Kindle Notes & Highlights
By labeling it “flesh” he is placing it within the sphere of ordinary, unreconstructed life, where human relations and practices have not been reordered in Christ.
According to this new taxonomy, life “under (the regime of) the Law” (5:18) does not counter the power of the flesh (as one might expect) but represents only another option within its sphere.
Great image
As recent research has emphasized, almost all social relations in Paul’s cultural context were governed by competition for honor.
The rumor mill was the Romans’ social media, and they were ever anxious to make it clear that by one criterion or another—wealth, ancestry, education, legal status, physique, ethnicity, or character—their honor could be established, in comparison with others’. As Cicero put it, “By nature we yearn and hunger for honor, and once we have glimpsed, as it were, some part of its radiance, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and to suffer in order to secure it” (Tusculan Disputations 2.24.58).
Ancient social media
Paul’s antidote to this social poison has two ingredients.
On the one hand, those who have been reconstructed by the Christ-event are no longer invested in the forms of “capital” in which most people find their worth.
The believer’s true and only worth is constituted by his/her identity “in Christ,” a gift received, not a status inherited or achieved.
The items listed among the “fruit of the Spirit” (5:22–23) are not so much individual virtues as the social characteristics that enhance and maintain a community.
Paul envisages communities where no one is self-sufficient.
“Burden” often has, for Paul, economic overtones (cf. 1 Thess 2:7; 2 Cor 11:9), and the motif here is not confined to psychological or emotional difficulties but includes the regular, mostly unspectacular ways in which those in fluctuating economic circumstances help each other out and support one another materially in times of crisis.
The Christ-gift thus enters into human relations, by the operation of the Spirit, equipping new patterns of social relationship where people are no longer treated by reference to the old hierarchies of worth (which have been bypassed by the gift of Christ), nor by competitive jostling for honor.
At issue is not simply the adoption of this or that Jewish practice but the capacity of the Christ-gift to reground and reorient the whole of life by a logic that challenges every other attribution of value.
As depicted in this letter, the grace of God is unconditioned (without prior considerations of worth) but not unconditional, if we mean by that the noncircular perfection of grace that expects nothing in return.
Central idea of the book
Grace, for Paul, is not a gift from a disengaged benefactor who would rather be left alone; it is not a donation “with no strings attached.” To the contrary: personal and social practice aligned to the good news is integral to what Paul means by “faith” or “trust.”
But the emphasis lies on the incongruity of grace—its mismatch with the worth of its beneficiaries in ethnic, cognitive, moral, or any other terms.
We can’t match up, but that doesn’t mean nothing is expected
Because he writes as an “apostle to the gentiles,” what is most relevant is the meaning of his ministry: God’s calling of gentiles, on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which were God’s gracious answer to the corrupting power of Sin.2
If Galatians stresses the value of God’s grace irrespective of worth, Romans clarifies that it operates in the absence of worth: it is given to “the ungodly” (4:5; 5:6), to those who are utterly unworthy.
Different emphasizes of Romans and Galatians
God’s grace and mercy are not identical, but, as we shall see, they overlap in meaning and character, both being unconditioned and undeserved.
The resurrection of Jesus constitutes, for Paul, that explosive moment when the power of the Spirit was let loose (1:3–4), creating the dynamic of life-out-of-death on which the believers’ trust is pinned (4:24–25) and in which their identity is formed (6:1–12; 8:9–11).
I will argue, in fact, that these two perfections are not evidenced in Romans and that the letter evinces a theology that might appear paradoxical, but only to those who have confused the incongruity of grace with its noncircularity.
But the purpose of this grace is to remake its recipients, to transform them as they draw new life out of a reality that is not their own but in which they share.
By this gift, always undeserved, they are molded into a holiness that accords with the will and character of God, such that the unfitting gift is designed to create a fitting outcome. In
The gift of the grace makes us fitting for its reception over time?
For those (in the Protestant tradition) who find Paul’s language of grace and justification hard to square with “judgment according to works,” this passage (together with Rom 14:11–12; 2 Cor 5:10, etc.) is a serious stumbling block.12
God’s grace is indeed incongruous with the worth of its recipients: it is unconditioned by their ethnic or moral worth since no one of any ethnicity has grounds to claim righteousness fitting for salvation. But it does not leave recipients as they were.
By the transformative power of God, those previously disobedient will exhibit “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5), and those who bore fruit fo...
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Thus, God’s incongruous grace creates congruity—people who “under grace” are committed to serve righteousness and holiness (6:12–21).
Good summary statement
This incongruity (God’s faithfulness to the faithless) is the ground for Paul’s hope, in a world corrupted by the universal effects of Sin.
Thus, despite recent arguments that Paul refers here to “the faith/faithfulness of Jesus,” I think it best to read pistis as a reference to the faith (or trust) of those whose new mode of existence is dependent on what God has done in Christ.15
Pistis
Faith of those in Christ.
This is where I landed in my interpretation as well
This is not a gift to the worthy: no fitting features can be traced in the recipients of God’s love, not even in their hidden potential.
Paul himself notes the oddity of such an incongruous gift: “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might be courageous enough to die” (5:7). One might presume that good gifts would be given to the worthy, and the costlier the gift, the more discrimination should be applied. One would hardly give one’s life to an undeserving cause.
If God has gone to such lengths to reconcile his enemies, how confident can they be that his love will endure through all the vicissitudes they face (5:3–5), all the way to complete salvation (5:10)!
Love love love this. Assurance of our salvation and what God Wants for us.
The opening chapters of Romans confirm that, as in Galatians, Paul figures God’s grace as incongruous with the worth of its recipients and consciously develops this perfection.
Indeed, such noncorrespondence is characteristic of the Abrahamic family from the very beginning.
Paul’s gentile mission reflects his understanding of the Christ-event as God’s fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises in the mode of incongruous gift.
This gift of God is, and remains always, incongruous—a gift created out of human nothingness and received in trust. But it is designed to produce obedient lives that, by a transformative heart-inscription performed by the Spirit, produce what is pleasing to God. This grace justifies the ungodly but its purpose is not to leave them that way. In this sense, the grace of God is unconditioned (given in the absence of merit or worth) but not unconditional, if by that we mean without expectation of alteration in the recipients of the gift. It is free in the sense that it is without prior conditions;
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What the gift does
Big idea
We will discover here the importance of the body as the site of the believer’s obedience and the significance of practice as the expression of the gift of life.1
Paul certainly believes that the moral incongruity at the start of the believer’s life will be reduced over time, as they are drawn toward holiness (6:19). When they come before the judgment seat of God to give an account of themselves (14:10–12), he expects that they will evidence a life lived in light, not darkness (13:12; cf. 2:6–16). But this does not reduce the essential incongruity of grace, since the life from which this holiness and light arise is an ex-centric creation, sourced in the resurrection life of Christ.
Thus, the gift is entirely undeserved but strongly obliging, unconditioned but not unconditional. It is circular but only by remaking the human agent who responds to the gift. The “obedience of faith” is not instrumental toward acquiring an additional gift, but it is integral to the gift itself, as newly competent agents express in bodily practice their freedom from Sin and slavery to Righteousness. Without this obedience, grace is ineffective and unfulfilled.
Really good summary
For long periods of Christian history, Romans 9–11 has been interpreted as a treatise on divine predestination and human free will, with scriptural illustrations.
We now recognize that the subject is Israel, its past, present, and future—not as an illustration of something else but because Israel itself is important to Paul.
Boom
In these chapters Paul is most self-consciously Jewish and most creative, and in that creativity, induced by the Christ-event, he rethinks the identity of Israel. Scholars have often had difficulty finding coherence in these chapters, but we will trace a single pattern of incongruity that is basic to God’s calling of Israel, by which Paul makes sense of the strange reversals of the present, and in which he finds hope for the future.
his earnest prayer for the salvation of Israel (10:1) arise from his self-identification with fellow Israelites (9:3–4; 11:1), whom he perceives as standing at a moment of crisis.
The cause of that crisis is the failure of “some” (in fact, most) to believe in the Messiah Jesus
Gentile believers are to find in God’s dealings with Israel not a parallel story of divine reliability but the root of their own experience of grace (11:17–24).
if Paul cannot make sense of what is happening to Israel, he cannot make sense of history, Scripture, or Christ at all.
The surprising “wealth” of God’s mercy to gentiles (11:12) is a sign not that God has abandoned Israel in favor of gentiles but that God will have mercy on all and that the presently “hardened” Israel will be saved (11:11–32).
But that makes incomprehensible Paul’s statement about Christ as Lord of both Greek and Jew (10:12–13) and his anxious prayers on Israel’s behalf (10:1–2).
Why an anxious prayer if all roads are equal
Here I will argue that, for all the changes in focus, Paul pursues a consistent theme that ties his arguments together.
From the start, Israel has been constituted by the incongruous mercy of God, which pays no regard to criteria of fittingness or worth (9:6–29).
At each step, mercy without condition is the pattern of God’s ways.
