On Romans 1:5

What does it mean to be a Christian? Are we saved by faith or by obedience? What does the Bible mean when it says that we will be judged by our works at the end?

The letter to the Romans opens with the following words:

‘Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets, in the Holy Scriptures, concerning his son who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be [lit. appointed as] the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints, grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’

One of the clearest ways of explaining what it means to be a Christian is with the phrase the obedience of faith. In the above passage, Paul calls himself a servant of King Jesus, one set apart and sent with an official announcement that the promised scion of the ancient royal house has been recently appointed King, Lord, the Son of God in power, by being momentously raised from the dead. (Note that Jesus did not become the Son of God at the resurrection for he was and is always the Son of God, but rather, God’s act of raising his Son from the dead changed him from being, so to speak, ‘the Son of God in weakness’ to being ‘the Son of God in power.’) And now Paul claims to have received a royal mandate to go among all the nations to bring them to the obedience of faith. This is imperial language about a newly installed Sovereign who demands allegiance and is the context within which we hear about the obedience of faith.

As I write, I have two friends in mind – the first, converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, because she felt that many Protestants held to a cheap faith where being a Christian was all talk and no walk. She pointed out that ‘by faith alone’ as a phrase does not appear in the Bible except in James, where the seemingly opposite point is made: ‘You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone’ (James 2:24). Roman Catholicism, however, offered to her a different explanation, that through grace, God produced works in Christians by which they are justified. Though my point here is not to affirm or to denounce Roman Catholicism, I nonetheless admire this first friend and her convictions, sympathising with her concerns about cheap faith even if I remain unconvinced that Protestantism is ultimately the problem or that swimming the Tiber is the solution. The second person in my mind is a very dear friend who’s from a Christian home and is seeking to know the Truth for himself and to find his own way. We recently had a brief conversation along the following lines:

‘I’m still a Christian you know, even if other people don’t think I am.’
‘Are you a Christian as in you believe a truth? Or are you a Christian as in you’re a follower of Jesus?’
‘Good question… I’ll have to think about that.’

Both of these people are not alone in their thoughts and struggles. I have also wrestled and am still wrestling with what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be justified by faith and not by works, where my works fit within the scheme of God’s own overall saving work, and much, much more. Like my first friend, I feel a revulsion towards cheap faith wherever it is found. Like my second friend, I can attest to having felt confused by attempts to juggle faith and works in such a way as not to undermine either the slogan sola fide, by faith alone, or the truth that ‘faith without works is dead’ (James 2:17).

So to return to our first and main question. What does it mean to be a Christian? The term Christian comes from the Greek designation Christianos, first used in Syrian Antioch (Acts 11:26), meaning literally ‘Christ follower’. The title Christ is Greek for Messiah, meaning the Anointed One, and in First Century AD Jewish context, the Chosen King. So at the level of literal meaning, to be a Christian is to follow a King – specifically, King Jesus. This fits well into Paul’s imperial mandate in the introduction of Romans. Paul’s aim is to bring about (literally) the obedience of faith. This all-important term is tricky to understand at first, especially when we want to interpret it without trampling on the banner of sola fide. Hence, the NIV translates the obedience of faith as ‘the obedience that comes from faith’, so as seemingly to make faith and obedience distinct things where faith is prior to obedience in logic, time, and significance. I think this is a well-intentioned mistake that limits the scope of meaning in exchange for easy comprehension (though obedience of faith certainly contains this interpretation and much has already been written by many others on what the correct rendering of this phrase is). Instead, I submit that the obedience of faith means the obedience of faith and not some lesser restriction. Note that I am not saying that the obedience of faith is prior to grace – God’s grace comes first – but rather that the obedience of faith is the single rightful response to God’s prior grace.

In unpacking ‘the obedience of faith’, I have found Christopher Ash’s ‘Teaching Romans’ to be extremely helpful. There, he gives the following definition: ‘The obedience of faith’ means bowing the knee in trusting submission to Jesus the Lord, both at the start and all through the Christian life. Let me summarise and quote the points Ash makes to back this definition up:

1. In the letter, Paul uses both the word ‘faith’ by itself (Romans 1:8) and the word ‘obedience’ by itself (Romans 16:19) to abbreviate the expression, and in particular, in Romans 15:18, he says ‘…to bring the Gentiles to obedience’ rather than ‘…to bring the Gentiles to faith’.
2. God ‘commands all people everywhere to repent’ (Acts 17:30), so that to repent is therefore to obey God’s command at the start of the Christian life. And to reject the gospel is not to obey it (Romans 2:8, 10:16).
3. Ongoing faith means ongoing obedience. Ongoing obedience is the outworking of our salvation (Philippians 2:12). Ongoing obedience is faith in its concrete expression – faith without works is dead (James 2:26). The Christian life consists of ongoing disobedience to sin and ongoing obedience to God (Romans 6:15-23).

He concludes by saying, ‘the obedience of faith is a trusting submission to Jesus the Lord, bowing the knee to him as Lord at the start (initial obedience and faith) and going on bowing the knee to him thereafter (continuing obedience and faith)… The obedience of faith helps us rightly to understand both obedience and faith, which are two ways of speaking of the same thing. Authentic faith is both a receiving and a surrender, and it is followed by ongoing receiving and ongoing surrender. True faith in Christ consists in bowing the knee in trusting submission to him as Lord. This obedience is the goal of Paul’s apostleship.’ To this list of Ash’s points, I add three more of my own:

1. In Romans 6:16-18, Paul puts forward the dichotomy of sin leading to death and obedience leading to righteousness after which he thanks God that the Romans have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which they were committed and have become slaves of righteousness (rather than thanking God that the Romans have come to faith).
2. Jesus says to the disciples in the Great Commission, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…’ (Matthew 28: 18-20). In other words, Jesus is saying, ‘Since I am now Lord of the cosmos, go and teach the nations to give me allegiance and obey me’.
3. The Greek word for faithfulness is the same word as faith – pistis. Hence faith has connotations of trusting loyalty.

Thus, the obedience of faith means trusting submission. Obedience and faith are two sides of the same coin, so to speak, two words describing essentially the same thing from perhaps slightly different angles. There cannot be one without the other. This is important because Jesus, as the Christ, must be both Lord and Saviour. Either he is your Saviour and Lord, or he is not your Saviour at all. You cannot be saved without bowing the knee. Tangentially, though Jesus may or may not receive your recognition of his Lordship at present, he is still Lord – the euangelion, the Good News, is an objective announcement about the enthronement of Jesus whether or not he has your current allegiance. Indeed, we are told with certainty that every knee will eventually bow (Isaiah 45:23, Philippians 2:10-11, Romans 14:11) either as a loyal subject or as a defeated foe. Your status as servant or as rebel doesn’t change or affect this imperial reality.  This is why I often hesitate to use the language of ‘accepting Jesus as your personal Lord’. I prefer to clear the ambiguity by emphasising the necessity of ‘giving personal allegiance to Jesus as the nothing-personal-about it Lord’.

I hasten to clarify that it is not by our obedience or faithfulness that we are saved. Neither is it strictly true that we are saved by our faith. Ephesians 2:8-9 puts it most clearly: ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.’ We are saved neither by our faith nor by our obedience. The basis for our salvation is God’s grace through the work of Christ. As Paul puts it starkly in Romans 5:19 – ‘For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.’ It is Jesus’ obedience by which we are saved, not our own. It is his work that is the basis for our salvation. But in order to appropriate, as it were, the efficacy of Jesus’ work, to receive the free gift, one must ‘confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead’ (Romans 10:9). We are saved by God’s grace through our faith. What is this faith? The obedience of faith.

Hence, this is why Paul can speak in Romans 2:6 of God ‘rendering to each one according to his works’ followed in verses 9-10 by ‘There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honour and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek’. I do not think, as some have claimed, that the second category of people is an empty hypothetical category used only to prove a point. Rather, Paul is foreshadowing in the opening chapters of his letter that those who have true faith in Jesus will be judged to have true faith by the obedience of their lives. The obedience of those who are saved by the grace of God alone will prove that they have indeed trusted in the sole saving work of Christ. In this way, we see that Paul is not at odds with James when the latter says with force that ‘a person is justified by works and not by faith alone’ (James 2:24; see also John 5:29 and Revelation 21:7-8). This doesn’t contradict the fact that the robber on the cross was saved even though he didn’t have a long life of obedience following his conversion. He submitted himself to Jesus as Lord for the rest of his life, even if in this life it wasn’t for long.

Let me caveat this obedience by saying that it means a life as a whole committed in trusting obedience to Jesus, and not perfect obedience in every single thought, word, and deed without fail. Yes, we aim to obey in every single thought, word, and deed, but there is forgiveness for every single time we sin and make mistakes. 1 John 1:8-9 says that ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’. Our obedience need not be perfect because Jesus’ obedience to the Father was perfect. His righteousness and his perfect obedience is counted to be ours when we are united to him by faith. A loyal trusting subject of the King can make mistakes because his Lord is gracious and has provided the means of ongoing forgiveness. Obedience of faith, then, means following the King as a stumbling but loyal subject, rather than as a perfect subject. We need not be afraid that God will cast us out because of our failures and our sin. God is committed to transforming us and he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. But, if we live a life of profligate sin, flagrantly flaunting our rebellion and caring not for obedience or ongoing repentance, then may Paul’s exhortation to ‘examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not know that Jesus Christ is in you? – unless indeed you fail to meet the test!’ (2 Corinthians 13:5) and the warning of Hebrews, ‘For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries’ (Hebrews 10:23-27), shock and frighten us to check if indeed we have true faith.

This is all in harmony with the declarations of Jesus himself in the gospels that ‘if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24). Jesus the King offers salvation for all who will bow the knee to him in trusting submission. Trusting submission is to repent, that is, turn around and change course, and believe. Not, I must stress, to mentally assent alone. No one will be saved by mentally assenting to an abstract idea, but by actively receiving the gift of salvation by bending the knee, taking up their cross, and following the King.

Returning to our opening questions then:

What does it mean to be a Christian? It means following the King in the obedience of faith.

Are we saved by faith or by obedience? We are saved by the grace of God alone through the obedience of faith.

What does the Bible mean when it says that we will be judged by our works at the end? In the Last Judgement, our life of obedience shows that we have true faith, the obedience of faith, in the sole saving work of Jesus Christ.