The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom

Abbreviations

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Reading Romans Before Christendom

Simply said, it was time for the gods of that age to withdraw: for too long they had served as the terrible and beautiful guardians of an order of majestic cruelty and pitiless power; for too long they had not only received oblations and bestowed blessings but had presided over and consecrated an empire of crucifixions and martial terror.

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It is usually reckoned that Paul wrote his letter to those called saints in Rome (Rom 1:7), probably from Corinth, around AD 55–56, a year or two after the accession of Nero. There was nothing very inauspicious about the early years of Nero’s reign and no obvious reason for Paul to be concerned about the security of the churches in the city. But that would change dramatically within a decade. On the night of 18–19 July AD 64, according to Tacitus’s well-known account (Tacitus Ann. 15.44; cf. Suetonius Nero 16.2), fire broke out in shops containing flammable goods at the southeastern end of the Circus Maximus. Blown by the wind the blaze raced through the combustible wooden structures of the congested lower parts of the city and then spread to the hills. It burned for days. Of the fourteen districts that made up Rome only four escaped unscathed, three were completely razed, and the remaining seven were left with only a few half-intact, smoldering buildings. The historian does not attempt to calculate the numbers of private mansions, tenement blocks, and temples that were lost, but of the most prestigious temples he lists one dedicated to Luna, the great altar and shrine built for Hercules, the temple of Jupiter, and the sanctuary of Vesta, which housed the tutelary deities of the Roman people.

Tacitus records—and apparently shared—the widespread belief that the emperor himself was responsible for the conflagration, his vainglorious intention being to found a magnificent new city bearing his name. He notes, for example, that attempts to stop the fire, which broke out on property belonging to the imperial family, were hampered by mischief-makers who claimed to have been authorized to make sure that it took its course; and a rumor had spread that while the city was burning, Nero took to a private stage in Antium and gaily sang of the destruction of Troy. In any case, the emperor took the opportunity, first, to construct for himself a splendid new palace and, secondly, to undertake a program of massive and very costly urban regeneration, stimulated by lavish donations from his own pocket.

The next task was to propitiate the gods. The Sibylline books gave direction that prayers should be offered to Vulcanus, Ceres, and Proserpina. The matrons of the city made entreaties to the goddess Juno, and married women held banquets and vigils. But neither Nero’s munificence nor the many official acts of piety succeeded in dispelling the sinister suspicion that the fire had been started deliberately. So in a last attempt to put an end to the report, Nero fixed the blame on a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. These reprobates took their name from a certain Christus, who had been executed by the governor of Judea during the reign of Tiberius. Following his death a pernicious superstition had broken out in Palestine and had since spread to Rome, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. Arrests were quickly made, and large numbers of Christians were convicted, not so much of setting fire to the city as of hatred of the human race. Their punishment was theatrical and grotesque. They were torn apart by dogs, nailed to crosses, or burned as torches in Nero’s garden to illuminate the spectacle. Tacitus had little sympathy for these godless malefactors, but even he was shocked by the savagery of the pogrom: they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.

Romans as an Eschatological Text

This may seem an odd, anachronistic, and distracting point from which to begin a reading of Romans; but there are two respects in which I think this story will get us moving in the right direction. First, we will do well to keep in mind, as we work our way through a letter that has much to say about persecution and suffering, that Romans is a historical text with a historical frame of reference—and that arguably this terrifying horizon of a great Day of Fire should have no less relevance for interpretation than the destruction of Jerusalem has for understanding Jesus’s life and teaching. Indeed, it was only two years after the fire that the ill-fated revolt against the imperial occupying power broke out in Judea, which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and, if we can trust Josephus’s arithmetic, the death of more than a million Jews. Given that Paul presents himself as an apostle called to proclaim and interpret the resurrection of Israel’s Messiah to the nations (Rom 1:4–5), we must surely reckon with the likelihood that certain critical, forward-looking trajectories in the letter will also land here. It seems to me virtually inconceivable that Paul—a man clearly imbued with the mindset of the prophets—could have used the language of the Old Testament to speak about wrath against the Jews and not have imagined some such outcome. Secondly, the story reminds us how precarious the existence of the early communities of believers was in an inhospitable world dominated by the pagan gods and subject to the savage and unaccountable foibles of the ruling elite. I believe that we do the apostles a great disservice if we suppose that this situation was only of marginal interest to them and not a matter of central and urgent concern.

These two observations, in a preliminary way, define the scope of this book. What I will suggest is that Paul’s argument in Romans in effect presupposes—in a way that is critical for interpretation—a narrative about the concrete existence of the people of God, that runs, roughly speaking, from the exile as a paradigmatic judgment on Israel, through the painful experience of subjugation by foreign powers, including the disastrous war of AD 66–73, through a traumatic bifurcation set in motion by Jesus and his followers, through a period of intense conflict with the paganism of the Greco-Roman oikoumenē (more on the scope of this term in chapter 5), to reach a provisional but nonetheless momentous conclusion in a victory over the gods and nations of the old world, represented most clearly by Constantine’s deliverance of the churches from persecution and the subsequent elevation of Christianity to the status of imperial religion by Theodosius. The point is not that Paul foresaw with any great clarity or precision what would be the historical consequences of his gospel—and certainly not that he foresaw what lay beyond the horizon of the birth of Christendom. But we will have to reckon with the fact that his argument in Romans about the righteousness of God is geared towards future events that were to have a decisive impact both on the Jew and on the Greek, both on believers and on unbelievers; and that we are likely to distort both his theology and his practical instruction with regard to the life of the community if we lose sight of the concrete political and social reality of these events.

In other words, we will have to reckon with the fact that Romans is an eschatological text—not in the idealized, popular, end-of-the-world sense, but in the sense that it addresses the concrete existence of the churches in Rome in the light of foreseen events that would be pivotal for the future identity and security of the people of God. The framing historical narrative has been, for the most part, suppressed by the theologies of Christendom because, for all their disagreements, they have operated from the premise that the final interpretive context for New Testament thought has been established in its assimilation to European rationalism. So all that is merely historical may be stripped away to leave the naked, shivering body of theological and devotional truth. We now have serious doubts, however, about the integrity and reliability of the overarching meta-narrative of Christendom; and if our own story as the modern—or postmodern—church can be relativized in this way, we may begin to see the value, not only for biblical interpretation but also for the current task of ecclesial and missional redefinition, of relocating New Testament thought in a limiting historical narrative. By setting a provisional historical horizon to our reading of the text, we allow ourselves both to give proper consideration to the contingency and realism of Paul’s argument and to rethink our own critical historical context.

A Hubbub of Voices

There is also a literary dimension to the contextualization of Romans that will be extremely important for interpretation. In the first place, Paul’s argument about the gospel of God and its significance for the churches of the nations is constructed to a large degree from materials salvaged from the Old Testament in the form of quotation or allusion. We will assume as we read the text that Paul has done this with what we might now call a critical awareness of the larger argumentative or narrative context from which the quotation or allusion is drawn, and that this context is likely to be, in one way or another, determinative for his own argument. To give an example that will be immediately relevant for us: we cannot make sense of Paul’s quotation of Habakkuk 2:4 in Romans 1:17 (The righteous shall live by faith) without first bringing into detailed focus the extensive prophetic argument about the dilemma faced by the few righteous in Israel from which the quotation has been clipped, and then asking how Paul makes use of this whole narrative, and not merely the isolated aphorism, to interpret the situation faced by the community in Rome. As a trope this is sometimes called metalepsis, though to explain it, as Hays does, in terms of the allusive echo that is generated in the unstated or suppressed . . . points of resonance between the two texts rather understates the argumentative or narrative force that it carries in Paul.

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However, the Jewish Scriptures constitute only one aspect of the literary environment that has shaped the language and thought of Romans. It will become apparent, as we attend to the overtones of the text, that the argument is the product—both substantially and rhetorically, and probably quite deliberately—of the intense and troubled engagement with first-century Judaism that resulted from the apostolic activity that is outlined in the letter. We should hear a hubbub of Jewish voices ringing in our ears, and we should not fool ourselves into believing that we will read the text better by filtering out the noise. John Piper advises scholars and pastors and laypeople who do not spend much of their time reading first-century literature to exercise some skepticism towards arguments such as N. T. Wright’s about euangelion that attribute a novel sense to familiar terminology on the basis of literary and historical context.³ That is retrogressive advice: the familiarity is precisely the problem, and the need is for scholars and pastors and laypeople to get out more—that is, out of the very small literary and linguistic world of the biblical text into the fascinating and enlivening environment that gave birth to it. Of course, the effect can be generated only to a limited degree: we cannot immerse ourselves in the thought-world of Paul’s various audiences. But as far as is possible, we will attempt to reconstruct narratives and arguments—both from the Old Testament and from the major works known to us from Second Temple Judaism—in the expectation that this will bring out the rich contextual dynamic of Paul’s thought. If it feels at times as though we are wading knee-deep through intertextual mud, then I suggest that that is a good thing—the nearest we can get to the experience of total immersion.

The Shape of Things to Come

Nero’s persecution of the Christians in a blatantly dishonest attempt to appease either the gods or the people was simply an early sensational flare-up in what was to be a long, arduous, and bloody conflict between an emerging counterculture of Jewish origins and the old pagan order. The climax would come with the Great Persecution under Diocletian in the early years of the fourth century. The persecution lasted for ten years and was brought officially to an end by the Edict of Milan in AD 313, which marked—at least in symbolic terms—the triumph of Christ over the gods of the Greek and Roman world. The significance of the moment is captured in the speech later made by the recusant emperor Licinius while sacrificing in a grove—albeit a speech disingenuously concocted for him by the church historian Eusebius (c. AD 260–339)—in which he portrays the coming engagement with Constantine as a final show-down between the old gods of Rome and the strange God of the Christians: Suppose, then, this strange God, whom we now regard with ridicule, should really prove victorious; then indeed we must acknowledge and give him honor, and so bid a long farewell to those for whom we light our tapers in vain. But if our own gods triumph (as they undoubtedly will), then, as soon as we have secured the present victory, let us prosecute the war without delay against these despisers of the gods (Eusebius Vit. Const. 2.5, NPNF2).

Licinius lost the battle, and the strange, ambitious God of Abraham and the patriarchs came to ascendancy across the empire under the name of Jesus Christ—a victory achieved through the extraordinary faithfulness of a people so passionately attached to Christ that they were willing to suffer and die with him in order to be glorified with him.

That ascendancy lasted for many centuries in one form or another, but it has now more or less evaporated. Very few people today regard Europe as a Christian continent other than in a residual cultural sense. Yes, the church appears to be flourishing outside Europe, not least where it has had to emulate the faithfulness of the early communities in their subjection to the cruel antipathy of the old pagan world; and the re-importation of this vigorous faith into the West may—or may not—have a significant revitalizing effect. But there must be some suspicion that the current form of global Christianity carries the same genetic susceptibility to irrelevance and decay under modern conditions, and that it will not have the resources to deal, in any credible public way, with the massive challenge that an aggressively secular and pluralist culture now poses to the Christian worldview.

I take it as a rough guiding hypothesis, therefore, 1) that the church faces a massive, and insufficiently understood, crisis of identity and purpose on all levels as a consequence of having been unceremoniously and sometimes quite contemptuously sidelined by the dominant culture of the West; 2) that this marginalization is self-evident in Europe, but in the long run is likely to be no less of a challenge for the ostensibly stronger global church; 3) that we will not in the end grasp the seriousness of the problem, or find answers to it, by framing it in terms of polarities internal to the Christendom mindset: between ancient and modern, between divergent Reformation traditions, between mainstream and dissident or conservative and liberal theologies; 4) that we need to address critically the entire legacy of the Christendom phenomenon, from the first rewriting of the biblical narrative in the language and thought-forms of the Greeks, through the long ages of cultural domination and slow decline, to the increasingly desperate endeavors to conserve, commandeer, deconstruct and reinvent that we are confronted with today; 5) that in order to imagine a viable future for the people of God in a rapidly mutating culture we need, in the first place, to reconsider how the New Testament reads as a narrative-historical and theological precursor to the emergence of Christendom; and finally 6) that this hermeneutic is likely to lead both to a more coherent and plausible understanding of Scripture and to a far-reaching reconstruction of the theological identity and practical purpose of the church for the age to come.

It is the point about re-imagining a viable future for the people of God that makes Romans such a pertinent text for the church today. I will argue that in order to read Romans after Christendom we must first read it before Christendom, as a text that anticipates the real-world victory of Christ over the manifold gods of the nations. That is not an easy conceptual shift to make. On the one hand, for many of us the reality—or at least the reputation—of Christendom has left a bad taste in the mouth, and we naturally resist the suggestion that the political, cultural, and religious hegemony of the church in Europe and in the world colonized and dominated by the European powers might be seen as the fulfillment of the New Testament hope that Christ would come to rule the nations. On the other hand, the intellectual transformation of biblical thought that has sustained this hegemony right up until the modern era has largely persuaded us that the writers of the New Testament were incapable of contemplating the future in contingent and limited terms, as the simple continuation of history. The assumption is that if Jesus has been elevated to the defining pinnacle of the cosmos, every conclusion drawn from that must have cosmic significance; if the Word of God has triumphed over the wisdom of the Greeks, then its various dogmatic pronouncements must have universal validity.

But Paul did not suffer from the benefit of our hindsight. He contemplated the future from the perspective of a Jew who understood the hope expressed by the Old Testament prophets that the nations would eventually acknowledge the sovereignty of YHWH, who had encountered the risen Christ as the embodiment of the persecuted churches (Acts 9:1–4; 22:3–8; 26:9–15), who had experienced firsthand the fearful hostility of both Jews and pagans towards those who dared to proclaim Christ; and, not surprisingly, he looked forward to a time when, for the sake of the glory of Israel’s God and for the sake of the churches, the current state of affairs would be overturned. He believed that the day would come when his God would be publicly vindicated and shown to be righteous, when those who had taken the risky step of trusting in this God would be publicly vindicated and shown to be on the right side of history.

Less Is More

I think we can also assume—and I think it can be shown—that even in a highly theological text such as Romans Paul’s argument remains locked into what is essentially a historical narrative about the concrete existence of a community, punctuated by certain critical events. Because the narrative is bounded both geopolitically and temporally, because it precedes the fulfillment that came to be interpreted in accordance with the overweening intellectual self-confidence of Western civilization, we