Romans 5:12-19; Paul's Problems--and His Rhetoric--First Essay

"Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— 13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. 14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. 15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. 16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. 17 If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. 18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous."

I. Introduction

In the earliest days of my Christian experience (late 1960s-early 1970s), Romans was my favorite Biblical epistle--bar none. I savored every phrase, memorizing each one eagerly and running through my mind various meaning possibilities for each of Paul's serpentine sentences. For example, on this passage I would have mulled over the statement that sin is not reckoned where there is no law (v. 13). But as I matured in my undestanding of Paul, I became less interested in understanding the meaning of each phrase, as if exegesis was only some kind of literary atomic science, and became more interested in the type of person Paul was and the issues that confronted him as he wrote. That is, what was on his mind as he wrote a passage like the one bolded above? That he didn't write it with a Christian festival called Lent in mind hardly needs argument, even though that is how we read his passage today. But he did inject into the passage his particular and peculiar argumentative method, even if, as often is the case in Paul, he ends up by "proving too much."

The purpose of these two essays is threefold: (1) to lay out the problems dogging Paul as he penned this section of Romans; (2) to suggest how he dealt with that problem in this passage; and (3) to show how Paul's rhetoric carried him a little further than he probably wanted, thus creating a new problem.

II. Paul's Problems

Paul writes with a pretty clean slate in Romans. He has never visited the Church, he doesn't know about or deal with the internal problems in it, he doesn't seem to be in prison or in huge need as he writes. It is one of his later epistles, written after he has had a decade or two to work through what you might call Gospel conundrums, the principal one of which had to do with the relationship of the Jewish law to Christian discipleship. He will deal with that issue obliquely in Romans, but in fact the issue that frames the "Romans painting" for him is the need for, and meaning of, Christ's death when there seems to be adequate Biblical precedents for faith (i.e., Abraham) without Christ.

Or, to state things differently, Paul has been overwhelmed in his personal experience by the vision of the risen Christ. That experience, more than anything, shaped his understanding of life--it brought him to himself, it reoriented his experience of living, it changed him from persecutor to supporter of The Way, it provided him with a most rich and plastic image or template for interpreting the world. Christ was everything now for Paul. If Christ had saved him while he was perniciously persecuting the Church, why isn't he the savior for all? Thus, he has Christ ever before him (to quote the Psalm), and all of life, including his past experience and the OT Scripture, now has to be explained in the context of this life-changing experience.

But the mere statement of things this way shows that Paul will have an intellectual or interpretive problem of rather major proportions. Given that Christ is now everything for him, how do you explain everything in the people of God's experience in the past? Four alternatives seem logically possible--even though some of them overlap: (a) the OT experience was a sort of shadow, type, or lesser reality, the fulness of which was realized in Christ; (b) the OT experience was fully true but had a sort of built-in expiration date, after which it would be succeeded by the Gospel; (c) the OT experience was a sort of like a temporary tutor or guide to point one to the Gospel; (d) the OT reality stood in opposition to the NT reality and thus was either the work of a lesser God or would need to be condemned outright.

The fourth explanation was the classic Gnostic way of interpreting the world. The world was made by a lesser divinity, Yaldabaoth, and the Jewish Scriptures reflected the character of this divinity. Paul used (c) in his explanation of the Jewish law in Galatians 4. He made reference to (b) in his brief and challenging statement in Romans 10:4, "Christ is the end of the law..." In general, however, Paul's approach will be characterized by (a) above--the shadow is in the OT but the fulness is in Christ.

Thus, in this passage, Adam will be a sort of type of Christ, but the results of their actions will lead in completely different directions. Adam's work brought about sin; Christ's work brings life. Yet, this method (a) doesn't work completely for Paul, primarily because he wants to show in ch. 4 that Abraham is not simply a shadow of the faithful person today but is an exemplar of faith. Abraham believed the Lord and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. He didn't even spare his own son, but at the command of God was willing to offer him up. The nagging question that would arise from a simple consideration of Abraham's faith is this: 'If Abraham was faithful and was acceptable to God, and didn't know or seemingly need Christ, why should we, hundreds of years later, really need Christ in order to have justifying faith in God? Paul doesn't deal with this question at all, even though I think from the perspective of two millennia it remains a fairly important one. His problem, as he sees it in this passage, is to explain a Christ/Adam comparison that results in our blessedness and salvation. Let's turn to that, in the next essay.

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