Canter Bridge

The apostle Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome is a constitutional document of Christian faith. The product of formidable passion and intellect, this theological-pastoral treatise has become the locus of a handful of doctrinal fine points that shape that faith and provide grist for the theological mill that grinds on into the present time.

By the time Paul pens this letter, he can assume that his readers are familiar with the Greek term ‘euanggelion’. Usually translated as ‘the announcement of good news’ or simply ‘good news’, the term resonates on multiple levels throughout Greco-Roman culture. Perhaps its most pertinent use as precursor to the apostle’s employment of the term is that which designates the arrival of an emperor. Paul is able to refer to ‘the good news’, suggesting that by late in the first century it had become commonplace among Christians to refer to the arrival of Jesus Christ and the proclamation of his achievements as the euanggelion par excellence.

Paul will enfold his own identity into this euanggelion, reiterating throughout his extant letters that it is the motivation, meaning, and context of his own eventful life. Here he announces that he is ‘not ashamed’ of it. Indeed, far from representing a calling card that this man might care to show—or not—depending upon the occasion and the company, he indicates that his own life is subordinate to it rather than vice versa. Indeed, it is God’s power.

It would be careless to pass quickly over this statement, embedded as it is in a lengthy self-presentation in a longer-than-usual letter that stands at the core of Pauline identity.

What can Paul mean?

It appears that Paul discerns a power at work in the proclamation of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that exceeds the identifiable dynamics of preaching and receptivity or rejection. That is, Paul seems to believe that God works autonomously—one struggles to find an adverb that is more apt than this one—when Jesus’ followers rehearse those events and urge upon their hearers a decision to live within the wake and story that they create.

Paul expains that God’s righteousness is revealed uniquely—and of course powerfully—in such proclamation, a sort of majestic right-ness that is apprehended by humans through the exercise of faith.

There is much to be unpacked in such a statement. This letter alone will comprise sixteen chapters of explanation and consequences, though Paul certainly did not organize his treatise according to such a count.

One begins to understand Paul, however, by lingering over this single cluster of words. God acts powerfully in the proclamation of the good news of Jesus’ advent, an announcement of fulsome events that is available by means of faith in the enduringly good intentions of God himself. The arguably tragic events of the man Jesus’ life represent not dismally failed good intentions, but rather a demonstration of God’s justice.

To say so—when the lives of other human beings become momentarily contiguous with such testimony—is to engage the power of God itself.

Perhaps the man Paul and his extraordinary personal history become accessible to us only through such words.