From Genesis to Romans: The Human Vocation

In N.T. Wright’s new book, Into The Heart of Romans, he locates the fundamental force of Paul’s letter within Paul’s understanding of the Genesis story. As he notes,

“… God called Abraham to undo the sin of Adam.”

How do we understand this sin and solution?
“God called Abraham to be fruitful and multiply and look after Gods garden (creation).”

In contrast,
“Abraham and Sarah are promised that God will make them fruitful (despite their old age) and give them a land (despite their presently being wandering nomads).”

What informs the gap inbetween the original vocation and Gods covenental purposes for a vocation gone wrong? We see this in the exile from the garden into the wilderness, the very thing that marks the wandering nomad. This becomes a movement back into a renewed garden space. Subsequently, we encounter the parallel story in Genesis 6 that finds the “be fruitful and multiply” command playing off of the progression of Cains murder and Lamechs successive murders, setting in play a pattern of retribution that then fills the earth. When we get to Genesis 6, this is joined with the outcome of the spiritual beings being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth with evil, resulting in a decreation account and the emergence of Noah as a new Adam set within a covenant- as Wright puts it, “God so loved his world that HE determined to put it right.”

In covenantal terms, “God always intended to work through human beings” according to the Jewish expectation of a promise that “included the whole world” and which “extended to include all the nations.”

“Paul believed… that all these promises had come true in Israel’s Messiah… the very heart of the Gospel. Jesus is thus the rightful kyrios, “lord”, of the whole world… It didn’t need translating into non-Jewish terms to be relevant- uncomfortably relevant of course!- to the world which already had other “lords”, Caesar in particular.”