We establish law 3

2. What don't we establish?
If we establish law, what don't we establish? I think the best answer in the light of Romans 3:28 is that we do not establish justification by "works of law." Notice that I didn't say we don't establish law (which would contradict 3:31) or the law (although the absence of "the" in Romans 3:31 may be signicant) or even that Paul doesn't establish "works of law." It is justification by works of law that Paul does not reinforce.

In this connection, look at how 3:28 is worded:

We think that a person is "reckoned righteous" because of faith apart from works of law.

In other words, Paul does not condemn works of law for a Jew, only justification solely on the basis of them. If justification required works of law, then God would "be God of Jews only" (3:29). But since God is God of both Jews and Gentiles, there must be a way for Gentiles to be justified "apart from works of law."

This line of thought requires us to consider "works of law" and the law that Paul establishes in 3:31 as two different things. On this score James Dunn seems to come close to an acceptable explanation. By "works of law" Paul primarily thinks of the kinds of ethnic boundary matters in the law that separated Jew and Gentile: things like circumcision, sabbath observance, food laws, etc... It is not clear to me that we can solely define them in these terms, but I think such was probably the main connotation the phrase had.

In this connection we have likely been aided by the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries in that one of the documents discovered is actually titled, "All the Works of the Torah." This document is arguably a letter from the hero of the Dead Sea community, the Teacher of Righteousness, to the Maccabean priest in charge of the temple. And the content of this letter deals with the finer points (to be sure, not fine to the Teacher of Righteousness) of calendar and the purity of the temple.

For me, the key matter is that the debates are what I would characterize as intra-Jewish debates, debates between varying Jewish sects. So while I imagine "works of law" might have broadly referred to any keeping of the law in theory, I wonder if when the rubber hit the road, Jews mostly used this phrase when they were debating the finer points. In other words, my line of thought amounts to Dunn's position.

Of course this is not the place to go very far into discussing what Paul was establishing with regard to justification. Everything is debated. I have defined the verb to justify as "to reckon righteous," in keeping with Paul's defining quote of Genesis 15:6 in reference to Abraham: "Abraham had faith in God, and it [his faith] was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Rom. 4:9). It is this faith in God to justify the ungodly (Rom. 4:5), this faith in God to raise the dead (Rom. 4:24), this faith that God raised Jesus for our justification (Rom. 4:25; 10:9), it is this faith by which human individuals are justified (Rom. 3:28).

Yet Jesus also had faith that God would raise him from the dead (cf. my interpretation of 2 Cor. 4:16, Hebrews 5:7) and that is possibly the "faith of Jesus" in Rom. 3:26. This faith lead to his faithfulness unto death (cf. Phil. 2:8), the one act of obedience through which many will be confirmed righteous (Rom. 5:19). I feel increasingly comfortable with the idea that the lead off phrase "through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ" in Rom. 3:22; Gal. 2:16; and Phil. 3:9 are all references to Jesus' faithfulness unto death and wonder if this was a traditional phrase used in the early church.

These comments are digressions from the question of what law Paul establishes. Suffice it to say that we have 1) concluded that it is something like the law of love as a summary of the law, Christ's law, if you would and 2) that the phrase works of law more often gravitated toward matters of detail in the keeping of the law, particularly in reference to those parts that made Jews ethnically distinct.

Next post, did Paul really think a Jew couldn't keep the law of love without the Spirit?