In Romans 6-7, Paul works through a series of rhetorical questions, preemptively heading off objections to his teaching that marginalizes the role of the Law of Moses for followers of Jesus. Here in 7.7-25, in two closely related paragraphs, he asks whether, because he’s said that there is no accounting of sin where there is no law, it follows that the law itself creates and promotes sin.
Text
[7.7] What then shall we say? That the law is sin? Absolutely not! That said, I wouldn’t have known sin if not through the law. For example, I wouldn’t have known what craving was if the law didn’t say “You will not crave.” [8] But sin, using the commandment as its base of operations, produced in me all kinds of craving, for sin was dead without the law. [9] But I was alive without the law. Then, when the commandment arrived, sin sprung back to life, [10] but I died, and the very commandment that meant to produce life was found to produce death instead. [11] For sin, making the commandment its base of operations, deceived me, and killed me through it. [12] So, the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.
[13] So then, did that which is good bring death to me? Absolutely not! Rather, sin was producing death in me through that which is good, so that it might appear to be sin and sin might become sinful beyond all measure through the commandment. [14] For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, having been sold under sin’s power. [15] For I don’t know what I am doing: I don’t do what I want, but I do that which I hate. [16] And if I do what I don’t what to do, I’m agreeing that the law is good. [17] It’s no longer I who am doing it, but rather the sin that lives in me. [18] For I know that what is good does not live in me, that is in my flesh; for the will to do what is good is close to me, but to actually do it is not. [19] For I do not do the good I want, but do the bad that I don’t want. [20] And if I do what I don’t want, it is no longer me doing it, but the sin that lives in me. [21] So I discover it to be a law that evil is close to me when I want to do what is good. [22] For I delight in the law of God in my inner person, [23] but I see that a different law is at work in my body parts, warring against the the law in my mind. [24] I’m a miserable person: Who will rescue me from this body of death? [25] (Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!) So then, I myself am enslaved to the law of God in my mind, but to the law of sin in my flesh.
Experience & Encounter
I’m of two minds when I read this passage. On the one hand, it’s exceptionally relatable. This is exactly what it feels like to be a person who wants to do the right thing in our world. At the same time, it seems very out of place here. First, the question itself is not a logical consequence of his arguments. Second, it’s hard to imagine any self-respecting Jewish man suggesting it. Third, his answer seems to fly in the face of what he’s just said about how we are dead to sin. Yet here he uses first-person verbs, and in the second paragraph switches to the present state: apparently not speaking of his former life, or about others’ lives today, but about his own frustrations as a person of faith. This hardly makes sense from the pen of a man who claims he — and all the faithful — is dead to the power of sin! And finally, it’s not representative of how he talks about the law’s role in his life elsewhere. So what’s going on here? And, considering we’ve already seen that his audience was likely predominantly Gentile, who is he even talking to?
I also have to note that his conclusion in 7.12 about the law being good doesn’t seem to follow from the preceding argument. If we follow Jesus’ teaching and recognize that ‘a tree will be known by its fruit’, how can we say that the law is truly good if it produces such bad fruit?
Explore
Two big questions have arisen in the first two sections of the study:
- Is Paul really speaking from his own experience here?
- What is he saying about the relationship between the Law and sin?
Literary Matters
There continues to be a lot of debate about who the ‘I’ in Romans 7.7ff is (see Kruse 317ff for a full discussion of the debate).* Certainly there is a long tradition, following the lead of St. Augustine around the turn of the 5th century, of taking Paul’s ‘I’ at face value. For people like Augustine and Martin Luther who carried a lot of guilt about the persistence of sin in their lives, understanding the passage as indicative of Paul’s experience put them in good company (Witherington 188). But there are very few scholars who would accept that interpretation today. While there are some outliers (Jewett, for example holds that it is representative of Paul’s life as a Pharisee before his Damascus Road experience (Jewett (2006) 449f), there is a general consensus that the use of the first-person “is stylistic rather than autobiographical” (SBL; cf. Witherington 180; Kruse 298, 317ff; Eberhart). The rationale is largely because of the concerns I raised above: Paul is reticent to speak of himself or his psychology and we know from Philippians 3.6 that he understood himself to be righteous in accordance with the Law (SBL).
But who the ‘I’ actually is remains an open question, and every commentator offers their own answer (e.g., Kruse believe’s it’s Israel, while Eberhart thinks it’s Phoebe’s own words). I’ll discuss one hypothesis here that I think could be helpful. Witherington posits that the ‘I’ is Paul putting on the persona of Adam (179). I was initially very skeptical about this, but his reasoning is compelling. First, he notes two reasons for understanding this as rhetorical impersonation (prosopopoiea): 1. the radical shift in tone and voice, which was indicative of the technique; and 2. the prominence of this interpretation among ancient Greek interpreters (Witherington 180). To support his claim that Paul is impersonating Adam specifically, he notes that this section already calls back to two of the three ways Paul has been talking about the old humanity in recent chapters — as death and slavery — so it would be fitting for him to reference the third, Adam (whom Paul used to introduce the theme and in whose story he’s grounded both the death and slavery imagery), as well. Paul’s description of sin using law as its starting point for deception, which led to sin and death also fits the Adam story well; if you replace “sin” with “the serpent,” it’s pretty perfect (Witherington 185). Additionally, Paul does not speak in this first paragraph in terms of the law as a whole or of commandments plural, but of ‘the commandment’ singular, which also fits Adam’s context. There was already a long tradition in Judaism associating the commandment against coveting with the Garden commandment not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Witherington 188; cf. Nanos 320; Kruse 300). This association is aided here by Paul’s abbreviation of the commandment, which changes it from a specific prohibition against coveting a neighbour’s property into a more general statement against envy and greed. Finally, Witherington suggests that the claim “I was once living without the law” really only applied to Adam (189). While I find the arguments compelling, it’s impossible to make any determination one way or the other.
At any rate, it seems best to think of this as Paul putting on the persona of humanity in general outside of Christ. Since Paul has already used Adam as the prototype for his kind of humanity, even if the reference wasn’t specifically intended, Witherington’s proposal still works.
Paul, Sin, and the Law
Paul’s point here is that the Law of Moses is not the problem; rather sin — and its tendency to twist the Law and use it against us — is the problem (Kruse 297; Eberhart). But how he talks about it deserves some comment. For while the context is clearly talking about the ongoing role for Jewish Law (or lack thereof), Paul’s argument is exceedingly Gentile. Let’s take a look.
The Psychology of Sin
As we’ve already seen in this series, Paul’s language and basic understanding of how sin works is a Jewish spin on the pop psychology of his day. We see that in this passage as well. For example, the word he uses for coveteousness is epithymia, which has a more typical meaning of ‘appetite, craving’. While this is an essential piece of Hellenistic Greek pop psychology, here Paul follows the Septuagint translation of Exodus 20.17 (epithymeseis). (Since the Septuagint tradition was linked to the Jewish community of Alexandria, which was the centre of Hellenistic philosophy, the philosophical influence on this biblical vocabulary is not surprising.) And again, by removing the references to things one should not covet, it becomes a broad statement about how sin works: as an outgrowing of unrestrained natural impulses (Eberhart; Witherington 188, Nanos 320). In Stoic thought (which was the basis of that first-century pop psychology), this was due to a misalignment within the nous, the faculty of interpretation of sensory experiences. Interestingly, Paul references the nous in 7.23, where he suggests that even if the law could correctly align the nous (which he suggests here in contradiction to what he’ll say in 12.2), there’s still a disconnect between the nous and the body that renders the law unable to really do anything about sin.
While the discussion in 7.13-23 is similar to later rabbinic teachings on the two conflicting impulses, yetzer ha-tov (‘the good impulse’) and yetzer ha-ra (‘the wicked impulse’) (1QS 3.15-4.26; Nanos 320), it also bears significant resemblance to Greek and Roman attitudes towards the will and behaviour. Consider for example Ovid’s Metamorphoses 7.19-29: “Desire persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse” (quoted in Witherington 194). And one could just as easily cite examples from Seneca, Epictetus, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, and Plautus (Witherington 200; Kruse 312ff). Of particular note for Romans 6-7 is that Paul’s description of the war between mind and body here is similar to how Seneca talked about the psychology of the enslaved person: they are always free in their minds but act per the bondage of their bodies (De Beneficiis 3.20). So, even here when referencing a Jewish story about the origins of sin, Paul is doing it in a way that would resonate with Gentile audiences, whether free and educated or from their past or present experiences of enslavement (Eberhart).
The Law
If the law isn’t the problem, but merely a tool for sin to manipulate, how does Paul understand that this works? His logic goes like this: In order to break a rule, the rule must exist; moreover, as soon as it exists, it introduces the possibility of breaking it (Nanos 320). And since the Law of Moses is holy, just, and good (as Paul puts it), by directing our thoughts to the possibility of injustice, it lets us know all is not right in the world (Nanos 320).
It’s interesting that Paul chose to talk about the tenth commandment here, because in so doing (following his inherited Jewish traditions), he highlights the one commandment that “involves not just external conformity to state law, but touches on people’s desires and affections” (Kruse 300). And in so doing, he stands alongside Jesus’ radicalization of the law, which pushes its boundaries back from action to thought (so that, for example, lust and hatred are as much ‘sinful’ as the adultery and murder they can motivate).
But once he’s established the goodness of the law, Paul doubles down on its ultimate impotence. Pointing out sin or guiding away from sin are not the same thing as preventing sin or creating conditions in which sin does not exist. Paul again uses enslavement language, saying we are “sold” to being “under [the power of] sin.” As Nanos helpfully paraphrases, life in the world as we know it means “finding oneself compelled to live in a different way than what one wishes for” (Nanos 320). We may know what God’s ways are and want to live them out, yet find ourselves compelled by some force in our bodies to do otherwise. He continues: “the point may be that once one is sold into a culture system and learns a way of life by habit …even when one wants to change, it seems insurmountable” (Nanos 320).
Such is life ‘in Adam.’ But crucially, as far as the rest of Paul’s writings are concerned, including elsewhere in Romans, it is not life ‘in Christ,’ which breaks sin’s hold on us and frees us live otherwise, subject to God’s ways.
Challenge
With the reference to the tenth commandment, and in the broader context of the debates about the applicability of circumcision and food laws in the Christian life, Paul is clearly addressing the Law of Moses here. But much of his argument applies more broadly to the idea of law itself. The ability of law to promote as much as prevent law-breaking is true whether the law is just (e.g., the Ten Commandments), amoral (e.g., traffic laws), or actively unjust (e.g., The Indian Act, Apartheid, etc.). To use the neutral example, for millennia—as long as there have been roads to cross—one just crossed the road when there was no traffic. But with the introduction of jaywalking laws in the 1920s (led by the wealthy automotive lobby over against popular opinion), suddenly something that had been normal and obvious behaviour was illegal. It’s a classic case of how the act of setting a boundary creates the infraction. This phenomenon seems to be the crux of Paul’s argument.
But if we think of how Jesus approached the law, he seemed more concerned about legalism. In a sense, the problem with law as a religious category is that it requires a kind of legalism. Ideas always have to be operationalized, and in the case of religious law, even the most lofty and spiritual ideal must be operationalized in the form of language. And that language must be as clear as possible to avoid confusion. But no matter how clear a law is worded, it will have to be interpreted — that’s why we have a vast system of lawyers and law courts. The only way behaviour can be judged according to the law is to look at the letter of the law. And focusing so closely to the letter leads to finding loopholes on the one hand, and an unhelpful scrupulousness on the other. In this way, the idea of religious law almost inevitably leads to hypocrisy and legalism. As Paul put it elsewhere, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (1 Corinthians 3.6). But the only way to access the spirit of the law is through the letter. What we need, it seems, is a different way of doing things altogether. And that’s what Paul gets to in chapter 8.
Expand
Paul here is addressing the problem of the human condition, ‘in Adam’, rather than the solution ‘in Christ.’ That makes it hard to see how an interpretation of this passage can help us to grow in faithfulness. But in order to get to the right treatment, we need the right diagnosis. And here Paul does a great job of that. The problem with the human condition is that there is a power at work in us and our communities (and the systems and structures that govern them) that makes it impossible to fully live into our reciprocal responsibilities in all of our relationships. This power can even turn our very good and just and holy approaches at limiting the damage against themselves. It’s a good reminder that the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. We need to consistently evaluate how our personal rules of life and community regulations are working to ensure that as much as possible they are creating the good outcomes we want — even as we recognize, with Paul, that no rule or regulation will solve all our problems.
Summary & Conclusions
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Here Paul argues that the road to sin can be paved with good, just, and holy laws. There’s a power at work in us that seems to make it impossible to do what is right, no matter how badly we may want to. It can even turn those good, just, and holy laws into tools and pretexts for sin. But as Christians, we must remember that Paul is not talking about an ‘end state’ here. He’s defining the problem. The solution is what he talks about next.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 