Jesus Displays the Grain of the Universe

Christ is more than Secretary of Afterlife Affairs

Don’t forget!

Order your copy of my new book, A Quid without Any Quo. New Testament scholar, Beverly Gaventa, says it is “witty and wise.”

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Romans 10.1-10

To those formed by the reductionisms offered by many churches in America, the tenth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Sunday’s lectionary epistle, can sound like the apostle is attempting a more eloquent version of the Sinner’s Prayer. Just as many Christians believe that Christianity is about a personal relationship with God and faith a private matter of the heart, Romans 10 can sound as if Paul saying that faith is what we believe (personally and privately) in our hearts.

Paul doesn’t mean anything of the sort, but so to see requires you to know Paul’s context.

When Paul wrote Romans, around the year 55, Christianity was a small, odd community amidst an empire antithetical to it. Christians were a nation within a nation. Christianity represented an alternative fealty to country and culture and even family. Baptism then was not a religious seal on a life you would’ve lived anyway. It was a radical coming out. It was an act of repentance in the most original meaning of that word: it was a reorientation of everything that had come before.

To profess that “Jesus is Lord” was to simultaneously protest that “Caesar is not Lord.”

Or, Caesar is lord no longer.