew and Mark, the one place where Jesus himself is recorded as addressing the father as ‘Abba’. Jesus on that terrible night was wrestling with his vocation, knowing from the scriptures – even though his whole self recoiled from the idea – that the way to the kingdom lay through the cross.

And that’s why holiness is important, not because God is a killjoy, but because we are called to be fully human in a way most of us have scarcely begun to imagine. We ourselves are to be places where heaven and earth come together, which means that, as we pray for God’s rule to become a reality ‘on earth as in heaven’, we must daily seek to live out that reality in our own recalcitrant bodies. Platonic escapism and the asceticism that goes with it is a philosophical attempt to avoid that moral challenge by saying that the body is bad; the biblical vision is that the body is good and is to be raised – but only if it learns to die. ‘If, by the spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live’ (verse 13).

Please note, again, that Paul doesn’t talk here about the soul. When he refers to the deepest human interiority – we quickly run out of language at this point and have to use cumbersome phrases like that – he speaks of the human spirit. And here he declares that the holy spirit as it were gets together with our own spirit to tell us the same thing, that we really are God’s children. We have to be careful here at a pastoral level. People’s ‘experience’ varies widely according to personality. It’s easy to be fooled either way: either into imagining something is the case when it isn’t, or into imagining something isn’t the case when it is. There are many casual or ‘occasional’ church attenders who have a vague sense of God being around the place somewhere and so assume they are ‘all right’; and there are many devout, prayerful folk with sensitive consciences who agonize over whether they are genuine Christians. And there are many other possibilities too. Pastoral experience suggests that the only way through is by prayer and gentle active listening as we seek to help one another discern, as we say, ‘where we really are with God’.

To say it again, Romans 8 is simply not about ‘going to heaven’. Heaven is never mentioned in this chapter; indeed, ‘heaven’ in the sense of ‘where Christians will go after death’ is missing from this whole letter and indeed Paul’s whole correspondence.

The primary meanings of ‘glory’ in this passage are, simultaneously, the glorious presence of God himself dwelling within us by the spirit, and the wise, healing, reconciling rule of God’s people over the whole creation. These two – God’s presence and human rule – are made for each other. They fit together.

We are more aware now than ever before of the crisis in ecology and climate change. That is of course controversial. Some of the rhetoric about it – on both sides of the debate! – is clearly driven by political and ideological agendas from which some of us would want to hold back. But, like the arguments a generation ago about the ill effects of smoking tobacco, the evidence is massive and mounting daily. From greenhouse gases to bad farming practices, not to mention nuclear accidents and ‘dirty bombs’, the post-Enlightenment world has twisted the vocation to be image-bearing stewards of creation into the chance to exploit creation to serve our pride, or greed, or both. This, alas, is scarcely new. Ancient empires, not least the Romans, routinely used a ‘scorched earth’ policy, literally or metaphorically, when it suited them. A rebel country or city might not only be defeated in battle. It might be rendered uninhabitable, with its wells poisoned and its fields sown with salt. That, we grant, wouldn’t have threatened the whole planet. But it was the smaller-scale equivalent of what we now face. If we, called to be wise stewards of creation in the twenty-first century, are to be true to that calling, this present passage will be one of our primary resources for a theological response to the crisis. Of course, the western church has regularly ignored this theme. This is partly because concern with creation has seemed ‘unspiritual’, being earthly minded rather than heavenly. ...

GO OFF, SIS!!!

We are more aware now than ever before of the crisis in ecology and climate change. That is of course controversial. Some of the rhetoric about it – on both sides of the debate! – is clearly driven by political and ideological agendas from which some of us would want to hold back. But, like the arguments a generation ago about the ill effects of smoking tobacco, the evidence is massive and mounting daily. From greenhouse gases to bad farming practices, not to mention nuclear accidents and ‘dirty bombs’, the post-Enlightenment world has twisted the vocation to be image-bearing stewards of creation into the chance to exploit creation to serve our pride, or greed, or both. This, alas, is scarcely new. Ancient empires, not least the Romans, routinely used a ‘scorched earth’ policy, literally or metaphorically, when it suited them. A rebel country or city might not only be defeated in battle. It might be rendered uninhabitable, with its wells poisoned and its fields sown with salt. That, we grant, wouldn’t have threatened the whole planet. But it was the smaller-scale equivalent of what we now face. If we, called to be wise stewards of creation in the twenty-first century, are to be true to that calling, this present passage will be one of our primary resources for a theological response to the crisis. Of course, the western church has regularly ignored this theme. This is partly because concern with creation has seemed ‘unspiritual’, being earthly minded rather than heavenly. ...

YAAAASSSSSS!!!!! POP OFF, SIS!!!

Actually, when I was in pastoral ministry I sometimes used this passage, cheekily, for this purpose. I had one or two regular readers – people who would volunteer to read scripture during worship – who liked to insist on using the King James Version. So I would give them passages such as this one to read. Here are verses 19–21 in the King James: For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Best of luck with that, out loud at 10.30 on a Sunday morning or any other time.

TOM!!!!

Obviously, the verses we are concerned with here (17–21) are part of a longer train of thought, with verse 30 as the real ‘ending’. There, sure enough, Paul lands where he began, with the promise of glory, emerging out of suffering. But our present short section, as a sub-set of that, reflects the same point.

But this ‘glorification’, clearly, is not about faithful Christians going to heaven. It is about creation being rescued from corruption!

So in this letter, sent to Rome itself, Paul is declaring powerfully that, like all pagan claims, the Roman claim is at best a parody of the truth. Everybody knew, of course, that in its own terms it was a lie. Rome’s supposed glory was built on ruthless military conquest, often backed up by crucifixions. Rome’s rule was always as precarious as the next provincial rebellion, or the next riot over food shortages if the grain ships failed to arrive on time. And for Paul, in any case, ‘nature’ was not an independent peaceful matriarch. The wider world, from his biblical and Jewish perspective, was not a self-supporting ‘nature’. It was ‘creation’, the good world made by the good creator God, but now groaning in labour pains, longing to give birth to the real new age as opposed to the glossy fake one imagined by the Roman court poets. Paul, in other words, was thinking with the Bible rather than with imperial propaganda.

The Old Testament regularly points ahead, even in the midst of Israel’s rebellion and failure, to the promise that the God who made the world would one day remake it. There would come a time of cosmic harmony.

The early Christians quite naturally retrieved and restated this biblical theme of new creation for the obvious reason that it had begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus. They believed that, by the spirit, this new creation was powerfully at work both in faithful human beings and through them in the wider world.

It is of course strange, from our much later perspective, that the two stories, the biblical and Jewish one on the one hand and the Roman one on the other, developed in unintended parallel. The Jewish texts go back long before the rise of Rome; and the Roman texts were certainly not borrowing ideas from Isaiah or the Psalms. However, many Jews of Paul’s day, calculating the future on the basis of ‘seventy weeks of years’ in Daniel 9.24, concluded that the new age was about to dawn in what we call the first century.1 And that, for quite different reasons, was the very moment when the Roman empire was trumpeting the arrival of its own new age through the Caesars. The great story of the gospel – the good news that the creator had rescued his creation through his son, and was bringing justice, salvation, peace and glory to all – was born into a world where there was already a powerful and well-publicized story about the good news of a son of god who had brought justice, salvation, peace and glory to the world.

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.

Where the biblical meaning of creation and new creation has been long obscured through semi- or sub-Christian teaching, it is fatally easy for toxic mixtures of faith and politics to push themselves in and take over.

In the Hebrew scriptures, ‘glory’ regularly comes to refer specifically to rule or power. That is why ‘glory’ is regularly a royal term, symbolized visually in crowns, sometimes with rays of bright light streaming in all directions. The bright light isn’t the glory itself. The light tells you about the glory, the weighty dignity and power. The honour of the person is symbolized by that bright light. So when scripture promises that God’s glory will flood the whole creation, that doesn’t mean that the whole world will become luminous, as though it had a powerful light bulb somewhere deep inside. It means that God’s creative power and wisdom will, as we say, shine out visibly all around.

For Paul and all the early Christians, the coming apocalypse would unveil Jesus himself. When Jesus returns, or when he ‘reappears’ (as Paul and John put it in Colossians 3.4 and 1 John 3.2), the twin halves of the good creation, heaven and earth – at present mutually opaque – will become fully and visibly one. Paul speaks of this moment in 1 Corinthians 15, Philippians 3 and elsewhere. But in the present passage, it is Jesus’ people themselves who are the subject of the ‘apocalypse’. They are themselves to be ‘unveiled’. As he says in Colossians 3.4, when the Messiah appears, ‘you too will be revealed with him in glory’. We normally think of Christians waiting for the Messiah to be revealed; but here it is the cosmos waiting for the Christians to be revealed!

Look closely at how verse 19 works in the Greek. Paul has already used the word apokalyphthēnai in verse 18. Now he seems deliberately to exploit the poetic potential of the word with the repeated apo, the ‘k’ sound and also the ‘d’: hē gar apokaradokia tēs ktiseōs tēn apokalypsin tōn hyiōn tou theou apekdechetai. Those words starting with ap- (apokaradokia, apokalypsin, apekdechetai) created an explosion of consonants, highlighting the explosive nature of the moment when God will finally complete his work with Jesus’ return and the transformation of all things.

Paul assumes, of course, that this will be the revelation of God, and of Jesus. But what counts here, because this is how God made the world from the beginning, is that creation is longing for us – us humans, us Jesus-followers, us spirit-temples – to be unveiled as the glorified, in other words the empowered, stewards of creation, called to restore creation to its proper purpose. Creation is, of course, waiting for its creator. But what it mostly wants is its proper steward, the wise human family in whom the creator’s own spirit is at work. One day we, Jesus’ followers, shall be revealed as exactly that. This, we note in passing, is exactly what the book of Revelation says about God’s plan for his redeemed human creatures: we are rescued in order to become ‘the royal priesthood’.

I hope it is clear just how relevant all this is to today’s urgent concerns. There are serious debates just now about human responsibility in and for creation. Some, seeing the awful mess that humans have made of the world, are saying that we should back off, live simply and let nature put itself right. Others still insist that God is going to burn up the present world anyway and take us off to heaven, so that ecological concern is a distraction from the gospel. And others, including many in our own day, are saying that we humans have to do it all, to sort it all out. What role might a Pauline Christian have in all this? Some might respond that perhaps indeed in God’s new creation we will have this authority to set creation free; but we are not yet raised from the dead! The new heavens and new earth aren’t here yet; so there’s not much we can do at the moment, is there? When people say that to me, as they sometimes do, one of the possible answers goes like this. Suppose someone came to me for a pastoral visit, and said something like, ‘You see, I have this problem with sin. I keep on sinning and I can’t stop. But one day God will give me a moral makeover! So I don’t need to worry about it now, do I?’ The proper answer to that would be firmly but gently to confront such an enquirer with a Romans-based inaugurated eschatology. According to Romans 6 and 8, and for that matter Colossians 3, we are already raised with the Messiah, so we are supposed, in the power of the spirit,...

One final question, which people ask from time to time. The scientists tell us that, according to their observations of the way things currently are, the present creation will eventually either cool down or heat up. It will either expand indefinitely into the vast cold emptiness of space, or (with the reassertion of gravitational force) rush back together again. The big chill, or the big crunch! How can we then believe that God will renew and restore it? The answer is that, in the present passage, God promises to do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus at Easter. Neither more nor less. Science will quite rightly tell you that when humans die, that’s it. Science studies the normal, repeatable evidence within the old creation. That’s its job. But the resurrection is the start of the new creation. And when we understand Easter the way Paul does – according to the scriptures, in fact! – we will see that it takes the same faith to believe in the eventual renewal of God’s world as it takes to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead.

This isn’t just about ‘going through a rough time’. Nor is it simply ‘something we occasionally have to put up with’. Paul is talking about our vocation not just to get through difficult times but to stand in prayer where the world is in pain so that God’s own spirit may be present, and intercede, right there. This is one of the most revolutionary and innovative moments in the whole letter. Paul here fills out both his Trinitarian theology of new creation and his pastoral understanding of the depths of the Christian heart, and joins them together. God’s spirit comes to dwell in the midst of his world, in the persons of Jesus’ faithful followers; but that world is in great pain. The spirit inhabits that pain, and calls out to the father from its darkest depths, by means of God’s people being in prayer, spirit-inspired prayer, at that place. This painful vocation is at the heart of God’s rescuing plan for the whole creation.

Paul doesn’t just toss extraneous ideas into the flow of a discourse about something else. He is building to a deliberate, sustained and indeed spectacular climax. The last thing he would do at such a point would be to add a strange and irrelevant little aside.

God’s plan is not to rescue humans from creation, to go and be with him somewhere else, but to come in person to dwell with his image-bearing creatures, so that together he and they may bring his rescuing, ordering wisdom to bear upon the world, ‘on earth as in heaven’.

Notice, by the way, that Jesus himself, at those moments, had the Psalms in mind. If the Psalms are not part of our bloodstream, how will we, and the people in our care, be Jesus-reflecting people of prayer and lament within the pain of the parish, of the city, of the world? I understand that some churches, eager to attract newcomers, have majored on happy, bouncy music. But without the biblical call to lament (which isn’t the same thing as dreary music!) we are failing in our calling. In any case, there must be many potential newcomers who would at once appreciate being drawn into genuine lament.

God creates the category of Messiahship, of the anointed king, so that he may himself come and be the anointed king of Israel, doing in person the work of judgment and mercy for which the ideal king would be equipped. Well, just as we can look back at the formation of that messianic portrait as a role designed for God’s own use, so the call to be people of lament at the place where the world is in pain is itself a vocation designed for God’s own use, in the person of his spirit, dwelling – and groaning! – in the hearts of God’s people.

Verse 22 offers a realistic appraisal of the present creation, as opposed to the bland optimism of imperial propaganda. Paul says ‘we know’. The ‘we’ here can’t simply be ‘all human beings’. All humans are aware of earthquakes, epidemics and war. But only those inhabiting the biblical tradition are likely to understand these as the labour pains of a renewed creation, rather than the chance horrors of a random universe (for Epicureans), the blind power of the world’s inner logos (for Stoics) or the flickering shadows of the insubstantial secondary world (for Platonists). So, paradoxically perhaps, though deeply biblically, this way of looking at the sufferings of the world is inherently positive: God’s new world is waiting to be born! The fact that labour pains are simultaneously horrible and full of hope answers exactly to verse 18, with present sufferings unable to compete with coming glory.

At the very point where we find ourselves in pain and sorrow too deep for words, at the heart of creation’s wordless pain – pandemics, climate crises, wars, violent crime and all the rest – in all this, God’s own spirit is there, with powerful groans which, though wordless, form the ultimate language of intercession.

But how do we know that God’s spirit will be there, doing this work? How do we know that God has not given up on his creation in disgust, as some Jewish thinkers speculated? Because we will be there, indwelt by that same spirit. We are called to be people who stand at the place of pain – in the cancer ward, at the asylum-seeker’s court hearing, by the graveyard full of memorials to small children or to families whose homes have been bombed in war – so as to be those within whose own painful perplexity the holy spirit will plead to the father on behalf of the whole creation. Indwelt by God’s spirit, we are to be right there in the chaos, so that God’s new creation may finally emerge, this time with humans as its spirit-enabled agents.

The mystery of Trinitarian theology is the mystery of prayer, that God the spirit comes to that place of pain so that our griefs, sorrows and loves are taken up into the grief, sorrow and love of God. This is what it means, in verse 17, to suffer with the Messiah so that we may be glorified with him.

Now there is a sense in which God’s providence does indeed assure us of God’s eventual victory over all the powers of evil. But the popular understanding of this verse will not stand up to close scrutiny, simply at the level of the meaning of the words, let alone of the overall sense of the passage.

All of this insists on the point that most exegetes and preachers miss: that verses 26–7 are not an ‘aside’ from the main argument, but take us to its very heart.

‘In everything God works for good with those who love him.’ The verse doesn’t say (in other words) that ‘all things work together for good to those who love God’, which appears to give God’s people a kind of inside privilege of knowing that things will fall out the way they want them to. It means that God is the subject of the main verb: it is God who is ‘working’, rather than the ‘all things’. And it means that God works not just for those who love him – as though they were simply the passive recipients of his ongoing benevolence – but that he works with those who love him.1 He is affirming, in other words, that their present work and struggles, to which Paul has just referred, and which are themselves part of what’s happening through the spirit’s work in them, actively contribute in the present time to God’s overall working out of his purposes. Paul is saying that we – ‘those who love God’, in the sense of those in whose hearts the seemingly inarticulate dialogue of the spirit and the father is going on – are God’s co-workers.

It is the verb, in fact, that provides the clue. The Greek synergeō means, literally, ‘work with’. It’s the word from which we get ‘synergism’ – which has had a bad press in theological discourse, to which I’ll return presently, but there’s no getting away from its literal meaning. In the traditional translation, this was understood in terms of ‘everything working together’, that is, the different bits of life’s jigsaw coming together with one another, as it were automatically. But that is not quite what the word means. When Paul uses synergeō elsewhere it means, as the Greek implies, two people or agencies collaborating with one another on a shared task, not various objects fitting together like the components of a mechanical clock.

So this is what it means that the God-lovers, the Jesus-followers, are ‘called according to his purpose’. The gospel-shaped call of God to human beings is not, in this passage, a matter of rescuing them from sin and death, though of course it has that effect as well. It is about being called for a purpose, a purpose that works not just for them but through them.

Some have objected to this idea. God, some will say, loves us just because he loves us, not because he wants to use us for a purpose. But biblically speaking that’s a false either/or. God’s loving purpose for Israel always involved God’s loving purpose through Israel. Paul’s own awareness that the son of God ‘loved me and gave himself for me’ is fully at one with Paul’s equal awareness that God had called him to be the apostle to the nations;

From the Sermon on the Mount onwards, Jesus’ promises that the meek would inherit the earth, that the poor in spirit would inherit God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, meant what they said. Romans 8 is one of the most vivid applications of the same point. God is working all things for good with and through those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. Of course, it doesn’t look like that on the ground. What Jesus’ followers mostly see is danger, suffering, wordless lament, tragic disunity. Paul is assuring them, and us, that God’s purpose is going ahead precisely through this faithful and prayerful, if frequently uncomprehending, witness.

There is, it appears, no stopping this God. Those who believe, having responded in faith to the ‘call’ which turns out to have been planned by God long ago, are declared to be ‘in the right’. That does not simply mean that their sins are forgiven for ever, though they are. It means that they can hold their heads up, now in their rat-ridden apartments on the wrong side of Rome’s polluted River Tiber, or in the slaves’ quarters at the back of some great house, or camping out in a ditch somewhere, having been kicked out of a home or town. They can be assured that they are the true people of the one creator God; that this God is working his purposes out, that one day at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. And as the spirit bears witness with their spirit that they are God’s children, as the spirit groans within their own groaning, longing for their full adoption in the coming resurrection, they are summoned, as are we ourselves, to faithful patience.

have suggested that this short passage, verses 28–30, is basically Servant-theology, focused on Jesus and then opening up to include all his people. Up to now in chapter 8, we have seen the mystery in which suffering seems to be not only something God’s people will have to go through but something as a result of which God’s purposes will come to birth.

All this is anchored in the story of Jesus himself. Paul’s doctrines are never simply theories with a loose base in an abstract Christology. They are about the living Jesus himself.

But, as in the gospel story, so in the story of those who are now shaped by the gospel: God’s love is the anchor. God is for us – not something to be said casually or cheaply, certainly not a licence to go slack on our own faithfulness, but something on which we can rest when the storms are raging, to quieten our hearts when everything seems to be going wrong. That’s what this passage is about.

So my sense is that Paul here sees Genesis 22 as an oblique forward pointer to the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant in the death and resurrection of God’s beloved son, not least in order to tie together the exposition of God’s covenant faithfulness in chapters 1—4 with the exposition of the consequent security of God’s covenant family in chapters 5—8. The second half of verse 32 then makes more sense than we might have initially realized. A traditional western reading might have expected Paul to say that God, having not spared his own son but having given him up for us all, would then save us from our sins and bring us to heaven. But Paul instead speaks of God giving us all things with him (that is, with his son). As he said in verse 17, we are fellow heirs with the Messiah; and the focal point is then on the inheritance, which is the entire world, rescued and renewed. The promise we just mentioned, about Abraham inheriting the world, means that the promised land was itself a forward-looking signpost, as the messianic psalms indicate.

the messianic inheritance, now to be shared with all the Messiah’s people, is the whole creation, set free from its slavery to corruption. So when he says here that God ‘will . . . freely give all things to us’ this is quite specific. As in 1 Corinthians 3.21–3, ‘all things are yours’, because ‘you belong to the Messiah and the Messiah belongs to God’.

So: who is going to condemn? As with the story in John 8.1–11 of Jesus and the men taken in hypocrisy (it’s normally called ‘the woman taken in adultery’ but you see the point), Jesus asks the woman, ‘Has nobody condemned you?’ ‘Nobody,’ she replies in bemused astonishment. Jesus has stood in the way – and it’s no accident that John 8 ends with people picking up stones to throw at Jesus instead.