I am not familiar with this terminology, can you clarify?
By 'mathematical use of words', I mean something like, logic built upon what words mean (or even, sometimes, on what they appear to mean), and not with relevance to earlier or known facts, in order to draw conclusions.
We see some of the same in Hebrews 6, though about a somewhat different subject.
I'm saying that Romans 7 can be put into a flowchart to show Paul's logic. Nevertheless, he flips back and forth through terms like 'died to the law' in comparing our situation with an actual woman married to a man who dies, because through Christ (somehow—he doesn't explain in the immediate context) we have died to the law of the flesh. If it wasn't Scripture, I would have cried foul, for false equivalence. But if that is all I see, I have more to learn.
This is the comparative logic he uses to end up saying that we died to what bound us, so that we can live in the way of the Spirit. There is a way to follow all that (which includes quite a bit that I didn't mention) that makes no logical leaps, other than a few assumptions explained in other parts of Romans and other Scriptures, except for, as I said, these strange jumps from earthly law to Spiritual law, and incomprehensible (to me) applications that I would never have thought of, yet to him are perfectly sensible.
Let me give an example of that last. In one place he says, "What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?" I can't understand that logic. If, like I said, it was anything but Scripture, I would see false equivalence and discard it out of hand as poor logic. It is bad enough to say that what comes up must come down, when it would seem more accurate to say that what comes down to earth goes up to heaven, but there he does one better —what ascended must have come from under the earth!
Back to Romans 7, he continues to talk that way, with occasional explanations —"in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwells no good thing"— else he would have to deal with protests that the Spirit of God dwells in him.
It gets even more complicated than the first part of Romans 7, yet it still can be put into a logical flowchart, but full of figures of speech, half-analyses, and unproven equivalences. I'm sure that if I knew Scripture and the mind of God as well as Paul did, that I would be able to work out the riddles I see here, but so far, I'm satisfied knowing and understanding the fact that we died to the law, and need to be putting to death the works of the flesh, because there is nothing good there, and that we have a conclusion to the matter: "
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin." —That, and, a couple of seminal moments that make perfectly good sense: "
Shall we sin that grace may abound? Of course not!", and "
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
