We establish law 5

4. What law had Paul not kept prior to coming to Christ?
I disagree with Dunn, who sees Romans 7 as something Paul claimed to be the ongoing struggle of a believer. Rather, Romans 8 should be read as the victorious ability of a person walking by the Spirit to keep the righteous expectation of the law, largely equivalent to love.

So if Romans 7 is not about Paul's current experience, is it about his past experiences? Are these Paul's past struggles (Moo) or is Romans 7 is largely hypothetical as far as Paul's own experiences went (Stendahl, Sanders). Sanders notoriously suggests that Paul has backed himself into an argumentative corner in Romans 7, as (in Sanders' interpretation) Paul tries to figure out why the law wasn't adequate on its own for justification. Sanders thinks Paul pushes his argument to the brink of saying that the law itself is evil in the process. So according to Sanders, Paul walks a not too convincing tight rope between affirming the law as holy, good, and righteous while portraying it as ineffective as a path to righteousness.

The tact I took in the last entry removes some of Sanders' difficulties while supporting his sense that the basic "problem" with the law for Paul is largely that it isn't Christ, God's chosen path by which He affirms "righteousness." I remove others of Sanders' difficulties by recognizing that the law is, on one level, simply an indicator of righteousness. A ruler doesn't make something a certain length. It only tells you what length it is. Thus it is clear that the law is not a path to righteousness--it is only a ruler to tell you whether you are righteous already or not. The question for Paul is thus not whether the law can make a person righteous but whether God is willing in his unmerited favor to accept the effort to keep the law as grounds for being reckoned righteous (Paul answers no; other Jews would have answered yes in terms of staying in a favored status).

So Paul's claim is that God is looking for faith as the basis for being reckoned righteous. A Jew can show faith by keeping the law, but here Paul would say that faith in what God has done in Christ Jesus is also essential in addition to any works of law. Meanwhile, I Gentile does not even have this effort to stand on. So it is the same God who will justify (on the Day of Judgment) the Jews on the basis of faith and the Gentiles through faith (Rom. 3:30).

But all this is basically review. In Romans 7, Paul claims that without the Spirit, the rule ("law") of sin and the power of sin will overcome even the person who wants to do good. Here we should consider Romans 5:12 through the first part of Romans 8 as one related train of thought. Paul is discussing the forces of sin over flesh that entered the world after Adam. Recourse to Adam is made to broaden the theological discussion beyond that of Israel to include Gentiles as well in the discussion. Although Paul argues that Abraham is the basis of justification by faith for all peoples, Adam clearly makes Paul's discussion about all humanity.

Thus despite the fact that Paul is referring to the Jewish law, the entire character of his discussion in this section pushes us to see this law in terms of a "law within the law" that Paul affirms (the law largely in its universal, non-Jewish-particular aspects), Christ's law that we mentioned in our second post or the "law of God" in Romans 8:7. Paul is not arguing so much over "works of law," which gravitates toward boundary issues that separate Jew and Gentile, but about the fundamental situation of flesh that makes it impossible even to keep the heart of the law.

Now this does seem a very bizarre discussion in the light of Paul's Jewish background. In my opinion, his writings do not breathe like he had felt like a horrible failure at keeping the law before he experienced Christ. I do not see the struggle of Romans 7 as some typical experience Paul had before he came to Christ. It does, however, seem to give some reasons why all sin. It also introduces Paul's pneumatology to this discussion: Paul sees the Spirit as the counter to the power of sin.

So in what at least superificially seems a very bizarre theology for a Jew, Paul teaches that evil forces and the power of sin frustrate anyone's attempt to keep the "law within the law" if one does not have the Spirit. But in the apocalyptic age of the Spirit, a person might actually keep the law within the law, Christ's law, the perfect law of love.

At this point I step out into the darkness of my scholarship knowledge, for surely people have already speculated along the lines I now do. As we try to read behind Paul's comments in Romans 6-8 looking for appropriate Jewish precedents against which Paul might have come to think in this way, an intersection comes to mind between early Christian speculation on a "new covenant" (derived from Jesus' own teaching? See 1 Corinthians 11:25), on Jeremiah 31 as the only place in the Old Testament where such a covenant is mentioned (see particularly 31:31 and 33) and Joel 2:29-32, where before the day of the Lord God pours out His Spirit on all flesh (cf. Romans 10:13).

This cocktail of passages easily could add up to the idea that 1) Jesus was inaugurating a new covenant by his blood, 2) that was a pouring out of Holy Spirit on all flesh, both Jew and Gentile, and 3) this Spirit would enable all flesh to keep the heart of the law from the inside out. It did not make void the law, particularly for Jews, but it provided a way for Gentiles to "do by nature those things that are in the law" (Rom. 2:14-15), counting their uncircumcision as circumcision (see also 2 Corinthians 3). Meanwhile, even for Jews it made it possible to do the good of the law that they wanted to do, although Paul at this point may be making more a theological point than one that many Jews would identify with experientially.