Bible Commentaries

Romans 6:1-14. In the fifth chapter, Paul has concluded his exposition of the “righteousness of God” which is revealed in the Gospel. But the exposition leaves something to be desired—something hinted at in Romans 3:8 (“Let us do evil that good may come”) and recalled in Romans 5:20 f. (“Where sin abounded, grace did superabound”). It seems, after all, as if the gospel did “make void the law” (Romans 3:31) in a bad sense; and Paul has now to demonstrate that it does not. It is giving an unreal precision to his words to say with Lipsius that he has now to justify his gospel to the moral consciousness of the Jewish Christian; it is not Jewish Christians, obviously, who are addressed in Romans 6:19 ff., and it is not the Jewish-Christian moral consciousness, but the moral consciousness of all men, which raises the questions to which he here addresses himself. He has to show that those who have “received the reconciliation” (Romans 5:11), who “receive the abundance of the grace and of the gift of righteousness” (Romans 5:17), are the very persons in whom “the righteous requirement of the law” is fulfilled (Romans 8:4). The libertine argument is rather Gentile than Jewish, though when Paul speaks of the new religion as establishing Law, it is naturally the Mosaic law of which he thinks. It was the one definite embodiment of the concept. The justification, to the moral consciousness, of the Gospel in which a Divine righteousness is freely held out in Jesus Christ to the sinner’s faith, fills the next three chapters. In chap. 6 it is shown that the Christian, in baptism, dies to sin; in chap. 7, that by death he is freed from the law, which in point of fact, owing to the corruption of his nature, perpetually stimulates sin; in chap. 8, that the Spirit imparted to believers breaks the power of the flesh, and enables them to live to God.

Romans 6:1. Τί οὖν ἐροῦμεν; What inference then shall we draw, i.e., from the relations of sin and grace expounded in Romans 5:20 f.? Are we to continue in sin (cf. Romans 11:22 f.) that grace may abound? Lightfoot suggests “the sin” and “the grace” just referred to. The question was one sure to be asked by some one; Paul recognises it as a natural question in view of his doctrine, and asks it himself. But he answers it with an indignant negative.

Romans 6:2. μὴ γένοιτο, cf. Romans 3:4. οἵτινες ἀπεθάνομεν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ: the relative is qualitative: “we, being as we are persons who died to sin”. For the dative, see Romans 6:10-11, and Winer, p. 263. To have died to sin is to be utterly and for ever out of any relation to it. πῶς ἔτι ζήσομεν; how after that shall we live in it? impossible.

Romans 6:3. But this death to sin, on which the whole argument turns, raises a question. It is introduced here quite abruptly; there has been no mention of it hitherto. When, it may be asked, did this all-important death take place? The answer is: It is involved in baptism. ἤ ἀγνοεῖτε ὅτι κ.τ.λ.: the only alternative to accepting this argument is to confess ignorance of the meaning of the rite in which they had been received into the Church. ὄσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν: we all, who were baptised into Christ Jesus, were baptised into His death. The ὅσοι is not partitive but distributive: there is no argument in the passage at all, unless all Christians were baptised. The expression βαπτισθῆναι εἰς Χριστὸν does not necessarily mean to be baptised into Christ; it may only mean to be baptised Christward, i.e., with Christ in view as the object of faith. Cf. 1 Corinthians 10:2, and the expression βαπτισθῆναι εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ. In the same way βαπτισθῆναι εἰς τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ might certainly mean to be baptised with Christ’s death in view as the object of faith. This is the interpretation of Lipsius. But it falls short of the argumentative requirements of the passage, which demand the idea of an actual union to, or incorporation in, Christ. This is more than Lipsius means, but it does not exclude what he means. The baptism in which we are united to Christ and to His death is one in which we confess our faith, looking to Him and His death. To say that faith justifies but baptism regenerates, breaking the Christian life into two unrelated pieces, as Weiss does—one spiritual and the other magical—is to throw away the Apostle’s case. His whole point is that no such division can be made. Unless there is a necessary connection between justification by faith and the new life, Paul fails to prove that faith establishes the law. The real argument which unites chaps. 3, 4 and 5 to chaps. 6, 7 and 8, and repels the charge of antinomianism, is this: justifying faith, looking to Christ and His death, really unites us to Him who died and rose again, as the symbolism of baptism shows to every Christian.

Romans 6:4. This symbolism interpreted. συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ κ.τ.λ.: Therefore we were buried with Him (in the act of immersion) through that baptism into His death—burial being regarded as the natural sequence of death, and a kind of seal set to its reality. Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:3 f. It introduces a false abstraction to say (with Meyer) that εἰς τὸν θάνατον means “unto death,” not “unto His death”: death in the whole context is perfectly definite. διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός: in nothing was the splendour of God’s power revealed so much as in the resurrection of Jesus, Ephesians 1:19 f. ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς: in life of a new quality; cf. Romans 7:6, 1 Timothy 6:17 : the construction makes the new quality of the life prominent. Winer, p. 296.

Romans 6:5. This verse proves the legitimacy of the reference to a new life in the preceding one: union with Christ at one point (His death) is union with Him altogether (and therefore in His resurrecton). εἰ γὰρ σύμφυτοι γεγόναμεν τῷ ὁμοιώματι τοῦ θανάτου αὐτοῦ: it is simplest to take συμφ. and τῷ ὁμοιώματι together—if we have become vitally one with the likeness of His death; i.e., if the baptism, which is a similitude of Christ’s death, has had a reality answering to its obvious import, so that we have really died in it as Christ died, then we shall have a corresponding experience of resurrection, τῆς ἀναστάσεως is also dependent on ὁμοιώματι: baptism, inasmuch as one emerges from the water after being immersed, is a ὁμοίωμα of resurrection as well as of death. It does not seem a real question to ask whether the ἀνάστασις is ethical or transcendent: one cannot imagine Paul drawing the distinction here. (On the word ὁμοίωμα, see Cremer.)

Romans 6:6. All this can be asserted, knowing as we do that “our old man” = our old self, what we were before we became Christians—was crucified with Him. Paul says συνεσταυρώθη simply because Christ died on the cross, and we are baptised into that death, not because “our old man” is the basest of criminals for whom crucifixion is the proper penalty. The object of this crucifixion of the old man was “that the body of sin might be brought to nought”. τὸ σῶμα τῆς ἁμαρτίας is the body in which we live: apart from the crucifixion of the old self it can be characterised as “a body of sin”. It may be wrong to say that it is necessarily and essentially sinful—the body, as such, can have no moral predicate attached to it; it would be as wrong to deny that it is invariably and persistently a seat and source of sin. The genitive is perhaps qualitative rather than possessive, though “the body of which sin has taken possession” (S. and H.) is a good paraphrase. See Winer, p. 235, 768. This body is to be reduced to impotence τοῦ μηκέτι δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς κ.τ.λ. “that we may no longer be slaves to sin”. The body is the instrument we use in the service of sin, and if it is disabled the service must cease. For the gen inf, see Burton, § 397.

Romans 6:7. ὁ γὰρ ἀποθανὼν κ.τ.λ. Here we have the general principle on which the foregoing argument rests: death annuls all obligations, breaks all ties, cancels all old scores. The difficulty is that by the words ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας Paul introduces one particular application of the principle—the one he is concerned with here—as if it were identical with the principle itself. “Death clears men of all claims, especially (to come to the case before us) it clears us, who have died with Christ, of the claim of sin, our old master, to rule over us still.” Weiss would reject the introduction into this clause of the idea of dying with Christ, on the ground that the words σὺν Χριστῷ bring it in as a new idea in the following verse. But it is no new idea; it is the idea of the whole passage; and unless we bring it in here, the quittance from sin (and not from any obligation in general) remains inexplicable. Weiss, in fact, gives it up.

Romans 6:8. The Apostle now resumes his main thought. συνζήσομεν: see note on ἀνάστασις Romans 6:5 : there is no conscious separation of ethical and transcendent life with Christ—to Paul it is one life.