Epistle to the Romans

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes… For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”

Romans 1:16-17

Overview

Romans is a letter of the apostle Paul to the church at Rome, the sixth of his epistles in order of composition and the first in the canonical arrangement of his letters.¹ Unlike most of Paul’s other epistles, it addresses a congregation he had not yet visited and was not occasioned by a specific crisis in the church; instead Paul lays out the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ as a plan encompassing both Jew and Gentile.² The letter moves in order from humanity’s guilt before God, to justification by faith, to the place of Israel in God’s plan, to the pattern of life that follows from the gospel.

Author and Date

Paul identifies himself as the author in the letter’s opening verse (Rom. 1:1), and the epistle’s authenticity has not been seriously disputed.¹ Internal and external evidence place its writing at Corinth, near the close of Paul’s third missionary journey. Paul explains that he is carrying a collection from the churches of Macedonia and Achaia to the poor in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:25-26), a collection he had already asked the Corinthian and Macedonian churches to prepare (1 Cor. 16:1-6; 2 Cor. 8:1-4; 9:1-4). The greetings that close the letter identify the city of writing: Paul sends greetings from “Gaius, my host” (Rom. 16:23), a Corinthian he himself had baptized (1 Cor. 1:14), and commends Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth (Rom. 16:1). Read against Acts 19:21, 20:1-3, and 24:17, these details place the letter’s composition at Corinth on the journey to Jerusalem described there, about A.D. 58.²

Historical and Literary Context

At the time of writing, Paul had never visited Rome (Rom. 1:10-15; 15:23-24), and nothing in the letter or in Acts records how the church there was founded.² Its membership appears to have been mixed: the letter’s argument repeatedly addresses Gentile believers directly (Rom. 1:13; 11:13-25, 30-31; 15:16) while also engaging Jewish objections and Jewish practice at length (Rom. 2; 14), consistent with a congregation drawn from both Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles who had gathered around Rome’s synagogues.² Paul had long wanted to visit the church but had repeatedly been prevented (Rom. 1:13; 15:22), so he wrote instead, apparently sending the letter by Phoebe as she traveled to Rome (Rom. 16:1-2).³ Because Paul was addressing a church he had not founded and did not yet know personally, he had reason to set out the gospel in fuller and more deliberate terms than his letters to churches he had already taught in person, which is part of why Romans reads as a comprehensive exposition rather than a letter answering a local dispute.³

Structure

Romans divides into a doctrinal argument (chapters 1-11) followed by its practical application (chapters 12-16).³ After a greeting and statement of theme (Rom. 1:1-17), Paul first establishes that both Gentiles (Rom. 1:18-32) and Jews (Rom. 2:1-3:20) stand condemned under sin, so that both alike need salvation by grace rather than by the law.³ He then presents justification by faith, using Abraham’s own justification apart from the law or circumcision to show that Abraham is the father of all who share his faith, Jew or Gentile (Rom. 3:21-4:25).³ From there Paul turns to the effects of that justification: the believer’s union with Christ as the second Adam (Rom. 5), freedom from sin’s dominion (Rom. 6), the law’s inability to deliver from sin (Rom. 7), and the assurance and hope given to those in Christ by the Spirit (Rom. 8).³ Because his teaching that Gentiles are admitted to full standing before God, alongside his teaching that unbelieving Israel is set aside, could seem to call God’s promises to Israel into question, Paul devotes three chapters to that problem before returning to his conclusion (Rom. 9-11).³ The letter’s second half then draws out the practical implications of this gospel for the Roman believers’ daily life: the consecration of the whole self to God (Rom. 12), submission to civil authority and love toward one another (Rom. 13), mutual forbearance between those with differing scruples of conscience (Rom. 14:1-15:7), and Paul’s own plans and final greetings (Rom. 15:8-16:27).³

Major Themes

Justification by faith apart from works of the law

Romans states what it means for a sinner to be declared righteous before God. Paul ties his opening statement of the gospel, that “the righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17, quoting Hab. 2:4), to his sustained argument that the righteousness God gives is received through faith rather than earned by obedience to the law: “the righteousness of God is manifested through faith” (Rom. 3:22), and believers “are justified by faith” (Rom. 3:26, 28; 5:1).⁴ This is the doctrine of justification worked out at length in the letter’s own central chapters, particularly Romans 3-5.

The universality of human sin

Romans 1:18-3:20 argues that both Gentile and Jew alike stand guilty before God, the Gentiles because they suppress the knowledge of God available to them in creation (Rom. 1:18-32) and the Jews because possessing the law does not itself make one righteous under it (Rom. 2).⁵ Paul brings the whole argument to its point in a chain of Old Testament citations: “None is righteous, no, not one… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10, 23).⁶ No distinction between Jew and Gentile survives this indictment; both stand equally in need of the righteousness God supplies in the gospel.

God’s righteousness revealed in the gospel

Paul frames the letter’s whole argument as the revelation of “the righteousness of God” (Rom. 1:17), a righteousness that is not merely his attribute as judge but the righteousness he grants to those who believe, “objectively revealed in the gospel, apart from the works of the law and before faith” (Rom. 1:17; 2 Cor. 5:19).⁴ This righteousness rests on Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom. 4:25) and is imputed to the believer through faith rather than infused by gradual moral improvement, so that God is shown to be both just and the one who justifies the ungodly who believe (Rom. 3:26; 4:5).⁴

Election and the place of Israel

Romans 9-11 addresses whether God’s word to Israel has failed, given that so much of Israel had not believed the gospel Paul preached.⁷ Paul answers that not every physical descendant of Abraham was ever reckoned among the children of the promise: “it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise who are counted as offspring” (Rom. 9:8), a distinction Paul traces to God’s call rather than to human descent, since the promise came to Isaac and not Ishmael (Rom. 9:7).⁷ The underlying question Paul is answering throughout these chapters is not whether faith is required for inclusion among God’s people (Rom. 1:16-17; 3:22; 10:9-10, 17 already establish that it is), but why so much of Israel lacks that faith.⁷ His answer is that a hardening has come upon part of Israel (Rom. 11:7, 25), while God has preserved for himself a believing remnant chosen by grace (Rom. 11:5).

The Christian life as living sacrifice

Romans 12 opens the letter’s application with an appeal grounded in the “mercies of God” already unfolded in chapters 1-11: believers are to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). Bavinck places this offering within the larger New Testament picture of the believer’s office, in which those united to Christ become “priests who offer up their bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God” (Rom. 12:1; Heb. 13:16; 1 Pet. 2:5, 9).⁸ The exhortations that follow, love without hypocrisy, submission to governing authorities, and forbearance toward believers who differ in conscience over disputable matters (Rom. 12:9-13:14; 14:1-15:7), present the doctrine of chapters 1-11 worked out as a pattern of daily obedience rather than left as abstract teaching.

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 445-51. ↩ ↩²
Barrows, 452. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Barrows, 453. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Oren Rhea Martin, “The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan: Part 2, The New Testament,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 240-41: “Romans 1:18-3:20 demonstrates the solidarity of humanity in sin and the inevitability of judgment on the basis of God’s righteous character.” ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 98-99. ↩
Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 160-61. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩