Romans 4:16

f. Διὰ τοῦτο : because of the nature of law, and its inability to work anything but wrath. εκ πίστεως : the subject is the promise, considered in reference to the mode of its fulfilment. ἵνα κατὰ χάριν : χάρις on God's part is the correlative of πίστις on man's εἰς τὸ εἶναι βεβαίαν κ. τ. λ. This is the Divine purpose in instituting the spiritual order of grace and faith: it is the only one consistent with universalism in religion οὐ τῷ ἐκ τοῦ νόμου μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τῷ ἐκ πίστεως Ἀβραάμ : there seems to be some inexactness in expression here. The seed which is “of the Law” ought to mean the Jews, as partisans of law in distinction from faith: then the seed which is “of the faith of Abraham” would mean the Gentiles. But the promise did not belong at all to the seed which was “of the law,” i.e., to the Jews, as Abraham's natural descendants; even in them, faith was required. And the seed which is “of the faith” of Abraham is not quite appropriate to describe Gentile believers exclusively; the very point of the argument in the passage is that the faith of Abraham is reproduced in all the justified, whether Gentile or Jew. Still there seems no doubt that the persons meant to be contrasted in the two clauses are Jewish and Gentile believers (Meyer), not Jews and Christians (Fritzsche, who supplies σπέρματι before Ἀβραάμ): the difficulty is that the words do not exactly suit either meaning.

ὅς ἐστιν πατὴρ πάντων ἡμῶν. The πάντων is emphatic, and ἡμῶν expresses the consciousness of one who has seen in Abraham the spiritual ancestor of the new Christian community, living (as it does), and inheriting the promise, by faith. Opponuntur haec verba Judaeis, qui Abrahamum non nominant nisi cum adjecto אבינר pater noster (Schoettgen). When Paul speaks out of his Jewish consciousness, he shares this pride (“whose are the fathers,” Romans 9:5); when he speaks as a Christian, to whom the Church is “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16), and who can even say “ we are the circumcision,” he claims all the Jews boasted of as in reality the property of believers: it is Christians, and not Jews by birth, who can truly say “We have Abraham to our father”. The earliest indication (an indirect one) of the Jewish pride in Abraham is perhaps seen in Isaiah 63:16. That Abraham is the father of us all agrees with Scripture: Genesis 17:5 LXX. The ὅτι belongs to the quotation. If there is any parenthesis, it should only be from καθὼς to σέ. As Abraham has this character in Scripture, so he has it before God: the two things are one and the same; it is his true, historical, Divine standing, that he is father of all believers. The attraction in κατέναντι οὗ ἐπίστευσεν θεοῦ is most simply resolved into κ. θεοῦ ᾧ ἐπίστευσε : but see Winer, p. 204, 206. In characterising the God whom Abraham believed, the Apostle brings out further the correspondence between the patriarch's faith and that of Christians. He is “God who makes the dead alive and calls things that are not as though they were”. Such a reference to Isaac as we find in Hebrews 11:19 (λογισάμενος ὅτι καὶ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγείρειν δυνατὸς ὁ θεός) is not suggested here (yet see Romans 4:24), and hence it is better to take ζωοπ. τοὺς νεκροὺς of restoring vitality to Abraham, whose body was as good as dead. In the application, the things that are not are the unborn multitudes of Abraham's spiritual children. God speaks of them (hardly, issues his summons to them) as if they had a being. Faith in a God who is thus conceived comes nearer than anything else in Paul to the definition given in Hebrews 11:1. On τὰ μὴ ὄντα, see Winer, p. 608.