thought about these things, it might become clear that the attacks, though sometimes interesting and important, are not ultimately valid. But most people in western Europe, and many in North America, do not think very hard about such issues. They assume, not least because the media tell them so, that “God” and “religion” are somehow out of date. Within the postmodern world it is feelings that count, not arguments; and there is a general feeling, widespread in much (though not all) Western culture, that all that sort of thing has had its day — certainly in any form that the culture has known for the last several hundred years.

Of course, this is not the only side of the story. New Age movements have brought “religion” of a sort back into fashion; and the oldest form of Christianity in Britain at least, that of the Celts, who evangelized much of Britain before the Romans arrived and effectively took over, has had a revival as well. Celtic Christianity was earthier, less authoritarian, more in tune with the created order than the Roman variety, and this has made its appeal powerful. But at a time when hardly anybody thinks about the niceties of theology (they are prepared to think about nuclear physics, about economics, about anything the media bombard them with, but not usually about theology), it is difficult for many to sort out the difference between the God-language of the New Age movement and the God-language of mainstream Christianity.

The God of whom Paul speaks in Galatians, of whom I have already written at the start of the previous section, is not a private God, to be worshiped by initiates but kept secret from the outside world. This God must be spoken of in the public arena. This God claims the allegiance of all, because this God is both creator and lover of all. This God is the reality of which the idols of the world are the parodies (4:8-11). But how can one speak of this God without being instantly misunderstood? If one uses the word “God,” people will suppose one is speaking of the detached, deist God of popular supposition. If one even pronounces the name and title “Jesus Christ,” one will at once send half one’s hearers off down the wrong street. Among those to whom the phrase is not simply a meaningless swearword, many will simply hear it as another signal of that “religion” which is assumed to be out of date and irrelevant.

Paul, we know from Acts, faced similar problems, and he got around them by telling the story of Jesus, perhaps with visual aids to show what he was talking about (“You before whose eyes Jesus the Messiah was publicly portrayed as crucified” [3:1]; did Paul draw one of the first-ever “crucifixes” as an aid to evangelism?).[17] The story itself, climaxing with Jesus’ death and resurrection, and his enthronement as Lord of the world, carries its own power (Rom. 1:17; 1 Cor. 1:18-2:5). The story must be told faithfully, accurately, and Jewishly (it only makes the sense it does in its Jewish context).[18] However, even this needs a hearing. Paul seems to have obtained his not least because of his original appearance in Galatia, which aroused their sympathy and showed them that he was already living by a different way when compared to other teachers and wandering philosophers they might have met.[19] Paul was embodying the message he was announcing. The story of Jesus was being recapitulated through his own actual life — which was why, Paul would quickly have said, the power of the Spirit of Jesus was at work when he told them of the Jewish Messiah, the Lord of the world. If there is a lesson for Christians today in all this, it is the one that is both obvious and also still sorely needed. Those who name the name of Jesus must be seen to be living the life that results from worshiping the true God. Their own genuine humanity, resulting from worshiping the God in whose image they are made, must be recognizable. The fruits of the Spirit, when we meet them, are impressive, particularly in our cynical age. If we are to get a hearing to tell the story of Jesus, this is the only way to start.

But there is more. The church must be active at the places where the world is in pain. The church must be in the forefront of work in the world to alleviate hunger and poverty, to remit major and unpayable international debt, to make peace and prevent war. The church must be on the front line in the fight against crime and the fight for proper punishment and rehabilitation of those convicted of crime, as well as for the rights of the victims of crime. Christians must be active not only in advocacy of the moral standards in which all are treated as full human beings, not as toys or as trash, but also to stand alongside and help those who, having been treated like that themselves, treat others the same way because that is the only way they know. In these and many, many other ways, those who would tell the story of Jesus must first live it, bearing a measure of the world’s pain as they do so.

In the process, though the words of the story remain important and ultimately nonnegotiable, the actions themselves will speak. They will provide, as it were, the grammar book and the dictionary that will enable people to understand that when we speak of God today we are not using the word in the normally accepted sense; that when we speak of Jesus we speak of a real human being in whom the living God was and is personally present, in whom the love of God was fully acted out. If the story is told with those lexical aids to back it up, it will be understood. People may not like it, but the message will be plain. And to those who respond, the challenge will come to continue with this God: “Then, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. But now that you know God, or rather have come to be known by God, how can you turn back?” (4:8-9).

4. Galatians: Exegesis and Theology We have now arrived back at the point where the detailed historical exegesis of Galatians and the wider theological reflections may, in some measure and very briefly, be joined together. My overall contention, as will by now be obvious, is that they belong closely with each other, need each other, and are mutually illuminating. It will take an entire commentary to demonstrate this point, but four major features may at least be outlined in conclusion.

First let me raise a point of method. Galatians offers itself to the reader as a text emerging from, referring constantly to, and intending to have serious effect upon a highly complex and many-sided social situation. At no point can we abstract Paul’s ideas from this setting; and this, within an incarnational religion such as Christianity, has almost always been and is undoubtedly a strength, not a weakness. To suppose that one must boil off doctrinal abstractions from the particularities of the letters in order to gain material that can be usable in different situations is at best a half-truth; it always runs the risk of implying that the “ideas” are the reality, and that the community in which they are embodied and embedded (Paul’s community on the one hand, ours on the other) is a secondary matter. Those who, like the present writer, work as theologians within actual ecclesial communities for which they have pastoral, organizational, and teaching responsibilities know otherwise. It is in taking seriously Paul’s struggles with authority, with other apostles, with agitators in a congregation, with division and reconciliation within a community, that we discover what the “doctrines” he seems to hold actually mean. This in no way reduces theology to sociology. Nor does it suggest that theological argument is shadowboxing, pretending to reason something out when what is going on is in fact disguised power play. It is a way of doing justice to Paul’s intention not least, but not only, in the first two chapters of Galatians: to enable his readers to understand what the gospel is, what his own relation to it is, and where they, his converts, belong on this map.

This intention, second, is expressed in Paul’s major concern throughout the letter but particularly in its central two chapters, 3 and 4. Here he tells the story of Israel, the people of God, as the story of Abraham and exodus. God made promises to Abraham, promises that (as in Gen. 15, to which, here and in Rom. 4, Paul refers repeatedly) envisaged God’s future rescue of his people from Egypt. God has now fulfilled those promises, Paul says, in Jesus Christ. His aim throughout is to persuade his hearers to understand themselves within this narrative structure, which I have elsewhere characterized as “covenantal.” He wants them, that is, to think of themselves as the children of Abraham, the heirs of the entire Jewish narrative.[20] A good example is 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, written of course to an ex-pagan congregation; the foundation of the argument is Paul’s reference to the wilderness generation as “our fathers.”

His deep-rooted negation of the Jewish Torah as the mode or badge of membership in this family is, of course, the central problem he faces, and hence the central problem of the letter; this rejection of the Mosaic covenant has influenced many contemporary writers to deny that Paul held any “covenantal” theology at all.[21] This, I am persuaded, is a radical mistake. Paul utterly discarded the ethnic and Torah-based shape of Judaism in which he had been so deeply involved before his conversion, and to this extent his theology is radical, apocalyptic, innovative, dialectic, and so forth. But all this is held within his conviction that the God whom he now knows in Jesus Christ and the Spirit is the God of Abraham, whose purposes have now taken a decisive turn in which the character of the community as defined by Torah is left behind (not, it should be noted, criticized as theologically repugnant). He tells the story of Abraham, Israel, Moses, Jesus, and himself—Paul himself becomes a character in the narrative, since he is the unique apostle to the Gentiles, a point that is foundational for Galatians—in order to help his readers understand where they in turn belong within the same narrative.

Because the letter indicates this as a very basic aim of Paul all through, I am persuaded that he has not simply introduced Abraham, and allusions to other biblical passages and stories, in order to meet points raised by his opponents. Indeed, even if his opponents had never mentioned Abraham, perhaps especially if they had not, Paul would have wanted to tell this story to address and controvert the point the agitators were urging, that Gentiles who wanted to join the people of Israel had to be circumcised. His way of telling the story of Abraham makes it abundantly clear that the promises God made to the patriarch cannot be fulfilled through Torah. According to Galatians 3:10-14, God promised Abraham a worldwide family, but the Torah presents Israel, the promise bearers, with a curse. God deals with the curse in the death of Jesus, so that the promise may flow through to the world, renewing the covenant with Israel as well. According to 3:15-22, God promised Abraham a single worldwide family, but the Torah would forever keep Jews and Gentiles in separate compartments (exactly the problem of 2:11-21 and, we may assume, of the Galatian congregations). God has done in Christ and by the Spirit what the Torah could not do (3:21-22; 4:1-7; cf. Rom. 8:3-4), so that there now exists the single promised multiethnic monotheistic family, God’s “sons” and heirs.[22] According to Galatians 4:21-31, insofar as Abraham has two families, they can be characterized as the slave family and the free; and it is the multiethnic people defined by faith, the people formed through Christ and the Spirit, who are the Isaac children, the free people of God. Paul has other ways of telling the story of Abraham and his family as well (e.g., Rom. 9:6-10:4), but it is this narrative, however articulated, that provides the theological grounding for the formation and maintenance of the community he believes himself called to address.

Third, we can now see that the regular theological dichotomies that have been used in debates about Paul for the last hundred years are in fact inadequate to the task. Schweitzer and Wrede insisted on “being in Christ” as a more central category than “justification by faith.” Sanders, similarly, prioritized “participationist” categories in Paul over “juristic” ones. More recently, Martyn and others have urged “apocalyptic” readings of Paul against “covenantal” ones. Granted that these broad-brush categories are imprecise, there is clearly a strong feeling among Western readers of Paul that one is faced again and again with different kinds of emphases, which may not always be strictly compatible. This works out in Romans, for instance, in terms of the playing off of one of its clear sections (chaps. 1-4, 5-8, 9-11, 12-16) against the others.

I believe, and I hope that detailed exegesis will support this hypothesis, that in each case these dichotomies have failed to grasp the more fundamental structures of Paul’s socially contextualized and literarily structured theological thought. Once we grasp the covenantal narrative that Paul sets out in Galatians as the world he invites his readers to inhabit, we discover that these elements — which appear disparate when seen from a post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, or postromantic viewpoint — belong together within the much richer tapestry he is weaving. The story of the new exodus in Christ, and the homeward journey of God’s people led by the Spirit, provides the setting for incorporative and participationist language to have its full meaning and weight simultaneously with the juristic meaning of justification. Because of sin, and the distortion of Torah by the people to whom it was given, the fulfillment of the covenant cannot but come about as an apocalyptic event, declaring God’s judgment on what has gone before and God’s new creation of what is now beginning. But when the dust settles and God’s renewed people look around them, they discover that this apocalyptic event is indeed the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham. This is how God is faithful to the covenant. It will take all of the letter to the Romans to set this out in full detail and most of the rest of the NT to explore the point from a variety of other angles, but the major components of the argument are already complete in Galatians.

What, fourthly and finally, about justification by faith? This is the subject that most expositors of Galatians have found to be central to the argument of the letter itself. But what is it actually about? There is no space here for a full exposition of the doctrine. Rather, I wish to pose the question thus: What particular emphases does Galatians, read historically and exegetically, provide in this central matter?

The first point we have already noted. Paul’s initial introduction of the topic is embedded within, and seems to be the sharp edge of, the question that was at issue between himself and Peter in Antioch and, we may assume, bears some close relation to the dispute between himself and the “agitators” in Galatia. This was not the general, abstract theological issue of, shall we say, how to go to heaven when one dies. It was not part of a theory of soteriology, understood in this way. It was the question of whether Christian Jews ought or ought not eat with Christian Gentiles. In other words, it addressed the question of the identity and demarcation of the people of God, now redefined in Jesus Christ — a question that is both sociological, in the sense that it has to do with a community and its behavior, which can itself be understood by the proper application of sociological methods, and theological, in the sense that this community believes itself to be the people of a God who has drawn up quite clear conditions precisely for its communal life.

Paul’s answer to the question is complex and dense, but its heart is simple. Because he, and all Jewish Christians, have “died to the law” through sharing the messianic death of Jesus, their identity now is not defined by or in terms of the Jewish law, but rather in terms of the risen life of the Messiah. The boundary marker of this messianic community is therefore not the set of observances that mark out Jews from Gentiles, but rather Jesus the Messiah, the faithful one, himself; and the way in which one is known as a member of this messianic community is thus neither more nor less than (Christian) faith.

Although this account (Gal. 2:15-21) is not itself about soteriology per se, it carries, of course, huge soteriological implications. If one has already died and risen with the Messiah, and if one has been grasped by the grace of God and enabled to come to faith and (by implication, brought into daylight in) baptism (3:26-28), then one is marked out thereby precisely as a member of the renewed, eschatological community of Israel, one for whom the act of God in the Messiah has dealt finally with one’s sinful past, one who is assured of God’s salvation on the Last Day. But the point of justification by faith, in this context, is not to stress this soteriological aspect, but to insist that all those who share this Christian faith are members of the same single family of God in Christ and therefore belong at the same table. This is the definite, positive, and of course deeply polemical thrust of the first-ever exposition of the Christian doctrine of justification by faith.

I have already provided a summary account of Galatians 3 and 4, seen as a narrative, or part of a larger implicit narrative, about the promises of God to Abraham and the way in which these are fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah. It remains here simply to note the way in which justification emerges within this structure of thought, which itself is grounded in Paul’s sense of the community he is addressing.

His emphasis throughout is that the true people whom God promised to Abraham are defined by their faith. He is not here concerned with how one enters the family, but with how, once one has entered, the family is then defined, assured of its status as God’s people. The arguments in chapter 3 about the curse of the law, and how it is exhausted in the death of Jesus, and about the apparent tension between the promise and the law, are not primarily abstract statements about the atonement on the one hand and about the existential or spiritual superiority or preferability of trusting promises rather than keeping moral codes on the other. No doubt they contribute to discussions at these more abstract levels, but such matters were not what Paul was basically talking about. And in the great climactic passage at the end of chapter 3 and the start of chapter 4, the question of justification is set within the narrative about slavery and sonship — that is, the exodus story, in which the key interlocking categories for the present status of Christians are incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit. These are not “about” something other than justification. Rather, justification by faith itself, in the letter to Galatia, is all about the definition of the community of the people of the true God.

This is, of course, a puzzling conclusion for those who have learned the word “justification” as a technical term for the way in which someone becomes a Christian. But it is noticeable that when Paul discusses that question (e.g., 1 Thess. 1), he does not use the language of justification. He talks about the way in which, through the gospel proclamation of the crucified and risen Jesus as Messiah and Lord of the world, God’s Spirit is at work to bring people to faith, a faith specifically in the God now known in this Jesus. This process, though, is not what Paul means by “justification.” Justification, to offer a fuller statement, is the recognition and declaration by God that those who are thus called and believing are in fact his people, the single family promised to Abraham, that as the new covenant people their sins are forgiven, and that since they have already died and been raised with the Messiah they are assured of final bodily resurrection at the last. This, of course, is the argument of (among other passages) Romans 5-8, and in a measure also Philippians 3. In Galatians it is hinted at but never spelled out, for the good reason that Paul’s eye is on one thing principally — namely, the unity of the single Jew-plus-Gentile family in Christ and the consequent impossibility of that family being in anyway defined by the Jewish Torah.

Fully to grasp this, I realize only too well, will demand of those who wish to be in tune with Paul, on the one hand, and to continue to preach the gospel and thereby to evoke and sustain Christian faith, on the other, that they think through afresh the language they use, the passages upon which they draw to make their point, and the detailed theology they are presupposing. But I am quite convinced that this essentially “new-look” reading of justification in Galatians does not undermine the traditional theology and spirituality that former generations, and other ways of reading Paul, have for so long built upon this text. Indeed, when the bricks of the house are taken down, cleaned, and reassembled in the right order, there is every hope that the building will be more serviceable and weather-proof than before.

There are of course many other issues that cry out to be discussed. I have said very little, for example, about the Spirit in Galatians, and the relation of what Paul says on this topic to other NT evidence. But I hope to have shown that the task of bringing together exegesis and theology is valid and fruitful, if demanding, and that a commentary series that attempts such a task has every chance of providing fresh stimulation and insight to a new generation for whom neither dry historical exegesis nor flights of theological fancy will do by themselves. Galatians is a wonderful example of a text that needs history and theology to be working at full stretch and in full harmony. But there is every reason to suppose that the rest of the NT will respond excellently to the same treatment.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Cf. the remarks of Karl Barth in the preface to the second edition of his famous commentary on Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 2-15.

[2] Ernst Kasemann, Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; London: SCM, 1980), p. viii.

[3] Hans-Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979).

[4] On this see now Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 25-36; he argues strongly against Betz that Galatians is an example of deliberative rhetoric, designed to convince its audience to take a particular line on an issue currently facing them.

[5] See the (to my mind overstated) claims of Philip F. Esler, Galatians (London: Routledge, 1998).

[6] Kasemann, p. vii.

[7] On these questions see, among recent literature, Bruce W. Longenecker, The Triumph of Abraham’s God: The Transformation of Identity in Galatians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998).

[8] The sense in which, according to Paul, Jesus also brings to fulfillment the Mosaic covenant is exceedingly complex, and is, more or less, the subject of N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), chaps. 7-13.

[9] Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, chaps. 2-3.

[10] See the commentaries on Gal. 2:16; 3:22, etc., and discussions in most recent monographs on Galatians. For the debate, see Richard B. Hays, “Pistis and Pauline Christology: What Is at Stake?” SBLSP 30 (1991): 714-29; James D. G. Dunn, “Once More, Pistis Christou” SBLSP 30 (1991): 730-44.

[11] The “third use of the law” was a way of rehabilitating the OT law as a moral guide once one had firmly rejected it as a way to justification. (The “second” use was in relation to civil government, etc.)

[12] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).

[13] For a somewhat fuller statement on the Palestinian/Israeli question, see the epilogue to my The Way of the Lord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

[14] For a moving account of the whole situation, with some deeply telling comments on the Palestinian problem in particular, see William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

[15] See the similarly strong statements in, e.g., Rom. 2:27-29.

[16] Were we to bring Romans into the argument as well, there would be more points to make. See Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, chap. 13; for a more popular-level statement, see my For All God’s Worth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), chap. 13.

[17] This is what the word in question means; despite most commentators, we should not be too ready to read the word metaphorically.

[18] On the narrative substructure of Paul’s theology in Galatians, see above all Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11, SBLDS 56 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars, 1983).

[19] Without prejudice to the meaning of 4:13-15 (was Paul unwell, or did he bear the marks of recent persecution?); see esp. 6:17 (“I bear the marks of Jesus on my body”).

[20] Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, passim.

[21] Cf., e.g., J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33a (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

[22] Cf. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, chap. 8.

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Galatians_Exegesis_Theology.htm