HUMANITY’S SALVIFIC DILEMMAS: DISENTANGLING THE PLIGHT IN ROMANS

In this dissertation, I examine humanity’s plight in Romans. If the gospel is “God’s saving power for everyone who believes” (1:17), from whom or what does it save? While many scholars conclude that Paul presents a consistent meta-narrative of the problem, I argue that Romans preserves four differing salvific dilemmas that do not fit neatly together in the letter’s ideological landscape. Adopting a structuralist description of Paul’s cultural matrix, I advance this thesis on two levels of analys