Justification by Faith in Romans
Paul's Epistle to the Romans is not the only treatment of the concept of justification in the New Testament -- Paul discusses the concept in other letters as well -- but it is perhaps the most extensive. That is because the concept of justification by faith is central to Paul's overall argument in the Epistle to the Romans, and is thus introduced early in the letter, and discussed throughout the text. But for the more crucial question of justification by faith, larger doctrinal questions hinge upon one single verse of Romans, 3:28. In the New International Version, this reads "For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law" (Rom 3:28). What would a full exegesis of this single verse entail? I hope by demonstrating the context of Paul's statement here within the larger argument of the Epistle to the Romans that we can come to a full exegetical understanding of the three crucial elements of this verse: not just the concept of justification itself, but also what Paul means by "faith" and "the works of the law" in the context of the larger issue of justification. By proceeding step-by-step with an analysis of these three concepts separately, we may finally reach a conclusion in which the synthesis of these individual exegeses into one final exegetical interpretation of the verse as a whole, and therefore about Paul's conception of justification by faith.
Definition
The first step towards a full exegesis of Romans 3:28 will be to undertake a definition of what precisely Paul means by "faith." This is where the fuller context of the Epistle to the Romans attains paramount importance in understanding the concept. Paul begins the letter carefully and earnestly, and extends his message openly to Jew and Gentile alike, most likely because (as John Murray in his commentary has observed) there was tension with the Jews in Rome at the time of the letter's composition yet Paul "had not founded nor had he yet visited the church at Rome" when he wrote the letter (Murray 1997, 1). However this openness may also be a way of offsetting the beginning of Paul's argument at Romans 1:18, where he turns to the classic preaching subject of God's righteous wrath at sinners. He begins with an account of the lapse of an entire community into sinfulness, where they "became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles" (Rom 1:18). Of course the "mortal human being" calls to mind the Greco-Roman pantheon, not only with its all-too-human gods like Bacchus or Priapus, but also with its deified Roman emperors: it is worth recollecting that the Jews had risen up against Rome when the emperor Caligula had demanded that they place a statue of him in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, while the "birds and animals and reptiles" clearly seem to indicate the ibis and jackal and crocodile gods of Pharaonic Egypt, the pantheon of Isis and Thoth. These would be the two most obvious forms of apostasy from Judaism at the time of Christ, apart from basic atheism. Although Paul's statement here has sometimes been misinterpreted as a call for Christian iconoclasm, it is more clearly meant to be a condemnation of apostasy: in this, Paul fits in perfectly with the history of Judaism as presented in the Old Testament tout court, when we recall Northrop Frye's memorable claim that the most constant narrative element of the Old Testament is that for "Israel….the spirit of apostasy appears to be remarkably consistent" and that generally in the Old Testament this results in a scenario where Israel "deserts its God, gets enslaved, cries to its god for deliverance, and a 'judge' is sent to deliver it" (Frye 58). Paul begins with description of a people fallen into Roman and Egyptian religious practices first, and thereafter they lapse into Roman and Egyptian sexual practices. And from thence it seems, by the end of Chapter 1 of Romans, Paul thinks that basically all moral worth gradually deserts these people, who have first abandoned God. Thus, the primary issue here is one of faith in God in the most basic sense -- the acceptance of the monotheistic God of the Old Testament, as opposed to the polytheistic pagan pantheons. The first error of the community Paul is describing at the...
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