Pentecost +3 morning after thoughts

Good morning!

Well, yesterday was week #2 of our new series in the book of Romans. The thing that sticks in my mind about this passage is how radically EQUAL St. Paul sees things. The "no distinction" he mentions in vs 22b means that in his thinking there is no distinction between Jew & Gentile in their standing before God, and in terms of Paul's all-important issue of justification. Two things come blasting into my mind almost simultaneously on this topic.......(1) how radical of a notion this must've been--indeed, I'm not at all sure that Paul's view was supported by ANY OTHER APOSTLE at the time......and (2) how almost entirely irrelevant it is in today's church.

Not that I'm trying to dis St. Paul or a passage from the Bible, but the whole issue of the status of Jewish believers vs Gentile believers is almost completely absent from our radar screens. As a matter of fact, there is a HUGE issue of interpretation when it comes to this & other such passages of the Bible. The writer *clearly* had a particular group of people in mind at the time of his writing. IF that particular set of circumstances is no longer active......or at least actively brewing in the church, does that mean that we should seek to re-interpret and in some ways re-apply the author's point? In other words, our own local congregation here at LCHS (to the best of my knowledge) has no such mixture of Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. We are all Gentile. So then should I re-interpret/re-apply any of Paul's Jewish/Gentile dialog to mean something more along the lines of older generation/younger generation believers.....or maybe long-time believers vs newer converts.....or maybe those who seem stuck on tradition vs those who are more free-wheeling?

The reason I pose the rhetorical question is that this is PRECISELY the way that huge sections of Paul's writings have been interpreted and applied in the all-Gentile church for hundreds of years. Since the Jewish/Gentile dynamic of Paul's setting doesn't apply to our own, we seek to draw parallels to situations that we do have.
I struggle with this, however, as I'm not sure that ANY parallel we could possibly come up with equates to the Jewish experience.

In our own faith tradition, we need look no further than Luther himself when it comes to mistaken parallels. When Luther, for instance, looked at Romans 3:28 and read: "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law," his heavily conditioned medieval thought process interpreted that to mean that our standing before God's law-court was entirely conditioned upon FAITH, not our GOOD WORKS....especially, not the system of Indulgences, fasts, Purgatory, Masses for the dead, etc. etc. In our modern lingo, we might say that our standing before God is entirely based on our faith, not on how much money we drop in the Salvation Army Santa Klaus bucket, or how many little old ladies we help across the street, etc.

But this is a case of an entirely **true** conclusion coming from a faulty understanding of the verse. Paul wasn't talking about "good works" or "good actions" etc. when he mentioned "deeds of the law." In this particular case the modern translation known as the Complete Jewish Bible is more accurate: "Therefore, we hold the view that a person comes to be considered righteous by God on the ground of trusting, which has nothing to do with legalistic observance of Torah commands." In other words, the "deeds of the law" that Paul is talking about are things prescribed by TORAH (dietary rules, circumcision, Sabbath requirements, etc. etc.), NOT what we would simply call good deeds.

What practical difference does this make? Well, the first is interpretive. As followers of Jesus it is IMPORTANT to us that we strive to understand the word of God properly even if the thing its saying doesn't touch our lives in particular. If nothing else, this will help us from being led astray by charlatans and hucksters. Secondly and more importantly, once we begin to re-evaluate Paul's "deeds of the law" statements from books such as Romans and Galatians--seeing those statements in terms of Torah & keeping Kosher etc.--we in particular in our Protestant faith tradition can come to a happier understanding of the place of good deeds within our Christian life. Sadly, after nearly 500 years of Protestantism's ideal that we are "justified by faith alone" there are many Christians who have the quite mistaken understanding that saving faith *is* alone......and is rarely, if ever, accompanied by any fruit. Not so. Faith alone saves, but saving faith is never alone.

Cheers,

TM