What St Paul really meant: Into the Heart of Romans, by NT Wright

Into the Heart of Romans

NT Wright

SPCK Publishing, £19.99, 224 pages

British scholar and Anglican clergyman NT Wright (who as Bishop of Durham was once one of the Church of England’s most senior prelates) is among the most influential theologians of the past century, and, since the death of JDG Dunn, the world’s preeminent interpreter of St Paul.

Wright’s ability to illuminate the long-shrouded promises of God to His image-bearing creatures in elegant and passionate prose has shaken the stale cage of Christian theology, which has for centuries been polluted by the Platonic supposition that matter, time and space are radically inferior to the disembodied spirit. So when his latest volume, Into the Heart of Romans, hit the shelves, the Christian world sat up to attention.

Like many of Wright’s previous works, Into the Heart of Romans is an attempt to redress popular but flawed interpretations of sacred scripture. The tendency in some quarters to understand the Gospel as primarily having to do with “me and my salvation” or “souls going to heaven” is Wright’s target here, as it misunderstands the vast sweep of scripture as much as it undersells God’s promises – don’t even get him started on the “rapture”.

The tendency to interpret Paul as a Platonic dualist who pits the body against the spirit is to miss the far greater purpose for which human beings were made. In Wright’s reading of Romans, the ultimate destiny for the redeemed is not to dwell forever in a spiritual realm called “heaven”, but to play a vital role in setting aright the crisis of the whole cosmos. Indeed, Paul never mentions the word “heaven” in Romans 8, and he never uses the term “heaven” in the sense of “where Christians will go after death” anywhere in his writing.

“The eternal security of God’s people in the New Testament”, says Wright, “has to do, not with their supposed disembodied post-mortem bliss, but with their resurrection from the dead into the rescued and renewed creation where they will have a truly human role to play … The Messiah’s inheritance, shared with all His people, is the whole redeemed creation, with forgiven sinners raised from the dead to share in ruling the new world.” The emphasis of Paul’s letter to the Romans, particularly chapter 8, is not salvation but vocation; it is not a set of directions on how to get to heaven but an intricate explication of what it means to be a true human bearing the imago Dei in the fallen world – and eventually in the new creation at the end of time. Humans were not meant merely to remain “passive throughout the story of salvation”, but to be God’s active agents within the world, sharing in His work.

Wright arrives at these stunning conclusions by adhering to three simple rules of exegesis. The first and most important is that the reader must take care to discover the overall thrust of the verse, chapter or entire letter. The depth and richness of Pauline text renders hopeless the exercise of plucking out a single line and attempting to discern the truth of it without proper context.

The popular interpretation of Paul’s use of the word “flesh” in Romans 8.5-11, for instance, as being a dualistic counterpart to “spirit” arises from an ignorance of Paul’s larger body of work, in which he routinely celebrates the goodness of the created world. Further, in Romans 7, Paul uses the word “flesh” to refer to Jewish people living “according to the flesh”, which is an entirely different ordeal than living “in the flesh”, which God created and is good. The overall thrust of Paul’s body of work, and also his letter to the Romans, does not conform to the gnostic notion that spirit and matter live at odds.

The second rule, to which Wright devotes the bulk of the book, is to pay close attention to Paul’s connecting words, which, in their original Greek, are ripe for misinterpretation in the English-speaking world. As Wright notes, Greek and English words may not always match up neatly, and even Greek conjunctions may not carry the implications of their closest English counterparts. For instance, Romans 8:28 is often misread due to a misinterpretation of the Greek word synergeo, which literally means “work with.” The King James Version and other popular Bibles, however, interpret the verse as though synergeo means “work for”. This translation (“All things work together for good to them that love God”) not only misrepresents Paul’s original meaning of synergeo, it also mistakenly puts “all things” as the main subject instead of God. This simple mistranslation of a connecting word mangles the verse beyond what Paul would recognise as his own thinking. A more accurate translation, according to Wright, would read as follows: “We know that in all things God works for the good with those who love him, who have been called according to His purpose.”

Finally, Wright makes sure to consider the first-century context of a given verse, chapter or letter. In order to make sense of Paul, we must first be able to make sense of the entire story of Israel, including what first-century Jews may have understood to be their place within the larger story at that time. For instance, when Paul writes in Romans 8:39 that “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” the first-century recipients of Paul’s letter would have been aware that the supposedly divine “secret name” for the city of Rome was amor.

Romans believed themselves to be descendants of Venus, the goddess of love. Just as Mark began his Gospel by proclaiming the euangelion or “good news” as a means of coopting the Roman victory cry of the same name – “good news” was a popular description of the accomplishments of Caesar Augustus at the time – Paul uses the word “love” in an intentionally subversive manner. According to Wright, Paul hopes to reclaim the word for the purpose of describing “the deepest truth about the creator God”, and re-establish the proper pecking order between human and divine.

Above all, the triumph of this book is that it pulses with infectious enthusiasm and joy. Most Christians would surely find the task of properly translating Greek “connecting words” tedious. But one never feels dragged down by the academic exercise. Instead, the book keeps readers on the edge of their seats, as if the fate of creation is at stake. If we are lucky, this is far from the last time Wright will reawaken our
hearts to the unfathomably beautiful designs of God for the redeemed in the new creation.

Peter Laffin is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.

This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.

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