Reflections on Rom 7:7-25 – Part 2

Thesis 2: The “I” is not a normal pre-Christian experience of wailing in guilt and then finding a deliverer.

As far as we know, Saul of Tarsus did not have a guilt-ridden conscience and was not waiting for a divine messianic figure to die an atoning death to save his troubled soul from the flames of judgment. In an autobiographical passage, Paul claims that as a Pharisee he thought he was “blameless” in regards to the law (Phil 3:8) and his zeal for the law meant that God was pleased with his religious efforts (Gal 1:14; Phil 3:6). So before his conversion on the Damascus Road, Paul thought he was doing alright, and he was certainly not bewailing his moral inadequacies nor looking for a God-man to heal his tender conscience that was racked with guilt. The problem is, as Krister Stendahl point out, that western theology has read Paul through the lens of introspective consciences of thinkers like Augustine and Luther, who had an unusual fixation on their moral failings prior to faith. As Stendahl argued, with some legitimacy I believe, that the conversion experiences of Augustine and Luther should not be regarded as paradigmatic for the moral struggle of every soul prior to coming to faith. The Puritans and even John Wesley used the law in their preaching as way of getting people to wail for their sins, to fear the prospect of judgment, and then after to hold out to them the promise of forgiveness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, that kind of carrot and stick approach only succeeds if one lives in a culture where the moral universe of the Judeo-Christian ethic is the recognized norm. If one’s default setting is that the Old Testament law sets forth God’s moral will, and if one becomes convinced that he or she does not match up to it, then obviously one would cling to a savior for release from the law’s condemnation. However, that is not necessarily how the Jews came to faith in Christ, since their guilt was atoned for by the sacrificial system available through the Temple cultus, and most Jews trusted in a mixture of election and effort to get them through to God’s future age. Even pagans did not necessarily struggle with moral angst. Greco-Roman religion was largely devoid of ethical imperatives, the gods provided benefaction not moral instruction, and notions of guilt were bound up more with schemes of honour and shame or virtue and vice in relation to family and social obligations. In which case, the moral struggle of the “I” narrated in Rom 7:7-25 is probably retrospective and reflects an inner anxiety about keeping the law that is only perceptible from the vantage point of faith. The person speaking is saying, “Ah, yes, in coming to Christ now I can see the struggle I formerly had, a struggle to obey the law, a struggle I could not win, because the law could not help me overcome the flesh.”