The Passage From Death To Life: Paul's Notion Of Death With Christ In Romans 6

Abstract

Paul in Romans speaks of a kind of death as the result of sin, which is also identified as spiritual death or the death of the soul.It is existence under sin, a state of lostness, a form of death despite biological vitality.Such existence is characterized by "living in the flesh" (7:5), as well as passions and immorality spoken of in Rom 1:18-32 and Rom 6-8.The remedy for spiritual death as existence in sin is the salvific death of Christ, which brings about "death to sin" (6:2, 10).It is by participation in the death of Christ that believers can be freed from sin (6:7), understood by Paul as a power (6:6, 7, 12) and an evil indwelling ruler (7:17, 20), which compels one to do the evil that one does not want to do (7:19).Nowhere else in the NT is the death of Christ presented as a death to sin except in Rom 6, where Paul also speaks of believers' participation in the death of Christ (i.e., death with Christ) with various expressions: being baptized into his death (v.3); being buried with him by baptism into death (v.4); being united with the likeness of his death (v.5); our old self being crucified with him (v.6); having died with Christ (v.8), whose death is a death to sin (v.10).Believers' death with Christ as their death to sin, mediated by baptism (6:3), is significant in that it has overcome the dominion of sin (6:14), destroy the body of sin (6:6), free oneself from sin (6:7), and lead to a new life in Christ (6:4).This paper attempts to elucidate that "death with Christ" is indeed believers' passage from death to life, i.e., from spiritual death as existence in sin to spiritual life as being "dead to sin and alive to God" (6:11).