In Romans 6-7 Paul addresses a series of concerns about his message being a license to sin. In chapter 6, he argued that marginalizing the role of the law doesn’t promote sin, because the law was part of the old order of sin, to which we died at our baptism into the new order of the Spirit, ‘in Christ’; we are no longer enslaved to sin but are now ‘enslaved’ (a wording he recognized was awkward) to holiness. In the passage we’ll look at today, he explains the dynamics of this through an analogy — though one that biblical scholars claim raises at least as many questions as it answers.
Text
[7.1] Or do you not know, brothers and sisters — for I am talking to those who know the law — that the law has authority over a person only for as long as they live? [2] For a woman under the authority of a husband is bound to her husband while he is alive; but when he dies, she is discharged from the law concerning her husband. [3] So then, if she falls in with another man while her husband is alive, she will be considered an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she falls in with another man, she is not an adulteress.
[4] In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you have died to the law through Christ’s body, so now you may belong to another — to the one who rose from the dead so that you may bear fruit for God. [5] For when we were ‘in the flesh’, our sinful passions, engaged by the law, were at work in our body parts with the result that we bore fruit for death. [6] But now we have been discharged from the law, dead to that which held us, so that we might be enslaved in the newness of the law of the Spirit and not the antiquated nature of the written law.
Experience
I have to say that my experience here is largely confusion. I understand the basic gist of Paul’s analogy: it’s an example where a death frees someone to one set of bonds, allowing them to pursue another. But the closer I look at it, the more tenuous it seems: For example, the analogy works best if sin and death died, but the death in Paul’s analogy is ours; and it seems strange that in this analogy our bonds to sin are understood to be legitimate! And while I always welcome a reference to bearing good fruit, its appearance here seems to come out of nowhere. So my main question is whether anyone else has had better luck with the details, or whether it really is best to let the analogy float by in generalities and focus on the main point Paul is making.
Encounter
In the story we encounter a woman who apparently wants to be with a certain man but who can’t pursue him because she is already married. But once her husband dies, she is freed from the obligations of that relationship and able to join with the one she desires. We have to admit here how wild it is from a biblical perspective that a would-be adulteress is the positive focus of this analogy! (Especially in light of Jesus’ radicalization of the law in Matthew 5.27f, in which he includes one’s thoughts and not just one’s actions in his definition of adultery!) I wonder if this is just a random example Paul thought of, or if he’s saying something about the scandal of the gospel.
Explore
There really is just one big question looming over this passage for me: What is Paul really talking about? But we can break it down into some helpful sub-questions:
- How does this analogy fit into Paul’s larger argument?
- What does the scholarship say about the details of the analogy?
- Can we say anything about Paul’s rationale for centering a would-be adulteress in his analogy?
Literary Matters
While some popular translations omit it, the passage starts with a conjunction linking it logically to what has preceded it: “For the wages owed for sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6.23) (cf. Witherington 174).* So we would do well to keep this context of ‘what is owed or due to someone’ in mind as we look at this passage in greater detail.
Colin Kruse helpfully notes that the end of this passage introduces the themes Paul will unpack in the rest of this broad section, with 7.5 (enslavement to sin in the old humanity) previewing 7.7-25 and 7.6 (enslavement to the Spirit in the new humanity) previewing 8.1-13 (Kuse 294).
What the Scholarship Says
Pauline scholars agree on nothing. Except that this analogy doesn’t really work. According to Nanos (320), the logic is “very difficult to follow” with “the same terms … used with different references and connotations, and the prevailing psychological interpretations … suspect.” Eberhart notes it has come under “critical fire” for its bad logic and requires “imagination” to make it work, while Gorman calls it “contorted” and Witherington (176) “hopelessly confused.” Kruse (289), Witherington (175), Eberhart, and Nanos (320) all additionally note the strangeness of Paul appealing to a detail of the Law of Moses to a predominantly Gentile audience — especially since Roman law, unlike the Jewish law Paul references here, allowed women the same rights to divorce as men. So I feel comfortable going with my initial instinct about this and not trying to dig too deeply into the details here. As Kruse concludes: “Paul does not seem to have been concerned about the lack of exact correspondence…, being satisfied with an analogy in which death (albeit the husband’s and not the wife’s) frees from the law so that the one freed can then belong to another” (Kruse 292; cf. Witherington 176; Eberhart; Gorman).
An Adulterous Analogy
A common thread that’s woven its way through this stud of Romans so far has been the importance of power and allegiance in both ancient politics and religion. And I think it’s a helpful entry point for why the Old Testament (and other patriarchal frameworks in the Ancient Mediterranean world) took adultery — especially women’s adultery — so seriously. It too was about power (a man’s) and the allegiance due to him. For a wife to cheat on her husband was a challenge to his authority and therefore honour. Even the question of the legitimacy of offspring oft-cited in these discussions fits under this broader rubric: for a bastard would essentially rob a husband of his legacy, and even his afterlife, since fathers were often understood to live on in their sons. With this in mind, it’s no wonder the adulteress became one of the greatest cultural icons of ‘the paradigmatic sinner’.
That Paul may have had this in mind is suggested by his description of the wife in the analogy as hypandros, ‘under the authority of a man.’ It does mean ‘married’, as many modern Bibles translate it, but it is a word only used for women and indicates their legal status as dependents of their husbands (Witherington 174f; Eberhart). In this way, it brings us into a similar legal realm as the enslavement analogy from the previous section. As Eberhart notes, a wife’s legal status (as emphasized by hypandros) approximates “the predicament of an enslaved woman who was forced to serve a male master.” Whether we like it or not, legally speaking, both are statuses in which a woman existed under the power of a man, and was therefore legally bound to him.
When speaking of obligations within a relationship, we’re squarely in the realm of faith as it was understood and practiced in the ancient world. Essentially, we once existed in a ‘good-faith’ relationship with sin; but now we are free to enter into a good-faith relationship with God instead.
In Paul’s broader argument, those legal bonds between a woman and her first husband operate as an analogy for the Law of Moses, which regulated Israel’s life while it was subject to the realm of sin and death (SBL; Eberhart). I don’t think this actually works theologically, and Paul will have a lot more to say about the law, but his basic point seems to be that those who are in the new humanity in Christ are no longer subject to the Law of Moses because it functioned within the context of the old humanity.
There is a lot that is strange in this analogy, but one of the biggest is that it flips the script on one of the Old Testament’s favourite analogies for Israel’s relationship with God (in context, YHWH): that of a wife and her husband. There, and especially in the Prophets, YHWH is seen as Israel’s lawful husband, whom she cuckolds by cheating on him with other gods (e.g., Isaiah 1; Jeremiah 2; Hosea 1). But here, humanity is imagined as legitimately married to sin/death, and our longing for God to be adulterous! Whatever else Paul is doing here, he is definitely subverting expectation.
If anything, all this would only seem to heighten concerns about Paul’s gospel being a shameful license to sin! But Paul’s focus returns quickly to the new humanity. This is where he brings up bearing good fruit (7.4). While at first glance this seems a bit out of place, in those Old Testament passages, Israel’s spiritual ‘good fruit’ as a nation — justice, peace, etc. — was positioned as the offspring of its marriage to God. Here in this analogy, the old ‘marriage’ produced bad fruit (sin and death), but the new ‘marriage’ produces good fruit (Kruse 294). This finally answers the charge of whether his gospel promotes sin.
Challenge
This is an interesting passage from the perspective of feminist theology. It is a rare story that centres a woman’s experience. On the one hand, Paul must do this to use this analogy, since a man could divorce his wife under the Law of Moses. But, on the other hand, the analogy is fraught anyway, so this doesn’t really make it any less odd. (It’s not a question of “this analogy is so great but Paul has to flip to a woman’s experience to make it work;” it’s a tenuous analogy so it’s all the odder that Paul used it when it meant he’d have to switch to a woman’s perspective.)
This is where Phoebe’s status as Paul’s stand-in in presenting the letter may be helpful. While I think he consistently overstates Phoebe’s role in crafting the letter, Eberhart correctly points out that this analogy would have had a strong resonance for Phoebe — and for the audience she was reading it to. As a formerly enslaved, Gentile woman, she had three strikes against her in terms of the ‘old humanity’. But, Paul indicates she was his patroness, which means she had quite a bit of money at her disposal, which in turn strongly suggests she was both a freedwoman and a widow. She knew first hand what it meant to be freed from old obligations. She had once been enslaved (a status in which physical, emotional, and sexual violence was the norm, to say nothing of the lack of any agency or social or legal personhood), but was now free. She was a Gentile, once on the outside of God’s story looking in, but through her faith in Jesus (and the power of Paul’s gospel) had been brought into the heart of things. And she had likely been married, but now as a widow was able to use her funds and freedom to serve God. This last piece is important: As Paul had mentioned at the end of chapter 6, we aren’t freed from sin’s power to follow our every whim; our life needs purpose and direction, and we will therefore always serve something. Phoebe is therefore a wonderful example for all of us in what it looks like to dedicate one’s freedom to service of the gospel.
So then, the analogy may not work well logically, but with Phoebe standing before the Roman churches as a human object lesson in the transformational power of these legal changes in status, it might have worked a lot better ‘in the flesh’.
Expand
The point of this passage is much the same as the previous two: we are no longer under the power of the ‘old humanity’, but exist within the power of the ‘new humanity’ in Christ, in which we are called to ground our moral and ethical behaviour in terms of the quest for justice and peace, rather than simple law-and-order. I’m reminded again of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6: “All things are permissible for me’ — but not all things are beneficial.’ All things are permissible for me’ — but I will not be dominated by anything.” There are few ideas in the Scriptures as expansive as this!
Summary & Conclusions
Continuing his argument that his marginalization of the law does not promote sin, here Paul uses a subversive analogy to show how one can be freed from one set of obligations in order to enter into a new one. As always, his focus is not on the old but the new, and he insists that the life of faith according to his gospel is all about bearing good fruit for God.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 