A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [71]
For example, what happens when a gentile follower of Jesus invites a Jewish follower of Jesus over for dinner and honors his guest by roasting his biggest, fattest, tastiest pig? What happens when Jewish followers of Jesus refuse to accept their gentile counterparts until they start acting more Jewish (by dropping bacon from their diet, by observing all the right holidays, and by getting circumcised, for goodness’ sake)? Even deeper, how do you help Jews and Gentiles stop seeing their counterparts as “the other” and start seeing them as “one another”? These are the kinds of messes Jesus’s followers had to deal with through the rest of the first century.
As the Acts of the Apostles unfolds, the center of gravity shifts from Jerusalem to Antioch, and soon there seems to be no single geographic center at all; the church becomes a worldwide web, expanding from every node as little cells of believers create sites of koinonia (“fellowship”) and diakonia (“service”) at every turn.8 And Paul is, in a sense, right in the middle of the mess. He is the guy simultaneously defending the right of the gentile Christians to be different and struggling to keep Jews and Gentiles working together as one community.9
So, the more I read and reread Romans and tried to make sense of its message, the more I became convinced that Paul never intended his letter to be an exposition on the gospel. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would soon fulfill that exposition role quite well. Instead, Romans aimed to address a more immediate, practical question in the early Christian movement less than twenty-five years after Jesus’s death and resurrection: How could Jews and Gentiles in all their untamed diversity come and remain together as peers in the kingdom of God without having first-and second-class Christians, on the one hand, and, on the other, without being homogenized like a McDonald’s franchise with the same menu, same pricing, same bathroom soap?
When we “Romans Protestants” want to prove that Romans is an exposition of the gospel, we often quote these words from the letter’s introduction: “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation10 to everyone who has faith” (1:16). But in so doing, we leave out the last nine words of the sentence: “to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” Those words, it turns out, aren’t filler: they’re the point. Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom must welcome Jews in their Jewishness and Gentiles in their goyishness, and Paul wants to show how that can be. If you don’t read Romans this way, you can with some wrestling twist chapters 1–8 so they fit together reasonably well. Then comes a strange interruption in chapters 9–11 that hardly fits at all, followed by a somewhat mundane practical addendum in 12–16. But if you read Romans as a refusal to let Jesus’s expansive and revolutionary gospel of the kingdom of God be shrunken back into the categories of anyone’s exclusive religion, then the theme flows beautifully from beginning to end.
Now when I say the theme flows beautifully, it’s important to note that Paul, like Jesus, is not a modern Western linear-argument type of guy. He’s Middle Eastern. He thinks in circles and speaks in parables. Paul is less the engineer and more the poet, maybe not the kind who doesn’t comb his hair, clean his glasses, or keep his shirttail tucked in, but at least the kind who understands the power of imagination and has a way with words. His letter (contrary to dominant readings) is no more of a well-reasoned, linear, logical, analytical argument than Jesus’s sermons were. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing, even though it frustrates some modern readers. A linear prose argument may be the best way to teach engineering or refrigerator repair, but to teach matters of the spirit literary forms work better—with all their twists and turns,