Charles Ellicott Commentary Romans 6:2

"God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein?" — Romans 6:2 (ASV)

That are dead.—Rather, that died. It is good to keep in mind Dr. Lightfoot’s remarks on the importance of keeping the strict aorist sense as opposed to that of the perfect (i.e., the single past action as opposed to the prolonged or continued action) in passages such as this.

“St. Paul regards this change—from sin to righteousness, from bondage to freedom, from death to life—as summed up in one definite act of the past; potentially to all men in our Lord’s passion and resurrection, actually to each individual man when he accepts Christ, is baptized into Christ. Then he is made righteous by being incorporated into Christ’s righteousness, he dies once for all to sin, he lives from then on forever to God.

“This is his ideal. Practically, we know that the death to sin and the life to righteousness are undeveloped, imperfect, gradual, scarcely realized even by the most saintly men in this life; but St. Paul sets the matter in this ideal light to force upon the consciences of his hearers the fact that an entire change came over them when they became Christians—that the knowledge and the grace then granted to them did not leave them where they were—that they are not, and cannot be, their former selves—and that it is a contradiction of their very being to sin any more. It is the definiteness, the absoluteness of this change, considered as an historical crisis, which forms the central idea of St. Paul’s teaching, and which the aorist marks. We cannot, therefore, afford to obscure this idea by disregarding the distinctions of grammar; yet in our English version it is a mere chance whether in such cases the aorist is translated as an aorist” (On Revision, p. 85).

These remarks will form the best possible commentary on the passage before us. It is also worth adding that the change between the position of the first Christians and our own involves a certain change in the application of what was originally said with reference to them. Baptism is not now the tremendous crisis that it was then. The ideal of Christian life then assumed is more distinctly an ideal. It has a much less definite hold on the imagination and the will. But it ought not therefore to be any the less binding on the Christian. He should work towards it, if he cannot work from it, in the spirit of Philippians 3:12-14.

It would be good for the reader to note immediately the corrections suggested in the rendering of this verse by Dr. Lightfoot’s criticism:

• In Romans 6:4, “we were buried” for “we are buried”;
• In Romans 6:6, “the old man was crucified” for “is crucified”;
• In Romans 6:8, “if we died” for “if we be dead.”