Baptism is death; death means you are ‘‘fully freed from the law’’
(Romans 7:6). How does this work, since the law is so eternal and hegemonic that it really seems impossible to reply to it or be done with it? Imagine a convicted felon being told he was headed for the death chamber and his reply was: ‘‘Too late, I am already dead.’’
The plea seems just too strange. Paul uses an infamous illustration of a married woman subject to her husband—until the man dies (Romans 7:1–4). How is a person freed from the law? Only by death. If the woman wants to live with another man she is accused as an adulterer. However, if the husband dies, she is free from law and can take another husband without any accusation. The law sees no marriage covenant where there is no spouse, and so it can-not imagine accusing a single woman of adultery.
But as exegetes point out, the problem in the illustration is that the woman does not die—only the husband does, and she is nev-ertheless free. Why does Paul immediately say: ‘‘In the same way . . . you have died to the law through the body of Christ . . .’’
(Romans 7:4)? The dead husband isn’t free to do anything! Many have used Paul’s illustration as an allegory, with the woman serv-ing as the model of the continually existserv-ing human subject which the legal scheme demands. But of course Paul knows the problem:
if I must be dead to be free, who wants it? In that case freedom would be pure passivity which is a fate worse than death—no one desires that kind of freedom. I desire the law as my means of life and righteousness before God so that if freedom is death to the law, I do not want it—What a Wretched Man am I! (Romans 7:24 NRS). My loophole to freedom is offered, yet I find it repugnant.
Teaching the Simul is like Jesus teaching Nicodemus. When every word of salvation is translated back into Adam’s old Aeon it comes out jumbled. ‘‘Born again? Do I crawl back in my mother’s womb?’’ (John 3:4). Paul has the same problem here. What has happened in baptism is that you have died, and you have been raised with Christ. This faith is either a fiction, as it appears in the Old Aeon, or it is truly a new Aeon and life. When E.P. Sanders leveled his modern criticism of Luther’s exegesis of Paul, it is pre-cisely at this point: faith in baptism’s promise is a fiction—the law is God’s form of righteousness for the Jews, and it can become so
for Gentiles when elected restrictiveness is finally loosed in Israel and the law is ‘‘graciously’’ extended to the uncircumcised—not only to include them but to keep them in the new people of God. 3 But for Paul, as for Luther, the promise is not the fiction, however hidden it remains.
Part of the problem in grasping the Simul is the hangover of the Old Aeon’s ontology (the legal scheme). Aristotle taught that the basis for logic was the law that two contradictory things cannot be in one ‘‘thing’’ at the same time. Yet, the baptized
‘‘person’’ is two separate people—the dead and the alive, sinner and just. When the law accuses of sin, it accuses the old, dead Adam, and is doing its job correctly. But the baptized Christian says, ‘‘But I am free of your accusation, because that person is dead.’’ The law does not believe this since it is spiritual and knows nothing of faith. Nevertheless, the great freedom of the Christian is to distinguish between an old ‘‘self ’’—unto death and law, and the new being—unto Christ. ‘‘You’’ are now both the dead hus-band and the free wife: two persons. The problem is that the old person is the one you feel and see; the new is only ear and so lives by the hearing of the external promise. Paul says this death in baptism was ‘‘so you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead that we may bear fruit unto God’’ (Romans 7:4 translation altered).
Identification of yourself comes by to whom you belong. If one belongs to sin, then the law’s accusation is accurate; if to Christ, then you are dead to sin and the law has no more power over you. In the modern world we have learned to think of selfhood or identity outside the boundary of self-subsisting entities by think-ing of bethink-ing as socially conditioned, so that ‘‘I’’ am what others call me. One is either what the law calls you, or what Christ calls you, and as long as both voices are heard, you are both at the same time—but one is old and ‘‘as good as dead’’ (like Abram before the promise), and the other is new and belongs entirely to Christ.
Everything depends upon to whom you listen. Sin, however, has an opportunity in the commandment (Romans 7:8, 11), which is to have the commandment speak to the heart/mind of the bap-tized, when its written words really belong to the members only.
Like any good teacher, Paul used illustrations like the woman whose first husband dies in order to teach the Simul, and in this case
Paul uses an illustration of one person having two dimensions—a mind/heart and hands/feet—inner and outer, or ‘‘heart and mem-bers’’ (Romans 7:22–3). The Old Adam and New Creature are not two parts of a whole. They are two distinct wholes, since nothing is more separated than when death stands between them.
As I have said, speaking to people who know the law means that everything gets translated and reduced into the secular, old world.
The problem in any illustration at this point is the unwillingness of our old creatures to make a distinction as Paul does between old and new—death and life, as two times (Aeons) divided at baptism: ‘‘while we were in the flesh . . . But now we are fully freed . . .’’ (Romans 7:5–6 NRS).
The law looks as if it could be the solution to the problem of sin after baptism, since with the promise of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit ‘‘I actually delight in the law of God according to the inner man,’’ (Romans 7:22 translation altered), but the flesh—the old Adam, the ‘‘members’’ (or hands and feet)—actually do not do it, and so I cannot bring these two together in one person: the old flesh and the new spirit. I cannot integrate myself or become ‘‘authentic’’ following baptism by using the law (i.e., make myself one who stands under the law and accomplishes what it says), and if I cannot do that, then the old person con-cludes, ‘‘what good is baptism?’’
The law presents a definite problem to those whose sins have been taken by Christ. With its attack on remaining sin, law appears to hold out a ‘‘new’’ opportunity for justification. If a new heart has been given that loves the law, should I not now, finally, be able to get its requirements done? But ‘‘I’’ cannot! Paul keeps saying,
‘‘not I but sin which dwells in me . . .’’ (Romans 7:16, 20) seems to be running the show. There is no ‘‘I’’ left who can get anything done according to the accusation of the law. But while the law is frustrated at every turn, the Spirit is busy getting all the work done—without any law! In his Preface to Romans, Luther says: ‘‘To fulfill the law, we must meet its requirements gladly and lovingly;
live virtuous lives without the constraint of the law, and as if nei-ther the law nor its penalties existed.’’4 Your job as a Christian is not to integrate your alienated person or seek authenticity or use the law to get rid of remaining sin. In fact, your true freedom is that you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Let the old die,
and trust Christ’s promise in opposition to the impotence of flesh—and let freedom ring.
It is this very resistance to the distinction of persons that presents what Paul calls an ‘‘opportunity’’ or foothold in the com-mandment for sin, since both law and gospel are in fact two words from the one God. The commandment tells us what to do; the promise tells us what God has done in Christ. Yet the opportunity which sin has in the law is that for now the Old, dead Adam clings simultaneously to the New Creature. This is not a flaw in the law, it is the weakness of human flesh that wills the good in accord with the law, but cannot do it. So the sinner can still be seen and felt while the faithful creature listens only to Christ. The law does not see this simultaneity as a possibility, because there is no potential for doing the law in the new creature. Therefore, law attacks, and when it does, it accuses what it takes to be the whole and only
‘‘you.’’ The law speaks to you without making the proper distinc-tion between new and old because it is spirit, and doesn’t know what Christ has done. This is sin’s moment—its ‘‘opportunity’’—
and last hurrah. The opportunity lies in God giving himself in an earthly, simple word of promise. What sin does with this opportu-nity is to intercede by injecting its voice between Christ’s promise and the hearer.
Knowing this, Paul could then lay out the stark reality. What happens to the baptized is exactly the same thing that happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. If the almighty God is going to put himself in a word of promise, then the weak point is the faith of Adam (or the baptized) that hears the word as the promise of life. All sin needs to do is short-circuit the tie between faith and promise with one question: ‘‘Did God say?’’ (Genesis 3:1). By that question, one is turned away from the external prom-ise to examine the self—or as Paul says here, to watch the law
‘‘at work in his members.’’ From an ear-animal who listens, the righteous is turned into a hand-animal who fabricates—who uses an appendage like an opposable thumb, an arm or leg or other dangling part in order to make something for itself. Suddenly, a receiver is turned into a desirer; Gift is turned into ‘‘task,’’ and so the promise is given up for a law. As with Adam, so with the baptized—belonging to Christ was given up for belonging to myself, since a self in this old world is nothing other than a relation
of the self to the self. But a self relating to itself has by definition ceased getting its identity from outside in the promise. Paul con-cludes: ‘‘For sin, seizing the opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me’’ (Romans 7:11). Luther calls this ‘‘the old, pious wish’’ to be found righteous in myself.
Wretched man that I am! That is never going to happen. Christ was my righteousness in my baptism, and will remain ever my righteousness—extrinsic to myself so that only my unity with him in death will ever deliver me from this body of death. I can-not do anything more.