Can’t You Just Speak Clearly?
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. Romans 7:4 NASB
Raised from the dead – Just when we thought we’d finally straightened out Paul’s schizophrenic logic (cf. Romans 6:14-15), he comes right back at us with this upside-down analogy of the woman’s dead husband. It could hardly be more confusing.
First he says, if a woman’s husband dies, she is no longer under any regulations concerning her marriage to him. Yes, that makes perfect sense. If he’s dead, she’s released from the marriage vow. Everyone agrees.
But then Paul flips the whole argument upside-down. He goes on to say that it isn’t the husband who’s dead when it comes to understanding our relationship to the “Law.” It’s us. We’re dead. In the first analogy, the husband is the symbol of the vow. Once he’s dead, the vow doesn’t apply. But in the second analogy, it’s the wife who dies. The husband (the Law) is still in place but it apparently can’t be applied to a dead person. Seems reasonable. The problem, of course, is that we aren’t dead! We’re still living here, in this world, and Torah is still active (because the husband hasn’t died). So, we might pretend that we’re no longer under the marriage vow, but the next time we encounter the husband, it might be difficult to convince him that we really aren’t married anymore because we think we’re dead.
Look! We get Paul’s intention. The “Law” doesn’t apply to dead people. Okay. But the “Law” hasn’t died. It’s still there, the voice of God in creation giving His instructions. And unless we are somehow no longer existent in the creation, it applies to us—just as it applies to everything else. We get what Paul hopes to accomplish, to free us from the “Law” because we have somehow stopped living in the “Law” world, but the analogy fails—miserably—because we really are still in the created world, and as far as I know, God’s “Law” applies everywhere, even in Hell.
What is wrong with Paul? How can he be so confused?
The answer seems to be this: when we identify with the Messiah, we identify with his death. He died. So do we, at least figuratively. Consequently, when he was raised from the dead, he was no longer the same person who died. He was, in Paul’s view, the fully authorized and vindicated emissary of the One True God. His status changed. You can see Paul’s hint about this in chapter 1 of Romans: “who was declared with power to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead . . .” (Romans 1:4). What makes him the “Son of God”? The vindication of the resurrection. A new person emerges. So, says Paul, it is the same with us. We emerge from the symbolic affiliation with the Messiah as new persons. We are no longer that old wife married to the husband-vow. It is as if we become someone completely different, and with that new status, we are no longer part of the old vow regulation. The husband was married to someone else, not us.
Ah, finally we see it. Yes, if we are completely new persons, never having been married to the husband-vow, then, of course, we can set about a new life without the former vows applying to us because it wasn’t us. But does that mean we are no longer under the Torah? Certainly not! If we are identified with the Messiah in death and resurrection, then Torah obedience is even more our way of living. No one could possibly imagine that after the resurrection the Messiah no longer practiced Torah obedience. That is unthinkable! His whole existence is based on Torah obedience and it certainly doesn’t cease when he is elevated to sit at the right hand of the Father. In fact, if we identify with the death and resurrection, we are ushered into a world where Torah obedience is all there is. Now what does Paul say?
Finally we realize that “the Law” in this verse is not Torah obedience. It’s legalism. It’s the rules and regulations of human society concerning our relationships and obligations. The marriage analogy isn’t just Jewish. Paul is writing to Gentiles and Jews in Roman. All societies have regulations about marriage, and he uses this fact to construct the first analogy. It’s not the ketubah that Paul has in mind. It’s all the marriage rules of every society. That’s why the Gentiles can easily agree. If the wife dies, the rules don’t apply. But the upside-down analogy deals specifically with the Jewish Messiah, and the Jewish Messiah’s operating system is Torah. When we become new persons, we’re no longer bound by the legalism of the old society. But we are bound by something. What is that? It’s the expectations and norms of the Kingdom—the Torah.
A final note: when the NASB and other English Bible treat nómos as if it always means Torah, the translation incorporates a subtle anti-Semitism. The verses become rejections of the Torah, and consequently, rejections of the people who hold Torah as the most important revelation from God. Treating nómos in this way forces Christian theology to construct Paul’s arguments along Christian theological lines. The results are catastrophic. Leon Morris is certainly right to point out that Paul does not use nómos in this verse for Torah, but rather for all law “used in a comprehensive sense.”[1] It’s not Torah that’s the problem. It’s every form of societal rules, the legalism of human origin.
“To be like God is to be able to declare that this is good and that is bad. This is what Adam and Eve acquired, and this was the cause of the break, for there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that our declaration will correspond to God’s. Thus 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.”[2]
Topical Index: nómos, Law, death, resurrection, Torah, new person, Romans 7:4
[1] Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Eerdmans, 1988), p. 272.
[2] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 15.
