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§36 Rome and Beyond: The Missionary Calling of the Apostle Paul (Rom. 15:14–33)

In the present section Paul returns to matters of personal interest which he broached at the beginning of the epistle (1:8–15). Romans 1:8–15 and 15:14–33 are the only two sections of the epistle which might be called autobiographical. Although they fall outside Paul’s main argument, they provide vital information about his reasons for writing. Both sections attest to the apostle’s longstanding desire to visit Rome (1:10, 13; 15:22–24, 28, 32) and to bring his readers a spiritual blessing (1:11–13; 15:29). Both bear witness to his commission as apostle to the Gentiles and to his desire to present them obedient in faith to God (1:5, 14; 15:15–17). And in both he presents himself united with and dependent on the prayers of believers in Rome (1:9–10; 15:30–31).

What stands before us is an eloquent testimony to the missionary impulse of Paul’s life, and to his sense of being apprehended by Christ in order to bring the redemptive message of the gospel to distant and disinherited Gentiles. Nevertheless, Paul must walk something of a tightrope at this point in the epistle. Considering that he has yet to set foot in Rome, has he been presumptuous in giving advice to the strong and weak in 14:1–15:13? Might his self-understanding as apostle to the Gentiles be viewed by the Romans as pretentious and ambitious? His upcoming trip to Rome—how should he explain it? If, as he states, he wanted “to preach the gospel where Christ was not known so that [he] would not be building on someone else’s foundation” (v. 20), why was he planning to visit Rome, which had already been evangelized? Might his epistle, in fact, be seen as an attempt to build on someone else’s foundation? In an opposite vein, might the Romans feel slighted if his road led not to Rome, but through it to Spain? And what contribution could Rome make to his Spanish mission, or might Paul be thought of as using Rome (financially, for example) for ulterior purposes? The waters of 15:14–33 may at first reading seem trouble free, but a closer look reveals a number of reefs and shoals lurking below the surface. Here as elsewhere Paul needed to interpret his mission pastorally in order to enlist understanding and support from those to whom it was addressed.

15:14 / The apostle Paul is commonly thought of as a theologian—perhaps a rather forbidding one. A theologian he was, but his first calling was to be a missionary pastor to the churches he founded. Both his missionary passion and pastoral devotion surface in an opening statement laden with emphasis, I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another. By goodness Paul is probably thinking not of ethics in general, but of a specific moral commitment to heal the breech between strong and weak, with knowledge of the gospel (e.g., 15:3) undergirding it. Considering the tensions that existed between Jews and Gentiles (e.g., chs. 9–11; 14–15), some readers may suspect Paul of being unduly optimistic in verse 14. Others may suspect him of flattery, and perhaps even of insincerity. Granted, Paul was a master of social propriety when he needed to be (see his appearance before Agrippa in Acts 26, his appeal to Philemon [Philem.], or his impression on captain and crew in Acts 27). The declaration of verse 14, however, is more than social decorum. It is quite literally a testimony to the priesthood of all believers and to the goodness and knowledge on which that priesthood depends.

15:15–16 / The apostle concedes that he has written … quite boldly on some points, by which he means his advice to the strong and weak in the foregoing section. Well might the Romans consider his words an intrusion into their affairs were such words not a result of the grace God gave him. Giving advice to others on what they should do in specific situations is a serious responsibility (if not a heady presumption). Paul would not have offered his advice were it not a consequence of God’s grace to him. If advice is nothing more than one person speaking to another, then well ought restraint or silence be observed; but where advice is prompted by grace and is thus more than human speech, there it has a higher responsibility to God and can be spoken quite boldly. If in his advice Paul treads on the limits of propriety, he quickly adds that it is only to remind you … again (v. 15) of that which the church everywhere teaches and takes for granted.

Verse 16 provides a window into the consciousness of Paul. God’s grace has enabled him to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles with the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Remarkably, Paul describes his commission to non-Jews in emphatically Jewish terms! Minister … priestly duty … an offering acceptable to God … sanctified—the language of temple sacrifice is applied to those excluded from the temple. This indicates rather indisputably that Paul considered his ministry to the Gentiles as fulfilling the commission of Israel. The promise that God would “bring all your brothers, from all the nations, to my holy mountain in Jerusalem as an offering to the Lord” (Isa. 66:20) had broken into the present. Eschatology was being realized in salvation history. Paul saw himself as a priest through whom the offering of the Gentiles was being brought before the Lord. This offering consisted not in holy things, such as cereal offerings, drink offerings, or animal sacrifice, but in holy persons “who were at one time disobedient to God” (11:30), but who now have been led “to obey God by what I have said and done” (v. 18).

15:17–19a / Paul could not have been unaware that such a calling posed a danger to his ego. It would have been tempting to seize the calling in Promethean fashion and pit himself against the God who gave it. It cannot be coincidental that Paul uses the word kauchēsis, “boasting” (NIV, glory) at this point, a word that often (e.g., 3:27) denotes arrogant pride against God. The apostle, however, refuses to arrogate glory to himself, but chooses rather to glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God (v. 17). Paul harbors no illusions of himself being the demiurge of salvation. He is simply its “minister” (v. 16) and its steward on Christ’s behalf. He will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through him in leading the Gentiles to obey God. He himself is not the source and power of signs and miracles but rather their vessel through the power of the Spirit. None of which is to belittle Paul’s role. He was awed by his commission to convert the Gentiles and by what God had done through him, but he would not cross the Rubicon that separates faith from megalomania. Dedicated to God’s mission, Paul sidestepped delusions of self-importance. His emphasis was always on what Christ has accomplished through me. Both his usefulness to God and his greatness in history are due to the fact that he did not confuse the servant of the mission with the Lord of the mission.

15:19b–21 / When the apostle stood before Agrippa with no defense but his faith and his chains, he recounted the Damascus road experience in these words: “So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven” (Acts 26:19). Verse 19 discloses the geographical extent to which Paul was obedient to that vision. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. As a statement of fact this verse raises rather considerable questions, for there is no reference in Acts (or anywhere else in Christian literature) to a Pauline mission to Illyricum (modern Serbia, Croatia, Albania). If the reference is meant to be inclusive, it may be, as one scholar suggests, that Paul evangelized the region from neighboring Macedonia when he revisited that province after his Ephesian ministry (Acts 20:1). But since by his own admission Paul did not evangelize in Judea (Gal. 1:18f.), it is possible, as Käsemann suggests, that he did not evangelize in Illyricum either, but that Jerusalem and Illyricum refer to the limits of Paul’s missionary activity, though not including them (Romans, pp. 394–95). But we cannot say for sure.

Equally curious is the impression that Paul has worked himself out of a job in those regions. All the way around … I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. Again, “There is no more place for me to work in these regions” (v. 23). This quite obviously cannot mean that Paul had preached everywhere and to everyone in those places. The ignorance of and opposition to his mission as recorded in Acts, let alone the physical impossibility of one person’s saturating several nations with the gospel, exclude a literal interpretation here. The key to these statements must be found in the apostle’s missionary consciousness. As a pioneer evangelist who desired to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, Paul determined his strategy, which was to establish Christianity in urban centers and to allow his converts to evangelize outlying areas. A classic example of this was his ministry in Ephesus, from which converts moved up the Lycus valley to plant churches in Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossae (Acts 19:8–10; Col. 1:7; 4:12–16). A nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary aspiration which hopes for every soul to hear the gospel in our generation will misunderstand Paul here. In comparison to the global dimensions of modern missions Paul’s vision must have seemed rather provincial. The expectation of the imminent return of Christ, which Paul shared (so far as we can tell) with most Christians of the time, forged his strategy, which was the maximum spread of the gospel in the minimum time allotted.

What emerges is a missionary ardor to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. At a practical level this resulted in a policy that avoided rivalry with other missionaries (cf. 1 Cor. 3:10). Some souls, perhaps, may have objected that in the epistle to Rome Paul was violating his own principle on both counts, since the gospel had already been preached there by others. Paul assures his readers, however, that he has no intention of ministering in Rome (v. 24), but only of passing through it to the west where Christ was not known. In the fourth servant hymn of Isaiah (52:15) Paul found a witness to his mission, which he quotes in verse 21. Him and hearing refer to the servant of Yahweh and his report, which Paul sees fulfilled in Jesus Christ and the gospel. It is this impulse, i.e., Christ and his gospel, which is the source and power of Paul’s commitment to proclaim the gospel to the least likely and farthest removed—the Gentiles.

15:22–23 / For years Paul had desired to visit Rome, but had been hindered from coming because of his labors in the eastern Mediterranean. But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, says Paul, the way is clear for the long-awaited visit. On the face of it, that is an astounding claim. As we noted at verse 19, the claim that there is no more place for me to work is surely tempered by the prospect of the imminent return of Christ. The nail of Christianity had been set in the east due to his missionary efforts, but it remained for others to drive home.

15:24 / Paul’s last frontier was Spain, the western-most limit of the Roman Empire. Exactly why he chose to evangelize Spain (as opposed to Gaul, for instance) we are not told. We know that Spain had an established Jewish population at the time, although how much of an attraction that would have been for the apostle to the Gentiles is a matter of debate. Spain’s network of roads promised an itinerant missionary access to the entire peninsula, but Paul can scarcely have chosen Spain simply because of its roads. Perhaps the word “around” (Gk. kyklō, v. 19) provides a clue. If we draw an arc from Jerusalem to Illyricum and extend it westward, it reaches Spain. If such an arc represented Paul’s missionary design, it may suggest that he hoped to cover the northern hemisphere of the Mediterranean, trusting that others would cover the southern hemisphere, and thus complete a full circle. A passing reference in 1 Clement 5:6 that Paul “was a herald both in the east and in the west” may lend credence to this view. Whatever the reason(s), Rome lay en route to his proposed Spanish mission, and Paul hoped to be received and assisted by believers in the capital as he reached westward.

Paul does not specify what form of assistance he hopes for. If his insistence that representatives from Gentile churches accompany him to deliver the Jerusalem collection is any indication, we might suppose that he hoped for representative missionaries (proficient in Latin?), rather than simply for financial assistance. But, in fact, Paul leaves his plans decidedly ambiguous, stating only that he hopes to have enjoyed your company for a while. At the very least, this is a tender admission of his need for spiritual nurture from Rome. Paul does not write as one who has arrived (Phil. 3:12). He too is part of the body of Christ, which means that his life is incomplete apart from other members of that body. He pays the Romans a great compliment in conveying that he stands in need of their company.

15:25–29 / Ironically, in the same breath in which he mentions Spain, he says he must first go to Jerusalem. Consider for a moment the range of Paul’s plans: he writes from Corinth to Rome, about a visit to Spain, with a trip to Jerusalem first. His plans reflect the tension between his allegiance to the mother church in the Jewish east and his missionary call to the Gentile west. The gospel did not present Paul with the option of serene detachment from the world. It made him increasingly vulnerable to the far-flung forces of his world. He had, in the words of Robert Frost, “promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

The purpose of the Jerusalem interlude was to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem (v. 26). This enterprise had occupied Paul greatly during the latter years of his third missionary journey. He made frequent reference to it in his letters to churches in Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia (1 Cor. 16:1; 2 Cor. 8:1ff.; 9:2, 12; also Acts 19:21; 20:22). Exactly why the believers in Jerusalem were poor we cannot say, although C. H. Dodd’s suggestion (Romans, p. 230) that their early experiment in economic communism (see Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–5:11) so divested the church of capital that when hard times hit it had nothing on which to fall back (e.g., Acts 11:27–30) is worth a second thought. Whatever the causes, Paul shows no interest in rehearsing them. His response was one of ministry, not analysis, endeavoring to unite the church in charity (lit., koinōnia), for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem (v. 26).

Many reasons have been advanced for Paul’s intentness on the contribution, but none is as compelling as his own explanation. If Gentiles have become the beneficiaries of the Jews’ spiritual blessings, then it is only proper, especially in time of need, that Gentiles share with them their material blessings. Paul speaks of a debt which Gentiles owe to Jews (v. 27). The financial contribution from the Gentiles is a vital installment in the making good of that debt, a tangible expression of both the unity and equality of Gentiles and Jews in the body of Christ. The church consists of Jews and Gentiles, as Paul has argued from the beginning, and both belong to it not because of their strengths but because of their indebtedness. Gentiles are indebted to the spiritual blessings of Israel, Israel is indebted to the material blessings of the Gentiles. The church consists of both the spiritual and the material, and both are in equal measure a ministry (Gk. leitourgein, v. 27) and service of the saints (v. 25). The contribution was, in fact, an object lesson of the strong bearing the weak, for which Paul argued in 14:1–15:13. Finally, we cannot discount the idea that in taking the offering to Jerusalem Paul saw himself as fulfilling his “priestly duty” of bringing the Gentiles as “an offering acceptable to God” (v. 16). His presentation of the financial offering in Jerusalem symbolized his much greater presentation of the Gentiles to God.

15:30–33 / After completing the relief offering, Paul hopes at last to be free to pursue his Spanish mission, stopping in Rome en route “in the full measure of the blessing of Christ” (vv. 28–29). Paul was under no illusions about latent hostility awaiting him in Jerusalem. Neither (apparently) was anyone else. He had already escaped one plot on his life there (Acts 9:29–30), and omens of yet another awaited him (Acts 20:22–25; 21:10–11). It is for good reason that Paul hopes to be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea (v. 31). In no uncertain terms he reckons with the possibility of losing his life at the hands of Jews who were opposed to the messiahship of Jesus. So ominous were impending events that in this, the only direct personal appeal to his readers in the epistle, he solicits their aid in his struggle by praying to God for me (v. 30). In going to Jerusalem Paul was quite literally risking his life for the unity and equality of Gentiles and Jews. In this too he needed prayer, not only that his life would be spared, but that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there.

Events in Jerusalem, of course, transpired quite differently from the hopes of verse 28. Paul fell victim to a misconceived plot and was nearly beaten to death in the temple precincts by an angry mob of Jews (Acts 21:17ff.). After an anxious rescue by Roman soldiers, he languished two years under as many governors in jail in Caesarea. Paul eventually reached Rome, but not as a pioneer missionary. He arrived as a prisoner in chains, and our chief source for these matters, the book of Acts, closes with his awaiting trial under Caesar in Rome.

Whether Paul ever made it to Spain we do not know. The NT leaves no record that he did. The traditional view is that Paul died at the hands of Nero shortly after the end of the narrative of Acts (ca. A.D. 62). There is, however, at least one brief though tantalizing piece of evidence that Paul may have fulfilled his goal of reaching Spain. The early record of 1 Clement (ca. A.D. 95) that Paul “taught righteousness to all the world” and gave his testimony “when he had reached the limits of the west” (5:7) is no negligible witness. It is, of course, possible to take “limits of the west” to mean Rome, but that is rendered less likely considering the fact that Clement wrote from Rome, which was the western limit of neither the empire nor Europe. What 1 Clement says implicitly, the Muratorian Canon (also from Rome, though a century later and of less value) says explicitly: “from the city (of Rome) [Paul] proceeded to Spain.” Whether Paul actually reached Spain is, in the final analysis, of no material consequence for our understanding of Romans. It is largely a point of historical curiosity. Nevertheless, 1 Clement and the Muratorian Canon caution us against foreclosing the question too hastily. Even if Paul fulfilled his goal of preaching “the gospel where Christ was not known” (in Spain), however, he must have been arrested again a few years later and executed in Rome, for tradition is unanimous that he died there sometime during the latter years of Nero’s reign (ca. A.D. 64–68).