Fr. Stephen De Young: In just a moment we’ll be picking up in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans 1:8. So the reason we didn’t get that far in Romans last time is that we had the introduction to the whole book last time which, at some time in the future for those sitting here with me, but already for those people who might be listening to this recording later, will be available online to listen to if you want to go back and hear that introduction. I’ll do a little bit of catch-up. It shouldn’t be that much catch-up because we only covered seven verses! [Laughter]

So we talked about, just in brief last time, that St. Paul is writing this epistle, this letter to the Christian community in Rome. He’s writing it in the mid-50s AD, probably between 54 and 56, so right in the middle of the decade. And we need to keep in mind a few things that that means. That means that this is, if we take 56, we take the latest date, that this is about 23 years after Christ’s resurrection and the day of Pentecost. So, on the outside, this Christian community in Rome has existed for maybe 20 years. This is a nascent Christian community; it’s still sort of forming.

And, as we talked about last time, there are not two separate religions of Judaism over here and Christianity over there, but the Christian community is still a part of the synagogue community at this point in history. So Christians—people who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah, as the Christ—are, for the most part, going to the synagogues, whether they are people of Jewish ethnicity who have now accepted Jesus as the Messiah or whether they’re Gentiles, non-Jews, who have embraced Jesus as the Messiah. They’re going on Saturday, on the Sabbath, to the synagogue for reading and preaching, though there’s now Christian preaching going on in many of these synagogues; and then on Sunday, on the first day of the week, they’re gathering just as a Christian community to celebrate the Eucharist.

In the midst of this, in this nascent community, as we talked about last time in Rome, the Emperor Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome, and, again, he didn’t discriminate between Jews and Christian Jews, but Gentiles who had joined the Christian community were not Jews. So you not only have this major segment of the nascent Christian community all thrown out of the city to leave the Gentile community to carry on, but no Jewish community in Rome means no synagogues operating. So for a period of between a year and two years, the Gentile Christian community had to adjust to sort of functioning on its own, and then after that year and a half or two years, the Jewish community is allowed to return, and so now we have this sort of re-assimilation issue.

Q1: Why did Claudius do that for such a brief period of time?

Fr. Stephen: He actually did it most people think at least twice. [Laughter] And it’s mainly because the Jews… In the same way that Nero would later use Christians as a scapegoat, the Jews were a convenient scapegoat because of their worship practices, specifically their refusal to worship the Roman gods. So when things weren’t going right… “Well, why is it?” “Well, the gods must be unhappy with us.” “Why would they be unhappy with us? We’ve been doing the sacrifices like we’re supposed to. Oh wait—these people living in our midst aren’t doing the sacrifices like we’re supposed to.”

Q1: Well, then why would he not keep it up? Why would he invite them back a year later?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Things would sort of cool off, and it wasn’t that they were invited back; it was more that the restriction just sort of ended, sort of passively.

Q1: Like enforcing it?

Fr. Stephen: It sort of ended, and there were a lot of reasons to want to be in Rome, with it being the imperial capital. So if people were allowed to return, they would return. It’s an odd dynamic from our perspective especially, not that we don’t have political scapegoating today—we certainly do—but in this case… You have to remember, there’s no separation between church and state, all of these things—religion, politics, the state, the culture, the society—are all woven together. And so Jews to a certain extent, and then Christians to an even larger extent, are sort of opting out of all of that by refusing to participate in these things.

The Romans, for the most part, not entirely, as obviously with this expulsion, but for the most part got a little bit of a pass, because the Romans acknowledged how ancient their beliefs were. And in addition to that they could kind of fit the Jewish beliefs into their religious logic in the sense that one of the biggest functions in terms of the gods you worshiped… We tend to think of the Greek pantheon or the Roman pantheon. Most Romans or Greeks worshiped one or two particular gods, and which ones those were—not that they denied the other ones—was based largely on where they lived, where they were from, their family’s history of worshiping some god or other. So you had this mix, maybe three or four. But if they were visiting somewhere else, and that city was seen to be the province of some other god, then they’d feel free to go and make offerings.

Q1: So when you went to Athens, you worshiped Artemis.

Fr. Stephen: Artemis, right. And so you would do that, too; it wasn’t exclusive. But they could kind of fit… They’d say, “The Jews, they just have one…” And from the Roman perspective, he’s the god of their people and their country. And so there are instances of both Greeks and Romans—not the God-fearers we were talking about, who were actually pious—sort of paying tribute here and there, or wanting to, at the Jewish temple, just to kind of cover all their bases and to say, “Well, this is the god of the Jews.” So they could kind of fit “this is the god of the Jews” into their system to a certain extent.

Christianity to them becomes more of an issue because, number one, they see it as new, this thing that just popped up, and, number two, in that they’re worshiping Christ, there’s no antiquity to it and they’re making the claim—we talked about this a little bit in the prologue of the epistle here, where we talked about how St. Paul’s saying that… giving titles to Jesus Christ like “Savior,” “Lord”—these are titles of Caesar. So the Christians are making these claims about Jesus Christ that not only he’s their god, but that he is the only God, and St. Paul’s going to say things in 1 Corinthians—all the gods of the nations are demons. [Laughter] So they’re making a very different claim. We’re going to see, especially in 1 and 2 Corinthians and in Galatians a little bit and in Ephesians and Colossians, St. Paul has this view that Christ has sort of defeated and destroyed the Roman gods who he believes to be demons. So that’s a very different kind of teaching than the way the Romans saw the Jews teaching. The Romans could sort of say, “Yeah, let them go worship their god; whatever makes them happy. We don’t really care.” Christians are making sort of different claims. When a Jewish person said that they believed that someday their Messiah would come and they’d rule the world and all the Gentiles would be their slaves, the Romans thought that that was funny and quaint. [Laughter] Like: “Yeah, sure.” So it was a different sort of dynamic.

Q1: And the Christians were converting people who had been up to that time worshiping the Roman gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Jews are not proselytizing. They’re happy to have those God-fearers: if you want to come to the synagogue and learn about the Jewish Scripture and that kind of thing, great, but they’re not going out and trying to convert people at this point. So, yeah, all of those things are sort of factored in there. But so there were occasional flare-ups—nothing like the persecution of Christians that would flare up later by the Romans. I mean, we’re talking right now: compare Claudius expelling the Jews just from the city of Rome twice to what Nero does with Christians. There’s sort of no comparison in terms of persecution level.

But so St. Paul sees with the Jewish community now returning with the Gentile community having gotten used to sort of operating on its own and operating outside the context of the synagogue—he sees this danger of the two communities not being reintegrated, of there being three groups now: Jews who don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah, Jews who do accept Jesus as the Messiah, and then these Gentile Christians over here. So a lot of the argument that we’re going to see even starting tonight as we get into the body of St. Paul’s epistle is going to be talking about—St. Paul arguing that the position in Christ of the Jewish person and the Gentile person who has accepted Jesus as the Messiah, they’re in the same position in all respects. They were in the same position before the Gospel was preached to them; they’re in the same position now that they’ve accepted it and received it with faith, and so that there’s not a difference. That’s going to be the major overriding theme.

And then within that he’s going to need to explain sort of a whole series of other questions that arise from that. Well, then what do all the promises mean in the Old Testament to the nation of Israel, if we’re all the same now? How come, if Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, so many of the Jews don’t accept him? There’s going to be all these other questions he’s going to have to deal with along the way in terms of trying to bring this one community back together to being one community again.

And so last time we basically, as I said, we read the prologue, sort of the introduction and greeting. We talked about some of the themes that were in there. It’s a little bit theologically dense—we’ll see that with all of St. Paul’s epistles, his introductions: he packs a whole bunch into it. And a lot of times then what he does in the rest of the letter is sort of unpack those things and pull those out and explain them. So unless we have any other questions or comments or anything, we’ll go ahead and get started in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans 1:8. And you can tell we’re getting into the body of his letter now because he helpfully starts with: “First…”, “In the first place…” [Laughter]

“[First], I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” So he starts out by saying, and he’s going to acknowledge this further, but remember, as we said, St. Paul hasn’t been to Rome yet… He’s going to go there, but he hasn’t been there yet. He’s hearing about the Church in Rome and what’s going on there, and he starts by saying, “Most of what I hear is good!” That people talk about them. And being the Christian community in Rome—it’s going to become much more dire under Nero in a decade, but they’re in the middle of the imperial capital. They’re in relatively hostile already territory in terms of what they’re dealing with, and the temptations they’re dealing with as a community, being in sort of the hub, the heart of Roman culture and yet trying to remain apart from it.

Q1: Has Peter been to Rome yet?

Fr. Stephen: It is unclear. Most likely not. It isn’t recorded. We read the book of Acts; it doesn’t say when exactly St. Peter went there. We know he’s there in the 60s and is martyred there, and we know he writes 1 Peter, although we talked about what “writing” means—we know he dictates the letter, 1 Peter, from Rome, because he indicates so at the beginning. So then you get into: Well, when exactly was 1 Peter written? That doesn’t really help you in terms of examples. [Laughter] It doesn’t say what day it was; there’s not a date at the top of the letter. So we know he was there in the 60s; whether he had been there yet in the mid-50s, my surmise would be probably not, because when we do see him in the book of Acts, surrounding St. Paul’s missionary journeys, he’s usually somewhere in Palestine. I mean, we saw him in Joppa, we saw him in some different places, but still within Palestine during that period. Now when St. Paul gets back from his missionary journeys, we read about him going and seeing St. James, and St. Peter is conspicuously absent. We also know that St. Peter was in Antioch. So we don’t know where he was when he wasn’t in Jerusalem, because St. Paul got back there. So all that is to say we’re not sure; my surmise would be: mid-50s, probably not.

Q1: I would think it would have some bearing on our understanding of this, because if Peter’s been there or is actually there, then I think Paul would have to say things somewhat differently or refer to Peter or something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, I mean, he’d probably refer to him. And we know St. Peter didn’t establish that church. That church would have been established by people who would have been there on the day of Pentecost and then gone back home and preached the Gospel from there. So, yeah, my surmise would be St. Peter showed up some time in the late 50s, so after this, as did St. Paul. Of course, St. Peter went there voluntarily; St. Paul sort of went there voluntarily. [Laughter] He wanted to go there, but he went there in chains.

So he starts by saying that he gives thanks to God for the fact that they’re… Now remember, “your faith is spoken of.” This is going to be very important later in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. When we talk about “faith,” we’re not talk about sort of spiritual fervor or excitement; we’re talking about… faith is about trust and loyalty and faithfulness. So when he talks about their faith, he’s talking about their loyalty to Christ and their trust in Christ, which again is, in the city of Rome, not going to be easy. They’re going to face a lot of conflicts in their everyday life that they might not face in some other places like Antioch. If they were in the middle of the Jewish community in Antioch and part of the Christian community in Antioch, it was a different thing than being sort of in the heart of Rome.

“For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the Gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers.” So he says: I’m constantly praying for you—because, again, he hasn’t been there—but I’ve heard good reports. I’m praying for you and for this community, “making request if, by some means, now at last I may find a way in the will of God to come to you.” So he tips off, and we saw this in the book of Acts, that even before he was arrested, his goal was to get to Rome. So he says: Not only am I praying for you, but I’m praying that at some point I manage to get there to see you in person.

“For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift so that you may be established, that is, that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.” So he says: I want to go there because I want to teach you more about the faith, because, again, this community has been evangelized, but if an apostle hasn’t been there yet, their level of knowledge of these things, we don’t know exactly where it is. So he says: I want to come there and instruct you further so that you can be established, so that a foundation—let me make sure a foundation is made, to strengthen you, and that doing that will benefit St. Paul also, being with them and doing this.

“I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often planned to come to you, but was hindered until now, that I might have some fruit among you also, just as among the other Gentiles.” So he says: I’ve been wanting for a long time. And notice he refers to them as “brethren”: we saw in the book of Acts, this is sort of what Christians called each other. They called each other brothers and sisters. They’d say they’d visit the brethren. And this is not just a friendly statement, Brother So-and-so, Sister So-and-so, like a title; this is… Calling someone your brother or your sister in the context of this culture, especially in Roman culture, entailed with it obligations. Some of the early pagan writers we have writing about Christianity, this is one of the things they think is really weird about Christianity, and they actually phrase it this way.

In Roman morality, you had this responsibility to your family. If someone in your family was poor or suffering some misfortune, that was a shame to the whole family, because people were saying, “Why aren’t the other people in the family taking care of this person?” That wasn’t a shame to that person; it was a shame to everybody else that they were letting that happen. So there was this network of responsibility that that entailed by being part of a family. And the Romans looked at Christians, and it wasn’t just that they called each other brother and sister; it was that they said, “These Christians extend that to everyone in their community, even people who aren’t related to them.”

That’s what they didn’t understand. There would be some person who was poor, in poverty or suffering in some way, and these people who are no relation whatsoever are paying their bills, feeding them, clothing, taking care of them, as if this was a family member. So they think that’s strange that you would try to extend that out past your immediate family. Because, immediate family, yeah, you’re obligated, but why would I do that for… You know, who cares about them? Well, the Christians did. So when we see this language of “brother and sister,” this is an important statement. By saying, “You’re my brother, you’re my brother in Christ, you’re my sister in Christ,” that’s not just a polite thing; that’s saying, “I’m making a commitment to you that I’m going to be there for you the way I would my physical literal brother or sister.”

And so he’s wanted to come because he wants to, as he says, he wants to have some fruit among them just as among the other Gentiles.

Q1: So does that mean…?

Fr. Stephen: Converts. [Laughter] Converts, in our terms. And this, while we talked about Judaism and Christianity not being separate religions, Christianity and paganism were very separate religions, so this is, these are straight-up converts if we’re talking about pagans. That language is important, too, because that’s not the language he uses when he’s talking about God-fearers. This is talking about pagans; this is talking about just straight-up Greeks, Romans, barbarians. Now remember, Rome, unlike a lot of the places where St. Paul went on his missionary journeys… I mean, when he went to Athens, almost everyone there is a Greek. You’ve got Greeks and you’ve got a few Jews in a little Jewish community, but it’s mostly Greek. Rome, you’ve got people from all over the Mediterranean world. So you’ve got a Jewish community there, but you’ve got Romans, you’ve got Greeks, you’ve got Egyptians, you’ve got other North Africans, you’ve got people from barbarian tribes in Europe—you’ve got everybody coming and doing business in Rome, so a vast variety of pagans from whom St. Paul wants to bring some to Christ.

He says, “I am a debtor, both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise, so as much as in me, I’m read to preach the Gospel to you who are in Rome also.” So he’s saying he doesn’t discriminate. Just a note on Greeks and barbarians: the word “barbarian”—barbaroi is the plural in Greek—comes from the fact that Greeks thought that all languages other than Greek sounded stupid, and so they said people who didn’t speak sounded like: “Bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.” [Laughter] That’s where it comes from, sort of like the adults on Charlie Brown! So when St. Paul says, “Greeks and barbarians, wise and unwise,” those are parallel. To be Greek and to speak Greek was to be educated. If you didn’t and you spoke one of these other languages, you were a barbarian; you were uneducated, uncultured.

So he now wants to get there to Rome and preach the Gospel, to the Greeks and to the barbarians, without distinction.

Q1: Romans were not considered barbarians.

Fr. Stephen: No, but educated Romans all spoke Greek. [Laughter] We have to remember, we think of Romans as speaking Latin, and that was their language, and Latin was used in the Senate; it was used by the emperor for official proclamations and this sort of thing, but day to day, even in the city of Rome, most people were speaking Greek, because of this big mix of people from all over the world. It’s sort of like if you go to a big city in Europe today, and you have people from a whole bunch of different countries, you’re liable to find them all speaking English to each other, because it’s sort of the bridge language, even if for most of them it’s not their first language, they’ve picked it up as a second or third language. So the same thing with Greek at this time in history. Unless you were a highly educated Roman, you wouldn’t know any Latin, but people everywhere learned Greek. People in Palestine, their first language was Aramaic, but they learned Greek to be able to interact with everybody else.

So now, now that he’s done that, he sort of has the prologue and his greeting, and then we have this sort of introduction. And we’re going to find—remember, this is a letter, so this kind of thing is normal when you’re writing a letter to someone—we’re going to find at the end of all of St. Paul’s epistles there’s this section which is always sort of: “Say hi to so-and-so. So-and-so who’s here with me says hi.” There are several of them. So this beginning is sort of the… especially with a community like the one in Rome where he hasn’t been there. When he writes to the Corinthians, he’s the one who helped establish the Church at Corinth; here he’s kind of saying, “I know I haven’t been there. I’m hoping to get there. I’ve been hoping to get there. I’m praying for you and I’m praying that I get there.” So he’s sort of introducing it. Now we’re sort of getting to the meat.

Q1: Why does he say he’s a “debtor” to Greeks and barbarians?

Fr. Stephen: Because he’s trying to make the point that he doesn’t discriminate between them, that both of them have assisted him and helped him, that he’s not… Remember what the primary issue is that we’re dealing with, is this sort of ethnic issue, and so he’s trying to make the point that that’s not an issue for him, that people of all kinds of ethnicities, whether they’re Jewish, whether they’re Greek, whether they’re barbarians, whether they’re Scythians, whether they’re whatever—that all of them have assisted him, all of them have helped him: he’s thankful for all of them. And that’s kind of a subtle thing, because it’s not directly addressing the problem he’s going to be addressing, but it’s in the ballpark.

And remember, he’s also just said, for what we’re about to start, about going there and preaching the Gospel, and we talked about what that means; we sort of redefined that last time, that he’s coming to proclaim the victory of Christ.

It says, “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.” So he says: I’m not embarrassed about it; I’ll come and preach it to anybody; I’m not shy. He will preach it to anyone, because it’s the power of God, and that “to salvation” is actually an “unto,” “unto” meaning the purpose of it: what it does. The Gospel, when it’s preached, has the power to save, to bring salvation, to everyone who believes it.

Q1: Let me ask about belief here, because in modern context so often Christian faith is reduced to belief in the sense of assenting to certain propositions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the true/false test.

Q1: Yeah. What’s the sense in which he’s using it here?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that is required as a first level. When St. Paul comes and preaches the Gospel to you and tells you that Jesus is the Messiah, he was crucified, on the third day he was raised again, he ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of God, and he’s going to judge the living and the dead—first you have to believe that that’s true, so that is the basic layer, but that’s not it. It’s not just assenting to “true” on the true/false test. Remember, we were just talking about the word “faith,” the noun “faith” and the verb “believe” are the same word in Greek.

Q1: Oh really?

Fr. Stephen: So St. Paul’s using the same word here.

Q1: Ah! That makes it clear.

Fr. Stephen: “Faith” is pistis.

Q3: Really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s pistis, and the verb is pistevo: same root. And so you can translate them—you can translate where it says “faith” as “belief,” or you can translate “believes” as “faiths.” [Laughter] So the person who believes in it is not only accepting the truth of it, though that is implied, but they’re also putting their trust and their confidence and their loyalty in it, and their loyalty to the Gospel of Christ, so that’s loyalty to Christ. So you’re accepting that Christ is the one who’s the Lord of heaven and earth, and he’s returning to judge the living and the dead, and so that then has consequences.

Q1: Yeah, so it does include, then, the consequences. It does indeed. Oh, that’s true! Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s going to become important later on, because as I mentioned last time, our Protestant friends like to separate out faith and works, like they’re these two different things. If the doctor came to you tomorrow and said, “Look, you have six months to live,” and you went out and put a bunch of money into long-term investments, people would look at you and say, “I don’t think he believed the doctor,” not because you said, “I don’t believe I’m going to die in six months,” but because your actions imply that you don’t actually think you’re going to die in six months. And so the same is true in this case. If you really believe that Jesus Christ is now reigning over all creation from heaven and is the Lord of all and he’s going to return at some point in the imminent future to judge the living and the dead, that, if you really believe that, will affect, then, how you live your whole life.

So you can’t sort of strip out the activity involved in loyalty and faithfulness and trust. They go together; you can’t separate those two out as two different things. And St. Paul doesn’t do that, but when we get to that we’ll talk more about what St. Paul is doing with that—but he’s not separating these two out. He’s not saying: Well, I’m going to come and I’m going to tell you who Jesus is, and if you say, “Yeah, I believe it,” then you’re saved. That’s not what he’s saying here, but he’s saying that…

Q1: Well, that’s why I asked the question.

Fr. Stephen: It’s “the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.” So the verb tense is here important: “believes” is in the present tense; it’s ongoing, not “believed,” at one point in time. There’s a different Greek verb tense if you want to say that. There’s a Greek verb tense called the aorist tense that’s for an action that’s completed, meaning it’s in the past: you did it.

Q1: Been there, done that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the present tense in Greek is ongoing, so this is everyone who believes, ongoing, and the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation for the person who believes it. So salvation comes at the end through faith; it’s not all past tense: “Now I’m saved because I believed at some point.”

And you notice, now he’s starting to get into his theme a little bit: “for the Jew first and also for the Greek.” Now here I have to make an important point. This isn’t just talking about his strategy. We saw that in the book of Acts, when St. Paul went to a new city, he went to the synagogue first and preached there, and then after he preached at the synagogue, usually after he got thrown out of the synagogue, he went to the people, the regular, run-of-the-mill pagan Gentiles outside, outside of the synagogue. He’s not just referring to that here, when he says to the Jew first and then to the Greek; he’s speaking historically. He’s speaking historically. Historically, the Gospel was proclaimed first to Jews and then to the Greeks, because when Jesus Christ became incarnate, he becomes incarnate in Judea. Remember, the word “Jew” here is really the Greek word for “Judeans,” so, yeah, the Judeans had him living in their midst, so they saw Christ first; they heard Christ preaching first. He rose from the dead right there outside Jerusalem. So they had him first, and then the Gospel went out to the Greeks, to the rest of the world.

It’s important to make that point here, not because that’s a big thing here, but St. Paul is going to speak historically through most of his epistle to the Romans. And this is one of the big errors in interpreting the epistle to the Romans, is not understanding that St. Paul is talking about the history of Israel and the Jewish people and the Gentiles, thinking he’s talking about, like, things I experience in my own life, for example, or something like that. He’s speaking historically here, and he’s going to continue to speak historically.

Q1: So that doesn’t mean primarily to the Jews and also, secondarily, to the Greeks.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is a historical sequence. You see that in the Great Commission at the end of St. Matthew’s gospel. Obviously, all of the apostles there are all Jews; they’re all Judeans, but Christ says to them, “Go out and make disciples from all of the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

And so that’s also how we understand what St. Paul—the principle that St. Paul is talking about there historically is also how we understand a whole bunch of passages in the gospels, like when Christ tells St. Photini at the well in Samaria that salvation is “of the Jews” or is “from the Jews,” that’s what he means, because he’s a Judean—a Galilean, technically. But he’s there first, and then it goes out to the whole world. That’s what, when Christ tells the Canaanite woman, or the Syro-phoenician woman, depending on what translation you have, that he’s come only to the twelve tribes of Israel, that’s how to understand all of those things, that there are sort of these two phases, because Jesus is promised as the Messiah to Israel, to the Jewish people by the prophets. So he comes to them and fulfills that promise, but then, from there, it moves out to encompass the whole world.

“For in it,” meaning in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed, from faith to faith; as it is written: The just shall live by faith.”

Q1: You have to work hard on that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Well, this is going to be another one of those problems with words being translated differently. So the word there, “the just,” and the word “righteousness” is the same word. In Arabic it’s the same word? Yeah, it’s the same word in Greek. The word dikaios can mean… Really means… Anywhere you see it outside the New Testament, it’s translated as “justice.” Plato’s Republic, the whole dialogue is “What is the nature of dikaios? What is justice?” And there are a couple of forms of it that occur here. Dikaiosyne, which is why it is translated as righteousness; “justiceness” doesn’t roll off the… [Laughter] “Justness,” I guess. But they’re the same word.

And you’ll also notice that St. Paul quotes Habakkuk.

Q1: The italics there is Habakkuk?

Fr. Stephen: Right, Habakkuk 2:4. So I haven’t done a lot of this in the past, but I’m going to do it in St. Paul’s epistles, and I’m going to do it for a reason, because this is another way that people misinterpret St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans a lot of times, is that they treat his quotes from the Old Testament like sort of proof-texts or something and gloss over them, but when St. Paul quotes something from the Old Testament, or from, from his perspective, the Scriptures, he’s trying to bring some ideas that are actually there in that text to bear. He expects them… We’ve talked before about how they didn’t have chapters and verses at this point, so St. Paul couldn’t say, “Well, it’s like it says in Habakkuk, chapter two, verses four through twelve.” He couldn’t say it, so you quote the first line. And he expected, because of their familiarity with the Scriptures, that when he quoted that first line, that would call to mind what’s going on in the context.

So I’m actually going to go back to Habakkuk 2 and read a little bit. Okay, so I’m going to start in verse one of Habakkuk 2. It says:

I will stand on my watch, mounted upon the rock, and see what he shall say to me, and what might I answer when I am reproved. And the Lord answered me and said, “Write the vision distinctly on the tablet, that he who reads it may flee. For the vision is yet for an appointed time and will come up at the end, and it will not be in vain. For if he should tarry, wait for him, for he will surely come, and he will not tarry.

I know you’re not understanding; we’ll get… I’ll come back. And then verse [five]:

If any many should shrink back, my soul will not be well-pleased in him, but the righteous shall live by my faith, but the one who has drunk and the scoffer, the man who boasts, shall accomplish nothing. He wind his soul as the grave, and his death he is never satisfied, and he will gather to himself all the nations and will take to himself all the peoples.

We’ll pause there. You noticed especially the last verse.

Q1: This is God trying to bring in all the peoples.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This quote from Habakkuk here is important, because St. Paul establishes a bunch of themes that we’re going to see later through the whole epistle. So he talks about that beginning part, just to explain it briefly—I’m not going to do a Bible study on Habakkuk now, but just to explain it briefly. Habakkuk has this vision, and God tells him: Look, you need to take this vision and write it down, because this vision is about something that’s going to happen later. That’s what it means: it’s going to be for the end. So this isn’t something—I’m not going to give you this vision because this is something that’s going to happen in your own life, Habakkuk, but you need to write this down and pass this down. So part of what St. Paul is doing by quoting this is saying that time is now; that time has now come, this time that was prophesied before.

And then what he says here has two parts. The first part is, and the part that he quotes is from: “If any man should shrink back, my soul will not be well-pleased in him, but the righteous shall live by my faith.” So there’s a contrast here. There’s a righteous person, who is faithful to God, and there’s another person who shrinks back, and God is not pleased with that person. So right away here, when Martin Luther quotes this verse, he says, “Oh, see, the righteous will live by faith, not works.”

Q1: Yeah, this is the big Lutheran text.

Fr. Stephen: By faith, not works. But how does Habakkuk go on to describe the person who shrinks back? “The one who is drunk and a scoffer, the man who boasts.”

Q1: These are behaviors.

Fr. Stephen: These are behaviors; these are sinful behaviors. So living by faith means living righteously. That’s what Habakkuk is very clearly saying here. And the time when this is going to happen, the time when this sifting out between the righteous who will be faithful and the unrighteous who are going to be sinners, this is going to happen at the end, and when that happens, that is when God is going to gather to himself all the nations and take to himself all the peoples. So that first group, amongst whom you have the righteous who are faithful, and you have those who shrink back, who are living in a sinful way—if this is before he has called the nations and the Gentiles to himself, who is it? It’s the people of Israel, or specifically the Judeans, the Jews. Some of them are going to be faithful and live in faithfulness to God; some of them are going to what? Shrink back and fall away. And when they shrink back and fall away, what is God going to do? He’s going to bring in people from all the nations and join them to those, that righteous faithful remnant.

So when St. Paul quotes this, he’s not just proof-texting; he’s quoting that whole idea, and we’re going to see, he’s going to keep coming back to that idea all through Romans, that there has been this judgment that’s happened among the Jewish people, and that’s what is represented by those who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah and those who haven’t. The righteous have, and the righteous have faith; the unrighteous have shrunk back and fallen away. And now God has called in the people from the nations to live faithfully and to replace them who have fallen away. So it actually means almost the exact opposite of how Luther interpreted it! [Laughter]

Q1: This may be less important, but St. Paul can be a confusing writer, and when he says it’s revealed from faith to faith, what does that mean?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because what he’s saying is, those people… We talked about this a little bit in St. John’s gospel. Remember, there were people who recognize Jesus and people who don’t recognize Jesus, and Jesus says, for example, “You don’t hear my voice because you’re not my sheep,” or, “If you knew the Father, you would know me, but because you don’t know me, that shows you don’t know the Father either.” It’s that same kind of idea. So the people who were faithful, the Jewish people who were faithful to God, when they hear the Gospel—who are the righteous, the faithful, this remnant, when they hear the Gospel, they accept it in faith, so they move from faith to faith. Their faith continues. The faithfulness they had to God now extends to faithfulness to Jesus Christ, when they hear the Gospel.

And so the ones who didn’t, weren’t faithful originally, the people who shrank back in Habakkuk, they’re the ones who don’t respond with faith to the Gospel, because they didn’t have any faith to begin with.

Q1: That’s a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and part of it is, again, St. Paul is writing to people who he expects to just: [Snap] “Oh yeah, Habakkuk on the watch-tower.”

Q2: [Inaudible] ...on that time, is why.

Fr. Stephen: It was; it was, because these are… They were hearing these texts, in the same way that I just did it. Remember when I said St. Paul’s hearers interpreting stories like St. Photini at the well, you knew what I was talking about. Why? Well, because one Sunday every year we read that story and it’s preached and it’s talked about!

Q2: We get it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. Same thing for them at this time, going to the synagogue. They’ve heard Habakkuk in the cycle of readings every year, and they’ve heard this stuff preached. So they know it the way I can refer to things in the gospels. So that’s why he can just sort of cite it: Okay, yeah.

But there’s even some of this in our liturgics, because, for example, one of the odes of the canon in matins is about Habakkuk, and it talks about Habakkuk on his watch-tower all the time. I think most folks are sort of like: “… Wait, what?” [Laughter]

Q1: This is interesting because in Christian art and in the liturgy and everything Habakkuk crops up a fair amount of times. And in my Protestant days, Habakkuk was never mentioned at all!

Fr. Stephen: He’s not the most popular of the Old Testament prophets.

Q1: They wouldn’t even say his name. And so I wondered. There’s some place where Habakkuk becomes more important than when I was growing up.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Isaiah is big.

Q1: Yeah, Isaiah is big stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Ezekiel is weird, so you don’t get that quoted as much.

Q1: Yeah, but Habakkuk is just ignored.

Fr. Stephen: But Isaiah and certain parts of Jeremiah… Well, yeah, all of them, except for Jonah—you usually read Jonah, because it’s got sort of an interesting story—but Obadiah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Zephaniah, all of those from the twelve prophets are neglected a lot.

Q2: And we don’t go back and read these. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

Q1: Yeah, they’re just names. I don’t have anything to go with the name.

Fr. Stephen: And what separates Habakkuk, and the reason why you see more than, say, Obadiah… If you read Obadiah, Obadiah is a series of oracles against the nation of Edom—so it’s important, but he was giving prophecies that were about things that were happening in his own period. So there’s of course things that we learn from that, that we can take from that, but Habakkuk, as we saw, is specifically having a vision that’s about something that hasn’t happened yet. And so especially—not just the Christians; the Jews at this time read this as “Oh, this is a prophecy about the messianic age in the future. So the early Christians were like: “Yes, this is a prophecy about now.” So Habakkuk, even out of those books, becomes very important to Christians for that reason, because as we’ve talked about before we tend to use “prophet” to mean someone who predicts the future, but that’s not what it meant in the ancient world; it meant someone who speaks for God. And sometimes God would say things about the future, but sometimes he’d say things about the present, and sometimes he’d say things about the past, so it includes all of those in the prophecy.