The event that split history into "before" and "after" and changed the world took place about thirty years before Paul wrote this letter. The event-the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus-took place in a remote corner of the extensive Roman Empire: the Province of Judea in Palestine. The letter to the Romans is a piece of exuberant and passionate thinking. This is the glorious life of the mind enlisted in the service of God. Paul takes the well-witnessed and devoutly believed fact of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and thinks through its implications. How does it happen that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, world history took a new direction, and at the same moment the life of every man, woman, and child on the planet was eternally affected? These are the questions that drive Paul's thinking. He takes logic and argument, poetry and imagination, Scripture and prayer, creation and history and experience, and weaves them into this letter that has become the premier document of Christian theology.