Romans: An Intro

The Letter to the Church in Rome — Romans — is the apos­tle Paul’s sig­na­ture writ­ing. It is as close to a sys­tem­atic the­ol­ogy as we get in the New Testament. Its cen­tral theme is right­eous­ness. God’s right­eous­ness which bestows right­eous­ness upon believ­ers stands in stark con­trast to the unright­eous­ness of the world. It is a call to believ­ers to live the life of righteousness.

It is my plan to take time each Friday for how ever long it takes to look at Romans, lis­ten to its chal­lenge, and present what I feel should be our response.  Today, we will talk about some intro­duc­tory mate­ri­als regard­ing Romans.

I will be using the com­men­tary on Romans by C. E. B. Cranfield (I.C.C) as my pri­mary guide to Romans with sev­eral other resources. Cranfield has also pro­duced Romans: A Shorter Commentary which is a handy lay­man ver­sion of his clas­sic. Douglas J Moo’s Commentary on Romans is also highly rec­om­mended for the seri­ous stu­dent of Romans.

Paul wrote this let­ter late in his min­istry, dur­ing a short period of time when he had some “down time.” Cranfield dates it around late 55 to early 57. He says it was prob­a­bly writ­ten while he was in Corinth, wait­ing for a good time to leave on his jour­ney to Jerusalem. 

Tertius was the scribe who was writ­ing the actu­ally let­ter — tra­di­tion says Paul’s eye­sight was poor and had a hard time writ­ing and wrote in very large let­ters so he could see what he was writ­ing. Due to the cost of writ­ing mate­ri­als, Paul used some­one else to scribe what he wanted since they could fit a lot more on the writ­ing material.

I can pic­ture Paul sit­ting there with Tertius dic­tat­ing what he wanted to say. Just as Tertius thinks he has it down per­fectly, Paul says, “Wait wait wait, lets say it this way instead.” Then poor Tertius has to sit there, scratch the let­ters away with a spe­cial knife used as an eraser while Paul sits there impa­tiently with the exact words he wants to say hop­ing not to forget.

Romans has that feel­ing to me of a very refined the­ol­ogy.  Paul was con­cerned that the truth of the Gospel and the life of the believer have a very solid foun­da­tion (Romans 15:15 [show]Romans 15:15 [15]But on some points I have writ­ten to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God (ESV)
). This was not as much of a per­sonal let­ter to a church as The Letter to The Church which just hap­pened to also be a per­sonal let­ter to the church in Rome.

Paul cer­tainly was moved by the Spirit to write this let­ter. It has influ­enced peo­ple through­out the ages to solid ortho­dox the­ol­ogy. Martin Luther was cer­tainly influ­enced by it as were most of the Reformers. In some­ways, it presents a stan­dard by which we can judge the truth of what peo­ple are say­ing theologically.

The theme of Romans is “The Path of Salvation: The Just Shall Live by Faith.” Of the scrip­tures that we were taught as chil­dren to mem­o­rize, a group­ing of them was called “the path of sal­va­tion”. John 3:15–16 [show]John 3:15–16 [15]that who­ever believes in him may have eter­nal life. [16]“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that who­ever believes in him should not per­ish but have eter­nal life. (ESV)
of course was one in this group but most were from Romans. Romans 3:10–12, 3 [show]Romans 3:10–12 [10]as it is writ­ten: “None is right­eous, no, not one; [11]no one under­stands; no one seeks for God. [12]All have turned aside; together they have become worth­less; no one does good, not even one.“ Romans 3:3 [3]What if some were unfaith­ful? Does their faith­less­ness nul­lify the faith­ful­ness of God? (ESV)
:23, 6:23, 8:1, 8:28, 8:31, 8:38, 10:9–13 are just a few that I unfor­tu­nately have at least in part for­got­ten. I will cer­tainly be work­ing on mem­o­riz­ing them once again.

I look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing this study next week and explore this path of faith as pre­sented by Paul.