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Rom_3:31 to Rom_4:24. The harmony of the doctrine of justification by faith with the law, illustrated by what is said in the law regarding the justification of Abraham.
The new chapter should have begun with Rom_3:31, since that verse contains the theme of the following discussion. If we should, with Augustine, Beza, Calvin, Melancthon, Bengel, and many others, including Flatt, Tholuck, Köllner, Rückert, Philippi, van Hengel, Umbreit, and Mehring, assume that at Rom_4:1 there is again introduced something new, so that Paul does not carry further the νόμον ἱστῶμεν , v. 31, but in Rom_4:1 ff. treats of a new objection that has occurred to him at the moment, we should then have the extraordinary phenomenon of Paul as it were dictatorially dismissing an objection so extremely important and in fact so very naturally suggesting itself, as νόμον οῦν καταργοῦμεν κ . τ . λ [932], merely by an opposite assertion, and then immediately, like one who has not a clear case, leaping away to something else. The more paradoxical in fact after the foregoing, and especially after the apparently antinomistic concluding idea in Rom_3:30, the assertion νόμον ἱστῶμεν must have sounded, the more difficult becomes the assumption that it is merely an anticipatory declaration abruptly interposed (see especially Philippi, who thinks that it is enlarged on at Rom_8:1 ff.); and the less can Rom_3:20, διὰ γ . νόμου ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτ . be urged as analogous, since that proposition had really its justification there in what preceded. According to Th. Schott, νόμος is not meant to apply to the Mosaic law at all, but to the fact that, according to Rom_3:27, faith is a νόμος , in accordance with which therefore Paul, when making faith a condition of righteousness, ascribes to himself not abrogation of the law, but rather an establishment of it, setting up merely what God Himself had appointed as the method of salvation. The discourse would thus certainly have a conclusion, but by a jugglery[933] with a word ( ΝΌΜΟς ) which no reader could, after Rom_3:28, understand in any other sense than as the Mosaic law. Hofmann explains substantially in the same way as Schott. He thinks that Paul conceives to himself the objection that in the doctrine of faith there might be found a doing away generally of all law, and now in opposition thereto declares that that doctrine does not exclude, but includes, the fact that there is a divine order of human life (?).
[932] . τ . λ . καὶ τὰ λοιπά .
[933] This objection in no way affects the question διὰ ποίου νόμου , ver. 27 (in opposition to Hofmann’s objection) where the very ποίου placed along with it requires the general notion of νόμου .