As we consider and study Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we discover that just as salvation meant something different for Paul than it does for many Christians today, faith and what it means to believe in Jesus have often been misunderstood. The misunderstanding is that faith means believing in a set of teachings or doctrines about Jesus (something that I have alluded to in the first article of this Bulletin). This misunderstanding has grown in Western culture over the last three centuries or so. This misunderstanding truly began in the West before and during the Reformation. Beliefs about Jesus – that He was born of a virgin, that He walked on water and changed water into wine, that he died for our sins and rose again on the third day, that he is the Son of God and the only way, and so forth – have changed from what everyone took for granted to claims that are questionable in the minds of so many. So faith, believing, has come to mean believing in a particular set of claims about Jesus to be true in spite of perhaps somewhat persuasive reasons to question them.

But this is not what Paul (and early Christians generally and their spiritual ancestors in the Jewish Bible) meant by faith. The word had two primary meanings: loyalty and trust. Loyalty was about commitment and allegiance – not to a set of statements, but to a person. Its opposite was not doubt, but betrayal. Trust was about who or what you trusted. Its opposite was not intellectual doubt, but anxiety. Faith for Paul was about loyalty to and trust in Christ, not about believing a set of statements about Christ to be true.

To crystallize Paul’s affirmation in Romans: Christian Jews and Gentiles alike are justified together by God’s grace and by faith – loyalty and trust – in what God has revealed in Jesus.

Perhaps some of the most magnificent passages in Romans are found in chapter 5-8 (be sure to pick up a New Testament and read them). They expand Paul’s theme to the new life in Christ. They occasionally echo the contrast to the failure of both Gentile and Jew in the construction of this world, but their dominant tone is vibrant and hope-filled.

In this section Paul contrasts Adam and Christ. Adam becomes a symbol of the universality of sin – the disordering of creation caused and sustained by Jew and Gentile alike. In Christ there is a new possibility. Just as we are all involved universally in sin, so now in Jesus there is the possibility of a new kind of life.

Jesus, as a man, demonstrates that it is within the power of humans to live a more noble life, living with unconditional love and trust in others, regardless of how others respond AND that living in this manner brings about the fullness of life and helps us to find the true meaning and purpose of life.