Into the Heart of Romans, page 13
Of course, the western church has regularly ignored this theme. This is partly because concern with creation has seemed ‘unspiritual’, being earthly minded rather than heavenly. If Romans is read as a book about ‘how to go to heaven’, then why would we bother with looking after the present space–time world? Well, thank you, Plato, enjoy your philosophical detachment – while the poorest of the poor face rising sea levels and acid rain. And sometimes, particularly in America, this Platonism has been reinforced by the caricature of biblical eschatology we find in the so-called ‘rapture’ doctrine, which actually welcomes signs of the imminent destruction of Planet Earth, or of a coming Armageddon, or whatever. Romans 8 stands firmly over against any such nonsense.
But Romans 8 has often not been well understood. This is partly because what Paul is saying doesn’t fit with what the theologians have wanted to emphasize, from the Middle Ages through to our own day. That is why the best-loved English translation from the last four hundred years, the King James or Authorized Version, makes such a mess of it: this simply wasn’t a theme that the learned translators of the early seventeenth century thought important. The result is that, if you want to avoid the challenge of the present passage, then read it in the King James Version, where you will find it as clear as mud. That will encourage you to read on quickly out the other side to the climactic verses 28–30 which you will be able to read in the way the tradition wants you to.
Actually, when I was in pastoral ministry I sometimes used this passage, cheekily, for this purpose. I had one or two regular readers – people who would volunteer to read scripture during worship – who liked to insist on using the King James Version. So I would give them passages such as this one to read. Here are verses 19–21 in the King James:
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Best of luck with that, out loud at 10.30 on a Sunday morning or any other time. You see, once you translate ktisis as ‘creature’ the meaning has already become unclear. For us, the word ‘creature’ doesn’t mean ‘creation’ as a whole. It means a small animal. By the time the text then says that the ‘creature’ became subject to ‘vanity’, we will be imagining that same small animal admiring itself in a mirror. As to who ‘subjected’ this creature to ‘vanity’, or how or why this was done, and as to what deliverance from that plight might consist in, the theological tradition both of the Middle Ages and the Reformation offers little or no help. And the ordinary reader hurries on to a few verses later, which appear to teach what we normally expect to hear.
Let us then do what we’ve been doing up to this point. Let us stand back a bit, to apply our normal questions to the passage and see what happens.
First, look at the start and the finish of the passage. Obviously, the verses we are concerned with here (17–21) are part of a longer train of thought, with verse 30 as the real ‘ending’. There, sure enough, Paul lands where he began, with the promise of glory, emerging out of suffering. But our present short section, as a sub-set of that, reflects the same point. We begin and end with glory. Verse 17: ‘we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified’; verse 21: ‘the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified’. This is the controlling theme of these verses. They expand and explain the last line of verse 17, and they set the context for verses 22–30. This is the framework within which we must understand verses 19–20. But this ‘glorification’, clearly, is not about faithful Christians going to heaven. It is about creation being rescued from corruption! What has that to do with ‘the glory that is going to be unveiled for us’? The answer is in the biblical background. We will come to that presently.
The second thing about reading Paul, we recall, is to look at the little words that tie together his clauses and sentences. Here, once again, we have three sentences linked to what precedes with gar, ‘for’. In my own translation, since a repeated ‘for’ sounds quite stilted in regular English, I have used other joining phrases but, if we render gar as ‘for’, the logical links become clear. Thus:
17. . . we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. 18For [gar] the present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be unveiled for us. 19For [gar] creation is on tiptoe, waiting for God’s children to be revealed; 20For [gar] creation was subjected to futility . . . in the hope 21that [hoti] creation itself would be freed from slavery, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.
Now if we assume the ‘normal’ reading of this passage, verse 19 doesn’t look as if it explains verse 18 at all. It looks like a non sequitur, moving from the coming glory (which the normal reading would assume to be ‘heaven’) to the longing of the present space–time–matter creation. But Paul links it with gar, ‘for’ or ‘because’. In my own translation, I have expanded this into ‘this is how I work it out’, partly because, at the start of verse 18, Paul uses the verb logizomai, which means ‘I work it out’ or ‘I reckon it up’; it’s a calculating word. So if Paul has just said that the present sufferings don’t compare with the coming glory, why would he explain that by talking, in verse 19, about creation longing for God’s children to be revealed? And why would he then explain that (with the gar at the start of verse 20) by digging down, not to the human problem of sin and death, but to the cosmic problem of futility and corruption? Answering these questions will give us a steer on where the whole larger passage is going.
We can approach these matters best by asking our third regular question: what happens when we try to read this text within the world of Paul’s day, within the worldview, narratives and assumptions that his contemporaries would have in mind?
The world into which Paul went as a missionary was the world dominated by Rome, by Caesar. For the previous century, the Roman propaganda machine had been churning out one particular myth (see Appendix 1). Many ancient pagans saw the great sweep of history in terms of a succession of ages – a golden age, then silver, then bronze, then iron. There were several variations on this theme, but they always pointed to a final return to the golden age, the age (as they thought) of Saturn. And in 41 BC, three years after Julius Caesar’s assassination, a brilliant young poet, Virgil, penned an eclogue declaring that the golden age had indeed come round again, bringing peace and harmony to the world of nature. Virgil said much the same in the Aeneid, tying this now explicitly to the rule of Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Augustus. The earlier poem was later taken up by Christians as a pagan prophecy of the incarnation of Jesus. (That is why, in some Christian circles, particularly in the Middle Ages, Virgil becomes a kind of honorary semi-saint, as in Dante’s great poem.)
Augustus solidified his imperial rule by engaging in a massive publicity programme, not just through his court poets and historians but in symbolic statues. The Ara pacis, the altar of peace, which you can still visit in Rome, declares symbolically that with Augustus as emperor there is now a time of peace, harmony and fruitfulness. The ground is bringing forth all that humans could desire. This scene of peaceful life and plentiful harvests was copied on coins, and carved in marble, right across the empire. Nature herself was seen as a placid matriarch, resting at peace, surrounded by abundant provision. The message was: you’ve never had it so good – and it’s all because Caesar’s heir is on the throne, bringing peace and justice to the world! And of course, the subtext of this, the message to the far-flung inhabitants of the empire, was: so please settle down and get used to Roman rule. Don’t even think about rebellion. Why would you? You are in the best of all possible worlds.
That line of propaganda was continued by later emperors, not least Nero, as in the third extract in Appendix 1. In the days before mass media, the way the message got out was through coins, statues, inscriptions and particularly poems. Rome, like all empires before and since, went on pushing this line. That was true throughout Paul’s lifetime, and in towns and cities more or less everywhere he went. Indeed, he seems to have made a point of visiting key centres of Roman influence, such as Ephesus and Corinth, intending then to go on to Rome itself and to Spain, the important western outpost of Roman rule. His strategy seems to have been to announce Jesus as the true Kyrios, the world’s true Lord, in places where that word, and the claims that went with it, had been firmly linked to Caesar.
So in this letter, sent to Rome itself, Paul is declaring powerfully that, like all pagan claims, the Roman claim is at best a parody of the truth. Everybody knew, of course, that in its own terms it was a lie. Rome’s supposed glory was built on ruthless military conquest, often backed up by crucifixions. Rome’s rule was always as precarious as the next provincial rebellion, or the next riot over food shortages if the grain ships failed to arrive on time. And for Paul, in any case, ‘nature’ was not an independent peaceful matriarch. The wider world, from his biblical and Jewish perspective, was not a self-supporting ‘nature’. It was ‘creation’, the good world made by the good creator God, but now groaning in labour pains, longing to give birth to the real new age as opposed to the glossy fake one imagined by the Roman court poets.
Paul, in other words, was thinking with the Bible rather than with imperial propaganda. He believed in the ancient Hebrew promise of new creation (see Appendix 2). The Old Testament regularly points ahead, even in the midst of Israel’s rebellion and failure, to the promise that the God who made the world would one day remake it. There would come a time of cosmic harmony.
Two features of this stand out. On the one hand, this would come about through the work of the Davidic Messiah, as in Isaiah 11 or Psalm 72. On the other hand, it would reveal the divine glory, as in Isaiah 35 or 40. Actually, Isaiah 11 and Psalm 72 say that as well: the whole earth will be full of God’s glory, rather as the wilderness Tabernacle, or Solomon’s Temple, had been filled with the glorious divine presence. These promises were variously retrieved, developed, expanded and celebrated in second-Temple Jewish writings. We sometimes call these writings ‘apocalyptic’, which means ‘revelatory’, because they speak of God the creator suddenly revealing his new creation as the shocking fulfilment of his age-old plan. Again we note the contrast with the Roman vision of a present imperial utopia. The Roman dream is built on violent military conquest. The Hebraic and Jewish vision regularly emerges through a time of intense suffering.
The early Christians quite naturally retrieved and restated this biblical theme of new creation for the obvious reason that it had begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus. They believed that, by the spirit, this new creation was powerfully at work both in faithful human beings and through them in the wider world.
It is of course strange, from our much later perspective, that the two stories, the biblical and Jewish one on the one hand and the Roman one on the other, developed in unintended parallel. The Jewish texts go back long before the rise of Rome; and the Roman texts were certainly not borrowing ideas from Isaiah or the Psalms. However, many Jews of Paul’s day, calculating the future on the basis of ‘seventy weeks of years’ in Daniel 9.24, concluded that the new age was about to dawn in what we call the first century.1 And that, for quite different reasons, was the very moment when the Roman empire was trumpeting the arrival of its own new age through the Caesars. The great story of the gospel – the good news that the creator had rescued his creation through his son, and was bringing justice, salvation, peace and glory to all – was born into a world where there was already a powerful and well-publicized story about the good news of a son of god who had brought justice, salvation, peace and glory to the world.
So here, at the climax of the letter precisely to the church in Rome, we see the implicit clash of controlling narratives. Of course, we can’t simply look back at ancient parodies of the truth and feel smug that we are not subject to similar distortions ourselves. We ought to ponder carefully the ways in which the vast and socially powerful narratives of both modernity and postmodernity have offered the world things that look a bit like the Christian gospel but are in fact deadly parodies.
Thus modernity has tried to steal Christianity’s clothes with its talk of progress and enlightenment, offering an eschatology without God and a would-be wisdom without God. Postmodernity, in reaction, has given us a harsh doctrine of original sin – the hermeneutic of suspicion is the secular version of that dogma – but without any hope of redemption or forgiveness. There are not, after all, that many great truths in the world. The Christian gospel has them all, and in proper balance. But powerful sub-Christian movements regularly snatch bits and pieces of them and try to put them together in new ways which never actually do what they promise. Modernism already showed its true colours with the guillotine, and followed that up with the Holocaust. Postmodernity does to cultural icons what tyrannical empires have always done and are still doing, demolishing everything but with no plans for rebuilding.
But the parodies of the truth are not just to be seen in the secular world. They crop up with sad regularity in the people of God themselves – ourselves, I should say. This sorry story goes all the way back to Aaron making the golden calf, at the very moment when God was giving Moses the pattern for the Tabernacle. It comes all the way forwards to what happens when God’s people today, individually or corporately, are seduced into grasping after something that looks like a good gift, but which in fact, like Caesar’s promises, is all smoke and mirrors, dust and ashes. Where the biblical meaning of creation and new creation has been long obscured through semi- or sub-Christian teaching, it is fatally easy for toxic mixtures of faith and politics to push themselves in and take over.
But this brings us back, above all, to the biblical meaning of ‘glory’. To go back to the key words: the Hebrew word kabod, and the Greek word doxa, do indeed come to include things such as radiance and brilliant light. That is what many readers imagine Paul is talking about. But this isn’t their basic meaning, and it isn’t what Paul normally means. In the Hebrew scriptures, ‘glory’ regularly comes to refer specifically to rule or power. That is why ‘glory’ is regularly a royal term, symbolized visually in crowns, sometimes with rays of bright light streaming in all directions. The bright light isn’t the glory itself. The light tells you about the glory, the weighty dignity and power. The honour of the person is symbolized by that bright light. So when scripture promises that God’s glory will flood the whole creation, that doesn’t mean that the whole world will become luminous, as though it had a powerful light bulb somewhere deep inside. It means that God’s creative power and wisdom will, as we say, shine out visibly all around.
This promise about the coming glory – the glory of human beings put in charge of the world – is a major theme for Paul. It goes closely with the promise of resurrection, which is built on the foundation of Jesus’ own resurrection. Paul retrieves these biblical promises in other related passages, particularly 1 Corinthians 15.20–8 and Philippians 3.19–21. Both of those passages make explicit what here is said densely and allusively. (That often happens with Paul: he spells out a point in one place and summarizes it in a puzzling aphorism somewhere else. You need to check the spelling-out to be sure you’ve understood the aphorism.)
In particular, in those passages in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, Paul evokes three psalms and a chapter of Daniel. The passages in question, worth studying carefully at leisure, are Psalm 2, where the Davidic Messiah is set in authority over the world; Psalm 110, where the Messiah is installed at God’s right hand to be over all enemies, a point strongly echoed in Daniel 7; and especially Psalm 8, the vocation of human beings to be God’s stewards in looking after his world: crowned with glory and honour, with all things put in subjection under their feet.
That’s ‘glory’ for Paul in these passages. Psalm 8, in particular, is vital. It picks up and focuses the promise of Genesis 1, of humans made in God’s image and given responsibility for God’s creation. That is one way in which the two meanings – the presence of God and the authority of humans – converge.
These pictures go together not least because some Jewish readers understood Psalm 8 in terms of the Messiah, making the coming king to be the ultimate, true human being. This aligns with a regular ancient view of kings as being made in the divine image. Genesis 1, of course, insists that actually all humans are image-bearers; all humans possess royal dignity. But many ancient Jews continued to read Psalm 8 messianically; and that opens the way for Paul to link it, in the passages just referred to, with other messianic texts.
Paul too saw Psalm 8 fulfilled in Jesus, the one to whom all things are put in subjection. For Paul, as we would expect after the famous Adam-and-Messiah passage in Romans 5, this is then about Jesus as the ultimate true human, just as in 1 Corinthians 15. Modern Christians have often assumed that our main task as apologists is to persuade people of Jesus’ divinity; but Paul, without in any way denying or undermining that, insists in these passages that Jesus is the truly human being. And his regular point, in line with the biblical democratization of the Davidic promise, is that Jesus, as Messiah, shares this role with all his people. Verse 29: we are to be conformed to the image of the son, ‘so that he might be the firstborn of a large family’. Psalm 8 picks up Genesis 1 and 2, insisting that the human vocation remains on the agenda, even though it wasn’t clear – until the coming of the gospel – how it would all work out. Those who belong to Jesus, who are indwelt by his spirit, share his vocation, shaped by Genesis 1 and Psalm 8.
