Abstract
Most Scripture studies move from a close examination of the details of individual texts to make a more general conclusion about a writing in question. In this slightly revised version of a 2015 Leuven doctoral thesis, Thomas Vollmer (Cincinnati Christian University) goes in the other direction. To help his historical-critical exegesis to be as objective as possible, Vollmer employs the historiographical insights of Udo Schnelle to understand a single text, actually the half verse Romans 8:26a, in its historical setting and so “present a reading of the text that strives to be as objective as possible” (p. 4). This includes the chronology of the letters, the consistency of Paul’s thought, Paul’s motivations for his arguments, and finally the Christian faith of Paul himself.
Vollmer begins his study by presenting and assessing previous work on Romans 8:26-27 in social-science interpretation, by consideration of religious experience, the importance of glossolalia as marker of the Spirit, the influence of Old Testament texts on its meaning, and its eschatological setting. He outlines “future directions” like ecological and imperial criticism, concluding that, in spite of this wealth of methodologies, “interpreters tend to read the text in isolation from other material in Romans,” neglecting Paul’s “overall purpose for the letter” (p. 39). V. attempts to remedy this by presenting in his chapter 2 the overall “purpose of Romans” (p. 41).
Thus, before commencing his exegesis itself, Vollmer delves into the great Romans Debate, the much controverted “question of why Paul wrote the letter in the first place” (p. 41). Vollmer complains that the many scholarly opinions on the purpose of Romans do not “engage the letter as a whole” (p. 67). There follows a lengthy discussion of Paul’s “missional” language, the addressees, the sending of missionaries, proclamation of the word, its goal and the “execution of the missional task” (p. 93). Having looked at each section of Romans, Vollmer contends that Paul’s whole life was defined by and dedicated to his mission, and so his purpose in writing the letter was to fulfill a missiological imperative, so pervasive of the whole letter. Thus, Paul wrote “to convince the Roman believers that his gospel was the correct one” (p. 67), and thus “to draw the Romans into community with one another” to “establish a location for the gospel’s presentation to the western world” (p. 95). In this Paul’s relies on his own spiritual experience to teach how the Spirit is necessary for such a mission.
Part 2 begins the exegesis of the text itself, looking first at its context (chapter 3), and then at meaning of the main components of the single clause under study (chapters 4–7). Vollmer concludes that Romans shows “the continuity of thought Paul maintains throughout [the Letter],” and that many of those themes arise in Romans 8:26–27 and its immediate context (p. 144).
Vollmer next (chapter 4) tackles the Pauline usage and the precise meaning of the conjunctive hōsautōs de kai, “in the same way also,” in light of Paul’s Mission, finding that these words relate hope and Spirit, notions found in the immediate context of Romans 8 as well as in Romans 5:3–5.
Chapter 5 presents a rather lengthy discussion of the meaning of “Spirit” for Paul’s contemporaries. Here, Vollmer finds that “Spirit” quite consistently describes the divine agent of God’s salvific purposes, that is, as mediating “God’s mission in the world” (p. 203), to use his rather un-Pauline language. In chapter 6, the verb form of synantilambanō is examined to find that it usually means assistance “in either administrative/management or leadership category” (p. 220). In the final chapter Vollmer claims that “weakness” as found in biblical literature refers most often to a general weakness, and so Paul speaking specifically in Romans 8:26a about “how the Spirit leads the process of overcoming both weakness and blocked prayer” (pp. 224–25). Thus, here Vollmer is concluding that Paul always has his mission in mind and that here Paul speaks of a weakness “more than just simply prayer, [but as] it relates to accomplishing God’s will in the world” (p. 261). The short “Conclusion” rehearses the findings of the study and shows how Paul’s overall missiological purpose of writing to the Romans is expressed in Romans 8:26a to show that “The Spirit steps in and aids the community in overcoming weakness and allowing it to align with God’s will.”
This study does not edit out much of the original dissertation boiler plate that shows thoroughness but is really not necessary for a presentation in a series like Biblical Tools and Studies. For example, chapter 1 dwells a little too long on the past exegesis of the text, rehearsing even solutions that have not gained much traction in the scholarly guild, while chapter 2 amounts to a nearly complete essay on the purpose of Romans itself, a project that requires far more space than a single chapter to unpack.
Certainly every scripture scholar attempts to be “objective” by taking the ancient context and a profile of the writer into consideration. It would have been safer for Vollmer merely to mention how he opted to follow Schnelle’s methodology in his work, rather than to insinuate that his study would be more “objective” than the others. The proof would be that his results will stand up to the scrutiny of the guild of biblical scholars, the more usual way of evaluating a dissertation.
Overall, however, one can learn much from this study: the essays on the purpose of Romans (chapter 2) and the presentation of the Spirit in Paul (chapter 5) contain much useful survey, and Vollmer proves his point that the overall context of a Pauline letter is a necessary part of the exegesis of any individual text it contains.