Paul continues in Romans 3:27-30,
“Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.” (NIV)
For the Jew to establish all of life on the basis of the Old Testament laws (i.e., ceremonial, civic, and moral / cultural) was to be in a very privileged position (Rom. 9:4-5). They were in this privileged position because God graciously chose them to be his people and gave them these laws to obey. This was an act of his grace (Deut. 7-9). Obedience to the law was to be a demonstration of their gratitude to God for his initiative in choosing them out of all the other nations and peoples God could have chosen. The law defined what it meant to be in a proper relationship with God. That initial divine grace shown to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and ultimately to the nation of Israel in giving them the law, established the relationship between them and God. The continuation of that gracious relationship depended upon the Jew keeping the law. But history shows the impossibility of keeping the law as a means to be right with God. And by Jesus’s day this grace degenerated to the point to where the Jew was taking pride in his privileged position and boasting in the law. He was prone to boast, not merely by thinking he as keeping the law to the letter, but that it was also his special possession as the means of maintaining a right relationship with the only true God. They began to believe God was God for them alone. Instead of God being the God of the Jew, God became the Jewish God.
Paul understood how profoundly wrong this was from his own personal experience both as a Jew and his conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-31). So Paul explains that this “boasting” is excluded on the principle of faith. Paul redirects the Jew from their emphasis on “works” based in their own obedience to the old law, to “the law that requires faith.” Paul is saying, “There is a new “law” to consider, and what this “law” is based in and requires from you is faith.” Paul is clear as to what he wants to communicate. “A person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” (3:28) When Paul states, “For we maintain,” he is saying, “This is what we have discovered, and this is what we proclaim and argue to prove – that Jesus is the Messiah. He is the Son of God.” (Acts 9:20,22)
Now Paul introduces a profound theological point which defeats this Jewish boasting. He asks, “Or is God the God of the Jews only?” It is a rhetorical question the force of which is obvious. There is only one God! Therefore, of course he is the God of the Gentiles too! That being the case, then given this principle of faith, both the circumcised Jew and the uncircumcised Gentile will be justified by faith. They are both justified by faith in Jesus Christ as previously worked out in verses 24 and 26. Here we have implied that God desires the justification of all persons – Jew and Gentile. The way he has designed for that justification to come to the individual is through faith.
Therefore, this passage defeats Calvinism on at least two points. First, it makes faith the means whereby anyone – Jew or Gentile – can become justified, that is, saved. Therefore, the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election is not biblical. Paul’s statement, “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith…” cannot be twisted to mean, “For we maintain that the persons God has predetermined to save are justified by a faith that God causes in them subsequent to their first being regenerated by God.”
Secondly, the Calvinist idea that faith becomes a source of boasting and merit if it is not understood as included in an unconditional election to salvation due to our “total inability” to believe is nowhere to be found and is refuted. The Calvinist maintains that when non-Calvinists state that it is the responsibility of the sinner given their own free will to decide to believe in Christ, then this makes them complicit in “saving themselves by their own merit, and this would be a cause for boasting.” Paul’s words here show that this is wrong precisely because faith for Paul is contrasted with the boasting in the merit that came from observing the law. This tells us that Paul does not think that the act of freely deciding to believe in Jesus is meritorious. A sinner adds nothing of merit or their own works to their salvation by believeing. We have already shown that the faith “required” is faith that is the person’s own decision. Paul does not place faith in the category of a meritorious work in which one may boast. If that were the case, there would be no sense in contrasting faith with works and boasting. Besides, one who boasts in their believing doesn’t rightly understand faith or, for that matter, the gospel! Hence, faith here is not something God needs to grant to a limited number of elect people lest there be an occasion for boasting. That cannot be construed from anything said in the text. It is not found anywhere in the text but must be imported on the basis of other Calvinist doctrinal presuppositions and its theistic determinism.
Again, Paul uses the logic of the oneness of God to argue an inclusive salvation. In Paul’s thought “since God is one” (3:30), God’s saving disposition for all is the same. Since there is only one God, he therefore is the God of the Gentiles as well as the Jews. On this logic Paul establishes that the principle of salvation by faith as a possibility for all. In that there is one God, and he is therefore also the God of the Gentiles, the privilege of having and keeping the Law as the means of favor with God is superseded by the response of faith. Faith has always been the way of relationship with God (Heb. 11:1,6). The inference from the fact that God is the God of the Gentiles too is that he therefore loves them and cares that they be included in salvation. Salvation by faith excludes the boasting that was rooted in possessing and observing the law as a special privileged of the Jews only. All else being equal, God’s nature will consistently and coherently express itself in his saving plans and purposes. The one God will justify both Jew and Gentile by faith. C. E. B. Cranfield comments,
“The question, [“Or, is God the God of Jews only?”] indicates what would necessarily follow, if what is stated in v. 28 were not true. If that were not true, then God would not be the God of all men in the sense that He desires and seeks the salvation of all with equal seriousness. No Jew of Paul’s day would ever have thought of questioning that God is the God of all men in the sense of being their Creator and Ruler and Judge; but Paul clearly takes it for granted that God is not the God of any man without being his gracious and merciful God. 1 So he follows up his question with a further question, [“Is he not the God of the Gentiles also?”]; which is answered positively by [“Yes, of Gentiles also…”]. Compare 3.22; to 10.12: without in any way calling into question the realty of Israel’s special place in God’s purpose, which is attested by the [“to the Jew first”] of 1.16 (cf. 2.9 and 10) and by such passages as 3.2; 9.4f; 11.1, 17ff, Paul insists on the fact that the divine purpose is equally for all men gracious and merciful.” 2
On Rom. 3:30 and the oneness of God Cranfield writes,
“In support of the affirmation [“…of Gentiles also”], Paul appeals to the fundamental fact of the oneness of God confessed in the Shema, the creed of Israel, which begins with Deut. 6:4.” 3
And on the final relative clause “who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith” Cranfield comments,
“The relative clause states what is for Paul the corollary to be drawn from the confession that God is one – namely, that He will justify Jew and Gentile alike by faith alone.” 4
Again, the text is clear. Calvinist exclusivism is nowhere to be found, but rather is refuted.
1 It is instructive to set beside Paul’s argumentation here the comment of Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai on ‘I am the LORD they God’ in Exod 20.2 (quoted in SB 3, p. 185): ‘God spake to the Israelites: “I am God over all who enter the world, but my name have I associated only with you; I have not called myself the God of the nations of the world, but the God of Israel.”’
2 C. E. B. Cranfield, International Critical Commentary: Romans, vol. 1 (London: T&T Clark, 1979), 221-222.
3 Ibid. 222.
4 Ibid. 222.
The Truth of the Gospel 