Original Meaning

WHILE PAUL’S CALL for believers to submit to governing authorities has a secure place in his outline of the “good … and perfect” will of God (12:2), it is a bit of a detour from the main line of his description of the believer’s responsibilities. With 13:8–10, Paul returns to this main line, picking up the theme of love from 12:9–21. The earlier text gave an overview of ways in which believers should show sincere love. He now shows that this sincere love is the heart of new covenant ethics. All the commandments of the Old Testament law culminate in the demand that we love our neighbors as ourselves.

While 13:8–10 connect in substance to 12:9–21, Paul cleverly plays on the notion of “debt” that he introduced in 13:7 to create a transition back into the topic of love. Believers are to pay their “debts” (cf. v. 7); they are not to “be in debt” to anyone (cf. v. 8). But, Paul acknowledges, one debt will never be discharged: the debt of love we owe to other people. As the early church father Origen put it, “Let your only debt that is unpaid be that of love—a debt which you should always be attempting to discharge in full, but will never succeed in discharging.”1

The second part of verse 8 explains (“for,” gar) why we will never discharge this debt of love: love of “the other” (lit. trans.; NIV “fellow man”) “fulfills” the law. The “one another” language used in the first part of the verse suggests Paul may be thinking of the need to love our fellow Christians (see 12:10, 16). But by using the more general “the other,” Paul may be alluding to Jesus’ insistence that love not be confined to those like us, but, as the good Samaritan illustrates, should be displayed to everyone we come into contact with—even those different from us.

In 13:9–10, Paul explains just how it is that loving others “fulfills” the law. The love command, found in Leviticus 19:18 and cited by Jesus himself when asked about the “greatest commandment” (Matt. 22:36–40), sums up all the other commandments. Paul cites as examples four of the most famous commandments from the Decalogue: the prohibitions against adultery, murder, stealing, and coveting.2 But how does the love command sum up these other commands? The verb Paul uses here (anakephalaioo) is rare in the Bible, occurring elsewhere only in his assertion that God intends to “bring … under one head” all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10). It was used in literary Greek to refer to the summation or conclusion of a book or speech,3 but this meaning is not relevant to this text. Thus, we are left to draw our own conclusions from the context and from Paul’s teaching elsewhere.

Two main possibilities emerge. (1) Paul may mean that love for others is the essential ingredient that must accompany obedience to all the other commandments.4 We must still obey these commandments, but they cannot truly be obeyed without a loving spirit. (2) Paul may also mean that the demand of love for others replaces the other commandments.5 When we truly love “the other,” we automatically do what the other commandments of the law require. As Paul puts it in verse 10, “love does no harm to its neighbor.” No one who truly loves another person will murder, commit adultery, steal, or covet.

We think the latter interpretation is closer to the truth. As we have argued, Paul elsewhere proclaims that believers are released from the binding authority of the Mosaic law (see 6:14–15; 7:4–6). Paul’s use of “fulfillment” language in this paragraph (13:8, 10) also suggests that he views the love command as the eschatological “replacement” for the various commandments of the Mosaic law (see Gal. 5:13–15).

Bridging Contexts

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT. Paul’s teaching in this paragraph cannot be understood apart from Jesus’ teaching about the greatest commandment. That teaching, in turn, may reflect some Jewish traditions. The great emphasis the Jews placed on the law and large number of commandments and prohibitions in that law led to discussions among the rabbis about the most important commandment(s). Generally, however, these discussions were theoretical in nature: The rabbis wondered if a single commandment would serve as the “logical” starting point for all the others, the commandment from which all the others could be derived.6

Some Jews preceded Jesus in summarizing the essential obligation in terms of love of God and love of others.7 Thus, when Jesus was asked about the “greatest” commandment in the law (Matt. 22:36), his response was not altogether new. But what separated Jesus from his Jewish contemporaries was a more radical approach to the law as a whole. In claiming to be “Lord … of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27–28) and to have sovereign authority to determine the meaning and application of the law (Matt. 5:17–48), Jesus demonstrated an authority that astonished the crowds and signaled his unique status as the One on whom the ages turned. With the coming of the kingdom and the preaching of the gospel to all the nations, the law no longer has the same authority as before.

Jesus, in other words, institutes a new law, built on the twin foundations of love for God and love for the neighbor and focused on his own teaching. When he commissions his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” he charges them to teach all he taught them (Matt. 28:16–20).

Paul refers extensively (though implicitly) to Jesus’ teaching throughout this part of Romans. Surely he builds his teaching in verses 8–10 on Jesus’ reduction of the Mosaic law to love of God and love for one’s neighbor. This means, among other things, that he probably does not intend love for the neighbor to be the sole criterion by which we are to judge right behavior. He focuses on that command because he is thinking in this context of the way we are to relate to other people. But he would not want to exclude the other commandment that Christ singled out: the need to love our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and body.

The believer’s obligation emerges from both these commandments. Against the background of Jesus’ teaching, we cannot imagine Paul suggesting that love for God, expressed in obedience to all his commandments, can ever be omitted when considering the ultimate responsibility of the believer.

Contemporary Significance

DEBTS. AMERICANS LOVE DEBT. We borrow to buy houses, cars, stereos, food, medicine, clothes, appliances, lottery tickets. College students take on staggering debts to finance their education. Churches borrow immense sums to erect buildings. What does Romans 13:8—“Let no debt remain outstanding”—say to our debt-ridden society?

A few interpreters, taking a more literal rendering of the Greek—“Owe nothing to anyone”—think that the Bible here prohibits any form of borrowing at all. Individual believers should not borrow money, nor should churches. We should wait to build the building, buy the house or car, purchase the stereo, and so on, until we have the cash to pay for it up front. But this is probably not what verse 8 means. The NIV rendering gets the sense of what Paul is saying. He is not prohibiting us from borrowing money but demanding we pay back what we owe. If I have entered into an agreement with a bank to pay them $800 per month for thirty years to buy a house, I need to discharge my obligation by paying that money on time. So what the text calls on us to do is to be careful, prudent financial planners, not taking on any more debt that we are sure we can handle.

Yet even this principle is sadly neglected in our day—by believers as well as unbelievers. As an elder in my church, I frequently have to deal with people who have overextended themselves and are asking the church to help them pay their debts. Of course, some people have encountered unexpected circumstances for which they are not to blame—catastrophic illness or sudden loss of employment. But we have had to deal with believers who made bad decisions about debt so often that we have instituted a program of financial counseling that is tied to our charitable giving. We are extending the program to anyone in the church who is interested.

The age we live in seeks to conform us to its pleasure-oriented, present gratification spirit. Buy what you want now so that you can enjoy life; let the future worry about itself. Believers need to anchor themselves solidly in a contrasting worldview—one that reminds us that present pleasure should never be our focus in life and that God expects his people to manage prudently and for his glory the resources he has entrusted to us.

Love and law. One of the perennial issues among ethicists is the relationship between inner motivations and external law or commands—or, to put it in terms of our text, the relationship between love and law. Which is primary? Does one take precedence over the other? Am I to decide what to do in a given situation by looking for a commandment to guide me? Or should I do what seems to be the loving thing? The interpretation of this text given above may suggest that we subscribe to this last viewpoint. For we have suggested that Paul teaches that obeying the love command is itself the fulfillment of all the other commandments of the law. But we need to qualify the significance of our interpretation in two important ways.

(1) The commands Paul has in view here are the commandments of the Mosaic law. We must never forget the important point that he uses the word “law” (nomos) in a specific way, reflective of his own background and situation. Nomos in Paul does not mean (at least not usually) law in general but the law of Moses specifically—the Torah. So what the apostle claims in this paragraph is no more than that the other commandments of the Mosaic law are no longer directly applicable to the believer.

As we have noted elsewhere, however, Paul clearly believes that other commandments—those of Jesus and the apostles—do stand as an authority for believers. These commands embody many of the same moral principles found, for instance, in the Decalogue. Of course, Paul would insist that love for others is basic to these new covenant obligations as well. But we misread Romans 13:8–10 if we think Paul does away with commandments altogether. As we argued in our comments on 12:1–2, the primary motivation and direction of Christian motivation comes from within us, as the Spirit “renews our minds” and instills love for others within us.

Mere outward conformity to commandments is not what God wants. He wants “sincere love”: an honest, consistent concern for other people that spills over into actions of all kinds. When we love rightly, with the love that the Spirit inspires in us, we cannot help but obey whatever commandments God has given us. For he does not speak with two voices. What he requires is what his Spirit inspires. But because our minds are not perfectly renewed and because we can misunderstand what love requires, we still need commandments to remind us of the absolute demands of God and to keep us on “the straight and narrow.”

(2) This brings us to the second qualification. I do not want anyone to misread what I am saying as advocating what is called “situation ethics” (see comments in the Contemporary Significance section on 12:9–21). This approach to ethics argues that there are no moral absolutes at all, except the demand of love. Any other commandment we name must be interpreted in light of the situation. Whether we obey that commandment or how must be determined on a case-by-case basis, and love will decide the matter.

We are commanded, for instance, not to lie. But suppose a friend of mine asks if another friend really said something nasty about that person. By answering truthfully I may damage the relationship between these two. So love for them demands that I tell a falsehood. But I am perfectly ethical in doing so since I am following the dictates of love.

I do not think this is at all what Paul is suggesting. The idea that the demand of love has a hermeneutical function, enabling us to interpret the meaning of other commandments, is not taught in the New Testament. We must love others, and that love should be the touchstone of the way I conduct myself in relation to others. But that demand of love does not absolve me from obeying the other commandments God has given me.