Saved from The Wrath (Romans 5:9) - Michael Wood

Saved from The Wrath (Romans 5:9)

‘Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.’(NRSV)

‘Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him.’ (NIV)

‘So much the more, therefore, shall we – having now been vindicated/rectified by his blood – be saved from the indignation.’ (David Bentley Hart)

Hermeneutics

No matter how this verse is translated into English, one thing is clear. The word “God” is not present in this verse in the original Greek. The English translators, with the exception of David Bentley Hart, have inserted it. They have made an assumption that we are being saved FROM the wrath of God. After all, to whom or what else would “the wrath” belong?

This is a very short article and I’m only touching on a subject upon which a great deal of ink has been spilled so I’m hardly going to do it full justice. My goal here is to give a simple (but important) example of how the lenses we bring to a text shape what we hear and ‘interpret’ what the text is saying. This process is called ‘hermeneutics.’ Some readers of the Bible don’t like this word at all. They say, ‘one should not ‘interpret’ anything – we should just do a simple/plain reading of the text and leave it at that.  And yet we have just observed a simple example of how the translators (committees of highly skilled and well-informed biblical scholars) have made an interpretative choice to insert a word in the English which is not there in the Greek.

Should we accept their decision as ‘gospel’? I feel a little anxious about making the challenge since I am not a professional biblical scholar. But I’ve read enough of the work of respected, published, peer-reviewed scholars to know that the question is worth asking, and I’m going to offer just a couple of thoughts around hermeneutics. It’s a good word and it doesn’t get talked about enough.

Who does “the wrath” belong to?

‘Wrath’ is a noun. The question is who it belongs to. Translators commonly assume that ‘The Wrath’ in Romans 5:9 belongs to God. Why?

To cut a long story short, the translation is being affected by the long legacy of a particular understanding of the work of Christ to save humanity. One common formulation of this understanding which is widely (almost universally) held in Protestant circles is that humans have a huge ‘problem’ in that we are sinners. As sinners, we are subject to the righteous ‘anger/wrath’ of God. Left alone who could survive this? So God, out of God’s mercy, becomes flesh in Jesus and absorbs God’s wrath (death penalty) in the person of Jesus (who is really God’s self) in our place, so that we don’t have to burn in hell. Because God’s anger has been cleared out of the way, we are now free to have a relationship with the otherwise very angry Father. In technical terms, this is called the ‘Penal Substitution theory of the Atonement (PSA)’.

This way of understanding the work of Christ is not universally held in the church outside Protestant circles. However, it is a hugely influential hermeneutical ‘lens’ which leads translators to do things like inserting the word ‘God’ into Romans 5:9. After all, who would the wrath belong to other than God?

The God of Wrath

First of all, we have to acknowledge that there is plenty of textual evidence, in the ‘plain reading of scripture’ (which is itself a hermeneutical a priori starting point) for God being angry and violent. As anyone who has read their Bible knows, God is apparently sending plagues; destroying the guilty; and ethnic-cleansing whole populations of men, women, and children to make a promised land for others. This is a God who we should be afraid of. It is a theme of PSA theory that we have every good reason to believe that, unless God stepped in to protect us from God, then we are in bulk trouble. I have seen a bumper-sticker more than once that says, ‘Fear God’.

Aaron steps into the breach

I was precipitated to write this article by someone sending me a copy of Brad Jersak’s article, ‘Why did Jesus die?’ (1). In this article, Jersak suggests that in Romans 5:9, Paul is:

“riffing off texts like the Wisdom of Solomon 18:21-22, where Aaron, a type of Christ our High Priest, “set himself against the wrath, brought calamity to an end, [and] overcame the destroyer.” Wrath, destruction, calamity, and death. Satan, sin, and death. These are the enemies that God in Christ saves us from”.

I am going to come to exactly the same conclusion and simply add a bit of my own thinking about why I think Jersak is right, and in a way that he expands upon in a far more comprehensive and nuanced way in several of his books.

Let’s take a look at the story about Aaron in Number 16.41-49 to which Wisdom 18.20-25 is referring. The story is about one of a number of mutiny attempts by the Israelites against Moses and Aaron. Anyone who has been in church leadership knows that such things are an inevitable part of community life. But not all of us have had the huge firepower of the LORD to back us up.  The LORD says to Moses, ‘get away from this congregation, so that I may consume them in a moment’.

Moses, with a terrific pastoral heart for the people and perhaps a deep concern for what is about to happen, instructs Aaron to step into the space between the LORD and the people to make atonement (peace), ‘for wrath has gone out from the LORD; the plague has begun’. Aaron succeeds to some extent, but not before 14,700 people lie dead (besides those who died in the affair of Korah) (2)

There is, at one level, in a slightly puzzling and even with some dark humour, Moses and Aaron stand in the breach between God and the nation. I can almost imagine Moses thinking to himself, “well, LORD, I’m glad I have you on my side to keep this rebellious mob in line, but, ‘hey bro – I think you’ve killed enough people today to make your point’”. We have this slightly weird situation where the human seems so much more compassionate than the LORD. But perhaps I’m the only one who sees it that way.

Revisiting who the wrath belongs to

So now we return to how the author of Wisdom 18.20-25 is reflecting on the Aaron story.

20 The experience of death touched also the righteous,

and a plague came upon the multitude in the desert,

but the wrath did not long continue.

21 For a blameless man was quick to act as their champion;

he brought forward the shield of his ministry,

prayer and propitiation by incense;

he withstood the anger and put an end to the disaster,

showing that he was your servant.

22 He conquered the wrath [Gk. Multitude] not by strength of body,

not by force of arms,

but by his word he subdued the avenger,

appealing to the oaths and covenants given to our ancestors.

23 For when the dead had already fallen on one another in heaps,

he intervened and held back the wrath,

and cut off its way to the living.

24 For on his long robe the whole world was depicted,

and the glories of the ancestors were engraved on the four rows of stones,

and your majesty was on the diadem upon his head.

25 To these the destroyer yielded, these he [they] feared;

for merely to test the wrath was enough.

Wisdom literature

Note that in the passage above, from Wisdom, there is no reference to God being the cause of the plague or the source of wrath. God, through Aaron, is quite explicitly standing against the mob/plague/death.

While we need to be careful about constructing an argument from silence, we have to ask why the author did not mention God’s agency here when the original story from Numbers lent itself to the author doing so.

We are justified in believing that the author’s concern is to lay the problem of human wrath, with which Moses and Aaron were contending, firmly at the feet of the angry mob.

There are a couple of additional supports to this possibility.

Firstly, it is commonly recognized that Wisdom literature contains countervailing theological movements against traditional Deuteronomistic logic (that the good will be rewarded and the bad punished by God). The most striking example of this is the Book of Job. When Job’s entire family and livelihood is wiped out, his well-meaning friends want to appeal to the ‘justness’ of God and that Job clearly be a sinner. They argue this robustly for 37 chapters until finally God silences them and declares Job innocent. There is no clear answer in Job for why unjust suffering exists, but any supposed link between sin and suffering is undone. Jesus speaks in this same tradition of wisdom when he says, God the Father, “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).

Secondly, the French American thinker, Rene Girard, wrote quite extensively about the connections between plagues and social unrest. Perhaps, in the history of Numbers, there was actually a plague at the same time as the mutiny attempt by the Israelites. Girard postulated that if a scapegoat could be found upon whom the plague could be blamed, then the community unrest could be calmed by the expulsion of the scapegoat. The ‘all against one’ became a powerful form of atonement that could restore community cohesion. In the case of Numbers, it might have taken the death of over 14,000 before the scapegoat mechanism became effective. And like all scapegoats, he/she/they have been expunged from the story and the justifying myth introduced (God did it).

Jesus the forgiving scapegoat

Girard’s theories have some compelling explanatory force and become even more interesting when we think of the way Jesus was scapegoated by an angry mob. As the High Priest says, “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11.50). He was right that they did not understand. As St Paul says, “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the LORD of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Girard pointed out that scapegoating is always an unconscious mechanism and is self-justifying.  The crowd must believe that the innocent scapegoat is guilty.

Jesus the hermeneutic lens

The penultimate point I want to make here is the Barthian (and biblical) proposition that our beginning, middle, and endpoint for all hermeneutics must be the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Tenach (what Christians call the Old Testament) must be read through the lens of Christ crucified and the Spirit who constantly refers us back to Christ as the image of God (John 1;1-14; Colossians 1.15; Philippians 2:6; Romans 8.31-39; Hebrews 1:3 & 12:18-24).

AS the image of God, we see in Jesus that God IS inherently nonviolent and the one who dies for his enemies as well as his friends (Romans 5:8).

As a hermeneutical first principle, we don’t start with an image of God pieced together from multitudes of adjectives drawn from the Tenach (including legal juridical descriptors) and then try to squeeze Jesus into that pre-determined mold (3). Rather, a distinctively Christian hermeneutic must start with the decisive revelation of God in Christ and then read all of the Bible through that lens. Jesus and the Spirit unveil’ to us where God in Christ is at work through the Tenach and the New Testament (Luke 24:13-35; 2 Corinthians 3:1-18). So a very interesting question, which I will not try to address here is, ‘where is Christ in the Numbers story’?

Once again, who does the wrath belong to?

If we remove, for a moment, the superimposed lens of PSA  (which in itself is built on a particular hermeneutics other than the one I have described in this article) and we take into account the movement in wisdom literature towards undercutting Deuteronomistic wisdom and we reflect on how violent sacrificial scapegoating originates in human culture (the old ‘Adam’) and we do our hermeneutics through the lens of Christ crucified, THEN we must conclude that ‘the wrath’ that Jesus is saving us from is human wrath and not divine wrath. This is most likely what Paul is intending in Romans 5:9.

We begin to see more clearly that the ‘human problem’ from which God saves us is not God himself (God’s anger) but the problem of Sin which shows up in human wrath, violence, scapegoating, and … yes … even mutinous behaviour. As a little Covid inspired aside it might be interesting to speculate on how the dynamics of linking plagues and scapegoats in our own age may be showing up on both the left and right.

God’s gift in Christ is not to save us from God but to save us from Sin. It is a great act of deliverance from an appallingly violent and destructive slave-master who, by grace, has ultimately been conquered in the great eschatological scheme of things, by the faithfulness of Christ. This is the earliest conception of the gospel and it’s still a fine one.

 

Michael Wood is an Anglican Priest in Perth, Western Australia. He serves as a Chaplain to the University of Western Australia.

 

(i)Jersak, B. ‘Why did Jesus die?’ Christianity without Religion 04/13/2017www.ptm.org

(2) This passage does support, of course, theories such as PSA. God’s wrath is (apparently) real, it’s highly dangerous and we have every reason to stand in fear of it unless God intervenes to save us from himself. Within PSA theory, it is not that God is arbitrarily violent, but that God’s holiness demands punitive consequences. In this way of thinking, God is fair and just in his dealings with sinful people. PSA theory is highly influenced by legal juridical presuppositions which can also be ‘justified’ by reference to Old Testament texts. PSA has a robust internal logic within its own frames of reference).

(3) For recent solid and readable explorations of these points, see Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life; Douglas Campbell, The Triumph of God’s Love. Brad Jersak, ‘A More Christlike God’.

Comments

[Ian Forest-Jones]

A great article and I couldn't agree more!

However, noting the author is an Anglican, I was a little surprised at the dismissive nature of the article toward PSA, but then I noticed he is located in Perth and not Sydney 😁 (I promise not to tell the Archbishop)