Q. Reading through your treatment of Romans I note your point about ‘the righteousness of God’ referring to an attribute of God (p. 191). Exactly right. And certainly one of the points of Romans is that God doesn’t want his people to simply have right-standing with him, he wants them to be actually like him in character. In other words, Romans is not just about justification, it’s also about moral transformation through ‘the obedience of faith’. I think you would agree with that. The ethics in Rom. 12ff. are essential to his argument. We recently had a dissertation done here on the phrase ‘the obedience of faith’ and in it there was a comparison with language used throughout the empire in regard to ‘faith’ and obedience to the emperor etc. It’s an interesting study, and it made me think that the more distinctive language in Romans reflects Paul’s knowledge of the rhetoric of Empire. Do you have a formed judgment on that idea?
A. I agree that justification involves moral transformation, as Roman Catholics have long argued. Rom. 12 continues the ethical comments from Rom. 6. I argued in Moral Formation that most of the ethical instructions are derived from the OT and diaspora Judaism. I think of empire studies as originating in the context of reactions to the American empire. Paul frequently uses words that resonate with the Roman Empire (dikaiosyne, pistis, etc.), but all of these words are more plausibly derived from the LXX.
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