Friday, December 05, 2025
The mistake occasionally made by Pauline interpreters, I think, is collapsing Paul’s arguments about what the Law cannot do into wholesale rejections of the Law for any other purposes. Thus, a Pauline statement to the effect that the Law does not justify or resurrect is erroneously interpreted to imply that Paul assigned no positive, even obligatory, value to any kind of Torah-observance and regarded it as a matter of complete indifference. However, such a construal fails to recognize the rather obvious point that denying something as a means to a first-order good, i.e., the Law as the path to justification, does not entail a denial of it as a means for other goods, goods that Paul himself describes as God-ordained realities. Thus, Paul denies that justification is through works of the Law, but he implies that a continued observance of the Law by Jews marks them out as Jews and that their distinction as Jews is something that God himself ordained and desires. This is the point missed (or dismissed) by those who deny that Paul continued to consider Jewish Law-keeping as good and intended. - Paul T. Sloan, Jewish Law-Observance in Paul
Thursday, December 04, 2025
But can anything else be said about the potential difference between the obligating content of “the Law of spirit and life” and “the Law of sin and death” (8:2)? Though requiring a longer treatment in its own right, it is important to recognize that given the Law’s incapacity to resurrect (Gal 3:21), and given Paul’s conviction that human bodies will become immortal in the resurrection (1 Cor 15:42–53), it may be that some of the Law’s commandments cease to function then (in the resurrection) as they do now. The difference between the ages, their respective bodies, and the commandments, though, lies not in the insignificance of the Law in Paul’s thought, but due to the supposition that the Law given to Israel regulates mortal bodies subject to impurity and death.
However, once resurrected and immortal, humans will possess bodies no longer subject to decay and impurity, and as such, laws that regulate such impurity will cease to be of significance. Without death and dying, purity regulations cease to be needed. Thus, it is not “the impurity laws” themselves that cease, but impurity. This kind of legal reasoning is evident in Luke 20, wherein the Sadducees present Jesus with the scenario of one woman having married several brothers before asking, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will she be?” (Luke 20:33). Jesus’s response is telling: “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage, for neither can they die anymore, for they are like angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:34–36). The change in the material quality of the resurrection body impacts a law that legislates marriage not because the “law” is insignificant but because it legislates a condition (mortal bodies that must procreate, the context of which is marriage in Jesus’s setting) that no longer obtains in the resurrection given the deathlessness of the bodies of that age. - Paul T. Sloan, Jewish Law-Observance in Paul
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Rather than simply distancing his audience from the Law in itself, Paul says that
because the Law, experienced without the Spirit, entangles one with sin and thus with
death, what is needed is liberation from “sin” (cf. 6:6–11) and “the Law of sin and death”
(8:2), which is the commandment seized by sin that leads the one “in the flesh” to death
(7:11–13).
Significantly, Paul goes on to say that “dying to the Law” liberates one from sin and
death, not “Law” generally or even the Mosaic Law specifically. This becomes clear at the
closing of Romans 7 and the transition to Romans 8 (see King 2017), wherein the members
of one’s fleshly body were captive to “the Law of sin” (7:23), but with the gift of the Spirit,
those in Christ who “walk according to the Spirit” can fulfill the Law’s requirement (τὸ
δικαίωµα τoῦ νóµoυ) (8:4). Thus, having “died to the Law” (or
possibly “by the Law”) (7:4; cp. Gal 2.19) and having been “released from the Law” (7:6)
most plausibly refer to the liberation from “the Law of sin”, by which he means the Law as
“seized” by “sin”, which effects death (7:9–13). The problem surrounding the Law, then,
was not “the Law” itself, but the fleshly composition of its recipients (8:3), who, when told
not to covet, were not equipped to fulfill this demand
- Paul T. Sloan, Jewish Law-Observance in Paul
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Significantly, Paul does not in Galatians or elsewhere blame the Law or criticize it for this function of “killing”; rather, like many Second Temple Jews, he interpreted Israel’s history after the giving of the Law as one of disobedience and covenant violation that incurred the promised discipline, leading to Israel’s “death”. - Paul T. Sloan, Jewish Law-Observance in Paul
Monday, December 01, 2025
My teaching on the healing of the woman with the issue of blood and the raising of Jairus's daughter from Luke 8. Notes. Audio 1. Audio 2.
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