Having undergone redemptive-historical modification, the law very much has a home in the New Covenant. The law continues to provide the moral standard that binds all people, not just Christians. It is this understanding of the law that helps us to grasp what the prophet meant when he looked to the day when God would “put his law” in his people and “write it on their hearts” (Jer 31:33). It is this understanding of the law that allows us to see what our Lord meant when he declared that he came not “to abolish but to fulfill the Law and the Prophets” (Matt 5:17).

Brian S. Rosner, Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God. NSBT 31; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2013, 249 pp. $24.00./£15.00

The apostle Peter famously said that “in all [Paul’s] letters … there are some things … that are hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16). These words can hardly fail to elicit a sigh of relief or even a wry smile from Paul’s readers. What we have all suspected but were afraid to admit, God has said – sometimes, Paul can be difficult to grasp.

One wishes that Peter had gone on and specified what those “some things” were. I rather suspect that high on that (theoretical) list would be something relating to Paul’s teaching on the law. Paul’s apparently contradictory statements about the law (compare Rom 3:31 and 6:14) have occupied interpreters for centuries. Historical-critical interpretation of Paul, at least since the days of F. C. Baur, has yielded an unending succession of unsatisfactory syntheses of Paul’s statements on the law. In no small measure, the New Perspective on Paul has been an effort to reckon with Paul’s view of the law from a posture of sympathy to first century Judaism. Evangelical interpretation of Paul has faced its own challenges, as recent debates about the so-called “third use of the law” in Paul attest.

Into this academic whirlwind Brian Rosner has bravely ventured. Rosner, Principal of Ridley Melbourne Mission and Ministry College, and an accomplished evangelical Pauline scholar, has authored a clearly articulated and argued monograph that tries to chart a way forward. He is not simply content to survey and to explain difficult passages, but to propose a “hermeneutical solution” that is “exegetically compelling” (p. 14). Although I do not find Rosner’s solution to be a compelling one, I am convinced that he has produced an important work that merits close study.

In the opening chapter, Rosner does a fine job setting forth the exegetical difficulties in Paul’s statements about the law (pp.24-5). He first proceeds to define terms critical to the discussion (‘Paul,’ ‘law,’ ‘believer’), stressing that Paul generally means by ‘law’ the first five books of the Old Testament (pp.26-31). Rosner then sketches what he will argue is Paul’s posture toward the law. For Rosner, much of the discussion has taken a wrong turn in the way that it conceives Paul relating to the law. “The question is not which bits of the law Paul is referring to in a given instance of nomos, but the law as what” (p.29, italics original; cf. pp.40-1, 43). Rosner begins, then, “by acknowledging the unity of the law,” and not by attempting to partition it” (p.208). Therefore, Rosner explains, when “Paul speaks positively or negatively about the law,” one needs to ask “in which capacity” for Paul “the law is functioning” (p.208).

Rosner proceeds to reject the venerable three-fold division of the law, dating back in Christian reflection at least to Thomas Aquinas and enshrined in many of the Protestant creeds and confessions. This division (moral, civil, ceremonial) is “anachronistic,” “impractical,” and “unsuccessful” (pp.36, 37). It is this third point that holds particular weight for Rosner. Such partitioning of the law, Rosner argues, fails to reckon with the root-and-branch character of Paul’s critique of the Mosaic law. What Paul has in view is nothing less than wholesale “replace[ment of] the law” (p.37).

Positively, Rosner summarizes Paul’s understanding of the law along three alliteratively titled lines – repudiation, replacement, and reappropriation. It is these three “moves” that occupy the remainder of the book (p.39). Rosner not only discusses them in relation to particular passages in Paul, but helpfully provides visual charts situating important Pauline passages under columns corresponding to these three moves (see pp.41, 210-6).

Chapters 2 and 3 address the way in which Paul is said to have repudiated the law. Their focus, understandably, is Paul’s negative statements about the law (p.45). Chapter 2 addresses “explicit” statements to that effect, while the chapter 3 explores lines of evidence in Paul that Rosner understands to constitute “implicit repudiation” of the law (p.83). No small part of the survey of the explicit statements centers upon Paul’s phrase “not under the law” (pp.47-59).  For Paul, Jews are properly “under the law,” that is, “bound by [its] demands” and “subject to its sanctions” (p.48). Gentiles, however, “are not and never were ‘under the law'” (p.48). Paul can also use the phrase “under the law” to refer to being “under the power and penalty of sin” (p.48), a condition in which, by definition, only Jews may find themselves. Paul also understood the law, Rosner further argues, to be a “failed path to life” (p.59), highlighting Paul’s handling of Lev 18 in Gal 3 and Rom 10 (pp.60-73). Where did Paul derive such a view of the law, Rosner queries? From the Old Testament itself, particularly the prophets Jeremiah (31:31-33), Ezekiel (36:22-32), and Daniel (9:9-16a) (pp.79-81).

Paul’s implicit repudiation of the law is evident, Rosner continues, from at least two forms of the “argument from absence,” namely omission and reversal (pp.83, 84). To give but two examples, Paul never says that believers “walk according to the law” – even though this is a common Old Testament phrase (p.85). Furthermore, while Paul says that Christians “fulfill” the law, he never says that they “keep” or “obey” the law (p.88). Rather, we “obey the gospel” (p.88.)

Chapter 4 addresses the ways in which Paul is said to have replaced the law. Rosner proposes several lines of Paul’s teaching in support of this claim. For Paul, according to Rosner, the obligation to keep the Mosaic law has been replaced by Christ, the gospel, and “apostolic instruction” (p.113). Such passages as Gal 2:19-20 and Phil 3:4-14 show, for Rosner, that “Christ took the place of the Torah” (p.115). The phrases “law of Christ,” “law of faith,” and “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (Gal 6:2; 1 Cor 9:21; Rom 3:27, 8:1) are overlapping though not synonymous expressions that collectively comprise a “substitute for the Law of Moses” (pp.120-1). Believers do not keep the law, because through love they “fulfill” the law (Rom 8:4, 13:8) (p.124). Believers are said to walk, variously, “in newness of life,” “in the light,” “in the Spirit,” and “according to the truth of the gospel,” expressions that denote “replace[ment of] life under the law” (p.127). For Rosner, Paul’s use of the term “new” frequently denotes “replacement of the old covenant of the law” (p.127). Finally, Rosner argues that the parallel statements at 1 Cor 7:19, Gal 5:6, Gal 6:15 not only repudiate the law (“neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything”) but also replace it with something else (“keeping God’s commands,” 1 Cor 7:19) (128, cf. 33-39).

What, then, replaces the Mosaic Law as a norm for Christian practice? According to Rosner, there is “obedience to apostolic instruction” (1 Cor 7:19). There is also “love produced by faith in Christ” (Gal 5:5-6), which Paul specifies in Gal 5:13-6:10. Finally, there is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17), that is to say, “ethics arising from the gospel” (p.132).

Chapters 5 and 6 address the way in which Paul is said to have reappropriated the law. Reappropriation is Rosner’s category for those passages in which Paul constructively and positively brings the law to bear on the lives of Christians. The law, in brief, “has ongoing value and validity” (p.136). This positive dimension to the law in Paul’s writings, according to Rosner, is two-fold. First, Paul is said to reappropriate the law as “prophecy,” that is, the law as it “forecasts and proclaims in advance” (p.138). This dimension of the law in Paul’s thought is especially evident in Romans, a letter replete with Old Testament citations and references that Paul understood to prophesy “key features of the gospel” (p.148). Second, Paul is said simultaneously to reappropriate the law as “wisdom.” While “the law as law-covenant has been abolished, the law is still of value for Christian conduct as Scripture and as wisdom” (p.160, italics original). Such an approach to the law, Rosner argues, is hardly unique to Paul. It has precedent in the Psalms (pp.165-74), and is faithful to the law’s own understanding of itself (pp.174-181). Paul’s moral teaching evidences not only formal links with the wisdom tradition, but also material indebtedness – in both “precept” and “practice” (pp.183, 188). That is to say, “Paul does indeed read the law as what may be described as wisdom for living” (p.188). How does this kind of reading differ from reading “law as law” (p.204)? Reading the law as “wisdom for living” means that Paul “has internalized the law, makes reflective and expansive applications, and takes careful notice of its basis in the order of creation and the character of God” (p.204).

In a concluding chapter, Rosner underscores that what he has proposed is a “hermeneutical solution … to the puzzle of Paul and the law” (p.208). The three moves within this hermeneutical solution are “what would be expected of a new movement in Judaism,” and, therefore, meet the test of historical contextuality (p.217). Where, then, does that put the Christian and the Mosaic Law? We do not observe the laws of the Torah – we do not “read the law as law-covenant” (p.218). Rather, we “retain … the Law of Moses,” that is, we reappropriate it as both prophecy and wisdom (p.218).

Rosner has proposed an exegetically-detailed and hermeneutically-sensitive way of addressing Paul’s teaching on the law. He has done so with admirable clarity. Paul and the Law, in fact, is a model of how a book should be written. No one can put this book down without a firm grasp of Rosner’s thesis. Pedagogically useful concluding chapter summaries, lucidly outlined chapters, and effective introductory and concluding chapters assist and guide the reader from the book’s beginning to its end. Rosner has shown that clarity and simplicity need not be foes of academic prose.

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