Reading Romans as Lament: Paul’s Use of Old Testament Lament in His Most Famous Letter by Channing L. Crisler (review)
- Reading Romans as Lament: Paul’s Use of Old Testament Lament in His Most Famous Letter by Channing L. Crisler
The title of Dr. Crisler’s book aptly summarizes his aim. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he suggests, is suffused with the language of lament, and reading it as such allows us to articulate more clearly Paul’s theology of suffering. C. admirably fulfills this aim, for he shows persuasively how deeply lament is woven into Romans, identifying first the cries of distress and then the gospel as God’s answer to those cries. In this way, his book helps to fill an important gap in NT scholarship by attending carefully to lament in light of the gospel. Yet, when C. identifies a single cause for the suffering and thus the laments in Romans, all readers may not be as easily persuaded.
By lament, C. means the OT pattern of lament, which he defines, using Claus Wester-mann’s formulation, as “an event involving the lamenter, God, and enemies” (pp. 3, 19; see Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms [Atlanta: John Knox, 1981]). In the OT, laments arise from a variety of troubles: illness, the betrayal of friends, the slander of enemies, the hiddenness of God. It is this last theme especially that prompts some scholars to argue that lament can sometimes function as complaint against or protest to God, while at other times functioning as penitence or sorrow for sin.
Crisler concentrates single-mindedly on the penitential function of lament and on the problem of divine wrath as the cause for distress in the Psalms. Even God’s withdrawal from the lamenter implies that those who lament “are somehow wicked or unrighteous” (p. 30). C. could have strengthened his argument at this point by addressing the theme of the “righteous sufferer” of the Psalms.
Likewise, C. identifies divine wrath as “the all-encompassing cause of pain” in Romans (p. 4). C. is aware of, and summarizes, several scholars’ arguments that theodicy is the primary problem in Romans. That is, scholars like Richard Hays and Sylvia Keesmaat [End Page 133] propose that lament in Romans is over “the theological problem of God’s faithfulness to Israel” (p. 7). In this view, lament functions less as penitence than as complaint or protest. For C., his disagreement is at the level of what lament itself is; for him, lament is the language not of theodicy but of a particular kind of suffering: the suffering of God’s rejection and divine wrath when confronted with human sin. Related to this is his definition of “God’s righteousness” (dikaiosynē theou): not covenant-faithfulness, as it is sometimes rendered, but God’s deliverance through judgment (p. 63).
Crisler identifies six key lament texts in Romans and devotes one chapter to each: 1:16–17; 3:1–20; 7:7–8:4, 9:1–11:36; and 15:1–6. In each chapter, C. applies Hays’s seven tests for discerning scriptural echoes (as laid out in Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989]) by methodically “testing the echoes” of the lament language (mostly echoes of lament psalms) in each text. In chap. 4 (on Rom 3:1–20), C. lays the groundwork for what follows by positioning Jews and gentiles as two elements of Westermann’s three-part scheme: Jews and gentiles alike are both enemies and lamenters, both “unrighteous enemies of God” and “guilty petitioners who plead for [God’s] mercy” (p. 66). God answers their lament by judging the enemies and having mercy on them (pp. 66, 91–92).
The book has many strengths. In chap. 7, C. insightfully connects Paul’s lament in Romans 9–11 to the OT tradition of intercessory lament (e.g., Moses in Exodus 32–34). C. shows convincingly that the “groans” of Romans 8 evoke a world of lament language. It is a greater challenge to demonstrate that every cry of lament in...
