How Tom Wright overshoots the heart of Romans

I have been reading Tom Wright’s Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive Into Paul’s Greatest Letter (2023), wondering whether I should make it recommended reading for a course on Romans. I probably will but with caveats.

My view is that Wright’s assessment of the traditional Protestant reading as narrowly individualistic is correct but he overshoots the heart of Paul’s thought when he says that Romans is about God’s plan to restore creation.

I think that Paul’s outlook on the future is geographically and historically circumscribed: the divine plan is not to restore creation but to bring to an end centuries of Greek political-religious domination and establish in its place a monotheistic civilisation that would confess Jesus Christ as Lord.

The first chapter of the book roughly sketches Wright’s general take on the letter. I have summarised his argument in bold type and added my critique.

The story of Israel in the Old Testament is integral to the purposes of God for the world. The Old Testament is not a compendium of “distant ‘types’, ‘figures’ and oblique detached prophecies” (7).

Thanks not least to Wright, this critical point is now quite widely understood, even at the level of popular reflection—at least in my small, academic-church world. The presupposition base for the New Testament is the Jewish scriptures and the world of first century Judaism in Palestine and the diaspora. The genuinely new appears not with the birth of Jesus or Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus but—legitimately, I would say—with the post-biblical theologising of the Greek fathers.

God called Abraham with a view to putting creation right. He would be the means of undoing the sin of Adam by becoming a new creation in the land. God would rescue and renew his creation by coming to dwell in this “micro-world” (20).

A lot has happened between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden and the calling of Abraham, and arguably God chooses Abraham in response to the proto-imperialism of the Babel generation. After the flood, which is itself a renewal of creation, the “clans of the sons of Noah” all speak the same language (Gen. 10:32-11:1), but because of their political and technological ambitions they are scattered and their speech is confused. Then Abraham’s family leave Ur of the Chaldeans and are told that they will become a “great nation” in Canaan (Gen. 11:31-12:2).

The context or presupposition for the calling of Abraham, therefore, is not the original sin of Adam and Eve but the failure of human social culture, represented by the building of Babel. It is not creation that needs putting right but various iterations of overweening, pagan civilisation.

But is Abraham really called to be the beginning of a rescue mission? The new creation in microcosm of Israel in the land will be a source of blessing for all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:3), and when they are redeemed by God from slavery in Egypt, this function is recast in priestly terms (Exod. 19:6): they will be a dedicated royal priesthood in the midst of the nations. But the fundamental challenge is not to be a transformative presence; it is to be an obedient and holy presence apart from the families of the earth. I do not see anywhere in the Old Testament the idea that Israel would be the means by which the cosmos would be restored. Correct me if I’m wrong.

It is foreseen in the Psalms and Isaiah that the family of Abraham would eventually include Gentiles, and the land would become the whole world (16).

I’m not going to try and defend the point here, but I do not think that the Old Testament envisages a significant influx of gentiles into Israel, even under eschatological conditions. At most, assurance is given that gentiles who converted during the period of exile will not be excluded from the returning population. Again, correct me if I’m overlooking something.

Nor do we have the idea that the whole world will become YHWH’s holy land. The nations will be reorganised around a gloriously restored Jerusalem and will make pilgrimage to pay tribute and learn the ways of YHWH. Jerusalem will dominate the region in the way that Babylon had once dominated, but the boundaries remain firmly in place. The nations are the nations, Israel is the covenant people in the land.

The covenant determined the conditions under which the descendants of Abraham would be instrumental in this plan to rescue the world.

The covenant determined the conditions under which Israel would be a holy people, distinct from and quite unlike the nations, in relationship with the one true God. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of how this is connected with a divine plan to rescue and renew creation. The function of a priesthood is to mediate between God and those people—or nations—that are not priestly or holy.

Inevitably, Israel failed to keep the covenant, which rendered them unfit for purpose, but the “covenant required a faithful Israelite, and that is what God provided in the person of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah.” Jesus accomplished “dramatically, shockingly, apocalyptically even, what the covenant with Israel has all along intended to achieve” (8).

There are moments when the covenant requires a faithful remnant of Israelites who do not bow the knee to Baal or crumple under Greek pressure to abandon ancestral traditions. Is a “faithful Israelite” ever needed to fulfil a creation rescue program?

What is at issue in the Synoptic Gospels is not the future renewal of creation but the religious and moral integrity of Israel. Jesus is the son sent to vineyard to get the fruit of righteousness. His resurrection on the third day embodies the resurrection of chastened Israel on the third day (Hos. 6:1-2), and perhaps it anticipates the resurrection of those disciples who would taste death before the kingdom came in power. But it is not said that the resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of the renewal of all creation.

The key theme of the “righteousness” or “justice” of God in Romans has to do with “the creator’s utter determination, faced with his creation in a mess, to put it all right” (14). God demonstrates his righteousness by remaining faithful to the covenant with his people “as the means by which he is putting the world right.”

The horizon of Paul’s argument in Romans, I contend, is not the renewal of creation but wrath against the Greek and the subsequent rule of the “Son” of the God of Israel. Its scope is civilisational, not creational.

Everything else in the letter hangs on this apocalyptic premise. If YHWH is going to judge the idolatrous Greek world, he must first hold his own people accountable—so wrath against the Jew. Israel has possessed the Law but has not provided a benchmark of righteousness. Therefore, a very different criterion has come into play: belief or faith in the significance of Jesus for the historical transformation that is already under way. And since a growing number of gentiles now shares this belief or faith in a new future for their world, the terms of participation in the eschatological community have been radically revised, and so on.

The “righteousness of God,” therefore, will be exhibited, first, in the reformation and renewal of his people, and secondly, in the wholesale recognition by the nations of the Greek-Roman world that idols are a vanity and that YHWH is the one God who made the heavens and the earth.

Justification is not only personal reconciliation with God but also inclusion in the “larger project” of the rescue of creation.

No, people were and would be justified by their belief or faith in the new future for the ancient world proclaimed by the apostles.

The glorious end in view is not a disembodied existence in heaven but new creation. Romans 8 provides the assurance to believers—especially to those who are suffering persecution—of “their resurrection from the dead into the rescued and renewed creation where they will have a truly human role to play” (9).

Paul’s argument in Romans 8:19-22, as I see it, has been widely misunderstood. We should remember the earlier distinction between creation (ktisis) and the created object (ktisis) or idol, which was the product of “futile” Greek thought (Rom. 1:19-25). It is this created object which has been “subjected to futility” and hopes—figuratively speaking—to be liberated from the bondage of religious and moral corruption when wrath finally comes on the Greek world, when the persecuted believers are set free from their sufferings and vindicated. Again, it is not creation but a particular civilisation that is under consideration.

The resurrection of God’s people is what “the whole world is waiting for…. We are saved, not from the world but for the world” (18).

The resurrection expected by first century Jews who believed in resurrection (I oversimplify, no doubt) was neither that of an individual messiah nor that of all God’s people at the renewal of creation. It was the resurrection of some of Israel’s dead at a time of national crisis to participate in the life of restored Israel, for better or for worse (cf. Dan. 12:1-3). What the New Testament adds to this is the premature resurrection of Jesus as the first fruits of the resurrected righteous (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:20-23) and a final resurrection of all dead humanity before a final judgment (Rev. 20:12-13).

Creation will be “liberated from its slavery to decay” when believers, as a “royal priesthood” and “image-bearing vicegerents,” intercede for and rule wisely over the world “as humans were always meant to do.” Insofar as we are “already resurrection-people, enlivened by the holy spirit,” this arrangement has already begun.

Again, I don’t think that Paul’s perspective is this broad. His focus is on the fate of the Greek or Greek-Roman world, the sphere of his mission from Jerusalem to Spain. The “royal priesthood” motif remains relevant, but Paul’s eschatology arises not from reflection on Genesis 1:26-27 but from the concrete experience of pagan opposition, viewed through the lens of a passage such as Isaiah 45:20-46:2: the gods of the oppressor nations will go into exile as people confess Jesus as Lord, to the glory of God the Father. The belief is not that humanity will rule over a new creation but that the root of Jesse will rule over the nations (Rom. 15:12).

How does this “vocation” work out? According to Wright, through participation in the “suffering of the Messiah,” by “praying to God the father at the place where the world is in pain,” and by being conformed to the image of God’s son (15).

All believers are heirs of God, but only those who are violently persecuted are heirs of Christ and are conformed to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:17, 29). The victory of Christ over the gods of Greece and Rome would be achieved through the faithful Christ-like suffering of the martyrs. Prayer in this context is not intercession for the world but the inarticulate cry of those enduring their own Gethsemane experience.

To be glorified, therefore, is to recover the status of “genuine, image-bearing human beings.” It was always God’s intention to work in the world through people created in his image (Gen. 1:26). “That purpose, gloriously fulfilled in the ultimate Image, the man Jesus himself, is now shared with his people by the spirit” (16).

It is the suffering churches and the martyrs who eventually will share in the glory of the exalted Christ, when the eschatological hope is fulfilled. Jesus is not presented as the image of a perfect or “ultimate” humanity; he is the image of suffering and vindication to which many of his followers were being conformed through the clash with the synagogues, on the one hand, and with paganism, on the other.

The prospect is anticipated in Psalm 8, which “celebrates the human vocation to be ‘crowned with glory and honour’ with all things put under their feet—the vocation fulfilled in Jesus and now shared with Jesus’ people” (22).

It is not sheep, oxen, beasts of the field, birds and fish which will be subjected to the genuine human (Ps. 8:6-8) but the nations of the Greek-Roman world to the genuine Jew. The expectation is new kingdom or new empire, not new creation.