Romans

Paul’s letter to the Romans looks backward before it looks inward. In its fifth chapter he returns to the garden and names the moment the plot began: through one human being hamartia entered the world, and through hamartia death (5:12). He does not retell the story, because his readers know Genesis. He reads it as a sequence instead, the way one reads the first act of a play from its last. Adam is not one case among many in this reading; he is the point where the whole human story enters its course.

Then Paul adds a step that Genesis does not spell out. Between Adam and Moses, he writes, hamartia was already in the world, but it was not counted, because there was nothing to count it against (5:13–14). With Moses comes nomos, the law, and with the law comes a measure. Paul’s claim about what the measure does is precise and uncomfortable: nomos came in alongside so that the misstep would increase (5:20). The measure was given for the sake of the goal, and its first effect is to make the distance from the goal visible and larger.

This is the complication of the plot, stated in Paul’s own grammar. A goal is given, a measure is made to secure the goal, and the measure begins to take the goal’s place. Every effort to keep the measure is sincere, and every effort makes the missing grow, because the one who keeps it is now aiming at the measure and no longer at the goal. Nothing here is a moral lesson about weak people. It is the mechanism of the first chapter, the correction that lands beside the mark, written down almost two thousand years earlier.

In the seventh chapter the same plot is told again, this time from inside. The speaker is an “I”, and the “I” remembers a time before the commandment: I was once alive without the law, but when the commandment came, hamartia came to life, and I died (7:9). The sequence follows Genesis step by step: a life without a measure, a word that forbids, a desire woken by the word, and death. Readers have long argued whether the “I” is Paul, Adam or Israel. Within this book’s conditions the answer is simpler: it is the position of anyone who has entered language and been given a goal.

From that position the measure looks good, and Paul insists that it is good. The commandment was meant for life, and it turned out to bring death (7:10), because hamartia took the commandment and used it. The “I” wants the good and does not do it, and does what it does not want (7:15, 7:19). Every attempt to close the distance widens it, until the missing shows itself as what it is, beyond all measure (7:13). Then comes the cry: what a miserable human being I am, who will set me free from this body of death (7:24)?

The turn comes in the next sentence, and it comes without any new effort. So now there is no verdict against those who are in Christ (8:1). What the law could not do, because it had to work through the very flesh it was meant to correct, has been done from outside the circle of measuring (8:3). The “I” has not finally succeeded; it has been moved to another position, from which the measure and the goal can be told apart. This is peripeteia in Aristotle’s sense, a reversal that comes from inside the plot and changes its direction, with recognition following close behind.

After the turn, Paul’s grief begins, and it is no longer about himself. In chapter 9 he writes of great sorrow for his own people, Israel, to whom belong the covenants, the giving of the law and the promises (9:1–5). The plot he has just told of the “I” he now sees in the history of a people. Israel pursued the law of righteousness and did not reach it, because it pursued it as if the goal could be secured by deeds (9:31–32). Paul’s own phrase is exact: they have zeal for God, but not according to recognition, epignōsis (10:2).

In the next chapter Paul names the goal. The telos of the law, both its goal and its end, is Christ (10:4). The measure was always pointing beyond itself, and a people who held it faithfully watched the goal it pointed to pass them by. Here Paul asks the question this book’s conditions demand, whether God has rejected his people, and answers at once: by no means, for I myself am an Israelite (11:1). Paul has not changed religion; he speaks as one of the people whose story he is telling.

Then the plot turns outward. Israel’s stumbling, Paul writes, is not a fall: through its misstep the way opens to the nations (11:11). A hardening has come upon part of Israel until the fullness of the nations comes in, and in this way all Israel will return to its place (11:25–26). The last sentence of the argument encloses everyone: all have been shut together in the same missing, so that all may be brought out of it (11:32). Paul’s eye has moved from the garden to the end of history, and what he sees there in the language of history, Revelation shows in images.