By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Paul's "born of woman, born under the law" (Gal 4:4), is arguably his way of recognizing that to be a human being is to be both of (or from) nature and under culture/society/history.
Of course, to be born of woman, of a human mother, as a human being, is to be under a law other than and prior to the law of one's particular culture/society/history, viz., the lex naturae,/naturalis, which is identical in essential content with both the lex scripta and the lex evangelica.
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A further reflection on Romans 10:4, "Christ is the end of the law":
As valid as Paul's reasoning to this statement may be from a Christian perspective, I'm obliged by my Christian faith as well by my experience and reason as a human being to recognize the possibility that adherents of other religious traditions may very well reason analogously -- and validly -- so as to vindicate, not Jesus Christ, but their explicit primal source of authority as "the end of the law." Certainly, any adherent of any of the axial religions oriented to effecting ultimate transformation would need so to reason if she or he were to reason consistently with the most fundamental presuppositions of her or his religion.
26 September 2008
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