Into the Heart of Romans, page 12
Once we see this, we find verse 17 turning in an unexpected direction. Psalm 2, left to itself, implies that the Messiah will inherit the world through military conquest. But the other scriptures to which Jesus himself was obedient made it clear that the way to that ‘glory’ – the glory of worldwide rule – is through the hard pilgrim road of suffering. That is the point that Jesus explained to the two puzzled disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. And it goes back all the way to passages such as Mark 8, the challenge to follow Jesus along the path of true kingly power – by taking up the cross. And, of course, this theme comes to a particular focus in the Gethsemane scene in Matthew and Mark, the one place where Jesus himself is recorded as addressing the father as ‘Abba’. Jesus on that terrible night was wrestling with his vocation, knowing from the scriptures – even though his whole self recoiled from the idea – that the way to the kingdom lay through the cross.5
And all this enables us to understand verses 12 and 13 more fully. Paul there makes it clear that the road to life is the road of mortification, of the active putting-to-death of things that the body would otherwise want to do. This isn’t just pragmatic, as though Paul were simply reflecting ruefully on his missionary experience, on what it costs to live and preach the message of the crucified Jesus. It is deeply theological: Paul has learned, at the foot of the cross, that this is how Israel’s God reclaimed his kingship over the world; and – though the church has by no means always figured this one out – that this is how Jesus’ followers will make that kingship a reality in the present and the future.
All this comes together, then, in the three interlocking emphases of these dense verses, 12 to 17. Let’s walk through it one more time and see. First, we have a spirituality of holiness and hope, verses 12 and 13. Second, undergirding this, we have the vocation of being God’s children, verses 15 and 16. Third, resulting from this, we are called to share the Messiah’s cross-shaped path to his kingly rule over the world. A word or two about each.
First, the spirituality of holiness and hope. We here pick up the regular biblical theme of pilgrimage: the Israelites’ pilgrimage through the wilderness, but also the regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem, evoked in psalms such as 84 (the people going through the vale of misery on the way to the holy city and finding that valley to be a well of water) and the Psalms of Ascents (120—34). Once more, we must be careful not to slide into thinking of these pilgrim psalms, celebrating the journey up to Zion, in terms of a Platonic ‘heaven’, as was customary in the Middle Ages. Zion wasn’t meant to point away to ‘heaven’; it was the place where heaven and earth came together. That is the promise for whose fulfilment Paul is hoping in verses 18–30. And that’s why holiness is important, not because God is a killjoy, but because we are called to be fully human in a way most of us have scarcely begun to imagine. We ourselves are to be places where heaven and earth come together, which means that, as we pray for God’s rule to become a reality ‘on earth as in heaven’, we must daily seek to live out that reality in our own recalcitrant bodies. Platonic escapism and the asceticism that goes with it is a philosophical attempt to avoid that moral challenge by saying that the body is bad; the biblical vision is that the body is good and is to be raised – but only if it learns to die. ‘If, by the spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live’ (verse 13).
Paul is here highlighting something he says frequently in various ways. In Galatians 5, he insists that the Messiah’s people have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. In Colossians 3, he stresses that you must ‘put to death all that is earthly in you’. And in 1 Corinthians 9 he likens himself to an expert boxer, one who doesn’t just flail around in mid-air but one rather who lands his punches – on his own body, to bring it into submission.6 He does this, he says – and if Paul says this to himself we can be sure we should be saying it to ourselves – in case, having preached to others, we ourselves might end up being disqualified. Our generation has seen too many such cases, in churches of all sorts.
The danger today is that we all too easily slide into would-be ‘Christian’ versions of the easy-going moralisms of the world around. We think of ‘authenticity’ or ‘spontaneity’, ‘doing what comes naturally’, ‘going with your heart’ and so on as the primary imperatives, often failing to realize that the heart is deceitful and, as Jesus warns, full of all kinds of things that would make us unclean.7 Christian ethics means going with the renewed heart, bringing the life of heaven to birth in a new earthly lifestyle. That new lifestyle, if we embrace it and learn to live into it, will indeed become spontaneous, and in that sense authentic. But that will only happen through hard-won and spirit-driven Christian virtue.
Again, we must note that this holiness is part of hope. I don’t mean simply that people who learn to live in God’s way can thereby be assured of the ultimate hope; there is some truth there, provided we recognize that this learning and living is the result of the spirit’s work within us. No: what I am saying is that holiness means drawing down, from God’s promised future, the life we are to live in the present. As in Romans 6, we are to be resurrection-people – already in the present time. And, to repeat, this happens by the spirit (verse 13). The spirit is not only the guarantee of our ultimate future. The spirit brings that ultimate future into present reality.
So: first, the vision of holiness and hope. Then, second, the vocation to be God’s children. Verse 15: ‘you received the spirit of sonship, in whom we call out “Abba, father!”’ – and, when we do that, ‘it is the spirit itself giving supporting witness to what our own spirit is saying, that we are God’s children’.
There are two problems here, one in the sentence structure and the other in the meaning. The punctuation of the sentence is the first problem (see Table 1).
Does en hō krazomen Abba ho patēr go with what precedes it, or with what follows it? In other words, should we be putting a break after ‘sonship’, or after ‘Abba, father’? The first way of reading it is to say, ‘we have received the spirit of sonship in whom we call Abba, father’, and then to begin a new sentence – without any characteristic Pauline connecting word – with ‘the spirit bears witness with our spirit’. The second way is to say, ‘we have received the spirit of sonship’, full stop, and then to start the new sentence with ‘When we call Abba, father, the spirit is bearing witness with our spirit’. You will see in my translation that I have tried to get the best of both worlds by rendering it: ‘You received the spirit of sonship, in whom we call out, “Abba, father!” When that happens, it is the spirit itself giving supporting witness . . .’, and so on. I think that probably catches Paul’s complex meaning. He wants to say both that the cry of ‘Abba, father’ is the sure sign that we have received the spirit of sonship – otherwise why would we find ourselves calling God father in this familiar way? And he wants to say that this is the sign, more specifically, that the holy spirit is getting together with our spirit, fusing with our own deepest inwardness, to say, Yes, we really are God’s children.
Table 1 The Sentence Structure of Romans 8.15–16
Option 1 We have received the spirit of sonship in whom we call Abba, father. The spirit bears witness with our spirit.
Option 2 We have received the spirit of sonship. When we call Abba, father, the spirit is bearing witness with our spirit.
So much for the sentence structure. What about the meaning? Here Paul refers to the human spirit of the believer. He has done this already in verse 10, and he does it as well in 1 Corinthians 2.11–12, which is quite close to the present passage. Please note, again, that Paul doesn’t talk here about the soul. When he refers to the deepest human interiority – we quickly run out of language at this point and have to use cumbersome phrases like that – he speaks of the human spirit. And here he declares that the holy spirit as it were gets together with our own spirit to tell us the same thing, that we really are God’s children.
We have to be careful here at a pastoral level. People’s ‘experience’ varies widely according to personality. It’s easy to be fooled either way: either into imagining something is the case when it isn’t, or into imagining something isn’t the case when it is. There are many casual or ‘occasional’ church attenders who have a vague sense of God being around the place somewhere and so assume they are ‘all right’; and there are many devout, prayerful folk with sensitive consciences who agonize over whether they are genuine Christians. And there are many other possibilities too. Pastoral experience suggests that the only way through is by prayer and gentle active listening as we seek to help one another discern, as we say, ‘where we really are with God’.
But at the heart of it here is this strange Aramaic word ‘Abba’, as in Galatians 4.5–6 and Mark 14.36.8 Granted that most of Paul’s hearers will not have been Aramaic speakers, why does he assume that they all use this word in prayer? I don’t think Paul can mean that they all speak in tongues and that, when they do, this is one of the things they say. Nor do I think it refers to the church praying an Aramaic version of the Lord’s Prayer, though that is not impossible. I think it must go back to the early catechesis, the teaching of converts, when people would come to faith and discover that the God who made the world was neither an impersonal force nor a distant faceless bureaucrat, nor yet a capricious and possibly malevolent personality, but was both deeply personal, deeply loving and deeply – in the best sense – paternal. And when the teachers in the early church recognized this new awareness in converts, they would guide and encourage them to address God in the way that Jesus himself had done in that memorable scene.
But this then projects us forwards to verse 17, which we will pick up in our next chapter. This is where we discover that the vocational pathway for those who pray the Abba-prayer is the same as it was for Jesus himself: the path of suffering. If Paul assumes that all Christians will address God as ‘Abba’, perhaps this is partly because he also assumes that all Christians will suffer – and it was as Jesus faced the sharpest suffering that he addressed God in that way.
But this suffering is not (as we shall see later) a question of ‘something unpleasant we just have to get through’. Like the sufferings of Jesus himself, Paul seems to envisage this suffering as an active quality. Strange as it may seem, this is one of the ways in which Paul understands Jesus’ followers to be exercising their vocation as the royal priesthood, as the image-bearers, the true humans, the true children of God. This is how, in fact, we are ‘conformed to the image of the firstborn son’, as in verse 29. This doesn’t simply mean that we are to be like Jesus, awaiting the resurrection in which we will at last resemble his glorious body (Philippians 3.21). It means that, through our life, and especially through our needing to pray the strange and dark prayer of verses 26–7, God’s purposes may be worked out, not only in and for us but (as befits the royal family, the family of whom Caesar’s family are a trivial parody) actually through us. This is how, as in 5.17, those who receive the gift of righteousness begin their glorious vocation of reigning in life through the one man Jesus the Messiah. And that is part – though only one part – of what Paul means by our being ‘glorified’.
But to take this further we need to look at verses 17 to 21.
Notes
1 See the discussion in PFG, ch. 12, with details.
2 Deut. 30.15.
3 Num 14.20–2.
4 Isa. 11.9; Hab. 2.14; Ps. 72.19.
5 Matt. 26.36–46; Mark 14.32–42.
6 Gal. 5.24; Col. 3.5; 1 Cor. 9.26–7.
7 Mark 7.17–23.
8 The parallel in Matt. 26.39 has translated this into Greek: ho patēr mou.
5
Romans 8.17–21: The Liberation of Creation
17And if we’re children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
17ei de tekna, kai klēronomoi: klēronomoi men theou, synklēronomoi de Christou, eiper sympaschomen hina kai syndoxasthōmen.
18This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us.
18logizomai gar hoti ouk axia ta pathēmata tou nyn kairou pros tēn mellousan doxan apokalyphthēnai eis hēmas.
19Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed.
19hē gar apokaradokia tēs ktiseōs tēn apokalypsin tōn hyiōn tou theou apekdechetai.
20Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope
20tē gar mataiotēti hē ktisis hypetagē, ouch hekousa alla dia ton hypotaxanti, eph’ helpidi
21that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.
21hoti kai hautē hē ktisis eleutherōthēsetai apo tēs douleias tēs phthoras eis tēn n eleutherian tēs doxēs tōteknōn tou theou.
We ended our previous chapter with Romans 8.17. As we saw, verse 17 functions as a kind of bridge, drawing together the line of thought in verses 12 to 16 and forming the foundation for what is to come. Paul has declared that we suffer with the Messiah so that we may also be glorified in him. But what does ‘glory’ actually mean? Today’s passage will tell us; but the church has been surprisingly slow to pay heed.
The deliberately slow pace at which we are moving through the chapter gives us the chance to look simply at this short passage, verses 17–21, rather than dashing on at once to the remarkable material that follows. Verses 22–30 are indeed fascinating, but they mean what they mean because of what we find here in 17–21. Paul has announced, in verse 17, the theme of suffering and glory. He will come to the suffering presently. These verses, through to 21, are simply about the glory, what it means and how it is to be attained.
Glory, of course, is where verses 18–30 are going, all the way to the climactic last clause of verse 30: those he justified, them he also glorified. So what does that mean? The church has usually understood Paul to be affirming that those who come to faith in Jesus, and so are ‘justified’, are assured of going to heaven. But if our present passage, verses 17–21, shows us what Paul means by ‘glory’ and ‘being glorified’, then we have to revise that view quite radically. Verse 30 is the conclusion to this passage, and to this point, not to something else. To say it again, Romans 8 is simply not about ‘going to heaven’. Heaven is never mentioned in this chapter; indeed, ‘heaven’ in the sense of ‘where Christians will go after death’ is missing from this whole letter and indeed Paul’s whole correspondence. The common contemporary Christian usage of the word ‘glory’ to mean ‘heaven’ as normally conceived (as when someone who has died is spoken of as having ‘gone to glory’) misses Paul’s point. So what is he saying?
The primary meanings of ‘glory’ in this passage are, simultaneously, the glorious presence of God himself dwelling within us by the spirit, and the wise, healing, reconciling rule of God’s people over the whole creation. These two – God’s presence and human rule – are made for each other. They fit together.
We have already seen, in verses 9–11 and then in verses 12–17, that Paul is retrieving the exodus-story at the point where God comes in person to dwell in the Tabernacle. That is the implication of all that Paul says about God’s spirit dwelling within believers to lead them to the ‘inheritance’. Those ‘in the Messiah’ are ‘new-Temple’ people. Paul insists in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 that the divine glory really does dwell within Jesus’ people, even though, as cracked clay jars, they know themselves to be deeply unworthy. That is the first meaning of ‘glory’, and it suffuses this whole passage. But all that we will now say about the second meaning of ‘glory’ – the human vocation and destiny to be set in authority over the world – is not to be played off against this Temple-idea of the divine glory dwelling within Jesus’ people. One of the spectacular features of this whole chapter is that the two meanings converge – as they did, and do, in Jesus himself. In technical theological terms, we are at this point near the heart of both Christology and pneumatology. In terms of what Paul is now going to say, we are reaching the point of convergence between God’s ultimate purposes for creation and his challenging vocation to his spirit-filled people.
The primary meaning of the many-sided word ‘glory’ (doxa in Greek, looking back regularly to kabod in Hebrew) is ‘dignity’, ‘worth’ or ‘status’. The Hebrew carries the notion of ‘weight’, as we might speak about the ‘weighty presence’ of a powerful or influential figure or the ‘weighty words’ of an important speech or sermon. This idea of dignity, worth and status goes with both sides of Paul’s meaning.
Before we get further with the exegesis, there are two preliminary remarks, one about our present global context and the other about the incomprehensibility at this point of the well-known King James Version of the Bible.
First, today’s context. We are more aware now than ever before of the crisis in ecology and climate change. That is of course controversial. Some of the rhetoric about it – on both sides of the debate! – is clearly driven by political and ideological agendas from which some of us would want to hold back. But, like the arguments a generation ago about the ill effects of smoking tobacco, the evidence is massive and mounting daily. From greenhouse gases to bad farming practices, not to mention nuclear accidents and ‘dirty bombs’, the post-Enlightenment world has twisted the vocation to be image-bearing stewards of creation into the chance to exploit creation to serve our pride, or greed, or both. This, alas, is scarcely new. Ancient empires, not least the Romans, routinely used a ‘scorched earth’ policy, literally or metaphorically, when it suited them. A rebel country or city might not only be defeated in battle. It might be rendered uninhabitable, with its wells poisoned and its fields sown with salt. That, we grant, wouldn’t have threatened the whole planet. But it was the smaller-scale equivalent of what we now face. If we, called to be wise stewards of creation in the twenty-first century, are to be true to that calling, this present passage will be one of our primary resources for a theological response to the crisis.
