Hope for the Wrong Thing
Intro I must begin tonight with a confession - I’m afraid of the book of Romans. It’s not that I dislike St. Paul or anything like that, it’s just that somewhere along the way during my theological education I got the impression that the book of Romans makes Protestants go crazy. I am and always have been, an evangelical, so my first introduction to this book was through something called the “Romans Road” - a proselytizing tool that somebody tried and failed to teach me at various points in my youth. To be fair, as a simple bible Christian, I was frankly a little concerned by the notion that the whole gospel could be reduced to a string of verses from one book of the Bible, so I didn’t try too hard to figure out what they were talking about. When I got to Providence, I discovered more evidence that my distrust of Romans was well founded. As every good evangelical does, I entered my reactionary catholic phase, and was deeply suspicious of all things “Protestant,” so imagine my d