NOTES for Rom 3:1-20

Today the Apostle speaks to us about very important things. God gives people His Word so that we may live according to His plan. Which of us has perfectly fulfilled His will? Yet even when a person proves unfaithful to his calling, God remains faithful to His love. Does this mean that His faithfulness gives us the right to forget His call and do evil in the hope that God can turn it into good? The Apostle warns us against this. For us, this is the only way to respond to God’s faithfulness.

Continuing the discussion of the advantages of being Jewish, Paul says directly that there are no such advantages. Of course, he is speaking not about religious advantages, but about spiritual ones in the proper sense. This is not about any tradition, any theology, or even any knowledge of the Torah as a text. An advantage in the spiritual sense could belong only to someone able to live without sinning, but in our fallen world, regrettably, there are no such people (v. 9).

To support his thought, the apostle cites the words of an ancient psalm that vividly describes human sinfulness (vv. 10-18). To this, of course, one could always object that the Torah did not require sinlessness from a person; it only required the right choice in a concrete situation, a choice that would conform to the norms of the Torah. But in this case Paul is, as can be seen, arguing with those who were sure that one could be freed from sin and enter the Kingdom by doing what the apostle in Greek calls "works of Torah" or "works of the Law" (v. 20).

The reference is apparently to what in Hebrew is called a mitzvah, literally translated as "command" or "commandment." In Paul's time, however, in the Jewish world it had begun to mean what we today usually call religious obligations. With this understanding of commandment, observance of the Torah was reduced to the performance of numerous religious obligations, some of which found a basis in the text of the Torah, while others rested solely on the rabbinic tradition that existed at that time.

Here one can see a polemic, not very noticeable at first glance, with another well-known rabbinic school: the school of Shammai, with whose representatives the followers of Hillel held constant discussions. Shammai was the one who was sure that the performance of religious obligations in itself sanctifies and purifies a person. But the apostle puts the emphasis elsewhere. He says that the Torah is not meant for competing with one another in the fulfillment of a multitude of religious obligations. It is needed in order, in Paul's words, "to know sin," that is, to learn to distinguish sin from righteousness and to see what hinders a person on the way to the Kingdom (v. 20). The Torah is not a magic wand that opens the gates of the Kingdom for the one who possesses it; it is more like a compass that helps one stay on the path of righteousness. Any other use of it makes the Torah useless, and hopes for its effectiveness illusory.

Paul quotes a text from the Book of Psalms that speaks of universal sinfulness, of the fact that no righteous people remain on earth. These are rather allusions to certain passages from different psalms, so that it is impossible to find the passage cited by the apostle in the form in which it appears in the letter. Such allusions to well-known passages from the Book of Psalms, from the prophetic books, or even from the Pentateuch were not rare in rabbinic discussions.

Paul's main thought is clear: there are no sinless people in the world, and therefore there are no innocent people before God and the Torah. It is precisely the Torah that reveals a person's sinfulness; by it, according to the apostle, sin is known. Here Paul raises a very serious problem, relevant to those who walked the way of righteousness presupposed by the Torah, and above all the inner Torah. It was precisely the inner Torah, perceived and experienced by a person as a spiritual and moral imperative, that revealed to the seeker of the way his own insufficiency.

The Torah, perceived mainly or exclusively in an outward way, could create the illusion of something on which one could establish oneself by contrasting oneself with those who do not know or observe the Torah. But then the Torah is reduced to what the apostle calls "works of the Torah" or "works of the Law," to what we would today call religious duties. And then, of course, the Torah becomes for those who follow it an exclusively religious phenomenon.

Paul, however, speaks of something else. He speaks of the inner Torah and of the spiritual path that following it presupposes. Here the issue is no longer religion. What matters here is to relate each step, each intention, to the inner Torah as to a system of God's intentions opened to a person. This is spiritual work, reducible to no religious practice. But precisely the attempts to relate one's will in its concrete manifestations to equally concrete manifestations of God's will reveal to a person his imperfection.

It turns out that doing this is not at all simple, even with every desire: the will of fallen humanity does not obey a person nearly so easily, and a fallen person cannot even simply track all his intentions, not to mention becoming aware of them. And no "works of the Torah," no religious practice, and no outward religious activity can help a person here. If only because all such practice and any such activity touch only the surface of the human person, the periphery of his existence. But the way of righteousness corresponding to the Torah requires deep changes.

From following the Torah Paul moves to another theme connected with the Torah: religion and religiosity. The apostle, as we can see, understands the difference between the Torah as a properly spiritual reality and the religion it gives rise to. Judaism as a religion is indeed unthinkable without the Torah. But the Torah itself is greater than Judaism.

Moreover, observance of the religious prescriptions of Judaism does not yet guarantee what the same Jewish tradition calls "keeping the Torah": one can be a religious person and at the same time a violator of the Torah, and then religiosity in itself loses all meaning. Or one can be not religious at all, like the Gentiles, but follow the "natural" Torah, and those who follow such a "natural" Torah may turn out to be closer to God than Jews who are confident in their religious piety.

Of course, when speaking of Gentiles, Paul has in mind not worshipers of some pagan cults, but rather those whom we today would call secular people, since most of those who were called pagans in Paul's time were religiously indifferent. There were, of course, real religious pagans too, but they would hardly have been among the apostle's listeners, and certainly would not have become Christians.

What matters to Paul above all is following the inner Torah, not the external forms of the Jewish religion. He understands perfectly well, of course, that precisely the attempt to follow the inner Torah will reveal human sinfulness faster than anything else, and this process itself becomes judgment for the person. But it does not follow from this either that the Torah itself is bad, or that one needs to sin deliberately in order to reveal one's own sinfulness to the end.

The inner Torah reveals it sufficiently as it is, and to sin consciously only means increasing the measure of sinfulness in one's life. One must simply not refuse the path that presupposes following the inner Torah, even if such a path becomes judgment for the person. And in this sense Jews as the people of God have an advantage over every other people: it was precisely to the Jews as God's people that the Torah was given for reflection, understanding, and conscious following.

Without the Jewish people, there would have been not only no Judaism as a religion, but also no way of the Torah, without which full knowledge of God is impossible. And if not all Jews walk this way, the way of the Torah is a matter of a person's personal, voluntary choice. A person can be forced to fulfill religious norms and prescriptions, but he cannot be compelled to take a spiritual path, to do the spiritual work without which that path does not exist. And even if many of Paul's fellow believers turn out to be merely religious formalists, their formalism in no way devalues either the Torah or the spiritual path that it presupposes.