A Tragic Mistake

For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under ^[a]the Law but under grace.  Romans 6:14 NASB

Not under the Law – Martin Luther’s mistake cost all of us centuries of spiritual deprivation.  Luther read Paul’s words and concluded that the Law no longer applied to the faithful.  He did just what the translators of the NASB have done.  He read nómos as if it meant “the Torah of Moses.”  But the phrase doesn’t contain a definite article.  The word is simply “norm,” or “custom,” or “principle.”  Paul uses the term nómos in nine different ways, only one of which refers to Moses’ Torah.  Here Paul tells his readers that they are no longer obligated to past custom or social norms.  Now they have a new foundation based on God’s cháris, that is, the joyful expression of acceptance by the Creator, the equivalent of the Hebrew verbal stem ḥnn.  “The verbal stem denotes a gracious disposition that finds expression in a gracious action.”^[1]  If you read Paul’s letter in the first century Jewish assembly in Rome, you would never have concluded that Moses didn’t matter any more.  You would have read the term as an expression of Roman custom.

But that’s not how Luther read it.  He writes:

“ . . . in the new law all these infinite burdens of ceremonies—that is, dangers to sin—have been removed.  God now requires neither the feet nor the hands nor any other member except the ears.  To this degree, all has been reduced to an easy way of life.  For if you ask a Christian what work renders him worthy of the name Christian, he will not be able to give any answer at all except the hearing of the word of God, that is, faith.  Therefore the ears alone are the organs of the Christian person, who is justified and judged a Christian not by the works of any member, but through faith.”[2]

Luther viewed the “Law” from an entirely Greco-Roman point of view.  Law was a burden because it restricted individual freedom.  God wants us to be free, therefore He removed the Law.  Now we are no longer constrained by the “infinite burdens of ceremonies.”  Life is easy because the only requirement is to listen.  It all sounds so good.

But, of course, life doesn’t actually work this way.  There are rules for everyone.  Society couldn’t function without them. Paul merely points out that all those rules you once were compelled to follow under Rome have been changed.  Now the rules of the game come from God, who happens to be a much better Emperor.  Luther’s antisemitism blinded him to the real translation of nómos, and it seems that many translators are just as Lutheran.

Topical Index: nómos, law, principle, norm, Luther, Romans 6:14

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 1301). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

[2] Martin Luther, cited in William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 141.