Romans 23

No I am not about to write a few more chapters to correct(!!!!) Paul’s theology of the gospel. Rather I am going to make a few comments on the first two Scriptures that I was taught to use in ‘witnessing’ – Romans 3:23 and Romans 6:23

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Everyone has sinned… so tell me you have never done anything wrong? Tick box. The result is you will die (= eternal punishing), however there is a way out of that situation. Tick box. With a few nuances we might be able to run with that, but as always we are reducing this to something individualistic. Paul has been working with a ‘Jew first, then Greek’ framework (makes some sense of chs. 9-11 and the Israel / Gentile material there and the final instructions how to relate together when there could be divides over food issues and ‘one day above another’ approaches). ‘All’ have sinned in this context is not as simple as ‘you + me + every other individual’ but all in the contextual sense of whether you are part of the covenant people or the non-covenant people – ‘all / both groups have sinned’. Paul has made that clear a few verses earlier:

Both Jews and Greeks are under the power of sin (Rom 3:9).

After the typical Jewish way of collating a set of verses (almost proof-texting!!) he concludes with 3:23 and defines sin as ‘falling short of the glory of God’. Coming from the guilt-heavy background of Western Christendom sin has been defined in relation to law / doing wrong, but Paul lifts it to a new level and with his opening chapter of Romans where he says that ‘they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles’. He roots sin with language that is deeply set in creation – where humanity is in the ‘image’ of God and was given stewardship with regard to creation – now the exchange is incredible, it is to fall from human identity and calling, hence to fall short of the glory of God. This is why I went with sin as a failure to be human when I wrote ‘Humanising the Divine’. (For an excellent article on sin, iniquity and transgression try https://bibleproject.com/articles/sin-iniquity-and-transgression-in-the-bible/)

A failure to be human surely puts into context the many community laws in the Old Testament. The Torah being a guide as to how to live, how to be the social beings that we were created to be. It is much more than a set of laws that are standards that we break… and when we come to the NT we have an elevation of expectation – we move beyond (e.g.) not lying to ‘not leaving a falsehood’ with everything set in the context for ‘we are members of one another’. Community; ‘in Christ’; ‘body’…

The result / outcome of sin is ‘death’ (far more the outcome than the punishment… the inevitable result / wages). When we (corporate ‘we’) fall short of being (truly) human the result is death. We can make that personal, but I think Paul is focused on the transformation of the world so we should not lose sight of death at every level, including that of society and creation. By contrast to be in Christ is to receive life of another age (eternal) as a gift (charisma).

The gospel is responded to individually but the framework is corporate; a humanity who has fallen from who they were created to be into ‘one new humanity’, a new humanity where ‘both have been reconciled to God’ (Ephes. 2:15, 16 – where the words ‘create… humanity’ are used).

The invitation of the gospel to one and all is to receive eternal life, to be created anew, to live within this world as if there is an eternal world in the midst of this temporary world (and this does not mean a ‘world set for being burnt up’!)… to enter the path of being truly human. Reconciliation to God, to others, to creation and to self.