Chapter 1
Greetings
1,7Fergus, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, to the followers of the same in Rome, to all the people of Rome and of the world far and wide, whose lives, now 2000 years on from Jesus’s time, have been profoundly affected, in one way or another, by his life and teachings. I wish you grace and peace, in these exciting, challenging times, from that same Jesus—how that can possibly be, when he has long since departed the scene, I will attempt to unfold to you in this letter.
Jesus, the remarkable Jewish man who lived between about 4 BCE and 30-33 CE in what was then the Roman occupied province of Judaea, now the modern state of Israel. Nazareth is the village where he grew up, in the north of the country near the Sea of Galilee—these days you will find there a small city often thronged with tourists because of the enduring interest of this man to so many.
Yes, I am a follower, a disciple, a devotee, but more than that, I feel a compulsion, a call on my life to share Jesus’s message with all of you now in a new way, one I don’t think you will have heard before. So, whether you consider yourself already a follower of Jesus, confident in your understanding of his message, or don’t consider yourself a follower at all—perhaps you closed your ears to his message long ago—I hope you will bear with me now for a little while and hear what I have to say.
Commentary 1.1
“A New Letter to the Romans”—indeed! So, what about the old one, the original letter to the Romans? It is believed to have been written about 57-58 CE by another Jewish man named Paul— “Paul the Apostle”, “St Paul”, as he has been variously called—to a small but growing community of Jesus’s followers in the Roman imperial capital. Paul was born in 5 CE in Tarsus, a town in Southern Turkey near the Syrian border, to a devout Jewish family, in his own words, “a Pharisee, born of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6[1]), drilled in the highly regimented religious practice of his forbears. He never met Jesus in the flesh but claimed to have experienced a bright, blinding vision of the great man a few years after his death, while travelling from the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, to Damascus in Syria. None of Paul’s travelling companions at the time could confirm the vision, but it seems to have had the effect of knocking him off his horse and literally blinding him for several days. According to Paul, the visional Jesus gave him certain instructions which had the effect of turning his life 180° around—an amazing metanoia if there ever was one!—so that from being an energetic persecutor of the followers of Jesus at the time, as an agent of the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem, he underwent a sudden conversion and in a very short time became instead their talismanic leader.
Metanoia? We’ll get to that in Chapter 2, but it really is the crux of the matter. The great Apostle himself is the subject of endless icons and paintings—the great Caravaggio produced not one but two separate interpretations of the Damascus road incident—and he is, to a large extent, the founder of the religion that eventually became known as Christianity. Yes, Paul, not Jesus himself, although the latter still obviously provides, to this day, the central inspiration for the faith. Paul it was, with his community work, his missionary journeys in the Levant, Anatolia and Greece, and to Cyprus and Rome, and his many letters that have survived, who drew the disorganized, ragtag group of Jesus’s followers together after his departure, and turned it into the highly effective religious movement that became the Christian Church.
Son of a carpenter
2-6,8-17Who exactly was Jesus, then? Well, on one hand he was, yes, a man—“just a man”, as Mary Magdelene sings in Jesus Christ Superstar. Little is known of his early life till about age 30—he is believed to have been the son of a carpenter, and probably became a carpenter himself—but then followed three short years, approximately, in which he rose to amazing fame, even notoriety, before being brutally executed, crucified by the Roman authorities of the day, at the behest of the Jewish religious leaders, his own people. You probably know all this, of course. Jesus, in those three years that so much has been written about, gathered together a small band of faithful followers, his disciples, and went around the countryside, eventually to Jerusalem, the Jewish capital, preaching an amazing message, often to great crowds of people, mostly poor and ordinary folk, who found great comfort and inspiration in what he had to say.
An amazing message about a wonderful “Kingdom” soon to come, a message which later became known as the “Gospel”—from the Old English, meaning, literally, “good news story”. I’m going to tell you all about it in this letter, obviously—in, as I’ve suggested, a new way that you mightn’t have heard before. But, on the other hand, Jesus claimed to be more than just a man—or at least his followers made such a claim, especially after his post-execution resurrection. Yes, if you can believe it, that’s what a number of them asserted, telling all and sundry that they had seen him with their own eyes, alive and well, risen from the dead, three days after his execution and burial. He claimed, or they claimed, that Jesus was none other than the Messiah, the Saviour or Christ, of Jewish tradition, the special, chosen one who, the old prophecies foretold, would be sent by the great God on high to save the people from their oppressors—who, at this point in time, following on from the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians, were the aforesaid Romans. And was Jesus, as Messiah, merely a man specially chosen by that God; or, indeed, a manifestation or incarnation of that God—as a magic trick like rising from the dead might indicate? Two titles, claimed by him or claimed of him, were “Son of Man” and “Son of God”—just to compound the ambiguity!
And who was that “great God on high” anyway? Just the particular deity of the Jews, a local god adopted, or perhaps invented, by this group of people, who, like all the other gods around the place at the time quite likely never actually existed, and therefore never really merited a capital G?! Or a truly meritorious capital G God who actually did exist—even if, as we’ll see, the Jewish people before Jesus’s time, and the Christian followers of the great man afterwards, understood that meritorious God in a very flawed, perhaps even fatally flawed, way? Either way, the proof of the pudding—was Jesus indeed more than just a man?—can only be in the eating, in how the whole following Jesus thing panned out after his time and up till now. It was, and always will be, a little matter of belief, faith, trust—in Jesus obviously—perhaps infuriatingly so, as I will now try to unfold, because that faith, trust, belief is never something we can find within ourselves, it can only come, it turns out, as a gift or grace from the outside.
So, are you ready?! I am truly thankful that you have chosen to listen to what I have to say and hope you won’t be disappointed. Am I trepidatious, embarrassed? Yes, certainly. I keep thinking, who am I to say all these outrageous things to people? I must be out of my mind! But I’ll keep going, hoping you will be the beneficiaries of my foolishness. I might be embarrassed about myself, but I’m not embarrassed about the great story I’m about to unfold, because I know it has real saving power for each of us individually and for all humanity. And what is it that we, first and foremost, need saving from? Ourselves, of course!
Commentary 1.2
“Messiah”, “Saviour” and “Christ” all mean the same thing—in Hebrew, English and Greek, respectively—in case you were wondering. Paul, in his letter, was not quite as cagey as me, in fact he came out with all guns blazing, in Chapter 1, verses 2 to 6, as you can readily read for yourself. There seemed to be no doubts in his mind that this Jesus, whom he had previously persecuted the followers of, and who had then appeared to him in a blinding vision on the Damascus road, was indeed the Messiah, descended in a direct line, as the old prophecies specified he would be, from the legendary King David (c. 1000 BCE), the greatest of the ancient kings of Israel. So, a man, yes, certainly, on one hand—Paul’s actual words, in a typical English translation of his letter, were to the effect of “descended from David according to the flesh” (1:3). But also, on the other hand, without doubt, Paul goes on to assert, the actual “Son of God with power”, as proved irrefutably by his alleged return to life after his terrible execution, and therefore not just human but also divine, a part himself of the divine Godhead.
Both human and divine: Paul it was who seems to have first attached the Greek title “Christ” to Jesus’ name, so that it became the common practice to refer to Jesus as “Jesus Christ”, or even sometimes just “Christ”. Paul, yes, has all his guns blazing from the start, and doesn’t take a single backward step throughout his long and compelling letter. There is no pause for reflection on any of the elements of the elaborate theological web he weaves, the cast iron linking of the whole Jesus thing with the Judaistic faith he was painstakingly schooled in. He leaps in a single unquestioning bound from seeing Jesus as a threat to that faith, to seeing him as the fulfilment of it. No entertaining, in other words, of the possibility that what Jesus brought to the world was something entirely new and unprecedented, not explicable in terms of anything—anything religious, that is—that had come before.
Faith, trust, belief, he would have said is, at any rate, what you need to apprehend the good news story of the Gospel—which necessarily requires, therefore, an unquestioning suspension of disbelief, distrust, disfaith. Infuriating!—and his successors for most of the last 2000 years have said precisely the same thing. Worse still, as I also have intimated, such trust, faith, belief, can only, according to Paul, come to us as gift or grace from the great God on high themselves—something, you might already sense, of a Catch 22.
Save us from ourselves
18-32What exactly is the problem then—with ourselves, with all humanity—that we need saving from? Well, the traditional, usual answer is, of course … sin! Yes, we need saving, people have long suspected, from our natural-born propensity and preference for sin. This is true, and nothing I will say to you in the remainder of this letter will take away from it. But the usual, traditional way of understanding sin is as disobedience to laws or commands of some sort, ultimately the laws and commands of—you-know-who—God. The sort of capital G God, indeed, who gives commands and makes laws, then judges and punishes us when we sin by breaking them. The controlling, judging, punishing omnipotent creator God of historical religions; the not very nice God whom we’ve cowered at for most of our history, secretly resented and hated perhaps, and, finally, at last, only very recently—why did we take so long?!—realized just doesn’t exist. Thank God, at last, for that!
But, no, sin, the problem with ourselves we need saving from, is not disobedience to the laws and commands of a capital G God in the sky. Rather it is something much more real and tricky to deal with, our natural-born propensity, preference, predilection for … being self-centred, for selfishly looking after ourselves first, never giving a thought for anyone else. We are all, without exception, born, perfectly naturally, innocent little babes, completely self-absorbed, which is harmless and even charming, until we get to about age two, when it starts to morph into wilful, intentional self-centredness, and then we have a problem we find ourselves battling against for the rest of our lives. Yes, sin! This is with certainty what the ancient writers were trying to get at when they invented the idea of “original sin”, but it is nothing to do with disobeying a control-merchant capital G God—if only because they don’t actually exist!
Selfishness, self-seeking, self-absorption, self-love, narcissism, conceit, uncaring, indifference, meanness, hatred, violence, spitting the dummy when we don’t get what we want—we take to it all like ducks to water, and, yes, it is the problem, the great problem of human existence, the cause of all human problems, every single one you can think of, everything from little kids not playing nicely in the playground to, in the present day, climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Now, there’s a problem for a capital G God to deal with, if one exists! But not merely by laying down the law then judging and punishing. No, a much more creative, nuanced approach is needed. In fact we can already see the sort of approach which might be helpful happening any day of the week: parents, teachers and other interested parties intervening in the lives of human children to teach them how to get out of their natural habit of selfishness and practise a little selflessness for a change—a little kindness, consideration, respect, caring, helpfulness, friendliness towards others. Yes, selflessness teaching, that’s what a capital G God would be useful for, if there was one—they could help us save ourselves from our own selfish, self-destructive selves.
But hang on: if, as I’ve just said, parents, teachers and other interested parties are already doing the job in question, why do we need any help, particularly from a God who may not even exist?! Why can’t we just save ourselves, in other words? Well, maybe we can—I’m sure you and I could debate that all day long. But let me ask you a question. If parents et al. doing the job, teaching young humans a thing or two about selflessness, is really all we need to save us from the worst of ourselves, how come all the worst problems keep recurring in adult human life? How come for example, humanity is right now facing amazing existence-threatening challenges like the ones I’ve just mentioned, climate change and the very real potential for nuclear war? Exciting times, for sure, but dangerous ones too.
And here’s another question you might like to ruminate on. If little humans typically learn selflessness courtesy of their parents et al., presumably their parents learned it from their parents, and so on down the generations, so how did the whole process start in the first place? If little humans only ever learn selflessness through outside intervention in their lives, there must be some sort of parent-like influence outside humanity as a whole that intervenes to get the ball rolling in the first place, and help to keep it rolling. Or are we to assume that humans just gradually evolved the capacity for selflessness, despite all the evidence pointing to the necessity for outside intervention?
“Some sort of parent-like influence outside humanity as a whole”? Sounds suspiciously like the capital G God we’ve been contemplating, the one who might be of use in helping us save ourselves from ourselves. So, let’s now go looking for that God—you never know what we might find!
A natural-born universe
Having established what our problem really is, therefore, and the sort of outside help we might need to solve it, let me begin, at last, from the beginning. Our world, we now know, is an evolving, living world, not one that was created ready-made all at once. I say living, because the world, the universe, is more like an organism than a machine. That is how the universe was pictured in the past—as a giant mechanical, automated clockwork universe, with an omnipotent God the clockmaker engineer, fabricating it at the outset then winding it up and letting it loose to do its own thing. We have the classical Greek atomists to thank for this machine image, by the way, as well as, more recently, the great Isaac Newton. It goes very nicely with the idea of an omnipotent creator God, of course, since both ideas basically come from the same old-time, old-school, religious worldview.
But, yes, now we have, from the early 19th century, thanks to developments in geology, biology and then cosmology, a new worldview, an evolutionary worldview. Not just living things like you and me and all the other animals, plants, bacteria and so on, but the universe as a whole, everything in it. Like a living thing, it starts out from virtually nothing, in the so-called Big Bang—“the Birth of the Universe” is how it is commonly described—then it starts expanding, differentiating, growing, evolving—also like a living thing. Eek, it’s alive! So, not a machine, a mechanical clockwork automaton, but more like an organism—not created, fabricated, but “birthed”.
For starters, therefore, if there is a real capital G God out there, they certainly can’t be an omnipotent creator. But—and this is such an interesting possibility, because it fits in so nicely with what we’ve realized we would need such a God to save us from if there was one—what about a sort of divine parent, who, yes, gives birth to the universe, gives it life and freedom of its own, but continues to hang around to nurture and encourage it, and in particular—the most important job of any parent—save it from itself by teaching it how to overcome its natural-born sinful selfishness? I mean specifically save us humans from ourselves in this way, we humans being the first and only organism so far to develop this particularly destructive capability. Well, what about it?!
Yes, sounds a bit far-fetched, I know. But it actually is happening: humans have begun to learn how to be selfless—all of us, these days, are capable of some degree of selflessness, and we’ve actually, slowly but surely, begun to develop significant forms of society based on selfless co-operation, namely the democracies of the modern era. Just a coincidence? Maybe. And here’s another coincidence to put in your pipe and smoke: not only did this man Jesus, the one whom this letter is all about, consistently preach and teach about selflessness, he consistently also referred to the great God on high as father, “my father”—our divine parent, in other words!
Hmm … now the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together, starting to make sense, it’s just so wonderful, exciting! Before we get carried away, however, it might be helpful if we dug a bit more deeply into this notion of selflessness teaching and learning, try to work out what it really involves. The word we’re looking for, intriguingly enough, is Metanoia, with a capital M—let’s now find out what that is all about.
Commentary 1.3
“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and injustice of people who suppress the truth by their injustice.” (1:18)
So begins the withering opening discourse of the original letter to the Romans. The great apostle continues:
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse …” (1:19,20)
It is an amazing insight into the human condition, ground-breaking for its time; but at the deepest level it is, I would contend, fatally mistaken—as you might surmise by comparing it to the corresponding passage of my letter above!
Paul was a man of his times, steeped in the religion and worldview of his ancestors, the narrative of Creation and Fall, followed by Redemption through the L-A-W Law that was allegedly handed down by the old creator God through the great prophet Moses. We’ll have plenty to say about the Law in the remainder of this letter, but as for Creation and Fall, Paul, around 1800 years before Darwin, could not have had the slightest inkling of the real truth. The two narratives—Creation/Fall/Redemption and Evolution—are completely incommensurable, and there is no choice, in my view, but to begin again—as you can see I have attempted to do.
No judgement to Paul, then. And even though he starts with a wrathful, judging God, he quickly gets down to the marvellous business of grace and faith, and stays with it for much of the remainder of his letter. But no, it is simply not true to say that “what may be known about God is plain to [all people], because God has made it plain.” God has not made it plain, and this is clearly evidenced by the fact that many or even most young people in the present day grow up with virtually no meaningful experience of God at all. God is seen as a quaint or unpleasant relic of our naïve human past, remaining resolutely just as Paul describes—invisible—so that now, when we look at nature and the physical world, we see not the qualities of a maker, its supposed creator, rather a world that has evolved under its own steam with no need of a maker or creator at all.
“So they are without excuse”—Paul hits a very important nail on the head here, but he adduces the wrong reason for it. We are not without excuse because we have known the clearly invisible God then intentionally disobeyed and rejected them, rather because our sinful selfishness, while driven by our instinctive, natural-born self-absorption, is always a course we, nevertheless, consciously, intentionally, knowingly choose. Yes, it does always involve disobedience and rejection, but not of a God whom we may have no idea of at this early stage—our deep childhood, I mean—but, typically, of our parents, who are trying very hard at this time to teach us a little self-control and consideration of others, or of our teachers, or other interested parties in the community around us. Later, in adult life, it might be disobedience to and rejection of societal norms or laws; and if we live, as the Jewish people in Paul’s day did, in a society with a religiously-based law explicitly referring to God as the author, maybe then we can talk about disobedience and rejection specifically of God—but that is certainly not the case now in the secular west, for example, and Paul’s ascription no longer makes any sense to us.
“They became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” (1:21-23)
It’s marvellous stuff! Selfish self-seeking certainly does make our thinking futile and our hearts senseless and dark, and, yes, in that dark, closed-in state we have fooled ourselves into believing in all the wacky gods of historical religion, including Christianity, who were mostly, we now realize, mere projections of our own egos, idols of our own selfish self—even when we embodied them as animals, real or fantastic! This amazing self-idolatry is always the thing that blinds us, blocks us from catching sight of the true God, the one who will save us from our tyrannical selves and open us up to the true reality of selflessness and freedom.
“Therefore God gave them over, in the desires of their hearts …”, Paul continues. In ascribing all sin to rejection of God, Paul is forced—following good Judaistic doctrine obviously—to conjure up an image of that same God retaliating by actively rejecting us. It is a chilling image, really, an old school parent, bitter and twisted, abandoning their errant child to their own devices, turning their back on them, an action we’d now consider abuse or neglect. What follows—Paul is really working himself into a righteous lather at this point—is a long, colourful list of the types of sin this wrathful God gives us over to. Three whole verses are allocated to the sin he obviously sees as the worst of all, namely homosexuality, with the remaining five verses covering about twenty-five less controversial aberrations. Paul is laying down the law according to … Paul!—even if he ascribes it to the angry, capital G God of his imagination. It is the God he wants to exist, the law he, himself, wants to judge everyone by.
We’ll see shortly that the same is basically true of the so-called capital “L” Law of Moses, which pre-dates Paul by about 1300 years, and which he (Paul) is obviously riffing off in this passage. But, no, God (the one who actually exists) is not a grumpy, old-school parent who judges and rejects us when we don’t live up to their commandments; they don’t in fact give us over to anything, we do all the digging of holes ourselves, ruining our relationships and our own lives in the process. The measure of right/wrong, good/bad is not conformity or otherwise to laws or commands made up by anyone at all, rather in our motivation: are we motivated by genuine consideration of others, or are we simply, as usual, only interested in taking care of number one? Is our behaviour selfish or selfless, in other words? Homosexuality, for example, is only wrong if it is selfishly motivated, as it surely might be, at least in some instances. Precisely the same is true for heterosexuality, and for all the other behaviours Paul lists—even God-hating, dare I say it, of gods that probably never actually existed, is wrong if it is selfishly motivated!
Why can’t Paul see this? It is the simplest and most obvious of things. Yes, he is dazzled by what he knows about Jesus and the vision he had on the Damascus road; but he is also dazzled—or perhaps, rather, dazed—by his upbringing, by his genetic memory from generations and ages past, of obedience or punishment, of old-school parenting, of laws and Law, of an invisible, omnipotent creator God who rules and judges the world by fiat. It is the hardest thing for any of us to see and really understand—this radical change Jesus came to work out in human life, in our lives—even today when we have long since had the old creationist view of the world totally blown away by the evolution revolution. And that, of course, is exactly why I feel compelled to write this letter—so please, if you dare, read on …
Thank you for reading Chapter 1 of New Romans – hope you enjoyed it. Chapter 2 is slated for release on 1 May, so stay tuned. To make sure you don’t miss out, contact me at ferg@antitheologia.com or subscribe to this website at antitheologia.com
[1] All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (2022).
