Was Paul a helpless sinner?

In a recent blog, Introspection: the good and the bad, I argued that, in essence, the pilgrim's path to the kingdom of God has a ditch on both sides. Believers can frustrate their desire to grow in grace by either failing to be alert to "the sin which so easily besets us" or by obsessing over their every naughty thought. I argued that obsession with one's own sinfulness is deleterious to growth. Sadly, Christendom has fallen into both ditches - the one by arguing that the law of God (which helps define sin) has been done away and the other by stressing the importance of introspection and self-awareness. The blog quoted Krister Stendahl's seminal essay "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West", where he says," We look in vain for a statement in which Paul would speak about himself as an actual sinner". One reader responded, "Is he serious? How does one not read Romans 7:14-25¹ as a series of statements in which Paul speaks about himself as an actual sinner?"

Good. I was hoping someone would point that out. What's the bone of contention? What would be so theologically-unsettling to take Paul's confession as showing he was engaged in a bloody, moment-by-moment losing battle with an innate carnality?

First, it leads to an unhealthy state of mind. William Barclay says that Paul "felt himself to be a split personality"². Therefore, we, too, should be likewise engaged. Further, he says, "It is part of the human situation that we know the right and yet do the wrong, that we are never as good as we know we ought to be. At one and the same time we are haunted by goodness and haunted by sin". Haunted!? Not exactly a frame of mind to cozy up to! This interpretation doesn't jibe with other statements of Paul. He declared that he had always had a good conscience before God (Acts 23:1, 24:16), and also that he was "blameless" when it came to his dedication to the law (Phil. 3:6). His confession of "chief sinner" (1 Tim. 1:15) must be taken to refer to his persecution of the church. Paul kept the law extremely well, thank you. Followers of Jesus need not desire to have a tortured, wracked conscience - at least not if one has repented of flouting divine law and seeks to obey God to the best of one's ability.

Second, consider Luther's disastrous take. He knew that sin was defined by the Law; he took Paul's words as a confession of the hopelessness that awaits any who seek to keep the law. Conclusion: forget the law. God never intended it as a permanent ethical standard and now "through Jesus Christ our Lord" we have been delivered from all obligation to keep the law. Luther concluded that

being justified by faith "without the law" (Rom. 3:21) means that in this era of the gospel law has been abolished. This theological position has done incalculable damage to the cause of truth.

We Westerners read Romans 7 almost slavishly as a "demonstration of inadequacies".³ But as Stendahl brings out, in Romans 7 Paul is not tearfully proclaiming his own inadequacy but is using a well-known style of rhetoric to show that, in spite of his shortcomings, "the ego is on God's side, and that it recognizes the law as good". Paul delighted in the law in the inner man (vs. 22), and so could Gentile converts who turned away from sin and looked to Jesus Christ (8:1). Although chapter 7 does not form the centre of gravity of the book of Romans, it does provide a supporting argument for Paul's thrust in the book - Jews are no better than Gentiles in the righteousness, and therefore the salvation, stakes. In particular, the fact that Jews had "the works of the law" (that is, they had grown up keeping the law) to "boast about" did not make them more righteous in God's eyes than Gentiles who had grown up as lawless "sinners". Jews and Gentiles alike must seek to the cross of Jesus Christ for atonement for sin.

Paul, as apostle to the Gentiles, was focused on helping Gentiles attain to salvation as well as on combating some Jewish "heresies" that claimed that only Jews could be saved.⁴ In the book of Romans Paul labored to show that Gentile followers of Jesus could attain to salvation in exactly the same way as Jewish disciples. Indeed, contrary to Jewish pride in their law-keeping, Paul pointed at that the Jewish community contained many sinners. In Romans 7 he points out that every Jew, even one as law-loving as himself, had been guilty of sin, as it is impossible for a human being to be totally blameless in his deeds and thoughts (as Job had to learn). As Stendahl says, "Paul's references to the impossibility of fulfilling the Law is part of a theological and theoretical scriptural argument about the relation between Jews and Gentiles".

Yes, all human beings have sinned, but some much more than others. Within depraved, sinful Israel of old you had some whom God called especially "wicked" (Jer. 5:26). So too in Paul's day. Paul himself was almost perfect according to the law, yet even he could be saved only through humbly placing his faith in Jesus Christ, just as the wicked would have to do after they turned from sin to obedience. Gentile followers of Jesus Christ who repented of law-breaking and came to delight in the law of God in the inner man, like Paul, were not one whit behind the Jews in saving access to God.

¹14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. 15 For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. 16 If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. 17 But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. 18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. 19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. 20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. 21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. 22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. 23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 I thank God - through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.

² The Letter to the Romans

³ Barclay, The Letter to the Romans

³ See the Dawn to Dusk book, Showdown in Jerusalem