Romans 10:8–13
On this First Sunday in Lent, we are met with an ancient formula found in Romans 10: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”
Of course, this passage is about the entire promise of the gospel: resurrection, salvation, abundant life in community with God and one another. The promise of Jesus is a metaphysical promise of abundance in the midst of the ambiguities of existence.*
But if we consider abolition as a sign of resurrection, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, then the promise here is meaningful in our work toward building an abolitionist reality. I am particularly struck by the doubled motion of “believe” and “confess” in this formula in Romans. If we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, then we also confess that he is Lord. If we believe in the power of God to accomplish resurrection, then we also must confess — in the public sphere as well as in private devotion — Jesus’ victory over the powers of sin and death, which include the death-dealing systems of incarceration and punishment. Our belief in Jesus’ victory over death may justify us but, according to this passage, it is our confession that saves. Salvation is tied to the articulation of Jesus’ lordship, of God’s power to redeem and save us from the powers and systems of oppression in our world, so that, as Paul concludes, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” And in our current context, abolition is one such concrete articulation of what it means that Jesus is Lord. Abolition declares that Jesus’ victory over death is real, that it has concrete consequences for our world today as well as the world to come, and that the nature of Jesus’ lordship promises the transformation of our communities and political systems from systems that bring death to those that give life. Abolition gives us a way of describing in practical and material terms one consequence of saying Jesus is Lord, and a way of expressing that fundamental theological reality in terms that make explicit its consequences which challenge us and our presuppositions about how the world works.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
*This is what 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich called the “triumphant union of unambiguous life” — his thought on existentialism has profoundly affected my own thinking, although I cite him here with hesitation because of the allegations of sexual harassment against him which came out after his death.