Dear Church,
One of the books I’ve been using for the How to Read the Bible class this Lent is Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel by Douglas Campbell and Jon Depue. In this book, the authors take a look at how Paul’s argument in Romans is contingent, contextual, and consequential (3 C’s oh boy here we go!)
1. Contingent
Paul is writing a timely letter to the church in Rome. Jews and Gentiles were not getting along very well, partially due to their vastly different social, cultural, and religious conventions. An additional factor in their divisions was that Christianity in AD 55 was very much still “Judaism”. Meaning: this early on, the church was still a “denomination” or “sect” of Judaism and was still figuring out how to include Gentiles into the elect people of God. Paul wrote Romans to do theological and pastoral work to help Jews and Gentiles conceive of themselves as “one people”.
2. Contextual
Paul’s discourse in the letter is dealing with “inter-faith debates.” Paul spends the first part of the letter dialoguing with “a Teacher” with whom he disagrees. Their disagreement isn’t total, however; the dialogue partner that Paul engages has similar categories and theology, but like most inter-faith disagreements, there are places of significant divergence.
3. Consequential
How we read Romans has been determinative of our ethics and gospel for centuries. One way to test whether a reading of Scripture is true is to ask whether it leads us to knowledge (i.e. love) of Jesus Christ and into the quality of life that is characteristic of the age to come (what Scripture refers to as “eternal life”.) This is an important lens we must use if we are to decide if something is “true” or not: does it lead to truthful relationships with God and others?
Back to Beyond Justification: we as a church are co-hosting a live conversation with one of the authors on March 23rd, 7-9pm. If you’ve come to the class—or even if you haven’t—this will be a enriching time of conversation around the gospel Paul preached and how we tend to the contingency, context, and consequences of how we read Romans! You can register here. Hope many of you can join us!
God bless you all,
Fr. Matt
