By Brian Sartor
In the Torah, life and death hinged upon our mode of approach to a tree: “…the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:9,17). In Saint Paul, life and death hinge upon our mode of approach to the law: “…the letter [of the law] kills, but the spirit [of the law] gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
Paul possessed unique insight into the concept of law. After abiding blamelessly by law as a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5-6), he had been dramatically reoriented to it by an encounter with Jesus (Acts 9:1-30). As a result, his analytical insight into the nature and function of law was unique, even among his fellow apostles. It was for this reason that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:11—2:21).
Jew-Gentile relations were troubled in early Christian communities due to commonly held assumptions about law, so in Romans Paul addresses the issue from the ground up. Attention to what Romans says about law therefore lends deep unity and interpretive structure to the epistle’s argument, clarity concerning its occasional purpose, and high resolution to its picture of the universal human condition.
The word ‘law’ occurs seventy-eight times in Romans; seventy-one of those occurrences are in 2:12—8:8; sixty of them occur within the eighty verses that comprise 2:12—3:31 and 7:1—8:8. This means that in these two sections of Romans, the word ‘law’ is found on average three times every four verses.
This would not be so remarkable if Protestant era readings of Romans did not fail to see the unity of these sections. Indeed, the unity of Paul’s argument about the nature and function of law, the unity of his overall aim to address the issue of Jew-Gentile relations in Rome, spans the entirety of Romans 1-11. Romans 3:21 sums up Paul’s announcement, “But now apart from law the righteousness of God has been manifested…” The universally presumed fundamental category of nature we call law is set aside for a divine righteousness that is based on something completely new and wholly other than law as we know it.
Yet Protestant readings of Romans have written law as we know it right back into the gospel. The natural, conventional, and perennial guiding assumption is that law remains fundamental to all things, even to the righteousness of God. As a result, we have read Romans as if Paul were addressing two different topics: the legal aspect of salvation (justification) in chapters 1-4, and the practical aspect of salvation (sanctification) in chapters 5-8.
However, Paul is not using justification as a legal term. Faith is not a precondition for, nor a means of access to, divine righteousness as a legal concept. God’s righteousness itself is a person who is our only mode of direct participation in the power of God, the wisdom of God, the tree of life. Life and death are not two topics, even as the spirit and the letter of the law are not two topics. The dual-designated tree of life at the center of the garden of Eden is not two trees. Life is life, law is law, and it turns out that all that matters is the way we go about them both. The spirit as the source of law gives life, and the letter as an agent of law leads to death.
As Protestants, we have been unwittingly befuddled by the characteristic mistakes of our age. We have interpreted Romans according to “a great mass of common assumptions”[1] about law in the West. St Augustine misread Romans and gave us original sin through the federal headship of Adam. Martin Luther misread Romans and gave us justification as an imputed righteousness. Both are nonsensical apart from a legal paradigm so definitive in the West that it has shaped even our theology.
Rereading Romans, however, promises in the words of C.S. Lewis, “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”[2] This patient and slow-moving breeze, Lewis says, is the only palliative to the characteristic mistakes of eras and individuals. Rereading Romans, we see Paul deliberately analyzing the concept of law, exposing its deadly natural function in the human psyche, naming something better that both perfects and displaces law.
“They exchanged the truth of God for the lie.”
Protestant era readings of Romans place the old lie about law right back at the center. Romans 1:18-32 describes the moral decline and the naturally occurring consequence of wrath among those who presumably do not have the Law. Their depraved condition and their condemnation are due to their own suppression of a basic, nascent, universal human knowledge of God. This purportedly highlights their absolute moral culpability, explaining why they are without excuse.
For many it will come as a shock to hear it suggested that in Romans 1:18-32, Paul is merely giving voice to conventional wisdom concerning the universal human condition. It sounds familiar, harmless, and true enough to many of us at first, just as it would have to the original recipients of the epistle. However, in Romans 2:1 Paul clearly begins exposing the lack of depth, and the inadequacy, of the conventional view to which he had just given voice. Romans 1:18-32 does not sufficiently describe nor accurately describe the human condition from the standpoint of Paul’s gospel.
Here we are following the groundbreaking work of Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.[3] Campbell’s work is extensive, detailed, and monumental. He reads Romans in such a way that the position given voice in Romans 1:18-32 is a voice-in-character speech attributed to a false teacher in Rome. Occasionally, the false teacher is given voice throughout Paul’s argument, representing either conventional human wisdom or an elemental false teaching (as I would read it), if not also that of a specific false teacher who had been influential in Rome (as Campbell reads it).
We already know that throughout the letter Paul spars with an imaginary interlocutor, a rhetorical voice interjecting thoughts and questions that are not Paul’s own but that ultimately serve his point. In this rereading of Romans, we are saying that the dialogical exchange between Paul and this rhetorical voice begins boldly and abruptly in Romans 1:18-32 where Paul steel-mans the position of his interlocutor.
Eventually, in Romans 7:7-25, Paul describes the human condition according to his own analysis of the nature and function of law. The description of the human condition in Romans 1 is woefully bereft of the analytical depth Paul offers in Romans 7. The contrasting relationship of these two passages ought not be overlooked, otherwise the unity of the entire argument is lost. Romans 1 and Romans 7 cannot be synthesized or assimilated to one another as statements made from the same voice or vantage point. This is why Protestant era readings fragment the structure of Romans 1-8 as if Paul were addressing two different aspects of the gospel, first the legal, then the practical.
Romans 1:18-32 is familiar and resonant to Protestant era Christian insiders, yet it feels uncharacteristic and troubling to outsiders, unbelievers, and dissenters. Romans 1:18-32 has been mistaken by both groups to be Paul’s actual voice and therefore his basic, final account of the universal human condition. Meanwhile, the passage where Paul actually gives his own final and accurate account of the universal human condition, Romans 7, is rendered obscure and irrelevant to the gospel. Moreover, it is often read as a description of normal Christian life, even though it is actually a description of enslavement to the law of sin and death apart from Christ.
Atheist psychologists, philosophers, and outliers within Protestantism, have not missed the plain meaning of Romans 7. Paul Axton brilliantly presents this point in his understated, overlooked, and invaluable contribution to any future rereading of Romans, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul.[4] Axton’s teaching ministry at Forging Ploughshares and Ploughshares Bible Institute has been the catalyst to this writer’s rereading of Romans. Douglas Campbell’s work on Romans 1-4 and Paul Axton’s work on Romans 5-8 converge decorously to expose and elucidate the characteristic mistakes of the Protestant era about law.
The subtle deceit granted character and voice in Romans 1:18-32 is apropos, as the conventional voice it represents is surely that of the serpent. We ourselves within Protestantism have been deceived even as we have read Romans in earnest. We have completely missed the fact that this passage gives voice to an incomplete picture of the human condition, one that is recorded precisely because it represents conventional wisdom. The position having been steel-manned by Paul, we ourselves are easily deceived by it (not purposefully by Paul, of course). The conventional view is partially true and partially complete, both of which are characteristic qualities of the serpent’s voice in Genesis 3. Although Romans 1:18-32 may sound right to many of us at first, it gives voice to a view that is twisted, wrongheaded, and incompatible with the gospel. In Romans 2:1-3:20, Paul proceeds to expose the conventional view as such. This passage will be the focus of my next post, Rereading Romans, Part 2.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation, by St Athanasius, St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1998, pp. 4-5.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Eerdmans, 2009.
[4] Paul Axton, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul, T&T Clark, 2015.