The Church in Paul's Letter to the Romans

At first, Romans might seem like an odd place to turn for an apostolic understanding of the church. The letter says nothing about the offices of the church, unless its brief mention of teaching and exhorting refers to official church roles (12:7–8). Similarly, it never mentions the Lord’s Supper, and, although it refers to baptism (6:3–4), the topic is not the ritual of water baptism but metaphorical union with Christ. The term “church” (ekklēsia) does not even show up in the letter until the closing commendations and greetings of chapter 16.

Despite all this, Romans is a profoundly ecclesiological document. The gospel is the creative Word by which God calls the church into existence, and there is no more complete explanation of the gospel in the Scriptures than Paul’s letter to the Romans. The way in which Paul envisions the gospel shaping the church is clear from the unusual address Paul affixes to his letter. Rather than sending it to “the church in Rome” (cf. 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Gal. 1:2; 1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1; Philemon 2), he sends it “to all those in Rome, dearly loved by God, called to be holy” (1:7). Rather than calling Christians in Rome “the church,” he substitutes for this term a description of what the church is. It is the group of people whom God has called into existence through his love, a love that entailed the sacrificial death of his Son and that expresses itself in the sustaining, strengthening gift of the Holy Spirit (5:5, 8). It is also the group of people God has made “holy,” or set apart from the rest of humanity, to be a prototype of what all human beings will become one day in God’s new, restored creation (8:16, 18–25).

The way Paul describes the gospel throughout the rest of the letter emphasizes these two themes: God’s gracious, loving initiative in calling the church into existence and the church’s response of living as God’s restored people. Throughout chapters 1–15, for example, the theme of glorifying and worshiping God plays an important role both in Paul’s description of the human plight that the gospel of God’s grace addresses and in his description of the response that believers should have to this gracious gospel. The basic sin from which all other sins spring, Paul argues, is a failure to “glorify” the Creator and “give him thanks” (1:21). It is a desire to worship “the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25) or a refusal “to acknowledge” him (1:28). That is why, on the other side of the gospel, once people have been justified by faith and reconciled to God, they give “glory to God,” as Abraham did (4:20), and “present” their “bodies” to God “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable” to him as their “reasonable worship” (12:1). Read More