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Neither height nor depth: discerning the cosmology of Romans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2011

Beverly Roberts Gaventa
Beverly Roberts Gaventa*
Affiliation:
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ 08540, USAbeverly.gaventa@ptsem.edu
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Abstract

Although the term cosmos in Romans is largely used in a neutral fashion to refer to humanity, as has been demonstrated by Edward Adams, the cosmos is nevertheless the location of a conflict between God and anti-God powers, most prominently the powers of Sin and Death. This conflict comes into view in Paul's repeated use of the language drawn from the arenas of slavery, statecraft and the military (especially in Romans 5–8). In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Sin and Death are themselves defeated (5:12–21; 6:8–11), but they are not yet destroyed. The conflict continues in the present as comes to expression in Romans 8, where Paul claims that the whole of creation (both human and non-human) waits for deliverance. And the conflict continues especially in 8:31–9, with its strong assertions that no power is powerful enough to separate humanity from its rightful Lord, assertions that would be unnecessary apart from the conviction that there are indeed anti-God powers whose goal is to reclaim human lives. Paul's cosmology, then, is less concerned with the order and wonder of the cosmos than with its need of redemption, a redemption begun but not yet complete. Cosmology and soteriology are inextricably connected to one another.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , August 2011, pp. 265 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2011

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims [God's] handiwork. (Psalm 19:1, NRSV)
The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven,
a glittering array in the heights of the Lord.
On the orders of the Holy One they stand in their appointed places;
they never relax in their watches. (Sirach 43:9–10, NRSV)

Cannot reason and demonstration teach [us] that God has made all things in the universe, and the whole universe itself, to be free from hindrance, and to contain its end in itself, and the parts of it to serve the needs of the whole? (Epictetus, 4. 7. 6, LCL)

None of these lines were written by the apostle Paul. There seems little reason to doubt that he would have agreed with the psalmist's assertion of awe in the face of God's creation. It is easy to imagine Paul nodding in assent to Sirach's claim that the beauty of heaven results from God's command. And Paul at points may reflect the views of Epictetus and others of his contemporaries about order in the cosmos. Yet he does not extol the beauties of the natural world as evidence of God's handiwork. Neither does he engage in cosmological debate of the sort found in Cicero or Plutarch. Admittedly, Romans 1:19–20 affirms God is made known from the ‘creation of the cosmos’. For Paul, however, that conviction is confined to a single brief passage, one which proves difficult to translate and even more difficult to understand in the context of his larger argument. For Paul, questions of the cosmos do not concern its origins or its testimony to God's providential design. Questions about the cosmos are overwhelmingly questions about salvation. What I shall argue is that, in Paul's letter to the Romans, the most important thing to say about the cosmos is that it is God's, that it is at present under siege by Sin and Death and other anti-God powers, and that God is redeeming it through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nothing in creation – neither height nor depth – will prevent God's final triumph.

Cosmos language in Romans

My starting point is with Edward Adams’ important study of cosmos language in Paul, Constructing the World.Footnote 1 Adams reviews the scholarly discussion of cosmos language in Paul, particularly the influential treatments of κóσμος in Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament Footnote 2 and in Hermann Sasse's article in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.Footnote 3 Both Bultmann and Sasse understand κóσμος as carrying negative theological connotations. For Bultmann, the individual is ‘in the grip of the world’ and is thereby under judgement.Footnote 4 For Sasse, the world is ‘estranged, fallen, and condemned’.Footnote 5 Both examine the use of cosmos language across Paul's letters, without attending to differences among them.

By contrast, among the important contributions Adams makes is his insistence on reading each letter on its own, in its own context. He demonstrates convincingly a difference between the use of the term in 1 Corinthians and in Romans, the two letters where the word κóσμος appears most often. In 1 Corinthians, where κóσμος appears twenty-one times, it does have negative implications. The world has a bankrupt form of wisdom, mere foolishness in God's eyes (e.g. 1:20–1; 3:19). It is the place where God's apostles are a spectacle (4:9, 13), where immorality is the norm (5:10). It is soon to be passing away, so that it is preferable for believers not to be caught up in the concerns of ‘this’ κóσμος (7:31).Footnote 6 Adams rightly locates this usage in the framework of the social dualism of 1 Corinthians, where Paul perceives the need to confirm and maintain the boundary between the believing community and outsiders.Footnote 7

In Romans, however, where cosmos appears nine times, the term is more nearly neutral in its connotations, according to Adams. Most often, it refers to humanity as a whole, as in 1:8 (‘Your faith is announced to the entire cosmos’) or 3:6 (‘Then how will God judge the cosmos?’; similarly 3:19; 5:12–13; 11:12, 15). In 4:13, Paul recalls the promise that Abraham's offspring would inherit ‘the cosmos’, which may also be a reference to humanity.Footnote 8 Some of these texts are slightly ambiguous and might mean the earth, but even so the reference would be to earth as the location in which humanity is to be found. It is not that God judges the planet earth, when God is said to judge the world. The one instance in which cosmos clearly refers to something more than humanity is in 1:20, which has to do with God's creation of the cosmos. Adams rightly concludes that Romans lacks the social dualism found in 1 Corinthians. There is not the sharp distinction here between those on the ‘inside’ of the community and those on the ‘outside’. In particular, 12:14–13:10 promotes a kind of ‘solidarity’ with the wider society.Footnote 9

A few additional brief observations about the use of the term κóσμος in Romans are in order. First, the use of κóσμος, when considered alongside the use of , may reinforce the universal horizon of this letter. As is well known, Paul again and again speaks of God's actions for all, starting as early as 1:5 (the ‘obedience that stems from faith’ is for ‘all the Gentiles’). The saving power of God's action is for ‘everyone who believes’ (1:16); ‘all have sinned’ (3:23); Adam's one act of disobedience and Christ's one act of obedience likewise affect ‘all’ (5:18); ‘God confined all in disobedience that God might have mercy on all’ (11:32). These two terms mutually reinforce one another.

Second, the use of κóσμος in Romans reflects the letter's emphasis on creation and specifically on God as creator. It is in connection with the claim about creation that Paul contends, in 1:19–20, that humanity knew God from the ‘creation of the κóσμος’ and should have acknowledged God. Abraham and his offspring, who are promised that they will inherit the κóσμος (4:13), are the recipients of the action of God ‘who calls into being things that do not exist’ (4:17). All of creation longs for God's redemption (κτίσις, 8:19–22).

Third, the use of κóσμος language in Romans is connected to the notion that humanity exists for the praise of God.Footnote 10 Paul early on identifies the refusal of doxology as the root of humanity's enslavement to sin. In 1:19–20, Paul contends that, although God is made known ‘from the creation of the κóσμος,’ and ‘they’ knew God, they did not ‘glorify God or give God thanks’. He reinforces this claim in 1:25 and 28 with statements that ‘they’ ‘worshipped and served the creation rather than the one who created’, and ‘they decided not to acknowledge God’. The second half of Romans 1 may have only Gentiles in view, but by the time Paul reaches the catena of 3:10–18, he has effectively included Jews in the same charge. ‘There is no one who seeks God’ and ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. Speech is emphasised within the catena:

Their throat is an opened grave.
With their tongues they deceive.
The venom of asps is under their lips.
Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.

The result of this refusal to give God thanks and praise comes in v. 19:

What the law says to those who are in the law it says so that every mouth might be shut and the entire κóσμος made liable to God.Footnote 11

The entire created κóσμος (again here in the sense of the human population of the world) is deprived of speech because of its refusal to acknowledge its created state. It should not be surprising, then, that Paul later depicts the unity of the diverse Roman congregations as speech in unison: ‘That you might together with one mouth glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (15:6). This point is reinforced by the numerous doxologies and blessings within the letter (as in 1:25; 7:25a; 9:5; 11:36; 16:20; [16:25–7]), which seem to call for the Romans to assent to Paul's argument with ascriptions of praise and thanksgiving.Footnote 12

Fourth, it is at least worth noticing that in most cases, the word might have been used instead of κóσμος, but appears only once in the Pauline corpus and that instance occurs in the citation of Psalm 18:5 in Romans 10:18.Footnote 13 It is especially intriguing to note 1:8, which might well read ‘your faith is made known through the the entire inhabited world’. 3:6 also serves to illustrate this point, as Paul might easily have asked, ‘How will God judge the , the entire inhabited world?’ Luke uses the term in just that way when he reports that Caesar's directive for a census went out to the entire (Luke 2:1; see also 4:5; 21:26; Acts 11:28; etc.). Similarly, Josephus writes that Cyrus identified himself as having been appointed by God as the great king of the (Ant. 11.3); Josephus also refers to the Romans as the ‘lords of the ’ (C. Apion 2.41; see also Ant. 19.193; War 4.656). It is of course hazardous to speculate about what does not appear in a text, but it may be that , which by this time is used in reference to the world as governed, even as controlled, by human beings, is less appropriate for Paul, and κóσμος reinforces his notion of the human population precisely as that cosmos is created and sustained by God.

Anti-God powers at work in the cosmos

To this point I have argued that, when Paul employs the term κóσμος in Romans, he does so in a way that is neutral. The κóσμος is not inherently bad; it is God's creation and in need of God's salvation. However, this point needs to be modified in an important way in order to include Paul's understanding that the cosmos (i.e. the human population and indeed the entirety of creation, κτίσις) has been taken captive by anti-God powers. And one important, perhaps the most important, aspect of Paul's cosmology in Romans is that humanity (i.e. the human cosmos) is at present the object of a conflict between God and anti-God powers. That is, the universe is inhabited by powers other than the power of God and the frail power of human beings.Footnote 14

Captivity to Sin and Death

The captivity of the human cosmos to anti-God powers is anticipated as early as 1:18–32, with the repetition of the statement that ‘God handed them over’ in 1:24, 26 and 28, where impurity, the passions and the base mind serve as metonyms for the power of Sin.Footnote 15 Romans 3:9 states explicitly that all ( again) are ‘under the power of Sin’.Footnote 16 It is with 5:12–21, however, that the enslaving power of Sin and Death becomes explicit. Through the action of Adam, Sin enters the cosmos and opens the door for Death. The lines which follow depict Sin and Death as establishing control over ‘all people’. Sin and Death rule as kings (vv. 14, 17). Sin increases in its power (v. 20); Sin rules through Death (v. 21). In 6:9–11, Paul comments that even Christ was at one time ruled by Death, and in 6:12–23, he speaks of Sin as an enslaving power.

Additional use of conflict language

These references to the powers of Sin and Death are widely recognised, even if there are significant disagreements about what exactly Paul means by them or what role they should play in understanding the letter.Footnote 17 But the full impact of Paul's language comes into view when we take into account the extent to which Romans, especially Romans 5–8, teems with the language of conflict:

  1. (1) The most explicit and startling example of such conflict terminology is that of weapons. In one of those rare, early imperatives in 6:13, Paul exhorts the Romans: ‘Do not present your members to Sin as ὃπλα [weapons] of wrong, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead and your members to God as ὃπλα [weapons] of rectification’. In a similar vein, 13:12 admonishes that ‘we should put away the works of darkness and clothe ourselves in the ὃπλα of light’.

  2. (2) Consistent with the language of ‘weapons’, at several points Paul employs the term ‘enemies’. Romans 5:10 speaks of ‘us’ as having formerly been God's ‘enemies’, and 8:7 characterises the mindset of the ‘flesh’ as at enmity with God. Romans 11:28 depicts the part of Israel that does not yet see Jesus as the Messiah (οἱ λοιποί) as being ‘enemies’ with respect to the gospel.Footnote 18

  3. (3) Less explicit but also derived from the arena of conflict is the language of ‘peace’ and ‘reconciliation’, which occurs at 5:1 and in the inclusio at 5:11. Now, Paul writes, ‘we have’ peace with God, a declaration that is repeated at 5:11 with ‘now we have received reconciliation’. As Cilliers Breytenbach has demonstrated, the language of reconciliation has its home in the arena of reconciling warring parties and is not in the first instance religious terminology.Footnote 19

  4. (4) The numerous references to ‘slavery’ and to ‘ruling’ or ‘reigning’ are also closely associated with the arena of conflict. Not only did many slaves in the Roman world become slaves as a result of war, but slavery necessarily reflects the suppression of conflict, the defeat of the enslaved and the overwhelming power of the owner.Footnote 20 Orlando Patterson's now classic study of slavery argues that slavery is to be understood, in the first instance, as having to do with power and domination more than with laws concerning property. Slavery, in Patterson's language, is ‘social death’.Footnote 21

  5. (5) At Romans 7:11, Paul writes that Sin took the commandment as an , an ‘opportunity’, using a term that is found elsewhere in military contexts as a pretext for making war.Footnote 22 Since Paul goes on to say that Sin ‘killed’ me, the violence of the image is undeniable.

  6. (6) At the very end of the letter, Paul solemnly declares that ‘the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (16:17).Footnote 23

  7. (7) Last but not of least significance, when Paul says that God ‘handed them over’ in 1:24, 26, 28, as when he says that Christ ‘was handed over’ (4:25; 8:32) and that God did not ‘spare’ (8:32) his own son, he is again using language found in conflict situations. Both in biblical and non-biblical Greek, the verb παραδίδωμι is used to refer to the handing over of someone or something to a third party, often in military contexts.Footnote 24 Similarly φɛίδομαι, used in 8:32, often occurs in contexts having to do with the sparing of human life in military conflict.Footnote 25

This extensive use of imagery associated with conflict, even violent conflict, culminates at the end of Romans 8.

Romans 8:31–39

It is possible to grant much of my argument to this point and still insist that, by the time we get to Romans 8, this conflict over the lordship of the human cosmos lies in the past. The first half of Romans 8 contends that believers belong to the Spirit and not to the realm ruled by the flesh; therefore, they are God's children, they are Christ's fellow-heirs and so forth. They may be subject to suffering, but they have already been rectified and even glorified (8:29–30). It is common to refer to chapter 8, even to chapters 5–8, as Paul's discussion of the Christian life, a life which may be marred by suffering but is not any longer the landscape of conflict. J. A. Fitzmyer, for example, describes 8:14–39 with the heading, ‘Christian life, lived in freedom bestowed by the indwelling spirit, has its destiny in glory’.Footnote 26 Leander Keck's heading for 8:1–30 is ‘Liberation by the resident Spirit’, and for 8:31–9 is ‘God's love celebrated’.Footnote 27

Headings necessarily oversimplify, of course, but the picture of Romans 8 is actually distorted by such headings, especially when we arrive at 8:31–9. This passage demonstrates that Paul regards the human cosmos (even if he never uses the word) as a place which remains disputed territory. God is in conflict with other powers for rule over the human cosmos.

First, the controlling question of 8:31–9 is clearly stated at the outset: if God is ‘for us’ (), who is ‘against us’ ()? Cranfield rightly observes that the words ‘God is ’ stand as a ‘concise summary of the gospel’,Footnote 28 but it is also true that the question that follows encapsulates the gospel as well. In view of the fact that God is , who can be ? Elsewhere Paul uses κατά with the genitive in similarly forceful contexts, as when Elijah is said to plead with God ‘against Israel’ (Rom 11:2) or when 2 Cor 10:5 speaks of ‘high places raised up against the knowledge of God’ (see also Gal 5:17). The full implications of this ‘against’ will emerge only in the lines which follow, but the question assumes both that resisting God is finally impossible and also that some agent (τίς) may well attempt to do just that.

Second, the language of both power and powers pervades this passage. Verse 32 recalls God's action regarding ‘his own son’, whom God is said not to have ‘spared’ but to have ‘handed over’. As noted above, both these verbs are frequently found in contexts which involve conflict. Verse 34 contains Paul's only reference to Christ as ‘at the right’ of God, in what is widely agreed to be an allusion to Psalm 110. Not only does Christ's presence in the heavenly court indicate his own power, but of course in 1 Cor 15:25 Paul cites the next line of this psalm in clear reference to God's final triumph over God's own enemies: ‘He must reign until “he has put all his enemies under his feet”’. In addition, when Paul lists in v. 35 the circumstances which may be thought to ‘separate us’ from Christ's love, several of them are directly or indirectly associated with conflicting powers, most notably ‘the sword’, but also hardship and persecution which regularly come about because of conflict. And Psalm 43:23, which is cited by way of interpreting these circumstances, similarly contains the violent image not only of ‘dying all day long’ but of being put to slaughter.

This brings us to v. 38, which provides the names of the agents that produce the circumstances. The list is a varied one, but at least some of these agents are to be understood as actual powers (especially angels and rulers and ‘powers’).Footnote 29 Whatever their ontology, these powers have the intent of ‘separating’ human beings from the realm of God, the love of Christ. That point can be made more forcefully still: what Paul writes here makes no sense if there is not, in his judgement, some intent to separate humans from their rightful lord. In the face of this intent, the final item in the list of powers is revealing. Paul says that ‘no other creature’ will be able to separate ‘us’ from the love of God; that is, whatever the power manifested by them, they are in fact no more nor less than another of God's creatures.Footnote 30

Third, and perhaps most important, the passage needs to be understood as a unity which moves in the direction of the final statement in vv. 38–9. There seems to be no question among students of the letter that this is true. With ‘What shall we say about these things’, v. 31 introduces a series of questions, each of which opens with the interrogative τίς. The series concludes in vv. 38–9 with the emphatic denial that there is any such thing. Literally, v. 39 says that there is no τις κτίσις.

It is important to underscore the unity of the section because commentators often implicitly undermine that unity by treating vv. 31–4 as forensic and then characterising vv. 35–9 as a personal faith statement or emotional outburst. Fitzmyer, for example, describes the passage as situated in the law court but treats vv. 38–9 as a statement of Paul's ‘personal conviction’.Footnote 31 Barrett regards vv. 31–4 as anticipating the Last Judgment, with Satan as the prosecutor, but then identifies vv. 35–9 as referring to believers’ fears of astrological powers.Footnote 32 It is true that the first and second of these questions may be taken as forensic.Footnote 33 It must be acknowledged, however, that the passage drives as a unity towards the last question about separation. And the last question does not pertain to people being judged but to people being pursued by agents who wish them separated from their rightful Lord. In other words, it is about a conflict of powers. Paul's final assertion is that there is no power which has the power to bring about this separation. The conclusion is clear, even if it remains unstated: the powers that attempt this separation will be defeated.

The question which arises rather quickly concerns the ontological status of these powers. What sort of ‘beings’ are understood by the list in 8:38–9? Similarly, when Paul couples the words ἁμαρτία and θάνατος as subjects with active verbs, does he mean something more than that everyone does things which are wrong? Everyone dies? Paul does not address the ontological question, probably because he assumes the reality of these powers and is more interested in describing the captivity than he is in describing the captors. There is, however, ample evidence in Paul's religious environment for the belief that human beings are subject to evil powers in the form of demons.Footnote 34 And it is worth pressing again the question of what sense 8:31–9 makes if there is not, in Paul's thought, the intention of some powers to remove believers from God's love in Jesus Christ. Without some sense of opposition, some actual resistance, to ‘us’ in this passage, the passage becomes nothing more than an emotional outburst, a rhetorical climax which is devoid of actual content.Footnote 35

κόσμος and κτίσις

This examination of cosmology in Romans looks very little like what one would customarily expect from a discussion of cosmology. Little or nothing has been said about the cosmos in the non-human sense of that term (the globe, its other inhabitants, to say nothing of the larger universe).Footnote 36 Further complicating matters, I have emphasised 8:31–9, which addresses not the entire human population, but ‘us’, presumably Christians, raising the question whether 8:31–9 has anything to do with the salvation of the whole of the cosmos. It is at this point that we return to Romans 8:18–25 where Paul makes a connection between the ‘us’, i.e. those who at present know what God has done, and the whole of the created order (κτίσις). Although there is currently a near consensus that κτίσις refers to non-human creation, I regard κτίσις as an all-encompassing term, one which refers to everything God has created, including humanity.Footnote 37 First, the subjection of creation (‘not of its own will’) has been overinterpreted as a reference to Adam's fall and its consequences. Elsewhere in Greek, the phrase is paired with its opposite (ἄκων), as is the case in 1 Cor 9:17, to contrast doing something freely with doing it under compulsion.Footnote 38 Instead of drawing attention to the disposition or attitude of creation, then, the phrase serve to draw attention to the one who subjects creation, namely, God. The role of v. 20, then, is to describe the subjection of creation and to reinforce the notion that creation was acted upon by God: ‘creation was subjected – not freely – but by the one who subjected it’.

Second, the fact that creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed and that v. 23 refers to the groaning of ‘we’ prompts many interpreters to argue that Paul is distinguishing between creation and believers.Footnote 39 However, no clear distinction is made; the eagerness with which all of creation longs for the apocalypse of God's children does not preclude God's children themselves from being part of that same eager expectation.Footnote 40 Indeed, far from saying that the children are not part of creation's longing, v. 23 highlights their longing. Even though they have tasted the first fruit (or perhaps precisely because they do), ‘we’ long right along with (and indeed as part of) the rest of creation.

Third, other passages in Romans suggest that Paul understands humanity to be part of κτίσις. The most important is 1:23, where he introduces the charge of idolatry by asserting that humanity made images of ‘human beings, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles’ and exchanged those images for the glory of God. He then summarises his accusation with the words, ‘they worshipped and served the creation (κτίσις) rather than the one who created’ (1:25). In other words, the problem with humanity is precisely its refusal to acknowledge its standing as creature, as made by God. (And this is the sense in which humanity participates in the ‘not willingly’ of 8:20, i.e. humanity did not wish to be subjected; in fact, humanity rebelled against its rightful place as creature.) The closing doxology of Romans 11:33–6 corroborates this association of humanity and the rest of creation, as Paul calls on scripture to convey the impossibility of understanding God's own wisdom and knowledge, concluding with the words ‘since from him and through him and for him are all things’ (τὰ πάντα).Footnote 41 There is here a unity of everything in its createdness and in its relationship to God that is hard to reconcile with the notion that Romans 8 separates humanity from the remainder of creation. Indeed, the ‘all’ (πάς) of v. 22 may provide further indication of the inclusive connotation of ‘creation’ in this passage, since (as noted previously) the word ‘all’ repeatedly refers in Romans to the whole of humanity (see e.g. 1:5, 7, 8, 16; 2:9–10; 3:9, 12, 19, 23; 5:18; 11:26, 32, 36; 15:11).

To be sure, even reading κτίσις as limited to non-human creation still indicates Paul's concern that the earth requires redemption, which can only come from God. Reading κτίσις as I have done, however, serves to locate the ‘we’ of 8:31–9 within a larger landscape of the salvation of all of God's creation.

Conclusion

In a footnote to the introduction of his Galatians commentary, J. Louis Martyn asks, ‘Can anyone imagine Paul sitting quietly and listening to a Beethoven symphony, or standing for the better part of an hour before Vermeer's Young Woman with a Watcher Pitcher?’Footnote 42 I cannot. Neither can I imagine Paul gazing in awe at the heavens as evidence of God's glory or expatiating on the order of the cosmos.

Instead, Paul's cosmology is soteriology. What Paul sees in creation (both the human cosmos and the remainder of creation) is less its order or its wonder than its captivity to powers which continue to endeavour to separate it from its rightful Lord. Although the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ defeated Sin and Death and inaugurated a reign of God's Grace, all of creation continues to stand on tiptoe (to borrow from the translation of J. B. Phillips) waiting for the arrival of its redemption.Footnote 43

References

1 Constructing the World: A Study in Paul's Cosmological Language, Studies of the New Testament and its World (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000). See also his article, ‘Greco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology’, in Pennington, Jonathan T. and McDonough, Sean M. (eds), Cosmology and New Testament Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2008), pp. 5–27Google Scholar.

2 Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951–55), vol. 1, pp. 254–59.

3 ‘κóσμος’, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 9 vols, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–74), vol. 3, pp. 868–98.

4 ‘The Understanding of Man and the World in the New Testament and in the Greek World’, in Bultmann, Essays Philosophical and Theological (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 78; quoted in Adams, Constructing, p. 17.

5 The phrase is Adams’ summary, Constructing, p. 18.

6 In Romans, this critique of the ‘world's’ value system does appear, but it is cast in the language of living ‘according to the flesh’ (8:6–14) and being ‘conformed to this age’ (12:1–2).

7 Adams, Constructing, p. 149.

8 Adams argues on the basis of usage in Paul's Jewish contemporaries that κóσμος here means the future eschatological world that is to be inherited by the faithful (adducing Sir 44:21; Jub 17:3; 22:14; 1 Enoch 5:7; Philo, Somn. 1.175; Philo, Mos. 1.155; Constructing, p. 168).

9 Constructing, p. 220.

10 On doxology in Romans, see Gaventa, , ‘From Toxic Speech to the Redemption of Doxology in Paul's Letter to the Romans’, in Wagner, J. Ross, Rowe, C. Kavin and Grieb, A. Katherine (eds), The World Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 392–408Google Scholar; ‘“For the Glory of God”: Theology and Experience in Paul's Letter to the Romans’, in Foskett, Mary F. and Allen, O. Wesley Jr., (eds), Between Experience and Interpretation: Engaging the Writings of the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2008), pp. 53–65Google Scholar. This line of investigation was suggested to me by an earlier essay of Minear, Paul S., ‘Gratitude and Mission in the Epistle to the Romans’, in Hermelink, Jan and Margull, Hans Jochen (eds), Basileia: Tribute to Walter Freytag (Stuttgart: Evang. Missionsverlag GMBH, 1959), pp. 42–8Google Scholar.

11 For this translation, see Gaventa, ‘From Toxic Speech’, p. 402; and Elliott, Neil, The Rhetoric of Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy and Paul's Dialogue with Judaism, JSNTSup. 45 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 144–5Google Scholar.

12 Gaventa, ‘For the Glory of God’, p. 64; J. Martyn, Louis, Galatians, Anchor Bible Commentaries (New York: Doubleday, 1997), pp. 91–2, 569–70Google Scholar.

13 On which see Wagner, J. Ross, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul ‘In Concert’ in the Letter to the Romans, NovTSup 101 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 184–6Google Scholar.

14 Most of the texts to be discussed in this section do not use the word κóσμος, but it would be short-sighted to restrict discussion of Paul's cosmology narrowly to his use of the term κóσμος. Just as Paul refers to the death of Jesus in Romans without ever using the term and has things to say about the Christian community without using the term 'ϵκκλησία prior to ch.16, there may also be cosmology without the word κóσμος.

15 For argumentation in support of this claim about 1:24, 26 and 28, see Gaventa, , Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), pp. 113–23, 194–7Google Scholar.

16 Martyn, Galatians, pp. 370–3.

17 In addition to the commentaries, recent contributions by Joseph R. Dodson and David J. Southall are instructive. In The ‘Powers’ of Personification: Rhetorical Purpose in the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans, BZNT 161 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), Dodson instructively notes that ‘personification’ is little in evidence in Paul's letters outside of Romans, where it is concentrated in chs 5–8 (pp. 120–1). His own conclusion is that Paul uses ‘personification’ in order to distance God from evil and to identify the Law as Sin's victim rather than as a villain in itself (p. 139). Dodson provides a helpful discussion of personification as a rhetorical device, but he does not ask whether Sin and Death are something more than or other than personifications, a question addressed by Southall, David J. in Rediscovering Righteousness in Romans: Personified dikaiosynē within Metaphoric and Narratorial Settings, WUNT 240 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), esp. regarding Sin, pp. 96–112Google Scholar. Southall in turn draws on Colin Gunton's instructive discussion in The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), esp. pp. 53–82.

18 The word occurs also at 12:20 in the biblical citation from Proverbs 25:21, ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat’.

19 Versöhnung: Eine Studie zur paulinische Soteriologie, WMANT 60 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1989), pp. 40–83.

20 Bradley, K. R., Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 14–15, 113–43Google Scholar.

21 Hence the title of his book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Patterson defines slavery as ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’ (p. 13).

22 Polybius, 3.69; Philo, Flaccus 47; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 5.5.3; 6.25.3; and elsewhere.

23 Some commentators have argued that 16:17–20 is an interpolation; see, for example, Keck, Leander, Romans, ANTC (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005), pp. 377–9Google Scholar, and Jewett, Robert, who provides an extensive review of the literature in Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), pp. 986–8Google Scholar. There is no manuscript evidence which supports this theory, however, and I concur with those who hold 16:17–20 belongs with the letter; see Fitzmyer, Joseph A., Romans, AB33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 745Google Scholar; Moo, Douglas, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 928Google Scholar.

24 For example, Herodotus, Histories 1.45.1; 3.13.3; Xenophon, Cyropaedia 5.1.28; 5.4.51; Deut 2:24, 31; 20:13; Josh 2:14, 24; Jer 21:20; Ezek 7:21.

25 Iliad 15.215; 21.101; Odyssey 9.277; 22.54; Josephus, War 1.352; 4.82; Deut 7:16; 1 Sam 15:3. For argumentation in support of this paragraph, see Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, pp. 113–23, 194–7; ‘Interpreting the Death of Jesus Apocalyptically: Reconsidering Romans 8:32’, in Still, Todd D. (ed.), Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 125–45Google Scholar.

26 Romans, p. 497.

27 Romans, p. 8.

28 The Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1, Introduction and Commentary on Romans I–VIII, ICC (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), p. 435. Similarly, N. T. Wright comments that ‘the statement that “God is for us” is about as basic a way as can be conceived of summing up the revelation of God's saving justice in the gospel’, Romans, NIB 10, ed. Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002), p. 612.

29 On the extensive debate about the list in vv. 38–9, see Carr, Wesley, Angels and Principalities: The Background, Meaning and Development of the Pauline Phrase hai archai kai hai exousiai, SNTSMS 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 112–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wink, Walter, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 47–50Google Scholar; Jewett, Romans, pp. 350–5.

30 We might recall Psalm 104:25 which shrinks Leviathan down to the size of God's plaything or, as my colleague Dennis Olson puts it, God's ‘Rubber Ducky’.

31 Romans, pp. 529, 534.

32 Barrett, C. K., Romans (London: A. & C. Black, 1957), pp. 173–4Google Scholar.

33 Note, however, that Robert Jewett has recently called into question the forensic interpretation of v. 33 (Romans, pp. 539–40).

34 For further discussion and bibliography, see Wright, Archie T., The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6.1–4 in Recent Literature, WUNT 2.198 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005)Google Scholar, and Bell, Richard, Deliver us from Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology, WUNT 1.216 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007)Google Scholar.

35 To be sure, the passage is highly rhetorical, but the rhetoric simply underscores Paul's desire to persuade and does not signal that the content is to be overlooked or ignored.

36 There is almost no overlap, for example, with the issues addressed in Dennis Richard Danielson's illuminating anthology, The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

37 For a sketch of the consensus argument, see Adams, Constructing, pp. 174–84, and more recently Hahne, Harry Alan, The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8.19–22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (London: T. & T. Clark, 2006), esp. pp. 177–81Google Scholar. This paragraph and the two which follow draw heavily on Our Mother Saint Paul, pp. 53–5.

38 See BDAG 313; LSJ 527. On the range of connotations of ἑκων, especially in early literature, see Rickert, Gailann, ΕΚΩΝ and ΑΚΩΝ in Early Greek Thought, American Classical Studies 20 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

39 A related question concerns the relationship between the believing ‘we’ and the rest of humanity, on which see Susan Eastman, who argues convincingly that the apocalypse of God's sons and daughters in Rom 8 anticipates the future rectification of all of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike (‘Whose Apocalypse? The Identity of the Sons of God in Romans 8:19’, JBL 121 (2002), pp. 263–77.

40 In conversation, my colleague Shane Berg suggests the clarifying example, ‘The Senate awaits the revelation of the new majority leader’. In this sentence, the ‘majority leader’ is singled out, but the leader is nonetheless a member of the Senate.

41 Less ambiguous and more to the point are the hymnic lines of 1 Cor 8:6.

42 Galatians, p. 42.

43 An earlier version of this article was read in the Pauline Soteriology group at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, at the kind invitation of Professors Susan Eastman and J. Ross Wagner. I am grateful to them for their invitation, as well as to Edward Adams for his response, and also to Shane Berg, J. Louis Martyn, Paul W. Meyer, Carey Newman and Patrick J. Willson for commenting on earlier drafts, and to Brittany E. Wilson for research assistance.