CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN ROMANS AND THE GOSPELS

 Jim Goad has provided us with two pairs of Scripture which he believes contradict each other. The first pair consists of Romans 10:13 vs. Luke 12:10.

“Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13) This is actually a direct quote from Joel 2:32 in which the original reference to God has been applied to Jesus Christ instead.

“Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” (Luke 12:10)

I will forgive you if you are like me and had to ponder those two passages for some time in an attempt to figure out where the contradiction lies. Then I went back to Goad's article on the internet for clarification. He posits a hypothetical situation in which a person one day makes some derogatory remark concerning the Holy Spirit and then immediately afterwards calls on Jesus to save him. Goad states, “These two verses can't be simultaneously true. They cancel out one another.”

As we shall see below, his pictured situation is not only hypothetical, but so unlikely as to be virtually impossible to imagine.

The first thing to point out is that Jesus' saying in Luke is paralleled in both Matthew 12:31-32 and Mark 3:28-30. Both of these other Gospel accounts have preserved the original setting for Jesus' comments while Luke, as he often does, has grouped those sayings together topically instead of chronologically. Once one looks at the immediate context of the words in Matthew and Mark, one thing is immediately clarified. These words are pronounced against the scribes (Mark) and Pharisees (Matthew) after Jesus had cast out demons.

As Soards says, “Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is attributing the genuine work of the Spirit to the forces of evil rather than to God.” It is not just some casual offhand remark made out of the clear blue or the denial that a true miracle has occurred at all. It refers to someone being confronted by an obviously genuine and beneficial miraculous event and then attributing it to the forces of evil rather than to God. For someone who replies in such a way, their heart is so hardened against the truth that there is nothing further God can do to convince them and so they remain unforgiven.

I could quote numerous commentators to shed more light on this issue, but I think that Wahrisch and Brown have done a great job in summarizing the situation, and so I will suffice by quoting them at length:

“This statement has been the subject of much questioning. Obviously the reference here is not to the naming of the Holy Spirit in a blasphemous utterance, for in Matt. 12:32 even blasphemy against the Son of man can be forgiven. Among the many attempts at exegesis, the most convincing is the suggestion that the man who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit is he who has recognized that God is working through the Holy Spirit in the actions of Jesus, and who quite consciously 'misrepresents faith in God as faith in the devil. This saying is an extremely serious warning against the demonic and scarcely conceivable potential in man: To declare war on God. This is not done in weakness and doubt, but by one who has been overcome by the Holy Spirit and who knows very well on whom he is declaring war' (E. Schweizer). This is the blasphemer who does it deliberately, after encounter with the God of grace, as the context shows.'Therefore he who blasphemes the Spirit is no longer speaking against a God who is distant, about whom he entertains mere foolish thoughts, but against the one who makes evident to him his gracious work and confirms it with his manifest, divine seal. He is a man who ought to give thanks, not to blaspheme' (A. Schlatter).”

“Lane goes on to comment: 'This is the danger to which the scribes exposed themselves when they attributed to the agency of Satan the redemption brought by Jesus. The expulsion of demons was a sign of the intrusion of the Kingdom of God. Yet the scribal accusations against Jesus amount to a denial of the power and greatness of the Spirit of God. By assigning the action of Jesus to a demonic origin the scribes betray a perversion of spirit which, in defiance against the Holy Spirit denotes the conscious and deliberate rejection of the saving power and grace of God released through Jesus' word and act.' Thus blasphemy here is much more serious than the taking of the divine name in vain which a believer may have done before coming to repentance and faith. It may be said to those who have been tormented by fear that they have committed the unforgivable sin that their concern is itself a sign that they have not committed the sin envisaged in Jesus' teaching here.”

The second pair of supposed contradictions consists of Romans 5:12 and John 8:51.

“Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” (Romans 5:12)

“Truly, truly, I say to you, if any one keeps my word, he will never see death.” (John 8:51)

I am surprised that Jim Goad isn't too embarrassed to offer this “contradiction” since the resolution is painfully obvious, but here are some random comments from scholars that should hopefully clear up any misconceptions others may have on the issue:

Vine explains that nekros ('death') may denote eight different concepts in the NT. The most important ones are (a) the death of the body and (b) the actual spiritual condition of the unsaved. It is only by (purposely?) confusing these two different meanings that one can arrive at this contradiction.

In contrast to Romans, “Jesus, however, speaks of death as the final and irrevocable separation from God.” (Ellis) Some parallels to John 8:51-52 are found in John 3:16; 5:24.

The idiom 'taste death' “is used elsewhere in the NT for physical death, and that is how 'the Jews' misunderstood it here [as did Goad]; but Jesus is referring to spiritual death.” (Brown)

“The Jews completely missed perceiving this new example of double-thinking in John, which here employed the image of death. Death can be physical and/or eternal. But the one who is obedient to Jesus, even though that one may die physically, will live eternally (cf. 11:25).” (Borchert)

“Physical death is a primary reality for all human beings, but in Jesus God's people have passed 'from death to life' and thereby 'will never die' (Jn 8:51; 11:26). All this is possible only because Jesus is 'the resurrection and the life' (Jn 11:25). Physical death for the believer is a transition to eternal life.” (Osborne)

“In the NT the state of death is no longer a final state for man. It has to be viewed in the light of the resurrection of Jesus.” (Coenen)

Finally, Murray explains that “the possession of eternal life does not cancel out physical death. It is opposed to a spiritual state, not to a physical event. The inference that we draw from all this is that death which is the result of sin is more than bodily death...It seems better to understand death as something that involves the whole man. Man does not die as a body. He dies as a man in the totality of his being. He dies a spiritual and physical being. And the Bible does not put a sharp line of demarcation between the two aspects...Sometimes the New Testament emphasizes the serious consequences of sin by referring to 'the second death' (Jude 12; Rev. ii 11, etc.). This is a rabbinic expression which signifies eternal perdition.”