Why the Torah

Why the Torah November 24, 2014

In a 2007 essay reprinted in his Pauline Perspectives, NT Wright gives this tight and quite wonderful summary of what Paul says about the cross in Romans 5-8. He is correct about Paul and largely correct in his criticisms of traditional atonement theologies.

He observes that the opening section of Romans 8 “is perhaps the clearest statement of substitution, indeed penal substitution, in Paul: there is ‘no condemnation’ for those who are in Christ (8.1), because God has passed judicial sentence of condemnation on sin itself (8.3).” But the context in which Paul makes this claim “is not the normal Reformation dogmatic framework of human sin, the threat of divine wrath and the turning away of that wrath through Jesus’ death, though of course it carries many features of that. Rather, it is the Pauline argument about what has happened in Israel through the arrival of Torah” (373). This should be qualified: Wrath against human sin, after all, is part of the larger context of Romans and the death and resurrection of Jesus are presented as the solution to that wrath. So the dogmaticians are not wrong; but Wright is correct that dogmatics has sometimes missed the historical thrust of Paul’s argument.

What is that thrust? Wright says, “(1) to call Israel to be his people in order to address the problem of Adam and so of the whole cosmos; (2) to make Israel the place where sin would do its worst, would raise itself to its full height; (3) to give Israel the Torah so that, despite and indeed through Israel’s perfectly proper longing to fulfill that Torah, rightly seeing it to be life-giving, sin would in fact grow to its full height through that strange ‘gift,’ since Israel, being also in Adam, would break even the good Torah, turning mere hamartia into paraptoma, ‘transgression’; and then, astonishingly but climactically and decisively, (4) to send his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering, and so to pass sentence once and for all on ‘sin’ at the very point where it had gathered itself together, and thus (5) to bring into effect the larger purposes, not merely ‘forgiveness of sins’ but ‘the righteous decree’ . . . of Torah, its full intention to give life” (373).

We might gloss briefly: Sin does its worst when the good gift of Torah is used to condemn and kill the Torah-giver. Sin is thus self-condemned, and God condemns Sin in vindicating His Son by raising Him from the dead. Sin, which has been distinguished from the “I” of Romans 7, and isolated, is targeted for condemnation. In the cross, Sin is put to death, so that humanity can rise again in the risen Christ.


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