The Men Redeemed or Unredeemed? Interpretations of Rom 7:14‒25 in Aquinas’s Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Romanos lectura and in Contemporary Exegesis

Abstract

This article focuses on the pericope of Rom 7:14‒25, especially on the problem of understanding the rhetorical ‘I’ in Aquinas’s Ad Rom, as well as in selected twentieth-century biblical commentaries. The first part of the article offers the analysis of Aquinas’s reflections on Rom 7:14‒25, where we find an exegetical explanation of the pronoun ‘I’ in Ad Rom. The second part includes the opinions of contemporary biblical scholars on the rhetorical ‘I’ of the pericope. The first scholar is Karl Barth whose well-known monograph Romerbrief  is an example of the philosophical (or anti-philosophical) and theological approaches to St Paul’s epistle. The second scholar is Douglas J. Moo, who represents classical historical-critical exegesis of Romans.