Adam S. Miller - Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans

Grace Is Not Gods Backup Plan:

An Urgent Paraphrase of Pauls Letter to the Romans

Adam S. Miller

Copyright 2015 by Adam S. Miller

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1508647763

ISBN-13: 978-1508647768

Adam S. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He and his wife, Gwen, have three children. He received an MA and PhD in philosophy from Villanova University as well as a BA in Comparative Literature from Brigham Young University. He is the editor of An Experiment on the Word (2011) and the author of Badiou, Marion, and St Paul: Immanent Grace (2008), Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (2012), Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (2013), and Letters to a Young Mormon (2014). He is the co-editor, with Joseph Spencer, of the book series Groundwork: Studies in Theory and Scripture, published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

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Cover by Jenny Webb

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My thanks, as always, to Jenny Webb, James Faulconer, Joseph Spencer, and Robert Couch. But, especially, Jenny Webb.

Romans is a rare thing in religion: an explanation.

Scripture is full of stories, visions, parables, proverbs, genealogies, poetry, prophecy, and even history. These are priceless. But beyond an occasional gloss, interpreted dream, or decoded parable, were never given anything like what Paul offers. Were never given ten thousand words of raw explanation. With extraordinary insight and psychological precision, Paul lays bare the underlying logic of the gospel. He explains what sin is and why we choose it, the relationship between sin and grace, how sin abuses Gods law and subverts religion, how Jesus saves us from death and sin, and what a new life in Christ looks like, both individually and collectively.

The view is staggering. But its hard to keep the big picture in focus. This has partly to do with the quirks and conventions of Pauls writingbut only partly. A lot of it is us, not him. The King James Version, for instance, renders Pauls letter with uncanny beauty but is opaque as an argument. Modern translations tend to have the same problem. Their overriding concern is with the letter of the text, not with its logic. As a result, Pauls forest is always getting sacrificed for the sake of his trees. But Pauls work is too important, his good news too urgent, to leave so much of him locked in the first century. We need our renderings to do more than mimic the original, we need them to bleed and breathe.

Its my argument that the deep logic of Romans comes into sharp focus around a single premise: Pauls claim that grace is not Gods backup plan. Paul never quite puts it like this, but he implies it at every turn.

To make sense of Romans, we have to surrender a very natural assumption. We have to stop pretending that the world revolves around us. We have to let God be the center of the universe. We have to stop looking at Gods grace from the perspective of our sin and, instead, let sin appear in light of grace. And this grace is everywhere. Gods work of creation is a grace. His work of sustaining that created world is a grace. His willingness to shape us in his image and let us make our own way is a grace. His gift of the law is a grace. His Son is a grace. And his willingness to stand by us, regardless of our weakness or wanderings, is a grace.

This, though, is what sin cant abide. Sin wants to be the star of the show. From the perspective of sin, everything is about sin. As Paul describes it, sin is an active suppression of Gods already obvious glory. Its a rejection of his already offered grace. Sin likes to think that it came first and that grace, then, is Gods stopgap response. Sin acts as if Gods original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didnt quite pan out, God offered his gracebut only the bare minimumto make good the difference and boost us into righteousness.

This is exactly backwards. Grace is not Gods backup plan. Jesus is not plan B. Gods boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows. Grace is not Gods response to sin. Sin is our embarrassed, improvised, rebellious rejection of Gods original grace. On Pauls telling, sin isnt just a name for our occasional, local lapses. Paul doesnt talk about sins, plural. Rather, sin names a whole way of being in the world. Its a name for the underlying sickness that links our local mistakes and defies our conscious choices.

Sin abuses Gods gifts and subverts them to its own end. It takes Gods law, severs it from grace, and repurposes it as a wedge. Sin doesnt oppose religion, it hijacks it. It coopts religion itself as a way of alienating us from God. Sin recasts the law as a measure of our ability to get by without Gods grace. It sees the law as an occasion for us to judge others and, so, excuse ourselves.

More, sin seizes the law as a chance to enflame our cravings. Because desire loves a vacuumbecause we naturally want what we dont havesin seizes the laws prohibitions as an opportunity to incite more sin. When the law shows up as a deprivation rather than a gift, it works crosswise to its intended purpose. It provokes what it was meant to forbid. And then, divided against ourselves, we feel powerless to change. We feel dead.

By raising Jesus from the dead, God demonstrates his unwavering fidelity to life and breaks the chains that bind us. Gods commitment to making things right is unconditional. He hasnt held anything back, not even his Son. All the grace that sin tried to conceal and suppress by hijacking Gods law is once again on full display in the resurrected Jesus. The love that sin tried to dam flows unimpeded in the body of Christ. Jesus returns us to life by revealing the truth about the law. He reveals that the law is itself a grace and that only grace can fulfill it.

This new life in Christ crosses all the old boundary lines. Gods grace is offered freely to both insiders and outsiders. Anyone willing to meet Gods promised grace with faith and trust of their own will find guilt, fear, and anger washed away. Without waiting for us to make the first move, Gods grace is already working to gather and seal the whole human family as joint-heirs with Christ.

Many of the pieces of this story will sound familiar. Or, at least I hope so. Romans is Christianity 101. But the challenge is to see how these pieces fit together. The challenge is to understand the deep logic that organizes them. And for this, we need to see Pauls interlocking gears in motion. If we cant get the gears to turn, then Paul is just a museum piece. We might view his work during regular museum hours, but we wont be allowed to touch. This is no good. Paul deserves more.

To this end, Ive rendered Pauls letter with a relatively free hand. What follows is not a translation in the ordinary sense of the word. Its more like a paraphrase. Rather than worry over the letter of the text, my goal has been to illuminate the large scale patterns that structure it. With little hesitation, Ive sacrificed some concern for details to a more urgent need for persuasion and clarity. At several points, Ive cut some details for the sake of fluidity. At other points, Ive expanded the material with additional explanation. Overall, Ive purposely adopted a brisk, contemporary idiom. Rather than aiming for a respectable English version of Pauls winding Greek syntax, Ive aimed for a forceful presentation of Pauls good news.