Canter Bridge

Leave it to the apostle Paul, that most bodacious of the Jesus movement’s constitutive generation, to speak in such extreme terms. Where others might have spoken of humankind’s ability to improve, repent, achieve, and so forth—with God’s good help as the wind in our sails—Paul simply says we are dead. Unable. Inert. Incapable. Clueless. Cold.

It is so like him to paint the picture in extremes, yet we would be wrong to understand this as rhetoric unmindful of its boundaries. This is no mere rhetorical flourish in Paul’s understanding of the Christ event and its vivifying effect on human beings. When he says people are dead in their sins, he means what he says. The development of this thought in Paul’s writing is too far-ranging and deep for us to get away with thinking the apostle is merely having a particularly metaphorical day.

Death, when it comes wrapped up as a core component of a carefully articulated system of understanding, means death.

But what does death mean?

In this fifth chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul delivers himself of the conviction that Christ’s life-giving death was no response to human initiative:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

Yet ‘weakness’, as Paul describes the human situation in that statement, might easily be construed as a limitation, yet something short of a deal-breaker insofar as human-divine agreement is concerned. However, Paul puts paid to that possibility by filling out what he means by humans as weak (asthenés). Weakness-cum-enmity appears to be the operative concept in Paul’s mind, a situation far more dire than simple weakness, left unexplained, might suggest. When one adds, as Paul does, that being weak is akin to being sinners, as Paul does, the matter becomes still more grave.

Still, Paul has not finished. The remainder of what we read as his fifth chapter comprises a discourse on death as the state of the unredeemed rebel who becomes, in due course, the reconciled friend of God. When one adds death to weakness-as-enmity-with-God, one has clearly arrived at a picture of humankind as unable to help itself.

So does redemption at God’s initiative by way of the agency of Jesus’ death become, in the Pauline understanding, a matter of divine intrusion. It comes uninvited, unsought, unachieved.

It is, in Paul’s oddly economical way of putting it, God’s ‘free gift’.

Thus does capability die.