Douglas Campbell, in the last chapter of his book The Quest for Paul’s Gospel , offers an even more radical reinterpretation of Romans 1:18-3:20 in comparison to Tobin’s modest rhetorical account. Campbell wants to place Paul’s own theological commitments further along in the letter, so that 1:18-3:20 contains premises that Paul attacks via “a masterpiece of ironic subversion,” which utilizes “argumentative reductions.” The traditional reading, which Campbell dubs the “JF model” (Justification-by-Faith), assumes that Paul is laying out his own position on justification and needs to craft 1:18-3:20 in order to create “a preparatory phase that will leave ‘everyone’ (‘Jews and Gentiles’) unsaved, and anxious as to how to be saved.” Campbell notes that it is difficult to find interpreters of Romans that break out of this camp, which unfortunately includes the early Barth as well as Käsemann. Seeking to provide a proper context for the gospel’s proclamation that begins in 3:21, 1:18-3:20 is read as an exposition of the pre-Christian state. “Consequently some deployment of general revelation or natural theology is automatically required.” Furthermore, a principle of divine retributive justice is at work in Paul according to the JF model.
1:18-2:8 is deemed to be the first of a three-part phase in the argument of 1:18-3:20, whereby Paul establishes “a necessary, innate, universal perception of the key principle that divine judgment will take place ultimately in accordance with works of the law, a principle based in turn, as we have already noted, on a divine nature defined in terms of retributive justice. Soteriology is strictly meritocratic. It is this principle that will undergird both Paul’s overarching strategy of ‘indictment,’ and his concern to include Jews within this judgment.” In 2:1, Paul then universalizes the point that all will be judged according to their own works. The second phase, Romans 2:9-3:9a, seeks to override any special pleading by Jews in order to escape this principle of judgment on the basis of works alone; “so things like possession of, and instruction in, the law (2.17-24), circumcision (2.25-29), and covenantal privilege (3.1-9a) are brushed aside.” The JF model believes that this move by Paul is an attempt “to level the playing field.” The third phase, Romans 3:9-20, “establishes the sinfulness of all humanity through massed scriptural quotation. A catena drawn from various books solemnly reiterates that ‘there is no-one who is righteous/discerning/a seeker of [etc.]’.” Campbell notes a number of problems with this reading of 1:18-3:20, which includes the use of “general revelation, the justice of God, salvation by desert, and the role of law-observance in relation to the foregoing, which seem inconsistent with Paul’s stated positions elsewhere, and in terms of his broader backdrop of late Second Temple Judaism.”
For our purposes, we will focus on the contradictory usage of natural knowledge of God in Romans 1:19-20. It is clear that for the argument in 1:18-3:20 to work, the Gentiles need to be held accountable to the law, albeit it in a different way. Thus, general revelation is the mode by which accountability for sin is secured. The problem with this is that it seems to contradict what Paul has to say against “the capacity of the wisdom of the world to know anything useful about God” in 1 Corinthians 1:18-29, where Paul speaks of the confounding of wisdom through the “message of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18).
It seems to me that one could argue that Romans 1:22 (“Claiming to be wise, they became fools”) also uses the language of foolishness and wisdom. In both texts, both Gentile and Jewish wisdom are being confounded, precisely because both have assumed a position of wisdom apart from God. It is true that in 1 Corinthians Paul makes the gospel (the message of the cross) to be the scandal, whereas in Romans Paul already has a scandal up and running through the knowledge of God in creation. But is this really a contradiction? It depends largely on how we read Paul’s anthropology elsewhere. Campbell notes that Paul’s encounter with Jesus makes no use of Paul’s prior commitments, but portrays it as “a divine irruption that cut across his own previous understanding and activity.” Furthermore, human nature in Romans 7:7-25 is “difficult to reconcile with a relatively unobstructed perception of divinity; it seems totally incapacitated – literally, enslaved to the flesh – as against innately informed but prone to idolatry (etc.) and hence merely culpable. (That is, it seems too sinful at times to even know this).” Finally, Paul states in Romans 8:7: “For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot.”
Campbell elaborates many other points against the JF reading of 1:18-3:20, which establishes universal human culpability at the cost of attributing to Paul a soteriology that is still fundamentally based on justification through works of the law to please a god of retributive justice through highly individualistic law-observance, a redefined Judaism without privilege that contradicts Romans 9-11, a problematic use of the “righteous Gentiles” (2:13-15, 26-29), a relatively weak attack on Jewish sinfulness (2:17-24), and a misrepresentation of Judaism that makes the conclusion in 3:19-20 to be premature and inadequate for what will be said in 3:21 and following. At this point it should be clear why we must at least register Campbell’s view, for if what is said about natural knowledge of God cannot be attributed to Paul based on Campbell’s rhetorical analysis, then we have taken away a key passage used to muster support for natural theology in all its forms. If the JF reading is found wanting, which Campbell believes it is, what alternative reading does he provide?
Campbell argues that we should view 1:18-3:20 in terms of an “ad hominem strategy” against supposed Teachers who are preaching “another Gospel.” This critique begins
by recapitulating the probable elenchic or condemnatory opening of the position that it intends to ultimately undermine. It begins by mimicking its opponent. In this way Paul flushes out a critical soteriological presupposition in the preaching that he is unhappy with, namely desert (which his rivals may not even have been aware that they were strongly committed to). He then drives their subsequent concern onto this principle in a series of devastating reductions. The result of these moves is the discrediting of the entire programme, in its own terms.
Thus, the JF reading remains intact, but Paul is distanced from the position of the text itself, thus getting him “off the hook” from all the problems previously discussed. Instead, in 1:18-32 Paul gets the listener to hear a message which may sound stirring at first but whose consequences are soon revealed to be quite terrible. The teachers have conceded that the Gentiles have “their own innate law,” and so salvation will be through works for everyone. God will judge with strict impartiality, so that neither is the Jew advantaged or the Gentile disadvantaged. The presence of the “righteous Gentiles” is used by Paul as a way to show that “Gentiles who have been saved by this gospel might “actually condemn – and even mock – Jews who have not been saved by desert (and will that category include the Teachers themselves? . . .). It is used to confute the fundamental objective of the Teachers – Gentile conversion – and adds a note of potential humiliation to that irrelevance. The point is simply a strict extrapolation of the basic principles underlying ‘turn or burn’ theology of natural revelation, divine retributive justice, and meritocratic soteriology.” By this extrapolation, Paul concludes in 3:19-20a: “ ‘You, the Teachers, and everybody else, will fail to be saved by works. You will not be declared righteous on the Day of Judgment, and so you will be condemned. In short, your gospel – your good news of salvation – will save no one, not even you, the people who are proclaiming it’ (a pretty crippling reduction, one would have thought).” It is the Teachers who have redefined Judaism. The meritocratic soteriology is countervailed by the scriptures citing universal sinfulness. Thus, while Paul believes in universal sinfulness, his point is not to establish this belief but to undermine the Teachers. The ad hominem strategy is utilized by Paul to reduce their arguments to absurdity.
Campbell finally explores three possible objections to this reading. First regards Greek word gar (γὰρ) in 1:18, which suggest that the ground of the Gospel in 1:16-17 is in the argument for universal sinfulness in 1:18-3:20. While Campbell concedes that this is a possible reading of gar, it is used so many times in Romans (around 145 times!). “And while it can denote causality or reason, it can also signify looser relationship of mere clarification and inference (cp. BDAG: 189-90).” Thus, the best possible reading of 1:18-3:20 should determine its translation, not the other way around. Second, it is objected that Paul is citing obvious antecedents in OT literature in 1:18-32, as well as Intertestamental literature such as Wisdom, so Paul must be using it for his own purposes. However, it is more likely that Paul’s opponents are the ones who are citing this literature. The third and final objection regards how Paul’s readers would recognize the ad hominem strategy. Were they sophisticated enough to understand it? “Ironic, and simply directly satirical textual strategies are evident throughout the extant texts of this general era.” Thus, not only Paul’s hearers but Paul himself was quite well-versed in these strategies, and Paul shows great use of them in passages such as the “fool’s speech” in 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:11, or the play on wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:16 which we discussed earlier. How would the audience recognize it? Campbell argues that irony is not supposed to make itself so obvious, and so a faithful performed reading of the text would be expected to confound the listeners of Rome.
Paul and Doug in Conversation:
Overall, I find Campbell’s analysis compelling. While he has shed light on the issues of the JF reading, he has provided a very interesting account that is successful in dealing with the problematic passages. Where I find Campbell’s analysis wanting is in his failure to raise the other obvious objection regarding the parallel of God’s revealing of righteousness and wrath in 1:17 and 1:18 respectively. This is why we treated 1:18 with 1:19-21- to show the interconnection of God’s wrath with the role natural knowledge of God plays for Paul. While Campbell is able to deny natural revelation, he has almost nothing to say at all about the wrath of God – although this is presumably what he calls the “turn or burn” theology of the Teachers. One question that Campbell must deal with is the use of wrath in the rest of Romans, which does not seem to be out of place at all in 1:18. On the one hand, the discussion of wrath comes so suddenly that it does seem to make an awkward transition from 1:16-17, even if we seek to understand it in light of what Paul says about the gospel and God’s righteousness. This awkward transition could bolster Campbell’s account that something new has indeed begun (something that does not belong to Paul’s own thought!).
However, it is wrath and the ungodliness of all that makes the Creator/creature distinction so palpable in the rest of Romans, and while Campbell’s reading wants to focus on our participation in Christ, the apocalyptic wrath against humanity needs to be heard as a faithful witness to the Gospel for the sake of humanity. Campbell seems dead set against 1:18-3:20 because he only conceives of it as a preparation to hear the gospel and thus wants to deny all natural theology. But none of our commentators nor Barth believe this to be the case because they have read 1:18 in light of 1:16-17. Thus, the JF model is a bit more complex than Campbell is willing to admit. Still, it remains to be seen how he will deal with this complexity when his new book, The Deliverance of God, which has only been a suggestive strategy up until this point.
