Paul of Tarsus, LCP
For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. Romans 7:14-15 NASB
Bondage – What if we read Paul’s letter to the Romans not as fodder for systematic theology but rather as the advice of an LCP (Licensed Clinical Psychologist) to his patients? What if we set aside all that inherited religious gobbledygook and read the words as a diagnosis? What would happen if we stop looking for prooftexts for sinful nature and listened to the emotional appeal in the story?
“Bondage” sounds ominous. Images of chains, abuse, slavery come immediately to mind. A long history in the West of terrible conditions make this emotionally loaded word particularly upsetting. Of course, when Paul wrote this letter, bondage was a daily experience for millions. In the Roman Empire, five million people lived under these conditions. Millions more were economic slaves.
Interestingly, “bondage” is not in the Greek text. It’s a translator’s addition. What? How can this be? It’s the most important concept in the verse. Why worry at all if slavery to sin isn’t even in Paul’s thought? Well, actually Paul does talk about sin, but what he says in the Greek text is pepramenos hypo hamartian, literally, “sold (as a perfect passive participle) under sin.” Not “sold into bondage,” just “sold under.” The preposition, hypo, can mean “under, by, from, with, among,” or “in.” Context determines the meaning, so here the translators have added text to make sure you read it properly, that is, with the ominous threat of total loss of personal freedom.
Is that what Paul is trying to communicate? What if we applied Schmelzer’s comment to Paul’s letter?
“Trauma fragments our memories and our experiences—we are miles and miles away from our stories and our emotions, even if we can utter the words. One of the effects of repeated trauma, as discussed earlier, is that you come to protect yourself from everything as if it were the trauma you actually experienced. You wrap yourself up in whatever protections worked at the time: avoidance, obedience, defiance, imagination, recklessness, or control. You come to believe in these protections the way one believes in gravity: without them, you would literally fall over, become unglued, cease to exist. These aren’t just protections, they are your laws of nature, the rules that govern your world. And like those laws of nature, you don’t see them until you challenge them, until in the Unintegration phase you do or say something that requires you to not follow one of those sacred laws. And then it feels like your whole world is coming apart.”[1]
“Even when you want to change or see how important the change is to your life, your relationships, your work—even when you can see how much you need to change—you can find it difficult to change your behavior. This is where you can understand your defenses as resistance. Resistance has been defined as ‘the motivational forces operating against growth or change, and in the direction of maintenance of the status quo.’ . . . So in some ways if you aren’t feeling at least a little bit uncomfortable, anxious, or awkward, you know you probably aren’t doing anything different—you probably aren’t stretching away from your old defenses.”[2]
“ . . the hallmark of trauma is helplessness, . .”[3]
Isn’t this what Paul describes? Set aside those years of Sunday school training and read Paul’s words like an LCP. Isn’t the experience the same? When we can’t break through past trauma, don’t we feel as if we just keep doing the same old things that we know we shouldn’t do because we are somehow helpless to stop ourselves? Let’s put this into first century perspective. Paul writes to a group of people who, if Paula Fredriksen is correct, have been traumatized. They have lost their connection to family, ethnicity, citizenship, and all those pagan protective gods. They have been spurned, rejected, and probably abused in order to follow a “new” religious perspective, but when they adopted that new view, they were often ignored, disparaged, and even rebuffed by the very group they hoped to join. They found themselves in no-man’s land, or as Fredriksen writes, “Forging an exclusive commitment to a foreign god, however—an act unique to Judaism in the pre-Christian period—was tantamount to changing ethnicity. A pagan’s ‘becoming’ a Jew in effect altered his past, reconfigured his ancestry, and cut his ties with his own patrimony, both human and divine.”[4]
Isn’t trauma an attack on identity? Trauma splinters the narrative of your life, leaving pieces unaccounted for, emotionally frozen. Whenever the triggers set off a replay of the traumatic event, you and I instantly retreat to those same emotions. Without awareness and expression, those traumatic events continue to live on in us.
What if Paul isn’t describing some theological doctrine? What if he’s writing to people who have unresolved traumatic experiences, and telling them, “Listen, being ‘in Christ’ is a place for healing to begin. You don’t have to keep doing the same things that leave you stuck.”
Topical Index: trauma, Gentile, Fredriksen, Romans 7:14-15
[1] Gretchen Schmelzer, Journey Through Trauma, p. 167.
[2] Ibid., p. 168.
[3] Ibid., p. 178.
[4] Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 54-55.
