Welcome to New Romans, a little project I am undertaking which I’m sure will have smoke coming out of your ears at the very thought: how dare anyone attempt to rewrite a book of holy scripture; who in the world does this person think he is?! But it is not a paraphrase of Paul’s mighty letter to the Romans, nor an update to 21st century language, rather a brand-new letter to a brand-new audience, an attempt to provide a new perspective on old truths.
Paul was writing in another world at another time, when the earth was flat and had been created ex nihilo by an omnipotent creator God only a few thousand years previously – or so he and virtually everyone of his day believed. The worldview of creation, fall and redemption, which Paul launches straight into in Chapter 1 of his letter, formed the basis of all the great apostle’s theology and teaching. Now, nearly twenty centuries later, Christian theology and doctrine of all stripes still feature the same awesome creator God, judge and jury of the world, whom Paul describes so ominously with these words from the opening discourse of his letter:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth … Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature … have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they [we] are without excuse … [1:18-20]
Help! And what follows immediately after these verses are some of the most controversial teachings in the New Testament, which now divide the church clean in two—as I’m sure you know!
Paul’s project, writing his many letters around 50-60 CE, was to transform the man Jesus, late of Nazareth in northern Israel/Palestine, whom Paul never met in the flesh, into the divine Christ, the atoning sacrifice, through his shocking death by crucifixion at the hands of the local Roman authorities (about 30-33 CE), for all human sin—all that ungodliness, injustice and truth suppression we have perpetrated—getting us back, in the process, into the great creator God’s good books.
Jesus the Christ, or just Jesus Christ, as Jesus then started to become known, took his place in time as the second of the three “persons” of the Holy Trinity, the Messiah or saviour not just of the Jewish people, but the true saviour of all humanity. The four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ earthly life are all believed to have been written after Paul’s letters, making it almost certain that Paul’s theology was a major influence, so that we get a fairly consistent picture coming through, from this dream team of New Testament writers, of Jesus as the Christ.
Yes, Paul’s basic theological infrastructure, articulated so powerfully in his original letter to the small group of Jesus’s followers in Rome, incredibly forms the basis of Christian theology and doctrine to this day—despite the obvious fact that we have long since transitioned to a scientific, evolutionary view of the world, with no once-off act of divine creation, no historical fall and, I’m afraid to say, no omnipotent creator God controlling and judging human affairs! Go figure!
What we do still have, however, are Jesus’s amazing teachings about living selflessly in community, his wonderful parables of the coming Kingdom of justice and love, which shine through in the Gospel accounts, and which, yes, also inform much of Paul’s pastoral writing, despite the fact that he still has his feet firmly planted in the old, defunct world-view. Best of all, we have a brand-new God, the God whom Jesus presents, perhaps even incarnates, no longer a control-merchant creator/judge, but a loving divine parent, who interacts with humanity not physically but spiritually—through the medium of the so-called Holy Spirit.
A new letter, then, built firmly on our new, evolutionary worldview, bringing Jesus’ good news about the new God and their coming Kingdom to light in a new way. And addressed to a new and different group of Romans, to a whole wide world now of spiritual seekers, all you who are concerned with not just finding but building the truth, the brave new Kingdom-world that Jesus spoke of so eloquently all those years ago. I invite you now, therefore, to read on – and rather than shocked, I hope you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
Thank you for reading the Introduction to New Romans – hope you enjoyed it. Chapter 1 is available now: New Romans – Chapter 1. To make sure you don’t miss out on future chapters, contact me at ferg@antitheologia.com or subscribe to this website at antitheologia.com