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§3 The Gospel: The Power of Salvation (Rom. 1:16–17)

These verses rise like a majestic summit of Paul’s gospel. This is not simply a high plateau of thought reflecting the terrain of what lies below, but a massif of bold and powerful words and ideas, each one like a shimmering peak. We must consider each aspect of this daring formulation, for, as all interpreters of Romans agree, these verses contain the heart of Paul’s understanding of salvation.

1:16–17 / I am not ashamed of the gospel, writes Paul (v. 16). The apostle had to be aware that a carpenter from Galilee posed problems as the savior of the world. In an earlier letter to Corinth he wrote, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.… But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are” (1 Cor. 1:23, 27–28). Verse 16 is the only place in the Pauline corpus (with the exception of 2 Tim. 1:12, 16) which mentions shame in connection with the gospel. In a place like Rome it took courage not to be ashamed of what must have seemed like an absurdity: that an unknown Jew who suffered a disgraceful death on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire was being proclaimed as God in human flesh!

But in a daring counteroffensive Paul calls the gospel the power of God. The epistle to Rome was written to a people who, like modern Americans, were conscious of their power. Ancient Rome needed no lessons in the meaning of power; indeed, Rome defined power. The Roman army controlled the better part of the Western world, the Roman navy plied and pacified the Mediterranean Sea, and Roman roads laced the patchwork of nations surrounding the Mediterranean and extending northward into Europe together into a united fabric of life. The Latin tongue would increasingly replace Greek as the mode of communication in the ancient world, and Rome’s currency measured the scale of values. Roman justice was the arbiter of what was right and wrong, who would live and die. The genius which made it possible was the Roman faculty for administration, symbolized by the raised eagle of the Roman standard.

In comparison with Rome’s self-evident power, the gospel of Jesus Christ must have been dismissed as something of little consequence. But the power of which Paul speaks is a different power. It is not the power of state, ideas, movements, technology, progress, or whatever. It is the power of God, and God’s power is a combination of his freedom and sovereignty to do what he wills to do. The power of God is expressed supremely in God’s way of dealing with the world, which is summed up in the gospel. The gospel, as we noted, is not a thing, but a person, Jesus Christ. The power of God does not compete with other powers in this world, nor can it be compared to them. The ways of God are not the ways of this world (Isa. 55:8–9).

This power in Greek is called dynamis, from which the English word “dynamite” is derived. But unlike the powers which so mesmerize our age—wealth, beauty, status, weaponry, winning, control—the power of God in Jesus Christ is a supernatural power. The power of God does not grow from the soil of worldly power, and thus it confronts the powers and values of this world as a paradox, indeed as an offense. It is a power whose instruments are not the great things of this world, but the weak things. It is strength in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), wealth in poverty (2 Cor. 8:9), life in death (Gal. 2:19–20), the Son of God being crucified as a common criminal (Phil. 2:6ff.). That which the world rejects God elects for his sovereign purposes (1 Cor. 1:18–31), so that what God ordains is solely indebted to God and not to this world. God’s power is thus the opposite of naked power. Power for its own sake is the sign of satanic power, power as brute force in and of itself, with no purpose other than unleashing itself and destroying everything around it—and finally itself—in its maddened heat.

God’s power, on the contrary, is power with a purpose, power for salvation. The noun sōtēria in Greek comes from the verb sōzein, which means to rescue or save. Jews, of course, were acquainted with God as savior. God had been their deliverer from Egypt, the superpower of the ancient Near East, and had rescued them from the threatening waters of the Red Sea. God had saved them from the hand of their enemies and delivered them from exile under Babylon. This much was clear to every Jew. But Paul never uses the word sōtēria with reference to rescue from temporal danger. Human oppressors and dangers must have seemed to him only symptoms of the ultimate forces of enslavement—sin, death, and Satan. It is for these, and especially for the human relationship with God, that Paul reserves the term salvation, for these are the final realities which either destroy or perfect the human soul.

Salvation for Paul has both a negative and a positive side. Negatively he understands it as a saving from the wrath and judgment of God (5:9). But salvation is more than the absence of inimical or menacing circumstances. Positively Paul understands salvation as a saving for the glory for which the entire created order longs (8:18–19, 30). The positive side of salvation is the more important, for it entails the restoration of the goodness and harmony which God originally created, apart from the rupture of sin. Salvation is thus a saving from sin and death, and a saving for eternal life (4:25). It is the only successful rescue operation which the fallen creation has ever been offered.

Two things always characterize salvation in Scripture: it is God’s saving initiative, and it is offered to sinners. The radical news about salvation is not only who performed it—God alone—but also to whom it is available. Paul’s answer, as startling as it is terse, is that salvation is for everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile (v. 16). The power of God in Jesus Christ is not for some and against others; salvation is not a matter of maneuvering oneself via nationality or good works or intentions into a favorable position with the deity. God’s power is not an arbitrary power but a creative power, constituted and executed for everyone who believes.

The universality of salvation is accentuated in three ways in verse 16. First, Paul inserts the pronoun everyone, which includes Jews as well as non-Jews (Gentiles). Second, to the Jew first emphasizes Jewish priority regarding salvation, although not Jewish jurisdiction over it. Salvation began with the Jews because they were chosen first, but it was not limited to them, and hence their priority in the scheme of salvation can not be understood as exclusiveness. Finally, the untranslatable Greek particle te implies a fundamental equality between Jews and Greeks. Paul will shortly remind his readers that all have sinned (3:23; 10:12), that there is no distinction between Jews and Greeks with regard to the need for salvation, and hence faith remains the only access to it.

The lifeline between God the rescuer and humanity the foundering victim is faith. Faith is often the object of misunderstanding. Some regard faith as a formula or creed, as a set of words (indeed, very true words) sufficient to save them. Others see faith as faithfulness, i.e., as something which human beings possess independently of the gospel, thus shifting the emphasis from what is believed or the act of believing to the believer. In an extreme form this results in the preposterous assertion that “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe it.”

For Paul, faith is distinct from all such ideas. Faith is always and only the human response to the gospel. Apart from the work of the cross there can be no faith. Faith is the response which God’s unmerited grace evokes from an individual, and it can best be defined as trust, belief, and commitment. Trust is a relational term. One does not trust in something but in someone, and in the NT the someone is Jesus Christ. Paul will discuss this posture of total dependence on God in the case of Abraham (ch. 4). But faith is more than active response. It is also a content of belief which depends on the character of God. Were it only response it would evaporate into subjectivism. But God has done something in the cross of Jesus Christ which is objectively true, apart from human participation and in spite of any response of it. This truth determines the destiny of individuals, nations, and the cosmos itself. Finally, faith is commitment. Commitment is the decision to live in the present according to the promises of the future. Commitment is the radical choice to entrust one’s destiny to God despite circumstances to the contrary. Faith is the corresponding human response to the divine initiative of righteousness. Righteousness and faith thus belong together. Where Paul broaches the subject of righteousness in Romans he turns to the vocabulary of faith; but where righteousness is absent (e.g., chs. 6–8), so too is the language of faith.

Thus, righteousness … is by faith from first to last (v. 17). The expression, faith from first to last, is an agreeable rendering of the Greek, which literally reads, “from faith to faith.” The saving activity of God occurs prior to human response and finds its correlative in faith. God’s righteousness both awakens faith and produces faith. Paul’s use of the present participle, everyone who believes (rather than an aorist participle which denotes completed action), denotes faith as an ongoing activity. Faith is less a quantum of something possessed than an orientation in which one participates actively and freely.

The Greek word dikaiosynē can be rendered by either “righteousness” or “justification.” The former word usually refers to the character and activity of God, whereas the latter usually refers to the justified condition of the believer. Context alone determines how it should be understood. In classical Greek, dikaiosynē usually meant ethical rightness or goodness. In the OT righteousness refers above all to God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Israel, an understanding reflected several times in Romans (3:3–5, 25; 9:6; 10:3; 15:8). But Paul’s typical usage of righteousness carries the sense of acquitting, or conferring a righteous status on someone. It contains the idea of transference or conversion, the essence of which is that God considers believers right with himself even though they are not yet morally good. The Christian life might be said to begin in a fiction, for when God declares a believer righteous the person is at the moment no better than he or she was before. But the fiction appears different from the divine perspective, for God’s declaring believers righteous through the death of Christ is grounded in a truth deeper than the human perspective can penetrate. God deals with humanity not by what it is, but by what it can be, indeed, what it will be through the work of Christ. Moreover, Paul says that God’s righteousness is revealed. The Greek construction (imperfect active indicative) means that righteousness is being revealed or unfolded in the gospel, thus underscoring its dynamic impact. Righteousness is therefore a new condition established by God, which bears fruit in new life, which is known as sanctification.

The concluding quotation, taken from Habakkuk 2:4, is better rendered, “The one who is justified by faith will live” (rather than the NIV, “The righteous will live by faith”). The idea is that God grants life to the person who first is made right with him by faith. Not works, but faith—defined as trust in God, commitment to God, and belief in God—is the only proper fulfillment of the law of God. This is the nucleus of Romans. The pattern of righteousness-faith-life in the Habakkuk quotation provides Paul with an overall thematic development of the epistle, in fact. In chapters 1–3 Paul will discuss the righteousness of God; in chapters 4–8 the meaning of faith, particularly in relation to sin (6:1–14), law (6:15–7:25), the Holy Spirit (8:1–39), and the salvation of Jews and Gentiles (9–11); and in chapters 12–16 the consequences of the new life for the church (12), government (13), and reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles (14–15).