> I'm sorry not to know how to abbreviate the material cited above
[referring to an exchange between Jonathan Robie and Jeffrey Gibson on
Rom 7:5]
> but the
> little bit I have to add to this discussion addresses both Jonathan's and
> Jeffrey's messages. And what I have to say is more in the way of
> reservations and hints at alternatives than of any notion of how this
> phrase, TA PAQHMATA TWN hAMARTIWN, ought necessarily to be read.
>
> (1) I think Krister Stendahl's little book of essays (I forget the title,
> perhaps _Paul among Jews and Gentiles_?) containing that important study
> asserting that Paul was called rather than converted is one that people
> ought to read and think about. I have to say that I'm not as convinced of
> his viewpoint as I once was, one major reason being that I think that
> Paul's rhetorical thrust and the context of his addressing concerns of
> different congregations in different letters led him to formulate his ideas
> in ways that are not so easily reconciled with each other from one writing
> to the next. I don't mean that I think he was inconsistent, just that his
> focus in different contexts led him to different emphases--such that a
> reader of 1 Corinthians might have some difficulty discerning the same
> attitude toward traditional Jewish standards as is expressed in Galatians.
> So I am not altogether convinced that the passage in Philippians 3:6b KATA
> DIKAIOSUNHN THN EN NOMWi GENOMENOS AMEMPTOS is to be taken at pure face
> value any more than his claim in Gal 1:16 that he didn't communicate after
> his call with any human being ("flesh and blood"). I'm not trying to say
> Stendahl is wrong, just that one needs to evaluate his argument carefully.
> At any rate, I don't think Phil 3:6b is sufficient evidence that Paul
> consistently held that perfect obedience to the Law of Moses is within the
> capacity of any human being.
I agree that to whom Paul speaks has an effect on his empahses, but
one of the things which makes the rhetorical tone of Cor. diffrerent
from Gal or Romans is that in Cor Paul is not dealing with issues
grounded in a mixed congregation of Jewish and Gentile Christians. And
when he does do this, his emphasis is often on always on what keeping the
law in the way he kept it, as one perviously joyous in being able to
obey it, advances.
> (2) With regard to the phrase PAQHMATA TWN hAMARTIWN I think that it might
> be worth taking into account the possibility that the word PATHHMA is being
> used, as was the word PAQOS/PAQH, in a sense akin to or even identical with
> the Stoic usage for "irrational emotions"--uncontrollable impulses. The
> objective of Stoic ethics was achievement of a condition of APAQIA, which
> doesn't mean quite what our word "apathy" does, but which definitely
> involves liberation from subjectivity to impulses that upset one's psychic
> equilibrium, among which PAQH the Stoics counted joy and grief, love and
> hatred, which emotions they deemed powerful enough to overwhelm the self's
> freedom to respond rationally. Now it seems to me that Paul's conception of
> SIN is very much like the Stoic conception of the PAQH: it is an enslaving
> power that compels human beings to do what is self-destructive and
> mutually-destructive. I think that such an understanding of the meaning of
> PAQHMATA may in fact underly the traditional phrasing of our translations
> of this passage: "sinful passions." And of course, there's also the
> principle that genitive nouns can very often be readily converted into
> adjectives qualifying the nouns to which they refer.
Why go so far afield? Granted Paul may have been familiar with Stoic
philosphy and psychology (though how familiar he was, let whether he
could assume his readers were sufficiently familar with it for an
argument cast within it to be comprehensible, is, however,
a matter of debate). But why not set Paul's explanation of how the
devotion to the Law enslaves within the context that we have evidence that
Paul not only knew and speaks about, but condemned in himself and others,
namely, the very Jewish tradition - in which he was raised and in which he
excelled - the tradition of Zeal. It is, after all, Zeal, ala that
exemplified by Phineas and the Maccaabees and Judas the Gamalian and Zadok
the Pharisee, which was grounded in an imatatio dei emphasizing (to use
Marcus Borg's term) a "politics of holiness" and called for a not
only a separation from all that was unholy but the violent
elimination of the unholy, that Paul himself tells us led him into
doing the one thing he did regret (persecuting the church) and
therefore actually put him (as his encounter with Jesus convinced him)
at odds with the very God he thought he had been serving.
The identification (from hindsight) of the corrupting power of Zeal
for the Law upon any one like himself who would be wholeheartedly
obedient to God (and perhaps
even some percipience of what the wholehearted emphasis upon Zeal would
result in eventually vis a vis Romans and Jews in Palestine) seems to
me to make far more sense out of both Rom 7:5 and the whole of the Romans
passage than the trdaitional reformation interpretation of what is being
spoken of there.
I welcome comments.
Jeffrey Gibson
jgibson@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu