This is an opportunity to sit at the feet of a master exegete at work. As usual, Tom Wright, the popularist doppelgänger of the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, is eminently readable and contagiously enthusiastic.
Wright takes us through Romans 8 as a summary of the whole letter and of Paul’s theology more widely, and finds it to be about a call to become genuine human beings by being filled with God’s own life.
The chapter is read as a recapitulation of the schema of Creation, Passover, Exodus, and Covenant. Not all scholars of Romans have been persuaded by the tidiness of this reading, but it is, none the less, compelling when set out in detail, and chimes with elements of patristic exegesis. Wright uses “platonism” as a shorthand for an earth/heaven dualism, but he would find allies in Christian Platonist writers who would also foreground recapitulation, the corporate dimension of salvation, and Paul’s synergism. Indeed, as Wright shows, Romans 8 is one of those passages that show that God does not like to do anything for us without us. Rather, what he does for us he does as one of us, with us, and through us.
He is at pains to take us away from a lazy reading of the chapter as about individual salvation in a heaven far away. Rather, it is about the renewal of the cosmos through the corporate agency of God’s redeemed people: a salvation experienced now and still yet to come.
Wright plays close attention to the structure and rhetorical style of the chapter. His three hints for reading its constituent sections are to look at how passages begin and end to see their thrust, to look at the connective words that reveal the argument’s logic, and to think about how the passage would have originally been heard.
There are plenty of nuggets for the preacher: a theology of the Ascension as the real feast of Christ the King; a theology of glory in which we are Christlike image-bearers and the locus of divine presence; Paul’s Damascus-road experience as neither conversion nor calling, but as sending. Wright links Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane to the Spirit’s groaning, linking the theology of the cross to pneumatology, as we put ourselves in those places where the world is in pain so that there the Spirit can intercede to the Father.
A deep dive indeed — for which it is worth holding your breath.
The Revd Dr Matt Bullimore is the Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
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