Romans' Author’s preface

Author's preface

    'Not another commentary on Romans?' My friend groaned audibly. There was pain in his voice and in his eyes. And I sympathized with him. For the literature surrounding Romans is so massive as to be unmanageable. I have myself read about thirty commentaries, not to mention numerous other works which relate to Paul and Romans, and still there are many more which I have not had time to study. Is it not a folly then, even an impertinence, to add yet another book to this huge library? Yes, it would be, were it not for the three distinctives of The Bible Speaks Today (BST) series which perhaps, if taken together, may justify it.
    First, BST authors (like all other commentators) are committed to a serious study of the text in its own integrity. Although a pre-suppositionless approach is impossible (and all the commentators tend to be recognizably Lutheran or Reformed, Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative), yet I have known that my first responsibility has been to seek a fresh encounter with the authentic Paul. Karl Barth, in his preface to the first edition of his famous Römerbrief (1918), called this an 'utter loyalty' to Paul, which would allow the apostle to say what he does say and would not force him to say what we might want him to say.
    This principle has made it necessary for me to listen respectfully to those scholars who are offering us a 'new perspective on Paul', especially Professors Krister Stendahl, E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn. Their claims that both Paul and Palestinian Judaism have been gravely misunderstood have to be taken seriously, although I note that the most recent commentator, the American Jesuit scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, whose work appeared in 1993 and was hailed by the reviewers as 'monumental' and 'magisterial', almost entirely ignores this debate. All I have felt able to do is to sketch a brief explanation and evaluation of it in my Preliminary Essay.
    But expositors should not be antiquarians, living only in the remote past. Reverting to Barth, it was his conviction that Paul, although 'a child of his age', who addressed his contemporaries, also 'speaks to all men of every age'. So he celebrated the 'creative energy' with which Luther and Calvin had wrestled with Paul's [Romans, Page 10] message 'till the walls which separated the sixteenth century from the first became transparent'. And the same dialectical process between ancient text and modern context must continue today, even though many commentators confine themselves to exegesis without application.
    I confess that, ever since I became a Christian fifty-six years ago, I have enjoyed what could be termed a 'love-hate' relationship with Romans, because of its joyful-painful personal challenges. It began soon after my conversion, with chapter 6 and my longing to experience that 'death to sin' which it seemed to promise. I toyed for many years with the fantasy that Christians are supposed to be as insensitive to sin as a corpse is to external stimuli. My final deliverance from this chimera was sealed when I was invited to give the Keswick Convention 'Bible Readings' on Romans 5–8 in 1965, which were subsequently published under the title Men Made New.
    Next, it was Paul's devastating exposure of universal human sin and guilt in Romans 1:18–3:20 which rescued me from that kind of superficial evangelism which is preoccupied only with people's 'felt needs'. The very first sermon I preached after my ordination in 1945, in St Peter's Church, Vere Street, was based on the repeated Romans statement that 'there is no distinction' between us (3:22 and 10:12), either in our sin or in Christ's salvation. Then there was Romans 12 and its demand for our whole-hearted commitment in response to God's mercies, and Romans 13, whose teaching about the use of force in the administration of justice made it impossible for me to remain a total pacifist in the Tolstoy-Gandhi tradition. As for Romans 8, although I have declaimed its final triumphant verses at innumerable funerals, I have never lost the thrill of them.
    I have not been altogether surprised, therefore, in the course of writing this exposition, to observe how many contemporary issues are touched on by Paul in Romans: enthusiasm for evangelism in general and the propriety of Jewish evangelism in particular; whether homosexual relationships are 'natural' or 'unnatural'; whether we can still believe in such unfashionable concepts as God's 'wrath' and 'propitiation'; the historicity of Adam's fall and the origin of human death; what are the fundamental means to living a holy life; the place of law and of the Spirit in Christian discipleship; the distinction between assurance and presumption; the relation between divine sovereignty and human responsibility in salvation; the tension between ethnic identity and the solidarity of the body of Christ; relations between church and state; the respective duties of the individual citizen and the body politic; and how to handle differences of opinion within the Christian community. And this list is only a sample of the modern questions which, directly or indirectly, Romans raises and addresses.

[Romans, Page 11]

    The third characteristic of the BST series is that each book is intended to be both readable in style and manageable in size. A commentary, in distinction to an exposition, is a reference work and to that extent unreadable. Moreover, many of the most influential commentaries on Romans have been published in two volumes, such as those by C. H. Hodge, Robert Haldane and John Murray, and those in our own day by Professors Cranfield and Dunn. As for the late Dr Martyn Loyd-Jones, his penetrating exposition of Romans 1–9 runs to nine volumes, comprising more than 3,000 pages. By contrast with these multi-volume works, which I fear many busy Christian leaders do not have time to read, I have been determined from the beginning to limit this exposition to one volume (even though a bulky one!), while at the same time making available to readers some of the fruits of my study of the larger works.
    I am grateful to Brian Rosner and David Coffey for reading the manuscript and making suggestions, a number of which I have adopted; to Colin Duriez and Jo Bramwell of IVP for their patient editorial skills; to David Stone for compiling the study guide; to Nelson González, my current study assistant, for giving himself the punishing task of reading the manuscript four times, and for deftly putting his finger on weak places where clarification or elaboration was needed; and, last but not least, to Frances Whitehead, whose undiminished enthusiasm, energy and efficiency have combined to produce yet another impeccable script.
    At the beginning of his fourth-century exposition of Romans, Chrysostom spoke of how much he enjoyed hearing Paul's 'spiritual trumpet'.1 My prayer is that we may hear it again in our day and may readily respond to its summons.
JOHN STOTT
Easter 1994