The New Reality

For when Gentiles who do not have the Law instinctively perform the requirements of the Law, these, though not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them,  Romans 2:14-15  NASB

A law to themselves – When Paul wrote these words, did he mean that those who did not know the Torah (the Law) created their own code of behavior by following the rules of conscience?  Does “a law to themselves” mean that they are not held to God’s Torah but instead have a separate morality?  Sometimes religious commentators who wish to remove Jewish thinking from Paul’s letters seem to claim that the Torah is no longer applied to these new Gentile believers, and given Paul’s language, it might seem that way, but that would mean Paul didn’t think the Torah was for everyone.  The implication is that Paul espoused a new ethic—a Christian, non-Jewish ethic.  But Paul also writes about the supremacy of the Torah, the authority of the Torah, and the ubiquity of the Torah.  So, what does he mean when he pens the words “a law to themselves”?

Jonathan Sacks actually provides the hint needed to understand Paul although he doesn’t apply his insight to Paul directly.  Sacks writes:

“Before there were laws of purity, death did not defile and the waters did not purify.  The laws created a new reality; but that does not mean that they are irrational or incomprehensible.”[1]

What this means is that the Law is actually a paradigm shift.  It is a new way of looking at reality.  When there were no laws about purity, the old paradigm held sway, treating concepts like pure and impure according to whatever the culture determined.  That, of course, is still happening today.  But when the Law delineated certain rituals about purity, it created a new reality, and anyone who adopted these rituals did so because they also shared that new reality—that new paradigm.  This idea can be applied across the board to all the requirements of Torah.  In other words, you don’t actually have to know that the requirement comes from the Torah in order to act accordingly, but when you act accordingly, you enter a new way of looking at the world—a way that is found in a Torah perspective.  The rules that you follow aren’t just rules you made up.  They are actually Torah rules that you instinctively adopted without knowing they were first given by God.

What this means is that Paul thought of ethics as intuitively human.  Created in God’s image means more than physical and rational constitution.  It also means that there is an ethical-moral DNA in the human constitution, what the rabbis later named the yetzer ha’tov.  It is possible to listen to that DNA and act in ways that are codified in the Torah.  Why?  Because the Torah is the DNA of human life spelled out for us.  Of course, having it spelled out makes obedience much clearer, but it is operating in the background all the time.  Principles of equality, justice, responsibility, fairness, compassion, and more are all there, under the surface, pushing us toward Torah obedience even when we didn’t know God had written it down.  “A law to themselves” is just another way of saying “a new paradigm with an old foundation.”

Topical Index: law, Torah, paradigm, Romans 2:14-15

[1] Jonathan Sacks  Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Leviticus: The Book of Holiness (Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, 2015), p. 24.