The Outlaw Jesus,the Justice of God,and Paul’s Letter to the Romans

Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul

Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013

Put far too briefly, Outlaw Justice contends that Paul’s letter to the Romans is a political text in that it is concerned with law and justice. In Jennings’s words, Paul “offers a fundamental critique of the supposition that justice is to be achieved through a legal structure of society… [Instead,] the political question of justice is to have a completely new basis: the act of God in the messiah” (3).

This is a bold and a brilliant book. To begin with, although the title does not reveal this fact, Jennings has written his way through Paul’s letter to the Romans, producing a brief commentary on the whole. As a result of that courageous decision, he cannot hide from those parts of the letter that are difficult for his argument, as one can always do when writing a monograph. In fact, some of the parts of the letter that would seem most strenuously to resist Jennings’s argument prove to be the most compelling “reads” (especially his treatment of chapters 9–11). In addition, Jennings has introduced into his own conversation with Paul’s letter to the Romans a number of names that are out of the ordinary. As his co-laborers in the exegetical vineyard, Jennings calls upon the likes of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacob Taubes. He has little or no use for the usual suspects. Yes, there is some interaction with the commentary of Robert Jewett and the monographs of Neil Elliott and Philip Esler, but none (at least none that is explicit) with the works of Brendan Byrne, C.E.B. Cranfield, J.D.G. Dunn, Joseph Fitzmyer, Leander Keck, Douglas Moo, or N.T. Wright.

This radical change of conversation partners makes for a fresh reading of Romans, but Outlaw Justice is more than an intellectual tour de force. There is here a quality of engagement with the letter and a sense of the letter’s urgency that seldom characterize the steady stream of monographs and articles spewed forth from the factories of the Pauline studies industry.

I can offer only a couple of examples here, and both come from the discussion of Romans 9–11. Taking up 9:6 b (“Not all who are from Israel are Israel”), Jennings deftly avoids the usual temptation to read into this statement the later discussion of the “remnant” and the “rest” (οἱ λοιποί; hoi loipoi) in chapter 11. Instead, he identifies the “some” of this text as those who serve in the place of “all,” and goes on to claim that this “all” “will be reversed so that ‘some’ leads to ‘all.’ Thus the complex use of synecdoche enables Paul to move from representation as substitution to representation as vanguard” (145). Here as elsewhere Jennings perceives (rightly in my view) that the argument of Romans moves forward, but not always in a direct path.

Later, concerning chapter 11, Jennings writes,

One of the most important characteristics of messianic politics is that it is not based upon a logic of scarcity, with zero-sum games abounding. Rather, the messianic entails a logic of abundance in which more for some means an exponential increase in more for all. Or in Paul’s regular phrase: “how much more” … We might call this messianic math. (166)

That comment—which I intend to borrow regularly (and with full attribution)—is indicative of Jennings’s understanding that Romans does not readily lend itself to the multiplicity of readings that minimize the size of the Gospel. There is a gentle disdain throughout for those who would reduce Romans to nothing more than a handbook of doctrine, a collection of moralistic teachings, or an episode in Christian history.

My admiration of this book is huge. I hope I have made that clear. For I must say also that my disagreements with this book are equally huge. Here I will focus on three issues, all of which are concerned with Paul’s apocalyptic understanding of the Gospel as evidenced in Romans.

The first issue concerns Jennings’s proposal about the law and the death of Jesus. Throughout the book, Jennings claims that, in Paul’s view, Jesus (or, as he prefers, Joshua) was put to death according to the law both of Jews and of Romans. For Paul this makes Jesus an outlaw (hence the book’s title, Outlaw Justice) and therefore exposes the problem of the law, both Jewish and Roman law. This line of argument begins as early as 1:3, where Paul refers to Jesus as being from the “seed of David according to the flesh.” Jennings takes the reference to David to be a coded reference to “the cross itself,” with its designation of Jesus as king of the Jews “in rebellion against the empire” (19). Later on, he speaks of Jesus’ “legal” execution, which is overturned by the resurrection with its aim of bringing justice for all people (80; see also 122). The legality of Jesus’ execution, brought about by “official interpreters” of the law who turned Jesus over to the Romans, means that the law is “exposed as that which is an instrument of injustice” (165).

Here Jennings is drawing on his own earlier work, Transforming Atonement. ¹ In that discussion he calls on Gal 3:13, where Paul claims that the curse of the law fell upon Christ as a result of Deuteronomy 27:6. ² But does that mean that Paul attributes the death of Jesus to the law in both its Jewish and Roman forms? Does Paul claim that Jesus died as a result of the law (whether Jewish or Roman)?

In my judgment, the answer to that question is clearly negative. Paul refers to the death of Jesus several times in Romans, and he does so in several different ways. In 3:21–26, the death of Jesus is God’s act that puts Jesus forward as the ἱλαστήριον (hilastērion), the very center of the Holy of Holies, the holiest place there is, an act that Paul characterizes as justification or justice or rectification (more on that below). Paul also in chapter 3 uses the language of redemption for Jesus’ death, which he explicates in chapters 5 and 6 as the release of humanity from the powerful, enslaving, violent control of Sin and Death. And in 8:32 Paul claims that God did not spare but handed over the son on “our” behalf. This imagery is varied, and I will return to it later, but nowhere does Paul connect Jesus’ death with the law, either Roman law or Jewish law. That is because for Paul, the death of Jesus is not simply a human act.

To be sure, 1 Corinthians 2:8 does claim that the rulers of this age “would not have put to death the lord of glory” had they known the hidden wisdom of God, but I take it that the “rulers of this age” are Sin and Death and other anti-god powers rather than the rulers in Jerusalem. ³ At most, the rulers in Jerusalem work at the behest of the powers.

The second—and closely related—issue of disagreement concerns the decision to render δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē) consistently as “justice.” Rendering δικαιοσύνη and related words into English is an infamous challenge, and this is no mere quibble among Greek wonks. Our translations of δικαιοσύνη reveal a great deal about what we think is at stake in this letter. Jennings is concerned that glossing δικαιοσύνη as “justification,” especially forensic justification, eviscerates the text of its demand for the actual doing of justice.

I understand the concern. I too resist views of δικαιοσύνη that equate it with an individual’s standing before God. Nonetheless, I am also concerned about the translation “justice.” To begin with, there is a need to explain how the term justice is being used, what work it is doing, but oddly I do not think that happens. Over the course of the book, I found that the consistent use of “justice” seemed at times to render Romans a fairly abstract, ahistorical discourse on the nature of law and justice. I even found myself wondering about the ontological status of “justice” in this reading. And I worry at least a bit about translating δικαιοσύνη as “justice” in an American context where the term “justice” serves a lot of different functions and especially where calls for “justice” often are calls for retribution or vengeance. My own solution to the translation problem is influenced by the work of J. Louis Martyn on Galatians, who proposed that we render δικαιοσύνη and related terms with “rectification.” ⁴ Paul’s concern is with God’s way of making right what has gone wrong. Badly wrong. And that “what has gone wrong” leads to the third issue.

The third issue of disagreement concerns Paul’s analysis of the human condition. Although Jennings does admit the universal implications of Paul’s argument, he tends to take some important texts as addressing specifically the elite and powerful. Romans 1:18–32 he reads, not as a depiction of all humankind or even of Gentile humanity, but as a depiction of the elite in Rome itself. Drawing on later Roman historians (that they are later does, I think, undermine the argument), Jennings sees in Romans 1 Paul’s awareness of the corrupt and abusive lives of the emperors and of their wives. Consistent with this emphasis on the indictments of the elite, Jennings sees in 9:17 an indictment of Pharaoh for his obstinacy. While that view may cohere with one thread of the Hebrew Bible, the story Paul tells is that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart for God’s own glory. Similarly, when Paul writes in 11:12 of the “trespass” of “the remainder” of Israel, Jennings brilliantly (if wrongly) identifies the trespass as the repudiation of the Messiah by the elite (165). (At one point, I found myself thinking of Chrysostom’s homilies, which, no matter what the text, seem always to end with admonitions about the church’s treatment of the poor. In both cases, I admire the impulse even if I find the exegesis problematic.)

To be fair, Jennings does say at several points that all are implicated in the injustice of the social order. “Even the good are complicit in the evil of the social order and therefore without innocence” (47). Yet Paul writes that “there is no one who is right [just], there is no one who understands, all have gone astray” (3:10–18). There is no exemption. Sin and Death together held all of humanity in violent, enslaving captivity, and Sin and Death are defeated only by the powerful intervention of God in Jesus Christ. Paul does not talk about the need for the elite (or anyone else) to repent and seek forgiveness; he talks about God’s liberating act that defeats the corrupt reign of Sin and Death over all humanity.

I have identified three areas of disagreement: the death of Jesus and the law, translating δικαιοσύνη as “justice,” and Paul’s analysis of the human situation. What ties all three of these disagreements together is that all of them involve conflict, and in every case Jennings and I differ regarding the location of the conflict. The implication of Jennings’s work is that Paul is primarily concerned about conflict that takes place among human beings. My own view is that Paul understands human conflict to be symptomatic—importantly symptomatic, but symptomatic nevertheless—of a much larger conflict between God and God’s own enemies, who go by names such as Sin and Death. It is not simply that human beings do wrong to one another (whether the wrongdoing is carried out by Pontius Pilate, Caligula, or Wall Street), but that the powers of Sin and Death generate injustice, even among those who try hardest to escape their grasp. And the death of Jesus (Joshua) is not, for Paul, simply the act of a bankrupt legal system, whether Jewish or Roman. It is God’s handing over of Jesus to the powers of Sin and Death, the condemnation of Sin in the body of Jesus (Romans 8:3), that begins God’s triumph over the powers and the liberation of all creation.

Everything I have said requires far more unpacking than space permits. These are serious disagreements, and especially for that reason I want to return to my opening remarks. This is a bold and a brilliant book. The longer I work with Paul’s letter to the Romans, the more camaraderie I feel with those who write on this letter. Seldom has that camaraderie seemed more genuine than with Ted Jennings’s new book.