Gospel In Galatia

James Dunn has observes that Paul’s letters are written for the defense and elaboration of the gospel. This is certainly the case with Galatians. Whatever other issues Paul raises about circumcision, purity rules, promises and Torah are all directed to clarity in the proclamation of good news.

Paul identifies himself in Galatians 1:1, as elsewhere, as an apostle of Jesus Christ, and then adds in 1:15-16  that he was set apart from the womb and confronted on the Damascus road to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. Paul’s self-identification is not “theologian” or “scribe” but “apostle of the gospel.”

Galatians is all about the gospel. Some twelve times in the first two chapters, Paul uses the word “gospel” (euaggelion) or the verb form, “preach the gospel” (euaggelizo). The central charge against the Galatians is that they have abandoned the gospel for another, which is no gospel at all (1:6-7). The issue in Galatians is the character and implications of the gospel of Christ

Paul begins and ends the letter with a summary of the gospel. Paul generally follows Greco-Roman epistolary form, but he deviates at crucial points. Instead of “greetings,” he uses the related term charein, evoking the favor of God that is the divine motive of redemption. He immediately connects it with eirene, peace, the aim of salvation, the state of the world brought back to a harmony and order that has been disrupted by sin.

The big deviation, though, comes in verse 6. Where Paul should be giving thanks, he instead rebukes the Galatians severely for abandoning the gospel. He pronounces a double anathema (1:8-9), evoking the herem utter-destruction texts of the Old Testament. According to the Torah, cities that go apostate (Deuteronomy 15:15, 17) and Canaanites (Deuteronomy 20:17; Joshua 6:17-18) come under anathema, as did Achan, a “troubler” like the troublers of Galatia (Joshua 7:1, 11-13; 22:20; 1 Chronicles 2:7). Paul is not venting. Abandoning the gospel is tantamount to going to serve other gods (v 6: the Galatians desert Him who called them). Galatia’s troublers entice to idolatry, and the city-church of Galatia comes under the ban.

The other big departure from normal epistolary form is Paul’s expansion of the reference to Jesus (1:4-5). Grace and peace come from the Father His Son Jesus; then Paul goes on to describe the work of Christ and its effect. 

Paul uses sacrificial language in saying Jesus gave himself for sins. Having dealt with sin, Jesus’ self-gift brings those who believe in Him out of the “present evil age.” Exodus is in the background: Jesus gives Himself like a substitute Lamb to deliver us from Pharaoh, and by that we are delivered from Pharaoh’s realm, from that age to another. “Age” comes close to the meaning of “kosmos” or “world”: Jesus delivers us from evil times, times when the world is evil: and brings us into a new world.

This is the gospel that the troublers of Galatian threaten. They are trying to impose circumcision and other ceremonies on the Gentiles, requiring them to become Jews to be part of the church of the Jewish Messiah. They are Christians who claim to be preaching the gospel, but are in fact, as Paul claims, preaching a different gospel which is no gospel at all.

We can imagine how they would respond to Paul’s charge: “We’re preaching Jesus as much as you are. We’re preaching deliverance from the present evil age by the forgiveness of sin. We just don’t believe that this means we have to abandon circumcision and other Jewish institutions and practices.”

For Paul this doesn’t fly. Deliverance from the “present evil age” means deliverance from the way of life prescribed by the Torah. This is surely how Paul sees his own “conversion.” The “revelation of his Son in me” brought an end to his advancement in Judaism. He received a new self, not built up from Torah or Torah-keeping but received wholly from Christ (2:20). The old I of Judaism, the I of Saul the Pharisee, died, and had to die. Though he continues to live according to the flesh, it is Christ living through him, or, to say the same thing, he is living by faith (or, we might say, by Faith, that is, by Jesus). As the gospel impinges on individuals, it means the transfer from one religious and social world to another. God has invaded the world by His Son and Spirit, intervening intervened in the present evil age to deliver from it.

Paul returns to his own death at the end of the letter. Through the cross of Jesus “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (6:14). This is not merely a dramatic way of talking about an important experience. The flow of thought in 6:14-15 indicates that the distinction of circumcision/uncircumcision belongs to the world to which he is now dead. What now matters is not Jew/Gentile, but new creation. We might expand thus: “being circumcised or not doesn’t matter; what matters is that you participate in a new creation (or have been made a new creation) by the Spirit of God.”

Paul continues to live on in flesh. The old world to which he died is a world in a specific sense, a world divided between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Paul now lives in a world where these distinctions have been overcome through Christ. Though it is somewhat too weak a term, we get at something of Paul’s meaning if we take “world” as a “cultural world” or “symbolic universe.” Paul has died to one set of religious-cultural practices and am now alive to another. 

For Paul, this transition from old world to new world must take concrete form in the practices of the church. To cling to the practices of the old world is to say Jesus didn’t create a new one. To continue to practice circumcision, that cut in the flesh that symbolized the cut in the human race, is to undo what Jesus accomplished, which is precisely the union of the two into one man. Only if we understand Paul’s gospel as this kosmic declaration can we understand why he is so exercised by the Galatians apostasy.