IV.
Detailed Analysis
3. The narrative of creation (vv. 20-22)
These three verses can be so grouped by the implicit
narrative they rely on and relate. The narrative is difficult to reconstruct
chronologically because it takes place in the heterogeneous temporality that
always accompanies messianic anticipation, yet it seems to follow a familiar
progression: Jewett shows how the passage progresses in such a way that it
recalls several major events (and styles) from the Bible, including the fall
narrative (creation was “subjected to futility”), the exodus from Egypt (the
creation hopes to be “set free from its bondage”), the wisdom tradition
(“futility” recalls the “vanity” of all things in Ecclesiastes), and the
prophets (the symbol of “labor pains” is a common motif in such literature).[i] In
other words, there is a veritable compacting of the major touchstones of Jewish
history into a few verses into which Paul skillfully weaves his own belief in
the imminent culmination of that history.
Paul’s recounting of history obviously functions as more
than a simple instructional device or rhetorical scheme. Laurie J. Braaten has
published an enlightening study of the use of the phrase “labor pains”
(sometimes translated as “travail”) with reference to uses of the same or
similar words in the Septuagint to argue that the “subjection” of creation is
not, for Paul, a “onetime primeval event” but is instead a “repeated
occurrence”[ii]
that is intricately “connected to the interplay between human sin and the
divine response of judgment or redemption.”[iii]
Moo has also highlighted the biblical background of Paul’s imagery here and
convincingly points to Isaiah 24-27 as the likely lexical and ideological
source of this passage; though Moo does not emphasize the repetition of nature’s
subjection, he agrees with Braaten that Paul believed that once the source of
ecological corruption (humanity) is addressed, creation, or nature, will be
reverted to its original, pristine state.[iv]
It is this sense of repetition that I wish to pursue and relate to Paul’s own
eschatological expectation. Paul, I argue, believes that the eschatological
event will provide the believers with a way out of this repetition, which for
him as for his readers must represent not only an ontological conundrum but
also a problem he confronts as a political mechanism that undergirds sovereign
power.
As I have previously mentioned, Jewett points out that the
ascendency of new emperors (and Romans was almost certainly written in such a
context) was usually accompanied by celebrations that commemorated the
rejuvenation of nature, a symbolic activity that explicitly tied the state of
things to sovereign, worldly power. Thus, by yoking the repetition of political
processes to the repetition of natural processes, the created order itself was
“subjected, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it.”
This is the hegemonic narrative that Paul is attempting to overcome by evoking
fundamentally Jewish motifs. For, as Jewett goes on to point out, “Whereas the
Roman premise was that disorderly barbarians and rebels caused the corruption
of nature, Paul argues that all humans reenact Adam’s fall.”[v] In
other words, Paul’s belief in history as a teleological process prevents him
from accepting the perpetuation of a cycle or a reversion to a previous stage
on the cycle—rather, the renewal of nature at the moment of the eschaton
demarcates the cycle’s end, the way out of the Adamic cycle’s futility (and the
futility of the nation-state), which human beings, along with nature, are
currently doomed to reenact endlessly: Corruption. Suffering. Death. Decay.
Paul does not substitute a theological problem for a
political problem so much as he uses each as a mirror for the other; as the
following verse indicates, Paul’s ingenious solution (to both the political and
theological problems) was the inclusive exclusion of the Christian believers.
[i] Romans,
513-515.
[ii] “All Creation Groans,” 136.
[iii] Ibid., 147.
[iv] “Romans 8.19-22 and Isaiah’s Cosmic Covenant,” 89.
[v] “The Corruption and Redemption of Creation,” 31.
