Lenten Reflection 1b: Romans 10.8b-13

Romans 10:8b-13
10:8b "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
10:9 because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
10:10 For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.
10:11 The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame."
10:12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.
10:13 For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

Comment
Jacob Taubes makes much of the connection between Paul and Moses: the deepest connection concerns their mutual willingness to be “blotted out” or “accursed,” with respect to God, for the sake of the people of Israel (Moses in order that God not destroy them after the golden calf incident, Paul in order that God would save more than a remnant). Here is another example of a Pauline repetition of Moses. Paul reads Deut 30 and inserts “faith” where Moses says “commandment,” turning Moses’ assurance to Israel of the closeness of the law into the Gentile’s immanent potential for salvation. (It is only a hermeneutical depravity that would read v.9 as an isolatable formula for salvation.) The demands of the law are not as much mitigated as displaced. The fact that, as Paul says earlier in the chapter, “Christ is the telos of the law,” should not be read only as cessation, but also as a fulfillment. Agamben takes the ambiguity of telos as the key to the Pauline reading of the law; as a kind of fulfillment in cessation.

The political significance of confession should also not be missed. Paul rereads Jewish law in light of its messianic transformation and, in this same gesture, undermines Roman law. To name as sovereign anyone other than Caesar would be treasonous; especially a Jewish peasant whom this same empire had executed. (Jesus would, in this way, fulfill the political function of the empty signifier as Laclau understands it: as that signifier which “empties itself” [cf. Phil 2.7] of content, or dies, in order that disparate demands and desires cohere – i.e. become universal – under a particular name.) In the text of Deuteronomy that Paul is glossing, the exhortation to keep the law turns quickly to the prohibition of idolatry: “But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish”. Turning to law is also a turning away from idolatry – an idolatry exemplified in the religious practices of the Canaanites. The turning to faith carries over this prohibition of idolatry – exemplified in the theologico-political practices of the Romans.