Lately, I’ve been revising the translations I made for my book, “The Practice of the Way” with the intent of republishing it as a second edition. After working through the life of Christ again, mostly from the Gospel of John, I’ve started in on the letters and have reached the chapters of Romans which I included in this volume, and to be honest, I’m finding myself having a harder time actually translating this work than I should be.
I’ve worked through it, translated through it so many times over the past thirty years that I’ve lost count. I probably know the Greek text of Romans better than I know any English translation of it. There’s just no good reason for me to be stumbling over the text. I feel like the Greek makes perfect sense to me, but when I try and render it into English I fall flat on my face, and I can’t explain that. I go back and look up the expanded definitions of words I already know and have looked up a dozen times before, and I still can’t seem to render into English what my consciousness, what my soul is telling me that it is supposed to say or mean.
Part of this, I know, has to do with my hyperliteralism, a holdover from my Asperger’s from before my neurofeedback treatments. I’m still very left brain dominant, and still not used to using my right brain or allowing it much freedom, especially with this. I’m stumbling over the actual words trying to either use the lexical definitions or create newer, more modern English ones, and the final result of neither approach looks or sounds right to me, but I know deep within that the standard translations found in versions like the King James Version, the New American Standard, the New American Bible Revised, or the English Standard Version are off. I know it, but I’m tripping up on the actual words trying to render what it is supposed to say into English, and the translation, and what Paul was trying to say, is suffering because of it.
In chapters one and two, Paul begins by trying to describe the downward spiral of human beings due to our common human ancestor’s mistake in the garden (from the opening chapters of Genesis) and the resulting malfunction, which he doesn’t actually mention until chapter five but assumes everyone knows what he’s talking about until then. He works off of the assumption that this resulting malfunction is located within a human being’s flesh, that is, the soft tissues of the body such as muscle, sinews, and organs, but doesn’t directly state this until chapter seven. What he does directly state is that the God is vehemently, passionately angry at this malfunction (as opposed to the human beings themselves) and what it has done to us, and has judged against this malfunction for the destruction it has caused. Where we were created as the genuine image of God, we now fail to measure up to that image because of this malfunction. For this reason, because the malfunction is inherited and physically based, it’s not possible for this malfunction to be corrected by just doing what the law of Moses, the Torah, says, and in fact, keeping the Torah, or any regulation or rule no matter how well intentioned, can and does actually exacerbate the malfunction. Everyone is born with it and it is the reason why our common human ancestor and all of his descendants began dying to begin with. It doesn’t matter if someone is circumcised or still has a foreskin, they are still affected by this malfunction and the flawed and erroneous behaviors it produces create a kind of insanity within everyone affected, making us unable to experience the God, and are destroying us and will eventually lead to the total destruction of the human race.
God’s solution to our malfunction, as Paul explains it, is to freely give us through His own charity towards us His own Eternal Life, His own Spirit through a union with Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection, thus correcting or bypassing the malfunctioning flesh as long as we cooperate with Him, “walking in the Spirit” as he describes it. What Paul describes is that He gave this to everyone freely out of His charity towards us, that is, everyone already possesses it and in order to make us of it, rendering the malfunction inert, we just have to trust Him that it’s there and cooperate with Him. He then spends an entire chapter digressing about how it is entirely “Biblical” that a person’s malfunction is corrected by just trusting the God using the example of Abraham in Genesis who also trusted God and it was counted as him operating from a right state of being instead of the malfunction.
From here Paul gets more explicit about the two states which exist within the human being, calling one the “old human being” and calling the other the “new/fresh human being,” depending on which state the person was cooperating with or, as Paul put it, enslaving themselves to. As far as Paul was concerned, a human being was either a slave of their own malfunctioning flesh, or a slave of God’s life, His Spirit with whom they had been joined. The former leads to death as its natural result, as he illustrated in no uncertain terms in the beginning of the letter. The latter leads to life, and specifically, God’s life within the person. There is no judgment against, no condemnation against those who are cooperating with God’s life within them, that is His Spirit, and His Spirit is incapable of erring or being subject to that physically based malfunction. The malfunctioning flesh however has no hope, no possibility of doing the right thing on its own, because it can’t. The only state of right being is God’s state of right being, and the only way to actually do the right thing is through engaging with and cooperating with God’s state of right being. Any engagement with or submission to one’s own malfunctioning flesh will result in errors, mistakes, flaws, and eventually one’s own destruction and death.
This is what Paul was trying to say in Romans 1-8 in a nutshell. And really, this is everything he was trying to say. It was never about God being angry with human beings, He was angry with the malfunction. It was never about needing a blood sacrifice to be forgiven, much less a glamour or facade of “righteousness” which could cover us so God didn’t have to look at our filthiness. It was about God fixing the problem by joining Himself to us, combining Himself with us so that we no longer had to be enslaved to this malfunction, and in this way He would break the downward spiral of insanity which the malfunction induced within us, and the flawed, harmful behaviors it caused. In Paul’s later letter to the Galatians, he becomes even more explicit that there is no way to achieve a state of right being just by keeping rules, regulations, or doing what the Torah says. The problem is in the malfunctioning flesh, and it will still be in the malfunctioning flesh no matter how many rules you keep. Rule keeping can’t change the inherited malfunction. As he writes there, “Walk in the Spirit, and you will not bring the desires of the flesh to completion at all. Because the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these two things are opposed to one another so that you can’t do what you want.”
This principle message which Paul sent by courier, probably to Priscilla and Aquila first as they had been returned to Rome for a couple of years at least, to be disseminated to the rest of the Roman groups of Christians, isn’t as well understood as it should be because of many factors both historic and linguistic. And it should be understood because it is literally the underpinning, the foundation of everything Paul wrote in all of his letters. Even John alludes to this understanding in his first letter where he talks about “the one born from the God” and “the one born from the slanderer.” Where Paul talks about the extreme importance of love in his writings, John declares that the one who doesn’t love doesn’t experience the God, because the God is love, and the one who loves is born of God and experiences Him. They may have said things in different ways, but they were in perfect synch with their understanding of both the problem and God’s solution, and it had nothing to do with God wanting to destroy anyone.
I’m still working through my roadblocks to doing justice to Paul’s thoughts in a translation of Romans, but for now, this is my understanding of what he was trying to say.
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