Commentary on Romans 10:5-15

This passage from Romans 10 invites the preacher to proclaim the “word of faith,” which is the good news of God’s victory in Christ. In fact, here Paul issues an urgent summons to do so. However, in order to proclaim the word of faith it is helpful to notice what Paul says in this passage about the relationship between faith, the law, righteousness, and salvation.

Paul actually has very little to say about the law or about the righteousness that comes from the law. Instead, verse 5 points forward to Paul’s main point, which is about the righteousness of Christ. In 10:4, Paul has declared that Christ is the telos (the end or goal) of the law, and in 10:6 Paul reinterprets the text from Deuteronomy 30:12–14 so that Christ himself is the subject of the text. With Christ as its true subject, Paul thus reasons that the law itself bears witness to the event of Christ’s righteousness demonstrated in the power of Christ’s death and resurrection (Romans 1:3–4).

Preaching the power of God

Paul locates the righteousness from faith in the power of God rather than in a human agent (see also Romans 1:16–17). For Paul, God is powerful. That may sound like a trite statement, but it is worth pointing out because many in Paul’s audience would have been accustomed to thinking of gods in much less cosmic terms. For example, gentile households would have had an altar where they worshipped their family/ancestral gods in their home. These domestic (and domesticated) gods stand in stark contrast to Paul’s God, the God of Israel, whose glory fills the earth (Isaiah 6:3) and whose power raises the dead (Romans 6:4).

In a culture filled with gods who were weak and ineffectual, Paul proclaims a powerful God whose righteousness is powerful for salvation (Romans 1:16–17). We ought not to imagine that contemporary audiences are any more comfortable with God’s power; indeed contemporary preachers sometimes shy away from speaking about God’s power and present a more domesticated and palatable version of God than the one we encounter in Paul’s letter. Of God’s power, Annie Dillard writes:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.¹

The preacher ought to take seriously God’s power to make all things right, because this is the heart of the good news for Paul. God’s power is the source of our liberation, and the liberation of all of creation.

The good news of God’s reign

When Paul speaks of the righteousness from faith in this passage, we ought to understand that as a faith that recognizes and trusts in God’s power for salvation. Salvation, which for Paul is God’s victory in Christ over the power of sin and death, is wrought through God’s deliverance in Christ. The coming of righteousness and salvation is an act of God. No human agent can ascend to bring Christ down, and no human has raised Christ from the dead. In Christ, God, who has the power to bring life from the dead, has brought salvation near (“in your mouth and in your heart”; verse 8).

God’s victory over sin and death, God’s power, and God’s Lordship in Christ necessitate an urgent need to proclaim the good news of God’s power and righteousness. We might think of Paul’s proclamation of victory as a declaration of emancipation, since Paul often uses the language of slavery to describe humanity’s captivity to sin (for example, Romans 6:6). Paul’s call to preach the good news here is therefore best understood not as an individual summons to a decision of faith, but as a proclamation to the captives bringing news of their liberation.

Juneteenth (June 19^th), which commemorates the date in 1865 when the news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached the enslaved persons of Texas, provides us with an approximate analogy for Paul’s message of freedom in Romans 10:5–15.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people in the Confederate States still in rebellion  “are, and henceforth shall be free,” took effect on January 1, 1863. However, news of the proclamation took a further two years to reach the enslaved population of Texas, which was still under Confederate control. Slaveholders in Texas and others loyal to the Confederacy ignored the proclamation, and even actively hid and suppressed the news of it in order to maintain control of the population of enslaved people there. Though emancipation had been declared over two years earlier, it took the arrival of the Union army in 1865 to enforce the liberation of enslaved people in Texas.

This is an imperfect analogy for Romans 10:5–15, but Paul’s letter also assumes that the proclamation of the freedom secured by the power of God is good news for all people who have been held captive by sin and death.

At the close of our passage, the good news Paul calls the preacher to proclaim is the good news of God’s eschatological reign (10:14–15). Here Paul quotes from Isaiah 52, where the messenger announces peace and salvation, proclaiming that God reigns from Zion (Isaiah 52:7). Paul’s equation of Isaiah’s reign of God with the Lordship of Christ ought to be understood as an affirmation of God’s power and of Christ’s divinity. For Paul, the proclamation of the good news of God’s reign is a summons to trust in the Lordship of Christ (10:9–13), who is powerful to save everyone who calls upon him. God’s righteous rule and reign was good news in Paul’s day, and it remains good news in our contemporary context.

Notes

1. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), 22.