Committed Critic

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):

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am fleshly, sold under sin. I don’t understand what I do. For it’s not what I want that I do, but what I hate––that’s what I do. Now if what I don’t want to do is what I actually do, I agree with the law that it’s good [i.e., I have to admit the law had it right, even though I can’t do it]. But at that point, it’s no longer I who am doing the deed, but sin dwelling within me.For good certainly isn’t dwelling within me––in my flesh, I mean. For the wanting to do what’s good is right beside me, but the actual doing of good is not. For it’s not what I want to do (good) that I do, but what I don’t want to do (bad), that’s what I do. But if I do what I don’t want to do, again, it’s no longer I who am doing the deed, but the sin dwelling within me.

So I find a certain “law” at work: When what I want is to do something good, the bad is right beside me. I agree with God’s law as far as my inner self in concerned, but I see another “law” among my members, warring against the “law” of my mind and taking me captive by the “law” of sin which is within my members.

I am a wretched mortal––who will rescue me from this deathly body? Thank be to God, through Jesus Christ our lord.

So then, I am in my mind a slave to the law of God, but in my flesh a slave to the “law” of sin.

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:

• Romans 6:2: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
• Romans 6:6: “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin…”
• Romans 6:11: “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
• Romans 6:17: “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were handed over. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
• Romans 6:22: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.”

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):

“What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword (as it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered”)?No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Amen.

I want to take up a question I asked earlier: “Is the cross a condemnation of human violence, an act of divine violence, or both (or neither)?”

For starters, let me postulate that God hates sin.

I’ll define sin as a breakdown of humans’ ability to love and relate to God and one another; alienation (to be mended later by reconciliation) is a good word for it. This alienation defies God’s purpose for creation, with the result that God (often violently) punishes whoever is responsible. He may avenge sin in this way because it is in nature to do so, or he may do so out of an insistence that humanity know how much he hates sin. The flood suggests the former, the cross the latter.

Genesis 1–7 begins with God’s intimacy with creation and shows how humanity breaks and increasingly defies that intimacy. I believe the flood is a key to the story of Scripture, because it shows God’s response to sin: God ultimately removes it or punishes it, whatever the cost.

It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the flood (whether one thinks it literally happened or is a myth intended to make a theological point), in that God was willing to destroy almost all of creation, out of both wrath and a loving desire to make creation good again. God starts again with Noah, who does love God and his family, but of course he and his descendants fall again into sin and alienation.

These early stories describing the pervasive sin both before and after the flood suggest a key point about humans: while the occasional individual (like Enoch or Noah) whole-heartedly seeks a realtionship with God on his/her own, humanity on the whole will inevitably descend into sin and alienation from God if left to ourselves.

So God makes it easier for humans by setting certain terms to define the relationship. He begins with Abraham and eventually establishes the covenant with Israel, in an effort to win back their love and to use them to win back the love of the world. But, of course, the people break this relationship early and often and continue to fall into sin. God responds to their sin, as he did during the flood, by destroying Israel’s world, via the exile, to make the nation good again.

In the incarnation, God conclusively defies divine/human alienation; though already present with Israel in many ways over the centuries, God now becomes a human to achieve the full intimacy of relationship.

The cross, I’m convinced, is beyond human comprehension. Scripture describes Christ’s work in various ways, many of them centering on animal sacrifice, and yet we never quite understand why sacrifice (animal or divine) should mend the broken relationship between us and God. I suspect that animal sacrifice was intended to demonstrate the weight of our iniquity, but of course it could not really settle the matter conclusively.

Here I would suggest that the crucifixion must be understood in light of the flood. I shouldn’t over-press the point, since the NT itself doesn’t draw this connection, but I do think it can help us make sense of divine violence in general and the cross in particular.

Both the watery destruction of the entire world and the death of the incarnate God underline the weight of sin in God’s eyes, but in powerfully different ways. In Genesis, God executes his wrath upon humanity and creation; in the crucifixion, God takes it upon himself. In one sense, this means that Christ suffers the punishment we deserve, but in another sense it is a proclamation to us that God will not allow human weakness to prevent relationship between God and his creation.

God was unwilling to leave sin ultimately unpunished, lest we think it unimportant. The cross, then, is not a condemnation of human violence, but a condemnation of human sin. If divine violence was inevitable, God chose the most gracious act of violence possible, in that God in the flesh was the willing victim.

The hope, it seems, was that all people in the world would look at the cross and recognize both (1) that we are sinners who need to repent and (2) that God loves us passionately and will forgive our sin so that we can be reconciled to the creator who loves us.

The beauty of the cross is this: only the crucifixion has proclaimed to humanity both the boundlessness of God’s love and the full weight of our sin without destroying us to teach us the lesson.