First, some key problems for Making Sense of Paul's Message in the Letter to the Romans. These problems center around the central Christian doctrine that Jesus' death saves people.
1. Why do people need saving? Do they need saving because they are sinful? Jesus' death saves from sin? How might we come to know that we are sinful and in need of salvation? Is it because we break God's commandments? If someone did not break God's commandments would they not be in need of being saved?
2. God sent his Son Jesus to save us by dying on the cross.
Why was this necessary? God wanted to save us from sin but he could not do so without Jesus' death? Why not? He wanted to forgive us our sins but he could not without Jesus' death? Why not?
3. Does Jesus' death save everyone? Only those who believe? Believe what? Did God just arbitrarily decide to save only those who believe certain things about God and Jesus? Does Jesus' death only save members of the (or a) Christian church? Did God just arbitrarily decide to extend salvation to church-members only?
4. What does the "salvation" consist in?
Does it consist in God's changed attitude? After Jesus' death He is more willing to forgive than he was before? Now He forgives everyone even if they remain just as sinful as they were?
Does salvation consist in some actual change in people? After Jesus' death they are actually less prone to sin than they were before? God is now more willing to help them not sin, more willing than he was before?
A historical and rational approach to Christianity cannot be satisfied with just saying that all these things are a matter of blind belief: that Christians just believe them because they know they are supposed to, and there is no further reason.
Think back to a time before Christianity began, when people did not yet believe these things. When Paul preached to them about the saving death of Jesus, why did they begin believing these things that they did not believe before, and before there was any powerful church to pressure them into believing?
People today do not continue passing on their parents' beliefs to their own children, unless something in their experience of life makes these beliefs attractive to them. It's unlikely that people today are completely unlike people in the past in this respect.
The following essay explains how the idea of "transcendent and oppositional moral passion" can serve as a key to answering the above questions and so making sense of Paul's Letter to the Romans. The Christian ideal that Paul presents in this letter is a "transcendent" ideal because one of his main points is to free people's instinctive passion for rightness from any limitation by accommodation to what is actually possible in human societies or to what is possible for ordinary human nature.
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Most people at various times are instinctively revolted by the injustice of the world around them – the fact that many good people suffer, are powerless, and go unrecognized, while many people who enjoy prestige and power and success in the world do not seem to deserve the success they enjoy. But there is also a general feeling that this is simply "reality." This is what "the real world" is like, and the occasional sense of moral anger and frustration we feel in the face of injustices is just an "unrealistic" part of ourselves that we need to ignore to get on with our lives.
It is the same with our own lives. Many people have an occasional feeling of general dissatisfaction with their lives, an occasional feeling that "there must be more to life than this." Some people have a "mid-life crisis"; that is, they have been relatively successful in the world, achieving the ambitions that earlier motivated hard work, but now they feel that this success is relatively empty and unsatisfying. But again, many people regard these as feelings that must be ignored or suppressed because they are unrealistic. They prevent us from being "well adjusted."
I think Paul’s view is the exact opposite of this. Those feelings that make us dissatisfied with the world as it is are the most important part of us. Trying to reduce them to accommodate to the practicalities of the world we live in -- out of a desire to achieve a feeling of "peace and security" in this world – represents compromise. We should instead move in the exact opposite direction, separating these feelings entirely from all desire to accommodate ourselves to the world. Complete separation is what would render ordinary moral passion a completely "pure" moral passion, a pure passion for a pure justice, a pure passion for a life that would be completely soul-satisfying.
A moral passion completely uncompromised by any accommodation to the concrete actualities of the world would be the transcendent "Platonic Idea" of moral passion, except that it would not only be an intellectual idea grasped intellectually, it would be a fierce psychological passion driving a person. This is how I would explain the phenomenon of "spirit possession" in Pauline communities. The release of moral passion from realistic accommodation also released it to be a much more powerful emotional force within early Jesus-believers. They felt "carried away" by an otherworldly "irrational" force taking them over, and used the common ancient concept of spirit possession to explain this force. Part of Paul’s work is to convince them to interpret and channel these powerful emotions in a completely moral direction, so that they would allow their lives to be governed by a holy spirit. In terms of religious movements at the time, Paul’s preaching constituted an "ethicizing" of spirit-religion, turning people’s attention away from intense emotionality, spectacular displays, and miracle working which they associated with spirit possession, and focusing their attention on the purely moral aspect of the "Holy Spirit" which for him was the only true "Spirit of Christ." Thus Dag Hammarskjold’s desire to be an instrument of something "in me but beyond and above me," can be seen as a result of this development, this ethicizing of spirit-religion, whose beginnings we see in Paul.
If a person allows her perspective on the world to be governed by this world-transcending moral passion, this would also mean releasing her anger at the injustice of "the real world." In a Jewish context, this would of course affect one’s concept of "God" whose main characteristic (differentiating him from Greek gods/goddesses) is that he is a righteous, moral God, demanding righteousness of human beings. If the present condition of the world is something a purely moral person should be angry at, then of course God, the epitome of righteousness, would be angry at it.
Paul’s enthusiasm for this wholly transcendent, otherworldly pure moral passion governed his entire perspective on the world, to such an extent that everything not "Spirit" could only appear as immoral "sin." This is the primary meaning of "sin" in Paul’s thought. Although he includes of course what we would normally regard as immoral behavior, he thinks of sin as something that characterizes the human condition in general -- all aspects of the human condition that are not "Spirit" in the sense given above. Mankind is "sinful" not only or primarily because lots of people "commit sins," but because "all fall short of the Glory of God." The "Glory of God" is an image of absolutely pure and perfect righteousness, and whatever falls short of this Paul can only see as its opposite, "sin." This polarized opposite of Spirit is what Paul often refers to as "sin-flesh" or "the body of sin." The terms "flesh" (sarx) and "body" (soma) in these phrases use the physical human body as a metaphor for all those elements of "ordinary" human being, i.e. those elements not informed by Spirit.
Thus the terms "flesh" and "body" do not refer only to what we would call sensuality. Surprisingly for modern sensibilities, they apply more importantly to ordinary "human" attempts to live up to the moral demands of a righteous God (such as "keeping the 10 commandments"). So for example, after a long passage describing his own ineffectual attempts to keep God’s law, Paul exclaims, "Who will deliver me from this death-filled body?" He does not mean literally ridding himself of his physical body, but transcending the limits of what is possible by ordinary "human" efforts, i.e. efforts directed by conscious deliberate will-power, considered as something different from the driving force of moral passion. Efforts one has to push oneself to make appear morally "dead" by comparison with the moral "life" given by this internal driving Spirit that has a life of its own.
Paul says similarly, "I see nothing good residing in me, that is, in my Flesh." Again he does not mean that there is nothing good in sensuality. This just represents his extremely polarized view in which ordinary human effort, conceived of apart from Spirit, appears also the complete opposite of Spirit. For Paul, all that is truly good comes from Spirit, and "flesh" as the opposite of Spirit, contains "nothing good." "The mentality of the flesh [phronema tes sarkos] cannot please God," he says.
In using these concepts Paul is constructing a set of categories to use in interpreting human experience. They should not be seen as rational concepts evident to everyone which can support Paul’s perspective on the world. They should rather be regarded as manifestations of Paul’s perspective, a perspective wholly determined by the fact that he identifies completely with pure moral passion. These categories describe how human existence appears to one who passionately identifies completely with pure moral passion, the Holy Spirit of God, and can only see everything else about human nature as falling short of this.
This creation of extremely polarized categories explains the extraordinary progression that takes place in Romans chapters one through seven. This progression begins in chapter one by speaking of the "anger of God revealed from heaven against all the wickedness of mankind." This is followed by a description of many human vices and sins, which Paul connects with the polytheistic religion of non-Jews. But then this is followed by a condemnation also of Jews who are not Jesus-believers, essentially saying that Jews who keep God’s Law revealed in Jewish scriptures belong to the same category as these non-Jewish sinners. All are equally condemned by the anger of God. This progression reaches its climax in chapter seven, where Paul speaks in the first person of his own attempts to do what he thinks God requires, attempts that he now regards as by their very nature incapable of actually "pleasing God," i.e. these sincere and strenuous attempts to do good, because they are "fleshly," belong in essentially the same category as the wickedness of obviously sinful pagans. This might seem completely unreasonable from the perspective of ordinary commonsense. I think it manifests the fact that Paul’s perspective is not governed by ordinary "realistic" commonsense at all. His perspective is governed by a devotion to an extremely perfectionist pure moral passion which has become "pure" precisely by divorcing itself from anything "realistic" or "commonsensical." From this perspective, "God’s Glory," stands in contrast to everything human which is not Spirit, and therefore "God’s anger" stands in condemnation of everything belonging to human "flesh."
All this I think is necessary background to understand what Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection mean to Paul. He says, "God sent his Son in the likeness of flesh... and in the flesh condemned sin." The horribly painful death of Jesus symbolically represents for Paul God’s angry condemnation of everything belonging to "flesh." Having "faith," or rather trust (pistis) in Jesus’ crucifixion does not mean having blind belief that it saves a person. True pistis crucially involves "putting to death" one’s own "body" (soma), i.e. fully accepting the morally "dead," "condemned" status of human existence considered apart from Spirit, no longer having trust in the ability of one’s own un-spirited "flesh" to make one "justified" in the eyes of God.
It is not that Jesus was "punished" for our sins so we would not be punished. It is rather that, before his crucifixion, he symbolically represented our own "fleshly" being, which we have to accept as nothing but the object of God’s condemning anger, as God’s condemning anger expressed itself in the execution of Jesus.
This acceptance of the condemned status of human "flesh" – from all realistic, practical attempts to become a good person – is what releases moral passion so that it can represent a perfect moral purity completely transcending the realistic possibilities of ordinary conscious human efforts. This is my rational explanation of what the resurrection of Jesus symbolically means to Paul. Jesus before his crucifixion symbolically represented ordinary, human, un-spirited "flesh." After his resurrection he represents an existence informed only by a purely otherworldly "divine" Life transcending anything human/fleshly. In this way he represents the mode of existence of the transformed Jesus-believer, who now trusts entirely to the Holy Spirit, i.e. to a pure moral passion felt and interpreted as something completely released from any compromising accommodation to the practical realities of human existence in the world.
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The above discussion provides a rationally plausible explanation both of Paul’s conversion and of his success in persuading his audience to adopt his interpretation both of Judaism and of his version of what it means to "follow Jesus." That is, on this account, at some point the preaching about Jesus’ death and resurrection connected on a very emotional level to internal religious struggles that were already troubling both Paul and many others in synagogue-gatherings. These struggles had to do with trying to live up to the moral demands of the extremely demanding God they read about in Jewish scriptures. Paul took the message of Jesus’ crucifixion to mean that one should simply give up practical, deliberate, "fleshly" attempts to please this God. Now the moral passion awakened in him by reading the Jewish scriptures became entirely purified of any compromising accommodation to practical possibilities, and this was also a kind of emotional release, felt more intensely as an internal force that felt like it was "in me but beyond and above me," to use Hammarskjold’s words. This intensely emotional experience, felt both by Paul and large numbers in his audience, was connected to the message of Jesus rising from the dead. This implicitly symbolic understanding is what caused them to attribute "saving" power to Jesus’ death and resurrection, as expressed in Paul’s very succinct statement that Jesus "died for our sins and rose for our justification."
Did Paul and his audience consciously and explicitly think of Jesus’ death and resurrection as "symbolic" events, as I am now picturing them? Almost surely they did not. On the present account, their whole life-orientation was transformed as part of their emotional response to the preaching of the crucifixion and resurrection. This preaching is the actual event that awakened and released in them "the power of the spirit." But one can easily see that my rational analysis given above is scarcely likely to evoke this same kind of emotionally transforming effect. This partly explains why there is actually something essential to Christian belief that it be presented in very concrete images, because concrete images, understood in the right context, have an emotionally transforming power that rational analysis lacks.
So I am fairly sure that Paul and his followers, like very many Christian believers today, would strongly resist this rational analysis. Paul and his followers would resist this for the same reason I think they would have resisted someone telling them that the end of the world was not coming soon. They would resist my saying that the crucifixion and resurrection are purely symbolic events, because they would feel this assertion as something denying the validity of their transforming experience and the new way of seeing and living in the world that resulted from it. It would appear to them to be reducing something "otherworldly" and divine to something merely human, "fleshly."
This is a paradox that my analysis, like any rational account of Paul’s thought, inevitably involves. Emotionally and psychologically speaking, it is probably important to almost all Christian believers to feel Jesus’ death and resurrection as objective events whose saving power is objectively inherent in the events themselves. Emotionally and psychologically, they will feel any questioning of this objectivity as a questioning of the entire Christian way of life. On the other hand, logically and rationally speaking, it is extremely implausible that actual knowledge that these events objectively have this power in themselves is the real basis which causes people to adopt the Christian worldview. No rational account can be given as to how Christians could acquire this objective information, and numerous problems arise if one tries to explain all the implications of this belief if one takes it literally. This distinction between emotional/psychological effects and rational logic is my way of accounting for this paradox that critical rationality has to give up the claims to literal objectivity that most Christians feel to be essential. Christians of course have a different way of dealing with this paradox. They customarily appeal to "faith," conceived of as a kind of knowledge based on nothing, but which is yet extremely virtuous and admirable. This is simply a retreat from rationality.
What I do want to claim is that my account corresponds to and supports the main practical conclusions Paul draws from his beliefs concerning how a person ought to live her life. For example, Paul wants people to trust in God’s saving power rather than their own power to save themselves. But to translate this idea into an actual way of living her life, a person would have to know where to encounter this "power of God" so as to make it the guiding and driving force of her life that Paul pictures it as being. I think that if this person developed and followed "pure moral passion" as I described it above, she would be following pretty exactly what Paul describes as following "the Spirit of Jesus." She might not call it "Spirit," and might not associate it with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, but in all essential respects it would amount morally and spiritually to the same fundamental life-orientation and attitude to oneself and the world that Paul recommends.
This rational account does not of course support everything Paul says or believes, and certainly not everything subsequent Christians believe. For example in my account, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are purely symbolic events whose symbolic meaning is wholly wrapped up in their relation to certain issues Paul and his audience are struggling with. From a rational and historical point of view, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the actual person Jesus considered himself to be a representative of "sinful flesh," and considered his crucifixion to represent God’s condemnation of sinful flesh. But Paul and his audience were extremely concrete-minded and imagined that Jesus actually thought of his life and death in this way. Paul pictures him as being "obedient" to a decree from God that he should die for this purpose. He says that the person Jesus "loved me and delivered himself up [to death] for me." Again it might be important for Paul and many Christians to maintain this very concrete and literal image of the person Jesus, because to deny it will feel psychologically like a denial that their way of life is based on something really "true." If it feels this way to sincere and good Christian readers, for most purposes I would heartily recommend that they reject the present account. It’s just that I think this attitude will require cordoning off their "Christian believer" self from the rational self that most modern people need to be to get by in the modern world.