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  • From: Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] Gal 2:19 & Rom 7
  • Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 16:39:47 -0700 (PDT)

John Brand wrote:

> My own interpretation of 2:19 is that Torah
> brought Paul to a point of realizing his utter
> helplessness in fulfilling the demands of Torah
> (i.e. Romans 7).

This, however, does not square with Philip 3:4b-6,
where Paul, speaking as an aggressive Christ-believer,
acknowledges that he had been entirely righteous under
the law, confident and blameless. As many commentators
have maintained, Rom 7 isn't autobiograhical -- even
if it does portray rhetorically a non-Christian's
plight under the law, as seen backwards from the
perspective of faith.

E.P. Sanders has expressed it the following way. If
the Torah no longer provides the basis for salvation
(on account of the Gentile question), then what was
God up to before Christ? Is Israel's covenant-history
a complete sham? Gal 3:19-26 shows Paul's initial
attempt to deal with the dilemma: God intended to
consign people to sin and death with the law (note:
not to provoke transgression with the law, but to
accentuate sin when transgression occurred), "so that"
he might subsequently save them on the basis of faith
alone. This solution keeps God's sovereignty intact,
but it's perverse. Rom 7:7-13 and 7:14-25 are thus
Paul's second attempt to deal with the problem: God
intended obedience and life with the law (as everyone
knows), but Sin foiled his intent by using the law
against him (7:7-13); or even better, God intended
obedience and life with the law, but Sin bypassed the
law, invading human flesh directly and producing a
state of hopeless weakness (7:14-25). The better Paul
portrays God and the law, the worse he ends up
portraying humanity. The more he covers for God, the
more he overstates human inability. The blame has to
go somewhere, doesn't it?

Sanders basically argues (in Paul, the Law, and the
Jewish People, ch 2 passim), that Paul's conclusion
that keeping the law is futile and hopeless (Rom
7:7-25) is the consequence of his Christology, not the
cause of it -- that is, the result of trying initially
to keep a place for the law in God's plan (Gal
3:19-26) which later causes him to recoil violently
against the implication that God acted for the bad
(Rom 7:7-25, especially vv 14-25).

Philip Esler comments along the same lines as Sanders:
"Paul was almost certainly troubled, even racked, by
the difficulty of reconciling his belief that the law
had a divine origin with the new means of achieving
righteousness through Christ...Paul's powerfully
negative assessment of the law in Rom 7 is therefore
produced by irreconcilable tensions between his
recognition that God had been with Israel in giving
the law and his overwhelming sense that God had sent
his own son to break the power of sin for the benefit
of all people, Israelite and non-Israelite." (Conflict
and Identity in Romans, p 240)

(So here's the question de jour: Does we prefer God
sovereign-but-perverse (Gal 3:19-26) or
benign-but-incompetent (Rom 7:7-25)? :) )

In any case, John, I think Gal 2:19 hardly points to
Paul himself having experienced hopelessness (or
helplessness) under the law -- anymore than Rom 7
does. What do you make of Philip 3?

=====
Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

"In the natural sciences a person is remembered for his best idea; in the
social sciences he is remembered for his worst."



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