The Letter That Changed the World

The Influence of Romans

On 11 February 2007, Greyfriars' Senior Minister Rob Yule began a series on Paul's letter to the Romans, the longest and most influential letter in the New Testament. In his opening sermon Rob shows the extraordinary influence Paul's letter has had throughout twenty centuries of Christian history – amply illustrating Paul's claim that the Christian message is 'the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes' (Romans 1:16).

A North African teacher of literature and rhetoric

In the summer of the year 386, a thirty two year old North African teacher of literature and rhetoric, living in Milan, north Italy, sat weeping in the garden of a friend. He was a brilliant intellectual, searching for the meaning of life, struggling morally, and to the grief of his Christian mother, living with a mistress. He was weeping, because he felt unable to break his immoral lifestyle.

As he sat, he heard the voice of a child coming from a neighbour's house, Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! 'Pick up and read! Pick up and read!' Listening to the sing-song words of the child's game, he saw a scroll nearby that his friend had been reading. His eyes lit on these words from Paul's letter to the Romans (13:13-14):

… not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.

He described this experience in his Confessions (8.29), the first autobiography ever written: 'I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.'

The professor's name was Aurelius Augustine. He went on to become the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, a great pastor, leader and Christian theologian. His writings shaped the Western church and Western thought for more than 1500 years.

A German monk and teacher of theology

In August 1513 an Augustinian monk and professor of biblical theology in the University of Wittenberg, Germany, began a course of biblical lectures. Like many others in medieval Christendom, he had been brought up in the fear of God, death, judgement and hell. His monastic austerities had done nothing to pacify his tormented conscience. God seemed to him more like a terrifying judge than a merciful saviour.

As he began to get to grips with Romans, he was perplexed by a passage in the first chapter. What did Paul mean when he said, in Romans 1:17, that 'the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel'? Doesn't God's righteousness condemn sinners? So how could the righteousness of God save a tormented sinner like him? Here is his personal description of his struggle (Quoted by Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Reformation in its Own Words [London, SCM Press, 1964], p. 27):

I had been possessed of an unusually ardent desire to understand Paul in his epistle to the Romans. Nevertheless.… I hated that word 'righteousness of God', because … I had been taught to understand it philosophically as meaning … the formal or active righteousness according to which God is righteous and punishes sinners and the unjust....

Day and night I tried to meditate upon the significance of these words…. Then, finally, God had mercy on me, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that gift of God by which a righteous man lives, namely, faith, as it is written: 'The righteous shall live by faith.' Now I felt as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered Paradise. My mind ran through the Scriptures, as far as I was able to recollect them, seeking analogies in other phrases, such as the work of God, by which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

Just as intensely as I had before hated the expression 'the righteousness of God', I now lovingly praised this most pleasant word. This passage from Paul became to me the very gate to Paradise.

The monk's name was Martin Luther. From his rediscovery that God makes us right with himself through faith in Jesus Christ came the great movement of Christian renewal called the Reformation, which transformed Europe in the 16th century.

A Church of England clergyman

On the evening of 24 May 1738 a thirty five year old Anglican clergyman went reluctantly to a meeting of Moravian refugees on the site of the present Barclays Bank in Aldersgate Street, London. He was a graduate of Oxford University, where he had been a member of an earnest Christian society nicknamed the 'Holy Club.' He had done a stint of missionary service among the Indians of North America, but had returned disillusioned. 'I went to America to convert the Indians', he lamented, 'but, oh, who shall convert me?'

As he entered the house meeting someone was reading from Martin Luther's Preface to Romans. The clergyman recorded in his journal what happened to him:

About a quarter before nine, while [the reader] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine; and saved me from the law of sin and death.

The clergyman's name was John Wesley. Gradually forced out of the established church because of his evangelical convictions, he became the great open-air preacher of the Evangelical Revival that transformed England in the 18th century. He declared that he had one objective: 'to promote, so far as I am able, vital, practical religion: and by the grace of God to beget, preserve and increase the life of God in the souls of men.' It is estimated that Wesley preached 40,000 sermons and travelled nearly a quarter of a million miles on horseback. His movement profoundly affected the urban poor, and, in the opinion of some scholars, saved England from the equivalent of the French Revolution.

A Swiss Reformed pastor

During the First World War a Reformed Pastor sat in his study in the Swiss village of Safenwil wrestling with what to preach Sunday by Sunday to his first congregation. He was disillusioned with the liberal theology he had been taught in seminary, because to his dismay all his theological teachers had supported the Kaiser's war policy. His liberal optimism was shattered by the carnage and destruction of the First World War. What should he preach?

He discovered Paul's message in the letter to the Romans. He began to preach through Romans, and write a commentary on it – while, he says, 'it required only a little imagination for me to hear the sound of the guns booming away in the north.' To his surprise his commentary dropped 'like a bombshell on playground of the theologians', challenging the human-centred theology of the day. Later he said:

The man who sat writing his commentary was then just a young country pastor .... Altogether ignorant both of the forces which were ranged against him and of those upon which he might call for help, he tumbled himself into a conflict ... the significance of which he could not foresee ... If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul; and if we be enlightened by his ... answers, those answers must be ours. (Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins [London: Oxford University Press, 1933], pp. v & 1).

The pastor's name was Karl Barth. He became the most prolific and influential theologian of the 20th century. He was challenged by Paul's letter to the Romans to let God be God. He discovered that the Christian message is not just an insipid reflection of the current mores of society. It is a message about 'the Godness of God,' the majesty and otherness of God, God's initiative and redeeming love for humankind through Jesus Christ his Son. Barth went on to become the prophetic spokesman of the German Confessing Church in its opposition to Hitler.

This package contains dynamite!

Before you unwrap it, read the warning on the label!

'HANDLE WITH CARE:
THIS PACKAGE CONTAINS DYNAMITE!'

Paul warns at the start of Romans that the gospel is God's dunamis, 'the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.' (Romans 1:16).

There's no telling what may happen when people begin to study Paul's letter to the Romans. What happened to Augustine, Luther, Wesley and Barth launched great spiritual movements which had a profound impact in their lifetimes and changed the course of history.

Read this letter, study this letter, listen to the message of this letter – at your peril! It can radically change your life and the lives of others! You have been warned!

Rob Yule, 11 February 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church