I hope that the discussion of death before the law as physical death or hell is somewhat resolved. Trying to work through these texts can be difficult. This response to Naz is a little longer and so I decided to surface this submarine discussion up to the level of a new post since it has little to do with the original post anyway.
I wanted to respond to Naz’s concern about taking Paul’s words in their apparent plain sense. I have nothing but applause to take the text for what it says. My concern is that as Naz is surely aware in interpreting the text, there are many examples where the plain reading of the text is the exact opposite of the sense that God wants us to get. Amos 4 is a favorite where God commands the Israelites to “go to Bethel and sin, and go to Gilgal and sin yet more.” Jesus commands those with sin problems to cut off hands and gouge out eyes in Matthew 5. And yet we are expected to directly disobey these grammatically and lexically clear statements, because there is a clearer theological idea.
In other places there are ambiguities in how a word is supposed to be understood in a given context, simply because this word is used in different senses in different contexts. What I was saying about the phrase you objected to, is that Paul is not talking about imputation of sin in the normal sense that we talk about it in Reformation theology. Because there must be a sense in which people before Moses’ day who were unsaved, unforgiven, and unrighteous to have been understood as such, and condemned by God.
In trying to understand the meaning, I think we need to solidify our understanding of the law of Moses as the specific law under discussion and its role in that society. According to the Jewish understanding of things in Jesus’ and Paul’s day, adherence to such commands as circumcision, feast days and sacrifices defined who the people of God were. Thus Paul refers to those ‘outside the law’ as sinners (Galatians 2:16). However, Jesus (Matthew 23:23) and Paul (1 Corinthians 7:19) were making a distinction between simple adherence to outward observances and true obedience to the law (Romans 2:25-29). Thus a true Jew is not one who is Jewish on the outside, but one on the inside.
It seems to me that Paul in Romans 5:13-14 may be saying with his ‘sin is not imputed where there is no law’, that ‘when the law of Moses is not around, it cannot do its job of defining who is a member of the people of God and who is not; it cannot say that this person is a sinner, in the sense that they do not participate in the physical rite of circumcision or in the feast days. And yet people were sinners and were punished accordingly.
Abraham lived before the law and was accepted by God because of his faith. And we in the post-law period are also accepted by faith. And even though we are not under the law of Moses, and therefore it cannot be used to distinguish the sinners from the people of God, there still are sinners and saints. The defining characteristic, according to Paul in Romans, and this is his point, is the Holy Spirit and faith.
I hope this gives some justification for my understanding of the text. In this case, I think that a plain reading, if understood from a certain perspective, forces one to say things that are not true, even in the context of the passage itself.
