Conformed to the Gift

Conformed to the Gift September 17, 2015

At the heart of John Barclay’s treatment of Paul & the Gift is the claim that Paul “perfects” the incongruity of grace. The grace-gift of Jesus is not a reward to the worthy; it is not a gift to those who will make use of the gift. It is a blessing in the midst of curse, a blessing to those who have earned nothing but further curse. The cross pays “no regard to pre-constituted criteria of value” (369).

The very cruci-form of the Christ-gift highlights this incongruity. By all normal standards—Jewish and Greco-Roman—the crucified Jesus has no value. He is cursed, and an outcast. And the fact that God gives His gift in this form means that the normal standards no longer apply.

And so this particular gift of Christ shapes a community that has been liberated from the norms and values that govern Jew and Gentile: “The gift of God in Christ is articulated as an unconditional gift in its creation of a community that neither mirrors nor endorses the regnant systems of value. The incongruous gift is defined as incongruous in the formation of a community that marches to a different step—and it is only in practice that the difference can be effected and evidenced. By its strategic indifference to preconstituted evaluations of worth—ethnic, social, sexual, or other—the community declares and enacts its freedom. By its ‘crucifixion of the flesh’—its break with the dispositions and habits that stand contrary to the values of the Spirit—it demonstrates an alternative allegiance derived form an alternative source of meaning and ‘life.’ Through resisting the tendencies to intra-communal rivalry, it affirms its special identity as a community beholden to ‘the law of Christ’” (439).

In Paul’s experience, this means that he dies to the world and the world dies to him. By the law he dies to the law. Torah is no longer the ultimate, absolute value. Christ alone is, in all His divine incongruity.

And this is why Paul sees the Galatian heresy as a defection from the gospel: “by adopting the socially ratified standards of value embodied in the Torah, they are confining the gift within the pre-established systems of worth. . . . To repackage this gift as given in alignment with Torah-practice would be to transform it into a gift of ‘Judaism’. . . . For Paul, the cross cannot be thus contained without being nullified” (391).

So, incongruous grace at three levels: In the valueless form of the cross; in the gift of Christ without regard to prior value; and in the freedom from the world’s worth-making within the assembly of believers. This gift given to these people reconfigures social life in these ways.


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