article22

§16 Widowed from the Law and Married to Christ (Rom. 7:1–6)

Paul at last turns to the problem of the place of the law in salvation, a problem he has mentioned in passing but has not discussed in depth. Like all Jews, Paul made certain affirmations of the law. The law was given by God and was thus “holy, righteous, and good” (7:12). It was the definitive expression of God’s will for the ordering of human life (2:1ff.), and as such it was worthy of endorsement (3:31). But in the wake of his conversion, and unlike most of his Jewish contemporaries and even many of his Christian contemporaries, Paul saw also a negative side of the law. The law makes us aware of sin (3:20), it reveals transgressions and thus brings God’s wrath (4:15), and, most disturbingly, the law has a dangerous liaison with sin. Apart from the law, sin was not even reckoned as sin (5:13), but now the law actually incites and triggers it (7:5). This crescendo of indictments severely qualified the role of the Jewish law in the Christian scheme of things. Although it is not clear exactly how Paul viewed the law prior to his conversion, it is certainly true that even though he may not have attributed his salvation to Torah observance, the latter was at the very least a “matching contribution,” so to speak, on his part to God’s prior inclusion of him in the covenant. But after his conversion he realized that God accepts sinners by grace alone, apart from legal observance, and henceforth he understood his relationship with God in a totally new light, “not under law, but under grace” (6:14). Justification by faith restored law to its rightful place in the drama of redemption. It retains its function naturally as a straightedge of sin, thus revealing our need of a savior, and after salvation it remains a norm for righteous behavior. But it is no longer—indeed never was—a means of salvation. Its function, in other words, is diagnostic, not therapeutic.

We might distill Paul’s thoughts concerning the law in the present chapter to three conclusions: the law is holy, but it is provisional and limited. The law is holy because it was given by inspiration and reveals the will of God. But it is provisional because, like an escort or chaperon which leads believers to Christ, it has largely fulfilled its function (see Gal. 3:24–25). Finally, it is limited because it provides knowledge of sin but is powerless to produce the holiness and obedience it demands. “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24).

Since the law was so closely allied in Paul’s mind with the problem of sin, the present section shares several parallels with the previous chapter. In chapter 6 Paul argued that Christians are free from sin; in chapter 7 he argues that they are free from the law. Chapter 6 began with sin (v. 1); chapter 7 begins with law (v. 1). There “we died to sin” (6:2), here “you died to the law” (7:4). There Paul admonished Christians to “live a new life” (6:4), here to “serve in the new way of the Spirit” (7:6). There he spoke of release from sin (6:7, 18), here of release from the law (7:3, 6).

7:1 / Do you not know, brothers, begins Paul. This is only the second time Paul has addressed the Romans as brothers, and he uses the term advisedly both here and in verse 4 below as an appeal to their mutual trust on the sensitive issue of the law. For I am speaking to men who know the law indicates that even among his Gentile readers Paul could assume a familiarity with the law, which indicates that in Rome, as elsewhere, many of the Gentile converts had previously been adherents to the Jewish synagogue or were “God fearers.” The law under discussion is scarcely Roman law, despite the fact that the Romans, as Paul well knew, were eminent jurists. The marriage illustration that follows clearly refers to Jewish and not to Roman practice.

The law, says Paul, has authority over a man only as long as he lives. The word for has authority, kyrieuein, was applied to the authority of death and sin in 6:9 and 14, and here it casts a cloud of suspicion over the law. Moreover, because the law holds sway only during one’s life, its authority is temporary. It is not eternal, nor is its authority ultimate. It had once been regarded as such, but with the advent of Jesus Christ the law was assigned its proper place, that of a penultimate guide to an ultimate savior.

7:2–4 / The provisional claim of the law is illustrated by the analogy of marriage. A wife is bound in fidelity to her husband as long he lives, but if he dies she is absolved from his authority. What formerly would have been adultery is now a legal right: she may marry another man. The analogy was drawn from Jewish marriage customs rather than Roman. Jewish thinking on marriage began with the prescriptions in Deuteronomy 24:1–5, and subsequent rabbinic tradition was unanimous that the death of the husband annulled the marriage contract, freeing the woman to marry again, all of which is consonant with Paul’s analogy.

The analogy is not exactly appropriate to illustrate the point of verse 1, however, because it fails the test of logic at the end. In verses 2–3 the husband (= law) dies, whereas in verse 4 it is the believer (= wife) who dies to the law. Obviously, it is not the law which dies but the believer who dies in Christ, as Paul says in verse 4. Because the analogy does not correspond in every respect to the point it illustrates, it is unwise to press it too far, and it is not necessary to do so, for it is simply an analogy, not an allegory. It is, however, eminently clear in the one respect in which Paul intended it—that death ends obligations. Christians are like the wife in the story: the law has lost its claim over them, and they are free to transfer their allegiance to another. Believers are widowed from the law and free to marry Christ.

The marriage analogy must be understood in light of what Paul said in chapter 6. Freedom from the law does not leave one in a neutral, noncommitted state. One cannot remain “unmarried.” Either one transfers allegiance to Christ or one falls back under the authority of the old Adam. “Anyone who has died has been freed from sin” (6:7). The law maintains its hold on humanity through sin. When sin is abolished (6:6; 7:6), so too are the penalties and condemnations of the law (8:1). This is summarized in verse 4, So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ. The NIV rendering, you also died, is a passive in Greek, meaning “you were put to death.” It connotes that something was done to believers in Christ’s death. This is probably a “divine passive,” by which reverent Jews avoided using the name of God lest they profane it. It means, “God put you to death,” and it testifies to God’s initiative in the work of salvation. It was God who “killed” the effects of law, sin, and death in us, and raised us in Christ to live in freedom and fruitfulness for himself.

This becomes a reality through the body of Christ. Several commentators take this as a reference to the familiar Pauline metaphor of the church as the body of Christ (e.g., 1 Cor. 12:27), or perhaps to the sacraments (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:16). But one wonders if the doctrine of the church is not premature at this juncture of the argument. It is more natural, and probably more correct, to understand the body of Christ as Christ’s redeeming work on the cross and our identification with it; in the sense of 6:2, “We died to sin” (cf. Col. 1:22; 2:14). The body of Christ is vividly and rightly anti-docetic. It reminds us that Christianity is not a noble ideal wherein Jesus simply appeared in the guise of a human being, although in reality he was spared both temptation and suffering. The body of Christ recalls a historical fact upon which redemption hangs, that through his body and the wounds inflicted on it by his enemies, Jesus “abolish[ed] in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations” (Eph. 2:15).

Death is brutal. In the world as we know it no creature experiences death without pain and suffering. Death is the robbery of life, the curse of existence. And yet, in the mystery of faith, death is a necessity. It may seem in our daily dyings and in our final physical passing that death is the final trick of a universe as meaningless as it is vast, but this is not so. God’s mercy is active in death, freeing us from whatever would enslave us so that we may be joined to him who was raised from the dead, for only in him can we bear fruit to God (see John 15:1ff.).

7:5–6 / Verse 5 reverses the image of fruitfulness. The old marriage to the sinful nature … bore fruit for death. The rendering, the sinful nature, is too restricted and pejorative in light of the Greek, “in the flesh.” “Flesh” (Gk. sarx), of course, is a key Pauline concept. Sinful nature suggests something evil, whereas “flesh” in Paul’s understanding (when it does not simply mean “physical”) pertains to all aspects of life—including individual aspirations, culture, politics, economics, and even religion (2:28)—that resist or stand apart from God’s redemption.

Although “flesh” suggests the material side of human nature in contrast to the spiritual, reminiscent of the body/soul dichotomy, this is not Paul’s understanding. He does not have in mind two parts of a person, but rather two possibilities of existence. Flesh and spirit are two realms, two authorities under which we may live. Flesh is the fallen nature, humanity apart from grace, which is descriptive of the condition of Adam in 5:12ff. It is a gravitational force-field determined by the pull of sin and death. The law, it might be hoped, would have arrested our fall into this perilous vortex, but it was of no help. Indeed, it made matters worse, for the sinful passions were aroused by the law. True, the law judges and condemns sin, but it also exacerbates sin, for it provides the specific handles by which sin seizes us.

But this is not the last word, for the Christian belongs to a different realm. Paul begins verse 6 with an emphatic contrast, But now. The power of the “flesh,” which is condemned though uncured by the law, is finished. The Greek verb for we have been released, another “divine passive,” means “to abolish or wipe out” and testifies that something decisive has been done for us by God. Dying to what once bound us repeats the theme of verse 4: we “died to the law.” Paul again contrasts the exclusive alternatives of sin and law to Christ and the Spirit. To drive the nail home he leaves the analogy of marriage and returns to that of slavery, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. Slavery to Christ leads to freedom in Christ, “whose service,” as the Book of Common Prayer says, “is perfect freedom.”

The new way of the Spirit and the old way of the written code present a double contrast between newness and oldness, or the Spirit and the letter. It is tempting to see here a contrast between the old and new covenants, or law and grace, but that would overlook an important nuance of the argument. Paul does not contrast the law with the Spirit exactly, but the written code with the Spirit. In the next verse he emphatically rejects the idea that the law is sin (7:7), and later adds that the law is holy (7:12) and spiritual (7:14). By the written code he evidently understands the scrupulous interpretation of the Torah characteristic of the rabbinic tradition, the “tradition of the elders” according to Mark 7:3, which later developed into the elaborate legal systems of Mishnah, Gemara, and Talmud. The written code is what religion becomes when the word of God is separated from the Spirit of God. It belongs to the “old self” (6:6), to Adam, and to the “flesh.” It puts legal proscriptions in place of persons, and substitutes legal technicalities for the original and driving intent of the law. The Spirit alone can breathe life into the word of God, making it “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16), regenerative rather than moribund. The new way of the Spirit is what Ezekiel foresaw when he spoke of need for a heart transplant in humanity, for the removal of the heart of stone and its replacement with a new heart and Spirit which would “move you to follow my decrees” (Ezek, 36:26–27). The written code is an external taskmaster, but the Spirit dwells within believers and moves (though not coerces!) their hearts, making obedience both possible and pleasing to God.