Justification by Faith in Romans Paul's Epistle

Justification by Faith in Romans Paul's Epistle to the Romans is not the only treatment of the concept of justification in the New Testament -- Paul discusses the concept in other letters as well -- but it is perhaps the most extensive. That is because the concept of justification by faith is central to Paul's overall argument in the Epistle to the Romans, and is thus introduced early in the letter, and discussed throughout the text.

But for the more crucial question of justification by faith, larger doctrinal questions hinge upon one single verse of Romans, 3:28. In the New International Version, this reads "For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law" (Rom 3:28).

What would a full exegesis of this single verse entail? I hope by demonstrating the context of Paul's statement here within the larger argument of the Epistle to the Romans that we can come to a full exegetical understanding of the three crucial elements of this verse: not just the concept of justification itself, but also what Paul means by "faith" and "the works of the law" in the context of the larger issue of justification.

By proceeding step-by-step with an analysis of these three concepts separately, we may finally reach a conclusion in which the synthesis of these individual exegeses into one final exegetical interpretation of the verse as a whole, and therefore about Paul's conception of justification by faith. Definition The first step towards a full exegesis of Romans 3:28 will be to undertake a definition of what precisely Paul means by "faith." This is where the fuller context of the Epistle to the Romans attains paramount importance in understanding the concept.

Paul begins the letter carefully and earnestly, and extends his message openly to Jew and Gentile alike, most likely because (as John Murray in his commentary has observed) there was tension with the Jews in Rome at the time of the letter's composition yet Paul "had not founded nor had he yet visited the church at Rome" when he wrote the letter (Murray 1997, 1).

However this openness may also be a way of offsetting the beginning of Paul's argument at Romans 1:18, where he turns to the classic preaching subject of God's righteous wrath at sinners. He begins with an account of the lapse of an entire community into sinfulness, where they "became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles" (Rom 1:18).

Of course the "mortal human being" calls to mind the Greco-Roman pantheon, not only with its all-too-human gods like Bacchus or Priapus, but also with its deified Roman emperors: it is worth recollecting that the Jews had risen up against Rome when the emperor Caligula had demanded that they place a statue of him in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, while the "birds and animals and reptiles" clearly seem to indicate the ibis and jackal and crocodile gods of Pharaonic Egypt, the pantheon of Isis and Thoth.

These would be the two most obvious forms of apostasy from Judaism at the time of Christ, apart from basic atheism.

Although Paul's statement here has sometimes been misinterpreted as a call for Christian iconoclasm, it is more clearly meant to be a condemnation of apostasy: in this, Paul fits in perfectly with the history of Judaism as presented in the Old Testament tout court, when we recall Northrop Frye's memorable claim that the most constant narrative element of the Old Testament is that for "Israel….the spirit of apostasy appears to be remarkably consistent" and that generally in the Old Testament this results in a scenario where Israel "deserts its God, gets enslaved, cries to its god for deliverance, and a 'judge' is sent to deliver it" (Frye 58).

Paul begins with description of a people fallen into Roman and Egyptian religious practices first, and thereafter they lapse into Roman and Egyptian sexual practices. And from thence it seems, by the end of Chapter 1 of Romans, Paul thinks that basically all moral worth gradually deserts these people, who have first abandoned God. Thus, the primary issue here is one of faith in God in the most basic sense -- the acceptance of the monotheistic God of the Old Testament, as opposed to the polytheistic pagan pantheons.

The first error of the community Paul is describing at the beginning to the epistle to the Romans is their failure to have the most basic faith in God. After all, Bruce thinks the centrality of the idea of faith to Paul is implicit in his biography; as Bruce puts it, "justification by faith was implicit in his Damascus-road experience. Paul, as we know, was suddenly converted to the service of Christ from a life in which the law had been the centre around which everything else was organized." (Bruce 35).

The spectacle of a community who has fallen away from God through lack of faith is in keeping with Jewish tradition. Yet even though this particular community -- and its moral decline through the acceptance of Roman and Egyptian gods and sexual practices -- is Paul's focus at the beginning, Paul is careful to expand the notion of God's wrath in the second chapter, in terms that are most commonly described as "original sin" (although Paul himself does not use that term here).

As Paul puts it bluntly in Romans 2:11, "God does not show favoritism" and everybody is subject to God's righteous judgment.

Paul's emphasis on the universality of sin here -- as he will later in Chapter 5 of Romans explicitly invoke Adam's transgression in Genesis -- also serves a strategic purpose, as Douglas Moo has noted, in terms of Paul's intention in this letter to smooth over the differences between the Gentile and Jewish followers of Christ in Rome, at a period of time when the Roman emperor Claudius (afterwards deified) issued a decree expelling the Jews from the city of Rome (Moo 1996, 4).

Paul's message in the letter of salvation available to all is predicated, however, upon the explicit sense that all have sinned. And this is where the idea of justification becomes crucial, so to speak. This connects with what Dunn describes as Paul's "emphasis elsewhere [in the New Testament]…on justification as something believers already enjoy" (Dunn 97). Basis Paul first introduces the concept of justification in Chapter 4 of Romans, in his discussion of Abraham.

We will return to the opening portion of this discussion, in which Paul discusses circumcision, later in our exegesis, but for now it is important to look at the way Paul defines justification.

He does so by performing his own exegesis upon the text of Genesis, in which he notes that in the Torah it is written of Abraham that Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of man nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead -- since he was about a hundred years old -- and that Sarah's womb was also dead.

Yet though he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he promised. This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness -- for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. (Romans 4:18-25). Paul's argument here relies upon the specific wording of the text of the Old Testament, to tell us that it is phrased so specifically so as to indicate a specific moral: that righteousness, expressed purely through belief rather than action, is enough to earn God's approval.

Of course, Paul does not go on to include in his exegesis here the later story of what God would ultimately demand of Abraham regarding this very child that was born to him in his old age, but that story involves actions rather than the mere persistence in the faith that God always keeps His promises even when it honestly looks like He is not (which is how it must have seemed to the hundred-year-old Abraham who had been promised a son).

But this discussion is where Paul first introduces the notion of justification, where it seems to be a sort of companion to the idea of Christ's atonement: in the phrasing of Romans 4:25, Christ "was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Thus the notion of Christ's death to atone for our sins, which is fairly standard and central Christian theology, is here linked by Paul to the notion that the purpose of Christ's resurrection was "our justification." The next verse, however, is crucial: "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand" (Rom 5:1).

Paul's phrasing here suggests that faith in Christ is all that is required to earn "justification" which is the state of repentance (which God had intended to be brought about by the period of apostasy and immorality) as indicated by professing faith in Christ. Christ's sacrifice is enough to appease God's wrath at all of humanity, but faith in Christ is required to earn "grace" or "peace with God," terms which Paul uses almost as synonyms according to the grammar of Romans 5:1.

Certainly he conceives of both as being available to everybody. Means Yet what is the means of justification? At this point we must approach the third concept that Paul uses in the verse we are subjecting to exegesis: "For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law" (Rom 3:28). What does Paul mean by "works of the law"? This is actually probably the most complicated single concept in the verse, and is worth unpacking carefully.

Paul seems keen here to present Jesus Christ in terms of two separate points of reference in the Old Testament, Moses and Adam. To some extent, this is intended to be an antithesis, but Paul manages to collapse the antithesis in his redefinition of Judaism away from Moses and toward Adam. Moses, of course, is the lawgiver of the Torah: to Moses were presented the Ten Commandments, which he then issued unto the Israelites at the specific behest of God.

Paul points out that Adam predates Moses, and indeed the law, by many generations: Adam was the first man, and he fell by sinning against God. Thus, the concept of sin actually predates the concept of Mosaic law: in Eden, there was only one law, and somehow Adam and Eve were persuaded to break it.

Wright's commentary on Romans makes it clear that Paul's concept of judgment is tied up with his concept of justification: Wright states that "God, the judge, is the justifier; in order words…the verdict has already been pronounced by the judge whose righteousness has been fully displayed.

And that verdict -- that those in the Messiah, marked out by faith, are already to be seen as 'righteous' even ahead of the final vindication -- is precisely what the lawcourt dimension of 'justification' is all about." (Wright 613) Paul's emphasis on this original sin is strong enough here that it is easy to see how Augustine was able to derive, a few hundred years later, a coherent doctrine of original sin from Paul's accounting here, but it is worth risking a lapse into the Pelagian heresy to indicate that Paul is really slyly positing a theological sort of paradox.

Adam only had one law, and he broke it. Leviticus has many laws, just as the Orthodox rabbis to this day in their "halakha" or Jewish law have their 613 mitzvot or "commandments," derived from the Old Testament as a whole. It is these pettifogging Levitican laws and rabbinical pronouncements that Christ comes, in part, to lift: that is why Paul emphasizes Christ's availability to Gentile and Jew alike throughout the Epistle to the Romans.

Thus Moses was both liberator and lawgiver, but Christ comes as a liberator from the lawgiver -- it is Adam's sin that Christ atones for, and thus Christ's new law therefore must logically supersede the Mosaic law. As Schreiner explains, "justification is not available by works of law: the law does not provide the ability to conquer sin but reveals its presence" (Schreiner 169).

This is the (somewhat shocking) conclusion that we must draw from what Paul basically offers here as a philosophy of "the law" because after all Adam only had one law given to him and still managed to break it: that lawbreaking must be the essence of what we have come to call original sin (although, as noted, Paul does not use the term).

Paul essentially redefines the Mosaic religious law and the Old Testament religious commandments, by offering an explicit explanation for why God should have later imposed "the law" upon Jews via the Old Testament. For a start, as Murphy-O'Connor observes, in Paul's own time Jewish "ambition to live the Law as perfectly as possible would have been frustrated by a gentile environment" (Murphy-O'Connor, 58).

It is worth reading carefully what Paul writes at Romans 5:20-21 if we wish to understand the full meaning of phrase "the works of the law" in Romans 3:28, because chapter 5 verses 20-21 show us how Paul defines "the law" philosophically from God's standpoint: "The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase.

But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Laws, Paul seems to be suggesting, are made by God to be broken, because it somehow is gratifying to God to exercise his grace freely upon sinners.

This may sound subversive, but it is quite obviously in keeping with much of Christ's actual message in the Gospels -- the parable of the prodigal son seems apropos, as it notes that God seems to exult in the return of his errant sons in direct proportion to how far away they might have erred.

And obviously, what with all the apostate worship of beast-headed Egyptian idols and indulgence in lesbian sex and whatnot that Paul has described at the beginning of the Epistle, there has been quite a lot of sinning among the very community that he was describing -- and were it not for the errors of belief in this community.

It is not quite clear if this problematic pack of sinners is meant to be identified historically with the Jewish community that caused problems over Christianity in the reign of the Roman God-Emperor Claudius and was thereafter expelled from Rome, as described by Moo in his summary of the historical context of the Epistle to the Romans (Moo 1996, 4).

It does not matter because their first error, as Paul points out, was apostasy -- they succumbed to the worship of gods like Isis and Claudius -- and because the first necessary element to obtaining grace is simply faith in obtaining God's grace. The God of Abraham may sometimes tarry in delivering upon His promises, but He does keep his word, provided that one places no other gods before Him.

This is, after all, Paul's scripturally-referenced definition of what faith means, and the text from Genesis that he points to is one that shows God credited Abraham simply for persisting in belief in the promise even when God had apparently exhausted His own credibility -- the God of Abraham is, after all, one that is rewarded for trusting that, if a man obeys this God, this God will generally step in a moment later than you might think, whether to permit Sarah's elderly womb to bear Isaac, or to hold back Abraham's hand right at the moment when it was about to butcher Isaac at the same God's apparent whim.

Results This Abrahamic faith in God, according to Paul, takes precedence over such a thing as obedience to the law.

We might remember the somewhat shocking conclusion that Paul reaches at Romans 11:32: "For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." This is, of course, a clear statement that sin is somehow innate or inescapable, and if Adam's fall is somehow inextricably part of the human condition -- to claim that "God has bound everyone over to disobedience" when the context is discussing Jewish laws about things like circumcision (which was, after all, the most visible distinction between Jews and Gentiles in Paul's day, regarding observance of the ritual Jewish law) is tantamount to saying that Christ's grace is available to Gentile and Jew alike precisely because all of these laws were made, by God, to be broken.

This would include all of the Old Testament's signs of observance of Jewish ritual law: Christians in 2015 do not find it controversial that God offers His grace freely to people who eat lobster or wearing clothing made from mixed fabrics, but in both of these cases a law from Leviticus is being violated.

"Works of the law" are presumably merely deeds that indicate adherence to the law -- specifically, of course, Paul is referring to circumcision, which is raised as the first issue in the epistle precisely because it encapsulates so neatly the bewildering extent of God's grace offered in exchange purely for the Abrahamic-style belief that Paul defines at 4:18-25, in the passage quoted above.

In the early discussion, Paul summarizes this paradox about the law for those who insist on its strict observance: " Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. So then, if those who are not circumcised keep the law's requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised?" (Rom 2:26-27).

If it is a sin to be uncircumcised, then the status of the sinner is identical to the status of the uncircumcised man in the eyes of God -- thus in the eyes of God we are basically all uncircumcised anyway, since we are universally in violation of God's laws.

In fact, our disobedience to God's laws is inborn, it is part of God's design, and it has no consequence provided that one inwardly believes in God -- this is the source of Paul's famous concept of "circumcision of the heart," by which he means the inward belief in Christ, rather than the outward show of obedience to Jewish ritual laws which Christ himself might not have observed. We may now return to the full text of the verse that we are subjecting to exegesis.

"For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law" (Rom 3:28). The law, in Paul's telling, exists purely to encourage sin. Paul says this outright in Romans 5:20 ("The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase") but this assumption (as to why God issues any laws in the first place) seems to be entailed in Paul's reading of Adam's transgression in Eden, and in Paul's explanation for why the Mosaic law has ultimately been superseded by Christ.

Assurance The full implications of this, however, are perhaps broader than they might look. Paul sets up a straw man of bogus antinomianism in 6:1-3 and again at 6:15, because he is after all concerned very much with what people are believing rather than what they are doing -- what people are doing is bound to be sinful, but it is.