3
The Gospel of God
Romans 1:1–17
Outline
- The Theme of Romans: What Is Romans About?
The Gospel regarding God’s Son (1:1–5)
The Gospel and the Righteousness of God (1:16–17)
–Not Ashamed of the Gospel
–The Power of God for the Salvation of Everyone Who Believes
–The Righteousness of God
- The Purpose of Romans: Why Romans?
Proposals Focusing on Paul’s Circumstances
Proposals Focusing on the Roman Church
- The Structure of Romans: How Does Romans Unfold?
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
- Identify several possibilities for the theme of Romans and point to evidence in the text in support of each view.
- Know what Paul means by “the righteousness of God” and how that phrase fits into his preaching of the gospel in Romans.
- Understand how the whole letter fits together as one long exposition of the gospel.
- Appreciate Paul’s purposes in writing this particular letter to the first-century Roman Christians.
- Apply insights from these first four points to your own reading of Romans so that you can better understand God’s purposes for us.
In the first two chapters we have surveyed some of the detailed questions surrounding the origin of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Now we are ready to put these details together into a big picture. To get all that God wants us to get out of Romans, we must read the letter as a whole. Too often we read the Bible merely in bits and pieces, and although God surely speaks to us through those bits and pieces, think how much more we could learn if we knew how they worked together as part of a larger act of communication. This is the perspective we are after in this chapter as we draw together the threads of our discussion to get a sense of what Romans as a whole is about.
The Theme of Romans: What Is Romans About?
As we saw in chapter 1, Romans has become a critical battleground in the war between a more individualist reading of Paul, inherited from the Reformation, and a more corporate reading, the dominant scholarly approach in our own day. Both perspectives, I argued, have something to teach us about Paul and about Romans. Paul is concerned to explain how God’s new work in Christ can integrate both Jews and gentiles into one new people. Critical as this theme is in Romans, however, it is not the dominant note. That note is sounded, I suggested, in the word “gospel,” which might also be translated “good news.” In Romans, Paul sets forth the good news of Jesus Christ. That good news is first of all a message directed to each one of us: God in Christ has made it possible to overcome the terrible and deadly power of sin and to enter into an intimate and eternal relationship with God. But the individuals who experience the power of the gospel belong to different ethnic groups—Jews and gentiles—and Romans has a lot to say about how the gospel relates to both these groups. In this section I want to pursue the issue of the theme of Romans by looking carefully at two key passages relating to this matter in the letter’s introduction: 1:1–5 and 1:16–17. As we look at these texts, we also will have an opportunity to note quickly some of the other significant themes in the letter.
The Gospel regarding God’s Son (1:1–5)
Some of what Paul says about himself in these opening verses is typical of his letters: he calls himself a “servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle” (v. 1). But, probably because he is writing to a church he neither founded nor visited, Paul gives details about the nature of his ministry that are unusual for his letter openings. These verses are often overlooked as readers skip over the preliminaries to get into the heart of the letter. But in these verses Paul makes five points that furnish important clues about what is to come in the letter.
First, Paul is “set apart for the gospel of God” (v. 1). Paul might be claiming that God appointed him from birth—as Jeremiah was (Jer. 1)—to serve the gospel. Or he might be thinking of his being “set apart” at the time of his vision on the road to Damascus, which was a call to ministry as well as to salvation. But in either case, I want to highlight Paul’s focus on the gospel. The word “gospel” has Old Testament roots, particularly in Isaiah, where “preaching good news” is associated with the day of salvation (see esp. Isa. 52:7, quoted in Rom. 10:15). “Gospel’’ can have an active sense of proclaiming good news, or it can have a more static nuance whereby it denotes the work of God accomplished in Christ as, in itself, the good news.
Model of first-century Rome (dalbera/Wikimedia Commons)
Second, this gospel was “promised beforehand through his [God’s] prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (v. 2). As in the overture to an opera, Paul continues in these opening verses to introduce notes that will become recurring motifs in the letter. The gospel can be the gospel “of God” only if it stands in continuity with the revelation of that same God in the Old Testament. Paul therefore repeatedly stresses in Romans (see 3:21; chaps. 4, 9–11) that God’s work in Christ for all people is exactly what he has promised from the beginning. The Old Testament and its law fit smoothly with the gospel in a single plan of God.
Third, this gospel is about God’s Son (vv. 3–4). Paul does not say much about the person of Christ in the body of Romans. Christology apparently was not an issue in the church at Rome, so Paul felt no need to address it. But we should not therefore conclude that Romans has nothing to say about Christology. Point after point in the letter assumes a certain view of Christ such as we find enunciated at length elsewhere in Paul’s writings. But we should not neglect what Paul says about Christ in these opening verses. They are governed by the introduction of Jesus as God’s Son (v. 3a). By calling Jesus God’s Son, Paul connects him with Old Testament predictions about a coming king, or messiah (see esp. 2 Sam. 7:14; cf. also Ps. 2:7). But the title also suggests Jesus’s unique and intimate relationship to the Father (see, e.g., Rom. 5:10; 8:3, 32).
After introducing Jesus as God’s Son, Paul describes him in two roughly parallel statements (vv. 3–4):
“as to his earthly life . . . a descendant of David”
“through the Spirit of holiness . . . appointed the Son of God in power”
The parallelism, which is much closer in the Greek than in English translation, has been explained in two basic ways. First, Paul might be describing two natures within Christ. Note the NJB translation: “in terms of human nature was born a descendant of David and who, in terms of the Spirit and of holiness, was designated Son of God in power.” As human, Jesus the Son is the Messiah, born in the line of David, to whose descendant God promised an everlasting kingdom (2 Sam. 7:14). But as divine (“Spirit of holiness”), Jesus is Son of God—a status declared to the world through his resurrection from the dead. But true as this might be, the “two natures” interpretation probably is not right. The phrase “human nature” in the NJB is a paraphrastic rendering of a Greek phrase that is literally translated “according to the flesh” (kata sarka). The exact significance of the word “flesh” in Paul is notoriously difficult to pin down. But “flesh,” especially when contrasted with the Spirit, as it is here (“Spirit of holiness”), connotes the weakness of human life before and outside of Christ. Sometimes, of course, this weakness takes the form of sin. But at other times the word has a more neutral meaning, indicating rather the “purely human” dimension of life (see, e.g., Rom. 8:3b). But in either case, “flesh” does not denote a “part” of the human being (“human nature”). In fact, the flesh-versus-Spirit contrast in Paul usually reflects his salvation-historical perspective (for more on this concept, see the next point). “Flesh” relates to the era before the coming of Christ, when sin reigned unopposed; “Spirit” attaches to the new era, which has dawned with the work of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit.
The point, then, is this: Paul’s typical flesh-versus-Spirit contrast suggests that he is contrasting not two natures of Christ but two stages in Christ’s existence. This idea is expressed in the NIV contrast that we quoted above. As God’s Son, Jesus came to earth as David’s descendant and accomplished the work of the Messiah; but after his resurrection, and through the work of the Holy Spirit, he entered into a new stage of existence, Son-of-God-in-power. This hyphenated phrase is a way of making the point that “in power” probably describes “Son of God” rather than the verb. And the Greek word Paul uses here (horizō) probably should be translated “appointed” (as it should in all seven other New Testament occurrences of the verb [Luke 22:22; Acts 2:23; 10:42; 11:29; 17:26, 31; Heb. 4:7]). Jesus, who has existed from eternity as Son of God, became Son-of-God-in-power when God raised him from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit to inaugurate the new era of redemption. Jesus now reigns over a kingdom in which redeemed men and women can experience the new power of the age to come.
Fourth, in arguing for a two-stage understanding of Paul’s christological statement in these verses, I have introduced the notion of salvation history. Contemporary scholars of Paul generally agree that Paul’s thinking and writing about Jesus and Christian experience are dominated by a certain way of conceiving God’s work in history drawn from his Jewish background. Jews in Paul’s day, especially those influenced by the apocalyptic movement, tended to divide the history of God’s work in the world into two distinct eras: the present age, dominated by sin and gentile oppression of Jews, and the age to come, when sin would be taken away and the Messiah would reign over a triumphant Israel. New Testament writers, as well as Jesus himself, adopted this scheme but modified it in light of the two separate comings of the Messiah. Jesus’s first coming inaugurates the new age of redemption without eradicating the present, evil age. At his second coming the present age will cease to be, while the new age, in an enhanced form, will remain. We use the term salvation history to denote this general scheme, according to which God’s salvation is accomplished in the world through a historical process divided into stages.
Interpreting specific expressions often requires that we set those expressions in a larger world of discourse. “Salvation history” is Paul’s world of discourse, and I will refer frequently to this overall framework to interpret and apply specific language in Romans. I introduce the matter here because it furnishes the appropriate context within which to understand the flesh-versus-Spirit contrast of verses 3–4. Within Paul’s salvation-historical scheme, “flesh” relates to the old age and “Spirit” to the new.
Fifth, Paul’s apostolic commission, he tells us in verse 5, is to “call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.” Paul’s call to minister to gentiles is well known. While Jews never were excluded from Paul’s apostolic sphere of service, God chose him to be the point man in bringing the good news of Christ to the gentiles. We therefore find Paul’s successful evangelistic campaign in southern Asia Minor to be the focus of controversy at the apostolic council (Acts 15), and Paul writes an impassioned letter to defend the law-free offer of the gospel to the gentiles (Galatians). We are offered the fruit of some of those struggles and controversies in this very letter, as Paul helps the Roman Christians—and us—to understand that the gospel is offered without the law and yet in continuity with the Old Testament.
But especially interesting in this verse is the way Paul presents his purpose in ministry: “the obedience that comes from faith.” The phrase is an important one in Romans because Paul, in a sense, frames the letter with it, coming back to it in his conclusion (16:26). Again the NIV translation reflects a decision: the Greek could more simply be translated “the obedience of faith” (so the ESV). The English preposition “of” (as the Greek genitive construction it translates) allows for several possible specific interpretations of the relationship between “obedience” and “faith.” Two are especially important: “the obedience that comes from faith” (NIV) and “the obedience that is faith.” The second interpretation takes “faith” to be an expansion of what “obedience” means. One obeys God by believing him and his Son. Support for this rendering comes from places in Paul’s writings where he seems to equate obedience and faith (e.g., Rom. 1:8; 10:16; 11:23, 30–31; 16:19). And one might argue that the book of Acts highlights Paul’s evangelistic ministry above all else. With the former rendering, from the NIV, the focus is more on the life of discipleship that should follow from genuine biblical faith. Paul would be suggesting that his mission is to exhort Christians to obey the Lord, whom they have believed, to live out their faith in everyday life. And Paul’s letters certainly manifest a concern for this life of obedience.
At the risk of trying to have my cake and eat it too, let me suggest that we avoid the extremes of each of these interpretations. Paul seems deliberately to have chosen a phrase that preserves a careful balance between his desire to awaken faith in non-Christians and his desire to stimulate obedience in believers. His mission is to call gentiles to a faith that carries with it the determination to obey the Lord, and to an obedience that is stimulated by fresh experiences of faith. The NIV “obedience that comes from faith” may convey this idea, but it is capable of being interpreted as a kind of two-stage experience: one first believes and then later obeys. For Paul, however, genuine Christian faith always carries with it, right from the beginning, the call for obedience. Paul calls on people to believe in the Lord Jesus, and calling Jesus “Lord” means that one is committed to doing what Jesus commands. Faith and obedience are two sides of the same coin. One cannot have true faith without obedience, nor can one truly obey without believing.
The Gospel and the Righteousness of God (1:16–17)
In verses 3–4, Paul connects the good news that he preaches with the person of Christ, descendant of David and risen Lord. As risen Lord, Jesus has entered into a new stage of “power” (dynamis). In verses 16–17, Paul explains the nature of that power. These verses function as the hinge between the letter’s introduction and its body. They introduce the theme of the argument that follows in the book and are therefore very important in understanding the letter as a whole. Paraphrased a bit, Paul’s argument unfolds in three steps:
- Paul is not ashamed of the gospel.
- Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, because the power of God for salvation is revealed in it (salvation that is available to everyone who believes, both Jew and Greek).
- The gospel has the power to save, because the righteousness of God is revealed in it (a righteousness based on faith, in agreement with Hab. 2:4).
Not Ashamed of the Gospel
Why does Paul begin this important paragraph with so defensive a statement? He might simply be using the literary device of litotes, whereby one uses an understated negative formulation to make a positive point (“I am not without some ability at basketball” = “I’m a pretty good basketball player”). But Paul might well intend to take a defensive stance here. As I noted above, Paul was God’s point man in bringing the good news to gentiles. As such, he was a very controversial figure. Loyal Jews and even some Jewish Christians considered him a traitor to his people, because, they believed, he had abandoned the law. Some radical gentile Christians thought he did not go far enough in shedding the trappings of his Jewish upbringing. And so Paul might suspect that rumors about his teaching—not always accurate or positive ones—were circulating in Rome. One of Paul’s purposes in Romans is to defend himself and, more importantly, the gospel he preaches from false accusations and malicious interpretations (see, e.g., 3:8).
The Power of God for the Salvation of Everyone Who Believes
When the good news about Jesus is preached, God’s own power is unleashed. That power is capable of “saving” anyone who believes. Two points about this salvation are especially important in assessing the argument of Romans that follows. First, this salvation is not only negative (saved from sin and death) but also positive (saved to restored fellowship with God). Second, this salvation is accomplished only when God has finished his work for us at the end of history. Paul usually does not use “save” and “salvation” in the sense of initial conversion (although see Rom. 8:24); rather, he applies these terms to the ultimate rescue from God’s wrath and deliverance into the eternal kingdom at the end of history (Rom. 5:9, 10; 13:11). The gospel and the power that it releases are intended not only to convert the sinner but also to transform that sinner and rescue him or her from every possible worldly and satanic threat.
We should not overlook the words that conclude verse 16: “everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” Here Paul sounds a note that will resound throughout the letter. The “everyone” motif is a critical subtheme of Romans. As a means of restoring the sinner’s relationship to God apart from the law, the gospel has a universal applicability. In a way not previously seen in salvation history, God offers salvation to the gentile as well as to the Jew. But we should note also the “first . . . then” part of Paul’s assertion. The inclusion of gentiles has not, Paul suggests, disenfranchised the Jew, or even pushed the Jews out of first place in God’s purposes and plans. The gospel is, after all, “the gospel of God . . . promised beforehand . . . in the Holy Scriptures” (1:1–2). It does not, indeed it cannot, take away the legitimate rights of the Jewish people granted to them by God himself in the Old Testament.
The Righteousness of God
The connecting word at the beginning of verse 17, “for” (gar), shows that the revelation of God’s righteousness in verse 17 is the basis for the power of God for salvation released in the good news (v. 16). But what is this “righteousness of God”? First, a comment on the English phrase. We encounter here another of Paul’s infamous and much-debated Greek genitive constructions (“obedience of faith” is also one of these). Our English “righteousness of God,” while not a literal rendering, preserves the ambiguity of the Greek phrase as a basis for our discussion. Second, in asking this question we get into a matter crucial to the interpretation of Romans, as this phrase (or equivalents to it) occur eight times in the letter (see also 3:5, 21, 22, 25, 26; 10:3 [twice]) and only once elsewhere in Paul’s writings (2 Cor. 5:21). Third, we also get into a matter that has been and continues to be a point of considerable controversy among scholars. The sidebar shows the location and usage of the phrase in Romans.1
Four main interpretations of the phrase should be considered: (1) the justice of God; (2) the faithfulness of God; (3) the status of righteousness given by God; (4) God’s act of putting people in the right. Each of these interpretations (with the possible exception of the third) has precedent in the Old Testament teaching about God’s righteousness, but I think the fourth comes closest to Paul’s intention here. As Luther recognized long ago, the revelation of God’s justice (the first interpretation) is hardly “good news” for sinful human beings. I think Paul does use the phrase with this meaning in 3:25, 26, but it does not fit the present context. Contemporary scholars rightly insist that Paul’s use of the phrase flows from the frequent Old Testament references to God’s righteousness. And those references, it is argued, come in the context of God’s covenant with Israel, meaning that “righteousness,” or “being in the right,” must be interpreted in light of those covenant obligations. For the Israelites, therefore, being in the right means obeying the covenant stipulations, the law. For God, on the other hand, being in the right means carrying out the commitments to Israel that he has expressed in the covenant. “Faithfulness” expresses this sense very well. This notion may be part of Paul’s meaning here, but I do not think that it expresses his full meaning. Paul goes on in verse 17 to make clear that this righteousness of God is attained only through faith, and it is hard to see how God’s faithfulness would be contingent on our faith.
This emphasis on faith is what has led to the popularity of the third interpretation: righteousness from God. Righteousness, on this reading, is the status of “right standing” that God gives to sinners when they believe. Again, I think Paul intends to include this notion in his expression, but I question whether it is broad enough to explain Paul’s language. How is it that this status of righteousness is revealed in the gospel? Moreover, this interpretation of God’s righteousness does not have strong Old Testament precedent. Yet Paul seems to assume here that his readers will know what he means when he uses the phrase, presumably because he builds on the Old Testament use of it. And, indeed, Paul claims in Romans 3:21 that this righteousness of God is attested by the Old Testament.
If we take this last issue as our starting point, our attention is drawn to several Old Testament passages in which it is predicted that God will manifest his “righteousness” in the last days. Note particularly Isaiah 46:13:
I am bringing my righteousness near,
it is not far away;
and my salvation will not be delayed.
I will grant salvation to Zion,
my splendor to Israel.
See also Isaiah 51:4–8:
Listen to me, my people;
hear me, my nation:
Instruction will go out from me;
my justice will become a light to the nations.
My righteousness draws near speedily,
my salvation is on the way,
and my arm will bring justice to the nations.
The islands will look to me
and wait in hope for my arm.
Lift up your eyes to the heavens,
look at the earth beneath;
the heavens will vanish like smoke,
the earth will wear out like a garment
and its inhabitants die like flies.
But my salvation will last forever,
my righteousness will never fail.
Hear me, you who know what is right,
you people who have taken my instruction to heart:
Do not fear the reproach of mere mortals
or be terrified by their insults.
For the moth will eat them up like a garment;
the worm will devour them like wool.
But my righteousness will last forever,
my salvation through all generations.
In these important prophetic texts God’s “righteousness” is another way of speaking of the salvation he plans to bring to his people in the last days. By putting things right again, God will vindicate himself and save his people, in faithfulness to his promises to them. This is the notion of God’s righteousness that Paul has in mind here (and in 3:21, 22; 10:3). The gospel brings salvation to people because it reveals God’s promised way of putting people into right relationship with himself. “God’s righteousness,” as Paul uses it here, implies God’s faithfulness to his promises, and it culminates in the status of “being in the right” when it is met with faith. But the idea is broader than either of these two, including the entire process by which God acts to put people into this saving relationship.
One final point about this “righteousness of God” needs to be made. As virtually all scholars acknowledge these days, this putting in the right that God is carrying out is a forensic act. That is, it does not mean that people are made right in a moral sense but that they are declared to be in the right in a judicial sense. In the gospel God acts first of all to rescue sinners from the condemnation they stand under because of sin and to declare them innocent before him of all those sins. This is what “God’s righteousness” involves and what the related idea of justification means. Moral righteousness, as Paul makes clear in Romans 6, inevitably must follow upon forensic righteousness. But the two are not the same, and the legal standing precedes the transformed lifestyle.
Paul concludes these verses with an emphasis typical of him and of the argument of Romans: faith. Many Jews probably believed that God would automatically bestow his righteousness on all Israel. But Paul makes clear that it is only those who believe—and all those who believe—who will experience God’s righteousness. This probably is what he intends to say in the debated phrase “out of faith for faith” (a literal rendering of the Greek). Some think that the phrase suggests a progress in faith, while others think that Paul is referring both to Christ’s faithfulness (the Greek word pistis can have this meaning) and to human faith. But the expression probably is emphatic, as the NIV recognizes: “faith from first to last.” And Paul reiterates the importance of faith with a quotation from Habakkuk 2:4. We might translate this quotation as “the righteous shall live by his faith” (ESV), but the argument of Romans suggests rather that we should translate it as “the one who is righteous by faith will live.” Life, eternal life, is granted to the person who has been declared righteous before God through his or her faith.
The Purpose of Romans: Why Romans?
We are now in a position to return to a question left unanswered in chapter 2: why Romans? Why, in other words, would Paul write what is arguably the most important theological document ever produced to a church that he had never visited? Since Paul says nothing definitive on this point in the letter, scholars have been free to speculate—and speculate they have!2 We can categorize the suggestions under two main headings.
Proposals Focusing on Paul’s Circumstances
In chapter 2 we discovered that Paul writes Romans as he is about to embark for Jerusalem, where he plans to deliver to the Jewish Christians a collection of money from gentile Christians. He will then proceed to Spain via Rome. We further noted that Paul hopes to receive some support from the Roman Christians for the work in Spain (15:24). Many scholars have seized on this last point in their explanation of the purpose of Romans. Paul writes Romans to introduce himself to the Roman church. And he does this at such length because he knows that false rumors about the gospel he preaches have reached them. He must defend himself against such charges if he hopes to enlist their support. Paul’s reference to this issue in the concluding part of the letter makes clear that a concern to solicit support for his Spanish mission is an important reason for his writing of this letter.3 But this purpose by itself does not adequately explain the particular choice of topics that we find in the letter. Some other purpose, or purposes, must be involved. One intriguing suggestion is that as he writes, Paul is dominated by his impending visit to Jerusalem. As 15:30–33 makes clear, Paul is deeply concerned about the prospects for that visit. So, it is suggested, Paul writes Romans as a kind of rehearsal of the speech he plans to make in Jerusalem.4 While it is unlikely that Paul would go to such effort in a practice speech, the proposal does have the merit of drawing our attention again to the issue of Jewish/gentile relationships that so marks the argument of Romans.
Proposals Focusing on the Roman Church
Paul usually writes his letters in order to deal with particular issues among the believers he is addressing. We can forget this when we read Romans, as we get caught up in the breathtaking development of grand theological truth. But Romans gives evidence of also being written, at least to some extent, to deal with issues in Rome. What might the issue in Rome have been? Romans 14:1–15:13 seems to furnish the best answer. Paul there rebukes the Roman believers for dividing into two parties and standing in judgment over one another. The issue, as I will explain more fully when we come to that text, has to do with the place of the Mosaic law in the Christian community. The “weak,” mainly Jewish Christians, insist on observing certain ritual requirements of the law; the “strong,” mainly gentile Christians, insist that all such rules are passé and mock the “weak” for insisting on them. A large number of contemporary scholars think that Paul writes Romans to confront this division within the church. The theology in chapters 1–11 is designed to provide the foundation for his general appeal in chapters 12–13 and his direct appeal for unity in 14:1–15:13.
Model of first-century Jerusalem (Berthold Werner/Wikimedia Commons)
Paul does, indeed, appear to be writing with a view to helping the Roman Christians regain their unity in the worship of the God they serve together. What becomes clear, then, is that Paul writes Romans with more than one purpose.5 He is both preparing for his own visit, when he will seek help for his Spanish mission, and seeking to heal the divisions among the Roman Christians. These two basic purposes share a common denominator: the missionary situation of Paul. As Romans 15:19–20 reveals, Paul has reached a significant stage in his missionary work. He is about to embark on a new work in Spain. He is on his way to Jerusalem with money that he hopes will bring some measure of reconciliation to Jew and gentile. And he writes to a church divided between Jew and gentile. He therefore writes about the gospel that he preaches. The Roman Christians need to understand the power of that gospel: it can both justify and transform the sinner. And they need to understand how that gospel, in bringing Jew and gentile together into one people of God, both continues the one plan of God set out in the Old Testament and inaugurates a new stage in that plan. The gospel in its salvation-historical context is the theme of Romans. Paul’s purpose in elaborating this theme is to help the Roman Christians understand and appreciate their situation in the flow of salvation history. And, because in Romans Paul is dealing with such basic and enduring theological issues, Romans transcends its time and place (as, of course, does all Scripture, in different ways) to speak to the church of every generation. As James Denney puts it,
Is it not manifest that when we give [the conditions under which Paul wrote] all the historical definiteness of which they are capable, there is something in them which rises above the casualness of time and place, something which might easily give the epistle not an accidental or occasional character, but the character of an exposition of principles?6
The Structure of Romans: How Does Romans Unfold?
How does this timeless, yet time-rooted, exposition of the gospel unfold? We will be looking at the specific turns of that argument as the book unfolds, but it helps in reading any book to have some idea of the lay of the land before plunging into the details.
At the outset we have to be careful about imposing our own neat structure on what is a very complex book. We sometimes seem to think that biblical books have to fall into a clear “Roman numeral I, point A, subpoint 1” kind of outline. But a glance at most of the letters we write reveals that this idea might grossly oversimplify the situation.7 Still, just because Paul is writing rather generally about the gospel without too much regard for specific issues, Romans unfolds with a certain internal logic of its own. Here are the chief points in that logic:
I. The letter opening (1:1–17)
A. Prescript (1:1–7)
B. Thanksgiving and occasion: Paul and the Romans (1:8–15)
C. The theme of the letter (1:16–17)
II. The heart of the gospel: justification by faith (1:18–4:25)
A. The universal reign of sin (1:18–3:20)
1. All persons are accountable to God for sin (1:18–32)
2. Jews are accountable to God for sin (2:1–3:8)
a. The Jews and the judgment of God (2:1–16)
b. The limitations of the covenant (2:17–29)
c. God’s faithfulness and the judgment of Jews (3:1–8)
3. The guilt of all humanity (3:9–20)
B. Justification by faith (3:21–4:25)
1. Justification and the righteousness of God (3:21–26)
2. By faith alone (3:27–4:25)
a. By faith alone: initial statement (3:27–31)
b. By faith alone: Abraham (4:1–25)
III. The assurance provided by the gospel: the hope of salvation (5:1–8:39)
A. The hope of glory (5:1–21)
1. From justification to salvation (5:1–11)
2. The reign of grace and life (5:12–21)
B. Freedom from bondage to sin (6:1–23)
1. “Dead to sin” through union with Christ (6:1–14)
2. Freed from sin’s power to serve righteousness (6:15–23)
C. Freedom from bondage to the law (7:1–25)
1. Released from the law, joined to Christ (7:1–6)
2. The history and experience of Jews under the law (7:7–25)
a. The coming of the law (7:7–12)
b. Life under the law (7:13–25)
D. Assurance of eternal life in the Spirit (8:1–30)
1. The Spirit of life (8:1–13)
2. The Spirit of adoption (8:14–17)
3. The Spirit of glory (8:18–30)
E. The believer’s security celebrated (8:31–39)
IV. The defense of the gospel: the problem of Israel (9:1–11:36)
A. Introduction: the tension between God’s promises and Israel’s plight (9:1–5)
B. Defining the promise (1): God’s sovereign election (9:6–29)
1. The Israel within Israel (9:6–13)
2. Objections answered: the freedom and purpose of God (9:14–23)
3. God’s calling of a new people: Israel and the gentiles (9:24–29)
C. Understanding Israel’s plight: Christ as the climax of salvation history (9:30–10:21)
1. Israel, the gentiles, and the righteousness of God (9:30–10:13)
2. Israel’s accountability (10:14–21)
D. Summary: Israel, the “elect,” and the “hardened” (11:1–10)
E. Defining the promise (2): the future of Israel (11:11–32)
1. God’s purpose in Israel’s rejection (11:11–15)
2. The interrelationship of Jews and gentiles: warning to gentiles (11:16–24)
3. The salvation of “all Israel” (11:25–32)
F. Conclusion: praise to God in light of his awesome plan (11:33–36)
V. The transforming power of the gospel: Christian conduct (12:1–15:13)
A. The heart of the matter: total transformation (12:1–2)
B. Humility and mutual service (12:3–8)
C. Love and its manifestations (12:9–21)
D. The Christian and secular rulers (13:1–7)
E. Love and the law (13:8–10)
F. Living in light of the day (13:11–14)
G. A plea for unity (14:1–15:13)
1. Do not condemn one another! (14:1–12)
2. Do not cause your brother or sister to stumble! (14:13–23)
3. Put other people first! (15:1–6)
4. Receive one another! (15:7–13)
VI. The letter closing (15:14–16:27)
A. Paul’s ministry and travel plans (15:14–33)
B. Greetings (16:1–16)
C. Closing remarks and doxology (16:17–27)