Into the heart of romans, p.5
Into the Heart of Romans, page 5
The second rule for careful exegesis is more mechanical, but it works time and again. Pay close attention to Paul’s connecting words – words such as kai (‘and’), de (‘but’), gar (‘for’), hina (‘in order that’), ara (‘so then’), oun (‘therefore’) and so on. As with all translation, the Greek and English may not always match exactly. A word in one language – even a small conjunction! – may well not carry all the implications of its nearest equivalent in another language. But we have to do the best we can. Paul doesn’t throw these little words around at random. Watch how he regularly argues: a string of gars, as in the present passage, means that he is digging more deeply into a particular truth (A happens because of B; B is so because of C and so on); then, when he’s gone deep enough, he builds back up with a sequence of de (‘but’, in the logical sense of ‘but if that’s so, then it follows that . . .’). That’s how he gets to verse 11 with a triumphant ei de – ‘but if that is the case, then it follows that . . .’. There then follows the QED of the whole paragraph.
Verses 1–4, and then 1–11 as a whole, thus offer classic examples of how Paul frequently structures his arguments. His sentences are not independent affirmations of distantly related points. They explore, with great precision, the logical interrelation of the many-layered truth he is expounding. And it’s the little connecting words that show us how that interrelation works.
The third rule is to think into the first-century perspective. People often say, ‘Well, Paul may have written X, but what he really meant was Y’, producing an anachronistic paraphrase – as though we have to help poor old Paul to articulate, a bit more clearly, what he really intended. (Some scholars have taken this pseudo-method to a wholly different level, suggesting that at times we can see what Paul ought to have said, if his argument was going to ‘work’ in the way we think it should, thus enabling us to correct – theologically! – what he actually says in the light of what (we think) he really meant. That kind of arrogance has no place in serious exegesis.1) No: the aim of all exegesis ought to be to get to the point where we can say, stand here (in the first-century world of a well-taught Jewish thinker); look at things like this; and then you’ll see that he has in fact said exactly what he meant. We don’t have to help Paul to get it right. We have to allow him to go on teasing us until we see his point, allowing the bits of the jigsaw to fall finally into place.
Of course, the question of ‘What this means for us today’ hasn’t gone away. That is often what drives people to say ‘What Paul really meant . . .’, hoping thereby to ‘translate’ what Paul actually wrote into something that preachers or teachers imagine will be meaningful for their audiences. This happens partly because Paul, quite often, is not actually addressing the questions with which contemporary readers come. When people reach too hastily for the ‘so what?’ question they will therefore often mishear what Paul is really saying. This puts the exegete, focused above all on Paul’s original meaning, in a similar position to that of Jesus in the fourth gospel, constantly appearing to answer, not the question that had been asked, but the one that was hiding unrecognized behind it. Thus, in our present passage, Paul writes some very tightly packed sentences about the law: the law of the spirit of life, the law of sin and death, what the law could not do, the proper verdict of the law and so on. People today, unless they are thinking their way carefully into Paul’s own world, will be puzzled. What does he mean by ‘law’? How does that fit with our assumptions? Why is that so important for him? Most people today, hearing the word ‘law’, will think of the laws of their land; or, if they are familiar with older theological discussions, they may think of ‘the law’ as a strict God-given moral code (perhaps the one given on Sinai) by which all humans are to be judged – and which, many have supposed, was then abolished by Jesus. But when we get inside Paul’s first-century Jewish world, things are significantly different. It is within that difference that we find the heart of his explanation of why ‘there is now no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus’.
This is one of those places, in fact, where what I said in the introductory chapter (about deficient ways of telling the biblical story) really comes home. If we have forgotten that the biblical story is focused for much of its journey on Abraham’s physical family – in Paul’s day, the Jewish people – we will be unprepared for the Israel-dimension, and hence the Torah-dimension, of Paul’s key arguments. In Romans 7, we are clearly dealing with the law, the Torah – which was widely understood, not just as an abstract moral code, but as the covenant charter for God’s people. It has been all too easy, from early days in the church, for people to sweep aside that Jewish perspective. Now we have the gospel, people have supposed, we don’t need to bother about the law! But that was never Paul’s view.
This plays back into the other question we raised earlier, the idea that, in order to make the gospel ‘relevant’ for non-Jews, Paul might have had to translate it into non-Jewish, that is, gentile, categories and terminology. Not so. The gospel was the news that the world was now under new lordship: a deeply Jewish message for the world, scandalous of course but (as Paul discovered) powerful. Thus, in order to understand the ‘therefore’ at the start of Romans 8, we need to do business with what Paul says about the law in chapter 7. That means understanding, in a brief form at least, the way he saw the whole story of Israel. Thus the point at which we might think, ‘Why should I bother with all this complex stuff about the law?’ is the point at which we are tempted to step off the narrow pathway of genuinely biblical thought and life, and settle for something less demanding, less biblical, less focused in fact on Israel’s Messiah, Jesus.
Reading Romans 8.1–4: The Framework
With these warnings and encouragements to persevere with the details, let’s read verses 1–4.
We apply the first rule of exegesis: the start and finish. Verse 1, ‘there is now no condemnation’; verse 4a, ‘the proper verdict of the law is fulfilled in us.’ That is the real conclusion. The second half of verse 4 (‘as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit’) qualifies that statement, looking ahead to verses 5–8; but we should be clear that the concluding punchline of verses 1–4 is ‘the law’s verdict is fulfilled’. In other words, joining together the start with the finish: the law is fulfilled . . . so that is why there is no condemnation! Of course, we haven’t yet enquired what precisely Paul means by this rather dense formulation, but we can already see that this is how verses 1–4 are meant to work.
One point, though, follows at once. Many Christians have supposed that Paul’s line of thought runs like this: the law condemns us as law-breakers; but in Jesus’ death God declared that the law was now wrong, irrelevant, demonic or otherwise redundant; therefore it is set aside, and there is no condemnation. This view owes much of its force to the sixteenth-century protestant reaction against the perceived heavy-handed and hell-threatening Roman Catholic moralism of the time. Sometimes Romans 10.4 (often translated as ‘Christ is the end of the law’) is quoted in support, though that is not at all what Paul meant there. This idea of the law as a moralist’s charter now abolished by the gospel has little to do with what Paul is saying.2
So to the second rule of exegesis: pay attention to the little connecting words. Why is there no condemnation (verse 1)? Because – gar – the law of the spirit of life has released you from the law of sin and death (verse 2). Why is that the case? How has that been accomplished? For – another gar – God has done what the law couldn’t do (verse 3). He has done two things, the first being the basis for the second:
1 the death of his son (verse 3)
2 the work of the spirit (verse 4).
The hina (‘in order that’) at the start of verse 4 shows that the latter (the work of the spirit) is the purpose of the former (Jesus’ death).
Now in a sense that is enough. There’s plenty there, we might think, without all the fiddly stuff about the law in verse 2 in particular. We might rest content with the outline instructions: like a car driver knowing that you put petrol in here, you press a button there, and off you go. But we study Paul (to change my metaphors) partly to train as mechanics, to fix cars that have broken down, our own and those of others. And, sadly, western theology has regularly broken down at precisely this point. What Paul says here about the law is more complex than we have usually allowed. And in that complexity we will find further riches, often ignored, of his understanding of God’s purposes.
A rather obvious clue comes in the opening of verse 1: therefore! The little word ara (properly, ‘so then’) tells us that there is a close logical connection in Paul’s mind with what’s just gone before. This brings us to one of the oldest clichés in the exegete’s book: when you see a ‘therefore’, ask what it’s there for. This ‘therefore’ at the start of Romans 8 is a well-known puzzle. In a sense, it’s where we should have begun. It implies that Romans 8.1–11 is the conclusion to a longer argument, not the start of a completely new one.
But the ‘therefore’ here seems, at first sight, singularly misplaced. After all, Romans 7 ends in frustration or even apparent despair. The ‘miserable person’ cries out in 7.24, ‘Who is going to rescue me from the body of this death?’ Paul does indeed answer in 7.25a: ‘Thank God, through Jesus our Messiah and Lord!’ But the last half-verse of chapter 7 (7.25b), declares sorrowfully that ‘left to my own self I am enslaved to God’s law with my mind, but to sin’s law with my human flesh’. So how can he go on at once to say that therefore there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah?
To answer this, we need to step back into Romans 7 itself. Only then will we see how the flow of Romans 8.1–4, and particularly Paul’s dense statements about the law, actually work.
Interlude: Romans 7 as the Build-Up to Romans 8
Romans 7 has long puzzled readers. Who is this mysterious – and indeed miserable! – ‘I’? The pre-Christian Saul? Paul as he now is? Or who? And – our particular question at this moment – how does the vivid and depressing description of this ‘I’, particularly at the end of chapter 7, enable Paul to say immediately afterwards that there is therefore now no condemnation for the Messiah’s people?
We need to clarify four points. Each could be defended and explained at length, but we must be brief.
First, the whole chapter, Romans 7, is about the law – the Jewish law, the Mosaic Torah. The Greek word for ‘law’ is nomos. Don’t be fooled by translations that lose their nerve and, in some verses, translate nomos as ‘principle’ or something like that. In the letter so far, Paul has said many striking and strange things about the law. This is where he explains how they all fit together, and how the larger picture then works.
After the opening illustration (7.1–3), Paul states concisely the point he makes in Galatians and elsewhere: that belonging to the crucified Messiah involves a break with Torah (7.4–6). But this, like several one-liners earlier in the letter, appears to cast Torah itself in a bad light. So Paul writes the next nineteen verses to clarify what’s going on – as well as thereby advancing his overall argument. Those who have come to Romans 6—8 in search of a ‘theology of the Christian life’, and who have then struggled to understand who the subject of chapter 7 might be, have ignored what Paul is actually talking about. And, again, if people say (as they might), ‘But questions about the Jewish law cannot be relevant to us today’, they are simply revealing their unwillingness to follow Paul’s own train of thought, and, with that, their unreadiness to engage with the fully biblical theology he will then expound.
The key passage (7.7–25) is framed by two questions: ‘Is the law sin?’ (7.7) and ‘Was the good [law] responsible for my death?’ (7.13). The answer to the first is: no, but ‘Sin’ used the good law to bring death. To the second the answer is: no, but Torah brought ‘Sin’ out in its full colours through the moral confusion of those who were wanting to follow it.
The first answer (7.8–12) is in the past tense: Paul is speaking of the past event of Torah’s arrival in Israel. The second answer (7.13–19) is in the present tense, referring to the ongoing situation of ‘Israel according to the flesh’. This then leads him to the conclusion (7.20–5): what he ‘finds’ about the law (‘finds’ in the sense of ‘discovers as a result of this enquiry’) is that it appears to split into two, just as he had said in 7.10. Torah promised life, but could only bring about death, because the material it was working on was the ‘flesh’ in which ‘Sin’ had taken up residence. This has had the effect of making Torah apparently do two opposite things (7.22–3). And that in turn anticipates the antithesis of 8.2, to which we shall presently come.
We should remind ourselves that for a Jew like Paul ‘the law’ – the Torah – was far more than just the Ten Commandments. It was the whole ‘five books’, the Pentateuch from Genesis to Deuteronomy. That was, and is, the bedrock of all Jewish life: its foundation, its covenant charter. If we imagine that ‘law’ simply means a moral code – as many readers of Romans have done – we will miss much of the point.
Second, 7.7–25 is telling the story of Israel in relation to the law. The character Paul refers to as ‘I’ is the whole people of Israel, from before the giving of the law, through that moment and on to Paul’s own day. This rhetorical device of the ‘I’ enables Paul to tell this large, complex story as his own – which indeed it is, albeit seen now in retrospect – rather than distancing himself from the problem, and from the people of Israel, by saying ‘they’ or ‘them’. One important result of this is that we would be mistaken to probe the chapter for elements of ‘Paul’s spiritual autobiography’. That’s not the point. Paul is not describing ‘his own experience’ as such. It is his present analysis – from his position ‘in the Messiah’ – of his previous historical and theological position.
To ask about Torah is ultimately to ask about Israel as a whole. Torah was given to Israel; so if we want to see how it ‘worked out in practice’, Israel’s story, in the Pentateuch and the subsequent historical and prophetic books, is the place to look. But there’s a wrinkle here that we need to iron out. As we saw earlier, in Romans 6—8 as a whole, Paul is following the sequence of Exodus: crossing the Red Sea (chapter 6), arriving at Sinai (chapter 7), then, with God dwelling in the midst, being led to the inheritance (chapter 8). Within that, however, Paul knows that the Mosaic law itself contained, towards the end, a prophetic narrative for the whole of Israel’s history. Among his favourite parts of the Pentateuch are the closing chapters of Deuteronomy, which focus particularly on the covenant blessings and curses of chapter 28, and which warn that Israel, faced with the choice of life and death, is going to choose the path of rebellion, idolatry and death. The ultimate curse – reflecting that of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 – is exile. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden near the start of the Pentateuch; Deuteronomy, near its end, mirrors this with the chilling warning that idolatry and injustice will bring about Israel’s expulsion from the promised land.
So when Paul brings us, within the overall Exodus-story of Romans 6—8, to the giving of the law on Mount Sinai (‘when the commandment arrived’, 7.9), that allows him to display for a moment the full sweep of history which the law disclosed in the warnings and prophecies of Deuteronomy 28 and 32. Precisely by loyally clinging to the covenant charter, Paul finds himself (in his earlier life as a devout Pharisee) caught between the vocation to obey Torah and the fact that Jews, like everybody else, are ‘in Adam’ – in other words, that they share the ‘sinful flesh’ that is common to all humans. Torah insists upon, and highlights, both.
The result, then, is a dramatic bifurcation in Torah itself – which, again, will be vital for 8.1–4. Torah remains God’s law, holy and just and good. It really does promise ‘life’ (7.10). And in 8.1–11, Paul will show how this promise is dramatically fulfilled through the Messiah and the spirit. But where Torah goes to work on ‘sinful flesh’ it is bound to produce death. And the ‘death’ takes precisely the form of ‘exile’ – exile from the garden (Adam), from the Land (Israel) and now from life itself. One regular word for ‘exile’ in the Greek version of Israel’s scriptures was aichmalōtos and its cognates (as, for instance, in Deuteronomy 28.41; 32.42 and many passages in the Psalms and the Prophets).3 This didn’t simply mean ‘captive’ or even ‘prisoner of war’, as in most translations of 7.23. It meant actual exile, ‘the Exile’, as we call it, consisting of Israel living under pagan rule, a condition which most Jews of Paul’s day, following the prophecy of Daniel 9, believed was still continuing.4 Thus, within the overall story of ‘new exodus’ in Romans 6, 7 and 8, Paul has inserted the smaller but highly significant story of Israel-living-with-Torah, the Torah which promised life but which was bound to condemn Adamic Israel. And in 8.3, Paul will show how, just as the Torah’s promise of life is fulfilled through the spirit, this warning of condemnation likewise comes to its fulfilment, in God’s action through the Messiah’s death.
Third, these verses are telling the story of Israel in such a way as to show how Israel has re-enacted the sin of Adam. This is exactly what we should expect from 5.20, where Paul had said (in his usual dense fashion) that ‘the law came in alongside so that the trespass might abound’. The ‘trespass’ there was Adam’s. Romans 5.20 insists that, when the Mosaic Torah arrived, it resulted in that primal transgression being amplified, filled out to its full extent.
This provides the answer to the question many non-Jewish readers, then and now, might well be asking at this point: but I’m a gentile! What has this complicated story of Israel got to do with me? That is where this third point comes in: Paul is emphasizing that Israel’s failure, foreseen in Torah itself, has re-enacted, and brought into sharp focus, the sin of Adam; in other words, how the problem facing the whole human race, then and now, became focused, within God’s strange purposes, on this one people. The Christian message must not bypass the story of Israel, though tragically that has often enough been done. This whole theme, actually (of Israel’s story as the focal point of the larger human story), is woven into Romans at several points, emerging sharply as we noted at 5.20. We see this particularly in the way Paul’s description of sin deceiving him and killing him (7.11) echoes the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent.
