Paul knows it, for here precisely is the contrast between Adam and Christ, between the old community and the new. It is there in the paragraph of your text, though it has to be dug out and inferred. We know what Adam’s act was—the expression of will-to-power. Christ’s corresponding act was an act of obedience, that meant a renunciation of power. “Not what I wilt, but what thou wilt.” And on occasion Paul will spell it out in detail. “Though he was in the form of God, he humbled himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient, even unto death.” And all that is neither myth nor dialectic but history.
I have been all too well aware that so far, all this may have sounded more like a theological lecture than a sermon; but we are coming to the sermon, to the preaching of the Gospel now. And though I disavowed provocation, this may sound provocative enough, for the Gospel is the contradiction of evolution. I do not mean that it rejects evolution as a valid description of the development of creation. Paul can be said to accept it. The biblical picture of humankind is a picture of a creature exercising will-to-power. The creation narrative itself represents God as saying to the man and woman he has made: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The same thought is echoed in the Psalms. This dominion has led to animal developments and other developments, all good and right when they are rightly used.
We owe to human will-to-power the marvelous advances in our understanding and employment of natural phenomena and processes. But there is a good deal else we owe to human will-to-power, from Cain’s murder of Abel to Hitler’s elimination of Jews, and beyond. It is this will-to-power, this will to survive, this will to dominate our environment that somehow must be dealt with. Dealt with, not eliminated. Not eliminated because if we eliminated it we would cease to grow, to learn, to develop. We should still tread the earth in deadly fear of the dinosaur, and we should squat in our mud huts, and think ourselves lucky if we survived to the great age of twenty-one. We should lose Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Berlioz, and Barth and Bultmann too. But there is stronger reason for holding on to any scientific theory that seems to meet the facts about humankind’s incredible search for mastery over its environment—we are still striving after knowledge of the infinite.
But there is a stronger reason—it is the command of God. I have quoted it already from Genesis, let me quote it now from the Psalms—“thou has made him a little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou has given him dominion over the work of thy hands, thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.” I chose the Psalm because it makes explicit what is no more than implicit in Genesis. Recall the beginning of the Psalm—“when I look at the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, the stars which thy hast established, what is a human being that thou art mindful of him; or the son of humanity that thou shouldst care for him?” A Human Being, master of his environment, looks small enough when viewed in the context of the universe—even as the universe was understood in antiquity. But the important thing is to see him in the context of God, who established the moon and the stars. “O Lord our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.” We may fly to the moon and the stars; but God will always out pace our knowledge.
We don’t like it. I have already repeated, and begun to demythologize the old story. Adam snatches at the snake’s temptation; “take, eat, and you will be like God.” How splendid—he eats and that is the end of Paradise. For as the Prince of Tyre had to learn, “thou art human, and not God.” But we are not yet at the end of the story. For how does this majestic God behave? We have begun to glimpse this too. The one absolute ruler by right of all the environment of the universe chose to become and live his life as a servant; it was in the humiliation of death that he received the name that is above every name, with all of creation crying—Lord! So when we meet him, we find him in the shame and agony of Calvary. If we are to live with him, we must also die with him. So Paul continues.
“So what shall we say? Shall we go on in sin that grace may abound? God forbid; we who died to sin, how shall we live in it?” In Christ crucified and risen, humanity begins again, and the old pursuit of knowledge and power is disciplined by divine love.
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“ROMANS 7”—Romans 7.25
[Preached once at St. John’s College Durham 11/21/00]
We have before us in this service Romans 7, perhaps the most difficult, most profound, and most important chapter in the most important and most profound of Paul’s epistles. I am not under the illusion that we shall get very far with it in twenty minutes, but I invite your concentrated attention and your ability to fill in the gaps by calling to mind all those parts of the chapter to which I shall not be able to refer specifically. I thought for a time it might be best to go through the chapter from beginning to end, but I decided not to do that; partly because if I did I should have about a minute a verse, and be unable to do anything worthwhile about any of them, but even more because this is a service, and this part of it is a sermon, and though an exegetical lecture and an exegetical sermon have a good deal in common they are not identical.
The chapter itself pushes me in this direction, for though Paul has a clear theological argument, it is one that cannot be separate from human experience, his own, and his readers! The chapter itself is an address from a dying human being to dying human beings, and our treatment of it better be that too. We have a clear, a very clear theological theme. He begins with an unavoidable but terrible question—Is the Law sin? How could a Jew even form those words? But the answer is plain—No, the Law is certainly not sin, quite the opposite. But sin—personified—has got hold of it and is using this great and good thing for human destruction. The question is answered. It is as if we—never mind who—we had discovered the marvelous power of atomic energy, in itself a splendid thing. But our enemy’s spies have found the secret and are using the power that should have been our defense for our destruction. The Law is good, but Sin has seized it, and is using the power that should have given life as an instrument of death.
The theological question is answered, but it cannot be answered like a question in an exam paper in dogmatics; it can only be answered by digging deep into the stuff of human life and experience and this is precisely what a sermon will do. It will have a theological content but it too will be an address from a dying person to dying people.
For a sermon we need a text—Where shall we find it? How shall I choose it? I must admit that my choice involves a fair measure of original sin, you see I myself am supplying an illustration for my sermon. There is a desire here, not only under the surface to provoke, to disturb. I am taking as text the half-verse that many people say Paul did not write, could not have written. Others will say, yes perhaps he wrote it, but not at this point in the chapter; someone has been shuffling the cards. This is it—“So then I myself with the mind serve the Law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin” (Rom 7.25). How could he write, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord”—How could he write that, and then the text of Rom 7.25? But he did whether it suits us or not.
And it is a good text. For one thing it gives me the three clear points which I am old-fashioned enough to like. And for another thing it is true to life, isn’t it? The three points are given by three words and they average only four letters apiece.
LAW
The Law is a good thing. It is spiritual, inspired by God’s Spirit. It is holy, righteous and good. It encourages the right things, the things you ought to do. It is not contrary to the promises of God, far from it, it speaks them. All that God looks for in human behavior can be summed up in one of its precepts—“thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” So what is wrong with it? Nothing really, and so Paul says. I have quoted his words already. Yet there is something wrong, and there are more words of his to quote. He begins at once
