Romans Road-test

A few months ago, I posted my notes on Reading Romans. Here I explain how I arrived at the different view of Paul’s message described in that article.

Several years ago, I read a couple of reviews of Douglas Campbell’s book called the Deliverance of God. I learned that he took a Socratic reading of Romans 1-4, in which Paul challenges the views of a Jewish teacher, but I did not take his ideas seriously, and the book was too expensive for me to purchase, so I have not read it.

I began to think about Campbell’s approach when I started reading through Romans again a few months ago. I was struck by a note that I had previously written in the margin of Romans 1:32, in which I noted this passage must have been addressed to the Jews because only they had a revelation that God had declared that the penalty for some sins was death. Looking at the verse in isolation, my note made sense.

However, when I read the entire passage, I realised that my note was wrong, so I rubbed it out. Roman 1:18-32 is addressed to all humans, not just to the Jews. But that does not make sense either. The passage says that God’s will is revealed through creation, and that all men know his will. That does not seem to be correct, because, the Jews had to receive the Torah through Moses to fully know his will. Furthermore, in Romans 1:32, the writer claims that God has revealed that sin is worthy of death, but this does not make sense, because there is nothing in creation that indicates that God has declared that death is the penalty for sin. In creation, death seems to be a normal part of life.

Trying to sort these contradictions, I thought again about Douglas Campbell’s view that Romans 1 as part of a debate between the teaching of Paul and the ideas of a Jewish teacher. Rather than buying Campbell's book and reading it, I decided that I would read Romans right though with an open mind. I assumed that if his view was correct, then the pattern of argument and counter-argument should be evident to an averagely intelligent person who had not been trained to understand Paul through the eyes of wrath.

I was surprised by what I found. Jarring contradictions seemed to stick out all through the letter and the most sensible way to deal with them was to read them as argument and counter-argument. To identify the parts of the letter that expressed the Jewish teacher's view, I looked for internal contradiction, contradictions with the Torah and contradictions with Paul’s teaching in the rest of the letter. Using this approach, the arguments of the Jewish teacher stood out quite clearly.

I wrote up what I discovered in an article called Reading Romans. In a way, I road-tested Douglas Campbell's thesis, and it came through really well.

Pauline Dogmatics (4) Story

In his fourth chapter Pauline Dogmatics, Douglas Campbell talks about how to testify to Jesus in a clear way.

Jesus arrives in our story somewhat unexpectedly. He is a revelation, and we learn about him by way of revelation. He is a gift. So he simply arrives, suddenly, unannounced. He is a surprise. Before the arrival of God in person in Jesus, we did not possess this truth about the universe in all its fullness, and so we could not tell our story properly. It was his arrival that told us where our story needed to go.

If we want to tell a true story about Jesus, whose truth has been revealed to us, then we need to begin with Jesus. We have to begin our story in the middle. I don’t see any other alternatives. Jesus is the truth. We must therefore begin with his arrival as a fact and with our initial response this arrival in confession and adoration, which is why this book began where it did, with the truth that is Jesus. The story about Jesus must begin with Jesus having already arrived.

This is really a really important point. To understand the problem that Jesus resolved, we must look at what he did and what he achieved. If we come to Jesus assuming that we already understand the human problem, we will get it wrong.

If we read Gen 1-3, without Jesus’ revelation, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that the human problem is mostly a problem with God and that we need to appease his anger with us, but that is misleading. When I read Ephesians and Colossians, I find that human have a far greater problem with the spiritual powers of evil.

When you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive with him and forgave us all our trespasses. He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him (Col 2:3-15).

He made us alive. He destroyed the power of the spiritual powers of evil and paid the ransom that they demanded for our freedom. There is nothing here about us needing to appease God first.

Douglas Campbell also deals with the history question.

The resurrected Jesus was still present within our human experience in some way, appearing, for a time, to these figures of and blood. In short, these events are said here to have been real. They really took place. And since they took place in the past, they were history in the broad sense of that word, which raises an additional truth question for us.

Such events leave marks that creatures of flesh and blood both produce and process. But we evaluate lingering evidence from the past as confessing Jews and Christians, rooted in the truth that God was fully present in Jesus and that Jesus is related, inseparably, to his Father and Spirit. And this location creates a presumption about reality—about the very nature of history. From this location, we do not expect past events to be limited to what we see and hear and touch, or to the material and textual remainders of those events. The past as people have lived experienced it is not all that is. God can work there, and we believe he did work there. In fact, God made the entire situation in the first place. So we should not evaluate the past the way that many modern historians do, when they bring a different, fundamentally secular account of broader reality to bear on it, and go on to pronounce certain things possible or impossible (such judgments are often not, strictly speaking, historical at all, but are philosophical and even religious claims; they are claims built on various foundational projects.)

But we do nevertheless expect any material and textual remainders to attest to the truths of the gospel insofar as those intersected with the lived experiences of those who see, hear, feel, and touch. So the question still arises whether this attestation exists, as we expect it to. As God enters our situation, one of the results his graceful condescension is a vulnerability to this sort of procedure. As God enters history, however gently, we expect an impact on history, however slight.

Campbell says that from the evidence in Paul, we can confirm that these events did in indeed take place.

I really like this approach. I read a lot of history, but I am struck that historians often struggle to agree on what happened as recently as a hundred years ago. They can tell us about what happened in the past, but given the lack of certainty their method produces, it is foolish to say that the resurrection did not occur due to failure to comply with their standards. Jesus is confirming his resurrection every day.

For those who want to more, Douglas Campbell has been going through his book online, chapter by chapter, during the shutdown. This series makes the message of the book really clear. The talks are listed under the heading "Lectures" at this link.

Pauline Dogmatics (3) God of Love

The heart of Paul’s gospel is love. That seems obvious, but Douglas Campbell explains the enormity of what this means in his third chapter.

At the heart of the universe is a play of love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

The nature of God is revealed definitively by the death of the Son on the cross for us at the behest of the Father and the Spirit. There the Father has offered up his beloved only Son to die for us, doing so, moreover, while we, the objects of this costly mission, were rebellious and hostile. Before any response had been offered, then, the Father undertook this ultimately costly act for us, which the Son obediently carried out. And this proves that the Father’s love for us is utterly fundamental to his character, and limitless, as is the Son’s and their Spirit’s. This God will stop at nothing order to reach us and to heal us. God undertook this supremely painful action—the Father’s sacrifice of Son—to save a snarling and ungrateful humanity. Astonishing!

Paul is well aware that this divine dimension is nothing short of mind-blowing. So he even prays at one time that we will be granted the capacity to begin to grasp it with the help of the Spirit. Without this revelation, effected by God, we lack the ability to understand the enormity and power of the divine compassion.

The way that God relates to us is mindboggling too.

The definitive encounter between God and humanity now takes place completely on humanity’s terms. As a result, God does not overwhelm people. People are met where they are, as human beings, by someone who is like them, who bears their very nature. And this act respects humanity. There is now no coercion in the relationship, whether physical or metaphysical. We are not overawed; we are not struck; we are not pushed or pulled around by an overtly superior being. God respects our humanity, including our free responsiveness, profoundly by meeting us an equal, which necessitates an incomprehensible lowering on God’s part. And yet this mode of humble engagement makes perfect sense. God is a God of relating and a God of love. And a God of love would relate to us in the most gentle and noncoercive way possible. Loving relating is gentle, not coercive, and it entails equal relating.

This explains how God reaches out to people who have not received a revelation of his love.

It follows from this remarkable insight into the nature of God that of course God the Father, the risen Jesus, and the Holy Spirit would delight in continuing to reach people through other people, gently and noncoercively, on their terms, walking alongside them, through other people.

Our God loves to relate through people. This is how a loving God operates.

When I thought about my coming to faith, I assumed that it was just me and God, perhaps because he had elected me. In hindsight that is fairly arrogant. Thinking more about these quotes, I realise that it was the prayers of my mother, the prayers of my wife who had chosen to marry a Christian man who turned out to be an atheist, and the prayer, faith and witness of our Christian friend, which allowed the Holy Spirit to break into my life, when I was looking the other way.

Pauline Dogmatics (2) Truth Claims

In the second chapter of Pauline Dogmatics, Douglas Campbell explains how we can be confident that God’s revelation to us in Jesus is true. I found his approach incredibly helpful, because it clarified something that I have always realised, but could not articulate clearly.

Now we have just spent quite a bit of time reflecting on the fact that the basic truth criterion for the church is the lordship of Jesus, which is to say, the God whom Jesus embodies with complete fullness. And I have emphasized that we know this about Jesus because it has been revealed by the Lord to those who follow Jesus. So this truth claim is active and essentially reveals itself. God in person present with us is the truth, which is our central truth criterion as well.

Everything else now needs to be measured against this truth criterion, and it is clearly an extraordinary one. The center of all truth is a crucified Jew who was resurrected on the third day; and all God-talk; and really everything else besides, has to be measured against it, which is really to say, brought in subjection to it. And we know this truth because this God has revealed it to us—that God is present most directly in this person and in events and activities associated with his life. Hence our truth criterion is alive and active on its own behalf!

However, people who are not responding overtly to the disclosures of God in these terms understandably reject this criterion as the ultimate measure of truth.

These people want to measure by truth by a different criterion and encourage us to do the same. It is here that the gambit is offered and it must be firmly rejected.

If we do this—if we accept this request and, in effect, start playing this game—then we place another truth criterion over the top of God to judge God, who is our truth. Hence this move turns out to be a denial that God is the ultimate truth. God is merely a truth and no longer the supreme truth, which is to say, the truth. We have thereby abandoned our initial position that God is our truth criterion and by doing so, we are really saying that God is not God. God isn’t synonymous with the truth, because there is another truth there that is bigger and better God, which really doesn’t seem like a good idea, once we think about it. God is not the truth?

We have stepped back from God’s gracious personal involvement as the truth in our own situation and have accepted the idea that an alternative approach to the truth should be superior to it...

God’s mode of dispensing truth has thereby been demoted to second place—which, as we have just seen, denies what it is entirely—and we have turned to some other mode of our own invention.

A more technical name for the procedure whereby we elevate our own truth criteria over the truth that is God, ultimately to judge God’s truth or falsity, is “foundationalism,” which denotes here our provision of a different foundation for truth from one that God has laid for us in Jesus, and hence a structure that we ultimately build for ourselves.

Any such philosophical attempt to construct a perfect foundation for thought and knowledge is indeed a form of foundationialism. In the light of the revelation of the Trinity, however, we can see that this exercise in human hubris exists in many more forms than philosophical foundationalism alone, and each of these needs to be identified and resisted.

To build a foundation for the truth ourselves is to reject the truth and to build our own version of the truth, which we then make the judge of all truth, and so the lord of truth, at which moment in effect we bow down before it and proclaim it as our new lord. So epistemological foundationalism, however sophisticated, is, at bottom, nothing more than another golden calf.

And we don’t need to do any of this. We are Christians, located by the work of God within the central truth that explains all of reality. We are in the truth already.

My experience reflects the reality that Douglas Campbell is describing. When I began studying philosophy at University in the early 1970s, I discovered that my Christianity was just a habit, and decided to become an atheist. However, after a while, I discovered this was a lonely position, as life was without meaning and purpose. I was just another animal that would live and die on earth. Because I could not bear to be an atheist, I decided that God must exist. I kind of created a god in my own image, because I decided what he would be like.

At this time my wife and I were invited to a Bible Study led by a young woman who was a friend of a friend. My wife wanted new friends, because we were living in a new city, and I liked arguing, so we agreed to go. When I got into arguments with this young woman leading the group, she would fall back on the bible, and quote what it said.

One day I was skimming through the Bible look for new arguments to use against her, when my eyes lighted on Isaiah 40:12-14, especially verse 14.

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?
Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD,
or instruct the LORD as his counselor?
Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him,
and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge,
or showed him the path of understanding?

God struck me hard between the eyes. I had been telling God who he could be, but he showed me how ridiculous it was for a human to tell his creator what he was like and how he could behave. I was blown away, and told God that I would accept who he showed himself to be, and that I would follow him.

I knew that this is a new kind of knowing, different from what I thought I knew. I realised that it was a revelation from God. It began as a revelation of the truth of the scriptures (as per Barth) and developed into a revelation that Jesus is a complete and perfect revelation of God (as per Campbell).

This revelation as a different kind of knowing. I realised that I was absolutely certain about that revelation. I also realised that I had this confidence, because the Holy Spirit was witnessing to the truth and giving me a certainty, that I could not have generated on my own.

Later when I started at theological college, my friends were all reading Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, which was popular back then, looking for evidence for their faith. I found his material interesting, but slightly irrelevant. I knew that my faith in Jesus was a revelation from God that had been confirmed by the witness of the Holy Spirit. Any other justification for my faith seemed weak by comparison.

I realise now that looking for this kind of evidence was bowing to a different criterion for assessing truth. I had chosen to stick with a superior criterion for truth which is God who is himself the truth.

Pauline Dogmatics (1)

I really enjoyed reading the first four chapters of Pauline Dogmatics by Douglas Campbell that came in the free Kindle sample that I downloaded. They were really helpful. These days most Kindle sample of books from Christian authors are full of recommendations from people whose opinion I do not really care about. So, I get to the end of the sample before I am out of the preface, which is frustrating. Pauline Dogmatics is quite different, because I got four complete chapters, and no recommendations. Well done Eerdmans.

The chapters that I have read are very accessible and quite easy to read. The footnotes are hidden at the end of the chapter.

The first chapter asks the question: “How do we know what God is like.” This is the most important question anyone can ask, as the answer changes the nature of life. Paul’s answer is that we know what God is like through his revelation in Jesus.

It is clear that Jesus will reveal God definitively and decisively as God. He is God—a momentous assertion! So to look at Jesus and to see what he is like is to look at God and to see what he is like.

There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God Has graciously bridged it from His side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift!

God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.

I labor this point a little because it is so central, so simple, so quickly introduced and understood, and so easily and rapidly abandoned (note Gal 1:6). We must affirm the insight that Jesus is Lord, along with all its entailments, and protect it, viligantly resisting all other candidates for this status. (People, and especially Christians, seem to love to avoid, to marginalize, and to obscure God’s gift of God’s very being to us in Jesus for all sorts of odd reasons).

Accurate God-talk is Jesus-talk. And God-talk that is not in some very direct sense Jesus-talk is probably not God-talk. Jesus is the key piece of information concerning God, in the light of which all other God-talk must be evaluated, which includes everything in this book and everything that Paul wrote.

Paul attributes the cause of the conviction about the lordship of Jesus to the call of God the Father and the activity of the divine Spirit, and here we see a third divine actor taking the stage in addition to the Father and the Son.

Paul has made some dramatic claims concerning divine activity. Spurning the contributions of the intellectuals and academics of his day, he has attributed certain important events within visible history—here the conversion of the Corinthians—to the hidden workings of God. They learned about God, he says, because God somehow spoke to them, and in so doing they became convinced of God’s presence in Jesus.

This describes my experience when I became a Christian. When I gained a revelation of Jesus, everything changed. I could not look at the world without seeing God’s handiwork. I could not think about the way the world functions without seeing God at work.

God is at work revealing his nature and purpose, and that this nature and purpose are so definitively revealed in the figure of Jesus that we must acknowledge the truth that this crucified figure was and is God and hence God in person, although, as we have just seen, Paul spoke in biblical language here of Jesus as Lord. This truth then lies at the heart of everything else because God lies at the heart of everything else, and we now know just what God is like. And we know this truth about God because it has been revealed to us by God. The truth has revealed the truth.

With God’s shockingly unexpected identity revealed to us in Jesus, we see that we have no accurate notion of God in ourselves with which to measure a claim about God and God’s nature and thereby to determine whether it speaks of God. God is foreign to our limited creaturely and sinfully distorted nature.

To affirm a revelation of the truth that Jesus is Lord as a revelation of God to us is consequently and necessarily to affirm a threefold activity by God in three different places: the Father sending Jesus into the world (i.e., sending him here from some other place); Jesus being sent the world, specifically to Galilee and Samaria and Judea; and the Spirit revealing this to us wherever are.

And we have learned that Jesus is God the only way we could—because God has told us that.

The chapter on knowing the truth really explained my experience clearly. I will summarise it in my next post.