Henry said:
From what I've read, the wording points strongly towards the fact that he's speaking about himself in the present. But I have to ask, what is Wright's view?
I’ll let others comment on whether it is pre or post conversion,....
As to Wright’s view (which I hope you will see is contrary to Scripture) he sees for instance in Romans 7:13-20 that it is not intended as an exact description of Paul’s or anyone else’s experience… though it may manifest itself in several places in the individual human life. For Wright, Paul is attempting to do two things:
(1) having described in the previous passage what happened when the Torah arrived in Israel (it meant that Israel copied and recapitulated, the sin of Adam, showing that Israel was indeed sinful), Paul now moves on to the present tense to describe the actual situation (as opposed to the felt experience) of
Israel living under the law. In other words, what happens to Israel, when having been given the law, does its best to live under it? Wright sees that Paul exonerates not only the law, but the “I” as well. He states, “Not only the law, but Israel itself, appears to be caught up in a larger purpose, a purpose in the service of which they seem for the moment trapped in a negative spiral. The more Israel does the right thing, which is to embrace God’s holy, just, and good law (the “good thing” of verse 13, referring back to verse 12 where the law is described in that way), the more the law itself says: You have broken me.” Thus, for Wright, the first thing Paul was doing was to say in effect, that Israel was right to desire to embrace the Torah and make it the way of life. But, whereas the law was “spiritual,” Israel, the “I” in the passage, is made of flesh and enslaved to sin (vs 14). Thus, Israel belongs to the Adam side of the equation. The law does not enable Israel to get out of the problem, but it intensifies it.
(2) According to Wright, the second problem proceeds from the above “facts” in that Paul “described the problem of Israel under the law so that it looks exactly like the problem which every puzzled pagan moralist from at least Aristotle onwards had observed.” He states, “there is a long tradition in Greek and Roman philosophy and poetry in which people complained, scratching their heads over it, that they could figure out what was the right thing to do but for some reason or other they couldn’t manage to do it. Conversely, they could see with their mind that a certain course of action was wrong, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway. Thus, Wright’s point is that Paul is saying, “this is the height to which God’s chosen people attain through their possession of the law – the same height as the puzzled pagan moralist.”
This is one example of his exegesis. When I have time I will post more for discussion.
