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I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been argued by any number of commentators, but I want to posit that reading Romans 7 (”I do not do what I want to do”) as a comforting passage reflecting Paul’s ongoing struggle with sin, with which we should identify, is simply wrong. It’s very enticing to identify with its struggle, because we’ve all had a common experience: trying to do what we know is right, sometimes succeeding but perhaps more often failing. Problem is, as far as I can tell, in Romans 7 there’s no sometimes. There is indeed a struggle based on an inner desire to do what is good, but there’s no mixed bag of success and failure. The speaker is simply, frankly, unable to do good. Not sometimes, but ever. Try to find where the passage leaves open the possibility of success (I’m using my translation, which at some points is more idiomatic than NIV, at others more literal; note the NIV butchers the passage as a whole):
Typically, protestants like to read this and say, “Ah, we are indeed depraved––but thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, for forgiving all our sins so that we aren’t condemned even though we sin all the time.” And yet:
I’m not one to insist that Paul never contradicts himself, but none of these is compatible with reading 7:14 (quoted above: “I am fleshly, sold under sin”) as describing the life of a Christian. “Sold,” following the dicussion of chapter 6, implies slavery, which Paul has said more than once is abolished at baptism. Instead, the struggle of chapter 7 sounds more like what Paul describes as a pre-Christian state (6:20): “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.” Chapter 7, then, is not at all about any ongoing struggle within the believer. (We may experience such a struggle, but it is only because we go against the work of the spirit and Paul’s good advice and choose to do bad, not because we are unable to do good.) Rather, the desperate situation that Paul describes is before you’re a believer, when you’re still a slave to sin. Everything within you might want to do what is good, but you can’t. I should note, we can debate how to apply this last point practically. I assume most of us wouldn’t claim that an unbeliever never does a good deed, but I don’t think that’s the point. Paul’s theological focus is on every person, apart from Christ, standing condemned as a sinner before God, unable to justify himself or herself (Rom 3:19). Some people don’t like this interpretation of Romans 7 because they prefer the one that seems to match their experience. However, the result of the Gospel as Paul envisions it is not merely a sort of back-handed good news, such that we’ll feel wretched our entire lives but take comfort in our forgiveness by Jesus. That may correspond to our experience, but it’s not what Paul was saying. But that would be a poor comfort anyway. Instead, we receive a word that is far better. God has assured us that he’s set us free from our old bond through baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit which accompanies our conversion gives us good news on several counts: it lives within us (8:9), it teaches us how to live (8:4), it helps us put to death the deeds of the body (8:13), it gives us life and peace (8:6), it testifies that we are God’s children (8:16), it helps us pray (8:26), it intercedes for us before God (8:27), and it will accomplish the resurrection of our mortal bodies after we die (8:11). It turns out Romans isn’t really much of a comfort to a neurotic like Martin Luther: Paul makes abundantly clear that God is not content for us to go on sinning (6:1, 15), but then he won’t go to the other extreme and say God is harsh so we can admit our condemnation and go about our business. But if we do have any doubts as to where we stand, Paul hits us with perhaps the most wildly celebratory passage of his corpus. Read it as a blessing (NRSV):
Amen. |
October 20th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
“Chapter 7, then, is not at all about any ongoing struggle within the believer. (We may experience such a struggle, but it is only because we go against the work of the spirit and Paul’s good advice and choose to do bad, not because we are unable to do good.) Rather, the desperate situation that Paul describes is before you’re a believer, when you’re still a slave to sin. Everything within you might want to do what is good, but you can’t.”
I don’t have time to fully respond to this, but with all due respect, I seem to remember Paul talking very much in the present tense, describing his situation as he was writing down the Scripture. I also seem to remember that at the end of the chapter, he said, “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
My take on Romans and the Gospel in general is that we were saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved. We are justified by faith, being sanctified by faith, and will be glorified when we go home to be with Jesus. Salvation is the whole gammit (is that a word).
God bless you.
October 20th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Dan-
Thanks for reading and commenting. I think I can totally agree with everything in your last paragraph, that salvation is the whole gammit of one’s life as a believer.
As for Paul’s speaking in the first person and present tense, I probably should have made the case for my interpretation of that in my original post. Please excuse my reply here, which has ended up being quite long.
I think that throughout chapter 7, Paul uses the word “I” as a sort of rhetorical device, when it’s not he himself that he’s talking about at all.
A good example is the curious statement in 7:9-10: “You see, I was alive without the law once, but when the command came, sin came to life, and I died, so that the command that was meant for life, ended up being for death.”
Since Paul obviously was not alive before the law was given, the only way I know of to take this passage “literally” (as opposed to rhetorically, which is how I think Paul intended it) is to assume an age of accountability, before which Paul was not under the law and after which the law condemned him.
But that explanation seems contrived to me, plus I think it’s generally preferable to look within Romans itself for clarification of a question like this. And in my opinion, we reach a better explanation of the passage, in this case, if we do fit it into the argument of Romans as a whole.
Paul has already mentioned Adam, noting that sin and death entered the world through his transgression (5:12–14). I think Paul’s discussion in Romans 7:9–13 draws intentionally on the story of the man (Adam) and the woman in the garden in Genesis 2–3 in order to explain the human predicament.
So in 7:9–13, Paul is using the word “I” to refer (poetically) back to Adam, whom both Genesis and Paul use as a symbol for all of humanity. (Indeed, the name “Adam” in Hebrew simply means “Human.”)
When Paul says, “I was alive without the law once,” he’s probably alluding to Adam’s life in the garden. The two-part command that God gave Adam was to eat from the trees in the garden (which we know included the tree of life), but not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Once God gave a command, Adam had easy access to the means of sinning; all he had to do was break that command. That’s why Paul says, “when the command came, sin came to life.” The command, as Paul will say, was meant for life (probably an allusion to the tree of life, which was among those he was commanded to eat from), but it resulted in death, because he and the woman soon broke the command and were kicked out of the garden, so that they no longer had access to the tree of life.
Paul goes on to say (Rom 7:11): “Sin, seizing the opportunity through the command, deceived me and through it [that is, Sin] I died.” If I’m correct so far in reading this whole passage as a reference to Adam’s fall, then here we have an accurate (though vague) depiction of the serpent tempting the woman. Sin (loosely identified with the serpent) took advantage of the command (by distorting it) to deceive humanity (represented by the woman, in the story) so that both she and Adam died.
It seems odd that Paul doesn’t differentiate between the man and the woman in the story, but he’s already been combining the two in Romans. Back in 5:12–14, he probably should have said (technically) that sin entered the world through the woman, but instead he referred to one “human” (5:12) who he then quickly identified as Adam (5:14). Paul mainly wants to set up Adam as the first sinner because of the easy contrast with Christ, who undid sin and is, of course, also male.
In any event, though, Paul is interested not in the fate of one man but in the predicament of all humanity. So we should read 7:9–13 as describing not the first time Paul sinned, but the plight of all humanity: we “remember” a time when things were right, but ever since we were given commands to obey, we’ve broken them and earned death. In one sense, this is true for each of us as individuals, but I think the sense here in Romans is more collective.
I say all this to get around to your point of disagreement with my post. Even though Paul is describing the fate of all humanity in 7:9–13, for some reason he decides to phrase it in the first person, past tense. So when we see the first person present tense a few verses later in Romans 7:14–25, we don’t have to take it as Paul speaking about himself.
Instead, after describing the predicament of humanity apart from Christ in the past (7:9–13), now he’s describing the predicament of humanity apart from Christ in the present. At first it was just a simple case of deception (7:11), but it unleashed the power of death into the world, so that now those who do not have Christ are enslaved to sin.
This is where the gospel stands out so clearly. Paul spent most of chapters 1–3 of Romans describing aspects of what life is/was like for those who don’t have Christ. Here in chapter 7, he teases out some more implications. The passages are indeed negative, but for believers they no longer apply anyway. That’s why we can say with Paul, “Thanks be to God.”
October 22nd, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Scott,<br /><br />I think you are right. And to add to your previous arguments, it is striking that the Holy Spirit and Christ are not mentioned in this passage, only the “I” and the Law. Well, Christ is mentioned at the end, but that is in answering the question who will save the “I” from the predicament described. <br /><br />It is unfortunate in a way that Paul used the roundabout way of talking here, but he certainly is doing just that.
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:46 pm
@Scoots - “I should note, we can debate how to apply this last point practically. I assume most of us wouldn’t claim that an unbeliever never does a good deed, but I don’t think that’s the point. Paul’s theological focus is on every person, apart from Christ, standing condemned as a sinner before God, unable to justify himself or herself (Rom 3:19).”
Allrighty!
So what practical difference does it make that every person is, apart from Christ, standing condemned as a sinner before God? In particular, how should people who accept this interpretation act differently from people who accept Luther’s interpretation?
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Luther thought everyone was still in this position in Christ. (At least, that is, if I remember correctly from my class on Luther 3 years ago; in any event, we can use the stereotype of him to represent that interpretation of Romans.) If we accept his interpretation, we still consider ourselves as sinners standing condemned before God.
Paul, if I’m reading him correctly, doesn’t think we’re in that position once we’re baptized. It’s not just that we’re forgiven, it’s that we’re actually set free for a different kind of behavior. This doesn’t make us arrogant, because we know we’ve only changed because of God, and we know our behavior still isn’t perfect.
Practically speaking, I suppose it affects our attitudes as Christians first, and our actions only secondarily. So when we sin as Christians, we can’t just shrug it off and say, “Thank God for God’s grace.” On the other hand, it’s obvious from the passage I quoted at the end of my original post that Paul doesn’t think we should worry all the time whether we’ve lost our forgiveness because of our sin. Those are the two extremes.
Rather, when we sin, we ought to feel genuine remorse because we haven’t acted according to the life we’ve been given. We should realize that we’re enslaving ourselves again to the life that God in Christ rescued us from, and the desire to please God who loves us should be our motivation for changing our behavior, knowing that we’re empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit.
I think this is the most appropriate grounding for the way we live. If we resigned ourselves to being sinners for the rest of our lives, it would be very easy to do things we know are wrong without much thought. And if we thought every sin would condemn us, we probably would be overly harsh with both ourselves and others, which would likely hurt our relationships and might paralyze us with fear.
I don’t think God wants either of those for us, and one of the beauties of Paul’s argument is that he charts a way between the extremes which still gives us legitimate reason to live right.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Wow, Scoots, I gotta tell you… I’m so absolutely floored right now. You seriously have your head wrapped all around this thing. Sounds to me like you’ve done a fantastic job interpreting this, and your take is more than compelling. I buy it. Actually, I’m more than freaking out a little. I spoke on Romans 8:31-39 LAST NIGHT, and I’ve been reading Romans for funsies lately, and I just got to Romans 9. Sheesh, talk about serendipity, or providence, if you will. Go get ‘em, Scoots. By the way. I shook hands with Captain Jean Luc Picard of the USS Starship Enterprise yesterday. Or, at least Patrick Stewart. I’m on cloud 9.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Let me provide a different point of view, to show where this line of thought “before you’re a believer, when you’re still a slave to sin. Everything within you might want to do what is good, but you can’t” is maybe off track. I was raised by an atheist and came to christ at the age of 37. I would say that within the non-believer there is not a struggle to want to do good, but can’t. On the contrary, it is only about pleasing oneself, within that moment and there is absolutely no thought on I should do good. It is more about doing what feels good. A non-believer can certainly do good, just like a stopped clock is correct for one minute twice a day. Non believers do good things its just that there is a different motive behind it. But there is not a struggle, becuase when you don’t have morals, what is there to struggle against. Only those things that violate the laws that could send you to jail are considered, God’s laws would never enter the equation. The struggle only begins as your heart changes and you accept Christ, because it is at that point that you want to do good, and not before. It is only at this point that you realize that the ways of the past were sinful, and the fight begins to not continue in the sinful ways. You would never see it as a non-believer because to a non-believer sin is considered fun. I hope this makes things clearer.