the telos of Romans 10.4
As we’ve seen, Israel was ignorant of God’s righteousness and did not submit to it. Meaning: they did not acknowledge the Messiah as their Lord, as God’s embodied righteousness for their salvation.
“For,” Paul adds, “Christ is the telos of the law.” Actually, he says more than that, but we need to sort out several things, so let’s deal with telos first.
So, what does telos mean? Its field of meaning revolves around the idea of “end,” but there are nuances. It can of course simply mean “end.” (E.g. Mt 10.22, “The one who endures to the end will be saved; Mt 24.6: “The end is not yet.”) This is the most common usage in the Gospels; and it appears frequently in Paul.
Telos can also mean something like “fulfillment.” In the garden, Jesus says that the things written about Him being numbered with the transgressors now have their telos (Lk 22.37). This usage shades into the more general idea of goal.
In Romans 6.21-22, the telos of lawless deeds is death, whereas the telos of sanctification is eternal life. Telos is here the fitting outcome, the native destination.
In 1 Cor 10.11, Paul refers to believers as those upon whom the telos of the ages has come. Generally, this seems to mean something like: the ages have culminated in the gospel.
As can be seen, along with others, Paul has a usage that essentially means goal. Given the metaphors of pursuit, overtaking, and stumbling that Paul has been using in the context, we have good reason to think that is what Paul has in mind here. What is in view is in some sense “the goal of the law.”
Now we must try to establish the overall structure of the verse, and here the terrain is a lot tougher. In English, a great deal of meaning and grammatical relationship is determined by simple word order. In Greek, however, word order plays a different role. It can define phrases, but there are also conventional placements (prepositions are almost always the second word in a grammatical unit) and placement for emphasis (the first word is frequently being highlighted). Relationships are determined by prepositions and by factors such as declensions, gender, and number.
In Greek, Romans 10.4 reads: telos gar nomou Christos eis dikaiosunen panti to pisteuonti.
A horribly wooden “literal” English rendering would be something like: Goal for of the law Christ unto righteousness to all who believe.
Telos appears first, and seems to be receiving emphasis. The genitive nomou (“of [the] law”) clearly modifies telos: “goal of the law.”
“Christ” is also nominative and therefore is in an “is” relationship with telos: Christ is the goal of the law.
Now things get tricky.
What is eis dikaiosunen doing? What does it modify?
The most likely candidates appear to be telos and Christos, although nomou is also technically possible, and wouldn’t be unexpected, given 9.31: Israel pursued “a law of righteousness.” That connection here would lead to something like: “Christ is the goal of the-law-unto-righteousness for those who believe.” I don’t really think that works with Paul’s point in 9.30ff.
I don’t really think “Christ is the goal-unto-righteousness of the law” makes any real sense at all. Perhaps one of my readers can discern order in that, but I’m not seeing it.
(I made the choice for goal already above, due to contextual indicators. I’m ready to admit that if we take telos as end, it makes perfect sense with eis dikaiosunen modifying nomou. “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness.” On this reading, the advent of Christ spells the end of the law as the definer of righteousness, which fits well enough with my understanding of Paul that I wouldn’t object to it. I’m just not convinced that’s exactly what Paul is saying.)
So then, if telos is understood in the sense of goal, then eis dikaiosunen surely modifies “Christ.” We’ll start off with the generic “unto” for eis to begin: “For Christ-unto-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Now we’re getting somewhere; granted the roughness of eis, this is a statement that actually makes some sense. But let’s explore the preposition further.
Eis generally carries ideas of direction or purpose. In the former role, it frequently gets translated as into or unto. But this role generally requires some sort of verb of motion; here, the verb is the implicit stative “is.” Technically, this could still have a sort of local sense, depending on the noun, but “in righteousness” doesn’t make much sense here.
Consequently, eis here has an idea of purpose. In this role, it is frequently rendered simply as for, which would give us “Christ-for-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Which is a pretty decent rendering, and we could stop there. We now have the preposition translated the way the versions usually render it (“for”), but we’ve clarified what it’s modifying.
“For” is of course quite general, and the precise role of eis is left somewhat indeterminate by that rendering. But it seems to me that the context provides a sufficient guide for us here. Christ serves as righteousness (for all who believe), and this is the goal of the law.
With this, Paul has completed his vindication of the law which he commenced in chapter 7. To be sure, his vindication is not a “this is why you should live under the law” sort of vindication. For Paul, the believer is not under Torah (6.14).
Yet Paul does wish to vindicate the law, and he has set himself a hard task. For he himself has identified Torah as one of the constitutive elements (stoicheia) of the world, the old creation, in Galatians 4, and in Romans 5 he has shown how Torah has increased the trespass. So Paul vindicates Torah in two stages. In Romans 7, he vindicates it by saying that its norms are in fact holy, spiritual, just, good. In other words, he assigns it to an expired age, but not because it was wrongheaded or bad. And now here, Paul vindicates Torah by saying that its telos lay beyond itself. It did not exist for itself, but as a running path whose goal was Christ.
To put it another way, the stumbling stone was actually the finish line.
I think now we can understand why Paul says that Israel pursued a law of righteousness, but did not succeed in reaching the law. It is because Torah itself had Christ Himself as the righteousness of God as its goal. And because Israel pursued Torah’s righteousness as if by works, they upset the order of the things.
The righteousness of God is His own action in Christ, and this is the goal of the law. When Israel focuses upon the law to trigger the Age to Come, they in effect confuse themselves with God; they are trying to do what He alone can do. They must submit to His own righteousness. They belong to “this present age,” an age which Paul has characterized as death. Their only hope is resurrection; their only hope is in the God who raises the dead and calls the things which are not as though they are, and so they become; their only hope is in the righteousness of God.