Category Archives: Current issues

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Racial reconciliation in Romans

Why did Paul have to spend so much time in Romans arguing from the Old Testament that salvation was by grace through faith? Were there any real Christians who doubted this? Reading Romans as an entire book explains the reason for each passage within that book, and each passage in turn helps us understand the letter as a whole. At least one central issue is that Paul addresses a controversy over Jewish and Gentile practices.

Paul begins Romans by emphasizing that the Gentiles are lost (Rom 1:18-32); just as some Jewish Christian listeners might be applauding, Paul points out that religious people are also lost (Rom 2), and summarizes that everyone is lost (Rom 3). Paul establishes that all humanity is equally lost to remind us that all of us have to come to God on the same terms; none of us can boast against others.

But most Jewish people believed that they were chosen for salvation in Abraham; therefore Paul reminds his fellow Jewish believers in Jesus that it is spiritual rather than ethnic descent from Abraham that matters for salvation (Rom 4). Lest any Jewish hearers continue to stress their genetic descent, he reminds them that all people—including themselves—descend from the same human sinner (5:12-21).

Most Jewish people believed that most Jews kept the Bible’s many laws (at least most of the time), whereas most Gentiles did not even keep the few commandments (often numbered as seven) that many Jews believed God gave to Noah. So Paul argues that while the law is good, trying to keep it never saved its practitioners, including Paul (Rom 7); only Jesus Christ can save us! And lest Paul’s fellow Jewish believers continue to appeal to their chosenness in Abraham, Paul reminds them that not all Abraham’s physical descendants were chosen with respect to the promise, even in the first two generations (Rom 9:6-13). God was so sovereign that he was not bound to choosing people on the basis of their ethnicity (9:18-24). He could choose people on the basis of their faith in Christ.

But lest the Gentile Christians look down on their Jewish siblings, Paul also reminds them that the heritage into which they had been grafted was, after all, Israel’s (Rom 11). God had a Jewish remnant, and would one day turn the majority of Jewish people to faith in Christ (11:25-26).

At this point Paul gets very practical. Christians must serve one another (Rom 12); the heart of God’s law is actually loving one another (13:8-10). Ancient literature shows that Roman Gentiles made fun of Roman Jews especially for their food laws and holy days; Paul argues that we should not look down on one another because of such minor differences of practice (Rom 14).

Paul then provides examples of ethnic reconciliation: Jesus though Jewish ministered to the Gentiles (15:7-12), as he shows lavishly through Scripture. Moreover, Paul himself was bringing an offering from Gentile churches for the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, to whom Gentile believers owed the message of salvation (15:25-31). In the midst of his closing greetings, Paul offers one final exhortation: Beware of those who cause division (16:17). One division that was central in the Roman church seems to be a division over Jewish and Gentile practices.

Getting the whole picture of Romans provides us a clearer understanding of the function of each particular passage in the work as a whole. It also suggests the sort of situation that the letter addresses. What we know of the “background” sheds more light on this situation: Rome earlier expelled the Jewish Christians (Acts 18:1-3), but now they have returned (Rom 16:3). This suggests that the Roman house churches, which had consisted completely of Gentile believers for many years, now face conflict with some of the Jewish believers who had different cultural ways of doing things.

I first noticed wider implications of this picture when I became a white associate minister in an African-American church in the U.S. South about a quarter of a century ago. I already understood the importance of Jewish-Gentile issues in Romans; it was one key element that tied most of the letter together. Nevertheless, it was when I began grappling with where the Bible addressed ethnic reconciliation that I turned to Romans and other passages. I quickly realized that early Christians’ struggles to bring Jewish and Gentile (or Samaritan) believers together had tremendous implications for us today.

If God summons us to surmount a barrier that he himself had established in Scripture (the barrier separating Israel from Gentiles), how much more does he summon us to surmount every other barrier that has been established merely by human sinfulness? Racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, sexism and many other -isms are just human selfishness taken to a group level—preferring our group above others. Jesus is the answer for sin, and he wants to deliver us from both selfishness for ourselves and our groups.

Paul’s letter to the Romans summons Christians to ethnic, cultural, tribal reconciliation with one another by reminding us that all of us must come to God on the same terms, through Jesus Christ and what he has done for us.

(Craig also authored a commentary on Romans, here.)

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Who are Christ’s ambassadors?—2 Corinthians 5:20

Who are Christ’s ambassadors in 2 Cor 5:20? When Paul says “we are ambassadors for Christ,” does he refer to all believers, or only to himself?

In every or almost every instance of “we” in the preceding chapters, Paul refers to himself and his ministry colleagues. Probably in 5:20, then, Paul also refers not to all Christians as ambassadors, but only to those who are bringing God’s message of reconciliation. After all, those he is entreating to be reconciled to God are the Christians in Corinth, who are not ambassadors but those who are in need ambassadors to them. That is why he urges them to be reconciled to God (5:20; 6:1-2, 17-18)!

Perhaps ideally all Christians should be bringing God’s message of reconciliation, but in practice most of the Christians in Corinth weren’t. The Corinthian Christians were acting like non-Christians, so Paul and his colleagues act as representatives for Christ’s righteousness to them, just as Christ represented our sin for us on the cross (5:21). Paul may be using hyperbole, a figure of speech in which one rhetorically overstates something to graphically emphasize a point. The Corinthians may not be unconverted, but they are acting that way, so Paul urges them to be converted.

The Corinthians should recognize that they themselves attest Paul’s ministry (3:1-3), a ministry of God’s new covenant in Christ by the Spirit (3:4-18). Paul and his colleagues have suffered to bring others the gospel (4:7-12, 16), including for the sake of the believers in Corinth (4:12, 15; 5:12-13). The division between “us” and “you” has been sustained through most of the preceding context.

This section of 2 Corinthians is primarily a defense of Paul’s apostolic ministry; Paul summons the Corinthians to recognize his role and to reject his critics.

Nevertheless, Paul and his colleagues do offer us an example. Those who are reconciled to God may in some way carry the message of reconciliation (5:18), as Paul did. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation (5:17), and thus has the Spirit that guarantees our future with Christ (5:4-5), the trust on the basis of which Paul is ready to suffer and die for the gospel. Not only Paul, but all of us for whom Christ died should no longer live for ourselves but for Christ (5:15). Like Paul, we who fear the Lord must seek to persuade others (5:11). Paul elsewhere presented himself as a model for the Corinthians (1 Cor 4:16; 11:1). We may not all be apostles like Paul, but all of us can live and speak like ambassadors, representing Christ’s name to others.

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Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament Out of Context?

Some claim that the apostles took Scripture out of context in the New Testament, and that their example authorizes us to do the same. We could respond that, no matter how led by the Spirit we may be, we are not writing Scripture.

But the fact is that claims about New Testament writers taking the Old Testament out of context are mostly overrated. Some passages are fairly straightforward, including some that announce the future reign of a Davidic descendant; these texts, however, are not the issue to be addressed here.

Many times New Testament writers do not give a straightforward interpretation of Old Testament texts. What we need to keep in mind is that this is not always what the writers were trying to do.

Most of the examples critics give fall into one of three categories, none of which authorize us to discover a text’s meaning by ignoring its context. First, when responding to opponents who used proof-texts, the biblical writers sometimes responded accordingly (“answering a fool according to his folly,” as Proverbs 26:5 suggests). Some of Paul’s uses in Galatians might fall into this category (e.g., Gal 3:12). Writers could also use the sorts of arguments popular in their day to make their point, without assuming that this was what a text actually meant. (Thus, for example, Paul emphasizes that “seed” or “offspring” in Gal 3:16 is singular, but he knows very well that it can be a collective singular. He uses the same Greek term for many people in Gal 3:29. If one reads how ancient rabbis often handled Scripture, however, Paul is usually tame by comparison.)

Second, and much more often, the writers simply drew analogies from the Old Testament, using them to illustrate a principle found in those texts or the lives they present. To apply a principle genuinely illustrated in a figure or a text is not to take it out of context; without this method, preaching would become next to impossible for most texts. For example, if a psalm describes the anguish of a righteous sufferer, the principle could apply to Jesus as the righteous sufferer par excellence. (At least with particular psalms, the early Christians probably did also believe that God intended some descriptions that matched this ultimate righteous sufferer more specifically. Nevertheless, that belief would not invalidate a more general application to those who suffer unjustly from others’ enmity.)

Third, and perhaps most often, the texts we think are out-of-context sometimes reflect our own failure to recognize the complex way the writer has used the context. Readers often accuse Matthew of quoting Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt have I called my son”) out of context; they often present this as the one of the most blatant cases of the New Testament writers misunderstanding context. They make this claim because Hosea in context is talking about God delivering Israel from Egypt, whereas Matthew applies the text to Jesus.

But Matthew knows the verse quite well: indeed, instead of depending on the standard Greek translation of Hosea here, he even makes his own more correct translation from the Hebrew. If we read Matthew’s context, we see that this is not the only place where he compares Jesus with Israel: as Israel was tested in the wilderness for forty years, Jesus was tested there forty days (Matt 4:1-2). Matthew also expects his target audience to know Hosea’s context: as God once called Israel from Egypt (Hosea 11:1), he would bring about a new exodus and salvation for his people (Hosea 11:10-11). Jesus is the harbinger, the pioneer, of this new era of salvation for his people.

In the same context, Matthew applies Jeremiah 31:15 (where Rachel weeps over Israel’s exile) to the slaughter of infants in Bethlehem (Matt 2:17-18), near which Rachel was buried (Gen 35:19). But Matthew knows Jeremiah’s context: after announcing Israel’s tragedy, God promises restoration (Jer 31:16-17) and a new covenant (Jer 31:31-34). Matthew compares this tragedy in Jesus’ childhood to one in Israel’s history because he expects his first, biblically knowledgeable audience to recognize that such tragedy formed the prelude to messianic salvation.

Matthew also knows the context of Isaiah 7:14, which he quotes in Matthew 1:23 (see the post on that passage on this website); the context remains fresh in Matthew’s mind when he quotes Isaiah 9:1-2 in Matthew 4:15-16. Matthew is not ignoring context: he is comparing Jesus’ ministry with Israel’s history and the promises those very contexts evoke. He may extend analogies further than we generally do today, but he read the context better than most of his critics have!

These observations are not meant to deny that people can sometimes teach us true principles using texts taken out of context. The point is that we cannot guarantee that the principles we find will be truly biblical if we get them from texts never meant to say those things. If we want to hear what God inspired the first authors to communicate, we need to read their texts in their context. Otherwise we can (and some today do) make texts say anything we want—things that will often run counter to the biblical message and sometimes prove very harmful to others.

See at greater length The Bible in Context, available at: http://www.craigkeener.org/free-resources/

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Supplement to Boko Haram is not new

Because of the time that I spent in northern Nigeria, I also wrote an article about the extremists in 2004 for Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/23.60.html

(Note: the links become available when you click on my specific post, rather than just view it from my home page.)

I offer this as a supplement to my post a few days ago, better informed by recent events (and other information published by investigators not available to me in 2004):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-s-keener/boko-haram-is-not-new_b_5303689.html
Again, there are others who can speak to these matters with greater experience and fuller knowledge than I. But it is important for the world to know that these events have been building for a long time. Those in Nigeria working for peace and restoration (including help for the girls) need our prayers.

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Boko Haram is not new

I spent much of three summers in northern Nigeria, 1998-2000. I am very grateful that the world is now paying attention to Boko Haram there–my disappointment is that it has taken so long to get the world’s attention. Boko Haram as such did not exist at that time, but the forms of extremism that fed into it did.

Normally I restrain myself and only offer Bible studies to be included on this site, but this issue was too close to my heart to ignore. Following is my post on this issue with the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-s-keener/boko-haram-is-not-new_b_5303689.html

It is said that Boko Haram wants to discredit the government and establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria. It is not satisfied with states that declared sharia there years ago.