Romans 7:7-20 – 7/3/2026 – The Feast of Thomas, the Apostle
What then are we to say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law sin lies dead.
Romans 7:7-8 (NRSVue)
Paul’s understanding of the relationship between the Law and the Gospel is subject to much scholarly theological and biblical studies debate. Here I want to focus on one particular aspect of Paul’s understanding of the law, its role in our moral psychology. He writes that “if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” The particular prohibitions of the Mosaic Law are what Paul thinks allow us to know that those things are wrong. To use his example, we would not know the coveting is wrong unless the law told us it was wrong, unless the law forbade coveting.
In this way of understanding human moral psychology, the only way human beings can know that an action is wrong or right is if we are told that it is by some outside authority. This position has led mainstream Christian theology to the conclusion that human beings do not and cannot know right from wrong on their own. We need the authority of the written “word of God” to know right from wrong, good from evil. This, the Christian theologian supposes, is a result of our fall from God’s grace and original sin. The corruption to our nature prevents us from seeing the world as God sees it, through the eyes of knowing what is truly good and what falls short of that goodness.
My contention is that Paul has an implausible moral psychology and this leads to a faulty understanding of the corruption of human nature in original sin. Contra Paul, I hold that human beings can be aware of their moral obligations and their moral shortcomings without a prohibition. Some of this is the inborn sense of community and cooperation we have in virtue of being the types of creatures we are. Some of this is the ability to reason about what actually is good for us and what harms us. To return to the example Paul uses, it is certainly possible to know that coveting is wrong without having a law telling us that it is wrong. It may be the case that particular individuals need to be told that an action is wrong for them to know it’s wrong, but this is certainly not the universal human trait that Paul believes that it is.
If we grant that Paul is wrong about moral psychology, that there are ways for people to know what is right and wrong and be aware of their own shortcomings without specific codified prohibitions, this allows for a broader, more nuanced understanding of “original sin” or the human fallen condition. If (contra Paul) our current state includes an awareness of right and wrong and the ability to reason about what our moral obligations are, even without a law, then we must search elsewhere for where the human condition has become fallen other than individual moral corruption. Instead, I hold that what keeps human beings from living well on their own by their own merits is the corruption of human society, of our communal life together. Competition and exclusion of others from social goods for the enrichment of others makes sin inevitable and something from which we need saving. It’s not that individuals are stained with corruption to the point where we can’t even tell right from wrong without having to be told. We were made with that awareness and the brokenness of our life together has made us unable to live up to that awareness without help and grace and a promise to recreate our human world.
Paul was a particularly scrupulous, zealous keeper of the law before he turned to follow Jesus. Though I do not know his personal psychology well enough to know for sure, I suspect that the law had become so central to his self-understanding that it seemed to him to be the only source of knowledge of good and evil, at least until Christ came to him. Though there are certainly others like Paul for whom religious scrupulousness is a means to understanding goodness and the grace of God, there are many others who come to such an understanding through other means altogether. We must resist the urge to universalize our experience, a mistake Paul makes here in Romans. Being aware that people come to these realizations in different ways, keeps us attuned to the numerous ways we are fallen and the multitude of ways God works in people’s lives. To universalize our experience blinds us to that fact.
Follow up question: What brought you to an understanding of what is good and to the realization that you could not attain the good on your own?
Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 7/3/2026:
Zechariah 2:6-13
Romans 7:7-20
Psalm 145:8-14
Feast of Thomas the Apostle Readings (ELCA):
Judges 6:36-40
Psalm 136:1-4, 23-26 (1)
Ephesians 4:11-16
John 14:1-7
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis
Dionysus on a Bike 
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