The Triumph of God's Mercy
A contrast of Paul and Seneca on the Nature of Mercy
Before John Barclay wrote his Paul and the Gift, he beta-tested parts of it in various academic papers. I’ll never forget his plenary paper on "Two Versions of Grace: Romans 9-11 and the Wisdom of Solomon" delivered at the British New Testament Society conference in Aberdeen in 2009. I was quite taken back by the paper because this was a time when the New Perspective on Paul was still in its ascendency and yet Barclay’s paper sounded like a tract from Banner of Truth.
In fact, a quote from that presentation that has stuck in my head:
"The purposes of God are reducible to his will, a will that initially appears equally set to harden or to save, but turns out on closer inspection, and in the end, to harden only in order to save, to hate only in order to love, and to consign all to disobedience only in order to have mercy on all. What has twisted Paul's theology into this strange shape is his understanding of a "gift" that has redefined the meanings of charis and eleos and defies explanation or rationale. That gift is the Christ-event which reconciled the world "while we were enemies" (Rom 5:6-10) and justified the ungodly (4:4-6)"
Barclay here is talking about “mercy” in Romans 9-11.
Initially, Paul makes God’s mercy sound arbitrary and even capricious, with his quotation of Exod 33:19 in Rom 9:15: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
However, there is a big climax in Romans 11, where Paul concludes his discourse about unbelieving Jews, by saying:
30 Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, 31 so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. 32 For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.
In other words, the chief end of God’s electing purposes, for Israel and for Gentiles, is that God may be merciful to all. What is more, this “mercy” provides the indicative to the imperatives that follow in Rom 12:1-2!
Why is this mercy so magnificent?
Well, it appears so magnificent when you contrast Paul’s account of divine mercy with how the Roman philosopher Seneca conceived of the nature and limits of mercy.