Let me begin by observing that many Pauline interpreters share with me a fundamentally participatory view of Paul's gospel, understanding salvation as a pneumatological incorporation into Christ's death and resurrection.Footnote ¹ This is arguably an irreducibly proto-trinitarian account as well, so recently Michael Gorman has rightly emphasised theosis within its description.Footnote ² This view holds further that the only effective ethic for a sinful humanity is generated by divine action, essentially in terms of inaugurated eschatology; humanity must be transformed in Christ in order to act well. Hence Douglas Moo clearly shares this articulation.Footnote ³ Indeed, I do not know of an Evangelical who does not affirm everything that has just been said; but it tends to be arranged under the rubric of ‘sanctification’, and hence treated in second position in any account of Paul's gospel.Footnote ⁴ And this brings us to the nub of the problem, and to the solution, that I articulate in my book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.Footnote ⁵

Many interpreters have, especially since the Reformation, prefaced the participatory account of salvation in Paul with a particular forensic construct.Footnote ⁶ Since Stendahl this has tended to be known as ‘Lutheran’ but I propose a moratorium on this designation which now confuses far more than it assists.Footnote ⁷ We will speak instead of ‘justification’. The dual analysis of Paul in terms of justification and sanctification is of course nothing new; Pauline scholars have spoken in these terms for over a century. But, until recently, few have grasped its real consequences, and gone on to resolve them. At precisely this point we need to be clearer and bolder because our problems are deeper than we tend to think.Footnote ⁸

Justification, as it is frequently articulated, denotes the exposition of Paul in terms of the Western ordo salutis, which the Reformation – not during its best moments!Footnote ⁹ – coded in explicitly conditional and individualistic terms.Footnote ¹⁰ And I suggest that this unleashes a construction within Paul's broader interpretation which collides with his exposition elsewhere in participatory terms. A system that works forward, or prospectively, in the light of a set of universal revelations in the state of nature – concerning a fundamentally retributive God, perceived by a fallen but not utterly incapacitated humanity – must clash on every level with one which works backwards, or retrospectively, in the light of the particular revelation to Paul of Christ – of a fundamentally loving God, anticipated by Israel, who transforms a fallen and utterly incapacitated humanity. Indeed, this is really just a particular manifestation of the age-old collision between theological foundationalism and non-foundationalism, although in a specifically Pauline mode. So when Paul is said at times, in Sanders’ useful phrases, to ‘think forwards’ and to ‘think backwards’ this is not just an observation; it is an epistemological crisis – a state of severe confusion. It is also arguably the fundamental dispute in Christian theology – the dispute at bottom between heresy and orthodoxy.Footnote ¹¹

Things have not usually been stated in quite these terms. But once the ordo's dynamics have been articulated, it is astonishing to see how many localised debates within Pauline studies are revealed to be surface tremors emanating from the deeper collision of tectonic soteriological plates between (heretical) foundationalist and (orthodox) non-foundationalist modes. These tremors include most of the major concerns of the new perspective: Stendahl's worries about tortured introspection (the first phase in the ordo); Sanders’ about the misrepresentation of Judaism (as the first ‘religious’ phase in the ordo which must fail to save and thereby convict), and the different directions Paul thinks in, here repristinating Schweitzer, who was himself restating early German complaints, along with Räisänen's related concerns about Paul's incoherence (here detecting the way that the foundationalist ordo clashes with the non-foundationalist approach evident in Paul elsewhere).Footnote ¹² Unfortunately, it also becomes apparent that the ‘new perspective's’ account of the problem is superficial.Footnote ¹³ Many more difficulties than introspection and Judaism are being generated by the interpretation of a significant part of Paul in terms of the ordo – for questions as diverse as conversion, gender construction and ecclesiology.Footnote ¹⁴

Things may be starting to look rather complex by now but the main consequence flowing from all this is fairly straightforward. As he is currently expounded in general, in terms of justification followed by sanctification, Paul is fundamentally unintelligible. He gives contradictory answers to every major theological question.Footnote ¹⁵ I suggest, however, that the usual response to this conundrum of denial does not have any long-term viability; it delivers Paul bound hand and foot over to his detractors (as does its alternative, domesticationFootnote ¹⁶).Footnote ¹⁷ Our only real alternatives are either to accept that Paul is fundamentally incoherent – which is a possibility, and the conclusion of his detractors, but something of a canonical and theological disaster – or to re-examine this entire situation with a greater awareness of what is at stake. But because we must assume an author's coherence until proved otherwise, we can at least explore the more palatable option first.Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, the very rootedness of justification in the European tradition offers us hope. We may have projected its Western foundationalist concerns unawares into our exegesis of Paul's texts inappropriately.Footnote ¹⁹ We might then find on turning to the texts that this approach is more assumed than proved; perhaps another, non-foundationalist construal lurks beneath our misconceptions. And with this possibility in mind, we can narrow our textual focus helpfully as well.

The theory of justification is complex, with a distinctive, carefully argued movement of individuals from a universal plight to its Christian solution. Consequently its explicit articulation can only really be found in Paul in Romans 1–4, the theory being launched by the exegesis of Romans 1:18–3:20, which describes the human plight. Now, I admit that the construal of Romans 1–3 by the majority of scholars, which we can dub the conventional or usual reading, seems to affirm the ordo. And I agree with scholars like Moo that the current crop of revisionist readings, exciting as it often is, is less persuasive on sober exegetical grounds than the conventional reading.Footnote ²⁰ But I contend that both conventional readers and revisionists alike have failed to introduce the presuppositional dynamics generated by the Western ordo sufficiently into the interpretative situation.

When we reject these presuppositions – not because they are presuppositions but because they are anachronistic and distortingFootnote ²¹ – a different, more persuasive reading emerges, namely, an alternative reading, which is also fundamentally apocalyptic.Footnote ²² But let me emphasise that this alternative is not a reconstrual of the text per se; I largely endorse the meanings that commentators have long suggested for the words and sentences which Paul uses in Romans 1–3. I simply propose a new approach to the argumentative arrangement, recalling that mistaking the argument in a difficult text – and here we are dealing with a very old one, thickly overlaid with reinterpretative discourses – is a surprisingly common phenomenon. In my view, we have misunderstood this text, and so generated all our difficulties, in part because we have not performed it correctly; we have supplied the wrong illocution. Certainly we have long failed to grasp the actual point of Paul's argument.

As I have just noted, conventional readers of Romans 1–3 take Paul to be laying out the critical first phase of the Western ordo. The apostle supposedly develops an argument from universal, self-evident premises in an essentially prospective or forward-moving case which is also foundationalist, that is, which makes claims valid for all future reflection including the theological. Hence our understanding of salvation, conditionally, in terms of sola fide, and of the atonement, in terms of penal substitution, is derived from and dictated by this prior phase to which it responds.

Romans 1–3 can be read alternatively, however, as a reduction, in several stages, of an essentially conditional Jewish Christian gospel rather different from Paul's to absurdity. This would be the gospel of the Teacher(s), whom we recognise from Galatia and Philippi (assisted by Lou Martyn and ultimately F. C. Baur).Footnote ²³ In this reading, Romans is best understood as a more polite and explicit version of Galatians written to Christians who do not yet know Paul personally. In all his responses to situations generated by the Teacher's activities Paul is basically exhorting converts from paganism to remain loyal to his approach and not convert further to an orthopractic Jewish Christianity which he views as a betrayal of the significance of Christ for the pagan nations – a Gospel that is really no Gospel at all (Gal 1:7a).

In 1:18–32 – and not in 1:18–3:20 in toto as I have sometimes heard it falsely reported (cf. Rom 3:8) – Paul epitomises the Teacher's preaching preamble, reproducing its irascible and prurient tone. The Teacher seems to have begun his preaching with a fiery and threatening tirade. Like its substantive prototype in the Wisdom of Solomon, however, it contains commitments both to divine justice and to human sinfulness, a conceptual inconsistency which Paul has noted and will craftily exploit. As the history of thought has shown, these two conceptualities do not fit together at all well.Footnote ²⁴ Following an epitome of his opening charges in 1:18–32 provided for the benefit of the Roman Christian auditors, Paul turns on the interlocutor who has uttered them. In a standard argumentative move, the apostle universalises the underlying premise of desert, applying it to the judgemental interlocutor himself. Then he begins to run a masterful set of reductions.

First, Paul folds the implicit premise of desert back in Socratic fashion on both Jewish and Gentile constituencies. Scandalously, sinful Jews – like the infamous rabbinic rogues who catalysed the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under TiberiusFootnote ²⁵ – must be condemned, undermining the Teacher's claims that circumcision and law observance are necessarily ethically effective. (The Teacher believes, like Philo, that circumcision excises the heart of the sinful passions; following this procedure devout men, appropriately liberated, can be tutored by the law and achieve perfect righteousness.Footnote ²⁶) Equally scandalously, righteous Gentiles, who have read God's commands out of a general law written into the cosmos and obeyed them, must be saved, undermining the same claims from the other direction. It seems that the Teacher's offers of circumcision and Torah to Gentile Christians to perfect their ethical progress to eschatological glory and glorying are otiose. The Teacher's gospel, considered in its own terms, is unnecessary, undercut by its own opening commitment to desert. Moreover, Judaism has been strangely if not horrifyingly redefined, that is, effectively out of existence, at which point Paul's first set of punchy complementary reductions is complete.

A brief conversation follows in 3:1–9a in which the Teacher rather foolishly insists on God's rigid application of desert to any sinful Jews. Paul then seizes this opportunity – that he has of course created for himself – deploying a massed scriptural assertion of universal sinfulness, and drawing the obvious conclusion: the Teacher's gospel, viewed in its own terms, saves no one, not even the Teacher himself – his second principal reduction. Hence, in closing this argument Paul picks up strongly on the contradictory premises in the Teacher's preamble that we noted earlier on, but here depravity trumps desert. Suitably scrutinised, the Teacher's gospel collapses in self-contradiction. As the scriptures even predict in Psalm 143 – paraphrasing a little – ‘no one gets saved this way’. Some other solution to the problem of radical human sinfulness will obviously have to be found.Footnote ²⁷ And so, with the ground suitably cleared, Paul turns from 3:21 onward to his very different understanding of the action of God in Christ – that God has done everything necessary for salvation and ethics in the Christ event, without remainder – an announcement, or gospel, which needs no theoretical preamble.

This is my alternative reading of Romans 1–3 in a nutshell. But it often faces an immediate initial criticism in terms of recognition – a charge I view as worth mentioning but as ultimately inadequate. In responding to it I will briefly extend some of my book's claims which were insufficiently developed there due to time constraints.

‘How would the original auditors of Romans have recognized the presence of a reductio in the way that I am suggesting?’, I am often asked. ‘More easily than a systematic articulation of scholastic Protestantism’, I am tempted to respond. Irrespective of this, it simply is the case that, with a certain illocution, Romans 1–3 performs as a reduction to absurdity of the first-century equivalent of a Fundamentalist preacher.Footnote ²⁸ No violence is done to any of the text. Moreover, ancient sources provide sufficient evidence for us to be confident that ancient auditors could have decoded ironic, subversive and dramatic textual strategies like this with relative ease.

There is a near-universal emphasis in the high school textbooks of the day, the Progymnasmata, on the detection by pupils of ‘speech-in-character’ (prosôpopoiia or êthopoiia).Footnote ²⁹ The reading of the ancient world's scripture, Homer, involved the not-infrequent recognition of unsignalled shifts in voice as Homer's characters suddenly make speeches unannounced – the figure of ellipsis in addition to prosôpopoiia, as Quintilian helpfully observes (Institutes of Oratory 9.2.37). We even know of an ‘ironic’ letter genre, as Pseudo-Libanius terms it, ‘in which at the beginning we praise someone by means of acting, but in the end reveal our goal – that what was spoken was acted’.Footnote ³⁰ In short, every technique operative in my suggested rereading is explicitly attested by an ancient source.Footnote ³¹

A good example of what I am suggesting is Horace, who wrote in the reign of Augustus. In book 2 of his Satires, numbers 3, 4 and 7 offer us dialogues, beginning in a monological mode, in which, classicist Susanna Braund remarks, ‘a sermoniser appears and delivers a lecture to the other character, who is in effect his victim, compelled to remain in his seat listening until the other has finished . . . [But] the lecturer or sermoniser is rude and intolerant, unpleasant or cranky. He exposes his own foolish obsession by the content and/or length of his sermon’.Footnote ³² Just this scenario is playing out in Romans 1:18–3:20.

Still more apposite is Juvenal, writing under Domitian, whose early satires open with long indignant tirades primarily against sexual sin – especially homosexuality – even going so far as to specify in eye-watering detail, not unlike Paul, the penalty for this perversion. But classicists have long suggested that Juvenal is misinterpreted if his anger is understood referentially, as his own voice – that he was the ancient equivalent of some aggressive right-wing radio talk-show host. His anger is a persona – a mask or role – with comic excesses detectable to the Romans of his day (and we can even track some of these thanks to Seneca's essays on anger and related sourcesFootnote ³³). The poet's rage turns out, as the satires develop, to be hypocritical and uncontrolled. It is repetitive, punitive and strangely obsessed. Juvenal was actually the ancient equivalent of a modern satirical impersonator (although rather more witty). The ancient Romans read his tirades and fell about laughing.Footnote ³⁴

The satires of Horace and Juvenal, and Paul's treatment of his opponent in Romans 1–3, are really drawing, in subtly different ways, on Roman comedy and what Welborn calls ‘the comic-philosophical tradition’ – a vast cultural discourse that loved to attack authority figures, and that Juvenal's readers and Paul's auditors were steeped in – a discourse which is also vital for an accurate understanding of 1 and 2 Corinthians.Footnote ³⁵ This type of text was common coin in ancient Rome.

In short, Paul's letter to the Romans was written to an audience more sophisticated at detecting irony and speech-in-character than modern Western scholars – scholars, furthermore, who lack intuitive competence in the texts and discourse under discussion, Koiné being a dead syllabic language,Footnote ³⁶and the Roman comic tradition, long past. In view of these considerations, any prima facie dismissal of the possibility that the Roman Christians could have detected a reductio in 1:18–3:20 – particularly before that reading has actually been evaluated as a reading – seems to me to be overtly invalid, if not a little embarrassing. (That is, it seems based in part on ignorance of the literary resources and strategies of Paul's day.) That the original Roman Christians could have detected a reductio in Romans 1–3 is undeniable; whether they did would have depended on the text's illocution, not to mention on subsequent explanation during discussion.Footnote ³⁷ (‘Speech-in-character’ is delivered almost entirely by performative or illocutive cues, and not by the written text itself.) So here we simply have to compare different performances of the preserved written text carefully and reach a judgement; we have to see which reading works best. And as Quintilian says:

I suggest that after this hermeneutical mastication it becomes apparent that the alternative construal of Romans 1–3 – one which does indeed detect a carefully laid trap – enjoys many significant advantages over its conventional rival. I have space here to mention only two, although they are significant.Footnote ³⁸ The first is in terms of contingency.

It has been axiomatic since J.-C. Beker's work in the 1980s to provide contingent readings of Paul's letters on the assumption that they were all written to deal with specific local problems.Footnote ³⁹ Paul's systematic thought, which Beker termed his ‘coherence’, can only be recovered as interpreters press through his letters’ particular occasional circumstances, termed by Beker their ‘contingency’. The interpretation of Romans, however, has largely evaded the force of Beker's dictum because of the ongoing debate over its contingency; this has allowed illegitimate coherent or systematic readings of its material to persist unchallenged. But this recapitulates a pre-critical reading of the text which assumes its primary address to ecclesial posterity and violates Beker's axiom, and should now be firmly repudiated.Footnote ⁴⁰

A solid account can be offered for contingency of Romans – that it responds to the same threat as Galatians does, namely, the Teacher's heretical gospel. A corresponding reading of the beginning of its letter body in contingent terms can be offered as well – that it is a reductio which deconstructs the gospel of the Teacher. And this is after all why Paul wrote all his other extant undisputed letters except Philemon – to combat the influence of third parties intruding on his congregations (a perennial insight of F. C. BaurFootnote ⁴¹).

Now I am prepared to grant the conventional approach a rejoinder here. The reading will be acceptable in this relation if it can be shown both how Paul has good contingent reasons for beginning his letter body systematically and evidence is provided that this was in fact how he began his preaching of the Gospel. But the conventional advocate stumbles here on both counts.

There is no plausible contingent account of Romans which justifies him crafting a systematic letter body. And when we look for decisive evidence of foundationalist preaching by Paul from plight to solution outside Romans 1–4 we encounter an ominous silence. There isn't any. We do find, however, considerable evidence that this is not how Paul preached. He specifically affirms a thoroughgoing emphasis on the cross in both 1 Corinthians 1:17–2:16 and Galatians 3:1–5, accompanied by a demonstration of the Spirit's power. It seems that Paul's proclamation was, by his own witness, without fanfare, technique or preamble; it was not non ex operibus legis but sola cruce.

In short, the conventional reading of Romans 1–3 is in serious trouble in terms of contingency; it is really a pre-critical reading – problem enough ordinarily for Pauline specialists to disqualify it from further consideration immediately. Moreover, its main claim – that it is the first phase in Paul's proclamation of the Gospel – seems to lack any explicit attestation (although not apparent falsification). So my alternative construal enjoys a fairly decisive advantage here. We turn now to consider a second area where it also seems to come out ahead.

How do conventional readers resolve an obvious problem in their reading, namely, the construal of the Jewish interlocutor, a problem readers of Paul have been aware of for some time, and acutely so since 1977?Footnote ⁴² But perhaps we need to grasp the difficulty involved here a little more clearly before we assess its implications for our respective readings.

Advocates of the construal of Romans 1–3 in terms of justification argue from a universal plight to this distinctive solution and consequently reduce Jews as well as pagans quite deliberately to despair in the pre-Christian condition. They do so by construing reality as fundamentally law-governed and going on to suggest that all transgress this arrangement, thereby eliciting God's promised censure. If this doesn't happen then no explanation is provided for why Christianity is superior to Judaism, or even why Paul's converts are law-free. So the Jewish interlocutor in the text is not just a Jew; for justification advocates he is the Jew. The reading must reduce all Jews to this definition, and a condition of despair, to work. However, the texts in relation to which the Jew's despairing progression is effected provide additional details concerning his construction.

The Jew in Romans 2 is a judgemental hypocrite and his actual transgressions are theft, adultery and temple-robbery; thus this figure is the ancient equivalent of an incestuous drug-dealing bank-robber (a strong signal, incidentally, that comedic conventions are in play). Lurid qualities aside, this figure must be generically culpable, either because his law-observance has not been perfect or because a reasonable expectation of law-observance has been violated through consistent depravity. (Although the text never states either of these critical axioms explicitly, we will assume the presence of one of them for the sake of argument; without this, multiple exceptions to Christian conversion are generated and the conventional reading immediately collapses.) Note also that no means of atonement or forgiveness are entertained prior to 3:25; this Jew has no land and no temple.Footnote ⁴³

The orientation of this figure is also primarily future and eschatologically salvific, which is to say, individualistic and rationally self-interested. These are the concerns in relation to which law-observance is positioned. This Jew keeps the Torah in view of future personal rewards and punishments and nothing more, so not for the love of God, or love for the scriptures and his people's traditions, or anything similarly selfless. Moreover, nothing more than this simple configuration is present and neither can it be or the argument will not unfold correctly into Christianity sola fide. If more is added then the argument won't work, and in any case, this is all that the text actually says.Footnote ⁴⁴

Hence Paul's discussion notes at one point, correctly, that such a Jew, construed in terms of desert, is only tenuously linked with the privileges of historical Israel and the particularities of Jewish scripture; his sinfulness must be overruled by God's judgement, while any special revelation is clearly of limited value alongside natural theology: so 3:1–9a. And Paul accurately seems to note as well that all good pagans are really – viewed in these terms – true (if not truer) Jews – although, somewhat disconcertingly, no such figures turn out to exist: so 2:25–9. To cap it all off, this construction necessarily applies to Paul himself; it is an account of his biography as well as of his theology. The two are synonymous, as they must be, if Romans 1–3 is actually a true account of conversion.

This then is the Jew, not to mention the image of the pre-Christian Paul, who emerges from Romans 1–3 when justification theory is assumed to be in play. Consequently I conclude in chapter 4 of Deliverance of God, along with many other scholars, ‘that this account of Judaism is absent from the Jewish sources roughly contemporary to Paul is self-evident’ (p. 113, emphasis original). Indeed, to claim that it is is to write both historical Israel and most of the Old Testament out of existence and to build this jaundiced account of Judaism into the very foundations of any ongoing Christian theology. And certainly, since Stendahl, scholars have struggled to find this biography in the rest of Paul's extant writings, while (again) much seems to stand against it.Footnote ⁴⁵

Now I simply don't know of any effective solutions to this complex and anguished difficulty in terms of the conventional reading of Romans 1–3, which reads Paul's argument at this point in foundationalist terms as the articulation of a universal problem.Footnote ⁴⁶ This reading locks this difficulty into its arguments unavoidably; it is its unpleasant but necessary concomitant, rather like collateral damage from a bombing raid. But I do know a solution to this difficulty in different terms while, left unresolved, it remains an important signal that the usual reading is wrong.

If Romans 1–3 is a reductio of the Teacher's tirades then the Jewish problem is instantly eliminated.Footnote ⁴⁷ Judaism per se is just not being discussed in Romans 1–3. That's why Paul's account of it is so inaccurate. Paul's argument here is directed specifically against first-century, hellfire-and-brimstone Fundamentalists (which is also, incidentally, where it ought to be directed today); it is addressing a corruption of the Gospel. The collapse of this preacher's preaching on itself, in ruinous self-contradiction, is exactly Paul's point, and nothing more – an utterly humiliating argumentative outcome for his rival, and something of a rhetorical triumph for Paul, but hardly an independent account of Judaism. So we can now take an important step forward in the overarching description of Paul by not having to add the embarrassing and even sinister claims of justification theory concerning Jews to it. Indeed, we need good reasons for not adopting the rereading and taking this step, considering its advantages. Paul's whole ‘legalistic’ account of Judaism can happily be abandoned.

Let me affirm in closing that if we do adopt the alternative construal of Romans 1–3 then the prospects are exciting; something of a new day for Pauline interpretation will dawn. We can move on, unconstrained by alien conditional constructs, to consider the questions which really matter in terms of the things that Paul really said. We will finally be reading Paul without the intrusion of the Western ordo, and a kinder, gentler apostle will come into focus.

If we don't adopt this alternative, then some words of classicist Mary Beard spring to mind, commenting on the tone-deaf reception of a piece of satire which appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement in September 2009.Footnote ⁴⁸ ‘The trouble with satire . . . is that the literal minded are always liable not to get it. And the satirist is inadvertently taken to support the very views s/he is attacking’ (emphasis added). An earnest but insensitive imposition of the Western ordo salutis on Romans 1–4 has led to the construal of Paul for centuries in the image of his judgemental rival – an ironic reading but of utterly the wrong sort! The Teacher, not Paul, was the judgemental foundationalist. Paul was the apostle of christology, revelation and grace. His reduction of his opponent's constricted and conditional gospel to ruin through Romans 1–3 is a masterpiece of Socratic subversion, and not a presentation of his own position. It's time for us to get it.