Romans 3:1-4:25
As an apostle of the gospel of God concerning his Son, Paul has argued so far that the Greek-Roman world, as he has encountered it in the course of his missionary journeys from Antioch to Athens, faces a day of God’s wrath or judgment. This constitutes the historical horizon of the letter.
Romans 1:19-2:29
Why does good news need to be heard regarding the “power of God for salvation”? Why does God have to justify himself by ensuring that the righteous person lives because of faith or faithfulness?
The reason is that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of people who possess the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18*).
Jesus tells a rather disturbing story about the judgment of his people at the end of the age of second temple Judaism. This is my very functional translation:
Romans 1:1-18
Paul introduces himself to those in Rome who are “called to be saints” as a slave of Christ and an apostle, “set apart for the gospel of God.”
The “gospel” is the proclamation of good news, anticipated in the Jewish scriptures, concerning a pre-eminent royal figure: a Son who was of the seed of David, now “appointed (horisthentos) Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness from resurrection of the dead” (1:4*).
I take several chapters in my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul to argue that in the first part of the Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 the direction of travel is ontologically flat: not from heaven to earth but from celebrity to ignominy. I’m not saying that the church fathers were mistaken in their christological conclusions, only that this is not what the encomium is about.
Christians who think that it is right and good to maintain a form a patriarchy, at least in church and home, will often argue that by naming the woman Adam exercises or asserts an innate, creational authority over her that is not abrogated by salvation.
In search of a suitable helper for the ʾadam, God brings every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens to see what he would call them, and the ʾadam gives them names: giraffe, buffalo, magpie, and so on.
John says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus (Jn. 12:41). Is this a reference back to the “glory” of God that Isaiah saw in the temple? Or is it something else? Well, I’m going to say that it was something else, not because I’m anti-trinitarian but because I don’t think that’s what John means at this moment in the narrative.
So we need to try and get a sense of what is happening.
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