Isn’t the personal struggle that Paul describes in Romans 7 simply an illustration or exemplification of the moral ineffectuality of the Torah in contrast to the law of the Spirit of life? Not a metaphor, therefore, but a synecdoche - a part representing the experience of the whole. If that’s the case, the ‘angst-ridden’ intensity of Paul’s experience is not in opposition to a more corporate or narrative-historical account - it simply anchors the larger theological argument in the actual experience of someone who more than most sought zealously to embody the law in his own behaviour.

Paul is not ‘every man’ here. He is not the type of every person since who has found forgiveness in Christ. He is Paul the Pharisee who thought that he represented all that was right and righteous about Judaism - or about covenantal nomism. He runs into Christ on the road to Damascus and his life is turned upside down; he is no longer leading Israel down a road that will end in disaster. But he remains Paul the Jew, who suffers ‘great sorrow and unceasing anguish’ over the alienation of Israel from Christ (Rom. 9:2-3). The law is deeply engrained in him, and that personal dimension - the continuing personal experience of sin described in terms of sin’s exploitation of the law - must inevitably be taken into account when he speaks to other Jews (7:1) about how the law has been superseded in Christ.