NOTES for Rom 7:4

Changing oneself and one's life is extremely difficult. Therefore, when calling us to renewal, the apostle speaks these astonishing words. This thought became one of the most important in Christian understanding of life and death. The apostle explains that death frees us from the obligations and ties accumulated in the course of life, first of all because we lose the ability to practice those ties. That is why physical death, depriving us of the ability to commit sin, allows us to detach ourselves from it. And the apostle's words give us grounds to say that Christians begin a new life, free from sin, already here and now.

This is important because we often think that Christians are waiting for recompense beyond the grave, or we make use of unbiblical ideas about hell and paradise, with frying pans and streams of nectar respectively. No, Christians, unlike the followers of all other religions, are waiting for nothing. They become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven already now, according to this word of the apostle.

Modern European consciousness is very fond of using the categories of “legality” and “justice.” We have inherited—both from the Jews and from the Romans—a clear idea that human life should be governed by certain ordinances and laws. Life should be arranged so that our actions do not cross the boundary established by law; this is what we are so fond of calling “legal consciousness.” Its roots run deep, and one cannot say that it is altogether wrong. After all, the Law of which Paul speaks was given by God to the Jews and, with and through them, to all humanity. For the multitude of commandments that the Pharisees knew and observed so well were originally based on the ten most important commandments of Moses’ tablets. Their role was great: they helped the chosen people remain united, not fall away from God, and await Christ. Yet—as is inevitable for humanity—their meaning was reduced to rituals, to literal reproduction without understanding. It is precisely this attitude that Paul calls service in the “old letter.”

The coming of Christ, His death, and His Resurrection bring humanity liberation from the “burden hard to bear” of many human ordinances: the renewal of the Law through Grace. It was not the Law that died, for it is from God. We died to the Law because above it came the New Law, the Law of Grace.

This is joyful and at the same time very frightening, because it lays an enormous responsibility upon us. We can no longer comfort ourselves by saying that we have carefully observed every ritual precaution and fast and recited all the prayers. Our salvation lies precisely in direct communion between the human person and God, in our ability to participate at least in part in God’s love for the rest of the world. This is what the Lord speaks of in the parable of the Last Judgment (Mt 25:31–46), where we will be judged not by how many times a day we prayed, but by whether we fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, and welcomed the stranger.

Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul again turns to the theme of life and death. He proceeds from the self-evident premise that the action and authority of the Torah extends only to the living, not to the dead (v. 1). As an example he cites the widow's right to remarry, which the Torah does not dispute (vv. 2-3). Marriage is the union of two people whom the authority of the Torah joins before God. It is indissoluble, and every attempt to violate the bonds of marriage turns out to be a violation of the Torah.

But after the death of one of the spouses, of course, there can no longer be any question of violating marital fidelity: the authority of the Torah extends only to the living. One can be freed from under the authority of the Torah either through violating it or through death. But death, according to the generally accepted ideas of Paul's time, was not the disappearance of the deceased without a trace, but the person's transition into a new and qualitatively different state. There is no single view of the afterlife either in the Old Testament or in rabbinic theology, but all agree that what is at issue is change, and radical change at that.

That is exactly why the Torah loses authority over the dead person: it is needed to help a person make the choice between sin and righteousness in that person's present state, that is, while the person is alive. If this state has become absolutely different, then the norms of the Torah lose their meaning for the person, and the Torah accordingly loses its authority over that person.

The same thing, in the apostle's thought, happens to those who choose the Kingdom. From the point of view of those who remain outside the Kingdom, they are dead: like the dead, they stop living the life they lived before, and their new life is inseparable from the life of the risen Christ (v. 4). But the life of the Risen One proceeds according to laws completely different from the laws of life in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed. In a certain sense, the difference between those who live in the Kingdom and those who live in our untransformed world is almost as great as the difference between the living and those who dwell in Sheol. And the Torah loses its authority over those who have received the Kingdom just as it loses that authority over those who have gone down into Sheol (vv. 5-6).