The Apostle Paul had a problem, or perhaps more accurately the Christian Church in Rome had a problem, and Paul was the logical guy to help fix it. You see, over the past ten years Paul had developed quite a reputation as church planter in the Roman provinces and that reputation had reached all the way to Rome itself, where Jewish and Gentile Christians were bickering. Paul was uniquely qualified to speak into this conflict, first because he was a Jew, but more importantly because he was a Jew who had taken on the mantle of Apostle to the Gentiles. This meant Paul had spent a lot of time thinking about how Jesus, Israel's true Messiah, had opened up that special covenantal relationship between God and Israel, and made it available to everyone-Jew and Gentile. It also didn't hurt that he was a Greek-speaking, Roman citizen-the guy could connect with almost anyone in the Roman world. Finally, Paul was increasingly being viewed as one of the Christian church's leading interpreters of Jesus-a man who had the theological and rhetorical gifts needed to make Jesus make sense to people who had never met him and weren't even Jewish. In short, Paul was the man for the job.
No one knows exactly what prompted Paul to write the epistle to the church at Rome, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where Paul, currently living Corinth, gets a letter from church leaders in Rome that goes something like this:
Dear Paul, We hate to burden you with our problems here in the church at Rome, but we are feeling quite desperate. Tensions between Gentile and Jewish Christians are getting out of control to the point where we really need some outside help. For a little context, the Roman government really made a hash of things, because they kicked the Jews out of Rome in AD 49, and then let them come back in AD 54. During that time, the Gentile Christians kept the church going, and started to develop their own identity and it wasn't freighted with what they viewed as Jewish cultural baggage. So now the Jewish Christians are back and sure, it's good to see them, but the Gentile Christians, well there's just no way to go back to the way things were. Things are just going to fly apart unless, you, Paul, give us some kind of iron clad theological justification for a unified Christian Church made up of Jews and Gentiles. We've got other problems too, like people getting caught up in that 'anything goes' Roman culture, being judgmental, disputes over whether to eat meat offered to idols, questions about how to relate to the Roman government-we could use help with those issues too, but honestly, they all pale in comparison to the Jew/Gentile issues. Can you help us?
In response to this request, Paul breaks out the pens and papyrus and writes his Epistle to the church at Rome-a letter that would play an outsized role in the long history of Christian theology, especially in the Protestant Reformation. Assessing Romans, Anglican scholar N. T. Wright says the following: ...neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul's lifework, Romans is by common consent his masterpiece. It dwarfs most of his other writings, an Alpine peak towering over hills and villages. Not all onlookers have viewed it in the same light or from the same angle, and their snapshots and paintings of it are sometimes remarkably unalike. Not all climbers have taken the same route up its sheer sides, and there is frequent disagreement on the best approach. What nobody doubts is that we are here dealing with a work of massive substance, presenting a formidable intellectual challenge while offering a breathtaking theological and spiritual vision.[4] Couldn't have said it better myself. Romans is a keeper. But while many writers have emphasized Romans as a dense theological book, I want you to remember that it is theology with a pastoral goal-to heal the divided congregation in Rome. Today's lectionary text, Romans 10:1-10, is a key passage in that effort, containing both Paul's critique of Israel's efforts achieve righteousness through the law, and starting in verse 9, a distillation of Paul's theological foundation into two verses: "If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved."
That's the core. That's what makes us Christians, and as Paul sees it, that's what makes a church full of Jew and Gentile believers all joint heirs to God's covenant promises to Israel. The law, God's gift to Israel, had devolved into a cultural tool for determining who was a Jew and who was not. Paul's theological critique of Israel in Romans 10 was that they were abusing the law. They were using it to take the One True God, who had promised to bless all the nations through Israel, and turn him into cultural, even national property. No, says Paul, you can be zealous for God and follow the law and not know Him. The righteousness that comes from following the law and the righteousness that comes from knowing God are not the same thing. The law does not save. Being culturally Jewish does not save. Jesus saves.
Fast forward 1500 years to 1517. Martin Luther had a problem, or perhaps more accurately the Catholic Church had a problem and Martin Luther wanted to fix it. Pope Leo the Tenth had authorized the selling of indulgences in Germanic lands to help finance the renovation of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Indulgences were a kind of 'Get out of Jail Free' card, where the purchaser was promised remission of punishment for their sins. In Luther's mind, the Catholic church had taken the act of penance and God's free gift of forgiveness and turned it into a financial transaction, and he was mad. Luther was mad enough to sit down and write his famous Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, and nail them to the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg-the signal act of defiance that most people mark as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation was a big deal-at first a call for reforming the Catholic Church, and when that didn't work, a kind of Declaration of Independence for northern Europe. But Luther needed a theological foundation for his new movement and he found it in Romans, with today's passage, Romans 10, playing a leading role. Echoing verse 9, "If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, "Luther proclaimed, "Sola Fide, by Faith Alone! and this became the rallying cry of the Reformation, along with four other Sola's-Sola Scriptura, by scripture alone, Sola Gratia, by grace alone, Solo Cristo, by Christ Alone, and Soli Deo Gloria, to the Glory of God alone.
The parallels between Luther's time and Paul's time are there. Paul was critiquing Israel for abusing the law, freighting it with Jewish culture, and trying to make it the only path to God and salvation. Luther was critiquing the Catholic Church for doing something quite similar-making a set of Catholic laws or doctrines that put the Roman hierarchy in the role of mediator between God and the people and ultimately in control of their salvation.
Sola Fide and the other solas allowed Luther and other reformers to strip away a millennium and a half of theological cruft and focus on scripture, which Luther translated into German, and to promote a direct relationship between God and the believer.
But some reformers, among them the early Anabaptist leaders, felt Luther didn't go far enough. The Lutheran church cleaved from Rome was still enmeshed with the state, still led by priests with questionable ethics, still populated with people whose daily lives bore no resemblance to the Christian virtues called for in the New Testament. Shouldn't the church, they asked, be made up of believers whose lives were visibly shaped by their faith in Christ and their daily walk as disciples? These convictions led the early Anabaptists to set off in a new and more radical direction, where the church was a visible body of believers, committed to discipleship, separate from the state church, where Christian values and character were in evidence.
Fast forward another 500 years to the present day. We've got problem, or perhaps more accurately, Mennonite Church has a problem. We are a religious minority, and at least by the numbers, we are in decline. Culturally, we are thoroughly dominated by US mainstream evangelicalism. For Mennonites, it's a fact of life that someone else defines the Christian popular culture, someone else defines Christian language and theological norms, ultimately someone else defines what it means to be Christian. Our own efforts to define who we are often lost in a cacophony of competing messages and worldviews, some of them Christian and some of them thoroughly anti-Christian.
Like all minorities, we are continually confronted by the potential for our own non-existence as a people-the sobering reality that we could lose the ongoing battle to convince our children to become the next generation of Mennonites, that our churches and institutions could wither and die like downtown merchants trampled underfoot by Walmart and Target, or that we would be so thoroughly subsumed by mainstream culture that we exist in name only, bearing no discernible resemblance to our peace-making, discipleship-promoting ancestors.
For us too, Romans 10 has a message: Get back to the things that truly matter. Our culture won't save us-not four-part singing, hard work, general nice-ness, not even peace or service to others. Important as those things may be to us and who we are, unless they flow out of our covenantal relationship with the risen Jesus, they are powerless. Paul was right. "If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." That's what matters. But, at the same time, don't think that Luther and Calvin are the last word on Paul or New Testament theology. What the early Anabaptists got fundamentally right is that when you confess Jesus as Lord, you are implicitly also saying 'and I am His disciple.' That is what truly matters. It's no accident that after laying the theological foundation for justification by faith in Romans through chapter 11, Paul spends much of chapters 12-15 talking about what it means to be a follower of Christ. In fact, there are two other places in Romans (chapters 2 & 14) where Paul talks about final judgment and how everyone is going to have give an account before God for the life they lived. That creates some interesting tensions if salvation is by faith alone.
That tension hasn't gone unnoticed in the theological community. Since the sixties, a number of scholars, dubbed the New Perspective movement, have taken a fresh look at Paul. What has emerged, best known in the works of NT Wright, is a view of Paul growing out of faithful interpretation that is friendlier towards works and human effort, more contiguous with Judaism, more covenantal, and, here's the surprise, quite Anabaptist considering it's coming from an Anglican priest.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Imagine discipleship as if it were a job-the greatest job on earth--great boss, best co-workers, fantastic benefits, meaningful work, a mission you believe in. Justification by faith is just the first step past the interview. Congratulations! You got the job, the boss says you're good enough to work here. If Pauline theology stopped there, or even discouraged us from working hard or getting better at our jobs, it wouldn't be worth much. Salvation is just the paycheck. You know what we think of people who are just working for the paycheck. Not that much. There are plenty of better and more noble reasons for doing good work. We want to please the boss, we believe in the organization and its mission, we love the work. This is where discipleship leads us, and I believe it is fundamentally right and true to the spirit of Romans 10. Every good thing, everything we got right over the last 500 years flows out of one simple covenantal proposition: that Jesus is Lord and we are His disciples. That's what truly matters.