Shane Williamson’s Reviews > Romans: Text, Readers, and the History of Interpretation > Status Update

Those in whom the Spirit does not reign do not belong to Christ; therefore those who serve the flesh are not Christians, for those who separate Christ from His Spirit make Him like a dead image or a corpse...Free remission of sins cannot be separated from the Spirit of regeneration. (Calvin, Commentary on Romans 8:9)

God's justice is said to exist through faith in Christ Jesus, not as though by faith we merit being justified...but because in the very justification, by which we are made just by God, the first motion of the mind toward God is through faith. Hence faith, as the first part of justice, is given to us by God. (Aquinas, Commentary on Romans, 302).

That is our work in this life, with the spirit to put to death the doings of the flesh; every day to afflict them, diminish them, rein them in, do away with them. — Augustine, Sermons 156.9 (Westerholm, 125-26)

If we believe [Christ] was handed over on account of our sins, why do we not regard every sin as hostile and injurious to us, seeing that it is recorded to be on account of these sins that our redeemer was handed over to death? For if any fellowship or friendship should again occur between us and sin, we are showing that we have no regard for the death of Christ Jesus. (Origen, Commentary on Romans, 4.7.7)

Paul the apostle believed "Christ died for our sins." That life-altering conviction is absent from the Second Temple writings that set the boundaries within which "Paul within Judaism" scholars allow him to have moved. Only with irony can such a domestication of his thought be labeled a "radical" perspective on the apostle. (75)

Paul thus appears to have shared the belief of other early Christian writers that the old covenant's rites of atonement served only to foreshadow the once-for-all, effective self-sacrifice of Christ (note 1 Cor 5:7; Col 2:17; Heb 10:1, 4). (55n35)