Receive one another, therefore, just as Christ has received you,
for the glory of God
(Romans 15:7)

Judith E. McKinlay

So Paul writes to the church in Rome; so we hear his words in our own twenty-first century gathering. But as we nod in agreement with what seems entirely appropriate for any Christian community, we should perhaps stop and ask what lies behind this call. For if we are to fully understand Paul’s words, set in the last major chapter of the letter, before the final greetings in ch.16, we need to stop and imagine him at work, writing the letter to the church at Rome, addressing this call to a particular gathering in a particular time and in a particular place. So imagine him, Paul, once Pharisee, still Jew, but now as Daniel Boyarin calls him, as Christian, a radical Jew1, writing to the church at Rome somewhere in the mid 50s CE. The question then is: what was the issue that led him to call this Roman gathering to receive each other? This is an important question because as we are even more aware in our own times and places, theology is always carried out and worked through in particular contexts.

It is easy when thinking and talking in terms of the early Christian missionary movement to focus on the word Christian and forget or play down the fact that this began as a movement within Judaism, and that some of the earliest Christian communities were predominantly Jewish. This seems to have been the case in Rome. The politics in Rome regarding Jews had been traumatic, as the Emperor Claudius had expelled many Jews, including Christian Jews, from Rome in 49 CE. After his death, however, - and this history is important for the context of this letter – it seems that they were able to return. What this meant for the church at Rome was that during the period between their expulsion and their return the leadership changed and the church became predominantly Gentile, so that the returning Jewish Christians came back to a markedly changed community. As James Dunn writes, “Paul was thus dealing with a major social as well as theological problem”2, the issue being how they were to express their faith, how they were to order themselves, and where they were to draw the boundary lines that identified them as a specifically Christian community when they were a mix of traditions. It sounds a remarkably modern and contemporary issue – it is ecclesiological to the core.3 We would like to sit down with Paul and share our concerns face to face.4

This sets the call to “receive one another” in its context, although, as with most aspects of Pauline study, not all scholars would agree with every detail of this scenario. But what is Paul calling for here? The Greek word, translated here as “receive” means literally “to take alongside oneself”, so “to receive or accept into one’s society, home, circle of acquaintance”.5 As the Standing Commission noted, it is stronger than the word “welcome” used in the NRSV, depending, of course, on how we understand the English word “welcome.” This is long-term, “wholehearted acceptance”6, and the issues it threw up for this Roman community were considerable: what did it mean to be a community of Jewish and Gentile Christians? That is the issue; it is concrete, it is immediate and it is complex. But at its heart, and here I am quoting again from James Dunn, the challenge posed to this community at Rome, was

to recognize that God accepted people whose views and practices they regarded as unacceptable … This was the crucial step in Paul’s pastoral strategy: to get the traditionalists actually to accept that someone who differed from them in something they regarded as fundamental might nevertheless genuinely believe in God’s Christ and be accepted by God.7

But what Paul is also stressing is that there is continuity with what has gone before. The past is not wiped clean. He begins this very letter stating that the gospel of God has already been promised beforehand through God’s prophets in the holy scriptures (Rom.1:2), and follows the call to receive one another in chapter fifteen with a statement about Christ confirming the promises given to the patriarchs. This is immediately followed by a series of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures, from the law, the prophets, and twice from the Psalms, all the major scriptural traditions being drawn upon to reinforce the point Paul is making here.8 Indeed, as has been well noted, Paul “draws a thread through the entire letter” to “show[s] that in Scripture God has indeed promised in advance the gospel for all humanity (1:2).”9 The inference is that the unity required in Rome is “but a local instance of God’s saving purpose in Christ.”10 What is particular and contingent fits as one part within the global and universal.

It is, of course, that phrase, “God’s saving purpose in Christ”, that is key for Paul, and for the whole Christian tradition. So I want to move the lens away from Paul and the complexities of the Roman church and turn it now upon Jesus the Christ. Although Paul highlights the saving grace through Jesus’ death and resurrection, his discussion of food restrictions in chapter fourteen of the same letter provides a link with the ministry of Jesus. Here we see acceptance and hospitality in action; here we see Jesus continuing the strong Jewish tradition of table fellowship but enlarging and reformulating it.

We see him feeding the thousands (Mt. 15:32-39; Mk. 8:1-9; Lk. 9:10-17; Jn 6: 1-15); we hear him telling the parables of the great feast and the wedding banquet shared with the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame, and those gathered in from the streets, in place of the invited guests who turned down their invitations (Lk. 14:15-24; Mt. 22:1-14); we see him sitting at dinner in Levi’s house with tax collectors and others described as “sinners” (Mk 2:15), and hear the Pharisees and scribes grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). We realize that what we are watching is the kingdom of God in action. In Jesus we are seeing and hearing God the host, who offers hospitality to all who are open to receiving it. And just as Paul makes the link with earlier scriptural traditions, so Jesus himself prophesies that many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven (Mt. 8:11). This is the eschatological hope – that the guests will come, will take up their invitations and be welcomed by God, the host of the messianic banquet.

But if, nudged here by Jesus, we turn the focus back upon Israel, then we also hear an Israel that sings of God bring(ing) forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart (Ps.104: 14-15), an Israel that knows that it is God’s passing guest (Ps. 39: 12), an Israel for whom God in God’s Wisdom prepares a table (Ps. 23: 5) and offers the invitation to turn aside for the life-giving feast (Prov.9: 1-6; Sir.24: 19-22), an Israel that dreams of a future when the mountains shall drip sweet wine and the hills shall flow with milk (Amos (9:18). I like Walter Brueggemann’s comment that “Israel is dazzled” by such divine generosity.11 But Israel also knows that it, too, is required to show hospitality, even to those whom Israel considers different and Other to itself.

If Israel’s own narrative begins with Abraham, now stressed by Paul as the ancestor of all, both Jew and Gentile (ch.4), as early as chapter eighteen of Genesis this founding figure is to be seen offering hospitality to those three strangers, angels in disguise, by the oaks of Mamre. In a small cameo scene of “numinous reciprocity”12, Abraham offers hospitality, and hears the angels deliver their divine message of a child to be born (cf. Rom.9:9), a message that is, at the same time, the promise that all the nations of the earth will be blessed in him (Gen. 18:18). If this is the model, then this must be Israel’s vocation too; so Isaiah sings of the servant’s call to be a light to the nations (Isa. 49:6), and Leviticus writes in Israel’s priestly manual that the alien (ger) who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens (gerim) in the land of Egypt (Lev. 19: 34), underlining this with the divine formula: I am Yahweh, your God.13 The Isaiah scroll in its vision of the divinely-ordered future sings of bringing the foreigner (ben nekar) to God’s holy mountain (Isa. 56: 6-7), while Ezekiel dares to dream of God decreeing resident aliens be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel (Ezek.47: 21-23).14

But while all this is very positive and encouraging, there is another biblical tradition that remembers the difficulties involved. Abraham’s act of hospitality in Genesis 18 was immediately followed by Sodom’s failure. The matter of acceptance is sharply pivotal in the return from exile. If the book of Ruth presents a Moabite accepted by the people of Bethlehem, despite the Torah ruling that no Moabites are to be admitted to the assembly of Yahweh, even to the tenth generation, precisely because they failed to offer Israel hospitality on their way out of Egypt (Deut.23: 3), the Ezra Nehemiah tradition goes as far as virtually creating foreigners out of a people with a shared Israelite ancestry. Far from accepting and sharing hospitality with the peoples of the land these returnees are to regard them as pollutants, as virtual Canaanites and Moabites, to the extent that any who marry among them and have children by them are to be seen as endangering the holy seed (Ezra 9:2).15 The lists of displaced peoples such as the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites recorded in Exod. 34: 11 and elsewhere and which Nehemiah 9:8 repeats with variation, keep alive the memory of the lack of acceptance shown to the original inhabitants of the land of Israel. It seems, as Daniel Smith-Christopher has observed, that “in most periods of Israelite history ... exclusionary attitudes co-existed with idealistic laws.”16 For the matter of group identity, what it is that permits acceptance, and who may be hosted is complex; we hear it being negotiated and renegotiated throughout the scriptures.

It lies at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman recorded both by Mark and Matthew (Mt.15:21-28; Mk.7:24-30). Matthew’s use of the C word, Canaanite, highlights the issue. And so we see him, Jesus, confronted by this Other woman, and watch as he rebuffs her not once but three times. There is to be no doubt in the mind of the reader: the mission to the Gentiles is an issue here too, and an issue even for Jesus. Are Gentiles only to be regarded as little dogs? Is the gospel only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel? We hear this hard saying drawing sharp boundary markers; we wait and watch as the woman challenges this Christ-ed one, and discover that despite her seeming acceptance of her place among the dogs, Jesus finally commends her for her faith. One other in this gospel, also a non-Jew, a Roman centurion, is praised in the same terms (Mt. 8:5-13; also in Lk. 7:1-10). Matthew’s reading is clear: no longer are Gentiles to be content with crumby remnants, now the messianic abundance is to be spread before all comers, irrespectively.17 The great commission of 28: 18-20 can be given with a credible legitimation. But the reader has heard the struggle and detects behind Jesus’ hesitation an early Christian community’s wrestling with its own boundary markings. Who is to be accepted in the new gospel community?

Paul’s letters, in particular his letter to the Galatians that recalls the confrontation with the leadership group in Jerusalem, indicate that this same struggle of Christian identity and acceptance was present in the earliest Christian communities. What Paul is at pains to stress is that there is room for both Jew and Gentile. For the Jewish Christians it was not a matter of denying their heritage, for Paul “saw his mission not as a turning of his (or God’s) back on Israel, but as a fulfilment of Israel’s own task.”18 That task, as he also reminded his Galatian readers, was set away back in the promise to Abraham that all the Gentiles shall be blessed in you (Gal. 3:8). And, as we saw, Paul clinches his argument here in Romans with readings of scripture: what the Scriptures foresaw has now become reality, what Moses19, the Psalmist and Isaiah20 looked forward to is now taking place. Read 15: 7-13 with chapter fourteen and the message is that “all those who believe the Christian gospel belong together at the same table.”21 But that did not mean that differences were immediately wiped out or glossed over. It was a matter of respect for difference as long as the fundamentals of the faith were not diminished or disrespected. And that was the rub: to quote Dunn again, how “to get the traditionalists actually to accept that someone who differed from them in something they regarded as fundamental might nevertheless genuinely believe in God’s Christ and be accepted by God.”22

What are we to draw from all of this? Paul Achtemeier in his Interpretation commentary on Romans sees it very clearly: what is required is a “Christian tolerance for those whose understanding of the faith requires from them a different response in their daily lives to the lordship of Christ” and that tolerance

shares in, and is part of, God’s eschatological plan for harmony and peace in his creation. That is the weight placed on the need for unity among Christians, despite the diversity of their response to Christ’s Lordship.

His conclusion from this, with which I imagine we would all agree, is that this “shows that the ecumenical movement is not a luxury but a necessary part of the mature faith of God’s people on earth.”23 Once the fundamentals have been agreed upon, different interpretations, different practices and different ways of ordering are to be respected as we take each other alongside in our Christian journeying, recognizing that this is our Christian calling. The very particularity of the Roman situation, with its issues about observing kashrut and certain days (14: 3-6), points to the inherent contingency of all theologizing: the work is never done. Each new situation requires a rethinking and readjusting.

A more disquietening question is whether we are all agreed on the fundamentals. The theme for this meeting is taken from Paul, but do we even all read Paul in the same way?24 And do we also need to listen to a Jewish scholar’s view, from his reading of Paul, that

what will appear from the Christian perspective as tolerance …from the rabbinic Jewish perspective is simply an eradication of the entire value system which insists that our cultural practice is our task and calling in the world and must not be abandoned?25

In Daniel Boyarin’s view “the call to human Oneness”, which he sees as a major motivating concern for Paul, “at the same time that it is a stirring call to equality, constitutes a threat as well to Jewish (or any other) difference.”26 This is a very different reading of Paul than the one James Dunn draws, and it is one that appears to play down the hybrid nature of the community that Paul appears to be advocating in Rom.14: 3-6. But in itself it highlights the problems inherent in the very programme of doing theology and making theological pronouncements, for there may be different ways of reading and interpreting the very source documents on which much of our work relies.27 At the same time it highlights the fact that any widening of identity boundaries poses problems for those whose distinctiveness is tied to what is being altered in the process of redefinition. For the widening of Israel’s self-understanding to create a new mixed Jewish/Gentile community based on Christ understandably posed problems for those who had understood their particularity in terms of a distinctiveness marked by an observance of particular laws and practices. Boyarin’s reading highlights the importance of listening to those whose perspective is different, and who detect in the very process of boundary shifting a requirement of assimilation, at the very least, if not an abandonment of what has been fundamental to one sector or grouping. This sets us back to asking that basic question: does, or to what extent, does “acceptance” necessarily mean “oneness” and what are its implications? If we were in any doubt, Paul’s statement that acceptance of each other in this newly defined Christ-based community is to the glory of God highlights the importance of the matter.28 For what undergirds Paul’s sense of the rightness of this acceptance is his conviction that it is part of God’s very plan for the world, God’s tikkun olam.

The Ecumenical Movement, and the Faith and Order Commission have long recognized both the importance of respecting difference within koinonia and the difficulties involved. The report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostela expressed it in this way:

As individuals and communities, we are confronted by the others in their otherness, e.g. theologically, ethnically, culturally. Koinonia requires respect for the other and a willingness to listen to the other and to seek to understand them … The encounter with the other in the search to establish the koinonia, grounded in God’s gift, calls for a kenosis … [s]uch a kenosis arouses fear of loss of identity, and invites us to be vulnerable, yet such is no more than faithfulness to the ministry of vulnerability and death of Jesus, as he sought to draw human beings into communion with God and each other.29

In their Message to the Churches their words were clear: “A test of our koinonia is how we live with those with whom we disagree.”30 I think Paul would have been nodding in agreement. As he concludes this section of his letter with a hope-based benediction, it seems fitting to set it as the conclusion of this paper:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
(Romans 15:13).

FOOTNOTES
1. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the politics of identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
2. James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1998), p.684. As he expresses the issue: “precisely how faith and practice interact, how and where faith should be resolute, and how and where ecclesiastical context should temper not just the expression of faith, but faith itself.” Krister Stendahl’s answer to his own rhetorical question: “what is the Epistle to the Romans about?” that “it is about God’s plan for the world and about how Paul’s mission to the Gentiles fits into that plan” highlights the theological undergirding (Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p.27).
3. As Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1989), p.86, writes, “Paul operates with an ecclesiocentric hermeneutic”, using Scripture “to shape his understanding of the community of faith” while his “experience of the Christian community – composed of Jews and Gentiles together – shapes his reading of Scripture.”
4. There is, however, another contextual factor as regards the letter as a whole. N. T. Wright, for example, in his essay “Romans and the Theology of Paul”, in D. M. Hay, E. E. Johnson (eds.) Pauline Theology, Volume III: Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp.30-67 (35), reads the tension here in relation to Paul’s “missionary strategy”, in that Paul fears that an “anti-Jewish sentiment” in Rome, his intended new base for his mission in the western Mediterranean, might “marginalize a mission that included Jews.” Wright’s thesis is (p.60) that “Paul’s great hope, in writing Romans, is (negatively) to quash any potential Gentile-Christian arrogance against Israel, and (positively) to enlist the Roman church’s enthusiastic and comprehending support for the 5. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996), p.835. The verb is also used in this sense in Rom. 14:1, 3; Acts 28:2 and Philemon 17.
6. Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans/ Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press, 1988), p.502. In n.36 he adds that it “has the notion of warm welcome about it.”
7. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, p.686.
8. Deut. 32:43; Ps. 117:1; Isa.11:10.
9. Leander E. Keck, “Christology, Soteriology, and the Praise of God (Romans 15:7-13),” in Robert T. Fortna and Beverly R. Gaventa (eds.) The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul & John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), pp. pp.85-97 (93-94).
10. Keck, “Christology, Soteriology, and the Praise of God (Romans 15:7-13),” p.93. Wright, “Romans and the Theology of Paul”, p.36, talks in terms of this being one location on the “large-scale map of the righteousness of god.”
11. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), p.530.
12. John Koenig, “Hospitality,” in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Vol. 3; New York: Doubleday, 1992) pp.299-301 (299).
13. See also Exod. 22:20; 23:9; Lev. 23:22; Deut. 14:29; 24:14-15, 17-22.
14. There is the stipulation that they must be residing and raising children in Israel, but, even so, as Jon D. Levenson, Theology of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40-48 (HSMS 10. Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1976), p.123, notes, “this prescription is much more radical than anything else in all the legal corpora of the Hebrew Bible.” See also Isa.66: 18-21. However, as Levenson notes, in “The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism,” in Mark G. Brett (ed.) Ethnicity & the Bible (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp.143-169 (162), “the degree of integration of a foreigner into ancient Israel remains shrouded in obscurity.”
15. As Daniel L. Smith-Christopher comments in ‘The Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9-10 and Nehemiah 13: A Study of the Sociology or the Post-Exilic Judaean Community’, in Tamara C. Eskenazi and Kent H. Richards (eds.) Second Temple Studies 2. Temple and Community in the Persian Period (JSOTSup, 175; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), pp. 243-265 (247): ‘the possibility remains that these ‘mixed-marriages’ were considered ‘mixed’ only by Ezra and his supporters, and in the first case not by the married persons themselves.’ The named peoples are not so much ethnic labels of the time but ‘old terms that almost surely have become stereotypically pejorative slurs’ (257).
16. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, ‘Ezra and Isaiah: Exclusion, Transformation, and Inclusion of the 'Foreigner' in Post-Exilic Biblical Theology’, in Brett, Ethnicity & the Bible, pp.117-142 (119).
17. So Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), p.138, ‘The gracious goodness of the God of Jesus is abundant enough to satisfy not only the ‘children’ of Israel but also the woman-child who as a female and as a gentile, is doubly polluted’. See also Sharon H. Ringe, ‘A Gentile Woman’s Story’, in Letty Russell (ed.) Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp.65-72, and Gail R. O’Day, ‘Surprised by Faith: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman’, in Amy-Jill Levine (ed.) A Feminist Companion to Matthew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp.114-125.
18. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, p.719.
19. Clearly a reading of Deut. 32:43 from the LXX, strikingly different from the MT “Gentiles (goyim), praise his people.” As Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p.72, notes: “For Paul’s purposes it is wonderfully useful to find a text in which Moses, in his great climatic song …includes Gentiles in the company of the people of God.”
20. As Hays, Echoes of Scripture, notes, p.73, Isa.11:10 gains its “full force” when heard in the context of the following verses of 11:11-12 where not only are the Gentiles summoned by the root of Jesse but both the lost ones of Israel and the dispersed ones of Judah are gathered from the four corners of the earth.
21. Wright, “Romans and the Theology of Paul”, p.66.
22. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, p.687.
23. Paul Achtemeier, Romans (Interpretation Commentary. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), p.225.
24. Wright, “Romans and the Theology of Paul”, pp.30-31, notes how “different ways of reading Romans usually reflect different understandings of Paul’s whole theology” so that the “weight of the letter is deemed to fall where the interpreter’s theology finds its locus classicus.”
25. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p.32.
26. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p.32. Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p.229, suggests, however, that “the Holocaust necessitates a revisionary intertextual reading of Paul that will reclaim the continuity of Paul’s proclamation with Israel’s Scripture and thus reaffirm God’s underlying love for Israel”; he suggests that his book is “a modest” attempt of this.
27. This, of course, applies to small details as well as the overall theology. For example, where Wright, “Romans and the Theology of Paul”, p.40, reads the we of 4:1 as referring to both Jew and Gentiles, Richard Hays considers it refers only to the Jewish group.
28. There is a textual question here as to whether the phrase is to be taken with “accept one another” or with “Christ received you.” It is likely that Paul meant the reader to understand both.
29. Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann (eds.), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia. Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Santiago de Compostela 1993. Faith and Order Paper no.166 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994), pp.232-233 (section 1, para. 20), quoted by Alan D. Falconer, “The Reconciling Power of Forgiveness” in idem and Joseph Liechty (eds.) Reconciling Memories (2nd ed.; Dublin: The Columba Press, 1998), pp.177-194 (191).
30. “Message to the Churches: Santiago de Compostela, Spain, August 1993,” in Jeffrey Gros, FSC, Harding Meyer, William G. Rusch (eds.) Growth in Agreement II. Faith and Order Paper no.187 (Geneva: WCC /Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), pp.939-941 (940).

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