Romans

Romans stands apart from Paul's other letters in one basic fact: he did not found the church he is writing to, had never visited it, and wrote instead to introduce himself before an intended trip. The result is his most systematic letter, closer to a theological treatise than to the occasional, dispute driven correspondence of Corinthians or Galatians. Its argument opens from universal human failure, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," before turning to its central claim, righteousness before God comes through faith rather than through observance of the law, anchored in the quotation from Habakkuk, "the righteous shall live by faith," which later became the rallying text of the Protestant Reformation. Chapters 9 through 11 turn to a harder question the letter cannot avoid: what becomes of Israel, God's first chosen people, if righteousness now comes by faith rather than by the law given to Moses.

Paul's answer, that Israel's partial hardening is temporary and that "all Israel will be saved," has generated centuries of interpretive disagreement and sits at the center of modern Jewish Christian dialogue. The letter closes with sixteen chapters' worth of practical instruction, on civil authority, on love as the fulfillment of the law, and a long list of personal greetings naming more individuals, many of them women, than any other Pauline letter.

No New Testament book has shaped Western Christian doctrine as decisively as Romans. Augustine traced his own conversion to a chance reading of Romans 13; a millennium later, Martin Luther's reading of Romans 1:17, "the righteous shall live by faith," became the seed of the doctrine of justification by faith alone that split Western Christianity at the Reformation, and John Wesley later described his own evangelical awakening as his heart being "strangely warmed" while a preface to Romans was being read aloud.

Catholic and Orthodox tradition draw on the same letter differently, reading its emphasis on faith alongside its equal insistence, a few chapters later, on transformed conduct, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind," and resisting any reading that separates faith entirely from the sacraments and moral life the other traditions also root in Paul's wider letters.

Romans 9 through 11, on Israel's ongoing place in God's purposes, has taken on new theological weight since the mid 20th century, cited on all sides of Christian reckoning with the history of Christian anti-Judaism and used by many mainline churches to reject any theology that treats the church as having simply replaced Israel. The letter's density has also made it the New Testament book most quoted, verse for verse, in later systematic theology, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike.