Epistle to the Romans

← Encyclopedia

The Epistle to the Romans is the longest letter attributed to the apostle Paul and the most sustained statement of his thought, addressed to the Christian community at Rome around the late 50s of the first century. Unlike most of his correspondence, it was written to a church Paul had neither founded nor visited; the letter introduces him and his message ahead of a journey he hoped to make, and in doing so it lays out his theology at greater length than anywhere else.

Scholars count Romans among the seven letters whose Pauline authorship is not seriously disputed, which makes it a primary witness to the earliest Christian thinking — earlier than the gospels in their written form. Paul likely dictated it from Corinth; the closing chapter names Tertius as the scribe who took it down, and a long roster of greetings shows how widely the new movement had already spread among the households of the empire’s capital. The text was meant to be read aloud to a gathered congregation, not studied in private.

Its argument turns on a single problem: how a person is set right before God. Paul holds that no one, Jew or Gentile, achieves this by keeping the law, since all alike have fallen short; what reconciles the human being to God is faith in what God has done through Christ, received as a gift rather than earned. He calls this being justified, and he insists the principle was already at work in Abraham, who was reckoned righteous through trust before the law was given. Much of the letter then wrestles with what this means for Israel — whether God has abandoned the people of the covenant — and answers that the promises hold, the inclusion of the Gentiles being a turn within the same long story rather than a break from it. The final chapters move from doctrine to conduct: how those who hold this faith are to live, govern their conduct toward outsiders, and bear with one another’s scruples.

For the traditions that received it, Romans became something more than one letter among many. Augustine read a few of its verses at the moment he described as his conversion. Luther’s reading of its language of justification by faith stood near the center of the Reformation, and the phrase has divided Western Christianity ever since over what exactly Paul meant by it — whether faith excludes works absolutely, or whether the contrast is narrower than the Reformers took it to be. In the twentieth century a commentary on Romans by Karl Barth reopened the same questions for modern theology. The letter’s later history is in large part a history of its rereadings; each age that returned to it found its own argument waiting there.

What the text itself offers is compact and severe: a diagnosis of the human condition as bound to a power it cannot break on its own, and the claim that the break has come from outside it. Whether that claim is heard as good news or as a hard saying has tended to depend on the reader, and Paul seems to have known it.

→ Related: Epistle To The Ephesians · Epistle To The Philippians · First Epistle To Timothy