§6 The Straightedge of the Law (Rom. 2:17–29)

Psalm 51 records the confession of David when the storm of guilt from his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah broke upon him. Psalm 51 is, in fact, descriptive of the human condition, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.… Surely I was sinful at birth” (vv. 3, 5). It may be possible to maintain confidence in one’s virtue if one limits or controls the field of comparison. It is common, for instance, in comparative studies of various kinds, to compare the strengths of one system to the weaknesses of another system in order to vindicate the superiority of the former. Jews did this in Paul’s day when they compared Jewish morality with Gentile immorality, as we have seen in the Wisdom of Solomon 12–15. A modern approach would be comparing “the American way of life” to that of the Far East or Latin America, or church attendance in America to that of Europe. But what happens when the good is not contrasted to the inferior but compared with the ideal, the standard by which the judgment is itself made? A vast difference results: we find ourselves no longer in the victory circle but on the ropes.

This is the program in 2:17–29. The exacting righteousness of God’s revealed will pronounces judgment on all people, and each person is forced to confess with David, “I was sinful at birth.” The face of unrighteousness first becomes apparent when one “looks intently into the perfect law” (James 1:25). Thus, the reflection of Jewish righteousness and confidence is as distorted by the mirror of the law as is the obvious unrighteousness of Gentiles. Paul eliminates all possibility of a righteousness apart from the grace of God.

2:17–20 / Paul now mentions Jews for the first time in his case against humanity, although he doubtlessly had them in mind since 2:1ff. If Jews could still maintain their confidence after 2:1ff., all illusion is now dispelled as Paul calls them from their seats in the courtroom, nay, from the jury itself, and summons them to the defendant’s chair. The diatribe style is again resumed (vv. 17–20), but even in verses 21ff. the style continues to be accusatory. The argument of verses 17–29 is essentially the same as that of 2:1–3, but what Paul argued on the grounds of moral logic in 2:1–3 he measures by the straightedge of the law in 2:17–29. We will understand Paul’s case here only if we grant his previous conclusion that God judges according to obedience to known good. The privileges which Israel received from God do not exempt it from judgment, but increase its burden of responsibility.

Verses 17–20 form the introductory condition of a logical argument (note the repetition of if), known as the premise or protasis. Paul resumes the direct second person singular address with which he intensified the argument in 2:1–5. He begins the prosecution by appealing not to Jewish weaknesses but to Jewish strengths. One strength is the name Jew itself. No later than the Maccabean period (second century B.C.) “Jew” had become a name of honor (although not always in the mouths of Gentiles) for the individual who confessed the one true God in an alien, polytheistic environment. For the rabbis Mordecai became the exemplary Jew who refused to forsake the God of Israel for the idolatry of Haman (Esther 3:5). Paul’s kinsfolk accepted the designation of Jew with pride as a name that fused a national faith and a strong loyalty to Torah.

A second strength is the law. Well might Jews rely on the law. “Torah” was a sacred word in Judaism, for to Israel alone the law had been given. Of all the nations Israel received Torah because it alone was worthy to receive it, and the possession and study of Torah were tantamount to ensuring Israel a place in the world to come. Israel might lose everything else, but the Torah remained Israel’s identity and hope. The rabbis waxed prolific on Torah:

In you we have put our trust, because, behold, your Law is with us, and we know that we do not fall as long as we keep your statutes. We shall always be blessed; at least, we did not mingle with the nations. For we are all a people of the Name; we, who received one Law from the One. And that Law which is among us will help us, and that excellent wisdom which is in us will support us (2 Apoc. Bar. 48:22–24).

The NIV says you brag about your relationship to God (v. 17), but brag slurs a reputation of which Jews were justly proud. Better to translate kauchaomai in verse 17 positively, “to boast,” or “pride oneself in,” as echoed in Jeremiah 9:23–24.

Jewish privilege and pride continue in verse 18 (note the third “if”).Torah was holy because it revealed God’s will. This too Israel claimed to its credit, that it alone knew God’s will. Knowledge of God’s will gave Israel a standard by which to approve of what is superior. This phrase, repeated in Philippians 1:10, means the ability to differentiate essentials from incidentals, the heart of a matter from peripherals. When Jesus criticized the Pharisees for neglecting the “important matters of the law—justice, mercy, faithfulness”—and tithing “mint, dill, and cummin” instead (Matt. 23:23), he had such things in mind. The distinction between primary and secondary matters of faith would play an important role in later theology. The diapheronta were essentials about which Christians could not disagree without jeopardizing the faith; the adiaphora, however, were non-essentials about which Christians could disagree and still hold the faith. The law, says Paul, admits of judging between the content of God’s will and the wrappings in which it appears. Such distinctions were important for Jews, and particularly Pharisaic Jews, who endeavored to exceed the minimal requirements of the law and fulfill it in its entirety. In these matters Jews had been instructed by the law. The Greek word for instructed, katēcheō, from which “catechism” is derived, means that such matters had been ingrained by formal religious instruction.

In verses 19–20 Paul lists four evidences of Jewish preeminence: Jews are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, and a teacher of infants. These again are premises of the subsequent argument, introduced by if. It may appear from these accolades that, similar to Matthew 15:14, for example, Paul is mocking the Jews or chiding them for harboring inflated claims of their importance. But this does not seem to be the case. These and other designations appear frequently enough in the OT and rabbinic literature to assure us that Paul is not being sarcastic. Especially in the Diaspora, one frequently encountered the belief that Torah was the supreme expression of the moral law, and that the wisdom of the Greek philosophers—Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Plato—was indebted to Jewish moral patronage. The idea is evident in the Sibylline Oracles, “[Jews] point out the way of life to all mortals” (3.195).

Such pretentions caused many Diaspora Jews to think of their Gentile neighbors as barbarians who lived in “congenital ignorance,” to quote Bengel (Gnomon, vol. 3, p. 36). Torah was for Jews the embodiment of knowledge and truth (v. 20), the latter being divine truth or “orthodoxy.” The Greek word rendered embodiment (NIV) is morphōsis, meaning “form” (cf. 2 Tim. 3:5). Here morphōsis has positive connotations. Jewish orthodoxy was not a hollow claim. Jews had been called and equipped for the special mission of being “a light for the Gentiles” (Isa. 49:6). The premise in verses 17–20 is not that Jews harbored inflated claims of themselves. They had reason to boast in God. Their problem lay not in overestimating their importance, but in failing to live up to it. God’s favor entailed a responsibility, not an exemption. They understood their privileges to excuse them from judgment, whereas Paul argues that their privileges accuse them before God.

2:21–24 / Paul now proceeds from the protasis to the apodosis or main point of his argument. On the basis of their privileged status Paul delivers the sentence: the one who has taught others the truth has failed to learn it himself; the one who has moralized against theft, adultery, and idolatry has been caught in the act. This is a charge of hypocrisy, which is serious enough. But there is something worse. Failure at the behavioral level has mocked profession at the verbal level (v. 23), besmirching God’s name before the Gentiles, to whom Jews were to illumine it (v. 24)!

Exactly how might these verses be understood? How many Jews, for instance, were guilty of stealing, adultery, and robbing temples? Is Paul overstating the case to make a point? Were not Jews on the whole innocent of such censorious deeds? Luther, apparently sensing hyperbole on Paul’s part, says such things “refer to the attitudes of the inner man,” to the desires of humanity to do such things, as Paul later attests in 7:16–18 (Lectures on Romans, pp. 57–58). Paul, in Luther’s understanding, is referring not to deeds but to intentions, to the problem of the hardened heart. These are the things Jews would do “if they were permitted to,” and of which they are thus guilty, since God knows the secrets of human hearts (2:16).

This interpretation disposes of Paul’s crowning blow, however. His intention is to burst the balloon of Jewish pride and presumption, and he must do so by citing actual violations of the law, for it is acts—and not intentions—to which the Ten Commandments appeal. Stealing, adultery, and idolatry are thus moral offenses, not cultic offenses. Paul must have been aware that fabrication of such offenses (or even exaggeration of them) would have weakened his argument, if not destroyed it altogether.

That some Jews were innocent of such vices cannot, of course, be doubted. Paul’s choice of sins is illustrative, not exhaustive. What could not be doubted, however, was that there were enough infractions of the law—even among pious Jews—to cause the most complacent Jew to shift uneasily in the chair of moral security. The rabbis themselves told stories of a man who lost his cloak and, upon going to the judge to get help in recovering it, found it spread over the bench of the judge himself; of a rabbi’s wife who caught her husband in adultery by disguising herself as another woman; of a rabbi who taught against lending money at interest and against stealing … and who was convicted of both; of double standards such as: “Robbing a Gentile is forbidden, but if one finds a Gentile’s stolen property he can keep it.” That Palestinian Jews felt justified in denuding pagan temples in the name of the One God was practically axiomatic. Some four decades before Paul wrote to Rome, the Jewish community there had been scandalized by four of its members who had persuaded a wealthy Roman proselyte named Fulvia to make a generous gift to the Jerusalem temple and had then absconded with the money themselves. In retaliation Tiberius expelled the Jewish community from Rome in A.D. 19.

There is no need to dig in rabbinic archives to find such aberrations, however. Matthew 23 and Luke 11:39–52 provide a chorus of evidence against the Pharisees, as the prophets had against their people earlier (Isa. 3:14–15; Jer 7:8–11; Ezek. 22:6–12; Mal. 3:5). Paul is not accusing Jews of crimes they were either guiltless of or unaware of; he is but one voice in a jury of his own people, and also of Gentiles. The evidence is sufficient, as Dunn rightly notes, “to undermine the confidence that the Jew per se stands in a position of superiority or advantage over the non-Jew by virtue of being a member of the people of the law” (Romans 1–8, p. 114).

Because they have been privileged by God, Jews are like the debtor in Jesus’ parable who was forgiven ten thousand talents by his master, and who then went out and grabbed a fellow debtor by the throat and threw him into jail until he paid back a hundred denarii (Matt. 18:23–30). Jews may be Exhibit A of human righteousness, yet even they cannot withstand the straightedge of the law.

2:25–29 / Paul now moderates his argument by shifting to a more reasoned and didactic approach. He resumes the general thought of 2:12–15 by taking up the trump card of Jewish confidence—circumcision. Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised (v. 25). Paul allows no separation of sign from reality, of circumcision from observance of the law. Most of his contemporaries would not have accepted either the wording or reasoning of verse 25. Already in the first century A.D. the sign of circumcision had replaced the significance it represented and, in the words of C. K. Barrett, was regarded as a “passport to salvation” (Romans, p. 58). In contemporary Judaism we find such statements as, “The circumcised do not descend into Gehenna,” or “at the last Abraham will sit at the entrance to Gehenna and will not let any circumcised man of Israel go down there.” To the average Jew circumcision seems to have carried an unquestioned pledge of security. The same sign which differentiated Jew from Gentile assured the Jew of his inviolable status with God. Comparable to the understanding of citizenship today wherein nationality depends on birth rather than on adherence to the ideals of the nation, so salvation was assured by the ritual of circumcision.

Paul parted ways from his fellow Jews on this issue. For them circumcision was the covenant, for him it was the sign of the covenant! According to the OT, circumcision, which dated from the time of Abraham (Gen. 17:10ff.), was practiced as an act of initiation into the community of Israel as a sign of adherence to the covenant. Paul’s terminology in 2:15 and 3:1 is instructive. He does not say that circumcision “justifies” (dikaioun), but that it “has value” (ōphelein). Its value depends on fulfilling the substance it signifies, i.e., the covenant of obedience, similar to wedding rings or pendant crosses today which have meaning only insofar as the vows or commitment symbolized by them are fulfilled. Failure to honor the marriage or faith commitment not only renders the symbols meaningless, it scandalizes them.

One can scarcely avoid the force of this argument with regard to the sacraments. There were theories in the later church that the effects of the sacraments were independent of the faith of those who received them, that they worked ex opere operato. In his battle against Donatism, Augustine, in fact, would appeal to such thinking. Verses 25ff. certainly cannot be cited as evidence for such an understanding. Paul, of course, did not despise the Lord’s Supper any more than he despised circumcision. It was precisely because he valued them that he warned against their misuse (see 1 Cor. 10:20–22). When the sacraments dispense with obedience instead of obligate to obedience, they run into the same danger which Paul saw in circumcision. The apostle had an inveterate mistrust that signs and rituals could become substitutes for the will of God rather than signs of it (see 1 Cor. 13:3; 14:6; Gal. 5:2). As signs they remained expressions of the will of the believer, and hence meaningful and necessary. But as substitutes they were deceptive and dangerous.

By reverse logic, if an inner commitment is the thing of God’s concern, then the doing of the law ought to compensate for the lack of the sign of circumcision. If, as Leenhardt says, “the presence of circumcision is [not] an automatic guarantee of divine favour, [neither] is its absence a sign of divine prejudice” (Romans, p. 88). This is the thought of verse 26, which repeats that of 2:14. The word logizomai, “to reckon or account” (NIV, regarded), conveys this idea. It means the imputing of a missing quality on the basis of an equivalent or superior quality. In the case of Abraham, God “reckoned” him righteous because of his trust in God (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3). Likewise, believers are “reckoned” righteous because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to them (3:28). Uncircumcised Gentiles who do the law are reckoned as having the sign of circumcision. If the circumcised who fail to keep the law betray an “uncircumcised heart,” then the uncircumcised who keep the law reveal a “circumcised heart” and are regarded as though they were circumcised (v. 26).

Thus, the uncircumcised Gentile who keeps the law will judge the circumcised Jew who does not (v. 27). A startling conclusion indeed! In the eyes of Jews, of course, Gentiles were transgressors or lawbreakers (v. 27). A non-Israelite who kept the law scrupulously was still regarded as a stranger to the covenant because of his uncircumcision. But the true economy of God is different, says Paul. The one who obeys the law (v. 27; the tense in Greek means continuous, ongoing obedience), even if a Gentile, will judge the one who does not, even if a Jew. “The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it,” said Jesus (Matt. 12:41). The written code and circumcision (v. 27) indeed identify Jews (v. 17), but they avail nothing apart from obedience to the law. The emphasis is shifted away from ritual and custom toward faith and ethics.

Chapter 2 concludes with reference to religion evident inwardly and outwardly. By inwardly Paul does not mean “private” or “closet” faith, but earnestness; and by outwardly he intends not to disparage ethics (which has been the thrust of his argument since 1:18ff.) but to warn against outwardness as the mask of hypocrisy. Inwardly and outwardly repeat the teaching of 2:11, 16: the true sign of the covenant is a willing (= circumcised) heart, which includes inner conversion and moral renewal. Apart from such commitment, circumcision of the flesh is a meaningless mark; in fact, it is a sign of condemnation because it signifies the disparity between the ideal and the failure to live it out. Circumcision thus does not make one a Jew, but it reveals the Jew inwardly, circumcision of the heart (v. 29).

The distinction between inward and outward was not new to Paul’s readers. Through the metaphor of the circumcised heart (Lev. 26:41; Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4), the prophets had admonished Israel to obey the covenant and not merely to name it. There is a vast difference between the human will and the divine will. The former, according to Paul, is designated by outwardly, physical, and written code. These are human elements which, apart from the radical surrender of faith and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, are but hollow echoes of the divine word. True religion is inward, of the heart, by the Spirit. It is of God, and what is of God receives praise … from God (v. 29). In Hebrew “praise” (hôḏâh) and “Judah” (yehûḏāh; e.g., Gen. 29:35; 49:8) sound similar. Paul seems to have made a word play on this (though he cannot have expected many of his Roman readers to have understood it): not the judging Jew nor the boasting Jew, but the true Jew receives God’s praise.

Additional Notes §6

2:17–20 / On the significance of the term “Jew,” see Dunn, Romans 1–8, pp. 109–10, 116–17; and Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 96–97.

Further examples of the importance of Torah in Judaism can be found in Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 115–18; 126–33.

On the idea of minimal versus maximal performance of the law, see Schlatter, Gottes Gerechtigkeit, p. 102.

Further references to the characteristics of Jews in vv. 19–20 can be found in Cranfield, Romans, vol. 1, pp. 166–67; and Dunn, Romans 1–8, pp. 112–13.

On the indebtedness of Greek philosophers to the Torah, see the examples listed in Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 98–105.

Bengel’s crisp formula is an example of his ability to say much in few words. He further observes that in his case against Gentiles Paul argued that their sins were first against God, then against themselves, and finally against others; but in his case against Jews the order is reversed, arguing that moral infractions against others and self ultimately dishonor God! The Jews thought of Torah as a loving father, but in reality it was an exacting schoolmaster. See Bengel, Gnomon, vol. 3, pp. 36–37.

2:21–24 / On the story of Fulvia, see Josephus, Ant. 18.81–84. For the other examples of Jewish vices, see the material gathered in Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 105–15.

Dunn’s discussion of these verses is balanced and helpful (see Romans 1–8, pp. 108–16).

On the bankruptcy of human righteousness, see Barth, Romans, p. 75.

2:25–29 / For the idea that Jews were exempt from judgment because of circumcision, see Cranfield, Romans, vol. 1, p. 172, and Str-B, vol. 1, p. 119.

On Jewish attitudes toward uncircumcised Gentiles, see Str-B, vol. 3, p. 119–21.

Some commentators understand verse 27 to mean Christian Gentiles who will judge Jews, taking the “circumcision of the heart” in verses 28–29 as a reference to the new covenant foreseen by Jeremiah (31:31–34). But this blunts the edge of the verse. As we noted in 2:13–15, it is doubtful that Paul intends Christian Gentiles here. His argument hangs not on faith in Christ but on a moral righteousness grounded in the law. Moreover, righteousness by faith is not formally introduced until 3:21ff.

Dunn offers a good discussion of the distinction between “of God” and “of man” in Romans 1–8, pp. 123–25. Luther adds this note: “Outer righteousness is praised by men and reproved by God; inner righteousness, however, is praised by God and reproved and persecuted by men” (Lectures on Romans, p. 59).