In Romans 7, Paul puts his Jewish foundations into terms that the city dwellers surrounded by street shrines and altars for the named Roman gods. He describes The Law of the Hebrew Bible as an important reference point to know the times one is off track from God's Ways; sinning, in other words. But being mortal creatures, people are bound to fail to follow the intent and the letter of The Law. He goes on to say that grace and mercy (by way of Jesus redeeming everyone else's sins) close the gap between God's Will and the ideas carried in The Law, on the one hand, and human weakness. Only Jesus paying the price can pay for everyone's sins. No amount of good deeds and so on will allow a person to develop a full relationship with God unless Jesus' redeeming grace is taken into account first.
The screenshot from Wikipedia article for 'weighing scales' illustrates the way that the two sides even out to create a horizontal line when the beam is balanced. In Paul's letter to the Romans he warns them about taking The Law too literally. It is not a magic idol to worship, Something similar could be said about taking the scriptures too literally, as if one needs only to cherrypick phrases or passages, disregarding the surrounding circumstances, in order to "prove" one's point of view. Perhaps the opposite extreme of "taking too literally" the teachings and parables is "taking too figuratively" (regarding phrases and passages more like poetry or indirect pointers in the direction of meaning; nothing legalistic, contractual, or detailed and subdivided). Seekers after God's presence and Way such as Mystics might be grouped into the people NOT dwelling on the commas, synonyms, and other verbal details but instead focusing on the general picture being presented. After all the spirit of the Law could have a double meaning of (a) intentionality that is present, regardless of the interpretations and emphasis heard by one generation of scholars or practitioners versus people of another time or place; and (b) the Biblical meaning of intelligent agency or force alive in the world that is invisible to human eyes - a living spirit which inhabits the bloodless text. When speaking in a court of law, for example, there is a clear distinction between what is "on the books" or "by the book" and the discretion in the sentencing judge's hands to consider the purpose and intent of the law that is recorded in order to give that day's view of the relevant statutes and come up with a declaration that is consonant with the Spirit of the Law.
Somewhere between the surface-level and word-centric, tightly literal interpretation and an imaginative image-centric loose interpretation of the law (and in Paul's description of The Law) there is a middle ground where some kind of balance exists: enough detail to make the words useful and coherent, but enough latitude for applying those terms in real life to make the worlds flexible instead of fuzzy and blurred. At one extreme or the other is very little value or worth. So worshipers must continuously check to make sure they do not stray so far into one extreme or the other. Besides this idea of balance between the extremes, there could be other dimensions to discover the middle point.
Literal implicates literacy and literature. So for oral traditions (no writing system; if at least nobody who can read or write it), maybe there are extremes for interpreting a surface and verbal-privileging interpretation AND for interpreting things more loosely in a visual or holistic interpretation. But to name the tight and the loose 'literal' and its opposite does not seem to fit: without a writing system to put sounds into letters, maybe such tight interpretations are less likely, too. [literal meaning deriving partly from the writing system, authors who are authorized to be authoritative authorities, and record-keep accountability]
Developmentally, too, added life experience, education and responsibility can lead a person to more liberal interpretations of others' lives and the confines that define one's own life. So "the letter of the law" seems to fit with more rigid thinking and narrow views while "the spirit of the law" seems to fit with more flexible or fluid thinking. The arrow of aging and evolving viewpoints seems to trend toward looser and looser interpretations. On the other hand, with age frequently comes orneriness and striving to resist changes to the accustomed ways of doing things. Overall, then, it is hard to say if maturation (not that everybody matures as the days go on) corelates with ever more "spirit of the law" or the reverse, ever narrower frame of mind.
Altogether different is the layers of problems going into the making of the "letter of the law" since the teachings of the Hebrew Bible that Paul shares with the Romans and other congregations he visited and wrote to. There was a time before the Torah was written down; it was maintained by oral tradition. Even after written words were committed to visual records, errors in copying, the passage of time to change nuance or major meanings of keywords, then the many centuries of translations into dozens of languages all have left marks on the "letter" of the Law. In other words, clinging too tightly to English of the 1980s and later makes the sentences palatable and the meanings clearly focused, but that is not always identical to the meaning at the time it was written in Hebrew of long ago. By claiming moral superiority on the basis of a string of modern English words that smuggle in modern overtones and images is problematic at best. At worst, to claim that a narrow view of a passage "must be right because it says so in black and white today" is just deluded and self-righteous, built upon nothing but hubris or rising seas of self-certainty.
In summary, in our time some people are well aware of the dangers of literalism for reading scripture, for seeking answers, and for drawing implications from "The Law." Seldom do that same people discuss the opposite extreme --figurativismfor reading scripture, seeking answers, and spelling out the meanings that follow from such a loose interpretation. Although Paul does not spend time in search for a balance between interpretations that are too tight or too loose, he does discuss the importance and the limitations of The Law when it comes to living God's Way in God's World. This seems consonant with Jesus' own assertion that he "comes not to abolish The Law, but to fulfill The Law" (Matthew 5). In other words, there is something more important that comes out of the Law; something beyond merely endorsing or enforcing those dictates. For people living in 2024, then, the task is to keep The Law in sight but to live filled with God's Love and guided by insight: the Spirit of the Law.
