7. ‘Law’ in Romans
7. ‘Law’ in Romans
The term ‘law’ (nomos) occurs over seventy times in this letter, not always in the same sense. Most often it means the law of God in one form or another, but there are some places where it means something else. Here are its principal meanings, in order more or less from the less frequent to the more frequent.
1. Law in general. When Paul says in Romans 4:15 that ‘where there is no law there is no transgression’, or in 5:13 that ‘sin is not counted where there is no law’, he may be echoing a general legal maxim, even if he is thinking more particularly of the Mosaic law. Again, when he says in 7:1, ‘speaking to those who have some knowledge of law’ (NEB), that ‘the law is binding on a person only during his life’, it makes no difference to the sense of his words whether he or his readers took them to refer to Jewish law or to Roman law. Theologically, however, he ignores the presence of non-Jewish codes of law before or alongside the law of Moses. Gentiles are said to ‘have no law’ (2:14, NEB) in the sense that they do not live under the Mosaic law; indeed, before the Mosaic law was given there was ‘no law’ (5:13). Had Paul known of the laws of Hammurabi or other pre-Mosaic codes, these would have been as irrelevant to his theological argument as was contemporary Roman law.
2. A principle. In Romans 3:27 Paul, having established that the grace of God justifies men and women through faith, says that, this being so, there is no room for boasting. ‘By what manner of law? of works? Nay: but by a law of faith’ (RV). These two occurrences of ‘law’ rightly appear as ‘principle’ in RSV. The law of works (not the same thing as ‘the works of the law’) and the law of faith are two contrasted principles by which human beings seek to secure God’s acceptance.
In 7:21 Paul, considering the moral conflict that rages in the soul of one who lives under law, discovers ‘a law’—that is, a principle or an observed regularity—‘that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand’.81 In the same context the moral conflict itself is viewed as a conflict between two laws or principles: first, the law or principle which hands one over bound to the domination of sin (7:23, 25b), and second, ‘the law of my mind’ which acknowledges the goodness of God’s law and desires to do it, but lacks the power to enforce what it acknowledges and desires (7:23). But when yet another principle begins to operate in the soul—‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’—this proves stronger than ‘the law (principle) of sin and death’ and sets one free from the thraldom of the latter (8:2).
3. The Pentateuch. When it is said that God’s way of righteousness through faith is attested by ‘the law and the prophets’ (Rom. 3:21b), ‘the law’ means the first five books of the Old Testament, as ‘the prophets’ is a comprehensive designation for the remaining books. This is a common New Testament usage, and reflects the Jewish application of the Hebrew word tôrâ not only to the law in the stricter sense, but also to the five books which pre-eminently contain the law.
4. The Old Testament as a whole. In Romans 3:19 Paul says, ‘we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law.’ The clause ‘whatever the law says’ refers to the catena of biblical quotations in the preceding verses (10–18); but of these quotations five are from the Psalms and one from Isaiah. If it is ‘the law’ that says these things, ‘the law’ can mean only the Hebrew Bible—our Old Testament.
5. The law of God. To a man of Paul’s heritage and training it was most natural to equate the law of God with the law of Moses—in other words, with the law as God gave it to Israel through Moses (not to speak of the oral amplification of the written law, which in rabbinical tradition was received by Moses at Sinai as truly—in theory, at least—as the written law itself). This was the form in which Paul had come to know the law of God in his own experience. Whether Romans 7:7–13 be regarded as a fragment of Paul’s spiritual autobiography or not, the person whose experience is there described tells how it was his first awareness of the law that gave him his first consciousness of sin. That the Mosaic law is in view there is evident from the fact that the particular commandment selected to illustrate the point is the last one in the Decalogue: ‘You shall not covet.’
When Paul deals with the situation of the Jews, who rejoiced in being the people of the law (2:17–27) and set themselves to attain the standard of righteousness which it prescribed (9:31; 10:3), it is naturally the Mosaic law that he has in mind. When he speaks in 5:13–14, 20a, of ‘law’ being unknown in the ages between Adam and Moses—that is, until God spoke at Sinai—the same equation of the law of Moses with the law of God can be recognized. Indeed, when he shows how Christians ought to live, and stresses the supremacy of the law of love, he formulates the law of love (as Jesus had done before him) in a commandment from the Pentateuch: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself (13:9, quoting Lev. 19:18). Similarly, when he goes on to say that ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’ (13:10), he explains what he means by ‘law’ by quoting a selection of commandments from the Decalogue.
Paul does not mean that the revelation of God’s will was confined to the Mosaic legislation, but that in the Mosaic legislation his will was given the form of law. When he argues that Jews and Gentiles are on an equal footing before God as regards their failure to do his will, he points out that, while Jews had a special revelation of God’s will in the Mosaic law, Gentiles were not deprived of all knowledge of his will, for ‘when Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires … they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness’ (2:14–15). That is to say, the Gentiles had not been given the tôrâ‚ or even the Ten Commandments, but they did have a sense of right and wrong: they had a built-in awareness of the essence of God’s law. So, when Paul says (3:20) that through law comes our knowledge of sin, he says something that is true in principle of Jews and Gentiles alike; and when he says in the same context that by works of law no human being will be justified in God’s sight, this too is equally valid for Jew and Gentile. Whether the ‘works of law’ are performed in accordance with a code promulgated by express divine authority, or in accordance with the dictates of conscience, the moral law within, Wordsworth’s ‘stern daughter of the voice of God’, or in accordance with an accepted standard of decent behaviour—no matter, these are not the grounds on which men and women are accepted by God. Whichever of these forms ‘law’ may take, it is right to keep it; it is wrong, and indeed disastrous, to break or defy or ignore it; but it is vain to imagine that by keeping it one can accumulate a store of merit in the heavenly treasure-house. God has given law for a variety of purposes, and it has many uses; but when it is a question of his justifying human beings, he proceeds by a more excellent way.
The law, then, whether spelt out in a code or implanted in the conscience, is God’s law, ‘holy and just and good’ (7:12). If, as Paul insists, it was not given as the means of justification, why was it given? To this question the letter to the Romans provides a variety of answers, which may be arranged under four principal heads.82
(i) It was given to be a revelation of God and his will. The distinction between right and wrong is not simply a matter of social convention: it is rooted in the being and character of God, and is written into the constitution of man, created as he has been in the image of God. Because the law is God’s law, it is, like God himself, ‘true, and righteous altogether’ (Ps. 19:9).
(ii) It was given for the health and preservation of the human race. This particular purpose is served mainly by civil government, which (as is clearly stated in Rom. 13:1–7) is a ministry instituted by God to protect and encourage well-doing and to curb and punish wrongdoing.83
(iii) It was given to bring sin to light, and to lead sinners to cast themselves on the pardoning grace of God. While in theory the person who keeps the law will live by it (10:5), in practice no-one is justified by the works of the law, because of universal failure to keep it perfectly (3:20a, 23). The innate human tendency to go contrary to the will of God manifests itself in concrete acts of disobedience when his will is revealed in the form of specific commandments (5:13), so that ‘through the law comes knowledge of sin’ (3:20b; cf. 7:7). But those who have experienced the law’s power to bring their sin to light, together with its inability to procure for them a righteous standing in God’s sight, are the more ready to cast themselves in faith on the grace of God brought near in Christ as the sole means of their justification. Thus, as Paul puts it in another letter, ‘the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith’ (Gal. 3:24). But now that Christ has come, he ‘is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified’ (Rom. 10:4). Not only has he fulfilled the law himself, by his perfect obedience to the will of God, but since God’s way of righteousness has been opened up in him, he marks the supersession or ‘end’ of the law as even a theoretical means of justification. Those who are justified by faith in him are ‘not under law but under grace’ (Rom. 6:14–15).
(iv) It was given to provide guidance for the believer’s life. Thanks to the indwelling of the Spirit in those who are ‘in Christ Jesus’, the righteous requirements of the law are fulfilled in them by a divine spontaneity as they live ‘according to the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:3–4). But even so Paul finds it proper at a later point in the letter to lay down fairly detailed guide-lines for the lives of Christians, so that by experience they may ‘prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect’ (Rom. 12:1–2). These guide-lines coincide with what Paul elsewhere calls ‘the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6:2). While he himself was ‘not under law but under grace’, while he rejoiced in being ‘discharged from the law’ so as to ‘serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit’ (Rom. 7:6), yet he could speak of himself as ‘not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ’ (1 Cor. 9:21). But this law of Christ is the law of love which he himself embodied and which he bequeathed as a ‘new commandment’ to his disciples. Moreover, the law of love sums up and brings to perfection all the commandments of the Mosaic law (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14).
Paul’s gospel is thus fully absolved from the charge of antinomianism. When men and women have been justified by faith, right is still right, wrong is still wrong, and the will of God is still the rule of life. But for them the will of God is not simply enshrined in an external code of regulations: it is implanted within their hearts as a new principle of life. Like Paul, they are for evermore subject to ‘the law of Christ’. The detailed resemblance between the ethical directions of Romans 12:1–15:4 and our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) amply entitles those directions to be described as ‘the law of Christ’. The law of Christ is no more able to justify the sinner than the law of Moses was; whether expressed in the ethical directions of Romans 12:1–15:4 or in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ’s law of love sets a higher standard than even the Ten Commandments. ‘The Sermon on the Mount is not, as many people fondly imagine nowadays, the fulfilment or essence of the Gospel, but it is the fulfilment of the Law.’84 It presents the standard by which the disciples of Christ—those who have been justified by faith in him—ought to live. Those into whose hearts the love of God has been ‘poured’ by the Holy Spirit are empowered by the same Spirit to fulfil the law of Christ by that love to God and mankind which is the reflection of God’s own love, and their proper response to it.85