Romans is often referred to as the best and brightest example of Paul's thinking and one of the most important scriptural books in the Christian Scriptures. It is also one of the most often misunderstood or misconstrued books in the scriptures, which people have attempted to use as the chief source of "proof texts" for whatever their theological agenda is.
Our goal at Context is to try to understand Romans as it actually is... not what we want it to say or what we think it should say... just what it actually says. Those of us who grew up around church must work extra hard to make sure that we don't just allow ourselves to go on auto-pilot assuming we know what he is saying before hand. I'm sure that if we do the hard work of study and serious analysis that we will be pleasantly surprised by what we find!
None of the resources that I post here are "authoritative" - they merely help us enter more fully into the conversation about what Paul is saying in Romans. The MOST important thing you can do is to read and re-read and re-read again the book of Romans so that you are completely immersed in Paul's thought. The second most important thing you can do is immerse yourself in the books of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms, and other OT books. You will find Paul's thinking getting clearer by doing this.
That being said, here are some links:
This is a general introduction with some framing comments about the book:
http://bible.org/seriespage/introduction-book-romans
Here is an article by NT Wright about Romans:
http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Paul_Caesar_Romans.htm
Here is a page with a bunch of articles by NT Wright:
Happy Studying!!
Feel free to post your reactions, questions, comments about Romans...
