Sunday, July 9, 2023

Patrick Henry Reardon (EO) on Romans 8:3

  

. . . later in this epistle Paul will appeal to the enfleshing of the Son as the point where the intervention of grace displaces the Torah as the governing force in human experience.

 

For what was impossible to the Law because it was weak through the flesh (δια της σαρκος)—God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (εν ομοιωματι σαρκος αμαρτιας) on account of sin (περι αμαρτιας), condemned sin in the flesh (την αμαρτιαν εν τη σαρκι) (Romans 8.3)

 

This affirmation respecting the Son’s assumption of “the likeness of sinful flesh” appears as the climax to the Apostle’s account of the experience of “sinful flesh”:

 

I am fleshly (σαρκινος), sold under sin (υπο την αμαρτιαν). . . . I know that in me—that is, in my flesh (εν τη σαρκι μου)—no good dwells. . . . O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7.14, 18, 24)

 

The “sinful flesh” (σαρξ αμαρτιας, a descriptive genitive) of which Paul writes chapter 8, the flesh assumed by God’s Son, is the same flesh of which Paul complains all through chapter 7. According to Saint Paul, that is to say, the flesh assumed by the Son of God was identical to our own. Assuming our likeness (εν ομοιωματι), he took on “the flesh of sin”—σαρξ αμαρτιας.

 

In view of the New Testament’s insistence that Christ was without sin—and that death, consequently, had no hold on him—Paul’s description of the incarnation in this text of Romans seems unusually bold. It is valuable for its clear assertion that the Son, in the incarnation, assumed our humanity with the weaknesses and disadvantages of its fallen state. (Patrick Henry Reardon, Romans: An Orthodox Commentary [Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018], 45-46)