In traditional Reformed interpretation, Romans 12:1-15:21 provides general ethical guidance for all Christians. Recent perspectives, however, emphasize its specific context: Paul addresses tensions between Jews and Gentiles in the Roman church. The pivotal verses (12:1-2) connect to Paul’s prior discussion on Israel’s fate. He challenges Gentile arrogance, encourages unity, and urges believers to avoid disruptive behavior to maintain peace under Roman rule. Paul’s call to transformation reflects the era’s Jewish-Roman conflict. The strong supporting the weak mirrors Christ’s service, symbolizing unity amid political and social imbalance. This situational focus reinterprets Paul’s ethical instructions as deeply rooted in contemporary issues.
In traditional Reformed interpretation, Romans 12:1-15:7 is regarded simply as a piece of Christian parenesis—that is, practical and ethical instruction or exhortation to be followed in all times, in all places. The letter tends to get sectioned thematically: justification by faith in the first four chapters, sanctification in chapters 5-8, what appears to be a digression or parenthesis in chapters 9-10 in which Paul discusses the fate of Israel, and finally some solid teaching about how to do ministry and deal with conflict to round things off.
The first two verses of chapter 12 are then regarded as pivotal. Moo’s commentary is typical:
Romans 12:1–2 is one of the best-known passages in the NT. Its fame is justified: here Paul succinctly and with vivid imagery summarizes what the Christian response to God’s grace in Christ should be. … “Therefore” must be given its full weight: Paul wants to show that the exhortations of 12:1–15:13 are built firmly on the theology of chaps. 1–11.1
So the bulk of the letter expounds the grace of God in Christ as it has been made available for all people. The parenesis tells us how to live this out in more or less general terms.
More recent “perspectives” on Paul and on Romans, however, have taken the modern reader back into the ancient first century context of a Jewish apostle addressing the historical problem of the anomalous, large scale inclusion of gentiles in a Jewish apocalyptic programme. We still, clearly, have practical and ethical instruction in this final main section, but the challenge has been to draw out and explain its contingency. How is it specifically about relations between Jews and non-Jews? How is it specifically about the relation of the churches to the Roman state?
I agree with the broad thrust of these new perspectives. The point I want to make here is that the beginning of chapter 12 connects most naturally with the conclusions that Paul reaches in the preceding section on Israel.
1. To label this as “Christian” teaching is anachronistic; it reflects a later Christianising of the New Testament. Paul would have regarded it as a radical but fundamentally Jewish argument about Jews and gentiles.
2. The conjunction oun (“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies…”), which Moo insists looks back to the entire content of the letter, appears 47 times in Romans and seven times in chapter 11; so there is no reason to think that it does anything more than continue the train of thought from what has just gone before—the lengthy discussion of the fate of his “kinsmen according to the flesh” (9:3).
3. Their minds need to be transformed “that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2). This links back to the declaration that God’s dealings with his people at this time are difficult to understand:
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” (11:33-35)
Behind this is the conclusion that Paul has reached regarding the fate of his people: they have become “enemies” for the sake of the gentiles but they remain “beloved” for the sake of the patriarchs, to whom the promises were made (11:28-32). So he urges the churches to understand better the “mind of the Lord,” who is managing his affairs—demonstrating his righteousness—in this controversial way, and teaches them how to deal with just this ambiguous status of the Jews as beloved enemies.
4. The body metaphor is used to correct a certain arrogance in the community: some are thinking of themselves more highly than they ought (12:3). This may look back to the arrogance of gentile believers, congratulating themselves over the fact that “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in” (11:19), and forwards to the sense of superiority exhibited by the “strong” towards the “weak” (14:1-15:1).
5. I have argued that Paul’s teaching about external relations in 12:9-13:14 presupposes a background of hostility from the synagogues and the need for the churches not to be seen by the state as troublemakers. This is why Rome stands at this stage for security and stability. If the churches look like a violent, disruptive, anti-social Jewish sect, the state will come down hard on them—in effect, wielding the sword of God’s wrath against his rebellious people (cf. 13:4). The churches cannot disown their heritage, but they can demonstrate an exceptional level of piety and peaceableness.
6. Paul does not name the “weak” as Jews and the “strong” as gentiles in chapter 14, and it’s possible that the categories do not exactly coincide. Probably, some gentile believers thought they should behave like Jews, some Jewish believers happily abandoned the constraints of Law and tradition. But it is certainly the tensions between communities that accounts for the exhortation to “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (14:19).
7. I have made the point before about the commonly neglected eschatological setting for the argument about the weak and the strong:
Paul pursues the argument about the weak and the strong against the background of a narrative experienced in the present in the form of the various tensions between the churches and the Jewish communities across the oikoumenē, which will culminate in a day of God’s wrath against Israel.
8. When Paul says, “do not be conformed to this aiōn,” he does not mean this “world” is general terms—the same sinful “world” in which we now live. He has in mind ways of thinking and behaving characteristic of the present “age” in which both Jews and Greeks stood under divine judgment, facing a day of God’s wrath (cf. Rom. 1:18; 2:5-16). It is the “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4) of the crisis of second temple Judaism, of the exposure of the Jews across the empire to Roman violence, and so on. The apostle’s concern is that the churches, which he believes must be an emerging, righteous alternative to the failed synagogues, witnessing to the future rule of Jesus Christ over the nations, should not become embroiled in the intensifying conflict between the Jews and the state.
9. In chapter 15 Paul makes clear the apostolic logic that has brought about the unprecedented and problematic unity of Jew and gentile: Christ became a servant to the circumcision with the result that gentiles have come to hope that they too will be ruled by Israel’s messiah. But Christ’s service to the Jews models what Paul expects from those who are “strong” towards the “weak,” so perhaps we should detect here an awareness of the political imbalance between Roman might and Jewish vulnerability.
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Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (1996), 748.
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