Romans 5:1-5; Boasting on the Brain I

"Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

Introduction

In this familiar passage the Apostle Paul shines forth with all his briliance and anxiety. We see his brilliance in the strikingly original argument about justification by faith, which began in ch. 3 and culminates in this passage. His anxiety is evident, too, as we examine his word choice in this passage. A word almost uniquely Pauline in the NT--about 35 times (kauchaomai and its noun/adjective derivatives; translated "to boast" or "have pride in")--appears twice in this text. As I will argue in the next essay, that term captures Paul's interior tension well. He would love to boast of his human accomplishments, but feels he ought not to do so because the grace of God through Christ has transmuted the boasting--into boasting in the Lord. But the mere presence of this word over and over again in Paul's letters, and here, shows that the notion of pride/boasting has not quite been eviscerated from his heart.

Before briefly expositing this passage, probably the most famous NT text on "justification by faith," it might be helpful to speak of the spectrum of NT beliefs regarding the interplay of faith and works for salvation. Ever since I took my Christian faith seriously (in the late 1960s), I have been puzzled by the relationship between these two ideas. Of course the simple answer is that they are related as smoke and fire; that one "justified" by faith will certainly want to live a servant life; that works "flow" from faith. But that doesn't answer the question that often is insistently pressed: "Is faith 'enough'"? I would say that there is a spectrum of answers in the NT, from the statements in John 3:16 or Acts 16:31 ("Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved") that faith is all you need to those statements in the Apocalypse or in James that "faith without works is dead" or that one will be judged according to one's works. The tension runs through Paul, too. In Rom. 5 we have the impression that justification is by faith--by faith alone, as Luther would say--but in other places Paul speaks of a "new creation" in Christ, of "faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6), even though I think Paul is a more "faith alone" type of guy. The passage for the morning underscores the "faith is enough" position.

Three points will constitute my thoughts: (1) the meaning of "therefore" in v. 1; (2) the concept of "boasting" here and in Paul in general; and (3) the fine chain of concepts from suffering to hope in vv. 3-5.

I. "Therefore"--Rom. 5:1

The "therefore" (oun in Greek) signals the culmination of Paul's argument. Though it is a frequent term in the NT, it appears an incredible 10X from Rom. 3:21 (when Paul's argument on justification began) through Rom 5:1. I have training as a litigator, as well as a biblical scholar, and you learn in the former that when a person uses the word "therefore" a lot in making an argument, that the argument is probably not as air-tight as the person would like. "Therefore" is a word that, in biblical language, covers a multitude of argumentative sins or lapses or leaps or gaps. What you should do in evaluating an argument is to leave out the 'therefore's' and see if the remaining thoughts seem to "flow" for you.

Paul has been trying, since Rom. 3, to make one of the most difficult arguments in his letters. He is attempting to explain in Romans how it is that Christianity is completely consistent with central Biblical principles but that the Jews, the supposed custodians of Biblical faith, by and large didn't accept Jesus as Savior. That is, the custodians didn't accept the one who is now interpreted to be the culmination of the faith. This is a real problem for Paul and for the early Christian movement in general. But he will argue that the Jews, even though they had gifts of the covenant, the promises, the Law and other things, pursued a sort of "human righteousness," while Christ gives us a "divine" righteousness. More specifically, he will argue in Rom. 3-4 that the central principle of Biblical religion is naked faith in God--but that the Jews have missed the boat on that one. They have substituted a righteousness based on law for the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ.

But the root principle of Biblical religion, for Paul, is faith. Romans 4 tells the story of the "founding father" of the religion--Abraham--and how he was "justified by faith." Actually, Paul doesn't so much tell the story about Abraham in the first part of ch. 4 as to glom onto Gen. 15:6 and run with it ("Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"--Rom 4:3). Faith, then, was the foundational principle of Abraham's life and, by extension, Jewish religion. By faith Abraham even was willing to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice to God (a veiled reference to this is in Rom. 4:20-21). When we get to Rom. 5, we are already at the end of the argument. It is too bad that the Lectionary just drops us into the text at the end of the argument. It might have been helpful to see it evolve and ask ourselves if Paul's argument convinces us today.

The next essay will consider the important topic of 'boasting' in Romans 5 and elsewhere in Paul.

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Lent III--February 24, 2008 Trinity Sunday--June 3, 2007

Lent III--February 24, 2008
Trinity Sunday--June 3, 2007