Canter Bridge

Few selections of Paul’s written discourse with his followers cause as much consternation as the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans. The latter portion of this chapter is taken up with the struggle of an ‘I’, the identity of which is one of biblical interpretation’s great conundra.

Is Paul speaking autobiographically of his own struggle with law, sin, and grace? Or is the ‘I’ rather ‘Paul as Israelite’? Or is the ‘I’ Israel itself, now writ personal in the prosopon of a metaphorical ‘I’?

It is difficult to arrive at a final conclusion without the accompaniment of a nagging voice suggesting that one may be entirely wrong.

Not so the first part of the chapter, where matters are clearer if by no means simple. There Paul turns the diamond of nomos—Law—in his hand. Like the binding force of marriage, which is severe in its finality while both partners live but dissolved in an instant upon the death of one, so Law functions in the life of the follower of Jesus. Paul’s metaphor is patient of more than one level of dissection. Like the marriage covenant—I am aware of the license with which I use the term—Law is for Paul’s Jewish kin permanent insofar as a new condition does not unmake its comprehensive grip. Like marriage, Torah is holy. Like marriage, which usually ends with the death of one spouse, Law is also temporary.

Here Paul treads knowingly upon the minefield that would blow apart the innate overlap of synagogue and church.

Paul develops the temporality of the Law in terms of what it accomplished as a kind of anteroom to what in his purview is ‘the new life of the Spirit’. The law creates the moral and spiritual clarity that allows those who live under it finally to achieve adequate comprehension of how hopelessly contaminated by sin they are. So polluted in fact are they, so incapable of remedy, that the Law has a kind of murderous impact upon any existential attempt to circumvent sin’s stultifying effect outside of the redemption that happens in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This, for Paul, is a spiritual, holy, murderous Law. He rejoices in the gift of it and exults yet again in the overcoming of the stage where such a spiritual corralling is required.

Paul is here a Jewish heretic. Though he himself claims deep—even deepest—lineage in the Hebrew Scriptures and peppers his prose with intelligent allusion to them by both catch-phrase and fuller citation, Paul parts company with a Judaism that defines life before God in terms of covenantal fidelity to Torah without need of the messianic event that in Paul’s life found its locus on the road to Damascus.

Is this Christian apostle Jewish? Decidedly yes. Emphatically no.