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See Romans in the light of modern historical and cultural studies with this commentary from ground breaking scholar James D.G. Dunn. Dunn maintains that it is imperative to grasp the coherence of Paul’s thought as it moves with sustained logic and consistent rigor from the opening announcement of God’s righteousness revealed in Christ and the gospel through each interlocking section of this epistle. He insists that the letter must be read and understood within a specific historical and cultural context. Paul’s background in Judaism, his perception of the role of the law as a marker of national Jewish identity, God’s saving actions in Christ both in continuity with the past and as a decisive new chapter in salvation and world history, and the ongoing eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet”–clues that inform a penetrating and moving piece of commentary writing.
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Paul never speaks of his encounter with Christ as a conversion, only as a calling and commissioning
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What does matter is that there were many God-worshiping Gentiles who attached themselves to Jewish synagogues. Already open to a new and different religion, but unwilling to go the whole way and become proselytes (the typical Greek would regard circumcision as disfiguring), they would be all the more open to a form of Judaism which did not require circumcision and which was less tied to Jewish ethnic identity.
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The indictment here is that failure to acknowledge God as Creator results inevitably in a sequence of false relations toward God, toward man, and toward creation itself.
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Paul’s point is that the law must be allowed its function as a universal standard set by God, and not be reduced to the level of an identity marker which distinguishes Jew from Gentile or be characterized too superficially by a rite like circumcision which separates the Jewish “us” from the Gentile “them.”
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Since the basic idea is of a relationship in which God acts even for the defective partner, an action whereby God sustains the weaker partner of his covenant relationship within the relationship, the answer again is really both
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