The End Of The Law?

The End of the Law?

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The End of the Law? The positive function of the Law of Moses in the social ethics of Paul

Robbert Veen

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Huizer Art Center Publishing Trompstraat 65 1271 SZ Huizen [email protected]

By the same author:

Fulfillment of the Law, Huizen 2005 ISBN 1 – 4116 – 5927 - 9 Justification and the Law, Huizen 2005 LULU Id. 205031

This edition 2005 @ by H.A.C. and R.A. Veen Printing on demand: www.lulu.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, or published, in any for or any way, electronically, mechanically, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher.

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To Noëlle

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface............................................................................. 9 Introduction a. The issue: the role of the Law in Christian ethics……11 b. Methods of investigation and presuppositions………41 1. The traditional approach to Paul’s ethics.................... 48 2. The canonical framework .......................................... 57 3. Outline of the argument of Galatians......................... 69 4. The Antioch incident................................................... 77 5. Justification by faith and not by works ....................... 91 6. Life in the Spirit versus life under the law ................ 107 7. The Noachide commandments and Antioch............ 117 8. Reading Romans...................................................... 126 9. The condition of Jew and Greek before God (Rom 1:12:27) ............................................................................. 136 10. Justification (3:21-3:30) ......................................... 150 11. The status of the justified (ch. 5) ............................ 164 12. The moral objections against the gospel of grace and the life in the Spirit (6:1-8:39) ....................................... 170 13. The new righteousness of the believer’s community (Romans 12) ................................................................ 188 7

14. Love for the enemy as the pattern of justice: the “moral” dimension of social ethics (Romans 13)...........206 15. The positive meaning of the law ............................221 16. The idea of theonomous obedience........................230 17. Abraham’s example: heteronomy and the cognitive function of the commandment ......................................241 18. The heteronomous source of obedience ................260 18. The heteronomous source of obedience ................260 19. Summary and Conclusions.....................................268 20. Selective Bibliography………………………………..277

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Preface This is the second volume in a series about the role of the Mosaic Law in early Christian ethics. The first volume was titled Fulfillment of the Law and dealt with the gospels of Mark and Matthew and the letter of James. This volume deals with the Apostle Paul. It focuses on the letters to the Galatians and Romans. A third and volume vlume will appear under the title: Justification and the Law and will examine the doctrine of justification by faith alone and its role in Christian ethics. The main issue, again, is the role of the Mosaic Law in Christian ethics. Did Paul, who is most often read as the one who most forcefully explained that the gospel of Christ takes us beyond the Torah and Judaism, actually saying that? Or is he arguing for a different way of reading and applying the Torah, now that the Messiah has come? This book makes a single statement: Paul did not accept a role for the Torah in the salvation of humanity, but did accept the Torah as the revelation of Gods will for humanity in the light of Jesus’ life and mission. Christian ethics was to be determined by a conversation on the Torah. Paul’s paraenesis, his ethics discourse, was saturated with Torah, and he envisioned that Jewish Christians would still be living according to its precepts. What Paul basically rejected, was the “unlawful use” of the Torah as a body of precepts applied “moralistically.” To see the Messiah reflected in the Torah as in a mirror took more than a legalist mind applying rules. In my estimate, Christian ethics can only attain its relevance as a critical alternative to morality-as-usual, its community-building power and its particular biblical shape by readopting its original “legal” hermeneutics, addressing the issues of obedience not through narrative modeling but by careful casuistic and paradigmatic reflection on the application of the divine commandments. Our renewed understanding, both of the way that law functions in Jewish practice, and of Paul’s (and Jesus’) attitude towards it, warrants such a return to the Jewish roots of Christian ethics. In substance and in formal mode of reflection, the Church should become pupil to the Scribes and Pharisees

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again. (Matthews 23:3a) I do believe however, that the traditional Mennonite insistence that faith in the Redeemer and obedience to the law of Christ ought to go hand in hand or rather, cannot be distinguished, provides us with an invaluable foundation to regain the proper perspective on the concrete contents and formal structure of Christian ethics. It is my hope to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the Jewish nature of Christian (social) ethics. Both from its contents and its method, a lot could be learned that will strengthen the Christian witness in this world. Robbert Veen, HUIZEN, Christmas 2005

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Introduction: a. The issue: the role of the Law in Christian ethics There is a distinct tension between the appraisal of Paul’s central doctrine of justification and the implications of the letter of James. Whereas James seems more concerned with the gap between rich and poor Christians and the over-emphasis on faith in opposition to works-obedience, it is widely held that Paul defined the true gospel as righteousness by faith in opposition to any kind of works-righteousness. In Paul’s ecclesiology this could be found in the doctrine of the one Church in which the boundary between Jew and gentile had been lifted, and in his ethics it could be found in a specific pattern. The imperative of Christian living followed the indicative of God’s redemptive presence in Christ. That imperative could no longer be considered analogous to the pattern of obedience to the laws of Moses. In this chapter we will try to show, that Paul’s solution to the problem of Christian ethics resulted from his position with regard to the shape and nature of the Christian community; that he did not fully solve that problem as can be seen from the different approach of the Jerusalem Council, especially with regard to the so-called Noachide laws, and that nevertheless Paul’s ethics remained orientated toward the fulfillment of the divine imperative. The brief discussion of Paul’s canonical status is intended to convey that the presumption of a Pauline primacy is incorrect. According to the gospel of Matthew, Jesus emphatically denied that it was His intent to reject the validity of the Mosaic law for His disciples. “Do not think that I have come to abrogate the law and the prophets.” Jesus’ mission was not to make void the law or abrogate, but to fulfill it. He who both teaches and does the law shall be called “great” in the kingdom of heavens. 1 1

Cf. Matth. 5:17 – 20.

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Anyone who on the contrary looses a single commandment from the Torah, even the least one, will be called “small” in that kingdom. If one begins to reflect on the meaning of these words without taking immediate refuge in the shelters of seemingly solid exegesis that have been erected around it, one makes a startling discovery. In a way, the Churches have concluded that Jesus’ mission in effect has abrogated the Mosaic Law for His disciples. Do we need to think that Jesus’ fulfillment of the law actually means in practice that its commandments have been set aside? But how is that possible? How could such a clear emphasis on the continuing role of the Mosaic law for Jesus’ disciples be wiped away in the history of the Church? How could to “fulfill” come to mean “abrogate, to declare void” and thereby indicate the obvious and exact opposite of the saying’s intent?2 Various kinds of antinomianisms and anti-Judaisms have in effect echoed a single phrase in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “for Christ is the end of the law.”3 (Rom. 10:4) Perceptions of the law as document of condemnation, as tutor that brought in awareness of sin, as mere preparation to the gospel of grace, have been with us since the 2nd century Church in various forms, and have developed into the orthodox position after the Reformation introduced its antithesis of law and grace. Even those who opposed a law-free gospel on the erroneous ground, that it furthered a life of sin because it was a “cheap grace” that was offered to the sinner anyway, almost never returned to the Mosaic law in full. Either they used that law as a source of civil law in a society that was Christian in name only, or they dispensed with large portions of the law and sought to 2

The argument that to “fulfill” in Matthews always means fulfilling a prophecy, i.e. to fulfill the law must mean to establish the reality to which the law pointed as its future fulfillment, does not hold. For one thing here in Matthew 5 to fulfill is the opposite of abrogate and therefore determined by its opposite. 3 As Dunn explains (Romans II, p. 596) Paul was thinking of the law in terms of the “works”, i.e. as “a means of establishing and fixing firmly righteousness as Israel’s special prerogative.” Christ is the end of that specific function of the law. The same could be deduced if one would read the Greek telos as meaning the “goal” in Rom. 10:4. In Käsemann’s commentary on this verse however the law is seen as the absolute antithesis to the gospel, so Christ is then the full abrogation of the Mosaic law and the Greek is rendered as “end.” (Käsemann, Römer, p. 269)

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formulate a Christian morality, hardly different from what could be expected of any man in a civilized, European society. The distinction between ritual law for Israel and moral law for mankind in effect subsumed the authority of Moses under a contemporary view of Christian morality. With the exception of some strands of Calvinism, the Mosaic law has not been respected – and certainly not in the way Jesus might have understood it from within 1st century Judaism – in the manner and to the degree of the Matthew 5:17 quote. That tendency to move away from Mosaic law may have had its own historical reason and justification, but can it be affirmed even today? In the last century, particularly after WW II, a totally new approach to exegesis has been opened in this respect. We can no longer take for granted, that the Reformation’s definition of the basic terms of Paul’s doctrines is historically and exegetically a sufficient basis for doctrine. Despite the new respect for Judaism and the essential Jewishness of Jesus, we have had for quite some time an effort (e.g. by the school of Rudolf Bultmann) to transform our historical understanding of the New Testament while at the same time maintaining the basic tenets and emphases of the Reformation. Rudolf Bultmann understood the words of Matthews 5:17 to be constructed in a Jewish-Christian setting and directed against the Hellenistic mission among the gentiles. The text established the law as continuing source of obedience to God, at least in the sense of what I will later call its paraenetical function, i.e. knowledge of the law as source of ethics. In particular the law was seen historically as a threefold condition in that early predominantly Palestine Church: (1) the condition of defining the will of God. (2) the condition of salvation, i.e. obedience to the law was in some way vital to redemption. (3) the condition of belonging to Israel. Bultmann observed that “the ‘Urgemeinde” held on to these three conditions. “In whatever degree she had (at least in the beginning) become critical towards the Jewish law-obedience under the influence of the words of her Lord, and in whatever degree she

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had broken away from the Jewish concept of merit that was supposed to have dominated 1st century Jewish thought, she held on to the law as a characteristic of the elect people, and was aware that she represented it.”4 But this Palestine theology, though admittedly early and in that sense closer to Jesus, also represented to him a break from the true Gospel which he found almost exclusively in the letters of Paul. Apparently then, the new historical understanding of Jesus as an exponent of Judaism did not lead immediately to a revision of doctrine, and certainly not of moral theory. In Bultmann’s view, Paul’s version of the Gospel in its Reformation version, remained the authentic one, precisely because it broke away from the Jewish pattern of faith that was still so clearly present in Matthew. We can make several vital objections to Bultmann’s approach to this problem. First, we must emphasize that Matthew’s gospel was in part written as a response to a Christian practice and theology that may have had its center in Paul, by a theologian in a community that in some way had continued the earliest impulses of Jesus’ disciples. Matthew’s Church at least had more continuity with the earliest theology of the Church in Jerusalem. Now this is not to say, that early means authentic and later must therefore mean falsified. It is important to affirm in advance that there is diversity in dialogue in the New Testament, despite the harmonizing framework that went along with the canonization-process or followed it. But this position does imply that we dispense with the argument of success altogether in dealing with the earliest developments in Christian ethics and theology. The apparent success of the Hellenistic mission with its emphasis on the law-free gospel is in itself not a sufficient argument to dispense with the Mosaic law in Christian ethics, if the latter can be shown to be a consistent position, held by a substantial minority in the early Church and in continuity with the earliest traditions around Jesus. Nor can the argument be construed in opposite direction. What we need is a reason that makes sense in a modern systematic theology to dispense with Matthew’s claim to the validity of the Mosaic law 4

Bultmann, Theologie, p. 56

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for the Church like has been done in the past. And if we cannot find one, we should be prepared to adopt Matthew’s affirmation of the Mosaic law into the inner circle of foundational notions in Christian ethics. In general, we need to find the biblical and systematic argument if any can be found, for such a direct contradiction to the gospel of Matthew. It is the Church that stands convicted for its past ignorance of Mosaic law if no such argument can be found. Secondly, we should recognize that there was a vibrant though perhaps short-lived type of Christianity5 in which the law of Moses continued to fulfill a vital function, independent of, or even contrary to Paul’s teachings. We know that type of Christianity through Paul’s vehement opposition against some of its adherents, and from the scarce evidence provided by Acts and quotations from the Church fathers. And thirdly, that there was and is a way (opened up in an unbiased and historically informed exegesis) to understand the law as a graceful gift of God to His people, as a source for a distinct way of life, without focusing immediately on the concept of “merit” and certainly without restricting the proper use of the law to its role as indictment and condemnation of humanity. Identifying the keeping of the law in 1st century Judaism with amassing merit in order to gain salvation through “good works” will not do anymore as a historic judgment. It has become part of the consensus over the last thirty years, that “merit” in the 16th century is not the same category as that of 1st century Judaism. To name just one essential difference: merit in 16th century parlance was taken by both Protestants and Catholics to have a final character, i.e. they contributed to redemption and were its necessary condition. In 1st century thought, merit was the (historical yet immeasurable) effect of compliance with God’s will both for the doer and Israel as a whole. In 16th century terminology, 1st century Palestinian Judaism would have seen merit as something that was both consecutive on God’ covenant-Grace and effective in adding to the redemptive condition of God’s people. Ultimately, redemption was not merited but granted based on God’s Covenant-loyalty and not human faithfulness. 5

Cf. James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity, ch. 11, pp. 235 – 267.

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It is equally clear, that the “law” in 16th century parlance does not cover the 1st century meaning of Torah but summarizes both a secular and Roman Catholic usage of “law.” It is therefore important to re-evaluate the New Testament-perspective on Jewish law without the bias that has obfuscated the role of the law in the New Testament-Church. Bultmann’s conclusions with regard to Paul’s “original” gospel and the necessity to overcome the vestiges of Judaism in the Palestine Church are in need of major modification and have been respectfully challenged in the past 20 years. First of all, there is the evaluation of the historical status of the Mosaic law in 1st century thought. We can no longer understand Jewish law in the 1st century as directed towards merit or acquiring eternal salvation by performing the “works of the law.” The positive evaluation of the law in circles of Jewish Christianity can therefore no longer be seen as a residue of the Palestinian Church destined to fade away with the rise of the Pauline Church. Furthermore, the concept of law in Paul itself is more ambiguous than even Bultmann thought. If Dunn is right, most of Paul’s antithetical statements with regard to the Mosaic law aim at a particular understanding of the Mosaic law as limiting righteousness to Israel as a special prerogative. If Stowers is right, most if not all negative remarks about the Law in Paul’s letter to the Romans are directed against gentile Judaizers who sought to add elements of the Torah into the gospel they had received. After a short period in which the scales were tipped to the other extreme, the most widespread position now is that Paul’s doctrine of justification is not the core essence of his gospel, nor the polemical slogan of the first decade of the century, but a reasoned attempt to contradict those gentiles who saw the Mosaic law as a necessary condition of salvation or even as an useful addition to the gospel of Christ. In both cases, affirmation of the law as a prerogative of the elect or as a means of salvation contradicted the supreme value of Christ. The kind of position that Bultmann took with regard to the Pauline solution of the problem of the law, however classic though antiquated it may be, might still serve as the starting point of an

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investigation into the foundations of Christian ethics. For one thing because it is still widely held even outside the circle of New Testament-scholarship. For another, because its result is alluring at least in one respect: no direct connection between Christian ethics and Jesus’ absolute moral teachings can be established. By emphasizing the existential call of the gospel and using Paul’s doctrine of justification as the foundational paradigm, Jesus’ direct ethical exhortation can be laid aside. Bultmann insisted that the “Urgemeinde” did not understand the real fullness of the gospel, that the real gospel was to be explained by Paul in his teachings on justification by faith (alone). Retrospectively that leads to a position in which only Jesus’ life and death can become focal points of a Christian ethics of imitatio. Despite the advance of biblical theology, many of Bultmann’s formal assumptions can still be seen as productive. His historical assessment e.g., that Paul developed his justification by faith in opposition to a Jewish doctrine of salvation through works and merit, implies at least a valid systematic correlation between sola gratia and the historical understanding of what Paul was arguing against. That provides us with a necessary though preliminary strategy of how we can tackle the problem of the foundation of Christian ethics. For if our historical understanding of Paul’s opponents changes, then, on account of this necessary correlation, our understanding of the doctrine should change as well. And if the latter changes, then also the concept of Christian ethics (or sanctification) that is linked to it, must change with it. It hardly needs argument that our historical evaluation has changed considerably since Bultmann. It has already become abundantly clear, that the historical correlate of the Reformed understanding of Paul’s doctrine was its understanding of Roman-Catholic practice and not Paul’s real 1st century opponent. Such a 16th century correlation between Catholic meritology and justification of the ungodly would make one think that Paul understood the law to be an instrument of instilling fear and guilt and as a mere preparation for the gospel instead of it being a “gracious arrangement made by God for ordering the life of his people while they were awaiting the

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arrival of the Messiah”.6 If the doctrine ultimately rests on an understanding of Paul’s adversary in the exegesis of his letters to the Romans and Galatians, then we must indeed redefine the doctrine as our historical understanding of this adversarial context changes. But there can be no doubt that our understanding in the last two decades of the 20th century has changed considerably since the Reformation, to a far higher degree even than in the days of Bultmann. It has changed to such a degree, that Bultmann’s effort to stay in congruity with the Reformation doctrine can no longer be maintained without running into considerable difficulty. So this is our first major point of departure: the new image of Paul in his Jewish, 1st-century context, and a new reading of the gospels against the background of Pharisaic (and Qumran-) Judaism. Several changes in our view of history have become part of our new hermeneutical situation: a new view of the meaning of 1st century Judaism as a religion that understood the concept of grace and a Jewish Christianity that managed to combine Torah-obedience and the gospel of Christ into one single kerygma. These two historical elements in particular motivated the basic question that I want to engage in this book: •

the fact that the early Church still found a meaningful connection to the Mosaic law and its Jewish exegesis and practice (and in quite a different fashion than the Reformation did) and that this connection is not contradicted by Paul’s doctrine of justification since its opposite is not the affirmation of the Jewish law as such but a Judaizing theology devised in circles of gentile Christianity;

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that the antithesis to such a form of “messianic Judaism” has its center in (an interpretation of) Paul’s doctrines, specifically his teachings on justification by faith, that construed its correlate in late Catholic meritology and the practice of repentance and salvation through good works, and not in 1st century elements of Jewish Christianity and/or Hellenist Judaism.

In the last three decades especially it has become clear, that 6

Yoder, Politics, 215. The quote is probably a reference to Stendahl.

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the criticism of the law that we can find within the New Testament cannot have been directed to 1st century Judaism as a whole. The criticism of the law that we find in Paul has now been severed in our understanding from the 16th century assumption that there was a Pharisaic Judaism that taught a redemption by a self-centered attempt to fulfill all the demands of the law and achieve merit with God. Paul’s polemic with the Judaizers had been primarily over the shape of the Church and the status of gentile believers, not about the importance and the validity of the law. New Testament-scholars with such different points of view and methods as James Dunn and E.P. Sanders have contributed to this new image. The merit-oriented concept of ‘works of the law” was gradually replaced by either of these two options. (1) the notion that gentile Christians were misunderstanding the law to demand meritorious deeds to gain salvation; Paul’s opponents could then be identified as gentile Christians who sought to reintroduce their particular understanding of Jewish law. On the other hand, (2) that Paul was merely or at least primarily talking about part of the mitzvoth, i.e. those that express a boundary marker for Israel to wit: circumcision, kashrut (dietary laws) and table-communion. The area of discussion changed from the gospel versus the law, to the shape of the Church, from soteriology to ecclesiology. There was room now for a more objective evaluation of Judaism and the way was open for a new search for the Jewish roots of Christianity. The consequences of this re-evaluation of the NT-position towards Judaism and the law both in basic Christian doctrine and in its practical consequence for Christian ethics, have however not been examined yet.7 However, there is an important 7

In this I agree with Meinrad Limbeck Jahrbuch 1989, p. 151 who wrote: “Dennoch findet sich in den meisten Arbeiten, die sich in den vergangenen 15 Jahren mit der Gesetzesproblematik bei Jesus, Paulus und dem Matthäusevangelium befaßten, kaum eine konkrete Überlegung, was die neutestamentliche Kritik an dem auch für Christen positiv nachvollziehbaren frühjüdischen Gesetzesverständnis für den christlichen Umgang mit Gesetz und Recht bedeuten könnte – weshalb es nur logisch ist, daß selbst die neueren neutestamentlichen Arbeiten zum Thema “Gesetz” im Bereich der

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correlation between the doctrine and Christian ethics. If we have to change our understanding of justification by faith because of our historical insights, we have to redefine the foundation and shape of Christian ethics as well. The subject matter of this study is therefore the connection between justification (by faith) and Christian ethics8, concentrated in the question whether the Mosaic law (both as a written text and as a principle of an attitude of obedience) is a valid source to determine the specific obligations of the Christian way of life. My question is, to put it from another angle, whether the “law of Christ” or the “messianic Torah” entails only or primarily the love command as a general principle of ethics, narratively summed up in Jesus’ own example of obedience unto death or provides us beyond that with a framework in which the concrete contents of the Mosaic commandments and the pattern of Torah-obedience are the primary means of understanding the will of God for a community of disciples. Such a path of redefinition might go against a well-established opinion, reiterated also many times outside the arena of theological debate. It seems quite self-evident to some, that Christian ethics is not concerned with the ‘realization of an imperative as an impersonal and transpersonal ‘thou shalt’, through which man could create for himself a secure status in the world and before God, but with a behavior on the basis of a present promise of salvation.”9 Bultmann’s vigorous opposition against the search for security through merit, and the selfcenteredness of moral striving, was the paradigm for his estimate of the shape of Christian ethics. In this, Bultmann expressed a view that was held among (Christian) philosophers as well. In Europe, ethicists generally maintained the following characteristics of any Christian ethics: Praktischen Theologie nirgendwo ernsthaft zur Kenntnis genommen und aufgegriffen werden.” 8 Christian ethics in this study can be broadly defined as the doctrine of the attitude towards life and the definition of behavior, to which God has called (a) people in Christ and (b) for which He enables them. Christian ethics is therefore a part of theology, since it involves a normative position and is based in some way on revelation. 9 H.-H. Schrey, Einfuhrung in die Ethik, Darmstadt, 1977, p. 30. My translation.

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1. Discipleship is focused on Christ’s suffering and cross, not so much on His teaching. Its shape in the gospels is therefore an heroic ethics for exceptional individuals or an “interim-ethics” (Schweitzer) or an utopian ethics (Goppelt) . 2. The subject of moral action is the new creation, the spiritually reborn in the new community of the Church. But reborn or not, such a person would still be a citizen of the state and his regeneration led to an inner morality or an exceptional selflessness against the background of complete submission to the national state. 3. Moral action is not oriented backward toward the codices of revelation and tradition, but exclusively forward, in anticipatory openness for the situation in which the “neighbor” is encountered. In that manner, disagreement on basic principles could be relegated to differences in culture and situation. A simple picture of love for the neighbor could be used to exemplify exceptional degrees of civic duty. In short, Christian ethics could be swallowed up by society’s need for moral values. 4. Specific Christian virtues are determined by the eschatological emphasis: sobriety, hope, steadfastness, readiness and the like. In addition, of course, such values were universal in themselves and led to the kind of behavior that was beneficial to society as a whole. The problem of Christian ethics was not primarily debated in the arena of biblical exegesis, nor based on an ecclesiology that knew about the principled status of the Christian congregation as a minority within society as large. The debate was philosophical more than biblical. The defining moment of the post-Enlightenment debate on the foundations of Christian ethics was the opposition between autonomy (freedom) and heteronomy, as an aspect of ethics that was constitutive for both the motivation and the understanding of Christian ethics as a religious ethics. Most often the solution to the tension between both defining elements was sought in a combination of both. If man e.g. could be understood to be oriented toward God by nature, then the autonomy of man is fulfilled when he directs himself to God. A theonomous heteronomy is then the last consequence of autonomy. Or autonomy could be understood as finding in its own depth the foundation for such a

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theonomy. The foundation figures of thought and speech were derived from the philosophical discourse. The specifically religious element in this debate about ethics can be located in a particular attempt to combine the viewpoints of autonomy and heteronomy. In other words, if man really understood his own autonomy he must find it ultimately reasonable to assume a divine foundation for it. He might even opt for the Kantian solution, that Christianity, understood philosophically, expressed in the life of Christ the ultimate image of rational morality. A complete understanding of human autonomy would then lead to the discovery of (postulated) theonomy, or their equation in a rationalist ethics. In both cases, the tension between human liberty and divine transcendence was not denied, but mitigated by a theory about their intrinsic or logical interdependence. The question must be raised what this discussion had to do with the biblical sources for Christian ethics and the status of scripture. It seems as if modern philosophical notions and not the return to a renewed understanding of scripture set the agenda for the debate on Christian ethics. Of course, such a return to a biblical ethics in itself would imply at least a provisionary decision about the need for theonomy. Nevertheless, I would venture, that the specific character of Christian ethics can only be found, if we return to a rigorous discipline in Biblical theology in which we ground the particularity of the Christian concept of God’s commandments as the ultimate basis and decisive shape of all Christian ethics. Turning to the area of exegesis now, the question underlying this study developed as follows. For years, scholars have become more aware of the importance of the Mosaic law in the writings of Paul, especially since World War II. Before that Paul’s theology had most often been interpreted as a sustained attack on the Jewish religion. One of the milestones in the new assessment of Paul’s theology was W. D. Davies’ Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1974, first edition 1948). It made ample use of rabbinic sources and provided arguments for the insight that a clear cut distinction between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism could no longer be maintained, so that Paul could not be simply explained as part of a monolithic historic entity called “Hellenistic Judaism.” The classic interpretation saw Paul vehemently opposing what was called the Jewish commitment

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to “works-righteousness”. It had been presupposed that Hellenist Judaism provided the basic motives for a critique of such a works-oriented (Palestinian) and legalistic form of Judaism. The second enriching insight was, that Paul’s relationship to contemporary Judaism was not simply that of anti-thesis, as the Reformation had claimed. It became clear that this interprettation of Paul derived from the anti-thesis between the Reformers and the Roman-Catholic Church, that became the model used to explain the New Testament references to the Mosaic law, oral tradition and the nature of the Pharisee movement. The result of Davies’ work and that of his student E.P. Sanders, was a better understanding of how Paul used contemporary Jewish moulds in which to shape his gospel, spec. his transformation of the attributes of the Torah into characteristics of Christ, what Davies called a “Christifying” of the Torah. He also showed, that righteousness in connection with obedience was a key concept to Paul, implying that he was after a new understanding of what it meant to live from faith as obedience. But this renewal of the concept of obedience still centered around the meaning of Christ as the one who was to be obeyed, emphasized the messianic way of life as substituting and surpassing, and not reaffirming and enhancing the validity of the Torah. The embodied or messianically interpreted Torah could still be seen as an abrogation of the “old” version, as in opposition to the written Torah. So we still have the problem that a transposition of the characteristics of Torah to Christ in the Pauline letters might in fact imply a dismissal of the former in any concrete sense. Such a concept would then again be outside the general direction given by Matthew 5:17 and would instigate the hopeless effort of reconciling Matthew’s clear emphasis on a Christian Torahobedience with a law-free Pauline gospel or a new dismissal of the former. Nevertheless a lot was gained here. At least Davies had shown that Paul’s theology was that of a 1st century Jew, and not that of a 16th century reformer. There was no clear break between 1st century Judaism and Paul’s theology apart from the identity of the Messiah and certainly not along the lines of an opposition between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism. But if

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Paul was then closer to his Jewish contemporaries in thought and even in his central theological statements, the question must arise what his “polemic” with the Judaizers was all about. How did Paul actually understood the role of the law now that Christ had come, if we could not simply state that he transferred the properties of the Torah to Christ? In this area new insights arose in the last two decades. E. P. Sanders wrote a summary of his position on Paul in 1991, in the past masters series of Oxford University Press. (Summarizing his Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977, and Paul, the law, and the Jewish People (1983).) Sanders argued that Judaism was not and never had been a religion of worksrighteousness. It was rather a religion of covenantal nomism, that granted salvation to all those within the Covenantcommunity and even beyond that by a free act of God’s grace. All Jews were saved by this grace unless their behavior indicated that they had fully renounced the Covenant. The proper response to this Covenant of grace was obedience to its regulations. Against the background of this covenantal nomism of Palestinian Judaism, Paul would best be described as producing a participationist eschatology. His theology was centered in the notion of dying with Christ and obtaining the new life of complete immersion in the mystic “body of Christ” which finally leads to an ultimate transformation when Christ would return. But that position did not qualify Paul as an antinomian. The covenant was only replaced or reinterpreted as participation in Christ’s life and the obedient response to it was explained with reference to the Spirit of Christ working within the community. On a passing note, we can infer that Paul’s approach hardly qualifies as being more universalist in outlook. Membership in Israel is as particularistic as Paul’s claim that only faith can give access to redemption. Nevertheless Sanders continued to affirm the image of a Pauline break with the Torah, by his assessment that justification in Paul meant to be saved by Christ, and did not mean (not primarily at least) to obey the Torah and to repent of transgression.10 As Sanders explained, Paul’s interest was 10

E.P. Sanders, Paul, (1977), cf. p. 552. Here we find Sanders’ famous dictum, that to Paul the only thing wrong with Judaism was, that it was not Christianity.

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focused on the eschatology of Christ’s imminent return that gave rise to the question who are they that belong to Christ, which in turn led to the concept of the union of the believers with Christ in and as Christ’s body. Paul, approached in this way, seemed to argue backwards. Christ’s coming into this world brought a righteousness for the believer in the coming judgment. That righteousness could not have been available before. The positive statement about the work of Christ must then necessarily evolve into a negative statement with regard to the function of the Mosaic law as written standard of behavior. To Paul, Sanders explained, the only thing wrong with the Jewish understanding of the law was, that it could not save gentiles. Despite the enormous importance of the new paradigm that Sanders has provided, and especially his intuitive grasp for the inner logic of Paul’s position, there are various problems in his approach. Sanders’ views for one thing lead to a rift between Jesus and Paul. The opposition between Jesus’ own Pharisaic teachings and Paul’s eschatological and mystical ethics could hardly have been imagined greater than in Sanders’ view. Coming from the incorrect dualism of a purely Hellenist versus a purely Palestinian Judaism, it must be disappointing to find that Sanders has in fact replaced the former dichotomy with a new one. Both James Dunn, who followed Sanders’ lead in focusing on the social identity of the Church, and Sanders himself, concur in their estimate that Paul’s Christology leads him to address the issue of justification and Christian ethics in terms of the believing community as a whole. In the perspective that was opened up by Sanders and Dunn, the sources of social ethics might remain the same as in Judaism. The function of the Torah might still have been affirmed. Different views as to the function of the Torah emerged in the context of this new image of Paul. The Mosaic law is surpassed as boundary marker but left in place as paraenetical source in Dunn’s view or surpassed by the life in the Spirit, in communion with the exalted Christ in Sanders’view. But despite these minor differences on what can only be characterized as a “low” view on the role of the Torah, one basic issue has been made clear by both: the ongoing validity of the Mosaic law, if there is any, in Paul’s theology,

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was now shown to be effective in the domain of ecclesiology and ethics, and not in his soteriology. Not redemption as such, but the concrete way of life of the redeemed community was at stake in Paul’s debate with the Judaizers. The law remained a vital source of insight for ethics, precisely because Paul held that the immanent principle of Torah-obedience was faith, and that faith had received its fulfilling focal point in Christ. Does that mean that we should now treat the doctrine of justification as merely an issue of the social identity of the Church? Is justification a concept that addresses only the status of the community and not the salvation of individual believers? That would be a decisive break with the Reformation’s insistence on the individual nature of salvation. Apart from the role of the law as such, there is the question who is addressed by New Testament paraenesis: the individual in the 16th century sense, or the community of the faithful? It seems our century has moved towards an “objective” and “social” gospel, where faith is an extrinsic power that motivates people from the outside and social justice is the first goal of all works of faith. The new image of Paul seems congruous with our 20th century predilection to treat ethics as a social and political issue. Is there then no room any longer for the individual’s experience of guilt and redemption? It may be true that the “new creature” of 2 Cor. 5:17, to name just one exegetical issue that showed this new emphasis, is not an individual and the text should actually read: “if anyone be in Christ: a new creation.11” The transformation spoken of therefore does not concern primarily the individual reality. But it is ironic to note against this tendency in exegesis that the same verse opens with ‘anyone” in the singular. It is to me nearly impossible to make the theology of Paul fit the position that redemption is only intended for collectives. The individualistic emphasis must certainly be dealt with in a critical fashion where it bars us from seeing the social implications of the gospel. But I would contend that we should be careful in falling yet again from one bias into another. For one thing, the imagery of the “body” is not identical to the social category of a “group”, notwithstanding all the elements of group dynamics that we would wish to include. All of this will have to be dealt with in some detail later. 11

26

Cf. Yoder, Politics, 222

For now it may suffice to point to the problem, that Paul’s theology must be read as essentially referring to a peoplehood but cannot be reduced to that perspective. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that part of Paul’s polemics does have its center in the issue of the shape of the people of God. James Dunn, perhaps the most influential writer now with regard to these issues, has followed the specific leads concerning the law and the identity of Israel that Sanders had established before him. He deeply agrees with Sanders that any description of Judaism must be based on Jewish texts and not on Paul himself – precisely in order to come to a real understanding of Paul, the Judaism that Paul responds to should not be reconstructed from his own texts. Yet, Dunn argues that Paul does indeed have a quarrel with a real Judaism of his own era when both are viewed as contrary definitions of the social identity of God’s people. Dunn’s main thesis is threefold: 1. that Paul’s opposition to the law is concerned primarily with the inclusion of gentiles and not with the law itself; 2. that the “works of the law” are the boundary-markers of 1st century (Temple-) Judaism, and 3. that Paul’s doctrine of the justification of the ungodly refers to the believer being taken up and maintained within the covenant-community for the sinners in the sense of gentiles. Such a view does not slander Judaism. The problem of the relationship between Israel and the nations was a real problem within 1st century Judaism. Paul’s solution to that problem differs from that of mainstream Judaism, but without misrepresenting the latter. And that in itself is an important gain in comparison to the theological construction of a Jewish-Christian conflict in the 1st century about salvation – as it had been reconstructed so many times. Dunn’s treatment of the evidence for his thesis is impressive. Of great importance to my investigation is the view he propagated both in his The Partings of the Ways (London,

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1991) and the earlier essay on Mark 2:1 - 3:612, that Jesus’ rejection of the Pharisaic distinction between righteous and sinner in accordance with covenantal (and ritual) issues of separation and exclusion, was developed further in the early Church to include the gentile ‘sinners.” 13 That meant both a distinction and continuity between Jesus’ teachings and the response from the early Church, depending on the social issue confronting whatever faction had arisen. Theology followed the gospel of Christ by the dynamics of the supremely practical question who was in and who was out. And so we can reconstruct a general position toward the Mosaic Law in Paul. If Paul understood the negative function of the law first of all as a hindrance to the table-communion between Christians of Jewish and pagan descent, then the polemic in Romans and Galatians has to be read primarily as a defense of the social shape of the Church. Furthermore, it would be obvious why the Mosaic law could be a secondary source for moral exhortation only, and not the primary legal code for the Church. Paul could not have accepted a validity of the Mosaic law if that validity implied a primacy of the Torah over the Messiah and of Israel over the righteous of the gentiles. Dunn’s argument amounts to a social re-evaluation of the function of the law within the Church and he therefore rejects any Pauline polemics with the law as such. The law of Moses had secondary and paraenetical value for Christians, because they were not “under” the law, but were “in Christ.” But Dunn’s expanded thesis is not without its own problems. For one thing, an assessment of Paul’s theology as a whole 12

Cf. “A Bridge between Jesus and Paul on the Question of the law”, 1983; in Jesus, Paul and the law, 1990 13 In the same direction but more nuanced in the conclusion, is Peter J. Tomson’s Paul and the Jewish law (1990). The bulk of his work is concerned with evidence that Paul uses the specific Rabbinic though-structure of “halakah” to define the way of life of the Christian community. Drawing upon Jewish, apostolic and Christ’s halakhic teachings, Paul specifically in his first letter to the Corinthians displays a great affinity with this proto-rabbinic way of thinking. This has consequences for the understanding of Paul’s theology, that is now not so much concerned with the individual’s justification but with the matter of the inclusion of gentiles into a community where Jewish dietary laws, prohibitions of idolatry and restrictions for table-fellowship with gentiles are still prevalent

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might indicate that the function of the Mosaic Law is completely embedded in a Christology that leaves little or no room for Torah-obedience as an independent standard of Christian behavior. In other words, Paul may have targeted the “works of the law” in their function as identity-markers, but could not prevent that the moral function of the law diminished equally. It may have been a characteristic of Paul’s method of polemics, that a negative position becomes exaggerated in his attempt to impress upon his readers the necessity of the path he wanted them to take. As I will try to show, this seems most clearly the case in Galatians where the denial of any need for gentiles to become Jews before they became Christians leads him to oppose the view of the law he himself expressed in Romans: the Torah would not even be of value to Jews according to that letter. But, if we take the Matthew 5 quote as our criterion, the proposed interpretation of Paul leaves little doubt that he would flatly contradict the Matthean gospel, even more so if the law would thereby be robbed of some or all of its paraenetical function. The question we will examine later is, whether this antithesis is necessary. If Paul’s theology in Romans is not only directed against the law in its function as boundary marker, but more precisely against its independent use as a written standard for behavior, his theology would emphasize a different relationship to the Mosaic law than was (is) necessary for the Jewish people, while keeping its (messianically reinterpreted) contents fully in tact. Paul’s argument would then not only deal with the social implications of the Torah, but also with a specific view of the effect of the Torah as a legal code. Dunn’s argument that the law, understood in terms of faith, deals with the expression of love in works, involves a change in the way people deal with the law as a code of rules, yet preserves its capacity to express God’s intent. But that can be argued as well for the Sermon on the Mount! The question must then be asked how Matthew and Paul tried to reshape the concept of obedience to the law in their Christology without denying the priority of the Mosaic law for knowing the will of God. This question must now be raised, whether we ought to choose between Paul and Matthew in this respect and how we can find a solution that does justice to both. Here the issue is no longer

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exegetical only but directly part of systematic theology. What weight should we give to the reports on Jesus’ teaching and the Pauline corpus? Some have defended the thesis, already defended by Bultmann in his Theologie, that Paul’s gospel was an independent theology, a reflection on the kerygma not based directly on Jesus’ teachings. But some have evaluated this fact in different ways. Especially in the Jewish search for the “real” Jesus the Jewishness of Jesus is emphasized to such an extent, that there is no room for a gentile Church any longer.14 Paul’s theology emerges as the real and quite distinct foundation of a gentile Church, against the dominant JewishChristian witness in Matthew. Such a secondary status attributed to Paul’s writings, might remove the antithesis found between Matthew and Paul but it would also set us into the impossible situation that there is no gospel left for the gentiles. Matthew’s Jesus would come out supreme because it would be historically more plausible that Jesus’ teaching was closer to Judaism. Between such a historical reconstructed Jesus as pious 1st century Jewish martyr, and the Christology of the gentile Church, there would be no continuity whatsoever. But whatever our assessment of the road that Paul took or his distance to Matthew, no matter how Jewish we deem Jesus, we cannot escape the question that dominated Paul’s mind: how can Jews and gentiles both share in the blessings of the messianic Age? It is difficult to see how we could answer that question on the basis of Matthew’s gospel alone. If we cannot find identity between Jesus’ teaching and Paul’s theology it may and must suffice to establish continuity within the dimension of the Church’s theology between the recorded life and sayings of Jesus and the theology of Paul. There is however also reason enough to review at least some of the arguments for this new image of Paul. Both E.P. Sanders and James Dunn have been challenged by Colin G. Kruse on the issues of the law and the primacy of the social function of the gospel. Kruse made a convincing exposition on these issues in his Paul, the law and Justification. (Leicester, 1996) In his view the Reformation was right to teach that Paul has argued that the 14

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Cf. Schalom Ben-Chorin, Bruder Jesu, München, 1967.

law had a limited function as a custodian and has now faded away. It has become obsolete not only as the condition for entry into the covenant-community but also as the standard of righteousness. Justification is apart from the law. Justification is not only and not even primarily about entry into the covenant as Dunn had emphasized, it is also God’s decision not to take the sins of the people into account, because Christ has died for them and this fact establishes the paradox that in order to live in obedience to God, one must “flee from the law.” 15 Both covenantal nomism and legalism are thereby excluded and he can argue then, that there is no special way of salvation for the Jewish people, apart from Christ. So it is obvious that although Kruse belongs to those, who have absorbed the points that Sanders and Dunn have been making and have come to regard them as meaningful emphases he at the same time remains adamant in his assessment of Paul as teaching justification by faith in a traditional sense.16 At least in experience, Kruse argues, justification is about an individual finding himself at peace with God and being freed from the Mosaic law. The conclusion that Kruse draws from his re-evaluation of Dunn’s work is motivated clearly by a Lutheran perspective, but the arguments that Kruse has brought into the dialogue are important to note nonetheless. Dunn’s thesis can only be affirmed partially in Kruse’s view: Paul did emphasize the abrogation of any application of the Mosaic law that hindered the social shape of the Church as a communion of Jews and 15 16

Kruse, Paul, p. 298.

With regard to the method of reading Paul we must make mention of one example of what Dunn called the “rhetorical reading.” Stanley K. Stowers wrote his A Rereading of Romans in 1994 in which he attempts “reading Romans afresh as a letter from the Graeco-Roman world of the first century CE.” (p. 6) The basic trust of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith is shown to be aimed at gentile Christians who sought to find a moral self-definition and self-mastery by introducing elements of Jewish law into their Christian lives. Through Christ, gentiles were given the same access to righteousness that had previously been given only to Jews based on the law. Moral improvement is not the answer for the gentiles; the faithfulness of chosen individuals like Abraham and Christ however is. Here the gentiles find the pattern of behavior and in Christ, also the source of power, from which they can obtain righteousness.

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gentiles. Many of Paul’s statements that are negative with regard to the law must be understood from that perspective. Nevertheless, Paul does indeed also reject a particular JewishChristian use of the Mosaic law as written standard to discern the will of God and consciously replaces that by the “focal image” of the Messiah as the embodiment of the divine will. Kruse is right in this last respect: in Paul, there is hardly room left for the Torah as independent standard. In my assessment however, Sanders, Dunn and Kruse are wrong in their common failure to bring out, that Paul nevertheless proposed a life in obedience in an ongoing process of ethical discernment (life in the Spirit) in which neither conscience nor freedom can act as moral principles that effectively abrogate the contents of the Mosaic law. It seems to me that there are three possible avenues for the translation of the new found insights in the area of New Testament-exegesis, through systematic theology into the field of Christian ethics. 1. the renewal of Paul’s position trying to find the continuity with Jesus’ original teaching, exemplified by James Dunn. His main thesis is, that justification of the ungodly gentiles implies the acceptance of non-Jews in the new covenant without the boundary markers of circumcision and dietary laws that belong to the nationalist use of the law as a mark of righteousness for Israel. The Mosaic law is then a secondary source of paraenesis because the ‘righteous demand of the law” must be read in terms of Christ’s commandment to love the neighbor. “Walking in the Spirit” replaces the Jewish Halakah as an incomplete analogue. 2. the appreciation of Paul’s reflective theology as secondary to Jesus’ own teachings but fundamental to the gospel of the Christian Church along the classic lines of Bultmann in which the law-free anti-Jewish gospel is the fundament of all Christian theology, implying the abrogation of the Mosaic law and 3. the re-establishment of Paul’s theology as the first and adequate explanation of the gospel of Christ even against the implicit theology of the gospel writers as we find e.g. in Colin Kruses’ work, in which the condemnatory function of the law is reasserted. In whatever direction we would want to find the answer, this at

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least is clear: the function of the Mosaic law (and thereby the concrete shape of Christian ethics) in Christianity depends on the interpretation of its status now that Christ had come. The individual and social reading of Paul’s position must waver between two positions with regard to the Mosaic law: either it is exclusively the constitution of Israel, including at the most a minority of Jewish Christians. In that case Christ abolished the law at least for His disciples. Or – and this is in fact a fourth option that I will try to defend - it is addressed to both Jew and gentile through the coming of the messianic Age, constituting a new community in which the Mosaic law continues to function though in a different manner for Jew and gentile. In that case Jesus fulfilled the law by bringing it to eschatological completion and upheld its formal validity. The question then remains in what manner the Mosaic law has validity for nonJewish Christians. To ascertain that, we must answer the secondary question of how the Mosaic law addresses people. First of all: which people? Israel or the Church? An emphasis on the Mosaic covenant and its social boundary markers of circumcision, kashrut and Levitical purity limits the function of the law severely. It becomes the basic charter of Israel alone. The moral function of the law, so appealing to the godfearers that were attracted to Judaism in the 1st century, seems to transform the constitution of a people into the universal moral guidebook for individuals. Most common indeed is the Reformation’s view, more than 15 centuries later, of the law addressing primarily individuals and not communities in order to prepare them for the reception of the gospel. James Dunn on the contrary had shown that Paul at least had communities in mind when he addressed these issues in Romans, Galatians and Ephesians. So it could not be held that the law addresses the Jewish nation first and foremost and gentile individuals in a secondary sense only. In Paul’s mind, the formal validity of the law was restricted to Israel and it made no sense to him to adopt the law as an individual believer. But is there a necessary disjunction between a validity of the Mosaic law for Israel first and for the Church in a modified sense as well? After all, the teachers of Israel did envision the rule of Torah for all peoples in the era of the Messiah. It can be maintained that the Mosaic law addresses both Israel and the Church, but does so

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in a different manner and through different historic channels. Neither is it necessary to limit the function of the Mosaic law for gentile individuals if Israel in its own prophetical tradition expects the entrance of peoples into the Mosaic covenant, while accepting a joining of individuals into Israel in the present era. There is also no theological reason for Christians to suppose that the opposite emphasis on the social dimension of justification as a “setting the relationship right” or “enabling humans to comply with the known will of God” cannot be combined with an understanding of an “imputation of righteousness” to the individual as such. John Howard Yoder has argued in his “Justification by Grace Alone” that we need to object to a doctrine of justification that would exclude the social and ethical dimension.17 But the correct inference from that position must be that both dimensions need to be addressed. The social emphasis cannot replace the Reformation’s insistence on the individuality of faith, but may deepen its meaning and widen its horizon. In short, the acceptance of a validity of the law for Israel does not mean the Church cannot in its own way, on the basis of the authority of its Teacher and Lord, accept that validity for itself, nor does that mean, that such a validity addresses only individuals and not the Church as such. So how could such a merger between the individualistic and social dimension of justification come about? And what function if any would the Mosaic law have in this connection? The doctrine of “justification by faith alone” in its 16th century Reformation shape, was up to a point individualistic. But there is a possible exception to be made for the AnabaptistMennonite emphasis on the “pure” Church and its insistence on holiness and moral purity for the congregation as such. Between the “magisterial” and the Radical Reformation this social and ethical dimension of the gospel was one of the main areas of dispute. Because of this, Mennonite theology has had a strong if not exclusive emphasis on the moral way of life of a community that is the result of and contemporaneous with redemption. It is therefore an intuition that we derive from our understanding of the 16th century Anabaptist-Mennonite movement, that we translate into a question that we address to 17

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Yoder, Politics, p. 215

the biblical texts: is there a function for a written code of behavior (a concrete social ethics) in the community of the redeemed? John Howard Yoder expressed the primacy of doing concrete ethics in the concept of Nachfolge forcefully in his Politics of Jesus. Taking as his starting point the conviction that Paul’s polemics was aimed at the exclusion of gentiles from the Church that was the result of a specific way of incorporating Jewish law, he finds that social ethics is the main form of faithobedience in the gospel. Jesus Christ is the norm for the ethics of the Church, which means that for Yoder too, Christian ethics is Christologically defined. The Sermon on the Mount is a way of life, not part of an indictment to be overcome through the general amnesty of justification by grace. The key to understanding Paul’s doctrine of justification is to Yoder not so much Romans and Galatians but Ephesians 2:14. The law that has been set “out of order” is here epitomized in the boundary markers for Israel. The “removal” of the law not so much indicates a change in the will of God, but a change in the social status of God’s people. The ethics that may develop on the basis of the social and moral re-evaluation of justification by faith, emphasizes the this-worldly elements of Jubilee, the practice of reconciliation, peace-witness and the like. Part of our investigation will focus on this possibility of combining what seemed impossible to combine before: the Mosaic law as source for the understanding of the will of God in its messianic shape for the Church and Israel in different manners and the dual perspective of the validity of law and gospel to individuals and the ‘redeemed community” alike. So how could one hope to answer the questions outlined above? It seemed necessary to me to combine the different dimensions of the question, history of theology, exegesis and philosophy, in the following investigation. The concept of faith as obedience, the role of the law in the life of faith, the sources of ethical rules for the Christian both as individual and as community, need to be found within Scripture, and with an open mind for the Jewish background in which they developed. That defines this inquiry as an exercise in biblical theology. But these questions are not purely exegetical. The dimension of the debate in which they are to be set is the development of the

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doctrinal core of Christian ethics in the post-Reformation era: the doctrine of justification and its corollary in sanctification. I hope to show here, that Mennonite doctrine is centered around an experiential emphasis within the doctrine of justification by faith that allows no rift between justification and sanctification. (But it has tended sometimes to obscure this core element of the gospel, by teaching an independent emphasis on sanctification as a human effort to comply with evangelical law.) That defines this inquiry as an exercise in (the history of) systematic theology. One last dimension needs to be introduced. The tension between the social and individual dimension of Christian ethics, between grace and obedience, gospel and law and the like, require also an understanding of the philosophical presuppositions involved. The theological appreciation of Paul’s “major” doctrine has been influenced in its various stages by dominating strands of general thought. The 16th century discovery e.g. of the inwardness of human self-consciousness in moral introspection as exemplified paradigmatically in the work of Descartes paved the way for the concept of cognitive autonomy in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Lutheranism, Wesleyanism and modern forms of evangelical conservatism with their strong emphasis on the inner nature of faith, all emphasize the personal and experiential nature of guilt and the imputation of righteousness. Though equally centered on the self and inwardness, they do not accept the modern claim of moral and cognitive autonomy that found its proponent in the philosophy of Kant and the like. The doctrine of justification in its secular counterpart from the late 18th century Socinians up to the late 19th century Modernists re-interpreted it to refer to that same moral autonomy, using the philosophical paradigm of moral autonomy as the foundation of theology. Nearly all 19th century forms of modernism and 20th century shades of liberalism followed that direction of trying to find a foundation for religion in human reason. The evangelical insistence on individual guilt and redemption made ethics into a secondary corollary of the gospel whereas modernism and liberalism tended to emphasize autonomous ethics without a basis in divine authority. It is obvious that within the confines of this book no full philosophical line of questioning could be developed. I hope to deal

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with elements of this philosophical dimension in a later study. The importance of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant both for ethical issues as such and as source for our understanding of modern liberal theologies cannot be overstated. The concept of moral and cognitive autonomy found in his work a well reasoned defense. In our time, the most prominent philosophy that opposes the Kantian (and Lutheran) paradigm of autonomy, is to be found in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The importance of both with respect to this study lies in the fact that Kant is the proponent of that form of secular “justification” that shows the inner logic of that doctrine combined with the presuppositions of the 16th century Lutheran Reformation: its insistence on human self-consciousness as the medium and maybe even source of truth. In the field of ethics, the universality of the Good, the insistence that outward duty and legalism are to be distinguished from the inner free resolve to do the Good out of deference for human reason as such, are principles that cast their shadow in many commentaries on Paul’s writings – up to and including Adolf Schlatter and Rudolf Bultmann. The contribution of Emmanuel Levinas to this discussion lies primarily in his apology for the fundamental heteronomy of ethics and his contention that this does not constitute the legalist outwardness that was the foe of Kantianism, but describes the original dimension of the primacy of the Other, on which all ethics (including the social morality of the state) ultimately rests – and by which the latter is judged. In dealing with the key texts in the New Testament it became clear to me that there is an inner “resonance” between its messianically explained Torah and basic motives that ground Levinas’ Jewish philosophy. The benefits of combining these perspectives are numerous. My exegetical discussion e.g. has benefited greatly by this philosophical re-evaluation of heteronomy. In the reading of Romans and Galatians I have had to show what Paul intended to convey by the key concepts of justification and life in the Spirit. The formal and material status of the Mosaic law in Christian paraenesis must be explained. I hope to show, that Paul intended justification to include the notion of enablement and (objective) sanctification but excluded the return to an

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ethics-as-usual. The life in the spirit contains the proper key for understanding the ongoing role of the Mosaic law in ethical discernment. Nevertheless, in this emphasis on the spiritual mode of ethical life, Paul did not in fact move away from the teachings of Christ as recorded in the gospel of Matthew as one might have thought by reading “spirit” along the lines of Kantian ‘inwardness.” The element of the Spirit in Pauline theology seems concerned with safeguarding the heteronomy of Christian ethics, not establishing a new autonomy of freedom – understood in a modern sense – over against the letter of the law. The notions of autonomy and heteronomy also served as a research tool within the exegesis. One of the problems I faced was the relationship between the gospel of Paul and the letter of James. It seemed at first as if James could only be seen as a deviation from the Pauline gospel and a return from the Christian freedom of Paul to the heteronomy of the law in James. But there is no need to affirm a dichotomy between Paul’s and James’ gospel. It has become highly probable to me, that if the writer of James did know about the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith he would have rejected it as inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus in so far as it implied a separation of justification and sanctification.18 (But of course as I will show, Paul did not actually teach that.) Without the application of an absolute Pauline primacy, without a reading of justification as a separate and complete act of God and without a bias in favor of a spiritualized ethics, this can be more easily detected. James can provide us with a necessary corrective in our understanding of Paul. The same goes for our reading of passages in Matthew that outright defend an ongoing validity of the Mosaic law in its messianic shape. Here the interpretation has found another barrier to its inclination to read antinomism in Paul. In evaluating these exegetical ways of approach philosophy may aid us. Kant and Levinas can provide us with two different paradigms that place the reading of the texts in a new and different light. Kantian autonomy and Levinas’ heteronomy are conflicting perspectives in modern culture through which different models of Christian ethics can be construed. For the great hindrance in the reading of Paul since the 17th century has been the collision between the self-evident prin18

Cf. Robbert Veen, Fulfillment of the Law, Huizen, 2005.

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ciples of human autonomy and the life under obligation. Finally, as to the result I think might be achieved, I hope to show that the center of the New Testament ethics lies in the concept of faith as active and concrete obedience to the commandments of Christ, which include the messianically interpreted Torah, in the context of the redeemed community, on the sole basis of justification by God’s grace – a grace that is external and imputative as well as intrinsic and active. God’s act in calling humans to faith, restoring the relationship with them through the Cross and resurrection of Christ is the full foundation of ethics. Without the Cross, there is no possibility for Christian ethics. However, the Cross becomes effective in the resurrection. The continuity between Jesus’ messianic Halakah19, Paul’s law-free gospel and James’ Torah-obedience is the notion that God calls people to become obedient to Him through Jesus Christ who is the appointed Sovereign of the world and enables them to do so by giving them an “amnesty” for their sins as well as regeneration and the new life. The ecclesia is called to display now in obedient witness and suffering, the character of the new humanity, that God will ultimately establish on Christ’s return but gives already to the faithful as an inner and outer transformation of their lives. I contend that this view on the particular nature of Christian ethics, is consistent with a fair reading of Paul, the gospels and basic tenets of Mennonite tradition. It leads us to a renewal of Mennonite theology, where it becomes clear that a reappraisal of the function of the Mosaic law and Christian halakah is now in order. But I must make clear from the start, that I do not mean by this renewed emphasis on sanctification any sort of moralist appeal to do good works. Justification by faith and sanctification are both divine works in man, and we should beware of any return to the kind of moralism that has obscured the central meaning of justification by faith in Mennonite theology. 20 My effort here is not to be listed in the inventory of 19

“Way of life” under moral principles as binding on the members of a community. 20 The main issue is not to add a concept of sanctification to the foundational notion of justification where each remains a separate concept, but to describe both justification and sanctification from a Biblical perspective on their inner

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attempts “To Keep Faith Ethical.” It is more the attempt to keep ethics faithful than anything else.

and intrinsic connection.

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b. Methods of investigation and presuppositions The exegetical questions that I have set myself to answer arise primarily from the observation that in protestant theology the issue of ethics has been dealt with as a corollary of the doctrine of justification, and that this doctrine is strongly dependent upon a specific way to read Paul, esp. his letters to the Galatians and Romans. If the goal of ethics is to understand what makes a man righteous or what righteousness is, then the doctrine of justification can be seen as the foundational response to that question. Our specific exegetical inquiry is therefore after the formulation of the doctrine of justification in the letters of Paul to the Galatians and to the Romans as the foundation for ethics in comparison with differing traditions in the New Testament itself. I start from the possibility that justification is an ambiguous term, referring both to a divine initiating act of salvation and a process of transformation in man that is usually called sanctification. Is it about man’s individual behavior, the status of redemption before God in a divine amnesty, the condition of a community, or combinations of these? If we accept the basic outlines of the discourse on justification in Mennonite theology, what type of Christian ethics would then be its result? In particular my exegetical aims are the following: y

I will attempt a presentation of Paul’s doctrine of justification that will bring out the intrinsic connection between God’s redeeming act as justification and the transformation of human ethics both in the individual believer and in the Church. I will make extensive use of E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn and a major critique of this reappraisal: G. Kruse, to formulate the doctrine and its consequences for the foundations of Christian ethics.

y

I will try to establish to what degree and in what sense the New Testament allows for the concept of obedience in faith. Can it rank equally with Paul’s concept of transformation through the Spirit? My intent was to test the

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position provided e.g. by my teacher R. Zuurmond that the rejection of “salvation by works of the law” precludes all heteronomous obedience and morality, and that Paul in fact transforms all ethics into a spirit-driven inner attitude. Contrariwise, if it could be shown that Paul lends support to the concept of a Christian halakah,21 specifically in his paraenetical address to the Romans, things would look different. Paul’s concept of life in the spirit might then be taken as a metaphor for the renewal of the condition of human beings within a fundamentally transformed community that is consistent with such obedience, and not as a possible basis for the “inner” morality of modernity. I have already attempted to show that the New Testament vision of ethics, as exemplified by the gospel of Matthew, is patterned more on obedience to concrete and specific commandments than on either an “enthusiast” spirit-driven life or an inner morality of conscience. In general, my aim is to find the biblical basis for the concept of heteronomous obedience as the grounding concept for Christian ethics.22

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Furthermore, the issue of justification is intrinsically linked to the issue of the status of the Mosaic law, as a cursory glance at the context of the term in Romans will show. To be justified does not mean to live righteously according to the precepts of the law, but still the demands of the law need to be met in some fashion. Even in the argument that justification is a divine act of grace to which we respond in faith, the law might still be construed as a primary source for our understanding of the ethical life. This role of the law in the argument for justification by faith and its expression in the gospels needs to be distinguished and brought into a correlative and synoptic view. In the chapters on Jesus’ attitude toward the Mosaic law I will try to show both the continuity and the discrepancy between the gospel account of the law and Paul’s theological reflection on its purpose and function.

21

Defined very generally as the effort to construct general rules of behavior that embody more general value-concepts and apply the latter to specific situations. These are to be distinguished from moral decisions by an individual and the moral discernment of a community. 22

Cf. Robbert Veen, Fulfillment of the Law, Huizen, 2005.

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I have made use of several methodological insights that have been developed over the past decades in what might be called a synoptic approach, in which the various methods are complementary to each other. My perspective on scripture has been defined in various extents by the following methodological viewpoints . y

In my estimate the primacy of the canon-historical approach (in combination with the “narrative” hermeneutics of the Amsterdam School) gives us both a view on the final redaction stage as the basis for all exegesis and a perspective on the relative weight of its various parts based on the reception of the New Testament in early Church history. We need such a reflection on the canonicity of the New Testament to establish the relative weight we must give to James and Paul, e.g., with regard to the issues over which they seem divided, if we are to proceed from the domain of exegesis into the area of systematic theology. The history of the canon may provide a basis for an integral reading of the entire New Testament and allow us to determine the relative weight of its parts, assuming that inclusion in the canon does not in itself imply an intentional doctrinal harmony or establish that a meta-narrative of revelational history separates Christ’s teachings from postresurrection theology, affirming one or the other as decisive.23

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The narrative approach. Basic methodological viewpoints and techniques of the Amsterdam School of Biblical Hermeneutics are used, in particular its insistence that the text itself must give us the data on which we base structural divisions and decide on context and meaning. The notion that the final redactor effectively functions as the author and intends the whole of the text to be precisely “as is” provides a major counterweight to the cutting up of texts into components and the need to hypothesize about their possible separate contexts. For a review of these principles I refer to Voices in Amsterdam: A modern Tradition of reading Biblical Narrative (Atlanta, 1994).

23

Cf. e.g. Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Minneapolis, 1992, pp. 70 – 79.

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y

Critical-historical method can and should still be used to find the patterns of genesis in the text, indicators of stages in the development of the final position arrived at and its basis in the history of Church life. We should interpret such textual layers not as divisions, or as marks of redactional cut and paste, but as patterns of dialogue that have been combined into the one view of the final redactor and to be taken as “intentional structural markers”; not as pointers to stylistic or theological hesitation or lack of editorial freedom.

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Jewish background - Knowledge of the thought patterns of 1st-century Palestinian Judaism may provide us with insight into the probable historical and possible systematic context of the received saying of Jesus, and the understanding of the logic of Paul’s argument, so that we may infer how interpretations altered (without denying the continuity that can be ascertained in many cases), how arguments were born out of a specific conflict or were reapplied to different circumstances by different spokesmen for different communities.

In this manner, the text as we have it becomes a dynamic and fluid pattern of thoughts and movements of interpretation constituting the theological discourse that underlies the New Testament as a whole. A basic result is the insight that in the gospels we still have more or less unaltered materials, some of which are shared by two or more of them; we have a common narrative framework which sets these gospels apart from others like the gospel of Thomas; we have a narrative reflection on the meaning and/or context of the material that was handed down in early tradition, i.e., we have a specific theology working implicitly and explicitly in the arrangement of the text and the redactional additions. Still, having said this, what we must look for is the continuity between the intentions behind the traditional material, the reflective/narrative context, the gospel theology, and the canonical framework. The imagery of ‘layers’ in a text seems to put too much emphasis on the archeological simile of this kind of textual analysis, as if what we have here is not a choir of voices but a load of debris. The text is not an object under dispassionate scrutiny, but an invitation to join a dialogue. The

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so-called ‘layers’ in the text are the recordings of voices that talked to one another about the meaning of Christ. They are different, and they do not sound completely in unison in the final stage; so what we need is a careful attention to the single voices in the whole choir, in order to better understand what the whole means. In other words, the analytical approaches of the history of form and history of redaction are effective only if they are combined as tools of narrative structural analysis, toward an understanding of how the theology of the gospel as a whole relates to the sayings and traditions. These elements not only evoked the canonical whole through their independent existence, influencing the ongoing dialogue in various ways but also became in their dependent existence as part of the literature of the early Church. In their latter function they became the building blocks of the final composition. And beyond that, we must move toward understanding of the intent of the whole of the New Testament as it has been handed down to us through the instrument of the canonical process. It is important to note that the actual shape of the text as we have it is the permanent basis for all possible explanations, including hypotheses concerning its genesis and origin. We should therefore grant to the actual existence of the text a high priority above all our theorizing about its production, even if we would not simply turn to dogmatics to affirm the principle that the Bible is after all a book of the Church and has been accepted by the Church as the witness of prophets and apostles to God’s revelation. It is particularly the fourth element of this outline of my approach (the Jewish background) that may present us with an important new image of the background of the texts. What E. P. Sanders called a ‘pattern of religion’24 - in his case that of early Rabbinic Judaism, which was the recipient of Pharisaic tradition - is the closest we can get from the rabbinic material to the 24

Cf. E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, pp. 1 – 24. On p. 17 he gives a definition: “A pattern of religion, defined positively, is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function.” The best analogy for such a pattern is a soteriology because the patterns deal with questions relating to how one stays within the religious community and what defines concrete adherence to a belief-system.

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actual statements of Pharisaism that the text refers us to. The contextual implications of Jesus’ own sayings, their original intent discernible to some degree within the synoptic redaction, can be reconstructed with the aid of such a “pattern of religion” and can be studied, to a degree, independently of the context that the gospels themselves have provided. All we need to do is to ask the question how a particular concept or behavior would be perceived to function as to the issue of the identity of a given community. Such a synthetic methodology with the aid of rabbinic material might be better equipped to deal with the sayings of Jesus than those New Testament studies that take Jesus’ position towards Judaism and the law as amounting a priori to the complete rejection of Pharisaism and the abolition of the law. That position too simply equates the 2nd- or 16th-century understanding of the gospel with the context and intent behind the particular sayings. It presupposes an identity between that theology, the theology of the gospel writers, and the proclamation of the kingdom by Jesus, or it proclaims that Jesus’ teachings were only the presupposition of that theology and not part of its contents and dynamic development,25 instead of applying the less stringent concepts of dynamic continuity and reflective stages that allows for greater differences and more complex relations between the voices heard. In many approaches there is also the assumption of contextual integrity, i.e. the assumption that the context adequately expresses or is a vehicle for the original intent of the passage. The principle that authentic Jesus’ sayings would be those, that dissent from Judaism, is a case in point. It accepts the dissenting context as the main indicator for the dissenting nature of what Jesus said and after interpreting it like that, uses it as support for the thesis that the saying or logion would have to have been incongruent with Judaism as well to be remembered and recorded in the first place. The uncritical acceptance of the denominator ‘“Pharisees” and its implicit generalization help further that impression. However, the opposite is more likely: i.e. that traditions in the mixed Church after or around the destruction of the Temple would have the tendency on account of its own heightened awareness of the growing rift 25

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As Rudolf Bultmann did in his Theologie des Neuen Testamentes.

with mainstream Judaism to reconstruct creatively and adapt the logia to fit their own context if they did not oppose the remembered Pharisaic position, for they would expect Jesus to contradict the theology of the Pharisees with which they were in conflict themselves.

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1. The traditional approach to Paul’s ethics This is the common view: in his letters Paul responds to pastoral problems in the Churches he had founded or had assumed responsibility for, and in so doing he occasionally explains doctrinal issues insofar as they seem to be relevant to those problems. Since Martin Dibelius, it has been held that Paul’s ethical passages are a form of paraenesis, blocks of moral maxims and advice without intrinsic connection to each other or to the doctrinal parts of the letter.26 Paul did not formulate an ethical code like the Mishnah, and his ethical discourse does indeed give the impression of being random collections. Dibelius argued that these ethical passages were written in a different style, without religious or theological foundation, often in the form of proverbs. They were not written with a specific community in mind but for a general pedagogical purpose; in short, the ethical blocks are repetitions of general instructions given to new converts. They are furthermore based on general Christian tradition and do not contain any specifically Pauline thought. The ethical vacuum that was opened up by the delayed coming of the kingdom was filled with a form of ethics that was derived from the outside world and was not specifically Christian. It may be a matter of how the paraenetical material is read and approached in the first place. H. D. Betz argued, much in line with the classic view of Dibelius, that the letter to the Galatians, our subject in the following chapters, did not contain a specific Christian ethics. “The Christian is addressed as an educated and responsible person...In a rather conspicuous way Paul conforms to the ethical thought of his contemporaries.”27 The support for that thesis lies in the observation that the paraenetical material is (1) without internal connections, as if it were a mere list of popular moral maxims that were Christianized in a superficial manner, (2) without direct reference to the 26

Cf. Martin Dibelius, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, Tübingen 1933, pp. 239-241. 27 H. D. Betz, quoted in Richard B. Hays (1996), p. 17.

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Scriptures, and (3) seemingly imported from general Greek culture into the Church’s early catechetical instruction. Because their form of presentation in the letters was the same manner in which such materials were taught in Hellenistic education, it seemed obvious that it was simply borrowed from the environment. Betz’s view was published in 1979 and the matter seemed decided. But perspectives changed nonetheless. Dunn expressed in 1993, in his commentary on Galatians, that Dibelius’s assumptions as to the manner of tradition that had governed thinking about paraenesis were unnecessary. “We need not assume use of fixed or established catechetical material. On the contrary, here [reference is to Gal. 5:13-6:10 – RAV] the terms of the paraenesis seem largely to have been determined by the circumstances addressed .”28 By the circumstances? Could Paul have adapted himself to the “ethical thought of his contemporaries” because the most determining factor “in these circumstances” was the imminent parousia? Did Paul in fact expect his pagan audience to adopt moral norms from the surrounding culture and Christianize them? The imminence of the parousia might have led to the conclusion that there was no time and no need to formulate a specific Christian halakah. The Christians’ ethic was an “interim ethics,” a way of obliging the old order while the new was on the brink of making its appearance. Is this however sufficient? Or is there a more intrinsic connection between the paraenesis and the doctrinal foundation? After all, the doctrinal parts of both Galatians and Romans are dominated by the issue of justification, a term with which Paul certainly addresses the basic condition or situation of ethics. Bultmann’s general contention, that in Paul’s work the imperative follows the indicative, provides us with an example of such an assumed intrinsic connection. But even then, the paraenetical material seems disconnected from Paul’s major theological themes. Bultmann explains this with reference to the parousia and the fundamental change in the ethical situation. We are left with the challenging question of whether the paraenetical material was simply adopted from the en28

James D.G. Dunn ( 1993), p. 285.

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vironment’s Hellenistic education, and if so, if it only had to be adapted to the belief in the imminent return of Christ. The idea that the indicative preceded and grounded the imperative, the notion that the imperative as such belonged to the old age, could then do the rest, or at least in part we could examine whether we are dealing with the intrinsic development and expression in written form of an existing halakah to which the pagan Churches contributed elements of moral discourse from their own background. We must then take particular notice of the form, the context, and the way the material is connected to find possible traces of deep differences between the material as received and its new meaning within a Christian context. Let us take a look first at this general “indicative” that provides the basis for Paul’s ethics as it appears in Richard Hays’ book on the ethics of the New Testament. We will use that later on to see whether such a general outline of the indicative background of Paul’s paraenesis gives us sufficient clues to understand the passages in question. Richard Hays has managed to rework Bultmann’s general thesis in an ethical context, and that is why we chose to discuss his thesis first. To be clear, this “general” framework is to be distinguished from Paul’s doctrine of justification, which is the systematic outworking of the situation of humanity based on God’s redeeming action in Christ. Here we speak of the pattern of various motives that Paul brings into play or presupposes in his paraenesis, and which makes it possible to see organization in the contents itself, even where the discursive context will not provide one. Hays gives three “recurrent, interlocking theological motifs that provide the framework for Paul’s ethical teaching: eschatology, the cross, and the new community in Christ.” 29 the eschatological motif Hays contends that Paul’s ethics is only intelligible when we keep in mind that he had an “apocalyptic” perspective on the historic reality of the Church. The vocation of the Church lies in its role within “the cosmic drama of God’s reconciliation of the world to himself.” But what perspective did Paul have? A major 29

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Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1993), p. 19.

passage is 2 Cor. 5, where the crucial verse 17 is rendered most often like this: Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things have passed away; behold, all things are become new. (KJV) Such a verse may provide a general perspective on ethics. If we understand it the way the KJV suggests, we accept that a convert to Christianity (someone who is “in” Christ, has been baptized and is saved) belongs to the new age. As an individual he is transformed from the old sinful creation to a new order of life. That would imply that the behavior we can expect of such a person is fully congruous with an unseen reality: the present reign of the Kingdom of heaven. But the translation is faulty, as Hays explains. It must be: Therefore, if any man be in Christ, there is a new creation. (or:, a new creation!) If in our present anyone can profess to belong to Christ, which would probably mean something like being part of Christ’s body, i.e., the Church, then that in itself means that the new creation is already present and active. But that new reality need not be fully realized by the individual in his or her practical life. The bearer of this new reality is the congregation or the Church as a whole. In other words, it is primarily through the social reality of the convert that his belonging to the new era is expressed. Hays takes this to mean that the ethical life of the Church is determined by the double perspective of the cosmic conflict. The Church represents the new age in a hostile world. Its proclamation of the truth is the divine weapon in the struggle for the new world. The difference between the two translations is that in the second version the basic situation of ethics is defined as the realm of the Church (“in Christ”), and this as a renewed, re-created community: new creation, whereas in the first translation we talk about an individual’s subjective experience of having been transformed through faith in Christ or through baptism as a personal event and the ethical commitment that follows it. At variance with Hays, it seems to

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us that the passage presents the Church as the new creation itself, and not as “at the juncture between” the old and the new age.30 It is not about the imminence of the Kingdom of heaven in history, but about the immanence of that Kingdom in the Church. Notwithstanding that, Hays is undoubtedly right that this situation of being between the times, cf. Menno’s insistence that “now is the time of grace, defines the Church’s ethical situation. The brokenness of all human ethical action might lead to utilitarianism and a careful calculation of the good effect of one’s actions. If the Church is the community that holds on to faith in Christ’s imminent return, this at least bars the way to this kind of realism. Instead, it signifies for the Church that there is now no barrier to doing the good intended by the creator right now, even if there is no visible result within the present order of life. Yoder, who similarly accepts the corrected translation of the passage in 2 Corinthians, developed this same idea. The Church’s being present in this world as the sign of the new creation is morally determined by this fact. Far from making ethical judgments pointless, this eschatological perspective actually defines the specific ethics of the Church. The eschatological dimension of her existence, the then that is already now, defines her approach to obedience in many ways. Yoder listed them in his “Christ, the Hope of the World.” 31 To quote just a few: y

If eschatology defines us, then we can abandon, e.g., the need for a causal link between our obedience and the results we hope for (p. 203). “We obey in a world that we do not control.”

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The immediate result might not be clear, but there may be results in a future beyond our reckoning. We may be pouring water into the desert, but the combined result of these actions might be that the water is there, and plenty of it, when some day a lonely wanderer needs it most. The meaning of what we do lies not in its productivity, but in its sometimes very real significance as a sign.

30 31

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Ibid., p. 20. In J.H. Yoder (1994), pp. 203ff.

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To have a “transcendent ideal” gives us the ability to unmask idols. The refusal to obey Hitler was meaningful even if one could not provide a clear social alternative by which to gain the right to criticism.

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To act in accordance with a transcendent hope might be as relevant as seeing a mirage. Though the mirage shows us a reality in a different place from where it really is, it still accurately depicts that reality in itself. The kingdom of God might not be on our doorstep, not on our horizon, but knowing it is there somewhere might give us courage based on a reality and not on fantasy. So the Church is the community of hope, which allows its actions to be guided by the transcendent ideal of the kingdom and not the realities of everyday life. And if it does, it actually becomes the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). The Church is a preview of the community of the future; it already unfolds the righteousness that is the characteristic of the new age, precisely because it already acts in conformity with that transcendent ideal in a world that is still governed by the rules of the order of sin and power.

It is in this perspective that it can be understood why Paul emphasizes the role of the Spirit so much. In Galatians the experience of the indwelling of the Spirit serves as one of the major factors in deciding the issue of the role of the law and the necessity of circumcision (Gal. 3:2). The presence of the Spirit is not only a sign and foretaste of the things to come, but it is the reality of the coming era itself. (In 2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5 the expression arrabon, meaning “first installment,” refers to the reality, not the sign.32) The Spirit thus enables action in conformity with the kingdom right away, even if it is confined within the remains of the old age. That is why obedience takes on the shape of suffering and cross. However, contrary to Hays, Yoder holds that the Church does not stand “between the times” as does the world; she already belongs to the new era through the spirit. Moral exhortation in the perspective of the Church as being the new Creature must be different from both the traditional view of the individual’s bearing the responsibility for new behavior (and succeeding only in 32

Cf. R. Hays (1993), p. 21

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exceptional cases), or of new behavior’s being a sign of the coming but not present kingdom. the motif of the cross Hays takes as his second ethical paradigm that of the cross, which he characterizes as the “paradigm of faithfulness.”33 The loving, self-sacrificial obedience of Christ as depicted in the Philippian hymn (Phil. 2:1-13) is the pattern for Christian obedience. In passing we may note that to Hays this is the real content of the expression “law of Christ” in Gal. 6:2. To fulfill the law of Christ by bearing one another’s burdens is to act in conformity with the pattern of life and death of Christ. In general, the model for obedience itself is obedience to God, in the service of man, to death. It functions as the exact antithesis of Adam’s rebellion, which was defiance of God’s will for selfserving purposes and which brought death to all. Identifying with Christ will not mean the removal of death in a physical sense. But sharing in His life implies sharing His death and resurrection. The motif also signifies a meaningfulness of suffering, when this is a result of our obedience, and makes patience and endurance into one of the most basic Christian virtues. We will deal with this motif again at the end of this study.34 the redeemed community Finally, the third motif of Paul’s ethical discourse is the redeemed community. We will see in our discussion of Galatians how important this notion of the unity of the Church was to Paul. Circumcision for some in the Church would entail erecting fresh barriers where none could have been intended. The vices enumerated in Gal. 5 are offenses against the community. Paul’s decisions concerning the eating of meat consecrated to idols, in 1 Cor., tell the same message. Paul was adamant that there could be no social barriers within the Church. The particular community of the Church was to be ruled by new marks of participation: baptism, confession, experience of the Holy Spirit. All three served to define participants in the Church as members of the body of Christ, as 33 34

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Ibid., p. 27 See chapter 43

unified beyond the pluralistic diversity within (formal) unity that society could offer. All three of these motifs then work together to provide a framework within which Paul’s ethical discourse can be understood as a unity rather than as Dibelius’s blocks of paraenesis without context or coherence. Of course, all of them are interlocked theologically. The cross is a paradigm of obedience as well as the real event that brings in the eschatological kingdom and grounds the new community. So, if we need to make a choice, the cross would be the most powerful paradigm of them all, since it by itself constitutes the others. On the other hand, one might be tempted to add to the list of motifs by making distinctions between the various ways they are brought into play and to list the other concepts that co-define Paul’s thinking, such as righteousness, salvation, faith, incarnation, covenant. All of these function in various ways to define the ethical situation as well. For our purposes, it is useful to adopt Hays’s suggestion that these three are the theological convictions that are at the basis of Paul’s ethical thinking and to demand that all three of them be used to adequately interpret any single Pauline statement. Nevertheless, though helpful in defining the background of the intent behind Paul’s paraenesis, especially in the context of doctrinal letters like Romans and Galatians, we must still seek what drives the shape of this paraenesis formally. We will contend that obedience in faith is still the best way of approaching the form of the Pauline exhortation. We need to add one dimension to the three motifs of Richard Hays. Paul’s ethics, as defined by the three motifs, is pastoral in its nature. That means that its formulation was usually connected to the real circumstances of Church life, addressed to real participants in particular conflicts, meant to change local conditions. Pauline paraenesis, far from consisting of separate and isolated blocks of tradition, was intended for a specific time and place from which it receives a specific coherence. Furthermore, Paul’s ethics was never intended for the whole Church, but only for the gentile Church that he ministered to, and he was never their only authority. The Jerusalem Church and the other apostles in general never relinquished their own apostolic mission for the Church as a whole, but yielded to Paul’s

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primacy only in his mission to the gentiles. That Paul needed approval from the Jerusalem Church is obvious from Galatians and Acts, as we will discuss shortly. Nevertheless, for the history of Christian ethics it is important to note in passing that this was not how the Church came to read Paul. Soon he became the sole authority in matters of doctrine and ethics.

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2. The canonical framework Let us move away from this preliminary overview of the central motifs of Paul’s paraenesis, the framework in which he wrote, and move to the framework in which he was read. At stake is the primary role Paul’s writings played, and still play, in the discourse on Christian ethics. In other words, we must again discuss his apostolic authority. In order to understand how very early on a hermeneutic framework was devised that emphasized the idealized Paul as the center of apostolicity, over against the empirical Paul and his actual relations with different Churches, we must look for a moment at the history of the canonization of Paul’s letters. Beker has argued that the doctrinal need of the 2nd-century Church was the decisive factor in producing the image of a Paul who addressed the opponents of the Church as an apostolic and inerrant teacher, rather than his factual audience in Rome or Galatia as a concerned pastor, or his intended audience as a partner in an ongoing dialogue that stretched far beyond the confines of the letter.35 Beker puts it like this: The specificity and occasional character of the letters was felt to be a hindrance to their catholicity once the letters were collected and later canonized [italics mine]. Therefore steps were taken to minimize their particularity and heighten their catholicity and doctrinal uniformity. It is doubtful, however, that this “hindrance” was only felt after collection and canonization. John Miller will be our guide for a moment.36 The addition of the apostolic writings to the Hebrew Bible had in itself a specific intentionality. It was motivated in 35

For a full discussion of the division between empirical and constructed audience and its importance for understanding Romans, see Stanley K. Stowers, A Reading of Romans, 1994, esp. chapters 1 and 2. 36 John W. Miller, Reading Israel’s Story: a Canon History Approach to the Narrative and Message of the Christian Bible, Kitchener, 1998.

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part by what has become common wisdom amongst scholars, i.e., that the canon was formed out of those books that had proved themselves over time to “to be the most useful in sustaining, informing, and guiding the Church in its worship, preaching and teaching...” 37 As John Miller states it, the Christian Bible was formed as a quick response to a theological challenge.38 In the third and fourth centuries the gentile Church began to publish the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in a specific order and combined them into one Bible together with a selection of apostolic writings to form the prototypes of our modern Bible, producing the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus as the chief surviving examples. As Miller explains, before this era the Hebrew Bible was taken for granted as a common source of revelation for Judaism and Jewish Christianity. The issue that divided them was the question of the fulfillment of scripture in Christ. With the Marcionite challenge in the third and fourth centuries, this situation came to an abrupt end. The question now became whether Judaism and Christianity had anything to do with each other at all.39 It was only after Marcion had published his canon-codex of the New Testament that Church leaders responded by creating their own counter-canon. Marcion’s position was simple and clear. Amongst all the apostles, it was only Paul who stood out as a faithful witness of the evangelical truth. All other apostles, in particular Paul’s opponents in Galatia and Rome, had been false apostles, because of their loyalty to the law and the prophets.40 The Church now took over Marcion’s collection, comprising Luke and the Pauline letters, but placed it in a different context. Luke was now surrounded by Mark and John, and the Pauline letters 37

Harry Y. Gamble, “New Testament Canon,” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, I ,New York, 1992, p. 857. Quoted in Miller (1998), p. 39. 38 In itself this is not a new insight. Harnack, quoted by Miller, and subsequently J. Knox (1942), had acknowledged Marcion as responsible for the creation of the catholic canon. Gnosticism, which claimed secret traditions from the apostolic age, was equally important, as Miller recognizes. Montanist claims to fresh prophetical revelations were equally influential. 39 J.W. Miller (1998), p. 43 40

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Ibid., p. 49.

were surrounded by the letters of James, John and Jude before them, and Hebrews, Timothy, Titus, and Revelation after them. The Church had recontextualized Marcion’s letter-collection.41 Miller explains the rearrangement of the Pauline letters as follows. Romans is taken up as the first letter, which placed Paul’s quite modest statement that the gospel “was promised long ago through the prophets in the holy scripture” (Rom. 1:1) at the opening of the collection. The letters that were added to the collection view Jesus as someone who was preceded by others, emphasizing the chain of tradition that linked the new to the old covenant (cf. Heb. 1:1). The opening four gospels, together, in contrast to Marcion’s gospel by itself, show Paul to be just one apostle in a missionary movement addressed to the whole world. In the oldest codices, Paul’s letters are preceded by Jewish-Christian letters, implying that James and Peter are just as important as Paul. By putting 2 Peter before Paul’s letters, the statement that Paul’s letters can be misconstrued and are difficult to read serves as warning beforehand.42 The whole was added to the Old Testament and closed with Revelation, implying again that Paul’s mission was just part of a larger narrative. Finally, all of this together meant that Paul had become just one of the perspectives within the apostolic tradition and no longer the single truth that Marcion had made him out to be.43 In a way, the order of the books in the canon now reflected the pre-Marcionite understanding of Paul’s relative role. Marcion’s insistence on the shorter canon was of course theologically motivated by the antithesis between law and gospel that made him state that the Old Testament had a different God than did the writings of Paul and Luke. In opposition to that, when the 4th-century codices opened the New Testament canon with Matthew, the relevance of the law 41 42

Ibid., p. 50.

2 Peter 3:15. On the other hand, such a statement presupposed the existence of Paul’s letters. Following the inner dynamics of the LXX as a history-oriented collection (as opposed to the order in the Masoretic text expressing the order of revelation: Torah, early and late prophets, writings) it would have been expected that Paul’s letters preceded those of Peter. 43 J. W. Miller Reading (1998), pp. 51-52.

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was again being stressed, owing to the far more positive statements concerning the law in Matthew 5. For our purposes this is far from irrelevant. It means that the anti-Marcionist intention behind the canon produced a Bible that was meant to contextualize and relativize Paul’s position, including his ethical position. It also meant that putting the letter of James before the Pauline letters, and the gospel of Matthew before that of Luke, intended to stress not merely a narrative continuity, and it was seen to be providing a chronological framework not for the age of the books, but for the seniority of the witnesses. The concept of contemporaneity with Christ might have had a hand in this. The older strata in the New Testament were not simply abolished by the newer in the sense of a gradual unfolding of the gospel, with Paul, in the center, determining the meaning of the gospels in hindsight and laying the foundation for the practical application of the pastoral letters and the historical perspective of the Revelation of John. Through this narrative framework the unity and catholicity of all the apostolic writings could be maintained, and the order of books provided some suggestion that any interpretation of its parts needed to take account of all. In the New Testament the apostolic witness was measured by its faithfulness to Jesus’ teachings, not its closeness to Jesus in time, the gospels therefore became more authoritative than the letters both in a doctrinal and a hermeneutic sense. But the recontextualization was in a way undone. Beker describes the reasoning behind the process of making Paul more “catholic” as follows: There is evidence that when 1 Corinthians headed the list of the Pauline collection, the superscription was enlarged in a catholic sense (cf. 1 Cor. 1:2, "together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours’). Because in all probability (cf. Tertullian and the Muratorian Canon) Corinthians opened the original list of the Pauline letters and Romans closed it, Rom. 16:25-27 functioned as the ending of the total collection. Its peculiar style, terminology, and general tone point to a non-Pauline hand; it most certainly displaced Rom. 16:24 when the letters were collected.

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On the basis of evidence of the early use of Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Ephesians, Nils Alstrup Dahl correctly surmises that even before the “official” collection of the Pauline letters, individual letters circulated in the Churches. In all these cases, geographical particularity was omitted for catholic reasons. This would explain, according to Dahl, the omission of Rome in Rom. 1:7 and 15, the omission of a geographic reference in Eph 1:1-2 (which Dahl considers to be a Pauline letter), and the catholic address of 1 Cor. 1:1. Moreover, 2 Thessalonians may have circulated as well without geographic address. (Polycarp points to a Philippian address [Pol. Phil. 11.3; cf. 3.2].) 44 Beker’s argument points to an early attempt, even before and outside Marcionite circles, to make Paul into the deciding authority within the apostolic witness. Important for our purposes is Beker’s statement that the opening verse of 1 Cor. was read as an indirect affirmation of the authority of the whole of Paul’s letters for the whole of the Church. Paul’s contextual ethics thereby became a general code, even while it was obvious that it was not couched in the literary form one would expect. Dibelius’s contention that Paul had used older paraenetical material can be seen as a corollary of that, since now the authority of Paul as collector of that collection is even more “general” than is suggested by the opening words of 1 Cor. Paul’s ethical authority would then rest on the prior acceptance of a common and older tradition, which was catholic in its own nature, and not on specific Pauline ethics being made universally valid for the Church by Paul’s personal apostolate. To move away from Dibelius here, as well as from the implications of this reading of 1 Cor. 1, implies recontextualizing Paul’s paraenesis and providing a fresh perspective on the issue of his authority. A secondary observation is important for our purposes as well. If we “have” the letter to the Romans or Galatians only as already interpreted in their canonical context, then what does this mean for our present exegesis? This implies, according to 44

J.C. Beker, Paul the Apostle (1980), p. 26.

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Stowers, that there never was an “original” letter as far as the Church was concerned. The Church began to read Paul from the assumption that his teachings were not embedded in a specific situation, were doctrinal in nature, and had final authority over everything else, and precisely for that reason she excised from her collection of letters those elements that gave the letter an empirical shape. The collection of letters therefore became a literary genre that substantially reshaped the framework within which one ought to read such a letter. So, in effect, the Paulinism that preceded the canonization of Paul must already have been working toward presenting the apostle as the final authority in the doctrinal issues that became important from the end of the first century. The anti-Marcionite canonization helped counterbalance this Paulinist movement only in part because it shared basic assumptions with Marcion about the catholic and doctrinal nature of the Pauline corpus. Beker continues his treatment of the fate of the Pauline corpus with the era of canonization. We will quote the relevant passage in full here: The particularity of the Pauline letters was diffused more decisively by the formation of the New Testament canon. The "ecumenical" Paul of Acts — who preaches the same message to a variety of Churches and who, as a supreme witness for Christ, faithfully adheres to the one Christian kerugma as authorized by the Jerusalem Church — was placed before the historical Paul and his collected letters. This placement actually functions as a hermeneutic key to the understanding of the Pauline letters, because the one ecumenical Paul speaks supposedly in them all with the same message. Second Peter 3:14-16, although acknowledging the difficulty of interpreting the Pauline letters, testifies that Paul proclaims the same catholic message, ”speaking of this [the forbearrance of our Lord] as he does in all his letters." When the "Catholic Epistles" were placed in the canon after the Pauline letters, they suggested not only the "catholicity" of the Pauline letters but also the idea that the apostle Paul was one harmonious catholic voice among the unanimous voices of all the apostles. At the

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time of the canonization of the Pauline letters then, both their particularity and the specificity of Paul’s gospel were felt to be a problem. Because the "apostolic" witness of the canon claimed universal relevance, Paul must have addressed himself to "all Christian Churches," just as such a universal address was ascribed to the so-called Catholic Epistles. After all, canonicity meant catholicity. The problem with the Apostle of the canon was not the plurality of the gospels but the particularity of the letters. Indeed, the plurality of the gospels in the canon was acutely felt, as the superscriptions reveal (e.g., the gospel according to Matthew) and to which the longevity of the Diatessaron in the Syrian Church testifies. How could the gospel be one and yet be present in four different forms? How could the "apostolic" witness be applicable to the universal Church if Paul had simply written to specific Churches about specific problems? Plurality and particularity are part of the same problem: How can the universality and the unity of the gospel be maintained in the face of them? Irenaeus argued for the universality of the gospel by speculating on the number four as a universal number. Just as the number four functioned as the universal number for Irenaeus, so did the number seven for the Pauline Epistles, as the Muratorian Canon discloses: in catholica habentur (1.69). And so Hebrews was finally conjoined to the Pauline letters to create a Pauline canon of 2 X 7. The Catholic Church then solved the issue of particularity by diffusing the occasional character of the letters, that is, by positing their universal "catholic" relevance. This in effect negated the problem of the particularity of the letters and allowed a general consensus of apostolic doctrine to overshadow not only the contingent character of the gospel within the Pauline letters but also the specificity of the Pauline gospel among the other books of the New Testament.45 45

Ibid., pp. 26-27.

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The multiplicity of views within the New Testament can no longer be seen either as an obstacle for Christian theology or as a source of delight for industrious historians. Revelation in the New Testament does not come in a neat package of logical and systematic discourse. It comes to us in the shape of a recorded dialogue in which we are invited to join, not one that forces us to be mere recipients. The contingent character of the Pauline letters is directly important for historic exegesis. It does not preclude the use of these letters as authoritative for the modern Church, but it does imply indirectly that that authority functions in a dialogue, because it has never existed outside of a dialogue with rival positions within the Church. The primary authority attributed to Paul is not a timeless given for the Church, but a particular statement by the Church, defining herself in specific historical circumstances. In the era of canonization, the urgent need to find a common source for doctrinal definition presented itself as the basic premise on which the collection of Paul’s letters was formed in the first place and then inserted into the order of books. If both the internal evidence of the New Testament and the canon history show us how that dialogue was the producing factor of the Bible as we have it, we can no longer pretend to be recipients of a closed doctrinal or ethical system, we can also no longer ignore our creative responsibility for discernment. If this is true, of course, then the kind of “hindrance” that the traditional exegesis has experienced with Romans and Galatians can be addressed in two ways. Along the first route, we try to understand again what the historical circumstances were in which these letters originated. And that again we can do either by reconstructing those historical elements (audience, occasion, simultaneous developments) from the outside, as it were, using both our increased knowledge and informed hypotheses concerning the continuity between 3rd-century Judaism (Mishnah Judaism) and 1st-century Pharisaism, or by reconstructing the audience of Paul’s letters with the aid of the internal evidence of the text, i.e., we assume that the intended audience is more important than the empirical audience as “we” see it. We then reconstruct the meaning of Paul’s letters as if the Pauline corpus were a single entity that could be interpreted on its own without reference to the rest of the New Testament. This is of course necessary toward a description of

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the content of Paul’s letters. Only those relationships that are present in the text themselves can be used for understanding the text as it is. But we are seeking the normative contents of the New Testament as ethicists. That means that we must take Paul’s authority as apostle of Christ into account, which implies a concurrent reading of the available evidence about Jesus and using the whole of the New Testament canon as the “legal” context of Paul’s writings. That brings us to a second possible approach, which we will follow here. Along this second route, we may take the process that led from the empirical letter to the letters as doctrinal genre as providing us with a necessary hermeneutic key for doctrinal exegesis. We then deny validity to the image of Paul as it has emerged since the 2nd century, as well as transcend the exegetical image of Paul’s letters taken on their own, and try to work within the canon-history perspective that we have indicated with reference to the work of John Miller. That has profound consequences. Paul’s authority as an apostle is then made relative (1) by the insight Beker provided into the Church’s tendency to move away from the contextual and pastoral Paul of the 1st century to the teacher of doctrine of the 2nd century, which gives us our exegetical clue, and (2) by the insight Miller provided into the intentionality behind the canonization of Paul in the first place, which is the cornerstone of the way we read Paul’s ethics. The intention behind the antiMarcionite canon that makes Luke relative within the fourfold gospel and makes the Pauline corpus relative within the perspectives of James, Peter, and John, is then our most basic guideline. Only then can we prevent falling into the 16thcentury temptation of neo-Marcionitism, which was to reinstitute Paul as the champion of grace over against law, of evangelical freedom against Jewish obedience, etc., and only then can we avoid using Paul as the basic paradigm of New Testament hermeneutics. The internal evidence of Paul’s letters (Beker) and canon history (Miller) not only provide us with the basis for accepting the authority of Paul’s letters, but instigate a hermeneutic of dialogue that does not submit to Paulinism, but listens to other voices as well. The position obtained thereby cannot pretend to be new. It is in fact nothing but the kind of hermeneutical

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situation that is prescribed in the gospel of Matthew. We cannot go into the entire context of the verse, but there is one aspect that needs lifting out at the moment. In Matthew 18:18 we read: I tell you (plural) truly, whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. There are two meanings of “binding and loosing” to consider here. The one is directly connected to the context, where we find a description of the way to deal with brothers or sister who have sinned, Church discipline, in short. Binding then means withdrawing fellowship, and loosing means forgiveness. But the most obvious meaning is derived from the Aramaic equivalent, which is used to denote the outcome of Rabbinic consultations on matters of law. Binding then means to declare a rule valid, loosing means to declare an inference from the law as invalid or not applicable. Binding and loosing are directed toward a situation in which a law might apply, so we can use the word discernment in this technical sense to describe the whole process. The result of discernment is a halakah as an application of a general law to a specific (type of) situation, i.e., a rule that defines a way of life. And through the context of forgiveness and exclusion we might add: the rule also defines those who are covered by it and the community that follows it. In such discernment, a knowledge of what is right and wrong is presupposed, as is the source of that knowledge: the Torah, not simply the whole of scripture, but a part of it. Halakah also functions as a jurisprudence, a tradition of decisions that are passed along to later generations and form the background of a specific community that is bound by them. The objective of this binding and loosing is obviously forgiveness, i.e., the restoration of relationships that have been disturbed by sin and hurt. From this perspective, not only the continuing authority of the Torah can be surmised, which we will deal with in discussing Matthew, but also a specific status of scripture. The status that Matthew was given as part of the New Testament canon is incongruent with the status Matthew ascribes to scripture as such. The Torah functions in Matthew 18 as the constitution of the community, and that entire community has the right and duty to apply its precepts to resolve matters of sin and hurt, i.e., to dispense judgment on sin in order to provide restoration and

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forgiveness. Because its goal is forgiveness and restoration, it is obvious that such a community, conditioned by the fact that it is assembled in the name of Christ, implying His presence both as the ultimate authority and the hermeneutical key for discernment, is as such the locus of this ethical discernment. The forming of halakah, which Judaism relegated to the rabbis as an intellectual task and to the people to accept or ignore, and thereby shaping it in practice, has now been given as a conscious task to the entire community assembled under the conditions mentioned and aspiring to the goal indicated. If Matthew, who belongs to the canon, defines what authoritative scripture can be as Torah, it thereby implicitly defines its own status with regard to ethics as being part of the “inspired” discernment of the Church. This passage, then, gives us a clear view on what scriptural authority may and may not be. Certainly Matthew’s Jesus affirms the eternal validity of the law, as we have seen. Jesus’ interpretation not only radicalizes the law, but it also radicalizes the processes of its application. The completion of the law that is the core essence of Jesus’ fulfillment of it also comprises this change in the relationship between the Torah as constitution and the people of God who are governed by it. The development of the status of Paul’s letters, from apostolic missionary to canonical authority, brought with it a decisive shift in hermeneutical framework. Having been placed into a canonical narrative framework in opposition to Marcion, it gained inspired authority and doctrinal status. After that, to a degree Paulinism was restored, and the final sequence of letters, placing Romans behind Acts, and adding James and others at the back of the collection, made Paul into the primary apostle again, in a historical framework in which Paul could be seen as the doctrinal center. All of this tended to strengthen doctrinal interest in Paul to the detriment of his ethical teachings, and it certainly changed the ecclesiological setting in which Matthew, and to an extent Acts, had placed apostolic authority, and made it into an equivalent of imperial power. To understand Paul in an ethical setting without destroying the apostolicity of his writings must therefore mean: to reconstruct the original dialogue within the Church as the background of Paul’s writings, and to view the different voices in the New Testament not as a hindrance to unity but as its basic mode.

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The canonicity of the letters provides us after all with an ambiguous concept: doctrinal authority with regard to and dependent upon the present situation of the Church, and an inspired status only as secondary commentary in the form of spirit-guided discernment on the absolute source of revelation: the Torah.

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3. Outline of the argument of Galatians We found in the letter of James that a part of Christianity had no reservations about the validity of the Torah and used it as a standard for Christian ethics. The letter obviously opposes the notion that, for Christians at least, the law has been abrogated. If we accept an early date for the letter, it must have been written in close proximity to the letter of Galatians, both around A.D. 50.46 But there seems to be quite a gap between these two apostolic messages! Even if we come to the conclusion that James is a late addition to the corpus of New Testament literature, we still have to accept that there was an intention behind the canon to provide a counterweight to Paulinism by its addition. Again, canon history provides us with a clue as to how the letter should be approached. If that is so, its anti-Paulinist intention must assume even greater importance, because that was part of the reason for its inclusion. We must turn now to the other end of the scale and discuss the letter of Paul that seems to ground the notion of the complete rejection of the law. In this paragraph we will provide a general overview of the letter, which we will later discuss in as much detail as is necessary for our purposes. From the beginning, Paul stresses in this letter that his gospel was not a human interpretation, but was based on a revelation of Jesus Christ as if “apostolate and gospel [were] interlocking realities” (Gal. 1:12).47 The experience of his conversion, or rather the experience of his commissioning, is vital to the understanding of this status of the gospel.48 It also implies that 46

James is given that date on the assumption that closeness to the gospels, the simplicity of Church organization, the simplicity of the author’s selfintroduction, and the lack of reference to other issues are arguments in favor of an early dating, despite the fact that the letter is written in literary Greek and was accepted fairly late into the canon (cf. Richardson [1997], p. 41). Galatians is dated around 49 on the assumption that it must fit into the timeline of Acts, which implies its having been written before the Jerusalem Council (cf. Dunn [1993], p. 8). 47 J.C. Beker, Paul (1980), pp. 42-43. 48

Commission is a better word than conversion, even though Paul’s transformation from enemy of the gospel to its prime advocate serves as a

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the authorities that his opponents in Galatia are referring to were not the source of his message (1:17). Still, in all respects Paul is like a true apostle, as is demonstrated by his success (1:23, 24) and by the analogies between his experience and those of the other apostles (1:18, the hint at a three year period of being instructed by Christ). The historical situation of the letter is of great importance to an understanding of its doctrinal intent, as has been stressed by Dunn and others. We must first reconstruct the audience Paul had in mind and the problem he was trying to address. Beker reconstructed the argument of Paul’s opponents as follows: [It] runs along the following lines: You Galatians were gentiles when, through the gospel which Paul preached, you turned to Christ. This turning away from idols and the "elemental spirits of the universe" (Gal. 4:3, 9) is an important first step. It is like the step gentiles take when they turn from idols to the God of Israel and attach themselves as semi-proselytes or God-fearers to the synagogue. However, do not mistake the first step for the end of the road (Gal. 3:3). Paul misled you when he told you that your new status as sons of God in Christ depends on faith alone.49 If that is what Paul had said, it was misleading indeed. As we have seen in the letter of James, for earliest Christianity, and in model for the conversion of gentiles in the sense that here, too, the Spirit leads to an awareness of the presence of the risen Christ. But Paul, in truth, was not converted to another religion, but experienced a change in his view on the status of the gentiles after Jesus as the Messiah had been resurrected. Cf. James D.G. Dunn (1993), p. 3. His own description of the status of being an apostle differs completely from that of Luke in Acts. To be a witness to the resurrected Christ as an apostle was possible for those who had witnessed during Christ’s life and had been authorized by Christ in their positions, with Matthias becoming an apostle as the successor of Judas in Acts 1 and being authorized through an act of the Spirit. Paul’s apostolate necessarily entails the notion of being commissioned and being a witness to the resurrection, but it does not comply with the first two conditions. But Matthias’s election also refers to a primacy of the Spirit in these matters: the resurrected Christ continues to have the authority He had on earth, and Paul is vigorous in defending on that grounds the equal status of his apostolate. 49 J.C. Beker (1980), pp. 42-43.

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keeping with the gospel of Matthew, e.g., it was taken for granted that obedience to God in the eschatological age did not mean a change in the contents of that obedience. I.e., the Torah remained in full force. It merely meant using the Torah in a different perspective, with an understanding of the nature of the final days, when gentiles and Jews both would share in the gift of the Spirit and experience the new Covenant of Jeremiah 31. That is an opportunistic misconstruction of the gospel and short-circuits its full implications. You realize—of course— that our Christ was the Messiah promised to the people of Israel, the true sons of Abraham. Jesus Christ is indeed the messianic fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, and therefore the promise pertains to those who belong to the people of Israel. It does not mean that gentiles are excluded from the promise: They can participate in the full blessings promised to Abraham if they join the people of the promise. When Paul opposes the Torah and Christ, he is not only wrong but also opportunistic, because he wants to make it religiously and sociologically easy for gentiles to become Christians in order to enhance his apostolic grandeur. 50 Apart from the accusations against Paul and the distrust of his motives, the portrayal of Paul opposing Christ and Torah seems to be right, if it means that the boundaries the Torah had set to separate Jewish existence from the pagan world were abolished by Paul for the gentile believers in Christ. This would imply also that Paul’s opponents in Galatia were not following James in his decision to allow the gentiles to remain as they are. Or, if they were, their argument against Paul would have to be reconstructed differently. Perhaps they had been saying that the gentiles, including Peter, had not lived according to the Noachian set of rules that was agreed upon in Antioch. As could have been the case in many such conflicts, Paul would then be overstating his opponent’s argument to bring out a major principle more forcefully. If that is so, we have the peculiar situation that Paul, who, according to Acts 15, had 50

Ibidem

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agreed, or had at least been present when an agreement was reached about the Noachian law, would have opposed that same element in the preaching of his Jewish-Christian opponents in Galatia, because it became connected to an emphasis on the possibility that gentiles could accept circumcision and go beyond the limitations of the Noachian status. If he was going to prevent circumcision’s becoming a stumbling block for gentile conversion, he had to oppose the Jewish-Christian gospel where it stretched the limits of the Antioch agreement, and perhaps he even passively accepted the wish of Noachians to convert fully to Judaism. It is simply false that gentiles can remain participants in pagan society without the "yoke of the Torah." The Torah and Christ cohere, because it is only within the realm of the Torah that the promise is fulfilled in Christ. To be sure, the observance of the Torah does not mean the observance of all its statutes and ordinances (cf. "the whole law": Gal. 5:3, 14; 6:13). Although Jesus Christ, the Messiah, acknowledged their validity, they have been fulfilled by him in his death for us. Nevertheless, "Torah-keeping" means the obligation to become a member of the Jewish people and therefore circumcision marks your entrance into the line of salvation-history that started with Abraham and finds its fulfillment in Christ. The Torah then, has primarily salvation-historical significance;51 it assures your participation in Christ by placing you in the correct salvation-historical scheme.52 As for this latter issue: it seems obvious that Paul understood his opponents to see the Torah as part of salvation history. But did they? Is it not more obvious that they considered the Torah to be part of the blessings of the new age for Jew and non-Jew 51

That this emphasis on salvation as a function of the proposed keeping of the law is an unnecessary hypothesis is evident from Dunn’s reading of Paul’s opponents: “In short, the letter makes clearest and fullest sense if we see it as a response to a challenge from Christian-Jewish missionaries who had come to Galatia to improve or correct Paul’s gospel and to ‘complete’ his converts by integrating them fully into the heirs of Abraham through circumcision and by thus bringing them ‘under the law’.” James D.G. Dunn (1993), p. 11. 52 J.C. Beker (1980), p. 44.

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alike? In the letter of James, the Torah is never mentioned as a source of redemption, but obedience to it is still required as the self-evident necessity of life in faithful obedience to Christ’s rule. Part of Beker’s description of Paul’s opponents rests on the assumption that every emphasis Paul made is a precise counter-measure against an exaggeration or distortion on their part. Is it possible that Paul deliberately misrepresented his opponent’s viewpoint? We can only guess, of course, but we cannot rule out that Paul’s opponents were not demanding circumcision as a prerequisite for salvation, but were merely offering that possibility to non-Jewish converts who already had accepted the Noachide law. They might have argued along the lines Beker gives here in setting up full Jewishness as a completed conversion. But on the basis of Torah and their understanding of the gospel, they might have argued that the non-Jewish Christians could be part of the Church by accepting the Noachian Code for themselves, which would also have settled the issue of table communion between the two groups. To these Jewish Christians, therefore, the Noachian Code was still the minimum requirement, to which circumcision and entrance into Israel was a good follow-up. To Paul, however, it seemed to have been the maximum, and going beyond it was highly dangerous. Paul’s gospel was not only based upon a revelatory and personal experience of conversion, but it was also in its contents a new revelation (2:2). It involved the idea that gentiles who converted would not have to, or indeed should not, be circumcised; in other words, that the gospel could reach the gentiles without their having to become Jews. Those who maintained that gentiles should be circumcised are called “false brethren” from the start (2:4). Since Titus was not forced to be circumcised when Paul was in Jerusalem, apparently all agreed on this. But the issue went beyond circumcision alone. In Antioch the issue deepened into the question of under what conditions table fellowship could exist between Jewish Christians and believers from the nations. Apparently Peter had been eating with the gentiles without using any of the special provisions that 1st-century Judaism would use in such a case, with the probable exception of pagan idolatrous rites. (On the arrival of emissaries from Jerusalem who are identified as disciples of James, Peter withdraws from these meals. Paul

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sees in this the implication that gentiles should follow Jewish law in this respect, and if they do not, Jewish Christians would have to withdraw from the communal meals. To Paul, this meant that justification still would have had something to do with specific commandments under the principle of law, and he interprets these as in contradiction to the gospel of Christ (2:16). The issue of the conditions of communion between Christians of Jewish and pagan descent was therefore seen as a practical test case of the reality of the gospel. The concept of justification, of being righteous, defines also to which community you belong. If justification is partly determined by law, then circumcision and dietary laws define the boundary between the just and the impious. If Christ is the measure, then such “works of the law” are no longer in effect. Then Jews and gentiles really have become one people, one Body of Christ. This historic occasion and its immediate consequences for the issue of table fellowship now gives rise to a prolonged argument about the relevance of the law, now that Christ has come. Paul states as his major principle that the law actually condemned me to death, and having died, I am resurrected with Christ so that he lives in me. All therefore is based upon grace, and the law can have no say in determining what righteousness is. A second argument opens chapter 3. If the Galatians already experienced the fruits of the new era through the infusion of the Holy Spirit, they should remember that the life in the Spirit they had been given was not earned by any kind of obedience to commandments of any sort. Circumcision does not grant the Spirit. Furthermore, the Torah states exactly the same principle when it states that Abraham was justified through his faith, and this was connected with the promise to bless all the nations. So Abrahamic faith was received by the gentiles through Christ, who sets them free from the law. And yet another argument is brought forward: the law demands obedience and grants life on condition of that obedience. Yet nobody can say he is justified on the basis of law, we are cursed because we did not obey, and besides, the prophet Habakkuk states clearly that the “just will live by faith” (2:4). How can we therefore become free from the curse of the law, and on what is this faith based? The link is in the fact that

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Christ, who is the object of our faith, became cursed under the law. But He was resurrected as a sign of God’s approval of His life, an argument which is not here, but can be adduced from Rom. 1:4. And this life of Christ beyond the cross is, through the Spirit, a reality within me (2:20). So by our participating in the event of Christ, the curse is lifted and the blessing of Abraham is bestowed upon gentiles. This raises questions about the function of the law. First of all, Paul defends the idea that the promise to Abraham was given before the law and was not annulled through the giving of the law. So why was the law given? It was intended to prepare for the coming of Christ by making clear that man had transgressed it. By showing that all men are under sin, the law showed the necessity of redemption on the basis of faith. The coming of the reality of faith annulled this function of the law (3:25). This also shows that man’s status is changed from being enslaved under law to being freed in Christ; we are sons and heirs to the promise. To try to remain obedient to the law while in this new condition is a paradox. The law makes it clear that the reality of being under the law is expressed in the birth of Isaac: born from the free woman Sarah, out of God’s power and promise. By reducing the Torah to the institution of law, Israel has in fact changed God’s intention, as if it were not Isaac, but Ishmael, and not Sarah, but Hagar who is the real metaphor of the covenant of the promise. This view of the law as demanding slave-like obedience and as defining the status of men by circumcision and works is therefore actually a distortion of its intention and function. If we as believers accept the law after Christ has come with the intention of adding to the righteousness of God revealed through it and made effective through the Spirit, we in fact remove ourselves from the sphere of grace (Gal. 5:4). We then pledge allegiance to an institution that is proven to be without efficacy. Righteousness, given by God, lies in a faith that works through love. Such a life is not without ethics. We are to serve each other through love, for in that unselfish service to others the demand of the law is actually fulfilled. A life in the Spirit will produce a behavior that is in harmony with the kingdom of God. The law

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cannot add to but only detract from the reality of such a life (5:18, 23). So when read like this, we can conclude that, to Paul, the “ethics” of Christianity had become decisively different from the Jewish matrix out of which it originated. Salvation in Christ meant (1) the abolition of the boundary markers between Jew and gentile, (2) the abrogation of the demands of the law as such, and (3) the institution in its place of the presence and indwelling of the Spirit that grasps the believer from within and brings forth a fruit of salvation. The latter is then better expressed in a Stoic lists of virtues and proper behavior than in citing the commandments from Torah. Let us now look into the letter with more attention to detail to see what all of this means.

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4. The Antioch incident Paul’s letter to the Galatians must then be the starting point of our inquiry into the relationship between justification and sanctification. In this letter, written at the latest around 54-55 to Christian assemblies in Galatia (the area to the south of Ankara in present Turkey), Paul mentions justification seven times: once in opposition to justification by works of the law (1:16), three times in opposition to righteousness under the law (2:21; 3:11-12; 3:24-25), and once in a reference to future redemption (5:5). The letter has been considered a “charter of freedom” (C. Kruse), as a description of the Spirit’s work beyond any law (Zuurmond), “one of the most important religious documents of mankind” (D. H. Betz) that “helped shape the character and self-perception of early Christianity, both in terms of its fundamental principles and in relation to the Jewish matrix from which Christianity emerged” (Dunn).53 Nowhere else is the connection between justification and the role of (a different) ethics so clearly stated as here. Nevertheless, the letter presents us with major difficulties. The exact nature of the “Antioch Incident” that plays a major role in the introduction of the letter is difficult to assess, yet its meaning is of the utmost importance. It not only shows to what historical situation the doctrine was related, a situation that provides part of its necessity and logic, but it also shows that Paul’s solutions represented at that time only a minority view in the early Church; one that very rapidly, however, became the dominant one. It is not unusual for Paul to take his incentive to write from a specific “pastoral” and historical situation; in fact, as Beker shows, Paul’s thinking is highly contextual, even in letters that have been traditionally portrayed as doctrinal.54 This is certainly the case in Galatians. Apparently the newly founded Galatian congregations had received visitors from Palestinian congregations, maybe even from James’s Jerusalem Church, or perhaps from gentile Christian missionaries who wanted to 53 54

James D.G. Dunn (1993), p. 2. Betz is quoted there as well. J.C. Beker (1980), pp. 37ff.

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stay closer to Palestinian Christianity.55 If they were sent by James, that in itself cannot have been a rare occurrence because there is ample evidence of a large Jewish population there. According to the terms of the agreement in Jerusalem, Paul would have a free hand in his mission to the gentiles, without interference from the Jerusalem Church. This leaves us with the question of who these “Judaizers” were that tried to influence the Galatian Churches. Whoever they were, it is obvious what they tried to do in Paul’s estimate: they wanted to convince the Galatians that they needed to be circumcised and keep the Mosaic law to complete their conversion to Christ. In order to convince the Galatians, they even spoke disparagingly about Paul’s status as apostle and questioned his authority and sincerity. So Paul had to defend himself against charges that his apostolate was of men, i.e., false (1:1-2:14), against the opinion that circumcision and keeping the law were necessary for Christians of gentile origin (2:15-5:12), a matter that takes up the bulk of the letter, and to speak out in favor of Christian freedom as a way of life in the Spirit that went beyond compliance with the law but could still be considered a way of obedience (5:13-6:18). The historical circumstances of the Antioch incident are now skillfully used by Paul, perhaps to set it up as an analogy with the situation the Galatians were in, but primarily to defend his own authority. The Galatian Churches had been established by Paul’s preaching (1:8), but they were hearing a different interpretation of the gospel. So the issue of Paul’s authority had to be raised. Paul insists that they were hearing an “other,” a twisted, and even a “deviating” (2x) gospel. The gospel he had brought to them was not an interpretation of a tradition he had received but a revelation of Jesus Christ (1:12). Paul boasts that after his encounter with a risen Christ on his way to Damascus, he had no contact with the apostles in Jerusalem but went to Damascus by way of Arabia, where he spent an approximate three years in preparation for his mission. These three years in Arabia with a risen Lord apparently are meant to outweigh the unmentioned three years the apostles in 55

James D.G. Dunn excludes this possibility by arguing that Paul refers to the troublemakers always in the third person, whereas he would include them in his 2nd-person address if they had been part of his gentile Church. Dunn (1993), p. 9, n. 1.

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Jerusalem had spent with Christ on earth. So full weight is given to his apostolic authority in presenting the correct gospel to them. Here we encounter our first problem, and we need to go into this in order to appreciate the specific character of this letter and the weight we ought to give to its doctrinal contents. If we take the account of Luke in Acts to be more trustworthy in a historic sense, all of this must be a deliberate exaggeration on Paul’s part, since verses 3 and 8 of Acts 9 inform us differently. Here it is stated that Paul saw Christ near Damascus and, being blinded for three days as a result, he was brought by his companions to Damascus without delay. Acts 9:19b intends us to marvel at the power of the Spirit that made Paul such an effective witness after having spent only a few days with Ananias and the other disciples in Damascus. That of course in itself raises doubt as to the nature of the account in Acts. It remains puzzling that Luke tried to set up Paul’s authority in this manner, while he contradicts the evidence of Paul’s own letter which by the time of his (Luke’s) writing had been around for some thirty years. After what was again a relatively short period of time, Paul went to Jerusalem and with the help of Barnabas gained access to the circle of disciples there. Paul then returned to Tarsus, where he is later found by Barnabas and sent to Antioch for a year. So when Paul states that he went to Jerusalem after three years, this either contradicts Luke’s rendering of events in Acts or it is an apparent exaggeration by Paul to enhance the idea that his gospel was independent and based on private revelation only. However, Acts was written about 30 years after the letter to the Galatians, and the contents of the letter were probably known to Luke. Did Luke think his account of the Damascus Episode was in harmony with that of Paul in Galatians (cf. Acts 11:25, 26)? In general it can be maintained that, to Luke, the doctrine of justification was one of the most important teachings of Paul. Some have argued that this is the reason this doctrine is set in the context of Paul’s Antioch sermon in Acts 13:38ff. One of Luke’s intentions could have been to show the continuity between Jesus and Paul by putting

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Pauline doctrine into Jesus’ mouth.56 And this device again is an early element of the tendency to make Paul into the one and only apostle who spoke with divine authority about all issues that the Church faced. Luke therefore makes Paul’s gospel, independent of circumstance, the epitome of Christ’s gospel in the fact that it reached Rome, supported by the Jerusalem apostles. Having stated the divine origin and authority of his gospel, Paul goes on to show that the Jerusalem apostles accepted his apostolate and agreed with his mission to the gentiles. On the basis of a revelation (which may either refer to his going to Jerusalem or to the contents of his gospel), he explained his gospel to the gentiles. He approached the Jerusalem Congregation as a whole, and probably the Apostles separately. Paul then shows that the agreement was in full effect: Titus, born of a Greek father, did not need to have been circumcised as would someone under Jewish law and was not forced to become so, not even after “false brethren,” spies perhaps from the synagogue, or Pharisees who accepted Christianity, “slipped in” (RSV) to see to what degree the new messianic sect was abiding by the Mosaic law (2:4). In this instance pressure from the outside did not make the Church budge from its position. The point of the Titus-passage is obvious: someone who was not circumcised, though part of the new messianic movement and living in a Jewish environment, need not be circumcised at all, even when that failure to comply with Jewish law, for so it would have seemed to the Pharisaic party (Acts 15) or the Judaizers (Paul’s opponents in Galatia), and to the disciples of James (in Antioch, cf. Gal. 1), who most probably all held on to circumcision, brought difficulties along with it. Paul can thereby contend that he had never before preached circumcision, against his opponents’ apparent suggestions to the contrary. It would have made his life a lot easier if he had done so (5:11). The Jerusalem Church, Paul asserts, accepted his mission to the gentiles in such a way that Paul alone bore responsibility for it. Problems that would arise in the congregations founded 56

U. Luz quotes Lk. 10:29, 16:15; 18:9-14; 20:20. Cf. Ulrich Luz in Friedrich Rechtfertigung, p. 366.

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by his gospel would be his to deal with. His suggestion is that when these problems were in the area of circumcision, the Jerusalem Church, by not demanding circumcision for Titus, clearly showed that no enforcement of Jewish law was necessary for those in the jurisdiction of Paul’s apostolate. This led to a problem when non-Jews had been converted by missionaries from the Jerusalem Church or when Jews were converted by Paul’s mission. gentiles would be circumcised by James and expected to keep the commandments, whereas Jews, converted by Paul, would become de-Judaized. The status of Jewish-Christian proselytes and Christian Jews was therefore uncertain. gentiles were being pushed into Israel, and Jews were being severed from their Jewish ties. In the Antioch incident, the consequence of this separation of missionary fields becomes obvious when the two parties (Paul and James) meet. Peter came to Antioch and ate with the gentiles in some form of table fellowship. Apparently Peter dropped all Jewish restraints in order to do so, because Paul later refers to it with the term “livest as the nations” (2:14). That seems to exclude the possibility, mentioned by Tomson, that Peter conformed to an already established halakah that enabled Jews to eat with gentiles, even if the latter still practiced idolatrous rites.57 For if Peter had eaten with them on the basis of halakah, that would not have constituted a breach of his Jewish way of life, and the only thing remaining would have been a dispute with the party of James about the proper contents of the halakah. Tomson’s position would also need to presuppose that James’s party favored the most rigid interpretation of Jewish law, which seems improbable if we remember that, whatever their Jewish positions were, they were Christians and already acquainted with the notion of the gentiles entering the covenant. So Peter’s eating with the gentiles apparently occurred outside of Jewish halakah and in a situation in which his gentile hosts did nothing to alleviate the problems of idolatry and impurity that arose for a Jew in such a situation. As Tomson states: “...the libation ritual undoubtedly performed by his gentile host would not affect the Jewish wine he would be drinking.” That would be the case for the specific lenient halakah that prescribed the use of separate tables, the 57

P. Tomson, Paul, 232.

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handling of the wine for the Jews by Jews only, and other measures of separation. It was of course no problem if the Jew was the host. But the libation ritual in itself must have remained a problem in all circumstances, especially if it occurred in the setting of the Lord’s supper. As we are informed in 1 Cor. 11:17-43, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated most often in the context of an ordinary meal. So we must conclude that Peter did indeed drop all of his Jewish restraints and really “acted like the gentiles.” The consequence of that will be seen in the following. When members of the party of James arrive in Antioch, Peter stops eating with gentiles. Paul states that Peter did this out of fear for the circumcised, i.e., the Christian Jews. Paul’s discontent with this act shines through forcefully in his statement that “he [Peter] did not walk straightforwardly according to the gospel.” This is a momentous statement! If Peter did indeed act completely according to gentile custom and disregarded the specific conditions of Jewish halakah for communion with gentiles, adopted by the Jerusalem council, this was the situation that Paul would refer to as “walk[ing] straightforwardly according to the gospel.” Paul’s objection is therefore not motivated by the decision to separate the missionary fields, but by the fact that the one gospel, as he saw it, should extend its freedom from the law to Jewish as well as gentile believers, including the restrictions of table fellowship.58 Peter’s non-compliance with a prescription of Jewish law that made a visible provision for communion between Jew and gentile, thereby in principle accepting their distinct identity, is set up as an example of Christian behavior for those out of the circumcision! In the same vein, Peter’s compliance with Jewish law after the men from James have entered the scene sends the message that circumcision and keeping the law are prerequisites for communion. That’s why Paul can interpret Peter’s action as his wanting to Judaize the gentiles, to make them submit to the Jewish way of life. 58

Is it possible that to Peter his vision in Acts 10:9-16 not only meant that gentiles were able to receive the Spirit but also that food laws were abrogated? Though the vision refers to the impurity of gentiles, now declared pure by God, by means of the analogy with pure and impure foods, it is possible that it also implied a change from the foods being declared impure to being pure; i.e., the terms of the analogy possibly share in the transformation of what they refer to.

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It is not clear, however, that this is what the emissaries of James really had in mind. After all, they did not force Titus to be circumcised, and the issue here is only that of table fellowship. If the host was a Jew, there was no problem of gentiles participating, so in Jerusalem there might have been no practical problem whatsoever. It is Paul who sees this consequence: if Christian Jews are going to abide by Jewish law and impose conditions on table fellowship with gentiles, this implies that gentiles should become Jews. What Paul had in mind was a Church without inner boundaries between Jews and gentiles, and the only way he thought he could reach it was by removing Jewish restrictions on fellowship with Christian gentiles. We do not think Paul’s mind was set against the halakah in itself, but against the practical implication of the halakah that a gentile Christian must still be considered to be impure according to the reasoning of Jewish law. To alleviate that, James had probably introduced the adoption of the Noachide code, giving gentile Christians the status of the ger toshav. It is not clear whether the resident alien was allowed to handle Jewish wine or was trusted enough to be left alone with the wine or prepare Jewish meals. But how does this incident relate to the matter of forced circumcision for gentile believers? If it is only a matter of table fellowship, it serves as an illustration of the general attitude of Paul towards institutions in Judaism, and the prohibition of eating with gentiles is treated just like the institution of circumcision. And if it could be shown that Peter disregarded the prohibition in order to have fellowship with gentiles, then it is obvious that he would also have to accept that circumcision was not to be imposed on gentile believers.59 So it seems to us that Paul was extending his law-free gospel to include Jews. And by default, if Jews were no longer under the law, then gentiles need not submit to it either. So we must conclude that the Antioch incident showed that Peter had adapted to pagan customs that crossed the boundaries of Judaism, while it was James and his emissaries who kept the Jerusalem agreement in the sense that they maintained the validity of the Jewish law 59

This is of course also the way Jesus was reported to have behaved himself in order to convert Jewish sinners. Cf. Mark 2:16; Matth. 11:19.

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for Christian Jews, and so they expected Peter to conform to that principle as well. It is unclear whether James would have accepted the lenient view that allowed Jews and gentiles to eat together in specific circumstances that were already permitted by provisions of Jewish halakah. To Paul, however, Peter’s violation of Jewish law seemed unimportant, or rather, it motivated him to state what must have been to him the common principle of Peter’s act of eating with gentiles outside of Jewish law and the ultimate consequence of Paul’s gospel. In the more recent literature very different pictures of this incident are given. Tomson has argued that the Antioch incident showed a difference of opinion between Peter and Paul, on the one hand, and James, on the other, concerning a matter of Jewish law. Peter and Paul would side with those more lenient teachers in Israel who accepted that it was possible for Jews to eat and drink with gentiles. First of all, their eating together could not constitute a breach of purity laws because outside of Palestine no issue of general purity could emerge, seeing that all Jews outside of Israel were already ritually impure and had to submit to a cleansing ritual before they could enter the temple on their return. Secondly, there were ways to circumvent the prohibition of table fellowship with regard to idolatry and food laws. A Jew could drink his own wine at a meal served by his gentile host, even if the latter did perform a ritual libation to his pagan deity, if that wine was not handled by gentiles and was drunk at a separate table. One could serve kosher foods or refrain from serving foods forbidden to Jews. James would then be the one to argue the more restrictive view that all such common meals with a gentile host were forbidden on account of idolatry.60 On the arrival of James’s emissaries, Peter would have felt their criticism and withdrawn from table fellowship. Notwithstanding the impressive display of knowledge and insight that Tomson presents us with, we are not fully convinced by his arguments. If he is right, Peter still could have been following an acceptable Jewish halakah in his meals with gentiles. But if that is the case, why would Paul have called his previous actions: living according to heathen ways? We would 60

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Peter Tomson, Paul, pp. 222-235

then need to know why Paul was dissatisfied with this halakah from Jerusalem that seems to be in full accordance with James’s position in the Jerusalem Apostles’ Conventicle. Tomson describes the issue like this: The whole sentence is charged with rhetoric and functions as a power center of Paul’s argument against forced circumcision in Galatia. It does not describe Peter’s diet but the liberal attitude towards the gentile brethren in which he used to be at one with Paul, vis-à-vis Antioch but more so Galatia. At this point the representatives of James disagreed, and Paul seems to rhetorically adopt their speech, “live like a gentile.” The sentence may then be paraphrased: “Before, you agreed to live and eat as a Jew together with the gentiles, and although some call that ’living like a gentile’,why do you now separate and wish to eat with them only if they become Jews?” This interpretation concurs with our analysis of Paul’s report on the Jerusalem agreement: the agreement was based on mutual trust in view of Paul’s law-free gospel to the gentiles and Peter’s law-abiding one for the Jews. The conclusion is that here Paul does not urge Peter to join him again in a non-Jewish way of life. On the contrary: he urges for a Jewish life which does not force gentiles to Judaize, in line with the agreement. Tomson’s solution necessitates an explanation of the expression “live like a gentile” as without its plain force, and even inaccurate as to Peter’s real position. It would imply that Paul would use the language of the Pharisaic party (“though some call that”) to describe and even exaggerate Peter’s position. But there is no necessity to infer that from the text itself. The context might in general give us the opportunity to establish the force of an idiomatic expression, but in this case, it is the expression itself that must aid us in determining the context. To Paul, we might infer, the sharing of meals with gentiles, even under the more lax of Pharisaic provisions, constituted a step in the right direction. If Peter had already consented to eat with gentile Christians, surely he could take the next step of letting go of all forms of separation between

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Jews and gentiles. Furthermore, Tomson’s approach changes the nature of the conflict in such a way that it becomes almost unintelligible in the light of the rest of the letter. The dispute is then not about being free from the law, but about conflicting ways of being true to the law, which is not in accordance with the main thrust of the letter. It is difficult to accept that the proposed rereading of the Antioch incident has the force to change the contents of chapters 3 to 5 on its own merits. The halakhic incident that Tomson reconstructed, that serves as the starting point of Paul’s analysis is in his treatment of it transformed into the actual topic of the letter, requiring us, on this insecure basis, to relativize other statements that refer on their own to an abolition of the law. Let us first examine the issue itself again. If Peter was participating according to a Jewish Halakah that made table fellowship possible but maintained the restrictions for Jews in a visible way, how could his action be taken to imply that all gentile believers should Judaize? In such a case his previous actions would have accorded with a strict observance of Jewish law, and James’s emissaries would have had to accept that. And why would James have objected to that, seeing that the reported agreement in Jerusalem was intended to make such table fellowship possible? Peter would then have been acting in conformity with James’s basic opinion that the difference between Jew and gentile could not be erased within the Church, though they might differ on the degree and means of their separation. If, on the contrary, he acted completely like his gentile hosts, with disregard for the Noachide conventions, and then afterwards acted completely as a Jew once more, this would indeed have been an affront to James’s emissaries and would have had the implication that Paul ascribes to it. The change in his attitude, then, has the force of a statement vis-à-vis the Christians of gentile origin. Finally, the insertion of the passage makes more sense if Peter’s attitude is similar, in Paul’s view, to that of the Judaizers who are his main opponents in the matter. After all, if even Peter was set free from the law and showed this by abandoning ritual and/or food purity, this case should make a stronger argument with a view to Paul’s later

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reasoning about the abrogation of the law as a principle of life than does a mere statement that James and Peter conflicted about a provision of the law. James Dunn, who advocates the idea that the issue here is focused on “identity markers,” must also presuppose that Paul’s saying of Peter that he walked according to gentile ways, reflects the viewpoint of the Jamesian party rather than his own. But it is far less complicated to see it, with Kruse, as a neutral description: first Peter accepted gentile customs, which implied fellowship beyond the law, and by retreating re-erected the boundaries that denied fellowship outside the provisions of the law. Furthermore, as G. Kruse has pointed out, Paul continues his statements about the law by speaking of “dying to the law,” which seems to indicate something more than a difference of opinion about its application (Kruse, 68). Dunn argues, on p.131 under (2), that: Despite the protests of some, “to live like a gentile” need not mean a complete abandonment of the law. Once again we are probably confronted with factional language: “living like a gentile” was the accusation which one sect within Judaism would throw at another which denied or disputed its halakhot (as infix. 6.32-35 and Pss. Sol. 8.13). From the perspective of the men from James, the modest level of law-observance in the table fellowship at Antioch was tantamount to abandoning the law altogether; the Jewish believers at Antioch were already too far down the slippery slope to complete apostasy. To maintain table fellowship at a level governed, say, by the conventions later regularized in the “Noachide laws” (Gen. 9:3, 4), was quite inadequate for a child of Abraham, a member of the covenant people governed by the law of the covenant as distinct from the other nations. “Need not mean” and “probably” are the key words here. Dunn wants to find a Jewish faction that insisted upon Judaizing the gentiles in this incident because the remainder of the letter is directed against Judaizers, at least against those who favored circumcision for gentiles. But the incident in itself is not about circumcision, which would imply a clear-cut issue of being in or

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out of Israel. It is about Peter’s “living like a gentile,” i.e., his giving up the relatively moderate distinctions between Jewish and gentile Christians that the Jerusalem Church expected to be maintained in deference to Paul, and then re-adopting them after James’s emissaries arrived. That means that Peter must have gone beyond the apostolic agreement of Jerusalem, and James’ emissaries would have been right to oppose him, remember that the letter presupposes an agreement on this issue, at least with regard to the distinction of missionary fields , especially if it concerned the prohibition of libations and non-kosher foods that even the semi-proselytes would have wanted to obey. So it must be concluded that Paul overstated the Antioch incident on purpose. To him, the relatively moderate demands of the Jamesians had implications that went beyond the letter of the agreement. To thwart what may have seemed in Paul’s eyes a growing reluctance to accept gentiles without circumcision, a reluctance perhaps furthered by growing opposition from the Jewish side, Paul comes to insist upon a gospel that departs completely from affirmation of Israel’s status as the people of God. So the function of the incident within the letter is to show Peter’s acceptance of the Pauline gospel of complete freedom of the law for both Jew and gentile, and the explanation of his attitude towards James as a matter of fear! So Paul’s message is clear: if the Galatians would accept circumcision, their only motivation would be fear, not the intent of the gospel. Dunn has argued the case, in an article called “The Incident at Antioch” (1980), that the expression “live like a gentile” did not only mean: live without any observance of the law, but could also comprise relative laxity, e.g., in the shape of the Noachide lifestyle vs. the Sinaitic lifestyle. On the other hand, the expression “to live like a Jew” is also interpreted as a relative term: not to live according to a well-defined set of rules, but rather to be “more” observant as opposed to less observant. But the issue cannot be settled in this manner: even if we would suppose that Paul did not accuse Peter of first having lived completely without law and now returning to the orthodox extreme; even if Paul merely meant to say that Peter had returned to a more Judaized way of life that made the breaking of communion with Antiochian gentiles necessary, the point is

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that Paul attacks Peter on the principle that the gospel makes the issue of obedience to law irrelevant, and he implies that any observance of principles of the law as a basis for making distinctions projects a message to the gentile Christians that they are not acceptable. The Jerusalem Conference, on the other hand, obviously accepts the application of Jewish law and enforces the acceptance of Noachide rules (forbidding idolatry of any sort as defined in Jewish doctrine), and thus it arrives at an intermediate position. We do not know what the party of James was responding to and how they responded. But under the terms of Acts 15, taking that as a previous event, James would have been right if the Antioch gentile Christians were not keeping the Noachide commandments that were commanded them, and if the Jewish Christians there did nothing to change that situation. If gentile Christians were in the majority in Antioch, they might have celebrated with Peter the fact that they were freed even of the minor commandments that were applied to them as semiproselytes, and so they would fall under the minimum requirements of the Jerusalem Council. It is mainly because of the apparent disobedience to the Jerusalem decision that is described here that we have argued for the possibility that the letter to the Galatians predates the Jerusalem Council and provides a plausible cause for it to happen in the first place. It seems clear that Peter’s response to James’s emissaries was prompted by the legitimacy of their claim that the manner in which he dined with gentiles constituted an act of idolatry which was in fact covered by the Noachide commandments. Peter’s fear of the circumcised is better explained by the presence of a real case for this allegation than merely his deviation from a minority view within Pharisaic Rabbinism or a Pharisaic faction within the Church. It can be ruled out, though, that the issue was particularly that of the Lord’s Supper, and that in Antioch Jews and gentiles did not share a meal at all apart from that, because the issue of the purity of the wine and the presence of pagan ritual before its use would have become urgent in that case, since the Lord’s supper meant in effect ”sharing one table.” The subterfuge of separate tables and separate wine was not enough in such a case. But if 1 Cor. 10:14-22 portrays Paul’s position accurately, he would undoubtedly have agreed

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with James, and he certainly would have considered libation practice around the Lord’s Supper as idolatrous.

any

So our conclusion must be that Paul showed that Peter, in accordance with “the” gospel, i.e., Paul’s interpretation of it, had not insisted on keeping Jewish law in whatever modest form, including the shape it got in the Jerusalem Council’s decision, while eating with gentiles in Antioch. If he did not abide by the law even in that respect, why would the Galatians want to return to a law that they were not subject to before? Or to put the matter in Paul’s words: if Peter did not try to be justified by works of the law, why would the Galatians? But what does this expression mean?

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5. Justification by faith and not by works The Antioch account turns smoothly into a homily on righteousness from ch. 1:14 onwards. The “we” might very well be Peter and Paul. Though they are Jews, and not sinners (idolaters) from out of the gentiles, they know that “a man is not justified by works of the law.” Now what does this statement mean in its context? Traditionally the “works of the law” have been explained as the performance of the ritual and moral commandments that amass merit before God. If the scale was ultimately tipped in favor of good works, a person was acceptable before God in the final judgment and merited the life of the world to come. The common interpretation of “works,” therefore, is that they (1) are deeds of outward obedience intended to earn merit before God. As Luther explained it, God would be forced to respond with grace to a deed of merit, an opinion that he ascribes to the “Papists.” It has been recognized that Luther’s explanation identifies Paul’s opponents in the letter with his own Catholic contemporaries, though there is considerable doubt that Luther even represented Catholic doctrine faithfully. After it had been made abundantly clear after WW II, that 1stcentury Judaism could not be considered a religion that based salvation on works of the law in that sense, it became obvious that Paul had to be interpreted differently. The effort was made to interpret the works of the law as (2) those elements of the law that served as identity markers for Israel: circumcision, Sabbath, dietary rules. That would make it possible to hold that Paul was not against the law as a way of life for Christian Jews, but did not see it as a prerequisite of salvation to either Jew or gentile, which Judaism did not hold either. But we have seen, in the discussion of the Antioch incident, that what was at stake is not merely a difference of opinion between Peter and James on the application of the law, but the principle of law itself. So we are left with these two possibilities: either the phrase “works of the law” refers back to what was at stake in the

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Antioch incident in a narrow sense: table fellowship and the boundaries between Jews and gentiles, and then “works of the law” can mean those elements of the law that protect these boundaries (see 2 above). That interpretation follows from the contextual reading of the letter and from drawing heavily upon the Antioch incident to explain the motive for Paul’s discussion of the term. But it remains to be considered that although the incident exemplifies the issue and motivates its discussion, the doctrine cannot itself be restricted to the contextual usage. Yet it is not possible to ignore the context altogether and to state, with classical Reformed exegesis, that Paul intended to show the absolute rejection of Jewish law (see 1 above). If the Antioch incident is about Peter’s wavering between being without law and being in conformity to the law, the issue here is the law itself, but still with emphasis on that element of the law that brought with it exclusion and strife. Without that emphasis, Paul’s position on the law implies that he misunderstood 1stcentury Judaism as a whole. If Peter’s attitude is a consequence of a difference of opinion on Jewish halakah with James, works of the law are merely identity markers, and the connection between the incident and Paul’s doctrine on law, as outlined subsequently in the letter, is severed. How could we evade the dilemma of overstating either the independence of the doctrine or the context-related nature of the text? And do we need to drop the traditional approach to the antithesis between works and grace altogether? This may be of fundamental importance to the question of Paul’s ethics. If that ethics is born from the pragmatic assumption that in Christ all boundaries between Jew and gentile have been removed, then the Torah is no longer the basic shape of obedience of the Church, since it was devised as a means of separating a people unto God from the world of the nations. That implies, ultimately, that Christian ethics becomes a pneumatic ethos that derives its formal nature from the principle of neighborly love, and its contents from the situation, the example of Christ, and some awareness of ethical values as in Stoicism. The eschatological background of the apostle Paul serves to explain the lack of interest in developing a more detailed ethical code. If, however, the law is abrogated only with respect to the boundary markers, then the rest of the law might still be a guide for the contents of ethical behavior,

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and obeying the commandments is still its basic form, though perhaps now transformed by the impact of the New Covenant, i.e., by the notion of a spirit-driven obedience. If the Torah is seen as primarily involved in this separation of Israel, the whole of the law must be abrogated; if the separation is just part of its contents, its principle remains in effect. So what does it mean that justification is not by works of the law? If justification is not through the separating mitzvoth, in distinction to other ethical rules, then justification by faith might refer to a life in obedience to Torah under the principle of faith, in this case as it is informed by Christ’s coming into this world and the eschatological effect of His coming. If it is not by mitzvoth as such, since it is assumed that all of them have a separating purpose, then the whole principle of law is abrogated. Which is it? Let us turn to another element of this complex question. Can it be said that “works of the law” defines a specific way of obeying the law? Is it impossible for a man to live a life of strict obedience and holiness? And would the attempt to lead that life imply an “amassing” of merit to force God to acquit him? It is most often understood in that way. Paul’s Pharisaic background would mean that he was acquainted with the opinion that justification was “earned” by deeds of righteousness. However, Paul would then have learned from Christ that (1) it was impossible to attain perfect righteousness, since man’s heart was unable to achieve complete allegiance, and (2) that Christ had come to reveal a righteousness that consisted in the acquittal of all believers, above and beyond the requirements of the law. So “works of the law” was taken as an expression for the meritorious deeds by which the Pharisaic Jews tried to impress God and win righteousness on their own; a kind of outward obedience that merely strengthened or covered the inner rebellion of man against God. The opposition was between God’s free gift of righteousness in Christ and man’s striving for self-righteousness as a refined element of self-deceit and an expression of arrogance and pride. Later proof for that conviction was sought by Christian theologians going over the Rabbinic writings in search for claims of salvation through merit. By quoting these writings selectively with a method called proof-texting, and leaving out both the context and the related passages, the conclusion was drawn

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that Judaism taught salvation through merit and not by faith. We need to go into this matter now and will return to the above question later. That the traditional view on the opposition between works and faith is quite resistant to new insights can be illustrated from the relevant passage in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, where it states with regard to “ergon” (work): This gives us the Pauline understanding of the contrast between faith and works. The (erga nomou) which are at issue for Paul have become a means of self-righteousness for the Jews. Hence they are no longer an expression of the absolute requirement of God—the law is this for Paul in Gal. 5:3—but they spring from man’s arrogant striving after selfrighteousness (emphasis mine). By no means, however, is it that self-evident that in the 1st century anybody, including Paul, would agree to describe Judaism (and we must also ask: which Judaism?) like this. The works of the law seems to refer to the law in its aspect of specific commanded acts, called mitzvoth in Hebrew. As such they can be enumerated alongside the whole of Torah, prayer, and earthly occupation, as in bBer. 32b Bar: “For four things man needs constancy, and these are: the Torah, good works, prayer, and one’s worldly occupation.” To call this an “ethos of work” that Judaism preserved “in spite of everything” is highly problematic in our time, but it was quite persistent and natural when most theologians had only Strack-Billerbeck to teach them about Judaism. No effort is made to understand what such a phrase would mean, and to 4th-century Rabbinic Judaism at that. It is obvious that the theme of “reward and punishment” is found everywhere in rabbinic literature. Several concepts of reward coexisted. Some argued that the reward for performing a mitzvah was the performance of another mitzvah, or a reward in the world to come. Because just reward was a sub concept of the concept of God’s justice and judgment was connected to

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each human action, the notion of divine approval or rejection had to be the logical outcome of any reflection of the value of man’s actions sub specie eternitatis. Three remarks are in order. First of all, the merit of a human deed was a free and sovereign response by God and not an automatic part of human achievement. Therefore it was considered inadmissible to act in order to gain merit. Mitzvoth should be performed for the sake of heaven. Secondly, God dealt with humans above and beyond the strictures of justice. God’s quality of mercy outweighed His quality of righteousness. Thirdly, the ‘merit” is most often considered as the effect of a good deed beyond the physical meaning of it as an action within creation, the metaphysical meaning or effective moral influence, so to speak, of human deeds. The effect of good deeds was then considered helpful in aiding others who lacked the ability to perform in such a way beyond the call of strict duty or in determining the moral standing of a community. In all of this, rabbinic “theology” does not equal the strict notion of a divine justice that needs full compliance in every respect from every creature while at the same time considering that man is unable, because of his inner duality, to accomplish anything good. In fact, the concept of Torah and the concept of Covenant must be seen as interlinked. Full compliance with the Torah in the sense of moral perfection was never seen as a prerequisite of the Covenant. Now, let us take a close look at the context of this baraita (a Mishnah not present in R. Judah ha Nasi’s collection of the Mishnah) that Bertram quoted in his article on ”works of the law.” Whence do we know this of Torah and good deeds? Because it says, Only be strong and very courageous to observe to do according to all the law: “be strong” in Torah, and “be courageous” in good deeds. Whence of prayer? Because it says, “Wait for the Lord, be strong and let thy heart take courage, yea, wait thou for the Lord.” Whence of worldly occupation? Because it says, Be of good courage and let us prove strong for our people. The context of this dictum, however, is exactly what Bertram

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thinks is missing in early Judaism and is dominant in Paul: the works of God that Paul was contrasting to the works of man. Let us examine this quote. As is appropriate in the tractate on prayer and blessings, the Gemara discusses the order of priority between prayer, fasting, charity, and the like, and inserts the baraita because it too is a statement on the order of priority. But still, the context remains the efficacy of God’s actions on which everything else is based, and that passage we will quote in full here: But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, [taking up the discussion of the relationship between prayer and God’s actions – RAV] and the Lord hath forgotten me. Is not “forsaken” the same as “forgotten”? Resh Lakish said: The community of Israel said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Sovereign of the Universe, when a man takes a second wife after his first, he still remembers the deeds of the first. Thou hast both forsaken me and forgotten me! The Holy One, blessed be He, answered her: My daughter, twelve constellations have I created in the firmament, and for each constellation I have created thirty hosts, and for each host I have created thirty legions, and for each legion I have created thirty cohorts, and for each cohort I have created thirty maniples, and for each maniple I have created thirty camps, and to each camp I have attached three hundred and sixty-five thousands of myriads of stars, corresponding to the days of the solar year, and all of them I have created only for thy sake, and thou sayest, Thou hast forgotten me and forsaken me! Can a woman forsake her sucking child [“ullah]? Said the Holy One, blessed be He: Can I possibly forget the burnt-offerings [“olah] of rams and the firstborn of animals that thou didst offer to Me in the wilderness? She thereupon said: Sovereign of the Universe, since there is no forgetfulness before the Throne of Thy glory, perhaps Thou wilt not forget the sin of the Calf? He replied: “Yea, ’these’ will be forgotten.” 61

61

Talmud Bavli (b), bBerakhot, 32b. The quote is given according to the Soncino edition of the English translation of the Babylonian Talmud.

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Because God does not forget the earlier deeds of His people and because He is involved in the history of His people, He can forgive. In fact, all of the stars in the infinite universe were made exactly for the purpose of aiding Israel and to keep “track” of her deeds. And by “forgetting” the evils, Israel can have a renewed start after she lapses into sin. Prayer, forgiveness and sacrifices are thereby taken together as one expression of God’s sovereign grace extending to Israel within the boundaries of the covenant of God’s promises to her, not within the “identity-markers” that define Israel’s relationship to the other nations. And in that context of affirmation of God’s covenanted pardoning grace, the statement about the “good works” is made. Bertram, however, continues by giving us the Pauline doctrine as a whole: In opposition to them we can only point to the act of God which creates faith in us. All thought of works retreats behind this, and can emerge again only within the community in relation to the working of the Spirit of God in the apostle and in believers, since it is God who works all in all (I C. 12:6). It thus comes about that the word ergon, already suspect in the Old Testament, acquires in Paul a completely negative sense whenever it is a matter of human achievement. For the work of man cannot stand before the exclusive operation of grace. If nevertheless there is reference to good works in the message of the whole of the New Testament, and this not merely after a human manner of speaking, it is in virtue of a return to the legitimate use of the term in revelation. It is true of fallen humanity that its works are evil. [And here the anthropological presupposition is inserted to make the point – RAV] But the time of salvation restores the situation as it was by creation. All man’s work is God’s work through man. Thus the erga tou nomou, the misunderstood and depreciated legal works of the old covenant. are confronted by the erga tou theou of the new covenant. Or rather by the one work of faith active

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in love (Gal. 5:6: John 6:29). 62 It may certainly be true that Pauline doctrine emphasizes this point; it may even be true that Judaism and Christianity differ on elements of this because in fact they stand in different covenants, but to state and imply that Paul’s adversary is the Rabbinic doctrine of good works that does not recognize the priority of God’s grace is flatly wrong. In the first place it is wrong because it is anachronistic to identify the Talmudic Judaism of the 4th century that is responsible for this subtle contextual exegesis as Paul’s partner in dialogue. Having discarded the text as a direct historical source of understanding, however, we must acknowledge that it still may be a source of understanding a specific “pattern of religion,” as Sanders taught, but then the context as a whole, not only fragments thereof, needs to be taken into consideration. In the second place it is also short-sighted, since the above quotation shows abundantly in what context of “God’s work” the rabbis discussed this issue of “good works.” If on the other hand the quotation is meant to emphasize the meaning of the baraita alone, Bertram is presupposing or providing a context that would give a meaning to a text that produces a connection with his (Paul’s) issue. But the context provided is not to be found anywhere outside his own interpretation of Paul. That circularity can only be avoided by not immediately identifying such terms as “good works” with “works of the law” in Paul, as has been done, e.g., in Strack-Billerbeck’s collection of Rabbinic references and parallels in the New Testament from which Bertram is quoting. The use of Rabbinic Judaism, either to identify what Paul had in mind or to identify the opponent that Paul is fighting against, is doomed to failure if there is no historical or theological exegesis that explains the connection in a systematically coherent fashion. There are more modern views on the phrase “works of the law,” which try do to justice to what we know of 1st-century Judaism. James Dunn, e.g., explained the concept like this: The phrase ta erga tou nomou belongs to a complex of ideas in which the social function of the law is 62

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Theological Dictionary etc., II, p. 649.

prominent. The law serves both to identify Israel as the people of the covenant and to mark them off as distinct from the (other) nations. “Works of the law” denote all that the law requires of the devout Jew, but precisely because it is the law as identity and boundary marker which is in view, the law as Israel’s law focuses on these rites which express Jewish distinctiveness most clearly. The conclusion of the previous section is thus confirmed: “works of the law” refer not exclusively but particularly to those requirements which bring to sharp focus the distinctiveness of Israel’s identity. But this approach is also not without its problems. G. Kruse notes that this approach resolves some of the tensions that earlier exegetes like Sanders and Räisänen have pointed out between, e.g., the positive and negative statements about the law in Romans.63 It identifies the “works” of the law with the mitzvoth, but within the perspective of the social identity of Israel, i.e., “works” refers primarily to the food laws, circumcision, and purity laws defining the barrier between Jew and non-Jew. Kruse, who more than any of the other exegetes quoted in this work has tried to maintain the traditional doctrinal reading of Paul’s letter, agrees that such an interpretation must be taken seriously. He comes to the conclusion, however, that “works of the law” must mean “all that the law requires,” as Dunn had allowed for as “not excluded” in a later response to criticism on this point, since the statement that “all are under the curse of the law” would then be restricted to all those who believed that law defined the people of God (Kruse, 79). Paul could hardly have been claiming these two things at the same 63

As E.P. Sanders wrote: “He (Paul) claims that he ‘upholds’ the law (Rom. 3:31), he favors keeping the commandments (1 Cor. 7:19; Rom. 13:8-10; 8:4; Gal. 5:14), and he states that the ‘law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good’ (Rom. 7:12); yet he virtually equates the law with Sin and the Flesh (Rom. 6:14; 7:5f.), and he maintains that the purpose of the law is to provoke sin or to condemn all of humanity (Gal. 3:19, 22; Rom. 3:20; 4:15; 5:20).” Paul, Oxford, 1991, p. 85. Some argued that Paul is incoherent in this issue. (Raissanen) Others have claimed that Paul is positive on the subject of the law in as far as its moral precepts are involved, based on the “law of faith”, and negative, where the whole of the law is seen as a series of identitymarkers. (James Dunn, D. Boyarin)

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time: that the Judaizers were merely fighting for the preservation of identity markers for Israel and at the same time wanted to make Christians obedient to the entire Jewish law.64 This does not mean that “works of the law” should therefore mean the fulfilling of the commandments as a means for acquiring merit before God, as the Reformation had thought. There is a third way, according to Kruse: the works of the law refers to the fulfillment of all the commandments “because this is what the covenant required.” In 3:6-14 the issue is that when some argue that justification is dependent upon the fulfillment of a few commandments, they fail to see that the principle of law involves the law as a whole. That would then have been Paul’s main point. But there are other problems in Dunn’s approach, as noted by Stanley Stowers. He wrote concerning Dunn’s approach to the intended audience of Romans: Dunn’s reading, for example, assumes as a patently explicit and obvious Jewish doctrine that God punishes gentiles severely but mercifully overlooks Jewish evil. I find the evidence vastly more complex and, on the whole, very different from Dunn’s assumption. We find no Jewish texts explicitly saying that God will ignore Jewish sin because of the covenant. One finds numerous examples of confidence in God’s justice and mercy and ultimate faithfulness to Israel. Many texts also unsurprisingly assume that Jews are typically more faithful and more pleasing to God than polytheists are, but Christian and Moslem texts say the same thing about Christians and Moslems. God’s justice and impartiality is also a pervasive theme in Jewish texts. Indeed, the most widespread view seems to hold that Jews are punished even more severely and held to a higher standard than gentiles, at least in this world. As 2 Macc. 6:14 explains, God shows his mercy to Israel by continually punishing Jews in order to keep them in 64

We use the term Judaizers as implying an effort to proselytize, though that is strictly speaking not correct: a Judaizer, in 1st-century parlance, is someone who lives according to Jewish halakah, not someone who tries to have others follow the Jewish halakah as well.

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line and in order that their sins might be continually atoned. One finds in ancient Jewish texts a persistent theme of reading Israel’s calamities as severe punishments wrought out of God’s love in order to discipline her, whereas God is frequently said to overlook gentile sin, allowing gentile liability to accumulate (see chapter 3). The evidence of Jewish texts betrays the implausibility of Dunn’s presumed reader.65 If this is correct, then the major assumption of Dunn’s reading of Galatians and Romans falls away: that Paul wrote with Jewish-Christians in mind, who introduced the Judaist concept of identity markers as means to entry into Christianity. If that Judaist concept was not in Paul’s mind, and could not have been in the mind of any 1st-century writer who had some first hand knowledge of Judaism, then there could hardly have been a Jewish-Christian faction who tried to Judaize on that basis. Stower’s conclusion is that Paul wrote Romans with gentiles in mind, who on the basis of their own Graeco-Roman understanding of “law” as a principle both of ethical life and social order, tried to integrate their “flawed” understanding of the Torah into that own bias. The Jewish law served them as the paradigm of the ideal constitution that they derived from their own social and political background. Torah was then being used to set up what we might call a pre-Constantinian “rule of law” in the Church. Against that background, Paul wants his gentile audience to understand that the Jewish law actually is based on the principle of election and sovereign grace and is understood as such by the Jews. The Torah they want to abuse as “law” is actually speaking on the side of Christian faith, especially where it speaks of Abraham’s faith and justification, and even if this aspect of the Torah as “law” would stand on its own, it could only contradict the reality of Christian life, because then it would show itself as the basis of equal judgment over both gentiles and Jews. The constructed partner in dialogue of Romans 2 is then the champion of these gentile Judaizers and as such a construction on Paul’s part to embody these gentile reasonings in a vehicle to carry his case to his audience. 65

Stowers, A Rereading , p. 29.

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It does raise the question of why the Jewish nation has not become followers of Christ if the Torah testifies to the righteousness that is manifested in Christ. Paul answers it in chapters 9-11 by reiterating that God’s promise will not fail with Israel as it did not fail with the gentiles who received the blessing of Abraham. So the basic intention of Romans is not to develop a specific Christian concept of righteousness and salvation, but to settle the matter of the principle of law: not imperial power and the acquisition of righteousness, but God’s sovereign grace, faithfulness to promise, and grace that enables man to do righteousness in Christ. All of this then serves as the basic presupposition of the exhortatory chapters 12-15. So the identification of good works with meritorious deeds and the narrowing down of that expression to boundary markers have both run into serious trouble. It would be better to argue that although the contextual meaning of the doctrine shows a main emphasis on table communion and circumcision, the “whole of the law” remains very much in Paul’s mind when he writes about the “works of the law,” G. Kruse has proposed a third possibility that avoids assertions that Paul had no real insight into Judaism because he did not presuppose that the Judaizers were trying to set up the Torah as a means for salvation, or that he only speaks about identity markers, by invoking the distinction first made by Sanders between nomism and legalism. The “works of the law” must refer to all that the law requires and not merely to those laws that protect the social identity of Jews. That was the thesis of Dunn against which Stowers argued. But the conclusion still cannot be that these works are the means to acquire merit before God. Paul’s conflict is not with Judaism in principle, but “with those who, by the demands they were placing upon his Galatian converts, were insisting that salvation depends upon [or can be added to by, RAV] the observance of certain demands of the law” (Kruse, 69). Kruse puts forward the interpretation that we discussed briefly in our opening paragraph when we quoted Beker’s description of Paul’s opponents. The issue would be the soteriological function of the Torah for non-Jews. In Kruse’s view, Paul and Peter were united in their rejection of

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legalism; i.e., the conviction that fulfilling the demands of the law was a prerequisite for salvation, but Paul disagreed with Peter on the issue of nomism: Christian Jews and Christian gentiles needed to comply with the demands of the law as part of their Christian obedience, but in a separate manner, since the law spoke differently to Jew and gentile. To this Paul responded by arguing that Christian Jews had also lost any relationship with the law, so they had become like gentiles in that respect (Gal. 2:19). So, in this view, the works of the law refers to the opinion that Paul protests throughout the letter: (3) that the fulfillment of the specific commandments of the Torah in itself leads to salvation or can add to salvation in Christ. In doing so, Paul leaves the paraenetical function of the law aside as probably self-evident. In passing, we may note that this nomism that Paul rejected is present in some way in Luther’s exegesis, where he states that obedience to the Mosaic law in civil life is still a necessary corollary of grace.66 Life under the law is a matter of works, and life under the gospel is a matter of faith. A Christian is under both! If this is true, then clearly the matter of the antithesis between grace and works came into existence in the 16th-century Reformation, and not in the 1st-century debate with Judaism. Paul’s rejection of legalism, however, the law imposed upon gentiles, does seem to go along with his rejection of nomism, the law as principle of life for Jews. From the letter to the Galatians it cannot be shown that Paul accepted an ongoing role of the Torah for Jewish believers, but it cannot be completely ruled out either. We have to decide on that question later. If justification is based upon sovereign grace, even in Judaism, and if this is the main polemical intent against Paul’s gentile readers who misinterpreted the function of the law, then his 66

Luther on Gal. 2:14 states it thus: “In civil life obedience to the law is severely required. In civil life Gospel, conscience, grace, remission of sins, Christ Himself, do not count, but only Moses with the law books. If we bear in mind this distinction, neither Gospel nor law shall trespass upon each other. The moment law and sin cross into heaven, i.e., your conscience, kick them out. On the other hand, when grace wanders unto the earth, i.e., into the body, tell grace: "You have no business to be around the dreg and dung of this bodily life. You belong in heaven."

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statement in Galatians 2:16 can be interpreted with some clarity: Paul and Peter knew that a man is not justified by works of the law no matter how much merit he has acquired: the fulfillment of commandments in itself, whether they express the social identity of Israel or any other good deed according to the principle of law, does not make a person righteous before God. No man can be righteous on the basis of deeds that exclude grace and on which he is judged by God, as we find in Psalm 143:2, quoted in 2:16: “And enter not into judgment with thy servant; for in thy sight no man living shall be justified.” If there could be righteousness through works of the law, then Christ has died in vain (Gal. 2:21). The rejection of righteousness on the basis of performance, of compliance with the law, is to Paul directly linked to the meaning of Christ’s death. It is either salvation through the law (as gentiles thought), or salvation through God’s grace (as Jews thought), but the third option is the best: through Christ. But it cannot ever be justification and salvation through law and Christ. Paul and Peter therefore had an argument only on the issue of the ongoing role of the law for Jewish believers beyond the issue of salvation. Apparently Peter, under pressure from James’s disciples, by his withdrawal from community with gentiles in which he abandoned all performance of the law, makes the explicit statement in doing so that the law remains valid for Jewish believers. His behavior shows that it matters where one stands in respect to the law. That would imply a message to gentile believers that they could perfect their faith by adopting Mosaic law and submitting to circumcision. Because of the burden under which that would place the gentile Christians, and because of the impression it gives that a Christian should be concerned with anything beyond that which is vital in salvation (i.e., the life within the Spirit, as we will see in Romans), Paul goes on to reject not only the necessity of Torah for gentiles, but even for Jews. We must conclude, therefore, that justification by faith means to Paul, in Galatians, being set free from the law in its legalist sense, i.e., from any righteousness that comes from obedience to a law or from being part of the nation that received the law. But in that respect, Paul did not say anything that was outside the boundaries of 1st-century Judaism. Enhancing Kruse’s statement (see above), we also hold,

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however, that Paul rejected Peter’s nomism not only for gentiles, but for Jews as well. And that is indeed a clear breaking away from 1st-century Judaism. That can be made clear from the following. If we read (with Zuurmond) the genitive in “works of the law” in Gal. 2:16 as saying: “the work that the law performs” (i.e., as a subjective genitive ) then we have a perfect antithesis to the “faith of Christ.” Law and Christ are then diametrically opposed as forces (cf. 2:21) working within our lives. The force of the law is seen to be working in a conditional way by demanding man’s active consent and obedience (Gal. 3:12), in the statement, “And ye shall observe my statutes and my judgments, by which the man [on condition of the fact] that [he] does them [he] shall live,” and as the standard of future judgment (Lev. 18:5). The law is portrayed in its ultimate and eschatological effect as a power that kills, for “I through law have died to law, that I may live to God.” The problem is not of course the law, but the inability of man. And we must remember that here, as is the case in the letter to the Romans, “law” can only mean “Torah itself.” So how can we be redeemed? The law only has jurisdiction over a man during his life (cf. Romans 7:1), so the identification of the believer with the crucified Christ means the end of the validity of the law, both as a social identity marker (cf. Eph. 2:14-15) and as a way of righteousness and salvation. The law, though perfect in itself, has power over the living but is unable to give life. It is Christ who now becomes the new principle of life, through His Spirit that works within us. The faith of Christ is then not our faith in Him, by which the opposition would be made between what the law demands and what Christ demands. The opposition is now between what the law does: giving a way of life with a conditional promise of life to those who comply with it, and the unconditional gift of the Spirit on the basis of Christ’s “faith,” i.e., his trustworthiness and loyalty to God unto death. Our faith as obedience is the effort to cling to that faith of Christ as the new principle of our life. If that is the case, Peter was indeed in conformity with the Pauline gospel when he broke Jewish law at Antioch. The principles of the right Christian way of life, according to this letter, cannot be found in the teachings of the law, in commandments and prohibitions that belong to the world

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before the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. One of Paul’s arguments is that the Galatians have already had such a Christian way of life in the Spirit. How did they receive the Spirit? Not because they performed the commandments or realized any kind of condition, but because they heard the preaching of the gospel and fell under the spell of the image of a crucified Christ (Gal. 3:1-2). With this crucified Christ the Galatians have identified themselves: they too have been crucified with Christ, and now the principle of their life has been changed. They no longer live, but Christ lives in them (Gal. 2:18-20a). But insofar as we can still speak of a life in the flesh, the believers live through their faith in Christ’s death and resurrection and His work (2:20b). The heart of the matter is, therefore, that if the Christian life begins with the identification of the believer with Christ in His death and resurrection, and that, therefore, faith in Christ and life in the Spirit is its principle, then to add to that by concentration on specific commandments, on works of the law, does not make any sense. The gift of the Spirit already makes the believer a member of the people of God and he does not add to this by doing the works that were commanded to Israel. Justification is received without and outside of the works of the law. The law as a separate force outside the authority of the Messiah cannot grant this. So in the ongoing Christian life there is no need for works of the law either. But in Galatians this means without doubt that the gospel is free from law to both Jewish and gentile Christians but is still not without a specific and radical form of obedience to Christ. So we can conclude: the Antioch incident results in Paul’s clear statement of the principle of his gospel: that the believer is justified by faith in Christ, and no longer obeys God through the intermediary of (knowledge of) the law, whether in its function as boundary between Jew and gentile (the ecclesiological view) or its function as God’s righteous demand (the traditional view). The position that works of the law are being denied as works of merit has no place here at all, since that was not an existing position within 1st-century Judaism.

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6. Life in the Spirit versus life under the law Paul stated twice that the reception of the Spirit , an expression for conversion and the beginning of Christian discipleship, was not based upon doing the works of the law (3:2), it was not based on the principle of obedience to law and was not for the purpose of making such obedience possible (3:2, 3, 5).67 After this reference to the faith experience of the Galatians, Paul argues further with the aid of the example of Abraham. It is “in the same way” that Abraham had faith in God, which was accounted to him as righteousness. In the promise to Abraham in Gen. 12:3, all gentiles were included since ”in you all nations will be blessed.” Resting on the fact that Abraham was declared righteous before the giving of the law, his faith in God’s promise was considered by God to be an act that constituted the “right relationship” with God, the opposite can now be stated. “For as many as are under [the principle of] works of the law are cursed” (3:10). Why are they cursed? The text in Deut. 27:26 that is quoted here states: “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all that is written in the book of the law.” This must be a quotation from the LXX, though with some variation; e.g., the LXX use of logos, which also indicates the spoken word and is closer to the Hebrew davar), is exchanged for gegrammenos), the written word. But there is a major problem here. Most importantly, the Greek translation changes the Hebrew original on three accounts. First of all, the Hebrew word translated as “continue” (can also mean “to uphold,” to consider something to be the standard. Secondly, the Hebrew text speaks of “the words of instruction” and not about “all” the words of the law, which would imply the notion of a complete inventory of independent tasks and would imply the idea that if one commandment is broken all are. Thirdly, the Hebrew 9&9! (arur) does not mean retributive dam67

Cf. James D.G. Dunn, Galatians, p. 153. Dunn gives Rom. 8:15; 1 Cor. 2:12; 2 Cor. 11:4; and Gal. 3:14 as proof texts of this sense of the expression. It refers to an experiential context for both conversion and affirmation, hence the linkage with baptism.

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nation and is not the opposite of salvation, but of being blessed. Someone is cursed if he is cut off from the source of wellbeing and blessings, and that source is precisely life in obedience to God’s Torah. The meaning of the Hebrew, therefore, is something like: Cursed (i.e., without blessing, without the fullness of life) are those who do not uphold as a standard the words of this instruction. Cursed are those who do not live under this instruction that gives life to all who obey it, and not: God will punish those that do not obey. Through the LXX, and Paul’s application of it here, we get the meaning: those who do not obey each and every instance of the law, i.e., those who break even one single commandment, have lost salvation and will be punished with a curse. In Paul’s view, therefore, the Torah as law demands full compliance and only then gives life, i.e., salvation. But how can this be an accurate assessment of the law? Did Paul forget that the law allowed for atonement to be made through sacrifices for all transgressions bishgaga “without intent”? Is he implying that such a work of atonement is not enough for the gentiles who have formerly engaged in such “works of the flesh” as he mentions in Gal. 5:19-21 (as it would not be sufficient in the case of intentional sin)? The same problems in connection with the translation can be raised with regard to Paul’s second quotation. Nobody is justified by the law, because it states: “the righteous will live by his faith.” This quote from Habakkuk is present also in Rom. 1:17. But Habakkuk has no direct bearing on the matter of the meaning of the law. The text refers to the difficult circumstances of the assault on Israel by the Chaldeans, who bend the law and oppress all, during which time the righteous will have to put their trust in God for their survival since the law and its intrinsic moral order no longer protect them. Paul uses it to imply that being righteous and therefore to live, to survive judgment, is by faith, while the Hebrew text states that one who is righteous by the standards of Torah will survive oppression because of his emunah, his trust in God. He can then continue by stating that the demand of the law is a conditional gift: he who obeys it will live. Performance of the law precedes life as its reward. (But that obviously contradicts the intent of the passage.) So Paul is stating that faith, not obedience, is a prerequisite for

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justification, and through it man will survive the judgment, will “live.” The opposition we had before between the works of the law and the faith of Christ Jesus (Gal. 2:16) is worked out as an opposition between being under the curse for failing to obey it all, and being liberated from the law. How are we liberated from the law? We read in 3:13 that Christ has liberated us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse. By showing that the law could only condemn him, i.e., Christ, the validity of the law was nullified insofar as it demanded obedience to all of its precepts as a condition of life, because one of its decrees has been nullified by God. If one of its statements was rendered invalid, then the whole loses its absolute validity. Of course this is very much in keeping with Paul’s calling. He had an encounter with a Christ who had kept the entire law and yet had to face death on the Cross. He had acted in conformity with Jewish law by persecuting a sect that turned out to be the body of this resurrected Messiah. In both cases strict enforcement of the law was counteracted by God’s own act. If righteousness under the law could not keep Christ alive, and did not make Paul righteous, then it could not save any Christian. That could be called the demonstrative force of Christ’s death with regard to the law, since it shows that the law lacks of efficacy to fulfill the promise that those who obey it will live, the perfectly righteous one actually died because of the Torah. A secondary observation begins with the contention that “ransomed” (must be given the full force of “paying a price to liberate someone,” specifically the paying of a ransom for the liberation of slaves. It answers the question of how the Messiah could be the source of blessing for all the gentiles while at the same time being cursed by God. Well, the answer must be that he bore the curse instead of those who were under the curse and set them free from it. That must of course refer to all who identified with Him through faith, Jews and non-Jews alike. Rom. 2:14 actually states that Jews and non-Jews alike are under its curse. However, specifically “under the curse” were the gentiles who lived outside the law and the blessings that accompanied its keeping, so Paul might be thinking here specifically of the acceptance of gentiles. This latter view, of course, exerts a great attraction for those who argue that the issue here is that of communion between Jews and gentiles (cf. Kruse, 87). If gentiles entered the covenant community

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because their curse had been lifted by Christ’s being cursed under the law, then of course the law can have no role in their being blessed as a consequence. All of this leads up to Paul’s statement that the blessing of Abraham did not come unto the gentiles because of the law, and that is why the reception of the spirit is not based upon the works of the law. Paul finds a close connection between the righteousness of Abraham by faith before the giving of the law, the blessing of the gentiles through him, and the reception of the Spirit in fulfillment of the promised blessing, all outside the sphere of the law. If all are redeemed by the fulfillment of a promise that was given before the law specified commandments to be obeyed and identity markers to be used to separate Israel from the gentiles, then Jews have become just like gentiles in these final days. Paul now needs to explain what the function of the law was before the coming of Christ. He takes up this argument in 3:1925. The law here is merely seen as an addition that in the end served a purpose in the greater scheme of the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Its revelatory status was therefore only secondary, since it was given through the hands of angels, implying that in it God did not disclose Himself as He had done in Christ (3:19b), though it might have the ordinary sense of divine origin that we find, e.g., in Acts 7:53. The law was added “for the sake of transgressions” (3:19a), i.e., to show that human conduct transgresses the law, and to “shut up all things under sin” (3:22). Such a law cannot make alive; it is a guardian and tutor to those who have been promised a future life under a new principle, that of faith. In its provisional function it has guarded (3:23) the boundaries between Israel and the nations and it has tutored (3:24) all of mankind by showing that justification cannot be a goal of human aspirations for perfection. Life under the law is portrayed as a life of imamturity, needing a pedagogos or tutor-slave who accompanies man in his service of God. When a boy comes of age, he accepts his heritage and the full responsibility for his actions, which the believer can, because Christ, the heir, is the principle of his life. So the Torah as written law-code has no redemptive relevance any more, neither with regard to entrance into the Church nor

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(directly) with regard to the lifestyle of Christians. “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor” (3:25). What then are the consequences for the new life outside the sphere of the law? First of all there is a change of status. Verse 3:26 informs us that “you are all sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” All distinctions that were maintained by the law: Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male or female, have been abolished. Not only did the law deal differently with all of these groups, it maintained their separation through its provisions. Baptism, not circumcision, is the sign of belonging to that new community. All are one in Christ Jesus because each of them has “put on Christ” (3:27). Paul explains what it means to have sonship in 3:5ff. First of all, as heirs to the blessing that was promised to Abraham, we are no longer slaves under the law, but sons. We have the “right of sons” (4:5). This refers to the notion of freedom that is explained further in ch. 5. Paul summarizes his view on Christian ethics in Galatians by stating that we live in the light of the resurrected Christ. “I live by faith, the [faith] of the Son of God, who has loved me and given himself for me.” (2:20) That involves dying with Christ, having put on Christ (3:27). All of this implies a particular way of life that is characterized by the new freedom from the law and righteousness on the basis of works. So the effect of justification is at the same time (1) the constitution of a new community that lifts the boundaries between Jew and gentile, and in doing so invalidates the Torah as principle and shape of obedience, and (2) the radical change within individuals who have received the spirit. These two aspects are dealt with by the Apostle as being completely connected. Let us now look more closely at Paul’s reasoning in ch. 5. Vs. 1 takes up the notion of ransom of 3:13 and explains again why Christian freedom is incompatible with submission under the law. Christ has liberated us to become truly free. Circumcision and its consequence, the demand to keep the entire law, is in contradiction to this principle of freedom. Submission to the law entails a kind of obedience that is like that of slavery. It is the law that prescribes action and man should be ready to conform to it. A life of freedom must be, put negatively a life without such external motivations for action. We must not let ourselves be put under a “yoke of slavery” again (5:1).

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But then, after this impressive catalogue of arguments against being under the law, Paul must warn his Galatian audience. The freedom that they have from the law in its double aspect of identity marker and tutor should not be abused. They should become slaves to each other through love. If they act in conformity with this principle, the law, insofar as it can demand something from man, is actually fulfilled. The essence of the law is: to love your neighbor as yourself (5:14). The entire law is fulfilled, says Paul, in this one word or commandment. A life that can be described as showing this (neighborly love) to be its principle of behavior is actually the life that the law intended to be lived. What is meant here? Is Paul setting up a spiritual principle of the moral life over against mere outward obedience to the Torah? Is life in the Spirit then a mere inward life? The implications of this statement by Paul are enormous, as becomes evident when we compare it to statements attributed to Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. In Matthew 19: 18-19 we hear Jesus say: “But if thou wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments. He said to him, Which? And Jesus said, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother and Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is far from stating that the essence of the law is the commandment to love one’s neighbor, though it is interesting that the commandment of Lev. 19:18 here concludes a series of commandments taken from the Decalogue. In Matthew 22:36-40, we are informed that the “great commandment” in the law is first of all to love God, and secondly, equal to it, to love your neighbor. Vs. 40 states that on these two commandments the whole law and the prophets “hang”-- which means that all commandments in their application must be interpreted from the viewpoint of these two. Not only do we find that the essence of the commandments is expressed in these two commandments, or in the second part of the decalogue, but we can also find that the keeping of these commandments provides us with entrance into life. In such words, the content of the Torah is transposed into the messianic Torah, changed in its character and addressed to a new community with new priorities, but not abandoned. Is Paul contradicting this? Furthermore, Jesus’ sayings actually describe the same

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conditional aspect of the law that Paul seemed to describe as contrary to the promise. According to Matthew 23:3, Christ wanted His disciples to conform to standard Jewish interpretations of the law (“whatever they may tell you do and keep”). Furthermore, it is obvious that Jesus did not state that the conditionality of the law hangs on the law’s being either fulfilled completely or not at all. In the practice of the law’s provisions, it is not being blameless that counts, but accepting all of it with regard to its objective: the love of God and fellowman. Here also, Jesus’ implicit view of the law seems contrary to that of Paul. Finally, Matthew 5:17 makes it abundantly clear that the Christ of Matthew’s gospel has not come to liberate from the law or to make it void, but to fulfill it, which in its context must mean: to uphold the standard of the law. (The passage refers to the same text in Deut. 27:26 that we looked at before.) We are told that to do away, i.e. abolish, not merely disobey, with the least of these commandments, is wrong, and that the righteousness of the disciples in the same sense must surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, which would be very difficult to understand if that righteousness were based on faith alone instead of on works of the law. Nevertheless, as we will see later, Jesus’ affirmation of the law does imply a change of perspective with regard to the goal of keeping the law and the conditions of its fulfillment. Doing the Torah can no longer be directed at raising the holiness of a minority, but should affect the whole of the life of God’s people, and, in the eschatological vision, the whole of the world. We contend, and try to show later, that this makes Jesus’ attitude to the law conform to Paul’s rephrasing of that same reality. In the eschatological situation, life in the Spirit is the same as life under the law. In the Galatians passage we discussed earlier, Paul uses the same word for “to fulfill” (pleroosai) that Matthew used as a translation of what was probably Jesus’ Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew jaqim of Deut. 26. He used the same word, but not in the same sense of “upholding” or even, apparently, “doing.” Fulfilling the law is “living a life in which the great moral concerns of the law are exemplified” (G. Kruse, 104). The entire law, from that perspective, can be reduced to one general commandment as a rhetorical device. This must be:

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faith, which works through love (5:6), which can be expressed in the language of the law as the commandment “love your neighbor.” But it is not the form of the law at all that is sought after here. It is not about a human faith that works and is effective through love as if it were an alternative to the kind of human conduct and activity that we have under the law, which would then constitute a different kind of obedience, but the power of Christ’s faith is working through a love that the Spirit works in our hearts without our cooperation. Therefore Paul can state that whosoever is led by the Spirit, who, in a way, lets the image of Christ become the contents of his self-awareness, is not under the law, not even the law that states “love your neighbor.” But at the same time, such a believer is actually fulfilling that same law by acting in conformity with its goal. So what then is this new life of the Christian outside of the law, even the law of love? In 5:16 Paul directs his main exhortation to the Galatians: “live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.” The law seemed an answer to the permanent question of man’s inability to do good. By living a life under restrictions that formed a hedge around the Torah by providing commandments that were meant to secure that man could not even begin to break the really important commandments, Judaism tried to tutor man from wickedness to righteousness. Paul recognizes this zeal since he was once part of that tradition. But now the tutor is gone, since Christ has come. That leaves us with the question: can Christians live without any kind of law? Does Christian freedom mean doing whatever you want? Obviously not, since there are two powers within man that are at odds with each other. The desires of the Spirit are set against the desires of the flesh, and man is but a tool in the hands of each. If you are in the power of the flesh, you have no freedom (5:17). If you are in the power of the Spirit, then Christ is expressed in your life (2:20). If you are led by the Spirit, the law is of no use, you are not “under” it (5:18). The fruit of the spirit (not its work or its demand) is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control (5:22). This fruit is set against the works of the flesh, the acts in which the flesh is expressed. The flesh, however, belongs to a previous life; it has been crucified along with its passions and desires. Man has been transformed, not only changed, in his

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status before God, from slave to son. Life in the Spirit is still a life of obedience, but not an obedience that is directed at the intellectual understanding of a law and its application. In that sense, Paul’s statements about the Spirit are in conformity with Jesus’ statements about the law. Both submit the Torah to a higher principle of obedience that is materially identical and analogous in the shape of its obedience, but not identical to the law’s aspect of demanding obedience to specific prescriptions. The exhortation that begins in 5:16 can therefore hardly be called a commandment. It is a reminder of the principle of a life that is already active (5:25a), and which can bear its fruit if we do not obstruct it by changing our allegiance from the Spirit to the law. If the flesh is crucified, the proper attitude is to bury it and forget about it, not try to curb it by obedience to laws that work against it. Not submission of the flesh by conforming to the demands of the law, but living spontaneously the pattern of life that the Spirit works inside the believer, and that is the pattern of the life of Christ. Paul is here very close to his statement in Romans 7:14-25 that the law actually provokes desire by prohibiting it, in contrast to the free gift of justification which evokes the desire (and gives the ability) to live life in the power of the Spirit. If it is not a commandment, but a description of what is actually taking place, its exhortatory effect can only be awareness of what is happening and giving up resistance to a work already under way. What is left are general guidelines for what is proper behavior in the Church, which are in a way descriptions of the new Kingdom of God as it takes on reality within the community. That this new life in no way resembles a life under “law” is also clear from Paul’s statement in 6:4 that each should “prove his own work…for each shall bear his own burden,” meaning that there is no imperative that can be used to condemn others. The function of the imperative has come to an end; what is left is “reminding” ourselves of what we have become in Christ and helping each other make it possible for the Spirit to bear its fruit in our lives. Such, apparently, is the “law of Christ” of Gal. 6:2. By bearing each other’s burdens, going to the full length of brotherly and sisterly love, a believer shows himself to act

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beyond the formal demand of the law of Moses.

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7. The Noachide commandments and Antioch We must ask a “legal” question now. Was this picture of life in the Spirit beyond the imperative of law accepted by all the Church? Is there really no place for the imperative in the Christian life? We have seen that Paul placed much emphasis on the acceptance of his gospel to the gentiles by James and John in the Jerusalem Council. In the description of that Council in Acts 15 there are some details that raise doubt as to whether Paul is referring to that meeting with the Jerusalem Church at all. Furthermore, the impetus for the meeting in Acts is the action on the part of the Judean brothers in Antioch. They taught that circumcision and the law of Moses were prerequisites for salvation. According to Gal. 2:2a, Paul went up on the basis of a revelation; in Acts 15 Paul and Barnabas were sent by the congregation in Antioch to Jerusalem to discuss this matter. But whether Paul is referring to this meeting or not, it is clear that the Antioch situation was treated differently in Jerusalem than it was by Paul. When the matter is settled by James, a specific part of Jewish oral law (halakah) is required of the gentile Christians: 19 Wherefore I judge, not to trouble those who from the nations turn to God; 20 but to write to them to abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from what is strangled, and from blood. 21 For Moses, from generations of old, has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath. The commandment in vs. 20 was not the mere trifle it might seem to us today. To abstain from the pollution of idols involved not only abstention from all things offered to the idol in the privacy of one’s home, or the refusal to participate in idolatrous feasts demanded in ordinary civil life, but it even ruled out participation in a domestic meal with friends and relatives, at least as to the foods being eaten, and maybe even with regard to the wine libations. Meat sold at the marketplace very often had its origin in the temple. If one had to ascertain

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beforehand what its origin was, it must have been obvious that relying on Jewish kashrut laws was by far a better means of procuring meat under this regulation, bringing the Christian community closer to the synagogue in this respect. That this was a real issue is obvious in Paul. Such incidents are referred to in 1 Cor. 8 as well. This sets us up with a clear-cut dilemma: (1) If the Jerusalem Council took place before the Antioch Incident, then either the gentiles in Antioch did not adhere to these instructions and Peter did not object, or they did, and the emissaries of James in Galatia shared the harsher opinion of the “brethren from Judea” and not that of the James mentioned in Acts 15. (2) If the Jerusalem Council was after the Antioch Incident, it served as a way to settle such matters against Paul’s own view as expressed in this letter. It would explain why Paul does not mention this very important part of the agreement, since it would also have settled the matter of table fellowship, and he could easily have referred to that as part of the solution. As matters stand now, Paul refers to the council only with regard to the separation of missionary fields (Gal 2:9) and the collection for the poorer brethren in Jerusalem (Gal. 2:10). So we must conclude in either case that the decision described in Acts 15 was not in Paul’s mind in Galatians, either because it preceded it, or because Paul intentionally ignored it. A third possibility could be that Luke for some reason distorted the outcome of the Jerusalem Council, or combined various sources into one, a possibility which we will ignore here for the moment but cannot rule out. But there is even more to it. The list of Acts 15:20 mentioned four prohibitions or abstentions: idolatry, fornication (i.e. illicit relations), the eating of the strangled (e.g., animals caught in a trap), and the eating of blood, i.e., meat with blood in it. It is easy to recognize here four out of the seven so-called Noachide commandments that were developed as a means to express the basic conditions under which devout Jews could consort with gentiles. Keeping the Noachide laws was a prerequisite of being a “righteous” person. Noah was called a righteous person in his age (Gen. 6:9), but of course it particularly refers to the matter of communion between Jews and gentiles in the land of Israel. In the Babylonian Talmud a person who has abjured idolatry is called a ”son of Noah,” a

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righteous one from the gentiles.68 The Noachide rules were valid first of all for those who lived in Israel and had the status of ger toshav, i.e., resident alien (Lev. 25:35). James’s proposal in Acts 15 is therefore to use these commandments to regulate the behavior of gentiles outside the land of Israel as well as to make possible communion between them and Jewish Christians living abroad. It is clear, then, that the decision by the Jerusalem Council increased the application of Jewish law beyond its original confines, while removing some of its more formal elements. E.g., one could obtain recognition for this status as Noachide by promising before a court of three judges to abstain from idolatry, but apparently the matter of the status of being Noachide was not decided in a court, but by entering the Church.69 Furthermore, in the time that the New Testament was written, the development of the Noachide Code was still in full progress. The account in Acts 15 may well be the secondoldest text relating to this subject. Around the year 100 B.C. we already find in the Book of Jubilees (7:20, 21) a summary of six commandments that were given to the sons of Noah (i.e. all of mankind): And in the 28th jubilee Noah began to teach his children the ordinances and the commandments and all the law that he knew, and he instructed his children (1) to do justice and (2) cover their nakedness and (3) to bless Him that had created them, and (4) to honor father and mother and (5) to love one’s neighbor and (6) to stay away from fornication and impurity and all injustice. Blasphemy and idolatry do not seem to be a part of this list, but according to Guttmann they can be inferred from the commandment (3) to bless the creator.70 Later, in Talmudic times, a list of seven commandments became authoritative and was worked out as the final say on the matter, but that does not 68 69 70

Cf. bAvoda Zara 51a Cf. Zuidema, 1991, p. 45. Guttmann, 1927, 105

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concern us here.71 What does concern us is the fact that this Noachide Code was an extension or application of the Torah to gentiles that expressed conditions for being righteous. Only those gentiles who kept these commandments could be considered righteous in practice, i.e., could enter into fellowship with Jews. On a practical level, the keeping of these commandments would be sufficient to allow Jewish and non-Jewish Christians to have fellowship together without either party’s renouncing its separate status under law. It would have been a fair compromise if it allowed for the Jewish law to stay in full effect without continuing the separatist side-effect of the Pharisaic Halakah and therefore would reject that the gentiles had no option but to become full-fledged proselytes in order to be a part of the New Covenant. However, the Noachide Code does not deal directly with the issue of separation or with issues of salvation. The righteousness that is its concern is of a social nature, regulating relations between communities, and not directly the relationship with God, and we must conclude that its basic concern is “ecclesiological.” There could have been no argument that the righteousness that is by faith surpasses the concerns of the Noachide Code, seeing that the latter is a minimal requirement with a social purpose. Now if these commandments were in effect for gentile believers in Antioch, it would have been hard for James’s emissaries to find fault with Peter. So if they did, unless they form a third party or reflect James’s position before the Council, the Antioch Incident took place before the Jerusalem Council, and therefore the letter to the Galatians must have been written before it, and the Jerusalem Council’s decree must have been an answer to the problems that this incident revealed. On the assumption that Paul did not simply ignore the matter, which we would have to suppose if he is referring to a meeting that has already taken place, we must argue that either Luke’s account has no historic reliability, or that Paul’s letter precedes that particular meeting. The trip to Jerusalem that is mentioned in Gal. 2:1 is then the one described in Acts 11:30; 12:25. Paul’s mention of a previous visit to Galatia, in Gal. 4:13, must then refer to a single visit, mentioned in Acts 13:13-14, 20. 71

Cf. bSanhedrin 56a-59b

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Galatians would then be the oldest letter of Paul, being written in 49 or 50. This idea is most often rejected because it seems unlikely that there were two councils on the same issue of circumcision. There are, however, major differences between Luke’s account and that of Paul, making it hazardous to base the dating of Galatians on Luke’s description of Paul’s journeys. It is also not impossible that Luke combined materials in a way to make it appear that the Jerusalem Council decided on all relevant issues pertaining to Jewish-gentile relationships at once. Paul did mention that his visit to the Jerusalem apostles in the first place was on his own initiative, whereas Luke’s account in Acts 15 mentions an initiative of the apostles themselves, instigated by the Judean brothers. The Jerusalem Council then merely reaffirmed the missionary decree, cf. Acts 15:12, which affirms the notion that Paul’s role here was that of portraying the success of his mission, a mission therefore already accepted and not only affirmed at that time, as indeed Gal. 2:9 states. The Council’s major contribution then lies in the solution by James that the gentiles should accept the Noachide Code, thereby ending the dispute with Peter and Paul that his emissaries, and the Judean brethren, must have had in the mission field where they met each other. What we have found so far is a Paulinist theology that is very much concerned with safeguarding the essential notion that justification is by faith, that Christian life could not be regulated by any kind of imperative or commandment. What was left for Jew and gentile alike was a life in the Spirit without any kind of conditional imperative that formulated a precise behavior in specific circumstances. We will study this notion of life under the spirit further in connection with the letter to the Romans. We will have to bear in mind, as a result of this chapter, that Paul’s vision of complete lawlessness for gentile believers, in the specific double sense that we explained above, was in fact changed by the Jerusalem Apostles’ decree, though the essence of Paul’s gospel of justification by faith and not by works of the law was reiterated there, according to Luke. At least we can say that to the Jerusalem Council proper Christian behavior was very much also a matter of proper obedience to a set of rules, the Torah for Jews and the Noachide Code for

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gentiles.72 What then does righteousness mean, if it cannot be found by the works of the law? And what is the relationship between righteousness by faith and the Noachide commandments? Paul’s argument seems to run like this: man is not justified by works of the law, i.e., by what the law itself does. Man can however be justified by the faith of Christ, that is by what the faithfulness of Christ does. Our faith in Christ results in an identification of myself with Him, so that His faith and life and resurrection become my own; that is, I die because of the workings of the law to which Christ Himself was subjected, the effect of the law is death as the ultimate atonement for sin, but I become resurrected with Christ because of this identification with Him. Though convicted under law and condemned by law, God gave evidence of the new thing He did in Christ through His resurrection. Christ lives in me and my ”self” no longer lives. The law brings me death, condemnation for my sins, curse and not blessing. Being made one with Christ gives me resurrected life, the blessing of Abraham, righteousness, and the gift of the Spirit. In as far as the law brings me death, I die, but with Christ. Insofar as the law brings me a curse, Christ bore that curse. Insofar as the law demands that I perform the commandments, I now live a life of faith in the Son of God (Gal. 2:20), which determines my life in the flesh, so I am no longer under the law. The shape of a life that aspires to achieve righteousness by performing a commandment as a condition thereto is taken away. Justification is then clearly seen primarily as it contains the results of life under the law. We might expect to acquire it through the law (5:4), i.e., through a life of submission under a diverse whole of commandments, since the law provides this as a way to achieve life: do this and you shall live. But in this manner the law will not achieve its goal. Law can only achieve its own lawful demand by punishing the sinner. If we do not become perfect under the law by doing all of its commandments, which is impossible on the basis of Paul’s anthropology and understanding of the perfection of the 72

This adoption of the Noachide Code in principle meant the establishment of a Christian halakah, which would also entail a “halakhic” form of applying the Mosaic law. Not only the specific regulations (as a Torah for gentiles) but the manner and mode of halakhic reasoning, a messianic oral law (a Torah of the gentiles) should be considered here.

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law’s demand, righteousness is lost. The righteousness that is demanded by the law can be summed up in one word, according to Paul: thou shalt love thy neighbor like thyself (5:14). So in terms of the law, the new life in the spirit that is nothing but “faith working through love” gives the righteousness that is all the law can possibly demand of a man. By having the faith of Christ working inside me, a love has become active in me that is the love of Christ (2:20), so I achieve righteousness by a faith that works through love (5:6). So by restating the goal of the law as the achievement of righteousness (equal to life in 3:11-12 and with future redeemption in 5:5), to be justified (more literally: be righteoused) must mean being in a particular condition. It means being identified with Christ, being set into a new realm where not the law, but the Spirit reigns (5:18). It means being set on a new path of life where the conditionality of performance has been replaced by the unconditionality of a free gift. To be justified means: fulfilling the law by adhering to its goal in a new way: not that of obedience and submission, but allowing the Spirit of Christ to do it inside of me. If this is the way God has acted to save the gentiles who were without the law in the first place, then the question arises of how God’s saving action in Christ relates to the Jews who are living under the law. As to the element of salvation, obviously Paul makes no difference. He is not arguing that faith-withoutlaw is the way for gentiles to enter the covenant people, so that Christian Jews would still have to submit to law after all. He is arguing that circumcision is not necessary because it is in itself without meaning after Christ has come. Jews and non-Jews alike are saved without recourse to the law, but if that is true, the law has no essential function. It might be argued that the problem of the (easy) entrance of gentiles into the Church was the starting point of Paul’s argument. But he did not stop there. By claiming that faith in Christ was the only means of entrance to gentiles and that the law should not be used to uphold the barrier between Jew and non-Jew, Paul had in fact abrogated the law for Jews as well. His opponents probably saw it differently. We can not be sure how much of this theology was actually considered and

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debated by the “pillars of the Church” in Jerusalem. The text in Acts 15:12 indicates that Paul’s testimony was limited to describing the great signs and miracles God was performing through him and Barnabas amongst the gentiles. It is Peter who raises the matter of the distinction between Jews and gentiles. God has made no distinction between Jews and gentiles, though it is said specifically of the gentiles that God did something extraordinary to make their entrance possible: He “purifies their hearts,” a clear reference to the covenant written by faith in the hearts of Jer. 31. Salvation, Peter states, is therefore in principle alike to gentile and Jew. And the barrier between Jews and gentiles has been replaced by the coming of the New Covenant in which the Spirit inscribes the demands of the law in the hearts of both Jews and gentiles. But then James in his concluding statement does not accept this gospel as implying that the Jews should become like gentiles, but prefers to find a way to uphold Jewish law and its boundary markers, and by appealing to the gentiles to conform to the Noachide commandments, he makes it clear that gentiles can and should draw nearer to Israel because of this. James’ quotation of Amos 9 speaks of the resurrection of the House of David first, and only then of the conversion of the gentiles. It seems clear that to the James of Acts 15 the adoption of gentiles into the covenant-people implied a decisive change in the way of life of gentiles, even beyond the requirements that were placed on the so-called God-fearers, who were allowed to practice the civil rituals that were demanded of them. The Noachide Code’s prohibition of idolatry would make such a compliance with civil religion difficult, if not impossible. So while it is true that the Mosaic law was not seen as the prerequisite of the gift of the Spirit, or of salvation, it was clear that to be part of the covenant-people, i.e., the Church, compliance with a halakah was demanded. To James this would have meant the continuation of the law for Jews and, as a necessary condition for gentiles, the imposition of the Noachide Code, implying further that James had no objection to gentiles who did want to undergo circumcision and become full fledged Jews. In Peter’s words in Acts 15:8-9, we therefore find the position that is closest to that of Paul. But it is concerned only with

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salvation and the gift of the Spirit, without making distinctions, the purifying power of faith for gentiles and salvation by the grace of Christ in the same manner. That position apparently was deemed completely in accordance with the implementation of the Noachide code as necessary and minimal requirement, and the acceptance of circumcision for gentiles who so desired. We must conclude, therefore, that if there is any credibility to the statements made by Luke in Acts 15, the position defended by Paul in Galatians was in profound disagreement with that of James, and maybe even that of Peter. We have some insight into how history favored the view Paul took: it would have been an advantage in his mission to the gentiles to make no demand of circumcision nor any other demand that could be explained as an element of the Jewish way of life. And yet, the attitude that was advocated by James did not fully depart from the Church.

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8. Reading Romans Our goal in this chapter is to make clear how the two major sections of the letter, the first dealing with justification (1:1611:36) and the second dealing with moral exhortations (12:115:13), are related to each other. As we stated before, the goal of this study is to find the relationship between the doctrine of justification and the practice of Christian life with regard to obedience. Since the law had had the function of “increasing trespass” (Rom. 5:20), it could be argued that Christians, by being dismissed from the observance of the law, were led into an immoral life. Being under grace, however, does not mean to live in sin (Rom. 6:15), but to live a life of holiness, of service to righteousness (Rom. 6:18). The main difference is then the attitude of obedience: it is not to be found in the condition of the “letter, but of the spirit” (Rom. 7:6). So Paul takes it upon himself to show how both are connected explicitly, as he had done more briefly and implicitly in the letter to the Galatians. In the scope of this work we cannot deal with all the issues that confront us in reading Paul’s letter to the Romans. We will have to give some clarification of how we read the letter and provide some framework for our detailed analysis of key passages below. We will try to go over the argument of Paul’s letter again, without trying to deal in detail with all the existing literature on Romans. We will try to answer two questions in our preparation of understanding Paul’s ethics; first: what is the extent of Paul’s usage of the Greek root dikaio- in terms that were translated traditionally as justification, righteous(-ness), justified, etc., and second: what is the condition and the identity of the believer to which the exhortatory portion is addressed? In our approach we will try to use the confrontation between a selected number of traditional interpretations (Schlatter, Ridderbos) and representatives of the new approach to Paul (Sanders, Dunn, Stowers, Johnson). E. Käsemann and G. Kruse represent the effort to maintain basically traditional views on Paul while at the same time responding to elements of the new perspective on Paul that had been developing since Davies’s publication of Paul and Rabbinic Judaism in 1948. The debate about the intent and structure of Romans 1-11,

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most often portrayed as the foundation of Paul’s ethics, has not yet been laid to rest. As late as 1994, Stanley K. Stowers published his A Rereading of Romans, which takes full advantage of new and old insights into the strongly Jewishdoctrinal and Hellenistic-rhetorical background of Paul’s thinking. One of its most essential conclusions is that the exhortatory part of Romans 12:1-15:14 is intended to give a specific moral and social content to the renewal of the gentiles as a community of faith. One of the most important conclusions of his approach is that the traditional doctrinal framework that connects chapters 9-11, about Israel, to chapters 12-15:13 is very weak. The chapters on the role of Israel seem to have become an interlude, instead of a vital foundation for the specific ethics of Christians. In order to see Paul’s intent more clearly, there must be a reading of Romans that shows how chapters 9-11 make the necessary link between chapters 1-11 and 12-15. Since we are not attempting to provide a comprehensive rereading of Paul’s letters in this study, we must give some insight into the general presuppositions of our more detailed exegesis of the passages that are vital to our line of inquiry. The following attempts to establish the major decisions we made to establish some consistent view of the general intent of the letter to the Romans. The letter to the Galatians was written by Paul to a Church he had founded and knew, and in defense of both the contents of his gospel and his apostolic authority against a “Judaizing” faction and against the specific background of the Antioch incident. In it, Paul presented a clear dismissal of the Torah as principle and standard of the Christian life. In Romans, which deals largely with the same theological issues, the situation is decidedly different. In this letter Paul is preparing his visit to Rome on his way to Spain, where he had not been before. The main thrust of the letter seems to be a defense of his gospel of justification by faith and not by works of the law against gentiles in Rome who advocated acceptance of Jewish law, at the same time emphasizing that with respect to salvation the gentile has precedence over the Jew. The polemical thrust of the letter makes it clear that this was one single position: a justification of the gentile believer based upon some higher form of obedience

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to law, whereby the Church replaced Israel as the people of God. The polemic seems addressed to a particular brand of Judaizers as well as to those who rejected Israel altogether, which is probable, if the historical circumstance that Jews and Jewish Christians who had been expelled from Rome in the year 49 under Claudius “because of their constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” and were now returning after Claudius’s death in 54 to a Church that had become dominantly gentile, has any bearing on this matter. A part of this polemical situation is the continuing criticism that the returning Jewish Christians probably made against Paul: that with his gospel of lawlessness he in fact was preaching immorality. Verses like 3:31; 5:20; 6:15 would not have been possible in Galatians. There he had to fight against the charge that elsewhere he had preached the circumcision! Because of its literary character and the way it later became canonized, Paul’s letter to the Romans is traditionally seen as the closest we get to a theological discourse as such in the New Testament. But, as we will see, in it Paul changes his view on the role of the law as present in Galatians and adopts a far more favorable attitude to its provisions. The doctrinal part of the letter opens by stating the core message of the gospel: that the righteousness of God is revealed in it (1:17). To many students of Paul, this has been without further consideration the core message of Paul’s theology as a whole (Luther, Calvin; of the moderns, e.g.,: Käsemann, Kruse) but not by all (e.g., J. Christiaan Beker [1980] who emphasizes the “Triumph of God in Life and Thought,” and Sanders, who sees Paul’s theology as deriving from two main emphases: (1) the Lordship of Christ and (2) the union of Jews and pagans within one Body of Christ).73 In Romans, the importance of justification is not in dispute, but its meaning and relative emphases are still not completely clear. Do we find in Romans the doctrine of justification by faith alone? Advocates will stress that the fundamental meaning of justification is expressed in Romans 3 to 5, and that the emphasis is on the legal, extrinsic character of the declaration of righteousness. Opponents will stress that Paul uses a whole range of expressions connected to the root “dika-” signifying various connected notions such as liberation and “enablement,” 73

Cf. Sanders (1977) pp. 441-442.

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even perhaps to intrinsic righteousness. That interpretation also implies that the whole letter is Paul’s explanation of what his essential gospel is, and that the exhortatory part is not an addition to a completed gospel but an intrinsic part of the argument. Paul opens his argument with a statement on the condition of the pagans, setting his “encoded” audience up for the first main issue: the use of the law as a means of judgment on others.74 The righteousness of God is first of all revealed in God’s wrath concerning ungodliness and unrighteousness.75 Though mankind could have known the truth that God is creator and therefore has a right to obedience (1:19, 21), mankind has fallen into idolatry, for which they were punished by being given up to harmful sexual and social vices that are a violation of God’s creation and will therefore result in death as judgment (cf. Rom. 1:28-31). This condition of mankind is universal; nobody can claim to remain unaffected by it, neither Jew nor pagan (2:3). The moralist audience of Paul has been tricked into agreeing with Paul too soon. Certainly pagans live an immoral life, but nobody can claim to be completely free from sin. In principle, therefore, all will be held accountable for their actions on the basis of “law”; i.e., a generalized principle of obedience (2:6), and this goes for Jew and gentile alike, though in different ways with regard to how the “law” was concretely present for each one (2;10). The possession of the written law for Jews (2:12) or the effective presence of the law-as-principle in conscience for gentiles (2;15) will not in itself excuse anyone on the day of judgment; it will rather bring out the culpability of the offenders more sharply. To be a Jew and have knowledge of the written law will not suffice to provide escape from judgment based on that same law, and neither will being without a written law and living by conscience. All of this does not compromise God’s revelation in itself, since our injustice 74

Stowers’s expression for the audience implicit in and intended by the rhetoric as distinct from our reconstructed audience, based on historic presuppositions only loosely connected to the text. 75 Such references to future judgment are (too) heavily emphasized by J. Chr. Beker, who argues that Paul’s theology was in a way derived from his eschatology, which gave all of his texts an “apocalyptic texture.” (Beker [1980] p. 17)

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brings out the more clearly the righteousness of God’s demand as executed in judgment. The law of Moses in its secondary function does precisely that, by making sin more visible, and by showing in the inevitable judgment of the sinner that nobody will be justified by the effectiveness of (having and studying) the law or by keeping the commandments as “works” of the law (3;19, 20). In contrast with the present revelation of God’s wrath, Paul opens a new chapter in 3:21 by stating that “now,” in the eschatological present, God’s righteousness has been revealed outside of this misunderstanding of the law. Christ has been made the propitiatory sacrifice in which God revealed His righteousness in such a way that God actually acts in accordance with it when He justifies the faithful. So man is justified through faith, without works of the law, which is the first major conclusion within Paul’s discourse (3:28). To be justified then obviously means several things, which are not all explained at once. In general it must mean here to escape the wrath of God and to remain free from punishment for idolatry and social vice. According to Paul, such a principle of justification, that man receives the status of acquittal for which God sovereignly provides the basis Himself, can be found in the Old Testament as well. Of Abraham it was said that “he believed God, and it was reckoned unto him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6, quoted in Rom. 4:3). Such righteousness obviously could not have been achieved through keeping the commandments, or by knowing and teaching the law, or by being a part of the community of Israel. In fact, circumcision, the commandment that signifies as no other the distinctiveness of Israel under the law, was given only after the episode of Gen. 15. Paul combines the statement about Abraham with a quote from Psalm 32:1-2, indicating that the judicial declaration of righteousness, which is based on Christ’s sacrifice, implies a total amnesty, a not accounting of sin to man. In fact, God justifies the “ungodly,” so completely sovereign is He in this justifying act of grace (4:5). In all of this judicial metaphor a cultic image of Christ as the mercy seat (cf. Lev. 16) and atoning sacrifice is operative, making the declaration at once extrinsic to the effort of man (imputation), but also making it a “real” declaration because of

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the effective revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ’s death and resurrection, and

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through the identification of the believer with Christ, making him righteous as a condition he is in. Acquittal from future judgment implies liberation from the power of sin and from a view of the law that can only condemn. The priestly declaration is not extrinsic, though it originates in the sovereign will of God alone. The particular characteristic of Abraham’s faith is explained in 4:17 as the faith in God’s promise to give him a son, which is taken as analogous to faith in Christ’s resurrection (4:25).

The fruit or the accompaniment of God’s declaration of righteousness is reconciliation, peace with God (5:1, 10), and it is again stated as based upon Christ’s death, now expressed as a loving self-sacrifice (5:8). In a typological passage, the cosmic scale of Christ’s sacrifice is made clear: mankind has been in submission to the power of death, sin and an accusing law, but now grace has intervened to procure the righteousness that the law was unable to produce. All of mankind is included in the justification unto life because God’s grace is offered to all (5:18), even while only those who are identified with Christ’s obedience will be made righteous (5:19). Objections that can be made to such statements about the conditions of receiving amnesty and righteousness are dealt with in Rom. 6:1-8:39. If there is total amnesty for sin, then it would seem possible that man remains a sinner in all respects, trusting in God to pardon him for all his offences. It becomes clear, however, that atonement through Christ means “dying to sin” (6:2). The imputation of righteousness is based on the identification of the believer with Christ in His death and His resurrection to a newness of life (6:4). Being “righteoused” means being set free from the power of sin (6:7; through death) and becoming alive again through the power of grace (through the resurrection). The objection to Paul’s teaching that it allows man to remain a sinner because he is set free from judgment does not hold up: the righteousness of Christ imputed to man implies his death to sin and becoming alive again in Christ. Being liberated from sin, man has become obedient to righteousness (6:18).

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A second objection directs itself to the function of the law in all of this. If justification implies having died with Christ, the law is no longer in effect, since it can rule only over the living (7:4). The newness of life beyond the law implies bearing fruit before God and being freed from the effect that the law has in inciting rebellion against God’s will. (7:5) This does not imply that the law actually effects sin (7:7), but it makes known what sin is, and it turns out that in our normal state such knowledge actually makes us desire it. More precisely: the power of sin is such that it abuses the law and knowledge of sin to enslave people under its power (7:8). The law in itself is good and righteous, but its abuse by sin turns its effect into the opposite. Finally, Paul grounds this perspective in a passage which deals with the nature of mankind and can be called an anthropology (Bultmann), though this is disputed by Stowers, Dunn, Sanders, and others who see in this passage a reference to Israel before Sinai. In both cases the passage is not to be taken as a reference to Paul’s individual biography. In my flesh, my life under the law, before my being renewed through Christ, there is no good. Sin makes me do things that I do not want. I am divided within myself and unable to comply with the law through my own power. That dichotomy is not alleviated by the law, which only expresses God’s demand that leads to condemnation but does not give me the power to do good, since it allows sin to reign over my life. So I need the life of resurrection to escape this problem. In the next passage (8:1-8:39), the consequences of life under grace are dealt with. There is no judgment for those who are “in” Christ, who have been identified with Christ on the basis of His sacrifice. Christ does what the law was unable to do: make it possible for the demand of the law to be fulfilled in those who walk according to a new principle of life, that of the Spirit, i.e., of a life being determined by the “mind of Christ.” It does not state that Christ made it possible for them to fulfill that demand themselves, so it is obvious we are not talking about a renewed obedience analogous to the obedience under law, i.e., the obedience to the law that is developed in the teachings of the gentile majority in Romans or was taught to them by the returning Jewish-Christians. Yet it is possible to ignore the newness of life in Christ and live according to the flesh (8:13), indicating that the believer is able to respond to exhortation. The imperative can be addressed to him as in 6:12-13: “Do not

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yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness,” “reckon yourselves dead,” etc. But this reckoning and yielding is in its essence a being aware of the actual condition of the renewed life and not a surrender of freedom under a demand that comes from the outside, as is expressed by the concept of slavery. But of course our present lives do not completely express the actual condition we are in. We have been redeemed in hope and expectation; we are heirs to the promise (8:24). All the circumstances of our life are, however, in accordance with our calling, though that knowledge is hidden from us (8:28). God has sovereignly justified us, so will He grant us also the triumph over the powers that endanger us (8:38). After the doxology of the love of Christ in 8:37-39, Paul turns to a second major question, that of the place of Israel in God’s revelation of salvation (9:1-11:36). The issue seems to be that if pagans receive justification while remaining outside of Israel, the promises to Israel would seem to have been revoked. But Paul states as his major premise that it is impossible that the word of God is without effect or made void (9:6). So it must be shown that justification through Christ remains congruous with the election of Israel and the privileges given them. Paul begins by making a distinction between the natural descent of Israel and the progeny of Isaac. The children of the promise made to Abraham are the Israel that receive the promises made to Israel. If Israel is based upon Abraham’s faith and his exemplary act of faith in the offering of Isaac, then the existence of Israel is actually based upon faith and promise, and not on law and works. It is therefore based on the sovereign will of God that revealed itself in Abraham’s election before circumcision, his being made righteous based on faith, the election of Isaac, and the rejection of Ishmael as the son according to the flesh. And again, the role of Jacob is expressed as a result of sovereign election, not of Jacob’s merit. So the fact that gentiles have received righteousness out of faith (9:30) is in accordance with the very principle of righteousness as revealed in the history of Israel before Sinai. Israel that tried to achieve righteousness under the law did not achieve the law because it interpreted it as a matter of single commandments, works of the law (9:31). Such works of the law

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count as inherent righteousness, as opposed to the righteousness of God that was unknown to them. But there is an opposition between the principle of the Sinaitic law that makes righteousness according to the law a condition of life, and Christ, who gives renewed life in order to fulfill the requirements of the law in the life of the believers (6:11, 8:4). This does not mean that Israel itself has been rejected. There is a remnant, elected by God’s grace, that has received redemption together with the gentile Christians (11:5). However, the rejection of Christ by Israel as a whole has a function within salvation history. It meant that the gospel could reach the gentiles, who were made part of the olive tree that is Israel, so that the gentile Church receives continuous instruction from that source. Paul apparently expected this condition to be temporary when he wrote that after the gentiles have been accepted in full number within the new community of Christ, Israel will also be redeemed (11:25). After all of this is said, Paul can offer exhortation based on of God’s mercy, displayed so totally in this gospel of justification by faith and sovereign grace (12:1). The basic principles of Christian ethics are congruous with what Paul developed earlier as the basis of salvation. The spirit of Christ in us (8:9) effects conformity to Christ: the living, holy, and God-pleasing sacrifice of our lives (12:1). Because of this insistence on our being united and identified with Christ, the metaphor of the body of Christ can come to the foreground in 12:4, and the specific exhortations of 12:9-21 seem to reflect the character of Christ’s life as it is working in the life of the believer. From this perspective of a community that imitates the character of Christ (12:1) and takes on His position in the world as Body of Christ (12:4), the role of government is mentioned in chapter 13. Submission to authority is meant to show the virtues of Christ incarnate in the Church, and it can be said that even without their knowing, the governments of the world serve God by creating an orderly society in which the Church can show its character. Because Christ has conquered the forces of sin, death, and law, no rebellion against government is needed or useful. It is enough to show the effective presence of mutual love in

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which all the commandments have their summary and in which the law is fulfilled (13:9). So chapter 13 deals with the relationship of the Church to government and the general demands of law, and chapter 12 deals with the inner nature of the Body of Christ in this world. Chapter 14 deals with matters of Christian life within the community: there should be tolerance with regard to religious matters, apparently referring to the ongoing presence within the Church of observant Jews and non-observant gentiles. Dietary laws and religious festivals may have been invalidated as a means of acquiring salvation or as conditions of being righteous, but they might be a useful part of the Christian life. The standard is Christ (14:6), and not a lawlike rule, but faith (14:23). We must first of all come to an understanding of the principal basis of Pauline ethics by discussing the meaning of righteousness and justification in the doctrinal part of the letter. Only by having a clear view of this major principle can we understand what life in Christ means to Paul and how it is effective in the Christian life in the practical circumstances that are described in the exhortatory part of the letter from chapter 12 on. Let us turn then to the major proposition with which Paul opens his discourse.

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9. The condition of Jew and Greek before God (Rom 1:1-2:27) The thesis of the theological part of the letter is stated in 1:1617: For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith;76 as it is written, “The one who is righteous shall live by faith.”77

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It is difficult to determine what difference, if any, Paul had in mind when he stated (Rom. 3:30) that the circumcised were made righteous from (a) faith (ek pisteoos) and the uncircumcised by the faith (dia tes pisteoos). Justification obviously had the same sense for Jew and gentile in 3:28. But it might be construed that the Jew, on hearing the gospel, heard in essence a principle of faith expounded that was already expressed in the Torah, as Paul meant to show elaborately in chapter 4. So the Jew was redeemed out of ‘a’ faith that was expressed in different ways to Jew and gentile. The gentile, who had had no prior access to this Abrahamic faith that was fulfilled in Christ, was made righteous by the faith, as was now preached to him through the gospel. That would explain the use of the determinate article. From faith, echoing the formula of Rom. 1:17 might then emphasize the notion of trust in a God who makes good on his promise, and by this faith, refers immediately to the faithfulness of Christ that is at the heart of the gospel that now also reached gentiles. Rom. 3:28 already stated that man, both Jew and gentile, is justified ”in the power of faith” (instrumental dative: pistei), which can then be understood to imply separate histories but equal forms of faith. 77 To Luther this was an adequate basis for the doctrine of justification by faith. Cf., e.g., his remarks in the “Sermon on Good Works”: “This is what St. Paul means in many places, where he ascribes so much to faith, that he says: Justus ex fide sua vivit, “the righteous man draws his life out of his faith,” and faith is that because of which he is counted righteous before God. If righteousness consists of faith, it is clear that faith fulfills all commandments and makes all works righteous, since no one is justified except he keep all the commands of God. (Emph. mine) Again, the works can justify no one before God without faith. So utterly and roundly does the Apostle reject works and praise faith, that some have taken offence at his words and say: “Well, then, we will do no more good works,” although he condemns such men as erring and foolish.” (Luther, op. cit., p. 122) From this passage, however, it may be inferred that the rejection of good works involves those works that have been done without faith, and equally that faith implies works of faith. The issue then

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The gospel is a divine power that has visible effects because of the work of the Spirit in the lives of men. It is here seen as restricted in its effect to those who have faith, at least in as far as salvation is concerned. In that respect there is no difference between Jew and Greek, as Peter had stated in Acts 15. The reason the gospel can be that power is that something else is revealed in it: the righteousness of God becomes effective through the gospel as a power to salvation. (We will go into the nature of “righteousness” in the next paragraph.) Following Dunn, among others, we read it like this: Righteousness springs from faith, which may refer to the faithfulness of God, and is accepted by faith. The quote from Habakkuk 2 has this same ambiguity implicitly, where it states ha-tzadik be’emunato jichjeh, the righteous will live through his faith., and it is not directly clear whether ‘emunato refers to His faithfulness, i.e., God’s, or the faithfulness of the righteous himself. So in effect Paul’s phrase “from faith to faith” can be read as a small midrash on ‘emunato, exploring both linguistic possibilities and making it serve his own purpose.78 Others have read differently and state that every act of faith makes the next one come to life, so it would refer to a life of faith in which righteousness is revealed in a practical sense, i.e., from one act of faith to the next.79 Schlatter has argued himself that the phrase “from faith to faith” is meant to exclude any interference from merit or works in the salvation of man, so in effect it refers to the sola in sola fide. There is also the possibility that two separate kinds or moments of faith are meant, e.g., that ek pisteoos refers to the believing acceptance of the gospel as the condition of the revelation of righteousness toward anyone that believes (verse 16), leading to faith as saving reliance on Christ. But then the passage is construed becomes what this concept of faith can mean if notwithstanding obedience is equalled to doing “works” without faith. 78 There are four versions in all of this Habakkuk verse. (1) The righteous by his faith(fulness) shall live (Masoretic text). (2) The righteous out of my faith(fulness) shall live (Septuaginta). (3) the righteous out of of faith(fulness) shall live (Paul). (4) My righteous one out of faith(fulness) shall live. (Heb. 10:38). Cf. Dunn (1988), ad loc. 79 Cf. Schlatter, Romans (1935), p.42, where he mentions this possibility.

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with the aid of the doctrinal distinctions of faith as assensus and fiducia, which are not to be found elsewhere in Paul. The quotation from Habakkuk presents some problems too. Käsemann has translated the quotation as saying: he that is righteous out of faith, will live. By faith is linked to righteous and not taken as the principle of the life of the righteous. Käsemann argues in his commentary on the verse that we have, not a quotation from the LXX, but a free rendering of the MT that transforms the meaning of be’emunato to fit the context of the Church. Anders Nygren read along these lines in his commentary in 1954 Schlatter argued along these lines as well in 1935, but added an emphasis on the divine righteousness working to bring people into the right relationship with God, thereby stressing the (social) concept of covenant that turned out to be so vital in contemporary scholarship. These emphases are still there in Luke Timothy Johnson’s Reading Romans, where he states that righteousness first of all means God’s virtue of being “just,” that is, to stand in and to act from a proper relationship to mankind.80 God is fair and impartial. From the LXX the readers could understand that this righteousness also implied God’s intervention on behalf of the weak and the poor. It signified God’s establishing right relationships where they did not exist before. After having stated the general thesis of his letter, Paul addresses the issue mentioned first: “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” This second section runs from 1:18-3:20. Paul explains that all have failed to respond properly to God’s revelation, so the wrath of God is revealed to be over the gentiles in particular. The fictitious reader is supposed to affirm this depiction of pagan folly and crime with relish. That was exactly the basic argument for seeking a righteousness under law to augment their gentile status as Christians. Paul’s argument in itself runs like this: The unrighteousness of man does not result from lack of knowledge, since mankind knew God as creator (1:20), a very slight hint pointing toward his larger thesis: that knowledge of the law will not help either. But mankind has not acknowledged God and has fallen into idolatry. On account of this idolatry, God has allowed them to act without righteousness in their relationships, particularly 80

Johnson (1997), p. 27.

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sexual vices in connection with idolatrous cults (1:24-27), which constitutes punishment in itself (1:27b). To “dishonor the body” is mentioned as the result of sexual vice over against the social vices and violence listed from verse 28 onwards. These other vices are mentioned in connection with a wrong way of thinking in 1:28, a way of thinking that was modified in chapter 12 to form the basis of a new ethic. All of these are connected with the righteous dictum of God: that those who perpetrate these things deserve death as punishment (1:32), not in the sense that they should be executed for it, but that death as part of the condition of mankind is proper for a humanity in the power of such vices. Having developed the notion of man’s sinfulness on the basis of his idolatrous rejection of God as creator, now Paul needs to address a first possible counter-argument in the beginning of chapter 2. You might say that you do not perpetrate the things mentioned in 1:23-31, that you do recognize God as creator and have not fallen into idolatry. That such an argument might be perfectly acceptable if individuals are concerned is highly likely. Paul himself states that he was blameless with regard to the demands of the law. Paul’s rhetorical opponent here is not an individual person, but a representative of either Jews or Greeks who might state: “we” do not do such things. It is necessary to see this before trying to make sense of Paul’s statement in 2:1 Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, every one who judgest, for in that in which thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. If the argument were directed at concrete individuals, the response might very well be: I myself do not “do the same things!” But if the argument is directed at types of humanity, or rather immediately against the Jewish condemnation of pagan vices, it actually states: although you as a Jew might argue generally that these things are not done by some or most of you, being a Jew does not in itself mean that such sins do not occur. If Stowers is right, we find here in actual fact not a Jew as intended audience, but a gentile (“O man”) and fictitious interlocutor. Instead of dealing with the “hypocrisy of the Jew,”

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as traditional exegesis would have it, Paul deals with a reconstructed ideal gentile, as he is seen from the perspective of his gentile readers.81 And so the argument can be construed as follows: the sins might not be the same, and not all of you have incurred guilt for them, but there is sin nonetheless. The “ideal” Jew that you gentiles would like to be is not a reality at all. Being circumcised and having the law does not imply that the “wrath of God” (1:18) cannot be directed at you, because it still depends on what you do. To condemn the sins of others will not lead to righteousness that can stand up in the day of judgment (verse 3). Verse 11 then reaches the first conclusion: there is no “acceptance of persons” with God; all will be dealt with according to their works and according to the covenant that is valid for them: those under the law will be condemned by the law, those outside of the law will be judged according to the truth that can be known without the revelation in Torah (cf. 1:18-19). Both will be judged according to their effective obedience. If in that sense Jew and gentile are alike, there is no need to become “Judaized” and adopt the position of the Jewish judge of gentile vices. But there still is a difference between Jews and gentiles. Paul explains it as follows 2:14. For when nations, who have no law by nature, do the things of the [mosaic] law, [then] these, having no [written] law, are a law to themselves; 15. who show the work of the law written in their hearts, [in the fact that] their conscience bears witness, and their thoughts accuse or else excuse themselves between themselves; 16. on the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ. In 2:14 Paul mentions non-Jews who “have no law, [but] practice by nature the things of the law.” The decision to translate “by nature” as an opposition to “practice,” as, e.g., in Darby’s translation, is no doubt connected to the interpretation 81

Stowers (1994), pp. 100-102. Stowers calls this interlocutor the ”Pretentious gentile.”

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of verse 15, where we read that they ”showed the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness,” etc. But is that perhaps a premature judgment? Schlatter states in his commentary on this verse: “Fusei [by nature – RAV] means that the pagans can show this behavior because of what they find in themselves and have received because of the history of their lives.”82 It makes it possible for Schlatter to use this as a paradigm of the kind of obedience that God demands from humanity later on in his analysis of the work of the spirit. “Where there are only words (note: this takes up Paul’s deconstruction of the law in terms of the letter vs. spirit dichotomy in 7:6, and the way Paul in Galatians changed the ‘words of Torah’ to the ‘written words’, the merely written word – (Gal. 3:10) the law as such is rejected. This makes perfect sense if Paul’s opponent is a modern legalist, who would value the possession of the written law over the obedience that is commanded by it. Such an opposition would entail an inner morality over against a merely outward legalist compliance with rules, as in the Kantian (and probably Lutheran) opposition between morality and legality. After all, it was not the possession of the written Torah in itself that was at stake, but the Torah’s dual role in the promise to Abraham as the father of many peoples and as boundary marker for Israel. But does the text state that these gentiles (ethne of course does not refer to pagans, but to non-Jews, it does not refer to “states” or “nations” because the definite article is missing) obey the law “by nature” in the sense of “according to their individual nature,” i.e., with the same force as “according to their nature?” Paul uses fusei only 3 times, if we disregard Eph. 2:3, whose sense is not different from the usage in Gal. 2:15. It refers, e.g., to those who are not gods by nature, i.e., the idols (Gal. 4:8), to being Jews “by nature,” i.e., through birth (Gal. 2:15), and then we have the expression in our verse. The problem is to what part of the sentence fusei belongs here.83 It may state: If gentiles, who do not have the law by 82 83

A. Schlatter, Brief an die Römer, p. 90.

Cf. James D.G. Dunn (1988, ad loc.) argues that “syntax and balance of the sentence require that fusei be taken with what follows” , against Cranfield and Achtemeier. The parallels cited in 2:27; Gal. 2:15, and Eph. 2:3 do show

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nature, do what the law commands, etc. Then we have fusei connected with the first part of the verse, which makes perfect sense. The other option would connect fusei with “acting,” as a mode of behavior and not as a mode of being. But this presents a problem. Nowhere does Paul use fusei in connection with a behavior. In the other two instances, fusei is connected with the origin of a way of being.84 It makes no sense, however, to state that someone acts according to his nature what the law commands, unless we construe that law to be a “natural law” or if we understand it to be a reference to pagan Christians85 in whom the prophecy of Jeremiah 31 had been fulfilled. I will discuss the Jeremiah 31 prophecy later so I will address the natural law option here first. I fail to see how such a concept of natural law can be part of Paul’s understanding of things, and the only other place where we might construe this is Rom. 1:26, where we have the change of natural (fusiken) to the unnatural (para ten fusin) use. Here, though, it is not a matter of acting “against nature,” but of acting against the “honor of the body” (Rom. 1:24). It therefore refers to a way of behavior, in this case, one that is incongruous with God’s intentions in His that Paul in general would have put fusei within the phrase and not at the end of it. Is it not possible, however, that Paul would have wanted to stress “by nature” because the context is about natural prerogatives? In that case, he would have put fusei at the end of the phrase. “gentiles who do not have the law, by nature [that is],, since after all, gentiles could “have” the law by becoming proselyte or adopting it in their Christian context. Furthermore, if Paul wanted to stress that gentiles practice the law “by nature” he would have put the fusei within the next phrase, following the same logic that Dunn proposed and we would have had the phrase: ta tou nomou fusei poioosin. If fusei, finally, does belong to the next phrase, as Dunn argues, it is somewhat singular in that its position is contrary to Paul’s general practice of using it within the phrase and the only reason for that could be the desire for emphasis. But if emphasis accounts for its positioning outside the phrase it is connected to there is no reason why it could not be connected to the previous part of the phrase anyway, since emphasis could be achieved in both positions. 84 Romans 2:27 has “ek fuseoos,” which implies a different concept. Gal. 2:15 does show fusei within the phrase, but here the phrase is quite short and no emphasis is intended: hemeis fusei Ioudaioi. Finally, in Eph. 2:3 there is also no opposite to fusei, since it applies to all that “we are by nature children of wrath.” So again, there is no reason there to put fusei in a separate construction. More importantly, both Gal. and Eph. show that fusei is normally connected to the origin of people, not to a mode of behavior. 85 Karl Barth e.g. stated in his Church Dogmatics, I,2, p. 332 that Rom. 2:14 can only refer to pagan Christians in whom the prophecy of Jeremiah 31:33 was being fulfilled.

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creation. But this behavior is expressed as the opposite of fusikos (in the derived sense of “natural,” according to its own original intent as immanent in its being) and not constructed with fusei, which would introduce a concept of “natural order” as a standard. (So I contend that “against its nature” must be distinguished from either against, or in accordance with, nature as such.) Consequently we read as follows: Rom. 2:14 must mean that the nations do not have the law because of their origin, and so we read fusei (by nature) as the opposite of those who came to the law by an act of conversion. What does the second expression, “to be law unto themselves,” then mean? Paul states that if they happen to do what the law prescribes for them, they turn out to be a law unto themselves, that is, their acting in conformity to what the law commanded Israel is not a matter of standing under any written law, because as gentiles they do not “have” the law. It is a matter of responding to “a” will of God, not to what the known will of God in the Torah is. Again, the crux of the argument is against the gentile audience’s pro-Jewish assumption that obedience to God must imply direct obedience to the written law. There can be obedience to God without the law. All of this is in harmony with minor Jewish teachings in pseudepigrapha like 4 Ezra, where it states, in 3:33ff., that some among the nations have “fulfilled Thy commandments.” It is obviously not meant to state that miraculously they have obeyed the Torah without knowing it, since that would weaken the argument Paul is seeking to make here against his gentile readers. It also seems to correspond with the more general notion that non-Jews who keep the Noachide commandments can be deemed “righteous amongst the nations.” This is unlikely, however. The problem is that the Noachide commandments were considered a written code that was based on oral tradition after the time of Noah. The status of that code was still under development within 1st-century Judaism, so it is hardly likely to have been thought of as “known” amongst the nations at the time of Paul’s writing. Besides, the code as it developed in its early stage turned out to be more of a standard for the gentiles, which defined conditions for Jewish-gentile communion, than what it became in the Babylonian Talmud: a code of behavior

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of the gentiles as their version of Torah. So, on the basis of this verse, it can only be said that the gentiles sometimes acted in apparent accord with rules of behavior that the Jews had as written commandments, even though these gentiles had no such written source. The argument is that the acceptance of a written law code as such does not make a person righteous, it still is only a matter of what you do. But having said that, it is obvious also that Paul exceeds the statement of Rom. 2:14 in the next verse, where the words of Jeremiah 31:31-32 are seemingly applied to nations outside of the law. 14 When gentiles who have not the law by nature, do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them. 16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. The notion that the nations have the work of the law “written on their hearts” is puzzling when we consider that the prophecy of Jeremiah 31 refers to a future state of affairs in Israel and is taken in the New Testament to refer to the reality of Christian life in the Spirit. The other reference to this future state in Hebrews 10:15-18 obviously refers to Christians. A little later we find Paul in chapter 7 explaining the ineffectiveness of life under the law by expressing the position of the proselyte under the covenant with Israel like this: “For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.”86 With this statement, the attitude of, e.g., Psalm 37:31: “The mouth of the righteous proferreth wisdom and his tongue speaketh judgment; the law of his God is in his heart; his goings shall not slide,” and Psalm 40:8: “To 86

The literature usually considers different possibilities in dealing with Romans 7: Paul is either speaking autobiographically about his individual experience with the Torah, or he is speaking about Israel’s collective experience under the law (Ex. 19), or, in a combination of both, about the ‘typical” experience of a Pharisee (Dunn). In our estimate he is speaking about the effect that acceptance of the law has on gentiles, who take that law as the means for salvation (with Stowers).

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do thy good pleasure, my God, is my delight, and thy law is within my heart” is both reflected and surpassed. For we read elsewhere that “the love of Christ is poured out in our hearts” (5:5) and that we “believe with our hearts unto righteousness” (10:10). Both Ezekiel 11:19 and Isaiah 51:7, on the contrary, refer to the restoration of Israel. Is Paul saying that the hope for the future as expressed by the prophets is nothing but an illusion, since the nations already had the law written on their hearts? Hardly. We must remember that Paul is not referring to the law as such, but to the work (or effectiveness) of the law, which is what the law had commanded them but which they did not receive through tradition in a written form. It is not the law that is written on their hearts, but the work of the law. What the law requires, in 2:14, refers to the claim of the law as specifically applied to them. That’s why it does not say ta erga tou nomou, the works (mitzvoth) of the law), since a totality of separate commandments is not what Paul had in mind. Neither the mitzvoth, nor the Noachide commandments, which are a written law for the non-Jews, but acting lawfully in general on the basis of their required acknowledgment of the Creator, was what he claimed for the non-Jews. To claim that all of the Mosaic law would be fulfilled by non-Jews would be untenable. It would imply that Paul had first reduced the law to a minor portion of the ethical prescriptions, say the ten commandments. But the intent of the passage is not to excuse gentiles, nor to put their understanding of the law on a par with that of the Jewish nation; the conscience of the nations would also accuse them on the day of judgment. So Paul’s argument is directed at two things: (1) there is a kind of obedience which is without the written form of God’s commandment that is still discernible even amongst non-Jews, and (2) even if man has the Torah to guide him in these matters, only the factual obedience, the deeds, will mean anything in the day of judgment. And both those who are and those who are not in possession of a written law stand accused of failing to meet its requirements. If there are non-Jews who do what God requires without having a written statute, then having the law would not make any difference. It is all about the “works” (but the “works” in 2:6 are not those of the law, and in 2:15 “the work,” in the singular,

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means the general effective reality of law), the actual deeds, that will be judged in the day of judgment. Paul is not stating that they have their conscience instead of a written law that informs them of this requirement, for in so far as there is a demand, it was revealed by God in his Torah. A strictly oral tradition was affirmed in Jewish tradition starting with Noah, but this tradition was in accordance with and derived from scripture. There is therefore no basis to think that Paul is referring to Noachide law. He is actually only referring to the fact that gentiles have a conscience, that they actually have a knowledge of the difference between good and bad without a written instruction, which he takes to be a mode of the presence of “law,” even if it cannot be the law as the written and studied Torah of Jewish experience. So it does not mean that gentiles on their own accord could find what is right and what is wrong, as Schlatter explains, but that they made such a distinction at all without written law! The principle of obedience to law as obedience to and recognition of God as their creator, the argument from chapter 1, is present with them in the way Paul describes in 2:14: they are a law unto themselves; in the inner dialogue of their conscience it is expressed what Torah is as instruction of law, rather than specifically what the law commands, since that can only be understood from God’s revelation. Of course one might object that surely some understanding of the prohibition of murder and theft and the like are meant here. But even then the principle would not be compromised that Paul is thinking about an analogue of the law for gentiles as distinct from the posession of a written and oral tradition as a mark of divine election. The Greek word for conscience, (suneidesis), needs some attention here, because its interpretation might decide the question of the precise nature of this obedience without the (written) law that Paul introduces here (and enhances considerably later). It is part of a threefold explication of what it means that the non-Jews are a law unto themselves. The demand of the law is (1) written on their hearts, i.e., known without formal instruction, and (2) their conscience (this knowledge accompanying all actions with the judgment of right and wrong: [sun-eidesis]) acts

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like a witness that testifies to that fact, and finally (3) their thoughts accuse or excuse each other. If we take it this way, we derive the plain meaning from classical Greek, where sunoida is used non-reflexively according to the expression: sunoida tini ti: to share knowledge of something with someone else. Their knowledge of (the fact), then testifies with others, and is a sign of their shame and their awareness of being set under judgment (suneidesis, summarturein). Such a witness (which obviously could be the same person who knew his own deed) could then either be for the prosecution or for the defense, depending on what he knows. The sequel that speaks of their accusing or excusing each other in thought makes a logical follow-up. As each person, in his own conscience, with perfect knowledge of the facts, accuses or excuses himself, so the judgment which they fear is a perfectly right and true judgment, their thoughts bringing the verdict. In its reflexive sense it would refer simply to being aware of one’s own actions, which leads to a tension since actions can be viewed from different and opposite viewpoints, and that allows for the kind of tension between good and bad that is characteristic of moral self-awareness. Now this we take to mean that to Paul the fact that the gentiles have a conscience is in itself a testimony to the fact that they are sensitive to the distinction between good and bad and therefore are in general subject to requirements that are analogous to those of the written law. The (written) law is effective, has an ergon, in so far as non-Jews make moral distinctions at all. Having a conscience means being divided in oneself; the ethical dimension shows itself as a tension. And it is in this tension that the reality of the law can be seen. It is interesting to note, in passing, that there is no direct equivalent for this concept of conscience in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. In Psalm 139:23 it is actually God who is called upon to be a witness to the inner thoughts, where it states: “search me, O God, and know my heart; prove me, and know my thoughts.” If God is the inner witness of my thoughts, then connected to this is His word as the standard of my behavior and the source of knowledge of good and bad. God’s word is close to man, in his mind and heart (Deut. 30:14), so that the

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Torah, and not an inner faculty of man, performs the function that is ascribed to the inner (reflexive) conscience in Greek thought. Might this be the actual context of Paul’s passage? His first step is to affirm that it can be said that, even without the written law, the non-Jews make a distinction between right and wrong and have a conscience, in the sense that they too live in the tension between right and wrong. If that is the case, then it is not only the actual possession of the (written) law that allows people to have the work of the law , that which makes man stand accused or excused, actually within themselves. Their very being testifies to an effective presence of the law, analogous to the memorized and studied law that conveys God’s word as a non-reflexive, “outer” witness of our inner thoughts and acts. Apparently Paul is disputing the contention that the possession of the written law is to be identified with standing under the efficacy of law, taken as expression of God’s will. He is denying that the law’s only effectiveness is through the possession of a written Torah. And of course he must do so, if he is to contend that faith in Christ actually fulfills the same function. Paul has prepared the way by arguing that gentile idolaters show evidence of the presence of the law in their consciences and experience the tension of right and wrong. He has established that no general status under law, but only actual deeds, are the proper subject of final judgment. Now Paul can return to the main line of his argument, started in 2:1. There is no excuse for those who judge others but do not comply with the law themselves. So if this “man” calls himself a Jew, no matter whether such a person is a Jew by birth or by conversion, or a Christian semi-proselyte or Judaizer, he has many things to boast of. Knowledge of God’s will, discernment, instruction in the law are all his. On that basis he can be a leader of the blind gentiles and new Christians who know nothing about the law. There is profound truth to this in the expectation of his audience, since the law really is the embodiment of knowledge and truth. But the criterion of righteousness cannot be the knowledge of the law, but must be the effectiveness of that knowledge. If sin is still present and death still reigns in such a life under the law, then the law will be shown to be ineffective. And since the argument can be made that both Jews and gentiles, with or without law, do sin and are under judgment of death, the gentile Christian who

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intends to adopt Jewish law after the Pharisee fashion as an enhancement to his faith is severely misguided. Therefore it must be said as a matter of principle: circumcision, the sign of this being under the law, only has meaning in the doing of the law (2:25). If those who have not been circumcised, the non-Jews who do not have the law by nature from 2:14 and the not circumcised “by nature” in Rom. 2:27-can achieve the requirements of the law, it is shown that the possession of the law is ineffective. The judging man of 2:1 will then be judged himself by the uncircumcised who does the law. Paul is setting up a moral standard that overrides being circumcised or being in possession of the law. And by that standard, though secondary to what the law is demanding differently from gentiles and Jews, there is absolute equality between the two. “The single most important theme of Romans is equality of Jew and gentile.” 87 In the matter of sin, there is really no difference.

87

E.P. Sanders Paul (1991), p. 66.

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10. Justification (3:21-3:30) The judging of the sins of others, setting up the standard of the law to reveal unrighteousness in others, does not lead to an improvement in behavior. Teaching gentiles the law would therefore only lead to an increase in guilt. So how then can righteousness be achieved? We come now to a major element of our argument, which is Paul’s treatment of imputed and/or infused righteousness. But now apart from [a] law righteousness of God is manifested, borne witness to by the law and the prophets; 22 righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ towards all, and upon all those who believe: for there is no difference; 23 for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; 24 being justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; 25 whom God has set forth as a mercy-seat, through faith in his blood, for shewing forth of his righteousness, in respect of the passing by the sins that had taken place before, through the forbearance of God; 26 for shewing forth of his righteousness in the present time, so that he should be just, and justify him that is of faith of Jesus. 27 Where then boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? of works? Nay, but by law of faith; 28 for we reckon that a man is justified by faith, without works of law. 29 Is the God of Jews only? is he not of nations also? Yea, of nations also: 30 since indeed there is one God, who shall justify circumcision on the principle of faith, and uncircumcision by faith. 31 Do we then make void law by faith? Perish the thought: rather we establish law.

This second part of Paul’s theological argument runs from 3:215:20. The subject of the whole passage seems to be that there is no distinction between Jew and gentile in the matter of salvation. 3:21-3:30 is devoted to the question of how righteousness was revealed in Christ and its relationship to the

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law. Though crucial for Paul’s argument, it is also the most difficult and obscure passage in the letter.88 Some have argued that Paul uses earlier confessional material, which could account for the density of the passage.89 Justification by faith is mentioned for the second time as a principle in 3:28. Chapter 4 contains the midrash on Abraham, where Paul uses the second quote (after Habakkuk 2:4 in Rom. 1) that affirms justification by faith on the basis of Gen. 15:6 (Rom. 4:3). Finally, chapter 5 expounds on the consequences of justification by faith, and is therefore our main focus later on. In the opening verse of our passage, a principle is introduced that refers back to 1:16-17, where Paul states that the righteousness of God was revealed in the gospel. It was outside of the gospel where God’s wrath was revealed through law and conscience and was exercised in His judgment upon all sinners, Jews and gentiles. So what is the meaning of this concept of righteousness? In 1:16-17 the essence of the gospel was explained as the righteousness of God revealed on the basis of faith. With the “now” of 3:21, Paul turns to the major thesis of his letter. Righteousness is now revealed beyond and outside [the principle of] law, while the law [of Moses] and the prophets testified unto its ultimate revelation. The first mention of law is without the definite article, and refers back to the statement in 3:20. The new righteousness, revealed in this new epoch, is different from the righteousness under the law that followed the works of the law. The “now” might be taken as both a logical and an eschatological antithesis and is opposed to the present of Rom. 1:18.90 The reality of the next verses is already present and working within the present world, though its fulfillment still lies in the future. That righteousness must mean here: a righteousness of God (i.e., gen. subj. with the explicative genitive in verse 22: dikaiosune de theou, “a righteousness of God then”), i.e., a way of being righteous that God has given. It has no reference to God’s being inherently righteous nor does it mean a righteousness of man before God or a “divine” 88 89 90

E. Käsemann Römer (1974), p. 85. C.G. Kruse Paul (1996), p. 188. E. Käsemann Römer (1974), p. 85.

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righteousness that would be a human achievement. The emphasis is on God’s effective exercise of justice in the midst of human failure.91 The forensic nature of the expression is not by accident and cannot be replaced by stating that Paul meant that God’s grace has been revealed.92 That means that justification is here seen as extrinsic to the anthropological condition of man; it is extra nos. Paul goes on to state the basis for this: the revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ is not in contradiction to God’s standard of justice, for it is based upon an atoning sacrifice. To further emphasize that God’s being is not compromised by this way of showing His righteousness, verse 21b states that the law and the prophets bear witness to this righteousness. There is no total breach with the prior history of salvation. Still, it is not the law as is understood by Judaism that bears this witness, nor is it merely a reference to those citations within the Old Testament that are taken as prophetic with regard to Christ. So it might refer to the whole of the OT, understood as promise which aspect of the Old Testament is restored by Christian faith, since the OT, according to him, confronts us so far only within the religious perversion of salvation by works, or to the center of Torah: the Day of Atonement, or more specifically to the story of Abraham (Kruse, p. 189) Such righteousness of God is achieved by the “faith-obedience” of Christ and is intended (effective) for all who have faith, who believe.93 The ground of our justification, which because of the 91 92

Cf. A. Schlatter (1935), p. 137.

Interestingly, in the commentary on Romans by St. Thomas Aquinas the role of faith is expressed as primus motus mentis in Deum, "a primary movement of the mind toward God", and faith thereby becomes a form of justice, a prima pars justitiae. For if faith in that way becomes a cause of righteousness, such faith must be a faith that is alive (James 2), works through love (Gal. 5), implies Christ being in our hearts (Eph. 3), and purifies (Acts 15). Apparently this exegesis is prompted by the succession of ”through faith” and ”for all who have faith,” with the first mention of faith signifying the means of access and the second referring to a mature faith that works through love and therefore signifies a being righteous (St. Thomas Aquinas, in Omnes S. Pauli Apostoli Epistolas Commentaria, c. iii, l. iii). 93 The phrase dia pisteoos Iesou Christou can be translated as: through faith in Jesus Christ. Since pistis can also mean “faithfulness,” it might be rendered, “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” The argument could be made that it was intended to be the opposite of “works of the law” so that the

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forensic language that Paul uses here (judgment in 2:16, 3:8, 20; accused in 3:9) is first of all a declaration of being set free from judgment (cf. 5:1) , is a sacrifice. (We will however examine the implications of the so-called forensic language later in this paragraph.) Verse 25 is crucial here. God has made Christ into a mercy seat (language of the Day of Atonement, Lev. 16:15-16) through faithfulness [shown] in his blood [death]. We again take “faith” here as a reference to the obedience of Christ and not as reference to the subjective faith of the believer. So in fact Paul has a basis for his statement that God revealed His righteousness by accepting believers into a renewed relationship with him, since the sins that would require Him to pronounce a verdict [of death, 1:32] on Jew and gentile are now atoned for by Christ. God does not condone sin, but atones for it through Christ. We have repeated here the common statement that Paul’s language of the courtroom in chapter 2 implies that justification here means a declaration of being set free from judgment.94 In opposition to that Sanders has stated: “This [the occurrence of logidzomai, to “reckon” 11 times in chapter 4 and in 3:28 - RAV] does not mean, however, that Paul thinks of righteousness as being fictitiously imputed to those who have faith, while they remain sinners in fact.”95 Now it may certainly be true that it is not correct to say that righteousness is merely or fictitiously imputed, and it may be true also that Paul does not always refer to righteousness in this sense. Sanders showed in his discussion of Paul’s letter to the Galatians that the Greek verb diakaiomai means “to regard someone who is right as being in the right.” It involves a declaration or acknowledgment of innocence. Wherever this verb is used in distinction to condemnation, in a specific judicial greatest antithesis is present as in the text. Dunn, however, argued strongly against that, on the grounds that Romans 4 deals with the believer’s faith in extenso. To him, the faithfulness of Christ was not in the apostle’s mind (Dunn, Romans [1988], ad loc.) 94 Käsemann, 1974, p. 86; Schlatter, 1935, p. 143) 95

Sanders (1991), p. 67.

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context, this is the meaning that we should assume (e.g. Rom. 5:18). It then becomes the equivalent of acquittal with a basis in reality. And this is true in all cases of the usage of the verb in the active moods. But Sanders argues forcefully for a difference in the meaning of righteousness when used in passive moods. With the exception of Rom. 2:13; 1 Cor. 4:4, 6:11, “being righteoused” means the same as being set free from (the power of) sin and not merely being declared free from guilt. It has the connotation of something that actually happens to a person and not merely a declaration extra eum.96 This is particularly helpful in restoring some balance in the discussion about justification that has been obscured so much by the emphasis on a believer’s being simul justus et peccator, for such an approach does not imply any transformation of the Christian and makes God’s declaration ineffective in the present world. When Paul states in 4:5 that God justifies the ungodly, this certainly does not mean that the ungodly remains what he is or that he will only be transformed into his real condition in the future. This other meaning of the passive mood of dikaiomai is most often passed by in the translations. In Rom. 6:7 we read: for he that has died is justified from sin (Darby), He that is dead is freed from sin (KJV), Denn wer gestorben ist, der ist gerechtfertigt und frei von der Sünde (Luther, ...justified and freed from sin, combining the choices of Darby and KJV). But from Sanders’s perspective, the point gets lost that having been justified (dedikaiootai) is equivalent to what is stated in 6:6b: “no longer slaves of sin.” And this last expression prompted KJV to choose and Luther to add the concept of being freed. But even in our passage, where the active sense of diakaiomai is dominant (the passive in 3:24 is probably equal in meaning to the active mode in 3:26) and the judicial language is obvious, there is also reference to the mercy seat and the day of Atonement. Could it be that what we call judicial language is usually distinguished too strictly from the priestly language of atonement and sacrifice? The blood that is brought into the Holy of Holies not only atones for the sins of the people, and sets them free from judgment, but it also purifies them. (Cf. 96

Ibid., pp. 48-49.

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Lev. 16:16, 30. The scapegoat of the day of Atonement also seems to refer to spiritual purification, a strengthening of moral attitudes and vigor.) The declaration could be also priestly and not judicial alone. Furthermore, in Rom. 8:4 Paul explains that Christ’s sacrifice involved the condemnation of sin in the flesh, “in order that the righteous requirement of the law should be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to flesh, but according to Spirit.” This can surely be read as a description of the reality of justification: being freed from sin, being united with Christ, having God’s Spirit dwell in us, implies walking according to the Spirit, so all of it refers to one and the same reality. The passive mood might extend the judicial meaning beyond its ordinary confines, as Sanders puts it, and this might be very true with regard to the relationship of this usage to classical Greek. But is it possible that to Paul “righteousness” had legal and priestly implications simultaneously? If justification is based on a sacrifice, the declaration of righteousness might very well be a priestly declaration. This can be clarified further by returning to the verb logidzomai for a moment. It is crucial in the next chapter of Romans, where we find the quotation from Gen. 15:6: “And Abraham believed (had faith) in God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” The Greek passive elogisthè used here is the translation both of the Hebrew va-jachsheveiha (in the active, kal) in Gen. 15:6 and the Hebrew techashev (in the passive, niph’al) in Psalm 106 (105): 31. When applied to reward in the New Testament, the Greek word keeps its classical Greek sense of “accounting,” reckoning in the commercial sphere. When taken in conjunction with grace (cf. 4:4), the Greek word is moved beyond its classical usage and into conformity with its status as the translation of the Hebrew (chashav). So how did Paul understand the passage in Gen. 15? The law is quoted to make clear that the righteousness that God revealed in Christ without law has been witnessed to by the law and the prophets (3:21). In fact, Paul makes the claim that this revelation actually confirms the law. The general principle of this revealed righteousness is stated in 3:28: we “reckon (an ordinary usage of logidzomai in the sense of thinking] that a man is justified by faith, without works of the law.” The “without works of the law” must mean that doing the

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commandments is not a prerequisite for obtaining justification. The question arises: on what grounds then was Abraham to be considered a righteous person? Obviously Abraham could not have acquired that status by doing the works of the law, since the commandments had not yet been given, an issue the rabbis resolved by stating that Abraham and the other patriarchs living before Sinai either conformed to the commandments already given (Noah), or did the law without having to know the written law, or even that the law was already being studied in its form of oral teaching. Now Gen. 15:6 states in the LXX that Abraham believed, had faith in God, and that “it was reckoned” to him, put on his “account,” as righteousness. This cannot mean that Abraham’s faith was a different work of the law that equaled all the other commandments put together. The “reckoning” in the one case is according to obligation, when reward is at stake, and in this case it is according to grace. So Paul reads Gen. 15:6 as saying that Abraham’s trust in God was sovereignly declared by God to be righteousness, to establish Abraham as a righteous man, i.e., that fact alone made Abraham “do the right thing” in accordance with the proper relationship to God. This sovereignty is expressed also when Paul speaks of justification of the ungodly in 4:5. The quotation of Psalm 32 immediately following can be seen as an illustration of the declarative function of this reckoning, when David calls the man blessed to whom God will not reckon his sin. So the ungodly is declared righteous without any condition in his fulfilling the demands of the law, but only conditioned on his affirmation of God’s sovereignty. Now we can restate our question. What does it mean to say that God declares a man righteous and imputes righteousness to him without works on the basis of faith, i.e., the acknowledgment of divine sovereignty? And most importantly, what is the extent of this declaration? Is it “merely” legal, a legal fiction that has no bearing on reality? Let us consider the weight of the Hebrew formula. In his “Die Anrechnung des Glaubens zur Gerechtigkeit” (The reckoning of faith as righteousness) Gerhard von Rad argued in 1951 that the expression chashav lo is taken from a cultic sphere rather than a legal sphere.97 In Lev. 7:17-18, e.g., the Torah states that if 97

Gerhard von Rad, Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, München,

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anyone eats the flesh of a sacrifice on the third day after slaughter, “it shall not be reckoned to him that had presented it.” It is the priest that is able to accept or reject the “imputation” of the sacrifice to the believer. The same meaning occurs in Lev. 17:4, where we find the niphal jechashev as in 7:18b. Lev. 17:4 is especially interesting, since here what is imputed is dam, blood guilt, which has as its opposite presumably tsedaka, righteousness. The formula for this declaration can be found, e.g., in Lev. 13:8, where a priest declares someone to be impure by stating: “it is leprosy.” By stating this in reality and formally, the condition is recognized as such. Of course, the priest does not create that condition by proclaiming it. It is not a legal fiction, but a legal recognition of a reality with cultic consequences. Von Rad then goes on to show that the formula in Ezekiel 18:9, which concludes a long description of a tzadik, is such a priestly declaration: “He is righteous, he shall certainly live, says the Lord God.” This declaration of righteousness, as is obvious from the context, does not imply a mere acknowledgment of the constitution of righteousness by man’s activity, but the recognition of the status itself, which makes it a reality in practice. It is not simply an indicative of God’s observation, nor is it a creative act, in which a new condition emerges in the declaration that has no relationship with reality at all. In all the senses of the word we discussed, we do not find the equivalent of the Greek legal usage of dikaioun, a legal declaration on the basis of a given reality, but the priestly declaration of a condition that becomes effective in the declaration itself so not conditioned on the reality, nor devoid of reality, but bringing that reality into effect as to its cultic implications. Its condition is faith, the moral status of the person, which in itself does not constitute a sufficient cause for the declaration. Von Rad then argues that the language of Gen. 15:6 is deliberately taken from the cultic sphere with the intent of setting up an opposition between priestly teachings on atonement and the teachings of the Elohist. Here it is emphatically not the priest who declares the condition of 1965, pp.130 -136.

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righteousness, but God in His sovereign grace, and such a declaration is not based upon a condition being met as in Ezekiel 18. “The event of ’imputation’ is now moved to the sphere of a free and personal relationship of the LORD with Abraham.”98 But is this dialectical tension toward the cultic language really intended? And why should we rule out the possibility that it is completely analogous to the declaration in Ezekiel? Strictly speaking, the cultic usage of chashav would only imply that this single act of faith and trust, mentioned in Gen. 15, of faith in the promise of God made in 15:4-5 warrants a declaration of righteousness. The fact that it is God and not the priest who pronounces it does not in itself imply that its basis is God’s sovereignty, as if that fact on its own would imply that nothing in Abraham was its material cause. Furthermore, the context indicates that this act of faith by Abraham was of crucial importance in Abraham’s life. So maybe we should enlarge the scope of this declaration. Could it not be that the declaration of righteousness is indeed an affirmation of the character of Abraham’s life that was epitomized in his unfailing trust in God? The act of faith need not have been considered an isolated event. Abraham’s life made God the truth (he’emin be- implies a total submission and confidence, whereas he’emin le- would mean a simple acceptance; all are related to the concept of ‘emet, truth, stability) and in so doing, the word could very well express on its own a condition similar to that in Ezekiel 18. If we can glean from Genesis the meaning of such a declarative justification, then we would have to say here that God affirms the righteousness of the believer who by his act of faith and trust in Christ identifies himself with Christ, “eats the meat on the day” (Lev. 7), and can therefore be declared righteous. Since faith involves identification with Christ, imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer involves God’s declaration of the believer’s being made righteous.99 It would, however, be the who98 99

Ibid., p. 133.

I am disregarding the reading of Gen. 15:6 that argues that it was Abraham that reckoned righteousness to God. The verse would then say that Abraham trusted in God’s promise because he reckoned (thought) it was righteous for God to do so, and not because he thought he had merited it. This reading by Nachmanides (commentary on Torah ad loc.), however, reflects rabbinic Hebrew usage, which hardly ever uses chashav for human achievements and most often as ‘thinking’ (even in Gen. 50:22), and instead

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le renewed life of the believer that was the basis of being made righteous, epitomized by trust in Christ, and not faith alone as a single, isolated event or characteristic. Faith, furthermore, would not be the corollary of the reception of justification, but indeed, as the “life of faith,” its formal equivalent. If read like this, we avoid the one-sided emphasis on the legal “fiction.” To be “out of the faith in Christ” (3:26) means putting one’s faith in Christ’s sacrifice, affirming God’s righteousness as revealed therein. It means accepting God’s promise to be truthful. All that has been expressed in the classic notion of faith as “assent”, as affirmation of the facts of God’s redemptive action in this world. But beyond that, it also means living in accordance with those revealed facts of God’s salvation. God now declares such a believer righteous, for that is what the believer actually becomes, not in himself and autonomously, but because of his identification with Christ’s sacrifice. It would not mean that his act of faith deserves such justification as an automatic response, since faith is not a “work of the law” but an analogy to a sacrificial act, and in that respect repentance, conversion, and moral commitment belong to it as well. This approach also alleviates the problem of the strange usage of dikaioun, since it can retain its proper meaning of declaring righteous those who have been made righteous. But it also retains the most important notion: that this righteousness is not earned by complying with the law, but received by identification with Christ’s sacrifice. The condition is not the sufficient cause for the declaration, but it still is a condition to be met before the constitutive declaration can take place. According to Bultmann, there was no difference of opinion between Paul and early Judaism on the forensic nature of justification. Both maintained that, especially in the eschatological judgment, a person was declared righteous or unjust and that the prerequisite of being declared righteous was righteousness! Righteousness, to both, signified a condition of redemption. The issue was how this righteousness was to be achieved and what the declaration actually meant. In the Old uses commercial expressions like he’elah ke-ilu. It might also be motivated by the fact, that Gen 15:6 uses kal, whereas in later rabbinic thought it would be more common to use a passive mood to express an activity of God.

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Testament, 2 Sam 19:20 reads: “let not my Lord impute iniquity unto,” in parallelism to “do not remember.” So there is a plea for an acquittal without any basis in compensatory merit. Here only the forensic or at least an extrinsic meaning is brought into play, but of course here the issue is not the imputation of righteousness unto the ungodly. In other words, the imputation has a declaratory meaning, but is not without basis in reality. He goes on to say that the main difference lies in the fact that Paul does not see this righteousness as a future condition but as already attributed to man on the basis of faith before the day of judgment. The future in Rom. 5:19 takes its reference point from the “now” of Rom. 3:21, and the future tenses in Rom 3:20 (will not be justified) and 3:30 (will justify) are gnomic or logical in nature.100 Because Bultmann at the same time believes that Paul did not fully dispense with the eschatological sense of the imputed righteousness and sees primarily the forensic sense of that concept, the eschatological righteousness is completely severed from any freedom from sin, ethical perfection, or quality of the believer. The future-oriented approach severs the connection between imputed and realized righteousness as far as the believer is concerned. To be truly “righteous,” in the plain sense of the “righteous” as in Rom. 5:19, can then only mean: to be acquitted in the present from a judgment that is in the future. That will have ethical consequences which Bultmann deals with at length from par. 38 onwards, but justification in itself means only this acquittal. I think that Bultmann has correctly established that to Paul the eschatological judgment or acquittal is effective in the present, but he has underestimated the reality of that present effectiveness by at the same time considering the full reality of the judgment to remain a future event. Now either the being made righteous or being constituted as righteous is a future event, and then justification primarily involves the certainty now that there will be no condemnation then, or it is a present reality, characterized by the contents of the eschaton, which then implies the transformation of man in accordance with the contents of the declaration. If the eschatological event is in the present tense, at least to the Church, it includes the 100

R. Bultmann (1953), 269-270.

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transformation as well as the legal acquittal. Furthermore, the imputation in itself is a reality, not a fiction, as Bultmann correctly states. But because Bultmann was so anxious to remove any possibility of righteousness as an ethical quality, he inferred that it could only be considered a righteousness of works under law if he allowed any meaning of righteousness as intrinsic. It has been argued that the forensic meaning of justification is not only present in Paul, but also in the gospel of Luke. In Luke 7:29 we find the expression used to denote the fact that the people accepted John’s baptism as coming from God. They justified God, did justice to Him, by acknowledging that baptism to be a “counsel of God.” Although God is the object of the justification, it is clear that to “do justice” means to acknowledge a situation, and not to pronounce a verdict. Luke 10:29 and 16:15 use the term to denote an action of selfjustification, i.e., to find grounds for acquittal on the presumed charge that some commandment has not been obeyed. In Luke 10:29 the question is put, “Who then is my neighbor?” The question serves no other purpose, we are told, than to justify the questioner. That such a question must be asked would involve an affirmation of the difficulties involved in complying with the command to love one’s neighbor, and that would serve as a continuous ground for acquittal. In Luke 16:15 the word dikaiountes is again used together with heautous, themselves, so the point is self-justification. To justify God and acknowledge His counsel seems to be the opposite of justifying oneself and finding excuses for not obeying the commandment. All in all, this can hardly serve as grounds for the idea that justification is a divine action which is present in faith, though there are overtones of forensic usage in all of these. Where God is the object, the declarative function of the word does play a role, but the basic meaning of acknowledging something as righteous is central to the argument. Where human beings are the object, again, forensic overtones are heard, but the main point is to evade guilt by referring to extenuating circumstances: who is my neighbor? And in the case of the Pharisees in Luke 16, it is Jesus who characterizes their whole moral intent as seeking for grounds for moral acquittal.

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We are left with one passage that may be interpreted as referring to justification by God through faith, and that is the parable of Luke 18:14. The prayer of the publican is simple and direct: God, have mercy on me, as sinner. Jesus then states in verse 14 that this one returned home, having been justified. Reformed biblical scholar Byron Curtis argued about this verse: “The tax-man is a sinner, who freely confesses he's 'guilty as charged’. But God nonetheless declares him ‘justified’, so that he goes home acquitted of his guilt. It is beyond reasonable doubt that Luke 18.14 is forensic in nature.“101 I cannot find this argument persuasive. The point of the parable is explained in verse 9: he spoke also to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and made nothing of all the rest of men. The Pharisee is not considered unrighteous because he lacked faith, but the point is that he considered his righteousness as something he could earn on the basis of his condition and could be confident about within himself. That selfconfidence made him disparage all others who stood convicted under his standards of exclusion and the insistence on Levitical holiness that went along with it. Jesus shows thereupon that righteousness (which can be considered standing in the proper relationship to God) is always a matter of divine action, even for the publican who can do nothing but pray for grace. It is a matter of humility before God and of remembering that salvation rests entirely on God’s grace. The very things that make Paul’s mention of justification into a forensic image are missing here: that divine grace is given on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice which revealed the nature of God’s righteousness (Rom. 3:20), and that faith is the act of identifying with this sacrifice and the basis or even means of justification (Rom. 5:1), on which basis God will grant acquittal in the future judgment (Rom. 5:19) and sanctification according to it in the present (Rom. 8:4, 10). The doctrine of justification of the ungodly is also stated 101

On the Warfield email-list, in a response to Robert Brow’s article “Did Paul Teach Forensic Justification”? on Feb. 18, 1999.

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differently in the letter to the Hebrews. Abel, e.g., is called a “righteous one” a dikaios, in Heb. 11:4. The interpretation of Genesis 4:4 that is given here indicates that the author of Hebrews did not make a declaration of righteousness as did Paul in his treatment of Abraham in Romans 4:5. Abel is recognized as righteous because he is, and the same goes for the other faithful that are mentioned in chapter 11. As the concluding remark in 11:33 shows, all of these have achieved righteousness according to the principle of faith, and were not justified because of their faith. 102 As we have shown, that was also the basic position of James.103

102

Cf. Erich Gräßer, “Rechtfertigung im Hebräerbrief,” in Friedrich, Rechtfertigung, pp. 79-94; against our intepretation, e.g., see F.F. Bruce, Hebrews, p. 285, who emphasizes the connection between Heb. 11:1 and 10:38 (the righteous one will live from faith” and concludes “There is no fundamental difference in this respect between Paul and the author of Hebrews…but our author…emphasizes the forward-looking character of saving faith, and in fact includes in faith…what Paul more often expresses by the companion word ‘hope’.” (p. 275) 103 Cf. chapter 15.

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11. The status of the justified (ch. 5) To determine how Paul viewed the status and position of the believer in justification, we need to take a closer look at Rom. 6:1-8:39, which we will do in the next chapter. There is a specific emphasis in the way the word righteousness is used in this passage, e.g., in 6:19, where Paul speaks of obedience unto righteousness, and in 6:20, where it is stated that the ”service of righteousness” is in opposition to the former condition of “being free from righteousness.” This new emphasis is prepared in chapter 5:12-20, where the justification that imputes righteousness to the ungodly is widened to become an cosmic event. The language here takes a slight turn from the previous chapters when we find Paul speaking about the “gift of righteousness” (which is not forensic language any more) connected to life and kingly rule (5:17), and Christ’s deed of righteousness leading to “justification unto life” (5:18), meaning not only staying alive in judgment, but the possession of (eternal) life. Still, in 5:16 justification is the opposite of condemnation, so we have the judicial sense. The subtle transition in the terminology seems therefore to have occurred between 5:16 and 5:17. But the main change in the terminology is apparent in 5:19, where Christ’s obedience leads to “the many [that] will be constituted righteous.” This verse presents us with quite a problem. By taking “will be constituted” (katasthesontai) as referring to an eschatological future, the plain meaning of dikaioi, righteous ones, can be made to refer to the ultimate result of justification beyond the present age.104 To be (intrinsically) righteous is then no element of the present state of the believer. Our future condition is acquittal, which means that all present efforts at being righteous are the more futile, since not even in that future state of affairs will we be able to obtain such righteousness. If we would take it as a being justified in a forensic sense, the future tense is obviously meant to refer to the present: our acquittal then frees us now. But if we take the basileusontai of verse 17 as its correlate and as a 104

So A. Schlatter, 192. The worthiness of being just will be given to believers when Jesus will accept them in His royal glory.

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reference to the new eschatological kingdom, we are talking here about “real” righteousness in terms of hope and expectation, as in Rom. 8:28. After all, being kings implies the exercise of righteousness. Then being “righteoused” goes beyond the forensic meaning, and still we have a future tense which must be construed as referring to the present, if we are to be righteous in the future in a real sense, in order to govern righteously, we can anticipate that condition and also be partially in it in the present. If not taken as reference to a temporal future, however, the force of the expression is weakened to mean a future taking its reference point from Christ’s resurrection, and then again the interpretation is possible that it means “having been justified,” i.e., declared guiltless, now referring to a moment in time after the resurrection of Christ.105 But is it necessary to maintain the forensic meaning of dikaiomai? Just as the present tense of chapter 7 is at the same time a reference to the past, this future tense can be construed to mean the breaking in of that future in the present of Christian life. The present state of Christian life is temporally shifted from the present of the state of affairs in this world; the Christian way of life is proleptic in essence! So though referring to a future, this eschatology is not temporally removed from our present, since it is the same “time” as the “now” of Rom. 3:21. And if the word dikaios is read as the opposition of the reality of all those who have sinned in Adam, it can hardly refer to that passive state of being declared pardoned. If this is correct, the 105

Most often the term dikaomai, is taken to mean exactly what is expressed in the passive participle dikaioothentes (cf. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, 1964 – vol. II, p. 191). Yet it is agreed that Paul sometimes uses the passive for those who have kept the law (Rom. 2;13, stating the general principle) implying an intrinsic meaning. The more complex formula referring to Habakkuk 2:4, stating that the just will live on the basis of his holding fast to righteousness, is expressed by Paul as being justified through faith. Through faith we cling to God’s righteousness revealed, which is a power of God unto salvation. The notion of accepting the righteousness of Christ as the essence of our own life does not seem to exclude the idea that having been justified also means that we are no longer sinners in Adam. In Rom. 5:19 the word must then mean being intrinsically righteous. To be intrinsically righteous can however mean two things: to be part of the the community of those who have been made righteous, or to be on a high moral level individually. I prefer the former sense as in general agreement with Yoder’s correct emphasis on the ecclesiological dimension of justification in Paul.

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verse provides us with an obstacle in understanding the righteousness of chapters 1-4 as meaning only that of an imputed and declarative righteousness, because then implies an inherent righteousness and states something beyond the mere declaration of the acquittal of the ungodly as in 4:5. Kruse (ad loc.) also refers to the fact that the future tense is used in 5:19 and states that Paul has justification in mind throughout this chapter. In verses 16 and 18 the dikaiooma and the dikaioosin dzoes stand in contrast to the katakrima in verse 16, so we must have a legal sense of the word righteous. But the judgment or condemnation needs not to be taken in a strictly forensic sense, since it is contrasted not with pardon, but with the gift of grace, which is given to all, and not to those who are acquitted in that judgment on the basis of their faith as in 3:28 and 4:5. If the judgment on Adam is taken as universal, it must refer to the general consequence of sin in opposition to the general consequence of the gift of grace. There can be no ”sentence of justification” for all, but there is no doubt that through Christ’s obedience there is a new way of becoming righteous for all. In Adam all are under the power of sin, so in Christ all are freed from sin, so they can become participants in Christ’s life and become righteous, which the many actually will become (5:19). Bultmann argues that Paul’s thesis of the present reality of righteousness does not take away from its forensiceschatological sense. God expresses His judgment now, and then the result of that judgment can only mean amnesty and never ethical perfection. The reality of being justified is that man is not considered as if without guilt, but he is really righteous, be it only in the formal sense of being acquitted in the judgment. This would mean that dikaios in our verse refers to being acquitted and not to any intrinsic righteousness. But the righteousness that is ours is in essence a matter of the right relationship with God.106 So Bultmann stresses on the one hand the reality of justification; on the other hand he excludes from this righteousness the idea of ethical quality. What then has made this other way of viewing righteousness possible? We need to find the logic of the argument, if we are 106

R. Bultmann (1953), pp. 272-73.

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to read the dikaios as meaning intrinsic righteousness. The grounds for this relative shift of emphasis can only be Paul’s statement of the corollary of justification in chapter 5:1-9, which paves the way for an extended application of the word righteous (subst. pl.) as meaning the opposite of wickedness, or, more accurately sinners. It is important in this respect to note that the language of 5:1 does not indicate that justification is the basis or cause of having peace, access, etc., as its result, but all are presented as immediately connected with each other. There is peace with God, access to God, the infusion of the love of God in our hearts (5:5), the reception of the Holy Ghost (ibid.), but all of that is expressed in connection with a repeat of the notion of the justification of the ungodly (here: the death of Christ for us while still sinners, 5:8). Justification of the ungodly cannot be separated from how it is received and the transformation that corresponds to it: by the reception of the Holy Ghost, by being identified with Christ, by having the love of God in our hearts. And if that is so, the liberation of our former life from the bondage of sin and death and the reception of the new life in Christ is such that 5:19 can speak of the believer being constituted as righteous, beyond the legal metaphor, and therefore intrinsically.107 In passing we may note that this can be the response to the claim that the doctrine of justification by faith does not provide the proximate basis of Paul’s ethics.108 The argument has been 107

The language of bondage under sin and sin and death as powers does not signify that Paul thought of these as separate, metaphysical entities. The language is metaphorical, and the real subject behind them is scripture, which defines gentile sin and shows its ultimate result in death. Cf. Stowers (1994), pp. 176-183, who on this basis claims that the interpretation of sin-aspower has led theologians astray since Augustine, since they derived from it a ”universal individualism” in which sin was made into a metaphysical characteristic of mankind, whereas it should be understood historically. 108 Cf. the discussion in E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, pp 439-440. Sanders agrees up to a point with the classical position of Albert Schweitzer that in general Paul grounded his ethics on the life in the Spirit and not directly on justification. But he argues that there are many passages that do make that connection. We agree with Sanders that justification by faith is connected intrinsically to life in the Spirit, the Spirit being received through faith, for one thing(Gal. 3:1-5), and being also the seal of justification, the sign of the future redemption, the gift of being identified with Christ in His resurrection, etc. But we disagree that this amounts to a form of mysticism.

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put forward by Schweitzer that the act of justification does not imply that man now receives the capacity to do good works, the fact that the believer is now enabled to do the will of God is based on his participation in Christ. The imperative to walk according to the Spirit is not based on the indicative of justification, but on the indicative of the believer’s life in the Spirit. That is true in the case of Gal. 5:16, where the exhortation to walk in the Spirit can only be based on the indicative of Gal. 4:6: and because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts. Gal. 4:29 speaks likewise of being born in accordance with the Spirit. So here the new life of the believer in the Spirit of the Son is the basis for the obedience that is demanded in Gal. 5:16. In the same manner, in Romans 8:1 the indicative is expressed when it states that “to them that are in Christ Jesus,” i.e., those who have been freed by the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” and that have the Spirit dwelling in them (verse 9) and on that basis it is expressed that the law is being fulfilled in those who walk according to that Spirit (verse 4) But precisely in chapter 8 of Romans, the interconnection between being justified and being in the spirit is also expressed. To be made free from the law of sin and death (8:2) obviously expresses the same thing as justification did in earlier chapters. Justification is connected to Christ’s being raised from the dead (4:25), and it is our identification with the resurrected Christ that imparts to us the new life in the Spirit that was Christ’s as well. But even if this logic holds, how can we determine this conclusively? If we follow the traditional division of the letter, taking chapters 1- 4 as dealing with (extrinsic) justification and chapters 5-8 as dealing with sanctification, the issue is resolved. Rom. 5:19 can then only express a reality from the standpoint of sanctification and is therefore doctrinally separated from the earlier chapters. Still, it would remain a problem that chapter 5 uses seven times a word derived from dik-, translated as: (having been) justified (2x), justification (2x), righteousness (2x), the just (1x). It is also connected to the former chapters by the “therefore” (oun) of 5:1. It functions as a The life in the spirit and the reception of the Spirit are terms for the entrance into the congregation and the adoption of a new lifestyle, only partially and initially defined by the ecstatic signs of the presence of the Spirit in the shape of speaking in tongues, prophecy and the like.

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means of joining two separate strands of thought: that Abraham was justified through faith, and that Christ revealed God’s righteousness through His death.109 The participle “having been justified” does not mean a statement of the cause of what follows, but begins to explain the reality of justification on the part of the believer. So what follows in the chapter can then be read not as the future outcome, but the inner reality of justification. “Having been justified” means that “we have peace,” “have received access,” ”stand in this grace,” and “rejoice in this hope.” Only then do we find a restrictive formula: “not only this,” but going beyond all that justification signifies, we also “rejoice in our tribulations,” connecting joy with endurance, endurance with character, and character with hope, verse 5 then returns to justification again: hope does not shame, because, and this refers back to justification as its basis, we have the love of God in our hearts. This reality of being justified provides the basis for trust in the hour of tribulation. If Christ has died for us while we were weak and ungodly, then we will also be saved from wrath (5:9). The opposition here is not between justification and sanctification, but between justification and life under duress. After that we have a second “not only that” in verse 11, referring to the reconciliation that we have received. So justification is made manifest in salvation from oppression and, ultimately, in reconciliation (katallagè). We rejoice in hope, in tribulations, in God. If we have read the flow of the argument correctly, the chapter is not about the response to being justified, but an explanation of the real effects of justification in the life of the believer. It describes not only the position, but the condition we are led into through justification.

109

Cf. A. Schlatter, Gottes Gerechtigkeit, p. 175.

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12. The moral objections against the gospel of grace and the life in the Spirit (6:1-8:39) There is good reason to hold that the passage 6:1-8:39 is all about objections, seeing that we find several real questions and answers, e.g., in 6:1, 15; 7:1, 7, 13. The question that opens this third part makes perfect sense after the 5th chapter has been read: 6:1. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? After having stated in 5:21 that “grace might reign through righteousness,” and in particular in 5:20 that “where sin abounded grace has overabounded,” the objection might be raised that Paul’s version of the gospel would imply logically that sin is of no consequence any more. The question states this hyperbolically: to sin means in fact making grace abound more. What shall we say with regard to the problem of sin, if we have now been told that grace increases with sin, i.e., that no “amount” of sin is unpardonable, that sin cannot resist grace? In essence the very same argument came to the fore in 3:7: if my sin actually makes God’s justice abound, why am I still judged and condemned for it? 7 But if through my falsehood God’s truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not do evil that good may come?, as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. So the argument of the “slanderers” is that a position that holds that God’s revelation of righteousness in Christ, which leads to forgiveness for all sins, an atonement not conditioned by the activity of man, actually leads to complete immorality. ”Sin gives God the opportunity to manifest his generosity to man,

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sin cannot be such a bad thing after all.”110 Now according to Dunn this question must arise for another reason as well. In Judaism, the place for a sinner to go in need of atonement was the Torah, which provided in the Temple Cult the means for atonement. In early Pharisaic thought, God’s forgiveness for sins was an element of His dealing with Israel under the Covenant. But the means for this atonement were given to Israel and not to mankind as a whole. Under the Torah, commandment and grace were held in balance, but both were given to Israel alone. However, in the second and third chapters Paul had developed his main position: that judgment would make no difference between those under the law and those outside of the law. The Torah was posited as an indictment against both Jew and gentile. So it is Paul who disconnected the bond between the Torah-as-law and the Torah-as-grace. The Torah-as-grace was only “testifying” to the righteousness that has now been revealed, that makes no difference between Jew and gentile in the indictment and as a consequence makes no difference between the two with regard to grace. Paul has to sever this link between law and grace because the Torah confines grace to those under the law, i.e., to Israel. God’s promise to Abraham could not be fulfilled, since the Torah did not reach the gentiles, the relatively large numbers of semi-proselytes that did not cross the last boundary of circumcision were evidence of that. If the Church chose to cling to circumcision and food laws, this would not guarantee that more Jews would convert to Messiah Jesus, but it would continue to block the entrance of gentiles into the new covenant. But, even apart from these pragmatic considerations, the basic experience that Paul brought with him on his theological journey pointed in another direction. Paul had been prosecuting Jewish Christians who had already allowed gentiles to enter into the synagogue-based Churches without demanding circumcision and adherence to food laws. That was such a deviation from Jewish practices that the early Church, as seen in the case of Stephen, was considered a threat to Judaism. The conflict at that time was not about the identity of Jesus, but 110

James D.G. Dunn (1988), p. 325.

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about the inclusion of gentiles Paul’s zeal for the law was particularly directed at preserving the distinctive character of Judaism; that is, to protect Judaism from defilement by gentile lawlessness.. If the Christ that these early Jewish converts followed was resurrected and could appear to Paul, then this in itself meant that Paul must change his view on the status of the gentiles. It was the fact of the resurrection along with Christ’s appearance as resurrected that brought this message home to Paul. On this basis Paul could not answer the objection by reiterating the validity of the law, which would also imply that the boundary markers which divided Israel and the gentiles were still in place. But how then could there be a basis for a Christian morality, if the law had no role to fulfill? Paul answers by referring to three things: (1) what has happened to the believer in baptism, (2) what is actually involved in the reception of grace, in justification, and (3) what new kind of exhortation could take the place of the commandment of the Torah? (1) what has happened to the believer in baptism Paul asks the relevant question: “By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” The general answer is that we have died to sin. Verse 10 states that Christ has died for sin once and for all, and Paul goes on to explain that we have died with Him. There are obvious connections to the former chapter. In our former life, we show the characteristics of Adam and share in the general condition of mankind as explained in 5:12, 17 (the reign of death) and 5:19 (the status of sinner). If Christ is the gift of grace (5:15), and if we have received the superabundance of grace and the gift of righteousness (5:17), then that is the cause (cf. 5:19) of our justification unto life (5:18). But what is the nature of this connection? In the previous chapters, including chapter 5 where we might have expected it, no mention is made of our participating in Christ’s death. Still, it was clear that the “deed” of righteousness (5:18) and Christ’s death for sinners (5:8) that justifies us (5:9) changes our status. We will live and rule as kings (5:17) because of Christ’s death. But the reason for that is still unclear in the previous passages. Justification has been dealt with up to now in almost exclusively forensic terms. Only 5:5 mentions the Holy Spirit that has been given us, but in that context, the

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consequences of that fact are not developed. Paul’s statement in our verse that “we have already died to sin” is really a new aspect of the issue. . 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. The connection between baptism and death was made in other strands of Christian tradition as well. In particular, in Mark 10:38-39 it is Jesus who refers to his coming crucifixion as the “baptism” that he is to be baptized with. All believers must be baptized with this baptism. Paul himself had stated in Gal. 3:27 that to be baptized unto Christ implied having “put on Christ.” As Dunn explains, the formula “in(to) the name of” signified a formal act of transfer from one dominion into another. That certainly was the usage in the baptism ritual, where the believer was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or into the name of Jesus Christ. But the expression “into Christ” has even stronger connotations than this change of dominion, as it signifies the fact that “their lives and destinies and very identities became bound up with Christ.”111 We have here then a further aspect of justification; beyond the acceptance of the faithfulness that Christ has shown unto His death and the trust in the God of Jesus Christ who can work beyond death, we now have a metaphor of participation. The range of this metaphor of participation is difficult to establish. Since it can be explained as having died with Christ and being resurrected with Him, it follows that it implies that the pattern of Christ’s life (obedience to God, acceptance of death as consequence, a renewal of His life through resurrection and living from the power and motivation of the Spirit) becomes the 111

James D.G. Dunn (1993), p. 203.

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pattern of the believer’s life. In that sense, ethically, the basic view for discerning ethical possibilities is not the imitation of Christ’s acts as example, but the cognitive effort to view all things moral with the aid of Christ’s life. In part, this involves a renunciation of all attempts at self-justification, of boasting and pride taken in ethical achievement. There is no success to be expected from moral behavior if the Christ who is accepted as morally perfect died on the cross as the consequence of it. A secondary element to this metaphor is that the mode of participation is not individual, but corporate. There is a decisive usage of “we” in these verses, and the whole range of texts on baptism is laden with references to the whole community of the baptized as being one through baptism. By being baptized, the believer takes his place in this world amongst those who have identified themselves with Christ and thus joins a single corporate entity. The moral impetus of baptism involves a change of orientation (the pattern of Christ’s life, death and resurrection) as well as a change in social identity (becoming part of the community) and the view on corporate, social life that is connected to it. Paul’s exhortations on the issue of Church life in chapters 12 and 14 show this corporate nature of morality in clear terms. 2. what is involved in the reception of grace Nevertheless, the act of baptism is not the reality, but a sign. It signifies a decision: to take one’s place within the community of the redeemed. But it is not in itself the reality. That reality is expressed in the following verses. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For he who has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. 9 For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.

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The identification with Christ implies an identification with Christ’s death and along with it a complete reversal of values. What had seemed to be life-giving to the “old man” has now turned out to be part of the Adamitic condition of mankind. What seemed a loss of self and life turns out to be liberation and a new life. The “old man,” the way of life the believers had before conversion, which was dominated by (fear of) death and (weakness towards) sin, has been crucified. I.e., Christ’s life has shown that God ultimately will step in to recognize and reward a life that has been faithful and obedient without the fear of death, to give it the eternal life that is intrinsically congruent with God’s nature. This identification with Christ implies that “the sinful body is destroyed”; i.e., it loses its power and is rendered inactive. This is to be taken literally, since we should not think that “body” here refers to the physical aspect of human life. As Dunn explains, sooma stands for the embodiment of man in his social relationships. Adopting Christ as Lord means a clean break from all the relations we had in this world that would keep us under the power of sin and death. To have died in that sense is as much experiential as a matter of doctrine. The newness of life should not be expressed only in terms of death, not only in negative but also in positive terms. Sharing Christ’s death means that our former life has been rendered inactive and useless. If that is all that justification can bring, it is hardly worth it (cf. 1 Cor. 15:14). But if it means sharing Christ’s resurrection as well, a matter of hope and expectation and not yet a fully realized promise, the transformation is complete. The experiential connection is not severed, however. Although it is true that Paul’s emphasis here is on the “eschatological tension” expressed in the repeated antitheses between the aorist of the meaningful fact and the future tense of expected events, the hope for sharing in Christ’s resurrection is affirmed by the “newness” of life that is already here and now. That newness of life is at the same time a promise and expectation based on Christ’s work, and a commandment or imperative for us. Verse 8 expresses as an expectation of our faith that we will live with Him. Verse 11 then expresses the exhortation to consider it trustworthy that this is already the case: we are alive before God and dead to sin. This is a

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description of the situation of those who have been made righteous. From verse 12 we have the exhortation that draws upon the basic act (having died with Christ), runs through the expectation that is linked to it (we will live with Him), and returns to the present (we are alive before God). On that triple basis of fact, expectation, and present condition, and the tension between its temporal modes, the exhortation must then be to act in accordance, to draw a practical consequence and act like we will be and no longer act as we are, since what we are has been pronounced dead and weak before God. 3. the new kind of exhortation The contours of the foundations of Christian morality now come into focus. Faith has made us identify with Christ. Baptism means we express our participation in His death, which reverses the standard by which we live and takes us out of the dominion of sin and death. The hope for the resurrection, and its certainty of through Christ’s resurrection, allows us to consider ourselves as already dead and buried and resurrected before God. The unseen reality of the new post-resurrection situation, which robbed death and sin of their power, is now a motivational force for Christians who live in a world that is still determined by these forces. 11. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and [must consider yourselves] alive to God in Christ Jesus. Understanding this reality makes possible the exhortation that immediately follows it. The believer is dead to sin, though the passions of his body, his belonging to the environment, can still reawaken his old life. So, no longer in bondage to sin, but still submitted to the power of death, the believer is “to draw [his] vital energies and motivations from God in Christ.”112 12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who 112

James D.G. Dunn (1988), 1, p. 333

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have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. Though freed from the power, the environment still provides a possibility to be tempted again by the still-active passions of the body, to act in accordance with the reality of the old world. But in Paul’s mind, such a relapse is no longer a necessity. It is not the power of sin itself that entices a Christian to sin, but the possibility of acting as if the believer still has sovereign liberty in himself. So Paul again emphasizes the new situation as “under grace.” Such a situation must be understood properly. In a way, justification might in itself tempt one to disobey the commandment, since it removes the fear of condemnation. If grace has already set me free, why worry at all about obedience and sin? 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16. Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? So the answer lies in the awareness that sinning indubitably leads to a restoration of the former bondage. The actual condition of a believer under grace, his response to it in practice, does indeed effect his situation in practice also. Sin as such still leads to death, not as eternal condemnation, but in the believer’s subjective experience of the quality of his life under the influence of despair and meaninglessness. 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. Liberation from sin is not the restoration of the Adamic condition. It is a new condition of submission to God in Christ

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that fills the space previously taken in by the powers of sin and death. Obedience from the heart no doubt refers again to the basic notion of the new covenant of Jeremiah, replacing the law written on the heart with the law obeyed through or by the heart. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification. 20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. In 7:5 the antithesis between being in the flesh and being “in the new state of the Spirit” is described. Being in the flesh meant that our sinful passions made use of the law to bring us to death. The law could not prevent that, since it actually provoked transgression in us by merely stating God’s commandment. In 7:7-26 we have the development of the function of the law and the answer to the question of whether the law that made sin known and became the instrument of sin was inherently sinful, the answer being that the law is intrinsically holy and righteous. The problem is not the law, but man. And the problem of man can only be solved through transformation by the Spirit. The passage as a whole therefore develops the statement of 7:5, where it is said that the passions work through, with the aid of, the law. Then, in a second statement, the life in the Spirit is brought forward. So we are discharged from the law and dead to it, released from captivity under it (7:6), not only to be acquitted, but to serve God in a new manner, which Paul announces in

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7:6 as “the new condition of the Spirit” and not the “old state of the letter.” This latter part is developed in chapter 8:1-17, on which we will focus our attention in this paragraph. If my life in the flesh turned out to be unable to fulfill the righteous demand of the law, then I need to be transformed by the Spirit. Then it would seem that the law, which is holy and righteous and good, is still discarded! We might then be released from the power of guilt and death, but the law would still condemn our lives since we could still not attain its standard. Does that express an intention on Paul’s part to get rid of the law? The first sentence of the passage 8:1-17 makes the connection between justification and new life. Kruse rightly points out that “justification and new life in the Spirit might be able to be separated in discussion; they cannot be separated in But we hold that even a separation in experience.”113 discussion goes beyond Paul’s language and argument. In the course of this letter, it becomes increasingly more difficult to separate the two “in discussion.” That there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ does not refer to justification only with the phrase “no condemnation,” which is of course a forensic term, but also by “being in Christ,” which is the language of our condition, of the reality of the Spirit, or, as we think Paul alludes to, the language of identification with Christ’s sacrifice of Rom. 3. The connection therefore is not only experiential, as if sanctification and justification are in themselves unconnected in the sense that the former is the objective condition of the latter, but also with regard to what this one, indivisible act of God brings about.114 Verse 2 brings this out clearly when it argues 113 114

Colin G. Kruse (1996), 216.

Justification by faith, participation in Christ, and the gift of the Spirit are called the basic focal images of Paul’s doctrine of salvation and of his ethics (Dunn [1998] p. 631). Though each of these do represent different subsystems in the language and imagery of Paul, they are all connected experientially: by faith the believer participates in (and identifies with) Christ, and the transformation inherent in that is expressed as the gift of the Spirit. Hays combines these three notions into one by talking about the new creation, and then adds the Cross as the paradigm of action and the community as the location of God’s effective grace (Hays [1996], pp. 196206). I prefer to make a simpler distinction between justification and sanc-

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that we have been freed from the law of sin and death, apparently in an attempt to explain what is stated in verse 1. Being freed from that law implies of course both status and condition. It means not only that we are not formally in the grasp or jurisdiction of such powers, but also that such powers have no effect on our lives any more. The spiral of guilt which begets more guilt because we despair of our ability to be moral is broken. And so is the fear of death, which hinders us in fulfilling God’s command. Still, the forensic element of the statement remains important. It helps to insure that the extrinsic origin of being made righteous, the essential element of imputation, is not lost to sight. And that also conforms to the fact that the new condition is derived extrinsically. The transformation that we have here is never a possession of the believer that separates him or her from its source and grants him a return to an autonomous way of life. The language of life in the Spirit, Christ in us, although not forensically extrinsic but rather intrinsic, does not refer to a renewal after which man is able to stand on its own and resume his life as if nothing had happened. Käsemann has rejected, in our opinion with solid basis, that the new life of the Christian would imply reinstitution of the law under new conditions. Because “ceremonial law” and ethical demand are never separated in Paul’s thinking about the Torah, the passage could never refer to a restoration of its function.115 So “law” in this passage means “Herrschaftsfunction”, the sovereignty of the principle.116. To Paul the law in its Jewish use is not reinstated, since it does not give power and commands obedience; therefore it condemns without enabling us to obey. So in as far as Paul understands the life of obedience under law as an autonomous human effort to obey specific precepts, tification. 115 Käsemann, (1974) pp. 204, 205) 116

“Das Gesetz des geistes ist nichts anderes als der Geist selbst nach seiner Herrschaftsfunktion im bereiche Christi.” Käsemann, Commentary on Romans ad loc. Schlatter however still tried to explain ‘law’ with reference to Mosaic law: “The law that was valid until then has been divested of its sovereign power by a new law. (Schlatter, 253) “Dem bisher gultigen Gesetz wird die Herrschermacht durch ein neues Gesetz genommen.’ The result is, that God “shapes both will and mind creatively’ of man. Man is made obedient in Christ, and has no autonomous power left to do anything but the negative of striving against it.

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there is no hint at a renewal of that kind of obedience after the impediments have been set aside. The form of obedience is completely changed. So the opening argument is clear: there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, who have been liberated from the necessary connection between sin and death. The law of Moses was unable to do this. The condemnation of sin by the law only set up the commandment as a standard of performance and brought death as a consequence. Sin had to be condemned in such a way that its power was defeated. That which was impossible for the law, God had accomplished by sending His son in the likeness of the flesh of sin (verse 3). The translation of this verse (8:3) is difficult. The function of “in which” is not clear, and the whole sentence appears to be anacoluthic, since there is no verb in the present tense connected to ho theos (God). We might read like this: “because of what was impossible in the law, in which it was weak through the flesh (i.e., the fact that it could only condemn sin by sentencing the sinner but could not transform the sinner) God has made possible. We then complete the sentence by the opposite of “impossible,” so God and the law become the agents here, by sending His Son in the likeness of the flesh and as a sinoffering (following LXX usage of the term and not: because of sin, which is superfluous) He has judged the sin the flesh.” The notion of atoning sacrifice is expressed four times in the letter to the Hebrews (10:6, 8, 18; 13:11), in the first three instances as a clear derivation from LXX Ps. 40 (39):7-9. ”Likeness of the flesh” might imply a distinction from humanity, since Christ’s flesh was not the same as sinful flesh, but like flesh that became corrupted by sin. So it might here express the same thought as in Phil. 2:7: en homoioomati anthroopoon, in the likeness of man. As in 1:23, the likeness does not imply identity, but similarity, which allows for representation. If God in Christ could atone for sin and remove it, the law (in its accidental function) of (empowering) sin and death could be broken. Sin was judged and condemned as the law demanded. But Christ’s death also accomplished liberation from sin and death for all those in Christ who have been resurrected with Him. So we can summarize our analysis of 8:1-3 as follows:

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There is no (present or future) condemnation for those who are set in Christ. They (Paul changes to “us”) have been liberated from the power of sin and death. That which the law could not do, make itself be obeyed and condemn the sin without destroying the sinner, God has been able to do In Christ by making Him into a sin-offering. The result of this offering was that, not Christ, but sin was condemned, satisfying the requirement of the law. And at the same time, by identifying himself with Christ, the sinner received a new life after dying in the way the law required. What then is the consequence of all of this? The hina-phrase in verse 4 expresses God’s intent. In us who walk according to the Spirit, the just demand of the law is actually being fulfilled, even beyond the satisfaction given to the law by our death with Christ. Paul uses diakiooma here, as in 1:32 and 5:16, with the meaning of demand, and not like dikaioosis (judgment).117 The just demand of the law might mean here: (1) the love of the neighbor and (2) the judgment of God over sin or (3) in its narrowest sense: the law as seen from the perspective of the 10th commandment. We will look at these possibilities in turn. y

The just demand of the law is summarized in the commandment to love the neighbor. In Gal. 5:14 Paul stated that the whole of the law is fulfilled in the commandment to love one’s neighbor. Gal. 5:16 calls upon us to walk in the power of the Spirit. Kruse (pp. 218-219) has argued in favor of this interpretation, citing three major arguments: (a) the notion of the spirit comes to the fore in

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In Rom. 5:16 the translators most often choose ‘judgment’, but that does not make much sense to me. Out of the offences of the many the gift of grace brought them to the just demand of the law, because that was being fulfilled in them by God’s grace, making them righteous, as in 5:19. The plural diakioomata, however, used once by Paul in 2:26, means the requirements of the law specifically. In Hebrews 9:1, 10 the word is used for ordinances, and in Revelation (15:4; 19:8) it is also used for ‘righteous acts’. The plural can be used for many acts flowing from a quality to denote that quality itself, especially in Hebrew, as in Psalm 11:7. This might be the source for the usage here. In Rom. 1:32 we have the singular, meaning the righteous demand. In Rom 8:4 the dikaiooma tou nomou (the righteous demand of the law, being fulfilled in the spirit-led life) is not fully equal to the diakioomata tou theou (God’s demand in the shape of separate mitzvot) in Rom. 2:26, and it certainly does not refer to the demand in its application as judicial verdict as in Rom. 1 where it denotes God’s verdict of death.

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both passages, (b) the antithesis of flesh and spirit is the same, and (c) the striking convergence of the concepts of freedom, walking in the spirit, and the negative aspects of the flesh. Schlatter, however, argued against this option with the contention that the context shows God here to be seen as judge (starting from the mention of condemnation in 8:1) who wanted to condemn sin, not atone for it (Schlatter, 257). But in Rom. 3:25, the concepts of showing righteousness and sacrificial language (mercy seat) are also connected. We might make such a clear distinction, but Paul apparently did not. So Schlatter’s counterargument must be rejected. y

The just demand of the law is the judgment on sin. Schlatter maintains that dikaiooma is the opposite of katakrima: the justifying judgment of God. Justification happens through the condemnation of sin and therefore it is the establishment of the law and not its annulment (Rom. 3:31). However, dikaiooma is not only the commandment of righteousness, but also its restitution through the justification of the believer. Our justification is based on the condemnation of Christ, so that we believe, and it happens (is a reality) through the reality of the Spirit in which we believe. There is one divine act: giving Christ up to death as a sacrifice for the many who believe, accompanied by the efficacy of the Spirit of resurrection.

y

The just demand of the law is summarized in the commandment not to covet. The third possibility is quoted in Kruse (218). Ziesler maintained that the dikaiooma refers to the 10th commandment, which Paul had in mind throughout 7:7-25. Kruse argues against this by stating that the 10th commandment functioned as a paradigm of the entire law. Rom. 7:7 does indeed introduce the 10th commandment as an illustration for the effect of the law with regard to mankind under the power of sin.

We favor Kruse’s interpretation in (1) because we find the parallel between Gal. 5 and our passage a convincing argument indeed. He also accepts the use of dikaiooma in the plain sense and does not overemphasize the opposition to katakrima as Schlatter did in our opinion. Käsemann agrees

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implicitly by translating: the legal demand of the law (Rechtsanspruch des Gesetzes). The just demand of the law is then that what the law can rightfully demand from human beings; that demand is then accepted as such, and not reduced to it, by referring to the one single demand in it that can be used pars pro toto to express the whole of it under a specific aspect: to love one’s neighbor. (In the same manner, the 10th commandment could stand paradigmatically for the entire law and the way it is abused by human lusts to bring man under the verdict of death.) We must equally emphasize that our text uses the divine passive for fulfilling. It is not about believers fulfilling the law as a requirement, let alone that such was a new condition for salvation. Walking in the power of the Spirit accomplishes it because God accomplishes it in us (8:4). If we have the Spirit, we have the mindset of the Spirit of Christ, which is life and peace. The flesh does not submit to God’s law; it is hostile toward God. But believers, first of all being in Christ (8:1) and in the Spirit (8:9), do. The multiplicity of God’s commandments (implied in the claim of the law, but there seen as a unity and not as a fragmented series of prohibitions and commandments), seen from the perspective of love for one’s neighbor, are being fulfilled in such a life. Our next observation must be of verse 13, where Paul introduces a new concept: sooma. The concept is taken to mean the whole of the human being as creature, the seat of volition and passion, without the connotation of sinfulness. Romans 8:12 first of all defines our situation in life with an image derived from civil law. We are debtors; we stand under an obligation. The term ofeiletès is used figuratively for a variety of obligations. In Gal. 5:3, someone who opts for circumcision becomes a debtor to the law and can be required to perform according to its dictates. It is as if he signed a contract and now has to perform a duty. Being freed from sin and death, we are obligated not to live according to the flesh, which stresses the negative meaning: in verse 13, to put to death (mortify) the deeds of the body.118 All acts that lead to death in 118

It does not state that we are debtors to the Spirit, presumably because that would imply a new kind of formal obligation. The obligation Paul intends to put forward is a negative one only: to refrain from something, as if the

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the flesh must be put to death in the body. What are these acts (praxeis) and what does it mean to put them to death? The acts of the body must be the same as the result of walking according to the flesh. The first expression seems to describe the fruit of the latter, the result of not submitting oneself to the law of God (8:7), of enmity against God. Being in the flesh meant succumbing to sinful desires, which led to the breaking of the prohibitive side of the law (7:5), so putting to death the acts of the flesh means refraining from doing what the law prohibited. It seems that the prohibitive side of the law is being referred to specifically. It also does not state directly that we will put to death the workings of the flesh or the flesh itself, for we are unable to do that. The terminology of deeds of the body is a way to describe deeds that have no power in them any more to make us obey, since the “body” can be seen as the flesh without power, or the flesh as being put to death in the Spirit. It does not say either that we have now a personal existence that is as “body,” i.e., that is flesh without power, which in itself would be able to produce the works of obedience that the flesh could not. The body, the personal existence of man, is useless even if cleansed from the power of sin and death. As a matter of fact, Paul even states directly that the body also is dead in chapter 8:10, and here the spirit is alive because of Christ. It is merely the bearer of the new reality of the Spirit, it is the new creature that gets its spirit from God, and where it tries to maintain its own in distinction to the Spirit, its works are equal to that of the flesh and should be “put to death.” So it seems we have reached a point now from where we can express Paul’s view on the ethical life of the justified. We have found that since both Jew and pagan are under condemnation, they can only escape judgment if God accepts Christ’s sacrifice as the basis of judgment. Those who have identified with him are set free from judgment and can already experience the fact that they are acquitted. But identification with Christ also implies the reception of the Spirit, the gift of a new life. We have transformation in the Spirit only allows us to abstain from what is incongruent with our new status but does not enable us to act positively in accordance with the intent of the Spirit. That positive side is expressed only as an accomplishment of the Spirit in us.

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died unto the demand of the law, so that we are no longer under its verdict; we are set free from the power of sin which threatens our moral life and from the power of death which reigns in our body. Having been set free, the Spirit of Christ can now act in us so we are justified also in the sense that we are made righteous, not in the sense that we are now enabled to do the law from our autonomous capability, but in the sense that God can fulfill the demand of righteousness through, not in, us. The most visible sign of that is the love for our neighbor in which the claim of the law is summarized. The ethical life of the believer is therefore most adequately present in an attitude of receptivity, in which the works of the body are being ignored or put to death, since the body is dead on account of its identification with Christ. The previous section has shown how the righteousness that comes from God implies the believer’s death and resurrection in the Spirit. God justifies man on the basis of his sharing in the life of Christ, who in His faithfulness unto death revealed God’s righteousness. The status of the law has changed dramatically because of this: from the covenanted condition that leads to life for the obedient it has become, because of sin and human weakness, the source of desire, the cause of death and despair. I know the law is good, says Paul’s alter ego in chapter 7. And because it is good, it shows my inability to be righteous on my own. Fortunately God justifies beyond the law (8:33). This raises a third important issue, that of the status of Israel (9:1-11:36). Manifold are the privileges of Israel (9:4-5a), but the highest of them all is the one that actually changes the perspective on Israel’s former history and status before God: the coming of Christ. If the consequence of Christ’s coming is then that man is redeemed outside of the law and its demands, what is the value of the promises to and the covenant with Israel? Are the promises annulled by the coming of the Messiah? As Paul explains, the giving of the law need not be seen in contradiction to the revelation of righteousness in Christ. God has always been sovereign in the dispensation of His promises. The election of Jacob who became Israel was based on God’s elective grace, and not on any previous obedience to law. The privileges and achievements of Israel are ultimately all linked to

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the same sovereignty that reveals itself in the righteousness of faith. If God intended to acquire for Himself a people, consisting of Jews and gentiles, on the basis of faith in Christ, then that is His sovereign will, and who could object? If that is the case, it explains the quite paradoxical turn of events that Paul mentions in 9:30. Pagans who did not strive for righteousness have received it through faith, or better: have received a righteousness that is based solely upon God’s faithfulness. Israel, however, who pursued righteousness through the law, has not acquired such righteousness. Paul states that they did not even reach such a law. Why not? Because apparently they did not fully comprehend its nature. They removed the principle of faith that was contained in it and were left with a principle of works. This notion of righteousness through works figures prominently in both Galatians and Romans. In Gal. 2:16 we hear about the “works of the law” that will not justify man and will certainly not give the Spirit (Gal. 3:2). Those who are trying to achieve perfection by doing the works of the law are in fact under the curse of the law (Gal. 3:10). The law, seen as a demand for works without faith, can only condemn. It requires full compliance, since whoever who has broken one commandment has broken all. In Romans we find seven references to works of the law: no flesh will be justified on the basis of it (3;20), Abraham’s justification was not on the basis of works (3:27; 4:2), and neither is the election (9:11; 11:6). And then there is the reference here in 9:32. It is obvious that Paul is arguing that Israel misunderstood the law, for he claims that they did not know the real nature of the sovereign righteousness of God (10:3). Had they known, they would not have excluded the principle of faith from their effort to obey the law and would not have interpreted the law in terms of works.

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13. The new righteousness of the believer’s community (Romans 12) We have found that Paul actually teaches a new type of righteousness that is not earned in a life that tries to fulfill the various demands of the law, but is fulfilled through us by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit when we accept Christ in faith. The atonement that Christ brings once and for all, assuring us of future acquittal in God’s judgment, frees us from the effort to acquire righteousness by doing the “works of the law,” both in the sense that we seek to become part of Israel as community and in the sense that we take upon ourselves the separate duties under the law to become more fully righteous. Faith leads to righteousness in the sense of leading us into an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in the sacrifice of Christ and the atonement brought by God’s action alone, and in the sense that the individual’s identification with the resurrected Christ involves a new way of life in which sin has no power and death does not have the final word. This act of faith does not evoke a declarative judgment of acquittal alone. It is also connected to our participation in Christ and the gift of the Spirit. These three elements of the initial movement of grace within us cannot be separated. The participation in Christ implies our dying with him and being resurrected with Him in the newness of life. The gift of the Spirit implies sharing His life, and being controlled by that Spirit. But there is an aspect of “not yet” in all of this. We have been given the Spirit in a world that, though already under control of the Messiah, is not yet fully realizing the Kingdom. Within the believer this is evident from the struggle between the Spirit of Christ within us and our own flesh. By remembering that we have actually died with Christ, implying that the interests of the flesh no longer have a place in the new reality of the Kingdom, we can “mortify” it, thereby allowing God’s spirit to work within us. We must turn now to the most important question of what the content of this new life in the Spirit really is. Is it determined in its contents by Christ as such, i.e. as a mode of imitation? After all, it is His Spirit, and we participate in His life. Christ is the

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“New Torah,” so we could emphasize the aspect of Christ as the teacher of righteousness. The basis for Christian ethics might then be the embodiment of God’s decrees in the Kingdom as exemplified in Jesus’ obedience in life. But the essence of God’s will would then be fully revealed only in the self-surrendering love of Christ on the Cross. That selfsacrificing love could then become the primary image in which the ethical ideal is portrayed. Imitation of Christ could refer to both these elements of course. But we might also construct an opposition between these two, creating a gap between the teachings of the “historical,” pre-resurrection Jesus of Nazareth (implying that we follow Him or become the disciples of this Teacher), and the post-resurrected, glorified Christ (that we through the power of His Spirit can imitate). Is there however a third way that does not try to derive the content of obedience from the narrative of the One who is to be obeyed? Is God’s demand perhaps already expressed in the law of Moses (and interpreted according to its inner purpose in Jesus’ teachings and example), and have we been freed from its destructive power by being set free from the power of sin? Is grace enabling us to actually live in accordance with the law of Moses? In that case, the intent behind the unity of the believer with the Spirit of Christ is enablement and in that sense it leads to the fulfillment of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The Kingdom-ethics is then a transformation, not an abrogation, of the Mosaic law. As we will see, a concept of the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice is of the utmost importance to understand the transformation of ethics and the continuity between Jesus’ ethical teachings and this focus of attention on the Cross. We turn now to the text of Romans 12ff. to seek an answer to this question in the environment of Paul’s paraenesis. This exhortatory section is immediately linked to the preceding one by the “therefore” (oun) of verse 1. In Rom. 12:1, Paul cites the “compassions” of God as the foundation of the exhortations that follow, undoubtedly meaning that this was the character of God he had been displaying in the first 11 chapters of his letter.119 Since all have been trapped in disobedience by sin and 119

The hebrew plural chasadim or mercies does not primarily denote a manifold number of compassionate acts, but is derived from the LXX-

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death, it was only through God’s mercy that righteousness is attainable for man (cf. 11:32). The service of God which is “intelligent” (DV) or ”spiritual” (NIV) is based upon our understanding of God’s character as revealed in His actions towards mankind in Christ’s death and resurrection.120 That service can now no longer be understood as analogous to lawobedience outside the principle of faith. Nevertheless it is a worshipping of God through our actions as servants, and a service through obedience to Him. Let us review the meaning of the law in this respect. The law, as Paul understood the primary effect of its dictates (not its intent as a whole!), effectively demonstrated the frailty of man. Death and sin took advantage of our weakness, and the law could only affirm what we were by condemning us and glorifying God’s justice in the process (Romans 2). Having been identified with Christ as the revelation of God’s ultimate grace, we have died to sin and regained new life in the Spirit (Romans 8). In that new life there is no room for sin any more, we are “dead” to it. The works of the flesh have no hold over us any more. Yet, even without the power of sin, our personality (Paul then speaks of the “body” in the sense of “being in a social environment) is weak. The deeds of the body must be controlled by the power of the Spirit. This does not involve a feverish activity on our part, but an attitude of “Gelassenheit,” of receptive surrender to the activity of God’s Spirit within us. That is the gist of what we have found so far. In this exhortatory part of his letter, Paul draws the ethical consequences of his exposition of the meaning of the law for gentiles, the new life in the Spirit, in short, all that justification by grace was shown to imply. The gentiles are called to a new shape of obedience. translation of the abstract plural as a divine attribute: compassionate. Paul seems to play here on the plural, since it may denote in Greek a plurality of acts. 120 The Greek latreia expresses both hired labor and cultic service. Both meanings enforce each other here: the cult qualifies the ethics in the sense that notions of dedication and sacrifice, embodied in the gospel, are not a motivational power, but shape the form of ethics in itself. It also means that the cult is approached from ethics as well: ethics qualifies the cult in the sense that our worship is part of our moral dedication. The precise meaning however, can only be explained with reference to chapters 12 and 13 .

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The new obedience forms a precise counterpart of the pagan vices that have been listed in the first chapter. That gives a macro-structural connection between the last and the first part of the letter. Stanley Stowers puts it like this: Chapter 1 tells of the ungodly and unacceptable worship of idols. These people worshipped (latreuein) the creation instead of the creator (1:25). They thus dishonored their bodies (1:24). The readers in 12:2 are to renew their minds. In the first chapter, gentile minds became base (28), their reasonings confused, and their sense darkened (21). Verse 3 of chapter 12 exhorts to a realistic humility as a basis for behavior,` while 1:22 and 30 accuse gentiles of false claims to wisdom, hubris, arrogance, and pretentiousness. As 1:28-31 lists a long string of antisocial vices, so 12:413:10 spells out a counter list of social virtues. The first chapter speaks of enslavement to desire and sexual passion; 13:8-14 elicits a freedom from sensual gratification; the latter chapters call for a reversal of precisely the degeneracy depicted in 1:18-32.121 The structure of the letter therefore is basically circular: the righteousness revealed as wrath over pagan vices is by its revelation as sacrificing grace effecting a reversal of these vices in the life of the Church. It shows also that the exhortatory part is not an addition to an already complete doctrinal letter, but a major aim of the letter. Yet, Stowers argues that the basis of chapters 12 and 13 is to be found in a single concept that expresses the basis for the righteousness revealed: Christ’s faithfulness. The opposition to chapter 1 only partly explains the construction of 12. The best traditional accounts have 12-15:13 exhorting readers to the new life described in 1-11 and thus connect the parts of the letter only in the most superficial and abstract way. I, however, want to argue for a genuine internal coherence between the discourse and thought of the two sections. If 1-11 finds its focus on God’s righteousness being made good 121

S. Stowers (1994), p. 318.

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through Christ’s faithfulness and understands Christ’s faithfulness as his generative adaptation to the needs of others, then 12-15 sketches an ethic of community based on the principle of faithfulness as adaptability to others.122 If that is correct, elements of the exhortation must be referring back not only to the list of vices, but to the positive character of Christ as revealed in His life and death. We might see in the renewal of thought in verse2 a reversal of the “confused reason” of 1:28, but the exposition of verses 3-8 goes beyond the reversal. The community that is ordered along the lines of self-control, according to the measure of faith that reaches each member in particular, is an organism. It is the one body of Christ, which implies that each member sees the other in the social character of member of the body of Christ, as part of Christ. And in that organic concept, the different charismata are like specific organs or functions within the whole that are working toward the common goal: to express the life and death of Christ in the form of a social community. The measure of faith can be easily recognized as an element of the previous discourse. The metaphor of the body is not new either, since we are “in Christ,” according to Rom. 8:1, which expresses a similar thought. And the rest of chapter 12 can be looked at in the same manner. The apotheosis of the passage in verses 19 and 20, with respect to love for the enemy, feels like a sober and pragmatic consequence of Christ’s attitude towards us, who had been “enemies” of God (Rom. 5:10). The shape of this new obedience (for obedience it still is; cf. Rom. 6:16, 19; 7:6) is called “presenting your bodies [as] a living sacrifice.”123 The terminology brings us back to the theme Paul mentioned only in passing, the cultic background of Christ’s death as a sin-offering in Romans 3:25. What does this expression mean? First of all, to what does it refer within the letter itself? The sacrifice of Christ in which God revealed both His justice (Rom. 3:21-26) and His sovereign grace (Rom. 4:24) is imitated by those who believe in Him. Sharing His death 122 123

Ibid

The body as living sacrifice seems also to stand in contrast to the dishonoring of the bodies in pagan practices in Romans 1:24. So is the renewal of the mind a reversal of the ”despicable thinking” in Romans 1:28.

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implies sharing His life-pattern. We are not called to imitate or follow Christ in the same sense that the moralism of Paul’s gentile audience called them, they believed, to obey Torah. The essence of Christ’s sacrifice had been expressed by His full dedication to God and His obedience to the law as an expression of God’s sovereign will for the present and unto death. Such a service in imitation of Christ’s obedience on the part of the believer can then be called “reasonable” or “intelligent,” because it makes sense that we, after sharing in His death, now share in His life. The reference to “bodies” is important too, since this was the term Paul used for the concrete existence of the believer within his social environment, as well as after his being united with Christ in His death. In Rom. 8:13, Paul adds the notion that the deeds of the body must also be mortified and brought under the power of Christ’s death. The idea of ”sacrifice” must mean a rendering of our lives to the service of God through death, i.e., through our identification with the death of Christ, as being dead to sin. But the force of that lies in the resurrection, not in the death itself, and certainly not in the “body” as such. So it is not enough to speak of sacrifice in the weakened sense of a commitment of our power. We are not seen by Paul to have any. The basis of our living in service is certainly our “death” in the sense of the acknowledgment in faith of our powerlessness. It points towards a source of power that is different from the “life in the flesh” and does not exert itself from within towards the world, but allows the power of Christ to move from the outside into the inner man. But what does it mean that, on the basis of our death as identification with Christ’s death, we follow the life-pattern of Christ in His obedience unto death? The “sacrifice” is further determined as “living, holy, and acceptable” to God. The term “living sacrifice” obviously is meant in distinction from the animal sacrifices that served to represent the possibility of communion between God and man. They needed actual moral submission (repentance, conversion) to achieve atonement, and had no efficacy in themselves. In this sense, the temple cult as a whole represented to Paul a means to obtain the “forbearance” through which sins were “passed by” (cf. 3:25). The death of the animal represented the dedication of a human life: as

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completely as the animal was given over to God in its death, so completely would man rededicate himself to keeping the law. In that perspective, calling Christ’s death a sacrifice means understanding His death as being an expression of God’s moral demand, and not as a cultic ritual of atonement by direct analogy. The prophets, after all, had argued against a sacrificial cult that had severed the links between ritual and moral dedication.124 Furthermore, it would set us up for the impossibility of a human sacrifice, unheard of in the Old Testament and early Judaism, and we would miss the more important connection with Jewish thinking on the merits of martyrdom. Here Christ sacrifices Himself by responding so completely to the demand of the law that his death became an inevitable response by a world that was in bondage to sin and death and dedicated to the pursuit of power. In that sense, Christ’s life as a whole was sacrificial, because the moral dedication that was intended by sacrifice was in Him provoking His death as a response of the ungodly powers. In that sense, Christ was indeed a “living sacrifice.” The expression “living sacrifice” as applied to believers does, however, also imply a distinction from the sacrifice of Christ. His death brings life. His death, and our participation in it, makes it possible for God to fulfill the claim the law has on us, instead of our dedicating ourselves completely to God by our own efforts. Following Christ on the basis of identifying ourselves with Christ does not put us in the same position. In other words: Christ’s death and our moral commitment are not linked in the way the beliver’s sacrifice under the old covenant was intended to bring that connection about. There is a reverse analogy between the ritual that signifies and presupposes moral dedication, and Christ’s death which removes the bondage of sin and grounds our dedication. Christ’s death is not a cultic sacrifice in the sense that its atoning effect lies in the satisfaction it gives to a God demanding punishment. Christ’s death is the outcome of the conflict between a world governed by sin and the New Man who complied fully with God’s will. The main point behind the notion of a “living sacrifice” can now be formulated: the death of the animal represented the total 124

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Cf. Amos 5:21-27; Micah 6:6-8.

dedication of the believer which must work itself out in obedience to the law, the same law that prescribed the sacrifice. Where this connection is severed, the early prophets of Israel express the moral prescription as superior to cultic purity, because then the intent of sacrifice is reduced to an outward and legal compliance. The prophets can then boldly state that such sacrifice is merely provisional, and even invalid, without its necessary moral accompaniment. Christ’s death expresses first and foremost His total dedication in terms of the obedience to God that led to His death in this world, this world being what it is. On top of that, His resurrection implied that believers who identify with Him adopt the way of life that is dedicated to God completely and has divine sanction even beyond death. So the analogy is reversed: the death of Christ is the outcome of moral dedication to God, and a counter-concept to the sacrifices under the old covenant that provided the basis for such moral (re-) dedication. The antithesis between sacrifice and service that could arise where humans failed to achieve the moral dedication that was presupposed in the sacrifices, and that is so prominent in a prophet like Amos, is overcome in Christ’s sacrifice. And that leads to the first conclusion: that Christ’s surrender unto death implies that our dedication to God no longer requires “our” sacrificial death by proxy, or, in a way, by identification, that we have passed through it. But having gone through death, having received justification and being transformed by the spirit, we are now enabled to imitate the pattern of Christ’s life of dedication ourselves. We must be careful here: “we” as a community are “enabled” to conform to this pattern of life. The major and primary effect is not that all of us separately have been given the ability to do so, so that we as individuals can now lead better lives. The second principle of our moral renewal is expressed in verse 2. There should be no conformity to this world, but we should have a reform of thought, i.e., our way of hearing and understanding must be renewed as well. Through the renewal of thought we are able to recognize what the will of God is .125 Both statements are passive: the body of sin becomes a living 125

‘Recognize’ from Greek dokimadzoo: to learn, to test and affirm.

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sacrifice, dedicated to the service of righteousness, motivated by the knowledge of a compassionate God. Our thinking, which begins with conformity to this world, is changed through a transformation of our understanding of the reality before God. Both exhortations call us to allow ourselves to be transformed, not to achieve it on our own. As Schlatter emphasizes: we are exhorted to “do” this, because God is already doing it “in” us.126 The compassionate God who motivates our service is the power source for our new understanding. The aim of this understanding is the answer to the question, “What is the will of God?” According to Käsemann, as well as Schlatter,127 the answer to that question must be found in the varying circumstances of life, and the answer to that question implies testing of that answer and an immediate affirmation of that will. But the argument can be developed in two different directions. When the believer judges the answer in accordance with his renewed thinking, the result will be such an affirmation of the divine will. The three attributes of the divine will that are mentioned here might be merely apposite equivalents.128 It would then state that the divine will is the good, the acceptable, and the perfect. They are of course maximum qualities. In that sense, the righteousness striven for is the ultimate that God demands, because God can demand it of sinners who have been made righteous. They might, however, also qualify the sense in which the divine will is sought for. By using renewed thinking, the good etc., that which is found can be recognized as the divine will. The mention of the divine will in this context then moves closer to being the motivational force behind the informed judgment on the ethical demand. We can easily recognize the classic dilemma of Plato’s Eutyphron in this difference. In the one case, (1) whatever God wills is the good, the acceptable, and the perfect. In the other, (2) whatever we 126 127 128

A. Schlatter (1935); p. 331. Ibid., pp. 334-35.

“Die drei Adjektive können die Attribute des thelema sein oder selbstandig als Apposition an dieses antreten.” According to Schlatter the difference is of minor importance: the attributes only express the reason why the divine will should be sought. But Schlatter has already decided, of course, in his commentary on chapter 2, that the goal of Christian ethics is inner congruence between our and the divine will, setting all heteronomy aside. He actually argues in conformity with the ‘Enthusiasm’ that Käsemann sees as the opponent in the passage.

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find to be the good, acceptable, and perfect must be done because we recognize it as the divine will. So does God will it because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? The form of our obedience is at stake in this exegetical dilemma! Käsemann argues that "will" refers to a specific decision in a concrete situation. The reference to the three attributes of God’s will is meant to curb the Enthusiasmus of those who would identify the moral command with the ability to decide and the immediate spiritual awareness of God’s will. Inspired obedience at the spur of the moment, in response to each and every situation as it occurs, must have some guiding principles. The congruence between my will and that of God cannot be complete, making necessary a reasoning process that is guided by the understanding of what is good, acceptable, and perfect. Käsemann argues that the three attributes are guidelines toward finding the will of God, but cannot be identified with it. So, in opposition to (1), Käsemann appears to deny that God’s will can be equated with the attributes. And he weakens the second argument by stating that the attributes are guidelines, and not the substance of our ethical decisions. But is that indeed what Paul is saying here? Of course the good, the acceptable, and the holy can be seen as references to the law in its capacity to instruct us in the divine will (12:2). In a way it can be seen as a higher mode of the law that is in itself called holy, just, and good in Rom. 7:12. Still, his goal is not the reestablishment of the law as system. But there can be no doubt that Paul presupposes that the law would still have some function in the Christian life: its requirements, after all, are being fulfilled in the Christian life, according to Romans 8:4. How the law should be used we should try to determine from the next passage. In 12:3-15:13 Paul draws out the implications of this living sacrifice for various aspects of Christian living: 12:3-8, the inner structure of the Church with regard to differences in faith and grace among them, the concept of the organic unity of the Church; 12:9-21, love in action, present in particular in the adoption of a completely non-violent attitude; 13:1-7, submission to the state, as a witness to it; 13:8-10, love of fellow

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believers as a way of showing a better community than the state with its power of sword can guarantee; 13: 11-14, life in the light of the imminent end; 14:1-23, no judging or causing fellow believers to stumble; 15:1-13, following the example of Christ in accepting others. There is a remarkable difference of opinion about the contents of these admonitions. According to Käsemann, the admonitions in chapter 12 are directed against exaggerated enthusiasm. Similarly, Otto Michel argues that in 12:3 the exhortation is directed against the charismatics. That would explain why Paul stresses notions of sober thoughtfulness, which is one of the Aristotelian virtues. Not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think sounds indeed like a caution against Gnostic exaggeration or against the kind of spiritual enthusiasm also found in 1 Cor., in which charisma would bestow personal status. But the motivational clause in verses 4 and 5 makes it clear that polemics is not the prime intent; indeed, Paul’s emphasis is on the solidarity of the members of the Church as a way to exercise the righteousness by faith that the entire letter is dealing with. Though the believers are different in many ways, these differences are the result of the measure of faith, not quantitatively, but qualitatively. They share in each other’s life because their life has become that of Christ. They have died to the ways of the world in which position and rank determine one’s social status and effectiveness. Not all members have the same office, but these “offices” are not seen as levels of hierarchy. To look at each member of a community as someone who has a personal contribution to make to the whole puts an end to the kind of hierarchical structure that might distinguish each person in a collective by social or political status. It is not power that determines the status, but service to the whole. Proleptically, the official of the state is also dealt with in this manner (Each member has a specific office according to the measure of his faith, based on his gifts, according to the grace that is given, i.e., completely dependent upon God’s work in man and not on the development of natural abilities. The different gifts are summed up in verses 5-8 together with the principle that guides their development. But it is important to remember that all of these different gifts come from one and the same grace; the will of God is one and the same good, and

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what is required of us constitutes one service of God. Not only the context but also the content makes it clear that Paul is speaking of the one principle of love as the commandment for Christians.129 We come now to the two passages that form the context of the passage on the relation to government: 12:9-21, and 13:8-14, which we will discuss together. In general we can say that the exhortations in 12:9-21 express how the commandment of brotherly love must be exercised within the community (verses 9-16) and with regard to “outsiders,” who are called “all people” (verses 17 and 18) and “enemy” (verse 20). The passage ends with the exhortation not to be overcome by evil - meaning not to resist evil with violence, but to overcome it with the good. Very naturally at this point, the three elements: (1) acceptance of the different gifts of people in a community as contributing to the unity of the whole, (2) brotherly love that makes patient acceptance of suffering possible, and (3) love for the enemy and submission to evil, are used to describe the attitude towards the rulers in chapter 13. The exercise of righteousness that is the fruit of transformation through the Spirit is a dedicated life governed by the principle of nonconformity to the world and an attitude of submissiveness. It involves a life within a community, structured around the principle of love and unselfish service to others, and love for the enemy and suffering with regard to the outside world. So how is the relationship to be worked out in a society within which Christians are a minority? What is the relation between Christian life and the powers of the state? There is no doubt that the passage in Romans 13:1-8 is not a separate discourse that strayed into Paul’s treatment of the principle of Christian love.130 It is an integral part of the ethical discourse 129 130

Cf. K. Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, Zürich, 1942, II/2, p. 796 (§38.3)

Apparently the reading of the powers in the opening of chapter 13 as the state obscures the inner connection between love for the enemy in chapter 12 and love as fulfillment of the law in 13:8ff., both of which deal with love on the level of the personal encounter. Many have argued, as Ridderbos, e.g., (1959, ad loc.) that the passage is more like a separate discourse inserted only because Paul felt its need for his Roman audience. By applying the alternative reading of the powers as ”officials,” however, the connection is restored.

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here. Let’s see how we can show this structural integrity of the letter. The structural connection between chapters 12 and 13 has been put nicely by J. H. Yoder: In the structure of the Epistle, chapters 12 and 13 in their entirety form one literary unit. Therefore, the text 13:1-7 cannot be understood alone. Chapter 12 begins with a call to nonconformity, motivated by the memory of the mercies of God, and finds the expression of this transformed life first in a new quality of relationships within the Christian community and, with regard to enemies, in suffering.. The concept of love then recurs in 13:8-10. Therefore, any interpretation of 13:1-7 which is not also an expression of suffering and serving love must be a misunderstanding of the text in its context (italics mine). There are no grounds of literary analysis, textual variation, or style to support the claim that we have here to do with a separate chunk of teaching which constitutes foreign matter in the flow of the text.131 In his short exposition of the contents of the entire letter leading up to chapters 12 and 13, he stresses the calling of the gentiles and God’s continuing concern for “ethnic Israel.” The point of the letter, according to Yoder, is the overcoming of the hostility between Jews and gentiles by the creation of community, “reaching even to the nuts and bolts of financial sharing and missionary support.” From that perspective he develops a reading of Rom. 13 within the context of the whole letter, not as a separate statement, and certainly not as the center of what the New Testament has to say about the meaning of the state and its power. To Yoder, the connection between the former chapters and chapter 13 lies in the social-political dimension of the letter as a whole, and the social ethics of chapter 12 in particular. The problem that is of great concern to any Christian is of course Rom. 13:1-7, which seems to imply submission to a government that, as instituted by God, has the right to make 131

J.H. Yoder, 1972, p. 196.

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use of the sword, i.e., it may use violence to achieve its goals. It would imply, as Yoder pointed out, that the ideal of love of one’s enemy in 12:19-21 and the demand of love in 13:8-14 are characterized as religious affairs, but that, for a Christian, existence in this world implies acceptance of the government that is there, even when it contradicts these religious ideals, as long as such a government provides for the minimum requirements of human society. All governments and authorities derive their power from God (verse 2), so that any kind of resistance, even on the basis of the religious principles mentioned in the context of the passage, is resistance to God, again, unless the government fails to comply with its basic function, and then rebellion seems in order. The essence remains that every soul (a Semitism for ‘everyone’, kol nefesh), here referring to Christians, must submit to the authorities (which Yoder consistently reads as synonym for the ”state”) that are set over them. With that statement, the fanatics of 12:3, according to Käsemann, had to be put in their place; literally: “had to be put back into the boundaries of the earthly order.” 132 Anders Nygren argues this possibility: the anticipatory, eschatological attitude would lead to a denial that a Christian lives in this present eon. Being set free from the present ruling powers would then lead to an anarchist attitude. The difference is simply that the exousiai, as dominating and demoniacal powers, have been reduced to mere worldly powers; Christians do not need to put their trust in them to achieve the good. That would be the reason Paul uses the same word, exousia, for demoniacal powers as for worldly government. The freedom of the Christian would then be exercised in the free attitude with which he can approach the government and measure it by its own standard. To Nygren, all government is in principle instituted by God, and only God can give the government power.133 This would lead, however, to a life in duality: being on the one hand religiously committed to the ethics of the new kingdom, and on the other hand standing in compromise with the realm of the old world. 132 133

E. Käsemann (1974), p. 335. A. Nygren (1954) pp. 303-306.

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Adolf Schlatter defends clearly the exact point against which Yoder has argued so forcefully. He acknowledges that the primary point of doubt for the Christian in his obedience to the state is the spilling of blood. Then Schlatter states: “Paul accepts even the military foundation of the state’s power as part of that which enables the state to fulfill its divine mission because she is the ’advocate of justice’, of which the divine wrath makes use; because of that power, God’s anger persecutes and punishes the wrongdoer.” If that is so, morality is subordinated to the political dimension: the state’s power and its habitual killing must be accepted because the state punishes wrongdoings in the place of God, as if the entire letter had not first preached the fact that the revelation of God’s justice meant acquittal for sinners; as if chapter 12 had not spoken out loudly against hatred and violence. Michel (1955) speaks quite similarly here. According to him, the state acts as the protector of the divine law and judges on matters of right and wrong. Good is the “general good” that pagans could know about through their consciences; evil is the disruption of social life. The sword is only the power of justice. All Christians have a duty towards the state. The state could rightfully demand taxes (both direct taxes like an income tax, phoros, and indirect taxes, telos, e.g., levies) but also respect and tribute. The institution of the state is based upon divine law, therefore its retributive justice, including the death penalty, is within its divine prerogative. First of all we can see, with Yoder, that the text does not imply a divine act of institution or ordination of a particular government.134 It is merely a matter of accepting the political power that happens to be there. This might be inferred from the usage of exousia in verse 2, the powers that are there. Yoder concludes by arguing that that excludes both the affirmation of the providential act by which any particular government comes into existence and the idea that the principle of government is being taught here. Paul is not intent on describing the minimal conditions under which a government may be accepted. A rebellion against such a government that fails to live up to this standard might then be motivated by the prophetic call for a proper government, which is the ideology of the just rebellion. 134

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J. H. Yoder (1972), pp. 198-199.

Christians would then be in the dilemma of giving active moral support to a government that fulfills its duty under God or of rebelling against the evil state if it fails in that respect. But the text merely speaks about submission. In no way can Paul be understood to be saying that a rebellion with force against any government is warranted, but what is important is the reason for this submission. Is it the divine origin of the state, or the general prohibition against the use of violence for no matter what purpose? But does the passage teach the divine institution of the state? Yoder observes that Paul does not say that the authorities are created or instituted by God (though the NIV uses “instituted” here as its translation of tetagmenai from tasso, to order, to set in its place), but rather that God sets them in their place. Government as such was not created by God: the state involved “domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed.” Paul’s acceptance of authorities is therefore no moral affirmation, but he intends to say, according to Yoder, that “by his permissive government he lines them (the authorities in general) up with his purpose.”135 Christians are therefore called to a nonresistant attitude even toward a tyrannical government. No revolution or insubordination is possible for the Church, precisely because it trusts in a God who governs the governments. Yet there are limits to this submission to the state and the cooperation it generally calls for. The sword, for Rome, was the symbol of judicial authority, not of state-violence, and the function of the sword to which Christians are subject, even when it implies the use of violence, is the judicial and police function, not the death penalty and war. And yet another limit is expressed in the structure of verse 6b: ”attending to this very thing.” Käsemann discusses various possibilities without making a choice: (1) the authorities are constantly mindful to be in the service of God (exaggerated and unlikely, according to Käsemann) (2) the authorities, insofar as they exercise their function, remain within the limits ordained by God. Yoder chooses the second possibility, seeing in the participial construction an adverbial modifier to the main statement. The 135

Ibid., p. 203.

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full translation, in the restrictive sense, would then be: “they are ministers of God only to the extent to which they carry out their function, i.e., the judicial and police function; through taxes, the ordering of economic life; what is referred to in the phrases ”servant for your good” and “execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” This is the criterion by which we measure whether the state functions as God devised it to do, not to ascertain whether such a government is permissible, using the condition of the kingdom as a standard, or should be rebelled against because it does not further the interests of the Church. Yet the payment of taxes does not in itself constitute recognition of the state, as Ridderbos argues, e.g.136 Yoder then makes an interesting point of exegesis. Normally verse 6 reads: “For that reason you also pay taxes, because they (RSV and NIV: the authorities) are ministers of God, [insofar as they are, Yoder] attending to this very thing.” We take "ministers" to be the nominal part of the predicate, and then have to search for the subject of they are, which we think we found some verses ago: the authorities. Then the text is saying that the representatives of authority are "attending to this very thing." But what if the nominal part is in fact the plural subject, referring to Christians? The text would then read: “For that reason you also pay taxes, because [you, as] ministers of God are also attending to this very thing.” Christians also devote themselves to approval of the good and the reprimanding of evil, with good and evil understood in the individual sense of the personal well-being of all. Christians should have no restrictions in their doing well to all, so that would include proleptically the servants of the state! It seems obvious that the state can then command obedience insofar as it serves the same goals as Christians do. We find it quite unconvincing, however, to assert this about the state and not about its officials. The expression “authorities” can better be read as “officials” to prevent the next problem from arising. Yoder concludes: Romans 12-13 and Matthew 5-7 are not in contradiction or in tension. They both instruct Christians to 136

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Ridderbos (1959), p. 293.

be nonresistant in all their relationships, including the social. They both call on the disciples of Jesus to renounce participation in the interplay of egoism’s which this world calls "vengeance" or "justice." They both call Christians to respect and be subject to the historical process in which the sword continues to be wielded and to bring about a kind of order under fire, but not to perceive in the wielding of the sword their own reconciling ministry.137 But can we really maintain that Christians should submit to all governments merely because they are there? Is it that the state must be affirmed because it does some good for its citizens, then we affirm the whole because of the goodness of some of its elements? It is one thing to reject the possibility of violent rebellion, but is this non-violence in the face of power wielded by the state really based upon the principle that the state is there and has a general function to fulfill? And does this function imply the abstract realms of judicial, economic, and political power, which would then be represented paradigmatically in these verses? Alternatively, can we read the text in such a way that the connection between chapters 12 and 13 becomes even clearer than in Yoder’s argument? For as things stand now, Paul would be changing his perspective from the individual obligation to love the neighbor and the enemy to affirmation of the state insofar as it does good. This proves to be quite unnecessary if we let ourselves be guided by a reading proposed by Strobel.

137

Yoder (1972), p. 210.

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14. Love for the enemy as the pattern of justice: the “moral” dimension of social ethics (Romans 13) Mennonites broke away from the idea that the state was coterminous with the Church. Instead they argued that state and Church each had their own distinct and exclusive membership, and their own standards of behavior. The Church was a voluntary separation of society because of the assumption of a different standard. The sword of justice was necessary to punish evildoers and maintain order in society. So there were two standards of morality for the state and the Church and only if the state turned evil could it be argued that Christians should not obey its official representatives. It followed from this principle that Christians were not allowed to serve in government, even if they could affirm the state’s right to use the power of the sword. Even though there was a social justification for the existence of the state, Christians were morally denied access to political power. Nonresistance to evil, the love for the enemy and the acceptance of repentance of all evil-doers were the positive requirements of any Christian that were inconsistent with the application of worldly power. The rejection of all warfare and capital punishment were equally incompatible with the other elements of the function of national states: to defend by force the political unity of a community and to restrain the evil-doers by the ultimate violence of death. In sum: the state could never be Christian. When the New Testament refers to the state it never uses the abstract term polis which is reserved as the common term for a township or local community. The state is meant when it refers to the emperor (Mt. 22:17) or the king (1 Pt. 2:13, 17; 1 Tim. 2:2), or when Paul speaks about “authorities” or exousiai. The philosophical background of the term polis can be assumed to be lacking in New Testament discourse on the state, and instead the notions of power and order come to the fore. It must be an anachronism therefore, to read back into the New Testament the notion of the modern state as it evolved since the Renaissance and has undoubtedly influenced the theological

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reflection of the 16th century Reformation. The proper strategy for reading “backwards” can only be found when we remember that after all the reality of the state is present not when we argue that the state is a “divine institution of ordering power”138 (Brunner) because all authority is from God. Power has been given to the state to serve the order, the community and justice. To apply the concept of the modern state, with its centralized power and the right to warfare and death penalty, to the submission to the “authorities” in Romans 13 has long been the standard practice. We propose a different avenue, by starting from the assumption that the reality of the state is nowhere else to be found as in the specific actions of individuals who act in conformity with the standard of the state and in a way produce its reality by doing so. The state is present whenever an individual justifies acts of government over others on the basis of the concept of the state, i.e. on the basis of the idea that a particular action is both necessary for the preservation of the state and beneficial to the wellbeing of a particular (national) community and serves their interests. If we start from the idea that the state is a reality only in specific actions of individuals, we can begin to understand the moral weight of the exhortation that Paul addressed to the Romans on this subject. Only then can we find the biblical foundation for the Mennonites’ insistence, that the “state”, far from expressing a divinely ordained political order in which all human beings live and are required to give their allegiance to, is actually a framework of justification for specific individual actions that may or may not be at odds with Christ’s teachings. An institution outside the perfection of Christ. Ultimately the political order must be measured by the moral order that grounds its reality.139 It is vital to make the distinction between the abstract concept of state and the notion of the state-official. Strobel, quoted in Käsemann’s commentary (p. 338), argued that Paul used 138 139

Emil Brunner, Das Gebot, p. 484

Cf. also Emmanuel Levinas, e.g. in “Liberté et Commandement”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 58, p. 266 (1953) who argues that the discourse of the encounter (i.e. the moral order) constitutes a relationship between individuals that precedes the institution of the rational law and is the effort to involve someone in a dialogue without using violence. The – exercise of violence and power rest precisely on the refusal to join in that dialogue.

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specific terminology of Hellenistic political life that would imply that Paul is not talking about the state, but about its representatives. The “governing authorities” (verse 1140) specifically refers to Roman officers of state. The expression “rulers” in verse 3 perhaps refers to magisterial power, and “ministers” refers to appointed representatives of an authority. If that is so, the jus gladii, the power, or better, right of the sword, in verse 6, refers to control over life and death, i.e., (capital) punishment, but also to the system of rewards and privileges that went along with that power in the emperor’s representatives. It refers in Roman perspective, therefore, to judicial power as it is put into the hands of officials. The word itself therefore points to a basis for the legitimacy of actions to the benefit of others or against others that otherwise would be acts of violence. If the language that characterizes the authority is in this sense morally neutral (it refers to individual acts in a political perspective), then by contrast the references to obedience (submission as hupotassesthai is to fulfill an existing duty) and to the goal of government, the “good” cannot be political but must indicate a moral response. The application of love for the enemy to the civil servant in a way detaches this servant from his own political order of legitimacy and looks upon him as a possible resident of the Kingdom of God. In the same vein, the ”servant who executes wrath” (RSV) or the “agent of wrath,” might be the prosecutor or district attorney in a legal sense, and the concept of the legitimacy of the state’s violence would be far removed from Paul’s thought. This would fit in very well with the general intent behind the passage to show how life within a hostile society is possible. It also makes the part about tax collection fit in nicely with the rest: the tax is paid because we recognize proleptically the intent of its collector to do good to all. And finally, this interpretation makes sense of the “all” in verse 7: this must refer to the officials themselves. The conclusion from all of this must be that Paul’s exhortation is contextual and not directly based upon a theological140

The Greek exousia refers to delegated power, the fact that one can exercise the power given him as if it were his own, but it can also be used for the persons carrying that power, so in this case: rulers, officials. Its usage as equivalent to power would be a Semitism; cf. Hebrew reshut, domination, authority, domain.

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metaphysical determination of the nature of the state. Neither the state nor the Roman Empire is the subject of Paul’s statements here, but the officials, the police, the tax collector, the judge, the circle of the bearers of delegated power. Paul demands an application of the love for the enemy in a moral sense to those who exert force in the name of the state and no affirmation of the state in any modern sense is implied We have argued that submission to the functionaries can be seen as an applied case of the love for the enemy in 12:20-21. His presence is not simply affirmed as an empirical reality, though the powers “are” simply there, as 13:2 states, with the word @×F4" (being) implying a moral neutrality, but they are seen as a means to act proleptically according to the values of the coming kingdom. That God has set them in their place does not mean that there is any kind of moral legitimacy to their being there, nor does it mean that the principle of statehood in itself is affirmed, but only its existence within the context of the coming Kingdom which is already a present reality. The Church should, by accepting this reality of the state only insofar as there are persons acting under its principle, accept the situation in which God has set her. If resistance against such bearers of authority, in whom “the powers are concretized personally” (Käsemann), is motivated by the effort to become emancipated either individually or collectively, such authorities become obstacles to political autonomy or social emancipation. If the Church does resist violently because she judges the state to be less than adequate, she is in fact showing hatred for the “enemy,” since every effort to emancipate politically will immediately make the officers of the state into enemies, which will make it necessary to resist them violently, even though she might argue that the necessity for violence results from their behavior and attitude, in order to achieve political goals. Read in that way, on the level of encounter with the representatives of government, political and violent resistance is not simply forbidden by the legitimacy of the state but is per se impossible for the Church. It is the commandment to love the enemy that prohibits violence to the officials of the state. It is not an acquiescence in the legitimacy of that state in so far as it does not hinder the practice of religion. In itself, this presentation of Paul’s ethical exhortation with

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regard to the powers of the state powers does not exclude Yoder’s claim that Christianity is a social ethic. It only brings us closer to understanding that Paul in his presentation of that ethic did not construct an abstract ontology of the state, but tried to put into the language of politics the very fundamental demand of love for one’s enemy as taught by Jesus Himself. The passage can be understood as a refutation of Zealotism.141 Political rebellion against Rome was based upon affirmation of God’s rule as the concrete alternative to human rule, i.e., as in basic conflict with it. The Maccabean revolt, which was its forerunner, was justified with the argument that when the religious existence of the people of Israel was threatened, a rebellion against foreign powers was the only way ot be faithful. The Zealots applied that principle to the political independence of Israel, perhaps because they saw in it a means to obtain and secure the former. So if Rome governed the world, then God was excluded, and only human action could reinstate God in His rightful place. Human government was always an occupying power where only God could rule. For the same reason, the Zealots called it an injustice to pay taxes to such a “foreign” government. The opposite of that position would be the acceptance of worldly rule without reservation. But Paul did not just reverse the Zealot position, and neither had Jesus. His argument against the Zealots is that God already does rule, albeit without deposing a faulty human government, and not in the perfect way of the coming Kingdom. But the governmental powers are still subject to God’s judgment and are under God’s control insofar as they provide the basic conditions of a stable society. That, however, is no reason for their acceptance. Christians do not deal politically with the state; they deal with it morally, in their dealings with the representatives of the state.142 The 141

Schlatter stated that it was not impossible that Paul had received messages that the Zealots were influencing the synagogues and Churches in Rome. Even without such a historical incentive, it would still be necessary for Paul to discuss the issue (Schlatter [1935], p. 350). 142 So we have a reversal here of the situation in which Judas Maccabeus decided to kill his countryman for obeying the command to sacrifice to the Greek god, and the representative of the Greek king who came to his home town to enforce the state’s demand. That representative was killed because he was identified with the state, and the state was a power to be opposed (1 Macc. 2).

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Zealots could try to make a case for justified killing of Roman officials as part of a just war scenario: when they killed even their own countrymen to further their political goals, this was to be accepted because they themselves accepted the principle of politics that the end justifies the means. The Zealot option was not reversed on the issue of the denial of the legitimacy of human rule where only God should be sovereign Lord. Submission to the state is not part of an acceptance of the old order if it had been reversed to become submission to the people who represent the state. The concrete alternative to Zealot violence, was the proleptic dealing with officials as if God already had established his Kingdom – which in Christ He already had in the view of the Church. This is a vital point: it is not the state itself that is acknowledged, but its legitimacy is reduced to the domain where neighborly love, the good of the individual, the love for one’s enemy rules. The moral order supersedes the political order. Such a submission is revolutionary in nature and far from constituting acquiescence to the status quo. It looks upon the representative of the state with respect to the good he achieves to the extent that he works toward the good that the powers of the state are supposed to accomplish. We do not see the state in the man we encounter, but we do see the function by which such an official is commissioned to further the well-being of others. In a way, such an acknowledgment treats the state official in a way analogous to that in which the members of the Church are to behave toward one another. In this respect, the Pauline exhortation proves to be similar in nature to the parenetical material that the Church ascribed to Jesus. In Mark 12:13-17 we find such paraenesis embedded in a controversy between Jesus and the Zealots. By this procedure of “embedding” the question, whatever Jesus was teaching becomes connected to the Church’s question as to who was handing down that teaching.143 The Zealots were refusing to pay the taxes because to do so would mean acknowledging the Roman Emperor as their sovereign. Jesus’ reply aims at rejecting the presuppositions of that approach. 143

Cf. M. Dibelius, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, Tuebingen, 1933, pp. 239-244.

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The coin with the emperor’s face on it makes trade possible, and only the Emperor has the authority to mint coins. God, however, mints people, because all have been created in his image. It is therefore in vain to refuse to render the coin back to Caesar, who has made that coin in the first place and in that sense is entitled to it as an “object,” and at the same time also to refuse to render unto God what is rightfully His, i.e., to reject the image of God in every man and to kill to further political goals. To kill people in the name of God is absurd, and so is refusing to pay taxes when you are participating in an economy that was made possible by that same Emperor. So the point is not that we should give all to God because of the radical understanding of the coming kingdom (against Goppelt, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, p. 164), but that we are caught up in an absurd paradox if we kill the image-bearer of God in His name for political reasons, and refuse to pay taxes on the profits that were made possible by the very imperial power that we seek to fight. So it is all right to pay the taxes needed to provide police and judicial functions within society, while at the same time Jesus commands us not to make use of that force and those rights under law. In Matthew 5:38 we find that we should not resist those who perpetrate evil. We should “love the enemy,” i.e., present our left cheek to those who smite us on the right cheek. Nonresistance and love for the enemy are correlative, and the point of this nonresistance is expressed by Paul in Rom. 12:21 to be no less than the victory of good over evil. But is all of this connected to the expectation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom? Are we right to argue that the main perspective is the Kingdom that has already been established instead of the referring to the eschatological expectation. Goppelt argues that though nonresistance is in direct conformity to the coming kingdom, there is now, under the present conditions, also reason for resistance. Because the Kingdom of God is still invisible, “history must be maintained with respect to its hidden and its visible coming.” Now there is a new character to resistance: one who has found the freedom not to resist will resist injustice with the aid of power and law without hating or despising the enemy: “He suffers because he has to resist. This new way to resist is also a behavior in

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conformity with the sermon on the Mount.”144 If the coming kingdom, instead of the present rule of God as visible in the Church, is relied on as the motivation for obedience to the command to love the enemy, then in actual fact the commandment loses its strength altogether. Now it is the situation that determines when it is proper to resist and when not to. Can Goppelt accept that Jesus only acted in nonresistance and still acknowledge the application of justice and power, both “fundamentally” and “practically”?145 But one must agree with Yoder that such a perspective on Christian ethics actually destroys Christ’s mission. “The cross is the extreme demonstration that agape seeks neither effectiveness nor justice and is willing to suffer any loss or seeming defeat for the sake of obedience.”146 Goppelt calls it a “conformity with the sermon on the mount” to resist evil by seeking an effective response or to use violent means in order to establish justice, because the “old world” still is there and the Kingdom is hidden. The individual can do so because he is part of the society around him, and Christ’s mission is to effect salvation, and His commandments are only “indirectly” realized through the process of salvation from within the society. So the new eon, according to Goppelt, is not entirely separated from the old. Jesus’ demand for a new kind of life is balanced by His acceptance of the legality of the old. Basically Goppelt defends this view because of an exegesis in which Jesus taught that the imperial taxes should simply be accepted. Part of the problem might be that Goppelt envisions an individual in this situation and asks whether it is possible for any single human being to act in conformity with Christ. But the 144

L. Goppelt, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, 1976, p. 165.[This “op.” is not previously cited and is not in the bibliography.] 145 Goppelt finds fault with Karl Barth for emphasizing the presence of God’s kingdom at the expense of the Kingdom that is still to be fully realized. According to Goppelt, Jesus wants the ”total conversion” of human beings, but the complete fulfillment of His commandments can never be a requirement for all, it has the character of an exception that acts as a sign pointing toward a kingdom in which it will be possible for all to obey. The reality of the present kingdom, one might oppose to Goppelt, is then reduced to an ideal without effectiveness in the present. 146 J.H. Yoder, Royal Priesthood p. 147

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call for the kingdom does not address the individual alone, and the point of the taxes is without merit in this context. The paying of taxes is not an affirmation of the old order nor of the state, as we have seen from Romans 13; it is a proleptic affirmation of the new one, changing our perspective on what is important and what is not within the remnants of the old world. In the context of Jesus’ saying, we can put it like this: if our dedication is fully to God it becomes immaterial whether we pay our taxes to the government, and if we use the system, why complain about that one element of it through which some good on an individual level can arise? We pay taxes, not because we affirm the state, but because we affirm the possible goodness in those people who use those taxes for the good of all, to the degree that this is what happens. There is good reason for us to do so. In the words of Yoder: “Christ is not only the Head of the Church; he is at the same time Lord of History, reigning at the right hand of God over the principalities and powers. The old eon, representative of human history under the mark of sin, has also been brought under the reign of Christ (which is not identical with the consummate kingdom of God, 1 Cor. 15:24).”147 We may therefore expect that the evil, which is inherent in the power of the state does not simply create chaos but is made subservient to God’s purpose. In Yoder’s words: “The characteristic of the reign of Christ is that evil, without being blotted out, is channeled by God, in spite of itself, to serve God’s purposes.” So we would confirm the state, not as created or instituted by God, but at least as a means by which God brings order and gives “room for growth and work of the Church.” Yoder may say that in such a way the violence of the state is not redeemed or made good, but is made subservient to God’s purposes. It may ultimately serve some good, and in that respect at least it earns some legitimacy. However, this will only be true, Yoder explains, for a given state if it does not add to the evil already there. The state has on some occasions subscribed to a moral value, punishing the guilty and saving the innocent. Then evil is used for a good purpose, though it in itself remains evil. The demoniac state, however, denies all moral responsibility, punishing the innocent 147

Cf. J.H. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p. 149

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and rewarding the guilty, as in Revelation 13. The state as such therefore cannot be called good, but some of its actions though can be called good to the extent that they do not add to the evil already there! Yoder presupposed that the authorities mentioned in Romans 13:1 (and the parallel passages in 1 Tim. 2 and 1 Peter 2) refer to the state as such. Romans 13, of course, has been most often interpreted like that, and we have quoted another solution above. But how can we possibly identify the “kings and people in high places” in 1 Tim. 2 with the state? 1 Peter 2:13 speaks about human institutions and mentions the emperor or his governors. Again, with Käsemann, we must say at least that the powers are personalized, though we prefer to state that the powers are being seen on the level where they are represented by individuals. In Romans 13, we would have to accept that Paul changes from his perspective on Christian morality, the application of love for the enemy, to the perspective of the state. But we find the position persuasive that the terminology of Romans 13 points toward the embodiment of the state in bearers of authority who continue the intersubjective framework of chapter 12. The point might be, then, that we never accept the state as such, but always and only specific people who use power, on the presumption that they do so with the object of doing good. It would mean that the state, per se, is mentioned only in Revelation 13 in the typical language of apocalyptic prophecy: the beast coming from the sea. The powers that govern the world are personalized, and only when the system dominates all the people in it and the intersubjective perspective of Romans 13 cannot be employed any longer, the state is envisioned as “beastified,” in the language of the Apocalypse. We must come now to the question of what kind of response Paul expected from his paraenesis, what kind of obedience is implied in all these specifications of the commandment of love. In general, we have found both in Galatians and in Romans that the way of life of Christians is determined by a threefold freedom: freedom from sin, from death, and from (an incorrect interpretation of) the law. It is not freedom from all restraints, since the believer is liberated to a new service. But this service seems to be rather paradoxical. “The servant of Christ” is at the

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same time a freedman of the Lord (1 Cor. 7:22). We are freed as was Israel: in order to obey. For Christians more particularly: to lead a life in the Spirit that allows God through us to fulfill the claim the law has on us (Rom. 8:3). What character does this new Christian imperative have? Bultmann and others have argued that, to Paul, the imperative follows the indicative. Let’s use this idea for a moment. In our passage we might look at 12:1 as a case in point. The exhortation is motivated “by the mercies of God”; the “sacrifice” is reference to Christ’s sacrifice for us (Rom. 5). The “indicative” of what God has done in Christ not only serves as a motivating force; it also expresses a reality in which we already share. The gift of the Spirit turns an eschatological future into a present reality. The spirit therefore can be expressed both as the power by which the believer can act in obedience and the standard by which he measures his acts, combining indicative and imperative. Gal. 5:25 expresses this duality: “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” As Beker puts it, this connection between indicative and imperative is meant as a polemical stance towards Jews and Jewish Christians because it “eradicates the works of the law and any fearful striving for acceptance in the last judgment, as if the Messiah had not already come.”148 If the nature of righteousness is at stake, as in Romans and Galatians, Paul will emphasize the indicative, but where there is danger of the exaggeration of the “exclusive celebration of the indicative” Paul stresses the imperative, as in 1 Cor. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see Paul’s ethic only in this tension between indicative and imperative. Beker explains this issue by making reference to the debate between Bultmann and Käsemann: “Ernst Käsemann has inserted a new dimension into the discussions. With Bultmann, he locates the heart of Paul’s gospel in " the righteousness of God," but he disputes Bultmann’s interpretation of it.’The righteousness of God’ has an apocalyptic derivation and denotes both God’s power and His gift. It expresses God’s cosmic claim on the world, which is proleptically made manifest in the lordship of Christ 148

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J.C. Beker , Paul p. 255.

and in which the believer participates through obedience. The lordship of Christ, however, does not rob believers of their volition; they are not simply pawns in a cosmic struggle, because their obedience demonstrates their allegiance to God’s sovereign will for his creation. According to Käsemann, the obedience of Christians must be viewed in the context of their solidarity with the created order, which comes to expression in Paul’s definition of "the body" (sooma). In other words, Käsemann advances the discussion of the relation of the indicative and imperative in Paul, which had heretofore been dominated by Bultmann’s definition of "the body" as a person’s relation to himself. This existentialist definition of "the body" neglects its cosmic-historical character and spiritualizes a person’s relation to the world. It causes an existentialist narrowing of both the indicative and imperative, because indicative and imperative are here construed as an antinomy or paradox in which God’s gift in Christ is simultaneously an appeal to our decision to become bearers of the cross in each moment of time. The problem is that a precise explication of this antinomy or dialectic remains hermeneutically vague. Bultmann defined it in terms of possibility and actualization and so not only endangered Paul’s emphasis on the actuality of God’s act of salvation in Christ but also overemphasized the human will.”149 So how does Beker see things? Beker considers the ethical necessity for Christians as closely linked to the apocalyptic expectation of the divine indicative, which he sees in Käsemann’s correction to Bultmann’s existentialist approach. But to Beker, Christian ethics is definitely aimed at the future cosmic-theocentric affirmation of Christ in the final redemption. All of the activity that Christians are commanded to do is defined as redemptive activity, pointing toward its final consummation in the future kingdom. So it is not the indicative itself that motivates obedience, but more precisely the indicative and “pattern” of the eschatological judgment, and the 149

J.C. Beker, Paul, p. 263

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imperative of Christian obedience serves as a pathway to the final indicative of the glory of God. The soteriological effects of Christ’s victory in the future are the telos of Christian obedience, but not its motivating ground. Christian obedience does not stand on the basis of a present reality; it has the character of hope. Beker sees his view confirmed in Romans 12. The use of the term “bodies” here refers, in his view, to the ontological solidarity between Christians and a world still under the power of death. At the same time, the “body” suggests the ethical seriousness of life in the Spirit “because believers are called to challenge the power of death in the world.”150 Christian obedience is therefore determined by solidarity with the world and proleptic faithfulness to the new life that God has ordained for his creation. The Christological indicative does not completely fill up the apocalyptic indicative: the last judgment is still there as a reminder of the seriousness of the need for solidarity with a fallen world. The problem with Beker’s approach is that if eschatology grounds ethics, all ethics of necessity becomes an interim ethic (the final indicative even swallowing up the imperative), and man simply has to await the coming of the new kingdom to see his obedience evaporate into thin air, along of course with any thought of merit. The imperative then has meaning only as long as Christians are still living within the old world, and only for that world. Christian ethics can then easily become the ethics of the present age, to which the element of a redemptive scheme provides only the hermeneutic and the motivational background. That is so because it is held at the same time that the apocalyptic vision of the future kingdom cannot be expressed in terms of precise behavior or values. Congruence between ethical acts today and the apocalyptic indicative cannot be established with certainty, only some tendencies or probabilities might be construed that give some direction to ethics. The basic flaw in this scheme of things is this: to Paul the righteousness of God is revealed in the faithfulness of Christ to the God of the covenant. Jesus’ dedication to God’s kingdom 150

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J.C. Beker Paul, p. 289.

was therefore firmly rooted in His dedication to God as the One who promised ultimate redemption.151 So our dedication in obedience to Christ must be rooted primarily in dedication to God. It is not based on any specific character of God’s revelation to us, but only modified by it. Christian ethics, we contend, is not rooted in the eschatology of God’s future redemption, and is not rooted in the present soteriology of Christ’s Spirit as reality in us, but it is established in the Cross as the basic symbol of complete dedication to God. In other words, Christian ethics is the ethics of the present Lord Jesus Christ who showed in his humiliation and death the way that God provides to become righteous. Beker’s argument in connection with the expression sooma (body) in Rom. 12:1 overlooks the obvious. If we are called to a reasonable service not in conformity to this world, and to a renewal of our thoughts which makes us “prove what is the will of God, the good, the acceptable and the perfect,” then our “imperative” is rooted in the character of God’s will and not partly based on our solidarity with the present world while hoping for a better one. The latter would constitute a principle of obedience besides that of God’s relating to humanity through the Cross of Jesus Christ and would invoke a separate source of motivation for ethics. To put it in the simplest of words: we obey God because Christ died for us, and in our obedience we constitute a separate community of the faithful, dedicated to obedience, accepting suffering, maintaining Christ’s position in this world as nonviolent love. At the Cross, solidarity with the present world is expressed as suffering love, not as moral dedication to improve it. There can be no solidarity with the world without going through its judgment. The expression “mercies of God” is also, as we have explained earlier, not so much a reference to the deeds of God, even if surely God’s revelation of righteousness in Christ reveals that character, but a name of God taken from the Old Testament. So chapter 12:1-3, if understood in the scheme of indicative/imperative, grounds our obedience in the God who chose to be Mercy and not in any particular activity of God with reference to this world, present or future. It does not allow us to 151

Cf. Thomas Finger, Christian Theology (1985) II, p. 93.

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posit solidarity with the world as our main motivation for ethics. Instead we must look to ethics as a way to define the particular community that is called upon to express its redemption in a concrete way of life in the midst of the old order.

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15. The positive meaning of the law The first passage we need to examine now is chapter 13:8-14, where the fulfillment of the law and the eschatological condition are mentioned together after the general exhortation to love each other. Ridderbos reads it like this: do not be in debt to others, i.e., do what is required with regard to others and (therefore) love each other. The statement then refers to existing obligations of the same order as those of the government in verses 1-8. That makes sense, especially because the word ofeile can mean debts, but also obligations, which brings it closer to the Hebrew technical expression chajav and because it makes a bridge between verses 8 and 9. Nevertheless it is quite unnecessary to think of existing obligations within the society where Christians need to live, which would imply that Paul was thinking first of financial obligations and then enlarges the scope of the word to include all societal obligations. It makes better sense to read it like this, with Käsemann: Do not accept any burden or obligation (and thereby become formally indebted) with regard to others except the obligation of the commandment of love. The only formal “debt” we have is that of love. The motivational clause then makes perfect sense: whoever loves the other has fulfilled the law, which must refer to the Mosaic law, and which in the context stands for the sum total of what can be required of us with regard to others. Everything that we might take on as a formal duty is already contained in this one commandment. So we are not to bring ourselves under the specific commandments of the law, but can profit from the law if we see it as a way to discern what the commandment of love requires us to do. Read like this, the passage again warns against bringing the law into play as a formal rule of obedience. But even so the law here gains a positive meaning as expressing God’s will, even if our new status implies that it does so without directly and formally prescribing what we are supposed to do, and without connecting obedience to the promise of life. The different context of redemption in Christ changes the

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reading of the law as the source of knowledge of God’s will. Paul goes on to explain that all the commandments (in this order: 7th, 6th, 8th, 10th) can be brought under the heading of the commandment of neighborly love. The expression used might indicate a ”summing up,” but more likely we have here the technical term for grouping a set of commandments under a principal rule that governs them hermeneutically ;152 the various commandments so grouped together are then considered applications of the “head” commandment. He goes on to explain in the next verse that love does no harm to the neighbor, and that is why it fulfills the law. Now what does this mean? It cannot mean that all the commandments can be reduced to the one commandment of love. It is surely an affirmation of the “ethical” meaning of the Mosaic law, but this poses a new problem, because it is not immediately clear what “moral” can mean in this context. There is a more solid answer, derived from the technical implications of such a “summary” of the law. The whole of that law is now being put under a specific hermeneutic perspective that looks for its provisions under the aspect of neighborly love, and not formal authority, the holiness of God, or simply the givenness of a manifold of commandments and prohibitions. It indicates a way of interpreting the law that is in conformity with the general rule of 12:2. Only by a change in our way of thinking can we “use” the law to guide us in finding the will of God. Every commandment in the Old Testament therefore is included in the commandment of neighborly love, and the radical nature of the love commandment is applicable to each and any of these. In that sense, the law is not reduced to the commandment of love as if other commandments are annulled, but all of these commandments are seen as concretizations of the demand of love, and the latter is used as the principle of their exegesis. That is the first step we need to make here. But the situation has changed for Christians with respect to the 152

According to Käsemann, the expression is derived from mathematical parlance and can only mean ”to sum up.” Still, he acknowledges that in this context it refers to the rabbinic issue of the ‘summary’, i.e., a definition of a general hermeneutic perspective of the law as can be found, e.g., in the last chapter of the tractate Makkoth. .

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law.153 First of all, Christians belong to a new type of peoplehood that is to be considered a ”body,” i.e., that has organismic, not organizational, coherence amongst its members. They all share the same life of faith and have the same Lord, have been redeemed by the same Sacrifice that renders their differences in merit meaningless. They are a people taken out of the nations, which implies their being dissassociated from the various states in which the life of the nations is organized. Secondly, they are all bound to the imitation of one particular aspect of Christ’s life that Paul mentioned in Romans 5 (Christ died for us while we were all enemies) and is now expressed ethically in 12:14, 17, 19 and 20: love for the enemy, in the real Old Testament sense of providing for his needs, the prohibition of revenge, aspiring for the good of all people. Thirdly, as Paul explained in the preceding sections: Christians are not ”under” the law in the sense that their autonomous freedom is being commanded to obey, necessitating a qualified response in accordance with the measure of power and the depth of our understanding of that law. Inner will power and knowledge would then become the basic traits of a life in obedience under law. Instead, power is derived from the Holy Spirit, and our status has changed since we have died according to the principle of the law. The new life fulfills the demands of the law, not by our aspiring to obey in a free response, as if our condition had not altered, but by allowing itself to be governed by the Spirit of Christ and by the communal process in which Christ is embodied. Apart from the situation and condition, however, the written law is still the source for our general understanding of what is good and holy and righteous. As Paul had explained that the law was not used ”lawfully” when it was considered a definition of righteousness and redemption, so here the law is used lawfully when it is considered as God’s righteous claim, to be fulfilled in 153

James Dunn argues that Paul’s critique of the law was “carefully targeted” against its abuse by sin, and against the assumption that having the law implied a favored position and redemption. The other functions of the law, defining sin and condemning transgression, were still valid for the believer.

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our communal Christian life through the specific hermeneutic that is embodied in Christ. To accept Jesus Christ as the definition and standard of our lives (“putting on Christ Jesus,” in 13:14) is perfectly congruent with fulfilling the law through the hermeneutic of the love for the neighbor in 13:10. Such a perspective on the law implies that it is still seen as the standard of righteousness, but as being established by (Abrahamic) faith, and not by works. Israel had pursued a law of righteousness, the Mosaic law, in vain, because they disconnected that law from the principle of faith that was embodied in it. By accepting the promise as a national prerogative and by demanding works as testimony to status alone, the law was not seen in its original intent as redeeming charter and guide to a life under God’s sovereignty. That implies, however, no criticism of the law as such. Israel (that is, the element of Pharisaic Judaism that Paul has in mind) did not attain that law because it did not approach it from the viewpoint of faith (“creaturely faith” as Dunn puts it, as in Abraham’s case, a faith that trusted in God’s ability to go beyond human capability) but from the viewpoint of formal obedience and works (Rom. 9:31, 32). That error consisted in establishing their ”own” righteousness instead of trusting in God’s faith: His righteousness in remaining loyal to the Covenant and promise (10:3). In that sense, Christ is the end of the law, because now the righteousness of the law that is required is established through faith in Christ, both by establishing a new covenantal relationship and by an ongoing life of faith. It is not that the law has simply vanished. To be the end of the law means to be its apex, its fulfillment, in the sense that all that the law was trying to establish has become visible in Christ. But to Paul this Mosaic law had not remained the same. Christ had given it His final interpretation, not only through the structure of His life and death, but also in His teachings. Dunn quotes “some eight or nine” echoes of Jesus’ teaching in Paul’s paraenesis.154 Romans 12:14, e.g., reminds us of Luke 6:27-28: Love your enemies...bless those who curse you. Romans 14:14 may remind us of Mark 7:15. He also argues that in a community that was well versed in the traditions, an explicit 154

James D.G. Dunn, Theology of Paul, pp. 650-651.

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reference to Jesus’ authority was unnecessary. When Paul does so, it is because he needs to qualify that authority or distinguish it from his own, as in 1 Cor. 7:10 -16. Since Paul also understood his own apostolic authority and the tradition handed down in the congregations as derived from Jesus’ authority, the Pauline paraenesis did not need to be a formal explanation or commentary on the law. In fact, as Dunn states it, the paraenesis in Paul had the same function as the Mosaic law had for Israel. The written word had become taken up in the ongoing process of discernment within the congregations, illuminated by reflection on Christ’s life and death and supported by new traditions that arose from it. The law of Christ could become the term that encompassed all of this into one title in Gal. 6:2, and it is reiterated in Rom. 13:9-10 as the fulfillment of the law in connection with ”putting on Christ.” The larger thesis that underpins the entire letter can now be made clear. In effect, Romans 1-7 deals with the wider picture of the fall of man (Romans 2) and how it was dealt with proleptically by the kind of relationship under the promise that God established with Abraham (Romans 3, 4). The righteousness God has established in Christ deals effectively with the fall of man (Romans 5, 6), whereas the law as written standard of indictment against humanity can only bring despair. (Romans 7). The New Covenant of the Spirit upholds the validity of the law while surpassing it in two ways. First of all, it brings in the gentiles, and secondly, it gives the ability to obey from the heart because of the power of the Spirit coming from outside us, dislocating the center of our lives (having died with Christ) and giving us a new center of life in Christ. The written law is thereby surpassed in a manner analogous to the prophecy of Jeremiah 31. Two elements of the new covenant are of importance here: first, the notion of having the law put “in their inward parts” and written ”in their heart” (Jer. 31:33). A typical interpretation of these words along the lines of the a priori convictions concerning the meaning of the law and the new Covenant can be found in C. F. Keil’s commentary on Jeremiah.155 One of the 155

C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, tr. James Kennedy, Michigan, 1950 (1886-1882). Of C. F. Keil the

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most illustrative passages in that commentary is this one: “The law, with its righteous demands, can only humble the sinner, and make him beseech God to blot out his sin and create in him a clean heart (Ps. 51:11ff.); it can only awaken him to the perception of sin, but cannot blot it out. It is God who must forgive this, and by forgiving it, write His will on the heart. …the forgiveness of sins is a work of grace which annuls the demand of the law against men. In the old covenant, the law with its requirements is the impelling force; in the new covenant, the grace shown in the forgiveness of sins is the aiding power by which man attains that common life with God which the law sets before him as the great problem of life…. “ It is important to realize that this is a commentary on the words of Jeremiah 31:31, that deals with a new covenant for Israel and Judah. The last part of verse 34 reads: “…for I will pardon their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.” It is the final clause of the passage, opening with “behold days come..” (verse 31) The order of thought seems to be like this: (1) God will make a new covenant, different from the covenant of the Sinai. (2) Now the law will be written in the hearts; God will be inseparable from His people. (3) All will know God and no one needs to be instructed by anyone else, and (4) God will forgive their iniquity. In James Dunn's view, Paul uses the word heart, kardia, 52 times in Paul’s writings) in its Hebrew sense as the seat of emotions, thought and will. God searches the heart (Rom 2:15) and obedience should be from the heart (Rom. 6:17; 10:9-10). Faith was “an expression of deeply felt commitment.”156 Now, it is not immediately clear in what relationship the text of Encyclopedia Judaica reports (Zev Garber): “He maintained the validity of the historico-critical investigation of the Bible only if it proved the existence of the New Testament revelation in the scriptures” (Vol. 10, 897). The passage referred to can be found in vol. 2 of the commentary on Jeremiah, p. 39. 156 James D.G. Dunn_Theology of Paul_, pp. 74-75.

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Jeremiah 31 stands to Paul’s description of the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us (Rom. 8:9). In 2 Cor. 3:3, Paul, of course, directly refers to the Jeremiah 31 quote. Here the Corinthians are called a letter from Christ, written on tablets of flesh within their hearts. The contrast is described between the old covenant of letter and stone versus the new covenant of spirit and freedom. The “letter” is surpassed by the Spirit, but, as in Jeremiah 31, the contents remained that of the law. 157 Likewise in Romans 8, though the indwelling of the Spirit describes a new reality of mankind and a new relationship to God, the moral content remains the same. It is the requirement of the law that is met through the Spirit, though the mode of being of the law under the old covenant (the letter, that needs instruction) becomes powerless because of the flesh (Rom. 8:3). The danger here is of turning the mode of enablement into the contents of the demand. If we stress, with James Dunn, that Christ’s death was a means to an end, i.e., “the end of a people ‘who walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6:4), who ‘serve in the new life of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:4),” then we wind up losing sight of the concrete contents. Dunn concedes that the contents of this walking in the Spirit is righteousness. “Such conduct fulfills the just requirement of the law.” 158 But this reference to the law is based on the former transformation of that concept as the “law of the Spirit of life, the law no longer restricted and defined in terms of the flesh.”159 The law in Romans 8:2 is the same as the law that led to death and condemnation, the “law of the Flesh,” but now connected to the “inner parts” of those who delight in that law (Rom. 7:22), who have been strengthened by the Spirit of Life that dwells within them – at the same time killing the flesh in the identification with Christ on the Cross. At this precise moment we must be careful. Life in the Spirit 157 158 159

Ibid., p. 148. James D.G. Dunn (1988), 1, p. 440. Ibid, p. 441

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does not refer directly to a new ethics, but more to a changed attitude toward the same source of ethics. The law, if applied lawfully, from the principle of faith and with total commitment, is not split in itself, but there is a dual mode of applying it already referred to in the Old Testament. Accordingly, Jer. 31 mentions that God will put His law in their hearts, not replace the law with something else. James Dunn correctly concludes that to Paul, “the purpose for which God sent his Son is explicitly stated as to bring about the fulfillment of the law’s requirement” (Rom. 8:4).160 But Dunn assumes that the meaning of ”law” in these cases is actually the equivalent of “God’s will.” Law of faith, law of the Spirit, and law of Christ can be rendered as: God’s will accessible through Faith, doable because of the Spirit and executed under the sovereignty of Christ. In place of the specific demands of the law, there is a reduction to a single "just requirement" that is equaled to “doing God’s will,” thereby going beyond the status of written law that has specific rules and regulations. Now this can certainly be defended as an appropriate interpretation of Paul. After all, we have found in Rom. 9:31 an opposition between a search for a law of (that leads to) righteousness that was not based on obedience in faith but on the teaching and learning of specific tasks and living according to rules, the “so-called works.” Rom. 8:4 does speak of a single “requirement,” and 8:14 seems to stress a being led by the Spirit as if from within (cf. 8:9-10) that is distinguished from a life in submission under the law. The aim of all of this is to strengthen the notion of obedience not diminish it. Paul is after a form of heteronomous or rather theonomous obedience. What is left of the function of the law can then be summarized in this manner: (1) the guiding, instructing function of the written law is taken up in the exhortations of the spirit-led life, and (2) the law is still a written source of understanding and finding the exhortatory demand exemplifying God’s will in specific situations. But the final word is no longer in the written statute, but rather the opposite: the law keeps its function as source of ethics only where it can be interpreted along the guidelines of 160

James D.G. Dunn _Theology of Paul_, p. 646.

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the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit of the Messiah Jesus working within the community has hermeneutic priority above the written text. Christ does not replace the law, but He does replace the hermeneutic principles of the oral tradition. It is no longer the authority of tradition and the legal hermeneutic of rabbinic commentary that decide on issues of law and ethics, but the Spirit of Christ as working in the discerning community.

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16. The idea of theonomous obedience I argued that Paul was trying to express a notion of a a strict theonomous obedience and only for that reason had to reject an approach of the Torah as a codex of rule-like Laws. What are we talking about? What does “theonomous” obedience mean? It seems to mean that every divine command is an absolute and must be obeyed because it comes from this divine source. Since Kierkegaard, the paradigm of such an absolute submission in contemporary theology has been the story of Abraham. When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son, Abraham obeyed. The divine voice is narrated as an absolute commandment. Now, the case can be made that the divine will is embodied in a Scripture and not in a practice of hearing divine voices, what Scripture tells us to do we must obey as if we heard from the voice of God directly. Both Abraham’s narrated obedience and our possible obedience to the text of the narrative might be called theonomous if an assumption with regard to the authority of the source is the direct foundation of the obedience. But there is this distinction between a voice heard and a Scripture being read that we must take into consideration now. Any text involves interpretation in order to be heard. This necessity of interpretation has an impact on the presupposed absoluteness of the divine commandment. Let us first take the notion of theonomous obedience a bit further. Mennonite Christianity defends a theonomous and revealed (inscribed) morality. Theonomous obedience is an answer to the basic question of ethics: how to choose between alternative actions, especially if we are uncertain about which is the best. The moral dilemma, as it is often stated, is about choices, and it presupposes human freedom to choose. The principles and value concepts by which these choices are guided can be derived from many possible sources: mysterious ones, like the inner voice of conscience, or such basic realities as the instinctive need for solidarity within a group, selfpreservation, or, closer to the reality of the person making the choice, utility and personal need. Moral choices differ from other acts of liberty because they need a standard by which a

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moral agent judges his actions to be either good or bad. To find such a standard in the conditions of the exercise of human freedom itself has been the ultimate goal of that type of philosophy that we call German idealism. The original impetus for this quest lies in ancient Greek philosophy. It was argued that political liberty implies that a commandment can be obeyed because those who obey it have freely consented to do so. Political authority can then be exercised in the form of a commandment, but still be considered based on the liberty of the citizens. Reason provides a rationale for such an obedience, since it makes it possible to understand that the one who is commanding is in fact doing so with the interest of those who obey as his primary motive. Tyranny is that form of commandment, that defies logical analysis and is based on the self-interest of the ruler, so that liberty is turned against its own interest. To obey a despot makes a mockery of political authority. Heteronomous obedience can be defined from this perspective as that kind of obedience that does not find a reasonable ground in the interest of those who obey it and serves no other purpose than that of the authority. In effect, the reasonable commandment can only be obeyed, if a free consciousness commands itself to obey. The external law and the rational institutions of society are at the same time an expression of the liberty of human beings who consent and have rational motivates for their obedience, and yet at the same time, being external, these laws and institutions are alien to the exercise of liberty itself. That liberty should command itself to obey the political authority, to safeguard its own exercise in the long-term is expressive of this ambiguity. In that same tradition the Enlightenment philosophy sought to defend the principle of liberty as guaranteeing both the political order and the inner moral freedom of individuals. Immanuel Kant sought for the highest principle of morality in the way an action by an individual can become a natural law without destroying the human community and the freedom of others. “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” That is because, in the end, the moral agent would destroy his own possible freedom by acting against it. Safe-guarding the exercise of liberty for the long term becomes an ultimate motive for

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all actions that seem in the short-term to restrict the exercise of freedom. The absolute (categorical) imperative must therefore be: to make the guiding principle of your private action such that it can be thought of as a natural universal law of behavior. If a specific action does not obstruct the freedom of others or disrupt ordered society, it passes the test, and the action can be considered good. Does such a way of thinking allow for theonomous obedience as a principle of ethics? The notion of theonomous obedience must be clarified further. The submission of freedom under the will of another subject has as its motive the continuation of that exercise in the longterm. In so far as freedom-in-obedience still refers to itself – by commanding itself to obey, by accepting the rational motive of self-interest – such an obedience leaves the autonomy of liberty intact. A divine commandment interpreted according to this political concept of freedom, must then also be understood to be in one’s own interest and would imply an internal acceptance of a restraint in the outward exercise of the will. In Kant’s perspective, the acceptance of the liberty of other subjects is only possible, insofar this acceptance can be understood as the ultimate cause of the self-preservation of my own liberty. In Hobbes’ view, it was the power of the King (=state) that made it possible for free subjects to live together, precisely because they gave up on their inherent right to defend their own interests and liberty with force. The sacrifice of liberty to the state for the common good, preserved the liberty of all people in a community. Again, all heteronomy of external restraint was ultimately acceptable because it referred back to the autonomy of liberty as its inner goal. The restraint in question was a force, a violence, that defended the liberty and welfare of all, against the opposition of an individual liberty that broke free of the commonality and usurped powers already given up to constitute society. In fact, the state could be conceived as the status of an armistice between rivaling liberties, a truce that maintained a provisionary equilibrium between citizens. Must we say then, that all heteronomy is as such bad, unless it can be referred back to autonomy as its source? In 1796 Kant wrote a treatise on the relationship between the sciences, called in German, Der Streit der Facultäten. In the first chapter he discusses the relationship between the theological and the

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philosophical sciences. After admitting that a book of law that was congruent with the dictates of practical reason would be of ultimate importance to guarantee “temporary and eternal wellbeing” to all citizens, he stumbles over this problem. A book of law, such as the Bible might be, would need verification of its authority. It has to be verified by a rational affirmation that God was its author, and only then could it be authentic. How can this verification happen? We would need to be certain that in it we are hearing the voice of God. But is this possible? For one thing, if God spoke to a human being, how would this human being know that it was God and not someone else? A finite mind cannot judge the infinite. God cannot be known with certainty by man at all, so how could His voice be recognized as such? The other way around, however, is possible. According to Kant, we have a method of recognizing that it is not God whose voice we hear. If God were to command anything that contradicts a moral law, we can be sure that voice is not God’s. The moral demand precedes all knowledge of God and serves as a basis to recognize that something is not God’s revelation. We can now say why this must be so: because this recognition of the moral value of a divine commandment allows for the grounding of such a commandment on the rational insight that ultimately my own liberty is being affirmed. Accepting a pure externality of the commandment would not only threaten the exercise of liberty itself, which is conceived as the condition of fulfilling the commandment in the first place, but it would also obstruct the obedience to the commandment: without a free will to respond to a commandment, the commandment is not a commandment. The externality of a commandment in Kant’s view must, by the nature of liberty itself, be conditioned by a free and rational response to a moral concept or rule. Such a formal basis for ethics goes against the foundational notions of Christian ethics, especially when it emphasizes that a moral action is in essence a self-affirmation of autonomous reason. But maybe we could construe Christian ethics as a “material” ethics (i.e. a particular value-system that uses a symbolic language to refer to basic principles) that needs the same formal basis that Kant described as the foundation of all ethics? N. H. Søe argued in 1965 that the distinctive idea of

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Christian ethics lies in the fact that the question about the Good is taken as the question about God.161 If only God can be called good (Mark 10:18), perfect (Matth. 5:48), loving (1 John 4:8, 6), and holy (1 Peter 1:16), then “God, His will and His work are also the Good.” We have encountered the very same idea in our discussion of the commentaries on Romans 12:2. To discern the “perfect, holy, and acceptable will of God,” we must “know” God in His attribute of compassion. The argument continues by stating that God cannot be known, as Kant stated, so that it is necessary to accept that God must reveal Himself to humanity, which Kant of course denies. Acceptance of our corruption by sin is correlated to the acknowledgment that only because God reveals Himself can we know anything about Him, and therefore it is on the basis of revelation that we know the Good.162 All ethics, according to the Danish Lutheran theologian, is revealed. On the basis of this foundational notion of revelation a particular ethics can then be developed. But then Kant’s question returns to haunt us. How do we know God reveals Himself? Sure enough, Søe denies that revelation can be demonstrated to non-believers. It can only be a revelation to believers who have received not only the contents of that revelation, but have also been enabled to hear God’s voice through the Holy Spirit. Because he does not claim universal rationality for the claims of Christian ethics, he can hope to dispense with the kind of formal proof that Kant demanded for ethical principles. The only avenue that remains open to Christians is to affirm that they have a particular bias which will ground a specific way of behavior that is reasonable only to them. Only the ”assumption” therefore of God’s revelation brings us into the situation of Christian ethics; only by ignoring Kant’s question does Christian ethics even begin to operate. The result would be that Christian ethics is a minority view on the Good without rational argument. It would prefer, like the “idiot” in “scientific sense,” as Kant puts it, the assumed authority of Scripture above the light of reason that tells us what the good in itself must be. Against Kant’s argument for a priority of the moral demand which gives us a standard of revelation, Søe simply turns things around. 161 162

N. H. Søe, Christliche Ethiik, ein Lehrbuch, Munich, (1965). Ibid., pp. 14-15.

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Revelation, as an ”assumption” of believers, is primary and is a standard for morality. Now this solution may take us around Kant’s problem, except that it does not infer the material good from the reality of freedom that is called upon to affirm it, nor does it content itself to identify formally the good with the self-affirmation of freedom. Neither does it simply identify the good with the written record of Scripture, nor does it claim without foundation that such a divine norm is positively given in Scripture. It seems to ground the particular character of Christian ethics upon a particular use of human freedom: the freedom to adopt a concrete system of ethics that contains historical value-symbols of the basic principle of ethics in a community. We will see later that ultimately that is what Stanley Hauerwas seems to be arguing for. The Christian ethics may then materially be different from Kantian ethics, but still it depends on its formal basis in the notion of individual liberty. And worse, the Kantian standard still becomes the criterion for what is valuable in such a particular ethics. If Kant is right that a biblical standard for morality precludes knowledge of the good, Paul is wrong that we need to discern the “perfect, holy and acceptable will of God” in order to know what is good. Knowledge in the sense of rational insight would be annulled by the very acceptance of biblical authority, and biblical ethics would imply irrationalism. Kant wrote an important footnote in this context to make his point clear. When Abraham was ordered to “slaughter” his son by God, he should have answered: “I know for sure that I should not kill my only beloved son, that is absolutely certain; that you, this apparition are God, of that I am not sure and I may never be sure, even when this voice came booming down from heaven.” 163 Certainty and knowledge should have been the guiding principles of Abraham’s decision, in Kant’s view. The autonomy of cognition is now added to the autonomy of conscience and inner faith. Only when conscience and faith can present a principle of action, a rule of behavior, that is at the same time possible to understand with certainty by an individual consciousness as in congruence with a principle of (practical) ratio163

Kant, Akademie Textausgabe, VII, p. 63 footnote, [my translation].

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nality, i.e., possibly universal, can such a principle be adopted. One could argue against such “ethical idealism” that it ignores the corruption of human nature as well as the specific nature of divine revelation. Both, however, are part of revelation and only accepted by those who believe. There are no rational, conclusive arguments by which one can demonstrate the reliability of such principles. How does one defend against the Kantian counter-argument? One strategy is to be found in the work of Stanley Hauerwas. First of all, one might attack the claim to universality that is so apparent in Kant’s ethics. Kant may have a right to ask questions concerning the universal nature of moral arguments. Such questions may even betray that ethics in all cultures shows recurring and typical problems. But as soon as one tries to answer these questions, one “necessarily draws on the particular convictions of historic communities to whom such questions may have significantly different meanings.”164 Such a relocation of moral questions from universal human reason toward the concrete community transcends both the Lutheran philosopher and his theological counterpart. Søe was as interested in finding in God the absolute ground for Christian ethics as Kant is trying to find the absolute ground in the moral nature of humanity. By positing that all concrete ethics is necessarily relative to a historic community with its own narrative and methods of incorporating the ethics embodied in such narrative, the Kantian standard no less than Søe’s particular Christian and revelatory ethics loose their foundation. Kant’s morality can now be deconstructed as based on the specific narrative of the Project of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, as Søe ’s attempt is based on the project of the Reformation and the state Church of Lutheranism, if we indeed live in a world of “moral fragments” in which no moral argument can definitely solve any given moral problem.165 Connected with this is the modern human experience that tells us that we are condemned to freedom, as Sartre puts it. There is no “essence” given that we can refer to in deciding the shape of our behavior. Yet at the same time we feel that our lives are 164 165

S. Hauerwas (1983), p. 1 Ibid, p. 5.

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determined by “elaborate games of power and self-interest” which leave us hardly any options to choose from. In such a situation, any attempt to find a foundation for ethics is doomed to failure. However, Christian ethics cannot simply become part of this fragmentariness. Its value does not depend on social functionality, but on some concept of ultimate truth. Hauerwas emphasizes the narrative nature of the founding convictions of Christianity, theological convictions in themselves signify ways of behavior and are not mere cognitive persuasions. Narratives ground traditions, traditions inform communities.166 And in the last analysis, ethics depends upon “vital communities sufficient to produce well-lived lives.”167 This grounding in history and community is vital to Hauerwas’s argument. The commandment is not sufficient as foundation for ethics, in that Hauerwas agrees with Kant. Christian ethics contains a definitive story that helps us envision the world. The world that we can see is the world we must act in. We need to change in order to see the world, since we must acknowledge first that we are sinners. Only through this view of the world as corrected by the basic Christian stories do we see it as it is. And these basic stories are present only in a community of story-tellers who try to act in conformity with the stories they tell each other. What then is the difference from the view that Kant discussed and rejected? On the one hand, the experience of fragmentariness of moral judgments in this world makes us retreat from the Kantian concept of universality, that concept is relegated to the world of fragments. Kant based his demand for universal rationality of moral claims on the notion of freedom. But specific answers are being demanded, and these are informed by specific cultural and relative contents. Kant would have no trouble with that. On the other hand Hauerwas goes on to claim for the Christian story a truthfulness, i.e., universality, that cannot be grounded on social functionality, and therefore ultimately lacks the kind of rationality and universality that Kant demanded, but must refer instead to individual persuasions 166 167

Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 15.

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becoming joined in a community’s commitment. One does not know the Christian story to be right; one judges that story to be in congruence with one’s life experience, and one does so in a community of people who share the basic stories and paradigms of that persuasion. . That may be called “true” as a statement of fact with regard to the people who hold to it, but it cannot be true in the rational and universal sense. Scott Holland affirms that this is a problem in his article, “Problems and Prospects of a ‘Sectarian Ethic’,” Conrad Grebel Review, Spring 1992, p. 165. In his assessment, “While he [Hauerwas] is appropriately critical of modernity’s tendency to impose a metanarrative or master story upon diverse communities in the name of truth, or the common good, or civility, his socalled sectarian or communitarian method of interpretation does not adequately address problems related to the legitimating of knowledge in a world of pluralism and competing narratives.” But Holland reiterates the Kantian claim by stating that “all positivism of revelation must be rejected,” whereas we claim that it must be reinterpreted away from historical and ontological to a particular ethics that must accept the characterization from the outside as a form of moral positivism. Holland is right, however, in stating, that Hauerwas’s attempt actually creates a positivism of communal peoplehood to function in the same way as revelational positivism.

By extending the moral agent from the individual to the specific community, by moving from the Bible as book of law to the historical narrative, we still have embraced and affirmed a form of irrationalism in the Kantian perspective, not shown its truth. That is why Hauerwas needs the recourse to a critique of Kantian universalism, that is why he needs -–as a subterfuge – the affirmation of post-modern fragmentariness. Only if we grant that all material ethics is relative to a social group, can we maintain any kind of truth for the Christian community. In a way, we then still affirm Kant. If it were not for the claim that Christian stories involve the claim for truth, and the idea that claims to universal morality are nothing but generalized particular claims, Hauerwas would be doing nothing but explaining and describing a particular given ethical frame of mind, peculiar to Christian communities. But the task of Christian ethics to make normative statements is then completely undercut. Hauerwas, however, still insists that the task of Christian ethics is both descriptive and normative. Such normativity must then necessarily be far removed from what we normally would understand ethics to accomplish.

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The second part of Hauerwas’s strategy in our reading is his deconstruction of the word ‘revelation’. Kant had argued that authority must be based on revelation, and revelation was equal to “hearing the voice of God booming from heaven.” Hauerwas contends that the word revelation “is not a qualifier of the epistemic status of a kind of knowledge, but rather points to the content of a certain kind of knowledge.”168 If it bears the ”stamp of God and God’s saving intentions,” it might properly be called ”revelation.” A secondary claim is that “propositional statements” can be revelatory, insofar as they combine to make up a coherent narrative with the same contents. But again, this sets up a standard by which to judge revelation that is analogous to Kantian claims to universal practical reason. A revealed morality must be in congruence with the basic formal requirements of rational morality in Kant, and in Hauerwas it has to fit within a coherent narrative framework and express “God’s saving actions.” A commandment that lacks this historical embeddedness could then very well be considered not revealed, supposedly because the lack of narrative coherence makes it impossible for the community that lives it to form a meaningful tradition around it. In the end, revelation is then up to the community’s ability to understand something in a formal sense as revealed moral demand. Its narrative imagination becomes the functional standard for Christian ethics, in very much the same manner as rational liberty was the primary criterion for any material ethics in Kant’s perspective. In the long run, Hauerwas’s depiction of the narration about Jesus and its ethical significance shows us a Christian ethics that is not about obedience, and is certainly not a theonomous one, and which submits to the Kantian claim that it must be grounded in some pre-known standard and must dispense with transcendent revelation. Kant’s claims for a universal and rational morality, no less than Søe’s claims for universal absolute knowledge of God as the principle of Good and Hauerwas’s references to the coherent narrative that informs the lived ethics of a vital community, must each reject Abraham’s choice to obey his God. To all of them, Abraham is a murderer and possibly an idolater. If God is a 168

Ibid, p. 66.

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symbol of reason, God could not have commanded the idolatrous infanticide, and the Bible is mistaken. If God is the Good, Abraham trusted in a God who commanded a human sacrifice, and the Good becomes irrational. If the story of Isaac provides us with a coherent narrative, how can a community live out its commandment? . And yet, a Christian ethics can hardly ignore that the Christian faith is intrinsically connected to this story. Not only is Abraham’s faith the model of ours with respect to trust in God (Rom. 4:9b) and the acceptance of a promise reaching beyond human infertility (Rom. 4:19-20), but Scripture even calls Abraham’s obedience the basis for his “justification by works” (James 2:21-23), seeing in it the fulfillment of Abraham’s faith for which he had been “justified” beforehand. As we explained in Chapter. 3, that justification according to James was proleptic because that faith only bore fruit when Abraham complied with the demand to sacrifice Isaac. So what does it mean that Christian ethics finds its basis in the offering of Isaac, going even beyond the faith of Abraham as explained in Romans 4?

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17. Abraham’s example: heteronomy and the cognitive function of the commandment A Christian morality that seeks enlightenment from the narrative of Abraham must be a heteronomous morality. It cannot ground itself on the universality of practical reason nor upon the notion of a particular narrative. It must seek the reason for obedience in God and God alone, at the risk of confounding moral reasonability, the identification of God with the Good, and the foundation of ethics in a story-telling community. It must on that account resist the temptation of all these three alternatives for the ethics of obedience. It must accept that cognition is not a basis or a verifying criterion for the ethical demand, the ethical situation does not demand an answer to the question of what we must choose, but a response to the commandment given to us. It is the commandment that makes us aware of the situation, not the situation that makes us recall a fitting commandment. The notion, attributed to Hans Denck, that to know Christ means to follow Him in life is a reversal of the order of rank of cognition and obedience, theoretical and practical reason.169 If obedience is to be theonomous, it must provide a way out of the circular reasoning that constructs human autonomy everywhere, for the Kantian counter-argument will make us say at every step along the way, “How do I know all this?” assuming that knowing the demand somehow qualifies that demand as immanent and autonomous. To understand a commandment as revealed and God-given would imply 169

I am using the statement here in its common understanding. The full quotation of Hans Denck, however, shows that the statement is more complex. Denck actually wrote: “But the medium is Christ whom no one can truly know unless he follow him in his life, and no one may follow him unless he has first known him. Whoever does not know him does not have him and without him he cannot come to the father. But whoever knows him and does not witness to him by his life will be judged by him...whoever thinks he belongs to Christ must walk the way that Christ walked.” Klaassen (1981), p. 87.

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knowing that it is so, and yet “knowing” it would destroy its absolute character. Knowing is not an absolute relationship, but involves a finite act of interpretation; it means, e.g., applying a (narrative) framework to a given statement. So knowing in Christian faith has an a priori structures that enable the predicates ”divine” or ”revealed” to become meaningful, and yet in these predicates their origin in human reason is being transcended.170 In this book we do not have the opportunity to discuss in depth the movement of “narrative theology” and its implications for ethics. Just this one remark about our position towards it must suffice. The importance of narrative in the sense of knowledge of the story of God’s actions with Israel is not being minimized by our stress on commandment and obedience. It is also true that the easiest way to see the differences between the ways of the Church and Israel is to look at their founding narratives, e.g., how these are celebrated in worship and practiced to become the major incentive for ethical behavior. It is also true that a general understanding of the intent of the commandment can be gleaned from the narrative framework by itself, and it is again true that the character of our being as the recipient of law is given through narrative. Yet, if narrative ethics were to imply a precedence of the question who we are above the question what we are to do, the matter would not be so simple any more.171 After all, in narrative, the transcendence and sovereignty of God is a characteristic of an “agent” in the story. The story is about what God does and how humans respond. The position of a commandment becomes problematic if it must derive its meaning from our discourse on its narrative framework. McClendon explains the notion of “narrative mode” with an example taken from Frank Kermode.172 If we say: “the King died and then the Queen died,” we have a factual report, presupposing monarchy and social structure, but not yet a story. But if 170

Because the objective implications of the statement in such a case transcend the mere finite nature of interpretation and express its own ground, i.e., through what it as interpretation is itself made possible. 171 Cf. James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology, O, Ethics, Nashville (1986). 172 Ibid, p. 330.

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we say: “the King died and the Queen died from grief,” we have a germinal narrative because character is added as an explanation of the incident. Character in this context means the “embodiment of self” or the “continuities of that selfhood.” Next to character we have the ”social setting,” and third we have the transformation of incident into an action of God. The narrative of the gospel can then be a meta-narrative in relation to our own life’s narrative, showing us the structure of response to divine actions and social setting and a specific perspective on selfhood that we can relate to. Against this emphasis on narrative we would maintain the imperative as the revelatory mode of the moral demand. We hold that only on the basis of the divine imperative can we read the narrative as an explanation of its possibility. When God gives the commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent’s question evokes commentary on the commandment (Has God said, thou shalt not eat from any tree?). Its explanation ascribes a motive to God incongruent with the divine origin of the commandment (God’s jealousy is incompatible with the gift of life). The motive was not jealousy, but protecting love as explicit in the commandment itself. The question finally denies the conesquence of disobedience (thou shalt not die) explicitly stated in the commandment as God’s motive, to protect man from death. What we see here is that the narrative we have before us allows us to understand the basic issue of human obedience. But that obedience is itself narrated and not embodied within the narrative itself. There is no “pattern” of behavior or ”character” to be emulated. There is a commandment that defines a situation, and a narrative (within the narrative) proposed as an alternative framework, which destroys the original protective intent of the commandment. The narrative actually shows that the commentary on the commandment, which takes it up in a narrative context of divine jealousy and gives immortality, contradicts the divine imperative itself. If Eve had taken the commandment literally, its own context would have shown that it (1) granted access to all the trees, without which no tree would have been permitted, and (2) equally sovereign, God forbade one Tree in order to protect man from death. The narrative explains that the “tra-

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dition” by which Eve was informed about the commandment provided a weakness of which the serpent could make use. To Eve, the commandment was given as tradition only, and she herself had tried to “protect” the given tradition by adding the commandment not to touch (3:3), or perhaps Adam had found it wise to do so. The point is that the narrative shows the vulnerability of a commandment when it is being interpreted from within a narrative framework. Only the divine commandment in itself ”fitted” reality and was proper behavior for humanity. So what the narrative here actually shows is that the commandment rules the narrative, or, that a narrative must be measured by the commandment it seeks to explain. We can return now to our question regarding the experiential veracity of the primacy of the commandment. Could God’s voice then be heard only within the immediacy of an individual’s experience? Kierkegaard thought that made Abraham into the single most lonely man in history. Such a pristine and immediate relationship with God must of its own nature be a unique event. The problem is that the nature of the demand would then be completely unique to the situation in time and place in which the individual experiences it. It would be a unique divine demand, but not a commandment, let alone a rule of behavior. In fact, the intent of the passage is most often constructed to the contrary, to show to Abraham that God does not require human sacrifice, probing his response to the commandment and accepting Abraham’s intent while at the same time refuting his submission to it. Along those lines, the unique event of an immoral divine demand is avoided. In such an interpretation, the immediate and literal content of the commandment is e.g. subverted by assuming a double intent on the part of God. While demanding a sacrifice, God is actually probing (only) Abraham’s submissiveness. If that is true, and if we are to hold on to the contradiction between God’s commandment and the moral law, Abraham must have known that such was the case. When it is stated that Abraham and Isaac went “together,” this might be an allusion to the fact that Abraham had explained the divine ruse to his son. Reason alleviated the disconcerting element in the narrative in this manner, and the story could no longer threaten our autonomy nor our image of a God who is in harmony with our view of the good. We can even second-guess God’s intention

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to be ultimately in accordance with moral reasoning, and in complying with commandments and ethics we “know” that God has an ulterior motive in giving us His law.173 Since we seek a way to justify God, we must identify all divine actions as intrinsically good. The human metaphor of pedagogy comes to mind in this reinterpretation: God lied about his true intentions to Abraham, tested him, and taught him a lesson in doing so. The lie was justified because of the goal: to test Abraham’s faithfulness. But what was the goal of the testing? Both Kant and religious historians assume that the commandment was about murder in a religious-sacrificial context. Kant assumes that Abraham could have understood that killing his son must be a transgression of the moral law. Biblical Abraham was faced with a contradiction between the divine voice and his previous understanding of God, and yet he complied. Kierkegaard agrees with Kant but claimed the “leap of faith” that made it possible (and meaningful) for Abraham to do this, but then separated Abraham from the rest of humanity. So was the testing intended to show that Abraham would go beyond the known moral demand to comply with the immediate and absolute commandment of God? Again we find Kant intruding upon our discourse: How then could he have known it was the voice of God? First of all, testing is too broad a term in this context. It is stated that God nissah, put to the test, in the sense of bringing something to a higher position.174 Abraham was given a task that up till then he might have been unable to perform, but “after these things” (22:1) he might have been ready for it. At 173

In the Midrash Rabbah this was obviously the interpretation of R. Abin. “Even though it may seem to men that God disobeys his own moral command, He never does so in reality. Although God demanded that no one would try to test God (Deut. 6:16) He Himself obviously tested Abraham” (Gen. 21:1; Bereshith Rabbah LV, 3). 174 The connection between the meaning of “testing” and “lifting up” (as a banner) was made, e.g., in the Midrash Bereshith LV,1. Utilizing Psalm 60:6, it is stated that Abraham was tried “to exalt him in the world like a ship’s ensign…in order that the equity of God’s justice may be verified in the world.” The Midrash thereby circumvents the strange implication that God would test because He would not know Abraham’s faith.

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this stage, Abraham had been given the solid assurance that God would keep His promise, Isaac had been born of Sarah, and the blessing to the nations would proceed through the people that were to be born from this son. The object of the test is Abraham’s view on this son, more than his readiness to obey God in all things. It is “thy son, thine only one, whom thou lovest” that he has to bring to Moriah, and the command to go to Moriah is phrased in the same manner as the original call to Abram in chapter 12: lech lecha, go by thyself, meaning in isolation from all other considerations and human interests. It is the mission of Abraham, the specific status of Isaac as the fulfillment of the promise, that is at stake here, not the depth of Abraham’s faith. Just as Abram was required to disassociate himself from his country, culture, and family, he must now in a sense abandon his own son, i.e., transcend the natural relationship that exists between them. The manner of this necessary abandonment or new separation is not understood fully if only the material act of killing this son is emphasized. God commands Abraham to bring up (ha’aleihu) the elevated (o’lah). The concept of sacrifice in the sense of making something holy (sacer facere) by destroying it, thereby giving it to God by withdrawing it from human use and taking it out of existence, is not the primary intention. Abraham has to make Isaac rise above the natural position wherein he was set, and thereby Isaac becomes dedicated fully to God and to the promise that operates through him and following generations. That this would entail killing him is an intentional paradox. How could Abraham have understood this divine command? If Isaac could be born beyond Sarah’s reproductive capacity, so Isaac could have been ”elevated,” brought to his purpose, in any way God deemed fit. And in a sense, the “killing,” as a symbol of the abrogation of Isaac’s natural state, can be read as referring to the election and specific purpose of Israel as a people in this world. The literal meaning then becomes a metaphor of the symbolic. Nevertheless the narrative moves forward within the literal meaning. Abraham “chopped the wood” (22:3), indicating he understood the offering to mean building a fire, i.e., in any case to involve an offering of a living being. We take that to mean that Abraham intended to kill his son and so perform the offering, and we assume ordinarily that that is in fact the only

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possible interpretation of the commandment. But it is an interpretation, even supposing that Abraham’s understanding of the commandment had been determined by an unknown sacrificial theology of the Chaldees that Abram had taken with him from Ur. Did the test imply God’s willingness to allow Abraham to find out how the “lifting up” and the separation were to be carried out? Or did it imply finding out whether Abram was capable of leaving his paternal culture? The ambiguous divine command and Abraham’s action must be seen in their tension. But does the story indeed assume that Abraham correctly interpreted the commandment? In verse 6 Abraham takes the wood, the fire, and a knife with him as he goes up the mount to “prostrate” himself and his son before God, Abraham intends to perform an act of complete submission to the divine will. That divine will was understood by him to imply killing his son, and at the same time was accepted by him as an “offering,” i.e., a full dedication of Isaac to God and His purposes above the possibilities of nature. But the commandment gave the key to the meaning of the act, the act itself, horrendous to Abraham in his natural love for his son, was considered because of this divine indication that it was an act of submission to and compliance with the same divine will that had given the promise and would be faithful in that and had made possible Isaac’s birth. Both were equally beyond human capability. The commandment was not “pristine” or absolute, as Kierkegaard imagines. It contradicted a history between God and Abraham in which mutual loyalty and trust had been put to the test. It destroyed the promise and a covenant because of the way Abraham interpreted it. Yet Abraham was perhaps acquainted with the idea of child sacrifice. That was part of his “narrative framework” as well. And in that “narrative” framework, the commandment went beyond all his former experience in giving an interpretative framework for Abraham’s action that in turn reinterpreted all of former history. The sovereignty of God, expressed in that former history, was now revealed as going even beyond its narrative determinacy. It, and not that history, defined Abraham’s situation. Still, Abraham had to interpret it to deduce the proper action. The commandment remained “Torah,” never

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becoming prescriptive law. Abraham understood that he was to give up Isaac according to the full measure of his human possibilities. To Abraham this meant killing his son. How God could realize His promises with a dead Isaac was beyond him.175 But God was equally beyond Abraham’s grasp for that matter, and so was the promise. We can see how Abraham interpreted the commandment when we take a further look at Isaac in verse 7, who asks the obvious question. “Where is the lamb for the offering?” If they had taken a lamb, it would have been Abraham’s interpretation of the primacy of the promise as he understood it that had laid the foundation for his acts. A narrative ethics indeed! Reasoning that Isaac could not be killed as a part of the offering, he would have brought a substitute himself. As Menno put it, Abraham in this respect “had laid aside all reasoning and wisdom and followed not sense nor flesh.”176 But Abraham, though obviously reckoning with the possibility that dedicating Isaac fully to God would mean sacrificing him on the altar, does not interpret the command from his own perspective. He allows the command to interpret and judge his own actions and responds by giving it the full destructive meaning it could possibly have. In a way he takes it literally, i.e., he interprets it according to the plain sense it must have on the basis of his own religious understanding. This becomes clear in Abraham’s reply in verse 8, where he states that “God will choose the lamb for Himself as an offering.” Abraham’s submission leads him to be ready for whatever God chooses to do, and if the voice had remained silent, he would have killed his son. The former commandment in its ambiguity, because it had left open the manner of the offering, is echoed in this verse. In sharp contrast to all this stands verse 9, in which we see Abraham acting according to his own interpretation of the command. Building an altar, laying the wood in order, binding Isaac, and laying him upon the altar, all of that is Abraham’s 175

Stressed by Menno (Works, p. 123): “This is for the encouragement of all the pious, that they should believe, and submissively follow the word of the Lord, however heretical and ridiculous it may appear to them, not murmuring against the Lord why he so commanded it; but it is enough that they know that he has commanded and in what manner he has commanded.” 176 Menno, Works, p. 125.

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interpretation of the required offering. In verse 10, Abraham takes the knife in his hands. And now the narrator interprets Abraham’s action for us, “to slaughter his son.” It is as if the narrator wants to show us that though Abraham on the one hand is driven by the commandment to see a specific action as the proper response, bringing an offering requires slaughtering his son as if he were a lamb, at the same time it is an action that can itself be interpreted from the outside and weighed against the divine intent. It is an external act, a risk taken. The commitment to obey the divine command is an effort to obey while interpreting. It can always be challenged by others and compared with the text of the commandment. Abraham’s obedience is an embodied commentary on a text. Though Abraham states his trust that God will choose a lamb, he does not wait until God shows him what to do. Submission to the divine will, the interpretative framework of the commandment itself, the whole history of Abraham’s dealings with God beforehand, leads him to take the knife, not to show this submission, but to ”slaughter” (lishchot) his son, since this was his interpretation of the divine commandment. The narrator’s intervention in the story means that if Abraham had in fact done this, it would not have amounted to bringing the required offering at all. In fact, it would have been a slaughter of his son. His son acquired the character of a lamb because Abraham assumes that Isaac was designated as the lamb in God’s view and that killing him was the only way to elevate him in dedication to God. The commandment turns out to change Abraham’s view of life in two respects: Isaac can become the lamb to be slaughtered, and this slaughter can be a fulfillment of the command to dedicate him fully to God as o’lah. The commandment to elevate and dedicate fully what Abraham must have understood to be both his own and humanity’s future was therefore interpreted correctly, save for the manner of its execution. That element of divine instruction was given only at the moment when Abraham stood ready to execute the command as he understood it. The angel of God intervenes, as one can imagine, because the slaughter of Isaac was not in reality the manner in which compliance with the commandment was demanded. But how do we deal with the reason given in 12b? “For now I do know

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that you fear God and did not withhold thy son, thine only son from me.” There is no way to evade the consequence of these words: that Abraham was indeed put to the test and that his submission to the divine will and his acceptance of the view of life that the commandment implied, against all his moral reasoning, was indeed part of his own ”elevation.” If the intent was “not to withhold his son,” then the lamb can be offered as substitute for that son. Abraham is not praised for intending to ”slaughter” his son, but for the affirmation behind it that he would not withhold Isaac in the face of God’s imperative. If on principle man would give his life, his future, fully into the hands of God, even accepting a God acting against all reason, then there can be an acceptable substitution. Or, better, the system of Torah in which atonement is reached through the intermediary of sacrifice is based upon the full dedication of life into the hands of God, against all natural instincts of selfpreservation and seeking assurance of one’s own future. In this manner the basic notion of intermediary sacrifice can be set up as a model of all obedience, including obedience to the specific laws of the Torah. Behind all of them is the intent to dedicate all life to God, equal to giving up what we might call our rights, our possession of our lives, our natural bonds of community. If there is the ability and intent to give that all up, there is the basis of obedience to the specific rule, that substitutes for full submission to God and enables obedience out of faith. Heteronomous obedience to the revealed commandment of God is the substitute God gives for the full weight of absolute submission He is entitled to demand. Against Kant, we must hold that the commandment given by the divine voice is not incompatible with anything within the order of moral reasoning precisely because it is not an item under scrutiny in that order at all. The commandment is neither a known fact before the tribunal of reason nor is it to be critically weighed within the framework of a narrative understanding of God’s intent, but it constitutes in itself a separate order of cognition that precedes moral discourse. It is in opposition to any autonomously known moral order as such. Seeing Isaac as the lamb, and his sacrifice as an ”elevation” toward his purpose, is a cognitive act that is in contradiction to all of Abraham’s moral and practical persuasions. And indeed, the interpretation that Abraham gave of this commandment was flawed. His actions, based on his own assumptions about what

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the required offering meant, do show his submission, but also show that there was a need for instruction from God to explain the meaning of self-dedication as something else than returning life to God by destroying it. The story grounds the need for the full development of Torah as an instruction in heteronomous obedience. Abraham, in a way, implies by his actions that the full dedication of a human being to God can only be in his real death on an altar, and cannot be exercised by way of finding the good through moral reasoning. The Torah is precisely that way of hearing God’s voice in an ordered manner and within a peoplehood that makes dedication through obedience possible. By substituting the lamb for Isaac, God shows that, in a human life, total submission is exercised beyond itself, and this substitution for total self-dedication or submission in the symbolism of the cult becomes the basis for specific obedience under Torah. In a way Abraham was right: our total submission does require our ”death.” But this death must be “symbolical,” in order for God to fulfill His purposes on earth with humanity. The promise of Abraham is fulfilled by and through a people that has gone through the Binding of Isaac, that has symbolically died to its natural instincts of self-preservation, and has renounced its own moral instincts as the basis for its morality. Theonomous obedience therefore requires basic submission to God in such a way that His commandment becomes the binding cognitive framework for its application. Without the revelation of the divine will, both as to basic values and manner of execution, it would be our interpretation of the commandment that would lead to the concrete act of obedience. In Abraham’s case, that would lead to an inability to discern what the concrete will of God really was. There are other conclusions to be drawn. One of them is that the result that God desired in the testing of Abraham was achieved, notwithstanding Abraham’s inability to fully grasp the nature of the test. His obedience was affirmed because it represented the highest possible form of submission in the light of what the commandment revealed to him about the world. But the goal of the commandment was achieved by the prohibition of the angel, the intermediary, therefore, who stated that Abraham should not ”slaughter” his son. The second and

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negative commandment belied Abraham’s interpretation of the divine command and gave a new one, and it proved Abraham’s faith that God Himself would provide a lamb for the sacrifice to be right. The effort to comply with the commandment through an interpretation that gave full weight to the “otherness” of the commandment was the correct attitude towards God, even if it led to a distortion of what God truly wanted. In examining the story of Isaac’s offering we have found a common ground between Judaism and Christianity.177 We must now turn, however, to the specific characteristics of Christian obedience. The binding of Isaac does not in itself sufficiently explain the specific road of Christian ethics and the ecclesiology that surrounds it. The Church has its “own commissioned witness to the world.”178 The Church believes that God’s righteousness was revealed in His faithfulness to the promise by accepting Abraham’s submission as the founding event of all obedience to Torah. By restoring Isaac and accepting the substitute, the Torah came to define the witness of the Jewish people for all times. James takes this trust and obedience to be the cornerstone of Christian faith as well. But there is more to be said. The Church also accepts that God’s righteousness was revealed in the obedience of the one faithful son of Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth. Here there was no substitute, and Christ was left alone by all to die on the Cross. But in the resurrection God proved to go beyond death here as well. What God began in Abraham, He continues in the Torahcentered life of the Jewish people, and He continues that in the ”gentile stones that were made into the sons of Abraham,” the Church.

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Cf. Jon Levinson, The Death and the Resurrection of the Beloved Son, London (1983), in which the binding of Isaac is shown to be the most fundamental “myth” that binds Jews and Christians together. The ideal of total submission to God in an act that at the same constitutes the basic covenantal relationship with God is present in the Akeidah and in its application to the life story of Jesus in the early Church. Judaism rests on the meaning of Abraham’s sacrifice and identifies itself with Isaac. Christianity reads into the story the act of God who relinquishes His son into death for all mankind (1 Cor. 15, this was the gospel Paul received, not invented), and rereads Abraham as the father of all faithful, identifying Isaac with Christ. 178 Paul M. Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part II, New York (1995), p. 42.

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But there is a difference between the Abrahamic pattern of faith in Judaism and in Christianity that we need to deal with. We take as our primary witness the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who wrote about Abraham’s ultimate test in connection with the Kantian position that we discussed earlier.179 His insights into the road Judaism travels between Autonomy and Heteronomy were a guide in our earlier discussion of Abraham. In Fackenheim’s view, Christianity suffers from a tragic misunderstanding by making Abraham into the lonely knight of faith who cannot communicate with others, and who in fact cannot claim any connection with human (universal) reason. Both Kant (who rejects Abraham’s action as immoral) and Kierkegaard (who accepts it as suspension of the ethical) make Abraham into an absolute exception. The direct and absolute duty toward God, what we have called “submission”, is a suspension of the ethical, according to Kierkegaard. Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, though exceeding the boundaries of the ethical, still has a universal purpose. It tries to serve the whole by sacrificing one of its members. Agamemnon is therefore a moral hero, while Abraham has to live with the paradox that he must obey the command to sacrifice Isaac and yet must believe that Isaac will live.180 Abraham’s obedience is therefore a private affair between himself and God, an absolute test that will not be reenacted since it could not be demanded of the faithful today. To Kierkegaard, then, Abraham is the father of the faithful because he accepts the paradox between commandment and promise in absolute submission to God; to Kant this was the exact reason why he had to disavow Abraham as a murderer, and both are agreed that Abraham is set apart from the entire human race by this acceptance of a divine command to slaughter his son. Fackenheim’s main argument is this: Abraham was not isolated from the human race, but his testing was for the benefit of humankind. God did not need to find out who Abraham was by giving him this demand. The midrash Genesis Rabbah that 179

Emil, L. Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, New York (1973). Cf. esp. Chapter 2, “Abraham and the Kantians, Moral Duties and Divine Commandments.” 180 Ibid, p. 63.

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explains Abraham’s ordeal is adamant that testing in this context is like showing something in its inner nature and value to others. Far from being a private affair, it was intended to show to the world the character of Abraham’s faith as the one to whom God had given the promise to bless all peoples. In a direct sense, Abraham was the father of all who stand in the covenant, because in some way Abraham’s obedience affects them all. It is based on Abraham’s merit that Israel was given the Torah, which implies that the whole meaning of Torah is dependent upon the character of Abraham’s faith. It signifies that elements of Torah are in fact as absolute as the divine commandment directed to Abraham. The values of humanity and moral good that Kant deemed intrinsically absolute are relative to the absoluteness of the giving of the Torah and its divine origin. Abraham’s faith, in that sense, is a basic principle of the Torah as the sum total of divine commandment that has ultimate and absolute character. But not only the commandment as such, but also God’s intervention and the gift of the lamb to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead, is part of that basic principle of Torah. Without adherence to the manner in which God demands obedience, a manner that is revealed and can be construed to be just an ethics with a particular application but without inner necessity, only complete and absolute submission could be the principle of religious ethics. And because such a submission could never be realized, we would have to resort to accepting a man-made ethics that, while being secondary and relative in itself, would in fact reign as a secondary God. Only if a particular and concrete ethics is the revealed substitute for the principle of absolute submission, and only if the former is then understood as a free divine gift, can there be such a thing as a revealed religious ethics. What Fackenheim seems to be arguing is that only by making a connection between Abraham’s obedience and the fullness of the Torah can the Torah be a concrete demand of God. Without that connection there is only the absolute principle of the creator’s right to demand anything on the one hand (the suspension of the ethical), and human concrete ethics (guided by political expediency and common life) without any possibility of mediation on the other, unless we find that absolute in other terms, as Kant did, e.g., by constructing human freedom as that principle.

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When Menno Simons wrote about Abraham’s faith, he was of course completely unaware of anything like the subtle philosophical context in which Fackenheim argued his case for Abraham against Kant. This does not make him unaware of the issues that were relevant to calling Abraham the father of the faithful. Fackenheim argued that Abraham was considered by Kierkegaard as a pattern of what may turn up in the life of a Christian as a surprise demand to abandon ethics. Every believer is a potential Abraham. But to Menno, Abraham’s conduct in the offering of Isaac is the fruit of a life of already established obedience in faith. It is brought into the open by the test, as the Midrash insists. It showed the inner contents of his faith. There was no struggle between the promise and the commandment, as Kierkegaard thought. Menno stated: “He well knew that unless he would believe the word of God, he could obtain no grace, no blessing, no promise, for only the obedient obtain the promise.” 181 In the manner of his obedience, Abraham can be called the father of the faithful. “This is for the encouragement of all the pious, that they should believe, and submissively follow the word of the Lord, however heretical and ridiculous it may appear to them, not murmuring against the Lord why he so commanded it; but it is enough that they know that he has commanded, and in what manner he has commanded.” 182 Surely, in such an approach Abraham is not set apart from the rest of humanity. His faith shows the pattern of obedience that Christians are called to with explicit reference to Abraham. Fackenheim would have agreed with Menno that the ultimate meaning of the Akeidah is love .183 When Menno wrote: “So entirely was this pious man dead to himself that he denied all his lusts, his will, and mind, and loved his God alone,”184 these words are echoed in those of Fackenheim: “…the original Akeidah was motivated neither by fear nor by hope, but rather 181 182 183 184

Menno. Works, I, p. 123. Ibid. The “binding” of Isaac on the altar is called Akeidah in Hebrew. Menno, Works, I, p. 125.

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by the pure love of God.”185 There is a second analogy between Menno’s treatment of Abraham and that of Fackenheim that we must go into before centering on the differences. Both would agree that the Akeidah will not be repeated in the life of the believer. But Fackenheim makes it clear that there is an absolute moment in the life under Torah which may lead to the ultimate sacrifice. Martyrdom, or Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of the Name of God), was a perpetual possibility. Seen from the point of view of Isaac, the Akeidah is a self-sacrifice (if the Midrash is right to emphasize that Isaac went willingly and accepted Abraham’s obedience as valid for himself) on the basis of a commandment heard from others (i.e., received by tradition), and not received in the pristine and private dimension of Abraham’s encounter with his God. Jewish martyrdom is grounded on the refusal to obey any human commandment that would invalidate the Torah as such, i.e., murder and profaning the Name by idolatry. If the only choice is that between death and apostasy or murder, acceptance of death is the only option. As Fackenheim remarks, according to Kant, a man must preserve his life “until the time comes when He expressly commands us to leave this life.” Apostasy is not a danger that must be evaded at all costs. But if the Torah (summed up in the negative by idolatry and murder, both transgressions that invalidate it) is to be kept even at the cost of one’s death, then Isaac is not a historically unique person, but the pattern of faith, as important as is Abraham. Fackenheim can then make a connection with modern Jewish martyrdom by explaining that giving up oneself and one’s children when faced with this manner of persecution is the “reenactment” of the Akeidah and a moment that testifies to the continuing basis of Torah obedience. This connection between the (faith of the) Akeidah and martyrdom was expressly there in Menno’s vision as well, though here it was mediated by the more general concept of obedience in faith ,and the martyrdom was expressed around two centers of attention: following the footsteps of Christ and the apostles, and adhering to the foundational concept of the believer’s Church: adult baptism. That is why this specific episode in Abraham’s life was not singled out to become the 185

E. Fackenheim, op. cit., p. 62

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narrative locus of Christian martyrdom. But to Christians, the reenactment of Isaac’s binding has been singularly expressed in God’s own Akeidah when Jesus Christ, the new Isaac, was murdered on the Cross. The “seed of Abraham,” in the Christian midrash, became Christ, who as the first-born of the Father also became the new man and the head of His Church. Through this Christological transformation within the New Testament, the focus of the connection between faith and martyrdom shifts away from the Isaac of the Old Testament to the “Isaac” of the New Christian Covenant without contradicting the former. Christian faith is about receiving the new Isaac, Christ Jesus, into the “heart”. That is a faith that acknowledges that God will not break his promise and thereby makes the believers “free, joyful and glad in spirit; though they are confined in prisons and bonds, have to suffer [death by] water and fire, in chains and at the stake;…for they believe on Christ in whom the promises are sealed.”186 If Fackenheim and Menno stand in agreement, both in the notion of absolute obedience out of love and the connection between Akeidah and martyrdom, what is the difference between their respective views on obedience, apart from the obvious difference that for the one the statute of that obedience is the Torah and for the other it is the law of Christ? It must be this: that to Menno, Abraham’s obedience to God is seen as a pattern that was fulfilled in the obedience of Christ, which may now serve as a model of our imitation of Christ, whereas in Judaism, the Akeidah is taken up as a principle in the life of obedience of the Jewish people to Torah. Circumcision and the Covenant with Abraham’s descendants according ”to the flesh” bring the Akeidah to completion. Judaism turns from the present of a life under Torah and in constant danger of martyrdom to the Akeidah as its foundational principle, whereas Christianity turns from its life under the gospel first to the Cross, and only then is it able to discern its connection to Abraham. When Menno states that “obedient, faithful Abraham received his son as a type of the resurrection,”187 this mediacy of Christ between Menno and Abraham is theologically expressed. 186 187

Menno, Works, I, p. 159. Ibid., p. 125a.

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It has two consequences. First, because obedience to Christ is understood as comprising first of all the spirit-led life, and only on that basis does human obedience to rules and ordinances come about, the principle of Abraham’s submission was expressed as submission to God directly and not through the mediation of Torah, like this: “inward man…does willingly all things whatsoever the Lord has commanded him, let it be what it will.”188 But then immediately those elements of the law of Christ are mentioned that fulfill the function of idolatry and murder in the call to steadfastness under Jewish law: baptism upon confession of faith, leading to life according to the inner word and the scriptures. This general principle of obedience is not immediately connected to the Akeidah itself, as in Kierkegaard, since there is no heroism in Menno that seeks ultimate submission by suspension of the ethical. But it is connected to a way of life that is determined by “doctrine, Spirit, commandments, prohibitions, ordinances and usages” in which they walk who “would receive the commanded baptism, surrender themselves to all obedience, and according to their weakness, walk as the Lord commands, teaches and enjoins upon all true Christians.”189 Secondly, in the Christian assessment, the principle of Abraham’s faith is subjectively reenacted in the believer’s acceptance of the gospel as commandment but objectively replaced (“fulfilled”) by the self-sacrifice of the new Isaac on the Cross; in Judaism, it is reappropriated objectively as the event that merited the Covenant of Moses and inherently motivates obedience to the Torah, and subjectively reenacted in the martyrdom of the people that emulates Isaac. In other words, the Akeidah is the analogy of the foundational function of the Cross in Jewish ethics; Jesus’ life and teachings function in the roles of both the Akeidah and the Torah in Christianity. So Abraham is received subjectively and objectively in Judaism; subjectively received in Christianity as well, but objectively surpassed or reinterpreted. We should not think lightly of this difference in the basic form of the Christian 188 189

Ibid, p. 123b. Ibid, 123b – 124a.

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and Jewish midrash with regard to the Akeidah. Rabbinical ethics could be a function of the Talmud Torah, the scrupulous study and practical application of the law, both written and oral, precisely because it envisioned the life under Torah as an embodiment of Abraham’s faith to God and the concrete and specific nature of God’s covenant in response to it. In Christianity, ethics evolved in principle without the resources of the oral tradition – or rather, oral tradition was the local tradition of exegesis but did not have universal authoritative application. It did not put the written Torah on a par with the oral, because both were embodied in the Word made flesh. The incarnation theology of John and Paul looked to the life and death of Jesus the Messiah for guidance on issues of obedience and behavioral rules. Precisely because of these profound differences, the analogies which we found before, namely obedience from love and the connection to martyrdom, are the more striking.

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18. The heteronomous source of obedience Despite Anabaptist insistence that obedience to the law of Christ was the first requirement of the life of faith, no evangelical law was proposed that functioned analogously to the Jewish concept of Torah. If, however, obedience was the prime requisite, and discipleship the essence of faith, this would lead to the question of how we would know the will of God. As C. Norman Kraus explained: Faith in Scripture for the second generation Anabaptists, then, meant acceptance of it as the moral authority for life (ital. mine) rather than subscription to its authoritative doctrine. They were not primarily concerned with correct theories of inspiration which would guarantee the Bible's rational authority. Neither were they under any logical compulsion to formulate a theory that would eliminate all the effects of human cooperation in its production and thus keep its authority purely objective. Scripture's authority rested on the fact that it was God's covenant with man, and it was an authority to be obeyed rather than defined.190

Obedience to Scripture did not imply having a correct doctrine as to its inspired status. The Bible was seen primarily as an instrument of finding the will of God in Christ. This did not in any way lessen the authority of Scripture, Christians were supposed to “regulate and conduct themselves only in accordance with this blessed gospel of Christ.”191 “Inspiration” refers to the high status of Scripture as a guide to knowledge of Christ, but it did not intend to express any supernatural quality of perfection, nor did it mean to put literalism in any shape to the fore as the deciding hermeneutical framework of reading Scripture. The locus of authority remained firmly in Christ Him190

C. Norman Kraus, “American Mennonites and the Bible,”,in: Essays on Biblical Interpretation, Williard Swartley, Ed., Elkhart (1984), p. 135. 191 Confession of Peter Jansz Twisck.

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self, and not in the written word. Only knowledge of Christ can give us the key to understanding Scripture, and only the will to obey can give us knowledge of Christ. Ben C. Ollenburger maintained that, to Anabaptists, (1) Scripture was authoritative for Christian behavior without limitations, but it was not applicable to the sphere of public life, as the magisterial Reformation held;. (2) The New Testament as such was the guideline for Christian behavior, and not the Old Testament; there was a prior understanding of the primacy of a Christological hermeneutic;. (3) A prior commitment to Christ was held to be a prerequisite for understanding Scripture. (4) This commitment to obedience was the only prerequisite; no theological learning and interpretative skill could equal that.192 In sum, Ollenburger is stating that obedience to Christ is the cognitive paradigm of reading Scripture for a community. “It is the task of the congregation, not the priest or the scholar, to discern the shape of the kingdom and the pattern of obedience as we together heed Christ’s call.” The specific brand of Anabaptist Biblicism, defined by its emphasis on obedience to Christ, the supremacy of the New Testament over the Old, and the congregational procedure of discerning God’s will together did not lead to an emphasis on the concrete will of God as written commandment. Because it did not, it can be presented as a legitimate continuation of that tradition to come up with a different view on the role of Scripture. Instead of being the canonical a priori of all contemporary discernment, it becomes a record of early theology. As J. Denny Weaver puts it, (J. Denny Weaver, “Perspectives on Theology,” in Swartley (1984), p. 19.) Mennonite theology is “the continuation of the task of reinterpretation visible in the Bible. It is one more attempt to restate what it means to be God’s people in yet another context and cosmology.” So now the “events” of history are interpreted in the Bible, and theology is a continuation of that process of interpreting 192

Ben C. Ollenburger, “The Hermeneutics of Obedience,” in Swartley (1984), p. 61.

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events. Canonical Scripture has a priority in this endeavor, but that makes it only a “participant” in dialogue, and the community of that dialogue has the locus of authority.

Moral commandments, like the duty to love the enemy, and ordinances, like baptism, were both obeyed to the letter, but their interpretation occurred not in the academic’s study but in congregational life. But there are distinctions to be made. First of all, great emphasis was laid on the distinction between two kinds of obedience. Early Anabaptists like Michael Sattler made a distinction between servile obedience and filial obedience. On the whole, the difference was expressed in this way: concern for one’s own life and the hope for reward may lead to servile obedience. The motivation for obedience is not intrinsically connected to the one who demands nor to the essential character and motivation of the commandment given. But that is only a first stage in the development of faith. Such a life may in its turn lead to obedience out of love for God without concern for reward: filial obedience. The role of the law as written commandment is now somewhat unclear. Its primary function is to make us aware of the judgment of God (as Lutherans would argue), but it also compels us through fear to “not do, counsel or agree to anything which...God, the righteous judge, hates in His soul and has forbidden in His holy Word.”193 Luther, Calvin, and Menno therefore agree on the prosecuting function of the law. According to Luther, that role of the law remained effective throughout the Christian life. To Calvin, however, the law could help Christians on their road to greater perfection. In Calvinism, the law was highly valued for its pedagogical use. According to Menno Simons, however, the regenerating and enabling power of God’s Spirit would make it possible for believers to obey all the commandments of God, making the written law a secondary source of enlightenment. 194 Though in principle Menno would have accepted the Calvinist understanding of the law as a source for discernment, in that role it was surpassed by the new type of knowledge available under the new Covenant, which followed from having the Spirit of Christ in the 193 194

Menno Simons, Eng. edn. (1956), p. 329. Ibid.

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inner man as God’s gift . A believer would obey the commandments of God out of love for God, seeking instruction in the Scriptures and obeying to the letter what was clearly prescribed, but most of all, he would obey whatever God commanded, taught, and enjoined in the present through His Spirit. As we have found in Paul, there was a profound difference in this idea that the Spirit could enable an understanding of God’s will that went beyond the letter of Scripture. Only in the acceptance of this effectiveness of the Spirit in the community could there be such a thing as a “law” of Christ. But what does the expression “commandments of God” mean? It did not mean to Mennonites that the prosecuting and pedagogical use of the law are transcended and the Mosaic law set up again in full force as a norm for life. The commandments of God are first of all Christ’s commandments, given under the New Covenant and explained under its provisions.195 There is no direct continuity or analogy between Mosaic law and evangelical law in its contents. Yet, Christ’s teachings were considered to be “law” in very much the same way as the Old Testament was “law,” in the sense that both were simply to be obeyed because God had commanded it, the characterization of the evangelical law as appealing to filial obedience being merely one of the differences that were observed between the two covenants and their definitions of the relationship of the believer to God. In other words, the Mosaic law was seen in effect as the expression of the Pharisaic mode of thought (and the attitude of worksrighteousness rejected by Paul), and not as having received a new status under the messianic covenant. Such a hermeneutical transformation was still beyond the visionary power of the 16th century, in which Torah primarily meant “law” and the meaning of law was seen as analogous to the law of the state. The Mosaic law was therefore understood to demand servile obedience, because it was connected to governmental autho195

E.g. Abraham’s use of the sword in Genesis 14 is immediately countered with a reference to the commandment to abjure any use of the sword under the new covenant when Menno deals with it. Menno Works, I, 122a.

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rity in which the state functioned as the power of punishment for evildoers. Anabaptists in the 16th century projected their own experience with state persecution into their reading of the law. If the Mosaic law dealt with government and ordered society, punishing evildoers and promoting the well-being of all its citizens, it was important because it gave a standard by which to judge our human corruption, but it was not decisive for Christians as a source of moral enlightenment. They after all had to stand apart from the government and the state, which were outside the perfection of Christ. The Mosaic law, understood in these two functions and as essentially correlated to human government, could by these facts alone never become the standard for Christian living. The 16th century Anabaptist vision of life as evangelical obedience to the law of Christ entailed an opposition, or at least a discontinuity, between gospel and (Mosaic) law. How would one remain faithful to their vision and at the same time correct their vision of the meaning of the law in the New Testament? We have found after all in the letter of James and in the gospel of Matthew a different perspective on the role of the law. The term “law,” as John Toews put it, “is a multi-valent word, the valence of which must be determined in each text and context.”196 Acquaintance with the Jewish literature contemporaneous with the New Testament is a vital prerequisite of this contextual determination. If the law is not superseded in its contents by the gospel, if Christ’s teachings affirm its validity as a principle of obedience, if the Jerusalem Council by adopting the Noachide laws for gentile Christians extends its use by adding elements of Jewish oral tradition, if Jewish Christians are still expected to keep the law,197 the acceptance of Christ’s teachings and commandments de jure involves an acceptance of the Mosaic law as an ongoing source for Christian obedience. The prosecutory and pedagogical use of the law then fall short both of the intrinsic meaning of law (as Torah, instruction, it is infinitely more than “law”) and its formal validity for the Christian community as source of enlightenment on what the “holy, good and acceptable will of God” really is. 196

John E. Toews, “Some Theses Toward a Theology of law in the New Testament,” in: The Bible and law, Elkhart (1982), pp. 43 - 64. 197 Because they are circumcised, they fall under the principle of Gal. 5:3.

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John Toews affirmed this vision by stating: In the teachings of Jesus the Torah of God as interpreted by the Messiah is normative for the disciple community and expresses itself most clearly in love of God and the neighbor.198 Jesus affirmed the permanent validity of the law; He fulfills it by bringing its liberating intentions to light with regard to the poor and the oppressed. The law, correctly understood, should be obeyed. Love of God and neighbor are defined as the hermeneutical matrix for this messianic Torah. It is clear that Jesus did not dispense with the law and that he called His disciples to a greater, not a lesser, obedience to it. If Anabaptist obedience is about following Christ, this obedience to the Mosaic law is part of their commitment. How will we deal, then, with Paul’s statement that righteousness was revealed in Christ apart from the law? We cannot give a full account of the meaning of this statement, and we have already made some effort to explain its meaning in a different context in our chapter on Romans. But we will note here that the righteousness revealed in Romans 3 is primarily God’s offer to enter into a covenant relationship with gentiles, not by incorporating individuals into Israel by means of the law, but apart from the Torah, by allowing the blessing of Abraham to become a reality for the faithful from the nations. The gift of the Torah to Israel was, after all, only the first part of God’s promise. In Christ His promise was fulfilled by bringing the nations under the “wings of the Divine Presence.” God who gave the Torah to Israel also called the gentiles to obedience, not directly to the Torah, but to the embodiment of the Torah in the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Before we go on, we need to summarize our present point to highlight its importance. The Anabaptist vision of the heteronomous source of obedience is, first, Christological. Authority resides in Jesus as the Messiah. The Bible is a means by which to find the concrete meaning and contents of that obedience – and in fact, such an obedience to Christ is in its 198

Ibid, p. 49.

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turn a prerequisite to understanding the Bible. In historic Anabaptism, the New Testament gained a specific status. Here was the source of the faithful life under the new covenant, demanding filial and not servile obedience. The Old Testament was understood along the lines of the Reformation in general in its prosecutorial and pedagogical use. Historic experience with the power of the state, and the connection between Mosaic law and government, made Anabaptists cautious in accepting the authority of the Mosaic law. Menno Simons is the most outspoken defender of the thesis that faith implies obedience to all of God’s commandments as they are present in the Holy Word, but in practice, this was defined as those commandments given by Jesus Christ. The principles of discipleship and the authority of Christ, however, do include formally the validity of the law as the source for our understanding of the divine will. In our day and age, we have increased our understanding of the different nature of Torah in comparison to Roman law, with which it had been almost identified. Meinrad Limbeck199 e.g. has argued that obedience in the terms of the Old Testament was basically a “hearing”, a careful and attentive noticing of something to the effect that it became a basis for future actions. Jesus also does not call to submission (obedience in this restricted sense) but to a new attentive listening to what was already present in the law and became fully clear in His ministry (Mark 4:9 e.g.) To fulfill the law never meant political compliance, i.e. to command oneself to obey the will of another subject in order to safeguard one’s own liberty for the future, but to heed a warning or accept an invitation to act in a way that enhanced life. Obedience in the Torah never implied a factual submission under a pure external word, since the word that was heard came from the Creator who was more “internal” that I could be to myself. Filial obedience to the Mosaic law, resting upon Jesus’ affirmation of its eternal validity, must then be a principle of any Anabaptist understanding of the law of Christ. By accepting Christ’s law as the formal principle of obedience, Menno would have been led to a reappraisal of the Torah if it had not been for the identification of Torah with (Roman) law and the doctrine of its various usages prevalent during the Reformation. If 199

Cf. Meinrad Limbeck, Das Gesetz, pp. 8-14.

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Marpeck and Philips would have had the opportunity that we enjoy, to know the spirit and meaning of the Jewish law from the inside, there might have been a totally different atmosphere to the Anabaptists’ moral thinking. Given the fact that there was a prevailing tendency to look at Jewish law in this manner, it is interesting to note how close they remained to the concept of obedience in faith as revealed in the New Testament. A secondary reason that at this stage no specific Christian halakah was developed (with the exception of Hutterites and Amish) is the strong rejection of the kind of casuistry that was present in the Catholic practice of confession. If the Bible as text was only a means to find concrete obedience to Christ, and if the Mosaic law was not seen as being embodied in Christ’s life or teaching, there still remained one avenue open to a concrete development of what Christ’s law was about. The pattern of Jesus’ life as the perfect form of human obedience to God must be in itself the “law of love” that God had commanded the Church to follow. Obedience only became concrete as discipleship, not in any formal sense, but in the concrete sense of “following after the pattern of His life.” This meant that God called the gentiles to a form of obedience that was not contained in the Torah as written, nor in the oral Torah, but in the “embodied Torah,” the Word that became flesh.

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19. Summary and Conclusions We have found so far that the general pattern of Christian obedience is theonomous. The offering of Isaac shows that submission to God’s will, whatever it is, beyond and above our own moral reasoning and even theological views on the nature of God, forms its basis. However, we have also found that ethics is not identical to this submission. Absolute submission is substituted by the heteronomy of a specific institution. In the life of Israel, heteronomous obedience to the Torah comes in place of submission. In a way, the Torah mediates between theonomous submission to God’s will and human liberty. It makes it possible for a community to have a standard for its conduct that defines a way of life for its individual members. If submission alone is the essence of ethics, all ethics would be individual, and there could be no adequate means of expressing its concrete contents. The Christian community is first of all an extension of Christ’s presence on earth, it is the body of Christ. Therefore, the believers’ community shares His fate in this world. Christians participate in the suffering of Christ (1 Peter 4:13-14; Rom. 8:17), there is communion with His suffering (Phil. 3:10; 2 Cor. 1:7). Such suffering is not to be construed as a historical incident that would allow us to say that keeping the faith under threat of persecution is all that matters, and that when persecution ceases, the suffering is over. As Yoder states we should not identify the course of history with Providence.200 The Constantinian domination of the world by the Church, and the acceptance of the state in the Reformation, were violations of the call to suffering. In the Anabaptist experience, suffering was considered part and parcel of the Christian life. Sometimes it was even expressed as a condition of salvation, especially in the apocalyptic vision of Balthasar Hubmaier, who wrote in his “A Christian Instruction”: “What is the nearest way by which one can go to eternal life? Hans: Through anguish, distress, suffering, persecution and death, for the sake of the name of Christ.” Christian living is “bearing the cross.”201 The effort to 200 201

J. H. Yoder (1994), p. 55. W. Klaassen (ed.) (1981), p. 88

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lead a blameless life and follow in Christ’s footsteps inevitably leads to suffering. After all, “servants are not greater than their master, and if they persecuted Christ they will persecute those who follow Christ” (John 15:20) . According to Menno Simons, therefore, suffering is a characteristic of the true Church; it is one of the notae ecclesiae. Conformity with the path of Christ will inevitably lead to it. It derives from the fact that Christian obedience is nonconformity with the world and the continuing task of the separate community. In that perspective, suffering is not a result of the specific social and historical situation in which the Church or the individual believer find himself or herself. Neither is it limited to an inward experience of guilt and sorrow. Suffering in this perspective is the result of nonconformity to the world, and that presupposes that there is no perfection of the world that would take it away. The powers of this age may change their modus operandi and thus change the specific mode of suffering. There may be regional differences in the kind of suffering to which Christians are subjected, but it can never vanish completely. Suffering is “participation in the victory of Christ over the powers of this age.”202 As Paul states in Phil. 2:8, the example of Christ is obedience unto death. One might argue that there is no specific way of life in the modern West that would imply suffering for Christians. But, to quote just one example, Paul’s insistence that brethren should not seek justice from the (Roman) courts, but should try to work out their own differences among themselves, is linked to the notion of suffering as well. As Paul states in 1 Cor. 6:7, it is a “fault” that brethren have (law-)suits before the courts. “Why do you not rather suffer wrong? Why are you not rather defrauded?” (6:7b) To evade suffering resulting from the mistakes of the believers among themselves, one might want to use the power and the violence of civil society to force one’s own rights. However, in doing so, the old system is strengthened, state violence is applied, and the body of Christ is compromised. Yet, the result of trying to settle differences within the congregation might be that someone is robbed of his rights under civil law; is ”defrauded.” But the alternative is that the life of the con202

J. H. Yoder (1994), p. 87.

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gregation would be divided into a religious part and a civil part. Christians, however, do not live in two worlds at the same time, since they are citizens of the kingdom of heaven, residing in the world until the kingdom is established at the return of Christ. To use the tools of civil authority would be in violation of that citizenship and would affirm that not Christ, but the state, is the highest power. And other instances could be mentioned. Christians would not be able to work in a sector of industry that is connected to warfare and/or implies the use of force against anyone.203 Their choice of occupation might be more limited because of their choice to follow Christ. Also their political participation would in principle be impossible, because it would lend credence to the system if they worked inside it. It might even follow that in Western democracies they would not validate the system of majority power by casting their vote, not even if their vote might make a difference or could be seen as support for a “moral” candidate. The notion that there could be a government that is less evil than another because of Christian participation in the affairs of the world ignores the reality of the Kingdom of Christ and the implicit judgment of a world that, as system, crucified Christ. The notion of suffering as a result of the nonconformist ethics of the Church leads to the question of what the mission of the Church really is. Whatever it is, it can never be the fusion of Church and society. We have found, in our discussion of Matthew 5 that the metaphor of salt does not refer to the influence of Christians within society, but refers to the vulnerability of the Church because of its contact with the world. Salting society as a means of preserving whatever good there is among the bad is not the purpose of the Church. (“Salting” the whole must mean preserving the whole, i.e., including the bad.) To be the visible city on the hill, however, is its purpose, and that purpose can be described as witnessing to the world. J. H. Yoder stated on several occasions that the Church does not have a mission, but is the mission. As he put it, “The Church’s responsibility to and for the world is first and always to 203

Cf. J. H. Yoder (1994), p. 63: “The second scandalous conclusion is that there may well be certain functions in a given society which that society in its unbelief considers necessary, and which the unbelief renders necessary, in which Christians will not be called to participate.”

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be the Church.”204 In order to be the mission, it has to be a visible reality. Moral nonconformity is a dimension of this visibility. Yoder enumerated the possible elements of this nonconformity. If the Church is visible in that these people keep their promises, love their enemies, enjoy their neighbors, and tell the truth, as others do not, this may communicate to the world something of the reconciling, i.e., the community-creating, love of God. 205 So first of all Christian ethics is in itself mission. Obedience to Christ’s commandment will lead to glorification of the Father in heaven when it is clear that only His authority is recognized in the behavior of the Church, as we have learned in Matt. 5:16. And such a witness is basically and intrinsically linked to the social ethics of the Church, 1 Pet. 2:9 affirms that the Church is called to be a priestly kingdom, in order “that ye may set forth the excellencies of Him who has called you out of the darkness to his wonderful light.” Through brotherly love (1 Pet. 1:22), through good deeds (1 Pet. 2:12), by suffering for Christ’s sake (1 Pet. 2:19), and all the other specific virtues mentioned in this letter, it is shown that this community of the faithful is indeed a “holy nation” that belongs to God as His property (1 Pet. 2:9). But stating that the Church in its separation and specific ethics is the mission does not exclude that it actually has one. In Matthew 28:16-20, we find that the early Church was under an obligation too, connected with the affirmation of Christ’s sovereignty. On the mountain in Galilee, where the disciples had been appointed, Christ after His resurrection gives the affirmation that He has all authority in heaven and on earth. So now the Church should do these things: •

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while going [out on the basis of Christ’s authority], make disciples of [or better: teach] all the nations [whereas before the resurrection they were warned not to go into the “way of the nations” (Matt. 10:5)];

J.H. Yoder, ibid , p. 61. 205

J.H. Yoder, ibid, p. 81.

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•

therefore baptizing them [i.e., the disciples, never children] in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit [which makes them into disciples, adopting them into the covenant community and establishing their right relationship with God on the basis of Christ’s death];

•

instructing them [continuously, as it is a present participle] to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

Teaching the gospel, baptizing disciples, and instruction in the law of Christ are the components of the mission. One should not downplay the connection between Christ’s authority and the words for discipleship and commandments. The sovereign power of Christ is not part of the gospel, but its basis. Becoming a disciple is an acceptance of that sovereignty, expressed in the obedience of baptism. And the Christian life that it sets out to establish is obedience to the commandments of Christ. Teaching the commandments is not equal to catechetical instruction in the doctrine of the gospel. The missionary statement in Luke 24 explains the contents of the teaching or kerugma that is first mentioned in Matthew. When Christ “opened their understanding, to understand the scriptures,” the gospel can then be summarized in two sentences: •

It was appropriate for Christ to suffer and to rise from among the dead the third day,

•

Repentance and remission of sins should be preached [keruchtenai] in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

The gospel of John contains another missionary statement that emphasizes Yoder’s point that the Church is the mission. “As the Father sent me forth, I also send you” (John 19:21b). In verse 23 of the same chapter, the mission of the Church is shown to be about forgiveness, and the Church has been given the power to forgive in practice. It can be read as a further explanation of how the “remission of sins” that Luke had mentioned functions within the context of the congregation.

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In sum, the mission of the Church is twofold. (1) In its capacity of being the redeemed community, consisting of those who have accepted Christ in faith and have submitted to his authority, they show Christ’s sovereignty through their behavior as a priestly kingdom, glorifying Gods “excellencies” and making others glorify their father in heaven. But they also (2) have a mission, a direct command to teach the gospel of remission of sins and repentance, and to be the community in which forgiveness rules. Teaching the gospel must have a continuation in teaching the commandments of Christ. The shape of the redeemed community is the product of its obedience to Christ’s law. Only then can the Church be the city on the hill, the visible Church. We cannot go into the dimension of ecclesiology beyond the short remarks we have given above within the confines of this inquiry. It must suffice for the moment to conclude that the ethical demand of the New Testament, comprising the Mosaic law as the primary written source for moral discernment, and the Noachide law as a source and model of halakhic reasoning, providing an example of such moral discernment, and finally, the understanding of the redemption in Christ through the Cross as the basic pattern of righteousness, are given to the Church as a whole. It is in the community of the faithful, that put their trust and hope for redemption on a glorified and risen Christ alone, that Christian ethics turns out to be social and political ethics. In addition, precisely because this communal ethics is based upon a transcendent act of redemption of divine origin, such an ethics is always embodied in a morality that can be imposed upon individuals, or rather, that liberates people to become individuals. The liberated community can then by no means become a new oppressive power. To show the possibility of such an historical enterprise the Mennonite Church has been called. It can only fulfill its mission by returning to a life of committed obedience to the divine commandment as revealed in Scripture. Only through such obedience will it know its Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

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