Exegesis of Romans 5:12–14; 7:1–6
The Law in Romans, Part 3
In previous articles, I discussed Romans 1–3 by way of introduction to the law in Romans, and Romans 4 on Abraham’s ‘justification’ as a relevant aside, before diving into the exegetical details regarding 4:15 in connection with 5:20–21 and 6:14–15.
In this article, I will continue my exegesis of law-texts in Romans with two initially quite confounding passages: 5:12–14 and 7:1–6. By considering them within the framework developed in previous articles (see also here), we can nevertheless make sense of them.¹
In a future article, I will take a look at arguably the law-text or rather passage in all of Paul’s letters, namely Romans 7:7 — 8:7. There I will focus on the meaning of the phrase ‘law of Sin [and Death]’ and Paul’s nonretributive use of ‘condemnation’ in chapter 8.
5:12–14
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one person,
and through sin death,
and so death came to all people
because they all sinned —
13 for already before the Torah
sin was in the world,
but sin is not billed
where there is no law.
14 Nonetheless, Death reigned
from Adam to Moses,
even over those who did not sin
like Adam did,
[who is a type of the one who was to come.]
5:12
Paul starts a comparison between Adam the ‘type’ and Christ the ‘antitype’, which he only takes up in verses 15–19, by asserting that “through the one human” — presuming that his audience knows who he is talking about — “sin came into the world, and through sin death”. At this point it is unclear whether Paul refers to the human act of sin and the divine punishment of death — the traditional retributivist reading — or the invading powers of Sin and Death — the apocalyptic reading. However, looking ahead, we see that Paul quickly frames both death (v. 14: “Death reigned as king”) and sin (v. 21: “Sin reigned as king”) as ‘royal’ cosmic powers. This, together with Paul’s broader argument in these chapters, should inform our reading of the present verse.
We will see in Romans 7 that God’s commandment to Adam and Eve provided a military base of operations (Gk: aphormē; 7:8, 11) for Sin which it used to produce sin and death. Accordingly, Paul’s present statement here should not be understood in a way that puts all the blame on Adam; rather, it should be read in a less theologically loaded, more straightforward sense: the one person Adam was the gateway through which Sin entered the world. Whereas the commandment was a military base of operations, the one person Adam was a place where Sin could take residence (cf. 7:17, 20). In other words, the human cosmos provided a realm where Sin could exercise its oppressive rule.
The next clause — “and through sin death” — is easily understood in the same terms; wherever Sin takes residence, it brings Death with it — not just in the factual sense of the condition of mortality resulting in death, but in the more sinister sense of a power of mortality and destruction, so to say, that sits enthroned in the cosmos and holds it captive (cf. 8:21). The subsequent clause now falls into place as well: it is because Sin, and through it Death, entered the human cosmos that death came to all humans, subjecting their bodies to corruption (cf. 7:24).
The final clause has been more controversial, mainly because of the opaqueness of the conjunction eph’ ō. However, looking at Paul’s broader argument, we consistently see d/Death as consequent upon s/Sin, not the other way around: “Sin reigned with Death/by death” (5:21), and “the wages of Sin is death” (6:23; cf. 6:16, 20; 7:11, 13; 8:2, 10). Therefore, it is safe to go with “because” as a rendering of ἐφ’ ᾧ: all humans sinned and consequently they all died, with both parts being understood as forms of bondage. The natural end of the oppression of Sin is destruction and death, the very opposite of the wholeness and flourishing God intended for humans.
5:13
The above, quite extensive, discussion of verse 12 was necessary to properly understand the role of the law/Torah in verses 13–14. My structuring of these verses (see above) is a variant of Longenecker’s rhetorical reading (who only takes c to be the objection; see table 1). As Jewett notes, verse 13 interrupts the flow of thought which Paul started in verse 12, namely the comparison between Adam and Christ. In my view, this is where a rhetorical objector interrupts Paul (possibly the Teacher). The postpositive γὰρ, then, does not function as a marker of cause or reason, but of clarification.
The rhetorical opponent starts by drawing out an implication of Paul’s statement: if, as Paul said, all humans sinned, even those who lived before the Mosaic Torah, and they had no natural law (which does not feature in Paul’s thought), then sin was in the world ‘without law’ (ἄχρι νόμου). The Teacher then takes this to its logical conclusion within his own retributive system: if, during that time, sin was in the world ‘without law’, then it could not be and should not have been ‘billed’,² which the Teacher understands in the retributive sense of divine accountability and punishment, namely the death penalty (see context; also 1:32). Τhe crucial presupposition here is that people need the knowledge of the law in order to be able to be held accountable and punished (cf. 2:14–15; also 1:18–32). But this seemingly logical conclusion is in fact a reductio ad absurdum, since all humans, even before Torah, clearly died, as Paul has in fact just said — that is, in the Teacher’s eyes, they were all held accountable by God and retributed with the death penalty! How could this be? What is God’s justification?
5:14
For Paul, however, as we now well know, the human condition of mortality should not be understood in the retributive terms of divine accountability and punishment at all, but rather in terms of the cosmic oppressive rule of Death (5:14). Thus Paul would have understood the metaphor of sin being ‘billed’ quite differently than the Teacher, namely in nonretributive terms: death is not ‘billed’ as the just desert of sin but as a form of malevolent (and non-merit-based) oppression. The agent of this oppressive ‘billing’, then, is not God — me genoito! — but the powers of Sin and Death.³
Paul replies accordingly: “But Death reigned as king even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression.” As noted here, a ‘transgression’ generally implies a divine commandment or law that is transgressed. Thus, the people who lived between Adam and Moses died, even without having a divine commandment or law to transgress (whether natural or written), but rather because they were oppressed by Death (through Sin), which apparently could do so even without a law at its disposal.
This ties back into our previous discussion of the law in Romans: 5:13 can now be seen to qualify the hyperbolic statement that “where the Torah is not, there is no transgression” (4:15). In general, Sin (and therefore Death) indeed “lies dead” without the military base of operations of the Torah, but the reality is that Sin and Death could oppress humans even without using a law. In other words, the Mosaic Torah is a big part of the problem for Paul, but did not create the problem — the Adamic commandment did, allowing Sin and Death to enter the cosmos and take over, oppressing all humans after Adam, even if they hadn’t received the Adamic commandment or the Mosaic Torah.⁴
Note that if Campbell’s rhetorical reading of Romans 1:18–3:20 is wrong, and those texts do directly reflect Paul’s own teaching, and Paul therefore believed in natural law, then it makes no sense whatsoever for him to talk about a time or place “without law” (5:13)— since the very point of natural law is that it is universally accessible.
It would of course be possible, as the mainstream tradition has done, to try to read 5:13–14 under the presupposition of natural law, so that Paul is only referring to the Mosaic law here, and that all being held accountable through death is made possible by natural law. However, this reading runs into trouble in verse 14, where Death is framed as cosmic royal power. Surely the oppressive evil powers aren’t the executive agents of God’s good and righteous retributive will? This for Paul would be unthinkable.⁵
Perhaps even more problematically, verse 14 implies that there is a category of people who did not sin as Adam did, that is, in relation to a commandment or law (see above), and who therefore did not have access to a supposed natural law. Any other interpretation of the ‘likeness’ of Adam’s transgression simply seems implausible.
7:1–6
1 Or do you not know, brothers and sisters — for I am speaking to those who know the law —that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime?
2 Thus a married woman is bound by the law under the power of her husband as long as he lives,
but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning [lit.: of] the husband.
3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she belongs to another man while her husband is alive.
But if her husband dies, she is free from that law,
so that if she belongs to another man, she is not an adulteress.4 In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you have died to the law through the body of Christ,
so that you may belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead
in order that we may bear fruit for God.
5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.
6 But now we are discharged from the Torah, dead to that which held us captive,
so that we are enslaved in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the written code.
At the end of chapter 6, Paul concluded triumphantly that the soldiers’ wages that Sin dispenses to its slaves is death, but that the free gift that God gives to sinful humanity is resurrection life in the Messiah Jesus, our king (6:23). This overall point of chapter 6 is important to keep in mind as Paul transitions to a somewhat complicated (some say confused) metaphor.⁶
The main image seems to be that Adamic/fleshly humanity (the wife) was ‘lawfully’ married to Sin (the most logical husband in context), so that when Sin ‘died’ (for which, see 8:3, where Sin is put to death by God in the flesh of Jesus), humans were thereby ‘set free’, both from Sin itself and from the oppressive law that bound them in ‘marriage’ to Sin.
Remember that in ancient times, marriage was generally an asymmetrical contractual relationship, with wives being hypandros, “under the power of [her] husband” (7:2). This resonates with the metaphor of slavery ‘under the power of [Sin etc.]’ used throughout. Moreover, interestingly, Paul refers to “the law of the husband” (7:2), which resonates with the recurrent phrase “the law of Sin [and Death]” (see 7:23, 25; 8:2), to be discussed in a future article.
Paul then mixes things up when he goes on to say that it is we humans — i.e., the wife!— who die, namely with Christ to the Law (7:4, 6; cf. Gal 2:19), before marrying the resurrected Christ. That is, when our existence in the ‘sarkic’ realm of the flesh is terminated (7:5), so is our captivity to the rule of the law, which supposedly is tied to the flesh (see the rest of ch. 7). Moreover, the same goes for Sin: as we die with Christ, we are liberated from it (cf. 6:7).
The important point is that, again, the Torah is exposed as collaborator with Sin: it “rules as a master over [kyreuei]” humans (7:1, the same verb being used for Sin and Death in ch. 6), “binds” them “under the power of their husband” Sin (7:2), actively “arouses sinful passions” in them (7:5) and “detains” them (7:6). (A similar portrait appears in Galatians 3:22, where it is said that “the Scripture locked everything up under the power of Sin”.)
You could almost say that the law is like the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them… Whatever the wearers of the ring do, bound by that ring, will be in service of Death.
Salvation and the Last Things
However, through dying with Christ, the Romans have been liberated from Sin and the Law and therefore Death. Instead of a fleshly life of captivity unto death, they lead a pneumatic life of freedom in Christ. Through baptism they have received the pneuma of Jesus and now share in his very own life (cf. 6:4). This new existence is marked by freedom from Sin, the Law, and Death, peace with God and each other (in other words, reconciliation), and joy in their salvation (cf. 8:2, 6; 14:16).
Moreover, it’s marked by a new ‘marriage’, namely to the one who died for them, as well as, paradoxically, a new ‘slavery’,⁷ albeit to a wholly good and loving Master: they are slaves to God through Christ (6:10–14, 22) and therefore slaves to righteousness (6:18–20). They now bear life-giving fruit for God (7:4) as they walk with Christ in obedience to God, trusting that one day soon they will shed their mortal fleshly bodies and experience the fullness of the pneumatic reality in which they now already share (cf. 8:9–11, etc.).
The only thing that rests, then, is leaving behind the fleshly ‘vessel’ in which they now have the treasure that is the pneuma of Jesus, a treasure of life and glory, a divine treasure (cf. 2 Cor 4:7). Although Paul elsewhere indicates that the Messiah is still on the battlefield subduing his enemies, and last of all Death (see 1 Cor 15:25–26), for the Romans at least salvation is realized, only being limited by the type of bodies they (still) have. Paul thus has an eschatology that is almost, and on the point of being, realized, but a soteriology that is fully realized.⁸ We have been saved in hope (8:24); what Christ will accomplish on the final day — the transformation of our bodies (Phil 2:25) — is nothing but unleashing the fullness of what was already there in the pneuma.⁹
Endnotes
1. Note Gaventa’s comments on the law in Romans, with which I strongly disagree: “It is a mistake to try to smooth out all the bumps here, finding some meta-explanation that renders this claim compatible with all of the letter’s other assertions about the law. Beginning with his first discussion in 2:12–29 and all the way through ch. 7, Paul makes a number of observations about the law, some of which are quite provocative (as in 3:19; 4:13–15; 6:14). These observations appear to be dropped into their context without development or explanation” (Romans, ). As this series (hopefully!) shows, a truly consistently apocalyptic reading of Romans can make sense of all these statements, however condensed they are.
2. For the rendering ‘billed’, see Jewett, in loco. For a similar metaphor, see 4:8: God, for Paul, does not credit sin with punishment — that is, Paul’s God is not retributive, but rather one who justifies the ungodly! See more here.
3. It’s not necessary to decide which power is presupposed here, Sin or Death; in the immediate context, as well as in the larger context of Paul’s argument, both Sin and Death are cast as the agents of death, although Sin is foregrounded by Paul. Cf. here for the relation between the powers of Sin and Death.
Paul’s answer to the Teacher’s ‘theodicy’ question raises ‘divine justification’ questions of his own, for how could God allow these powers to invade and oppress his own creation? For Paul, however, the important thing is that God rules now, and will rule in the end. The closest he comes to a ‘theodicy’ is his exoneration of the law in ch. 7.
4. On the relation between the Torah and the stoicheia kosmou, see here.
5. Gaventa’s reading (see her recent commentary) inevitably runs into this implication.
6. This section is a rewording of and elaboration on an earlier explication of this passage in this article.
7. On this paradoxical slavery as part of Paul’s larger discourse of ‘cruciformity’, see Michael Gorman, Cruciformity, e.g. in ch. 7: “The children of God are liberated from all past slaveries and their related fears, but only as they are led in Christ by the Spirit (Rom. 8:9–17). This is the kind of slavery that liberates and empowers. True freedom, in Paul’s experience, is belonging to the right master.”
8. For Paul’s salvation as realized, cf. Ann Jervis, Paul and Time.
9. I cannot help but think of the profane image of Thanos needing a sufficiently strong gauntlet, and indeed body, to be able to channel the immense power of the Infinity Stones.
