Into the heart of romans, p.9
Into the Heart of Romans, page 9
This basic meaning of sarx is why, for Paul, the resurrection body is not sarx but soma. Soma, which we normally render ‘body’, is for Paul the bridge term. Paul’s anthropological terms are best approached as ways of referring to the whole human being but from one particular angle or with one particular aspect, rather than supposing they refer to different parts of the same human. Thus the Greek word soma denotes our whole public personal reality – the whole self, the body, in fact almost what we mean by the ‘person’. This soma can still give in to sin. That is why, perhaps surprisingly, Paul can speak in verse 13 of the need to ‘put to death the deeds of the body’. But it can also be the locus of our ‘living sacrifice’ as in Romans 12.1–2. The ‘body’, the whole self, is what we are to give in service to God and to our neighbour. And, decisively, the body, not the ‘flesh’, is what will finally be raised from the dead, as in verse 11.
By contrast, when Paul uses the phrase ‘flesh and blood’, he means ‘humanity in its present corruptible state’. That’s why, in 1 Corinthians 15.50, after talking about the resurrection body, he declares that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom’. This has caused some confusion, because not all New Testament writers follow this distinction. Thus, in Luke 24, the risen Jesus tells the disciples that a ghost doesn’t have ‘flesh and bones’, sarka kai ostea, as he obviously does. Paul is here using the word sarx in a tighter, more technical sense. Some of the early Fathers, in their determination to speak clearly of the resurrection of the physical body, used the word ‘flesh’ in that context as well, as when, for instance, Tertullian wrote of resurrectio carnis, the resurrection of the flesh. Tertullian didn’t mean the corruptible flesh. That would have meant that resurrected people would have to die again, perhaps going round and round in an endless circle of being. That is certainly not what the early Fathers believed, any more than Paul did.1
Coming back to Romans 8.5–8, another vital parallel passage is Galatians 5.16–26, where Paul places in contrast ‘the works of the flesh’ and ‘the fruit of the spirit’. How easy it would be, again, to suppose that ‘the flesh’ here has to do with what we would call physical sin and misbehaviour, and that the ‘fruit of the spirit’ is to do with what we call ‘spiritual’ things such as prayer, love, wisdom and so forth. But, in fact, as many have pointed out, the ‘works of the flesh’ in Galatians 5 could mostly be practised by ‘a disembodied spirit’ – jealousy, malice, sorcery, ambition, party spirit and the like. And the ‘fruit of the spirit’ includes various things expressed in bodily action, such as kindness, generosity, gentleness and so on. So clearly the distinction Paul is making between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ does not map easily on to the way we, in the largely Platonic modern west, have come to use those words.
So what is Paul talking about here, once we’ve got ourselves unstuck from those tricky issues? Paul is making a sharp contrast between those ‘in the flesh’ and those ‘in the spirit’. He is talking about the basic orientation of someone’s life. In particular, he’s talking about the basic mindset, the focus of the mind and its habitual patterns. He clearly doesn’t imagine that Christians are now sinless, or that they never suffer from wandering thoughts or wayward actions. Had they been sinless, he wouldn’t have had to give such frequent moral exhortation.
Paul is obviously very concerned, in this letter and elsewhere, about outward bodily behaviour. But here he is thinking particularly of the mind, the thoughts. Verse 5: those in the flesh – I’ve cashed it out in my translation as ‘people whose lives are determined by human flesh’ – think about, focus their minds on, matters to do with the flesh. They focus attention, in other words, on the things he lists in Galatians 5 as ‘works of the flesh’, things such as factionalism and party spirit, jealousy and envy, as well as drunkenness, sexual immorality and so on. In today’s world, our news media make sure that we do indeed focus our attention on such things – the factionalism, the party spirit, the jealousy and envy particularly of well-known people, and then of course the immorality that becomes a source of endless (and delighted) gossip. It takes a constant effort to drag the mind away from such things and to focus instead on ‘the things of the spirit’ (kindness, generosity and so on) and how to bring them about. Part of Paul’s point, here as constantly in the letter to the Philippians, is that Christian living doesn’t just happen. It takes what we call a mental effort, a concentrated exercise of the mind to focus on God’s way of being human. That is all right there in summary form in verse 5.
Then in verse 6, Paul refers back, by way of explanation, to this whole way of learning how to think and what to think about with the abstract term phronēma, ‘mindset’, which I have cashed out in my translation in terms of the regular focus of the mind. Of course, he doesn’t mean that, as long as your mind is focused in the right place, you can do what you like with your body! On the contrary: as in the start of chapter 12, the way you present your whole selves, your bodies, is precisely by being, as he says, ‘transformed by the renewing of your minds’. What you learn, by regular and disciplined practice, to think about will show up in your outward behaviour.
This brings us to the further explanation in verse 6. Here is the great either/or from Deuteronomy and Joshua, coming into sharp focus: choose life, not death!2 Here, specifically, he urges his readers to choose the phronēma tou pneumatos, the ‘mindset of the spirit’, rather than the phronēma tes sarkos, ‘the mindset of the flesh’.
Now of course this isn’t easy. It requires the effort of choice, a choice to be made again and again. Your phronēma, your mindset, is a deeply engrained habit. Christian virtue includes retraining the habits of heart and mind. It requires the thousand regular and difficult choices of focusing on kindness, gentleness, love, peace, rather than envy, malice, factional spirit or bodily licentiousness. We have to go on making those choices until they become, as we say, ‘second nature’, the well-formed, spirit-led phronēma. Even then, there will be fresh challenges. The reward for climbing one moral mountain is to be given a steeper one next time. Those in Christian leadership particularly need to be clear on that.
Paul offers yet further explanation of all this in verse 6. Here the phronēma tou pneumatos is not just life, verse 6b; it is life and peace. That has a covenantal, indeed priestly, echo. In Malachi 2.5, God’s covenant with Levi was for ‘life and peace’, going perhaps with the new-Temple theology we will discover in a moment.3 But before we can get to that, verses 7 and 8 link the contrast of flesh and spirit back to the question of Torah, which Paul has still had in mind ever since the start of chapter 7, even though by now the work of the spirit is taking over, fulfilling what Torah by itself could not. The phronēma tēs sarkos, the mindset of the flesh, he says, is ‘hostile to God’. God is the God of life. Death is an affront, a slap in the face, for God the good creator. And the flesh, heading for death, is thus a small version of that affront. That’s why the whole sacrificial system in Leviticus and elsewhere is designed to keep the holy place clean of any reminder of death, so that God may dwell there. Torah, however, promised life, as we saw from 7.10 and 8.4: the right and proper verdict of the law is fulfilled in the spirit-people. So the flesh-mind cannot submit to Torah! That was the point of 7.7–25. This is the last mention of Torah in the present long argument. Its work is done. It has handed on the baton to the Messiah and his spirit, and they are giving the life that Torah could not.
The negative result of this (verse 8) is that those who are, in this sense, en sarki cannot please God. That is a remarkable statement, implying as it does its converse: that those who are in the spirit can and do please God, as Paul says in various other places.4 There is a strand of post-Reformation spirituality that is so anxious to avoid any appearance of ‘works-righteousness’ that it shies away from any suggestion that anything we can do might actually please God. The best we can hope for on that score is to avoid getting into trouble. But if God’s spirit is at work within us, then of course we ought to please God! Of course, we will be caught up in his love and his purposes, as we shall see later in the chapter. To all this we shall return.
So, as previously mentioned, the first main thing we must recognize – which will require some retraining in our thinking as we try to live in the minds of first-century Jews rather than the mindset of western late modernity – is that ‘flesh’, sarx, doesn’t just mean ‘material physicality’, and spirit, pneuma, doesn’t mean ‘non-material reality’. That Platonic misunderstanding has often been invoked. The same mistake is regularly made today, sometimes under the guise of retrieving ‘spirituality’ in the midst of secularity. But Plato is a delusion. He and the later Platonists had no desire for bodily resurrection. We have to learn to think Jewishly – granted that quite a few Jews of the time, such as Philo of Alexandria, were looking to Plato for help. Paul does not. For him, resurrection is vital; and the moral choices implied in verses 5 to 8 are themselves part of the promise of resurrection itself. They are about the new way of life that is God’s advance gift from the ultimate future. Ethics isn’t just a matter of learning how to behave, though it is that too. It is primarily a matter of inaugurated eschatology. The spirit comes to us from God’s future, enabling us to live as already-renewed humans even in the midst of a world of sin and death.
The second main theme for which we need to think as second-Temple Jews – reshaped around the crucified and risen Messiah – is the underlying Temple-theology of verses 9 to 11. We easily miss this because we neither catch the echoes nor follow the underlying narrative flow. We have to bring both into focus.
First, the echoes. Look for the word ‘dwells’, though in my translation it is simply ‘lives’. First, in verse 9: you are not en sarki but en pneumati, not in the flesh but in the spirit, if the spirit of God dwells in you, lives in you (oikei en hymin). That vital little clause is repeated in verse 11, speaking of the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwelling in you, oikei en hymin. Then, more fully at the end of verse 11, bodily resurrection results from the spirit dwelling (literally, ‘indwelling’) in you (dia tou enoikountos autou pneumatos en hymin). Now, of course, the words ‘dwell’ and ‘indwell’ are relatively common. But one of their regular biblical uses is in relation to YHWH himself ‘dwelling’ in the wilderness Tabernacle and then in the Jerusalem Temple.5 But why would Paul want his readers to hear that echo here?
The answer, second, is in Paul’s larger implicit exodus-narrative. Think how the original exodus worked. God rescued his people from Egypt so that they could leave the land full of idols and worship him in the desert. The idea was that, after coming through the Red Sea and being given Torah on Mount Sinai, God could establish his Tabernacle in their midst and then come to dwell there in person, living alongside his people, leading them to their inheritance. Exodus–Torah–Tabernacle–inheritance. To repeat what I said before, Romans 6 speaks of the exodus: the slaves come through the water to freedom. Romans 7 brings them to Sinai, with all its puzzles and problems but with its continuing promise of life for those who actually keep Torah. But how (granted that, as in 7.17, ‘Sin’ dwells within them)? Paul’s answer is the spirit – and now the spirit coming to dwell actually within humans themselves, not just in a tent outside the gate of the camp. This is the new Tabernacle. And then, as we will discover in the subsequent passage, the spirit leads God’s redeemed people to their inheritance – which is not ‘heaven’ but the entire renewed creation.
Paul, like several of his contemporaries, is rereading the exodus-story in the light of all that had gone wrong with the people of Israel in the meantime. Jesus had chosen Passover – the exodus-moment – to do what had to be done. He had given his followers a new version of the exodus-meal, the Passover. The early Christians quite naturally saw themselves as the new-exodus people. And part of the Judaean expectation of the second exodus was the longing that Israel’s God, YHWH, would come back in person, as he’d always promised. The Judaeans had rebuilt the Temple after the return of some of them from Babylon. They had restarted the sacrifices. But the indwelling divine glory had not returned. Isaiah 52 had promised the visible return of God. That hadn’t happened. Nor had the similar promises of Zechariah or Malachi been fulfilled. But Paul, like all the other early Christians, believed that with Jesus and the spirit the promise had in fact been finally fulfilled. Jesus himself was the living embodiment of Israel’s God, come to be and do at last what the Temple was and did. And now – exactly as with the Pentecost-scene in Acts 2 – the spirit comes to constitute Jesus’ followers as the new-Temple people, those in whom the glorious divine presence genuinely dwells. The Temple was the joining-place of heaven and earth. In Acts 1, Jesus’ ascension means that part of ‘earth’ is now firmly established in ‘heaven’; in Acts 2, the breath of heaven begins the work of new covenant and new creation on ‘earth’. Paul expounds all this elsewhere, particularly in the Corinthian correspondence and then, dramatically, in Ephesians. But it’s there all the time, underneath so much of his thought. As often in Paul’s writings, the conclusion of one section of a larger argument is repeated, having been further explained, in the next section: verse 11 corresponds to Romans 8.30: ‘those he justified, them he also glorified.’ The glorious divine presence already dwells in all Jesus’ people.
As with the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians, so with the Temple of our bodies. God had promised that the Temple would be rebuilt. Well, if God has dwelled already in our present bodies, he will certainly rebuild that Temple. Verse 11: he will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his spirit who indwells you. The promise of our final resurrection, within the eventual new creation, is rooted in the ancient Passover-story, and in the Temple-shaped hopes of the second-Temple Jews. It’s all there in the closing chapters of Ezekiel, which – unsurprisingly – follow the dramatic ‘resurrection’ prophecy in chapter 37. Much food for thought there.
All this then enables us to read these dense verses, 9 to 11, with their three-dimensional meaning. Verse 9a is the starting-point. If God’s spirit dwells in you, then your basic identity is not ‘in the flesh’ but ‘in the spirit’. There is the danger of an initial confusion here, because Paul can talk almost in the same breath of us being ‘in the spirit’ and also of the spirit being ‘in us’. Which does he mean? The answer seems to be: both! Partly, perhaps, because Paul may have formulated the phrase en pneumati on the analogy of en sarki; but also because God’s spirit is of course not confined to the interior lives of believers, but is living and active all around us, so that when the spirit dwells within us we are in tune with the new-creational purposes of God which are going ahead in a thousand ways we don’t normally see. That too is a theme deserving of more attention than we can spare at the moment.
To this basic statement in verse 9a, Paul adds a warning note: if someone doesn’t have the Messiah’s spirit, they do not belong to him. That goes with other warnings, particularly in 1 Corinthians, against presuming that, because we associate with other Jesus-people, we must be doing all right. Paul doesn’t stop here to deal with the pastoral questions that arise, or the worries that some may have about their own state or condition. But note the fascinating way in which he refers in a variety of different ways to the work of the spirit. Verse 9a speaks of the spirit of God. Verse 9b speaks of the spirit of the Messiah. Then in verse 10 he simply says that the Messiah, Christos, is dwelling in you. This corresponds to various passages, such as Galatians 2.19–20, where, having said that he has been crucified with the Messiah, he says that he is nevertheless alive – but it isn’t him, it’s the Messiah living in him. Or think of Philippians 1.21 – ‘for me to live means the Messiah’. Or Colossians 1.27: ‘the Messiah, living within you as the hope of glory’.
In each of these passages, Paul is talking of the remarkable phenomenon at the heart of Christian experience: a new life, a new energy, bubbling up inside us, leading us to praise, urging us to prayer, warning us against complacency or sin, nudging us to acts of love and gentleness, providing fresh glimpses of previously unimagined wisdom and illumination, leading us to places and tasks that might seem crazy but that might just be our true vocation. This indwelling life, this new-Temple existence, is what matters. To speak personally for a moment: when I was confirmed, on my fifteenth birthday, and began regular attendance at Communion, I used to pray that old chorus:
Cleanse me from my sin, Lord;
put your power within, Lord;
take me as I am, Lord,
and make me all your own.
Keep me day by day, Lord,
walking in your way, Lord;
make my heart your palace
and your royal throne.6
(The only thing wrong with that chorus, by the way, is the use of the word ‘Lord’ as a semi-colon. That’s a habit to avoid if possible, especially in extempore prayer.) The point was and is the humble invitation to Jesus himself to come and dwell within us by his spirit. That is a Temple-prayer.
Now we see at last how the larger passage works. Part of the point of the Temple in Jerusalem was that it was an advance signpost to the eventual new creation. It was a heaven- and-earth structure, pointing forward to the promise of new heavens and new earth. In the same way, we human ‘temples’, individually and together, are meant to be signposts pointing forwards to the final new creation of which Paul speaks in verse 18 and onwards. Thus Romans 8.1–11 establishes the base of operations – the promise of bodily resurrection – so that Paul can then move on from verse 12 onwards and explain that what God promises to do in and for his people he will do in and for the whole creation in the end.
But we are not just mute signposts to that coming fulfilment. We are given an active role in working towards it. In fact, as he will shortly explain, we are caught up, often painfully, in the middle of the process, as active, prayerful, suffering agents. That, actually, turns out to be part of what Paul will mean by ‘glorification’. God had promised that his divine glory would come back to dwell in the Temple. Well, as with Jesus’ own ‘glorification’, this is what it looks like.
