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39 Markus Bockmuehl 2 AquinasonAbraham’sFaithinRomans4 One of the more tantalizing and yet surprisingly neglected exegetical puzzles in Romans is this: does Paul depict the covenantal, circumcised, Jewish observant life of faithfulness as overtaken and replaced by an entirely law-free faith in Christ, or does he instead envisage such Jewish Torah praxis as in some sense tolerated or even affirmed and taken up within the Messianic faith? Two millennia of Gentile Paulinism may understandably have left little incentive to press for an answer; but the question as such does seem exegetically relevant to the figure of Abraham in chapter 4, as also to chapters 9–11. In other words, is only the uncircumcised Abraham the forefather of Christ-faith, or is there a sense in which the circumcised Abraham too serves as the type of what an observant Jewish faith in the Messiah might mean? Needless to say, the answer to this question does matter enormously for a reading of Romans. If it is true, as N. T. Wright likes to say, that circumcised faithfulness is merely the boat we once needed to get to shore but that we have now left behind as surplus to requirements,1 then Christ evidently does supplant and replace the circumcised faithfulness of Abraham. That is, to be sure, a view with extensive patristic and Reformational pedigree. Nevertheless, and quite apart from its unfortunate anti-Jewish potential, it would seem to generate a number of exegetical difficulties for the reader of Romans 4. Most egregious of these difficulties, one might argue, is that Abraham himself appears on that reading to regress from the life of “Christic” faith to the life of “nomi1 . N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 57, writes, “It is not hard to imagine illustrations of how this continuity and discontinuity function. When travelers sail across a vast ocean and finally arrive on the distant shore, they leave the ship behind and continue over land, not because the ship was no good, or because their voyage had been misguided, but precisely because both ship and voyage had accomplished their purpose.” He cites Gal 3:22–29 as illustrating this perspective, which he regards as exemplifying the right balance between continuity and discontinuity . stic” works. He would suddenly appear rather hamstrung, indeed counterproductive , as an exemplar of the point Paul wishes to illustrate. Here I shall not be able to offer an analysis either of Paul’s letter to the Romans, the making of books about which knows no end,2 or of Aquinas as theologian or exegete, a topic of immense importance about which I know very little. Aquinas’s view of Abraham, more generally, is a matter of considerable interest that would also merit more extensive analysis than we can undertake here. This is not least because of his controversial handling in the Summa of divine command ethics in relation to the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, a passage of vital importance to Jewish and patristic thought that, on most modern accounts, Paul largely ignores.3 For present purposes, I wish to offer a few observations about Aquinas’s handling of Abraham’s faith in his exposition of Romans 4, focusing especially on the relationship of Jewish to Gentile faith. Once biblical scholars look past the unfamiliar Aristotelian form of highly structured presentation, it is not difficult to see here a careful exegete at work who repeatedly allows his critical questions to be both generated and addressed by a close reading of the biblical text. Romans 4 Just as the end of Romans 3 brought proof from Scripture that all are sinful , so chapter 4 is Paul’s quite ingenious proof that righteousness comes by faith. Paul here argues that the Torah itself shows God’s free gift of righteousness to be based not on a Jewish ancestral privilege but on sheer grace and election. Unless Paul can prove this from the Torah itself, he will have lost the sympathies of his Jewish Christian readers in Rome. In brief, the argument is that Abraham himself, the father of the covenant, is the chief example of faith-based righteousness because in Genesis 15:6, significantly before he is ever circumcised in chapter 17, we read that he believed in God, and God counted this as his righteousness. This point is of course familiar to modern commentators but well captured by...

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