A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

can only be made righteous through the grace of God as a result of the
crucifixion of his son, Jesus Christ. ‘Sin will have no dominion over you, since
you are not under Law, but under grace’ (Romans 6:14). The crucifixion has, in
fact, transcended the Jewish Law: the traditional observance of it has been
replaced by need of faith in Christ: ‘We shall be saved by him from the wrath of
God.’
The two crucial premises that underlie the theology of ‘justification through
faith’ that Paul develops in Romans are, therefore, the wrath of God and the
inadequacy of human efforts to regain his pleasure as a result of the pervasive
power of sin. Hence the need for Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Paul’s theology
has become so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition that other ways of
conceiving the human condition have been obliterated. Is he right in saying that
anger is such a dominant feature of God and that human beings are helpless?
What evidence can he provide for his assertion that sin settles like a stifling
blanket over all human endeavour? Origen, after all, put forward an alternative
position in which God is essentially forgiving and souls are endowed with the
free will and reason to make their own way towards him. As so often in the
Christian theological tradition, different conceptions of God are in conflict here
(even if these conflicts are usually obscured in introductions to theology), and it
is hard to find a means to resolve the differences between them.
We do not know what influences impelled Paul to create such a pessimistic
picture of God and humanity. Although no direct connection has been made
between Paul and the Essenes, the Qumran community whose activities are
recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are numerous similarities in their ways of
thinking. The Essenes were deeply ascetic and found sexuality, in particular,
repugnant. They saw the world as one divided into light and darkness and were
required ‘to love all the children of light and abhor all the children of darkness,
each one according to the guilt, which delivers him up to God’s retribution’. This
comes close to the punitive god of Paul, who divides the world into saved and
unsaved. 8 Paul’s own personality also seems relevant. In Romans itself he tells
how ‘I have been sold as a slave to sin. I fail to carry out the things I want to do,
and I find myself doing the very things I hate... I know of nothing good living in
me’ (Romans 7:14-20). This is a man who feels unable to fight ‘the sin’ within
himself. Perhaps it is not surprising that he envisages the whole of humanity in a
similar state. But it is also important to note that Paul was writing at a time when
the second coming of Christ was widely predicted, and his letters, which reflect
the urgency to commit oneself to Christ before it is too late, were never intended