“Now to him who is able to establish you according to my Good News and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret through long ages, but now is revealed, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, is made known for obedience of faith to all the nations; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.”
— Romans 16:25–27
Paul has finished his letter. The argument has reached its conclusion, the greetings have been given, and the final doxology has returned everything to the God whose gospel occupied the opening sentence. For the Christians who first received Romans, however, reaching the end of the letter did not mean that its work among them was finished. They still had to live together in Rome. Phoebe still had business requiring their assistance. The strong and weak still had different consciences. Jewish and Gentile Christians still brought different histories into the same churches. False teachers still had to be recognized, missionaries supported, and the ordinary work of serving, loving, giving, welcoming, and pursuing peace continued.
What Paul had written would shape how they understood all of those things. The theological argument was not detached from the life awaiting them after the letter had been read aloud.
The same consideration matters when we reach its final amen. After studying Romans closely, it is easy to measure what we have gained by the number of theological questions we can now answer. Romans certainly deserves careful theological study. Few biblical books have contributed more to Christian thinking about sin, justification, faith, grace, the law, union with Christ, the Spirit, Israel, election, Christian liberty, governing authorities, and the church.
Yet Romans itself will not allow knowledge of those truths to be separated from the people those truths should produce. Paul did not write merely to give the Romans a more sophisticated explanation of the gospel. What Christians believe about the gospel necessarily changes how they understand God, themselves, one another, Scripture, the church, and the world into which Christ sends them.
Reaching the end of Romans therefore leaves us with the task of reading the rest of Scripture with the same care Paul’s argument has demanded and of allowing what we have read to govern the life created by the gospel he proclaimed.
Read the Argument, Not Just the Verse
Romans contains some of the most frequently quoted verses in Christianity. That familiarity can become a disadvantage when individual sentences become so well known that we stop noticing what Paul was doing when he wrote them.
“All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” belongs to an argument that began long before Romans 3:23. Paul has spent the preceding chapters closing every possible escape from the charge that humanity stands guilty before God. The verse is not an isolated observation about universal imperfection but part of Paul’s conclusion that neither Gentile rebellion nor Jewish possession of the law leaves anyone with grounds for boasting.
“Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined” does not appear as an independent statement designed to settle every later debate concerning election. It occurs within Paul’s assurance to suffering Christians that God’s purpose for those who love him reaches from foreknowledge to final glorification and that nothing encountered along the way can overturn what God is accomplishing in Christ.
“All Israel will be saved” arrives only after Paul has spent chapters discussing Israel’s unbelief, the remnant, Gentile inclusion, the olive tree, hardening, mercy, and the warning that Gentile Christians must not become arrogant toward Jewish branches. Likewise, “all things work together for good” receives its meaning from the good Paul identifies as conformity to the image of God’s Son. “Faith comes by hearing” belongs to an argument about the proclamation of Christ, while the command to present our bodies as living sacrifices follows eleven chapters explaining the mercies of God.
The reading habit required by Romans extends beyond Romans itself. Scripture must be allowed to make its own argument. Chapter and verse numbers are useful for locating passages, but Paul did not compose Romans as thousands of independent statements waiting to be removed from their surroundings. Words belong to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to arguments, and those arguments to a letter written for a reason.
Careful reading therefore requires more than verifying that the words we quote actually appear in the Bible. We must ask what those words mean within the argument in which they were written. Romans rewards that patience because Paul regularly introduces questions long before resolving them, returns to themes after they have temporarily disappeared, anticipates objections, draws conclusions from earlier sections, and expects his readers to remember what has already been established.
Following that argument makes Romans more difficult to reduce to a collection of theological slogans and provides a model for reading the rest of Scripture with the same attention to context.
Let Paul Define the Question
Readers inevitably come to Romans carrying questions of their own. Christians inherit theological traditions, denominational debates, familiar interpretations, favorite teachers, and controversies that influence what they notice when they open the letter. Those influences cannot simply be discarded, but they become a problem when our questions become so dominant that Paul is no longer permitted to establish the questions governing his own argument.
Romans 9 provides an obvious example. Christians frequently arrive there prepared for a debate about Calvinism and free will. Questions concerning election and human response legitimately arise from the text, but Paul identifies the problem driving his discussion before mentioning Jacob and Esau or the potter and clay. He is grieving over Israel, and the question he raises is whether Israel’s unbelief means that “the word of God has come to nothing.”
Ignoring that question can produce an extensive debate over individual statements in Romans 9 while leaving the argument Paul carries through Romans 10 and 11 almost untouched.
The same problem appears elsewhere. Romans 7 can become a debate over whether the speaker is regenerate or unregenerate before the reader has followed Paul’s sustained discussion of sin, law, death, flesh, and the inability of the law to produce the life it commands. Romans 13 can become primarily a discussion of the limits of government without sufficient attention to its place within Paul’s teaching about vengeance, authority, obligation, love, and Christian conduct in the world. Romans 14 can be reduced to a general claim that everything is a matter of conscience when Paul is actually addressing particular disagreements among believers whom God has received.
Good interpretation does not require abandoning theological questions. It requires allowing the biblical writer’s argument to govern how those questions are asked.
That discipline also changes the relationship between Scripture and our theological systems. Instead of beginning with a system and looking for the place where a verse belongs within it, we begin with the argument of the text and allow our theological conclusions to be tested by what we find. Sometimes the result confirms what we already believed. Sometimes greater qualification is required. At other times we may discover that we have been asking a passage to settle a question the writer was not addressing in that place.
The recurring attack upon human boasting throughout Romans makes such interpretive humility especially appropriate when reading a letter that so frequently overturns the confidence of people who assumed they already knew where they stood.
Do Not Turn Grace into a System for Boasting
One of the stranger possible outcomes of reading Romans is using its theology of grace as another reason to regard ourselves as superior to other Christians. Paul spends much of the letter making that response impossible.
The person who condemns Gentile wickedness discovers that he too stands under judgment. The Jew who boasts in possession of the law discovers that hearing the law cannot justify its transgressor. The person tempted to claim righteousness as wages encounters Abraham receiving righteousness through faith. The Gentile Christian tempted to boast over unbelieving Jews is reminded that he stands by faith and is supported by a root he did not create. The strong Christian who despises the weak and the weak Christian who judges the strong are both placed before the Lord who received them.
Romans repeatedly removes whatever platform sinners construct for looking down upon others. That pattern should affect the way Christians hold even correct theology.
Understanding justification by faith provides no grounds for boasting over someone who explains it poorly. Understanding the relationship between Israel and the church does not permit contempt for Christians who interpret Romans 9–11 differently. A mature conscience does not permit the strong to mock the weak, and a restrictive conscience does not permit the weak to appoint themselves judges of everyone else.
None of this makes doctrinal differences irrelevant. Paul cares enough about truth to warn the church against teachers whose doctrine contradicts what they have received. Yet the same Paul refuses to treat every disagreement as apostasy or every difference as grounds for separation.
Romans therefore requires discernment in more than one direction. Christians must distinguish truth from error while also distinguishing errors that undermine apostolic teaching from disagreements among people whom Christ has received. Treating every disagreement as insignificant eventually empties doctrine of meaning, while treating every disagreement as a test of fellowship makes the unity Paul commands impossible.
Paul’s approach depends upon knowing both the content of the gospel and the implications of Christ having received people who do not agree about everything.
Remember What Mercy Does
Romans 12 marks the most obvious transition in the letter when Paul urges the Christians in Rome, “by the mercies of God,” to present their bodies as living sacrifices. He does not abandon theology at that point but begins concentrating upon the life produced by the theology he has already explained.
The order matters. Service, love, hospitality, generosity, submission, patience, peace, self-denial, and concern for weaker believers are responses to mercy rather than means of purchasing it. Christians do not perform these things in order to create the standing before God described earlier in Romans. They perform them because God has already acted mercifully toward them in Christ.
That order protects Christian obedience from opposite distortions. Obedience cannot become the means by which sinners establish their righteousness before God, because Romans has already located justification in the grace of God received through faith. Yet the exclusion of works from justification cannot become an excuse for treating obedience as unimportant. Those united with Christ are commanded not to continue presenting themselves to sin. They walk according to the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body, renew their minds, use their gifts, love sincerely, overcome evil with good, fulfill the law through love, and pursue what builds up their brothers and sisters.
Paul therefore maintains a distinction between earning and transformation without separating grace from the life grace produces. Making obedience the price of mercy destroys grace; using mercy to excuse indifference toward obedience ignores the new life Romans describes.
The God who justifies sinners also changes the relationship those sinners have with sin, with one another, and with the lives they now offer to him.
See the Person Christ Received
Romans repeatedly brings theological conclusions into relationships, and nowhere is this clearer than in the dispute between the strong and weak. Paul could have addressed the disagreement by identifying the better argument and moving on. Instead, much of his concern is directed toward what disagreement has done to the way these Christians regard one another.
His descriptions are deliberately personal. The person on the other side is a brother, another’s servant, someone for whom Christ died, and someone whom God has received. Paul does not minimize the importance of truth; he refuses to let confidence in being correct become permission to destroy another Christian.
That remains difficult because theological categories are useful. Christians really do hold different positions, and those positions sometimes need names if they are to be discussed clearly. A person may be described as Calvinist or Arminian, dispensational or covenantal, continuationist or cessationist because those descriptions communicate actual differences in belief.
The problem arises when the category becomes more important than the person it describes.
Romans 14 forces the reader to see something else before deciding how to treat the Christian with whom he disagrees. That person belongs to Christ. God has received that person, Christ is that person’s Lord, and both will eventually stand before the same God.
The letter containing some of the New Testament’s most sustained theological reasoning therefore also contains some of its strongest warnings against theological arrogance. Paul sees no conflict between careful doctrine and love for other Christians because properly understood doctrine supplies reasons for that love. A reading of Romans that produces increasing confidence in our own theological superiority while producing increasing contempt for other Christians has failed to absorb a substantial part of Paul’s argument.
Let the Gospel Create a Church
The final chapter of Romans prevents Christianity from being reduced to an individual relationship with God supplemented by occasional contact with other believers. Paul’s gospel has created a community populated by people with obligations toward one another.
Phoebe needs to be received and assisted. Prisca and Aquila have risked themselves and opened their home. Mary has labored. Andronicus and Junia have shared imprisonment. Rufus’s mother has cared for Paul. Timothy works beside him, Tertius writes, Gaius hosts, and Christians gather in households throughout Rome while exchanging greetings with believers elsewhere.
The movement from universal guilt earlier in Romans to these particular relationships at its conclusion belongs to the gospel. People justified through Christ become joined to other people justified through Christ, and Paul describes them as members of one another because belonging to Christ creates responsibilities that an individualistic understanding of Christianity cannot accommodate.
Those responsibilities are often ordinary. Other Christians require patience when their consciences differ from ours and humility when ours is the conscience requiring restraint. Material need creates opportunities for generosity, travel and displacement create needs for hospitality, shared life creates occasions for forgiveness, and Christian liberty creates situations in which love may require voluntarily surrendering something we are otherwise free to do.
The body also requires Christians to recognize that other people possess gifts they do not. Romans 12 undermines the idea of the self-sufficient Christian by describing different members performing different functions for the good of the same body. By Romans 16, that teaching has ceased to be an illustration and has become a list of actual people serving Christ and one another in different ways.
Reading Romans faithfully therefore makes isolation difficult to reconcile with Paul’s understanding of the gospel. God does not merely reconcile individuals to himself and leave their relationships with other believers untouched. He creates a people whose members must learn what belonging to one another requires.
Keep the Gospel Moving
Paul’s letter does not conclude with a church turned inward upon itself. His own circumstances place Romans within an expanding mission. He has preached Christ across a substantial portion of the eastern Roman world and hopes to travel west, with Rome becoming a potential partner in carrying the gospel farther.
That missionary setting prevents theological understanding from becoming an end in itself. Paul values accurate understanding too highly to tolerate careless doctrine, but the gospel he understands so carefully is also the gospel he wants proclaimed where Christ has not been named.
The churches participate in that movement without every Christian performing Paul’s particular work. Romans 16 shows a range of service surrounding the mission. Christians travel, give, host, pray, labor, write, provide assistance, and make their homes available. Some forms of service are described in detail, while others have left almost no historical record beyond a name.
The mission therefore does not require identical roles. It requires a people who understand that the gospel entrusted to them is not a possession intended to terminate with them.
Paul’s commission concerns “all the nations” at the beginning of Romans, and the final doxology returns to the gospel being made known to “all the nations” for the obedience of faith. The Roman Christians stand within that movement as both recipients of the gospel and participants in its continuing proclamation.
Reading Romans After Romans
Reaching the end of Romans changes the way its beginning can be read. The reader now knows how important the distinction between Jew and Gentile will become when Paul describes the gospel as salvation “for the Jew first, and also for the Greek.” His opening reference to the prophetic Scriptures anticipates an argument that will repeatedly depend upon Abraham, David, Moses, Isaiah, Hosea, and the history of Israel. The “obedience of faith” associated with Paul’s apostleship in the opening chapter returns in the final doxology, while the exclusion of boasting in Romans 3 anticipates later warnings to Gentile Christians and the correction of strong and weak believers tempted to judge or despise one another.
The enormous theological argument also ends among individual names. The gospel announced in Romans 1 justifies sinners, addresses the reign of death, explains the relationship of law and faith, reveals life in the Spirit, defends God’s faithfulness, humbles Jew and Gentile alike, creates churches throughout the Roman world, sends Paul toward Spain, places Phoebe on the road to Rome, and joins Christians who have never met within the same fellowship.
Seeing those connections should affect the way Scripture is read beyond this letter. Romans has required us to follow arguments across chapters, respect immediate and larger contexts, allow Paul to establish the questions governing his discussion, test theological conclusions against the text rather than force the text into conclusions already reached, and distinguish the words of Scripture from assumptions accumulated around them.
It also teaches something about the posture with which such reading should be undertaken. The people addressed in Romans possess no righteousness about which they can boast, no mercy they earned, no standing before God they established for themselves, and no gift that makes the rest of the body unnecessary. Careful interpretation should therefore produce neither indifference toward truth nor confidence in our own superiority. The reader remains someone dependent upon the same mercy the text describes.
From Rome to Us
The Christians who first heard Romans did not receive it as a monument of Christian literature. They received a letter addressed to churches containing people with actual disagreements, histories, relationships, needs, and responsibilities.
They heard Paul place all humanity under sin and announce righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ. Jewish believers heard him defend the faithfulness of God to the promises given through Israel, while Gentile believers heard repeated warnings against turning their inclusion into grounds for arrogance. The strong learned that Christian freedom could be exercised destructively, while the weak learned that conscience did not give them authority to condemn someone God had received.
The closing greetings then located that theology among people they knew. Phoebe was coming to Rome and needed their assistance. Prisca and Aquila were part of their Christian community. Rufus and his mother were not illustrations but people. Groups gathering in different homes heard themselves addressed as members of the same church. The theological argument had immediate consequences for what happened when the reading ended.
The distance between first-century Rome and the modern church changes many of the circumstances, but it does not remove the relationship between Paul’s theology and the people who receive it. Justification still concerns sinners who have no grounds for boasting. Mercy still determines how Christians regard one another. Christian freedom still operates in relationships where its exercise can help or harm someone else. Different gifts still require believers to depend upon people unlike themselves. The gospel still creates obligations of service, generosity, hospitality, patience, discernment, and love.
The same is true of interpretation. Careless handling of Romans does not remain an academic problem because theological conclusions eventually reach actual people. What Christians believe about grace affects how they treat sinners. What they believe about justification affects where they locate assurance and boasting. What they believe about the church affects whom they receive. What they believe about Christian liberty affects how they use freedom around weaker believers. What they believe about Israel, the nations, and the mission of God affects the story in which they understand themselves to stand.
Paul wrote Romans because the gospel required careful explanation, but the explanation was never detached from the life of the people hearing it. The Good News of God promised through the prophets concerning his Son had created communities of Jews and Gentiles who stood by grace, lived by faith, walked in the Spirit, depended upon mercy, and now had to learn how to belong to one another while participating in the continuing proclamation of Christ among the nations.
The final amen therefore closes Paul’s letter without turning what preceded it into a completed academic exercise. The Roman Christians were left with churches in which to embody what they had heard, neighbors to love, disagreements to navigate, brothers and sisters to receive, error to resist, needs to meet, and a gospel whose movement into the nations had not ended with its arrival in their city.
Readers of Romans inherit the same gospel and, with it, the responsibility to understand what Paul wrote carefully enough that his argument is allowed to shape more than our conclusions about the letter.