The Cure

But sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me ^[m^]coveting of every kind; for apart ^[n^]from the Law sin is dead.  Romans 7:8  NASB

Is dead – Want the absolutely guaranteed way to stop sinning?  Die!  Problem solved.  Oh, wait.  That’s not very convenient.  Paul offers another “solution.”  Live apart from the Law.  Apart from the Law, sin is dead.  Now, what can that possibly mean?

The first thing we must realize is that “sin” is a religious concept.  It is not reprehensible moral behavior.  Reprehensible moral behavior is a function of societal ethics.  I can be very bad but not “sin.”  Why?  Because “sin” requires that I act against the will and wishes of a divine Law-giver.  Sin is breaking the divine Law.  It is not breaking the expectations of proper behavior in my society.  In order for sin to exist, I must be a member of a community that embraces God’s divine instructions.  We made this point many years ago.

“Sin is possible only when the transgression is a violation of the command of a divine lawgiver.”[1]

“He [Adam] is to obey God in order to obey God and for no other reason.  And when he disobeys God, he has not violated a law that has an autonomous claim on his conscience and which therefore puts him in the wrong in an objective sense, but he has rebelled against God, whose command he has broken.  The violation is, then, directed at God.  And because it is directed at God, it constitutes a break in the relationship between God and man which requires remediation.”[2]

We must contrast this with society’s view of ethical and moral behavior:

“Contemporary man insists on knowing why the good is good and evil, evil.  And once such knowledge is obtained, or the illusion of such knowledge is obtained, the need for a commanding God disappears entirely.  For if the commanding God forbids that which is anyhow inherently evil and commands that which is anyhow inherently good, then his forbidding and commanding lacks all authority, since the mere fact that God forbids or commands something cannot by itself make it either evil or good.  This discovery, first made by Plato in the Euthyphro, substitutes an autonomous moral claim for a commanding God and eliminates the concept of sin from our moral dictionary.”[3]

Now Paul’s statement is perfectly clear.  If there is no Torah, there can be no sin.  Consider the enormous implication of this statement.  Modern men who no longer embrace Torah as the basis of their understanding of God’s will are not sinners.  Without Torah, the idea of sin doesn’t apply.  Christians generally reject Torah as antiquated Jewish law.  The Christian idea is the separation of Law and grace.  Therefore, when someone “comes to faith” in a Christian environment, they do not transition from sinner to saved.  They were never sinners in the first place.  The real transition is from conviction about a failure to live up to societal rational ethics to a system of thought which removes the guilt of failing to live up to societal rational ethics.  It just happens that some, but not all, of the society’s rational ethics appear to be the same as the Jewish commandments, but this is an accident because the biblical commandments are not based on Man’s rational consideration of what is good.  They are based on God’s revealed will.  A “sinner” acts in opposition to God’s will.  That does not necessarily mean he will act against society’s norms.  But this much is clear.  He cannot be a “sinner” in a system that does not begin with a divine Law-giver.

Given that the history of the West is so intimately tied to the Church, how can we make any sense of this distinction?  Does this mean that all those Christians who thought they were being forgiven of sins were wrong because they lived in a world that no longer embraced Torah?  Well, yes—and no.  Technically, of course, the immoral acts of people who live in an anti-Torah culture aren’t really sins.  So, of course, they can’t be forgiven of something that doesn’t exist.  But there is a looser view of divine law.  It’s the general consensus of what we expect as human beings in our relations to each other and to the world.  Breaking that sort of law is what Paul calls ungodliness and unrighteousness because it opposes the creation itself.  This is as close as we get to the Greek concept of cosmic law.  It isn’t law based on human rational ethics.  It’s law revealed in the creation of a God who is beyond us.  It’s what we might call conscience.  Even without the explicit commandments of Torah, some things are known to be wrong just because we are human.  Violating them isn’t technically sin, but it still produces guilt and engenders God’s wrath.  Nevertheless, Paul is absolutely right.  Technically, no Law—no sin.  What does that say about Christian salvation?  Once again, we need Ellul:

“. . . to establish morality is necessarily to do wrong.  This does not mean that a mere suppression of morality (current, banal, social, etc.) will restore the good.  God himself frees us from morality and places us in the only true ethical situation, that of personal choice, of responsibility, of the invention and imagination that we must exercise if we are to find the concrete form of obedience to our Father.  Thus all morality is annulled.  The Old Testament commandments and Paul’s admonitions are not in any sense morality.  On the one side they are the frontier between what brings life and what brings death, on the other side they are examples, metaphors, analogies, or parables that incite us to invention.”[4]

“Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.  The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual . . . Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result.  From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity . . . and the mystic theology that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed  . . . Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.”[5]

Topical Index: Law, sin, salvation, Romans 7:8

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

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 15.

[5] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 3: Caesar and Christ, p. 595, 599.