Paul himself did not divide his letter into parts.
The division is for our convenience and reflects our interests. One of our
interests is Paul’s account of salvation history. We find that developed in
Paul returned to salvation history in chapters 9-11. This was because he was forced to recognize that the Jews as a group had not understood the great change that had taken place. They were still seeking to attain righteousness by obedience to the law. Paul was impelled to understand how God’s own people could have been left out of the new development in salvation history.
Meanwhile, however, Paul must yet again respond to the charge that his formulation of the gospel opened the door to sin and even encouraged it. He had replied to this charge briefly before (3:8), somewhat dismissively. In chapters 6-8 he responded in depth. He took the occasion of these challenges to reflect on the two ways in which salvation was sought: through obedience to the law and through participation in Jesus’ faithfulness. In this life of faithfulness the transforming power was the Spirit; so we have described it as “life in the Spirit.” Paul divided the discussion into three parts, which are accurately reflected by the chapter divisions. Chapter 6 describes how participation in the death of Jesus brings freedom from the power of sin to those who have been justified. Chapter 7 explains how the effort to attain righteousness through the law backfires. And chapter 8 describes life in the Spirit and its ultimate consummation.
The end of chapter 5 leads into the
next problem, which actually came up before (3:8). If the increase in sin
resulted in the even greater increase in grace (
Did this mean that those who participated in Jesus’ faithfulness found that sin had actually been eradicated from their lives? Paul knew that was not their experience. Having died with Christ in baptism was reason to refuse bondage to sin. It did not make freedom from sin automatic. This is clear from verse 11, where Paul wrote that the baptized must “consider” themselves dead to sin. It is even clearer from the exhortations that follow in verses 12 and 13, where they were urged not to let sin have dominion.
Given Paul’s awareness that those who participated in Jesus’ faithfulness must constantly struggle against sin, interpreters have often understood his doctrine of baptism in continuity with the forensic view of justification. In this view, what changed with baptism was the self-understanding of the baptized. Believing that they were justified, they understood their new situation as one in which the old struggle to justify themselves had ended. Paul wrote in verse 14, “sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (NRSV). Baptism was then understood as the symbolic entry into this new form of life.
This may, indeed, be the best way
to appropriate this passage today, but it does not capture Paul’s own thinking.
The rhetoric of justification by faith is absent here. Instead, Paul’s language
implies that baptism itself effected a change. It did not simply symbolize
dying with Jesus but actually united the baptized with Jesus in his death. In
baptism the old self was crucified with him (6:6). Baptism was “into Christ
Jesus” (6:3), and the new life that followed from baptism was “in Christ Jesus”
(
That this is more than symbolic is shown by the discussion of resurrection, which became central here for the first time since the introduction. If Paul’s meaning were adequately grasped in the forensic interpretation, the logic of belief in future resurrection would follow from the assurance that God had justified all those who participated in Jesus’ faithfulness. Jesus’ resurrection might serve as a demonstration of God’s power over death, which would assure them that a loving God would give them new life as well.
Paul did not take this route. Instead, he wrote in verse 5, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (NRSV). It was unity with Christ that assured the faithful of resurrection, not simply that God’s love had been revealed to them. Meanwhile, although participation in his resurrection remained future, those who were baptized into Christ Jesus were already able to “walk in new life” (6:4).
For Paul, therefore, believers were united with Christ, participating in his faithfulness, his righteousness, his burial, and his death. They confidently expected to participate in his resurrection as well. This unity had broken the bondage sin had exercised over them. God justified them by viewing them in terms of this unity and participation, rather than in terms of the continuing power of sin in their lives.
Being free of this bondage, however, did not ensure that the faithful would not sin. It meant instead that they did not have to sin. Whereas, apart from this participation in Jesus’ faithfulness, which reached its climax in his crucifixion, they were simply bound to the old order in which sin reigned, now they had the freedom to live in Christ. Old habits died hard, though, and the baptized were in constant danger of falling back into bondage to sin.
To understand Paul it is important to see the difference between his view of the power of sin in human life and the later ideas of human sinfulness. This has been developed into a notion of an irrevocable, incorrigible, corrupt and depraved “human nature,” a concept absent from Paul’s letters. For Paul, sin is a power that exploits the weakness of what Christians later came to call human nature, just as it exploits the weakness of the law. That does not make human nature itself “sinful,” any more than it makes the law “sinful.” Paul accents the freedom either to continue in the old order or to live into or out of the new life that the transformation that participation in Jesus’ faithfulness effects. Of course, there remains the constant danger of falling back into bondage to sin.
Paul’s phrases “the body of sin”
(6:6, NRSV), “this body of death” (
What can we make of Paul’s talk of unity with Christ, his “Christ mysticism,” to use Albert Schweitzer’s term? Is this a feature of his thought that is wholly alien to us? It has proved alien to most of the church’s theologians. In much of Christian history, even among the theologians most committed to Paul, it has been ignored or denied. This is unfortunate. Of course, it is not possible to reenter Paul’s world of thought and experience in any full or exact way. Nevertheless, whereas the understanding of Paul in terms of the forensic doctrine of justification has been deeply illuminating of Christian life and has given valuable guidance to the church, the exhaustive translation of Paul’s many-sided interpretation of the faithful’s relation to Christ in these terms has also impoverished the church.
Paul’s rhetoric here, and often, was that of participation and indwelling. The faithful were “in Christ” and Christ and the Spirit were “in” them. The dominant conceptuality of the Western tradition has denied that one entity can be “in” another. Any serious claim of indwelling is taken as “mysticism” and viewed with suspicion. Those shaped by the dominant, substantialist, conceptuality are compelled to translate all this rhetoric into a language that reflects the mutual externality of all things. The ideal of forensic justification aided and encouraged the translation of the language of mutual internal relations into a language of external relations. This has not led to total error. For Paul, because of believers’ participation in the faithfulness and righteousness of Christ Jesus, God viewed them in terms of that righteousness, rather than in terms of the continuing power of sin in their lives. The idea of forensic justification is genuinely Pauline and, therefore, in Protestant circles, it has served as a valuable hermeneutical key. But when all the other genuinely Pauline ideas are reduced to this one, Paul’s thought is greatly impoverished. Roman Catholic tradition, especially its sacramental theology, on the other hand, is more open to the real indwelling of Jesus Christ and the Spirit.
The dominant philosophical tradition has a substantialist view of reality. According to this view, relations are external to substances. Substances are what they are in themselves and are related to other substances only spatio-temporally. It is our belief that this fails to express the real nature and importance of relationships, particularly in actual human experience. Process philosophy, especially as Alfred North Whitehead developed it, gives primacy to relations. It shows that real entities do “indwell” or “participate in” one another. The real entities in question are “occasions of experience.” A present human experience includes past occasions within itself, selectively, but genuinely, as well as events in the environment. Most, but not all, of these relations are unconscious. Even events that are in the remote past play some role in the constitution of present events.
This means that we are what we are and who we are largely by virtue of our relations to others. A husband and wife become changed beings as each is shaped and reshaped in this relationship. The communities in which we live largely determine how we think, and even how we feel. This is why an account of salvation history in terms of peoples makes sense. On the other hand, the existential reading of Paul is not false. We are individual persons who make our own decisions as to how to respond to God’s grace.
For Whitehead, this relational thinking extends to theology. God is quite literally in creatures as a contributor to each moment of their experience. Creatures become part of the life of God through God’s full knowing of them. God is in creatures, and creatures are in God.
From the point of view of those caught up in substance thinking, this whole vision of reality may be called “mystical.” But it is intended as an account of the most ordinary human experience, as well as of the world of scientific objects. The evidence is that the latter, too, are profoundly interrelated.
Although we understand this mutual participation to characterize the world in its everydayness, it does open the way to understanding what is more commonly called “mystical.” If God is in fact present in everything, then the occasional vivid consciousness of God’s presence is understandable. If past events participate in constituting the present, then some may be understood to play particularly important roles and even to be consciously felt.
For Paul, the baptized profoundly internalized Jesus’ life of faithfulness, which for Paul is best seen in his crucifixion, and his resurrection. These events of the past informed their present experience. Being informed by these events was to be conformed in some measure to them, and this introduced new possibilities of experience and action. Paul called others into this relationship, and he found that they were changed by it. For him, baptism was the key way of entering this relationship and the community of those who were shaped by it.
No doubt some of Paul’s intention escapes this interpretation as well, but it comes much closer to explaining what he meant in passages such as the one before us now than does the forensic one. Past events participate in constituting present experience, and present decisions and actions can partly determine which sets of past events will chiefly shape the future. We believe that the church, whose vocation is to keep the faithfulness of Jesus effective in its life, can have greater vitality when it appreciates the realism of Paul’s sense of participation and indwelling.
We can understand and appreciate Paul’s vision of dying with Christ in baptism into Christ as well as his understanding of the new form of life in Christ that resulted when this relationship to Christ was actually established. But today baptism rarely has the effects that Paul saw in his day. The fact that the rite is performed does not ensure that those who are baptized participate in Christ’s death or that they enter into a new life. There is no magical relationship between the rite and the transformation of which Paul spoke. Many of the baptized—with pain we must say most—still live in bondage to sin and law as Paul described that bondage.
This is not just a recent phenomenon. As we read church history we find that the sins of Christians have not been fewer or less serious than the sins of others. Indeed, adherence to Christianity seems often to have intensified pride and justified cruelty more than it brought freedom from these sins. Probably the worst forms of legalism in human history have been developed and insisted upon by Christians. Too often appeal is made to Paul in their support!
Today many who have been baptized
are caught up in the idolatry of wealth. Nations that have historically been
Christian have led in organizing the world for the sake of increasing the
wealth of the wealthy. In the
We have argued that Paul’s vision of participation and indwelling makes sense. Why, then, is it so ineffective? Of course, even in Paul’s day it was not wholly effective. He was constantly exhorting the baptized to make it more so. But the view that baptism had this effect made considerable sense then. Today it rings hollow. What has changed?
In Paul’s day, typically, those who were baptized found in the church their basic community. This community centered its life on its relation to Jesus Christ. As a result, life in the community was drastically separated from life outside it. Often with good reason, Paul saw the life outside the community as still shaped by the sin introduced into the world in “Adam.” He saw that the power of sin was heightened by the very efforts to counter it through law. To live in that world was to be in bondage to sin. To be a part of the church community, however, was to be reshaped by the effectiveness in that community of the particular past events around which it organized its life, which collectively we may call the Christ event. When individual life conformed to the Christ event, it was no longer shaped primarily by the patterns of sin and law that dominated the larger society. This change was real and profound.
Even today many witness to such a change. When a youth who has been conformed to the ethos of a street gang is converted to Christianity and joins a Christian community, and when this community becomes the basic context of his new life and encourages his conformation to Jesus’ faithfulness, he may witness to a profoundly new life—one that is no longer conformed to “this world” and in bondage to sin. He can be free from bondage to sin, but that does not mean that habits developed during his gang years suddenly cease to operate. He needs constant reminders of the importance of strengthening his participation in Christ and reordering all his life in conformation to Christ. Paul’s language in this passage may be understandable to such a convert.
As in Paul’s day, so also now, many factors affect conformation to Christ. Interpretation is always involved. The community that seeks this conformation may also be highly patriarchal, homophobic, legalistic, or authoritarian. We do not want to imply purity or perfection just because there is some real conformation to Christ.
For most baptized Christians today, however, there is little chance of extensive or intensive conformation to Christ. They do not make the church their primary community. Most churches do not even provide much opportunity to do so. The church is one of many groups or institutions to which most of the baptized belong. In some cases, it does provide the primary identity of the baptized person without attempting to provide the only one. Some attempt is made to order the other influences in one’s life into a whole of which conformation to Christ provides the center. In those cases, something of Paul’s meaning may be understood. We find this preferable to an enclosed and self-contained Christian community of the kind found in Paul’s time and in some sects today. Nevertheless, the intensity of conformation is likely to be a good deal less.
For most of the baptized today, in any case, the church is but one of several influential contexts by which they are shaped. The different demands and influences of these contexts may be left unintegrated. If they are integrated, in most instances the distinctively Christian influence is not the center. Baptism is then, at most, an expression of exposure to the influence of Christ. Even this is significant, but it does not have the character Paul realistically ascribed to baptism in the early church. It does not free one from bondage to sin and law.
Romans 6:1-14 was Paul’s response to the question, “Should we continue in the sphere of sin that grace may increase?” The answer was that participation in the new order of grace, which means participation in Christ, was inherently in contradiction to continued participation in the old order in which sin ruled. The more fully one participated in the new order, the less one would come under the power of sin.
In the first thirteen verses, Paul did not directly address the role of law. But in verse 14 he did: “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (NRSV). Law belonged with the old order from whose bondage the baptized were freed through their unity with Christ. In a world under the bondage of sin, law offered an account of how to avoid acts that reflected bondage to the power of sin. But Paul had already argued that in fact law did not overcome this bondage. Instead, it heightened it. In chapter 7 Paul spelled out his profound understanding of this fact. The new life into which the baptized entered through union with Christ was one that was “not under law.” They could not be free from bondage to sin unless they were also free from the law.
Paul thus raised explicitly the
issue that most upset his opponents. They believed that the only alternative to
sin was righteous living and that righteous living was living according to a
pattern established and revealed by God. For most of them this meant the Jewish
law, but others no doubt followed moral principles developed in the Gentile
world. The issue was the same. Paul set both law and moral principles aside.
From the point of view of many people then, and from the point of view of many
people today, both in and out of the church, to set moral principles or laws
aside is to invite immorality. Paul began this new passage by addressing this
issue directly: “Should we sin because we are not under sin but under grace” (
Paul’s need to defend his rejection of the law as the means to righteousness and freedom from sin arose in a specific social and historical situation. It was easy to draw false, and absurd, conclusions from his views about the increase of grace to meet the increase in sin and from his view that those who were baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection were no longer under the law. In Romans, Paul used an imaginary dialogue or debate partner, but the inferences and objections to which Paul responded in each case were not merely hypothetical. They represented the voice of believers and non-believers alike who opposed the kind of law-free mission to Gentiles for which Paul had become the leading advocate and representative.
This debate was not only with Jews
who rejected Jesus but also with Jews who believed in him but opposed his
law-free gospel (
All three positions had in common the conviction that God was at work in the world through Israel’s prophets—including missionaries of the gospel about Jesus Christ and even Jesus himself—to bring the Jews first and then the Gentiles into one people who had faith in, and lived to, the living God. All sides of the debate agreed that faith in, and living to, God is incompatible with a life of sin. At issue is whether the life of faithfulness to the living God is to be governed by law or by the Spirit. Paul’s views seemed to the others to entail the acceptance of unrepentant Gentile sinners and the encouragement of Jewish believers to live like unrepentant Gentile sinners without the benefit of the law. They thought that would lead to the toleration of all manner of vices and wickedness. Paul had to defend himself against these legitimate concerns.
Despite the concreteness of the issue in a historical situation remote from our own, the argument is by no means time-bound. The issue of legalism has been part of the concern of the church throughout its history. Opposition to Paul’s teaching is as strong now as ever before.
In the church, the opposition is usually not direct. Instead, it takes the form of reinterpreting Paul so as to take the sting out of his radical views. For example, Christians may suppose that Paul had in mind only the Jewish law and especially the requirement of circumcision. Gentile men were generally very reluctant to submit themselves to this operation. Accordingly, these Christians argue, Paul rightly thought it should not be required. Some suppose that Paul also saw that many other Jewish laws lacked ethical content and could be left aside. They think that Paul’s critique of the law applied only to these. If these interpreters of Paul are correct, then his later followers are free to develop codes of ethics within the church and to insist on obedience to them.
Other Christians grant that Paul was against legalism in general. They then proceed to define legalism narrowly. Some argue that legalism is the view that obedience to moral rules will save us, and they may project this view on Jews. Since they agree with Paul that no one is saved by good deeds alone, they accept his argument against the law as an argument against legalism defined in this way. This, too, leaves them free to develop and propose systems of law that should govern Christian life.
Others define legalism in terms of undue rigidity in the understanding of moral rules. What we need, they think, are broad principles whose application must be flexibly related to changing circumstances. Paul is then supposed to have understood by the law a set of rigid rules inflexibly applied in inappropriate contexts. They agree that this is damaging, and they hold that the Christian is free from such a legal system. Again, one can agree to reject this kind of rigidity but still formulate a set of principles that all Christians should accept.
Still others assume that the problem with legalism is that it shows no mercy. Those who violate the rules are condemned. Mitigating circumstances are ignored. The confession of penitents is met by indifference. They must pay the price regardless. Such hardheartedness, these commentators suppose, Paul rightly opposes. God is merciful, and it behooves us also to be merciful. If this were Paul’s position, then one could accept his views and still insist on an ethical system that included emphases on forgiveness and mercy.
The term “legalism” is not to be found in Paul, and Christians are free to define it as they please. It is misleading, though, to think that what Paul opposed was limited to “legalism” in any of these senses. When Paul spoke of how the law worked, he did not use examples of its distortion. He made no distinction between moral and other laws. He treated the law in general as rightly identifying good and bad acts. He did not accuse his opponents of supposing that the law by itself saved. He did not talk about the consequences of excessive rigidity in the application of law or the need to temper it with mercy.
Paul thought that believers were free from the law, including the best forms and uses of the law, in general and overall, not just from distortions that many defenders of the binding character of law also opposed. The “legalism” Paul opposed was the acceptance or formulation of principles and rules of conduct as binding upon believers. Acceptance of any such law was a form of bondage. It was this radical rejection of the life of obedience to principles, rules, or laws that Paul had to defend in his day and that those who agree with him have to defend in our day.
While it is important to understand that Paul’s critique of obedience to law was much more fundamental than many interpreters have supposed, it is also important to recognize that, for him, conformation to law was not always legalistic. Paul encouraged Jewish believers in Jesus to conform to the law in many contexts for practical purposes. In chapter 14 Paul criticized those who expressed their freedom from the law in ways that caused others to stumble. To be free from the law did not mean that there was some merit in violating the law!
Furthermore, laws are essential for social life. Some establish arbitrary, but extremely important, rules, such as driving on the right or left side of the road. Some establish penalties for acts that the society rightly wishes to discourage. In 13:1-7 Paul made strong statements in support of obedience to governmental authorities. In most cases, he believed, faithfulness to God led directly to avoiding the actions prohibited by law, but even when it did not, the faithful would usually conform for the sake of social order and to avoid trouble. In fact they would also conform to social prejudices even when they did not share them.
This general view is relevant today as well. Even if Christians see nothing morally significant in some of the social practices of the culture in which they live, they normally conform to them. For example, a Christian today may suppose that there is nothing inappropriate or undesirable about a woman nursing her child in public and yet avoid the practice where society frowns on it or it embarrasses others. Of course, there are exceptions. Some Christians may judge that participation in war, mandated by society, is incompatible with faithfulness to Christ, and they may refuse to conform to the relevant laws.
We believe, also, that if a group of people decides to express its strong sense of community by adopting particular customs, following these customs rigorously is not legalism. For example, they may decide to pray for one another at an agreed upon time each day and to greet each other in a distinctive way. Obedience to law in this sense is a way of expressing one’s deepest sense of belonging. No doubt this is the experience and understanding of many Jews and many Amish, to take two examples. Following agreed upon rules for reasons such as these is not what Paul meant by bondage to law, and it does not have the negative consequences he described. On the other hand, when the people who have joyfully adopted these practices enforce them with their children, the children’s experience of the rules is likely to be, at least in part, legalistic.
Paul had dealt with the law earlier
in the letter, giving some explanation of why the life of the faithful was free
from bondage to law. At three other points in this letter Paul took three
approaches in his discussion of this topic. In
The first argument (
Today there are diverse corporate
structures of evil. Paul would want to know why all such structures are corrupt
and corrupting, at least in part. Does that not point to a deeper level of sin?
People today might argue that there are several alternatives to participating
in those corporate structures and thus being under the sway of sin. Paul knew
only one. For him it was the Christ event and no other that provided the
alternative. This alternative is the faithfulness to God seen in Jesus, which
here Paul describes as a life of being “enslaved to God” (
In this passage, Paul described the
alternatives as slavery to sin and slavery to righteousness (
Since living under grace rather than law meant, for Paul, conforming to Jesus Christ rather than to the world, then certainly it was not a license to commit particular sins. Those who were faithful through participation in Jesus’ faithfulness might commit such sins because of habits and desires that had not yet been conformed to Jesus Christ. The solution, however, was further conformation to Jesus Christ, not the reinstitution of the law.
Paul’s use here of the rhetoric of slavery seems contrary to the claims of freedom for the life of believers, but Paul did not think so. Slavery to Jesus Christ was perfect freedom. For Paul, freedom was never absolute. It was always relative—that is, relational. Everyone served a “master” of one kind or another—on the one side, sin, passions, desires, and the law; on the other side, God, Jesus Christ, “things of the Spirit,” and righteousness. In Paul’s social world, some were happy and proud to be slaves to wealthy and powerful masters. Paul described himself as a “slave of Christ Jesus” (1:1). That self-identification sent the message that he was not, and would not be, a slave of anyone else—not the Emperor, not his opponents, and certainly not sin.
That, however, was not the issue in Paul’s mind. His effort was to shift the attention of his critics from the question of particular sins to the deeper question of to whom, or to what, one belonged. If one belonged to Jesus Christ—or in the terminology of this passage, “to righteousness,” or “to God”—then one’s life would be righteous. Although Paul did not explicitly deal here with the role of law, the implication is that there would be no need for the law. In subsequent passages, Paul argued not only that the law was not needed, but also that being subject to law was harmful.
Today Christians are not likely to use the same language as Paul, but his point remains fundamental. The central question is that of basic commitment, basic orientation, basic passion, basic belonging. Some people have no such organizing center. Their way of living will reflect the patterns of society around them. If they are fortunate in their companions, this orientation may not involve them in serious sins. It does open them to such sins, though, and it certainly provides no defense against involvement in the general corruption of society.
Others have a definite organizing center. The question, then, is the nature and the quality of that center. For some it has been loyalty to their nation. Many have been willing to give their lives for the nation. This national loyalty frees them from the emptiness and drift of the first type of life described above. It evokes heroism and self-sacrifice. It can lead to close relations with others who share the same commitment. But does it free them from sin? It is patently obvious that it does not. It is itself a form of idolatry that distorts other values. It divides the world into “us” and “them.” It often supports war, in which devotees are called to kill other equally committed and virtuous nationalists who idolize other nations.
For many today the organizing center is success in the market place. This market orientation binds one to the values of the market, which, in turn, lead to greater and greater ruthlessness in the quest for success. It also may lead to decisions to break public laws if it is profitable. Some may justify all this from the theory that the acquisitive efforts of individuals expand the market and ultimately benefit society as a whole. However, if the goal of social benefit is truly the organizing center, then a quite different discussion is in order. For those whose organizing center is market success, the appeal to social benefit is often a rationalization, so that the actual effects on society are not really important to them.
For some, the organizing center is indeed the desire to benefit humankind or even the whole Earth, including, and especially, its human inhabitants. It is this center that we find best to express service to God today. People may seek to benefit the Earth in diverse ways, often complementary, but sometimes conflicting. When conflicts arise, there are still bases for discussion and the possibility of finding agreement. People with such inclusive goals have just as many personality problems as those who are more obviously idolatrous. Often their egos get in the way of effective service of the Earth. They are far from perfect, but they have a perspective from which to resist the dominant social forces and values and to identify better ones.
What, now, of the role of ethical principles or law in persons such as these? Almost everyone grows up with some moral teaching. Is it effective with such people in countering the massive power of evil in our world? Does it help those committed to saving the Earth to fulfill their task? How?
Among the drifters, such moral teachings are likely to be one factor among others in shaping their behavior. If their companions share some of these principles, they are likely to follow them. If their companions ridicule them, they are likely to give them up. Occasionally, they may be influenced to move away from some companions because these are encouraging them to violate their ethical principles too drastically. Let us assume that the law thus plays a moderately positive role in their lives. Still it will not lead to any real break with the power of evil. Actually, more common are instances when the law generates unresolved feelings of guilt that are psychologically destructive.
Among committed nationalists, moral teachings will be reshaped to fit their basic loyalty. Teachings that inhibit actions to advance national interests will be set aside. Teachings that strengthen willingness to serve the nation and to sacrifice lesser goods to that end will be reinforced. A new set of laws in which patriotism is the supreme command will come into play. The law will intensify both the good and the bad effects of nationalism. It will certainly not challenge the overarching power of evil.
Commitment to market success has a similar effect. Some of the moral teachings of childhood support the needed actions; others restrict them. If commitment to market success is indeed the organizing principle of life, new rules will emerge. The law will be formulated to support the goal.
Christian supporters of the importance of the law will not be satisfied with this kind of account. They believe, rightly, that many people who are strongly committed to such ends as the power of the nation and market success also have strong commitments to being moral. If the church can strengthen and clarify these latter commitments, they argue, then the negative effects of both nationalism and economism can be checked.
Surely there is some truth in this view, but it is rather limited. Conscientious business people who care about being moral have considerable interest in business ethics today. Many stories can be told about how they have mitigated the consequences of competitive practices, maintained honesty, dealt humanely with employees, and found ways to reduce the destructive impact of their businesses on the environment. Some have given leadership in the development of voluntary codes of conduct. We do not wish to minimize these heroic efforts to bring morality into the marketplace. It must be acknowledged, however, that overall they have at best slowed the processes whereby the global domination of the planet by transnational corporations exploits hundreds of millions of its inhabitants and threatens the future habitability of the Earth. By all means, continue to emphasize morality! But also recognize the severe limits of its usefulness.
Of course, enforced law also plays a role in relation to the market place. This role is truly necessary. Governments can establish rules for the market that allow competition to proceed fairly while protecting workers, consumers, and even businesses from practices that, often, businessmen and women themselves know are destructive, but to which they are driven by the necessity to compete.
Those concerned for morality in business would do well to emphasize the importance of government regulations that can discourage destructive business practices. Too often those who press for personal morality do so as an alternative to governmental regulation. Recent efforts to deregulate business and get government out of the market place gain no support from Paul or from us. Paul’s concern here is the moral law that claims the right to require particular patterns of behavior of all.
It may be argued that, whereas the moral law has little influence on the great affairs of nations and corporations, it is still important in the private sphere. In fact, the church in recent decades, especially at the congregational level, has concentrated its attention on this sphere. What about the use of moral law in family relationships and between neighbors? Is this where it has its greatest value?
In private affairs, also, the role of law is questionable. To take simple examples, it is highly doubtful that Christians over the centuries have made a significant contribution to society or to their own members by their teaching about sexual morality. It is doubtful also that Christians, even when they are now prepared to recognize their past mistakes in this area, are in position to offer a good set of moral rules. If it is thought to be unfair to test moral codes with this example, what about honesty? We sometimes suppose that all would benefit if all succeed in persuading their children that they should always tell the truth. But can we really teach our children that? Do we believe it? Are there not many times and circumstances in which concern for the feelings of others, or even concern for ourselves, warrants some fudging on the truth? Should we then teach our children always to be honest, except under certain circumstances? Could we ever get the list right? Could we state when it is proper to fudge the truth and how much? Or is not the goal with children to bring them to a maturity in which they are sensitive to the feelings of all involved, and to the needs of the wider society and of the Earth, and respond accordingly in the ever varying situations of life? Perhaps the relevant law is “be sensitive to the needs of others as well as your own.” But does formulating such a law advance the attainment of this sensitivity? We doubt it.
Christian proponents of law may still feel that we have failed to consider its most important roles. For example, one might argue that Christian law calls on people to consider the widest range of consequences of their acts, so that it influences the choice of a center around which to organize one’s life. There may be instances where this kind of law has helped, but generally the stories people tell about how they came to order their lives around a particular center give little credit to law of any kind. Indeed, in listening to such stories, one hears more about the painful struggle with the law as experienced in childhood, than about its positive effects. Of course, better laws could diminish the negative effects, but we suspect they are diminished more when the approach to children is less legalistic.
What about those people we celebrate as ordering their lives to the inclusive good? Do they need the law? We think not. Sometimes they use moral arguments against those who are upholding and intensifying the current destructive system. They hope to make these people feel guilty and change their ways. Success with this approach is rare. Information about the state of the world and the threats to its sustainability is needed. It is appropriate to remind people about what will happen to their grandchildren. It is highly desirable to give face to the faceless ones who are being exploited. These approaches may be viewed as appeals to a deep moral concern that most people have, but they are not legalistic.
Finally, what can we say about those, rather rare, persons who make morality as obedience to law the central organizing principle of their lives? How do they fare? Because there was much encouragement of such a form of life in Judaism, Paul may have had this role of law more in mind than do we. Within Judaism, people of this sort had a community of support and an important social role. Canon law in the Roman Catholic Church may reflect a somewhat similar situation. We will not pass judgment on those who operate in contexts of that sort, although we agree with Paul that this kind of commitment does not effect the changes that are more deeply needed. However, concentration on moral rectitude today in the context of our Protestant churches tends to do more harm than good. It often inhibits needed changes, generates divisiveness and guilt, and directs attention away from the church’s basic message and ministry.
All of this discussion is our effort to support Paul’s basic point. Within the world ordered by sin, moral law is inevitable, but its effects are ambiguous at best. What is needed is a basic reorientation, basic changes in commitment, in short, religious conversion. This was Paul’s view in his day and it is ours today. If the church busies itself with promoting moral laws while failing to call for the basic conversion that alone can save us, it will not have been faithful to its Lord.
For Paul, the most important reason that believers were not under the law was that they had a radically different basis for being righteous, one that was far more effective. This was Paul’s argument in chapter 6, but he had more to say. He continued with an argument that seems rather odd to us, but may have seemed more relevant to Paul’s first readers, who knew that the law applied only while people were alive. His new thesis was that those who were united with Christ Jesus were not under the law because, through, with, and in him, they had died. Paul referred here to his teaching that the faithful participated through baptism in the death of Jesus. Formerly, they were slaves of sin. But now, through baptism into Christ Jesus’ death, they were “dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (6:11, NRSV). They had become new creatures in Jesus Christ.
Paul illustrated the general principle that death ends the applicability of law with the case of a married woman. A woman violated the law if she had sex with a man other than her husband while her husband was alive. But her husband’s death ended the applicability of this law. When he died, the woman was free to marry again.
Verse 4 begins with the Greek word hoste, which is best translated “therefore.” This inferential conjunction may refer back either to the general principle that death ends the application of the law, or to the example about marriage. The NRSV translation (“in the same way”) invites the reader to treat the example of marriage law as a close analogy to the situation of those who were baptized into Christ Jesus. However, the lines that connect their situation and the example of marriage have eluded interpreters. The following is our proposal.
The example about marriage illustrated how a wife is released from a law that bound her to her living husband when her husband died. We could say that, through her husband’s death, she died to the law that bound her to her husband. In a similar way, according to Paul, the baptized also “died to the law,” and this happened “through the body of Christ” (7:4). Clearly, the key connection between the two situations is that both the wife and the baptized experience release from law through a death. When the husband dies, the wife is released from, or dies to, the law binding her to her husband, so that the law can no longer condemn her if she unites with another man. Baptism is also dying to the preceding form of life and, hence, to the law that governed that life. Accordingly, the baptized are free to unite with another master, the risen Christ.
Like many analogies, this one cannot be pressed very far. In the case of the baptized, the “other” with whom they unite is none other than the one in whose death they participate—Christ Jesus, whom God has raised up. In the marriage analogy, the wife does not reunite with her dead husband. Further, the law from which the husband’s death releases the wife is the law that bound her to her husband. The law to which the baptized died, however, bound them, not to Christ Jesus, but to the sin alive in their bodies (7:5; also compare chapter 6).
The analogy, therefore, is limited to the point that, in both cases, death brings release from the reign of law. The death of her husband releases the woman from the law that bound her to him. In the case of the baptized, “we are released from the law, since we have died to that which held us captive” (7:6). Obviously, the two cases are very different.
In these verses, then, Paul reasserted his basic message that participation in the faithfulness of Jesus was also participation in Jesus’ death. That participation, he now argued, ended the reign of the law. Through participation in that death, the baptized came to belong to Jesus Christ, rather than to the law that bound them to sin. This one to whom they now belonged was alive. Similarly, those who now belonged to Jesus Christ no longer had their sinful passions aroused by any written code but were alive in the Spirit.
It is hard to believe that Paul’s critics would have found this convincing. The whole issue for them was whether believers should die to the law. They did not think so. Many believers have thought that their task was to live moral lives and that this entailed careful distinction between what was right and what was wrong. They have been very much alive to the law. But for those who, like Paul, have experienced, through Jesus Christ, freedom from the law, the principle that death changes the relation to the law can be clarifying. In any case, this emphasis on death and its implications for the believer’s relation to the law followed naturally from Paul’s discussion of dying with Christ in baptism (chapter 6), and the comment that the law aroused sinful passions pointed forward to the next part of the argument.
One word Paul employed in this account—namely, “flesh”—deserves our special attention because of its importance in what follows. The NRSV translates verse 5 as follows: “While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.” However, the English phrase “in the flesh” can be misleading. Paul elsewhere uses this phrase to mean simply physical existence in which the baptized continue to participate fully (see Gal 2:20). The NRSV translation rightly makes clear that in 7:5 the Greek phrase refers to a condition that no longer obtains—namely, an orientation to the flesh instead of to Christ. A better translation of the verse would be: “When we were living for the flesh, the sinful passions, aroused through the law, were at work in our body parts to produce fruit for death.”
“Living for the flesh” was, for Paul, a way of describing life apart from Jesus Christ. Although Paul wrote of “the weakness of your flesh” in 6:19, the NRSV translators are probably correct when they translate the phrase as “because of your natural limitations.” The term “flesh” as used there had little theological meaning. The more distinctive meaning introduced in 7:5, however, plays an important role in the analysis from 7:14 through 8:13. Some preliminary comments here may help to clarify this passage.
Paul frequently spoke of “flesh” in contrast with “Spirit.” Clearly, he was not thereby contrasting the body with the soul. The flesh was not identical with the body, nor Spirit with the soul. Paul in no way imagined that the life of the baptized was removed from the body. The body could participate in a life transformed by the Spirit.
Nevertheless, Paul thought that passions and desires that were in tension with what the law required arose in the body. They were also in tension with the working of the Spirit. These urges required curbing and redirecting. The law aimed at meeting this need, but it was not successful. Living for the flesh, or according to the flesh, was living in this tension between acting on these passions and desires and striving unsuccessfully to overcome them through obedience to the law.
Even when one submitted to the Spirit, these fleshly urges did not disappear. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal was the transformation of the body by the Spirit, so that the sinful passions in the flesh would cease to war against it. In chapter 8, Paul pointed to the eschatological fulfillment of this goal.
Paul’s second discussion in chapter 7 (verses 7-25) is often treated as two arguments (verses 7-13 and 14-25), but it is better understood as a two stages of a single account of how the encounter with law affects people psychologically, existentially, or spiritually. The rhetorical objection in verse 13 introduces the next step in Paul’s singular argument, just as the rhetorical question in verse 7 launches the next step in his argument after verses 1-6. Paul richly developed his critique of the ambiguous relation of law to sin, which he had mentioned just before (7:5) and earlier, when he noted that the coming of the law into the world had the effect of increasing sin (5:20). This idea raised the question of whether the law was itself the sin that held sway in the world (7:7).
Paul emphatically denied this. He did not want his rejection of the reign of law to be misunderstood as a denial of the goodness of the law. His point was not that the law was sin or part of the overarching structure of sin. It was not (7:7): “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (7:12, NRSV). But the encounter with the law added fuel to the fire of sin. The law identified and opposed the sin that had been present already, but this did not weaken sin’s hold. On the contrary, it fanned the flame. It was not the law that led to death; it was sin, which worked through the law to this end. This implied that, although the law was not part of the structure of sin, slavery to the law, rather than freeing people from slavery to sin, actually intensified that slavery.
This sounds paradoxical, but Paul illustrated it convincingly with his famous example of coveting (7:7-8). The English word has an inherently negative denotation, whereas the Greek word it translates here refers to desires in general, including desires that are harmless or good. The Greek word can also be used for desires that are excessive and thought to be unnatural, as in 1:24, where it is translated “lusts” because of its connection with improper sexual desires. In Romans 7, it is properly translated as “covet” because it refers to the part of the Ten Commandments where the focus is on desiring for oneself what belongs to another (Exod 20:17 and Deut 5:21).
The law prohibits coveting, and Paul affirmed that this is a right and righteous command. But the effect is actually to heighten covetousness. Before encountering the law, children have spontaneous desires for attractive objects with no sense of what belongs to whom. They are alive. When the law teaches them about property rights, they learn that many of these desires are sinful. They now understand that they should not desire the objects that belong to others. The law teaches rightly. Yet the law does not diminish the desires. On the contrary, they became more important. Spontaneity has been crushed, replaced by an unsuccessful effort to stifle desires now recognized as wrong. Natural desires have been transformed into coveting.
This psychologically harmful consequence does not make the law against coveting wrong. On the contrary, the law is correct and to be respected. It is the sinful desire for what does not belong to one that does the harm. Nevertheless, by identifying the sinfulness of the spontaneous desires, the law heightens their sinfulness.
We are today largely in agreement that sexual desires, like a child’s spontaneous desire for attractive objects, are in themselves simply natural and healthy. Yet every society has to surround the expression of these desires with rules. These rules turn many of the desires into sins, but the recognition of their sinfulness does not prevent the desires from continuing and often expressing themselves in behavior as well. Even those who recognize that the rules are needed do not find them psychologically healing. Indeed, the guilt generated by the encounter with the law can lead to serious distortions of natural sexuality.
This account holds up quite well under analysis. Knowing that something is wrong does not reduce interest in it. Sometimes there is a special pleasure in eating forbidden fruit. The law often evokes resentment and rebellion. When what is forbidden is in fact “natural” and healthy, the prohibition makes matters worse. Christian morality has focused far too much on sexual desires and acts, even ones that are natural and healthy, and it has generated a great deal of irrational guilt. It has done vast harm over the ages, more to those who tried to obey than to those who ignored Christian teaching or rebelled against it. In this case the law was part of the structure of sin, but Paul’s point was not that laws might be in error and forbid what should be permitted. Paul wanted to show that the best and most necessary laws fail in their deeper purpose and add to the human problem.
The following passage, beginning with verse 14, has drawn much debate. Traditionally it was taken as Paul’s autobiographical statement, showing, especially in verse 25b, that even a mature Christian struggled with sin and continually needed new incursions of forgiveness and grace. The concluding sentence, following as it does on the thanksgiving to Jesus Christ, then supported the church’s move from an emphasis on the radical newness of life in Christ to one on the continuing power of sin within that life. Augustine and Luther gave especially influential leadership in this move. Today few scholars would allow so personal a reading. The passage presents a picture of life in Christ so different from all of Paul’s other autobiographical utterances that such a reading is excluded. It could, of course, express some memories of Paul’s experience with the law before his conversion, but there is no reason to take it as introspectively personal.[1] Besides, Philippians 3:6, which is autobiographical, gives a very different picture of Paul’s experience with the law!
One reason for reading Romans 7:7-25 as autobiographical is the prominence of the first person pronoun in these verses. This is in contrast to verses 5 and 6, where Paul spoke of “we.” There he was including his readers, but since he did not in fact know them personally, the “we” must have referred generally to those who participate in the faithfulness of Christ. What he said in verse 5 can be taken as the text that was to be explained in what followed. Verse 6 makes it clear that verse 5 was an account of the way it had been before conversion. It was emphatically not an account of what it meant to be “released from the law,” since “we” had died to that by which “we” were held captive, so that “we” were slaves in the sphere of a new Spirit, and not in the sphere of an old written code (7:6).
The “we” surely included Paul, but he was certainly not speaking here of his private experience. He was describing the human condition in which, before conversion, all had participated. In verse 7 he shifted from the first person plural to the first person singular, and he retained that form throughout the rest of the passage. This shift has been taken to mean that he was becoming more confessional, but this is unlikely. He was unpacking a condition first expressed in terms of “we.” On the other hand, it would be surprising if he thought that his account of how the law affected sensitive and moral people had no application to himself. The most natural explanation of the shift from “we” to “I” is that he began here to show how “we” are affected individually by the encounter with the law. “I” worked better for his example. He used “I” as the typical individual in this category—one who wanted to do the right thing but found that efforts to do it, in this case, to stop coveting, only made matters worse. We will follow the same device in what follows.
In order to explain the tension between what one wants to do and what one does, Paul needed to show that there is a difference between what I rationally and consciously desire and the passions that I find operative within myself. I may want to forgive, but I find that I am still angry and resentful. I may want to love, but find that I do not really care what happens to many of the world’s people. I may want to give up an addiction, but I find that I cannot. I recognize that the commandments to do these things are right and righteous, but this does not enable me to obey. Indeed, encountering a commandment heightens the inner division within me.
No doubt when Paul wrote this passage, he recognized his own experience, just as when we read it today we recognize our experience. But we are not being autobiographical or privately confessional. We are treating our experience as typical, and Paul was doing this also.
Verses 14-25 are often treated as a quite separate example of the problems engendered by legalism. Neither the text nor the argument, however, shows a sharp break. It seems, instead, that Paul was extending and deepening the discussion of how the law worked against its own purposes. The example of coveting could still function to explain this further discussion.
In verses 7-13 Paul described the consequences of sin and law in terms of death. In verses 14-21 he showed how encountering the law turns me into a divided self. On the one hand, I am controlled by the flesh, which means the passions and desires arising from the body. On the other hand, I recognize the goodness of what the law calls for, and I want to obey. My actions conform, not to my desire to obey the law, but to the different “law” that is in my members. In this sense, it is not I who act but the sin that controls me. The good that I want to do lies outside me.
Verses 22-23 give a slightly different picture. They identify within me an inmost self and a law of the mind. These are the seat of that desire to be righteous that is not able actually to control my sinful passions. As a result I am torn and divided and, therefore, “miserable” (verse 24). I cannot resolve my problem by my own resources. I call out for help. In verse 24, I find myself thanking God for rescuing me, through Jesus Christ, from this miserable condition.
Up to this point the passage is clear and largely convincing. But the final sentence is puzzling. Immediately after thanking God for rescuing him from what may be translated either as “this body of death” or “the body of this death,” Paul wrote: “So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin” (verse 25b, NRSV). If this had come earlier in the passage, there would be no problem. In verse 22 Paul contrasted the law of his mind with the law he found in his members. There he identified the mind with the aspect of himself that wanted to serve God. In verse 25, he returned to the language of flesh. Thus verse 25b is simply a slightly different formulation of the point made in verse 22 and, indeed, in the whole passage.
What perplexes the reader is that Paul restated the problem after he thanked God for the solution. His thanksgiving in verse 25a has led the reader to expect the celebration of the consequences of God’s deliverance, which he offered in chapter 8. Instead, verse 25b is a restatement of the problem.
There have been three major interpretations. One interpretation is that this concluding sentence indicates that the deep divide from which Paul suffered characterized even the lives of those whom God, through Jesus Christ, had “rescued.” In this view, God, through Jesus Christ, “rescued” or “delivered” them, not from a deeply divided self, but from the merciless punishment they deserve. For support, this view points to 8:1, which declares that those who are in Christ Jesus are not condemned. Interpreted in this way, Paul was renewing his emphasis on the forensic character of salvation as a declaration of pardon or forgiveness.
This
view appears to be consistent with 8:1, since its “therefore” seems to
introduce a conclusion from 7:25a. However, this view does not easily account
for the intervening 7:25b. The primary difficulty with this view is that in
8:2-17, and elsewhere (for example, chapter 6), Paul strongly argued that those
who were in Christ had died to sin and the law. Given all the rest that Paul
wrote, it makes no sense to suppose that, after the salvation brought by
God through Jesus Christ, this split was unaffected. Paul began the whole
passage in 7:6 by making a clear contrast between before and after conversion.
The NRSV translates this verse as follows: “But now we are discharged
from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not
under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” This is
problematic because, according to chapter 6, what held us captive was sin, not
the law. A better translation would be “now we have been released from the law, since we have died to that by which we used to be bound.” Paul’s teaching is that, just as bondage to the law came as a consequence of
bondage to sin, so release from bondage to sin brings release from bondage to
the law. Accordingly, “we are slaves in the sphere of a new Spirit, and not in the sphere of an
old written code.” Given this strong
contrast, with which the whole discussion in 7:7-25 is introduced, it makes no
sense that the climactic verse of the explanation of the condition from which
those in Christ were rescued, after thanking God for rescue, would announce
that, in the new situation brought about by that rescue, the human condition
remained unchanged!
A second interpretation is based on precisely this inconsistency. Because verse 25b, at the very least, is in tension not only with 7:6 but also with Paul’s argument in chapter 6, his thanksgiving in verses 24-25a, and his argument in 8:2-17, some interpreters conclude that a later scribe added this sentence to express his interpretation of chapter 7. Some of these interpreters also consider 8:1 a scribal addition. When these two sentences are removed, the argument of 8:2-17 follows nicely on 7:24-25a. However, simply excising difficult passages should be a last resort, particularly when, as in this case, all available manuscripts include the problematic passage. If these verses are scribal additions, it is surprising that none of the existing manuscripts lack them.
A third interpretation tries to make sense of this sentence as belonging precisely to this part of Paul’s argument without supposing that it describes the condition of those who have been delivered. In this interpretation, Paul brought his argument to a climax in verses 24-25a. Then he introduced verse 25b as a restatement of the human condition as he had described it up through verse 23. In other words, this verse applied, not to those whom God, through Jesus Christ, had delivered, but to those who had not been delivered. Left to themselves, apart from God’s salvation through Jesus Christ, people were unable to escape their divided selves. God, through Jesus Christ, “rescued” or “delivered” them, not only from condemnation (8:1), but also from their divided selves. Although we wish that Paul had not written in so confusing a way, we think this third interpretation must be correct.
Some interpreters of chapter 7 have found a tension between Paul’s sweeping critique of the law and the fact that he never urged Jewish believers to abandon it. They have suggested that in fact his arguments in this chapter were intended only to explain why the law should not be imposed on Gentiles. However, this is a strained interpretation of the text. Although we reject the view that Paul is being autobiographical, it would be odd for him to speak of “we,” and even more of “I,” while excluding himself as a Jew from the relevance of what he was saying.
We have earlier argued for a more plausible way of understanding why Paul’s critique of the law did not lead him to ask Jewish believers to cease to act in accord with it. What he rejected was not behavior conforming to law but slavery to the law. Slavery implies a sense that one must obey it or at least should obey it, not in order to accomplish some other worthwhile goal, but simply because it is righteously commanded. Paul never suggested that his readers should avoid doing the things that were commanded in the law. On the contrary, those who were slaves of righteousness would fulfill the purpose of the law and do much of what the law specifically required. In the present instance, they would come closer to overcoming covetousness than would those who tried to do it in obedience to the law. They would do this, not in response to a command that made them guilty for their coveting, but because, as they conformed to Christ, their desires changed.
The logic of Paul’s attack on legalism spelled out here is that no one benefited from the legalistic approach to the law. A Jewish believer who approached the law in that fashion should cease to do so. To tell Jews not to act in accordance with the law, however, would be just as legalistic as telling them they must obey the law. Jewish believers in Jesus who did what the law required out of their new freedom in no way acted contrary to Paul’s teaching.
Probably Paul had the Jewish law primarily in mind throughout, although there were other elaborate legalistic systems in the Greco-Roman world. In spite of Paul’s warnings, renewed by Martin Luther and other theologians, many Roman Catholics, many Protestants throughout the centuries, and many Western Gentiles who are not Christians have been brought up under legalistic systems. These are often more destructive in the ways Paul described than was the Jewish law.
Paul is partly responsible for bringing about a situation in which legalism became a more serious psychological problem, because of the strongly subjective form in which he cast his discussion in chapter 7. It would certainly be false to contrast Christianity with Judaism by saying that Judaism was interested only in behavior, whereas Christianity introduced concern for motives. Nevertheless, the emphasis did shift. Jesus is depicted as making this move in his contrast of his own extreme teaching about motives with what his hearers had previously been taught about actions (Mt 5:17-48). Paul’s account of coveting in Romans 7:7-12 was similarly thoroughly focused on an inward or subjective attitude. Someone might refrain from acting on wrong desires, but this would not ease the plight Paul described.
The intensification of subjectivity brought about by Jesus and Paul has expanded the exploration of inwardness in fruitful ways. Much understanding has become possible in the unfolding of the turn to the subject in the history of the West. Some of this can be found in Augustine who, influenced by Paul, gave additional impetus to this development. But with respect to legalism, the emphasis on subjective motives has also heightened the problem Paul undertook to resolve.
Many Western systems of law have been preoccupied with sexuality. Like all social systems, they have established rules of sexual behavior. But they have also attempted to address sexual feelings and condemned all desires for forbidden actions. This attempt has led to futile efforts to repress normal and healthy sexual feelings. Unfortunately, this effort has been combined with a generally negative attitude toward the sexual dimension of human existence, connecting it closely with what Paul called “flesh.” The overall result has been that the West has been preoccupied with sex in an unhealthy way, and that those who have tried hardest to be moral have suffered most acutely.
In the past century, Western society has relaxed rules about sexual behavior to an extent that is probably not sustainable. At the same time, the church has tried to overcome its heritage of anti-sexual teaching, while maintaining a strong sense of responsibility to one another and to society as a whole. Much remains to be done, however, and much of what has been done retains a strongly legalistic tone. So powerful have been the effects of a legalistic upbringing, and so common has such upbringing been in the church, that for many, especially those who have left it, legalism, especially in the area of sex, represents the primary message of Christianity.
This reality points to the absurdity of Christians today identifying legalism with Judaism. No doubt Jews have problems with their legalism, and it may well be that Paul, a Jew, can be helpful to Jews even today. At best, though, Christian criticism of Jewish legalism is a case of the pot calling the kettle black! It reminds us of Paul’s description of those who judge others (2:1-5). Even worse, it is often an instance of trying to take a speck out of the neighbor’s eye while there is a log in one’s own (Mt 7:1-5 and Lk 6:36-42). This is especially true of Protestants who, partly because they theoretically reject legalism and have no institutional ways of dealing with the problems it causes, depend on secular psychologists to heal the sicknesses for which their legalism is responsible.
In our critique of legalism, it is important to remember with Paul that the law is holy, just, and good. Christians and others have created some truly bad laws, but for the most part the acts and motives that are prohibited are acts better left undone, and motives and attitudes it would be best not to have. It would be better, for example, not to desire to possess things that belong to others. The creator of the moral code is correct.
The alternative to forbidding bad actions cannot be to ignore their negative character. What Paul saw as needed then, and what we still see to be needed, is a different approach. If parents bring up their children to care about others and to want to act in such a way as to contribute to the common good, the purpose of the many rules will be fulfilled without the guilt-arousing prohibitions that do so much harm.
Fortunately, despite its vastly excessive use of law, the church has also functioned as a community that evokes the desire to participate in positive ways. Also, in many Christian families, even when there is considerable legalism, there is an overarching spirit of love and mutual support, in which the negative effects of legalism are blunted. We turn now to Paul’s account of this other modality in which the purpose of the law is fulfilled without legalism.
In this section, Paul continued the previous section’s contrast between the “law of God” (7:22 and 25b) and “the law of sin” that is at war with it (7:23 and 25b). Now formulated in terms of “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” and “the law of sin and death” (8:2, NRSV), this contrast echoes 7:6, with its contrast between life in the sphere of the new Spirit and life in the sphere of the old written code. In 7:7-25, Paul elaborated on the latter part of that contrast. In the section to which we now turn, he took up the first part of that contrast.
Three interconnected issues affect the translation and interpretation of 8:2. Since it states the theme of this section of Romans, these issues require attention to some details in the Greek text. The first issue has to do with the Greek word nomos, used twice in this verse. The standard English translation of this word is “law.” In the vast majority of cases, that may be the best translation. The word “law,” however, is more limited in its range of meaning than is the Greek word nomos. In English, for example, “law” in this context would usually refer to a religious or moral code, and it calls to mind a system of jurisprudence. The Greek word, however, has a wider range of meanings, since it can also refer to a custom, rule, or principle.
Paul used nomos in the
former sense when he contrasted “life in the sphere of the new Spirit” and
“life in the sphere of the old written code” (7:6), even though there he used
the Greek word gramma (“letter” or “writing”) instead of nomos.
That sense was also in play when he used a Greek word that refers to
“legislation” (nomothesia) to name the giving of the Mosaic law as one
of God’s gifts to
Nevertheless, in some instances the translation “law” is not the best one and may even be misleading. The NRSV translation of the phrase “the law of faith” in 3:27 illustrates well the limitation of the term “law” here. Clearly, this phrase is not about a written code or codification of statutes. The plain sense of this phrase is that “the principle of faith” (see the NAB) excludes boasting.
In a similar vein, the NRSV
translation of the phrase “the law of sin” in 7:23, 25, and 8:2 could imply
that this construction referred to a written law-code concerning “sin.” A better
translation of nomos here is “rule.” Here the emphasis of nomos
is on the ruling function of sin as a power. In 3:27 faith, as the principle to
which nomos referred, is more like a norm or standard operating in
Paul’s judgment about boasting. Clearly, neither phrase had anything to do with
“law” in the sense of a written code.
Further complicating this issue in 8:2 are efforts to find a connection between the use of nomos here and its use elsewhere in Romans for the Jewish law. Paul, no doubt, had the Jewish law in mind throughout his discussion of nomos in Romans. At the same time, however, that reference is too limiting. For example, when in 2:14 and 15 Paul described the Gentiles as being “a law to themselves” (NRSV) and as having “the work of the law written in their hearts,” that does not mean that their laws and customs, which they developed independently of the Mosaic tradition, were really no different from the Jewish law, or that the Jewish law was written into their DNA. Rather, the point was that they, no less than Jews with their law, could conform to God’s righteous purposes, which elsewhere in Romans Paul simply calls “God’s law” (7:22, 25, and 8:7).
A closer look at chapter 7 leads to discovering other reasons why nomos in 8:2 does not refer to the Jewish law and is better translated “rule.” As we noted above, in 7:7-25 Paul elaborated the part of the contrast in 7:6 about “life in the sphere of the old written code.” The first stage of that elaboration (7:7-12), which was his defense of the holiness of “the law” (compare 7:14), clearly focused on the Jewish law. But we need to remember that 7:6 brought to a conclusion an argument that began with an analogy from marriage law that would be at home as much in the Gentile world as in the Jewish one (7:1-3). Paul then applied that general principle of law to the new life that followed from baptism into Christ (7:4-6), and then, more expansively, to “the old life” when sin exerted its power to pervert God’s holy and spiritual law exemplified by the Jewish law (7:7-25).
That leads to a second observation. Paul’s analysis of “life in the sphere of the old written code” could not have applied only to life under the Jewish law. That would have left Gentiles out of the picture, since they were not under the Jewish law. To apply what Paul said about sin’s power to pervert the Jewish law, and efforts to observe it, Paul’s analysis in 7:7-25 must apply equally to Jewish, Greek, or Roman law, or to Jewish, Christian, or Islamic law, or, in our own time, German, British, or American law. Sin’s power perverts every attempt to organize life around any law. When Paul analyzed the spiritual and psychological effects of nomos, his analysis would also apply to the Gentiles who do what their conscience, or their nomos, required of them, as well as to Jews who obeyed their law.
To what, then, does nomos in 8:2 refer? One view is that nomos refers, not to the Jewish law, but to two contrasting “principles” or “rules.” In this interpretation, the contrast is between the “rule” of the Spirit and the “rule” of sin and death.[2] A second view is that nomos in both phrases refers to the Jewish law. According to this interpretation, Paul contrasts the Jewish law used by the Spirit and the Jewish law used by sin and death.[3]
At issue between these interpretations is whether Paul thought of the Jewish law as the organizing center of life even for those who were united with Christ through baptism and led by the Spirit. That view may appear to find support in 8:3-8, where nomos refers, not to a “rule” or “principle,” but to a “law” that is “fulfilled” in those who “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (verse 3, NRSV). That support disappears, however, when we notice, first, that “God’s nomos” in verse 7 is the same phrase as in 7:22 and 25, which was part of Paul’s generic description of human existence, so that it applied equally to Jews and their law and to Gentiles and their own laws. It is better, therefore, to see in 8:2-8 a continuation of the use of nomos that applied equally to Jews and Gentiles.
Besides, in verses 2-8 Paul did not refer to competing sets of regulations or moral codes. Instead, he contrasted “things of the Spirit” and “things of the flesh.” He viewed Spirit and flesh as powers that function as ruling powers. In short, he contrasted two patterns of life: In one, people lived in the sphere of the Spirit; in the other, people lived in the sphere of the flesh. One’s life could follow either pattern and still be organized around a set of moral regulations and requirements.
But, after 6:14-15 and 7:1-6, it is inconceivable that Paul would now assert that the Jewish law was to be the organizing center of life, not only for Jews who already had “the law,” but also for Gentiles who did not have the same “law.” Those earlier statements, which contrasted life “under law” and life “under grace” and “in the Spirit,” were unqualified. That left no room for a later formulation of life under the law now guided by the Spirit.
There is a second reason why 8:3-8 fail to support the identification of nomos in verse 2 with the Jewish law. The phrases “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit” in verse 3 are parallel to “the rule of the Spirit” and “the rule of sin and death” in verse 2. For all these reasons, we think it is better to translate nomos in 8:2 “rule,” and to take nomos in verses 3-8 as including both the Jewish law and more generally “God’s law,” which Gentiles could relate to their notions of god-given laws common in the Gentile world.
What God’s act in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection created, according to Paul, was a new organizing center, replacing law. That new center was “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” This new center of life was, according to Paul, able to do what the law, “weakened by the flesh,” could not do (8:3). The law could not overcome the power of sin “in the flesh.” Liberation from “the rule of sin and death” came, not from a revivified law, but from “the rule of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
The two remaining translation issues in 8:2 have to do with the phrases “of life” and “in Christ Jesus.” These two issues are so interconnected that it is better to discuss them together. The Greek phrase “of life” can be translated either adjectivally, as a quality of the Spirit (“the living Spirit”), or as that which the Spirit produces. If it is translated in the latter sense, it can be linked with the next phrase. It would then be rendered, “the nomos of the Spirit that produces or brings life in Christ Jesus.” Otherwise, it is left standing alone: “the nomos of the Spirit that gives life.” That reading is favored by interpreters who link “in Christ Jesus” with the verb, because they want to make clear who the agent of liberation from sin and death is. The resulting translation then would be, “by Christ Jesus, the nomos of the Spirit of life liberated us . . . .”[4] That translation is possible but the first translation is easier, since it follows the Greek word order, in which “in Christ Jesus” follows immediately after “of life.”
To summarize our reading of 8:2, Paul contrasted the rule of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus and the rule of sin and death. The former provided those baptized into Christ with a way of ordering life by participating in the faithfulness of Christ Jesus. That way of ordering life, in contrast with the Jewish law or any system of moral requirements, liberated them from “the rule of sin and death.”
The “law of sin and death” operated both when people struggled to force themselves to obey the moral law and when they allowed sin to determine their behavior. In the context of legalism, no one could escape what Paul called the law of sin and death, because of the weakness of what Paul called “flesh.” God, however, had freed those who were in Christ from that whole way of being. The contrast could also be formulated in terms of living “according to the flesh” and living “according to the Spirit.” In chapter 7 the focus was on life in the sphere of the flesh. In chapter 8 Paul celebrated life in the sphere of the Spirit.
How did the change come about? Through Christ! But again the question is, “How?” and the answer is obscure. Paul wrote that God sent Jesus in the form of “sinful flesh.” To deal with sin, God condemned “sin in the flesh.” The result was that the valid requirements of the law were realized in the new life in the sphere of the Spirit. This is a different formulation of the saving work of Jesus from those we have encountered before, so it merits our attention.
First, Paul emphasized God’s sending Jesus, not simply in “the flesh,” but “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (8:3, NRSV). This term comes closer than almost any other in Paul to implying that the flesh is inherently corrupted. But even here he proceeds to the language of “sin in the flesh,” partly as explanatory of his meaning. It would be close to his own views expressed elsewhere to say that Jesus came in the likeness of that flesh in which the power of sin reigned. He did not say that sin had actual power in Jesus’ flesh. He certainly did not exclude the possibility that Jesus might himself have avoided actual sin—but the implication is that Jesus participated with others in the human condition, which was subject to sin. The purpose of God’s sending Jesus into this situation was to deal with sin—just how, Paul did not explain here. Perhaps Jesus’ faithfulness in the face of sin and death broke the domination of sin. Since those who were in Christ participated in his faithfulness, perhaps they could also participate in his freedom from sin.
Paul emphasized that something more happened. The Spirit actually entered, as a dynamic power, into the lives of those who were in Christ. Paul could equally well call this Spirit “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” (8:9), not because he made no distinction between God and Christ, but because the Spirit was so closely related to faith in Christ and so fully characterized by what was revealed of God in Christ. Indeed, Paul could speak of the baptized as being “in” Christ and of Christ as being “in” the baptized (8:10). One would be hard pressed to distinguish the presence of Christ in the baptized from the presence of the Spirit.
The distinctions that became so important in the later Trinitarian and Christological controversies were absent from Paul’s mind and concern, and his language cannot be made to conform to them. Although his formulations tended at times to treat the Spirit as a separate being, it probably never occurred to him that the Spirit was a divine Person distinct from the risen Jesus (or Jesus as the Incarnate Logos or Word) and from God. If we define “theology” in terms of sorting out such questions, then Paul’s letters do not engage in “theology.” What was important to Paul was that divine power had entered the lives of those who belonged to Christ and was working in them. As a consequence, the Spirit dwelt in the faithful and the faithful were alive “in the sphere of the Spirit” (8:9).
On one theoretical and practical issue with which the church subsequently struggled, Paul’s rhetoric gives us important helpful guidance. Does the indwelling of the Spirit constitute “possession” in such a way that the Spirit displaces human agency? Does the Spirit replace or become the person’s spirit? Paul elsewhere expressed this relationship in terms of “Christ,” rather than “Spirit.” He wrote in Galatians 2:20, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (NRSV). That could mean that Christ became the very “self” of those who lived “by the faithfulness of the Son of God” (compare the NRSV translation and its footnote to Gal 2:20). Some interpreters might find in Romans 8 support for the view that Paul implied that the Spirit replaced a person’s “self” and cried “Abba Father” and prayed through the body of those who were “led by the Spirit” (8:14, 14, and 26). It is a doubtful that any of these passages should be read in this way. In any case, in the crucial passage to which we now come, the idea of the Spirit’s replacing the human spirit is excluded.
Paul taught that being indwelt by the Spirit reshaped the understanding and experience of God. Those who had received the Spirit no longer lived in fear of God’s wrath but, instead, cried out to God as intimate “Abba, Father!” (8:15). When they did so, it was “with [or by] the Spirit who brings adoption.”
For purposes of the present argument, the key verse is 16. The NRSV translates it: “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” The human spirit remains, now transformed and empowered by the divine Spirit. Paul did not think that the faithful were “possessed” by the Spirit. “Indwelling” is quite distinct from “displacement.”
As in so many instances, the translation is not unproblematic. The main problem here is a logical one. To whom are the divine Spirit and the human spirit jointly bearing witness? Paul may have had in mind a cry of “Abba” that occurred publicly in the community of faith, so that the witness was to the community. However, a more straightforward account is possible with a change in the translation. The Greek can equally well be read as, “the Spirit itself bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16). It is we who need this witness, and it is our spirits that receive it. This makes the distinction between the indwelling divine Spirit and the human spirit even clearer.
Since Paul so emphasized the Spirit in this chapter, and since the Spirit was so important for the early Jesus communities, we will reflect somewhat further on how Paul understood this and how we can understand it today. We should begin by recognizing that what Paul called “Spirit” was an experienced reality in the communities centered in Jesus Christ. It was actual experiences that led to the use of the term. The expectation was that, upon baptism, people would experience the Spirit and act accordingly. The cry of “Abba” (8:17) may be associated with this post-baptismal experience. In the early Jesus communities, prophesy and speaking in tongues were widespread phenomena and understood to be the result of the presence of the Spirit (see, for example, Gal 3:1-5 and 1 Thess 5:19-22). Paul did not initiate any of this and did more to contain it than to encourage it (see 1 Corinthians 12-14). He pushed the understanding of the Spirit away from ecstatic phenomena toward life transformation, but he did not deny or depreciate the former.
The question was not whether the Spirit was present and active. It was how to understand it and evaluate its various expressions. What was the cause of these powerful phenomena associated with the life of faith? Paul virtually identified the Spirit with the effective presence of Jesus Christ. The Lord is the Spirit, he taught (2 Cor 3:17). As we noted, Paul could use virtually the same language about the relationship to Jesus Christ and to the Spirit. This Spirit indwelt the faithful, and the faithful also indwelt the Spirit, just as Christ was in them and they were in Christ.
The temptation today is to turn to psychology for explanations of such phenomena. No doubt, much can be learned in that way. But before assuming that this will provide a comprehensive explanation, consider the possibility that these phenomena were associated with the actual presence of Jesus Christ in the believer. We discussed above a participatory understanding of reality in which each experience of a person is composed largely of the presence in it of other experiences. These others can be from the more or less distant past as well as in the immediate environment. Thus others participate in constituting who I am as I conform myself to them. If the other people are contemporaries, quite literally, they are in me and I am in them. In Romans 12, Paul’s language of our being members one of another fits this model.
If this is an accurate picture of real relationships, then the human Jesus lives in those who conform themselves to him. If the resurrected Jesus is a spiritual continuation of the historical Jesus, then to say that this Jesus is in the faithful and they in him also makes sense. If that spiritual continuation can be named both “Christ” and “Spirit,” much of the language of Paul in describing what members of his communities experienced makes sense.
Of course, there are problems. Why would the presence of Jesus or the Spirit produce prophecy and glossolalia? It is easier to understand how it produces peace and love, and Paul’s emphasis was on these. But to suppose that the ecstatic experiences in the early Jesus communities were independent of its central relation to Jesus Christ is implausible. The intensity of that relationship, the internality of what was felt, must be an explanatory factor of the charismatic phenomena as well.
A
second problem is that Paul could call one and the same Spirit “the Spirit of God”
and “the Spirit of Christ.” One might explain this by supposing that for Paul
there was little difference between God and Christ, and it is true that Paul
attributed an exalted divine status to Jesus, especially as the resurrected
Lord. Indeed, speaking of Jesus Christ as “Lord” approached deification. In the
Jewish tradition, the title was associated with God. In the Septuagint, the
Greek word kyrios (“Lord”) translates the Hebrew word adonai, one
of the names of God. Paul also attributed divine functions to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians
8:6b, he assigned to Jesus Christ a role in creation, which Jewish tradition
reserved for God. The hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6-11 asserted that Christ
Jesus was in “the form of God,” and at the end implied his elevation to a
status equal with God.
Nevertheless,
Paul never called Jesus “God.” The conjunction “and” in 1 Corinthians 8:6
precludes identification of Jesus and God. The hymn in Philippians clearly
distinguished Jesus and God. It reports that God highly exalted Jesus
and that we are to confess that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Colossians 1:15-23—whether Paul or a later disciple of his wrote this letter—went
farthest in attributing divine status to Jesus Christ: “He is in the image of
the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in
heaven and on earth were created” (1:15-16, NRSV). Nevertheless, even
here, it is clear that “the firstborn of all creation” is still a creature and
not God the Father. However exalted this creature may be, the difference from
God the Father remains clear.
However distinct the ontological status of Christ Jesus was from that of God in Paul’s mind, he closely associated the relationship with Jesus Christ and the relationship with God. When people participated in Jesus Christ or were conformed to him, they were also conformed to God. That meant that God is also effectively in people, constituting what they become moment-by-moment. The Spirit, presence, or power of Jesus Christ and of God coalesces in their work in the world. If we think in some such way, we can be comfortable with Paul’s fluid language.
The situation was still more complicated. Through the Spirit’s indwelling, the human relation to God as Abba became like that of Jesus himself. Apparently, the Spirit dwelt in him too; and, through this indwelling, he was “God’s son” (1:4). Through this indwelling in the faithful, they became children of God and “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (8:17a, NRSV). The church in later years thought it was important to hold that God was in Jesus in a way fundamentally different from the way God is in others. But this difference was not important to Paul. When the faithful rise with Christ, they will share Christ’s glory.
The second half of verse 17 can be understood in two ways. The NRSV translates the Greek to say that we will be joint heirs with Christ “if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” That means that Paul placed a condition on being united with Jesus as a joint heir. This condition was that the faithful must suffer with Christ. In the context of this chapter, this condition was not a serious limitation, since Paul knew that suffering was imposed on the faithful by the hostility of the society in which they lived. Still, introducing a condition at this point breaks the flow of the rhetoric.
A better translation is possible. Instead of setting a condition, Paul was encouraging his readers to understand their suffering as preparing them for glory. The phrase can be translated as, “because we suffer with him in order also to participate in his glory.” Paul took for granted that those to whom he wrote suffered for their faithfulness, and did so willingly, as did Jesus. Just for this reason they could count on sharing Christ’s glory.