III. Life under Law and Life in the Spirit (6:1-8:39)

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 1:18-5:21. Attention there was to how the world came under God’s wrath and how, through Jesus’ faithfulness, God’s righteousness was revealed as love. To make his case, Paul needed to show that, apart from this revelation, all were under wrath. That meant that no one could attain righteousness through obedience to the law. The law and the prophets themselves pointed toward a new situation in which Jew and Greek alike would be justified by participation in Jesus’ faithfulness to death. The account of Abraham showed that it was faith, rather than law, that justified him. Romans 5:1-11 continued and developed the account in 3:21-26 of how Jesus’ faithfulness to death had led to the reconciliation of sinners. The account of Adam showed how the act of a single person could transform the situation. That explained how such a transformation could have been effected in Christ.

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.

6:1-14

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 (5:20), one could conclude that it was good to sin. Paul, of course, rejected this false and absurd inference again (6:1-2). This time his explanation of why it is absurd to think that he encouraged sin centered on baptism. Just as, according to our understanding of Paul, the faithful participate in Jesus’ faithfulness even to death, so he here asserted, quite unequivocally, they participate in his death and burial through baptism. The old self was crucified with Jesus, and those who participated in Jesus’ faithfulness in this way were thereby freed from bondage to sin.

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” (6:11).

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” (7:24, NRSV; or “the body of this death”), and “the flesh of sin” (8:3) come the closest to implying a “sinful human nature.” However, these phrases, best translated “sinful body,” “mortal body,” and “sinful flesh” respectively, should be interpreted in the light of chapter 5. In that context, they refer to humans as they have been invaded by the power of sin and are under its dominion, and as a result are now subject to death. That is the Adamic heritage that Paul described in chapter 5, which continued to resonate in chapters 6-8. Apart from this invasion by sin, however, the human body as such was not “sinful.” Especially noteworthy is 8:3, where the phrase “sin in the flesh” immediately follows and interprets the phrase “sinful flesh.”

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 United States, the health care and educational systems now function as part of the market system. The government is under the control of the wealthy and measures its success by indicators of market activity. Many, perhaps a majority, of those who have reordered society in the service of wealth are baptized Christians. Most other Christians give tacit, and sometimes vocal, support. It does not seem that baptism ensures that they will participate in the faithfulness to God of the one who declared that no one could serve both God and wealth (Mt 6:24 and Lk 16:13; compare Mk 10:23 and Lk 18:24). Most of those who now lead us into imperial adventures are baptized Christians. Some of them, such as George W. Bush, make much of their conversion to Christ and use biblical language to justify their use of military force.

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.

6:15-23

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” (6:15, NRSV)? Paul answers this question in the remainder of this part of Romans.

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 (15:31). The movement to spread the gospel about Jesus Christ included at least three views about the law. Some held that the law was a non-negotiable requirement of all Jewish and Gentile believers; at the opposite end of the spectrum was Paul’s view that the law was not a requirement of either Jewish or Gentile believers; in the middle was the view that observance of Jewish law was required of Gentiles only when Jewish and Gentile believers lived together. The clash between these views seems to have been the reason for Paul and his coworkers’ meeting in Jerusalem with the established leaders of the communities of believers in Judea. It also caused the falling-out between Paul, on one side, and Peter, Barnabas (Paul’s early missionary companion) and the rest of the Jewish believers in Antioch, which had become the center of the movement to spread the gospel beyond Jerusalem (see Galatians 2).

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 6:15-23, where he undertook his most extensive discussion, we see the first approach. He took up the other two in chapter 7. In chapter 8 he offered his most powerful expression of what he saw as the alternative to bondage to law.

The first argument (6:15-23) can only be understood if we recognize that by “sin” Paul was not referring to individual sinful acts. He thought of sin as an objective power that shaped all of life in the Adamic inheritance. We can understand it best as, or at least find a suitable analogy in, corporate evil in which everyone is immersed. Under the sway of corporate evil, individuals violate many good moral laws; hence, there is a close relationship between sin and sins.

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” (6:22).

In this passage, Paul described the alternatives as slavery to sin and slavery to righteousness (6:17-18). Righteousness, no more than sin, consisted of a series of acts. As interpreted in the previous section, it consisted, rather, in Jesus Christ’s faithfulness. The one who was a slave to this righteousness performed many righteous acts, so that there was a connection between righteousness as objective reality and power and righteous acts. But it was the former to which Paul directed attention. For Paul there were two ways of being in the world. One conformed to the dominant social reality cumulatively shaped by the power of sin in the world. The other conformed to God’s righteousness, which Paul saw in Jesus Christ’s faithfulness.

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.

7:1-25

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.

8:1-17

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 Israel (9:4). It may also be the primary meaning of nomos when it refers to the Jewish law.

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.

8:18-21

The remainder of the chapter has three parts. The second and third parts begin with verses 22 and 28 respectively. Both begin with an expression stating common knowledge (“we know that . . .”); and both begin with explanations of preceding statements. In verses 18-21, Paul described the groaning of creation for the glory about to be shown in the children of God. He divided the second part, verses 22-27, into three sections: a description of the groaning of creation, with the children of God, in and with hope (verses 22-23); a definition of hope, as that which was unseen, and for which one waited with endurance (verses 24-25); and a description of the Spirit’s intercession (verses 26-27). In the third part (verses 28-30), he continued his argument establishing the basis of the hope described in verses 18-27 and moved toward its ultimate ground in God’s providential work.

Paul ended the previous section by speaking of the relation of sharing in Christ’s suffering and sharing in his glorification. He began the present section with reference to these same themes. Previously, he wrote of the connection between sharing in the sufferings of Jesus and sharing also in his glory. Here he wrote that the glory is incomparably greater than the suffering. Paul could speak about suffering extensively from personal experience. Later in this chapter he mentioned some forms of suffering that the faithful of his day might endure—hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword (8:35)—forms of suffering with which he was personally familiar (see 2 Cor 6:4-5 and 11:23-27). When they were endured as a result of serving Christ, they united the sufferer with him. This union was the basis for the anticipated sharing also in Christ’s glory, a glory so wondrous the present suffering paled in comparison.

Paul did not give an extended description of the “glory” that God would “reveal.” In verse 18, the passive voice of the Greek verb implies that God is the agent of this “unveiling.” God’s act causes what was hidden or unknown to become visible, known, or revealed. The use of this verb in 8:17 and 18 shows that a publicly observable event is involved. A similar verb was used in 3:21 for a public “proof” or “demonstration.” That “glory” was already made known in the resurrection of Jesus Christ (6:4, and compare 2:10, 5:2, and 8:30). The point here, therefore, is that God is about to make this “glory” a visible reality.

The manner of God’s imminent unveiling of this “glory” is a matter of debate, due to the ambiguity of the Greek prepositional phrase (eis hēmas) at the end of 8:18. The NRSV reads: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” The Greek allows that translation. If this was Paul’s intention, then he thought that he and the others encompassed in the first person plural would be observers of the revelation about to happen. However, the following verses give another picture, which suggests another, equally allowable, translation that appears in such other versions as the KJV and NIV. They indicate that the glory will be revealed in those in whom the Spirit now dwells. They would be part of the revelation itself—its very centerpiece. That is precisely what 8:19-23 describes: They are to be transformed into this “glory.”

This “glory” is best understood as “the radiant splendor of the presence of God.” The Greek word doxa denotes the brilliant radiance belonging to heavenly bodies (see 1 Cor 15:40-43). It is used frequently in the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint in reference to God’s kābôd, traditionally translated “the glory of God,” but which we have translated “the radiant splendor of God’s presence.” It refers to the “splendor” from which all human beings and, as a result, all creation have “fallen short,” since “all have sinned” (Rom 3:23).

This splendor was to be revealed in the faithful. It would become manifest to all. The creation eagerly and anxiously awaited this unveiling. It would free creation from its bondage to decay and for participation in “the freedom of the splendor of the children of God” (verse 21).

Crucial to the understanding of Paul’s vision is the meaning of “creation.” Did he mean everything except God? Probably not in this context. In verse 22, “the creation” could be understood as all that God created, and this would include the children of God in whom the splendor is to be revealed.

In verse 23, however, Paul introduces distinctions. There Paul writes “not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit” (NRSV). The presence of “the first fruits of the Spirit” distinguishes the faithful from what Paul here calls “creation.” Looking back to verses 19 and 21 from this vantage point, we can also see that the “creation itself” is distinguished from “the children of God.” On the other hand, our bodies, in which Paul had earlier noted that there dwelt a law at war with the law in the mind (7:23), wait for redemption. This seems to put our bodies on the side of creation. The best guess is that Paul meant by “creation” what we might call the “natural world,” including by that all that was not the effect of the Christ event or the work of the Spirit. This “natural world” was originally good but was corrupted by human sin. When the children of God would be revealed in their new splendor, this corrupted creation would also be liberated.

If it were not for this one passage, readers of Paul would be inclined to view him as limited in his concern to the destiny of human beings. The reader expects to learn how Paul thought of the destiny of those many people who were not part of the faithful community, but on that topic Paul is silent. In chapters 9-11, Paul expressed his deep concern that the people of Israel as a whole had not chosen to participate in the faithfulness of Jesus but, in this passage about the final salvation, Paul wrote only about his vision of the transformation of the faithful, on the one side, and of the creation, on the other.

Indeed, in this brief description of the final salvation, Paul gave as much attention to the creation as a whole as to the faithful. Although the revelation of the radiant splendor of God’s presence was to be in and through the participation of the faithful in the splendor of the risen Christ, Paul immediately turned from this brief statement to how the whole creation would participate.

Clearly, Paul was deeply moved by what he saw as the bondage to decay of the whole created order. He briefly indicated the cause of that bondage. His explanation was limited and not very satisfactory. The NRSV translation of verse 20 reads, “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope.” Perhaps a clearer explanation can be found in the following paraphrase, which we believe is justified by the Greek: “for the creation was subjected to futility by God, who subjected it in hope, because the creation itself also will be liberated.”

No doubt Paul thought that this suffering of creation was bound up with human bondage to sin. In Genesis 3:17 God tells Adam, “the ground is cursed because of you.” The suffering of creation is, therefore, not creation’s fault. God caused it but intended that it not be permanent. There was hope. If human sin was the reason for the subjection of creation, then Paul could reason that the final victory over sin among the faithful would end creation’s subjection to “futility.” Paul believed that creation longed eagerly for this freedom.

Verses 18-21 bring together the deeply personal experience of justification and the indwelling of the Spirit treated in chapters 6-8 with the completion of the salvation history that dominated the first five chapters of Romans. It does so by emphasizing the comprehensive nature of the anticipated salvation. Paul says nothing here about individual rewards or punishments. The apocalyptic vision is of the salvation of the whole world.

We have noted that Paul says nothing directly about the destiny of those who are still in bondage to sin. Yet, if our hypothesis about his understanding of creation is correct, they must be included the whole, indivisible creation. We have proposed that creation is all that God has brought into being except for the effects of the work of Jesus Christ and the Spirit. It includes even the bodies of those in whom the Spirit dwells. If so, it must certainly include the bodies—and the minds—of others. They were part of the creation that waited in eager longing for the unveiling of the splendor of the children of God. Through this event, they would participate with all the rest of creation in liberation and transformation. In the language of later theology, Paul’s vision of salvation was all-inclusive.

This passage, brief as it is, was Paul’s fullest account of salvation. For him this salvation was what it was all about. He envisioned this salvation as participating with Jesus in his glorified state. How he came to this vision may be suggested by such passages as Galatians 1:16 and 1 Corinthians 15:8, which refer to Paul’s experience of the resurrected Jesus (compare the later embellished legend in Acts 9:1-18, 22:6-16, and 26:12-18). One may understand the whole of his mission and the whole of his teaching in the light of this hope and expectation.

He referred to this consummation often, but more in passing than in exposition. The great majority of his letters dealt with the struggles of the communities he established, the issues that were divisive within them, the importance and nature of the Gentile mission, the character of life and community among the faithful, and especially the way they related to Jesus Christ. He set all this in a history of salvation context, on the one hand, and participation in the faithfulness, righteousness, suffering, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, on the other. Paul concluded that participation in the resurrection of Jesus was the glorious fulfillment that constituted salvation itself.

Despite the decisive importance for Paul of his confidence in the resurrection, he actually wrote very little about it. Does resurrection occur on the Earth or in some other dimension? Would it constitute the end of human history? And of the cosmic process as well? What would the resurrected life be like? Would resurrection constitute the end of the succession of events, or would it initiate a new sequence of events? Apocalyptic writers in the Bible and throughout the ages have answered questions of this sort but, apart from Romans 8:18-23, Paul provided few clues. Here, too, many questions remained unanswered.

Paul offered no clue as to what the glorified faithful would do in their new blessed condition. Perhaps they would not do anything. On the other hand, the resurrected Jesus was not inactive, so that joining Jesus might not mean that all action would cease. Probably Paul would regard such questions as idle curiosity. That the faithful would share in Jesus’ resurrected splendor was for him enough to anticipate.

How can we today relate to Paul’s vision? For several reasons, it would be impossible simply to affirm it. Few today can seriously adopt his idea that the whole of creation has been bound up so closely with human actions as to depend on human fulfillment for its liberation. The universe now known is simply too vast to be that closely tied to human history and destiny. Paul was thinking primarily of this planet and, with respect to it, there is much to be said about the close connection of its destiny with the human one. Paul’s attention to this relation was a rare contribution to theological reflection. But Paul spoke of the whole of creation.

Second, he depicted these events as imminent. In fact, however, the world has continued for nearly twenty centuries without the salvation that Paul expected. Simply re-dating the events thousands of years later is not an option for most thoughtful people. The way Paul located this consummation in his history of salvation is simply not possible for most people today.

Third, any kind of transformation of the universe as a whole, such that the course of physical events would come to an end, is likely to evoke incredulity among those with some understanding of science. The problem is only slightly less difficult if the apocalyptic events are limited to humanity. People can imagine an end of history, but the more plausible scenarios are of human self-destruction, rather than apocalyptic transformation.

Nevertheless, apocalypticism is alive and well in today’s world. The hunger for a salvation brought about supernaturally is deep, and those who promise it gain a wide hearing. Paul’s apocalyptic vision is beautiful and moving.

At least since the time of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) a stream of liberal Protestant thought has focused on this life as the locus of salvation. Much of what Paul wrote about the love of God and life in the Spirit can be appropriated in such a this-worldly context. One response to the text before us is to say that such eschatological visions are dispensable, that Christians should content themselves with the mundane, accepting the fact that this life in this world is all there is. Christians can then concentrate on making this life and this world as good as possible.

Other Christians find this position unacceptable. For them, if there is nothing more to be said, then even this turns to ashes. An important movement in late twentieth century theology has been the theology of hope, which grounds the meaning of our actions in their role in the whole course of salvation history, which will culminate in universal resurrection. The theologians of hope can be seen as reformulating Paul for our changed context (see, for example, Jürgen Moltmann).

We share the judgment that hope is of crucial importance for Christians. We also fear that without some kind of eschatological hope, personal and historical hope can also prove fragile. Nevertheless, we find it difficult to think of the kind of future consummation of the whole of history to which these theologians point. They, like Paul, combine the ideas of resurrection and the history of salvation. We wonder whether these should not be separated.

Paul and the theologians of hope connect these two on the grounds that Jesus’ resurrection confirmed the idea of a general resurrection at the end of history. We would not dispute that it confirmed this expectation for many, including Paul, at the time. At that time, the idea of a general resurrection belonged to the history of salvation approach. Hence, Paul interpreted Jesus’ resurrection in that context. In our judgment, that does not bind all later theologians to the adoption of that context in their eschatological thinking.

Actually, of course, a great deal of popular piety has moved away from this kind of history of salvation thinking. For many Christians over many centuries, the hope and expectation has been for continuing personal life after death. Among some, this hope has been connected with the idea of externally imposed rewards and punishments, which would take place immediately on death, rather than at the end of time. But for others the note of imposed rewards and punishments has faded. They have learned from Jesus and Paul that God, who is love, will give them continuing life. If they are unable to love and to accept love, the quality of this life will be limited, but perhaps even after death they will be able to grow spiritually. The God who is gracious to all in this life will not cease to be gracious in another life.

Paul’s vision of the resurrected Jesus fits into and supports this way of thinking as well as, or better than, the apocalyptic one. In one sense, the faithful can participate more fully in Jesus’ resurrection if that resurrection was to a transformed spiritual body that did not await or entail the end of history. The resurrection appearances of Jesus seem to confirm that at least some people live on in a transformed state after physical death. The confirmation of this continued existence alongside history is clearer and more direct than any confirmation that there will be a general resurrection at the end of history.

There are, of course, problems and limitations with this popular idea. One limitation is that it separates eschatology from history, whereas apocalyptic thought unites the two. In Paul’s case, the apocalyptic vision also unites nature and history. On the other hand, there are dangers with this unity. Conclusions are drawn from apocalyptic beliefs that can be historically harmful. Their association with the history of salvation can lead to giving them a status that removes them from realistic criticism. There may be an advantage in separating judgments about history, even about the salvation of the world from nuclear or ecological destruction, from judgments about personal salvation. The problem would arise only if the conditions for personal salvation led to indifference to the course of events on the planet. Basic elements in the Christian message should prevent that.

A second problem is that belief in personal resurrection at death does not have the note of finality that Paul’s apocalyptic vision conveys. Continuing existence as a spiritual body suggests new adventures, rather than final consummation and completion. To continue to exist forever may not be a real answer to the deepest hunger of the soul. Indeed, in Indian religion, the goal is to come to an end of such ongoing existence. This may express a deep need or desire. Paul probably envisioned the transformed and glorified mode of being as complete and finished and as bringing a final end to all things.

Our own mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, did not exclude the possibility of additional adventures beyond death. But for him this did not solve the eschatological problem. He felt that, if every event simply occurred and then forever ceased to be, human beings could not find a basis for the meaningfulness of action that is so important to them. This would be as true in a heavenly or glorified state as here and now.

His solution was to propose that all that occurs in the creaturely world is taken up into the divine life. What is ephemeral here is everlasting in God. All that people do and feel affects God, and for this reason human actions have the importance that is necessary to give life meaning. Everything that happens matters not only to creatures but also to God, and recognizing this fact calls us to bring about what good we can. There is also a kind of resurrection. What perishes in the world lives on in a transformed state, sharing in the splendor of God.

This proposal agrees with Paul that the whole cosmos is, in this way, “saved.” God’s inclusion of creaturely events is not limited to human ones. Sparrows are included as well. Indeed, even quantum events are forever preserved in the transformed existence that all things have in God.

The limitation of this and any eschatological view that emphasizes finality is that what we know as subjectivity ceases. A nontemporal subjectivity is unimaginable. In Whitehead’s view, what are preserved in God are subjective experiences but, as preserved unchangeably and finally in God, they lack the kind of subjectivity that is involved in becoming. To recover that kind of personal subjective existence, one must posit ongoing adventure. One cannot have it both ways in a single entity. One can affirm an ongoing resurrected life each moment of which is preserved everlastingly in God, and also a vision of the ongoing process in this world of healing this planet and saving it from catastrophe. But this requires a willingness to divide up the elements of eschatology, rather than combine them all in one form of hope.

These proposals have another limitation. They are all speculative. We believe they share this character with all expressions of hope. Paul knew that his ideas were a matter of hope, rather than of sight, but he also experienced them as grounded in his vision of the resurrected Jesus. This gave him a degree of confidence that is difficult for open-minded Christians to attain in the context of this highly pluralistic world.

We believe there is good reason to think that we contribute to God’s life as God contributes to ours. We think the resurrection of Jesus and other evidence points to the fact that physical death need not be the extinction of personal existence. It suggests a glorified existence, at least for some. We think that the God we know through Jesus, the one of whom Paul wrote, will do for us what can be done in this life and beyond. This gives us the assurance we need to participate in the faithfulness of Jesus. We will do what we can to express God’s love here and now with confidence that such action is meaningful and without anxiety about the future. We believe there is continuity between this stance in life and that for which Paul called. But we know there is also a difference.

8:22-25

After offering this all too brief glimpse into the salvation he anticipated, Paul returned to an account of the present situation in which the “glory” has not yet been unveiled. In this situation, the whole physical world is still groaning as in labor pains. This striking phrase seems to pick up on the curse of women’s bodies in Genesis 3:16. However imminent the consummation may have been, the physical world, including the human body, was still suffering from its bondage to decay brought about by sin. Even the faithful, “who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (verse 23, NRSV). “The first fruits of the Spirit” refers back to what Paul has said about what the Spirit had accomplished among the faithful. God’s love had been poured into their hearts (5:5), they have been freed from the law of sin and death (8:2), and they have been assured that they are children of God (8:17). But more was to be expected, much more. Through God’s Spirit that dwelt in them, life would be given to their mortal bodies (8:11). Having the first-fruit of the Spirit, they waited for the final glory.

The emphasis on groaning on the part of both the physical world and the faithful at first sight seems strange, following immediately on the promise of glory. However, just that expectation may have intensified the present longing that expressed itself in such groaning. The cognitive dissonance created by the contrast between the Spirit’s witness to adoption as God’s children and the reality of present suffering, the longing for release, not only from the suffering itself, but also from its causes, and the sense of the imminence of this release created earnest longing and groaning.

The importance for Paul of the redemption or liberation of the body may offer some explanation for his intense concern for the physical universe. In his view, as in ours, the human body is fully a part of that universe. For Paul, as long as the physical world was unchanged, even the faithful were held back from the fullness of their glorious destiny. He did not envision the human soul or spirit floating free from the body. The human being is bodily. But Paul did envision a transformation of the physical body into a spiritual one in the context of a total transformation of the physical world. That is evident not only here but also in 1 Corinthians 15, which contains Paul’s most complete explanation of his understanding of “the resurrection of the body” (compare 2 Cor 4:16-5:10).

Clearly, the situation in which the faithful found themselves was one of hope. In verses 24 and 25 Paul turns to a direct discussion of this hope that enabled them to wait with fortitude. He began by noting the centrality of hope for the whole process. This makes sense, but his formulation is surprising. He stated that “in hope we have been saved.” The surprise here is not the importance of hope, but that he wrote of salvation in the past tense!

Elsewhere in Romans (5:9, 10, 9:27, 10:9, 13, 11:14, 26, and 13:11) Paul wrote of salvation as that which was hoped for in the apocalyptic future for which the faithful longed. It is unlikely that this change of tense involves any substantive theological change, but terminologically it is interesting.

Most Christians today think of their “salvation” as something that has already happened. Some identify it with their baptism. Evangelicals often refer to the time when they accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Karl Barth responded to an evangelical’s question about when he was saved by pointing to the cross of Christ.

Paul thought of the faithful as already justified and thus reconciled with God. Nevertheless, he thought they remained in an unfinished process. Salvation was to be the consummation of that process. In Romans it was only here, at a point where he was emphasizing the imminence of this consummation, that he uses the past tense. “Saved” in 8:24 apparently refers to the “salvation” that was inaugurated by Jesus’ death and resurrection (3:21-26 and 5:6-21), in which the baptized participated (chapter 6), and which the Spirit made effective in their life in the “flesh/body” (8:1-17). That “salvation” brought a real release from captivity to sin, but one, nevertheless, that God had yet to complete. Paul’s argument in 8:18-23 was that God was about to make it complete. Perhaps Paul wanted to stress that this whole process was characterized by hope—namely, hope for the consummation that he usually identified as salvation.

This use of “salvation” by Paul opens the door for contemporary Christians to speak of salvation more as an ongoing process than as a completed state. Paul in fact throws far more light on the former than on the latter. The whole process is characterized by hope, but in this view it is not necessary to have great clarity about just what lies in the future. The uncertainties that we expressed in our own eschatological reflections do not invalidate this hope that is supported by the whole saving work of God.

In 8:24b-25, Paul wrote more generally about the nature of “hope.” Hope had to do with the expectation of the future, in distinction from both the perception and experience of the present, and the memory and recollection of the past. The good that lay in the future could not be “seen”—not even by those who had knowledge of the gospel, participated in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and had “the first fruit of the Spirit.” They too, with all creation, hoped for the good that they trusted God had in store (see 8:28), but that they could not yet “see” (compare 2 Cor 4:18 and 5:7). This “longing” (the same verb used in 8:19) is now “with patience” (NRSV) or “with endurance” (NAB), instead of “anxious longing” and “groaning.” Hope, as Paul said earlier, empowered endurance (5:1-5).

8:26-30

Traditional exegesis interprets the next section, 8:26-27, as a statement about how the Spirit helps with the prayers of those who “have the first fruit of the Spirit.” True enough. Also, no doubt Paul alludes here to prayer in which a person’s speech is “inspired” by the Spirit. Elsewhere Paul describes praying “with the Spirit,” in terms familiar in Hellenistic Judaism and Greco-Roman philosophy:[5] “my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive” (1 Cor 14:14, NRSV). These verses, however, are not about “how to pray,” as if “with the Spirit” instead of “with the mind,” but about “what we should pray for.”

Paul was still concerned with how to live while waiting for the consummation. The faithful were groaning and hoping, without being able to see what was to happen. Yet they already had “the first fruits of the Spirit.” What role did the Spirit play?

In the NRSV, the first phrase of verse 20 asserts that the Spirit “helps” those who are waiting. However, the Greek word translated “helps” may be better understood as “shares with” them. Paul said that it shared with them in their weakness. This weakness was their human condition. In this case, Paul’s emphasis was on human ignorance. The faithful wanted to pray, but did not know how. Actually, the NRSV translation here, too, is misleading. Paul’s emphasis was on their ignorance of what to pray for, rather than of the method of praying. The verse would be better rendered, “Likewise the Spirit shares with us in the frailty of our human condition. What should we pray for? We do not know.”

What then did the Spirit do? The Spirit “interceded” with God by bringing the groaning of the faithful and of the whole creation before God. The idea was that the Spirit brought the believers’ groaning, and the groaning of the whole creation, before God. That was the meaning of the Spirit’s “sharing in our weakness” (verse 26a). The Spirit’s “intercessions,” in the form of “inexpressible groans,” brought before God what the Spirit found in human hearts—deep longing for release from captivity to sin and death. The Spirit thus brought before God a person’s innermost desires and thoughts.

What mattered to God were the deepest desires of the faithful. These were beyond articulation, even beyond their awareness. The heart was the locus of these deepest desires, which were the object of God’s searching the heart. That was also the seat of the Spirit, and the Spirit mediated to God the knowledge God sought.

After centuries of theological development, this picture of God and the Spirit is difficult to appreciate. Christians have come to believe that the Spirit is God, not a separate instrument of God. They understand God to be omniscient, knowing them better than they know themselves. God needs no special instrument. In addition, God’s love is such that Christians do not need some intermediate being to intercede for them. Hence, in many ways these verses are not helpful. Nevertheless, our sense of need of God’s help, also when we try to open ourselves to God and God’s purposes, remains as great as ever.

Verse 28 is one of the most popular in the Bible. It is taken out of its specific context in Romans 8 and used as a source of reassurance to the faithful in any context. “All things work together for good for those who love God” (NRSV) suggests a strong doctrine of providence. It implies that God can use even events that seem negative, in conjunction with other events, for a positive outcome. Those who love God can thus have confidence in the course of events.

Whether Paul thought along these lines we do not know. What he wrote here was part of a discussion of the salvation of which he wrote in verse 24 in the past tense. After he introduced the idea of “the will of God” in verse 27 (NRSV) as the reason for the Spirit to operate as it did, he picked up on it again in verse 28.

In verses 28-30, the point was that God’s purpose “in all things [to] bring about the good” alone governs who are called. This purpose is to bring all whom God chooses, and with them the whole creation, into the presence of God’s splendor (verses 17-23). The notion that God “assists or helps” others toward producing “the good” is in some tension with the verbs in verses 29-30, which describe God’s unilateral actions. Paul’s use of “works together,” therefore, seems to describe a unilateral action of God. The following verses inform us that those who were called according to God’s purpose were foreknown, predestined, and conformed to the image of God’s son. They were also justified and glorified. All this, no doubt, works together for their good.

The tone and content of this passage are designed for reassurance. It was addressed to those in Rome who believed that they were among the people whom God had chosen. As Paul said of them, they were “God’s beloved in Rome” (1:7). This awareness of their special place in God’s providence was no doubt a source of joy and deepened commitment. These statements rightly accent the initiative and power of God in the context of the confidence that God loves all people and seeks their good.

We affirm this intention but, like many other such statements, this one is one-sided. First, it raises the question about the fate of those whom God does not choose. The treatment of this question through the history of Christian theology has often evoked appalling ideas quite inconsistent with the revelation of God’s love so important to Paul. Paul himself may have believed that the choosing was not so much for salvation as for a particular role in salvation history. That is to say that, since all creation is to be transformed, Paul may well have understood that the consummation would involve everyone. He thought of the revelation of God’s presence in the faithful as the condition for this inclusive salvation of creation. That God chose some for particular roles in the salvation of all does not have the disturbing implications often drawn from the doctrine of predestination.

Second, this passage lends itself to a view of God as all-determining. The reason that readers can be sure all things work for their good is, presumably, that God makes them do so. To conclude from Romans, however, that Paul was a divine determinist would be mistaken. It is well known that, while Paul upheld the indicative of salvation, he also emphasized the responsibility of those to whom he wrote. That is to say that he asserted what God had done and exhorted the recipient of God’s gifts to live in ways that responded appropriately to those gifts. He never allowed the former note to weaken the latter. Salvation was certainly God’s gift. God’s act in Jesus’ faithfulness revealed the true nature of God’s justice and righteousness as love. Those who participated in that faithfulness were freely justified by grace. The focus was on God’s act and God’s free gift. But the participation in Jesus’ faithfulness involved human agency. And Paul exhorted those who were faithful to intensify their commitment and their efforts to conform to Christ and not to the flesh. Though in some strands of Reformation theology, faith is assigned wholly to divine agency, Paul did not treat faithfulness in that way. There would then have been no role for the exhortations that play so large a role in his letters. Still, passages such as this one give support to those who are prepared to sacrifice human responsibility in order to affirm divine agency.

Much as we support the intention to offer reassurance, we know too much of the history of the teaching of divine determinism to affirm the message of this passage uncritically. We even wonder whether the passage in its present form accurately reflects Paul’s intention. Some ancient manuscripts add the word “God” to verse 28, so that it reads, “God works in [or with] all things for good,” instead of, “all things work together for good.” The RSV followed these manuscripts and the NRSV allows this translation as an option. We do not know which formulation was Paul’s, but we are sure that we prefer this variant. We do believe that “God works in and with all things for good,” even in the face of the Holocaust and environmental destruction. We see God working in all things for good and calling us to work for good also. But we also see much happening that is not good. We do not try to explain how the AIDS epidemic expresses God’s will or benefits those who believe in Jesus. Paul did not say anything like that either. He did not suggest, in his salvation history, that human idolatry and its consequences worked for good.

We cannot agree with the classical theists’ understanding of divine “omniscience” and “omnipotence,” which entail God’s foreknowledge of future events, not just as possibilities or probabilities, but as actualities. We oppose even more strongly the correlative doctrine that God foreordains future events. Paul did not engage in discussion of such issues, so we do not know what he thought about them. But we can see here, and in chapters 9-11, that what his theological affirmations require is the freedom, goodness, and priority of God’s providential actions. They do not require the denial of responsible human decision and action.

We can also affirm that God’s “purpose” to transform all that has gone wrong in all creation, and not just in human affairs, is nothing new—it has always been God’s “purpose.” Further, we can see how Paul’s affirmations about God’s “providence” entered into conversation with his own pagan and Jewish intellectual culture, against skeptics’ claims that the gods, if they existed, had nothing to do with events in this world, or that they were unwilling or unable to transform patently bad circumstances. The question was whether the gods were willing and able to “save” humans and the world they inhabited from corruption, worthlessness, futility, and decay. But, even though we acknowledge the value of what Paul wrote here, looking back after many centuries in which it has led to disturbing consequences, we regret his formulations.

8:31-39

The stock phrase, “What then are we to say about these things?” (8:31, NRSV), introduces a new series of arguments that close this section of the letter. Those arguments continue the theme of God’s redemptive providential purpose as the ground of hope in the face of the present condition of creation. Although the emphasis in this passage is on the hope of “the children of God” or “the saints” (8:14-17, 18, 23-30), God’s redemptive purpose also answers the groans of all creation for release from its captivity to worthlessness and decay (8:19-22). Hence, the affirmation that nothing can separate “us” from “God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39) also applies to “all creation.”

With eloquence and poetic beauty, Paul announced that Jewish and Gentile believers, and indeed all of creation, were under the protective love of God. Beginning with a series of rhetorical questions, he dismissed the suggestion that those who shared Jesus’ faithfulness, apart from the law, stood accused and condemned. Paul asked whether God and Christ will do the accusing and condemning, leaving the reader with only one possible answer—a resounding, “No, not at all! Impossible!”

In the style of a mock trial, Paul played the part of the defense attorney. After an introductory rhetorical question in verse 31a (“What then are we to say about these things?”), his presentation to the jury, the implied readers, was structured in four rhetorical questions. The first three consist of complementary pairs: verses 31b-32, verse 33, and verse 34. The last, verses 35-39, is more complex and sums up the whole section.

The first two pairs concern God’s possible role. The question in verse 31b (“If God is for us, who is against us?”) contains within it its own answer. Since up to this point in the letter, Paul had meticulously and relentlessly argued that “God is for us,” it should be clear that God could not be “against us.” If that was not clear to the reader, Paul’s follow-up question in verse 32 nailed it! Beginning with an allusion to the foundational narrative of God’s love, this question invited the reader to consider the absurdity that, though God had made the ultimate sacrifice of God’s “own son . . . for all of us,” God could be unwilling or unable to give everything to “us”! Here Paul’s image of God was that of the ultimate friend, who was always “for us,” would give up anything “for us,” and would graciously give us everything. In this eschatological, and forensic, context, “everything” must refer, not to luxuries, nor even to the necessities of life—food, drink, shelter, and the like—but to acquittal, freedom, and all the salutary benefits mentioned in the sections of the letter up to this point. If “God is for us,” therefore, no one can be “against us,” for no one greater than God is conceivable.

Paul then moved to a question in verse 33a about God’s role as the possible prosecutor: “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect” (NRSV)? Again, one rhetorical question is answered by a second in verse 33b: “God who justifies?” Or, if “the elect,” just mentioned, are the implied object of God’s action, “God who acquits the elect?” Again, the questions are absurd. How could God both “elect” believers apart from the law and bring charges against them? How could God, the judge who renders a verdict of innocence and pronounces that those who participate in Jesus’ faithfulness are free to go, also be the prosecutor seeking to impeach “the elect”? God is not a corrupt judge or a judge in a corrupt court. God is a God of justice! God’s word and judgment are faithful, true, and righteous. If God, the supreme and eschatological judge, finds believers innocent apart from the law, who is left to bring charges against God’s “elect”? No one!

The next pair of rhetorical questions (verse 34) moved up the court hierarchy, from the prosecutor to the judge. To the question “Who is to condemn?” Paul answered in a way that again rendered the question absurd. How could “Christ Jesus, who died and, more than that, was raised, and who is at the right hand of God, and who intercedes for us,” also “condemn us”? This is impossible for the same reason given for the first two pairs of rhetorical questions. For God’s sake, Jesus is not the judge, but the intercessor! Only incompetent and/or corrupt defense lawyers would condemn their clients before the judge and jury. But Jesus is no incompetent or corrupt intercessor! He is God’s faithful and righteous one, the Messiah, whom God raised up from death and enthroned at God’s own right hand. If God and the one whom God had appointed to the highest court of the heavens have no charges to bring against “the elect”—and, indeed, are “for us”—there was no one higher to condemn. No one should be foolish enough to press charges against those who share Jesus’ faithfulness or righteousness apart from the law, because they have the highest officers of the heavenly court on their side!

The last rhetorical question (verse 35) breaks from the pattern of question and follow-up question and turns from juridical questions about accusers, prosecutors, and judges to the topic of love (see verses 35, 37, and 39). It also leads into a more direct and complex answer (verses 36-39) that sums up the whole section. At first glance, the connection between separation from “the love of Christ” (verse 35a) and the list of life’s hard knocks (verse 35b) is not clear. Are the latter signs that Christ no longer loves those who suffer hardships? Are they opportunities to lose faith in the love of Christ? Clarity comes in the following verses.

In verse 36 Paul quoted Psalm 43:23 verbatim from the Septuagint (for the Hebrew text, see 44:23 in the NRSV): “For your sake we are in danger of death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” This verse is from a lament, in which Israel remembered the past victories God had given them over their enemies (verses 2-9). But then God abandoned them to defeat and shame (verses 10-17). They responded by protesting that, though they had not broken the covenant in any way, they “are in danger of death all day long” and “are considered as sheep to be slaughtered,” because God had abandoned them (verses 18-23). Their lament concluded with loud cries to wake God up from sleep, demanding that God rise up and come to their help (verses 24-27). At the very end, the community reminded God that God’s “name” was at stake (verse 27). The Hebrew text, however, ended with the reminder that God’s “steadfast love” was at stake (44:26, NRSV), which is similar to Paul’s confidence that God’s love would bring them victory (Rom 8:37) and that nothing in all creation could separate them from God’s love (8:39).

Interpreted through the lens of this lament, in the second half of Romans 8:35 Paul did not just list life’s general hard knocks; rather, he described the perils brought upon God’s people by their enemies. The psalmist also made it clear that these perils were not consequences of idolatry or any other violations of God’s law; on the contrary, it was precisely the innocent who suffered such perils. But did Paul share the psalmist’s view that such perils were signs God had abandoned the people of the covenant? His answer in verse 37 was, “No!” Paul quoted the psalmist to acknowledge that those who participated in Jesus’ faithfulness were suffering these things and to connect their suffering with the tradition of the righteous sufferers that the psalmist represents.

Paul also went beyond this lament, because for him this suffering was for the sake of Christ and God’s love, not because God had abandoned them. Their witness, which included their sharing in Christ’s suffering for the sake of this gospel, would find victory in Christ’s and God’s love, from which nothing in all creation could separate them (verses 37-39).

This gospel and those who witness to it also had nonhuman enemies in “creation”: death and life, angels and rulers, things present and things to come, powers, height and depth (verses 38-39). With the exception of the singular item, “powers,” these are pairs of polar opposites. Paul very likely thought of these as cosmic powers, similar to the tripartite classification of cosmic powers into celestial, earthly, and subterranean divine beings in Philippians 2:10. As there, so here, Paul announced that God and Christ were greater than all these powers. If these could not separate the faithful from “the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” nothing else in creation could!

Concluding Reflections

In many ways, chapters 6-8 are less distant from us than the discussion of salvation history in the earlier chapters. The nature of the new life in Christ and how it relates to life apart from Christ are familiar topics today. The quasi-psychological analysis of the human dilemma in relation to law can speak to us quite directly.

The main problem we have is one with which the church has struggled at least since Augustine. The radical difference Paul describes between life in the church and life in the world has not corresponded with Christian experience for many centuries. Some sectarians can still identify with it, but in the old-line churches it seems quite unrealistic. Church and world are too intertwined. We may criticize Augustine and Luther for reading their own ideas back into Paul, but we will have to be grateful that they provide a more realistic account of what most Christians actually experience.

Indeed, even their accounts sometimes give greater clarity to what it means to be a believer than we can find realized in many of our churches. The danger of the acculturation of old-line Protestant churches is severe. Just for that reason, a fresh encounter with Paul is fruitful. Even if the church cannot recover just what was experienced in the Pauline churches—and perhaps does not wish to do so—Christians may gain insights into what would be involved in attaining a fresh authentic identity for the faithful in our time.

On one point, Paul is very helpful. It is as important today as it was in Paul’s time that Christian identity not be sought in a legalism. The churches lose their souls to whatever extent they define themselves in terms of a new law, whether a law of beliefs or a law of practices. Paul’s critique of legalism was devastating, and it requires only modest updating to apply to the current situation.

Paul showed clearly that the alternative to legalism was a way of being in the world that was truly conformed to Christ and therefore oriented to the service of God. To whatever extent the church can draw its members into that way of being in the world, Christians can rid themselves of legalistic definitions and argument. If the church cannot do this and becomes, instead, a bastion of particular beliefs and practices, it will have cut itself off radically from its Pauline roots. Disciples of Paul must try to avoid that fate. At least they can make clear that faithfulness to Paul is not found by turning his writings, in all their opposition to legalism, into a new book of laws!

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[1] See Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976).

[2] For this interpretation, see Leander E. Keck, “The Law and ‘The Law of Sin and Death’ (Romans 8:1-4): Reflections on the Spirit and Ethics in Paul,” in The Divine Helmsman: L. H. Silberman Festschrift, ed. J. L. Crenshaw and S. Sandmel (New York: KTAV, 1980), pp. 41-57.

[3] For this interpretation, see Paul W. Meyer, “Romans: A Commentary,” in The Word in This World: Essays in New Testament Exegesis and Theology, ed. John T. Carroll, The New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p. 189. For the earlier versions of Meyer’s commentary, see the bibliography at the end of our commentary.

[4] Compare, for example, C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols., International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), 1.374-75; James D. G. Dunn, Romans, Word Biblical Commentary 38a (Waco: Word Publishing, 1988), pp. 416-19; and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, Anchor Bible 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 482.

[5] Hermann Martin Kleinknecht, “Pneuma in the Greek World,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1968), 6.332–359.