Episode 327: Douglas Campbell - Ripping Up the Romans Road
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Douglas Campbell about rethinking the “Romans Road” and what Paul is really doing in his letter to the Romans. They explore how common readings have turned Romans into a step-by-step plan of salvation, often missing its original context and ethical focus. Together, they invite listeners to see Romans as a vision of God’s radical love and a call to live transformed, relational lives shaped by that reality.
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about undoing the Romans road with Douglas Campbell.
Jared: Doug is a New Testament professor at Duke Divinity School, where he focuses on the life and thought of Paul.
Pete: We had a great conversation and let's get right into it.
Doug: Good theology is practical. All theology is ethical.
Romans is ethical. You keep saying, well, you, you come back to the ‘is Romans about salvation?’ which means you're back to the Romans road, which is, ‘I have a problem. What's God's solution?’ Uh, Paul's not writing to people who aren't saved. He's not debating people who aren't saved. They're talking about the implications of that.
Pete: Doug, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.
Doug: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Jared: For people who don't know what, what is the Romans road?
Doug: Romans road is, um, it's a reading of Romans that actually predates the modern critical period, uh, but we've not been able to discard it because it does such important theological, political, and cultural work.
And it comes from the assumption that Paul wrote Romans to tell the church what its systematic theology should be.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: It's Paul the whole way through. He's writing in general terms and he is writing for a church. This is very, very important. He's writing for a church that is, um, post-Constantinian, so it's intertwined with and supportive of the state and its politics.
By and large, there's been a sundering of the relationship between Jews and Christians. So Jews are no longer people that we know. They're people that we vilify. And if you've lost those two, well, if you've added in a love affair with power and taken out a knowledge of what Jewish people are really like, and you start off reading Romans as if Paul wrote this for the church, you'll drastically misunderstand his opening argument.
You'll miss the point, you'll miss the point of almost everything he's trying to make. And you will introduce what, uh, a theological structure, which is known as the, in, in, in theological circles as the Western order of salvation, and will unsurprisingly support state-ist politics. It will support, um, the othering of the Jews. And that will then control everything else you say about Romans and everything else that you say about Paul.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And it'll probably control everything else you say about the Bible.
Pete: So, so it's, it's, um, it's a failure. I mean, to put it as simply as possible.
It's a failure to read Paul contextually in his time, right? It’s, it's imposing later needs. I mean, the, the, the need to have the Bible be a systematic theology. I don't know where that began, but it's very much with us today. And so you read Romans that way, right?
Doug: Yeah, 100%. And it's also, I mean, we don't read things in a neutral way.
We read the Bible as, as you know, better than most, expecting to find what we already believe. We want it to affirm what we think. So if you're an authoritarian figure, you will be utterly unsurprised that Paul is an authoritarian too, and so is God. Um, and so you'll get to the end of chapter one where God is going to execute everybody who's not a Christian, and you won't have a problem with that because what else would you do?
Right? This, this is how you organize things.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Um, and you won't notice that. Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, and resurrected has done no work in that whole structure.
Pete: What do you mean by that? Explain that a bit.
Doug: Um, the Western order starts off with your unsaved condition where it appeals to you on the basis of natural theology.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: So it says, what do you, what do you know about God from just looking at the stars and the clouds and the birds and the bees and what do you know about God? And what we know about God is of course what we really think about ourselves, what we think is really important. And for some people, that's, um, power.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Right.
Doug: And a particular understanding of power that's aggressive. A god of lethality.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: We might say. And that will be the basis for your whole theological program. And this is where the Romans road kicks in.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: You look at reality and you see a God of laws, you see a God who punishes the infraction of laws.
This is where, uh, purveyors of the Romans road are well intentioned, they're sincere, they're good people. They want you to become a Christian, but they're gonna try and frighten you into becoming a Christian.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: So the god of law will execute you at the end of the age if you have not converted, uh, joined the church, and accessed a diversion of that punishment and rage and anger onto the shoulders of Jesus on the cross.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Okay. So all the work in that theological model is coming from the front. Uh, it doesn't work. It builds from this generalized perception of what reality is like. You can't negotiate that away. Kind of give it away. Uh, otherwise the whole model collapses. Your account of the gospel collapses. Um, this is not a good thing because we are caught up in our own sin and frailty, and when we look at the world, we don't see God.
We see a mirror image of ourself.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And Jesus is then not able to control the gospel. And what we really need is a God who breaks into our brokenness and our confusion and corrects us and says, Hey, this is what I'm really like. This is what I want you to be like. So, the true account of the gospel, uh, works backwards.
It begins with the solution, and then in the light of the solution, we begin to understand our problem. It's as I tell my students, it's very much a, a story of the addict who comes to the 12 step program, is, is brought there by a friend, gets another program, his or her mind clarifies, and then they look back on their addiction and go, oh, now I understand problems I was having.
Pete: And the solution is, uh, Easter weekend.
Doug: The solution is Easter weekend. I could not have put that better myself. Yes. And what's so important about that is Easter weekend, the solution is not just Friday.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: It's Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And Sunday is really important.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Sunday saves you, um, and if you lose Sunday, we are still mired in our sins. We are not transformed, we are not resurrected.
We're not participating in Christ. We're not given help with our ethics, and we reduce God's solution to Friday and we somehow have to make God's solution to the wrongs of the world co-terminus with the actions of the Roman state, when they publicly tortured Jesus to death. And that is a very, very, um, difficult place to be.
Pete: You know, for, for, I think for a lot of people, um, what, what you've been doing here, I think is drawing out implications of this Roman road and where it comes from and what some of the assumptions are behind it.
I think most of the good people that you're talking about who think this way, they probably just think, well, this is just giving us the path to salvation, how individual human beings are saved you, followed this, you know, um, uh, yeah, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So we're all screwed up and we're all going to hell, that kind of thing.
Yeah. So, um, what, um, I mean, textually in, in Romans, what are some of the things that should make people say that's not the way to read Roman?
Doug: Right. Well, that's where the new perspective comes in.
Pete: Okay.
Jared: Well, before we get there, hold on, because I, I don't know if we've done a good enough job of, of, I think for a number of people, they have that narrative of, I've, I've sinned.
And there is no solution except for the cross. You kind of described that, but can you paint the Romans road picture? 'Cause I think for a lot of people, they're using five or six verses in Romans to give us this entire narrative. So can you set those up first and then we can kind of see it from a different perspective?
Doug: Yeah. I, I don't have the Romans road verses memorized, but I know that they get really excited about Romans 3:23. Because all. Lack the glory of God. And that's meant to be a summary of the very first argument.
Then we move into faith. Uh, Paul talks about faith in the letter for quite a long time, and if you've set up a problem, uh, in which an individual has sinned and it's going to fall into the hands of an angry God, um, you're gonna have to ask them to do something to join the group that is saved, which is the church.
And because Paul starts talking about faith, the assumption is, uh, that faith is the key thing. But faith is important. Um, this is true. And then you'll plug later verses from Romans into this theological framework without reading what's actually going on around them.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And so what you tend to do is you, you subject all the later verses from Romans and all the later arguments from Romans to this opening argument.
Jared: Which is that, which is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, all sin. And we need a, that's a problem that sets up for all of humanity in some universal sense, and we need a solution for that.
Lo and behold, keep reading Romans and you get to Jesus and, and our participation. We have to do something. We have to ask Jesus into our heart. If we do that, then we get to participate.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And what you've overlooked is you've already built the solution into your understanding of the problem.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Pete: Right? Yeah.
Doug: The outline is already there and you've taken control over the Christ event where God is actually showing us what God is like. We've already decided, we've already decided what God is like and our image of God is political and legal.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And if, if we just set that aside for a moment and go deeper into the letter, the image of God that Paul uses is familial and loving.
And when Paul starts talking about God, uh, in his deepest and most Christ focused way, it's in Romans 5, uh, and in Romans 8.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: God shows his own love for us in this. This is God the father. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Um, and later on he describes us as hostile. A God who was prepared to offer up his only child to suffer and die for a humanity that is hostile, and a God who is prepared to go into that place and die for a humanity who is hostile, is fundamentally characterized by a benevolence that is limitless.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: This is why I think Paul wrote Ephesians, the prayer of Ephesians 3. We need the Holy Spirit to expand the categories of our mind, to grasp this compassion because it exceeds all parameters.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: We, we must be enlightened by the spirit because it's so far beyond what we can manage.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And that is what Paul is talking about in Romans 5, in Romans 8, and in between and on into Israel where God says, I will never let go of you Israel, even though you have let go of me, even though you have rejected me. When I have come to you, I will never let go of you. So you read on into Romans and you find this God of love and faithfulness.
And you go, what the hell is going on with Romans 1, 2, 3? What, what, is there a major personality shift in God between these blocks of material? Um, can we think about these things in a way that is more consistent? And for goodness sake, let's think about the front of Romans, uh, in a way that's consistent with the God revealed by Easter, by Jesus Christ.
Nothing is clearer than that. So let's figure out how these things fit together.
Pete: You know, I mean, there's so many things firing in my head now, but just on that last point, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God for, um, salvation for Jew first, then for the Gentile, and um, that sort of, I mean, I've, I've heard this as, as sort of like, this is, this is the starting point. This is a summary.
If you agree with this, if you don't, please, please correct us. But this seems to be a summary of the argument. So he is after Jews and Gentiles, and then they get to Romans 3:23. And as it's been explained to me, and if this is wrong, you gotta tell me that too. Um, instead of saying, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, say both.
Both groups. Jew and Gentile on the same level, and, and that seems to bring some parts of the letter into, into some coherence, but I, I see that you, um, might not be in love with me right now for saying that, so please go ahead.
Doug: Yeah, the Romans road gets certain things right. I don't disagree with a lot of things it says, when it says everybody's sinful. I agree wholeheartedly. I'm more enthusiastic about the sinfulness of humanity than people who advocate the Romans road. I think we're so broken. We're so confused that we can't even exercise an act of faith. We don't have the clarity to follow a rational journey to God.
We need the Holy Spirit to clarify our minds. So this is correct. I do agree that Jews and Gentiles are both in need of the salvation of Christ. But to say that they're on the same level there is not to say that Israel is not immensely precious and, and overflowing with privileges and gifts. In a way that pagans aren’t.
And Paul's very clear about that.
Pete: Yeah.
Doug: And what happens with that move is if you read Romans 1-3 the usual way, the Jews go completely under the bus. In Romans 1-3, everybody gets judged according to works. You don't do the works, you're out and nobody does the works.
So Jews are out. So the only way out of Romans 3 if you are a Jew, is to become a Christian.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: So Jews are an interesting religious construction according to the Roman Road. God has set up this religion so that it should learn eventually that it has no right to exist. The heart of its identity should be the discovery that it's a really terrible idea.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Which, you know, is tricky when you're trying to evangelize Jews and it isn't what the rest of the letter says. It also overlooks the fact that most of the early church was Jewish.
And continued to practice Judaism. That the heart of the church. Was Messianic Jews and the early church was a diverse body of Christians who were converts from paganism to Paul's version of things.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And then you got these Messianic Jews running around who continue to observe the Torah. So the Roman road has unwittingly done terrible damage to the Jewish people.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: By build, building its own identity on top of the erasure of Jewish identity.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Right.
Doug: I can't, I can't. I mean, let this sink in.
Pete: Yeah.
Doug: These guys are gonna get executed at the end of the age. Right. Unless they become Christian.
Now has that, or has that not proved to be sociologically and politically one of the most damaging things that humanity has ever come up with?
Pete: Mm-hmm. Right. But it's clean. It's neat, right?
It's, we have the insiders and outsiders.
Doug: It's a final solution.
Pete: Yes.
Doug: We can tie, we can tie up all the bows on those on that.
Jared: Well, let me just say, to be fair, I grew up kind of with this very strong theology and it was almost though, that it wasn't the Jewish people in particular, it was that in history, the Jewish people were there to show all humanity that we aren't good enough.
And so that, that's kind of the line of thinking is not like somehow Christians are better. It is more like we were taught to think of Jews as sort of the pioneers of understanding the need for Jesus, and now everybody needs to understand that need as well. And so we sort of had pride of place for, for the Jewish tradition, but only insofar as it pointed out our brokenness and sinfulness.
Doug: Yeah. And, and if you know Jews, did you find they were kind of helpful and, and would say yeah, you know, the crucial thing about Judaism is it shows that nothing works and religion is kind of, I'm a dirty, rotten scoundrel.
Jared: Yeah. I grew up in Texas, so actually I don't think I met any Jews until I was an adult.
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Pete: But Doug is there, is there a sense though, does Paul do some throwing of the Gentiles under the bus as well? In the early chapters, like in, I'm thinking of chapter 1.
Doug: Oh, everybody loves chapter 1. Yeah.
Pete: I don't know if I love it. I'm just saying other people may.
Doug: Well, here, well, here's the thing.
Paul's been under the bus himself.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Um, so his fundamental approach to people is, you know, I'm, I'm there, I'm with you, I'm broken. But Jesus Christ has overwhelmed me with his grace and love. So I think his first move is never, um, hey, there's something wrong with you. Jesus is gonna fix it. His first move is always, Jesus loves you and it's gonna fix you.
What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do in response to that?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Um, so I think the right way to read Romans 1-3, and the consistent way, but this is a minority reading. This is, this is me. My few followers who I can number on the fingers of a mutilated hand. Um, I think the right way to read it is, it's a Socratic argument in which he's doing battle rhetorically with opponents, and they are kind of Romans road people.
They are hard-asses. They are authoritarians. They like the political image of God, and don't we find these sorts of people wherever we go?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: The history of the church is a conflict between the kind of authoritarian controllers and the nurturing humanist compassionate people.
And so Paul starts off the reading by recapitulating their basic premises. So they arrive and say turn or burn, turn or burn. And then Romans 3, 1-3 makes sense as a turning of those premises upon their purveyors. You will not escape. Your gospel will save nobody.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Doug: Your gospel erases your own Jewish identity.
It's a masterpiece.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Rhetorically. Um, it's a brilliant way of Paul introducing himself to a church that does not know him. That may have heard things about him.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: That shows that he's actually a very sophisticated person and the other people coming in are the aggressive, um, hostile, domineering people that should be ignored.
So Romans 1, good example of preaching that Paul thinks sucks.
Pete: Right.
Doug: This preaching sucks. This just is not God.
Jared: Okay, so let's, let's zoom out because if we're saying the Romans road is, is not, it's not true to the historical context in which Jesus or in which Paul is, is addressing, and in fact maybe rhetorically, uh, going against in those first couple of chapters.
So if we zoom out, then, if Romans isn't about getting people saved and showing them the path to that individual salvation, at the high level, what would we say Romans is about? What were the problems that Paul was addressing?
Doug: Yeah, it's, that's a great question. Um, you've gotta think of this like, um, a political debate.
If I'm on the campaign trail, um, what do I need to address? What do I need? What questions do I need to answer? What issues do I need to address? And there are four. I, I need to give you my message. I need to know what you are saying. I need to know what you are saying about me and defend myself, and I need to launch criticisms against you and show people why you are wrong.
So that there are those four different types of arguments and all of those are operating in Romans, which means, yes, Paul will give us an account of how Jesus saves us when you find the right place in the letter where he is answering those questions. And those questions are answered in chapters 5 through 8, because in chapter 5 and chapter 8, Paul is responding to a criticism that if you follow Paul's gospel and show up before God on the day of judgment, you'll be damned and condemned.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: You'll be thrown into hell if you follow this guy. You're not saved. You're in big, big trouble. And so Paul has to answer that practical question with what? What sort of God are we dealing with?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: What is God really like? And that's where he makes his most important theological moves, which is, it's the God revealed by Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us.
So that's where we get God. And in between 5 and 8, actually from 5:12 through 8:14. Um, what question is Paul asking? How do we behave in the light of Jesus giving himself for us? What is the significance of our baptism for our ethics? So that's where we get Paul's account of the significance of Christ in our everyday lives, which is, we participate in him through the power of the spirit and live out of a new reality where we walk and step with the spirit.
A new reality characterized by love, family, faithfulness, gentleness, peace, kindness, goodness, self-control. So those, that part of Romans is the heart of it.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Notice how I gave you a very practical account, a very important theological material.
Pete: Mm-hmm. This, my, my brain's going in 10 different directions right now.
Doug: Great. Great.
Pete: Very basic question, 'cause I hear this all the time. Um, in your opinion, does Paul believe in predestination the way, um, some Calvinists would describe it?
Doug: Which, which ones?
Pete: Well, they're all sorts. They're not, they're not all cut of the same cloth, but essentially believing that God ordained everyone from the foundation of the earth and no one has any sort of choice or personal agency.
In the mystery of God and the Council of God, he zaps some people before the universe even began.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. No terrible idea. Um, but you see, the reason why I responded the way I did is 'cause Bart was a Calvinist.
Pete: Yes. Yeah.
Doug: And, and Bart rejigs the doctrine of election and the light of Ephesians 1:4, and says something quite sensible, which is, if this God loves you, God makes the first move.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: God loves his creation. We know because of Jesus Christ, that God loves everybody and reaches out to everybody and influences everybody and wants to save everybody. It's actually pretty simple. Um, yeah. What, what parent, well, no, that, that possibly has taken me in a slightly dangerous direction, but let's, let's, let's speak.
Ideally, we wanna conceive and have our children. Because we love them. We don't go, Hey, let's have a, let's conceive a child. And I mean, if we don't like them, we'll just get rid of them. That's not, we don't make a decision prior to the gestation of this infant. We wanna love, we wanna love all of them.
And that's, that's what God is like with us. Um, which is a wonderfully comforting doctrine because in Romans, Romans 8 is where it appears. And Paul is deploying election to get his converts through their terrible struggles with poverty and violence. This is a word for our time. Are you distressed by the suffering, the constriction, the pain that surrounds you?
God is on your side. He always has been. He always will be. He will get you through this. It's, it's very Johannine. Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. It's a very uplifting pastoral doctrine when you understand it correctly.
Pete: Another, you know, $2 question here that people always raise about, uh, Romans, um, was Paul a universalist?
Doug: Um, okay. So I give a nuance. Well, I try to give a nuanced answer to this. It's a really interesting question. I don't think he was, I think if he sat him down and said, Paul, you are a universalist, it would've depended.
He, he probably would've gone, I don't know what you're talking about. Um, what I would say is he's implicitly a universalist. When he's looking at the implications of Jesus Christ, he's a universalist. And he's quite explicit about that. When he's looking at people who are, uh, hurting or harming his followers or doing damage inside the church with unrepentant sin, then he gets a little edgy and aggressive.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. So it depends what question he is focused on.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Um, he's, he's, he gets angry.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: He was an angry man before he converted. It's extraordinary the depth of compassion that he now has. But every now and again, you get a flash of the old Paul.
Pete: Yeah, Doug. Before, but I mean, I, I, this is, this is so helpful.
Um, could you just tease out a little bit, you know, the second half of Romans 5, where, where this tends to come up for people? The, the, all the many. And like Paul's like, he's clearly not a systematic theologian at this point. 'Cause he's all over the map and he's using these words that are just confusing.
Doug: No, no. I actually think he's pretty good
Pete: Go ahead. But not a systematic theologian.
Doug: He's, he's much more, he's more systematic than you think. Um, Romans 5:12-21 gets it exactly right. But he's looking at Christ and so something comes along and goes well. It's the point that you made earlier.
We are all broken. We are all contaminated. We are all on the grip of evil lusts that are out of our control. We are all oppressed by demonic forces that we can't understand. That's the reality of humanity in Adam, but the reality of humanity in Christ is prior to that, bigger than that, and will last longer than that.
Because Jesus Christ is really what humanity is. So whenever you look at Adam, Christ is bigger, better, stronger, more significant in every way. Life will conquer death, resurrection will conquer sin. And he says that very clearly, and he's exactly right. Because God, the image of God, and that creator, that redeemer, it's always gonna be more significant than the image of Adam.
And how many of us make Adam more significant than Christ. So I think he's very clear about that. That's one of his best passages. That's where you see his universalism, his implicit universalism coming through. Um, but he is a mortal, which means like us, he never gets all his ducks lined up exactly in a row.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: There's always a few that quack and fall off the ledge and you know, I don't hit 'em too hard because of this 'cause we're all like that. But there are points where it all just doesn't quite follow through.
Pete: It's a lot to ask of anybody to make it all fit. I think.
Doug: It's too much. It's too much to ask.
Pete: Dealing with the mysteries of faith and all that.
Doug: Well the, the point is not so much making everything fit. The point is where are you coming from?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And if people have got that right, you can let them work things out.
Jared: Well, and and maybe that's a good segue, and I think we're, we're teetering on starting to, to talk about this, which maybe we don't have time to dive fully into the idea of the, the new perspective on Paul and how scholars get there.
But from this conversation, I feel like, um, maybe Pete, you've, you've leaned in one direction and Doug, I'm trying to kind of see where you lean in this. Some people read Romans as a story about personal salvation, whether it's Romans road or not. It is the impact of Christ on us in sort of an eternal way.
And then there is, well, there's this Jew, gentile relationship that also seems to be significant in how we read Romans in terms of what, where's the emphasis? And so for, where would you put the emphasis of what Paul's kind of takeaway, what he wants the readers to take away. Is this about Jewish-Gentile relationships?
Is this about personal salvation? Is this about salvation in some other sense? Um, maybe go there first and then maybe we can dip our toes into this new perspective and how that started to shape how scholars read this letter.
Doug: It's a great question. Um. I'm going to resist reducing Romans to one theme, because then you're reading it again like a piece of systematic theology.
Which is what it isn't. It's a debate. So there are multiple issues. Um, but what's the most important set of issues? It's the sort of God we're involved with and the implications of that for ethics.
Jared: Okay.
Doug: Because remember that Paul is. Undertaking the most revolutionary theological and ethical move in the history of the church and the history of Judaism.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: He's saying you can join the Jesus movement and if you're a Jew, you become a Messianic Jew. Uh, things continue as normal, except Jesus is in the center. If you're a pagan, you do not have to leave behind all your pagan ways of life. Some of them have got to go, but many of them you can hold onto.
You do not have to become a Jew.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Radically inclusive, revolutionary move. That is the basis of all further inclusion and diversification in the church. What's the theological reason for that? Now, most people don't get this, but if you participate in Christ and the power of the spirit, you are being lifted into a new reality.
It's the world above and the world that is coming, where God has acted to definitively wipe out all the problems that face us and gift us with an entirely new image. Now, this is radical stuff. How do I know it's true? Because the Holy Spirit does this, and the Holy Spirit is present amongst us in power and love.
That's the heart of Romans. Do not shift away from this gospel. It is the truth. If anyone comes and tries to tell you anything different, they are liars and deceivers. I got you saved there, Jared. Did you notice that?
Jared: Yeah, I felt it. I’ve been saved like 27 times, mostly at camps when I was a kid, so.
Doug: Yeah.
Your heart was strangely warm.
Jared: Yes.
Okay, so how, how then? I mean, what I keep hearing you say, uh, in, in various and sundry ways is this work is theological in the, in the broader sense that it is about who God is and, and then the practical things flow from that.
Doug: Yes. Yes.
Jared: And that's, that's really the heart of it. It's, so whatever we're gonna say about Romans in the particulars, it is, uh, it is theological in the sense of what kind of God are we dealing with here. And everything kind of flows from that.
Doug: Yep. You're exactly right. Good theology is practical.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Doug: All theology is ethical. Romans is ethical. You keep saying, well, you, you come back to the, ‘is Romans about salvation?’ Which means you're back to the Romans road. Which is, ‘I have a problem. What's God's solution?’ Uh, Paul's not writing to people who aren't saved.
He's not debating people who aren't saved. Right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: They're talking about the implications of that.
Pete: Well, can we focus on that a little bit more, Doug? Because you mentioned before the ethical outcome of this theology.
Doug: Yeah.
Pete: Which I presume you probably mean like the, the latter third of the letter, or maybe, maybe it's more than just that, but could you just riff on what are the ethical implications of the kind of God that God is, that Jesus shows us that God is?
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastically important question. And I think this is really simple, but I wonder if I've just been staring at my own books for too long. Um, what's happened, the gift of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is we’ve been brought into a family.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: A divine communion. Romans 8. We bear the image of the son.
And this is a family where persons are intimately connected to one another. The most important thing about them is their personhood is a relating personhood. Persons are relational. We get to know the father, which means straight away we can't know the father. If we don't know the son. We get to know the son.
He's not a son unless he has a father. Um, so we learn that persons are relational, which means we are not individuals and we're not a collective, we're a network or a community of relational persons relating in love. So the quality of our relating is always what matters. It matters less than the structures in the bodies that are making that relating possible.
How we relate is the key question, not what we relate over. And that's an ethical revolution.
It's an ethical revolution because if you're armed with that knowledge, you can go anywhere, any place, anytime, any context, and look at it and go, hey, I can affirm stuff here and I can also invite you to live in a more loving, constructive, and relational way.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And you'll not lose your identity.
Pete: Yeah. So that's the heart of it.
Doug: That’s the heart of it.
Pete: It sounds simple. Of course, it's not simple. It's excruciatingly difficult, but to, to love.
Doug: Yes, yes.
Pete: But how does Paul flesh that out in Romans? I mean, he doesn't just talk about love, he gives examples.
Doug: Romans 12
Pete: Yeah. Talk about that a little bit.
Doug: Love, love. Yeah. He sets it up and says the Holy Spirit has to do this. We need, uh, our minds to be transformed.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And then he says, love, let your love be sincere. And everything else that follows from that is an evocation of love, which, or Augustine, whom I don't always agree with, understood.
At the heart of Paul is the, um, position you might have heard of called Agape-ism.
Jared: Hmm.
Doug: Agape, uh, love, explains all the other ethics and ethical moves and virtues and holds them all together. So it's 1 Corinthians 13.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: It's always about love. Um, although your, your point is very well made, Peter, so I expand this through the Philippians.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Doug: 2:6-11, the Christ story. And I think when we, we gaze into love as Christ has shown us. Because we can't confuse this with our own definitions of love, with our own pop songs, with our own rom-coms. Okay? Don't go there. We, we need, we need Christ's love. Um, Jesus showed us that love is overflowing with grace and generosity.
It is implacably, resiliently, faithful. It is profoundly committed to restoration and reconciliation and peacemaking. It is also deeply committed to celebration and to joy. This is the sort of relationality that we're invited to join, and it's not something we manufacture for ourselves. It is literally opening the, opening the door in the back of the wardrobe and stepping into Narnia that's been there all the time.
Pete: So it's, what I'm hearing, I mean, I like this. This is very helpful. Um, that Romans is setting a vision for what reality can look like and not an owner's manual for how to get from point A to point Z.
Doug: No, no. It is pointing us towards the reality that informs us that we cannot see, but is the most important thing at work in our life.
Exactly. 100%, right. Yeah. And it's also saying there are people that will try and take that away from you.
Pete: Yeah.
Doug: That will rob you of that reality. Don't, don't be violent with them, but do not listen to them.
Jared: In light of that, as we, as we wrap up here, for people who have a hard time getting out of their own way, right?
They've been taught to read Romans in a particular way.
Doug: Yeah.
Jared: Are there certain things to look out for, certain ways to reengage this text in a different way?
Doug: Yeah. Great question. Um, it's not a systematic theology text, so you don't start in the beginning. Don't assume that Paul starts his argument in the beginning.
So, so start Romans, read it out of order. Read Romans 5, 6, 7, 8. Then read Romans 12, 13, 14, 15. Then read Romans 9-11, and then go back and read Romans 1-4.
Pete: Okay. Why? What does that do?
Doug: You'll get your assumptions lined up in the right way. That if, if you've really studied the text, you'll, you'll really know where Paul is coming from and you'll be able to see very clearly how the alternative reading of the text is, is, is gonna be more coherent.
Pete: Because if you start that book without knowing the big picture, that beginning, those first two and a half chapters or whatever, it's three and a half chapters.
Jared: Sets you on the wrong course.
Pete: Exactly. Yeah. It'll, it'll distort. It'll distort Paul.
Doug: Yeah. The whole thing.
Pete: Okay. That's a pretty serious thing.
Doug: Yeah. The whole thing. It's the long, and if only Paul had written a couple more paragraphs in 1 Corinthians. 'Cause then when they did the, the kind of churchy version of his letters and published them in order of length, 1Corinthians would've been first.
Jared: Mm.
Doug: And we would've started off with the cross and a God who goes down into the depths.
Jared: Yeah,
Doug: But what did we, what did we start off with? Romans 1, 2, 3. It's the worst possible place to start your journey into Paul. Jesus doesn't even get mentioned until a parenthesis in 2:16 where he does no work and he arrives finally on the scene in 3:22.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Pete: Yeah.
Doug: The damage has been done by then.
Jared: Thank you so much for, for coming on and, and helping to kind of debunk some of this and maybe set us on a different trajectory when we're reading Romans.
Doug: Oh, you're very welcome. Anytime.
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