. Introduction
What an exciting time to speak on the topic of Romans 1. Yesterday was the feast of St. Paul; today we remember in the church calendar the two companions of Paul, Timothy and Titus (and we are reminded again, Augustine College students, that Paul encourages Timothy to let no one despise his youth). This week is also the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.. Finally, it is a great time in the life of my church, the Anglican Church of Canada, as we come to the verge of full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada. For me, as one whose genetic make-up is Swedish Lutheran, to come together with my Anglican mind, shaped by Scripture, tradition, and reason, is finally to bring disparate parts together. Surely my students will rejoice to think that finally I might be "all there".
So, to begin my presentation tonight, I'd like to use the prayer assigned for the day: "The Lord be with you. Let us pray. Almighty God, who called Timothy and Titus to be Evangelists and teachers, and made them strong to endure hardship: Strengthen us to stand fast in adversity, and to live righteous and godly lives in this present time, that with sure confidence we may look for our blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever."
. Our understanding of Romans 1
I think that most Christians who read Paul's text are quite clear on what Paul is saying. Paul is arguing that men and women have turned their backs on God and, consequently, have become perverse in their behaviour.
But, today, it seems that readers of Romans tend to zero in on Paul's words concerning the perverted sexuality of those who turn their backs on God, with males engaging in same sex relations with other men and with women either doing the same, as most would argue, or as Francis Schaeffer argued years ago, abandoning their natural look for cosmetics and a changed natural appearance. (Needless to say, not many paid any heed to Schaeffer's attempt at a close reading of Scripture, since, they concluded, we know perfectly well what Paul is talking about.) And, while Paul goes on to talk about an extraordinary list of immoral behaviour, clearly the final list gets less attention paid to it than the earlier, more dramatic depiction. Even here, however, exceptions, though not widely heeded, are noteworthy. For example, John Calvin argued that all else in Paul's list paled into insignificance in comparison with gossip and God-hating, two, resulting behaviours at the end of Romans 1. In the end, whatever parts one chooses to emphasize, it would be hard to argue with the bleak assessment that Paul provides us with in his opening chapter of Romans.
We, as readers, identify quickly with Paul as he writes. We can see quite clearly who those are that he writes about. "They" are the enemies of God. In the final analysis, we conclude in anti-Pogo fashion, the enemy is clearly "they" and not us. I wonder.
. What is Paul's Point?
I would like to probe Paul's argument here a bit further to identify more accurately who these enemies of God are.
First of all, let's see what Paul's arguments in Romans 1 are. Paul's argument to the Roman Christians technically begins in vs. 15 with his statement "I wish to preach the gospel to you in Rome", followed by his rationale in 1.16 "because I am not ashamed of the gospel". For this to be good logic, Paul's audience must understand that the reason that this is so, while unstated, is nevertheless clear, namely, because "One preaches what one is not ashamed of, be it in Rome or anywhere else it may be appropriate". Sounds right.
Paul then gives a reason for the reason he has just given! He tells his audience that the reason he is not ashamed of the gospel is because "it is the power of God for salvation for anyone who believes -- to the Jews first, and also to the Greek" (1.16a and 16b), that is, to the Jews first and then also to anyone else who is not Jewish. Again, Paul assumes that his audience will agree with him that this is so because one cannot be ashamed of what is God's power for salvation to anyone who believes.
Now, to this point, Paul's argument is actually quite easy to follow. But, then, to the potential question that someone might raise, namely, why the gospel, rather than anything else, is the power of God for salvation to anyone who believes, first to Jew and then to non-Jew, Paul says because "in the gospel we find out how to be right with God by true faith".1 That is God's saving power.
But, Paul does not stop there. Rather, he moves on to explain why it is that it is in the gospel that we find out how to be right with God by true faith. This is a difficult explanation and, as it turns out, has been misconstrued by many. It is the beginning of a specific turn in Paul's argument, which, as we shall see, will force us to ask why Paul argues this way. For the moment, we note that the argument asserts that it is in the gospel that we find out how to be right with God by true faith because the gospel that Paul has been talking about reveals the anger of God against the impiety and un-rightness of men who suppress the truth. This anger, it turns out, is what men can know about God (1.19a) in so far as God has made anything about Himself known to men (1.19b).2
Now in that Paul is not talking about one of the four Gospels, how, we might ask, is the anger of God good news? In what follows, Paul answers this question implicitly.
In what follows, then, rather than setting down the principles of a natural knowledge of God on the basis of what men have deduced dialectically from first principles or induced from scientific observation of nature, Paul confirms that what God has made known of himself is the stark contrast between man and God. The eternal power and deity, God's majesty and his glory, are not revealed merely for man's knowledge but so that man might honour and fear a God who is radically different from man. What can be known of God, then, is the stark and absolute contrast with man's impiety and man's immorality, which are man's punishment for his abandonment of God. As a result of this studied and practiced ignorance of God, God hands men over to a series of punishments that would confirm their dishonour of God, because, though they knew what kind of God the true God is, namely, a God of anger at men's abandonment of him and suppression of the truth about him, they did not honour God as such.3
So, Paul says, God first punished men for their abandonment of the God whose righteous anger should have been obvious to them by handing men over to the desires of their hearts, to dishonour their bodies in uncleanness. As a result, Paul says, some lost sight of the truth about God and began to think of created beings as gods. They became futile in mind and in thought, fools who claimed to be wise, idolaters who exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man, as well as of birds, animals, or reptiles (1.21-23).
Second, Paul says, God punished men by handing the female of the human species over to the punishment of exchanging the natural use for the unnatural (1.26b) and the male of the human species to the abandonment of the natural use of the female (1.27). Having lost knowledge of God in their first imprisonment of idolatry, they lost sight of themselves as the image of God in their second imprisonment.
Third, and perhaps most damningly, Paul says, God punished humans by handing them over to unthinking minds, such that even if they tried to think about God and return by themselves to God, they could not. As a result, Paul says, all sorts of evil actions, whether intended or not, result from men and women in this state of confinement. Unable to act as they might wish to act were they in complete control of their own bodies or minds, they murder, rebel against parents, boast, gossip, slander, etc. etc. etc. This prison of no-return is a fool's prison worthy of the insane asylum of the Marquis de Sade. But, Paul says, this is the human condition, not a geographically limited prison.
But, remember, Paul's focus is not on the extensive, cascading punishments. His argument begins with the gospel, which is God's power showing men how to overcome the situation in which they have gotten themselves by denying the true God. If abandonment of God is the crime that leads to the punishments of idolatry and immorality, both progressively more and more out of control, it is the good news that shows the way to right the situation.
But, at this point, surely someone would have stopped Paul or whoever was reading Paul's letter to the Roman congregation and said to him: but Paul, surely we Jews do not fit the picture that you have just described? Surely we have not dishonoured God? Surely the things that you are talking about are the sins of our, ahem, Gentile neighbours here on the other side of the church?
Rather than being non-plussed by such a question, however, Paul would have been delighted. It is a natural question, and it is exactly whither Paul's argument is leading. For, what Paul has done is very neatly and succinctly to present that very point in words and imagery drawn from a Jewish best-seller of the period, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon.4 This book, which was written perhaps during the lifetime of Jesus, provides remarkable parallels to Paul's words in Romans:
13.1:
For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that
are seen to know him who exists,
nor did they recognize the craftsman while
paying heed to his works;
13.2:
but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air,
or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water,
or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
12.24:
For they went far astray on the paths of error,
accepting as gods those animals which even
their enemies despised;
they were deceived like foolish babes.
13.11:
A skilled woodcutter may saw down a tree easy to handle
and skillfully strip off all its bark,
and then with pleasing workmanship
make a useful vessel that serves life's needs,
13.12:
and burn the castoff pieces of his work
to prepare his food, and eat his fill.
13.13:
But a castoff piece from among them, useful for nothing,
a stick crooked and full of knots,
he takes and carves with care in his leisure,
and shapes it with skill gained in idleness;
he forms it like the image of a man,
13.14:
or makes it like some worthless animal,
giving it a coat of red paint and coloring its surface red
and covering every blemish in it with paint;
14.7:
For blessed is the wood by which righteousness comes.
14.8:
But the idol made with hands is accursed, and
so is he who made it;
because he did the work, and the perishable
thing was named a god.
12.23:
Therefore those who in folly of life lived unrighteously
thou didst torment through their own abominations.
14.12:
For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication,
and the invention of them was the corruption of life,
14.22:
Afterward it was not enough for them to err
about the knowledge of God,
but they live in great strife due to ignorance,
and they call such great evils peace.
14.23:
For whether they kill children in their initiations,
or celebrate secret mysteries,
or hold frenzied revels with strange customs,
14.24:
they no longer keep either their lives or their marriages pure,
but they either treacherously kill one another,
or grieve one another by adultery,
14.25:
and all is a raging riot of blood and murder,
theft and deceit, corruption, faithlessness, tumult, perjury,
14.26:
confusion over what is good, forgetfulness of favors,
pollution of souls, sex perversion,
disorder in marriage, adultery, and debauchery.
14.27:
For the worship of idols not to be named
is the beginning and cause and end of every evil.
It is not too difficult to see how the texts of the Wisdom of Solomon have provided Paul with his material in Romans 1 and in fact with the arguments that we have examined above (the arguments, at least, in general form). Paul has taken these portions of Wisdom much as any ancient writer, and many moderns, do to make a point that is either in agreement with the original text or contrary to it. The question is, why has Paul done this? The answer will help us to see not only what Paul's arguments assert but why he employs them at all.
As is clear from Wisdom, the people that have abandoned God and been led to idolatry and immorality are those peoples in whose midst the Jews have always lived, the Gentiles, the nations of the world, the "other", the enemy, whom God will one day destroy, praise God. So, Paul's interlocutor is right. As is clear from the parallels in Romans to the passages in the Wisdom of Solomon, the idolaters and immoral are Gentiles, the other, our enemies.
Paul's interlocutor would then probably have encouraged Paul to hasten to the conclusion of the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon, the conclusion that follows the passages that Paul uses. For, the faithful, Jewish writer of Wisdom concludes his denunciation with this confident encomium:
15.1:
But thou, our God, art kind and true,
patient, and ruling all things in mercy.
15.2:
For even if we [i.e., the Jewish people] sin we are thine, knowing thy power;
but we will not sin, because we know that we
are accounted thine.
To paraphrase the writer of Wisdom: we have seen the enemy and we know the truth, and both are "out there": we thank God that He made us Jews, who will not sin, rather than Gentiles, who can do nothing other than sin!
And, so, when Paul reaches the end of chapter 1, the Jews in Rome would have in fact been in full agreement with Paul in what he had said thus far because Paul appears to believe that they would almost assuredly have known the book of Wisdom, for his arguments presuppose that they would have been following Paul's argument carefully and were getting ready to shout a great "Amen" when Paul got to the conclusion to which Wisdom 15 comes, "but not so for us, the Jewish people". "Amen, brother", they were ready to shout.
But, of course, they never got their chance. Because Paul's conclusion is a very different one from that of the writer of Wisdom. As we know, following chapter 1, Paul turns his attention away from the Gentiles, who the writer of Wisdom and all Jews agree to be a lost cause, a "basket case", something akin to what white North Americans and in particular American Republicans think about Africa and Africans. Paul turns and says to the Jews of Rome: "now, let me tell you about you, what you, not the other, are like."
Paul then turns from the parallels with Wisdom and begins to enumerate the sins of the Jews. In fact, what Paul has to say not only does not give them a chance to say "Amen" with Paul, but leaves them at the lowest possible level of self-esteem, namely, as equals to the despised Gentiles!
2.17: But if you call yourself a Jew and rely upon the law and boast of your relation to God
2.18: and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed in the law,
2.19: and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness,
2.20: a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth --
2.21: you then who teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal?
2.22: You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?
2.23: You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?
2.24: For, as it is written, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."
So, to the Jews Paul says: "I'm glad that you are so ready to condemn the Gentiles, because you can then add yourselves to the condemned".
And, so, you ask, that pretty well covers it. That leaves the whole of humanity in the same boat, both Jew and Greek. Who is left that can say: "I alone, O Lord, am left, to stand before you in my own righteousness"? The answer is no one.
And that is precisely Paul's point as Paul, himself, will say in 3.9-18: no one is right with God! Because if someone could say, as the writer of Wisdom can, that he or his people will not sin, well, then, there is no need for that person or that person's group to right any situation before God. But, if all are guilty, then God can have mercy on all rather than just on some. If the argument of the writer of Wisdom were allowed to stand, it would be clear that there would be one group that would not need the saving grace that God manifests in Jesus, namely, the Jewish people. But, given that they are as guilty as the Gentiles, then, they, too, need salvation through Jesus.
Now, far be it from the Jews to suggest that they would ever have been able to save themselves. But, it is amazing how quickly God's benefits and graces are appropriated by God's people no longer as God's gifts and graces but as "my property", "my deeds", "my goods", "my righteousness". Of course, that never happens elsewhere than among the Jews! My friends, for those who believe that, may I remind you that one of the prisons Paul speaks of is a prison of forgetfulness and oblivion.
. What about us?
But, if what Paul has said is so, where does that leave us? If we today were to take Paul's message seriously for us, what might that message be?
Well, the first thing that we ought to note is the need to put Romans 1 in the context that Paul intended for it by remembering where Paul's argument is going. It would be illogical for a reader or hearer of Romans 1 to point to idolatry or actions of immorality that Paul identifies -- be it homosexuality, murder, children's rebelliousness, gossip, or wearing cosmetics -- as somehow the "point" that Paul is trying to make. Paul claims that these are not first of all crimes but punishments that men incur because they abandoned God. To denounce homosexuality or murder or children's rebelliousness as the crime rather than seeing it as the punishment would be comparable to denouncing the criminal because of her sentence of life-imprisonment rather than seeing that she has been sentenced for a crime and what that crime is. One does not denounce the punishment unless you are a trial attorney seeking to overturn the punishment; you denounce the crime and you uphold the judge's decision.
Paul's rhetorical point is to have the Jews in Rome agree with him and to show them that he agrees with them, that this is what the Gentiles are like. So, it should also then be clear from what I have said that to pick details and pieces out of what for Paul is a whole fabric, a seamless garment, a single, rhetorical address rather than an itemized, theological manual, is to unravel Paul's elaborate argument and to undercut the very thing Paul is trying to say and why he is saying it. Thus, if one wishes to say more about homosexuality than Paul does, it will have to be said from texts other than Romans 1 or by pointing to texts other than Romans 1, since what Paul wants to do in Romans 1 is to gain the agreement of his Jewish audience that the Gentiles are abjectly immoral and can do no other: it is, to coin a phrase, "their destiny". It is their sentence for the crime of abandonment of God, knowing full well that they have done so. Or, if murder is wrong, it must be proved otherwise or from elsewhere, for the same reason. If gossip is wrong, if rebellion against parents is wrong, etc. etc. these must all be proved otherwise and from elsewhere since here Paul 's goal is to gain the assent of the Jewish side of the audience who would say "yup, I recognize these people: they're gentiles: God hates them and, because we're not them, we hate them too".
But, Paul's point is not to end there, for he will go on to say, "this is no worse than what you do, and in the eyes of God. Your actions and theirs evidence that you are both equally culpable of a crime and that you are both in a cul-de-sac, and there is only one way out". By the end of chapter 2, it is clear that both non-Jews and Jews have equally failed in God's eyes.
What Paul envisions is a society in which all are immoral, as individuals and as peoples. This is very important. The title of my presentation is coined from the title of that landmark 1932 work by the German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. His work, entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society, sought to develop the thesis that human societies and social groups are less rationale, less able to transcend themselves, less able to comprehend the needs of others, and more prone to "unrestrained egoism than individuals", whom Niebuhr concluded are more often than not moral, able to consider the interests of others, sympathetic to the needs of others, and inclined to justice. I suggest to you that Paul will have none of that. The reason that societies and groups are immoral, as Niebuhr concluded, is precisely because, as Paul says, all men have abandoned that true God who is justly angered: not just Gentiles, but also Jews, that is everyone!
But, we cannot stop here either. If one were to stop there, we would end up as we often have, as grim-faced Calvinist New England Puritan juries or mother-knows-best liberal welfare-state finger waggers, doing exactly what Paul criticizes the Jews for doing. No, Paul does not stop there; he is barely 2 chapters into his extensive 16 chapter presentation of the grace of God that he has wanted for some time to share with the Roman Christians. So, Paul's first step is not a stopping point for a grim outlook on life or to have the satisfaction of finger-wagging and sending Gentile or Jew to Hell, but an first step in clearing the decks and getting everyone on "the same page" of God's books, namely, the page of condemnation. I believe it is a necessary step in a community that was likely dominated by those who must have felt "how great we are and how disgusting our enemies, even within the same congregation"!5
In other words, the vision that Paul has for the assembly that is gathered together by grace in Jesus' name is that it is comprised not of the morally perfect, or of those who will ever be perfect -- in spite of what Saint Francis de Sales or John Wesley have written -- but of those who recognize both that they are immoral and that they are also saved by God through Christ. In Lutheran thought, the Latin phrase sums it up: simul iustus et peccator, both justified and sinner. It is also summed up well by helping members of the church of Christ to see themselves not as having been made perfect but like drunks who are part of AA: one is never not a drunk, only a drunk who recognizes that he is only one drink away from being a drunk again. One is never not a drunk, never not a betrayer of God, but one can want to do something about it, an act of the will that can only be realized by depending on God fully for the grace to do anything about it at all.
But, if grace is shown to anyone, regardless of ethnicity, given that all are equally deficient in the eyes of God, why is it that Paul here and later in Romans suggests the priority of the Jewish reception of grace. As Paul says in those later chapters, 9-11, chapters often viewed as an appendix, an addendum, rather than the closure to the argument begun in Romans 1, the Jews are first because they know or, at least, ought to know, just how much more they need and have always needed the grace of God. They know through the stories of the OT much better than the Gentiles who lost all touch with God. If there is any Jewish priority, it is an epistemological priority of knowing that one needs grace and where to go. Whether one will go, however, is not a matter of ethnicity, but a matter of will. And that, in fact, makes the Jewish abandonment of God even more grievous.
Similarly, Paul would assuredly have said that the grace was shown to men first, then to women. In his social order and cultural understanding, there would be an awareness on the part of those who are responsible for the public life of the community concerning the failings of that community. And, in Paul's day, the woman's role was not that public role. Theirs was centered on the household, and on the efficient running of the home, thus making in the world a "nest", a kind of externalized womb, a safe haven for the family, a home. The world of that day was primarily public, not private as it later became in the modern era.6
Paul is addressing men in Romans 1, not the women who would have learned in private at home from their husbands or fathers. It is Gentile men, not the women, who are here charged first of all with a recognition of their abandonment of God and their resulting idolatry and immorality; it is Jewish men who have failed to uphold the knowledge of God and so have abandoned God. Sure, the consequences extend to women, as they do to those non-gendered entities we call "children", but that is all the more grievous in that the crime wasn't first theirs. But, if that is so, then men ought also to be the first to have grace shown to them and to be dispensed to women.
Note: it ought to happen this way; just as the Jews ought to respond first to the gospel, says Paul; however, that does not mean that it will always happen that way, just as it does not always happen that the Jews respond first. The epistemological order can be overridden by the will, stubborn and obtuse or enlightened and willing to change. And, when that happens, God will raise up faithful Gentiles and faithful women to respond: Gentiles like Matthew's Roman Centurion and women like Deborah and like Jael.
In this week of prayer for Christian unity, we focus on the way in which God has overcome divisions of ethnicity, not by declaring some already perfect and others idolatrous dogs and "great Satans" or lesser ones, but by declaring that all have failed and that "all who receive him" are recipients of God's grace. It is during this week that we are reminded that the unconverted, hard-wired realities of who we are in our own minds, who our family is, who our friends are, who our enemies are, hard-wired realities that we still allow to determine and dominate our lives, become all the more scandalous. The willingness of the church to call those who are born of God "mine", or "yours", or "his", or "hers", family or not family, denominationalism, church strife, the inability of Christians who follow Peter to break bread and drink wine and eat together with fellow Christians in spite of Paul's rebuke.... The inability of Christians to see "the other" not as the enemy but as a recipient of God's grace, has not disappeared. In churches that practice the same kind of one-up-manship that leads Paul to his rebuke of the Jews the communion wine that we drink is the wine of sour grapes: of envy, of jealousy, and of hatred. And please note: these churches are your churches and mine. You are the other and I am the other. The enemy is us, but many of us have yet to see it.
Perhaps the only way we will see it is when it is put in front of our faces, when we see the point to which ethnic hatred can go, for ethnic hatred is simply the extension of our self-gratifying view that we are perfect and that the other is our enemy and so much less than we are. Thus perhaps we can only see what Paul is talking about and how high the stakes are for us when we see the images from Rwanda, from Israel, from Indonesia, from India and recognize in them the face of ethnic hatred, the hatred of one who is not family, and know that deep down inside, it is what the Jews in Rome felt against their Gentile brothers, and that it is what you and I admit that we feel against others when in our sober moments we see and admit that I do not see my brother or sister as family but as male or female, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, as the "other", perhaps to be pitied, but certainly not like me.
Perhaps, like the Jews in Rome, we will not realize that we feel this way very often. Unlike the Jews in Rome, we Canadians are almost immunized by centuries of Christian teaching, by a landscape that gives us physical and psychological space that does not necessitate ever meeting the "other", by riches and abundance beyond the wildest imagination of the most covetous poor person, and so we are rarely put in the position of sobriety and self-examination that is more than self-justification and charitable good works. When, however, we do look deeply into the faces of "others" and truly see, truly believe, as Paul wrote, we will see what and who we, too, are, unless of course, contrary to Paul's contention, we really are not sinners and are not in need of God's grace to the end.
Look deeply into the faces of those in the photographs that Ron Haviv took in 1992 when Serbs attacked Bosnian towns in what became known as "ethnic cleansing" are our faces. Faces of fear. Can you see yourself? Can you see yourself holding the gun? Or when we can only imagine the faces, because they are hidden, that of the local butcher, that of his wife, that of her sister, gunned down by a young Serbian soldier, still smoking a cigarette, the sunglasses perfectly set on his well-trimmed hair after the murderous deed, in anger kicking the dying wife in the head. This is whither moral superiority in league with ethnic perfectionism leads.
These are the faces, my friends, that Paul speaks to. And through them, Paul wants to speak to their hearts of darkness. To recognize this and to recognize that God's grace is extended to them, as well as to us, should lead us to ask not "how long, O Lord?" but "how, O Lord, how is that possible?" Not, "how could you love them, O Lord?" but "how could you love me, O Lord?" And, I suggest to you in conclusion, if we do not ask these questions, knowing what we now know, it is because we really have not examined our own lives and our own deepest thoughts, Jews or Gentiles, immoral men or immoral women, all of whom, thanks be to God, can be righted with God through Jesus and begin to learn from God.
1
The suggestion that Paul is talking about how to be right with
God presupposes that Paul uses an "objective genitive"
(with God) rather than the more traditionally understood "subjective
genitive" (of God). "True faith" is understood
as a "Hebrew superlative".
2 The difficulty that many have had with Paul's argument is that they have tried to interpret Paul's logic dialectically, rather than rhetorically. Paul, however, clearly uses rhetorical argumentation of an enthymematic kind, whereby he moves from conclusion to (usually) minor premise, omitting the major premise, which is what Paul assumes his audience will agree with him on. In some cases, however, Paul omits the minor premise, thus arguing "abductively", as Vernon Robbins argues on the basis of C. S. Peirce's logics. Were we to set out this argument dialectically, rather than rhetorically as Paul does, the first argument in question here would be abductive (i.e., it would be a "leap" for the reader or hearer) and would look something like this at this point (with the unstated premise in {}):
The next argument, as is characteristic throughout this section, picks up the stated premise from the previous argument as its conclusion, and states another premise, as well as another unstated (enthymematic) premise. Note again that the argument is abductive, rather than deductive:
Finally, one notes that usually commentators omit the necessary locus of revelation in 1.19a as "in the good news"; however, in doing so, they destroy Paul's logic and make his arguments invalid. The key to interpreting the text thus far is to ensure that the revelation in the gospel (1.17) be maintained, not just via the repetition of the word "revealed" (1.17 and 18) but via the logic.
3 The triple repetition of the word "handed over", used here in the context of "handing over" to torturing beings or entities and thus recalling to the reader or hearer what happens to those found guilt of crimes and imprisonment, cannot be incidental to Paul's argument. Whether, as I will argue, it is progressive, may be a matter of debate; that it is central, however, seems to me to be beyond debate.
4 Before people rise up in arms against the thought of my introduction of non-canonical texts into the discussion, you should know that just as Christians today are not shaped in their thinking exclusively by canonical, biblical texts, so in the day of Jesus and of Paul, faithful Jews were not shaped exclusively in their thinking by canonical, biblical Old Testament texts.
5 One wonders how many sing the great hymn "How Great Thou Art" thinking more about who they are over against others rather than how great the God is who is angered by all suppression of truth.
6 I suggested to Prof. Al Wolters, in light of his presentation on the "Valiant Woman in Proverbs 31", that the woman described there was exceptionally described and perhaps for exceptional circumstances but could hardly have been considered "typical". I therefore agree entirely with his assessment of her as "heroic", for in the same way that men were not normally like the heroes described by Homer or in 1-2 Samuel, so women were not normally like the woman described here, or like Deborah and Jael described elsewhere.