Blinders

For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.  Romans 7:5  NIV

Aroused by the law – Did the Law make me sin?  Some might draw that conclusion when they read Paul’s difficult analogy in chapter seven of Romans.   Despite his apparently contradictory claim that the Law is not sinful, it certainly appears as if Paul suggests that I couldn’t have sinned until I was aware of the Law.  “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not!  Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law” (Romans 7:7).  Even Jewish intellectuals are quick to reject Paul’s argument:

“Sometimes the experience of spontaneous religiosity shoves aside the feeling of obligation and subordination.  The result is a religious experience that is cognitive, moral, or aesthetic.  An individual who undergoes such experiences rejects authority and chooses only those laws that have a rationale he finds convincing.  The result of this freedom is anarchy. Saul of Tarsus (Paul) was wrong in seeing the law as the cause of sin; religiosity lacking the objective-revelational element cannot conquer the beast in man.  The Holocaust proves this: ‘All those who speak of love stood silent and did not protest.  Many of them even took part in the extermination of millions of human beings.’”[1]

Was Paul confused, perhaps internally contradictory?  I think not.  The problem, it seems to me, is two-fold: first, Jewish scholars often view Paul through the lens of the Church, and since the Church adopts Paul’s material via Augustine and Luther, Paul appears to be as antisemitic and self-contradictory as an ancient author could be; and second, commentators on both sides of the aisle fail to recognize that “sin” is a religious, not an ethical, idea.  On this point, Wyschogrod is correct, “Sin is possible only when the transgression is a violation of the command of a divine lawgiver.”[2]  Paul is not saying that doing something ethically suspect is impossible without the Law.  Ethics is not the same as the Commandments.  Nor is Paul arguing that misdeeds and evil don’t exist in a Law-less environment.  Societal expectations and a general sense of right and wrong are part of humanity, even if there is substantial variation between cultures.  What Paul is saying is that “sin” is a violation of the will of a divine law-giver, and unless one is aware of the will of the divine law-giver, “sin” doesn’t have any meaning.  Evil acts may occur, but they are not properly “sin” until the divine will reveals them as such.

Soloveitchik argues that man’s approach to God moves through the stage of sheer experience of the divine to necessary obligation to the divine.  This is the transition from cognitive ethics to religious conviction.  Paul’s obtuse statements follow the same trajectory.  Men can be aware of ethical commitments without being aware of the divine will, and in that state acting against their higher ethical values does not make them sinners.  It makes them evil.  Sin is an entirely different category since it assumes the presence of divine law.  And when the divine law is present, “sin,” as a religious idea, is born.  The proclivities to violate ethical standards are transformed into “sinful” behaviors because of the presence of the divine will.  They may have existed before, but now they take on a new meaning.  Wyschogrod explains:

But when man develops a morality not based on God’s commandment—even if coincidentally much of it may coincide with those commandments—an act of expulsion of God has occurred.  He is no longer the lawgiver.  Now reason or moral intuition or something else performs the function that the Bible can only envisage God as performing.  Man dethrones God, and this form of rebellion is particularly dangerous because it leaves man morally fulfilled, freed of the guilt that may be experienced—sooner or later—by the rebel who violated God’s command and who might not remain self-righteous as the moral rebel.  The moral rebel finds a relationship with God increasingly irrelevant as his moral convictions deepen and he engages himself more and more in the realization of his moral ideals in the context of the real world.[3]

Both Christian and Jewish exegetes miss Paul’s point when they fail to recognize that Paul is not talking about ethical behavior.  He’s talking about “sin.”  The difference is significant.

Topical Index: sinful passions, ethics, Soloveitchik, Wyschogrod, Romans 7:5

[1] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, And From There You Shall Seek, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Ktav Publishing House, 2008), p. 55.

[2] Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, ed. and trans. R. Kendall Soulen (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 55.

[3] Ibid., p. 59.