The baptismal death to sin (vv. 3-4). Paul grounds (v 3) the statement that believers have died to sin by pointing to baptism as involving a participation in the death of Christ. For all the significance of this text in the history of sacramental theology, it is not Paul’s aim at this point to provide an instruction on baptism. He makes a passing allusion, assuming the Christians of Rome to be as familiar with this rite of Christian initiation as the communities he has himself founded (cf. Gal 3:26-27; 1 Cor 10:2; 12:12-13; cf. 1:13-17).
What may come as a surprise to the Roman community—though this we cannot really tell—would be the particular implications Paul draws out from baptism in terms of the Christian’s “death” to sin. Do they not know that being baptized “into” (eis) Christ Jesus means being baptized “into his death” (eis ton thanaton autou)? As in the parallel references to baptism in Gal 3:27-28 and 1 Cor 12:12-13, behind the expression here lies the characteristic Pauline idea of the risen Lord as personally constituting a sphere of influence or milieu of salvation “into” which believers are drawn through faith and baptism, henceforth to live “in Christ” (cf. v 11). Christ does not lose his individual personal identity but, nonetheless, as risen Lord and “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45), he somehow “contains” within his person, in a communal sense, the messianic community destined for salvation. The present allusion to this truth goes beyond earlier presentations (Gal 3:27-28 and 1 Cor 12:12-13) in its suggestion that baptism involves not simply a being joined to Christ in a static “spatial” sense but also a dynamic insertion into what might be called his overall “career”—death, burial and risen life. It is this conformity to the “career” of Christ that lies at the heart of Paul’s insistence, negatively, upon Christians’ “death” to sin and, positively, their orientation towards a new, righteous life.
The following sentence (v 4) draws a preliminary conclusion. If baptism implies this involvement with Christ in his death, it must mean involvement in the rest of the process as well: his burial and risen life. “Burial” stresses the finality of the “death,” the radical cut-off from preceding existence that death implies. It is expressed here in the first of a series of compound verbs with the syn-prefix (synetaphēmen) which are a feature of the way this passage portrays believers’ intimate involvement with Christ’s career (cf. v 5, v 6, v 8; also 8:17). But “burial” with Christ is only a stage on the way to arrival at the full term of that career: resurrection. Paul does not speak immediately of the risen glory off believers. Instead, he associates the raising of Christ “through the glory of the Father” with the divine intention (cf. hina . . . ) that “we should walk (peripatēsōmen)in newness of life (en kainotēti zōēs). Within the biblical traditional “walking” refers to behavior in the sight of God. “Newness” (kainotētēs) points to the new creation (cf. 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15; cf. Rom 12:2). There is an eschatological aspect to the “walking”—it flows from something which begins here and now. Though not yet wholly removed from the conditions of the present, passing age (suffering, temptation, death), believers are summoned and empowered to live out the righteousness appropriate for the new. For Paul, it is precisely the hope of one day sharing fully the risen life of the Lord that sheds worth and dignity upon present life in the body (cf. esp. 1 Cor 6:13-14) and motivates the desire to live out God’s gift of righteousness. (Brendan Byrne, Romans [Sacra Pagina 6; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1996], 189-90)
