Third Phase B

THE GREAT TRANSITION (7:7–8:39)

Paul has been developing a number of analogies, all of which have the import that the messianic reality is to be radically distinguished from the Adamic reality. That distinction has to do with the question of the place of sin or violation in the new or messianic reality. His case is that sin has no place in the messianic and therefore that the new reality is one in which justice reigns in place of the injustice that had characterized the reign of law. He will be clarifying this same theme in the extended argument regarding law and spirit that he now undertakes.

11. Death and the Law (7:7–25)

The analogy concerning marriage has brought us back to the theme of the law that had appeared in the discussion of Abraham’s faith, which produces a justice that is before or outside the law. Paul had said that the new justice has been disclosed apart from the law (3:21) but will not mean that the law is overthrown but upheld (3:30). He has hinted at a strange relation between sin and law: but the law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied (5:20). He has further and more recently suggested that 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 (7:5).

If the result of the law is that trespass multiplied or that our sinful passions (and we recall that these are “political passions”) are thereby inflamed, it would seem that the law is somehow identified with sin. Paul has been at some pains to show that sin must now lie behind those who adhere to the messiah, and his analogies suggest that these messianists are somehow beyond the reach of the law (one meaning of “outlaw,” surely). But many loose ends are still hanging, and some account must be taken of them. How is it that we do not abolish or overthrow the law? In what sense is it to be upheld?

Paul then begins with another question that is still outstanding: Should we say that the law is sin? Absolutely not. The subject of previous questions of this sort, with a similar answer, has been sin, but now it is law. We know that law and sin are closely related, yet they are not simply to be identified. How is this to be thought?

First, there is the connection between law and the knowledge of sin or violation or, as we heard before, the measuring of sin or crime. Sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not measured [reckoned] where there is no law (5:13). Earlier he had said that where there is no law, neither is there violation (4:15). Paul has thus signaled before that this theme must be clarified or addressed. He now turns to that task. We can even see a progression in his thought. At 4:15 he simply said that where there is no law, there is no violation. But at 5:13 he clarified that there was indeed sin before the law, but it was not measured prior to the law.

What Paul now says is this: If it had not been for the law, I would not have known [about?] sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” Here we have a summation of the law already found in emergent Judaism in Paul’s time (Käsemann, Commentary on Romans 194) as that concerning covetousness: the desire to have something that belongs to another as the very summary of all sin. This has a certain resonance with Stoic wisdom as well, in which the good life involves staying within the limits of what is one’s own.

What are we to make of the introduction here of the first-person singular? Who is this “I” who is first “before the law” and then under the law, informed by the law, and so on? This is perhaps the most decisive issue in the interpretation of what lies before us. And here it seems clear that this “I” can only be what we encountered earlier as Adamic humanity (in contrast to messianic humanity). It is essential to recall that Adamic humanity is regarded in the argument of 5:12–21 as both before and (then) under the law. Indeed, the difference signaled between law and prelaw is that of knowledge and increase of sin. But what these aspects of Adamic humanity (before the law and under the law) have in common is precisely sin and death. The law does not solve but only clarifies and exacerbates (hyperbolizes) the basic problem.

What is at stake in the current discussion is precisely how, within Adamic humanity, the law winds up not eliminating sin (and producing justice) but actually making sin both more apparent and more virulent. This being said, it seems clear that the “I” is the Adamic humanity of sin and death, but it is also cognizant of law and even (as will be said later) loves law.

It is precisely by giving this “I” a different sense—by transferring it to the situation of the messianic human, that is, to one who is not under the law but under gift—that enormous damage has been done in the history of interpretation and in theology as a whole. Christianity then becomes an alibi for becoming “realistic” about the continuing power of sin and thus an alibi for continuing to live “under the law” in such a way that violation is simply forgiven rather than abolished.

The task then is to give full weight to Paul’s messianic project. The character of the messianic is precisely that it must seem unrealistic when measured against what Alain Badiou calls the knowledge of the situation. Badiou writes, “A truth process is heterogeneous to the instituted knowledges of the situation” (Ethics 43). It is of the category of what Derrida calls “the impossible” so stands beyond or at the limit of knowledge. Derrida says of the gift: “The gift as such cannot be known, but it can be thought of. We can think what we cannot know” (God, the Gift, and Postmodernism 60).

A nonmessianic perspective has seemed plausible because of Paul’s fundamentally sympathetic picture of one who is under the law, loves the law, yet is unable to do what the law requires. Paul does not take the worst case of one who is somehow obviously “depraved.” His picture comports well with that of the just gentile who, in a certain sense, “does what the law requires.” This will also be in accord with the just Jew who is “as to the law, blameless,” as Paul had said of himself in Philippians. But Paul’s basic argument is that in neither case do we have to do with the justice that comes “apart from the law.” Messianic justice is one that is no longer corrupted by the admixture of sin, by the incapacity to do what is just, and so on. Instead, the messianic is empowered or spirited in such a way that it answers to the call and claim of justice, a claim based on divine gift or generosity (rather than the threat of wrath) and thus faithfulness rather than works. Accordingly, the correct way to understand this argument is to see it as another contrast like those we have thus far encountered. This discussion in chapter 7, beginning at verse 7, is again a “before,” to which the early part of the following chapter (8:1–13) serves as a depiction of the “after.”

But sin seizing an opportunity in the commandment produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

Here, it is said that precisely sin has somehow gained control of the law in order to turn it into a provocation to sin.

Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from [before] the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. The commandment that was [supposed to be] life for me became death. For sin finding opportunity in the commandment deceived me and by it killed me.

For clarification of Paul’s argument it may be helpful to turn to the reflections of Jacques Lacan, who, in his seminar of 1959–1960 on the ethics of psychoanalysis, introduces a paraphrase of Romans 7:7–11 as exhibiting the very dynamic that he had been trying to clarify in psychoanalytic terms (83). This becomes, in Lacanian psychoanalytic language, the tale of everyone, who begins life before the Law but then encounters the Law as the symbolic order, as the Law of the father, as the interdiction of desire, and so on. Instead of restraining what is prohibited, the Law only makes it more attractive or compelling. We thus have a dialectic of Law (as prohibition): the incitement of desire and thence transgression of the Law.

Since Lacan’s reading of Paul on this point has a significant influence on later philosophical readers of this text (especially Badiou and Žižek), it is worthwhile giving it a bit more attention. In commenting upon this passage, Lacan writes: “The relation between the Thing and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms. . . . The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes the desire for death. It is only because of the Law that sin, hamartia—which in Greek means lack and non-participation in the Thing—takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character” (83–84). Later he suggests that “we are in fact led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law” (177).

Slavoj Žižek, whose indebtedness to Lacan is evident in almost everything he writes, will suggest that Paul does not remain trapped within this dialectic of command, inflamed desire, and trespass but will offer an exit from this trap through the notion of love. He writes: “What if the Pauline agape, the move beyond the mutual implication of Law and sin, is not the step towards the full symbolic integration of the particularity of Sin into the universal domain of Law, but its exact opposite, the unheard-of gesture of leaving behind the domain of Law itself, of ‘dying to the Law’ as Saint Paul put it (Romans 7:5)?” (Fragile Absolute 96). He returns to this point in a later text, referring to Romans 7:7 (Puppet 135) and suggests Lacan’s Seminar XX as following up this possibility psycho-analytically (114, 116). We shall see that Paul does indeed break out of this psychological (or political) deadlock.

While accepting that Lacan’s reading of Paul makes good psychoanalytic sense, I propose that Paul is doing more than good psychology here. He is working on a far broader canvas, even if what he says is certainly relevant for understanding certain psychodynamics. To get at this broader canvas (and engage the political thinking that is at work here), let us attend to the way Paul’s argument connects to the general case that he has been trying to make.

First we notice that life and death come into the picture again but in a very different way than in the previous discussion of the Adamic and the messianic. They are redeployed now with a rather different effect:

Before the law = I am alive; sin is dead.

Under the law = sin is alive; I am dead.

This contrasts with what was happening before in that there we were concerned with a different transition: from death to life, that is, we were focused on the transition from messiah (or messianic human) as dead, to being made alive. Now we are clarifying how it is that the human came to be “dead” or one who was ruled by death. This has to do (again) with the advent of law.

How are we to make sense of this before and under the law? We know that for Paul it is possible to say that even those “without the law” know enough of God to do the right or just thing; for that reason they are “without excuse.” But who is this who was alive before the law and for whom sin was dead?

Paul doesn’t say explicitly, thereby leaving open the door for a variety of suggestions. Among these suggestions is an autobiographical “confession” in the manner of Augustine or even more so of Luther (e.g., Breton 89). Indeed, Nietzsche’s reading of Paul as conflicted about the law seems to read back into Paul precisely the torment of Luther: “Luther must have experienced similar feelings . . . an analogous feeling took possession of Paul” (Daybreak § 68). But this seems highly unlikely given Paul’s assertion that he had been blameless with respect to the law. In this way I am in agreement with Krister Stendhal’s view (78–96) that the “introspective conscience of the West” owes more to Augustine (and then Luther) than it owes to Paul.

We have already seen that Lacan can read this as the basic psycho-dynamics of “everyone.” But if we try to stick with what we have in Paul’s own argument, then we have two candidates: Adam and Abraham. Let us begin (appropriately) with Adam. He is alive; sin is dead. Or in this case sin is not yet in existence. The commandment says, Don’t eat the fruit of that tree. This is already the prohibition of covetousness, that is, of desiring that which does not pertain to oneself. It is then “sin” that takes hold of the command and turns it against Adam to deceive. That is, after all, the way the story is constructed, that the human is deceived by that which turns the commandment into a provocation. Paul has said that sin came into the world through one human and that from it came death, which seems to be the very thing at stake here as well. Even though Adam doesn’t die at once, he is under the dominion of death—which subsequently comes to expression, as we saw, as murder.

We may extend this analogy to another who has been said to be before the law, Abraham. The subsequent command to circumcise, in Paul’s view, certainly becomes an incitement to suppose that there is a privilege in being circumcised, so one takes possession of this privilege as something that is one’s own (as Christians may, for example, suppose that baptism—or even right belief—confers privilege before God). Paul has been at pains to demonstrate that this false sense of security leads to a certain laxness with respect to the law as such, or with respect to that at which the law aims, namely, justice. In either case, and there are multiple instances, we find this terrible irony: What seeks to offer us life comes to be the agent of death. It is overtaken by sin.

We might also deal with the broader question of covetousness and the law as the guardian of property, as that which divides mine from yours and “protects” the proper allotment of property. Breton has noted that “the mere fact of belonging to Christ seems to abolish all other forms of property and possession” (63). Thus, it seems to abolish even the desire for possession and in this sense strikes at the root of covetousness. The law, however, seeks to limit covetousness by distinguishing between mine and yours. But we all know that this comes to mean the defense of the rich (those who have) from the poor (those who have not). Adam Smith, the father of capitalist theory, lamented a similar meaning of the law, noting that when those who engage in commerce propose legislation, it is generally for the sake of duping the public.

So the law is holy and the commandment is holy, just, and good.

Here it should become clear that however much the law fails in producing justice, it nevertheless aims at or intends justice, and it is thus holy and good. What is at stake, then, is the tragedy of the law, or of commandment. It is this that Derrida has sought to make clear in his complex reflections on the relation of law and justice, in which law aims at and betrays justice so that justice, while inseparable or indissociable from the law, is nonetheless necessarily outside the law (Jennings, Reading Derrida 22–38). In one of his last essays, “Justices,” Derrida makes use of a verb form of justice derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to phrase this relation quite vigorously: “Isn’t this what gives us to think justice in its essential link to law, as well as its irreducibility to law, its resistance, its heterogeneity to law? Which would come down to seeing a suddenly looming justice break the surface, a justice that will always exceed law but which law, by justicing, would never begin to exhaust itself going after justice?” (714). Certainly for Paul the tragedy of the law comes to bleakest expression in the condemnation and execution of the one who turns out to be the messiah, and thus divine (God’s son, as he said at the beginning).

In any case we have the law as that which is just (since it articulates the claim and call of justice, the necessity of justice) yet comes to be an instrument of injustice not only incidentally, in this or the other instance, but generally and necessarily. It is this that Paul is wrestling to explain, or at least to make apparent.

Did the good become death to me? Absolutely not! It was sin that, in order to be manifest as sin through what is good, worked my death.

Sin shows up as sin precisely as the agent of murder and, indeed, of my own murder, that is, of my own being subject to death. Paul could have said that the law, insofar as it has the force of law, condemns me to death, and in that sense what is good intends my death. But that isn’t where he is going. Of course, he does not deny that the law itself condemns and in that way procures my death. What he says is that the good doesn’t do this. The law is good in that it aims at life, so it does not aim at death. Rather, sin itself (personalized it would seem, almost like Satan) turns the law from being what gives life to what gives death. In this way we see how really awful sin is: it produces, procures death, and does so even through what is intended for life. Thus, through the commandment sin becomes hyperbolically sinful. It is, as it were, supercharged. Far from the law restraining sin, it becomes the fuel for the acceleration of sin. In the same way, the state that promises to restrain violence does so through giving itself a monopoly on violence and thus institutionalizes violence, thereby making violence not an individual act but the very foundation and articulation of the social order.

How can this be understood? How does this happen? The name we are going to hear is “flesh.” Flesh is the weakness of the human basar (in Hebrew) or sarx (in Greek). It is the way we are vulnerable, exposed. Our life is subject to touch, that is, to what gives pleasure and pain, gives joy, and makes wounding possible. And it is somehow this very vulnerability that is going to be the explanation of how sin is able to overcome Adamic humanity, especially that Adamic humanity that is under the law.

How is it that an awareness of one’s flesh—that is, one’s vulnerability—becomes the incentive to turn from justice? We have too many examples of this on the geopolitical stage. We saw how the fear inflamed by the political manipulation of the vulnerabilities exposed by 9/11 served to arouse a willingness to engage in torture and indiscriminate war. And on the other side? The sense of cultural vulnerability to modern Western encroachment had more than a little to do with the launching of acts of desperate “terrorism.” It would be all too easy to supply examples of the sense of weakness or vulnerability seizing control of that which intends life (let us suggest the traditions of Islam or Christianity or Enlightenment “freedom”) to accelerate injustice, to hyperbolize violence and violation. Thus, flesh comes also to name hostility to justice or to God, the very hostility that crucified the messiah as son of David.

The law therefore is spirited, but I am fleshed. The opposite of flesh is not, however, impermeability but breath, liveliness, power. We met this contrast earlier where flesh named the death of the messiah, and spirit named that by virtue of which the messiah is raised as divine son. So far, we have seen that the law is spirited as that which aims at life, just as something like the resurrection of the messiah produces life. And chapter 5 contrasted messianic life and Adamic death. That is precisely where this argument is heading. Here the Adamic “I” is what is “sold” into sin, as a slave to sin and injustice, an instrument or weapon of injustice Paul has written. Wed to sin, he has also said. Owned by sin.

The bewilderment of Adamic humanity is now brought to expression. We recall from the indictment of gentile civilization that there are those, both Jews and gentiles, both with and without the law, who practice what the law intends. Paul is not concerned here with something like a doctrine of human depravity—far from it. He supposes that Adamic humanity does indeed want to do what is right but cannot, because it is caught in a web of sin and death. Here is the complaint:

I don’t know what I am working [doing]. For I don’t practice what I aim at. But I do what I hate. I agree with the law that it is good. But now I no longer work it, but the sin dwelling [at home] in me [works it]; for I know that the good is not at home in me, in my flesh; for to aim at the good is present to me, but not to work the good. It isn’t the good that I aim at but the evil I don’t aim at; that is what I practice. But if I do what I don’t aim at, then it is not “I” that works it, but sin that is at home in me [works it].

Is this an alibi? Or is it the cry of one who has finally attained lucidity about the Adamic human situation? In any case, sin here is not something outside (like an owner or a husband) but something that has lodged deeply within, that has me at its mercy by having seized me at the most vulnerable place (flesh). The fact that it lodges in me yet still is not me is important to emphasize. As we shall see, this will also be true of spirit. Once again, it is not a question of autonomy but of subjection or, rather, subjugation. Here we can refer again to the idea of Louis Althusser that the ideological apparatuses of power (injustice in Paul’s terms) interpellate the subject to “subject” him or her to conformity to the social, economic, and political world patrolled by those apparatuses. (Later Paul will exhort his readers to not be conformed to that world.) Here it is crucial that we are not dealing with the worst of human beings but the best, which distinguishes what is going on here from the indictment that started out Paul’s letter. It is the problem of humanity that has the honor of Adam as well as the shame.

So I find it to be a law that when I intend good, evil is present. For I delight in divine law according to the inner human [what is most truly human in me delights in this law as something spirited]; but there is a different law [or rule] in my members warring with the law of my mind and taking me captive by the law of sin that is in my members.

What makes me human is the capacity to desire the good, to intend it. But something else is in my members, my way of engaging the world, of speaking and acting and walking, of interacting with my world, my fellow human. This is where sin is lodged, in my members, in my engagement with others. And I am captured as a prisoner of war, as a weapon of war, as a slave, as a captured woman sold into slavery or marriage. The aporia, or “no way out,” is given desperate expression: Wretched human I [am]. Who will redeem me from the body of this death?

In both cases “I”—not someone else, not an alibi. The human, the would-be good and just human, is caught in a vise, incapacitated. In this at least Augustine was right. But not perhaps Luther. For this is not a description of the human who belongs to the messianic reality that has broken in: Thanks be to God through Joshua messiah, our leader. The exclamation is inserted following the lament, preceding the summary because “the answer” is what determines the diagnosis and the answer to the problem is what Paul supposes to be the glad-making proclamation, the one that incites gratitude, rejoicing. Thus, the problem is shaped by the “solution,” by the message concerning the justice of God, which does not place one in an impasse but actually breaks one out of the “no way out.” The aporia sets the stage for the eucatastrophe, that is, the catastrophic destruction of the world of sin and death that is at the same time glad tidings.

So then I myself, I serve the divine law with the mind, but with my flesh, the law of sin. All that Paul has been dealing with here is the before: the before of being a slave of sin. This applies not just to the worst, who perhaps gladly indenture themselves in this way, but also to the best, to those who want to be good, just, holy—who want what the law “wants” or intends. After all, for this reason there is law, even the law we pass in a democracy. It’s not just evil persons or evil classes of persons who are to blame here (the rich and powerful, for example, who are sometimes very decent people and who sometimes really do want to do what is right). It is precisely when we intend or want or aim at doing what is good that we find ourselves brought up against the tragedy of law.

Here we may find some help in the reflections of Derrida in Gift of Death: “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. . . . As a result, the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal and aporia” (68); “I can respond only to one (or to the One), that is, to the other, by sacrificing that one to the other. I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibility, to all the others, to the ethical or political generality” (70). With an almost lyrical eloquence Derrida writes of uncountable others who are “sacrificed” in any attempt to do what is right or just, whose claims are ignored in order to respond to any one of them. Accordingly, Derrida can utterly reject any attempt at a “good conscience.” That one aims at justice only makes clear one’s immersion in injustice.

12. The Spirit and Life (8:1–17)

We have heard from Paul of the lament of Adamic humanity: the humanity under the dominion of sin that has taken possession of the fleshly vulnerability of the human and taken up residence in the members of this humanity. As a result, even when this humanity yearns for justice and delights in the law that aims at justice, it finds itself nonetheless trapped, subverted, mired in injustice. This humanity, we have seen, was sold out as a weapon of injustice, a slave of injustice, married to injustice.

But what is the other humanity, the messianic humanity, that is delivered from this past servitude? This humanity can scarcely restrain itself from the shout of gratitude for its deliverance: Thanks be to God through Joshua messiah our leader.

There is no condemnation to those in messiah Joshua. Once again we see a sense of solidarity with and belonging or adhering to the messianic, to that which has death behind it, so also law and condemnation.

No condemnation. The law is above all the law of condemnation, which propels the orgai tou theou, the rage of divine justice. And this comes to expression as the force of law, the death penalty that enforces the law. This very penalty has fallen upon the messiah and has been broken upon the body of the executed messianic leader. Somehow the execution of the messiah means that the power of condemnation has been broken. It has lost its power. There can no longer be condemnation for any who are taken up into the messianic event.

How is it clear that the condemnation that fell upon the messiah (from the law both of Israel and of the gentiles, so law always and everywhere) is broken, is made into past tense? By the resurrection, the resurrection by the spirit of holiness, the spirit or power of life that overcomes death and the threat of death that is the very force of law as instrument of death. Thus, we encounter this basic opposition that Paul had signaled at the very beginning of his letter—between flesh and spirit—the flesh as the weakness that overpowers us and the spirit as the force, energy, dunamis that empowers us:

For the law of the spirit of life in messiah Joshua freed you from the law of sin and death.

In both cases, there is a law, but they are quite different laws: the one of life, the other of death; the one that has become the servant of injustice, the other (as we shall hear) that makes us servants of justice. This conflict of law with law is echoed in reflections of Derrida on the claims of hospitality: “The law is above the laws. It is thus illegal, transgressive, outside the law, like a lawless law” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 79). Paul has elsewhere made use of the idea, in a more compact form, of messianic law (Galatians 6:2; 1 Corinthians 9:21). The phrase and its function may bear echoes of Plato’s suggestion in The Statesman that the best statesman would be one who governed without law (294a), although Plato makes clear that such a statesman would rule with or without consent and would still rule by violence if necessary (293d). Clearly this ideal statesman would not measure up to Paul’s notion of the messianic law, since Paul has renounced the violence of law, not merely its rigidity as written law.

On account of the incapacity of law, its being weak through [having been overpowered by] the flesh, God sending his son in the likeness of flesh of sin, condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the justice of the law may be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.

This is difficult but can be broken down. We know already that the law is overpowered by flesh, since our sinful passions were aroused by the law at work to bear fruit for death . . . while we lived in the flesh. The law had been overcome by our own resistance to our weakness as flesh, or our denial of our vulnerability. The law, as compensation for our weakness as flesh, cannot produce justice but tragically becomes an accelerant for injustice, injustice to the nth degree, hyperbolic sin. But now the divine action works outside the law. By coming as divine son (the one whom flesh/injustice acknowledged as son of David), the divine enters into the lump of humanity dominated by sin and death precisely in a likeness to sin, that is, as Adamic.

The messianic does not stand outside the Adamic but is precisely a part of this Adamic reality, the reality of “sinful flesh”—that is precisely where the messianic comes to be or takes place as an event. This is an extreme solidarity of the divine with the Adamic, such that the divine takes place precisely within the Adamic, within and as sinful humanity, “who becomes sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), who is or becomes a curse or “accursed” (Galatians 3:13).

The result of the messianic taking place is that sin is condemned in the flesh. How is this true? It is true because the messiah is marked as a criminal and condemned to death. But his conviction by the law that condemns sinful humanity is itself overthrown (by a resurrection from the dead).

And this marks a dividing line within Adamic humanity, a before and after: the before of the Adamic, the after of the messianic. The “before” of walking according to the flesh, that is, in accordance with that very anxiety that makes us prisoner of the self-preservation that kills. The “after” of walking according to spirit, not according to lack but abundance, not fending off death but existing after death, so in “newness of life.” Walking: a mode of living, an exercise of members, a manner of being in the world.

Of the spirited walk, of this liveliness of new life, it is said that through this mode of life the just requirement of the law is fulfilled. That is, the aim of this event is that what was impossible before now becomes actual—the doing of what the law intended, aimed at, sought: life and justice. (Paul will still need to clarify this toward the end of the letter since this is what his letter, his argument, aims at.) In this sense this walking is in accordance with the law, the spirited law, the life-giving rather than death-dealing law. That is the call and claim of justice.

We can put things slightly more schematically: Paul is here distinguishing the before and after. Let us first look at the before. To walk according to flesh or live according to flesh or have a mind set on flesh—to be determined by lack, vulnerability, weakness—is death. Moreover, it is enmity against God, that is, it is hostile to, resentful of, bitter toward God. Aware of the condemnation that is its due, it is resentful and filled with animosity, so it doesn’t submit to [subject itself to] the law of God (the claim and call of justice). We have seen that indeed it cannot, even when it delights interiorly in the law of God, in justice, in the good, so it cannot please God. This is the trap that we have seen. I simply cannot do what God requires, so I am resentful of the claim and walk in enmity or hostility. It is in this condition, remember, that Paul had already said that the messiah died for us: while we were weak, (flesh) while we were sinners, while we were enemies. Moreover, the messiah was claimed to be “son of David” according to the flesh, by the testimony of those whose hostility to the messiah brought about his execution.

And now, the after: if we walk according to spirit (abundance, liveliness) and live according to spirit and have our mind set on what pertains to spirit, to life to abundance, then instead of experiencing death and enmity, we enjoy life and peace. We have heard of this peace before (5:1), a peace that comes from being made just and that is also called reconciliation instead of enmity. We are not talking about some distant future state. This is now: You are not in the flesh; you are in the spirit. This now is the now of belonging to the messiah, of being caught up into and by the messianic event.

We/you are in spirit, [are spirited, are flooded with this liveliness] just as messianic spirit dwells in you [recall what previously dwelled in you].

It is precisely the infusion of this messianic spirit that signals that one belongs to the messianic event. This is at least a partial answer to a question we have wondered about: How is the belonging to the messianic to be understood? Here it has to do with messianic spirit or liveliness.

Among your spirit, the messianic spirit, and the divine spirit, there is no absolute division. The messianic is flooded with liveliness. For spirit/ruah/pneuma is the breath by which we are animated, made alive and now lively. We still are not clear what this means, how this is manifest. Paul still has not explicated this liveliness, but he will soon. This liveliness will stand outside the law, but in such a way as to improvise approximations to justice.

There is another division: If messiah is in you, even though your bodies are dead because of your sin, your spirits are alive because of justice. Now our bodies are dead. For us as body, death still lies in the future, although not for us as spirit, where death lies in the past. Our body, our being in the world, is still dead “through sin,” perhaps even now as we begin to walk, to live, to have the mind-set of life or spirit. But then that resurrection power that has already begun to invade us, to take possession of us, and will come fully into being in us so that the one [God/Spirit] who raised Joshua from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies, by that spirit which has now taken up residence in you. Before, sin had taken up residence in us, but no longer. That was then; this is now. This energy or life force has taken up residence in us, so it must follow that the mortal bodies that we are will also be enlivened by the same life force that gave life to the dead messiah.

Note that the resurrection of the messiah portends our resurrection. He is, as 1 Corinthians says, “the first born . . . from the dead” (15:20). And in Romans Paul had said, 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 (6:5). It is important to recall that this had been said of “all” (5:18): just as in one all died, how much more in one shall all be made alive.

So then comrades [brothers], we are debtors, not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. Note that the language of debt appears here with respect to flesh (and thus sin and the law taken possession of by sin through the flesh), but only to be canceled. For he will not say that we are debtors to the spirit, but before we were indebted to, sold to, or captured by this economy of sin, debt, and death. This is what walking in, or being indebted to, or bound by, the economy of death means: we die; we are condemned to death; death comes to all through Adamic fate. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the spirit the practices of the body you put to death, you will live. Again this is rather difficult. The practices here that are being put to death are of course those that arise from anxiety in the face of death, those that make us like Cain, voluntarily or involuntarily. Putting to death is rather harsh. We have previously heard, So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin (6:11), or We know that our old self was crucified with him (6:6). But now we are no longer passive spectators but agents who affirm this death and in that way put to death the practices of the body. I think putting to death the body practices of injustice is better than the standard translation. The simplest explanation is that we put the activity of injustice behind us, turn away from it, and allow it to be what it really is: dead and buried. This is possible because now it is replaced by that which is far more, which is excessive, which corresponds to that “how much more” we heard about earlier and about which Paul is now to write far more extensively.

How has this to do with “politics”? The whole business of dying to the world, or of “putting to death” the ways of embodying injustice, has been connected by several contemporary thinkers with Paul’s reflections in 1 Corinthians about living in the structures of the world “as if not.” This “as if not” means treating these structures as if they no longer have the capacity to enforce themselves upon one, to define one’s identity and “comportment.” Slavoj Žižek can point to a certain “uncoupling” from these structures of social life. For example, Žižek writes that “uncoupling does actually involve a symbolic death—one that has to die for the Law that regulates our tradition, our social ‘substance’” (Fragile Absolute 127). Moreover, love is “the hard and arduous work of repeated ‘uncoupling’ in which again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into” (128–129). For Badiou this will mean that a particularity that seems to have a position of privilege is refigured in accordance with what he terms the “universal.” Thus, the figure of Abraham “anticipates what could be called a universalism of the Jewish site” (Saint Paul 103). Or Paul can begin with what appears to be an endorsement of male privilege only to revoke that privilege in favor of an equalization of male and female (104). Thus, Badiou claims: “The necessity of traversing and testifying to the difference between the sexes in order for it to become indifferent in the universality of the declaration culminates in symmetrical, rather than unilateral, constraints within the contingent realm of customs” (105).

This unplugging does not mean an ascetic withdrawal from the world but a living in the world without being determined by it or its classifications and structures. Agamben writes, in this connection, about the Franciscan attempt “to create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them, yet rendering them inoperative” (Time 27). He sees this as a precise working out of the Pauline “as if not” that likewise renders inoperative given conditions without giving itself over to the task of abolishing them juridically (26). Nor is this simply a Stoic inner detachment that regards these things as of no importance compared with the cultivation of the self. What seems to be at stake here, as we shall see in Paul’s development of this argument, is a corporate style of life in which we become more rather than less interconnected with one another and with the messianic reality that has dawned. Paul will speak of love, mutual care, and concern instead of detachment.

It is not wrong to speak of a certain nihilism here (Taubes 72), one that refuses to give authority to any of the structures of social, political, and economic life. But it is a nihilism that provokes a different form of sociality and thus of politics. All of this will be treated in more detail in the last stage of Paul’s argument, when he describes the messianic sociality that is coming into being. At this point, what is critical is that Paul does have in mind a polity that is not determined by law but by what he calls spirit. The character of spirit is precisely its liveliness, its creativity. Spirit has nothing to do with a rule book. Spirit improvises and does so surprisingly.

Paul has developed a series of before-and-after pictures of human being with an emphasis on how in the messianic reality the human comes to be just. What follows is a significant restatement of the after, the now-time, in the messianic reality. The passage that we are to read looks a lot like an argument that Paul has made in Galatians: “so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying abba father! So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir” (4:5b–7).

The combination of spirit, son, and heir come into play here in Romans, together with the connection to the cry of “abba father” and the opposition to the metaphor of slavery. What he now writes is this:

For all who are led by the spirit are sons [uioi] of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption [son-making] by which we cry out, abba! Pater! The spirit itself testifies together with our spirit that we are children [tekna] of God, and if children then heirs; heirs of God, joint heirs of messiah, since we suffer with him in order that we may shine forth with him.

Let us begin with the cry abba/Pater. It is often supposed that this cry of abba is peculiar to Jesus and designates a peculiar intimacy with God. This is implausible, because this terminology is by no means characteristic of Jesus. There is only one place in the Gospels—which in any case were written after the Pauline epistles—where Jesus calls God abba: in Mark’s Gospel at the point of Jesus’s desolation prior to death as he struggles in Gethsemane (14:36). In that narrative Jesus has no auditors. The disciples are left behind. In fact, not only does Jesus leave them behind but he immediately discovers that they are asleep. There are no ear-witnesses to Jesus’s prayer. It is the reader alone who hears this—and the reader who hears this is precisely the reader who has heard from Paul that this is the sign of adoption. That is, Mark is concerned to show us that the adoption we experience is by no means an escape from the fate of Jesus/Joshua, who will be executed, who will face death. In this, Mark does not fundamentally depart from Paul.

The acclamation of God as abba/Pater then appears for the first time in Paul’s letters, and it is here that we must discover its significance: an acclamation of God as father in two languages. Why two? Which two? The language of Judeans (Aramaic) and the language of gentiles (Greek). Paul has said “to the Judeans first and then the Greeks.” It is Paul’s concern, not only in this letter, to put together Judean and pagan believers. It is therefore both, in their own way, in their own tradition/culture, in their own tongue, who acclaim God as abba/Pater. Why? Perhaps because this is the appropriate response to discovering that one has been adopted.

Historians of the period present us with something like the following picture. A child is born to the wife or concubine of a Roman “father.” Before the child can be taken into the family, the father must acknowledge the child. The child is placed on the floor before the father. If the father picks up the child, then it becomes a part of the family. If not, the child may be “exposed,” left outside the walls for another to pick up, perhaps to use as a slave—or simply left to die. Early Christianity would be characterized by its complete opposition to the exposure of children; they would be adopted into the new family of faith(fulness).

Here the metaphor is even radicalized: The child is born a slave but is unexpectedly adopted, taken into the household, and made an heir. That is, the child is taken from the bondage of being another’s slave and made now a son of one who gives life.

In Roman society, it is fathers who have the authority to adopt, the capacity to define the status of the child. For Paul, the “son” is both male and female, of course. It is the faithful one. But why then son rather than, as some translations suggest, child? Because what is at stake is not the becoming of an infant, a property, but an agent, an heir, one who is destined to receive and be responsible for that which is “proper” to the father. In our modern Western society there would be little problem in suggesting daughter as a translation of uios, but she would be a decidedly liberated daughter, one who has the same rights that previously belonged preeminently to the son.

That we have been adopted enables us to thus acclaim God as father, to know that we are not slaves (of sin or law) but adopted children. The slavery that Paul has employed rather dramatically before is here “deconstructed.” Paul had introduced himself as a slave of the messiah, and in 6:16–17 there were two kinds of slavery. One was slave of one or the other. But not here—one is no longer a slave but a son. (Jesus will be said in the Gospel of John to have told his apprentices that they were no longer slaves but friends, a similar transformation.) That metaphor of slavery had a particular purpose, but we are now in a different situation, and the new is not really comparable to the old. Thus, we have not slaves of the old or slaves of the new but slaves of the old or sons (and daughters)—that is, heirs—of the new.

That we are heirs of the divine means that we are those who inherit divinity, or at least the reconciliation, the being at peace with God. In subsequent Eastern theology, we become those who inherit divinity, and this is not a bad reading of Paul; for that is what “sons of God” means. As heirs of God, we are also jointly heirs with another who is called son: the messiah. Being joint heirs will also have to do with being joined to one another in and through the messianic.

Badiou will claim that with Paul all are filiated as brothers rather than as slaves: “The resurrected Son filiates all of humanity” (Saint Paul 59). While Badiou may be inattentive to the continuing salience of the slave metaphor in Paul and perhaps be overinfluenced by a certain appropriation of a Freudian metaphor, nevertheless, it is true that here Paul wishes to insist on a new status: that of being sons (and so brothers) on account of the messianic.

13. Affliction and Solidarity (8:18–39)

This business of solidarity with and as sons (which is what makes us brothers, as Paul said in 8:12) is not without cost, as we are constantly being reminded: since we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him. The present still remains the time of the cross for us, the time of affliction (as we also heard in 5:2–5). Much of the following discourse is an elaboration and explanation of what had been touched on earlier. The term for “glory” was also there: the hope of the glory or radiance, or shining forth of God; and here, to be glorified or shine forth with the resurrected messiah. Before, we heard of having a death like his to share in a resurrection like his; here we hear of suffering with him leading to being made radiant or shining with him. As we said in discussing baptism, what is in view here is no virtual cultic death or virtual suffering but sharing in affliction that demonstrates or testifies to our solidarity with the executed messiah. Later Christians will call this testimony martyrdom.

For I consider that the sufferings of the present aren’t worth comparing with the coming radiance that is to be manifest [apokalyphthanai] [in]to us. That which comes is an unheard-of light. All will be manifest. This is the language of apocalyptic hope. The sufferings, we may suppose, are those that have been indicated before: those of the opposition to the messianic that occurs within the world of sin and death, and the law that rules this reality. Before, Paul has used the “much more” to designate the new. Here he says that even with respect to the now-time of the in-breaking messianic reality characterized by suffering, what we hope for is truly incomparable and thus is incomparably “much more.”

We have seen before how Paul shifts focus. We heard of the current polities divided between Israel and the nations, and we heard of Abraham, who stands before that division. Then we heard of the weakness of Adam, in whom is comprehended all humanity as such. Now the frame widens again, and we see the true dimensions of the apocalyptic horizon within which all of this is taking place. This horizon becomes visible precisely as the locus of a certain kind of suffering, moreover, of a certain solidarity in suffering and so in yearning.

This further extension of the Pauline frame of reference follows almost naturally from the designation of Adam as humanity. In Hebrew adam speaks of the earth, the earthling made of earth, of the solidarity of earth and earthling—hence we have the extension of the good news also with respect to creation and thus to all creatures. We recall that Paul had gestured in this direction when he spoke of “all flesh” as not being enabled to be just through law but through unconditional generosity. We will see this now played out in unexpected ways.

But we should also note that one way contemporary philosophy is “catching up” with Paul is in troubling the distinction, so fundamental to Western thought, between the animal and the human. Whether we think here of the reflections of Agamben in The Open, in which he interrogates Heidegger, or of the many essays of Derrida culminating in The Animal That Therefore I Am, we are the beneficiaries of a fundamental troubling of the self-evident distinction between the animal and the human. In this the patristic authors were more in tune with Paul when they thought of redemption as a redemption of the whole earth.

Creation itself is anxiously watching, eagerly expecting [on the lookout for], the manifestation of the sons of God. Like one who waits for the ship to appear over the horizon, pacing on the “widow’s walk,” alert for the first glimpse of what brings what one hopes for with bated breath, all creation is on tiptoe scanning the horizon for the appearing of what will turn its yearning to celebration. This yearning or longing is quite different from the “boredom” that Heidegger has attributed to the animal and for which he has been strongly criticized by Agamben and Derrida. Stanislas Breton writes: “By that Eros incorporated into their very essence, living and inorganic beings alike tend toward their supreme humanization in a revelation by which they are made to participate in the unheard-of dignity of the Sons of God” (117).

For the creation was subjected to futility. Here is the astonishing solidarity between the human and the creation, one that only Eastern theology was able to grasp and elucidate. In the modern West we have lost track of solidarity between the human and the rest of creation. And in theology it has sometimes been forgotten that biology, including evolutionary biology, has at least retained something of the sense of our bound-up-ness with creation. Most of our DNA, for example, is the same as that of the lowliest earthworm.

Here that creation of which we are a part suffers subjection to futility. Not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope is a phrase not all that astonishing today with our growing knowledge of how the planet groans under subjugation to the folly, greed, and rapaciousness of the human bound for death. Most translations relate the phrase “in hope” to this will to subject. But before going too hastily in that direction, we should recall that the one who had the vocation, according to Genesis, to subject the earth, was Adam, the one who became subsequently subjected to flesh, sin, the Law, injustice, and so on. In the first instance the one who has subjected the earth is the human. But we could also view this as a certain hope that the human would subject the earth to hope, hope for solidarity rather than enmity. But in this case the agent of hope (though not directly the one who had “subjected” creation) would be God. In any case, we are to see that humanity and creation share a common hope, as well as a common subjugation to “vanity.” Stanislas Breton writes that “the human mastery of the cosmos, by its effect on the things themselves, affects the latter with its own historical fate, whether that fate be one of misery or of grandeur” (119).

But it will be set free from bondage to death and decay. The destiny of the earth depends on the destiny of humanity, a dependence that is one of hope, of yearning, of eagerly expecting. Our destiny is its destiny: to obtain the radiant liberty of the children [teknōn] of God. Just as it was subjected by our becoming subjected to death, so also it will obtain liberty as we do and become, as we do, the children of God. Thus, the evangel or proclamation of glad news concerns the earth itself and all creation. The bondage to death (which has to do with the entry of violation and violence into the world, accelerated by law) not only concerns the human but also the whole of creation. And the promise of liberation from this law of violence pertains not only to the human but also to the earth and its denizens. Such is the amplitude of Paul’s message of the good news that stems from what the divine has done in and through the messianic event.

We know the whole creation has been groaning together in birth pangs until now. This suffering is really now to be understood as birth pangs, the groaning in agony of the great mother whose groaning is also our groaning, a groaning for redemption. Who will deliver me from this body of death? That is also the cry of the great mother who labors to bring forth a different kind of humanity than that which is subjected and has subjected her to death. And in this groaning all creatures, all creation, are “together.” (We should pay attention to how often Paul makes use of the prefix syn-in Greek to indicate a togetherness: of suffering, of subjection, of hope, of care, and so on; it is one of his most characteristic word formations.)

Jacob Taubes notes that Paul’s assertions regarding creation are reflected in Walter Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Fragment” (70). Agamben will go further, claiming that Benjamin (in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) is able to give new expression to what is essential in the whole of Romans as one who lives in a homologous world crisis: “These two fundamental messianic texts of our tradition . . . both written in a situation of radical crisis, form a constellation whose time of legibility has finally come” (Agamben, Time 145). (One cannot help wondering whether this “finally come” might also be an index of Agamben’s own messianism, his own messianic consciousness.)

And not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Our bodies as “the part of world that we ourselves are,” as Käsemann rightly maintains (New Testament Questions 135), are destined for redemption because the earth is also destined for redemption. Adoption may be spoken of here both as already and as to come. For it is the redemption of body, so of creation itself, that is the horizon of hope. What we are or have is the first fruits, the springtime promise of more to come. But we have not ceased to groan. Our adoption is behind (so we cry abba); our adoption is yet to come (so we groan). Perhaps it is precisely the spiritedness that makes this groaning possible? Or even necessary? Breton notes: “From the highest point to the lowest on the ontological ladder, a single groaning, transmitted from one level to another, proclaims that the essence of the world is simply freedom” (117).

For in this hope we were saved.

We hope (now); we were saved (then). We should attend to the astonishing time out of joint, the hinge that is unhinged or that unhinges the grammatical tenses. The “were saved” occurs within the framework of hope. It is precisely in hope that we live. Like Abraham, who believed the promise and whose confidence in the promise was fidelity (faithfulness) and so reckoned up as, or credited toward, justice.

What has happened has happened in the key of hope: Now hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience, endurance. Hope makes us capable of enduring—exactly when we don’t see what we hope for. There is perhaps not yet a sail on the horizon, but we remain in hope; we endure because we hope, like the one who paces the widow’s walk, who remains faithful to hope. And this, as we heard in the earlier discussion of the coming of the messianic, produces or is produced by a kind of obstinacy (Heidegger), a persevering in spite of appearances, a hope against hope (as Paul said of Abraham). In any case this is not optimism: it is yearning, groaning . . . in spite of appearances, in spite of what could be termed knowledge. It is the key of the messianic. What we have is the groaning, the yearning, and the resultant solidarity with all who yearn, so with creation as a whole. This is a solidarity that is itself the spirited solidarity that heralds a coming that cannot yet be seen, grasped, or possessed.

Likewise the spirit partakes of our weakness. The traditional translation, “helps us,” is, I think, flat wrong—the spirit is a sharer, a partaker, in this very weakness of groaning, of yearning. For we don’t know how to pray as is fitting or appropriate. How do we know how to say what we hope for or, yearn for, really, deeply, truly? We don’t know the words that say or bring to speech that which has not yet ever been, that which is the deepest yearning of inanimate and animate nature. The spirit itself intercedes on behalf [of us, of creation, of God] with unutterable groanings. We/creation/spirit all groan, all yearn, all beyond speech, the earth-spirit groan. Before language. Before speech. Inarticulate. Somehow in this groaning and yearning, we glimpse the awaited solidarity of earth and humanity and spirit. The beginning of that solidarity for which we hope if we dared to speak its name is “already” present . . . as groaning. Paul elsewhere calls it God, all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). Thus, the praying/yearning of spirit seems like weakness but is already the joining together of what has been separated, and thus is a strange kind of power: that which raises from the dead. In a later text, the Fourth Gospel, the resurrection of Lazarus will also be accompanied by a groaning, on the part of the messiah (John 11:38, 43).

And the one who scrutinizes the hearts knows what is the mind of spirit because in accordance with God spirit intercedes on behalf of the saints. This is a very enigmatic phrase. But it does indicate that the groaning of the spirit in and with us is in accordance with the will or intention of God. In this way, the spirit is the agent of power (precisely as weakness) of God in us, so in creation as a whole. The spirit intercedes precisely as groaning, as the yearning of the divine in and for us.

The material beginning at 8:28 amplifies what we found concerning exulting or rejoicing in 5:3–5. Thus, the intervening material serves to ground this more surely and in ways that will found this level of assurance.

And we know that to those who love God, all things are brought together by God toward the good according to the purpose that they have been called into being. The phrase called into being and similar phrases here have in view what will come in chapters 9–11. These are those who love him, that is, who adhere to him in joy and thanksgiving—those who are faithful adopted heirs, those for whom whatever happens turns into or is turned by God into good. That is, whatever happens is turned by God into the direction of God’s redemptive purpose for all. There is, of course, nothing here of the pseudo-gospel of health and wealth. On the contrary, what is in view here, as in chapter 5 and later in this chapter, is precisely what might be regarded as terrible misfortune. But it will be turned into good, into redemption, and not only for “us” but for all, as the succeeding argument will show.

These who are summoned to faith are those who are conformed to the likeness of the messianic son, in order that he should be only the first and not the last, still less the only son, for all are to be incorporated into “sonship.”

We now hear a drum roll of past tenses: foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified. In some ways, it is the future perfect. But the effect is to make even the future past and thus indubitable. The messianic time, which Paul sometimes calls the now-time, is a time unlike the time in which past-present-future seem to be unproblematically distinguished from one another. The foreshortening of the messianic time means that the verb tenses seem to get scrambled. What may seem future so invades the present, is so inaugurated in the past (perhaps as promise), that the tenses become interchangeable. Thus, it is necessarily unclear whether the messiah has come or is yet to appear (parousia); adoption can be spoken of as that which has occurred (so we shout abba) and as yet to occur (so we groan); being just may be both what is already true for those who are caught up in the messianic event and something that must be made true, must become true.

Giorgio Agamben writes of messianic time that “it is that part of secular time which undergoes an entirely transformative contraction” (Time 64). This contraction “implies an actual transformation of time that may even interrupt secular time here and now” (73). While he emphasizes the ways in which past and present pass into one another (the past becoming open with possibility, the present fulfilled or finished), it also seems that the future participates now in the fulfillment of the past. Messianic time is that contraction of time that renders discrimination between past, present, and future entirely precarious.

Paul is writing to a tiny, embattled, and almost overwhelmed group, yet he asks, If God be for us, who is against us? The whole of the empire, the whole of civilization, law, and religion are here reduced to naught in the apocalyptic horizon. Nothing whatever can stand in the way of the accomplishment of the divine promise and goal. The divine commitment to the project of which we are but the tiniest foretaste is absolute: the one who did not spare his own son but on our behalf gave him up, won’t he give everything to us? This is not a theory of atonement but of free gift, of incalculable commitment/generosity. Having gone this far, will God pull back now?

Who will bring a charge against the ones chosen by God? It is God who makes just; who then can condemn? Earlier Paul had said there is now therefore no condemnation for those included or sharing in the messiah. Here we get again the idea of suspended condemnation. Will the one who was condemned and who is now the “judge” be the one who condemns? It is messiah Joshua, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. He will come to judge, but who is the judge? Will the one who was rejected by the law then judge or condemn? If it is God who has discovered a new way to produce justice at great cost, will God then go back to the old way? If the messiah is the one who advocates for us, how shall we be condemned? One can speak of forgiveness here to some limited extent, insofar as our embeddedness in the world of injustice will not count against us and our loyalty to this one and this way will be counted for us, as justice, as on the way to justice.

Then Paul “lets go” with an exultation, a rejoicing. For in a certain sense the proclamation is that nothing can separate us from the love of messiah . . . from the love of God in messiah Joshua. Accordingly, even in the midst of terrible sufferings—affliction or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness or peril or sword—there is an exulting in irreversible victory: we are more than conquerors. For the rest, notice that it is precisely the situation of tribulation (as sheep for the slaughter) that shows our solidarity with the messiah and his with us. How then could what unites us with him (suffering) separate us from him?

For I have been persuaded that not death, not life, not angels, not rulers, not things present, not things to come, not powers, not height, not depth, not any other creature—there is no need to belabor each word searching for special meaning (height, depth, etc.). Paul is on a roll, or perhaps we should say that he is writing a riff on his theme: Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in messiah Joshua our leader.