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1. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. Before we receive the Spirit, we are under the power of Sin. We cannot do the good even if we want to. We will inevitably sin.
However, once we have the Spirit of Christ, the situation changes. We are rescued from the power Sin has over our flesh. We are empowered to keep the righteous requirement of the Law and to love our neighbor. Where we couldn't keep the essence of the Law before, now we can by the power of the Spirit.
Paul goes further in 1 Corinthians 10:13: "No temptation has taken you except what is common to humanity. But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to resist. But with the temptation he will make also a way to escape so it is possible for you to bear it." He is telling the Corinthians that it is not inevitable that they will succumb to temptation. God will make a way of escape so that they do not sin.
It's important to note that Paul was not really setting up a system like I am in these comments. In Romans, he is trying to make it clear that his teaching does not advocate sin or the breaking of the Law's essence. Rather, his theology of the Spirit actually makes Law-keeping possible where it otherwise wasn't. It is a general framework rather than an absolute system.
In Corinthians, he is concerned that some in the church are compromising their loyalty to God by visiting the temples of other gods and partaking of meals there. We know from Romans 16:23 and an inscription that some of the believers at Corinth were actually involved in city government. [4] It is possible that they saw such participation as crucial to their participation in city life. Paul is saying God will make a way for them to get around such things.
2. The Corinthian church is a good example of how human practice often doesn't match the theory. In theory, the Corinthians should have been full of the Spirit from their earliest moments in the faith, from their baptism. Filled with the Spirit, they should have immediately found themselves living a life above temptation and filled with love for one another.
Instead, they formed divisive factions in the church. They were jealous of each other and had selfish conflicts. 1 Corinthians reveals to us a thoroughly "carnal" church -- a church that was operating out of the "flesh" rather than the Spirit. At every turn, it seemed, they were letting their "flesh" run the show rather than the Holy Spirit.
3. But what does Paul mean by "flesh"? The first version of the New International Version (1984) often used the phrase "sinful nature" to translate this Greek word sarx. In doing so, it was passing along over a thousand years of tradition going back to Augustine (354-430) and continuing in Wesley (1703-91), who used terms like "inbred sin" or the "carnal mind." "Carnal" means "fleshly" -- you can see the similarity to words like carnivore, someone who eats meat.
The fundamental meaning of sarx is "skin" and thus "flesh." There is an inevitable dualism hiding in here between the flesh and the Spirit that we often find in the New Testament texts (e.g., John 3:6). Currently, many biblical interpreters and theologians are allergic to this sort of dualism, but the biblical texts themselves don't care. Paul was no Gnostic, but he did often use a dualistic framework.
So, it is clear that Paul connected the human propensity to sin with our bodies. Romans 6:12 -- "Do not let Sin rule in your mortal bodies." "Present your bodies a living sacrifice" (12:1). "Who will rescue me from the body of this death." [5]
It is no coincidence that the word flesh is a bodily term. Unlike the Gnostics, Paul and the New Testament authors did not consider our fleshly bodies to be inherently sinful, but they are "weak." "The spirit is willing indeed, but the flesh is weak," Jesus says in Mark 14:38. Our "flesh" is the most productive point of attack for Sin.
You'll notice that I have sometimes capitalized Sin. When I have referred to a sin act, I have left the word in lower case. However, when I have been referring to Sin as a power over us, I have capitalized it. Paul says in Romans 7:23, "I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind." This other law is the force of Sin over my body. Notice again, the "members" here are the members of my body.
Krister Stendahl well pointed out decades ago that Paul does not see our minds as the point of weakness. [6] The person in Romans 7 wants to keep the Law. They serve the Law of God with their minds (7:25). Unlike Augustine, who saw my "I," my will as the point of corruption, Paul sees my body, my "flesh" as the point of weakness.
See the dualism. There is my spirit. There is my mind. There is my will. These want to serve the Law of God. Then there is my body, my flesh, my "members." Sin takes hold of them and thwarts my attempt to do the good. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. This is how Paul presents the conflict. [7]
4. This is different from Augustine. Indeed, Augustine has made it difficult for us to hear Paul on his own terms. Augustine did not know Greek and famously misinterpreted the Greek of Romans 5:12: "Just as Sin entered the world through one human -- and death through Sin, and thus death passed to all humans because all sinned." What Paul was saying is that Paul brought the power of Sin into the world leading all humans to sin. We all sin like Adam and, therefore, we all die like Adam.
But Augustine misread the words I have translated as "because" in the verse. He understood the last part of the verse to say "in whom all sinned." That is to say, Augustine believed that we sinned "in" Adam along with Adam.
Herein is the doctrine of original sin as Augustine understood it. For Augustine, we all share the guilt of Adam's sin because we sinned in Adam. One of the purposes of infant baptism was then to wash away the guilt of original sin.
But Paul knows none of this. Paul does not consider us guilty of Adam's sin. There is no original sin in us in Paul's thinking. Rather, we sin like Adam because Adam introduced the power of Sin into the world, a power of Sin over our bodies. All have sinned and, therefore, we all die. We do not die fundamentally because we are guilty of Adam's sin.
Paul uses the word flesh in many ways. In its most basic meaning, it simply refers to our skin or is a synecdoche for our bodies. In that use, it has no connotation of sin. Jesus Christ descended from David "according to the flesh" (Rom. 1:3). There is no sense of sinfulness here whatsoever.
However, in Romans 7-8, flesh is my skin under the power of Sin. This is the sense that Paul uses in Romans 8:8: "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." My flesh has a propensity to give in to temptation. Therefore, Paul admonishes his churches not to be "in the flesh." "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Rom. 8:9).
5. This clearer understanding of Paul's imagery immediately clears up many of the debates I grew up hearing about. "Does God eradicate the sin nature in entire sanctification or is it merely suppressed?" The Keswick view of sanctification was considered to be a sub-orthodox view because it saw us continuing to struggle with Sin after sanctification. [8] The orthodox Wesleyan view was that the root of Sin was removed at sanctification. Our hearts were cleansed of inbred sin.
But this entire debate is askew from the very beginning. We cannot get out of our skin or bodies. They are always with us. In that sense, Sin is always lying at the door, waiting to take control again if we do not continue to walk in the Spirit daily.
I find the image of plugging into the Holy Spirit much more fruitful. It focuses on the positive power of the Spirit rather than the negative removal or suppression of a supposed sinful nature. When we are filled with the Spirit, we are plugged into God as a power source. The inherent weakness of our flesh is overcome. We are not slaves to the power of Sin but slaves to the power of righteousness by the Spirit. We are empowered to love God and our neighbor.
But as we know about power, it has to be re-supplied. In this case, it has to be continuously supplied. I have a laptop whose internal battery is defective. It works fine as long as it is always plugged in. Unplug it, and it dies immediately.
"Walking in the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16) is about being continuously plugged into God. The power of the Spirit means that Sin has no force over our flesh. We want to do the good, and we are empowered to do the good.
But if we unplug -- or if our connection to the Spirit is "spotty" -- our flesh will quickly become susceptible to the power of Sin again. It's as simple as that. No need for arcane discussions about eradication versus suppression.
Sin is not a thing. It is not some lump of coal that must be removed by spiritual surgery. Sin is much more the result of the absence of good than the presence of something. This is how Sin can exist without God being its creator. God created the possibility that Sin would arise in the absence of good. He did not create a thing called Sin.
6. A final note seems in order in relation to Mildred Bangs Wynkoop's theology of love. Wynkoop's theology emphasizes the relational nature of holiness. She also moves beyond Paul's dualism to a more holistic transformation of the heart. In the final chapter, I will also try to move beyond Paul's categories to discuss the transformation of our hearts in more holistic terms.
For now, I want to affirm her emphasis on relationship. When I talk about plugging into God, the conversation can seem rather impersonal. But God is a person, and the Holy Spirit is a person. When I talk about plugging into God, I am not talking about impersonal forces. We plug into God by having a relationship with him. We plug into the Holy Spirit by having a relationship with him...
[1] At the very beginning, Paul locates the audience among the Gentiles (1:6. 13). In 11:13, he also arguably addresses the audience as primarily Gentile (2:17 is a hypothetical). In 15:15-16, he connects his role as apostle to the Gentiles to his letter to the Romans. His ethical instruction throughout also assumes a core sense of the Law rather than a fully Jewish sense, which would involve circumcision. It is an implicitly Gentile-oriented perspective. An uncircumcised Gentile de facto could never keep the Jewish Law, yet Paul assumes this possibility (2:26). The only factor in favor of a significant number of Jews in the audience is Romans 16, which more likely was a letter of commendation for Phoebe to the Ephesian church.
[2] E. P. Sanders argued that the reason Paul chose this command in particular was because it was the one commandment that was more internally oriented. Almost all of the others can be kept perfectly in concrete terms (not murdering, not stealing, not taking oaths, not giving false testimony). In Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Fortress, 1983).
[3] I should throw in here that Wesleyan theology also expects victory over sin from the moment one receives the Spirit at conversion. A key difference at entire sanctification is that victory over temptation should cease to be a struggle.
[4] An inscription mentioning that a pavement was funded by Erastus is visible still at Corinth. It is often thought that this is the Erastus mentioned as the city's treasurer in Romans 16:23.
[5] I've heard some "preacher's stories" about someone having to carry a dead body on their backs. This is completely made up. The verse is rather straightforward. Our bodies are a weak point when it comes to the power of Sin.
[6] Krister Stendahl, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," in Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976).
[7] We might note that Paul probably was not functioning with a sense of creation ex nihilo. He simply doesn't address that question. However, given the assumptions of the time, he may have seen God more as the redemptor of our bodies -- the "re-organizer" of them as it were -- rather than the one who designed their fundamental nature and characteristics.
[8] The Keswick view originated in the "higher life" movement in England in 1875. Its key leaders included William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)
3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)
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