Participating in Christ: Romans 6.1-14

Last time, we looked at the second half of Romans 5, in which Paul contrasts two different ways of being human: the normal course of human life in the kingdoms of this world, which is to follow in Adam’s footsteps into sin, and the course of a new, renewed humanity in the Kingdom of God, following Christ’s footsteps into genuine justice and peace. But once again, Paul is concerned with bad actors misrepresenting his message by claiming that it is just a license to sin. In Romans 6, Paul, tackles these fad-faith readings of his message and insists that sin has no place in the new way of Jesus. He does this in two parts. Today, we’ll look at 6.1-14, in which he picks up on the idea of participation in Christ that we introduced last time. And then next time, we’ll look at 6.15-23, in which he answers the challenge using the Exodus motif.

Text

[6.1] So then, what are we to say? Shall we persist in sin so that grace might increase? [2] Absolutely not! How will we who have died in sin live in it? [3] Or, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? [4] So then, we were buried with him through baptism into that death so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the Father’s glory, so will we also walk in newness of life.

[5] For if we have been united with him in a death like his, so also will we be united in a resurrection like his; [6] knowing this, that our ‘old human’ has been crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, no longer being enslaved to sin, [7] for the one who has died has been justified from sins. [8] But if we have died with Christ, we trust that we will also be raised with him; [9] knowing that Christ rose from the dead he is no longer subject to death, since death no longer has lordship over him; [10] for he who died, he died to sin once and for all; but he who lives, lives to God. [11] In this way, consider yourselves too to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

[12] So then, may sin not reign in your mortal body, leading you to obey its appetites. [13] And may you not present your body parts to sin as tools of injustice, but present yourselves to God like those now living who were once dead, and your body parts to God as tools of justice. [14] For sin does not rule over you, for you are not under the law but under grace.

Experience

I used to feel bogged down by this point in Romans. Paul is so challenging to understand that it can be exhausting to try. But ever since I came to read him through the lens of a participatory rather than substitutionary framework, this passage has really come alive for me despite its difficulties. Now it excites me to read it. I get a real sense of the transformational power Paul believes the gospel to have. As exciting as this is, it also gives me pause. Paul makes big claims about what the gospel does, claims that are all too rarely born out in the lives of the faithful.

Encounter

This passage works on two levels in terms of its characters. In the foreground, the main characters are Christ and his followers. But in the background, we have Paul, his readers, and his opponents. The implied accusations Paul addresses are big, but they’re also silly in their extremity. It’s hard to imagine a good-faith hearer misinterpreting Paul to be promoting sinful behaviours. So it makes me think he’s addressing bad-faith misrepresentations of his teaching by his opponents. But that said, I have encountered Christians who have used the idea of “we are not under law but under grace” to justify all kinds of bad behaviours. (One memorable example was one group who used it to justify not paying for their meals when eating out!) So, I’d like to know more about who Paul is really addressing.

Explore

The study so far has raised some questions that will guide this section:

• What can we say about the rhetoric and formal structure of the passage that might clarify its difficulties?
• Who is Paul’s dialogue partner? Are these good-faith misunderstandings or bad-faith misrepresentations of his gospel?
• What is Paul really saying about his expectations for the Christian life?

Literary Matters

It’s generally agreed that chapters 6-8 form a unit within Romans (the main question being how Romans 5 fits into the structure). Where Romans 1-4 discussed the human condition as it stands outside Christ, this section tackles similar ground but from within a specifically Christian framework (Witherington 155). If 1-4 explored the need for salvation, 6-8 explores its consequences. Chapters 6-7 deal with the issue of sin through three lead questions:

• “Shall we persist in sin so that grace might increase?” (6.1)
• “Shall we keep on sinning since we are not under law but under grace?” (6.15)
• “Is the law sin?” (7.7)

Romans 8 then concludes the section (and the first half of Romans with it) with the positive flipside, what life in the Spirit in Christ looks like.

Today we’re looking at the first of the three questions about sin. Again, Paul seems very concerned to head off misunderstanding of his message. If, as he argued at the end of chapter 5, human sinfulness elicited the pouring out of God’s grace, wouldn’t it follow that if we keep on sinning, God will pour out all the more grace? Obviously, the answer is no.

Once again we find ourselves in a Pauline word-salad. (Tonstad refers to it as a “thicket” (182).) But where in chapter 5, that seemed to indicate some rhetorical failure — where Paul got distracted half-way through a comparison — this passage seems more intentional, using rhetorical and poetic devices such as paranomasia (the repetition of words from the same stem in close proximity), enumeration of terms, and the choice of words to sound nice together (Eberhart). It should also be noted that with the return to the question-and-answer format, we’re back in the rhetorical world of diatribe (Nanos 320; SBL; Eberhart). Overall the structure seems to be as follows:

Question (7.1): Shall we persist in sin?
Answer (7.2): Absolutely not; how is it possible to live in sin when we have died to it?

Expansion (7.3-11):

• Baptism unites us with Christ’s death and the promise of his resurrection
  • ‘Old’ human nature (i.e., Adam’s nature, cf. 5.14) was crucified with Christ, and enslavement to sin with it
  • ‘New’ human nature (i.e Christ’s nature) is therefore available to us through his resurrection
    • the resurrection demonstrated that death, which is the logical consequence of sin, has no power over him, and therefore over us who are ‘in him’
• Conclusion to Expansion (7.11): So we ought to account ourselves as dead to sin but alive to God, i.e., part of the ‘new’ human nature, not the ‘old’

Conclusion to Argument (7.12-14): Since you are dead to sin, don’t let sin control your actions.

This conclusion takes the form of a chiasm:

A – May sin not reign in your mortal body…
B – May you not present your bodyparts to sin as tools of injustice
C – Present yourselves to God like those living from the dead
B’ – And [present] your bodyparts to God as tools of jutsice
A’ – For sin does not rule over you … (For a slightly different analysis see Kruse 258)

One thing that stands out in the passage is the shift in verse 11 from the indicative mood (what is or has happened) to the imperative mood (exhortation or commandment). This marks a shift from theology to application (Tonstad 198).

Paul’s Dialogue Partners

Paul is clearly heading off opposition here (SBL; Kruse 256; Keesmaat & Walsh 121). But whose questions is he heading off? Are these good-faith misunderstandings, or bad-faith misrepresentations? The passage takes the form of a diatribe, which, as we’ve seen previously in this series, means that he may not have been addressing anyone in his audience, but rather some hypothetical questioner.

We know from Acts, Galatians, and passages like Romans 3.8 that Paul did face significant opposition to his ministry. This opposition focused around his marginalization of the Law of Moses. If you eliminate the identity-markers within the Law, such as dietary laws and circumcision, do you not eliminate the whole thing? And if you remove law, doesn’t that necessarily lead to moral anarchy? Because these questions and accusations followed Paul, it seems best to assume these are real and not just hypothetical questions (Kruse 259; Keesmaat & Walsh 121; Tonstad 195).

As my story about the Christians who used Romans 6.14 to justify theft shows, there will always be those who struggle to understand that Paul is not advocating amoral lawlessness, but a morality born from an inner commitment to God’s justice — the law written in the heart, not on paper (cf., Romans 2.29). And so, for their sake I’m glad Paul took the time to spell things out here. But that said, I think his questions are mostly directed towards people who are intentionally misrepresenting his gospel and its implications (Kruse 259; Tonstad 195).

Paul’s Radical Theology of the New Person

This is one of the passages where we see Paul’s Christian anthropology: his beliefs about what it means to be human, and specifically a human ‘in Christ’.

The ‘Two Ways’ Wisdom Tradition

While Paul’s Christian commitments represent a radical new theology of the human person, they didn’t come out of nowhere. His ideas about the ‘old’ and ‘new’ human have their roots in the Scriptures. While we see this idea in the Deuteronomistic History (e.g., “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30.19), it comes out especially in the Wisdom tradition. Psalm 1, for example, frames the whole book by contrasting the way of the blessed, who “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season” to the way of the wicked, who “are like chaff that the wind drives away.” In his basic approach of contrasting two ways of being, Paul stands in this long tradition.

But Paul is convinced that we are no longer left to our devices in picking one path or other other, with the law only serving to point out our failings and unable to fundamentally change us; rather, he believes that God has acted decisively to cut off the power of the ‘way of wicked’ and empower us to live out the ‘way of the blessed’.

Adam and Christ

That decisive act is, of course Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection, which opens up a whole new human experience. This is called a recapitulation understanding of salvation, in which Jesus repeats humanity and Israel’s past, fulfilling them and restoring them to their full potential. I’ve previously used the analogy of a software patch to describe this, and I think it works well. Something went wrong with human programming, a bug whose impacts compounded with each successive generation. Jesus restores humanity to its original programming, allowing us to live as God intended. While the Adam-Christ contrast is explicit only in 5.12-14, it hangs over and “undergirds” this whole section leading up to chapter 8 (Witherington 154; Tonstad 186).

In the passage we’re looking at today, we see this in the repeated references to death and its connection to sin. Death is seen not just as a problem here, but as the fundamental problem:

In Paul’s construal, death is neither nice nor natural if by natural is meant what God intended for creation in general and for human beings in particular. Like sin, death ‘came into (eiselthen) the world’ (Rom. 5.12), from the very first charged with such a momentum that it ‘penetrated (dielthen) to all’ (5.12). Death’s coming is in this representation that of an intruder (Tonstad 183).

But, through baptism, we have died with Christ, and therefore died to that old, sinful and therefore mortal, human programming and have installed the new, just and therefore immortal, coding (Eberhart). Critical to this conception is that sin and death no longer have power over us (Childs 114). Whereas in our old state sin and death were the default settings, now our default is justice and life (Witherington 160).

This vision involves two ideas that should be familiar by now: participation and apocalypticism.

Participation

Paul frames this discussion in terms of a participatory metaphysic (Tonstad 197; Eberhart). That is, if we are running the ‘old’ buggy software we continue down and therefore participate in Adam’s destructive path (cf. 2 Baruch 54.19), but we are saved inasmuch as we participate in Christ’s death and resurrection. This comes out especially strong in this passage, with its repetition of “with him“: We are buried with him (6.4), united with him (6.5), crucified with him (6.6), died with him (6.8) and live with him (6.8). This is a key concept in Pauline theology; language of dying and rising with Christ is also found in 2 Corinthians 5.14-21 and Colossians 2.8-15, 3.1-3. This participation in Christ is actualized in our baptism, in which we symbolically die to the old humanity and are reborn into the new (Keesmaat & Walsh 121; Witherington 157).

Apocalyptic

Whenever we find ourselves using language like “God has acted decisively” to enact a radical transformation in the world, we are firmly in the territory of Jewish Apocalyptic. We see this here with the repeated references to the reign, rule, and power of sin, understood in terms of a spiritual force or state rather than as discrete actions. There is a battle going on between the forces of life and the forces of death; here Paul claims that since we belong to (are united to and participate in) Christ, death has no claim over us (Keesmaat & Walsh 122)

The sense of spiritual warfare involved in this theology (which is explicit in the parallel passage in Colossians (Kruse 275)) is hinted at by the language of presenting our bodies as tools, either for injustice or justice. The word translated as ‘tools’ here (hopla) is most commonly used for weapons (the general term for an infantryman was ‘hoplite’). But it could also be used for a blacksmith’s tools or farming implements. Our bodies can be weapons for evil and destruction or tools for good and creation: the choice is ours (Witherington 163; Eberhart). (It’s hard not to think here of the proto-apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 2 in which God’s messianic reign involves the nations of the world “beating their swords into plowshares.”) As St. John Chrysostom put it in the fourth century:

The body, like a military weapon, is not in itself inclined to either vice or virtue. It can go either way, depending on the user…. The flesh becomes either good or evil according to the mind’s decision, not because of its own nature.” (Homilies on Romans 11)

Challenge

The theology Paul develops here is nothing short of glorious. It presents a powerful and uniquely Christian vision of what salvation entails: nothing short of the complete regeneration of humanity itself, utterly freed from the power of sin and death. Paul’s only problem — and it’s a big one — is that in actual fact, Jesus-followers continued to sin. What he presents in this passage as a theological impossibility is nonetheless the lived reality of Christian life. Paul takes this problem very seriously: Sinning-while-Christian is not just a misstep but evidence that the gospel isn’t true: Inasmuch as we are still following the old way, the new way hasn’t worked; the ‘patch’ to our programming has failed.

It is often said that Christianity lives in the tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. We believe, to paraphrase N.T. Wright, that the end of time has happened in the midst of time, that the Kingdom of God has appeared in the middle of the kingdoms of this world. (As Jesus put it, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a small amount of yeast that leavens a whole batch of bread.) This means that, surrounded by the ‘way of Adam’ as we are, it will always be a temptation to us. And it’s a temptation we will all fall prey to. That makes things messy and complicates any easy, decisive theology, of the kind Paul develops here (Witherington 156, 159; ).

The doorway in this passage between the theological truth Paul is talking about and the harsh lived realities is that shift we noted earlier in the post at verse 11 between the indicative and imperative mood, from theology to application (Tonstad 198). The participatory theology Paul develops here is true, but it is not magic. It needs to be constantly lived into and acted out. The key word in the passage about this is the first of the imperatives: ‘consider’ (Witherington 162; Kruse 267; Tonstad 198). There is a choice to be made, and one that has to be made in every moment: Am I going to act according to the old programming or the new? Am I going to participate in Adam or participate in Christ? If we are conscious about this (which is the sense of ‘consider’ here) and truly understand the apocalyptic consequences of our faith, the choice will be obvious (Tonstad 198).

It has to be stressed that this is in no way a return to a ‘works-based’ salvation; it’s simply what faith looks like in practice.

Expand

As I noted last time, it’s hard to imagine a more expansive theology than the participatory vision Paul describes here. But the shift to exhortation at the end of the passage reminds us of the message of Romans 2: that knowing the Scriptures and having good theology is useless if we don’t live it out.

Summary & Conclusions

Paul is concerned his message of grace will be misconstrued into a license to sin. He heads this off by insisting that since we have died with Christ in our baptism, we are dead to sin and so it has no power over us. We are a whole new kind of human being, empowered to live out faithful, peace- and justice-oriented lives. But it’s not magic: we need to consistently decide to live that theological reality out.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.