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Discussion Notes
Romans Study 5 : Romans 7.21-25
Emotional Intelligence
So when I want to do what is good, I find
a law at work that determines that right then, evil is close
at hand. Now I delight in the law of God with every ounce
of my being, but I feel in my bones another law, waging war
with the law of my mind. It imprisons me in the law of sin
that runs right down to my bones. I am a detestable man. Who
will rescue me from this body of death? Thank God through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
So then, the real me (an heir of Israel),
with my mind, am a slave to God’s law, but with my flesh
I am a slave to the law of sin.
Paul is a Jew of Jews, immersed in Torah
– the Jewish law. It was not merely a book that was
taken with utmost seriousness, so much as a lens for interpreting
all that happened in the world, with the intention of seeing
oneself and the world through God’s eyes.
This short paragraph summarises all that
Paul has so far been arguing about the monstrous gravity of
human sin that sucks all humanity into a fatal black hole
of unity with Adam. What power did the law have? It is as
fallen as those it sought to guide!
But surely, it is God’s law, and so
cannot be fallen. There is an important point to make here
about biblical interpretation: that we only interpret any
text by ‘actualising’ it, making it real in our
daily life. Our lives are the enacted interpretation of the
texts that we truly honour, be they the Bible, or some Ideology,
or the quiet dictates of today’s Empire. Whilst God’s
law is good in itself, it is still nevertheless external to
who I really am. (Hence Jeremiah longing for the day when
God would ‘write his law on our hearts). So there is
this good law which is external to us, which we seek to measure
up to; then there is the bad side of Torah, that all it seems
to achieve is highlight how sinful we really are.
The two different aspects of law that Paul
is talking about, are not two different laws, but two different
dimensions of God’s good law. Perhaps a modern day example
is to listen to Christians with powerful testimonies, being
saved from crime or witchcraft or war. And genuine and exciting
and liberating as such testimonies are, the effect that they
often have upon Christians can also be extremely negative:
‘I could never have that kind of testimony’, or
‘I could never be that good as a Christian’. It
can leave us feeling that our own, unremarkable conversion
stories are second rate. So the dramatic testimony is good,
but actually it is also bad – it leaves me realising
how poor my Christian life is.
The Law as Paul describes it, has this dual
characteristic. As something ‘out there’ to measure
up to – it is good and I try to embrace it. But, in
my inmost being, as I try to live according to this law, as
I try to ‘internalise’ it, sin takes over and
this great law becomes ‘sin’ once it is part of
my life.
So Paul is left with this awful moral struggle.
He is desperate to be this great channel of Grace that the
law requires and inspires and encourages us to be, - but when
it comes to it, he – even as a good Jew – is united
with Adam in sin, and the negative side of the law condemns
him. In the end, Paul is left simply recognising that he needs
to be saved.
One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th
century, who also happened to be an atheist and a Nazi, had
argued much the same – that we need and long to be agents
of grace – but we are helplessly fallen. At the end
of his life, Martin Heidegger threw his hands up in despair
and claimed, ‘only a God can save us’.
Ethically, ‘biological determinism’
– which says that we are shaped entirely by our physical
needs and therefore destined to be selfish – claims
the same thing as Paul is saying at this point. That we have
the capacity only for utter self-centredness. There is no
escape.
Recognition of this reality is a necessary
part of emotional intelligence. Instead of whitewashing our
human plight and our personal experiences with up-beat moods
or a positive attitude – the emotional intelligence
of Paul and of the philosophers – requires us to face
up to the horror of our actual plight in the world.
But Paul then moves to talk about our liberation.
What the philosophers and moralists lack is grace –
Jesus Christ reaches into our world to save us from this inescapable
cycle of sin that leads to death. There is no shortcut to
this insight for Paul, just as there is no short cut to resurrection
that short-circuits death. Paul has outlined the sheer negativity
of our actual plight before any good news of any worth can
be seen to have any real effect. But Paul closes this section,
not with a note of hopeless despair but of sheer gratitude.
Discussion
Questions:
1. How might we today idolise the bible,
in order to protect ourselves from a genuine encounter with
the God who addresses us through Scripture?
2. In what ways might we shy away from facing
up to the depths of human evil, or our own sin, or of the
dark situation that faces the church or the world? Can we
think of examples of premature attempts to be positive that
have prevented us from getting to the heart of a situation?
3. Do you ever find yourself in a purely
negative world, sharing the despair of the philosopher, or
the gloomy outlook of the ‘determinists’: that
is, simply experiencing all the ravages of sin without a genuine
encounter of salvation here and now? Should we always expect
such an experience ‘here and now’?
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