Romans 5.15:

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

“The doctrines of grace.” This phrase is one of those phrases that ring so deeply of Calvinism every time I hear of it. I remember one of my college roommates using the phrase to describe the sermons and theology of a preacher, with me getting the impression that “grace” is what these doctrines espouse. Grace had been treated as referring to a system of salvation that was essentially taken to be described by the Calvinist TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

This way of understanding grace has had the effect of turning grace and salvation within the Western Protestant mind as a theological system and process, even for those who do not embrace TULIP. Once grace was understood as a system and process, then it becomes the provenance of theologians who in their desire for systematicity and orderliness began to push towards understanding salvation as if it is an assembly line process, where people who are saved go through specific experiences in a specific order and that those who successfully go through the process of salvation say, think, feel, and do specific things that are litmus test either for their salvation for the spiritual growth. The theological impulse is to define grace and its significance with specificity and minimal ambiguity.

Part of the reason for this tendency to define grace such is perhaps explained by John Barclay in his work Paul and the Gift:

On occasion, Paul appears to offer some defining, or at least limiting, description of χάρις: if something is by χάρις, it is not “from works,” “otherwise χάρις would not be χάρις” (Rom 11:6; cf. 4:4-5; 1 Cor 15:9-10). In these cases, χάρις is χάρις because it is not something else. This definitional gesture has encouraged Paul’s interpreters to seek the essence of “grace,” to define its core or proper characteristics.¹

If one thinks of Paul’s letter to the Romans to convey a systematic exploration of the Gospel, rather than as I take it to be as a  less abstract philosophical reflection on the nature of the Gospel, then statements like Romans 11.6 may certainly inspire approaches to understanding grace as principally a set of ideas or doctrines about what God does in salvation. Yet, there are reasons we should perhaps rethink this whole way of thinking.

Barclay has been responsible for inducing new reflections on the concepts of gift and grace. Yet, even Barclay’s work may be guilty of treating “grace” as a set of ideas or beliefs. According to the count I have from my Kindle version of Paul and the Gift, he uses the phrase “theology of grace,” as if Paul is expounding a specific set of ideas in association with grace. Nevertheless, his conclusion on Paul’s theology grace does have some merit to it:

Paul’s notion of the incongruous Christ-gift was originally part of his missionary theology, developed for and from the Gentile mission at the pioneering stage of community formation. Since God’s incongruous grace dissolves former criteria of worth, it forms the basis for innovative groups of converts, by loosening their ties to pre-constituted norms and uniting them in their common faith in Christ. The starting point is the framing of the Christ-event as gift. Christ’s death “for our sins” (e.g., 1 Cor 15:3-4) is interpreted by Paul in the language of gift (God’s gift of his Son, or Christ’s gift of himself). The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are thus, for Paul, the focal point of divine beneficence: the witness of Scripture and the history and identity of Israel are interpreted in this light. Grace is discovered in an event, not in the general benevolence of God, and its focal expression lies not in creation nor in any other divine gift, but in the gift of Christ, which constitutes for Paul the Gift.²

The strength of Barclay’s conclusion is that he personalizes grace to the person of Jesus Christ. Yet, this personalization is not complete: grace refers to the “gift of Christ” in connection with the event of Christ’s death and resurrection as if the events of Jesus’ life something we make use of like an object. Yet, this manner of objectification is not so much exploitive as much as it is something to used to make a cognitive, rational conception that brings a theological coherence:

The Christ-gift thus provides the basic soteriological shape for Paul’s theology of calling and of sin — his configuration of the story of Israel and his representation of the plight of humanity. The integration of these theological matrices is Paul’s distinctive achievement.³

At the end of the day, however, grace, alternatively referred to as the Christ-gift, still seems to be understood by Barclay as fundamentally cognitive, as something that makes sense of Paul’s thinking, with a specific cognitive content being the understanding of the event of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Grace has a fundamental cognitive, theological shape in Barclay’s analysis. The mistake in Barclay’s analysis in part seems to be treating the concepts of grace and gift as functionally synonymous, with very little evident differentiation between the two. Yet, the term of grace was used more to characterize persons, particularly socially superior and wealthy patrons who gave help to socially inferior and needy clients. Grace was often used to describe the way privileged individuals came to the need of those who were less privileged. Typically, grace characterized a person, whereas gift describes the benefits given. In some occasions, grace could have been used as a metonym where the benefits conferred are referred to by the character that motivated the gift, but this would be a feature of pragmatics and not the primary, semantic meaning of the term grace. For a couple of analogies, grace is to gift as love is to a kiss and joy is to celebration: the linguistic concepts and meanings are related to each other but the former terms principally describe persons whereas the latter terms describe something that is done or given. By treating grace and gift more as functionally synonymous, rather than operating within a larger semantic domain, the effect of Barclay’s analysis is to think of grace as a ‘something’ that is then understood as a theological understanding.

Yet, this will not do. In Romans 5.15, χάρις (“grace”) is used in relation to two genitives:  τοῦ θεοῦ (“God”) and τῇ τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (“the one human Jesus Christ”). The terms are used to describe personal beings. Meanwhile, ἡ δωρεὰ (“the gift”) is said to be metaphorically located ἐν χάριτι (“in grace”). Similarly, we see a linguistic distinction between gift and grace in Romans 5.17 in the reception of τὴν περισσείαν τῆς χάριτος καὶ τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς δικαιοσύνης (“the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness”). While the two concepts are tightly related to each other, they are best seen to profile distinctly different things.

We see the prologue to the Gospel of John used grace similarly to Romans 5.15. In John 1.14, the Word and the only-begotten Son is referred to as πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας (“fullness of grace and truth”). Then, in 1.16, this same fullness of the Word is said to be received by others, which is described as χάριν ἀντὶ χάριτος (“grace upon grace.”) In both cases, grace is used in relation to Jesus as the Word, and more particularly to describe the way he is the visible representation/glory of His Father, which is to say that the grace of Jesus is also the grace of the Father (cf. grace used to describe both God and Jesus in Rom 5.15).

Yet, grace is also relational in that people receive from Jesus’ fullness in John 1.16, much as Paul talks about the reception of the abundance of grace and gift of righteousness in Romans 5.17. However, this receiving is not simply a receiving of an object or thing, but it is to receive a person. The grace of God and Jesus Christ is not something we obtain for ourselves, but it is the character of God and Jesus which motivates us to receive them in our lives along with the benefits such grace comes to provide.

To that end, grace is not itself about our salvation or how we get saved or any idea about those things, but about the One who as the one with power and status saves us who are weak and helpless (Rom 5.6) and the One who we receive because of this grace. What saves us is that we receive He who is full of grace to help us in our time of need. In the end, grace characterizes the way God relates to people as One who mercifully helps us in our weakness through the same grace that His only-begotten, incarnate Son also has. Thus, it makes sense to speak of the reign of grace (Rom. 5.21) as an alternative way of saying Jesus in Lord.

To Lose is to Win

They say:
“Better to have love and lost
than to never have loved at all”
Foolishness!
What do they know of love?
What do they know of loss?

Thrown against my will
without understanding
into a transparent cage
of triple-layered, sound-proof glass.
Then the memory of you
Sprang forth with your words.

“”Dream. Dream big!” you said.
But what sort of dreams
can be dreamt in this transparent cage?
A life devoid of warm touch,
all meaning feels as if
a distant, unobtainable wish.

Yet, I listened, dreaming of you:
Breaking through the glass
feeling your hand’s warmth on my cheek,
seeing your smile across the dinner table,
hearing your laugh over the movie hero,
holding you in my arms with a baby in yours.

Was it all but a misguided wish?
Is it a dream never to be?
Perhaps, but yet,
Another dream overtook me
A dream of a three-fold power
A three-fold power that broke this transparent cage.

Recalling our time together
When I felt so unsure,
so scared, so confused,
yet to care for you
to watch over you,
to give myself for you.

The memory I had,
the will of the Father,
the love of the Son,
the leading of the Spirit,
to feel a love afresh,
love for another.

They say,
“Better to have loved and lost,
than to never have loved at all.”
Foolishsness!
No love was lost. Love was found.
Even if I lose, I have won.

Romans 1.16:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

At the beginning of his preface to Romans, Martin Luther expresses what he believes to be the importance of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian’s while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well. The more one deals with it, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.¹

Similarly, John Calvin thought Romans was a presentation of the Gospel that was centered on justification as given in Romans 5:

The whole Epistle is so methodical, that even its very beginning is framed according to the rules of art. As contrivance appears in many parts, which shall be noticed as we proceed, so also especially in the way in which the main argument is deduced: for having begun with the proof of his Apostleship, he then comes to the Gospel with the view of recommending it; and as this necessarily draws with it the subject of faith, he glides into that, being led by the chain of words as by the hand: and thus he enters on the main subject of the whole Epistle justification by faith; in treating which he is engaged to the end of the fifth chapter.²

However, a problem has occurred as a result of treating Romans as an expression of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the diffusion of the idea that the Gospel is fundamentally logical/doctrinal in its content. Far from the Gospel being fundamentally story-driven (cf. 1 Cor. 15.3-8), the content of the Gospel has been understood to fit the content of Romans.

The idea that Romans is intended to be a presentation of the Gospel is evident among many scholars. F.F. Bruce takes Romans, along with Galatians, to be an explication on the “gospel of justification by faith.”⁴ Douglas Moo takes the gospel to be the theme of the letter.⁵ When we turn to the first sentence of Paul’s thesis in Romans 1.16, we observe Paul talk about the Gospel. It certainly seems reasonable to think that Romans is Paul’s presentation of the Gospel for the specific context of the Christians in Rome.

However, regarding Romans at the content of Paul’s Gospel assumptions has some problems. In the argument of Romans 1.18-8.39, Paul only explicitly uses the word εὐαγγέλιον once in Romans 2.16. There, Paul describes his Gospel as God’s judgment of the secret thoughts of all people through Jesus. That Paul feels the need to clarify the specific content in 2.16 is part of his Gospel suggests that Romans as a whole is not intended to be an explication of the Gospel, otherwise such a statement would have been superfluous and redundant.

As to Romans 1.16, the real critical question is how Paul uses ἐστιν that links Paul’s reference to the Gospel with the power of God. Is it intended to identify Paul’s Gospel as the pertain to the power of God as it content? Or, is Paul identifying the Gospel as the instrument of God’s power? This question is critical to assessing what Paul’s takes his letter to the Romans to be describing, as the power of God takes central place in Romans: Romans 6 and 8 are perhaps the clearest examples of how Paul gives priority to the way God’s power in Christ and through the Holy Spirit is at work in the life of believers. If Paul is describing the content of the Gospel, then the discussion on the theme of God’s power is Paul’s Gospel. If, on the other hand, Paul is describing the Gospel as the instrument of God’s power, then we are not necessarily getting a presentation of the central content of Paul’s proclamation.

While the differences are subtle, the implications are significant. If Romans is not “Gospel,” then how we understand the fundamental proclamation and message of the Christian faith dramatically differs from those presentations that justification by faith to be central to the heart of the Gospel. If Paul’s discussion on God’s power is intended to describe the way the Gospel has power, then we are getting a more reflective, if not even philosophical discussion about the Gospel.

There are reasons to consider that the content of Romans is to be understood in a philosophical nature. If Stanley Stowers is correct that Romans is protreptic rhetoric, then this species of rhetoric would fall under the convention of ancient philosophy. Yet, we may be able to observe that Paul’s letter functions more in an epistolary fashion than simply a regular epistle and rhetoric. The logical and methodological nature of Paul’s letter to the Romans fits with the conventions of philosophical letter writing, like that of Cicero and Seneca.⁶. Much of the content of Romans addresses themes common to ancient philosophy, such as the origins of human society and ordering (Romans 5.12-21), the nature of the passions (Romans 7), and an understanding of the cosmos (Romans 8.18-24).

To that end, Romans may be understood as a philosophical reflection on the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how God’s power is at work through believers in it. The difference between the Gospel and philosophical analysis may be taken to be analogous to the difference between art and the philosophical domain of aesthetics. One’s reflection on the nature of art and its evocative power is not itself the power of art, but it is pulling the veil behind the experience of art and digging into the dynamics at play. Art is not philosophy, though. Art is a concrete experience, whereas aesthetics is an abstracted and logical reflection on the nature of the concrete experience. In a similar manner, Romans may be taken to be a philosophical reflection on the Gospel consistent with the conventions of ancient philosophy, particularly as Judaism and ancient philosophy were commonly brought together in the 1st century AD.

Perhaps it is this philosophical nature of Romans that makes it appear so magisterial. Yet, the awe of Paul’s letter that has begotten deep reflection on it through the centuries need not control what we understand to be the central, fundamental proclamation of the Gospel. Too much energy has been spent trying to make the Gospel fit the content of Romans, with the unfortunate result is that the Gospel that it has been taken that Paul preached often looks very different from the portrayal we have of Jesus in the Gospels, which barely mentioned justification and even Paul’s own description of his proclamation in 1 Corinthians 15.3-8.

Instead, perhaps we have the beginnings of philosophical Christiana in Romans, with one important caveat: Paul’s “philosophical analysis” of the Gospel provides a greater place to the interpretation of story and Scripture as a source of authority, particularly in Romans 4, which differs dramatically from the way we understand philosophy today to start with reasoning as the highest authority of philosophy. However, to the extent that Israel’s story about God and the Scriptures were authoritative and important sources for philosophical reflection wouldn’t differ dramatically from the conventions of some Stoic philosophers to appeal to pagan mythology as containing the seeds of meaning for the philosophers to expound upon.

For Paul, the Gospel is the story of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension that will culminate in His eschatological judgment of the world. Instead of it being an explication of the Gospel, Romans may be better than to function to observe the way this Gospel has power in human history and the lives of believers. Thus, justification by faith would not be the Gospel, but it is rather more appropriately taken to be a reflection upon the active grace of God is at work in human lives through those who believe in the Gospel. The experience of justification, or even other part of the traditional ordo salutis such as sanctification, is not the Gospel, however. The Gospel is that Jesus came to live among us, was crucified and raised, and that He has thus become Lord of all creation.

Most theological anthropologies work with a basic, implicit assumption: that there are either two categories of people. Firstly, there are people known as sinners. Then, there are also the saints. While the category of sinners is inhabited by people who actually commit sins, the category of the saints can be variously understood between theological anthropologies as forensic, in terms of being regarded as a saint without concern for one’s behaviors in virtue of faith, or as a saint in terms of holy behaviors in one’s life. While any serious acceptance of sanctification in Paul’s letters would necessitate saints are such in virtue of saintly behavior, there exists a problem with theological anthropologies that embrace a qualitative, behavioral difference between sinners and saints. They set up a dualistic anthropology in which people are placed into the binary of one of two opposing categories. This leads to either one of two logical conclusions. Either (a) if one is not a saint, then one is a sinner or (b) one can be simultaneously a saint and a sinner (Luther’s simul justus et peccator).

While such a theological anthropology has a very powerful, persuasive appeal to many Christians as we as humans have a marked preference for parsimonious yet all-encompassing explanations, there is a problem; Paul’s letter to the Romans doesn’t readily fit into a binary system of categorizing people according to their ethical behaviors. On the one hand, Paul does draw a clear contrast between sin and righteousness, such as in Romans 3.20-21. Yet, on the other hand, it is by no means clear that Paul categorizes humans as being either “sinner” or “righteous.” In fact, Paul’s discourse in Romans seems to imply that there are multiple categories that people may be understood with reference to ethical and moral behavior.

Case in point, the example of the Gentile who has no Torah but does the things of the Torah in Romans 2.14-15 highlights the possibility that there are people who exist in between sinner and saint in Paul’s mind. Nothing suggests that this Gentile Paul describes is a Christian believer, because his thoughts alternate between accusing and defending him, whereas a person who has been justified by faith is someone who has a hope that allows them to stand with a confidence boast in God (Romans 5.1-11). This alternation indicates that this Gentile is neither simply a “sinner” nor blameless by being joined to Christ. Thus, it is not appropriate to describe him as the wicked are described in Romans 1.29-32. Paul implies that such a person may stand at God’s judgment as they do the things of the Torah, and thus would not be accurately described as a person who does not obey the truth that God brings wrath upon (Rom. 2.8). What is have in the example of Romans 2.14-15 is an example of a person who jams up any dualistic separating of the world into the righteous and the wicked.

I would put forward that Paul has in mind two different types of sinners. On the one hand, there are those people as described in Romans 1.18-32 whose lives stray in the very opposite direction of God. Such people are fit to be brought to death by God’s judgment because, as Paul describes in Romans 2.8, they are self-seeking and obey principles of wickedness other than the truth that God provides. Most likely, Paul is alluding to a characterization of the ungodly in Wisdom of Solomon 2:6-11:

Come, therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that exist,
and let us use the creatures hastily as in youth.
Let us be satiated with expensive wine and perfumes,
and let no blossom of air pass us by;
let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wilt.
Let none of us be without a share of our revelry;
let us leave everywhere signs of merriment,
because this is our portion and this is our lot.
Let us oppress a poor righteous person;
let us not spare a widow
or respect the ancient grey hairs of an old man;
but let our strength be the law of righteousness,
for what is weak shows itself to be useless.

Wisdom here characterizes the ungodly as engaging in a self-seeking form of reasoning that leads them to a “might makes right” ethical reasoning, the opposite of what God’s Torah commands. They rationalize a false sense of righteousness that makes them reject the truth that the Torah speaks to and instead replace the truth with a wicked form of reasoning.

In contrast to this, there is another type of figure in Romans: those who seek to obey God’s Torah, whether in the actual letter of the Torah or an implicit knowledge of the things of the Torah, but yet are not able to live in full integrity according to it. We have the aforementioned Gentile whose conscience alternates between accusation and defense. Then, we find in Romans 7.14-25 a Torah-observant Jew that is unable to stop doing the things that the Torah forbids. Nothing in Paul’s discourse suggests this figure is totally unable to ever do anything good at any point of time, as if they are entirely incapable of doing good, but rather Paul is impersonating someone who recognizes their moral weakness that leads them to do the very things they know they should not do. The language Paul uses to describe him is suggesting of a person who is enslaved against their will, a metaphor Paul uses in Romans 6, by having been taken captive by sin that inhabits the body (Rom. 7.23).

This highlights the fact that for Paul there are “sinners” of two types. The weak (cf. Rom 5.6) who find themselves enslaved to sin and unable to obey God and those who actively obey principles of wickedness. Of course, Paul does not distinguish between them in terms of being able to receive God’s grace, as even the ungodly can come to be justified by God (Rom 4.6) The importance of the distinction, however, is in terms of judgment. Paul says only the self-serving who obey wickedness will face God’s wrath. Meanwhile, while the one who is justified by faith will have confidence in sharing in God’s glory, the Gentile of Romans 2 who does the things of the Torah may be uncertain about themselves but they can yet be justified *at the eschatological judgment,* standing somewhere in uncertain limbo beforehand.

There are at least four implications when we connect Paul’s moral anthropology that distinguishes between these two types of “sinners” with his description of the apocalyptic judgment. First, there will be people who do not believe in Jesus who will stand as God’s judgment. Their lives will be of such a mixed character that their consciences may alternate between accusation and defense, but God is not going to cast out those who sought to do what is good, even if they were incapable of really giving their lives over to God’s instruction. Secondly, the benefit of following God in faith is that one can have a boast and confidence in God and share in the glory that is to be given. Third, God’s wrath is directed towards those whose lives are lived in diametric opposition to the truth of God, who explicitly live by different law and principles, not those who simply don’t live up to God’s glory. Finally, a great place for liminality is needed in our theological anthropologist that recognizes that that unbelievers as a lot should not be sweepingly labeled according to some broad base theory of human sin such as “total depravity” that focuses on describing the human sinful nature, as if there was a single essence or nature to people and their relation to sin,

1 John 4.17-21:

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sisterd whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisterse also.

Fear is the social currency of modern-day politics and society. We fear those people who seek to tear apart the order of our society, such as “terrorists,” “communists,” “rioters,” etc, and we fear those people who use their power to harm those under them, such as “dictators” and “abusers.” We fear those people who are unproductive and only take up resources and we fear those people who are greedy and hoard from others. We fear those who would take away our freedoms and we fear those who would use their freedom to bring harm to others, such as not following basic health guidelines in the COVID-19 world. If we look at so much of what motivates and drives politics in the present world, it is fear. While different people fear different possibilities with them usually setting them in opposition to those who fear other possibilities, the experience of fear is a pervasive phenomenon that media uses, if not exploits, with the result that we all feel a greater degree of insecurity in our world.

The truth is that fear is an incredibly useful psychological phenomenon that allows the integration, if not conformity, of various people and their behaviors into a larger, socially cohesive force. This isn’t as apparent in our present world because there are opposing social forces of fear that each have power, one force expressing the fears that are consistent with the spectrum of conservativism-nationalism-fascism and the other being consistent with progressivism-socialism-communism, that leads to perpetual gridlock and conflict that bogs down American politics and society, but in world history, there is usually one central source of power that expresses a set of fears that keep most of the people under their authority in line with often brutal effectiveness. This is at the heart of empire, where people, resources, territories, etc. are all “integrated” under a central authority who is believed to have the power to “protect” people from those fears, while also punishing those who would dare cross their authority. This is the situation that we have in the Roman Empire. While the Roman Empire was not brutal in the way that political regimes of the past few centuries have been, it was an effective agent of inculcating a sense of fear, both fear of violent forces that legitimate them being agents of the Pax Romana and a fear of punishment that would keep ost of those who would even harbor a thought of resisting Roman power at bay.

When we read John’s words about fear to the church in 1 John 4.17-21, he speaks of God’s future judgment that those who are perfected in love may face with boldness and confidence. Yet, such a day of judgment would no doubt have brought about fears that the Roman society would have inculcated, with the temptation to think that God’s judgment is likened to Roman power and judgment. Similarly, given the latent fears within the Roman empire, people would have existed in persistent aggression and competition with others as potential threats, such that even fellow Christians would come to have hatred and derision towards their fellow believers. While John is not directly addressing the effects of Roman power on people’s fears of God and their relationship to each other, we can certainly imagine how living in such a time would necessitate the need of a power of love that far exceeds the power of fear that had been given great authority. It is God’s love that forms people who live in such a world so as to live with confidence before God and love for each other.

Speaking personally, over the past couple of months I have experienced what feels like the providential leading of God to perfect my heart in love. Without going into details, I would see regular “coincidences” regarding actions I had taken or thoughts I had for that day on my phone and social media, on the radio, when I was out driving on the road, and when I went to church. Being well-informed in psychology, I am aware of the way our mind can be biased to see coincides and immediately attribute meaning to them, but it was happening with such regularity and consistency on a daily basis that at one point I had become a bit hypervigilant about the idea that someone had hacked my phone. Of course, the odds of such were incredibly low, but I had trouble arriving at other explanations until I recognized that these coincidences were happening even with things going on in my head that I never directly expressed or acted upon. Insofar as it was happening through my connections to the internet, perhaps the data-collection of various companies had become so good that it could indirectly detect things one is thinking about through other behaviors that have been found to be tangentially related in indirect ways. Yet, this was itself an unlikely explanation, which lead me to the third conclusion: that the love of God had providentially arranged things in such a way that I would be able to experience healing from past traumas in a way that no therapist, no pastor, no other person would have known enough to mend.

You see, at the heart of my trauma was a deep, pervasive sense of fear that eluded any clear explanation. In a very difficult time of my life, I was entirely unable to make any clear, coherent sense whatsoever of everything that was going on, to the point of reaching the point of an entire mental breakdown that eventually left with me with the symptoms of PTSD, including hypervigilance. The nature of trauma was such that I struggled in the months and years after the events to ever make any sense of what happened and there were occasional events that occurred that would signal to me that that situation was not resolved and that it could come back to harass me again. While I was able to suppress these fears and traumatic reactions when I needed to throughout the day, the nature of these traumas were so connected to personally significant parts of my life that it left me in perpetual fear about my future life and well-being. Even as I saw therapists and managed my the worst expressions of my anxieties, the damage that had been done was so deeply rooted that I developed a series of very latent, irrational fears that my hopes and dreams for life would never materialize and that people were looking for any excuse to discard me. With such deeply entrenched fears and anxieties, my deepest need in such a place was for clarity, to have some understanding of what was happening, to be treated with honesty and fairness, and to know that people would recognize that my thoughts and feelings actually mattered and should not be ignored. However, I constantly feared that my need for clarity, justice, and agency was not being respected. Even as I managed to control this anxiety in many instances, it was such a strong force in my life that it was impossible to entirely keep it at bay. I lacked the direct experiences of love that are so often pivotal in overcoming such fears. This was increasingly exacerbated by the way modern society peddles in fear, making me even more anxious about the irrationality and callousness of people. I have some training in psychology and even with that, I could not fully understand all that was happening to me. How much less could anyone else, except the God who sees and tests the heart.

It is my experience of these past couple of months that God has done what people did not and could not do, and even undoing some of the harm, intentional or unintentional, people have done, by providing for me a divinely-guided exposure therapy to my irrational fears. God, who knows the heart in a way no person can, has lovingly provided what I needed to heal from the anxiety and fear. God’s love perfects us in ways that can allow us to live more wholly and fully from a place of love. It is God who shows the poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn how to find liberation through hunger and thirsting for righteousness that in God’s love leads us to experiences that bring forth mercy, form our hearts to be pure with God’s purposes, and lead us down the pathways towards shalom, particularly in being one who brings shalom. No person could do not. Not even any specific spiritual practice on my own end could accomplish that. It is God’s love that we then recognize, receive, and respond to as He shows it that perfects us in love.

Romans 3.31:

Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

Matthew 5.17-20:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Psalm 119.9-16:

How can young people keep their way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
do not let me stray from your commandments.
I treasure your word in my heart,
so that I may not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O LORD;
teach me your statutes.
With my lips I declare
all the ordinances of your mouth.
I delight in the way of your decrees
as much as in all riches.
I will meditate on your precepts,
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your word.

As important as it was for the focus on salvation by faith to be brought to the forefront by the Protestant Reformation, one of the unfortunate outcomes of the Protestant Reformation was the subtle denigration of “works” as humanity’s effort to make oneself righteous before God. Paul’s discourse about “the works of the law,” or more appropriately “the works of the Torah,” was taken by Luther to be in regards to the futile effort of humanity to be righteous with God. As Luther states in his preface to Romans:

You must get used to the idea that it is one thing to do the works of the law and quite another to fulfill it.The works of the law are every thing that a person does or can do of his own free will and by his own powers to obey the law. But because in doing such works the heart abhors the law and yet is forced to obey it, the works are a total loss and are completely useless.

…

But to fulfill the law means to do its work eagerly, lovingly and freely, without the constraint of the law; it means to live well and in a manner pleasing to God, as though there were no law or punishment. It is the Holy Spirit, however, who puts such eagerness of unconstained love into the heart, as Paul says in chapter 5.

¹

For Luther, there are two ways one can “work,” by the law as an act of human free will and power, or without the law through the Holy Spirit. This leads the (stereotyped and false) impression that the Old Testament law and Judaism was all about human efforts to earn one’s salvation and that Jesus comes to provide a way to God that doesn’t require human merit. Consequently, God’s commandments in the law/Torah would be considered to be of relatively little value for the Christian, because we as believers have the Spirit.

There are at least three problems with this reading. Firstly, this reading emerges more so as a consequence of trying to connect specific words and phrases throughout Romans and the rest of Paul’s letters to other uses elsewhere to determine Paul’s meaning, while deprioritizing the flow of Paul’s argument. A read through Luther’s preface will show that he regularly jumps around Romans and makes a few comments on the various passages, without a critical inspection, and then makes a connection to and jumps to another passage. While such comparisons between different sections can certainly bear fruit when one is showing conceptual connections between different words and themes, we can only reliable determining the significance and usage of those words and themes by how they are used in the specific context. As a consequence, Luther’s understanding of the “works of the law” seems to explain Paul’s language, yet not all interpretations are correct because they offer a comprehensible explanation on the surface; something more needs to be discovered and dug into to text to really bring out the meaning of “works of the law/Torah.” Most pertinently, Paul declares that he upholds the Torah in Romans 3.31, which should make any attempt to regard the Torah itself as a hindrance to one’s status before God rendered exegetically and theological dubious.

Secondly, it diverges from the Gospel of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus, who said that He came not to abolish the Torah but to fulfill it (Mat. 5.17-20). Jesus teaching from the Torah and the oral traditions in Matthew 5.21-48 do not come across as “The Torah says one thing, but you don’t need it anymore.” Rather, Jesus demonstrates a different way of understanding the Torah as a guide towards the complete love of the Heavenly Father by the Torah guiding people deeper into their hearts in a way that the letter of Torah does not directly address, instead of finding the Torah commandments to be the end of one’s ethical responsibility and obligation. Luther’s reading of the law/Torah as a problem of human agency does not comport well with Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount who maintains the significance of the Torah.

Thirdly, understand the works of the Torah as human efforts to obey God devalues what the Old Testament testifies to about the purpose of the Torah. Perhaps one of the best explanations for the purpose of the is given in Psalm 119.9-16, where the person who follows God’s commands keeps their way pure. The Torah, far from simply a set of laws that God handed down that one were to follow or else one would be punished, were more like tour guides who showed people the safe pathways to explore life. There are many different ways to live life that our hearts can conceive of, but some of these take one down a path towards destruction. God’s Torah provides instruction in a way of life that protects one’s life when one reflects and mediates on them.

These three problems lead to a different way of understanding what Paul is saying about Torah: that the purpose of the Torah has been fundamentally misunderstood by many within Judaism. As Second Temple Judaism developed a series of halakhic applications of the Torah through various other rules and principles to prevent breaking the Torah, it was thought that diligence to not break God’s Torah would make them righteous people. However, what was not necessary in such a practice was to live by an active trust in God’s promises. A different way of living would be arrived at through using the Torah from a heart of faith. In Romans 3.27, Paul contrasts the Torah of works and the Torah of faith, with the latter being the basis for exclusion of boasting of social superiority. The one who comes to the Torah by faith recognizes their ultimate dependence upon God, much like the Psalmist in Psalm 119 recognizes his dependence upon God through the Torah. The “works of Torah” is better understood as the halakhic applications of the Torah, whereas the rightful use of the Torah recognizes it’s Spiritual origins from God (Rom. 7.14) and hears God’s promises and leading through the Torah. When used with God’s promises in view, the Torah can direct people about the ways of sin to avoid (Rom. 3.20, 7.7), which then points people in faith towards to God’s fulfillment of His promises in the revelation of His righteousness in Jesus Christ (cf. Gal. 3.23-24). Works of the Torah as the halakhic application of the Torah hinders recognizing God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ, as it places the emphasis on the purification of the person through what they do rather than in the sanctification of the person through the One to whom they trust and by whom they are redeemed.

Yet, for Paul, the Torah still retains moral and ethical value for believers and the body of Christ, particularly for Jewish believers (Rom. 8.4, Rom. 13.8-10; cf. 1 Cor. 14.34). As such, we can certainly imagine that the meditation upon God’s Instruction that the Psalms repeatedly extol (Psa. 1.2, 119.15-16) still has a place for believers. Such meditation with an eye towards God digs deeper into the hearts of people, making them attuned to the will and purposes of God that go deeper than the letter of the Torah to the deepest recesses of the heart. What is excluded, however, is using the Torah as the basis for building an ethical program that then gets used to establish one’s ethical superiority. One must make use of the Torah as instruction from God with God’s own righteousness in view, otherwise one is simply building a merely human ethical program (Rom. 10.3).

Thus, we can suggest that the value of the Torah and obedience to it for Paul was that it directs the mind and forms the heart in such a way that one can avoid the pitfalls of sin in one’s life. While ultimately the Torah itself was powerless to eradicate sin, it nevertheless functioned to bring to light those areas of life in need of God’s saving grace and redemption that emerge. While we as Christians don’t have to follow Torah, we can still consider God’s commandments to us to function similarly. God calls us to obedience, but when we find those places in our lives where obedience seems harder and we seem to be far from living according to God’s Word, it is in these places where we can appeal to Christ to bring us grace in our time of need to protect our hearts and minds from the pathways that could lead us off course. God’s commandments, both in the Torah and in the words of the New Testament, provide us one tool for those who seek God with their whole heart to keep one’s way pure. They don’t save and redeem from the power of sin, but through our meditation and attempts at obedience to them, we discover the places where the crucified Christ and the power of the Spirit can bring transformation and sanctification in our lives.

So, let us not look down on human agency to attempt to obey God through His word as somehow being foolish or misguided. Where it gets misguided is where one’s heart is focused solely on the commandments and not the God who promises and commands such that we falsely make the Christian life conditioned upon our own energy and capacity to obey successfully, rather than looking to God who gives strength to all of us who have been weakened by the powers of sin and death.

2 Thessalonians 2:13:

we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation by sanctification from Spirit and faith in the truth

Romans 12.1-2:

Therefore, I am appealing to you, brothers and sisters, through God’s compassion to present your bodies as sacrifices which are living, holy, and pleasing to God. Do not be comforming to this age, but be transforming for the renewal of your mind so that you may examine what the will of God is – good and pleasing and mature.

2 Corinthians 7.1-2:

Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God. Make room in your hearts for us; we have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one.

1 Thessalonians 4.1-7:

Finally, brothers and sisters,a we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you know how to control your own body in holiness and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one wrong or exploit a brother or sister in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, just as we have already told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness.

Sanctification. Often treated as the lesser brother in salvation to justification in the Protestant Reformation, in the past couple of weeks, I have made the argument that sanctification is foundational to Paul’s understanding of salvation. In 2 Thessalonians 2.13, we get the most explicit affirmation of this, where salvation is spoken of occurring by salvation, alongside faith. As he portrays it in 2 Thessalonians, there is no salvation without sanctification.

Interestingly, Paul makes no mentioned of justification in that passage in 2 Thessalonians, but instead ‘truth’ (ἀλήθεια) in 2 Thessalonians 2.10-13 semantically functions in an ethical sense in contrast to wickedness and unrighteousness. In a similar fashion, truth functions in an ethical fashion in Romans 1.18 and 2.8 when Paul describes God’s judgment on human wickedness. Yet, for Paul, faith is more than just faith in some ideas or propositions, but it is faith s directed ultimately towards the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If “faith in the truth” is synonymous with how Paul talks about faith elsewhere in his epistles, then this leads to a particular conclusion: faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus is of serious moral implications. This is strongly implied by Romans 10.10, where faith is said to result in righteousness, if one does not automatically assume righteousness is understood here forensically but that it is rather a quality of the heart with which one believes. However, Paul makes it painstakingly clear in Romans 6, where the union with Christ’s death corresponds to freedom from sin in one’s life. Without going further here, there is no clear reason to think that Paul conceives of justification as something that occurs independently of sanctification. Instead, justification is grounded upon the ethical truth and power that the death and resurrection of Jesus has on a believer.

As I have previously observed, in Romans, Paul connects the death of Jesus Christ with people’s moral status and sanctification, whereas justification is connected to having life and resurrection. This becomes evident in Romans 12.1, where people who offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, which can be understood as participation with Christ’s death, are called holy. The death of Christ sanctifies. This accords with the theology of the preacher of Hebrews, who talks about Christ’s death as enabling Him to purify and sanctify believers:

Hebrews 9.13-14:

For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!

Hebrews 9.22:

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

Hebrews 10.10:

And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

The preacher of Hebrews speaks of the blood and body of Christ as bringing about purification and sanctification. The one time he mentions forgiveness, it is mentioned alongside purification, with the recognition that it is the purification that is the condition for forgiveness, much as the blood of the sacrifices in Old Testament were used to cleanse what it was applied to. The significance of the death of Christ is understood primarily in ethical terms of sanctification. We see it similarly said in 1 John 1.7. The one time we see justification connected to blood in Romans 5.9, we don’t get an expanded explanation of how the blood justifies, but it seems to be a restatement of Romans 3.24-25. Yet, in Romans 6.6-7, the freedom from sin by our crucifixion with Christ is the basis for one’s justification apart from sin. In other words, it is reasonable to suggest that for Paul, the sanctifying power of Christ’s blood is the basis for being justified through His blood.

If, then, Paul and the New Testament’s understood of Christ’s atoning death is primarily understood through the lens of the moral transformation/purification/sanctification, then there is a corresponding shift to how we understand what the purpose of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In Protestant circles, it has been usually understood to be the way God saves sinners from the judgment and hell that people’s sins merit; justification is the solution to the problem of judgment. However, a shift to prioritizing sanctification as what the Gospel brings would alter the way we understood the problem that the Gospel solves. I would put forward that the Gospel of Jesus Christ solves the problem of human blindness and resistance to God’s righteous vision for human life that enables people to see the truly good life and live this out with others. The problem for Paul according to Romans is that the world is mired in sin such that widespread injustice and wickedness is being perpetrated that God is going to stand in judgment. In a sanctification-centric vision of the Gospel, the crucified and resurrected Savior provides the way in which people become free from involuntary enslavement to sin that the world was condemned to through Adam so that they can then live in a newness of life that shuns the evils being witnessed in the Roman world around.

Reading Romans 12.1-2 as a summary statement about the holiness that comes from living a life crucified with Christ, then there is a transformation that allows people to discern God’s good will. Far from Romans 12.1-2 being some ethical implications of the Gospel of justification proposed at the beginning of Paul’s letter, it is a concise exhortation expressing Paul’s vision of what happens to believers when they accept the Gospel he preaches. The holiness that comes with one’s union with Christ enables people to see and know God’s will. Eyes are opened.

What our eyes are opened to isn’t simply to some sterile sense of “morality” about the do’s and dont’s of behaviors. Rather, something much more sweeping and significant is at stake: social holiness. As John Wesley observed, “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.” One can not be holy about from the way one relates to other people, both as individuals, as groups, and as a society. In 2 Corinthians 7.1-2 and 1 Thessalonians 4.1-7, sanctification is spoken of in regards to people’s relations and behaviors with others. As our lives are cleansed from the desires of the flesh so that our bodies and lives are used for holy purposes, people’s relations with each other become transformed. Yet, this transformation is more than just simply “doing what is good” but it is eye-opening; it allows people to comprehend God’s righteous vision for human life that has been brought forward through Jesus Christ. To believe in the truth of the crucified-and-resurrected Savior is to bring light to people’s spiritual eyes, allowing them to see themselves and other people in a new light.

How much is this real Gospel needed in our present day, where many people who parade the name Christ not only disregard other people, but actively justify behaviors and policies that cause harm to others, whether it be resisting basic precautions for Coronavirus or standing against our African-American brothers and sisters who are struggling for justice. Is it because they understood the Gospel to primarily be about their justification that they then feel they can justify living in such a way that risks bringing harm to others and can justify endorsing social practices and political policies that keep others perpetually down? As people are awakened by the sanctifying, moral transforming power of the crucified Savior, they can be raised to live in the newness of life that will stand at the judgment and would become much-needed salt and light in an often spoiling and dark society.

Without sanctification, there is no justification. With sanctification, we can come to comprehend God’s righteous vision and live it out.

Romans 6.23:

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Hell is the deserved punishment for our sins. Such an idea has been deeply implicit with evangelicalism: there is a future judgment that we will all face that no one will stand at based upon their works that will send them to eternal punishment, therefore they will need to be judged by Christ’s imputed righteousness at the judgment to avoid the punishment. Undergirding this picture of God is a God of the law (not Torah/Instruction) who metes out punishment for infractions, with (spiritual) death being the one penalty for all sin. While many evangelicals may not pragmatically act out this idea, recognizing God’s grace and mercy towards people in their sins, there is still this fundamental theological presupposition of a punitive God that is then conjoined to idea that God is merciful, which leads mercy to be defined by the not meting out what is “deserved” rather than mercy as compassion towards people in their weaknesses and struggles.

One of the passages that has been marshaled in support of this punitive portrayal of God is Romans 6.23. A favorite for use in evangelizing people, the phrase “the wages of sin is death” has often been understand to refer to the just penalty that God gives. Douglas Moo that Paul in this phrase “implies that the penalty sin exacts is merited.”¹ The contrast between ὀψώνιον (wages) and χάρισμα (gift) is taken to suggest that the idea of merit is central to Paul’s understanding about God’s response to sin.

However, the weakness of this interpretation is that Paul is not speaking in a forensic tone in Romans 6.15-23. The idea of a judicial judgment against sin is an outsider to Paul’s discourse. Rather, Paul’s language is much more pragmatic and consequentialist. Do the things you used to do and the outcome is death; be sanctified and enslaved to God, you get ongoing life (Rom. 6.21-22). Looking further back to Romans 5.12-21, Paul is contrasting two rival “imperial rules” between the sin ushered in by Adam and righteousness brought for by Christ that continues to be implied with the power language of enslavement in Romans 6. With that interpretive frame, ὀψώνιον is better understood to refer to the way that sin as a ruling power gives to those who live under its reign, much as a king would pay their soldiers. While in Paul’s theology, this outcome ultimately comes down to God’s judgment, the metaphor is not being used with a forensic frame in mind. It isn’t merit that Paul has in mind, but simply the outcome.

Those who give it to the urges of sin as a power are going to receive the outcome of their actions. Paul is not intending this, however, to be any and everyone who commits an individual act of sin. Instead, Paul has already mentioned the type of people who will face death as an outcome in Romans 1.28-32:

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled (πεπληρωμένους) with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full (μεστοὺς) of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice (πράσσοντες) such things are fit (ἄξιοι) to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

Here, Paul gives a common vice list of behaviors that define some persons in the Gentile world. Paul’s language here does not describe people who once coveting something or one time went against their parents. Paul’s language is direct towards those whose lives are defined by these behaviors. They are filled with, full of, and practicing such sins. It is these people that Paul says are fitting for death. Many translations render ἄξιοι in Rom. 1.32 as either “deserving” or “worthy,” suggesting there is a notion of merit in the background. However, it is more likely that ἄξιοι is used to describe the outcomes of death their lives are being prepared for death based upon the excessive evil that defines their lives, that they are formed by their lifestyle to face death and judgment.² Their own wickedness had lead them to suppress the truth about God and his creative power (Rom. 1.18,22) the one who gives the gift of life, and so by refusing the truth of the life-giver, their life has become formed in such a way that their outcome will become death.

The reason they will face such an outcome and judgment? Paul doesn’t say it was because they broke God’s laws and rules. Rather, Paul describes God’s universal judgment this way:

Romans 2.5-11:

But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality

Those persons who are being prepared for God’s judgment are not described as disobeying God. It is much more severe than that. They are (1) people who are concerned about themselves and (2) having given themselves into service and obedience to a different principle that God’s truth. They aren’t the people who fall short of God’s standards, but the people who show no regard for what is good. Paul characterizes such figures as being wholly unconcerned about the truth of God.

So, by the time Paul reaches Romans 6.23, he has already described a vision of death and judgment in the letter. What Paul is not saying is that everyone is going to go to hell because of any and every sin they committed until Jesus comes along and gets people out of the jam. Rather, Paul is casting forward the image of two different rulers one can submit oneself to, sin and righteousness, and the one who you let rule you will form you. Suppress the truth and let sin rule, then it will form one to be worthy of death; let righteousness reign, then one is living out from the gift of life that will not be shaken but will remain at the judgment as those who patiently do good. While sin is a power at work in every person such that they are enslaved to prior to freedom in Christ, not every person willingly obeys its dictates (Romans 7.14-25).

With this in mind, the idea of merit is not in the background. Paul’s usage of the language of grace is not a way of describing people’s lack of merit. Grace is, rather, God’s help in people’s need amidst their weakness (Rom. 5.6-8) in order to resist and overcoming this imperializing force that if obeyed will lead one to death. The result of this grace is that Christ makes many people righteous (Rom. 5.19), which in Romans 6 is understood as people’s death to sin, enslavement to God, and sanctification.

With this vision in mind, compassion for the weak is at the heart of God’s revelation of His righteousness in Jesus Christ. God’s grace and mercy is not about giving to people different from what they ‘deserve,’ but it is about seeing people’s struggles in their weaknesses and providing the way out so that they can successfully overcome the ravaging powers of sin and death. God is not having to be restrained from punishing sinners, as if God is incredibly angry at them, but God so deeply loves them and wants them to come into something much better.

The more we move away from a “merit” reading of Romans, the more we will be freed to see the principle concern for PAul’s understanding of God’s revelation of righteousness is that it pertains to sanctification and formation, not punishment and forgiveness of punishment.

1 Corinthians 9.24-27:

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I wear down my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

Over the past few months, I have endeavored to lose weight. From starting about three months ago, I lost about 25 pounds, although my weight loss was partly held back by a car wreck and shoulder surgery. My goal to become healthier and come as close to the athletic fitness I had over a decade ago as I can is rooted in a desire to bring a bit more healthy order to my life. As my struggles with PTSD was a partial contributor to an increase in body weight, I progressively lost more and more energy, and with that, motivation. While I could complete the tasks I knew to do, I was regularly devoid of energy and motivation. As I have lost weight, I notice a slowly increasing energy level over the long run. However, as I lost weight, I experienced many of the unpleasantries that come with dieting and exercise, such as hunger pains, cravings for specific goods that go unsatisfied, and aches from working out. Such experience makes salient to me that the physical fitness of one’s body is tightly interconnected with our mental life in a circular fashion. In other words, we really can’t separate the mind from the body as has historically been done in the West in the past few centuries.

When Paul uses the metaphor of athletic exercise to describe his own self-discipline, we may often be inclined to regard Paul’s approach as somehow ‘spiritual’ or ‘mental.’ Yet, Paul is very explicit that he is not simply disciplining himself mentally/spiritually to be in relationship to God, but that he is disciplining the body. His goal is to bring it into subjection to his mind, so that it does what he wishes. By contrast, in Romans 714-19, Paul speaks of the personified, but probably not autobiographical, “I” who experiences his flesh being in control of his actions rather than his mind. In Paul’s mind, one’s relationship and submission to God is irreducibly contingent upon one’s relation to one’s body. Does a person have control of the body and its desires or does the flesh and its desires have control of the person? As Paul goes on to describe in 1 Corinthians 10, the people of Israel were mysteriously partakers in Christ but yet their desires, which the flesh regularly serves as a source for according to Paul, were for evil and lead them to fall under God’s judgment.

To be clear, Paul is not describing the ability of the body to endure contests of physical endurance, speed, and strength as many athletes train for. Yet, there is a relationship between the body and serving the Lord, a relationship that the Corinthians Paul is writing to have seemed to miss in lieu of a focus on a Stoic-like wisdom that prioritizes knowledge and reason lead many of them to regard the body as peripheral to one’s faith. While not yet a form of gnosticism, the Corinthian blend of Stoicism and Christianity likely prefigured early gnosticism through the blending of the Stoic ethical indifference to many bodily matters that is combined with a Christian sense of God’s impending judgment that will destroy the body. So, when Paul speaks of discipline his body in 1 Corinthians 9, this isn’t just some throw-away line of inspiration meant to encourage people to view themselves like they are in an athletic contest. Paul is trying to make a critical point: the Corinthians’ response and faithfulness to God, that is their holiness and sanctification, is crucially connected to the way they relate to their body.

The body is central to understanding 1 Corinthians. When Paul says that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6.19), this is expressing a central, critical idea that dominates almost all of Paul’s letter. This goes beyond simply one’s direct relations to one’s own body, but includes even the way believers treated the bodies of other as part of the body of Christ, failure in which brought duscipline so as not to be condemned with the world (1 Cor 11.27-32)., and perhaps even the Israelites of the Exodus that Paul mentioned in the previous chapter. Such a focus on the body is important to hear the message that Paul has about God’s redemption in the letter.

Exodus 17.1-7:

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Deuteronomy 6.16:

Do not put the LORD your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.

Matthew 4.5-7:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

Judges 6.36-40:

Then Gideon said to God, “In order to see whether you will deliver Israel by my hand, as you have said, I am going to lay a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will deliver Israel by my hand, as you have said.” And it was so. When he rose early next morning and squeezed the fleece, he wrung enough dew from the fleece to fill a bowl with water. Then Gideon said to God, “Do not let your anger burn against me, let me speak one more time; let me, please, make trial with the fleece just once more; let it be dry only on the fleece, and on all the ground let there be dew.” And God did so that night. It was dry on the fleece only, and on all the ground there was dew.

Isaiah 7.10-17

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. Then Isaiah said: “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. The LORD will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria.”

Matthew 12.38-42:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here!

Psalm 34.4-8:

I sought the LORD, and he answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
Look to him, and be radiant;
so your faces shall never be ashamed.
This poor soul cried, and was heard by the LORD,
and was saved from every trouble.
The angel of the LORD encamps
around those who fear him, and delivers them.
O taste and see that the LORD is good;
happy are those who take refuge in him.

Does God want us to ask for God to demonstrate Himself or not? Does God want people to put him to a test or not? On the one hand, we have Deuteronomy 6.16 which calls against testing God, which Jesus quotes when tempted by the devil. On the other hand, God fulfills the request of the Israelites as Massah, Gideon’s multiple requests for confirmation, and even offers Ahaz any sign he requests. It seems that the Scriptures don’t speak with a simple formula on the nature of seeking God to offers signs and validate His trustworthiness.

Perhaps an explanation can be given by understanding the nature of trust and how it builds. According to Roy J. Lewicki there are two types of trust: calculus-based trust (CBT) and identification-based trust (IBT).¹ CBT is usually the first stage in building trust that is based upon rewards and punishment, where doing good is rewarded and violating trust is disciplined. We can broaden this further to incorporate the implicit expectations that needless and unjustified pain and harm is not inflicted a party. In short, CBT is based upon the specific outcomes that come about and how they match our expectations and desires. If things go according to what is established and expected, both in rewards and punishments, trust will grow as people can anticipate that what people say and do can be relied upon. However, eventually, CBT may lead to IBT, where people trust “based on identification with the other’s desires and intentions.” As trust based upon specific outcomes according to explicit and implicit expectations is fostered, trust moves towards a deeper trust based upon the other person. In short, the fulfillment expectations and desires that are uncertain at the early phase are tested by the outcomes. As they are increasingly validated, these expectations and desires become implicitly assumed by the parties, leading to a deeper trust that each person is concerned for the well-being of the other. (There is more that can be said here about the role of clear communication in building the expectations and inviting the outcomes that ground trust, but that spans beyond the focus of this post).

For instance, a dating couple initially builds a trust based upon positive exchanges with each other according to what each person says. At this point, there is a calculus based trust based upon showing interest, arriving at planned dates, treated each other with respect, making each other feel good, etc. As the relation and trust build, they move towards implicitly trusting people’s words, intentions, and desires that allow them to have a trust based upon identifying with each other. For another example, a student newly arrives at a school, but they are uncertain about what to expect while there. As they find a positive educational experience and find what they are told and informed of is generally reliable, their trust with the school often builds to an identification with the school. This is why, for instance, so many colleges have alumni who identify with their college sports teams, as their time as a student built their implicit trust and identification with the school.

Now, often times, some people may be inclined to assume an identification based trust with people, that their words, intentions, and desires are worthy of trust and largely skip the calculus-based phase of trust-building. People who makes friends easily are often these types. Couples who develop their relationships fast may be like this. Sometimes, this is based upon people’s trusting nature and sometimes this is based upon having a common sense of identity and interests. Other people are more reticent to trust and have to work through the calculus-based phase of trust-building before they begin to identify with other parties. Perhaps they have been hurt in the past or they are not sure what another person or party is like due to not sharing a common identity. Then, there are people whose trust is as far as their eyes can see in the moment; their relationships are almost permanently stuck in an “what have you done for me lately” that expects other people to always prove their trustworthiness, even after they have demonstrated it again and again. Permanently stuck in calculus based trust, such people never seem to move to identify with the other party and implicitly trust them. Finally, there are those who are not even open to trusting to any degree, but they will always be skeptical and critical. We can look at these four types of people as quick to trust, cautious to trust, capricious trust, and untrusting.

While we often categorize people in simple, binary categories of trusting and untrusting, the truth is that most people tend to be somewhere in the middle between cautious and capricious, with fewer people being quick to trust and untrusting. Yet, we often pass judgment on people for being untrusting when they are actually in the wait-and-see approach towards the other party. The truth is that trust is a complex attitude that is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but that in most relationships, there is a need to establish, or repair, the basis of trust before trust deepens.

We can apply these four ways of trusting to God. Some people are quick to trust God. Whether it is one time where God showed up, or even just hearing and accepting the word of God, they trust without needing any demonstration and confirmation. Sometimes, however, there are people who are slower to trust in God but they are willing to trust. Gideon is an example of this, wanting to make sure that the word he has received from the Lord is genuinely from Him. He is reticent to trust, but when God demonstrates His intentions according to the request and expectations of Gideon, Gideon moves forward with the call from God. On the other hand, the Israelites do not develop trust, even as God shows up and demonstrates Himself again and again. The prohibition of testing God in Deuteronomy 6.16 serves as a reminder to not follow the persistently untrusting attitude that the Israelites in the wilderness demonstrated, but they always expect God to act anytime there is the slightest threat, even as God demonstrates time and time again His faithfulness to protect the people He called and lead out of Egypt; their trust in very capricious. Finally, the scribes and Pharisees may be considered the untrusting types, who are utterly skeptical of Jesus and His Messianic claims.

From this perspective, God is all too willing to demonstrate His faithfulness to those who are open to trusting Him. Psalm 34 calls for people to make requests of God and then to discover that God is good, rather than just simply assume it. Sometimes the demonstration requires people to wait upon God, but the Scriptures testify to God’s willingness to demonstrate His faithfulness, particularly when He makes a difficult call upon the person. The problem comes when people’s capriciousness and disdainful skepticism steps in; people who will not trust and people whose trust is like a quickly disappearing mist are spoken of negatively in the Scriptures. Sometimes, people may needlessly go down the path of expecting confirmation from God when they are not in difficult times, which can lead people down the route towards a capricious trust, which may stand at the heart of why Jesus refuses the temptation of the devil. Other times, they will never be satisfied with God and will always find criticism and a reason to be dissatisfied and utterly skeptical. God will leave people who are so deeply hardened to God’s goodness will remain in such a state, leaving only a sign that will require them to believe their own sin to be convinced, such as the resurrection of Jesus demonstrating the sin and hardness of heart of the scribes and Pharisees.

In Christian circles, we are often inclined to categorize people’s trust, or the lack thereof, in God in binary, all-or-nothing categories, where anything short of 100% is unbelief or unfaith. However, the truth is that trust in God is something that grows for most of us because God is a God who loves to show His faithfulness to those who are willing to trust and come to a deeper relationship with Him. Note that Jesus says that faith even the size of mustard seed can lead to the moving of mountains, as it isn’t the strength of faith that is necessary for God to demonstrate His faithfulness, but only that there is an openness to faith.

Of course, we need to distinguish between wanting God to be faithful to our own expectations versus seeking to trust God’s promises, calling, and will. Many people may treat faith in prayer to require anything any type of person may ask of God. However, God’s promises in prayer is directed towards His disciples, who have been learning from Jesus and growing to trust Him, and so their requests are those type of things that would be in line with the will of God; they have delighted themselves in the Lord who gives them the words of life and truth and it is to them that have been formed by the Lord who will receive the desires of their heart (Psa. 37.3-4), which is ultimately geared towards the love that Jesus demonstrates and teaches and the Spirit is cultivating in them. In other words, those who are willing to trust God in His character will see signs of God’s faithfulness. It isn’t those who ‘trust’ God in terms of some personal agenda or expectation that has not been brought to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and transformed by the work of the Spirit. In other words, not everything we label faith/trust towards God is the type of faith and trust that the Scriptures testify to. Furthermore, God’s faithfulness may be demonstrated in ways that may not always accord with the way we want God to demonstrate. Trusting the Lord is about trusting the person of God and not remaining in a calculus-based trust of God giving specific, expected outcomes. While throughout the Scriptures, God will act in response to specific requests and pleas, the goal of the relationship between God and His people is a more general trust in God. So, just because certain things we seek and want to happen don’t occur, at least according to our timelines, is not a sign of people’s lack of faith.

With this distinction in mind, we can look at God’s signs and demonstrations of His faithfulness to be something we who are open to deepening our faith can receive.