Explanatory Notes: Romans 1:16-17

1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel...
This verse marks the transition out of the thanksgiving section and into the body of the letter of Romans proper. Romans 1:16-17 constitute the basic thesis of Romans, a general statement that is played out especially in the first eleven chapters. The conjunction "for" marks the transition in section. Paul is ready to preach to those at Rome. Why? Because the gospel holds the possibility of salvation for them.

The ancient world was an "honor-shame" culture, rather than a "guilt" culture such as most of the Western world today. Westerners tend to be individualists. We formulate our identities and our sense of self as individual entities. We "have it our way" at restaurants, who oblige us by holding the pickle or holding the lettuce. "Special orders don't upset us."

We date, sometimes for very long periods of time, because as highly differentiated individuals, it can take a while to figure out if we are going to be compatible with someone else for the rest of our lives. We also feel comparatively free to break up with our spouses if it doesn't work for us as individuals. We each decide as individuals what we believe, and we value the person who is true to their beliefs, even when everyone else disagrees.

We are introspective. We can look deep inside ourselves to ask why we feel the way we do and why we acted the way we did. We feel guilt--a sense of whether we have acted according to our individual values.

On the other hand, we do not feel shame, which is a devaluation of ourselves because we have not acted according to the values of the groups to which we belong. The biblical worlds were group cultures, not individualistic cultures like the Western world. Marriages could be arranged before a person was even born because a person's identity was largely fixed at birth. You were born male or female into a family with a certain status that belonged to a particular people group.

Unlike the modern, Western world, where we prize the tale of the "self-made man" or the "rags to riches" story, it was generally expected that a person would be born and die with the same basic status in life. If your father was a carpenter, the expectation was that you would likely be one too. Your identity was embedded in the groups to which you were born into and thus belonged.

Shame in this context is thus the sense that one has not lived up to the values of the groups that constitute your identity. When Paul says he is not ashamed of the gospel, he no doubt alludes to the fact that many Jews--one of the major groups that constituted his natural identity--would have seen the gospel as discordant with Jewish values. After all, "cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Gal. 3:*).

But Paul's value system and identity-defining group has changed. He is not ashamed of the gospel because in the conflict of his identity, the fact that he is "in Christ" has won out.

He is not ashamed of the gospel. We have already seen in 1:3 that this particular good news is "concerning His Son." It is the good news that Jesus is the Lord, Jesus is the promised king through whom God will bring His reign back to the earth.

... for it is the power of God for salvation, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
The good news entails the possibility of salvation. Salvation for Paul is primarily future oriented. It is about escaping the coming wrath of God on the Day of Judgment. Paul can speak of being saved in the present tense. Ephesians 2:8 even speaks of being saved in the past tense.

But Paul does not use salvation language literally in reference to something we escape now. There are things that he believes we escape now, like the power of Sin. But he does not use salvation language in this way. The power of the gospel for salvation is the power of Jesus Christ to rescue us from the coming visitation of God's judgment on the world.

This salvation came first to the Jews. Jesus came into the world as a child of Israel and the Messiah is of the Jews (Rom. 10:*). But essential for Paul's understanding of the gospel is that the Jew is not thereby one bit more worthy of God's salvation, even if they have a special place of honor in that kingdom. The gospel is also to the Greek, who here represents the entirety of the Gentiles, non-Jews.

1:17 For in it [the gospel], the righteousness of God is revealed...
The interpretation of the phrase "the righteousness of God" in recent times has a long and complicated history. The story starts with the Roman Catholic understanding of the phrase in the late Middle Ages, namely, as a reference to the justice of God as he distributes it to the world. The Latin Vulgate rendered the phrase as the iustitia Dei, and it was thus all to easy to understand the verse to say that the "justice" of God was revealed in the gospel, just as the next verse talks about the wrath of God being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.

Martin Luther recognized another possible way to take the phrase, namely, in reference to a righteousness from God, which is the way some translations have actually rendered the phrase (e.g., the New International Version). Does not Paul champion justification through faith in Romans, dikaioo being the verb "to justify" and dikaiosyne being the noun "righteousness"? Should we not then understand the "righteousness of God" to be none other than the righteousness God assigns to us on the basis of our faith rather than our works?

For Luther such righteousness was an "imputed" righteousness, for we are truly sinners. It is a legal fiction in which God considers us legally innocent even though we are in truth guilty. Some later (e.g., John Wesley) would argue that such righteousness is not only imputed but truly imparted through the Holy Spirit as well so that we can truly become blameless ethically as we walk in the Spirit.

However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940's triggered a re-examination of the phrase in the light of its Jewish background, and Romans scholarship has returned to the conclusion that whatever the phrase, "the righteousness of God" might mean exactly, it refers primarily at least in this verse to an aspect of God or His action rather than to justification in relation to humanity. Ernst Käsemann took "the righteousness of God" to mean something like the "justifying of God," which for him was God's action to set the whole cosmos right, to justify it.

If we read the phrase against the backdrop of the Old Testament and contemporary Jewish literature of the day, we end up seeing it as a reference to God's righteousness, which in the later part of Isaiah (40-66) appears regularly in parallel with the salvation of God. Isaiah thus tempts us to understand the phrase as God's propensity to save, especially His people, but now also the whole world. One scholar translates the phrase well when he thinks of it as God's "saving righteousness."

Recent days have seen a return to reading Jesus and Paul in their Jewish contexts. The result is an appropriate recognition of Israel as the starting point for understanding how Paul conceptualized the people of God. However, it is perhaps unwise to think of God's righteousness as His covenant faithfulness to Israel, with some highly developed theology of the Gentiles inclusion in Israel. It is not that we cannot find statements in Paul to support these elements of a reconstructed Pauline theology. It is only that those scholars who advocate this reconstruction probably have made a tidier system out of Paul's thought than Paul himself and thus they run the risk of skewing some of Paul's comments by their system.

... from faith [leading] to faith, as it is written, "The righteous person on the basis of faith will live."
The expression "from faith to faith" is variously interpreted. Given a similar grammatical expression in 2 Corinthians *, some have taken it something like "completely by faith" or as the NIV translates it "by faith from first to last." However, with the shift back to understanding the "righteousness of God" in terms of God's righteousness, perhaps most scholars see the phrase as a reference to a movement from God's faith, His righteous faithfulness, to the human response of faith. A smaller group of scholars sees the progression here from Jesus' faithfulness to our faith.

Paul then quotes Habakkuk 2:4, which is a foundational verse for him. We should understand Paul to be alluding to this verse every time he uses the expression, "from faith," or as we have translated it here, "on the basis of faith." The phrase is thus a shorthand way of referring to Paul's understanding of this verse, namely, as teaching that it is the person who is righteous on the basis of his or her faith who will live, who will be resurrected.

Some scholars further see in this verse an allusion to Jesus' faith, taking the phrase "the Righteous One" as a reference to the Messiah and thus a prophecy of Jesus' resurrection on the basis of his faith. This is certainly possible, although it is difficult to know on the basis of this verse alone. We would argue that Paul sees the justification of both humanity and Jesus as being on the basis of faith, drawing on 2 Corinthians 4:13 as a key to this underlying pattern of thought in Paul. Thus it is both the faith of Jesus and the faith of believers that has justified, Jesus with true innocence and believers because they are in the faith of the Son of God (Gal. 2:20).