Romans : An Orthodox Commentary
Overview
God seems to have chosen the Apostle Paul to demonstrate—arguably more than in any other person in Christian history—how the life “in Christ” arrives at insight through experience. If this is the case of Paul more than any other person in Christian history, the reason may be simply that Paul’s words are the Word of God. His epistles stand forever as the divinely chosen model of how the Christian arrives at truth through experience. Unlike so many theologians of later times, Paul did not inherit a Christian worldview. His vocation, rather, was to create such a thing from his own experience. For this reason, Paul’s thought ever remains the Church’s cutting blade, the biting edge of her apologetics and evangelism.
To affirm, as everyone does, that Romans is unique in the Pauline corpus should serve to indicate the necessity of caution in using it as a guide to the other epistles. But in recent centuries the Christological and ecclesiological core of Paul’s thought has been displaced by a preoccupation with religious and moral psychology; all the epistles were interpreted through a Romans lens. This is a false turn, which runs the risk of reducing salvation itself to a sub-division of religious anthropology. To misinterpret Paul is to misunderstand the Gospel itself. Fr Patrick Henry Reardon guards against this error and offers a fuller and more balanced picture of the Letter to the Romans, reading it in the context of the entire Pauline corpus and relying upon the best ancient sources, the Apostle’s earliest disciples and defenders, those Christians in the churches that Paul had a hand in founding. These churches, closely associated with the composition and copying of the epistles rightly enjoyed a recognized authority in the determination of early Christian doctrine.
- Offers a balanced picture of the Letter to the Romans
- Places Romans within the context of the entire Pauline corpus
- Interacts with recent trends in Pauline studies
Top Highlights
“His mind was essentially formed by the doctrine he inherited from the Christian Tradition. Failing to notice he spent a decade or so living among other Christian teachers before his first missionary journey, and rooting his theology solely in his conversion, many of Paul’s readers (starting with Marcion) have isolated his thought from its native ecclesiological context. This sense of continuity, however, in which theology is always an ecclesiological effort, has marked the thinking of the Church ever since.” (Pages 26–27)
“The theory of a merely ‘imputed righteousness’ effectively separates repentance from holiness, as though God would declare a man righteous without actually making him righteous, pronounce him to be just without causing him to be a ‘saint,’ and convert him but without giving him a new heart. The Bible never separates these things.” (Page 67)
“Jesus did not become Son of God by his Resurrection. On the contrary, this text implies his pre-existence as God’s Son.” (Page 37)
“Now because faith is internal to my heart and soul, the divine justification” (Page 57)
“It is not a mere assent of the intellect but a dedication of the heart.” (Page 38)
- Title: Romans: An Orthodox Commentary
- Author: Patrick Henry Reardon
- Publisher: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press
- Publication Date: 2018
- Pages: 172
- Christian Group: Orthodox
- Resource Type: Commentary
- Topic: Romans