IV.
Detailed Analysis
1. Proclamation of the imminent revelation of
glory (v. 18)
Verse 18 introduces the major topic of this passage, which
one commentator has summarized as a discourse on “eschatological time
anticipated in the present.”[i]
Yet this summary is misleading since, for Paul, the condition of what has been
referred to as “messianic” or “eschatological time” is not only anticipated in
the present but overlaps with it and seems to participate actively in the
shaping of events and attitudes: The Old and New Ages, as most modern
commentators have pointed out, exist simultaneously, allowing elements of both
aeons to be active during the transition.[ii]
The eschatological framework of this passage must then be considered not only
as reflecting a coming age which one awaits with ardent expectation but also as
an authorizing force to be reckoned with in the present situation of the
ecclesia and the Roman Empire.
The peculiar temporality of Paul’s realized eschatology
leads paradoxically to a state of pre-determined indeterminacy, a theme that
Paul will build upon in the following verses, in which history unfolds
according to the telos of God but humans and institutions experience a loss of
agency. There is a significant gap between the expectations the believers have
of their God and the raw reality of their lived experience in “the last days.”
Consequently, this verse holds within it both the recognition of the violent
conditions of the present (“the sufferings of this present time”) as well as a
uniting hope for delivery from such conditions (“the glory about to be revealed
to us”) to the extent that the violence of the believers’ material conditions
is minimized by the promise of that glory. Yet the comfort of this promise is
tempered with the following observation: Though all creatures experience this
suffering and frustration (which, in this verse, is not restricted to suffering
“on behalf of Christ”[iii]),
the promise of salvation seems available only to a select few. It is this
tension that Paul develops in the following verses in an eschatologically
informed attempt to defer the resolution of inter-religious tensions by
exploiting the radical possibility inherent in the heterogeneity of messianic
time.
[i] Barrett, A
Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 165.
[ii] See, for example, Ernest Best, The Letter of Paul to the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1967), 98; Douglas J. Moo, The
Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 26; Dunn, Romans 1-8, 486-487.
[iii] Moo, The
Epistle to the Romans, 511.
