Law

Contemporary Western readers live in a highly legalistic, litigious culture where ‘the law’ primarily evokes civil and criminal law and the legal profession; this is a partial asset for Paul’s legal-metaphor argument in Romans 2-7 but requires care to keep readers from assuming only contemporary secular legal categories are in view, and to avoid caricaturing ‘law vs. grace’ in a simplistic ‘legalism is always bad’ way that some popular ‘hyper-grace’ teaching in contemporary English-language Christian media encourages.