Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One (For Everyone)

It’s clear that he is not just writing as a professor but as someone who is living and working amongst real people and making these so-called deep truths vibrant alive and powerful not for the elite and the smart but for ordinary Christians living in the real world!

This is a great book, and I love the Kindle version for the ability to highlight text and create notes. However, right away the author points out that there's a glossary of important terms in the back. Oops! Hard to use this in a Kindle version and then skip back to where we left off. So I ordered the paperback version as well and am glad I did.

Delivery was prompt and book was in very good shape. I won't be embarrassed to take it with me to my weekly group meeting!

Wright is extremely well researched and knows his stuff. He drops tons of interesting facts (e.g., in Rome, a city of 1 million at the time Paul wrote the letter, there were probably 100 Christians meeting in various homes: that was the "Church of Rome") and explains the meanings of many, many words used. He goes right to the heart of the issues Paul was dealing with and of the points he was driving at, as he understands quite fully the culture of Rome and of its tiny group of Christians living there. Wright has tremendous respect for Paul and for this marvelous letter and his excitement for his material shines though. In my opinion Wright's little homey vignettes don't always light it up, as not every verse from Paul is equally important, but it is great to have a feel for the meaning and import of every paragraph as even the lesser ones illuminate the greater ones. Rich and powerful blessings are found in better understanding our great Paul through the eyes and heart of N. T. Wright! It is brilliant, lively and extremely useful!

Romans will always be one of the more frustrating of Paul’s letters, and that’s saying a lot. Writing in the first century, as a Jew steeped in religious tradition and thoughtful knowledge, Paul can seem to be impenetrable. N. T. Wright wades in and actually makes Paul more accessible. However, Wright himself can be perplexingly opaque. He seems to enjoy stringing compound sentences together with parenthetical comments and should-be footnotes into “what-the—“ paragraphs. Still, if you spend the time and reread as necessary, he does eventually unlock the mysteries of the ancient brain of Paul.

Having read several N.T. Wright works in the past I knew that Romans was a book that he has a special admiration for. I picked this volume for that reason. Wright has a gift for tackling difficult subjects and explaining them in a way that “everyone” can understand. He did not disappoint. The big picture Biblically, historically, culturally, socially, etc. is always the context in which he explains scripture. I recommend this commentary highly and look forward to reading Part 2.

It is easy when reading Romans to get lost in the overall purpose of Paul's writing - e.g., to forge unity between the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome as a prelude of that church becoming a base for his hoped-for travels to Spain. Whether he ultimately made it there or not is speculation. But the divisions between these two factions of the church in Rome were real and needed sorting out. In the process Paul gives us a glorious overview of how God was faithful to his covenant to Israel, favored the Abrahamic covenant of faith yielding justification compared to the civil society covenant of Moses but was now driving Paul to encourage all nations to see His grace in building a forever family under the lordship of Jesus the Christ. Easy to read, but profound to contemplate.

I haven't read part 2 yet, however I thoroughly enjoyed this commentary. My goal this year (2019) has been to really read, dig into and understand Paul and his letters. In the past I've found Romans to be a challenging book, but now feel more of an understanding of the beauty of this book, and how I want its message to be something that helps me have a deeper relationship with God.

An erudite but entirely approachable commentary on a challenging book. The small section by small section comments allow for reflection and "inwardly digesting", to make the good news entirely desirable.

Not as described. Full refund.

Rev Wright obviously loves Jesus and handles scripture reverently. I just can't buy into some of the beliefs he holds out however. They seem -- shall I say -- old fashioned? Mind you, the version I read was published in 2004. Perhaps his theology has changed since then? Take his stance on homosexuality in his comments in Chapter 1: "this is not what males and females were made for."My local priest C. Page had this to say on that passage: "Whatever behavior Paul was attacking in this verse, he was not describing our contemporary situation. Paul did not have in mind, adult, consenting, respectful, responsible, same-sex intimacy. Paul certainly was not referring in this passage to believing, baptized, committed Christian persons living in faithful, monogamous same-sex unions. Such a situation would have been completely foreign to Paul’s imagination. He was referring to people who had abandoned God in favour of idolatry and, as a result of their idolatry, were sunk in sin. He describes those about whom he is speaking as people who, having understood God’s “eternal power and divine nature,” (v. 20) have, none the less chosen to “by their wickedness suppress all truth,” (v. 18). They have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (v. 23). This can hardly be a description of most people living today in homosexual relationship."So IMO Rev. Wright has missed the 'boat' on this one. Interesting how our culture and experience of life can influence our interpretation of scripture. Does Rev. Wright not know any gay Christians?I also get a sense that he believes in a retributive view of Jesus' work on the cross (PSA). I think Bradley Jersak has a better understanding as seen in this quote. In his book A More Christlike God, Jersak puts it this way: “…Jesus himself absorbs the curse of sin and death for all of us, sucking the darkness of the world into himself, where his own blood is the all-powerful, spiritual anti-venom that cleanses sin and overcomes death. Assuming the likeness of fallen humanity, he is able to heal it.”Another point of disagreement for me is Rev. Wright's view of humanity in Chapter 5. He states that "there was nothing whatever to commend us to him (God) and indeed everything to make him revolted by us..." I just cannot buy that. And that is not how the Jews by-and-large viewed humanity. Their dominant view is that we are all born pure and untainted and that we sin because we are not perfect, not because we are sinful by nature. Perhaps I'm being too hard on Wright on this point but I was uncomfortable with his perceived thrust. We have been rescued by God because we are of great value. And God never withdrew from us because he hated sin in us. If anyone withdrew, it was us.Rev Wright gets 2 stars for effort, but I will not be reading any more of his commentaries.