Justification by Faith in Romans 3:28: A Full Exegesis

Introduction

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. 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. For the crucial question of justification by faith, larger doctrinal questions hinge upon one single verse: 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? By demonstrating the context of Paul's statement within the larger argument of the Epistle to the Romans, we can arrive at a full exegetical understanding of three crucial elements: 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 through an analysis of these three concepts separately, we may finally reach a synthesis — a single exegetical interpretation of the verse as a whole, and therefore of Paul's conception of justification by faith.

Defining Faith in the Epistle to the Romans

The first step toward a full exegesis of Romans 3:28 is to define precisely what Paul means by "faith." This is where the fuller context of the Epistle to the Romans becomes paramount. Paul begins the letter carefully and earnestly, extending his message openly to Jew and Gentile alike, most likely because — as John Murray has observed in his commentary — 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 it (Murray 1997, 1). This openness may also serve to offset 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.

Paul begins with an account of the lapse of an entire community into sinfulness, in which 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). 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 recalling that the Jews had risen up against Rome when the emperor Caligula demanded that they place a statue of him in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, while "birds and animals and reptiles" clearly seem to indicate the ibis, jackal, and crocodile gods of Pharaonic Egypt — the pantheon of Isis and Thoth. These would have been 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 misread as a call for Christian iconoclasm, it is more clearly a condemnation of apostasy. In this, Paul fits perfectly within the history of Judaism as presented in the Old Testament. As Northrop Frye memorably observed, 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 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 a description of a people who have fallen into Roman and Egyptian religious practices; thereafter they lapse into Roman and Egyptian sexual practices. By the end of Romans 1, Paul suggests that all moral worth gradually deserts those who have first abandoned God. The primary issue, then, is faith in God in the most basic sense — acceptance of the monotheistic God of the Old Testament, as opposed to the polytheistic pagan pantheons.

The first error of the community Paul describes at the beginning of the epistle is their failure to maintain even this most basic faith. As F. F. Bruce argues, the centrality of faith to Paul is implicit in his biography: "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 that has fallen away from God through lack of faith is thus fully in keeping with Jewish tradition.

Even though this particular community — and its moral decline through acceptance of Roman and Egyptian gods and sexual practices — is Paul's focus at the outset, he is careful to expand the notion of God's wrath in the second chapter in terms most commonly described as "original sin" (though Paul himself does not use that term). As Paul states bluntly in Romans 2:11, "God does not show favoritism," and everyone is subject to God's righteous judgment. Paul's emphasis on the universality of sin — he will later in Romans 5 explicitly invoke Adam's transgression in Genesis — also serves a strategic purpose. As Douglas Moo has noted, Paul's intention in this letter was partly to smooth over the differences between Gentile and Jewish followers of Christ in Rome at a time when the emperor Claudius issued a decree expelling the Jews from the city (Moo 1996, 4). Paul's message of salvation available to all is predicated, however, upon the explicit premise that all have sinned. This is where the idea of justification becomes crucial — connecting with what Dunn describes as Paul's "emphasis elsewhere [in the New Testament]… on justification as something believers already enjoy" (Dunn 97).

The Basis of Justification: Abraham and Atonement

Paul first introduces the concept of justification fully in Romans 4, in his discussion of Abraham. He does so by performing his own exegesis on the text of Genesis, noting that the Torah records of Abraham:

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many 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 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 had 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 on the specific wording of the Old Testament text to draw a moral: that righteousness, expressed purely through belief rather than action, is sufficient to earn God's approval. Paul does not include in his exegesis the later story of what God would ultimately demand of Abraham regarding this very child — a story that involves actions rather than the mere persistence in faith that God always keeps His promises, even when circumstances suggest otherwise. It is in this passage that Paul first introduces the notion of justification as a 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." Christ's death to atone for sin is central Christian theology; here Paul links it to the claim that the purpose of Christ's resurrection was specifically "our justification."

The verse that follows is equally 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 suggests that faith in Christ is all that is required to earn justification — a state of repentance brought about 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 in Romans 5:1. He conceives of both as available to everyone.