Gal 3:28 contains not only an early, Jesus-movement formula for salvation but also three of Paul’s main images for sin—Gentile, slave, and woman. The verse has supported a broad range of interpretations, from the notion that differences in status, ethnicity, and gender were only dissolved “in Christ” but not in social or ecclesiastical roles, to a notion of equality that erased difference, to (more recently) approaches that take seriously the constructed aspect of ancient (since all) identitarian categories. For these last interpretations (see, for example, Dale Martin), each pair in the formula represents a hierarchical spectrum in the worldview of a first-century Jewish moralist. Salvation constitutes becoming not only more free, but also more Jewish and more male.

Such a reading also makes sense in terms of Paul’s vision of the problem to which salvation responded. Believers were called to be less slave-like, less like “Gentile sinners” (Gal 2:15), less female. And though these categories are transformed to their opposites, the constant, common denominator across the span of sin to salvation is not simply life, but desire.

The foundational role of slave, woman, and Gentile as images for sin becomes evident through a close reading of Rom 6-7, perhaps the most classic Pauline section on the problem of sin, Throughout, sin is understood with reference to the “laws,” both natural and societal, of slavery, marriage, and “foreignness,” and is solved by God’s granting salvation in the form of life, but life understood as free, Jewish, and male. Each category is understood as an escape of the social, natural, and cosmic constraints placed on life.

In Rom 6-7, Paul intertwines imagery of death leading to freedom from slavery with ideas of death leading to freedom from marriage. In each case, the original situation of enslavement or marriage, understood as a contract, is “nullified” (katargein) so that the believer is free to marry or be enslaved to another man—here, God. The feminine evocations continue into the famous passage Rom 7:7-25, where, if scholars such as Stanley Stowers are convincing [l] (and I think he is), Paul pulls on a standard figure for lack of self-control: Medea, particularly as portrayed in tragedy and philosophical argument. Out-of-control Medea (who, jilted by Jason, decides to kill their children and his new bride) is not only a woman but foreign, non-Greek, and, thus, to the ancient mindset, doubly susceptible to a failure of the will. As with many (beyond-the-)new-perspective readings, this interpretation of Rom 7 simply acknowledges an overt acceptance of “natural” slavery, misogyny, and ethnocentrism as a reality of ancient civilization.

My (not necessarily original) observation about images for sin in Rom 6-7 stems from work on an essay on Paul and the recent writings of Giorgio Agamben, focusing on Paul’s odd use of the verb katargein, “to render ineffective” or “to nullify.” Many throughout interpretive history have succumbed to the temptation to translate the verb as “to destroy,” since it would seem to make sense in many of the eschatological contexts in which Paul uses it. Many recent scholars, however, have rightly insisted that the verb more likely adheres to its etymology (kata-a-erge-ein, “to make not working”) in Pauline contexts. Granted, it is evident that Paul uniquely deploys the term. But he uses the standard meaning to strange effect: since the imagined slave and wife escape the contracts by death, Paul casts death as if it were the mere suspending a legal agreement. Life itself, then, can be transformed simply by altering (though radically) the “legal,” regulative terms of its activity.

In order to be transformed, then, must life really become free, Jewish, and male, as in Gal 3:28? (A frequent intertext here, Gospel of Thomas 114, becomes even more relevant, as Mary Magdalene must become “male” in order to inherit “life.”) Moreover, the metaphors themselves offer tantalizing images: once the sinful “woman” is married to God, as the sinner is transformed will the union gradually become one between two men?

The “answer” provided in Rom 8 follows neither of these tacks, per se. Aside from the collectivization of the individual situation of sin (the “you”-singular and “I” of Rom 7 becomes “we”), believers become adopted “sons” of God with all the (masculine?) rights thereof. They are transferred from the dominion of the “Law,” like the “laws” of slavery and marriage, to “the law of the spirit of life” (8:2). This spirit itself “is life” (v. 10); God “gives life . . . through the spirit” (v. 11).

But the transformation of God’s sons also concurs with the transformation of nature itself, which has been “longing” v. 19) to experience a similar transformation, “groaning in labor pains” (v. 22). It is this notion of creation’s “longing” along with the believers that lends us a foothold into a distinctive aspect of Paul’s soteriology. While much of the rhetoric of Rom 6 and 7 fixates upon slavery, femaleness, and foreignness as images for sin, the images recur here with relation to how nature (and, alongside it, believers) await final salvation. First, creation is female, experiencing “labor pains.” Also, spirit, which, as we saw, “is life,” here also “offers redemption” (v. 23) not only to believers but to a creation subjected to “bondage” (v. 21). Believers not only unite as a “we” not just with each other but also with creation itself—and still suffer the effects of femaleness, slavery, and foreignness (insofar as they are waiting to more fully be sons of God, that is, members of his family).

Continuity between the situations of Rom 6-7 (sin) and Rom 8 (justification awaiting salvation) is strongest when we consider the most basic category of ancient moral pedagogy: desire. Desire is the root of sin in Rom 7, with epithymia becoming a distilled summation of the Ten Commandments. But in Rom 8, desire, like life construed as slavery, femaleness, and foreignness, is transformed into a spirit-induced “longing,” “groaning,” and “sighing” (v. 26). In the same way that life is transformed through justification, through vicarious death in Christ, so is desire. Thus, we are perhaps led to investigate the relationship between desire and life in Paul. In fact, it would be helpful at this point simply to explore the once seemingly self-evident category of “life” in his letters.

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I don’t know the type of situation to which SZA’s “Aftermath” refers (a romantic relationship is one guess, and that’s as good a context as any), so I read it quite generally as a meditation on how categories of humanity can be refreshingly stripped away through the encounter with another, offering liberation for one’s basic categories of existence—life and, perhaps, a new type of unregulated desire. I suspect SZA sees more directly something we can see in much fainter form in Paul, a remainder that lurks in his attempt to sound a triumphant note concerning salvation. For this is the same Paul who says, with regard to sexual desire, “It is better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor 7:9). To be “aflame with passion” (NRSV translation) is to be avoided at all costs for any ancient moralist, including Paul—or so one would think. But what is left after justification in Christ is a longing, a sighing, a desire produce by the spirit and resulting in a new solidarity, a new “we,” hopefully independent of prevalent notions of property, gender, and ethnicity.

Interpreters would respond that the difference between desire before and after Christ, between Rom 7 and 8, is the spirit and its transforming effects. But transformed from what to what? We know that flesh turns to pneuma, that, in a sense, the spirit transforms believers into itself (1 Cor 15), and that this physical change leads to life and a desire in accordance with God’s will. But life and desire itself seem not transformed but preserved and redirected. What then is the spirit other than the entity guaranteeing the persistence of the basic elements of creation?

When the spirit transforms the believer, beyond the “fleshy” categories of gender, ethnicity, and status, the raw material of that transformation, left over to experience the resurrection, is life and desire. Despite his aversion to desire in Rom 7, in the following chapter he implicitly suggests, “Maybe we should burn?”