Romans

Lancaster's Romans (Belief, 2015) is a pastorally accessible commentary with genuine strengths: her engagement with the history of interpretation — bringing Origen, Chrysostom, Luther, and Wesley into dialogue with Paul throughout — is consistently illuminating, and her treatment of chapters 5–8, organised around the Adam-Christ typology and the two-dominion framework, is coherent and historically well-informed. However, its revisionist conclusions on four major issues are directly contradicted by the leading critical commentaries she herself cites. On homosexuality (1:26–27), Lancaster makes two arguments: that Paul condemns only the uncontrolled passion behind same-sex acts rather than the acts themselves, and that his para phusin ("against nature") language is mere cultural convention — no more binding than his remark about long hair in 1 Cor 11:14. Neither argument, however, survives scrutiny from the leading critical commentaries. Dunn (WBC) refutes the first directly from the Greek, showing that aschemosyny katergadzomenoi"indicates clearly that not merely homosexual tendency or desire is in view, but the genital act itself," and explicitly rejects the pederasty-only hypothesis she relies on to limit Paul's scope. Cranfield (ICC) refutes the second by turning Lancaster's own comparator passage against her: physis in both Romans 1 and 1 Cor 11:14 means "the very way God has made us," with "the decisive factor" being "his biblical doctrine of creation" — so the passage she recruits to relativize Romans 1 carries the same creation-grounded theological weight, and cannot do the relativizing work she needs it to do. On divine wrath (1:18), Lancaster imports the doctrine of impassibility as a hermeneutical lens, inferring that because God is beyond irrational passion His wrath-language must mean something mild, but Cranfield argues this inference does not follow: even granting that God is free from capricious emotion, "a man who is not angry at the injustice and cruelty of apartheid cannot be a thoroughly good man; for his lack of wrath means a failure to love," and a perfectly loving God must be capable of precisely this higher, rational indignation against evil. Dunn reinforces the point from the text itself, noting that the thrice-repeated paredōken ("handed over") "puts the issue beyond dispute" as a deliberate divine act, leaving "little of the 'impassibility of God'" in the passage. On atonement (3:25), Lancaster claims Christ's death "was not desired or needed by God," but this creates an internal contradiction in her own reading: she accepts Paul's wrath-diagnosis in 1:18–3:20, yet 3:21–26 is precisely Paul's answer to that wrath, and severing the cross from it leaves the two sections of the letter logically disconnected — she accepts the diagnosis but denies that the cure is actually a cure. Jewett (Hermeneia) closes the gap directly, stating that "the logic of Paul's exposition is that the wrath of God, expounded in 1:18–3:20, is somehow averted by Jesus' death," while Cranfield adds that for God simply to pass over sins without the cross "would have been to condone evil — a cruel betrayal of sinners," treating sin as having no moral weight and forgiveness as requiring no moral seriousness. On Jewish salvation (9:1–11:36), Lancaster gestures toward a dual-covenant reading in which Jews need not come to Christ, but Dunn is unsparing: the thesis "makes no sense either of Paul's anguish in 9:1–3, nor of the line of argument now to be developed," with Israel's salvation coming "through a personal encounter with the exalted Christ," a conclusion Cranfield and Jewett both confirm. Across all four issues, Lancaster reaches a predetermined conclusion and selectively marshals scholarly support, while the most rigorous critical work on the passages consistently points the other direction.