Search Results

For the next few weeks we will be reading portions of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. This letter is significantly different from the other epistles. It was not a community Paul had established. (...)

In the ancient Roman world, unwanted children were routinely abandoned or sold into slavery. Sadly, such cruel realities persist today in many parts of the world, where families crushed by poverty abandon infants they cannot (...)

This section of Romans makes it clear that divisions in the church go back to the earliest churches. The “strong” who are mentioned here apparently eat everything, observe all days as the same, and perhaps (...)

Chapters 5-8 of Paul’s epistle to the Romans are practically a self-contained meditation on the operation of grace. Though many other notes are sounded in these four chapters of the letter, the overriding tone is (...)

Diving into this lesson at v. 12 of Romans 6 puts one midstream into a powerful current of Paul’s theological reflection. Indeed, v. 12 begins with the word “Therefore” because what follows in v. 12 (...)

The Lenten readings of Paul’s letter to the Romans begin with a summary. While it may seem a bit strange to jump into this complex letter halfway through chapter 5, the text itself begins with (...)

At first thought, the readings for the Festival of Pentecost and the Festival of the Holy Trinity in Year B seem to have been inadvertently reversed. The reading for Pentecost, a week earlier than Holy (...)

In Adam’s story Paul hears how sin gained dominion over humanity. The paradox that Paul maintains is that although we can’t escape sin since we are connected to Adam (“sin came into the world through (...)

This text has been the source of some of Christianity’s most controversial, challenging, and distinctive doctrines. It was the locus for Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and for K. Barth’s claim that Paul is saying (...)

This reading needs context. It jumps in the middle of a particular argument Paul is making about the believer’s relation to sin, driven by two questions: one in Romans 6:1 and the other in 6:15. (...)