On pp. 1166ff. Tom is arguing that in Rom. 10.9-13 we have the fullest and perhaps clearest most concentrated description of what reformulated monotheism, election, eschatology looks like to Paul. “It is all hear…the faithfulness of God, the work of the Messiah as the ground and basis for it all; belief in God’s raising of Jesus as the tell tale signal that precipitates the divine verdict ‘righteous’; and the confession of Jesus is Lord as the public, outward behaviour (signalling an entire world of obedience to this Jesus) which is the pathway from the initial justification, based on nothing other than faith, the final salvation which is based on the whole life, life lived in the Messiah and in the power of the Spirit.” (p. 1167). Tom argues that the use of the phrase ‘the righteousness of God says’ as a way of introducing a quote from Deut. 30, he is signalling that what that language is really all about is covenant renewal and return from exile, ala Deut. 30. There are several problems with this conclusion: 1) were it about the renewal of the covenant Moses is referring to we would not hear about ‘there is no distinction between Jew or Gentile’ in this same context. Moses’ covenant is precisely about setting apart a chosen people from the nations. Furthermore, the renewal of that covenant is said to include “the Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you” (30.7), which hardly comports with the removal of the barrier between Jew and Gentile in Christ. Furthermore, the obedience spoken of in Deut. 30 is not to Christ or his teachings, or some combination of teachings that involve just some of the commandments found in the OT, but rather it is “and you will keep his commands and decrees that are written in THIS book of the Law” (vs. 10). So when we get to Deut. 30.11ff. and Moses says “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach” he is of course referring to keeping the Mosaic Law. And when he goes on to say “It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it? Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it? No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you can obey it.” This very language of course recurs in the passage under consideration here in Rom. 10. Paul however in a dramatic way has reused the text to talk about a very different Word, namely Jesus the Word of God himself, not the Mosaic Law. It is Jesus one doesn’t have to go into heaven to find, in Paul’s creative reusing of the language of Deut. 30. And the personified Righteousness of God in this passage may also be Jesus, as the speaker of the Deuteronomic text in the first place. Now it needs to be seen that this passage, like Gal. 4 is midrashic in character. Paul is not arguing ‘this is that’, he is using the covenantal language to talk NOT about the renewal of the Mosaic covenant, but about a very different covenant in which finally it is true, through the work of Christ and the Spirit, that God’s Word is written on the human heart, because God’s incarnate Word resides in the human heart. It is the name of Jesus, not the reciting of the Mosaic Law that is on the lips of the believer that Paul is referring to. And you will notice that Paul quite deliberately says nothing here about covenant renewal, nor does he mention anything about return from exile. And here, I think we can see precisely where things have gone off the rails for Tom’s reading of Paul, for which Deut. 30 is so crucial, and even leads him in Rom.2 to say the Jew=the Christian. It is a hermeneutical issue which I think involves an over-application of the point Richard Hays was making in his classic study, “Echoes of Scripture in Paul’. It will be remembered that what Hays argues is that Paul does not soundbyte the OT, but rather when he uses phrases often he is thinking of the whole of the passage from which the phrases are taken, and attending to those whole passages will show that Paul is indeed doing proper exegesis of those whole texts (see Greg Beale’s work) or at least drawing on, alluding to the whole text in context, time and again. While I think that sometimes this may be true, sometimes frankly Paul is doing the same thing John Wesley did— repurposing phrases, ideas, sentences to speak about different, though not unrelated matters. And yes, like Wesley, he quotes selectively. So when Wesley says he was ‘a brand plucked from the burning’ alluding not to what Ezekiel had in mind, but rather to his own being rescued from the Epworth parsonage when it caught fire, rescued, according to his Mom for an important ministry future, we would call this, to use a French term ‘relecture’, or repurposing. And I think this is exactly what Paul is doing in Romans 10– he is both quoting deliberately selectively (nothing about covenant renewal, nothing about return from exile, nothing about enemies being cursed— the latter would be singularly inappropriate here) to talk about a very different Word, and a covenant that is not the renewal of the Mosaic covenant at all, but rather the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham in the Abrahamic one!! In short, Paul often uses the OT text in a homiletical not an exegetical manner, and here is a perfect example of this. Deut. 30 in its original context was never about going up into heaven and finding Jesus! It was about God’s Word of Mosaic Law having been revealed on earth to the mediator Moses. That’s all. When we actually read Deut. 30 in context and then read Romans 10, we realize, Paul is not arguing ‘this is that’ or even ‘this is the renewal of that’ or even ‘this is the fulfillment of that’. As with the case of typology, he is simply arguing ‘this is in some ways like that, and that Mosaic covenant in some ways foreshadowed this new one’. End of story.
So in terms of hermeneutics I would suggest that when Paul talks about fulfillment that is one thing. When he draws an analogy, comparison, typology that is another, and the only safe way to understand how he is using the OT is: 1) when there is a direct quote that is one thing; 2) if a passage in addition alludes to or echoes other aspects of the source text we may assume more than just that one verse or verses is in play; but 3) we must allow Paul to use the text in non-exegetical as a well as exegetical ways, as it is obvious from Gal. 4 that he does do this. Further, he sometimes uses Scriptural language to talk about something the original Scriptural text did not refer to, and he does this because he thinks in the divine economy of things there are patterns, parallels to be drawn since God is not capricious but rather consistent in his plans, purposes, promises, and prophecies.
Tom wants to translate the personification in Rom. 10 as follows ‘this the faith-based covenant membership puts it like this’ and then the quote from Deut. 30. This however is not what the righteousness of God means answer else in Romans, and of course for a majority Gentile audience God did not owe them a covenant renewal, or indeed a vindication. He had no covenant with them previously. In short, this approach does not work. As important as the first thirteen verses of Romans 10 are, they do not answer the question which prompted the whole discussion in Rom. 9-11 namely has God reneged on his deal with Israel,and why should we think he would be faithful to Gentiles now, if he was not faithful to his first chosen people (who were certainly not Jew and Gentile united in Christ)? The issue is God’s character and God’s promise to non-Christian Israel, and that issue only gets an answer at the end of Romans 11, not in the middle of Romans 10.
What the righteousness of God means is: 1) in the first instance it refers to his character; 2) it refers to his justice, vindicating the oppressed etc.; 3) in regard to people to whom he has promised something it involves their vindication or salvation or rescue; and 4) in regard to Gentiles it means either their being set right (if they believe in Jesus) or the divine judgment on their sin (as in Rom. 1.18-33). It does not simply mean what Tom suggests in pp. 1168-69, though 3) is close to some of the things said there. I agree with Tom on p. 1169 when he suggests that the issue here is not trying to establish a claim on God by good works (critiquing Luther), but when Paul talks about submitting to God’s righteousness as opposed to seeking to establish a righteousness of one’s own, this surely means recognizing the latter is impossible since all have sinned and fallen short, so unless God gives us both right standing and set’s right our very natures so we can obey him, nothing ultimately good is going to happen. Right standing and also new birth happen by grace and through faith in Jesus.
Tom’s critique of attempts to make Paul into a universalist on p. 1170 are on the mark. He is just as particularist as any other early Jew, it’s just his particularism focuses on Christ as the one mediator of salvation. Tom is furthermore correct on p. 1171 that another good reason Jews could not establish their righteousness before God is because when you get circumcised you are committed to keeping not merely this or that law well, but keeping it all! Yes all. It’s a package deal. Cf. Gal. 3.12 and Rom 10.6.
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