The Flesh and the Spirit: Romans 8.1-13

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Since chapter 5, Paul has been exploring the implications of his participationist take on the ancient ‘two way’ ideology. It isn’t that we can follow one of two ways, as Paul understands the world, but that there are two humanities in which we can participate: the old humanity of Adam that is bondage to sin and death and which fails to live out God’s written law, or the new humanity of Jesus that is free for justice and peace, living out God’s law imprinted on the heart. Over the past two chapters, he’s detailed what that old humanity of Adam looks like. Now in chapter 8, he finally dives deeper into the blessings of the life in Christ.

Let’s look at the text.

Text

[8.1] There is therefore no condemnation against those who are in Christ Jesus; [2] for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death. [3] For God did what was impossible for the law, which was weakened through the flesh: By sending his own son in the likeness of the sinful flesh to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, [4] so that the law’s just decree might be fulfilled in us who walk not in accordance with the flesh but with the Spirit. [5] For those who are are aligned with the flesh think fleshly thoughts, but those aligned with the Spirit think spiritual thoughts. [6] For the fleshly mind is death, but the spiritual mind is life and peace. [7] So the fleshly mind is hostile towards God because it does not submit to God’s law—nor is it able to. [8] And those who are in the flesh are not able to make things right with God.

[9] But you are not in the flesh but are rather in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God lives in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to him. [10] But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of justice. [11] But if the Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies too because of his Spirit that dwells in you.

[12] So then, brothers and sisters, we have obligations, but not to the flesh, or to live in alignment with the flesh, [13] for if you live aligned with the flesh you will die, but if you put to death the works of the flesh by the Spirit, you will live.

Experience & Encounter

I’m struck most here by the centrality of the Holy Spirit in this passage. The Spirit has felt like a side character so far in Romans, but here its importance comes to the fore. In fact, the Spirit is here the single defining characteristic of being a Christ-follower: “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to him.” Those are strong words! But there’s also a surprising fluidity to how Paul talks about Christ and the Spirit here, so I’d like to unpack that a bit today. I’m also struck by the concluding theme, that the new life in the Spirit still contains obligations. Again, we have this consistent reminder that the new life Paul envisions is not a license to sin. The wording is reminiscent of the awkward metaphor he used earlier, about how sin’s death severs our ‘marital’ bonds to it and frees us to ‘marry’ God anew.

Explore: The Spirit and the Law

There is really only one question I’d like to explore here today: What is Paul saying about the relationship between the Spirit and the law? Romans 8 is famously all about the Holy Spirit. But here in 8.1-13, Paul is still in the gravitational pull of his concerns in chapter 6-7 about the law. So how do these connect? But first, let’s look at how Paul has talked about the Holy Spirit so far.

The Holy Spirit in Romans 1-7

While the the Spirit of God is found only five times in the preceding seven chapters, it’s found over twenty times in this chapter (Witherington 209).* The earlier references are:

Three of these prior references explicitly link the law and the Spirit, though not in the same way. While 7.14 acknowledges the inherent ‘spiritual’ nature of the Law of Moses, 2.29 and 7.6 both use the new Spirit-led life which naturally expresses the principles of God’s law from within, rather than being dependent on the written law given to Moses, which Paul argued was twisted by sin for its own purposes.

What Law is Paul Talking About?

One of the things that makes Paul so difficult to understand is his tendency to use the same term in different ways close together. For example, so far in Romans, Paul has talked about law in at least four different ways (three of which were active in the five references to the law in 7.21-24!): 1. a kind of natural law to which everyone is subject; 2. the Law of Moses, 3. law as a general principle, and 4. law as an outside authority. Moreover, in the way Paul uses the terms, sense 4 has co-opted sense 2 to use it for is own purposes!

The question then is which of these four meanings of ‘law’ does Paul have in mind when he says in 8.2 that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death”? Tonstad, following N.T. Wright and others, believes that these are both a reference to the Law of Moses in the broad perspective of salvation history: The Law of Moses, which had been pressed into service of ‘the law of sin and death’ has now been “taken in hand by Christ, thus being delivered from its lethal alliance with Sin” (Tonstad 231, quoting J. Louis Martyn). Others, however, think this is pushing Paul’s usage a bit too far, and prefer the fourth sense outlined above: as a power to which one is subject (Witherington 211; Kruse 324).

I find myself swayed by this second option. As we’ve seen, questions of power and authority have been in the background of the whole book so far. Here Paul introduces a new power, the law of the Spirit in contrast to the old power, the law of sin and death. Such an interpretation is aided by the many contrasts between ‘spiritual’ and ‘fleshly’ that we see in 8.1-13, which remind us that we’re still under the broad ‘two ways’ anthropology that Paul’s been developing since chapter 5 (Tonastad 232).

At any rate, this interpretation can bring Tonstad’s perspective along with it. For this new law of the Spirit is able to redeem the old order, which includes the Law of Moses, to its proper functioning, breaking the power of the law of sin and death (Kruse 324). Whereas in the old order, the written law was only able to point out sin and not stop it, the new order of the Spirit writes the point of the law of God on our hearts, enabling us to live it out from within (Witherington 211; Nanos 320). This interpretation links back well with the previous passages in which Paul connected the Spirit and the law, 2.29 and 7.6.

Crucially, however, this does not mean that we perform every ‘jot and tittle’ of the written law, but rather, its “just decree” (8.4).

What is the Law’s Just Decree?

With all this talk of the law, it’s notable that what is to be “fulfilled” in our lives is the law’s “just decree,” in the singular, rather than its “just decrees.” In other words, it’s not the whole thing, but its purpose, the “unity expressing the fatherly will of God” (Kruse 328). As Gordon Fee put it: “Paul does not say that Torah is now ‘obeyed’ or ‘kept’ or ‘done’—the ordinary language for Torah observance—but that which the Torah requires is now ‘fulfilled’ in us” (quoted by Witherington 215).

So what is this “just decree” that is fulfilled in us? The best answer is nothing other than the “new commandment” that Jesus left his disciples at the Last Supper: to love one another (John 13.34). This is of course essentially the same as Jesus’s summary of the law, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22.37ff), which is in turn firmly grounded in Jewish precedent (e.g., Deuteronomy 10; Micah 6; Ecclesiastes 12). Not only is this answer suggested by this huge biblical precedent, but Paul will also go on to spell it out later in this letter: “he one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” and “love is the fulfilling of the law” (13.8, 19).

Kruse notes the strong parallels between 8.4-5 and Galatians 5.13-16; if this is in view here, the ‘new commandment’ could be expanded to include the bearing of good fruit and the Fruit of the Spirit more generally (Kruse 328).

Challenge

I think this discussion has gotten a decent handle on what Paul’s message in this passage was. But a significant swath of New Testament scholars would protest that I’ve ignored something very important here. Witherington, for example, considers this to be the clearest passage in Paul’s writings in support of the penal substitution model of the atonement (Witherington 214). So let’s take a look back at the text to see if we’ve missed something critical.

Towards the start of the letter, Paul spent the better part of three chapters making the case that everyone, left to our own devices, stands guilty before God, whether for breaking the Law of Moses (Jews) or for violating God’s general law that is understandable from the created order (everybody else) (1.18-3.20). Now here in 8.1 he claims that “there is no condemnation” for those who are “in Christ.” So, something has happened to change our guilty verdict to ‘not guilty’. Now there is no doubt that Paul is using forensic, or legal, imagery here (SBL; Eberhart; Tonstad 231; Witherington 209; Kruse 323). But, how he uses this forensic metaphor isn’t straightforward. The argument goes something like this:

8.1: The guilty verdict is overturned.

8.2: Because we are no longer under the law of sin and death but the law of the Spirit

8.3: Because God did something the law (of Moses, which was weakened by the flesh) could not.

God condemned sin ‘in the flesh’ by sending God’s Son ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’.

God did this ‘to deal with sin’.

8.4: so that the law’s just decree might be fulfilled in us.

By this logic, the thing God accomplished that he law could not is not the payment of the penalty for sin (as per penal substitution) but allowing us to fulfill the law’s just decree. In other words, the change in verdict is not because of a judicial sleight of hand (God paying the penalty on our behalf) but because God has created the conditions in which we are now able to live faithfully.

Proponents of reading penal substitution into this passage would argue that the focus on God’s condemning the law in the flesh of Jesus suggests a sacrificial meaning (Kruse 327). And there are hints in the passage suggesting a sacrificial context, such as “to deal with sin” (peri hamartias) being phrased in the way the Septuagint talked about sin sacrifices, and the word translated as “to please God” (aresai (8.8)) having transactional connotations (Kruse 327; Witherington 213).

But once again we have to remind ourselves how the Old Testament sacrificial system worked: sacrifices ‘for sin’ were not understood in terms of payment or vicarious punishment, but as purification; blood was not ‘life for life’, but spiritual soap. But if this is the case, how might we understand the idea of God condemning sin in Jesus’ flesh? I would argue the image makes even more sense from within a recapitulation model of atonement than it does in a substitutionary model. In this view, in the incarnation, Jesus takes on human flesh but fills it with his divinity, restoring it to its normal settings. When it comes to his death, he breaks the system, since death has no legitimate hold on him. All of this dealt with sin and condemned sin, and ‘pleased God’ in Jesus’ flesh. And crucially, in Paul’s ‘two ways’ understanding of humanity, we who are ‘in Christ’ participate in his renewed humanity.

Kruse acknowledges that this interpretation has been increasingly common in New Testament scholarship; I find it telling that he doesn’t so much make a case against it as note that he doesn’t understand it (Kruse 327). For Witherington’s part, while he remains committed to the idea of vicarious payment, he rightly insists that the important point for Paul is that this must also be “paired with a subjective transformation” (Witherington 210).

So, while these more classically Protestant scholars are correct to point out the forensic and sacrificial images Paul is using, I don’t think it follows that we’re talking about substitutionary atonement. Instead, Paul is talking about something far bigger: a renewed humanity.

Expand

The interpretation that has emerged in this study is beautifully expansive, as it transfers morality and ethics beyond a list of dos and dont’s to being about how best to express God’s love and live out God’s peace in the world.

Summary & Conclusions

Ending (for now) his discussion of the law, and how Christ-followers relate to it, Paul makes it clear that God has created a new way of being human. We are not called to follow the letter of any written law, which as we’ve seen, seems necessarily to lead to hypocrisy and legalism, but to live out the law of God’s magnanimous, self-giving love, expressed tangibly in the good fruit of joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, generosity, gentleness, and self-restraint (and more).

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.

 

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