Romans 8:21

The conujnction ὅτι (that, or because) may be made directly dependent on the words in hope: “in hope that. ” Romans 8:21 would then state wherein the hope itself consists. But we may also take it in the sense of because, and find in Romans 8:21 the reason of the hope: “I say: with hope, because ”...This indeed would be the only possible meaning if, with Tischendorf, we adopted the reading of the Sinaït. and the Greco-Latins: διότι, seeing that. In any case it is the natural sense; for why otherwise would the apostle repeat in extenso the subject of the sentence: αὐτὴ ἡ κτίσις, the creation itself? No writer will say: nature was made subject in the hope that Nature herself would be delivered.

The pronoun itself glances at a natural objection: one would not have expected such a fact in a being like Nature. The καί, also, even, refers to the same thought: the unintelligent creation no less than men.

In the expression: the bondage of corruption, the complement may signify: “the bondage which consists of corruption.” But this complement may also be taken as the genitive of the object, subjection to corruption, as a law. This second meaning is undoubtedly better; for the idea of enslavement is thus rendered more emphatic, in opposition to the idea of liberty in what follows.

The term φθορά, corruption, putrescence, is more forcible than the word vanity, and serves to define it more exactly.

Paul does not say that nature will participate in the glory, but only in the liberty of the glory of the children of God. Liberty is one of the elements of their glorious state, and it is the only one to which nature can lay claim. It expresses the unchecked development of the free expansion of all the powers of life, beauty, and perfection, wherewith this new nature will be endowed. There is nothing to show that the apostle has in view the return to life of the individual beings composing the present system of nature. In the domains inferior to man, the individual is merely the temporary manifestation of the species. We have therefore to think here only of a new nature in its totality, differing from the old system in its constitution and laws.