Abstract
Readers from Augustine to Martin Luther, Karl Barth, and Alain Badiou have made the monologue of Romans 7:7-25 into a centerpiece of reflection on sin, human nature, and subjectivity. Though sin, body, mind, and passions figure elsewhere in Paul's letters, they are never given the sustained attention of 7:7-25, where a speaker agonizes at length about its inability to put the good into practice and speaks of its body and mind as if simultaneously in and outside them. Whereas this speaker claims confusion in 7:14 ("I do not understand my own actions"), eventually arrives at a clear-eyed evaluation of its condition: it is trapped by sin in the "body of death" so that it cannot free itself to put into practice God's law (7:7-13) or the good (7:14-25) more generally. 1 A number of influential Christian interpreters have taken the speaker's incapacity to do the good as capturing something axiomatic about human nature. Thus Augustine understood this as exemplary of how even the best person fails before God and relies wholly on God's mercy and grace.2 Due to Luther's rediscovery of the Augustinian reading, the monologue has figured prominently in Protestant theological traditions as a prooftext for Luther's famous dictum that man is simul iustus et peccator, at once a sinner and justified by God in spite of this depravity. To give only one example drawn from twentieth-century Protestant traditions, Rudolf Bultmann maintains the focus on Romans 7 as a prooftext for doctrines of sin, but he understands sin here primarily as a matter of reliance on the self as opposed to God.3 To the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition, Bultmann adds a modern conception of the subject as a special interior realm of thought and reflection, cut off from the world of objects. He thus reads the speaker's agonizing reflection on and alienation from its body and mind as prefiguring the crisis of the subject coming to know itself as an object. Bultmann's appropriation of the monologue demonstrates the interpretive richness of the text, but it is not hard to imagine that this reading is ahistorical, given the mutability of notions of self or personality.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Paul and the Philosophers |
| Publisher | Fordham University Press |
| Pages | 69-83 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISBN (Print) | 0823249646, 9780823249640 |
| State | Published - Feb 2013 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences
- General Arts and Humanities