Kindle Notes & Highlights
the emphasis falls again on the unconditioned nature of the divine decision,
The emphasis lies on how God has created his people, Israel, as Paul takes care, again and again, to exclude from the reckoning multiple criteria that might have influenced God’s choice.
Thus, from the start and at the end of the day, Israel is a creation of God and not of biology.
God’s choice of one son over another indicates that behind genealogy there is another, more basic criterion for selection—namely, God’s selection alone.
Philo’s anxiety is understandable: his aim was not to dilute the grace of God but to explain it, lest God’s choice appear arbitrary or unfair.
The topic here is the making of Israel, not divine predestination in general or in the abstract.
Paul here strips away all natural and reasonable explanations for Israel’s election to show that God’s mercy never has been, and never will be, dependent on human achievement or status.
These twin possibilities are not based on some pretemporal or natural destiny
The pots “prepared for destruction” are not shown here being destroyed, and that leaves an opening for Paul’s hope in Romans 11.9 But for now the essential point has still to be rammed home: God is in charge of history and his creative power is unlimited.
Paul has here laid bare the characteristics of Israel’s election, as a people created by divine choice, without regard to birth, achievement, disposition, or any other measure of worth. Their existence hangs on God’s purpose, which can exclude or include, jettison or preserve, expand or reduce to a remnant, hate or love—and also turn again to love those not loved. Everything is designed to put Israel’s past, present, and future into the hands of God, so that when Paul analyzes his present (9:30–10:21) and looks to the future (11:1–32) the primary question is not “What will Israel do now?” but
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Ultimately its about hope. Really good summary of Romans 9-11
The problem with Law-based righteousness is not that it epitomizes human self-reliance, nor that it excludes gentiles, but that it does not and cannot provide a basis of worth before God, which is given wholly and only in Christ.
From start to finish, Israel is constituted by a calling that bears no relation to its worth, and into this Israelite privilege gentiles are drawn by an indiscriminate grace.
It is as if Paul bends all his theological grammar into the shape of the death and resurrection of Jesus, so that every facet of God’s saving power is first crucifixion then resurrection, first disaster then salvation, first death then life.
This is the pattern of the incongruity of grace, which disregards human canons of possibility, reason, or justice, and creates something out of nothing, where there is no fit or capacity.
If God bypasses the traditional systems of order, reason, and justice, it is possible to imagine reality anew.
I really like this idea. God didn’t go by the old rules so it allows us to envision the new rules. When we do this it needs to be done carefully and not haphazardly. Tracing the patterns of how God works anew
here it takes shape in the empowerment of the weak.
The paradox of strength in weakness reflects the dynamic of the power of God in the powerlessness of crucifixion (1 Cor 1:18–25), or, as Paul puts it here, the weakness of the cross and the power of the resurrection (2 Cor 13:4).
Using the cross as a place to see how God uses weakness for strength.
The grace that is given in the absence of worth is the power that is given in the midst of weakness.
This is a great way to phrase it
When we use gift-language, we tend to think of things given (perhaps even wrapped in gift-paper), and so the question will arise: What exactly does God give in grace?
For Paul, the Christ-gift is most fundamentally not the giving of a thing but the giving of a person: “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20; cf. Gal 1:4).
Graced himself to me
The gift is the person
This gift can be spelled out in various terms: it concerns righteousness, wisdom, holiness, and redemption, but all these, Paul says, are given “in Christ” (1 Cor 1:30). They are not gifts given in addition to Christ, or even by Christ, but the facets of salvation that come through solidarity with Christ and through participation “in” him.
All paths lead back to Christ, whose arrival in “the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4) is the event that constitutes, for Paul, the Gift.
Across Paul’s letters we have found grace to be defined consistently as an incongruous gift. It is given “freely” in the sense that it is given without prior conditions and without regard to worth or capacity. But that does not mean that it comes with no expectations of return, no hope for a response, no “strings attached.”
In fact, as we have seen, the Christ-gift carries strong expectations because it is transformative: it remolds the self and recreates the community of believers. The social effects of this divine gift in human gift-practices are, therefore, a necessary component of grace.
This is why grace isn’t free or without expectation of response.
We call marriage a gift, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing expected
Paul expects the grace of God in Christ to cascade through the life of communities, such that the grace received is passed forward by believers and shared among them. In this sense, the return-gift to God is also, at the same time, the forward transfer of grace.
He is careful to insist that in the delicate relationships between weak and strong, they are to build up one another (14:19); the weak also have something to contribute.
The “weak” have something to offer
The mutuality in this instruction indicates that there are no self-sufficient individuals able to carry their own load together with that of others: everyone needs the help of other people in carrying his/her own burden.
Paul is a practical theologian, and his theology generally revolves around the resolution of issues that concern the practices of believers.
As we have seen (chapter 3), the work of E. P. Sanders led to a thorough reconfiguration of this topic, and the resulting ferment in Pauline studies has spawned many new ways of configuring Paul’s relationship to his Jewish heritage.
Recent “apocalyptic” readings of Paul (inspired by Karl Barth) represent a radicalization of this tradition, emphasizing the “newness” of the Christ-gift, the revelatory character of the good news, and the powerful agency of God in liberating a captive humanity.
I have emphasized that for Paul the unconditioned gift—given in the absence of worth and without regard to worth—is not also unconditional in the sense of expecting no return.
We noted an important distinction among the perfections of grace, between incongruity (without regard to worth) and noncircularity (with no expectation of return).
Our own reading of Paul has attempted to repair this problem by insisting that divine grace given without regard to preexisting worth (indeed, where there is none at all) is designed to be transformative, reconstituting human agents whose “newness of life” has a necessarily different set of orientations, allegiances, and obligations.
These are not new burdens placed onto the old, incapable self but the proper expression of the new life realigned to Christ and newly energized by the Spirit.
This is good
Not a new burden
The Protestant tradition has typically construed Judaism as a religion of “works,” a form (even the quintessential form) of “works-righteousness,” in which legalistic achievement takes the place of divine grace.
Christianity is not uniquely a “religion of grace.” In fact, Paul was not the only Jew of his day who took God’s grace to operate incongruously in the absence of worth.
What makes his profile distinct is not that he, and he alone, “believed in grace,” but that he took the Christ-event to be the definitive expression of God’s unconditioned grace and understood this incongruity to relativize the distinction between Jews and non-Jews, and thus to legitimize the gentile mission. Paul does not reject “Judaism” as a “legalistic” religion. In fact, he considers Israel’s very being as founded on the unconditioned mercy of God. He is therefore hopeful for the future of the Jewish people, despite the fact that many had so far failed to recognize the gift of the Messiah
What makes Xianity unique is the Christ event not grace
agreement with Catholic tradition: the grace of God in Christ is transformative
Believers are not left as they were, altered only in their legal status before God. They are reconstituted and reoriented by their receipt of grace, such that the practice of love and generosity, in the power of the Spirit, is integral to the expression of salvation.
In our reading of Paul, we have stressed how the incongruous gift is designed to create congruity between the believer and th...
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in “the new perspective” emphasis is placed on the historical context of Paul’s work and the social dimensions of his theology.
However, “the new perspective” often fails to connect these social phenomena to their proper Pauline base, his theology of grace.
The radical terms of Paul’s mission were founded, rather, on the incongruous grace of God in Christ, given without regard to ethnic (or any other) worth. The fact that Paul did not require his gentile converts to adopt the symbolic capital of the Jewish tradition (“the works of the Law”) can be explained best by the subversive power of an unconditioned grace that calls into question all previously constituted criteria of worth.
As is clear in Romans 9–11, it was impossible for Paul to think about Israel’s identity except in relation to the gift of God in Christ, and it was impossible to think about the gentile mission except in relation to the destiny of Israel.
Paul’s purpose is to indicate that even the Torah, the greatest defense against Sin, has failed and that only grace given to the unrighteous can match the depth of the human problem.
According to the well-known Christmas song, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” it is Santa’s task to keep a list of those who do right and wrong, and he will distribute his gifts accordingly. In other words, Santa’s gifts are conditioned: he gives to those who have been good. Like most responsible givers, he wishes to give only to worthy recipients, and he finds out who they are.
no resulting relationship,
In other words, Santa’s gifts are congruous but noncircular. They are given to worthy recipients but have “no strings attached.” They fit the moral ideals of modern, Western individualism.
This is a great way to phrase it to a congregation
The Christ-gift was given to the “ungodly”—in the absence of worth—and it was given to all, without regard to any preconstituted worth of gender, ethnicity, status, or success. There was no “list” and no selection determined by “who’s naughty or nice.” But it was given in order to transform the human recipients and to establish a permanent relationship: the receipt of this gift is necessarily expressed in gratitude, obedience, and transformed behavior.
This grace is free (unconditioned) but not cheap (without expectations or obligations). Those who have received it are to remain within it, their lives altered by new habits, new dispositions, and new practices of grace.
Good snapshot of what barclay gets at in the whole book
