Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel of Peace in the Midst of Empire

Scot McKnight
Baylor University Press, 236 pages
Reviewed by Neill S. Morgan

In an age when Scripture is weaponized for political advantage, how can we calm our hearts and minds to hear what the Spirit has to say to us? How can we, as a traditional prayer of illumination asks, “calm the troubled waters of our hearts, and still all other voices but [God’s] own?” Scot McKnight brings us an old answer, an answer that has stood the test of time in an age of high anxiety: context, context and context.

While his answer is old, McKnight brings a fresh approach to entering the context of Romans — beginning with chapters 12-16, then reading 9-11 before reading chapters 1-8.

When the end is our beginning, we discover and discern complex and layered identities of those Paul calls the weak and the strong. We meet Phoebe, whom Paul commends as a deacon or minister of the church (Romans 16:1). Phoebe, McKnight argues persuasively, was commissioned by Paul and instructed by him in how to perform this letter in the house churches of Rome, and to address the questions Paul includes. If you thought all of Paul’s questions in Romans were rhetorical, McKnight will persuade you otherwise.

The greatest strength of “Reading Romans Backwards” is in making the case that Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is not a theoretical abstract systematic theology of salvation, but primarily a pastoral letter to a divided church. It is Paul’s pastoral theological guide to the church of Rome — how to heal divisions between the weak and the strong, the Torah-observant and the non-observant, the politically and socially powerless and the powerful.

This book is a deep dive into the world of Paul, academically supported, but always pointing beyond academic interest to lived theology. Avoiding any simplistic temptation to draw a straight line between the first-century church and the 21st-century Christian context, McKnight details the first century’s world of power and privilege, weak and strong, ethnic, gender, governmental and ecclesial politics in such vivid prose that we can draw our own conclusions. We can read Romans again with heightened hearing for God’s Word to us.

While I wish that the author had provided us with a few discussion questions at the end of each section for a study group, this is a minor deficit. “Reading Romans Backwards” will be a valuable resource for any preacher who chooses a season of adventurous preaching — cutting the barbed wire fence that keeps us within the familiar green pastures of the lectionary to take a gallop down the rough road and through the wooded trails of the great sections of Romans not included in the Revised Common Lectionary.

It could also serve as a fine resource for a Bible study class willing to take the time to absorb all the rich details of cultural, historical and literary context McKnight provides. I envision a small group of readers entering into the world of the early church in Rome, internalizing the theological issues with which she grappled, then emerging to hear how the Word challenges our own assumptions. Who is strong? Who is weak? How would Paul recommend we relate to one another in our own context? What would it look like for us to conform to Christ if we break free from the chains of our own empire?

Neill S. Morgan is pastor of Darnestown Presbyterian Church in Darnestown, Maryland.