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  • From: "John Brand" <jbrand AT gvsd.mb.ca>
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] Gal 2:19 & Rom 7
  • Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 18:29:01 -0500

Thanks, Loren, for your well thought through response. It has been helpful. I should familiarize myself more directly with Sanders and Esler so that I can benefit from their study. I especially like Sanders 'aha' moment idea. Hopefully, you will find my interaction with their presuppositions does not hinder by appreciation of their conclusions.

> 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).

Loren wrote:
>
> 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.

John:
There is a syntactical point of correspondence between Philippians 3:9 and Galatians 2:16 that may help us in our interaction between Paul's thought in Philippians and his thought in Galatians (and E.P. Sanders interpretation of Paul's working out his theology backward from the perspective of faith):

Philippians 3:9 kai eureqw en autw mh exwn emhn dikaiosunhn thn ek nomou alla [note the contrastive particle vs ean mh] thn dia pistews cristou thn ek qeou dikaiosunhn epi th pistei

Galatians 2:16 ou dikaioutai anqrwpos ex ergwn nomou ean mh dia pistews insou cristou
My only thought on the reason for the obvious strong contrast in Philippians and the milder exceptive is that Paul is talking to Gentiles at Philippi and starting from the Jews at Galatia since the Judaizers were posing a problem for the stability of the Galatians.

What the Philippians passage does do that the Galatians passage does not do is to elaborate on what Paul is talking about when he is talking about the righteousness that comes from faith versus the righteousness that comes from law viz a vis it is the participation in the sufferings of Christ that actualize the righteousness.

Raymond E. Brown has pointed to Isaiah 53 as a key passage in understanding NT theology. If we were to take his argument as a starting point we might understand some of the difficulty that we encounter in understanding the various expressions of Paul's attitude to the law that you have outlined. In the post-Reformation era we accept a priori the notion that Christ has satisfied God's justice as per Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (11th Century CE). Thus, Christ fulfills the demands of the law for the believer so that the believer is no longer obligated to the law but becomes obligated to Christ. The problem IMO: Who is Christ in this scenario, if he is not in some way related to the revelation of the character of God in the law? In other words, we have to start with the inferior revelation in order to understand the fulness of the revelation in Christ.

Paul's argument in Philippians starts out pointing the Philippians toward greater 'knowledge and depth of insight' (1:9). His intention in directing their attention to this is that they might discern what is best and may be pure and blameless ... filled with righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ (v10-11). In chapter 2, he gets at the heart of what this knowledge looks like: 'let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus' (2:5) and follows a hymn of some sort that moes along the line of Isaiah 53. Thus, what he is saying in chapter 3 is that the law observance that he was practicing, though making him blameless in terms of the mores and folkways that he and his fellow Jews understood, did not bring him to an understanding of Isaiah 53. Rather than giving himself to those who bruised him in order to bring about their healing, he murdered those who sought to follow the fulfillment of Isaiah's vision. This plagues him and drives him to undo what he had done by seeking to bring the Jew and the Gentile together in one community.

To move into the rest of your discussion:

Loren wrote:
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.

John:
Jumping over to Romans 7, I would see the same argument in this case though best understood by referring to the old Stoic argument that the body is full of trouble and must come under the subjection of the mind as the mind apprehends the good and the beautiful (i.e. Plato's Phaedo is a good example of this reasoning). The mind (called logistikon by Plato) connected to logos becomes dominant and the lower nature (called epiqumatikos by Plato in his Republic) comes into subjection. Paul came to see Christ as the manifestation of logos rather than the law since the law was weakened by the epiqumatikos or sarx.  That is the war of desires within the sarx twist the perception of the logos embodied in the Torah.

I would agree that Paul is looking backwards from the perspective of faith. However, I would define faith beyond the fideistic definition as a fact of Christ resurrection that is ascented to at the beginning of one's Christian experience.  Faith is the apprehension of a greater reality that is revealed in Christ and it is from the perspective of this advancement that he was able to experience through faith that Paul looks back at his experience under the law.

Loren:
>
> E.P. Sanders has expressed it the following way. If
> the Torah no longer provides the basis for salvation

John:
Let me just interject since I would  argue that Torah is an embodiment of knowledge and truth (Romans 2:20). For the thoughtful among the Greco-Romans law is a force within one's nature, the common lot of gods and men which enables a man to overcome the control of the gods through the apprehension of the 'golden cord of logos' (Plato) which lifts him above the control the gods formerly exercised over a man through his epiqumatikon.  The law of the state is an embodiment of this greater logos and, thus, inferior though a necessary device for bringing the polis together.

Loren:
> (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

John:
This appears to echoe the 'covenant of works' idea of English Calvinism viz a vis Adam is under probation in the covenant of works which he must keep perfectly and when he fails to do so he awaits the new covenant. I am not convinced that this is what Paul is arguing since the commandment is summed up in 'love your neighbor' and this can be done even by returning a cloak to the one who gave it as surety for a loan (i.e. 'it will be righteousness to you before the Lord your God' Deuteronomy 24:13). To anticipate your question du jour: The Covenant idea does make God malevolent since he obligates man to do what is a priori impossible. Whereas, Deuteronomy asserts that what was being commanded was 'not too difficult' (30:11).

Abraham is the one who is in view in chapter 3. It is because he will teach his sons cdqh and +&pt (Genesis 18:18) that God will be able to bring the promise into fruition. Torah is the embodiment of cdqh and +&pt, added for the same reason as the Greco- Roman posited logos was embodied in the common law of the state: because the foolish are turned aside from the logos through 'wicked habits.'  The embodiment of cdqh is inferior to the cdqh itself (BTW cdqh and +&pt are equated with the 'way of YHWH' in Genesis 18:18) and can easily be turned to the misuse that the Judaizers had turned it: Control of others through various rituals. Jesus, himself, criticized the Pharisees for tithing 'mint and and anise and cummin'  and omitting the 'weightier matters of the law, judgment [+&pt], mercy [cdqh], and faith': these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone' (Matthew 23:23).

Loren:
(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.

John:
Yes, it is but I do not think that is Paul's argument. The blessing is a function of Abraham's adherance to the 'way of YHWH' viz a vis cdqh and +&pt which is later embodied in law. The Torah becomes the righteousness of Israel (Deuteronomy 6:25) in that as they fulfill it when the opportunity arises (i.e. Deuteronomy 24:13 returning a cloak taken as surety for a loan), they are accounted righteous before God. When they, rather, oppress the weak and the poor, the break the covenant in that particular instance and become subject to the curse of the covenant. There is an absolute relationship between the cdqh and +&pt of the Torah and the blessing/cursing of the Torah which cannot be annulled. Those who enter into the death of Christ (Philippians 3:9), are those who fulfill the Torah and, thus, become heirs of the blessing.

Loren:
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).

John:
I have argued above that this is better understood in terms of Stoic thought: that the body is a world of evil (i.e. epiqumatikon) that must become tamed through the connection of the logistikon (mind) with the logos. When logistikon is disconnected from logos, epiqumatikon becomes increasingly dominant. The gods control a man through these epiqumia as a puppeteer controls a puppet.

Loren:
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).

John:
I would argue that Paul better understood the relationship between the law and Christ as a result of his rubbing shoulders with the wise among the Gentiles who had the whole matter of the relationship between logos, logismatikon and dike worked out and argued out from the 6th Century BCE. The Jew was content to hide under the ritual of Torah while the Gentile sought to understand the logos embodied in nomos.

Loren:
> > 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)

John:
Though I am not directly familiar with the argument of Sanders or Esler (and I don't want to dismiss them a priori), I would argue from your summary that they are assuming that Christ fulfills the requirement of the law for the believer viz a vis Anslem's argument in his Cur Deus Homo. For Anselm, man was created to enjoy a happy immortality but is prevented from so doing because he cannot fulfill the justice of God; thus, Christ comes to satisfy the divine justice.

It is interesting that Anselm was a Platonist; yet, he posits that justice is a matter of satisfying God's justice through a surrogate which Plato posited only fostered injustice. Also, whereas Plato saw that happiness was the result of becoming just even though this meant that one must suffer as the divine benefactor Prometheus suffered for his justice; Anselm, argues that happiness is unattainable because we are unable to do what is required: We await a happy immortality.

Loren:
>
> (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?

John:
To get back to Galatians 2:19, Paul's death to the law is his death to his ability to do what the law required in order for the blessing to be realized. Whatever he did as a Jew was above what was expected in the normative system that was posited in Second Temple Judaism; yet, this very same 'righteousness' moved him to kill those who followed the realization of the prophetic expectation. This is what perplexed Paul and the reason why he sought to help the Gentile understand the danger of coming under the dominion of those who did not understand the limitation of the embodiment of justice. Christ is the fulness of the Godhead whose way the law embodied. For the Gentile to follow Christ's law: 'love your neighbor as yourself' would bring him into the blessing of the covenant whereas the keeping of food customs, would only keep him out and under the curse of the law.


John Brand
B.A. Bib Stu (Providence College, Otterburne, MB, Canada, 1980)
M.Min. (Providence Seminary, 1991)
jbrand AT gvsd.mb.ca



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