In the seventh chapter of
Romans St. Paul speaks in such clear fashion of theological sin and death as to leave no room for argument as to what he connotes by his use of the terms thus so closely linked. By incarnation we came under the Law, begins the Apostle. Under the Law we developed sin, which was our violation of law while we were yet ignorant children (as expounded further in
Galatians iv.) Then by sin came death. The whole sequence is the "cycle of necessity", as Greek philosophy called it, or the periodical descent of soul into the lower worlds for its cycles of experience, which bring it "under the law", give it the consciousness of good and evil, or the sense of "sin", and subject it to a bondage to the flesh. As pre-human animals we lived without Law, says Paul. Hear his words: "I lived at one time without Law myself, but when
the command came home to me, sin sprang to life, and I
died; the command that meant life proved death to me. The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and used the command to kill me. . . . Sin resulted in death for me by making use of this good thing.
The interests of the flesh meant death. . . ." Here are words of unmistakable meaning:
the command that meant
life to us proved to be, theologically, our death. Had scholar’s known Paul’s background of Greek philosophy, they would have known that he was discoursing on death as the incarnation of the soul in mortal body. The Lost Meaning of Death A B Kuhn
DB Sin is life in the flesh. DB from the perspective of souls who knew it knot
