EngineeredTheology

What’s All This About Rethinking Paul is much like teaching someone that the earth revolves around the sun. It is going against tradition, and also against what we have learned to see at first glance with our eyes. It also is against the idea that we are at the center of it all. Christianity is not about me and my salvation, but about the work that God is doing. As we are piecing the puzzle together of how to interpret the bible, we need to be aware of the pieces we are leaving out. Much of the current ideas of Paul are made with puzzle pieces poorly fit together that are mearly echos of what he is really trying to say. The Protestant tradition was built on a framework of reading the bible fresh, despite tradition. We dishonor the reformers if we take what they said as a static truth.

Rules of Engagement We must be reading the scripture in its first century context, to understand what the words ment at the time. We also must read Paul as a whole, and interpret the passages as a piece of a whole continuous argument and train of thought. We are in trouble if our finished exegesis only relates tangentially to what Paul actually wrote.

First-Century Judiasm When Paul was writing Romans, Jews in general were not discussing how they might get into heaven. They saw themselves still in exile because God was righteous, and they had broken their covenant. They were awaiting the day (reading Danial 9 to try to figure out when it would be) when God would finally return and restore them. Righteous is “conformity within a norm” (64), and for God these are the norms in which “he himself has set up, in other words, the covenant” (64). The lawcourt implication of righteousness is important. If someone was deemed righteous in court, he would be in the right (innocent if the defendant, or in favor of the plantiff). The judgement is justification, and the result is now the person is righteous. Neither of these terms has anything to do with virtue specifically. For God an Israel, “the point of the covenant always was that God would bless the whole world through Abraham’s family” (67). God will be faithfull to that covenant (righteous) and save his people from their exile (which was again a righteous move as spelled out in the conditions of the covenant). What was discussed in first century Judiasm is how to keep the law in order to keep Israel’s end of the covenant (how Israel can be righteous).

Justification The meanings of words can grow beyond their original intent, but for words like justification, this can cause problems. It has grown into a word that encompasses the entirety of Christianity. The problem is that when people read back through the bible, it mixes up what the author was actually trying to say. Justice and righteousness are the same Greek and Hebrew word. They “denote the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor” (90). It is the status of a person that changes when the decree is made (in the right). “Justification makes someone righteous, just as the officiant at a wedding service might be said to make the couple husband and wife – a change of status” (91). It says nothing of their character; one could be righteous and immoral, or even guilty.
All of this, for Paul is wrapped up in “covenant”. The covenant is a shorthand for why God called Abraham, or really His plan to bring all of humanity back together and repair what was done in Eden. Paul’s soteriology is looking at God’s plan, which we can call the “covenant”. The problem with the “single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world” (covenant) is the Israel part – who had not been faithful to the covenant and needed a faithful Israelite through whom the single plan can proceed (the Messiah who is faithful). Because he represents the people, he can take upon himself the death they deserved. “The messiah is able to be the substitute because he is the representative” (106).

The rest of the book is working out these ideas in specific through the exegesis of the Pauline epistles – and are far too dense to summarize.