5 Sin in Paul. Douglas J. Moo
DOUGLAS J. MOO
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. —Ephesians 2:1–31
This passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (2:1–3) touches on many of the most important aspects of sin that Paul wants to communicate to us. Sin, Paul notes, is endemic to life on this earth: people “live in” it. Sin involves, fundamentally, an obsessive concern with one’s own interests and pleasures: humans are engaged in “gratifying the cravings of our flesh.” Human sin is part of a bigger picture, enmeshed in a nexus of evil: people who sin follow “the ways of this world” and are under the influence of “the ruler of the kingdom of the air.” And sin has consequences: people who sin are “dead” and “deserving of wrath.” Finally, as the temporal focus of these verses suggests—“you were dead”; “you used to live”; “at one time”; “we were by nature deserving of wrath”—this life under the dominion of sin is past for the believer. Paul goes on to say, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ” (vv. 4–5a). The terrible reality of sin is the setting that explains what God has done for us in Christ. Indeed, there is a close reciprocating relationship between sin and salvation: salvation takes the form it does precisely because of the nature of the sin problem; and the sin problem is rightly understood only in light of the form that God’s salvation has taken.
In his groundbreaking 1977 monograph Paul and Palestinian Judaism, E. P. Sanders famously argued that Paul’s theological reasoning moved “from solution to plight.” In contrast to many popular perceptions, Sanders maintained, the pre-Christian Paul did not struggle with sin, seeking a solution to his plight that he discovered in Christ. Rather, he was confronted, suddenly and surprisingly, with the reality of the resurrected Christ, a reality from which all his theological reasoning proceeds. Convinced that the “solution” was the good news of God’s intervention on behalf of humanity in Christ, Paul was then forced to reflect on the kind of “plight” that might have led to this solution. Having come to the conviction that a crucified Messiah was the means through whom God acted to provide salvation for both Israel and the world, Paul would have engaged in a thorough reassessment of his own Jewish experience and, eventually, the nature of humanity’s problem. Sanders’s “solution to plight” analysis of Paul’s theology has been widely accepted. Du Toit, for instance, claims that “Paul’s personal experience of grace led him to a new hamartiology.”2 However, the “solution-to-plight” reading of Paul’s theology has not gone unchallenged.3 Among other points, it is certainly likely that the pre-Christian Paul, like virtually any self-reflective religious person, would occasionally have reflected on his failure to live up to the standards of his faith. Nevertheless, passages such as Philippians 3:2–11 do indeed suggest that Paul was a pretty self-satisfied Jew, confident in his standing with God provided by “the righteousness of the law.” For him personally, “solution” probably did precede “plight.”
However, the direction of Paul’s experience need not be the direction of his theological argument. Of course Paul’s letters, being the occasional documents that they are, do not usually furnish us with clear evidence of the sequence of his theological argument. The clues they do contain suggest variety in the sequence of Paul’s theological reasoning. Whatever the sequence, however, it is clear that Paul engages in significant, if not always systematic, reflection on the nature of the human predicament. In this chapter, I survey the main lines of Paul’s teaching about this predicament, what we usually call simply “sin.” I begin with a brief discussion of the key terminology before analyzing more generally the nature of sin and the various forms that it takes. As I have noted with reference to the text from Ephesians above, Paul sets sin in a wider “environment” of evil, a matter that I discuss in the next section of the chapter. Sin, Paul makes clear, has consequences; and those consequences are the focus of the next part of this chapter. I conclude with a brief overview of the Christian’s relationship to sin. I will be focusing especially on the letter to the Romans, because by far the most extensive Pauline commentary on sin comes in this, his most significant theological contribution.
The Vocabulary of Sin
Paul signals the importance of sin for his theology by the number of different words that he deploys for the concept. Most of these words denote specific sins—e.g., “greed” or “covetousness” (pleonexia), “murder” (phonos), “drunkenness” (methē). While these words for specific forms of sin help us to understand the nature and many facets of sin in Paul, our focus here is on the twenty or so words that Paul uses to denote sin in general. Four words, or word-groups, deserve special mention.
“Sin”/“commit sin”/“sinful”/“sinner” (hamartia and harmatēma, hamartanō, hamartōlos). This word-group occurs ninety times in Paul’s letters, with fully two-thirds of the occurrences (sixty) found in Romans. The relevant Greek words regularly translate words from the most significant word for sin in the Hebrew Old Testament, the verb 
and its corresponding noun, 
4 The word-group in Greek has the basic sense of “missing a target” (a point often heard in preaching about sin!).5 In fact, however, it is doubtful if the word’s etymology plays any role in Paul’s conception of sin. Paul rarely uses the noun hamartia in the plural, preferring the singular. We will consider below the importance of this pattern for Paul’s teaching about sin. A representative text is Romans 3:9: “What then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin [hyph’ hamartian]” (my translation).
“Trespass” (paraptōma). Paul uses this word fifteen times, nine of them in Romans (other New Testament writers use it four times total). The root idea of the word is “falling by the way,” although (again) it is doubtful that its etymology holds significance for Paul’s usage. Paul uses the word to refer to sin in general. See, for example, Ephesians 1:7: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins [paraptōmatōn], in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”
“Desire”/“passion” (epithymia). This word can have a neutral meaning in Paul (Phil. 1:23) but usually denotes some kind of illicit desire or the “passions” that characterize human beings outside of Christ (nineteen times in Paul). (We might mention here also two related words that are often connected with epithymia, both usually translated “passion” or “passions”: pathos and pathēmos—used together five times with reference to sin in Paul.) See 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee the evil desires [epithymiais] of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.”
“Transgression” (parabasis) and “transgressor” (parabatēs), while not used that often by Paul (five and three occurrences, respectively), are significant pointers to an important aspect of sin in Paul: disobedience to the commands of God. Every occurrence of these words in Paul has this nuance, a nuance that bears significantly on the meaning of the texts in which they occur. See, for example, Romans 4:15b: “And where there is no law there is no transgression.”
The many other words that Paul uses to describe sin are important indicators of his understanding of sin. Several of these stress the negative, being formed by a base word with the prefix a- added. This Greek alpha functions much like our prefixes “un-” or “dis-” in English. Thus sin can be characterized as “unrighteousness” (adikia [twelve times]; see also adikos, “unrighteous” [two times]), “disobedience” (apetheia and the corresponding verb apetheiō [nine times]; see also parakoē [two times]), “uncleanness” (akatharsia [nine times]), “lawless” (anomos [six times]), “godlessness” (asebeia [four times]; cf. asebēs, “ungodly” [three times]), “unbelief”/“unfaithfulness” (apistia [five times]; cf. apisteuō, “disbelieve”/“to be unfaithful” [two times]), “ignorance” (agnoia [one time]). Other words denoting sin in general in Paul are “error” (planē [four times]), “vanity”/“futility” (mataiotēs [two times]; cf. mataioomai, “become futile” [one time]), “lie” (pseusma [one time]; cf. pseustēs, “liar” [one time]), “to stumble” (proskoptō [two times]), and “to cause to stumble” (skandalizō [two times]). In addition, of course, Paul uses a number of phrases to express the idea of sin, such as “[doing] what is evil” (Rom. 13:4 NASB), “deeds of darkness” (Rom. 13:12), and “do not obey the gospel” (2 Thess. 1:8).
Two observations about this survey are worth mentioning. First, Paul’s use of so many different words to refer to sin in its basic sense suggests how important the topic was for him and how many dimensions sin has. Second, the concentration of words describing sin in Romans is quite remarkable. No other letter of Paul even comes close to the level of focus on sin and its consequences that Romans does.
The Nature of Sin
Sin as Power
The many words that Paul uses to describe sin suggest the manifold forms that sin takes in human experience. Humans have discovered an astonishing number of ways to manifest their estrangement from their creator. But Paul’s focus is often more on the fundamental fact of sin and its implications for humans than on its variety. This focus is reflected especially in Romans, where forty-eight of the sixty-four Pauline occurrences of hamartia occur. Of these forty-eight, forty-five are in the singular (and two of the three plurals come in OT quotes: 4:7 [= Ps. 31:1]; 11:27 [= Isa. 27:9]; see also 7:5). (By way of contrast, only seven of the sixteen occurrences of hamartia in the other Pauline letters are in the singular.) Moreover, Paul attributes quasi-personal powers to “sin”: it “reigns” (5:20; cf. 6:13, 14), can be “obeyed” (6:16–17), pays wages (6:23), seizes opportunity (7:8, 11), “deceives,” and “kills” (7:11, 13). Some interpreters think that this language suggests that Paul views sin as an evil spiritual power, a kind of demon.6 But this would be to mistake personification for personalization. Paul attributes personal qualities to sin in order vividly to picture the power and devastating effects of human sin in the lives of human beings. He shows that individual acts of sin constitute a principle, or network, of sin that is so pervasive and dominant that the person’s destiny is determined by those actions. In doing so, he follows Old Testament precedent, which also pictures sin as a power: it is “crouching at your door; it desires to have you” (Gen. 4:7).
Paul’s point in appropriating this language is to make clear just what the human predicament really is. In a key summary statement, Paul claims that “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin.” Paul does not say that all people “commit sins,” as if doing things contrary to God’s will was just an occasional problem. Nor does he even say that all people are “sinners”—suggesting that sin is a pervasive problem. Rather, he says that all people are “under the power of sin.” Paul uses this kind of language to speak of a situation of domination, even slavery. See, for instance, Galatians 3:22: “But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin [literally, “held prisoner under sin”], so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe” (and see also Rom. 6:14, 15; 7:14; 1 Cor. 9:20; Gal. 3:23, 25; 4:2–5, 9, 21; Eph. 1:22). The NIV’s “under the power of sin” in Romans 3:9 therefore appropriately brings out the force of the Greek hyph’ hamartian. For Paul, the human plight is not that people commit sins, or even that they are in the habit of committing sins. The problem is that people are helpless prisoners of sin.
The power that sin holds over humans is vital in understanding Paul’s view of sin and has direct bearing on his view of the solution that God has provided in Christ. Paul, in line with Scripture generally, views humans as addicted to sin. They are imprisoned under it, unable to free themselves by anything they can do. Knowing this, God has sent to us not a teacher or a politician but a liberator—one who has the power to set us free from our sins (this idea is suggested by the language of “redemption” in Rom. 3:24). When we really see the people all around us—at work, in our neighborhoods, at the store—as helpless captives of sin, we will be better motivated to help them find the liberator who alone can rescue them from their captivity. Only Jesus Christ, proclaimed in the gospel, can break through the walls of sin that imprison human beings.
Sin and the Law
Another important facet of Paul’s presentation of sin is its relationship to God’s law. Much of Paul’s theology, especially in Romans, where Paul says so much about sin, revolves around the meaning and significance of the law. We are not surprised, then, to find that Paul focuses quite a bit on the way that sin and the law interact. He makes three basic points.
First, Paul makes clear that sin’s power means that the law cannot liberate humans from the power and consequences of sin. “No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law,” affirms Paul (Rom. 3:20). This is not the place to enter into the contentious matter of the meaning of “works of the law.” Suffice to say here that the phrase probably refers generally to obedience to the Mosaic law and, as the Reformers recognized, by extension to anything that humans beings do: their “works” in general.7 Obedience to law in any form cannot put a human being in right relationship with God. Nor can obedience to law enable humans to conquer sin’s power in their lives. However we identify the person whose experience Paul relates in Romans 7:7–25, this much is clear: the law, because it was given to humans already locked up under sin’s power, cannot liberate human beings from the lifestyle of sin (see Rom. 8:3: “what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh”).
Second, in keeping with the Old Testament, sin can be defined as disobedience to the law. As we have noted, parabasis (see also the cognate parabatēs) is a technical word denoting “transgression” of a commandment or of the law. Paul’s description of sinners as “lawless” evokes the same idea (see esp. 1 Tim. 1:9). Several occurrences of the language of “disobedience” also have the law of God in view. This particular aspect of sin typifies the initial human sin, Paul suggests: Adam sinned “by breaking a command” (Rom. 5:14, as the NIV translates the noun parabasis here; the same point is made with respect to Eve in 1 Tim. 2:14: she “became a transgressor” [my translation]). The law of Moses that God gave to Israel parallels in a certain basic sense the commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve in the garden (see esp. Rom. 5:13–14). We might expect, then, that Paul would also define sin as violation of the law of Moses. He speaks in these terms especially in Romans 2:17–29, where he argues that the genuine privileges that God gave to Israel have not been of ultimate benefit to the Jews because of their repeated failure to do the law. But Paul goes beyond this fairly obvious point to make another, more controversial one.
The law not only defines sin, Paul argues—it also exacerbates it. Sin’s co-opting of God’s law for its own purposes, says Paul, has enabled sin to be seen as “utterly sinful” (Rom. 7:13). While debated, it is this “catalytic” effect of the law that Paul probably also has in view when he claims that through the law is knowledge of sin (3:20) and that the law enabled Paul to know what sin was (Rom. 7:7; see also 1 Cor. 15:56).8 This perspective on the effect of the law in salvation history also explains Romans 4:15: “. . . the law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression.” The key to understanding this text is the technical sense of “transgression” (parabasis) that we have noted above. The last sentence in this verse reflects this basic meaning of the word for Paul: only where some kind of law is present can one speak of “transgression.” All transgression is sin, but not all sin is transgression. One can sin apart from an express command or prohibition from God. What Paul is saying in this context in Romans 4, then, is that the coming of the law into the history of salvation did not rescue Israel from her plight. Indeed, quite the opposite: by spelling out in detail the demands of God to his people, God raised their level of accountability, rendering their inevitable disobedience even worse than in the absence of that law. While it is debated, it is probably just this point that Paul is making in Romans 7:7–25. And the same idea is arguably found in two other texts, Romans 5:20 and Galatians 3:19. In the former, Paul acknowledges that the law came into the situation of sin and death that Adam’s original sin had created. The law did not, however, ameliorate the situation; rather, Paul affirms that “the law was brought in that the trespass might increase.” Just how the law “increased” the trespass is debated; but it is likely that Paul is thinking here again of the way that the law, in its specificity, served to increase the seriousness of the trespass. Galatians 3:19 is likewise debated: the law “was added because of transgressions.” The Greek word translated “because of” (charin) could mean “because of the need to deal with transgressions” or “in order to stimulate transgressions.” The latter is slightly to be preferred because Paul uses here again the word for sin as “disobedience to a law” (parabasis). The law was given by God in order to make manifest the true nature and utter seriousness of sin, pointing all the more clearly to the need for a radical solution to deal with the problem of sin.
The Essence of Sin
When discussing the relationship of sin and the law, then, Paul takes the standard Old Testament and Jewish view that the law can serve to define sin and that sin can often be seen specifically as violation of God’s commandments. But he is particularly concerned to go beyond these views to show how the law of God is itself incapable of solving the sin problem. In making this point, Paul is saying nothing that the Old Testament itself does not say. But he needs to insist on this point again and again in response to a tendency among Jews in his day to view the giving of God’s law to Israel as itself the solution to their problem. Implicit in Paul’s argument on this point is his understanding of the extent of sin’s power over human beings. Showing people what is right—teaching them the law of God—while an obvious good in itself, will not liberate people from the power of sin.
While the Jewish context in which Paul was setting forth his theology demanded that he spend quite a lot of time talking about the relationship of sin and the law, it would be a mistake to give the law too much importance in Paul’s theology of sin. Following the Old Testament,9 Paul ultimately defines sin not in relationship to the law but in relationship to God. The justly famous summary claim of Romans 3:23 makes this point: “. . . all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The second verb elaborates the first: sin consists in the failure to live in accordance with the nature of God, stated as so often in Scripture in terms of his “glory.” Similar in emphasis is the quotation from Psalm 36:1 that climaxes the series of Old Testament quotations through which Paul grounds his claim that all are under sin (Rom. 3:10b–18; cf. v. 9): “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Romans 1:18–32 makes the same point. Paul focuses in this passage on the state of human beings in general as they confront the evidence of God’s person and nature in the world that he has made (vv. 19–20).10 At the end of the passage, Paul enumerates, in the longest “vice list” in the New Testament, the many ways in which sin is manifested among humans (vv. 29–31). Following Jewish precedent (see esp. Wisdom 14–15), Paul also notes how humans in general have fallen into serious sexual sin (Rom. 1:25–27). But giving rise to all these sins is the decision of humans to turn away from God and to embrace idols of their own making (v. 23)—just as the Israelites did when they fashioned a golden calf to worship (1 Cor. 10:7; cf. Exodus 32). Their basic sin is personal: they refuse to glorify God or to give thanks to him (Rom. 1:21). In Paul’s day idolatry often took the very specific form of making images that people would worship in place of the God of the Bible. But the essence of idolatry, of course, is putting anything or anyone in the place of primary allegiance that only God deserves to have.11 Idolatry is manifested in an infinite variety of ways in our day: pursuing money or power or sex—or yes, even photography, one of my own interests!—in place of God.
Sin and Sins
Paul’s focus on sin as a power that rules over humans apart from Christ does not mean that he ignores the many ways in which sin manifests itself. It is not possible, or necessary, to enumerate here all the specific sins that Paul identifies in the course of his letters. Nowhere does Paul attempt any kind of systematic listing or categorization of sins. But he regularly castigates three general sins: greed or self-indulgence, inappropriate sexual relations, and harmful or negligent speech.
Paul mentions greed, or covetousness, several times (Eph. 4:19; 5:3, 5; Col. 3:5; 1 Tim. 3:3, 8; 6:5–10, 17; 2 Tim 3:2; Titus 1:7, 11). Particularly striking is Colossians 3:5 (with a partial parallel in Eph. 5:5), where Paul concludes a list of sins with “greed” (pleonexia) and then claims that greed “is idolatry.” The identification of greed with idolatry has its roots in the Old Testament and has parallels in Judaism and in the New Testament. The Old Testament frequently sets wealth in competition with God as a source of security (e.g., Ps. 52:7; Prov. 10:15; Jer. 48:7). The Jewish philosopher/theologian Philo, a rough contemporary of Paul, claimed that the first commandment prohibits “money-lovers” (Spec. Laws 1.23). And the New Testament frequently highlights the love of material possessions as offering a particularly enticing and entrapping alternative to the love of God (e.g., Matt. 6:25–34; 1 Tim. 6:17; Heb. 13:5).12 Because greed is the inappropriate desire to accumulate more and more, it is a fundamental attitude that underlies and gives greater impetus to other sins (see Eph. 4:19).
Sex was in Paul’s day, as in ours, a form of behavior in which biblical standards clashed especially harshly with contemporary mores. We are not surprised then that he says so much about the matter to his Gentile converts (see esp. Rom. 1:24–27; 1 Cor. 5–6; Eph. 4:19; 5:3; 1 Thess. 4:3–6; 1 Tim. 1:10). As we have already noted, Paul follows Jewish precedent in identifying inappropriate sexual conduct as an especially clear indication of the way in which humans have turned from the worship of God (Rom. 1:24–27). In one of his first letters he reminds Gentile converts that their sanctification consists, especially and first of all, in their avoidance of “sexual immorality” (porneia; 1 Thess. 4:3). Paul provides no enumeration of specific sexual sins, although homosexual relationships are clearly included (Rom. 1:26–27; 1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10).13
Mentioned even more often than either greed or sex, however, are sins of speech (Eph. 4:25, 29; 5:4; Col. 3:8–9; 1 Tim. 1:6; 3:11; 5:13; 6:4; 2 Tim. 2:14, 16, 23; Titus 1:10; 2:3; 3:2, 9). One reason for the prominence of this form of sin was the situation that Paul was addressing: the Pastoral Epistles focus on this matter because the false teachers were occupying themselves with unfruitful and divisive speech. But Paul may also be following the same path that James takes, who famously draws attention to the way in which sin is especially manifested in speech (James 3:1–12).
It is also important to note that sin involves not just our actions; it is rooted in our very pattern of thinking. As we have seen, the sinful actions that humans commit (or the things that they sinfully fail to do) are the manifestation of a more fundamental condition—being “under sin.” And this condition, as we would expect, affects the mind. When people turned away from the knowledge of God, God “gave them over to a depraved mind” (Rom. 1:28). Their minds are hardened (2 Cor. 3:14); they are “darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them” (Eph. 4:18). They have a pattern of thinking, a mind-set, that is “set on earthly things” (Phil. 3:19; see Rom. 8:5–7). We should not be surprised, then, when non-Christians have trouble understanding things that seem very logical to us believers, such as that taking the life of a child in the womb is wrong or that labeling a homosexual union “marriage” is a fundamental category error. Non-Christians are incapable of thinking rightly about many such issues. A critical part of God’s new-covenant work, therefore, is the “renewing” of the mind (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23).
Since sin is basically the failure to honor God as God, it can also be described in terms of a failure to live up to the fundamental response that people are to make to God: faith. As we noted above, then, Paul can describe sin in terms of a failure to believe. Not believing is the root of other sins and of estrangement from God (Rom. 3:3; 4:20; 11:20, 23). Especially interesting is the claim that Paul makes in warning the strong in faith not to compel the weak in faith to act against their consciences: “everything that does not come from faith is sin” (14:23). Paul suggests here that sin can be relative to the believer’s own strength of conscience. Eating meat (14:3, 6) or drinking wine (v. 21) would not be sinful, Paul makes clear, for those whose faith is strong, for those who are convinced in Christ that it is not wrong to eat meat or to drink wine (v. 14). But these acts would be sinful for the Christian who has not yet been convinced that they are free in Christ to do them. The sin in this case would appear to be a disconnect between mind and act. Indirectly, then, Romans 14:23 testifies to the importance of the mind in Paul’s conception of sin.
The Larger Environment of Sin
In order fully to understand Paul’s teaching about sin, we must set it in the context of what we might call its “environment.” While an inescapably personal decision, sin is an act that flows from a nexus of relationships and from a specific context. Paul repeatedly focuses on three critical aspects to this environment of sin: the flesh, Adam, and the “powers.”
Flesh14
Sin is an inevitable aspect of the “the present evil age” from which Christ redeemed his people (Gal. 1:4). One of the words that Paul most often associates with this old realm, and therefore with sin as well, is “flesh” (sarx). This is one of the most difficult words in Paul’s theological vocabulary. The complexity of Paul’s use of this word is reflected in the NIV, where twenty-eight different words or phrases are used to translate sarx (and the NIV is no outlier here; every other modern English Bible displays a similar pattern). As Anthony Thiselton has pointed out, sarx in Paul is a “polymorphous concept,” and its meaning is very much context dependent.15 The large number of different renderings of sarx in the NIV simply reflects this fact. Many scholars and lexicographers have attempted to categorize Paul’s uses of sarx. For the sake of the argument of this chapter, five basic senses can be distinguished. The most basic meaning of sarx, and the most common in secular Greek, is (1) “the material that covers the bones of a human or animal body.”16 Paul occasionally uses the word with this sense. The clearest is 1 Corinthians 15:39: “Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another” (see also Eph. 2:11; Col. 2:13; cf. Gal. 6:13). Following precedents in secular Greek, Paul also (2) applies sarx to the human body as whole: e.g., 2 Corinthians 7:1: “Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body [sarx] and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (see also 1 Cor. 5:5[?]; 6:16; 2 Cor. 12:7; Gal. 4:13; Eph. 5:31). But more often, Paul (3) uses sarx to refer not to the human body narrowly but to the human being generally. First Corinthians 1:28–29 illustrates this use of the word: “God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one [sarx] may boast before him” (see also 1 Cor. 1:29; Gal. 1:16; 2:16). This sense of the word merges almost imperceptibly into a bit broader concept: (4) the human state or condition. While debated, 1 Corinthians 10:18, where Paul refers to Israel kata sarka (“according to the flesh”), probably falls into this category. Finally, in a usage that is distinctively (though not uniquely) Pauline, sarx can (5) designate the human condition in its fallenness. As Timo Laato has neatly put it, the difference between meanings (4) and (5) is the difference between the human being in distinction from God and the human being in contrast to God.17 The latter is often called the “ethical” use of sarx, in contrast to the “neutral” use of its meaning (4).18 A clear example of the “ethical” use is Gal. 5:16–17: “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh [sarx]. For the flesh [sarx] desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh [sarx]. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.” This sense of sarx is quite common in Paul (anywhere from twenty-five to thirty occurrences, depending on how one interprets several notoriously difficult texts).
In what we have said about Paul’s use of sarx thus far, we have followed the traditional distinction between Paul’s “neutral” and “ethical” uses of the term. James D. G. Dunn, however, has called into question this distinction. He argues that the meanings of sarx in Paul do not fall into separate, watertight categories but occupy a spectrum of meaning. In contrast to scholars who suggest that Paul may have derived his more neutral sense of sarx from the Old Testament and Jewish world and the more negative sense from the Greek world, Dunn, along with many others before him, traces the spectrum of Paul’s usage to the Hebrew bsr, with its sense of “human mortality.”19 One implication of this conclusion is that a certain negative nuance often clings to sarx even when Paul uses it in apparently neutral senses. Dunn has a point, as several texts make clear (Rom. 1:3–4; 4:1; 9:5, 8; Gal. 4:23, 29).
The tendency to use “flesh” in this negative way, it must be emphasized, distances this word from Paul’s use of “body.” To be sure, Paul can sometimes suggest that sin is rooted in our bodily existence (see esp. Rom. 6:6; 8:13, 23). But he says this simply to remind us that our bodies in this life, unredeemed as they are, can become the platform for sin. In a point that follows biblical precedent and that differs fundamentally from the typical Greco-Roman viewpoint (and the tendency toward dualism in many forms of thinking since Paul’s day), the body, Paul affirms, is destined for resurrection. We will live forever in bodies. Sin in Paul is not, then, tied inescapably to life in the body. He therefore makes clear that ascetic practices—the “denial” of the body and its natural functions—in themselves have no power to conquer our sinful tendencies (Col. 2:23).
For our purposes, what is especially important is to trace the connection between “flesh” and human sin. The natural human condition is to be “in the flesh,” to be fundamentally determined by the perspective of this world, in contrast to the world to come. And sin is the inevitable result of this condition. We are people who, by virtue of our belonging to this world, are governed by the flesh, “gratifying” its cravings and “following its desires and thoughts” (Eph. 2:3). The natural person therefore cannot please God (Rom. 8:8); he or she sins and dies (7:5), thinking and acting as a person who takes no account of the divine realm (8:4–7). Christians, because they are still in this world, must strive to avoid falling into such patterns of thought and activity (8:12–13; 13:14).
Adam20
In Romans 1:18–32, Paul strongly implies that all people have participated in the fatal turn from God to idols that he chronicles in these verses. The universality of sin becomes explicit in chapter 3: “Jews and Gentiles alike are under the power of sin” (v. 9); “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (v. 23). But Paul reserves his explanation for the universality of sin (and death, which follows on sin) until chapter 5, in his famous comparison between Adam and Christ (vv. 12–21). These verses highlight Christ’s power as the “second Adam” who more than reverses the dire consequences of the first Adam’s sin to ensure that those in him will have eternal life (vv. 20–21). The basic building block of the paragraph is a “just as . . . so also” comparison. Paul introduces this comparison in verse 12 but never completes it (most English versions, like the NIV, signal the break with a dash at the end of the verse). But he resumes the comparison and finally completes it in verses 18–19.
The fact that Paul attributes to Adam this sin is significant since he certainly knows from Genesis that the woman, Eve, sinned first (cf. 2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:14). Already we see that Adam is being given a status in salvation history that is not tied only to temporal priority.
Paul’s claim that “sin entered the world through one man” would have been nothing new to anyone who knew his or her Old Testament or Jewish tradition. Nor would his second assertion in this verse: “. . . and death through sin [came into the world].” The unbreakable connection between sin and death, made clear in Genesis 2–3, was a staple of Jewish theology. But what does Paul mean by death here? He may refer to physical death only, since “death” in verse 14 seems to have this meaning. But the passage goes on to contrast death with eternal life (v. 21). Moreover, in verses 16 and 18 Paul uses “condemnation” in the same way that he uses “death” here. These points suggest that Paul is referring to “spiritual” death: the estrangement from God that is a result of sin and that, if not healed through Christ, will lead to “eternal” death. In fact, however, we are not forced to make a choice between these options. Paul frequently uses “death” and related words to designate a “physio-spiritual entity” of “total death,” the penalty incurred for sin. Here, then, Paul may focus on physical death as the evidence, the outward manifestation of this total death; or, better, he may simply have in mind this death in both its physical and spiritual aspects.
As verse 12b depicts the entrance of death as the consequence of sin, verse 12c makes explicit that this death has spread to every single person. Paul connects this assertion to the first part of verse 12 with “in this way” (houtōs). He is drawing a comparison between the manner in which death came into the world through sin and the manner in which death spread to everyone also through sin. Verse 12 then is a neatly balanced chiasm:
A sin (12a) produces
B death (12b);
B all die (12c)
A' because all sin (12d).
If this reading of the structure of the verse is right, then verse 12d has the purpose of showing that death is universal because sin is universal: “all sinned.” This means, in turn, that we are giving the opening words of this last clause (ephʾ hō) a causal meaning. This is the meaning adopted by most commentators and by almost all English translations. But it is not the only possible rendering. Perhaps the most famous alternative is the translation “in whom,” adopted by Augustine and by a few others. In that case, assuming that “the one man” is the antecedent of the pronoun, we have an explicit statement of “original sin”: “in Adam all sinned.” But this interpretation, and others that rest on a similar grammatical basis, is unlikely. The two words in the Greek phrase probably function together as a conjunction. The phrase may then mean “from which it follows,” “with the result that,” “inasmuch as,” or “because.” The last suggestion is by far the most popular among modern scholars, although the evidence in its favor is not nearly as strong as some suggest. Nevertheless, this is the meaning the phrase almost certainly has in 2 Corinthians 5:4 and probably also in Philippians 3:12 (it almost certainly does not in Phil. 4:10), and it is the meaning that fits best in the context here.
Paul, then, has shown that the entrance of death into the world through the sin of Adam has led to death for all people; all people die, Paul asserts, because all people “sinned.” In a sense, then, Paul’s focus in this verse, and throughout the passage, is not with “original sin,” but with “original death.” Paul says nothing explicitly about how the sin of one man, Adam, has resulted in death for everyone; nor has he made clear the connection if any between Adam’s sin (v. 12a) and the sin of all people (v. 12d). What he has made clear is that the causal nexus between sin and death, exhibited in the case of Adam, has repeated itself in the case of every human being. No one, Paul makes clear, escapes the reign of death, because no one escapes the power of sin.
But we cannot stop here. For the fact that Paul in this verse asserts the universality of sin (v. 12d) after mentioning the responsibility of Adam in unleashing sin in the world forces us to ask the question: What is the relationship between Adam’s sin and ours? Or, to put it another way, why do all people without exception sin? This question is made even more insistent by Paul’s focus on the sin of Adam as the reason for universal condemnation in verses 18–19. How is it that the sin of Adam led to the condemnation of all people? These questions force us to look more carefully at just what Paul means in verse 12d when he asserts that “all sinned.”
At first sight, this question would appear easy to answer. Paul certainly uses the verb “sin” regularly to denote voluntary sinful acts committed by individuals; and this is what most commentators think that this same word, in the same tense as is used here (aorist), designates in 3:23: that all people, “in their own persons,” commit sins. Probably a majority of contemporary scholars interpret 5:12d, then, to assert that the death of each person (v. 12c) is directly caused by that person’s own individual sinning. The question is then how this “individual” explanation of death is to be squared with the “corporate” explanation of the universality of death in verse 12a–b and, with even greater emphasis, in verses 15–19. In other words, how can we logically relate the assertions “each person dies because each person sins [in the course of history]” and “one [man’s] trespass resulted in condemnation for all people” (v. 18a)?
First, we could posit an unresolved tension between the individual and the corporate emphases.21 Paul in verse 12 asserts that all people die because they sin on their own account; and in verses 18–19 he claims that they die because of Adam’s sin. Paul does not resolve these two perspectives; and we do wrong to try to force a resolution that Paul himself never made. Now it is certainly the case that we can err by insisting that a text give us answers to all our questions about a topic or (still worse) by foisting on a biblical author theological categories that do not fit that author’s teaching. But we can also fail to do our job by failing to pursue reasonable harmonizations that the author may assume or intend. So we think it is legitimate to ask whether Paul suggests any resolution of the tension between individual and Adamic responsibility for sin in this text.
One popular explanation holds that Paul assumes a “middle term” in the connection between Adam’s sin and the condemnation of all human beings: a corrupted human nature.22 Verse 12d refers, indeed, to sins committed by individuals in the course of history but as the necessary result of a corrupt nature inherited from Adam. Death, then, is due immediately to the sinning of each individual but ultimately to the sin of Adam; for it was Adam’s sin that corrupted human nature and made individual sinning inevitable.23 This view has much in its favor: it retains the “normal” meaning of “sin” in verse 12 while explaining at the same time how Paul could assert that Adam’s sin brings condemnation upon all (vv. 18–19). It also explains why all people act contrary to the will of God: there is a fatal, God-resisting bent in all people, inherited from Adam (Adam as fallen, not as created). For this reason alone most theologians have assumed the necessity of some such view of the effects of Adam’s sin. Nevertheless, we may question whether this is what Paul means in verse 12d. The most serious objection is that this interpretation requires us to supply the crucial “middle term” in the argument: Adam’s having and passing on a corrupt nature. For in each case where Adam’s sin and the death of all are related, the relationship is stated directly: “many died by the trespass of the one man” (v. 15a); “the judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation” (v. 16b); “by the trespass of the one man, death reigned” (v. 17a); “one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people” (v. 18a). In the view we are examining, these statements must be expanded to mean “one man’s trespass resulted in the corruption of human nature, which caused all people to sin, and so brought condemnation on all people.” While it is possible that Paul would want us to assume these additions, he has given us little basis for doing so.
If, then, we are to read verse 12d in light of verses 18–19, “all sinned” must be given some kind of “corporate” meaning: “sinning” not as voluntary acts of sin in “one’s own person,” but sinning “in and with” Adam. This is not to adopt the translation “in Adam” rejected above. The point is rather that the sin attributed to the “all” is to be understood, in the light of verses 12a–c and 15–19, as a sin that in some manner is identical to the sin committed by Adam. Paul can therefore say both “all die because all sin” and “all die because Adam sinned” with no hint of conflict, because the sin of Adam is the sin of all. All people, therefore, stand condemned “in Adam,” guilty by reason of the sin all committed “in him.” This interpretation is defended by a great number of exegetes and theologians. It maintains the close connection between Adam’s sin and the condemnation of all that is required by verse 15–19, a connection suggested also by 1 Corinthians 15:22: “in Adam all die.” And a sin committed before individual consciousness also explains how Paul could consider all people as “by nature deserving of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). The major problem with this view is, of course, whether it is the most natural way to read verse 12d. While Paul does not make explicit a connection with Adam’s sin in this clause, the parallel created by Paul (“and in this way”) between the entrance into the world of sin and death (v. 12a–b) and the spread of death to all people (v. 12c) makes it possible to argue that the causes of these phenomena—the sin of the “one man” and the sin of “all”—are also closely related.
We must admit that the case for interpreting “all sinned” in verse 12d as meaning “all people sinned in and with Adam” rests almost entirely on the juxtaposition of verse 12 with verses 18–19. And maybe we should not force this combination when Paul himself did not explicitly do so. But one further point inclines us to think that Paul may, indeed, have been thinking along these lines: the popularity of conceptions of corporate solidarity in the Jewish world of Paul’s day. This notion, rooted in the Old Testament, held that actions of certain individuals could have a representative character, being regarded as, in some sense, the actions of many other individuals at the same time. I think that there is good reason to suppose that Paul adopted such a concept as a fruitful way of explaining the significance in salvation history of both Adam and Christ. For Paul, Adam, like Christ, was a corporate figure whose sin could be regarded at the same time as the sin of all his descendants.
Of course, this interpretation of Romans 5 raises a serious question: the question of fairness. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it bluntly: “It is impossible for me to be held jointly responsible as though I were a joint cause for an act that another did many generations ago and in a situation radically different from mine.”24 Various theological and philosophical constructs can offer more or less help in answering this question, but no explanation ultimately removes the problem. “Original sin” remains an “offense to reason.”25 On the other hand, some such doctrine is necessary to explain the fact of universal sin and evil. Pascal in a famous passage put it like this:
Original sin is foolishness to men, but it is admitted to be such. You must not then reproach me for the want of reason in this doctrine, since I admit it to be without reason. But this foolishness is wiser than all the wisdom of men. For without this, what can we say that man is? His whole state depends on this imperceptible point. And how should it be perceived by his reason, since it is a thing against reason, and since reason, far from finding it out by her own ways, is averse to it when it is presented to her?26
The folly, degradation, and hatred that are the chief characteristics of human history demand an explanation. Why do people so consistently turn from good to evil of all kinds? Paul affirms in this passage that human solidarity in the sin of Adam is the explanation. Whether we explain this solidarity in terms of sinning in and with Adam or because of a corrupt nature inherited from him does not matter at this point. In any case, this biblical explanation for universal human sinfulness appears to explain the data of history and experience as well as, or better than, any rival theory.
Sin in Paul, then, while a matter of individual choice—a choice for which humans are justly held accountable (see Rom. 1:21)—is also a matter of necessity rooted in one’s solidarity with Adam.
The Powers
A third important part of the human environment related to sin is the presence and influence of the “powers,” evil spiritual beings. Paul uses a variety of terms to refer to these beings: “angels” (angeloi; see Rom. 8:38); “authorities” (exousiai; see 1 Cor. 15:24; Eph. 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:10, 15); “ruler/s” (1 Cor. 15:24; Eph. 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:18; 2:10, 15); “powers” (dynameis; see Rom. 8:38; 1 Cor. 15:24; Eph. 1:21; also kyriotētes; see Eph 1:21; Col 1:16); “thrones” (thrōnai; see Col. 1:16).27 Following the Old Testament, Paul also refers to a spiritual being who is particularly involved in tempting humans to abandon God and follow the way of sin: the “devil” (diabolos; see Eph. 4:27; 6:11; 1 Tim. 3:6, 7; 2 Tim. 2:26) or “Satan” (Satanas; see Rom. 16:20; 1 Cor. 5:5; 7:5; 2 Cor. 2:11; 11:14; 12:7; 1 Thess. 2:18; 2 Thess. 2:9; 1 Tim. 1:20; 5:15). Paul makes clear just how great is the influence of Satan over this world and the humans who belong to it. He is “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4) and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient” (Eph. 2:2). The existence of spiritual beings of various sorts and their critical impact on the affairs of human beings were fundamental components of the ancient worldview. Translation of this emphasis into our culture is contested. On the one hand, the ancient worldview about the significance of spiritual beings for the affairs of this world is, in a fundamental sense at least, the biblical worldview as well. Spiritual powers, while defeated in Christ (Col. 2:15), are still active and powerful. Human sin, Paul makes clear, can often be traced to the influence of these beings. More contested is whether we are justified in finding reference in a text such as this one to the various structures, persons, and institutions through whom evil “powers” might be working today. On this view, the language of these texts can be applied to “unseen forces working in the world through pagan religion, astrology, or magic, or through the oppressive systems that enslaved or tyrannized human beings.”28
The Consequences of Sin
Sin, Paul teaches, affects the entire created world.
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Rom. 8:19–22)
This passage makes no direct reference to human sin. But Paul clearly has the story of Genesis 3 in view here; “the one who subjected [creation]” is clearly God, and his subjection must be the curse that he pronounces on “the ground” (Gen. 3:17). The “creation” that Paul has in view here, as most interpreters recognize, is the “subhuman” creation. Following the lead of psalmists and prophets (e.g., Ps. 65:12–13; Isa. 24:4; Jer. 4:28; 12:4), Paul personifies the world of nature in order to portray its “fall” and anticipated glory. Human sin, Paul is affirming, has led to some kind of change in the nature of the cosmos itself. It has been subject, Paul says, to “frustration” or “vanity”; the Greek word suggests that creation has been unable to attain the purpose for which it was created. The natural world itself has been affected in some way by the human fall into sin and is therefore no longer in its pristine created state. Human sin has affected the state of nature itself—and will continue to do so until the end of this age. But if creation has suffered the consequences of human sin, it will also enjoy the fruits of human deliverance. When believers are glorified, creation’s “bondage to decay” will be ended and it will participate in the “freedom and glory” for which Christians are destined. Nature, Paul affirms, has a future within the plan of God. It is destined not simply for destruction but for transformation.29
More often, however, Paul refers to the effects of sin on those humans who are held captive under its power. In one text Paul implies clearly that sin can result in physical problems. In rebuking the Corinthians for their selfishness in the way that they are failing to share food when they gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, Paul warns them they may “eat and drink judgment on themselves” and goes on to say: “That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 11:30).
Paul typically focuses on the broad spiritual consequences that arise from the state of being under sin’s power. He expresses this state in a wide number of ways: “die/death” (apothanō, thanatos); “condemn/condemnation” (katakrinō, katakrima); “wrath” (orgē, once thymos); “trouble and distress” (thlipsis kai stenochōria); “curse” (katara, cf. anathema); “punish/punishment” (ekdikos, ekdikēsis, dikē); “perish,” “destroy/destruction” (usually apollymi, apōleia, three times olethros, once phthora). The most important of these terms is “death.” Death, Paul teaches, echoing Genesis 2:17, is the immediate and inevitable consequence of sin (Rom. 5:12). As I noted above, the exact meaning of this “death” is not easy to pin down but probably includes both physical and spiritual elements. In the Genesis account, as in Paul’s appropriation of it, physical death and spiritual death are intertwined in ways that make it difficult neatly to separate them. Paul, with other New Testament authors, teaches that all people, including believers, must still experience physical death (e.g., Rom. 8:10), the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). But believers have been rescued from spiritual death through their union with Christ (note the past tense in Eph. 2:1: “You were dead in your transgressions and sins”); and, while having to pass through the experience of death, they are assured that they will escape the “eternal death” that unbelievers will suffer. It is vitally important for Christians to allow this biblical teaching about the desperate status of non-Christians to mold their thinking. Only when we truly perceive the nature of the “plight” will we be adequately motivated to proclaim the “solution” provided by God in Christ.
The consequences of sin are therefore both present and future: as there is in Paul an inaugurated eschatology of life—believers enjoy life now as the first stage of life eternal—so there is also an inaugurated eschatology of death—human beings suffer condemnation and wrath now as the first stage of eternal death.30
Sin and the Christian
The inaugurated nature of God’s work in salvation is the indispensable backdrop for understanding Paul’s teaching about the believer’s relationship to sin. On the one hand, as Paul’s many warnings and exhortations to Christians make clear, sin remains a real possibility, a danger to which the believer must always be alert. Indeed, while Paul never expresses the point in such straightforward language, he would surely agree with John: “If we claim that we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). The reason why sin will continue to threaten the believer is the “not yet” side of God’s eschatological work. While justified, reconciled, and adopted into God’s family, Christians are not yet glorified. We are still in our earthbound bodies, constantly affected by the passions of those bodies and by the unredeemed world in which we live (see esp. Rom. 5:2–19; 8:18–30).
But Paul’s special focus is on the other, “already,” side of our status. He emphasizes this status in terms of our relationship to sin in Romans 6. The main point of this paragraph is that God has decisively changed the believer’s relationship to sin. Paul uses the imagery of slavery, mastery, and freedom to make his point. We should no longer serve sin (v. 6) because we have been “set free” from sin and have become “slaves” to God/righteousness (vv. 17–22); sin is no longer our “master” (v. 14a). Specifically, Paul says, “we died to sin” (v. 2). What does Paul mean by this? Clearly he does not mean that Christians are not tempted by sin or that we are incapable of sinning—as both his commands in verses 11–14 and the “not yet” side of our salvation that we noted above make clear. He apparently uses this imagery of “death” for two reasons. First, it creates an obvious point of contact with the death of Christ, an important step in Paul’s argument here (vv. 3–4). Second, it is a powerful image of a decisive shift in state. When someone becomes a Christian, Paul implies, their change of state in relationship to sin is as dramatic as the change from life to death. Paul spells out the implication of this change in a rhetorical question: “How can we live in it any longer?” (v. 2). This question might be turned into a statement: we who are Christians no longer live under the domination of sin. We cannot, therefore, just go on living in sin the way we used to.
Yet this “indicative” emphasis is matched in this text by a corresponding “imperative” focus, a hallmark of Paul’s balanced teaching about the believer’s relationship to sin. Believers, Paul insists, must actively and continually regard themselves as people who have been placed in this new relationship to sin (v. 11). And they must then act on this recognition. Paul demands: “Do not let sin reign” (v. 12). Yet at the same time as he issues this imperative, Paul again circles back to the indicative, claiming in verse 14 that “sin shall no longer be your master.” The victory over sin that God has won for us in Christ is a victory that must be appropriated. Putting away those sins that plague us will be no automatic process, something that will happen without our cooperation. No, Paul insists, a determination of our own will is called for to turn what has happened in principle into actuality. Verse 13 makes the same point in a different way. With the words “members” and “weapons” Paul brings before us a picture of all our varied capacities and abilities. All of them we are to withdraw from the use of our master sin and place at the disposal of our new master, God. It is “righteousness,” that standard of right behavior that God reveals to us, that we are now to serve.
As we dedicate ourselves to this life of righteousness and renunciation of sin in all its forms, we do so with the joyful assurance that our work will not be in vain.
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:54–58)
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in this chapter are from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
2 André du Toit, “The Centrality of Grace in the Theology of Paul,” in Focusing on Paul: Persuasion and Theological Design in Romans and Galatians, ed. Cliffers Breytenbach and David S. du Toit (New York: de Gruyter, 2007), 89.
3 See especially Frank Thielman, From Plight to Solution: A Jewish Framework to Understanding Paul’s View of the Law in Galatians and Romans, NovTSup 41 (Leiden, UK: Brill, 1989).
4 The Greek noun hamartia translates the Hebrew 
over 230 times, while the verb hamartanō renders the Hebrew over 160 times. See G. Quell, TDNT, ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, trans. G. W. Bromiley. 10 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 1:268.
5 See, e.g., ibid., 294.
6 E.g., W. Grundmann, TDNT 1:310–11.
7 For this viewpoint see Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 206–10.
8 I pick up this language of “the catalytic effect of the law” from the important monograph by Chris Vlachos, The Law and the Knowledge of Good and Evil: The Edenic Background of the Catalytic Operation of the Law in Paul (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009).
9 See House, 39–63.
10 Many interpreters think that the passage addresses Gentiles, and this is not far from the mark. But Paul’s failure to identify the people he refers to as Gentiles and the transition from chapter 1 to chapter 2 in 2:1 suggest that his focus is on a certain kind of revelation. And all people, Jews as well as Gentiles, are confronted with the evidence of natural revelation.
11 James D. G. Dunn likewise emphasizes “misdirected religion” as a key aspect of Paul’s view of sin in The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 114–17.
12 See on this topic especially Brian S. Rosner, Greed as Idolatry: The Origin and Meaning of a Pauline Metaphor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).
13 On the issue of homosexuality in the teaching of Paul (and the NT generally), see especially Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 379–406; Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002).
14 Material in this section is taken from my article “‘Flesh’ in Romans: A Problem for the Translator,” in The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World: Essays in Honor of Ronald F. Youngblood, ed. Glen S. Scorgie, Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 365–79.
15 Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Bultmann, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 408–11.
16 W. Bauer, F. W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, eds., BDAG, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 743.
17 Timo Laato, Paulus und das Judentum: Anthropologische Erwägungen (Åbo: Åbo Academy, 1991), 95.
18 See, e.g., W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 19; D. E. H. Whitely, The Theology of St. Paul (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1964), 39.
19 Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 62–70; cf. also Dunn’s “Jesus—Flesh and Spirit: An Exposition of Romans I.3–4,” JTS 24 (1973): 44–51; W. D. Stacey, The Pauline View of Man: In Relation to its Judaic and Hellenistic Background (London: Macmillan, 1956), 154–73.
20 This section depends on and, indeed, quotes from my treatment of the passage in Romans, NICNT, 319–29.
21 Cf. particularly A. J. M. Wedderburn, “The Theological Structure of Romans v. 12,” NTS 19 (1973): 339–54. Advocates of this approach find confirmation for this view in the fact that contemporary Judaism evidenced a similar tension between individual and Adamic responsibility for sin and death. Note, for example, how the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch can assert, on the one hand, “When Adam sinned a death was decreed against those who were to be born” (23:4), and “What did you [Adam] do to all who were born after you?” (48:42), and, on the other hand, “Adam is, therefore, not the cause, except only for himself, but each of us has become our own Adam” (54:19). Similarly, note 54:15: “although Adam sinned first and has brought death upon all who were not in his own time, yet each of them who has been born from him has prepared for himself the coming torments.”
22 Indeed, some scholars (e.g., Luther and Calvin) think that “all sinned” in verse 12 means just that: all people exist “in a state of sin.”
23 Representative is the succinct summary of the early seventeenth-century theologian Johannes Wollebius: “As person has infected nature, so in turn the nature has infected persons.” Quoted in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 314.
24 Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1985), 124; cf. C. W. Carter, “Harmartiology: Evil, the Marrer of God’s Creative Purpose and Work,” in A Contemporary Wesleyan Theology, ed. C. W. Carter, 2 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), 1:267: “Guilt stems from a culpable act traceable to the unethical conduct of a morally responsible person.”
25 Offense to Reason is the title of Bernard Ramm’s study of the doctrine (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).
26 Pensées, 445.
27 The references in Col. 1:16 may, however, be to spiritual beings in general, whether good or evil; see Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, PNTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 122–23. “The elements of the world” (ta stoicheiai tou kosmou; cf. Gal. 4:3, 9; Col. 2:8, 20) is often taken as a reference to spiritual beings also, but this identification is unlikely; the reference is probably to the material “elements” of the universe, with possible derivative significance for spiritual powers. See Moo, Colossians, 187–93.
28 N. T. Wright, The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon, TNTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 72. See, for this general way of thinking about the “powers” in the NT, the three-volume project of Walter Wink: Naming the Powers; Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence; Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984, 1986, 1992). Clinton Arnold is reluctant to make this hermeneutical move; cf. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992).
29 This paragraph relies on my article “Nature in the New Creation,” JETS 49 (2006): 459–63.
30 Douglas J. Moo, “Paul on Hell,” in Hell under Fire, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 91–109.