The frame
Romans 6 is the only passage in the New Testament where ἐλευθερία and δικαιοσύνη occur together. Novenson takes the coincidence as a title, by way of Francis Bellamy, the Christian socialist who wanted "liberty, equality, fraternity" for the 1892 Pledge of Allegiance, judged it too French and too utopian for his fellow school superintendents in the heyday of Jim Crow, and settled on "liberty and justice for all".
The phrase turns out to summarise what Paul attempts in Romans 5 to 8, which is the phenomenology of moral experience on the part of immortal human beings.
The physics
What Paul does in Romans 6 is not what the chapter's reputation suggests. Having painted himself into the diatribe's corner, if more sin brings more grace shall we carry on sinning, he answers no and explains why the question is nonsense. Only three of the chapter's twenty-three verses contain an imperative. He is not, for the most part, instructing his gentiles not to sin; he is describing the mechanism by which their sinning is prevented.
Baptism, on this reading and with Schweitzer against most of the field, is not about forgiveness at all. It is a ritual of metamorphosis. The immersed person dies with Christ, and the person who has died has been rightwised away from sin. She is thereafter what the risen Christ is: pneumatic, incorruptible, righteous throughout, while still briefly carrying a mortal body. Since Paul's pneuma is material in something like the Stoic sense, the book's formulation is that she is an angel in a corpse.
The two nouns
Liberty is meant in the republican sense: the absence of domination by the arbitrary power of another. The correction Novenson enters is that the power from which people-in-Christ are freed is Sin, and never the law. Freedom from the law is a long Protestant idiom and not Paul's; the one occasion on which Paul says the law freed anyone, the liberator is also a law, since the law of the pneuma of life in Christ Jesus freed you from the law of sin and death. The freedom is also ironic, in that the freed are immediately enslaved to righteousness and to God. Freedom in Paul's idiom consists in being dominated by a benevolent power rather than a malevolent one.
Justice is not everyday righteousness in the law, in which a person can be blameless and mortal, but the maximal kind: all the duties performed effortlessly and permanently, what Hayes calls robo-righteousness, the substance of the kingdom of God, which the law legislates rightly and cannot bring about.
"For all" is where Novenson parts from his own school. Against the proposal that Christ's righteousness is for gentiles only, Jews being provided for already, he argues that in respect of attaining eschatological righteousness and life Jews and gentiles are in the same position. However debauched he thinks gentiles normally are and however decent he thinks Jews normally are, both are mortal, and mortality is to sin as fire is to smoke. Death comes for everyone. Jews had the promise of this liberty and justice and gentiles had not even that; now all have access to the thing itself.
The hinge
The moral life of the resurrected dead is Paul's religious project stated in one phrase, and the chapter's largest claim follows from it. High-minded Jews and Christians from Maimonides to Heschel and from Aquinas to Bellamy have dreamed of a world of liberty and justice for all and worked towards it. Paul did not dream of such a world or work towards it. He announced that it had arrived, which is what εὐαγγέλιον means.
This is why the book holds that Paul's project corresponds to neither Judaism nor Christianity as lived religions. When Barclay insists that Paul goes beyond what any mainstream ancient Jew would say about the law, and Fredriksen insists that Paul does not straightforwardly underwrite Christian theologies, both are right. That the announced world was not in fact here is not a problem for Paul's theology. It is a problem for the theologies built on his letters.
The objections
Luther would begin with the title of his own book. The Freedom of a Christian holds two theses together: a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Domination by a benevolent power is a paradox he preached first. What the chapter takes from him is the accuser. If the freedom is from Sin and Death and never from the law's sentence, then something must still answer the law when it reads the charges, and the promise of a future angelic condition has never quieted a conscience at three in the morning. He would ask whether the chapter retains a use for "no condemnation".
Novenson's answer is lexical. κατάκριμα at Romans 8:1 is not the verbal thunder of condemnation but the penalty assessed, and Romans 5 identifies the penalty as death. No κατάκριμα for those in Christ means that the death sentence no longer applies to them, and the mechanism is the one place Paul does speak of freedom from the law, where one is freed from a law by a law. The accuser is not talked down but superseded. He would then decline Luther's midnight as evidence, on the book's stated rule that modern religious experience is not admissible.
Schweitzer would note the footnotes. Baptism as a physical event beginning a real transformation is credited to him against the forgiveness readings; the obstructing spirits are named as what Schweitzer called the angel powers; and the summary judgment is that Schweitzer was basically right about the resurrection mode of existence and Stowers basically right about the physics, converging on a Paul the book calls an architect of transhumanism. Kennedy of Edinburgh had called that reading a grotesque misconception; the book quotes the sentence in order to overturn it, a century after the argument was made.
Hart would take the physics as vindication of his translation practice. Material pneuma, celestial bodies and the σῶμα πνευματικόν are precisely the register that pious translation has fogged into spiritual abstraction; the ἅγιοι are the heavenly host rather than "saints", and the mortal body is ransomed rather than escaped. He would press his standing objection harder here than anywhere. If the corpse is what withholds righteousness, and all corpses are to be raised, the arithmetic should be finished; the chapter stops one sentence short.
Fredriksen would record where the chapter corrects her and concede part of it. Her proposal that Paul's righteousness is the Second Table, with the covenant already providing for Israel, meets the answer that the righteousness in question is not the everyday kind at all, against which standard the distinction dissolves. She would remain unpersuaded on one point: the promises to the patriarchs were of land and seed and blessing, not of physics.
Paul's own account
Romans 6 to 8 supports the reading closely, and the support is grammatical rather than thematic. Paul writes in the indicative far more than the imperative. He says that those baptised were baptised into Christ's death, that they were buried with him, that the one who has died has been rightwised away from sin, and that they are to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God. The instruction that follows rests on a state he says already obtains.
He also writes the sentence Luther needs and the sentence Novenson needs, and they are the same sentence in sequence: there is now no κατάκριμα for those in Christ Jesus, for the law of the pneuma of life in Christ Jesus freed you from the law of sin and death. Paul gives the ground in the next clause, and the ground is a law.
And he states the outcome in the body rather than in the conscience: the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his pneuma dwelling in you.
The remaining disagreement
Everyone accepts that Paul describes a transformation. The disagreement is over what the description leaves unaddressed.
Luther holds that a physics of immortality does not answer an accusation, and that Paul plainly thought it did. Hart holds that the physics, taken seriously, entails more than the book will say. Fredriksen holds that the promises were ethnic and historical rather than physical. Novenson holds that the letters describe a mechanism, that the mechanism is the argument, and that the honest historical result is to report it and stop.
The same chapter as a dialogue sets these positions in the participants' own voices, which is how this was first written.